Life's Grandest Contest

Do you like the title? What do you suppose can be the grandest contest? Think about it for a moment, then read on. A contest is, by definition, competition. So, I might be talking about The Superbowl, The World Series, The Academy Awards, an Olympics event, a World War, or the struggle between religions. People spend their youth training merely to have a chance to compete in such things. The contest of which I speak is something you, I, and anyone can do every day. Compete with yourself.

The game of golf comes to mind. If you play golf at the same course regularly, you have a chance to repeat your activity with little variation, except that you will remember what you did the last time or several times that you teed up at each hole on the course. You have a chance to improve your game. You are competing against yourself. Oh, you say, what good is that? The way that I win is to beat the other guy at the office. I win the boss's favor and I savor the defeat of my coworker. No. There is nothing great about that. You have achieved arrogance. Play a game with yourself and win. Then, you will achieve confidence.

If you want to define your contest in terms of making more money, this approach will work for you. Whatever it is that you do for your pay, do it better. Do it different to see if that was better. Find the best techniques, make better alliances, accrue finer resources, market yourself and your product more effectively, but tell no one that what you do is all a game in your mind. You play the grandest game. No matter how good you are, be better, every day, better than the day before. The art of this approach to your daily activity is that you taint your game if you make someone else lose. Someone else does not matter in this game. It is just you, and only you.

I am playing this game right now. You don't have to know about it. You are not part of it. It is my game. But, I will tell you, just because I like you. The title of my article is eye-catching. It is a tease to tempt you to read the article. I regularly assign titles to my articles that tease, but today, I am upping my game. I distracted you in the first paragraph. I write to you as if I am talking with you. Yet, I don't know you.

I have involved you in this article. This is high art for a writer. I have advanced my craft of writing. I threw bait in your direction. Very many people define winning as a personal victory over others. I told you that you missed the finest part of winning if that is all you do. I win my game today if you change your behavior. What will you do?

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Why "The Secret" Doesn't Work for You

"The Secret" is a very famous book which in a nutshell states that whatever you visualize will appear to you in some way or the other. The idea being that if you constantly focus on a goal, the likelihood of it being achieved is almost guaranteed.

But what if this just doesn't work for you?

What if this visualisation thingy is just not doing its job? You are trying your level best to visualize the perfect future but nothing seems to be happening. Moreover you don't feel motivated at all by seeing that perfect picture of you chilling out in Tahiti on your visualisation board. It just doesn't cut it for you.

Maybe then you need to look at human motivation and what exactly motivates you.

According to NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) there are two kinds of people, those that move away from things and those that move towards things.

For example, Ajay has recently graduated and joined a multinational bank, when asked why he joined this particular bank, Ajay said that because he didn't like all the other options available to him and so he picked this one. In other words, Ajay moved away from all the other options to select this one.

Vijay joined the same back just like Ajay but when asked why he joined this particular bank Vijay said that it was because of the tremendous opportunity of growth that this bank would give him. This is the classic moving towards behaviour.

In simple words, you move towards pleasure or you move away from pain.

'The Secret" works wonderfully if you are a moving towards person. You create a vision board with all the wonderful things you are going to do and every morning you look at it and are fired up to go and win the world. However if you are a moving away person, this is not going to push you in any way.

So what can work for you if you are a moving away person?

Default future

Here is an interesting but little known psychological trick that can work wonders. Default future is thinking about and writing down what would be your default future if you continue the path that you are on.

Let's say five years from now, if you continue doing what you are doing, where will you be in life?

Make it as real as possible, and make it as brutal as possible.

For example, if you are a smoker, you may want to think about how healthy you will feel and be five years from now, you may even look at some older smoker in your group and use that as a reference to how you would be. Read this statement every time before you light up.

What this does is, it brings the pain that you would feel in the distant future to the here and now. And pushes you to change your behaviour and move away from the bad habits to hopefully better ones.

So, if you are struggling with making 'the secret' work for you, I would suggest you use the default future technique along with your vision boards. Every morning, have a look at your vision board (Where you want to go in life) and have a look at your default future (What happens if you continue doing what you are doing) and this will be a better motivator than your vision board alone.

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