Hello me and people like me. I hope your days are going great. Winter is about to go and some people are excited for the summer.
Every year, I ignore taking up any new year resolution because I know I won't do them. But, Every year around this time, I dream about being the freest person, going on the beaches, with a ripped 6 abs fit body taking awesome photographs. Just like new year resolutions, I don't work on this either.
Technically It is not impossible to do. See, after listening to Tim Ferris for some time, you will get motivated enough to believe that anything is possible in 3 months. You can change your life completely within 3 months of focused actions. And my goals are also possible in 3 months. All I need to do is to spend 30 minutes every other day for exercise, and a few hours for work. That's it. I already have laptop and a place to live.
Yeah I know I won't. Just telling you.
Yesterday, I was in a stadium with a friend of mine. A guy was sprinting through the track passed through us. We say them and looked at each other. After a moment of enlightenment, a word blurb out of his divine mouth, "Dedication, bro".
I took me a few seconds to even realize, "Oh! There is a word like that in English!", while we were laughing on each other's stupidity, that guy, wearing his grey hoodie, kept on running in the cold.
In reality, we both felt ashamed. Where is my dedication? Am I really dedicated or not? It is not like I keep wasting time. I am always busy in working on my things. Thinking solutions through problems, juggling between the stuffs thrown at me by life, managing each and everything making things work out. But still internally, things didn't felt right. Even after doing so much hard work, why do I felt ashamed?
I know I am hard working, but still I feel something is a bit off shore between me and the word "dedication".
Let's analyze it. When we hear someone saying, "He is dedicated to his family/goal" what do we understand? We imagine a person who is committed to the progress of his commitments. We imagine a hard working person, who does not let excuses ruining his progress.
Am I not?
In the books, there is a separate page called "dedication". You see, there is already an "acknowledgement" page, but still, dedication is something different.
To dedicate means to giving up self.
And I am not giving myself up. Yes I am working hard, but I am letting myself becoming the bottleneck in the progress of the goal I am committed to.
And that is the root of my shame on myself.
What is happening, as the sprint guy was dedicated, he didn't care whether it was cold or night or he was hungry or not. What time it was. He didn't care about himself. He was like a machine. Not caring about the situations and conditions he was in, instead focused only on his objective, ignoring everything.
I was juggling everything based on how I was feeling. And he made himself a robot, to feel nothing for his goal.
And no, he is not doing wrong. Being focused and resilient like this is actually healthy for mind and also for his accomplishments. His success is going to make him far more satisfied than my excuse for cold.
At least he won't be feeling guilty like we did.
And here is this word. GUILT. That is how you know whether you were dedicated or not.
Is this the best you can do? Are you giving your 101%? Or letting self comforts take over you?
When we are working on things, there are certain other things that allows the comfortable execution of our goals. For example, it would have been better if it was not too cold, if it was a little warmer, running for me was also better. But you notice, there are people running despite that. I might say, "but I am sensitive to cold", again, there are people who are running despite that.
You are not a princess. When we allow ourselves to let the present situations be favorable, we start demanding more! You need a hot day, a good friend, a good clothes, free mind, and everything to run, and there are people running despite of these.
This is what I meant when I said, dedication means giving up yourself. To give up my sensitivities so that I can achieve something bigger than me. My goal.
You are underestimating yourself. You can do better. But being too comfortable, you are making your life hard.
There are walls in front of you. You can either keep wasting time finding ways, or you can walk through them breaking them with your sheer dedication. Yes you can.
If you are committed to accomplish something, accepting your sensitivities and current difficult conditions, you have two options. Acknowledge these bad conditions and blaming your life for not letting you have a favorable environment where you can work productive, or ignore everything, just do what is required despite of these defects.
Are you allowing yourself to have more control over you than your commitments? Have you dedicated yourself to your goal?
Only you can tell yourself.
Thanks for reading
Shubham Ramdeo