Many people are insecure; they doubt their abilities and often leave tasks unfinished due to fear of failure and making mistakes while the same tasks are done by average people, and the reason is they are confident and believe in themselves. People are rejected when they appear for an interview; they are bright and talented, but their looks are scary: they appear timid and send signals that they are not fit for this job. Success is more about your attitude and the way you handle things and approach people, you may be great, but if you are not able to showcase your talents; you get scared of facing people; you are unwilling to receive criticisms about your work. Let’s explore the qualities of people who live up to their potential.
“Tiger, one day you will come to a fork in the road,” Boyd said to him. “And you’re going to have to make a decision about which direction you want to go.” Using his hands to illustrate, Boyd marked off these two directions. “If you go that way you can be somebody. You will have to make compromises and you will have to turn your back on your friends. But you will be a member of the club and you will get promoted and you will get good assignments.” Then Boyd paused, to make the alternative clear. “Or,” he said, “you can go that way and you can do something—something for your country and for your Air Force and for yourself. If you decide you want to do something, you may not get promoted and you may not get the good assignments and you certainly will not be a favorite of your superiors. But you won’t have to compromise yourself. You will be true to your friends and to yourself. And your work might make a difference. To be somebody or to do something. In life there is often a roll call. That’s when you will have to make a decision.”
KEY POINTS:
- You need to find your life’s task.
- You should be aware and be careful in life.
- You should not give up due to problems.
Purpose:
Life without a purpose is a life wasted. The majority of people waste their life do not know where are they heading. They waste their time in idle pursuit; they follow a dead routine; they hardly read and write; they even lack basic communication skills. The purpose is crucial in life, and a clever person knows very early in his life that he will achieve his goals in the future; he gradually steps towards his goals. If you do know your life’s task, you need to explore what you are good at. What makes you different from others? What is it that you were fondly in love with in childhood? You need to ask other people to tell you about your strengths and weaknesses. Once you find the purpose of your life, you can improve your life. People get depressed and anxious and one of the reasons is that they do not live a purposeful life, once you know your life’s task, your days are filled with joys; you develop a sense of urgency; you stop procrastinating.
“A man is worked upon by what he works on,” Frederick Douglass once said.
“If your purpose is something larger than you—to accomplish something, to prove something to yourself—then suddenly everything becomes both easier and more difficult. Easier in the sense that you know now what it is you need to do and what is important to you. The other “choices” wash away, as they aren’t really choices at all. They’re distractions.”
Carefulness:
People make the worst mistakes when they rush things and deviate to shortcuts to earn money; shortcuts are ways to avoid learning. Masters in the past did not follow shortcuts, nor they succumbed to temptations but rather adhered to their goals, and worked persistently to achieve their desired outcomes. You should carefully observe what works for you and what does not, you need not focus on the relief you are deriving by following paths that are easy, but you should focus on the long-term consequences: you need to know about the end results. Gamblers waste their money with the hope that they would win: the shortcut to earn money, though he knows easy comes easy go. It takes courage and boldness to avoid easy paths, and travel on a path that is hard to cover, but the reward is massive in the end. Becoming a master is hard, but not difficult.
“In Boyd’s world, the number of stars on your shoulder or the nature of your appointment or its location could easily be confused as a proxy for real accomplishment.”
Never let obstacles or opponents stop you:
What scares us is problems and hindrances on the path to success, and sometimes we live everything in the middle due to fear of facing problems. As it has been said that no pain, no gain; expecting a life without problems is expecting a baby fallen from the sky. All the great leaders, writers, musicians—and artists faced countless setbacks, but they did not give up, rather they reflected on their problems, and make a name for themselves. You cannot learn without suffering, and you need to suffer to understand life.
“Boyd undeniably changed and improved his field in a way that almost no other theorist has since Sun Tzu or von Clausewitz. He was known as Genghis John for the way he never let obstacles or opponents stop him from what he needed to do. His choices were not without their costs. He was also known as the ghetto colonel because of his frugal lifestyle. He died with a drawerful of thousands of dollars in uncashed expense checks from private contractors, which he equated with bribes. That he never advanced above colonel was not his doing; he was repeatedly held back for promotions. He was forgotten by history as a punishment for the work he did.”
Conclusion:
We should live a purposeful life; we need to know about strengths and weaknesses; we need to be careful in life. Moreover, we should face problems and learn from them, sufferings make us stronger.
References:
- Holiday, R. (2019). Ego is the Enemy. Elex media komputindo.