Drowning in choices

Birkarnelzelzit Thiyam *

I know with all the rush of the coming exams, life’s priorities must have all jumped to a common paradigm. It's hard to take all options in one hand and think of choices based on superiority.

It’s tough to be positive at times like this but trust me, go down to the nuances of all human existence - most motivations seem to hold all the similarities. Keeping that in my mind - let me do the needful of taking the honor in presenting my crazy perspective towards the basic motivations.

Most of my life - I have been judged as something I am not. But I have always kept my choices with myself. The same boiling water that softens the potato hardens the egg. It’s what you’re made of. Not the circumstances.

You can either experience the pain of discipline or the pain of regret. The choice is yours. It must have happened to a lot of you as well - being the victim of people's opinions. At times like this - always welcome the opinions or criticisms as an opportunity, it’s one lucky box that has all the needed courage to change yourself.

Trust me - left or right - it will always be a wrong path for you, say most. Those who have gone the path won’t want you to follow and those who haven’t won’t want you to explore. In the midst of all these eyes and ears - your necessity for survival will push you to work for something in life and sadly, it will have to occupy most part of your life.

At times like this, remember what Steve Jobs projected. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.

If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. On your hunt for finding what you love, disappointment will never let you lose from their wrath.

Even if with all the good words, it’s hard to stay consistent with all the hatred and opinions. So, remember sometimes when you’re in a dark place you think you’ve been buried but you’ve actually been planted.

Keep believing in yourself, don’t even listen to those who tell you to change when you know that you haven’t even found your true self. But don’t kill your “yet to meet yourself” with expectations. Remember what Anne Frank threw. Everyone inside them has a piece of good news. The good news is you don’t know how great you can be ! How much you can love ! What you can accomplish ! And what your potential is.

Also remember that some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have, which once you have got, you may be smart enough to see is what you would have wanted, had you known.

So readers, keep failing, keep falling, keep pushing. To be a champion, I think you have to see the big picture. It’s not about winning and losing; it’s about every day hard work and about thriving on a challenge. It’s about embracing the pain that you’ll experience at the end of a race and not being afraid. I think people think too hard and get afraid of a certain challenge.

Like Thomas J. Watson projected success quite simply, really: Double your rate of failure. You are thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it isn’t at all. You can be discouraged by failure or you can learn from it, so go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you can. Because remember that’s where you will find success.

Closing it - like I have mentioned earlier, there will be a lot of criticism coming along the way. So take Hillary Clinton’s advice, “Take criticism seriously, but not personally.”