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There is one scene from the movie Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara that lives rent-free in my head.

When all the three characters are about to jump for their skydive, Imraan (played by Farhan Akhtar) is afraid to take the leap.
Arjun (played by Hrithik Roshan) sees his fear, and in that moment, he says:
LET IT GO.
LET IT GO, IMRAAN.

Whenever I see the scene, I get the chills.
Because it is such a powerful scene.
And so true for our lives!

There are many things we want to pursue.
There are also several factors holding us back.
All it requires is that ONE moment of faith.
The moment we push through.
The moment we let it go.

To make way for what we truly want.

“I don’t have time!”

When people say this, what they are essentially saying is that they do not have energy.
But what kind of energy are they lacking?

Physical energy:

– Quality of your sleep.

– When and what you eat.

– Your fitness.

Emotional energy:

– Do you have self-confidence?

– Do you talk positively to yourself?

Mental energy:

– Are you creative?

– Are you optimistic?

Spiritual energy:

– Do you have integrity and commitment?

– Are you honest?

If you eat shit, sleep late, and lie to yourself that you will fix it tomorrow,
It doesn’t matter how well you have scheduled yourself for the next day.
Your day will be shitty!

It isn’t about managing time.
It has always been about managing your energy!

Our living room has a beautiful large window, overlooking the Aravalli Forest.
On a day as bright as today, the window seems non-existent, as though one can walk through it.

That is what the bee, this morning, thought as well.

There was a bee. Inside the living room. Trying to get out.
And all it kept doing, for nearly 5+ minutes, before we helped it, was to get past the window.

It also didn’t realize that there is another window next to this big clear one.
And that window was open.
Wide open.

If the bee could, it would have stopped banging its head against the big window and instead moved to its right and flown into the open skies through the window that was open.

But it didn’t.
I wonder why?
I think it was because it was convinced that if it tried hard enough, it would be able to get past the window.
After all, the bee could see its goal. Clearly. Vividly.

I ultimately helped it, by using a towel to push it towards the open window. A couple of attempts and it worked.
The bee flew away.

But what if I didn’t help?
Would the bee have still continued to try?
Would it have given up at some point?
Or would it have figured the open window, on its own?

We will never know.

THIS, is our life as well.

Our life, where we can often see our goal clearly. Vividly. Within our reach.
BUT SOMETHING is coming in our way.
And we just cannot figure what it is.
We just keep telling ourselves, “try harder, don’t give up, it is within your reach – you can see the goal. DON’T GIVE UP!”
So we keep banging our head against the window.

If only we stopped. We gave up, NOT on the goal, but on the path.
If only we realize that the goal may be the same, but the paths are multiple.
If only we moved sideways, to see if there was another path.
We may find the open window.

Don’t change your goals, if it gets too hard.
Change the path.

Old phones.
Charge for an hour.
Lasts for a week.

New phones.
Charge multiple times.
Lasts less than a day.

In the old days, phones were used for just one purpose: calling.

Now they are used for shopping, watching movies, chatting on a video call, paying our bills – virtually everything!

Since the functions have increased, they need to be charged more often.

Similarly, as we’ve grown up, we do multiple things – read, work, attend to family, hobbies – everything, which wasn’t the case when we were kids.

The question is: “How often do we charge ourselves?”
When we don’t charge ourselves, we are drained out.

And a drained-out phone doesn’t work, despite all the specs.

More than two decades back, the society revered the ones with high IQ.

Over time, it began giving higher importance to mastering our emotions, and understanding them in others.

So EQ became the in-thing.

However, there is a third important thing beyond both of these: focus.

The top minds in the world today are working towards just one thing: your focus.

A tag in the Slack overflow.
An important WhatsApp notification.
A story “mention” on Instagram.
Someone tagged you on Facebook.

Beautiful ways to make you realise you are important.
While nothing is more important than your focus.

If you have the ability to sit and work on one thing at hand for 60, 30 or even 5 minutes at stretch, you have the biggest asset in this world: focus.

Our intelligence and emotional mastery is relevant, only when we have learnt the art of focusing on the subject at hand.

Focus is the new IQ.

How do we respond when we are hurt?
Do we blame the person who did that to us?
Or carry the baggage of that hurt forever?

Here’s a simple question to ask:
“What is this trying to tell me?”

We’d probably get nowhere getting to the root cause of hurt.
However, understanding the lesson behind each hurt and failure grows us tremendously.

When hurt, ask for the lesson. Not the reason!

We’re entering the elevator from the 10th floor.
Have to go to the 20th one.
By mistake, we pressed the ground floor button.

In the haste to correct that mistake, we instantly press that 20th floor button.
Forgetting that the elevator will go to the ground floor first.

It doesn’t care about our mistakes.

What if we remembered this while making mistakes in life?
How would our actions change when we knew there’s time to rectify the mistake?
Would we do anything different if we knew there was no need to hurry up?

Probably, we’d help ourselves from making another one.

We always have time to correct the mistake after we’ve made it.
Trying to correct it immediately is another mistake.

We work really hard.
Give up on all pleasures.
Sacrifice valuable family time.

All in order to get to our goals.

Unfortunately, sometimes we are not able to make it.
Our dreams are shattered.
So does our hope go for a toss.

And sometimes, we do achieve our goals.
Of all the things we had been struggling hard for, one day they become a reality.

And when they do, we find ourselves asking the questions:

Now what?
What’s next?
Is that all how success feels?

Not getting to life’s goals is tragic, however, getting there is equally tragic.

When the ink in the pen gets over, we keep the pen under the tap to clean it.

And that’s a messy process. Ink all over. More than you thought there is.

However, after that, the pen is absolutely clean.
Ready to write again with the newly-filled ink.

Any clean up process in life will be messy.

But as much as we would want to avoid that mess, it is only after that mess that we will see something more beautiful emerging at the end.

It is not the mess during a clean up that we should fear.
It is avoiding the mess that we should fear.

You see a video and feel inspired.
What if you hadn’t seen that video?

You read a book and feel inspired.
What if you hadn’t read the book?

You meet someone and feel inspired.
What if you hadn’t met that person?

When we leave inspiration to chance, it leaves all those things that depend on our inspiration to chance as well.

What if we made inspiration a discipline?
What if we showed up to it daily instead of serendipity to bring it to us?
What if that consistency made it impossible for inspiration to escape us?

Inspiration isn’t just a choice.
It’s a habit that shows up when practised daily.