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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 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.

“Your content is really inspirational.
I also want to create content.
However, I feel I have nothing to share..”

This is the fear of a lot of people struggling to create content online.

We are constantly thinking what we know isn’t good enough.
What we do isn’t cool enough.
What we have accomplished isn’t attractive enough.

And so we do not share.
Thus allowing someone else’s content to come out.
Someone else who believed their work was good enough.

Sharing what you know isn’t about what you know.
It is about how you feel about yourself.

We’ve all made mistakes.
We still do.
We will continue to.

However, the first mistake rarely brings any harm. 

Ignoring the mistake and not learning a lesson from it causes real harm. 

Because we’ve wasted a learning opportunity.
Because we might repeat the same mistake again.
Because we have let a life teacher go by without giving us a lesson.

Committing mistakes is not the mistake.
Not learning from them is.

What is the role that we define ourselves by?

Am I a Product Manager?
A painter?
An engineer?
A leader?

Society has trained us to believe that we should be just one thing in our life. 

However, none of the successful people in history – from Michelangelo or Albert Einstein to Bill Gates did just one thing. 

They did multiple things, and that helped them excel in the one thing we know them for.

What if our role was not limited to just one title?
What if we could do everything that nudged our emotions?
What if we made this possible?

We have just one life.
Why live it with just one identity?

Strengths are our trump cards.
We already have an edge over them.
They make us start ahead of everyone else.

Weaknesses are our jacks.

We will have to work more than everyone else to even be at par.

Then why is it that people are told to work on their weaknesses and not on their strengths?

Working on our strengths gives us a competitive advantage.
Working on our weaknesses doesn’t offer that; every bit is a struggle. 

Strengths increase on the principle of compounding; so do our weaknesses.

Which one would you choose then? 

When we only do what we were told to do, we own the output. 

If anyone else gets that work done better, cheaper, faster than us – they would replace us.

Owning the output makes us dispensable

However, if we stopped and asked ourselves, “Why am I being told to do what I have been told to do?”, We will own not just the output, but the outcome as well. 

Owning the outcome will surprise people each time we deliver stunningly more than what we were supposed to do.

Owning the outcome, instead of the output makes us indispensable.