We Indians love to enjoy every festival.Not only they bring a moment of joy and happiness…but festival also brings us together where the diversity of culture, language and religion creates a beautiful rainbow.

So growing up with stories like how this wonderful guy called Santa Claus sneaks-in at night and brings you Christmas gifts that you secretly wished. I used to wonder whether he will bring any gifts for me any day. As a child we have amazing power to Believe in Wonders.

My wonder happened 2 years ago in 2009.on the day of Christmas a cute little daughter came to my world.

Trying to get innovative.I am working on technology to use my books as audio-books. I think I deserve a award for such  creative idea.

Anyone listening!!!

"When you win something or score a century you say you are happy, but not satisfied. Satisfaction is like engaging the handbrake and hoping a car moves forward,"

- Tendulkar told the latest issue of Sky Sports Magazine

Disclaimer: This story was emailed to me by my friend, I am not sure of the authenticity of the article and original source of article. However I enjoyed this article hence sharing with you.

An Article Address by Azim Premji in the ‘Shaping Young Minds Program’  (SYMP) organized by  AIMA in collaboration with the   Bombay Management Association (BMA)  in Mumbai on ‘My Lessons in  Life’.

I am very happy to be here with you. It  is always wonderful to be with young people. As my hair turned from black, to salt and pepper and finally salt without the pepper, I have begun to realize the importance of youth.
At the same time, I have begun to truly appreciate some of the lessons I have learnt along the way. I hope you will find them useful when you plan your own career and life.

First

The first thing I have learnt is that we must always begin with our strengths. There is an imaginary story of a rabbit. The rabbit was enrolled in a rabbit school. Like all rabbits, it could hop very well but could not swim. At the end of the year, the rabbit got high marks in hopping but failed in swimming. The parents were concerned. They said, ‘Forget about hopping. You are, anyway good at it.  Concentrate on swimming.’ They sent the rabbit for tuition in swimming. And guess what happened? The rabbit forgot how to hop! As for swimming, have you ever seen a rabbit swim?
While it is important for us to know what we are not good at, we must also cherish what is good in us. That is because it is only our strengths that can give us the energy to correct our weaknesses.  

Second

The second lesson I have learnt is that a rupee earned is of far more value than five found.. My friend was sharing with me, the story of his eight year-old niece.  She would always complain about the breakfast. The cook tried everything possible, but the child remained unhappy. Finally, my friend took the child to a supermarket and brought one of those ready-to-cook cereal packets. The child had to cut the packet and pour water in the dish. The child found the food delicious. The difference was that she had cooked it! In my own life,
I have found  that nothing  gives as much satisfaction as earning our own rewards. In fact, what is gifted or inherited follows the old rule of ‘come easy, go easy’. I guess we only know the value of what we have, if we have struggled to earn it.

Third

The third lesson I have learnt is, in Cricket, no one bats a hundred every time. Life has many challenges. You win some and lose some. You must enjoy winning. But do not let it go to the head. The moment it does, you are already on your way to failure. And if you do encounter failure along the way, treat it as an equally natural phenomenon. Don’t beat yourself for it or any one else for that matter! Accept it, look at your own share in the problem, learn from it and move on. The important thing is, when you lose, do not ‘lose the lesson’.

Fourth

The fourth lesson I have learnt, is the importance of humility. Sometimes, when you get so much in life, you really start wondering, whether you deserve all of it. We have so much to be grateful or. Our parents, our teachers and our seniors, have done so much for us, that we can never repay them. Many people focus on the shortcomings, because obviously, no one can be perfect. But it is important to first acknowledge, what we have received. Nothing in life is permanent, but when a relationship ends, rather than becoming bitter, we must learn to savor the memory, of the good things, while they lasted.  

Fifth

The fifth lesson I learnt is, that we must always strive for Excellence. One way of achieving excellence, is by looking at those better than ourselves. Keep learning what they do differently. But excellence cannot be imposed from the outside. We must also feel the need from within. It must involve not only our mind, but also our heart and soul. Excellence is not an act, but a habit. I remember the inspiring lines of a poem, which says that your reach must always exceed your grasp. That is heaven on earth. Ultimately, your only competition is yourself.

Sixth

The sixth lesson I have learnt is, never give up in the face of adversity. It comes on you, suddenly without warning. Always keep in mind, that it is only the test of fire, that makes fine steel. A friend of mine shared this incident with me. His eight-year old daughter was struggling away at a jigsaw puzzle. She kept at it for hours but could not succeed. Finally, it went beyond her bedtime. My friend told her, "Look, why don’t you just give up? I don’t think you will complete it tonight. Look at it another day." The daughter looked with a strange look in her eyes, "But, dad, why should I give up? All the pieces are there! I have just got to put them together!" If we persevere long enough, we can put any problem into its perspective.

Seventh

The seventh lesson I have learnt is, that while you must be open to change, do not compromise on your values. Mahatma Gandhiji often said,” You must open the windows of your mind, but you must not be swept off your feet by the breeze." Values like honesty, integrity, consideration and humility have survived for generations. At the end of the day, it is values that define a person more than the achievements. Do not be tempted by short cuts. The short cut can make you lose your way and end up becoming the longest way to the destination.

Final

And the final lesson I  learnt is, that we must have faith in our own ideas even if  everyone tells us that we are wrong. There was a newspaper vendor who had a rude customer. Every morning, the Customer would walk by, refuse to return the greeting, grab the paper off the shelf and throw the money at the vendor. The vendor would pick up the money, smile politely and say, ‘Thank you, Sir.’ One day, the vendor’s assistant asked him, "Why are you always so polite with him when he is so rude to you? Why don’t you throw the newspaper  at him when he comes back  tomorrow?" The vendor smiled and replied, "He can’t help being rude and I can’t help being polite. Why should I let his rude behavior dictate my politeness? I hope you achieve success in whatever way you define it and what gives you the maximum happiness in life.

"Remember, those who win are those who believe they can."

Prayer is not a spare wheel that you pull out when YOU ARE IN TROUBLE, It is a steering wheel that keeps you on the right path throughout your life.

Taken from a local daily Dainik Bhaskar Indore Edition!!!

This is a picture of Lord Ganesha from Chintaman Ganesh Temple in Ujjain.
In this picture the deity is decorated with 5 different dry fruits like: cashewnuts, pistachio, anjir(Common fig), makhana (foxnut)

This idol is symbolizes of 3 deities: Chintaman, Ichaaman and Siddhivinayak.
All of them various  incarnation of Lord Ganesha.

Chintaman means One who will take away all your worries. People coming here have a deep belief that if they have any worries visiting this place will relieve them from their worries.

Ichaaman means full filler of your wishes, People pray here to get their desires fullfilled.

Siddhivinayak one who leads/helps you accomplish things. People here come to get blessings of Lord Ganesha to accomplish some thing like building a house, success in examination, starting a new business.

The message one tries to convey behind these religious beliefs are:
• Go ahead to achieve your accomplishments.
• Start what you have dreamt of without worrying what will happen if you fail or what other people will say if you do some thing.
• If you want to achieve some thing there will be obstacles, if you start worrying about obstacle your worries will become obstacle, so stop worrying and try to find out solution for your obstacle.
• If your wishes or desire is pure then it will be always fulfilled. By purity of desire/wishes it means it should be beneficial to you and others. If it is not beneficial to you and other it doesn’t means that it is impure.in such case it will only remain simple desire or wishes that may/may-not get fulfilled.

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

To me competition means to seek together the Best among the option available.
When I am in a competition I seek to become the Best option.

To become the Best:

• I need to have a clear understanding of what I am seeking. This means I should have a clear picture of my objective or goals.
• I should know why I am seeking an objective. This means I should know the benefits or rationale of seeking the objective.
• It should be clear that I really want to achieve this objective.
• Know my strengths to achieve my goals.
• Never hide my weakness so that there is an opportunity to get a suggestion on how to overcome it.
• Never hide my weakness so that I know what are my risks to achieve my goals and how can I mitigate it.
• Know my competitors, appreciate their strengths.
• Feel proud to have a competitor, as he gives me that rush of winning the game.
• Learn the weakness of competitor, so that I can fill in the gaps left by them.
• Always remind my self that even the Best can Fail,  I may fail to become the Best.But never fail to give the Best.

Additional Tips

• Focus on what I want to achieve, Never waste your time what will happen if the other person wins.
• When I am stuck and find myself reaching nowhere, Just reboot my thinking process, just pause for a moment from what I am doing or thinking, start afresh.
• Never give up but walk out if.
  • I find early that the objective cannot be met.
  • or the objective I am pursuing is not the desired objective.
  • or I will waste time, money and energy trying to achieve the impossible just to satisfy my ego.
• Take help from others.

Related articles

The power lies within me . It gives me strength to achieve great things. It also tries to drive me to destruction. It all depends on whether I own the Power or Power owns me.

The sense of power is like getting the best of the world. Its the power within you that can destroy you or build you.

The most important power you have is the your Power to Response

Responsibility is the the ability to response.because its made up of words Response + Ability.

-The Seven Habits of Effective People

No matter what we are or where we are. we all respond to a given situation.some times we respond blaming or sometime we respond by accepting or finding some solution. However or What ever we Respond we do it because we have The Power to Response..

How to use the Power of Response?

Asoka the Great Indian Emperor from 269 BC to 232 BC, enraged by Ruler of Kalinga not accepting his Supremacy responded by brutally attacking the tiny kingdom completely destroying the state of Kalinga.

When the war was over the same Asoka felt sick seeing the destruction, responded become the first emperor to follow Non Violence and Turned into messenger of Peace by converting himself to Buddhism.

Now you see you have two options to respond violently or peacefully.The option to select gives us the Power to Choose.

The power to choose gives us the power to Response.. What will happen when you encounter a Bear in a Jungle.You have got three option Fight the Bear, Run Faster than Bear and Remain Calm, Here goes a ancient story:

The Bear and the Two Travelers

Two men were traveling together, when a Bear suddenly met them on their path. One of them climbed up quickly into a tree and concealed himself in the branches. The other, seeing that he must be attacked, fell flat on the ground, and when the Bear came up and felt him with his snout, and smelt him all over, he held his breath, and feigned the appearance of death as much as he could. The Bear soon left him, for it is said he will not touch a dead body. When he was quite gone, the other Traveler descended from the tree, and jocularly inquired of his friend what it was the Bear had whispered in his ear. "He gave me this advice," his companion replied. "Never travel with a friend who deserts you at the approach of danger."

Though the Lesson from The story is: Never travel with a friend who deserts you at the approach of danger.

But the real lesson here is the power of choice: One friend chose to desert his friend other one chose to remain calm and then response to deal with the situation.

But You can use Power to Choose only when you have Options. How do we get Options.by using the Power of Ideas and the Power of Imagination.

Imagination is the ability to form mental images of things or events. This is how the Ideas get generated. As a example: Some of our ancestors imagined to be able to Fly. Then few of them tried various ideas from Hot Air Ballooning to Paragliding to modern Aircrafts. Now if you want to Fly to anywhere in this world now you have Choice to select any of the implemented ideas like Hot air balloon, Private Jet, Helicopter developed by the power of imagination to be able to fly.

So what happens when we have the Power to Choose but still feel unsatisfied or desperate for some unknown thing. This is because we tend to forget the Power of Appreciation and the Power of Change..

The Power of Appreciation is the expression of gratitude for all things.this has to to do with appreciating both the good and bad things in our life.See we all love sweets but too much sweet can cause Diabetes.Like a Chocolate made of cocoa where the later taste bitter in raw.when combined with proper measurement of sugar it tastes great. Remember the brightness of Day is for Working and Having Fun.While the Darkness of Night means to Halt and Relax so that you have enough energy for the next bright day. the power of appreciation takes zero investment but returns high results. so why not appreciate yourself and others using this power.

The Power of Change is moving from current situation to another one. It is generally said we human are generally hesitant to change.but ask a person who recently got promotion with higher perks.or suppose you just win a lottery of 10 million dollars.will you hesitate to accept the change that it will bring?.

The truth is every thing is mortal in this world.There was a Ice Age it ended. There were Dinosaurs. The Latest Fashion will end. The Stone Age was followed by Bronze age followed by Iron Age. The industrial revolution replaced by IT revolution.. It is natural that once the thing get obsolete it needs to be replace and that is change and that is good. And that’s the Power of Change why the human civilization survives long…

The Power of Change can be achieved with the Power of Will, The power of will is the strongest ammunition in achieving success.

But then how do we develop strong will power?

Actually you do not develop will power, you already have will power.You need to press the right buttons to switch on will power. And the right button is the Power of Desire. If you have a strong desire for some thing the result will be strong will power. Suppose you have a desire to build a great physical body then your will power will drive you towards difficult exercise regime and food habits. There is a difference between wishing and desiring.When you wish you hope to get it fulfilled(hopefully).and when you desire you want it strongly(with all your strength). To test your will power you need to identify what you desire not what you wish.

When you desire some thing then use the power of faith . having faith means have a strong believe in your self or other.Whether you are good or bad at something its because you have faith in yourself. Due to various situation we might feel down with our self.but then use the power of your faith to heal yourself. The faith that whatever adversary happens in your life will never let you stop and using the faith in your self you will stand again to give it a fight.I will share with you the following clip from the Movie Rocky Balboa:

Let me tell you something you already know.
The world ain’t all sunshine and rainbows.
It is a very mean and nasty place,
and I don’t care how tough you are,
it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it.
You, me or nobody is going to hit as hard as life.
But it ain’t about how hard you hit. It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward;
how much you can take and keep moving forward.
That’s how winning is done!
Now, if you know what you’re worth, then go out and get what you’re worth.
But you gotta be willing to take the hit, and not pointing fingers saying you ain’t where you are because of him, or her, or anybody.
Cowards do that and that ain’t you.
You’re better than that!
I’m always gonna love you, no matter what.
No matter what happens.
You’re my son, you’re my blood.
You’re the best thing in my life.
But until you start believing in yourself, you ain’t gonna have a life.

The above speech converted into Motion Typography by blasdit.

 

Thats the power of faith.it does not matter how hard you hit.its about how hard you can get hit.

Harness the power within you mentioned above.Please do leave me comments if you liked my article or find some suggestions for me.

Regards

Shoumik Kahali

Other Articles:

What is Success?

1. Once, all villagers decided to pray for rain, on the day of prayer all people gathered and only one boy came with an umbrella.
THAT’S FAITH.
2. Example of the feeling of a one year old baby. When you throw him in the air, he laughs because he knows you will catch him.
THAT’S TRUST.
3. Every night we go to bed, we have no assurance to wake up alive the next morning but still we have plans for tomorrow..
THAT’S HOPE.
4. Paper said 2 Money "U R just a piece of paper" Money smiled and said of course am just a piece of paper, but I haven’t seen a dustbin in my life.
THAT’S ATTITUDE.

Source: This article is based on a email forwarded by a friend.

Success has got two meanings :

• A success is defined as An event that accomplishes its intended purpose.
• Success is also defined as a state of prosperity or fame.

Though basically both are same in meaning but today when we about success we generally give more emphasis on the second definition that for us success means a state of prosperity and/or fame. Now since most of us want to be successful as mentioned the second definition…we tend to forget the first definition. Lets take a look into the first definition "an event that accomplishes its intended purpose" this definition take following points into consideration:

1. Intended Purpose: This means to be successful you must have a well defined purpose.
2. Accomplishment: This means achieving what you planned.
3. Event: Something that happens in a given time or place.

Now lets map the above points with definition of success as prosperity and fame :

1. Here the intended Purpose are: To earn money/wealth and to be known by people.
2. Here the accomplishment will be: To have a plan so that you become a millionaire and have a list of fan.
3. Here the event would be: Getting published in cover of Times or getting mentioned in top places.

What we find here is that if you want to be successful you must first identify what will be your intended purpose to become successful.

The second important thing that you need to understand is the word satisfaction. If success means achieving a goal, satisfaction means liking what you achieved.

It is very important to have satisfaction, reason if you are not satisfied with your success then you can never be happy.

So the key to Happiness is to achieve success doing something that gives you satisfaction.

So in order to be successful you must define your intended purpose that will give you immense satisfaction and achieving success will give you the Happiness you are looking in your life.

The Happiness Triangle

Based on above discussion we find that these three words Happiness, Success and Satisfaction are interrelated and your happiness depends on how much score you give to other two factors Success and Satisfaction..

If you rank above:

1. Success and being Satisfied is the Best thing in life and this will be the most idealistic thing to do.and this will fill Happiness in your life
2. Failure and being Satisfied is a daring thing and most important thing on your journey to Success. If you remember the story where some one asked what did he do when he failed to build electric bulb for 5000 times.He replied I didn’t fail But I now know 5000 ways not to build a bulb.
3. Being Success and not Satisfied is a dangerous thing for your happiness.it means that you are trying to achieve things in life that you don’t like to do.This could mean that you are doing a job because every one said this was the most practical thing for you to do but inside you never wanted to do that job.or committing to a relationship without knowing what you really wanted in your heart.
4. Being Failure and not Satisfied is a doomsday in your life.Just get out of it.remember what Thomas edition said in point two.Failure’s are there to teach you some thing.Failure means its time to move on. Failure means start afresh.

Here I would like to share with you a video presentation by John Wooden on True Success:

I thank you for taking time to read my article, Please share your Success purpose in the comments section of this blog. If you want to share your success motivational stories, send me a email.

Thanks
Shoumik Kahali

Related articles by Zemanta

• How Do You Define Success? (lifescript.com)
• The Power Within You

Writing a blog article should be fun and for a person like me having a full time job.it should be done at leisure.as if full time job has the luxury of finding leisure

Being a great philosopher(not a serious kind off course) random article ideas come flashing down to my mind at random moments.and you just keep wondering if I could start to write blog with this idea.

I was always wondering if I could find some desktop tool where I can write a blog and articles in spare time and latter I could arrange them to form a complete blog article and publish them latter.

One sunny day my prayers were answered and I found this Free Desktop Tool “Writer” as a blessing.And this one happens to be the first blog post written using this tool.

Features I liked about Writer (I am testing this on my WordPress Blog right this moment I am writing this post using it):

1. Its Free Off Course.
2. It is easy to write blog using this tool.
3. Its a Desktop tool.You just configure your blog once and it will take care of the rest.
4. You can save the draft version of post locally.
5. It works with WordPress and other Blogging Software.
6. It extracts your WordPress theme so that it can Preview you how your post will look after it is published.
7. Supports Multiple Blog account (I need to explore this feature).
8. Allows you to select WordPress Category you want to add your blog.

Features I didn’t like:
Well As I said I just started exploring it.but whatever those are I know the features I liked will keep me going with this tool and I will keep writing blog using this tool.

Where to Download this tool and start writing Blog:

Microsoft Live Writer

I am sure you will try this tool to write your blog articles. Do share with me your blog writings using this tool(or not using this tool).

Take care

Shoumik Kahali