Your personal goals - Shout out loud or keep them to yourself ?

The new year 2015. I know it is kind of late to write about the new year but still as the first quarter of the year has ended I realize this indeed is a good time to write about it. As per my opinion, the problem with being too much energetic or enthusiastic at the beginning of the year is that we end up making too many commitments to ourselves and then end up not being able to live up to them.

Now, since those commitments had been made to ourselves alone, we fail to monitor ourselves well enough to check our progress time and again and hence we lose the track. The cycle repeats itself over and over again every year.

The solution to this, I believe, is to become accountable to someone for your achievements and goals. What I mean here is that we can try to be explicitly vocal about things that we want to achieve in the year to some people we can trust and we know are going to push us when we feel like drifting away. These people can be your best friends, siblings, parents etc. But a minor detail that is important here is that that person(s) should motivate you when you are going off the track and should not rather draw energy out of you. 

So, when we are accountable to others about what we do and do not achieve, we tend to push ourselves in the times of crisis because there is a certain aspect of social reputation that is attached to it. This is something to be tried and tested to see the results.

If we do try and implement this, we would not impractically over-commit and would also have a feasible method of going about our goals as we would know that the status of our progress is being monitored.

Ah well now you may or may not agree with whatever I just said but still you should watch this TED talk below by Derek Sivers that is completely opposite of what I just discussed.

The blog link for the same is here http://sivers.org/zipit 

I personally do not agree with Sivers here but you may choose one of the two methods and see the results for yourself. I would love to know which of the two methods you tried; being socially active about your goals or keeping them to yourself and which one worked for you, do let me know in the comments.

P.S: Reference link that goes in my favor is here.

Your idea of Success, is really Your Idea?

Today's TED talk was about the current society's idea of success and failure and its repercussions on the humanity as a whole.

The speaker started with the days of grief that he used to have on the weekends when he was dealing with the career crisis thinking where is his career headed. He talks about how these days snobbery has become a global phenomenon. Snobbery i.e. the practice of observing a part of a human being and assuming and making image of the individual as a whole based on that. 

This happens a lot in the social settings where "What do you do?" has become the most prominent question and we make the whole image of the person in our mind based on response. So, what is written on your Business Card has become important for the people than the real you. 

We are living in the times where it is a general belief that if you have the right talent, resources and hard work anyone can achieve anything There is nothing particularly wrong with this ideology apart from the fact that this also means that if someone is not very successful then it is because of their own reasons and hence are responsible for it.

Because of this, in general, there is more career related anxiety in people these days. Earlier people did not used to expect much from themselves and from their careers but now with "anyone can achieve anything" mentality most of the careers are in grief.

In previous days human beings used to centre the life around other forces like God, Universe, Nature etc and used to worship them to find the answers. These days, on the contrary human being believes he doesn't need any of that and can pray to himself and believe in himself to achieve anything.

Due to this situation, there is a contrary thinking that if I am a failure I am because of my own; which increases the suicide tendencies in humans while the truth is that Success and Failure are just random events and should not be made to be the centre of the human lives. 

This also takes us to the reasons as to why this sort of mentality has prevailed. Primary reason is the media that keeps highlighting the success stories of the people making it sound easy, logical and likely rather than being random.

Because of all the media hype, the idea and definition of success for people has not been unique rather, has been dictated by what they consume from the media. It is such an unfortunate moment when you achieve someone else's definition of success and realise; after investing a significant amount of time and energy in it that you did not want it in the first place.

To conclude, it is important that we think deeply about what our idea of success really is and then go about achieving it rather than running around the media's or society's idea of success.