It's easy to feel hopeful during the good times

Hope. It indeed is one of the strongest emotion human beings can conceive. It defies reasons and logics and keeps our spirits almost unnaturally and impractically alive when we need it the most. I recently came across a wonderful graduation speech given by the lead female actor in the movie “The Amazing Spiderman-2”.

“I know we all think that we are immortal. We are supposed to feel that way. We are graduating, but like our brief four years of high school, what makes life valuable is that it doesn't last forever.”

“What makes it precious is that it ends, we know that now more than ever, and I say it today of all days to remind us that time is luck”.

“So, don’t waste it living someone else’s life, make yours count for something. Fight for what matters to you, no matter what, cause even if we fall short what better ways is there to live.”

“It's easy to feel hopeful on a beautiful day like today, but there will be dark days ahead of us too. There will be days where you feel all alone, and that's when hope is needed most. No matter how bad it gets, or how lost you feel, you must promise me that you will hold on to hope. Keep it alive.”

“We have to be greater than what we suffer. My wish for you is to become hope; people need that.”

“And even if we fail, what better way is there to live? As we look around here today, at all of the people who helped make us who we are, I know it feels like we're saying goodbye, but we will carry a piece of each other into everything that we do next, to remind us of who we are, and of who we're meant to be.”

--- Gwen Stacy

May we all get the strength to realize and attain hope when we need it the most because it indeed is something which is deeply imbibed in all of us but, it’s just that we tend to forget this fact when we are going through the ‘not so sunny’ days of our lives.  

Youtube link to the speech: Here. 

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.