Luckily unlucky

Luckily unlucky

What is luck? Is it something that follows you if your adhere to a certain routine? Is it something that sticks to you because of your perseverance? Is it a dame smiling down at you because you have an outright personality or because you are irresistible? Or is this something that rides on the wheel of time and crisscrosses every doorway once in a while?

Luck comes to those who persevere on the route to perseverance. Only if you keep at it will luck ever whizz past you. To keep at it one needs mental strength and admirably strong focus to be able to keep going in the face of strong odds and results that are not favorably inclined. Therefore luck is is a by product of the mind. Everything that goes right is because you think right and everything that goes wrong happens because there was no conviction in the argument.

So through aside luck and train your mind to be luckily unlucky because this takes away the thought that luck is something waiting to happen and will happen at least once in a life time. Some argue that it is being there at the right place at the right time. I would prefer to be unlucky always so that I can place my efforts in a more focused and directed way rather than wait for that little bit of extra to be added to taste.

Imagine you are going for a job interview, think about the job profile, the company and the scope of activities after you join. Do not even for a moment think about losing out to your competitor. When this happens the strength and confidence in yourself, your voice, body language all add up to present a perfect you and the interviewer sees in you a person who can be hired. You may still lose the race but that will not be on account of ill luck or plainly being unlucky, but because the other person held their side of the bargain better than you.

The mind is the most powerful and potent force in your system, train it to yield results and erase the word ‘Luck’ from your memory. You are what you think you are and if you stay that way you will finally end up exactly as you thought. Caress the mind to yield results, and they will all come in time. If it doesn’t come to you then it is not because you didn’t try but because you gave up just at the nick of success.

Imagine a man trying to uncork a bottle that has been stuck severely and not giving way in spite of all kinds of human pressure. You try it with your right hand and then try it with the other hand just in case. Still it does not yield. You try to unscrew it holding a piece of cloth yet it does not yield. You give it your last bit of energy and it still holds. Frustrated you ask your friend, partner, bystander for help and they unscrew it easily with aplomb. Why does this happen? Were you doing something wrong? Or did the other person unscrew it in a new defining way? - No.

What actually happened was that every time you put pressure the cork was unscrewing a bit but not enough for it to yield. You were not prepared to open it bit by bit and so you felt frustrated and unsuccessful. Finally you gave up just when it was ready to yield at the next pressure. That was the time your partner, friend, bystander took over and achieved that which you had vainly tried. You curse your luck when you should be cursing your lack of perseverance your lack of application. Had you kept at it the next pressure exerted would have opened the bottle and you would have been successful. So banish luck and stay focused on what you want while adding perseverance to your virtue. 

Written by- Robin Varghese – robin_vargh@yahoo.com

Stepping into the Dark

Stepping into the dark

When he sat under the apple tree he must have been dead bored, in all probability idling time, lost in the process of reconciliation with the past or the future. Whichever way, he was quite oblivious to the present, or so it seems, since it took a falling apple to wake him up from his stupor and start the churn in the mind.

Like Sir Isaac Newton, most of us are always in stupor lost in the past or mired in the future, but without having the power to change course on both accounts. It takes a Eureka moment for a new thought to flash across in the mind and give birth to new innovations much in the mold of Sir Isaac Newton. However for flashes of brilliance you must be living in the present. To live in the present we have to be thinking animals of today and not get lost in the maze of yesterday or the inconceivable of tomorrow.

Flashes of brilliance or ideas that flash across the mind are mostly considered stupid enough to be bottled up inside the person for fear of being ridiculed by others more so by experts who carry on the everyday rants. The majority of people are happy churning out the same recipe for everyday life. The thought process and the motions are mundane and boring but done in a flurry of everyday activity that we are quite accustomed to.

To suggest something contrary to acclaimed and accepted views and something that has not crossed the expert minds would be akin to teaching a fish to swim. However innovations and improvements have only happened when you break the trend, when you force yourself to be strong enough to air your views. Sooner or later the brave one will find a supporter, and then their numbers swell to form a caravan, this is how innovation takes place. The only effort required is perseverance that is unfortunately hard to come by and missing in a lot of adventurous people.

While working in the garment Export industry I found that many of the daily routines were undertaken and taken over by the so called experts whose expertise spanned a lifetime of monotonous routine. They in turn dished out the wares to newcomers. Since most of the new comers in production lines and on the floors came from a non-too enlightened background, they lapped up the dishes irrespective of the sweetness or the staleness. In later life they would swear by them and challenge new thought entrants since it did not sync with the ideas they were introduced to or grown up with. The supervisors and Managers manning these lines and floors rarely do a peep into the staleness of prevailing systems or experimenting with newer ideas.

The result being that for time unending they tend to carry on with the daily chores unmindful of workers satisfaction, or freshness in commitment or routine. Over a period of time, daily routine has turned out to be more mechanical than conscious driven, simply because it lacks freshness of ideas and innovations. Two examples of debates being stilled in the conceptualization stages are explained.

The finishing section has workers who are segregated on the basis of skills like; thread cutters, initial checkers, measurement checkers, final checkers, folders and taggers etc. Realistically speaking all these are skills that do not need specialized training. A routine training to teach each individual worker the method, would suffice and this segregation can be erased making them unified finishing workers for all activity mentioned above thereby increasing their satisfaction and raising motivational levels along with productivity, bringing down the cost of production.

However people experienced in the activity refuse to toe this line because it disturbs their equilibrium and forces them to realign anew. So engrossed and programmed are they with the routine that even peeping out of their comfort zones, gives them the shivers, as a result an Eureka moment is lost and forever melts into uncertainty.

A second thought - Finishing workers are all across the industry forced to stand continuously on their feet for an entire working shift of 8 to 10 hours with a lunch break of about 30 minutes. Does anyone realize the damage it does to their morale and enthusiasm not to say about physical strain they undergo to be part of this daily routine. Can’t they be provided with stools where they can be seated and do their work. Ask the supervisor and the manager and they will come out with familiar stories of how a seated worker loses the will to work and how seating turns them into lazy folks, thereby reducing their efficiency and productivity.

Not thinking, in terms of improvement is losing out on moments of flashes of brilliance. The learned in the modern world are turning more and more to startups than traditional forms of work, because they have an advantage of being their own masters. An idea that is born in the mind and when implemented that bears fruit is like giving birth to a baby and see it growing, an individual that does not characterize the known, a being that thinks and acts independently, more so when it is given the freedom to fly sky high.

Robin Varghese- robin_vargh@yahoo.com

21^st November 2015