You might also like...

Showing posts with label risk. Show all posts
Showing posts with label risk. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Limitless




मैं कहाँ रुकता हूँ अर्श-ओ-फर्श की आवाज़ से,
मुझको जाना है बहुत ऊंचा, हद-ए-परवाज़ से 

So I was looking out the window at the cold, wet weather and thinking if I want to walk to office carrying that heavy bag or take the car. I am going to London in the evening and will take a cab directly from the office so taking the car will be a nuisance, I will have to come home to drop the car first. But the bag contains my tripod, camera etc. and is slightly heavy. Then I remembered that the last time we held auditions in London, last week, I had walked to the office with the same bag, and the weather was was similar. Okay, walk it is.

I thought how funny it is that just the realization that I have done something before makes it easier, even though physically nothing has changed!

In athletics there was a limit that a distance of one mile could not be run in less than 4 minutes. But one man, Roger Bannister, just refused to accept it. He kept trying and trying until in 1954 he accomplished the supposedly impossible milestone of four-minute-mile.

In a year from his first achievement, almost 10 runners all over the world had achieved the same thing. What changed? The road was the same, their bodies were the same, and yet they performed better, why? Only one thing changed. The limit in their mind disappeared. They now knew it could be done!

It is true not just in running but in any area of life. When you come across the next "impossible" task, look at it closely, is the limit real? Or is it just in your mind?

Happy flying! :)

(The sher translates to - I don't let the voices of the Earth and the Sky stop me. My goal is to reach much higher than the limit of the flight.)

Monday, March 31, 2008

The Leap of Faith

Update: hehe...I am on a video-blogging spree these days so I am adding the video clip to which I refer in this post. This one is from dubbed version of Spiderman 1 but I guess a smashed face is a smashed face in English, German and Dutch. *grins*



Have you watched "Spiderman"? I am talking about the first part where he starts to get all these powers. Remember the scene when he starts realizing that he may have some special powers as a result of that bite from the radio-active spider, where Peter Parker wants to test his spiderweb cord and jumps from one sky-rise building to another, across a main New York road? When I saw that I was like, "What an idiot! Why the hell do you want to risk breaking every bone in your body for that?". In my view, the same thing could have been tested with a much smaller, and therefore, safer jump. That's common sense. That's valid logic.

Well, since then I have realized that many times in life you have to take a leap, a big leap, a leap of faith. That leap carries an element of risk, you know that you don't know what's ahead, but you take the leap anyway. It was a long time back when David Lloyd George said, "Don't be afraid to take a big step if one is indicated; you can't cross a chasm in two small jumps". There are many times in life when a big step is indeed indicated. It may be the decision to start a new venture, embark on a new journey, start a new relationship or maybe just to change a habit or a pattern, many times you have to take a jump into the unknown. History shows, if anything, that people who take risks are more successful in achieving what they set out to.

I think behind the mentality of taking a risk, there always has to be a mindset of taking responsibility for your actions and your life. If you are one of those people who think that God, or life, or Nature, or your parents, or your boss, or somebody has screwed up your life and that's why you are miserable, you'd probably not be willing to make a change in your current situation mainly because you think that your life is not a result of your actions and your choices. But if you accept this basic fact then you will be more willing to take control of this life, make a change and that kind of change almost always involves risk.

If you have this firmly established in your mind that you are the one who is in control, not some universal puppet-master or some unknown force then the unknown variables will not scare you that much. There is a majority of people who advocate common sense, logic, the "practical" approach to life, who make a good case for the safe approach, the secure way of living. If I look around though, I don't see if any of these practical people have achieved anything spectacular. Any great man that I see, has taken a risk in his life, at some point, most of the time that leap was the turning point of his life - be it Bill Gates or Gautam Buddha.

Oh well, I can keep rambling on in my usual fashion but I think you got my point!

Tuesday, January 08, 2008

Thought of the day - 8th Jan 2008

He who deliberates fully before taking a step will spend his entire life on one leg.
- Chinese proverb

Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Little mistakes

"I never make little mistakes...only big ones!"

I am reading this book by Heinlein called "I will fear no evil". While this is the work of a master, the book itself is quite slow and uneventful; no chases, no persecution by authorities, no narrow escapes, nothing that makes me finish a Heinlein book at break-neck speed. This one I have been wading through for weeks.

However, I admire Heinlein not only for his stories, but his ideas, his philosophy, his revolutionary not-always-right-but-quite-challenging concepts. And this one caught my attention and I thought of course, that makes sense. If you are making big mistakes then you are taking big risks and ask any Wall Street financial analyst you have to take big risks in order to reap big rewards.

Oh, I can add another one to it, "If you are not failing sometimes, then you are not taking enough risks." Taking risks, as I might have said before, is an essential part of success, indeed a part of life itself. Think about it, anything you ever did, from learning to ride a bike to proposing to that wonderful, beautiful girl, anything worthwhile came with a risk.

Yes, it's scary; yes, it's dangerous, but as the man said, "Sure the game is rigged, but if you don't play, you can't win!"

Hehe...guess who said that, Robert Heinlein! :-)

Thursday, October 25, 2007

Thought of the day - 26th Oct 2007

If all of life and everything in it is fleeting and constantly changing, why do we cling so desperately to the idea of permanence? Can love and passion be denied out of fear that they might fade? Life without daring, without the risk of failure, is only existence and to exist is not to live!
-Unknown