When we look at success around us, we tend to fixate on its superficial layer. We see the luck, the book or the project that brings the money and the attention. In other words, we see the visible signs of opportunity and success. But actually, we are grasping an illusion.
In fact, what really matters are the changes occurring in the inside of a person, it's all about the invisible signs. The slow accumulation of skills and knowledge, the incremental small changes overtime, the ability to withstand criticism. So the fortune and dramatic transformation we see from the outside is basically the visible manifestation of all of this deep preparation.
Who looks outside dreams, who looks inside awakes - Carl Jung-
Stop fixating on what other people are thinking or doing, and instead start to focus on yourself onwardly, on your uniqueness, on your personal inclinations which are generally formed during your childhood. But as we grow, we tend to listen more to our parents, to our teachers who dictate to us which things are good or not, to friends who tell us what’s cool and what’s not. Consequently, we start becoming stranger to ourselves and begin doing things that don’t suit us intellectually and intentionally. Dive deep into your uniqueness and recall your personal inclinations, the subjects that spark this child-like intense curiosity in you.
Most people are looking for some straight-forward line toward success. But in reality, we must welcome and embrace the long-term path of wrongness, flaws and mistakes.
Look at what will happen to you when you start thinking from the inside out. Because you are headed into a direction that resonates with you personally. Thus you can sustain your attention and focus for a much long period of time. What excites us is the learning process itself, overcoming obstacles and increasing our skills' level.
Scientifically speaking, in observing chess players, scientists notice that there’s something magical in the 10.000 hour-rule of practice discovered by the psychologist Anders Ericsson. The minds of these people became suddenly much more creative and fluid. The structures of their brains altered by all those hours of practice. And at that 10,000 hour-mark, we could see a visible transformation in their performance and creativity.
Finally we can claim that there's a way into transforming ourselves, and this is through our work and the slow, organic process of self-discovery. And at the borderline of this process, we contribute something meaningful to our culture through our work, which is usually ugly, boring or banal.
This article is inspired from the TEDx talk, "The key to transforming yourself" by Robert Greene.
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