112- Monday Musings: Of personal victories

112- Monday Musings: Of personal victories

As the sun sets on the horizon of a lifetime, I would want to believe that the personal victories are the ones that one remembers and by implication are the ones that would matter. The stores of great men are often stories of adversity. In fact all the great men and women of the times gone by, who have ensured their mention in the league of all time great, seem to have overcome some adversity or the other, mostly extremely personal. So whether it be a debilitating stammer, or personal family tragedy or morbidity of some kind or the other, or a background of extremely humble origins, it seems that personal battles have been the subtext of all the saga of greatness that we recognise today as inspirational or motivational. If there is man who inspires you to go beyond your means, uplifts you beyond your limited means, there cannot be the mention of adversity far behind.

But we lead normal lives. I cannot chose penury today and hope to overcome it in the search of greatness or wish for a disease or disorder or limitation that will provide fodder for my aspirations and wings for my greatness. Where does that leave the need for personal victories?

Here is my take on it. Let’s do something new, something which is so fundamentally against our natural grain, that the mere act of doing it is some sort of a battle – and mastering it is nothing short of a personal victory. Ideally this something can be what we enjoy. Lets learn a new language, a new art or a new craft, a new hobby – art, poetry, prose, literature of any kind, lets watch 100 best movies of all times, pick up one theme and become some sort of a master in it; learn a new sport that we always wanted to, run long distances, enrol in dance classes or something else which is wacky and crazy – but something that makes us do something fundamentally against our basic comfort. The act of doing it and doing it successfully is a personal victory.

Nothing replenishes the fountain of confidence more than one such pursuit chased enough to provide some level of adeptness. I remember reading about a gentlemen who used to pick up one new hobby every three years- logic being that it takes at least 3 years for acquiring some level of expertise. At the end of three years, it was time to move on.

I have been generally enthralled by the sheer prospect of experimenting with one new pursuit every few years, though my performance with this resolution has been rather unsatisfactory. But whenever I have picked up a new pursuit and treated it with a certain level of fidelity, I have felt extremely good about myself. The spring in my feet could not have been an outcome of anything else but by the buoyancy only personal victory could provide.

Guru