What is the least abundant part of our knowledge base? The unobvious answer is the knowledge of abundance. Man is mostly oblivious of the fact that nature has bestowed everyone with abundance — of invaluable, immense and unlimited resources that are capable of providing him with progress without having to vie with his fellow beings. And this ignorance is the main cause of ill feelings like jealousy, hatred, one-upmanship, etc. It also creates the feeling of less in him as he sees only less and misses the more lying within. ‘The sky is the limit’ happens only when man competes with himself as he is unrestrained to go after and even exceed the goals while when he competes with others, he restricts himself to reach only up to their levels, and even if he exceeds them, he loses the motivation, for they are not there anymore to compete with.

If we consider the self-governed, but not autopiloted, journey of competition-within as a river, then the knowledges that come from the environs are the tributaries that add value to the mountain springs, i.e., the river in you. A river cannot compete with its tributaries as they are there to feed, not to fend off, the river. So it is counterproductive to compete with the elements —  like your friends or foes — of the environs that you dwell. Friends and foes alike give lessons to learn from though the lessons may differ in nature. The knowledge from those lessons, however, are the tributaries to you, and the wise decision is to let them feed you. But, how can man get himself out of this debilitating, self-limiting matrix of competing with others? A paradigm shift in thinking and behavior that will surely makes him hit the jackpot lying within is inevitable. That shift is fueled by the redefining and reinventing realization resulting from an internal churning whose rules are unique but do look arbitrary to others.

The realization is that there is enough for everyone on the earth and that competition with imaginary or real contenders is not the way to harvest the unlimited wherewithal planned for you by nature. Rather, healthy competition  — both: for and against — with oneself to find the abundance-within is the thoroughfare to the abundance out there. How do I compete with myself? It is impossible for today to compete with tomorrow, but it is within the realm of possibility for today to compete with yesterday. Today needs to be an improvised version of yesterday, meaning man’s learnings from the deeds of his past and putting them into use can equip him to self-compete in order to create a better tomorrow. Today is the theatre of that creation, and the higher the level of activities in this theatre, the better the utilization of the resources to create a better tomorrow.

The abundance of resources in you has no limit unless you put a cap on it. And this unimaginably high resource trove can largely be captured in one term: intellect. Though emotions have immense value and importance to individual existence, I am deliberately keeping emotional elements out of the resources because emotions cannot prove or disapprove facts and that mining of the resources from within is a fact-based voyage. Intelligence and wisdom are the manifestations of human intellect. In other words, harvesting of man’s intellect is done by the tools of intelligence and wisdom.

It will be suboptimal to chain down the term: intelligence to any particular definition, but we can say that intelligent thinking shows the ways to choose from while wisdom chooses the best way. Wording in a different way, intelligence does mind-mining that lets out not-good, good, better and the best out of a man while wisdom functions as the judge to zero in on the best. Intelligence is aided by skills, abilities, capabilities and acquired as well as basic knowledges. The adage that none other you decide your destiny implies how intelligently and wisely you utilize the intellect latent in you.

The most beautiful part of intellectual abundance is that it is packed in layers. Touching upon one layer of this abundance and mining it using your intelligence and wisdom will automatically connect you to the next layer of abundance planted in you by nature. That is why success, which is the accomplishment of a pre-set goal, is never a full-stop but a pause to ponder over and connect to the next layer of progress. In order to maintain the continuum, an abundance-savvy nature ensures that it provides abundance to a man, both inside and outside him, when he gets ready to take it handful. This getting-ready is competition-within. A man who is ready from within will find abundance everywhere outside. There is no stopping of such a man because he is not competing to take away anyone’s resources but competing with himself — letting loose his unfathomable intellect to take away the dues allocated to him by nature. He realizes that resources out there are aplenty and that he has to only present himself to claim his share as anyone else can do.

A telltale example of abundance is the relation between the fishermen and the waters of the oceans and the seas. The vastness of these waterbodies is an epitome of resource-abundance that nature has openly concealed for man to meaningfully exploit. And none other than fishermen know the true meaning of this nature’s gift! Fishermen of a fishing vessel do not compete with their counterparts of another vessel for a better catch while casting nets, rather they compete with themselves by dwelling deep into the resources-within like their experiences and the knowledge to gauge the waters for a good catch. Competition for a better catch is anathema among fishermen because fishermen know that oceans and seas had never intended to have their resources exploited that way. Abundance does not call for external competition, and shoals and schools of fishes are the signboards by nature to reemphasize this point.

Time and nature are the best teachers; while time teaches lessons from our past, nature keep its doors open to anyone keen to observe and learn from how it operates. The message of abundance is the best lesson that nature is conveying , and missing it is likely, but hitting it is not a chance but a choice that man has to make deliberately.

Note: This article of mine was published in the souvenir that came out duting the eve of International Fisheries Congress and Expo 2024 organized by Kerala University of Fisheries and Ocean Studies (KUFOS) & College of Fisheries Panangad Alumni Association (COFPAA).

People answer in different ways if we ask them, “What is the most likable thing about social media?” Knowledge acquisition, new information, friendship, pastime, etc. are some of the answers that will come onto the table. Though I, too, like these things of social media platforms, the most I liked is something else. WhatsApp, one of the most popular social media, gives many options like delete, share, archive, unarchive, see to who all messages got delivered and who all had seen the message, and so on. All these options have a prerequisite to be fulfilled before they can be executed, and that is one has to select the post on which any of these options needed to be acted. Yes, the feature of selection is the most important thing I like about social media. I can share, delete, archive in order to escape the frequency of incoming messages, even ignore messages by not opening it and so on by using the feature of selection.

Selection is an unavoidable element in life, which we do knowingly or unknowingly. There are many interesting factors about and around the phenomenon called selection. Selection is the manifestation of a thought process that decides how man responds in a given situation Hence, it is an expression of man’s power to choose — the culmination of a churning process that evaluates the utility value of different alternatives and choose one, accordingly. The churning process is necessitated by either situational compulsions or suo motu inclinations though both are not mutually exclusive. How does this churning process work? In other words, how do we select or make a choice?. A straight answer is through our thoughts – thinking that decides priorities.

Countless wise souls who lived before us gave an invaluable maxim: “Man is what he thinks.” Nothing but this universal truth is responsible for whatever ultimately happens in our life. Every event that happens in our life may not necessarily look like an output of our thought process, but if we dive deep down and look at the event, revelation will come that it was a direct or indirect consequence of our thinking. Now, the big question: what forms the basis of man’s thinking? A man can think about something with direct or indirect or no knowledge about it or with a combination of them. To a large extend, man thinks based on his ‘learning’ — either as an extension of that learning or as a total departure from that learning. Inventions, for example, are the fruits of the latter kind of thinking. A man behaves — selects to conduct himself in a particular fashion — based on his thinking which is largely dictated by his learning. So we are now at a coordinate that says selection, the power of choosing, is based on thinking which is mainly fueled by what all that man had learnt from his life.

I remember my management classes where I learnt the relation among perception presumption and assumption. Man tends to learn through his perceptions which can be influenced by his preconceived notions called assumptions as well as by presumptions. Assumptions influencing learning is dangerous because, unlike presumptions, assumptions are guesses based on past events or can have no connection to any past event, with no realistic underpinning to a particular situation on hand. Conversely, assumptions can be based on earlier perceptions, meaning each feeding the other. How to extricate one’s perceptions out of the assumptions in order to reach to the reality is at the center of learning. By and large, man can not escape the bane of assumptions without deliberate effort to obliterate them. Another scenario is that what if the perceptions, which can form the bases of assumptions, itself were wrong and away from reality?

On the other hand, presumptions have elements of realistic value drawn from the task on hand. Presumptions are conclusions based on evidences gifted to a mind capable of critical thinking. Every task or a situation on which man has to make a choice has unseen roots of knowledge branching out, and these roots reveal the fruits or their absence on the tree that is the task. The seeing and reading of these roots is presumption. And, how does man presume? There is no silver bullet to do it but a thought process that filters out assumptions and subjectivity by using intelligence.

Learning is complex as much as a concept as its practical leanings, for learning is multidimensional as well as progressive, meaning there is more than one way to understand anything about life and that learning is a gradual process, built brick-over-brick — with each brick further strengthening the learning  or altogether demolishing the very learning itself in order to give way to a new learning. There is not a single man who has driver’s license to drive the vehicle of life, rather he is perpetually on a ‘learner’s license,’ learning everyday a lesson or two to choose the best from among the alternatives.  

The last thing a man wants to lose is his credibility. But, is it that which gets his first priority? If credibility is not the first priority for a man, then it cannot be that last thing to lose. In other words, credibility is not an accident but a default output of deliberate and consistent choices that a man makes in life. Since it is an output by default, it cannot be manipulated. Howsoever hard a man tries to hoodwink others about his credibility, he will ultimately fail in it as credibility is not an end in itself and that the means to the end were already set in by him.

What is credibility? In one word, credibility is trustworthiness. A man of credibility is a man who can be trusted for his words and actions — he will irresistibly abide by the meaning that his words expound and that his actions will be in congruence with his words. If we break the word: trustworthy, it reads worthy of trust. This element of worth is added to the variable: trust not overnight but over a period of time through a process where your belief in something or someone gets tested repeatedly. There is difference between trust and belief. Believing someone or something can be a one-off incident while trust is the intangible set of tried, tested and succeeded beliefs accumulated over a period of time. For example, when you buy a brand of soap or perfume or any product for the first time, you decide to believe in the benefits it claims to deliver, but these claims can be true or false. If they are true, your belief in the brand has succeeded, and if not, failed. The succeeded-belief will be tried and tested during repeat purchases over a period of time, and if each time your belief in the brand – belief in the benefits it claims to deliver – succeeds, you develop a trust in the brand. I do not believe what you say, and I do not have trust in you: these two often-heard sentences echo the not-so-subtle difference between belief and trust.

Trust is not a dead end but a live wire, meaning trust can be shaken and even broken. Trust in someone or something is shaken when your belief is tested and failed once while trust is broken when your belief is tested and failed repeatedly. Trust shaken can be repaired and restored while trust broken is broken forever. In order to elucidate further on the difference between trust shaken and trust broken, I wish to cite an incident without any prejudice to the protagonist in the incident. A few years back, CNN suspended the program: Global Public Square, or G.P.S., because in one of the episodes, the anchor and program creator was found to have done a little bit of plagiarism. I used to watch this program — and also after the incident – and the viewers’ trust in the program was shaken by this single event. Subsequently, the anchor apologized and the channel reinstated the program. Since it was a one-off incident where the viewers’ belief in the program was failed only once, the trust in the program was shaken but not broken. Had the probe by CNN revealed that the program was doing plagiarism over many episodes it would have made viewers’ trust in the program battered and shattered, leading to trust in it broken forever.

There are three factors: ideology, ignorance and credulity that have the power to make a man lose his credibility even when he has the noble intention of being on its side. Trust can sustain worthiness only when truthful actions emanate from a man. When there is tussle between truth and falsity in an ideologically charged environ, ideology forsakes truth if it is not in harmony with the tenets of the ideology. In other words, falsity gets a moral push under the cover of ideology and looks triumphed over truth. An ideology-wedded man, who is honest and trustworthy in the larger domain of life, does vouch for the ideology even when he knows that it is not in harmony with truth. Such repetitive aberrations from his otherwise trustworthy quality of consistently holding on to truth can make him a man whose credibility is seriously dented.

Ignorance does not make a man less, for it is not being aware of. Nonetheless, ignorance can cost a man heavily, including a hit on his credibility. However, the real danger is not ignorance but being ignorant about the ignorance, autopiloting a man to continue with his ignorant actions leading to the loss of credibility. Temporary setback to credibility from an ignorant action can be set right, but loss of credibility from continued ignorant actions is all but restorable. “You do not know what you do not know until you know it,” the famous quote sums it all about being ignorant about ignorance.

What is the biggest casualty of credibility? The answer is credulity. Credulity is the proclivity to assume that something is true. Being credulous, instead of seeking and verifying the veracity, can lead to actions bereft of credibility. After all, credibility is truth-centric. Assumption is a gateway to either truth or falsity with equal probability. But if you can replace assumption with presumption, the possibility of being on the side of truth is much higher. Presumption is informed assumption, meaning when truth is beyond the comprehensible spectrum, man tries to find the perceived linkages of truth and take decisions based on such information. The most damaging aspect of assumptions is that they have irrepressible powers to go incognito into the thoughts of a man and influence his thought process. And this can cause damage to his credibility without his knowledge because assumptions can be false, hence, the consequent decisions will fail against the yardstick of credibility. Ultimately, only will credibility be judged, not the assumptions behind decisions. Guard yourself against the proclivity to assume. Discard credulity and use the power of presumption as a way forward when truths are beyond the reach of comprehension.

It is within the possible realm to evaluate the credibility of a friend or acquaintance by the sheer fact of myriad opportunities of interaction with her/him. However, how do we evaluate the credibility of the words and actions of strangers with whom we have no option but to interact with for reasons of necessity? This is the most difficult part while dealing with strangers. There is no silver bullet to manage this difficulty except that we can take some quick notes of the person. In this regard, let me mention a couple of known psychological portrayals that are debatable either way. Over-humility is a sign of deception, and people showing such a character are highly likely untrustworthy. Consistent inability to look at the other person’s eyes during interpersonal interactions is a sign that a person is not straightforward and needed to be more cautious about — signs of lack of credibility. I have one point from my observations: People who possess the quality to laugh loudly are able to do so because they do not have a hidden personality and that they are not fearful that there is something untoward in their personality which might come out during their no holds barred laughter, thanks to their candid nature — a sign of trustworthiness.

I have to end this blog with the same sentence I used in the beginning of the blog with a small change: The last thing a man wants to lose must be his credibility.

Many of you will be familiar with the term: Ease of Doing Business, or E.O.D.B., an index that measures regulations which directly affect business. It has ten subindices like starting a new business, dealing with construction permits, getting credit, etc. with which the regulatory framework — hence, the consequent easiness or lack of it — of doing business in a country is evaluated and ranked. New Zealand, for example, has been consistently topping the list since 2017.

Is there a set of regulatory code of conduct for man that directly impacts easiness or difficulty with which he lives his life? This thought flashed my mind while I was reading an article on E.O.D.B. recently. Such a code of conduct ought to be there, for doing life with ease is not an easy thing and that it is highly likely that nature has postulated a set of criteria for man, like it did for other creatures, to do a life of easiness. Understanding those regulatory criteria can tell us where we stand with respect to the easiness that life offers; also, it can be used for midcourse correction if any. This, however, is easier said than done because though understanding the nature’s parameters of easiness is not an uphill task, practicing them is undoubtedly a difficult feat. Nonetheless, the scope for its practice is alive because many rightly say that life is not easy, as well as due to the fact that easiness and difficulty lie on either side of a single spectrum.

A universal truth that I am obliged to consider at this stage is that physical well-being, barring physical labor, is a consequence of mental easiness. Ease of Doing Life, or E.O.D.L., therefore, is the direct output of mental easiness. So the factors that have a regulatory influence on easiness in life have unfailing influence on our thought process. It is unfailing because not only does their presence have an assurance of easiness but their absence can also produce diametrically opposite and disastrous outcomes for a man. Hence, the regulatory framework of living a life of easiness is a proposition of live it or leave it, with no relative gray matter like in a black and white chessboard.

More clarity about the definition of easiness — hence, E.O.D.L — is required to further read through this blog. Easiness is the integral attribute that ensures wholesome flow of life through a logically consequent track when the related, guiding and binding variables are steadfastly met. So Ease of Doing Life is the life’s assembly line whose flawless movement is regulated by unequivocally established, non-negotiable and inherent factors capable of ensuring that when events and incidents happen, they pass out in their natural flow. These factors, like the subindices of E,O.D.B., form a set of criteria which we can call as the nature’s code of conduct for man. And they are forgiveness, honesty, integrity, righteousness and optimism. Let’s look in detail at each one of these regulatory codes of easiness, along with their possible linkages.

Forgiveness is the capability to absorb, neutralize and disperse injustice meted out by others by overcoming the feeling of retribution. It is a win by man over himself, independent of who causes injustice to him. The most striking saying about forgiveness is this: forgive and forget. Forgiveness is complete when you can forget the incident for which you forgave someone. But man has a penchant to not completely disengage himself from the past sour incidents even after he walked past them, so it is possible that the sour incidents can inadvertently flash through his mind. Along with forgiving, if you can completely forget the incident, then it is the best service you can do to yourself. However, if you succumb to that flash through the memory line, and as long as the flash disappears at the same speed with which it hits you, you are as good as a person who can forgive and forget. In this context, it is interesting to look at the difference between history and past-history. When an incident is buried beyond the redemptive powers of memory, history becomes past-history. If you can convert the history of sour incidents into past-history, then you have mastered the art of forgiveness.

The virtue of forgiveness offers plateful of returns beyond man’s expectation. It gives man equanimity of being at ease with himself, a prerequisite to be at ease with his surroundings. Forgiveness gives man more time for himself — to plan and do things for his future — by freeing him from wasting his valuable time in preparing plans of retribution. The eternal contribution of forgiveness is it gives man the feeling that he has no enemies in this world because his mental-make is such that anyone who considers himself/herself as his enemy and does harm to him ceases to be an enemy as far as he is concerned — injustices will be absorbed into and neutralized in the default pot of forgiveness, so his ease with himself will be nonchalantly protected.

Honesty is the principle of telling truth. Being honest or not is a personal choice and has its consequence; this consequential effect is a regulatory factor that generates or degenerates Ease of Doing Life. We need to differentiate between comfort and easiness as both are not one and the same. Let me illustrate the difference by asking a question: are you comfortable with being dishonest? If the answer is yes, it means that you can comfortably live with dishonesty, but that does not mean that this comfort can bring easiness in your life for, otherwise, there is no room for realization for a dishonest person. Indisputably, dishonesty can give comforts, but these comforts will always have questions seeking the reasons for their existence, and the inclement answers for these questions have the potency to take the easiness out of the comforts. On the other hand, easiness that honesty offers is non-subsiding and non-disappearing because it does not accompany ruffling questions.

Integrity is that part of your being without which you are as good as walking dead. It is something with which man identifies himself, so does the world. Integrity is the repository of elements that stems up the values with which a man operationalizes his character. In short, integrity is the base on which all other virtues are built up. It is impossible for a man to be honest or ethical after compromising his integrity. Integrity is the foundation of values that form the DNA of man’s character. It regulates your behavior as much as you allow it to do so, meaning if a man is a man of integrity, he is bound to attract and reflect all other virtues of goodness, guiding the life to move through the natural path of easiness.

Righteousness is the judgment based on facts, so it is irrefutably objective. Righteousness does not need a reason to exist as it is the reason by itself. It is the yardstick to segregate the deserved from the undeserved. Righteousness is so important a factor that its absence is tantamount to a man without soul. The Holy Bible asks, “And what do you benefit if you gain the whole world but lose your own soul?” The answer is nothing as man becomes a thinking machine of flesh and blood but hollow from inside if he loses the soul. Righteousness is the soul’s regulatory intervention to guide man along the path of truth in the material world.

Optimism is the practical side of hope. It is the energy drawn from the hope for a better future. Hope, even when it is a ray, creates so much energy and enthusiasm that man tends to forget the drudgery he is in. Optimism does not optimize the radiant energy from hope, rather it is the maximization of hope in present value terms — so optimism is the net present value of hope. How does optimism have a regulatory influence on man? To get up in the morning and begin the day on a positive note needs something to look forward to — the hope of a good day or the feeling that something good is on the way for you. That optimism has a huge bearing on how a man conducts himself during the course of a day.

Though these regulatory attributes of life of easiness are not mutually exclusive, effectiveness of each one has a considerable peripheral influence on others. For example, without possessing integrity, a person’s penchant to be honest can be debilitated because honesty is most tested when it is least demanded. Similarly, it is possible of being honest without being righteous, but man can never be righteous without being honest. Forgiveness and optimism are indirectly linked as forgiveness can kill pessimism, and when pessimism is dead, it is most conducive for the seeds of optimism to sprout. Irrespective of counting or discounting the linkages among the five factors for Ease of Doing Life, each one offers its own share of easiness when man puts it into action. Which of the attributes gives more or less easiness is only an academic question, but each gives energy to live life with easiness.

It will be an incomplete attempt if I try to give numerical value to human virtues. However, to draw a parallel with E.O.D.B., let me assign nominal values to the five factors of easiness. Unlike the subindices of E.O.D.B.. the factors of East of Doing Life can be given nominal values of only 1 and -1 as the highest and the lowest metrics respectively because they are characteristically come under ‘either or’ clause. You can be honest(1) or dishonest(-1) with no option of being a partially or occasionally honest person as similar as there is nothing called half-truth, for truth is absolute. Similarly, you do or do not have integrity; you are optimistic or pessimistic; and your sense of righteousness is either operationalized or shelved. So a numerical value of 5 is the best score for Ease of Doing Life, and -5 being the worst. Here, the positive and negative scores do not neutralize each other, meaning loss of easiness of one factor, say, righteousness, can not be compensated by the easiness of the another factor, say, honesty. For example, a score of 3 is always accompanied with -2 in a non-neutralizing combination: similarly, 2 and -3, 5 and 0, etc. Lower the positive score, lesser the easiness of life man enjoys. And a minus 5 score completely scores out the easiness that life offers. On the contrary, when a man scores a rank of 5 across these factors, he unquestionably and impeccably lives with the easiness life offers.

Life is not easy and has given us the tough task of finding and following the unflinching factors of easiness to live with. So Ease of Doing Life is a choice whose efficacy is regulated, hence, guaranteed when man lives his life under the guiding factors of forgiveness, honesty, integrity, righteousness and optimism.

What is that one thing that man can effortlessly give to another? It is possible that elements like love, money, time, etc. would have flashed your mind had you paused for a while to ponder over the question I raised. I am sure that most of you had come across the term: unconditional love. Whether it is possible to give unconditional love or not is a moot point, and the answer in either way demonstrates that a lot of investment is needed in order to give love. So giving love is not effortless. Money, one of the few exceptions to Diminishing Marginal Utility, is, though not the last thing to give up, not an easy commodity to part away with. Lesser amounts of money for global charity works as compared to the wealth getting accrued to the rich and the new-rich is a testimony that money is a hard-to-giveaway article. Those who know about the value of time rightly and wisely choose where to invest the limited time available. The fact that we are largely configured with a 3-stage cycle of sleep, work and recreation in almost equal scale, investing 8 hours available under recreation in our likes and dislikes is a judicious decision. It means that our time is also not easily and effortlessly available for anyone. So, what is that which we can give effortlessly to anyone? Respect. Yes, man can effortlessly give respect to others. 

What  is respect? Or, how do we define respect? Respect is honoring one’s own commitment to the norms governing human values. Respect is also honoring others’ commitment to the norms governing human values. If we club these two, respect is honoring one’s own commitment as well as others’ commitment to the norms governing human values. So it is clear that respect has two dimensions: self-respect and respect for others, and the former is a prerequisite for the latter. It is highly unlikely for a man to respect others — their values — if he does not respect himself — his values. In the same breath, we need to understand that it is not possible for a man to have a set of values, still, not honor them because the only sign of life that values possess is the honor with which they are upheld. Values are sitting-dead if they are not upheld. The elements of value system that man has to have in order to keep himself on the default track of self-respect mode are honesty, righteousness, humility, kindness and similar virtues of goodness.

Though understanding increases the level of respect, it is not necessary that someone has to understand someone else to show respect toward him or her. Manifestations of respect are acknowledgment and appreciation. Acknowledgement is making the other person aware that you have taken note of his/her presence and that you are willing to listen to him/her. Appreciation is one step ahead from acknowledgement, where you recognize and applaud the goodness and achievements that the other person had brought onto the table. Only can a man who acknowledges and appreciates the goodness in him show the willingness to honor the goodness in others. In other words, those who cannot acknowledge and appreciate, i.e. respect, others have their own values sitting-dead inside them. 

Unappreciative mind as well as appreciation bereft of enthusiasm — half-hearted gesture — possibly reflect an element of jealousy. To appreciate others, man needs a lot of courage to overcome the inbuilt inhibiting element called jealousy. Jealousy is a big hindrance to progress in life; it ties down a man to the narrow confines of his mind, where he, instead of competing to acquire the attributes of success, gets obsessed with his limited knowledge about others’ success, thereby absenting himself from exploring the times that offer opportunities for progress. It is impossible to fake ourselves because our subconscious mind takes inside and responds to the dominant thought dwelling on the top of our mind. You may have experienced that irrespective of your desire to have a positive mindset, you often tend to have the opposite. This happens when the strength of the negative forces like jealousy is more than those of the positive desires. If you want to be a man of virtues, you have to be a man of virtues as there is no other go — you can possibly game all but yourself.

Appreciation, the integral soul of respect, is also a two-way journey as it gives a return in proportion or more to the investment you put up for it. For example, if peer jealousy can be replaced with appreciation, then it has the potential to be a powerful factor that motivates you to succeed in life. Let me explain this with an example. Our life is like a river. All rivers get born in the mountain-highs as pools of water, and in order to become rivers, they break their way out through hard rocks as streams, take a plunge of thousands of feet down along the rocky mountains, land on plains with cuts and bruises. Yet they quickly organize themselves to begin the new journey as rivers. As stream begins new journey and flows down the plains, it grows in length and breadth as tributaries get added to them, finally, becoming a full-fledged river. We are all pools of waters as we begin our life. As we flow, tributaries of knowledge get added to us, and we become rivers of length, breadth and depth, churning out fertile soils from underneath – the fertile soils of life’s reflections as we experience. Why do some people continue to remain as pools of water while others stream out and flow as rivers?

The internal pressure generated from the success ingredients is the force that breaks the hard rocks of life’s tests and tribulations, enabling us to stream out from the pools of our self-inflicted limitations. But this internal pressure will be created only if we are on a positive mental framework which also includes acknowledging and appreciating the feats of streaming out by our neighboring pools. We can learn from their success — how they managed themselves to stream out to become rivers — and use such learning as an impetus adding to the internal pressure. But for this to happen, our dominant thought should not be jealousy but of showing respect toward the success of others — acknowledging and appreciating their feats.

As we all know, change is inevitable, but changing oneself is neither inevitable nor unavoidable but optional. Over the years, we change physically by growing older, but that does not guarantee a transformative change in emotional and mental spheres. Unlike physical growth, growing mentally and emotionally is tumultuous and painful, but it is a regenerative process where you molt and shed off the inherent inhibitive and unwholesome habits that stagnate you in the pool and adorn new traits that commensurate with or exceed the physical growth. It is a transformative change involving sprouting of positive mindset. Do make respect — acknowledging and appreciating — for others a part of your mindset as it adds value to and hasten your own progress in life.