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Become exceptional at work, at writing, at whatever your chosen vocation is I have many spiritual answers to this question. But there is only one physical answer that works every time.
You improve your concentration. If you can give your single-minded undistracted attention to anything you’ll become truly exceptional at it. To give you an example, I wrote ‘Keep Off The Grass’ and Johnny Gone Down’, my first two novels which did pretty well in India, but both of them lacked that content to be truly exceptional worldwide phenomenons. Yet in just a couple of years from then, I wrote the ‘Yoga of Max’s Discontent‘ which got a worldwide book deal with Random House.
What Changed In That Intervening Two, Three-Year Period?
Honestly, it happened a lot by chance. I started meditating for completely different reasons. And the by-product of that was my improved concentration. Which started to show in my writing. Instead of getting up every five minutes to have a cup of tea or checking Facebook and Quora while I was writing. I was extremely focused on my writing and that started to show on my output. So that’s why I believe that anybody who sets an intention can dramatically improve their concentration. And as a result, become exceptional at what they do.
How Do You Go About Doing It?
Look, let’s first kind of understand why your concentration slips. So if you think of a little bit of a philosophical framework here, according to Eastern thought before the world was created all that existed was shimmering vibrating energy. The sum of everything. Good and bad, up and down. Positive and negative. Happiness and sorrow, everything. The sum of all polarities. And then it kind of manifested with this desire to experience itself. Very, very similar to the Big Bang.
The only difference is that science thinks of this energy as being dry and attributeless while in Eastern thought the energy is just like full of like attributes it’s full of up, down, misery, sorrow, happiness, everything. It’s the sum of all attributes. So now as the energy manifests itself it is propagated by its desire to experience itself which is very linked to evolution. So that’s where it moved from inanimate, mountains and oceans, to animate, to the man with higher and higher levels of intelligence. And underlying all of this desire to grow and propagate was the need to survive. And that’s why it’s kind of biologically wired that in order for an individual to seek full expression, he obviously has to survive first. So that means it’s biologically wired to seek pleasure and avoid pain.
I want that fruit, I want that vegetable, I want this to survive and I… have to avoid this predator, I have to avoid that snowstorm. I have to avoid everything that can damage me in order to survive again. So you’re constantly seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. Intuitively, biologically. And how the desired kind of manifests itself in modern life is that you’re sitting working on something and you have this inner kind of craving to experience more pleasure by getting up and having a cup of tea or getting a sudden rush by checking the internet. Or like turning around and talking to someone because that gives you an immediate burst of pleasure which is very biologically wired. So this idea that you can’t concentrate it’s almost not your fault. It’s kind of wired in you not to concentrate. But now that you’ve reached that higher level of intelligence that you don’t need to seek pleasure constantly to survive or avoid pain.
How do you build that single-minded attention of just working without seeking that pleasure and pain? Right? That’s kind of the fundamental challenge. And the answer of course is meditation but I won’t get into the details of meditation here apart from two facts. You can improve your ability to concentrate by teaching your mind first to concentrate on one thought, one idea. And that’s where concentration-based meditation comes and then you should check my video on concentration-based meditation.
You’re basically training your mind to go from this constant seeking pleasure, avoiding pain, this distracting energy to this single one-pointed energy. And that’s kind of the fundamental of concentration-based meditation. The other approach is the awareness or insight-based meditations which are called Vipassana and again you could go into my video and see that. But the fundamental thought I wanted to pass today was to have that awareness at every moment of the day rather than just the 30 minutes that you’re meditating. Like so, if you are– If you just have this conscious awareness that something is happening and you’re noting it down.
The impulse automatically dies. So if you’re working on something and you feel the need to check Facebook, or you will feel the need to get up or uncross your legs. Or become more comfortable, my free meditation video course today. You just note to yourself, yes I’m feeling distracted now and I want to do this. And what happens is that in the act of noting that impulse will go away completely. So if you can have that awareness almost throughout the day but particularly in the moments when you need deep attention or single-minded concentration, you’ll see a very dramatic improvement in your concentration. So do try this. And you’ll see your attention improve and as a result, the improved concentration will lead to dramatic success in life. And with that, I’ll see you next week. Thank you.
This is Karan Bajaj and I want to offer you
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