Wednesday, September 23, 2009

A Better Version of You (Rather Than a Bitter One)

Its been a while and a lot of unwritten thoughts. Today's will be about the way we handle difficulties in learning a new skill. Lets take stamp-collecting as an example. Its a rather tame one but I have chosen it for a reason :). I go to the stationary store, buy a stamp album, start writing loads of snail mail to my facebook friends in exotic countries and blackmail them to at least send me a blank letter back for the sake of those little square pieces of paper that are probably licked onto the envelopes ;). Then I have to learn the value of each stamp which depends on its rarity, categorization of stamps according to shapes (diamond, triangle, regular, etc), countries, year, blah. And then I learn the fine art of shameless bargaining. "I will give you two triangles for one of your 1980 retros". And the learning continues.

This is easy compared to skills you have to build that involves people like Public Speaking, Sales, Leadership, Dating, etc. Why? I am sure you didn't ask me that LOL. The reason being that there is this teeny weeny thing called rejection. You try this, you try that and you look for the things that click, discard the ones that flop. Same as in any skill acquisition but the feedback is instantaneous about whether what you are doing is a success or a failure. And this is one thing I have learned to handle. The only way to get through all the shit is to-get-through-all-the-shit. Because when you get used to people getting bored of your speeches, people not being impressed by your sales talk, people being put off by your social etiquette, thats when you learn and most importantly, that's when you realize that what other people think should never stop you but inspire a tough person like you to get it correct the next time.

(thumbs up)