My secrets of being Gold Medalist; How to be the best in any field.

I have discovered some secrets which I will share with you. Before that, a brief history of my life. I started as an average student and even failed my 5th grade. However this didn’t stop me from being Gold medalist in my university with a perfect scores. Anything is possible if we believe in ourselves.

Before I start I realized something I would like to share: If you are ever stressed and it doesn’t get better no matter how much you rest or try to enjoy yourself. This actually means there is something your subconscious knows that needs to be changed( This can be some task or work you need to do or some change in your life). The stress is actually not a bad thing, it is signal given from the sub-conscious mind to resolves things in our life. To overcome it we have to find the source of the stress and take action on it .

1. Curious and Curiouser !!

To be the best in anything, enthusiasm and curiosity is the key. The more passionate we are about something the more we learn and become good at them.

1. Learn to Suffer and Sacrifice

Let me tell you this doesn’t mean you have to suffer or be unhappy and stressed or anything. On the contrary, you can actually find happiness and inner peace with this, as you move towards your goals. The idea can be understand if we image how Buddhist monk sacrifice all materialistic thing for inner peace. As being the best in any areas requires a lot of work and effort, naturally we have to sacrifice and prioritize our time on our goals and sacrifice.

2. Rituals and Habits

Before getting in the mode of studying or doing anything important make a ritual to prepare you mind for it. This could be few minutes of meditation/ prayer, etc. With such rituals we can leave all the distraction and worries from outside world and focus on task at hand with a relax and peaceful mind, which optimizes our performances. Secondly, for a productive life style, as everyone says, we have to built productive habits. The most important is however to not indulge in detrimental habits, which can invoke negative thinking.

Negative thinking: which is the most harmful as this can throw us out of track and destroy our believe on ourselves. whenever this happens it is important to be kind to ourselves and hit refresh/ and start over. Remember, it is never too late to start over even if you have messed up the most terribly, even a jiffy left is not too late for anything. With this mentally you can be at peace and focus on task or test at hand, which will give you the optimized result; even if you haven’t prepared anything( ex. for a test) till the last min. On the other-hand if you dwell in negative mindset then your performance can be worst.

Remember positive self talk at all times is very important to be in a peaceful mindset.

3. Surround yourself with productive people, who have similar ideals as you.

As obvious as it sounds. This means that you have to be careful about with who you spend the most time with. Without realizing we become like people we surround ourselves with, so choosing ones companion carefully is very important. This also means being careful about what you watch in TV, YouTube, in social media, and distancing from people who can have negative influence in your life.

4. Always Motivate yourself

Being motivated is like building muscle, we have to keep exercising it daily. This means we have to always do things to make our life interesting, such that each day you wake up looking forward towards something exciting. We can make our life interesting by always challenging ourselves with realistic (being over optimistic can sometimes burn us out, which I feel everyone goes through one time or other) goals. Other things you can do to motivate is watch good movies, read books, see blogs of ambitious people. We all want to imitate people whom we admire, watching them or reading about them gives us clearer picture of what we aspire to be and gives us drive to do things certain way like them.

5. Learn to say no !

We can feel compelled to please our friends, professor or people in higher position. But it is better to be honest to them and say no when we can’t help them. We can’t always make everyone happy, so sometimes it’s okay not to care about things out of our control and focus on things that is in our control.

6. Getting started is the hardest !!!

Things look daunting, we can overthink and over-analyse things to a point we postponed them again and again. So we need to remember, it’s okay to start without preparation and once we build the momentum we can start analyzing. A great way to start is,

5 min rule: start the work with the intention of working on it for 5 min and if you don’t want to work then stop after that. What happens is you often find yourself working on it relentlessly( this article is proof of that :D).

2 min rule: Say to yourself if a task is takes less than 2 mins, I will immediately do it. Most of the time this question will give you the will power to cross the task at hand.

7. Be prepared for Hiccups

Hiccups are inevitable. Therefore, we have to be prepared to not get into the negative mindset, and be ready to hit refresh and start over stronger. Taking two steps forward and one step backward is how we can progress.

8. Plans things in Advance

Yearly plan, monthly plan, weekly plan and daily plan. This makes sure we know what we want to do and removes the confusion regarding what to do, which causes overthinking and procrastination. Also, we can change the plan with time as our priorities may change with time and situation.

9. Write Journal

Writing Journal helps us think clearly, and clear the confusion we have in our mind which we can’t quite point out. Its like a self therapy; ask for help to yourself and you will find it.

10. Tiny changes for big Leap !!

Sometimes we can’t see results for our effort but that doesn’t mean we haven’t progressed. With tiny progress, a time will come when we will suddenly reap the fruits. A detail explanation is given by James Clear in his book Atomic Habits.

Thank you very much for reading till the end. There are many more things to write on this topic. The methods above has worked for me but different methods might work for you, so be curious and keep experimenting different methods till you find yours. I Will write more on such topics on the next article. So keep in touch :D