QW #4 - Everything is Practice

i think choking and giving up are both results of thinking of events more of the main event than of practice. It is when we put too much emphasis on it and not allow failure to happen that we get disappointed. And as any person who has been successful in anything in life, failure is part of the natural process. There is no avoiding failure. It is just part of the path...Get through it and u are one step close to success. As i read in a book recently, it is best to look at the success path as more of a U shape than a uphill climb...u start high, fall hard, hit rock bottom, and finally improve your skills and mentality and go higher.

so what do i recommend? I recommend viewing every opportunity and every effort as just practice. There are no main events. there is no real thing. It is all practice. When you view something as practice, you only care about improving. You don't care about the score. You are excited to try out new techniques and to learn. You don't have the added burden of not living up to expectations or falling short of being the best. It doesn't matter in practice. The goal of practice is just to do and to learn. And that is how we should approach everything in life.

So, here is my rule of thumb:

1. view every attempt as practice. there are no main events. everything is practice
2. think up new techniques for every practice. That way it continues to be exciting and never gets boring.
3. enjoy the fact that you are doing it and improving your skills.

* i thought of this when i was playing tennis with rino yesterday. i was doing better than normal and wanted to give up because i wanted to end on a high note. i wanted to end it by being able to say that the score was close and i was able to play well. and i was afraid that if i keep playing that i would lose and all that will be remembered was that i lost. i was scared to do worse and "fail". It was only when i realized that it is just practice. it is not a real match and even if it was, that is still practice. as with every grand slam final for federer is practice for him to improve as a player, so to are every matches i play. This mentality helped me work hard for a few more points then i got bored. That meant that just seeing it as practice was not enough. I needed to find ways to spice things up...that is why viewing it as a match is good...it makes it more interesting but there are many drawbacks to that. So i needed to think of another way to do it but without the drawbacks...and my solution was to find new techniques i want to work on continually during the practice. in doing this, i am always focused on something and can't get bored. I will get joys from trying out the new technique and feel that i have used my time and effort wisely...and that is how all this came about...