In life when things get hard, such as studying for your final exams or learning a new language, we often just procrastinate and tend to avoid the task altogether.
But what If these obstacles present opportunity?
How can we turn adversity to advantage?
Obstacles are present in every stage of our life, from learning how to walk and talk to riding your bike to learning how to cook and drive a car. Learning is a natural phenomenon and the brain is able to overcome such phenomena by learning.
Hurdles and downturns are a normal part of our lives, as life is within its self imperfect so is our planning and execution. Instead of turning away from a job because its far away and the morning is cold and you haven’t worn the correct type of coat and don’t feel like taking a shower. Reasoning why we should act to favor a better outcome can help defeat our procrastination!
In order for us to overcome and adversity or obstacle such as passing a final exam or changing our body into a fitness model’s body comes down to our own end goals and in order to achieve the end goal we must maintain will and alter our perception of reality. Reality has many flaws and most of the times we can easily become swayed by following society and doing just what everyone else is doing.
however what if we take a route away from the main stream and just look at out objective and tackle the steps needed to achieve an objective?
Lets say you are a graduate, like myself and become tired and bored of working 9-5 for a low satisfaction job. The ultimate goal would be changing job, however how can you change job if you have to go work to maintain your housing and food? here the way you approach the issue is to use the extra time to create a side hustle that will allow you to achieve your goals.
Our Perception is Deceiving
We usually tend to be sucked in by the events around us and act passively towards a goal, sometimes also waiting for things to just happen. Unfortunately we are not Isaac Newton and an apple rarely will fall on your head unless you go find an apple tree.
Here the concept of action is needed. Yes, action within its self is the most important thing you can do! with action, you can test and see for your self aspects that you doubt about. you can learn how to code or study from failing, however, if you never take action then you will never succeed.
Action and will are by far the most important aspects to help us move forward. We can take action from knowledge acquisition, the more you can learn the faster you will earn, and this has never been so true.
Our perception can help us visualize reality in either a positive way or a negative one. looking at things in the long run and looking at things objectively can help us take better action and we can become less rash and effected by our own emotions. Rationality and how we look at our life events or obstacles is important.
Example: during medical school i managed to get good score for all the 5 years at University however i failed my final OSCe examination stations and had to resit which made me start my clinical attachment later. I personally felt like quitting at that point in time! however if you take time to sit down and realize that the resit is still coming up and you still have the ability to redo it, you start to realize its just a matter or a few weeks.
here the point of view or objective reality is different to the inner feeling of frustration and we should not let our emotions dictate what action we should take.
We focus on the Goals but forget the Process!
Most of us just expect results to come fast, but in reality its not just A —> B it more like Z = A, B, C, D, E……….Z.
So in order the get to the goal we want to achieve we must take time at perfecting our skills and then using those skills to move forward in life. The real problem with our thinking that when we over think or fixate on a particular goal and not look at the step by step process we either loose interest or end up giving up.
The importance of the process cant be more emphasized as the end result is the result of time x effort that creates and outcome.
The book recommended for further reading on overcoming obstacles: