Are You Training For The Correct Strategy In Life?
Discover Your Mentality; Form Neuro-Pathways Accordingly
I’ve had an epiphany of late: you know the phrase that goes “How you do something is how you do anything?”
It goes hand in hand with another saying: “Birds of a feather flock together.”
A simplistic way to look at this would be to see how not only do introverts stick together in, let's say, a classroom setting, but the way each student carries out their tasks would fall in a similar pattern.
There might be slight nuances here and there, but overall, you’ll see an emerging pattern in the ‘behavior’.
Behavior is Learnt
If we could trace our earliest learning center to find its origins, we would end up at the home — the one place where all children from the time their vision and hearing start working properly begin to ‘learn how to function in this world’.
As humans, we’ve been blessed with this amazing circuit called mirror neurons, which allows us to mimic people in our surroundings.
And most of the time, these people turn out to be our primary caregivers. Parents, Grandparents, Aunts, Uncles, or even the day caregivers — as long as children spend an appropriately long amount of time in their presence, you can be sure the good old mirror neuron has kicked into place.
Which Brings Us Next To This
When we are running the race of life, there can be two general strategies to tackle our daily to-do lists.
We either run as a sprinter or as a marathon runner.
Both employ different training methods as well as exhibit different strengths during the race.
The sprinter is all about muscle building and training to exploit its raw explosive power — where speed is rewarded.
The marathon runner trains by exposing the body to prolonged bouts of running, to get its muscle used to sustaining a constant release of energy over a longer period of time.
(This is simplified — the point is to show the difference between both athletes.)
At Your Workplace
There are now two things to consider :
- Your running and training strategy
- The environment (boss/mentor/colleagues) where you find yourself associated with
When at the starting point of our careers, we could be inundated with various choices to pick from in the beginning. How would you specialise? Is this a field that you can see yourself working in the long haul?
Perhaps this is when the sprinter's strategy would be best employed. You’d want to use this time frame to explore various possibilities in a short time period.
Later along the race, you’ll gather experience and make the fine-tuned adjustments to choose your long-term career — this is when the marathoner strategies come into play.
Remember, you’re now in it for the long run.
Everything you do now is with the view of ‘Slow is Smooth, Smooth is Fast’.
This applies to everything job-related, be it learning and applying new skills, leading and managing a team, planning your career advancement; as well as things you do in your daily life as well.
Sleep, nutrition, rest & recreation — they all matter.
Slow is Smooth, and Smooth is Fast.
The last thing you’d want to encounter along your journey (and trust me, there will be plenty of opportunities for this) is to feel burnt out during your journey.
Sometimes burnout becomes more of a train wreck rather than a planned stop. And if that happens, everything goes out of whack longer than you think.
In Conclusion
Back to the point of the story — your strategy as well as your environment plays an important role in not only your career but your life as well. Take note if you’re sprinting or long-distance running, as well as your peers/mentors along the way.
A small action, multiplied over a period of time, becomes a habit.
And life is all about habits.
