Selfalot

Daily Quote: “Any ordeal that you can survive as a human being is an improvement in your character, and usually an improvement in your life.” Viggo Mortensen

Many people consider working on self-improvement as a constant work load rather than looking at it as the invigorator of your life. Attitude will make all the difference in your life when it comes to improvement.

Listen to the interviews of athletes who have lost a big game or didn’t achieve what they had set out to do. Very few of them say that they are fed up of not winning and are going to give up. Most of them state emphatically that this was a learning experience and they would go home and rethink their training strategy to improve on their performance.

They have the idea of winning set in their minds. And they will work on improving their performance until they are first in their field. And sometimes these very sports people don’t ever get to be number one. Many of them work around the periphery always just on the fringe of success. But they don’t give up and continue to work at it.

In fact in many sports such as tennis or golf you can make a really good living just getting through the first round. Sure you are not going to see huge returns such as the Roger Federer’s or Tiger Woods’ have. But they certainly make a fair income by working hard and constantly improving their skills.

Every improvement you make to your life whether with regards to personal relationships or your work, will bring you greater happiness and contentment. That doesn’t mean you will be number one in your field. But by constantly striving and working at your skills you will find your own level of satisfaction.

Do not see this focus on improvement as a task or job. It might certainly feel like it on many occasions especially when you find yourself not reaching your goals as you had hoped.

You might have studied at evening school over several years for your post graduate degree. Yet it did not bring you that career advancement as you had hoped. There are a fair number of MBA graduates who have found this out much to their disappointment.

Yet the years spent learning will have contributed to that person’s life. New knowledge will have been absorbed, new friendships made, new skills acquired and a mind pushed and stretched to achieve more.

That qualification will benefit you in other ways even if it might not have gotten you a jump into senior management. It could have kept you your job for instance. Without your MBA you might have ended up getting retrenched.

View every bit of improvement as an achievement. Realise that sometimes just the effort you expend to improve yourself could be the benefit not necessarily what you had wished for. Just using your brain and learning could be it rather than the actual qualification itself.

What about older folk who at the age of 90 go back to school to learn to read and write. Is this a wasted effort? Not at all. Just keeping the brain active and using and exercising your memory will add considerably to your enjoyment of life.