I wish, I could finish preparing my exam in time, or did that job in time or built that mobile app or developed that website, etc, etc….. Confess it, this is the most common and fundamental reason, we often hear and explain someone in our daily life.
Though we desire to complete and give 100% to our work but we often fail to do so. Most of our planning or commitments are either left untouched or if started, left incomplete and abandoned. The most basic reason behind that is FOCUS and STRESS. Yes, focus and stress are very much important and plays a key role in performing most of the work. Though we never realized that, these two words can affect our life to such a great extent in performing most of our work but this is reality. If we are stressed and not focused, we often fail to complete our work. Despite, promising and committing ourself to complete the work, most of the time we loose our focus and due to stress, the result is we are left with our incomplete work. By work I mean, anything that you desire to do, ranging from small personal things to your official stuffs, for example, preparing for a exam, doing homework, researching some topic, investigating new idea or doing the job given by your boss.
Now let us suppose you are a student and you usually have a lot of exams but you don’t know how to cope with them or suppose your boss has given you so many things to work on that you can’t see the end. You are the boss or a freelancer, a designer, a lawyer and you are responsible for all decisions and tasks and your business and life depends on them.
What if you could manage all this without feeling stressed out?
We can learn from marathon runners, how this can be achieved.
A marathon is a 42.19 km (26 miles and 285 yards) race. It is exhausting and it’s hard to finish, let alone win. Running a marathon is so hard that, if a runner is thinking during a race about how much he has to run there is a real danger of a heart attack.
Wait, if it’s true, why during the Olympic games we don’t see dead athletes laying all over the place?
The first thing a marathon athlete learns is how to focus. While he is running he focuses on something short, achievable, that is in his sight: the next hill, or the next road turn, or just that tree over there. Once there, the runner sets another near goal, and so on until the finish. He never ever thinks about the end of the race or how much has left.
This is the marathon way and can be applied at school, at work, in business, everywhere. I never realized that this can be such helpful until recently I applied it to my life. Start applying it and get the stress out of your path to success.
For example, suppose we are preparing for exam, we can think of all the chapters as different components and divide them into small components which are easier to focus on. Even, if we are preparing a specific component ( chapter ), we can divide it further into smaller parts so that, those can be completed in less time usually less than an hour to finish. Focusing in such a manner keeps me motivated and at the end of the day I know that I achieved something.