In a corporate presentation at most of the instances, the first slide is the Agenda of the presentation and usually, less than a minute is devoted towards the same. This is mainly because the person who is presenting is clear about the schema that he has set and before it puzzles the audience by making them think what would be in Point N in the list, he / she takes the liberty to move on.
Do I think I need the agenda of my life as well?
If yes, have I set the agenda of my life?
If yes, have I anytime pondered over the same every day for a minute to make sure I am on the track?
What is it actually needed to be on track? What is the measure of the same? Do I really have the Comprehensive Agenda – The Whole and Sole Purpose (may be consisting of numerous modules) set?
What have I done until now to stick to that Agenda? On a scale of 1 to 100, where am I today since the day the agenda was set? What is the speed at which I am progressing day by day towards the fulfillment of that agenda? How long am I gonna take the reach there provided I work at the same pace?
Do I need to increase my velocity and momentum? If yes, when? If then reply to when is not today, why not today then? What is stopping me? Do I not want to meet the destination at the set time lines or rather before it? Do I just want to keep on dragging and procrastinating thinking that one fine day I would hit the target and be happy about my achievement?
Does happiness lie in merely achieving the so-called desired target and not in working towards it?
I believe I don’t get the feeling of happiness each day because in reality I am not content with the way I have spent my day towards my Goal / Purpose / Target / Agenda. In the exterior, I manage to fool around myself and others by expressing that I have certainly worked towards what I actually want to achieve.
I cannot refrain myself from quoting the below study done in the early 1990s by the psychologist K. Anders Ericsson and two colleagues at Berlin's elite Academy of Music. This study is referred from the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. Hence, my sincere gratitude and consideration of due permissions for the same!
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With the help of the Academy's professors, they divided the school's violinists into three groups. In the first group were the stars, the students with the potential to become world-class soloists. In the second were those judged to be merely "good." In the third were students who were unlikely to ever play professionally and who intended to be music teachers in the public school system. All of the violinists were then asked the same question: over the course of your entire career, ever since you first picked up the violin, how many hours have you practiced? Everyone from all three groups started playing at roughly the same age, around five years old.
In those first few years, everyone practiced roughly the same amount, about two or three hours a week. But when the students were around the age of eight, real differences started to emerge. The students who would end up the best in their class began to practice more than everyone else: six hours a week by age nine, eight hours a week by age twelve, sixteen hours a week by age fourteen, and up and up, until by the age of twenty they were practicing—that is, purposefully and single-mindedly playing their instruments with the intent to get better—well over thirty hours a week.
In fact, by the age of twenty, the elite performers had each totaled ten thousand hours of practice. By contrast, the merely good students had totaled eight thousand hours, and the future music teachers had totaled just over four thousand hours. Ericsson and his colleagues then compared amateur pianists with professional pianists. The same pattern emerged.
The amateurs never practiced more than about three hours a week over the course of their childhood, and by the age of twenty they had totaled two thousand hours of practice. The professionals, on the other hand, steadily increased their practice time every year, until by the age of twenty they, like the violinists, had reached ten thousand hours.
The striking thing about Ericsson's study is that he and his colleagues couldn't find any "naturals," musicians who floated effortlessly to the top while practicing a fraction of the time their peers did. Nor could they find any "grinds," people who worked harder than everyone else, yet just didn't have what it takes to break the top ranks.
Their research suggests that once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That's it. And what's more, the people at the very top don't work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.
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Where do I stand? I need to check myself.
Having said all this, if I feel that may be I still don’t have any agenda in my life besides spending each day as it comes and most of the times dwell in the past or dream about the future then so be it. That’s my way and choice of living.
The above paragraph might have been put at the beginning as a disclaimer but I intentionally placed it at the end so that during this journey or writing I might get an agenda clicked and set for myself. Disclaimer might have stopped be even from writing or digging further. Having mentioned this, just writing or digging further won’t serve the purpose either. The 10000 hour schedule will.
Let me move on to the next slide of the presentation!
