Throw The Blanket Before Killing the Lion
A lot of people talk about slaying big giants, yet they fail in their own battle against their blankets that they go deep and deep into their blankets and sleep more and more whereas they ought to be up and about moving ahead. You will never be able to kill a lion in public if you do not possess the courage to throw your blanket away on a cold gloomy day to wake up on time. Public battles can be won only if you overcome your little private struggles.
If your blanket or your favourite dish takes control over yourself, how would you overcome serious life challenges such as rejections, separations, defeat, misunderstandings, loss of loved ones, failures, hardships, and many other gigantic unavoidable life battles? During a Navy Seal Graduation, William McRaven, the commander, announces to the audience that it is impossible to change the world if you cannot make your bed first. If you intend to become a giant killer, throw away the blankets, wake up, make your bed and face life. Defeating minor personal battles is crucial whilst achieving great victories in public.
A Sri Lankan mother whose children are in a western country told me that she has to visit her children twice as her children cannot live on their own. This is the outcome of poor parenting, when you have not trained your children to throw away the blankets, yet you wanted them to have big dreams from their childhood. Prior to enrooting the massive dream of becoming a cardiologist, train them to take the broom and tidy their room. If they do not accumulate the focus and patience to clean the room, how could they gain the focus and patience required to do a heart surgery? This does not apply only to your children, this also applies to you as life’s battles will never end until we depart from this world.
Life is like raising a high jump bar. There is no alternative to jump a level higher if you do not jump the previous height first. Every mind has its own capacity just as our physical strength. Unless you acquire the ability to withstand a light mental weight, you cannot lift a stronger mental strength, as you have not yet obtained the mental strength to lift a lighter weight. You cannot lift 80kg if you fail to lift 40kg. That is why I mentioned in my book that you must train your mind muscles to lift greater mind struggles so that you become stronger during the severe life battles. Becoming emotional and shedding tears is a good emotional attribute that one should possess. Yet, permitting that pain or that feeling to take control over you is as disastrous because then your feelings have more power than you.
The driver should have control over the vehicle, never should the vehicle have control over the driver. Food is essential to be alive but the purpose of living should not be to eat. Sleep is indeed a high priority for humans, but humans should not be alive to sleep. We should know the purpose of our lives, it is only then that we will be able to overcome every other storm that comes our way. At one point in my life I consumed poison as my mind did not have the strength to uplift the mental weight of that specific mental trauma I was going through. Until then, I was training my mind to forgo lifting life’s struggles by escaping life’s challenges by consuming drugs. I was the type of person who would chose not to learn driving but use a driver till he finds himself lost along with the vehicle without a driver.
Even though we may live a luxurious life we have made sure our son is independent from the age of ten. He knows to use public transport and travel by bus as he is being trained to face the reality of life and handle any pressure that he may have to face. Life is on track. Hence, we need to keep to the track and avoid losing track. My son can have his own car one day but until that he must acquire the mental energy that is required to counterattack mind battles which he is sure to face in the future. The day Joshua turned ten, we told him that he must begin to do all his work by himself, starting from cleaning his room to washing his clothes and other similar responsibilities.
We even got him to cook us a meal every week by the age of ten so that his mind is trained to face the usual life battles that none of us can avoid. Problems are a part and parcel of life, like a branch to a tree. A branch cannot bear fruits by moving away from the tree. Problems make us stronger, wiser and successful. If you have not trained your children to walk barefooted amidst the stones, then whenever they must, they will easily give up as their brain by default will say that they cannot do it as they have not done it before. Your brain responds based on history, meaning on experience. The level of spice you could fathom will be decided based on the level of spice you are known to have consumed previously.
Our brain is exactly like a computer. It makes decisions based on the data it acquires. Every stage in life is a stage to accumulate the armory needed for the next stage. No school will promote a student if that student has miserably failed in the existing grade. That is the science of how our mind works. The mind capacity increases based on how we allow it to lift different levels of mind pressures. You have three options in life. The first is to give up or stagnate and finally to challenge the situation and move forward. Every time you give up you disallow your mind to gain mental strength. Every time you stagnate on a problem you disallow your mind to be sharpened hence made blunt so that your mind hinders its growth. Every time you fight your battles and move forward before life’s pressures you accumulate more mental strength. Then your mind muscles become stronger than they were prior to the challenge. They become like steel that cannot be bent.
As I always say, it is perfectly fine to leave your sword on the ground and cry for a while when life becomes tough. However, you should be as determined to pick up the sword and fight back until you achieve what you desire to achieve. Consistency is the key towards growth. You would not have a bright white tooth by brushing your teeth once a year for six hours. It should be brushed for five minutes a day, every day. Your mind requires similar constant training so that your mind muscles will grow through constant development, where the mind strength to lift up grows from one capacity to the other by lifting one life problem to the other and thereafter to another, thereby increasing the weight it can bear. To purchase the book “The Art of Bouncing Back” visit
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