Mirza Yawar Baig – How to identify your Life Goal #01
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AI: Transcript ©
A question that I'm asked from time to
time by
thinking individuals,
thinking
young people
is
how should I
focus on a goal?
How do I arrive at a goal for
myself in life?
Now those who
are born with that
thought and that knowledge and that
focus
clearly in their minds are
and they are blessed.
But those who are not born with that
are
in a way blessed even more.
Because
when you get something easy, sometimes you tend
to lose
value for it. You think it's okay. It
comes easy to me, so must be easy.
Well, the reality of life is that it's
not easy.
And for those who to whom it does
not come easy,
I'm saying they are even more fortunate and
more lucky lucky because
on the one hand, they will
get
the
get that knowledge when they work hard enough
for it. And meanwhile,
they will have the
opportunity to develop resilience, to develop perseverance,
and to develop consistency,
and to develop persistence,
and to develop commitment,
and to develop discipline,
all of which
are critically
important
to achieve that goal
no matter how easily
or no matter with what difficulty
you arrived at it in the 1st place.
So even the person who knows from the
moment you opened your eyes
that I want to be this, whatever that
this is,
he will need persistence and he will need,
you know,
he will need a staying power. He will
need
the commitment, and he will need,
all of that
if he really wants to achieve the goal.
Knowing that you want something is one thing,
getting it is a whole different ballgame.
The benefit or the or rather the only
benefit
of knowing clearly what you want is that
you can start working in that direction
sooner than somebody
who has to go through,
a lot of,
you know, soul searching and
so forth before he or she gets to
that clarity. That's the about the only benefit.
But if
you know it clearly,
but you do not do anything
to develop,
to bring discipline into your life,
to
be persistent,
to be consistent,
to have determination,
then
good luck to you because you're not going
to achieve that goal.
Now,
therefore, how to do this? So I'm not
talking about the one
to whom this is clear. I'm talking about
the one to whom
it may not be so clear and they
are struggling.
The first thing to do is to make
friends with yourself.
I've said this many times and I've believed
this and I believe it very strongly. That's
one of the greatest things that we have
lost,
which used to be a strength.
Maybe maybe for some people it was a
strength.
By default, I mean, you know,
they didn't ask for it, but it was
there. It became part of their life.
It's like people living on steep mountain hillsides.
They get to do a lot of,
cardiac work walking up in our hillside not
because
they're interested in
cardiac fitness, but because
that's how you get around.
You live on top of the hillside, you
go to go down to the river to
for water, carry the water back up again,
and so on and so on. So you
are getting,
you're doing some work for some other reason,
but you're getting cardiac fitness as a bonus.
And I think that is something which is,
you know, worth thinking about. So
the the thing to do, what we have,
lost
is this, which is
the ability
to be comfortable with yourself.
The comfort with silence,
the comfort with solitude,
comfort with being by yourself.
And when I say by yourself,
I don't just mean by yourself physically, personally
as in one human being, but one human
being minus their phone.
Because the phone is the biggest distraction
and the biggest,
interference
that we have
bought and brought
into our lives.
And we have created
this completely
toxic lifestyle,
which is based on
where the most
common feeling is that of fear, FOMO,
fear of missing out.
And if you just think about
all the time we check the phone so
that we don't suffer from FOMO,
so that we don't miss out something,
and see, okay, so
I check my phone,
you know, 10,000 times a day because that's
that's the truth of it. That's how much
we check
every 3 seconds.
And say, okay, sure. So I did that.
Now what did I get?
Well, obviously, I didn't miss out.
I was taking care of that every 3
seconds.
So I must have got
what I was
chasing.
What did I get?
Ask yourself, what is the answer?
You know the answer. I know the answer.
So
the
ability
to
be alone
and to be comfortable
with yourself
being alone.
So number 1,
you're talking about how do I get to
a life goal.
So first step,
make friends with yourself.
Learn to be alone.
Seek
being alone.
Don't seek company. Seek being alone.
Seek solitude.
I don't mean seek solitude as in,
you know, somebody who is, functionally introverted,
somebody who is depressed. No. As a perfectly
healthy
human being who is very
comfortable with other people,
who has high social skills and so on,
but they like to be alone by themselves
for some part of the day.
And that's where we need to get.
Today,
there's a whole
branch of psychology which deals
in these things, which is
anxiety creating moments
for people who,
hate.
Solitude,
feel worth, being by yourself creates anxiety in
people, creates fear in people.
I'm asking you, get to a point where
you will be happy with
that. You will seek that.
And if you don't have that for some
time, that will make you unhappy. That will
make you,
not anxious, but it will be something that
you will
want to have. You'll say, oh, I wish
I could be by myself.
Not because I hate people, but because I
want to be by myself. So make friends
yourself. The second thing is
once you are alone and believe me, be
prepared for pain, be prepared
like anything else. If you're going to the
gym and you say, well, you know, my
muscles right now would,
they would look like look nice on a
chicken, but,
since I'm not a chicken, I need to
do something about it. And you start
under a coach, you start,
a regimen of,
of calisthenics
and weights and so on.
The first thing, the very first sensation
that you will feel, which will be very
strong,
is that of pain.
You will feel pain. Your
whole body will pain.
You will question your sanity. You will say,
what the *? Why did I do this?
Am I insane?
And the answer is no. It's not you
are the sinest person in the world.
So why did you choose the pain? Because
you know what is behind this pain.
The pain is a mask. The pain is
is a barrier.
And once you go
over that barrier
then there is beauty, then there is comfort,
then there is great,
beautiful health. There's all kinds of good things.
So the same thing with solitude.
Be prepared for the pain. Be prepared for
anxiety. Depending on what kind of a frenetic
lifestyle you have, depending on how addicted you
are to your phone,
all of this is going to come up.
Don't even take your phone with you. Don't
give yourself more difficulty by saying, I'll take
my phone but I won't look at it.
No, you won't. You will look at it.
Keep the phone at home. Keep the phone
as far away from yourself as possible.
And, if the phone is linked to your
watch or something, imagine see how we have
physically and voluntarily
put chains
on
our ankles and our and our feet and
our,
wrists
and run our necks.
These are the real chains, right? Not the
steel and iron chains that slaves
used to were forced to wear. The slave
didn't like what he was wearing. We love
it, and that's where the problem is.
I was reading some
stuff by George,
George Orwell
and Aldous Huxley,
2 philosophers.
George Orwell wrote the book
in 1984,
and I suggest you read it.
Aldous Huxley wrote the book,
Brave New World, which also I suggest you
read.
They make a there's somebody else who made
a
wonderful,
commentary on them, comparing them. And he said
George Orwell feared
that we would be enslaved
by the things we hate,
and Aldous Huxley
feared that we would be
enslaved
by the things we love.
And so on, I mean, I think this
is where we are. We are enslaved by
the things we love.
We spend
money we can't afford
to get
more and more
sophisticated phones.
Most of the,
most of the
features of it, we don't use,
And then we also make sure that we
are hooked up in other ways where the
phone is
hooked up to the watch and the
watch is hooked up to something else and
so on. So shade after shade. You need
to break out of that, so throw all
that.
Leave your watch, leave your phone. Don't take
any watch. You don't need a watch.
The world doesn't depend on you.
If you are not
contactable
for a few minutes or a few hours,
believe me, nothing will change in the world.
And if you don't believe me, go to
the next funeral that you go to, named
Janata,
and see
the people who come to the Janata, people
who
pray
the people who go to the cemetery, people
who are burying the person who has died,
look around.
See how committed they are to their task.
See how interested they are in the person
who died
and how interested they are in getting it
over
and getting back to their lives.
Just see that. Right? It's a very solitary
thing. No matter how much that person was
loved, everybody loved.
No matter how much that person was respected,
no any no matter how big a crowd
there was, so the janaza,
the crowd in the kawristan, and the cemetery
is smaller,
and so on and so forth. So
the point is that that's exactly
how important you are and how important I
am.
So let's not get side side by that.
Nothing in the world will change if I
disappear for a few hours. Nothing at all.
And, if you don't believe me, disappear and
see what happens. Nothing will happen.
So stay,
go and sit in the forest, ideally forest.
There's something beautiful about forests. There's something beautiful
about trees. But if you are,
if you are not fortunate enough to live
near a forest and find something, find a
park or something, go out. Don't sit inside
the house. Go outside
into a place of nature,
into a place where
surrounds
you. Go and sit down and
just be by yourself.
Do nothing, say nothing, speak nothing. And I
said, alone.
Don't take your best friend with you.
Don't take your cat or your dog with
you. Don't take your phone with you. Definitely
don't take your phone with you.
Be comfortable with yourself. You're talking about getting
live goals. How do I
get clarity of my life goals? This is
the first step. Make friends with yourself.
Second thing you do
is
you,
then learn what to do with yourself when
you are low.
And that is the skill of introspection.
Reflection,
introspection, and abstract conceptualization.
3
very critical things to do.
Reflection,
introspection, and
abstract conceptualization.
So there's another word which, David Cobb uses
in his beautiful model. He calls it reflective
observation. It's a very beautiful term, reflective observation,
which is in reflection,
thinking about the incident that you are reflecting
on.
Now he's talking about specific incidents. I'm talking
about being there with yourself and your time
and
and,
you know, trying to,
be with yourself and your time and
see what I, what can I learn? So
reflection. Now for that, for you to be
able to do
reflection, observation
and abstract conceptualization,
you need
a pad and a pen.
Again, no tablets,
no electronics. Your pad and your pen.
Take a pad and pen, sit down in
this forest,
in silence,
and
reflect
and introspect.
Keep your heart
alive
with the zikr of Allah.
Keep remembering Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala. You know,
could let let your heart be beating to
that, to
to the and
whatever,
but
keep focused on yourselves
and try to be aware of what is
happening
within yourself. What's happening in my heart?
How do I feel? Right? When you sit
in that forest, try to feel your whole
body.
What do my toes feel like?
My head and my arms and my fingertips
start from the extremities and come inwards.
What is each of these feeling like?
This awareness, this physical awareness is very important.
It does 2 things. 1 is
it is an exercise in developing awareness,
and second thing is
it then cancels out
the interference that
that lack of awareness can have because you
know your back will pain and your leg
will do something and so on and so
on and this will all interfere in your
thinking and your reflection. So you want to
get rid of that. The thing about that
is when you become aware of it, it
goes away.
It stops disturbing you.
So become aware, consciously
aware of what is,
happening to you inside yourself.
Once you've done that,
bring your mind to the task at hand,
which is what do I want out of
life?
And write.
Don't worry about grammatically, is it correct? What
does the sentence look like? What with somebody
who reads it, will they laugh when they
cry?
What will they do? It's not about anybody.
It's not an exercise in composition writing. It's
not an exercise in writing poetry. It's not
an exercise in anything. This is between you
and yourself and you and your heart and
you and Allah. So write down
whatever is
going on in your mind.
Ask yourself questions.
Write whatever the answer is. Don't worry about
the answer. It doesn't sound nice at all.
Just write whatever is in your mind.
Including, I think I'm insane.
Why did I listen to this
lecture?
Think Shefiawari is insane. I write down. Write
write all of them down,
but make sure that you're writing.
The writing is critical,
without a doubt. Okay?
The writing is absolutely critical.
So make sure you don't not write.
Now when you are writing down, remember, as
I said, 3 step process,
reflection or reflective observation,
introspection,
and abstract conceptualization.
So this is the first step. The first
step is
reflective observation. So you're writing down,
what's happening in your mind, your thoughts about
your goal.
What are the different goals that I'm
potentially,
considering?
Some of them might be clear. Some of
them might not be clear. And it's a
good thing to try at this stage to
narrow down to,
if possible, 2 or 3 goals.
And again,
having said that, don't try and do that
in the first,
attempt because if especially if you are not
used to being by yourself,
it's not easy.
So don't think that, oh, no, I spent
2 hours and I didn't really
get anything out of the snow.
This is part of the part of the
development process.
So
keep it keep it short
and keep on,
you know, your focus on it and,
and keep working and it will come, inshallah.
Not to worry. So focus on,
rashing down. And again, as I said, you
may have to go again,
do it a couple of times. I know
about,
That's the way when you start liking this,
and you will I hope you will enjoy
it as much as I do.
So writing down.
Now once you've written that down, so in
that process, try and narrow it down to
2 or 3.
It's not it's not difficult because you're you're
not looking at every single,
thing or human activity as possible. You're looking
at some things which you would like to
do, and you're saying out of these, which
are the top 2. Now one caveat,
don't get into
what is practical and what's not practical.
For example, you say I want to become
a airline pilot. I want to be able
to fly,
a 3 eighties or whatever
or whatever
is the new plane that gets developed
in the place of the a380.
I want to learn to fly that.
My immediate thought will come, you know, I
am a poor guy, or I come from
a more middle class or lower middle class
family.
We
don't have a lot of money,
flying school costs a lot of money,
how is this gonna happen? Don't worry about
that.
Do not worry about the practicality of it.
Right now, at this stage of the exercise,
we are looking at
narrowing down
possibilities
of what we want to achieve.
No matter how
impossible it seems,
no matter how unlikely it seems,
no matter how difficult it seems,
no matter how expensive it seems,
no matter anything.
We're just narrowing down
on the possibilities.
This is what I would
like to do.
So
focus on that,
and keep thinking of that.
Now once you have that,
go home.
Take your pad
and go home.
If you don't have it yet
and you've spent a couple of hours and
you're getting hungry or something and you want
to go home, go home.
On the question of hunger,
feel free to take some food with you,
coffee, tea, or whatever is your, you know,
drink, water. No problem with that. I just
don't want you to go there with your
phones and stuff. Alright? So take this with
you.
Now go home.
We then go to the second step. And
again, we don't go to the second step
until we finish the first step. And the
first step may take 2 or 3 iterations
of this.
So I go to the forest the first
time. I come back with a few
sketchy notes. I'm not very happy with that.
I go again,
and I work more on this.
Until I'm satisfied with the notes I have,
I think I have
everything that
I need
in order to go to the
next
step of this exercise,
which is the step of introspection.
So this step of
introspection is where you are going to be
working with the data you have.
And
at the state of introspection,
now you think of,
to make this happen,
what are the steps?
Once again, don't worry about, can I do
it? Can't I do it? Do I have
the resources? Don't have the no. What is
required?
What are the steps required?
And in that, the reason I'm saying keep
it separate is because there's always this
tendency and temptation to make
compromises to,
in the steps to say, well, I don't
have enough money. I don't have enough time.
I'm living in the wrong country. No.
The standard is very important.
The requirement is very important. If the requirement
is not clear, then you don't know what
resources you need to fulfill it. So make
sure that your requirement is clear. This is
what I need to achieve
this goal that I have set for myself.
So clarity on the goal,
what out of that set of 2 and
3,
you can concentrate and Try and bring it
to 1. Even if you can't bring it
to 1,
bring it to
2.
Usually, a good idea not to
take it beyond 2.
And then you come to
the,
once you have 2,
then you look at those 2 and say,
to achieve number 1, what are the, what
do I need to do, we need to
have? I have to achieve number 2, what
do I need to have? Some of the
things you need to have might be material
in terms of money and,
you know,
getting
this or that material stuff.
Others
may have to do and will have to
do
with yourself,
developing myself. Now, developing myself is in 2
ways. 1 is acquiring again knowledge and so
on, where I need to I need a
PhD, I need a master's,
and I need it from this university or
that university. That's one part.
Second thing is, as a human being,
what do I need to develop myself?
You might say, well, I need to develop
more patience.
I need to develop better conflict resolution skills.
I need to develop
better
communication skills.
I need to develop better skills
to communicate with people
who I have serious differences with.
Right? It's easy to to talk to and
be with people that we agree with,
but what about people we don't agree with?
And in life, you're going to get both.
You're probably gonna get more people you don't
agree with than with than the opposite. So,
what are the skills I need for that?
Skills of empathy,
skills
of
courage,
facing danger,
and looking danger in the eye
without fear.
What do I need to do? So there's
a whole
series
of set of skills that you,
should identify
and say these are the things that I
need to develop.
One of the one of the top skills
that I
recommend, and I think everybody should have it,
is,
the ability to to
communicate
through writing.
The skill of writing, the skill of creative
writing
is very, very, very important skill because remember,
that is a legacy skill.
Whatever you say
is going to be finished.
It will be this will be forgotten
even if you record it. If you record
it on some, you know, media,
it might stay there for a while, but
what remains
is writing.
That's how today, 2000 years after Plato passed
away,
we still read the Republic.
We still,
read the,
the ancient books
of, different cultures
because
of writing.
And that's why even the Quran al Kareem,
which came as the spoken word, the Quran
did not come as a written word, it
came as a spoken word,
was
then
written down.
People didn't say, well, you know, it's okay.
We all have memorized it and,
we know it and we love Allah and
we love his Rasool and we have everything
and we don't need to write. No. It's
a home.
Writing is important.
And,
even though
the prophet salallahu alayhi wasallam
was unleaded, he didn't know how to read
and write. He encouraged it. And he said,
write it down. So that's how the Quran
and the Hadith,
the his teachings,
his explanation of the Quran,
have been written down from day 1.
And those who say that the hadith were
not written down, they were not preserved and
so on, they're talking through the hatch. They
do not have,
you know, they they don't understand what they're
saying.
It was written down, and it's makes
logical sense. Why would you write down
a command
and not write down how that command was
to be fulfilled? I mean, it makes absolutely
zero sense. Right? So you're saying that somebody
people who say that the Adi's were not
preserved,
they're effectively saying that we wrote down and
what was written down was establish the prayer,
but not how it is to be done.
I mean, it doesn't make sense. That makes
absolutely zero sense. No one with half a
brain would do that. And the people who
were who did it were a lot more
intelligent than that. So, that's a side note.
But on the the important point is that
learning to write
is a very, very important and critical skill,
which I believe we should develop. So,
this is what we're doing now in the
introspection
excite. What do
I need to succeed?
Material
things, non material things,
things that I,
that have to do with acquiring knowledge, and
things that I have to do with acquiring
skills and abilities.
Some are skills as in to do with
your hands and with your mind and so
on and communication. So in a conflict resolution
skills and communication skills and so on, but
much more important are skills, which are,
which are,
a state of being.
As a person,
what do I need to be?
And how do I need to be? What
is that skill?
Develop those skills.
Not develop, I mean, write write all the
down. So this is what I need.
Finally,
3rd stage, which is abstract
conceptualization,
which is
your road map going forward.
Well, you're going to say, right? So I
now have all this data,
of what I
need to do and what I need to
develop and so on. So now going forward,
what is my game plan?
How am I going to do this?
Where do I start?
When do I start?
And how do I start?
So this is where
the issue of the of, coming arriving at
a goal is.
So I wish you all the very best,
and,
you're most welcome to comment on the video.
Welcome to ask me for for further clarification
if you think you need it, and,
all the best in setting inspirational goals for
yourself
and, even more importantly, in achieving them.
Thank you very much, and
the opportunity to talk to Aalgu.