Freedom - The longest detour to Success?!

The qualities and skills required to achieve your goals have been thought upon and listed down for centuries in so many forms. While there are many key habits and characteristics such as discipline, hard work, resilience, never giving up, learning from failures, time management, that are spoken about to be indispensable to achieve success,  one of my favorite idea to ponder upon has been the contribution and role of freedom in the path to success. Particularly, how freedom in our life can lead us away from success if not handled prudently.

Freedom, which by virtue seems a very good and noble thing to have, can be one of the worst ingredient you can add in your recipe of success. Freedom is ironically one of the toughest shackles. Let us then understand it deeper and break it. When we separately list down the actual achievements of our life versus the goals which we are still in our to do list, we will notice that most of our achievements will be of the nature where timelines were mandated by some external factor other than ourselves – it might have been by our parents, the education system, the examination institutions, competition bodies or government laws, etc. Whereas, the goals which we are yet to achieve in life will have a common theme where it is us who would have had the freedom to choose to take steps and define timelines to complete those goals. We were having the freedom to tag higher importance to those goals or lower their importance in our life based on the situations we faced. The result – a long to do list getting created and gradually transforming into a regret list.

This phenomenon of freedom can be seen in our personal and professional lives both, and can affect our success, growth and upliftment to a great extent.  This free will is one of the toughest blessings for human beings to handle in consideration to our natural behaviour. Give someone a chance to achieve a goal with all the resources, all the roadmaps and the necessary directions and add to it a freedom to complete the goal at his own will and the result is most likely a failure or a diminished achievement against the marvelous results that could have been pulled off with proper discipline.

We, as human beings, need guidance. But in the form of guidance, many a times, we are given one of the most delusional things, the contemporary of freedom - choice. When we choose something, we feel that we are free. But alas, if we start thinking whether the choices itself were ours or not. And we realize a whole new reality!! Whether the last scroll on the screen was my choice, whether the last food which I ate was my choice, whether the weekend spend on parties was my choice, whether the last series watched was my choice, and coming to serious aspects of life, whether the academy path I did was my choice, whether the next certification is my choice, whether the career I am following was my choice, whether the lifelong passion given up was my choice and whether the life I am living is my choice!!!

Phew!! Coming back to the paradox of choices… I was stating that having so many choices in all the realms of life, is a dangerous distraction if you are on the path to achieve your long term goal.  It gives us a false sense of freedom and a false sense of achievement. We all want to achieve higher levels of success in our life but we ignore the daily tiny steps of discipline which play the most important part in getting us closer to our destiny. We should in fact restrict ourselves from having too many choices to achieve anything. Giving ourselves more pathways of achieving success is actually creating in turn more pathways of failure. In today’s world, it is all the more imperative to follow this amidst the growing service industry ready to delude you with choices of customization in any field rather than the crux of the solutions to help you achieve your goal. Ask to choose a career, ask for a medicine, ask about an exercise, or ask for a coffee or a burger, ask for a diet, ask for music, ask for a map, or ask for a cab or what not... you will be bombarded with so many choices and your day goes away in choosing things rather than actually working upon your long term visions. If one is serious about reaching their destiny, these distractions which make you feel free and provide you cozy comfort zone have to be avoided.

What shall we do about freedom though, is it not a good thing to be free. Is that not the main point of all the struggle, so that we can be free and we can enjoy ourselves for some part of our life. Just be aware and choose wisely. The best way to use our gift of freedom is to use it when deciding or choosing our goal. During that time, we can go ahead till the end of our imagination and max out our thinking ability to understand what we actually want to do in life or at that point of time, which are the possible ways to overcome the present challenges and what outcomes - good or bad - we are ready to have in our life post our decision. And after the decision is taken and the path is chosen, forget freedom as a thing in this world and just befriend discipline as your only companion in your onwards and upwards success journey.