Humour is the quality of being amusing by trying to find something interesting in almost any situation. A good sense of Humour keeps a person lively, free from stress and thus is a great asset. When a person says to someone “I am warning you to not mess up with me as I know Karate, Kung Fu, Judo, Daimoku, Jutsu” etc. and similarly names 28 other dangerous words. The time when a person reads these words, one cannot imagine that ultimately that person is saying he only knows words and nothing else. This makes you smile and that is humour. Life is short thus one should always smile.
When a person thinks that he needs glasses at his age and if wine glasses are shown in a picture in place of wearing glasses it makes that person smile.
To that extent, humour should give some surprise by either pun of words or in any other manner so that the surprise achieved is a pleasant one but without sarcasm.
Someone who is fond of vacation might say I need a 6 month vacation twice a year. Now, this is absurd but still it makes one smile.
It is said that humour is by far the most significant activity of the Human Brain. Never mistake a person’s silence for weakness. No one plans a murder out loud.
As said by Osho “If you find a saint who has no sense of humour then he is not a saint at all.” Humour is indeed a great asset.
There is another saying which goes as “A sense of Humour makes a man handsome and a girl beautiful.”
If one is serious and says. “A recent survey has found that one in three men is just as stupid as the other two.” Again, absurdity makes you smile.
The great leaders and the famous people throughout the world have also expressed humour in different ways.
Abraham Lincoln said “I destroy my enemy when I make him my friend”.
Albert Einstein said “Two things are infinite; the Universe and the Human stupidity and I am not so sure about the Universe.”
Author Francis Bacon said “There are two ways of spreading light: To be the Candle or the mirror that reflects it.”
He also said that “If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts he shall end in certainties.”
Sometimes there are just wise sayings and only expressed humorously.
Humour is also about right thing, and needs to be having right words at the right place.
It has to be well-timed too.
Someone said “Failure is the opportunity to begin again more intelligently”.
It is said that “Common sense is like deodorant and the people who need it the most never use it”.
Whenever there is a surprise or if you are comparing two things which don’t justify the comparison it makes you smile and that is Humour.
“Forgive and forget; I am neither Jesus nor do I have Alzheimer’s disease.”
Humour is rightly called Mankind’s greatest blessing.
Charlie Chaplin once said “A day without laughter is a day wasted”.
When it comes to why humour should be used, Lincoln said “If you are in a situation wherein important and controversial ideas must be presented to less than open minds, humour allows those ideas to be presented in a non-threatening manner”.
Abraham Lincoln was famous for his ability to relate humorous stories. And so was Albert Einstein who said “A person who never makes a mistake, never tried anything new”.
Find humour in everything and you will live without worry and die without worry.
Thanks for reading.
Tag: Abraham Lincoln
Four formidable pillars of success
It is often said,” Nothing succeeds like success!” It is indeed the truth. Once you are successful there is no looking back. Many success stories are a testimony to this statement.The success story of Steve Jobs who was fired from his own firm is one to get inspired from.Stories like this have inspired us and keep motivating us to achieve success. We all desire success. Who wants to fail? We all have dreams and wish our dreams could come true. We often wonder ,” What will make me successful in my endeavor”?
Well, we here discuss the mantra for SUCCESS.
There are four formidable pillars wherein lies the foundation of success viz. courage, desire, direction and hard work. All these four essentials pave the way to success and work in cohesion to make your dreams come true. Remember success is never an accident. But it is a choice which one constantly makes. The choice of emotions, feelings, attitude and above all a discipline which one practises everyday until he meets success.
“You are the masterpiece
of your own life.
You are the Michelangelo
of your own life.
The David you are sculpturing
is you
(Dr. Joe Vitale)” This is the quote from a famous book ” The Secret” by Rhonda Byrne.
Definitely who else can turn your fate towards success? It is only one, who has to be successful, should work out courageously in his life to realize his dream and his desires with relentless hard work in a particular direction. This, alone, could turn the tables to success. No one else can be held responsible for a failure and no one else can enjoy the sweet success than the one striving hard for it.
Let us discuss these “must haves ” which can lay a strong foundation for success as one can’t buy success- It needs to be built!
1) Courage:- ” Courage is not the absence of fear but the acquired ability to move beyond fear.”
Courage is the ability to take up what sets you on fire. Courage is to pursue one’s passion and attain success. But many times the fear of failure takes one away from following one’s passionate dreams.
As the quote by Marc Anthony goes,” If you love what you do, you will never work for a day in your life! When you work for something you love, you tend to put heart and soul into it and the result is a fruitful outcome. So why not be courageous enough to achieve success by doing what you love? Michael Jordan , renowned Basketball player is the leading example of courage. He was courageous enough to pursue his dream of being a football player in spite of several failures..
Indeed, courageous terrains are the risky ones. But it is often said,” No risk is the biggest risk”. One needs to take calculated risks and foresee hindrances while one takes the path of courageous behavior.
Take up your passion as an adventure and go ahead with the well chalked out plan to achieve success without any delay!
It is true that Success is not final and failure is not fatal. So what is that differentiates between the two? Well, it is a continuous courage one possesses to overcome the failures and to convert those into success which really counts.
2)Desire- “ A desire is the starting point of all achievements, not a hope,not a wish but a keen pulsating desire which transcends everything.”….Napoleon Hill
Indeed, one has innumerable desires throughout one’s life but to realize those desires one needs to work hard in a certain direction. If one desires something quite passionately, one finds a way and is ready to work hard to achieve it with commitment and dedication. If the desire is weak, one often ends up with an excuse. Many people desire to be millionaire, and many others to be a film actor. But why all of them can’t fulfill their desires while only a few carve their niche?
Well, one needs to have strong willpower in order to support the equally strong desire.
For eg:- If one fat person wants to lose his extra pounds, he should wilfully exercise and control his diet, or sweet tooth. Thus, exercising and controlling his dietary habits are entirely dependent on his willpower.
It is often thought that the desire is a product of will but rather its converse is true. Will is a product of desire. The more your desire to attain some height, or achieve something in life the more is your will to help achieve it.
Thus, we can also say that the distance between the success and failure is measured by power of one’s desires. A person who has unsuppressable desire is sure to walk the distance towards success sooner when compared to the one less desirous. This also leads to the fact that the stronger the desire the sooner the achievement. One should always dig into one’s desires and build a strong will to materialize the same.
Bill Gates has been desirous of the success his company enjoys today. Nothing can be achieved without a strong desire.
Let us now come to the most important of all the pillars:-
3) Hard Work:- For All your days prepare
And meet them ever alike
When you are the anvil, bear-
When you are the hammer, strike!
….Wings of fire by Dr A.P.J
The power of hard work can never be underestimated. Hard work always bears sweet success. There are proven stories which lead to the fact that determined hard work never gets unrecognized. Consistency in hard work leads to the sure destiny of success. There is no elevator to success and thus, one needs to climb the stairs. One should not only work hard but one should work in silence and let the success roar, eventually.
Hard work goes hand in hand with patience. One has to be patient enough to enjoy the success after one’s hard work. The best example is of the farmer. Farming is no joke. One has to toil hard to sow the seeds in the fields and be patient enough to reap the harvest. The crop doesn’t grow in a single day but takes its own time. The seeds of hard work needs to be nurtured with patient care.
It is nothing but disciplined hard work throughout the years which has produced the stalwart legends like Abraham Lincoln or Nelson Mandela . It may be asked whether hard work guarantees success! It might not guarantee success but it helps in improving the chances towards success. It is often said that if hard work becomes one’s weapon then success is bound to be one’s slave.
One might encounter bad luck or bad moments in life but relentless hard work works as a alchemist which transforms into great success.
The Indian freedom Struggle led by M K Gandhi is a testimony of his hard work towards achieving independence.
And we now come to fourth pillar of ensuring success:-
4) Direction:- Direction of efforts plays an important role when striving to achieve success. Hard work should always be accompanied with right direction. Remember :-Hard work without correct direction leads nowhere.
Swami Vivekanand was guided by Saint Ramakrishna in his pursuit of higher self. A mentor is the one who provides for the correct direction and guidance so that one often reaches one’s goals without wasting time in futile ways. When one desires of something one needs to specifically chart out the plan, detail in the timeline within which one needs to achieve it and finally search out for a mentor who can guide accurately guide him onto the path of success.
Dr A P J has rightly quoted in his book Wings of fire
” When the student is ready, the teacher will appear!” With mere talent one can’t dream to achieve success. One has to get the ship guided in the proper direction else it will be drowned or may not reach its successful destination.
Acquiring success is not so difficult. It is merely when your desire meets a courageous and well-directed hard work that leads to success. Success is 99% perspiration and 1 % inspiration. Success comes to those who believe in the power of their dreams and desires. These people work hard towards achieving those desires with relentless conviction, dedication and discipline even at the cost of risking their lives. No denying the fact that hard work is indeed a two way street. You get back what exactly you have put in!!
Happiness is not expensive.
Today when there is so much information available on all human emotions and the reasons there of no one has any right or business to be unhappy. Actually there was never a reason for people to be unhappy. Abraham Lincoln said in the early 19th century that ‘most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.’ However at that time there was no internet, literature was scanty and hardly available. Today, with the internet all the information and the images that one may require to collect about happiness, are easily available.
Vikram a student of 6th standard volunteered to collect the relevant information and the images on ‘how to be happy’. I reproduce the material collected by Vikram in about half an hour. When I went through it, I found that anyone who would spend some time to read the knowledge collected by Vikram and see the pictures again collected by him should be never unhappy.
He informed me that he collected the pictures from Google images. Further he collected the entire written material from Wikipedia. Please spend some time to look at the pictures and also a few minutes on reading the text which he collected from Wikipedia.
A smiling Rebecca L. Felton
Research has produced many different views on causes of happiness, and on factors that correlate with happiness, but no validated method has been found to substantially improve long-term happiness in a meaningful way for most people.
Sonja Lyubomirsky concludes in her book The How of Happiness that 50 percent of a given human’s happiness level is genetically determined (based on twin studies), 10 percent is affected by life circumstances and situation, and a remaining 40 percent of happiness is subject to self-control.
The results of the 75 year Grant study of Harvard undergraduates show a high correlation of loving relationship, especially with parents, with later life wellbeing
Psychologist Martin Seligman asserts that happiness is not solely derived from external, momentary pleasures, and provides the acronym PERMA to summarize Positive Psychology’s correlational findings: humans seem happiest when they have
- Pleasure (tasty food, warm baths, etc.),
- Engagement (or flow, the absorption of an enjoyed yet challenging activity),
- Relationships (social ties have turned out to be extremely reliable indicator of happiness),
- Meaning (a perceived quest or belonging to something bigger), and
- Accomplishments (having realized tangible goals
- Abraham Harold Maslow, an American professor of psychology, founded humanistic psychology in the 1930s. A visual aid he created to explain his theory, which he called the hierarchy of needs, is a pyramid depicting the levels of human needs, psychological, and physical. When a human being ascends the steps of the pyramid, he reaches self-actualization. Beyond the routine of needs fulfillment, Maslow envisioned moments of extraordinary experience, known as peak experiences, profound moments of love, understanding, happiness, or rapture, during which a person feels more whole, alive, self-sufficient, and yet a part of the world. This is similar to the flow concept of Mihály Csíkszentmihályi.
- Self-determination theory relates intrinsic motivation to three needs: competence, autonomy, and relatedness
HEALTH
- Richard Davidson‘s 2012 bestseller The Emotional Life of Your Brain argues that positive emotion and happiness benefit your long-term health. From a study conducted in 2005 by Andrew Steptow and Michael Marmot, findings have found that happiness is clearly related to biological markers that play an important role in health.
- At University College London, Steptow and Marmot collected health and well-being data from 116 men and 100 women. All 216 participants were middle-aged, British civil servants between the ages of 45 and 59. The researchers aimed to analyze whether there was any association between well-being and three biological markers: heart rate, cortisol levels, and plasma fibrinogen levels. Interestingly, the participants who rated themselves the least happy had cortisol levels that were 48% higher than those who rated themselves as the most happy. The least happy subjects also had a large plasma fibrinogen response to two stress-inducing tasks: the Stroop test, and tracing a star seen in a mirror image.
- In Happy People Live Longer, Frey reports that happy people live 14% longer, increasing longevity 7.5 to 10 years.
- Steptow and Marmot furthered their studies by using their participants three years later to repeat the physiological measurements. They found that participants who scored high in positive emotion continued to have lower levels of cortisol and fibrinogen, as well as a lower heart rate.
Despite a large body of positive psychological research into the relationship between happiness and productivity, happiness at work has traditionally been seen as a potential by-product of positive outcomes at work, rather than a pathway to success in business. However a growing number of scholars, including Boehm and Lyubomirsky, argue that it should be viewed as one of the major sources of positive outcomes in the workplace.
Thanks for reading.
