#365DaysOfWriting – Day Fifty-Three

Pressure.

It does strange things. Not just to humans, even inanimate objects. You’ll might have heard of the story of the rope that shredded a rock in a well after years of applying pressure to it, because it rubbed the rock whenever villagers pulled water out of the well.

You can see this in two ways: either the rock was persevering enough to create such a deep dent in the rock, or that apply enough pressure, and even something as hard as a rock will give way.

I prefer to see the first way – that of the rope being persevering enough to cut a rock. I’m optimistic that way. Some people say a bit too much, but that’s how I’m built. That’s how I motivate myself to take on a challenge. Too often, I’ve seen people hide behind the garb of ‘realism’ to spout cynicism. Fine, think the way you want but don’t force your cynicism on me. The world has enough cynical people and I do not want to add to that population.

I digress. We were talking about pressure.

Pressure comes in all forms. One type is Force/Area, something I learnt in a Physics textbook when I was in school (thank you Pascal). The other pressure was the pressure to remember the damn formula. And the pressure of your friends asking you whether you remember the formula (this type is called peer pressure, prevalent in every Indian school).

Now that I’m an adult though, I would kill to have the pressure of those school days.

A lot of people throw the word ‘stress’ around these days. Stress is the adult form of pressure in my opinion. The formula for stress is = Work (Forced upon you)/Area (of the brain left untouched and fresh to take on work). Usually this ratio is almost always 10:1. And there’s no time for the brain to rest to match up to the volume or force of the work.

Now, a lot of this pressure can be attributed to uncontrollable factors. But what about those that you can control?

1. Sleep 7–8 hours a day (at a stretch)
2. Have a great breakfast
3. Read apart from what you read for work
4. Watch sitcoms and laugh
5. Smile even during the darkest hour
6. Listen to your favourite music
7. Remember that nothing lasts forever – not even pressure

I would love to call these the 7 habits of highly effective people (but I’m not anywhere near as effective as I’d like to be and I’d probably be slapped with a multimillion copyright lawsuit by the Coveys).

And you may find the above points too simple, to the point of simplistic. But in life we’ve got to do the simple things right. We complicate situations unnecessarily and that’s where a big chunk of pressure comes in. We also try and keep up appearances – another thing that can be completely avoided. If we behave as we are, it may give us some short-term pressure, but it helps a lot in the long run.

There’s probably a lot of pressure on you, but I think you should read this post of mine. And oh, tap the little green heart while you’re at it. No pressure there.