Life Recipe. Are you a good Cook?

My wife thinks I can’t cook anything. The truth is that I can cook enough to survive on a different meal for a week. Atleast thats what I believe. It may not be the most exquisite or exotic dish but it would be edible. Cooking is something which I never really had a lot of interest, but don’t mind doing it from time to time. I would like to believe that most men are like me. Of course I know that there are many men who love cooking and I admire them for this.

The fact is I don’t have to be like them. There are many things I’m good at that’s what I want to do. Cooking is just not one of them. You give a bad cook all the ingredients (and the recipe) to make a dish and the result could still be disastrous, while you give a good cook the minimum ingredients and the end result will in all probability taste absolutely delicious. Why is it that with the same ingredients 2 people can make the same dish in very different ways?  You could say that it’s due the skills, experience, love for cooking of the good cook. It’s got to do with the way the cook uses the ingredients; the proportions, the sequence of cooking, etc.

Life is very similar. We all have the same ingredients at our disposal. However each one’s life turns out very different to the other. Some are rich, others poor, some healthy, some sick, some successful, some failure. Have you ever wondered why? Just like cooking it depends on how we use the ingredients of life. What are the key ingredients of our Life?

Time

The most important ingredient of your Life is Time. Pick up any self-help, personal development or time management book. The most clichéd punch line is

Everyone on this planet is given the same 24 hours in the day

Our usual reaction to not doing something is to come up with an excuse on why we don’t have time. We have become masters at coming up with excuses and then have all kinds of reasoning to justify why the excuses are justified. We like doing this because it makes us feel good.

If the cliché is true (which all of us will agree) then why is that some people seem to find all the time to do things they want to do along with all the other things they have to do? Why is it that some people struggle to even find 10 minutes in a day to eat an uninterrupted breakfast, while others spend time enjoying a 3 course meal? The answer to this is that we have been taught to manage time. The fact is that we cannot manage time, we can only manage tasks.  And when you manage tasks you have to prioritize these tasks. Do a check on how you are spending your time, what tasks are taking up your time, which tasks you need to prioritize? Sure enough you will have many things in your day which are transactional and you cannot avoid. Things like daily hygiene, doing the laundry, etc. However there will be many activities which you don’t need to do or do less off. As an example how much time do you spend reading the newspaper in the morning? 30 mins, 1 hour. Do you read the same news in different newspapers and again on your phone or tablet? How much time do you spend browsing through your Facebook account doing what I call idle browsing? How many times have you sat down to watch your favourite programme on TV and then did not switch off your TV for another 1 hour after the programme was over?

Do an exercise for a week to take stock of how you use your time in the day. You will be surprised at the amount of time you spend on things which do not add any value to your life. Spend as little time on things which are “transactional” and spend more time on things which will be “transformational”. What are transformational activities? Anything which gives your long term benefits over short term pleasure.  These are usually activities which don’t give you instant results but give you true happiness and success in the long term. Read books, Learn a skill, acquiring new knowledge, exercise, building relationships, working on your dreams/goals, etc. Don’t just go through life doing your daily chores. Your time is the most important and precious ingredient of your life. Use it wisely.

Choice

Very often we are confronted with life situations where we keep telling ourselves “I dint have a choice” or “I had to do it”. The truth is that we always and I mean always have a choice. Even when we are faced with what might seem like insurmountable obstacles or situations in our life, we have the freedom to choose. Victor Frankel in his book “Man’s search for meaning” has described this as Man’s greatest freedom. The freedom to choose. In his book he talks about the life of a prisoner in the Nazi concentration camps and how even there people who made a choice to have hope and live a life based on his imagination of how life could turn out to be. While most of us will not be put in that situation, the lesson to be learnt from it is that no matter what life throws at you, there is always a choice. How you use that freedom is what will determine your future. In other words it’s not that we don’t have a choice. It’s simply a case that we are afraid or have the fear of losing something different.

Let’s take a simple example at work. You are in a job where you don’t like your boss, you think you don’t get paid enough and you get very little job satisfaction. When I ask people why they don’t quit, the   common answer is that they have a family to take care of and a life style to maintain. If you observe carefully, what you see here is that it’s not that we don’t have a choice. We do. However the consequences of that choice are something we are not prepared to deal with. In this case it could mean being out of work for months or more, a compromise of the lifestyle, dig into our savings or worse go into debt, not being able to pay our bills and so on. No matter what the consequence, the fact remains that we have a choice and are free to exercise it. You could reject this whole idea as a play of words, but that still does not change the hard fact that you had more than 1 option to choose from.

So the next time you are tempted to say I don’t have a choice, take a step back and accept that you do have a choice. However you choose to take the path where you have least perceived pain or the path of least resistance. It’s important to understand that it is perfectly fine to do this and does not suggest that you are weak. The point I’m trying to make is that when you accept it and make a conscious choice the chances of you whining over it are reduced and you focus on making the best of every situation.

Attitude

Let’s do something interesting right now. As yourself 1 question and make a note of your answer. The question to ask yourself is this

Is the world treating you fairly?

You can have 3 possible answers

1. Yes
2. No
3. Maybe/Undecided

You answer decides your attitude towards life. If you answered Yes, then it means you have a positive attitude towards life. If you answered “No” it means you have a negative attitude while if you could not decide, then it simply means you have an “Ok” attitude and it changes based on the circumstance.

The purpose of this exercise was simple. It was to show you that you receive what you give out. If you are someone who radiates energy, you will find people around you who are full of energy. If you are someone who is always finding excuses and complaining, you‘ll find that you meet people who are the same.  Most of you have already heard this in the book “The Secret” and heard about the Law of Attraction.  I’ll give you a real life example which happened with me recently. Every morning I go to drop my son to school and on my way back there is an old man who helps children cross the road. Every day I would drive past this man and we would look at each other. No reaction from either of us. We were just 2 individuals doing what we did every day. Few days ago I decided I’m going to smile and wave at him from my car just to see his reaction. The first day he didn’t quite see me. The next day he saw me and probably thought that I may have mistaken him for someone else. The third day he smiled back. And today he was the first to wave out to me. We went from being total strangers to waving hands and smiling in a total of 4 seconds (1 second a day when my car crosses where he stands)

Your attitude will determine what you achieve in life. Just like the spice in the food which spreads the aroma around, a positive attitude is the spice your add to your life. A good attitude is contagious and soon people will want to be around you. Your attitude is what will add that zing to your life!

So the next time you are faced with a life situation and need to make a decision remember the ACT.

A – Attitude

C – Choice

T – Time