Fly Free Fly High

One seagull, dreams of flying better than a seagull has ever flown, instead of spending his days looking for scraps of food.

“Most gulls don’t bother to learn more than the simplest facts of flight—how to get from shore to food and back again. For most gulls, it is not flying that matters, but eating. For this gull, though, it was not eating that mattered, but flight. More than anything else, Jonathan Livingston Seagull loved to fly…This kind of thinking, he found, is not the way to make one’s self popular with other birds.”-  Richard Bach

There is one seagull in a flock, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, who cares a lot less about scrounging for food than the other gulls, and cares more about learning how to fly well. He gets thrills from figuring out how to fly faster and more dangerously than any gull has flown before. He crashes a lot, but always gets up, fluffs his feathers, and begins again. The other gulls in the flock don't understand why he cares at all about this, and the elders take his determination in this as a sign that he does not care about the right things. They declare him an Outcast. He pleads, but they ignore him and send him away. He gets to a ‘Heaven’, how he call it, he finds other seagulls, who like flying like he does. Chiang (He is one bird who is in ‘Heaven’ and he teaches Jonathan to ‘fly’)  teaches him to fly and Jonathan comes closer and closer to perfection. After practising some time he wants to return to the earth to teach other seagulls who would want to. He soon found several good flight students. Fletcher Gull (He is also a very questioning seagull who thinks that there must be more in life then just thinking of how to get food) was one of them, he has a desire to learn to fly. Jonathan teaches Fletcher to fly like Chiang has told him. Fletcher soon develops enough to take Jonathan’s place as an inspired, powerful teacher, and so Jonathan moves on to a higher level of consciousness.

To fly high and to fly free one must try to achieve excellence.

And the price needs to be paid for excellence. Excellence requires leaving the flock, being alone, and practising. And the practice requires "fierce concentration."

"You are always free to change your mind and choose a different future, or a different past"-  Richard Bach

Source : “Jonathan Livingston Seagull: A Story” — Richard Bach

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The Secret of Achieving More with Less

 The secret in simple terms as per  Richard Koch ~~

  “Do more of what makes best use of time and money.”

You have probably observed that often the majority of output stem from the minority of input. It could happen in your business when the majority of sales come from a little subset of your products. Often this ratio is around, but not limited to 20% and 80%.

People expect life to be fair and balanced, but it’s not. That’s why it’s called the 80/20 rule or principle. Aka the Pareto principle, the law of the vital few, or the principle of factor sparsity.

“The 80/20 Principle tells us that, at any one point, a majority of any phenomenon will be explained or caused by a minority of the actors participating in the phenomenon, Eighty percent of the results come from the 20 percent of the causes, A few things are important, most are not.” ~~ Richard Koch

 Taken literally, this means that, for example, 80 per cent of what you achieve in your job comes from 20 per cent of the time spent. Thus for all practical purposes, four-fifths of the effort—a dominant part of it—is largely irrelevant. This is contrary to what people normally expect. So the 80/20 Principle states that there is an inbuilt imbalance between causes and results, inputs and outputs, and effort and reward. A good benchmark for this imbalance is provided by  the 80/20 relationship: a typical pattern will show that 80 per cent of outputs result from 20 per cent of inputs; that 80 per cent of consequences flow from 20 per cent of causes; or that 80 per cent of results come from 20 per cent of effort.

“The way to create something great is to create something simple.” ― Richard Koch

“Strive for excellence in few things, rather than good performance in many.” — Richard Koch

Source : “The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More with Less”  — Richard Koch

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Sense of Purpose

“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” 
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” 
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

 Frankl was a psychologist, and he founded a school of psychology called Logotherapy .Viktor Frankl was also a holocaust survivor, and this in so many ways informed his work. One might think that this was the most horrible experience of Viktor Frankl’s life, and in many ways that was true. Frankl was trained in psychology and neurology, and had achieved some renown when the Nazi’s sent him to Auschwitz in 1944. It was a most horrible and dehumanizing experience. 

Frankl survived the experience of a concentration camp because he realized that there was an important task he personally needed to complete: the completion of a manuscript he had been working on. That manuscript later became one of the most influential book of the post-war period: Man’s Search for Meaning, a book that explains the basis for his psychological theory, called Logotherapy, which holds that a fundamental basis for psychological and spiritual health is a sense of purpose.

Frankl noticed that there was a difference among those who survived and those who did not: a sense of purpose.

“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.” 
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

Source:  “ Man’s Search for Meaning " by Viktor Frankl

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