365 Exciting Ways to Live: Excitement # 25: Take Inventory of Your Bad Habits!

Take Inventory of Your Bad Habits

Your net worth to the world is usually determined by what remains after your bad habits are subtracted from your good ones.

 Benjamin Franklin

In any organisation, once in every year a complete inventory is taken to take stock of the assets and the liabilities so that the balance sheet can be drawn. The health of an organisation can be seen not merely looking at the profit and loss account, but also at the balance sheet. The investors will be keen to know the liability part of the balance sheet. As individuals, we should also know our assets, which are our good habits as well as our liabilities, which are our bad habits.

Today, make an inventory of your bad habits! Sit calmly and list at least ten bad habits, which you want to get rid of. Against each bad habit, honestly write down how the same has affected your life. Just visualise how your life would be now and in future without these bad habits.

The law of nature is very clear: what is noticed alone will grow. The same applies to removing something bad. Unless you notice a bad habit, you cannot remove it. It’s like garbage removal. Unless you notice, you will not remove it!

Make today an inventory taking day!

(From my book '365 Exciting Ways to Live')

NC Sridharan

www.thetimefoundation.com

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Do not avoid, challenge and conquer!

Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all.
Helen Keller

We live in a society which is filled with good and bad things. There are good people as well as not so good people. We cannot choose to have only an all-good-ideal- environment.

I was speaking to a group of parents whose children were leaving the school to pursue college studies. They will be staying away from their parents first time in their life. The parents were advising their wards to ‘avoid’ bad company, to ‘avoid’ students with bad habits, to ‘avoid’ this and ‘avoid’ that!
Isn’t it true that by avoiding you don’t become mature? It is only by conquering oneself that great people are made.
Have you heard the story of Gautama Buddha? Siddhartha, born in a royal family, was shielded from seeing any human suffering, death, aging and sickness. But at 29, when Siddhartha saw these realities in life, he started questioning why these things happen to human beings and this transformed him in to Buddha! 

So, don’t avoid.
Be in the company of smokers, but don’t smoke.
Be in the company if drinkers, but don’t drink.
Be in the company of indisciplined people, but be disciplined.
Believe in yourself and in your wisdom to choose between good and bad.
N C Sridharan
www.thetimefoundation.com
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A feel good thing need not be good!

If merely ‘feeling good’ could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.
William James

By nature we like pleasure and avoid pain. Choosing to feel good will give us pleasure.
There are many things you can do to feel good. There are also things others do to make you feel good. But just because it makes you feel good, it need not do good for you!

Consider the following situations:
•    You feel depressed and take alcohol and you feel good!
•    You commit a mistake and others do not point out the same to please you and you feel good!
•    You are not working hard enough, and people feel embarrassed to correct you, and you feel good!
•    You yell at people who cannot retort due to your position in life, and you feel good!
•    You have no discipline and act the way you want and, and people do not correct you. You feel good!
•    You over eat and feel good!
•    You are overweight and skip morning jogging and feel good!
Now, honestly reflect if the above feel good factors will really do good for you! The other alternative is not to feel good and face the reality.
Isn’t it wise to avoid feel good things if they are not good for you?

NC Sridharan
www.thetimefoundation.com
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