Do not let yourself Stagnate

When I was small, I used to live in the village surrounding with backyard pond. When I first put water in the pond, it was healthy and vibrant. It will support fish and plant life. But if I keep the same old water in the pond for weeks, pretty soon it gets stagnant. The fish and plant life in the pond become poisoned with waste and eventually die. For the pond to support life, you have to recirculate the water or, better yet, add new water frequently. When you do that, the fish and plants will thrive for a long time.

Like a pond, each of us has a certain amount of mental, emotional and physical “ water “ – meaning our thoughts, our actions, our history and so on – at any given time. That water does a pretty good job of supporting our lives at their current levels. But unless we add fresh water all the time in the form of new experiences, new ways of thinking, new beliefs and new ideas, then we too become stagnant.

The last time you were faced with a new idea or a different way of looking at something, how difficult did you find it to open up to opportunities ? All too often we get stuck in our prejudices and old ideas because we feel they are right. We do not even see opportunities until we are forced to do so. Closing yourself to opportunities keeps you stagnant and in today’s accelerated world of life and business, stagnant means failure. Stagnant means never growing or learning, as we were born to do.

Just think about the changes that have occurred in the past 10 to 20 years. The internet. Cell Phones. Podcasts, Instant text messages, and now the IPhone. Today you can be halfway around the world from loved ones and or business associates, and see them through videocast and hear them via satellite phone. New drugs and treatments can cure diseases once thought incurable. You can be in your company headquarters in the Kuching, go to a computer and change manufacturing specification for a product in a factory in the US, and the machine in US automatically will implement the change.

Now imagine what would happen if you closed your mind to all these opportunities. You’d still be using a rotary telephone and doing business by fax and snail mail. It would take days or weeks to make changes in your company’s products. You might not benefit from the latest medical treatments because you were not interested in any ‘ newfangled’ medicine.

In the same way you need to open up the opportunities represented by the technological innovations that surround you constantly, it is even more important that you open up to the opportunities that life constantly presents to us and embrace the changes that come our way. If we do so, then we find ourselves growing – almost without having to think about it.

As Sommerset Maugham has once said:- It is a funny thing about life. If you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it. Thus stay connected with new ideas all the time to stay ahead of time.