Olympic Task

Any task can be done by Olympic standard. Ideally, this should be the approach for all our tasks and work. To do away with mediocrity which, in a way, slowly weakens and eats away our true will.

In the initial days of working on your will, it’s a good practice to keep any feeling and thought-involved work outside the purview of the Olympic tasks. It can be quite difficult for us not to get influenced by our feelings or get bruised in our egos when we don’t live up to Olympic standards.

Tasks involving food, artistic work, writing articles all lie in a grey area. It will be more difficult and ego bruising when we don’t live up to Olympic standards or we are subjected to others opinions and thoughts about meeting Olympic standards or not.

Tasks involving food, artistic work, writing articles all lie in a grey area. It will be more difficult and ego-bruising when you compete by Olympic standards in highly subjective tasks where the likes and dislikes in cooking or food is as varied and subjective as there are people on the planet.

Pick a non-subjective or less subjective work as your Olympic Task.

When approaching from a simple chore perspective, the Olympic approach has a tendency to rub off on other higher order chores and our professional work as well.

Example: If you clean a glass or the kitchen sink or bind a book in the Olympic way, it can – and usually does – subtly move you to do your personal or professional work by Olympic standards as a secondary effect.

For now, if you tackle any big tasks head on in the Olympic way, there is a possibility of failing or giving up, since a sense of purpose hasn’t been built yet.

When these will practices are more established in your routine, you can go for the big guns (tasks) in Olympic style. By then you would have found it easy to let go of your feelings, thoughts, attachments to compliments and criticism and so on.

During this camp, and at an earlier stage of your boot camp practice, you need to keep heavily subjective work away from an Olympic attempt and tackle simpler chores.

Imagine that you are sent to the Olympic Games (no time limit in these games) for cleaning the kitchen sink. You have to compete with many people from different countries. There is no way on earth you will let yourself get beaten in this task. Maybe all of you will get gold, but you are not settling for silver.

Pick a simpler task if you must, but go for gold.

Capt. Preetham Madhukar