The Habit of Winning by Prakash Iyer

Author:Prakash Iyer [Iyer, Prakash]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9788184753660
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2012-08-13T16:00:00+00:00

Taking for Granted:

Lessons from F Words!

Take this simple test. Read the sentence below, and see how many Fs you can find:

FINISHED FILES ARE THE RE-

SULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTI-

FIC STUDY COMBINED WITH

THE EXPERIENCE OF YEARS.

So how many did you count? Three? Four? Or five? If you counted six, congratulations. You are a genius. In fact, you’ve done as well as an average seven-year-old.

Truth is that when this test is administered to grownups, less than 5 per cent get it right. (And some among them have probably seen this before!) There are indeed six Fs. And here they are, highlighted for you!

FINISHED FILES ARE THE RE-

SULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTIF-

IC STUDY COMBINED WITH

THE EXPERIENCE OF YEARS.

So why do adults get it wrong, while kids can get it right in a jiffy? Experts reckon it’s got to do with the way the adult mind gets conditioned to reading the F sound. Our minds tend to miss the F in ‘of’. It’s there but several years of reading fast—and latching on to F sounds in words like ‘finish’ and ‘files’, and missing it in words like ‘of’—result in adults not counting the Fs accurately. In trying to read faster, we notice a few Fs and miss out on the others, which our minds take for granted.

If you think about it carefully, it’s not just F words that we take for granted. There are several things in our lives that our conditioned minds miss out on. As we spend all our waking hours chasing Fame and Fortune (Ah, F words again!), there are some other Fs that we take for granted, ignore, lose sight of …

Like Friends. Family. Faith. And Fun!

They are there, all the time. But in our scramble for Fast cars and Fast cash and Fame and Fortune, the mind loses sight of them. Important as they may be, the mind takes them for granted. And ignores them.

Perhaps it’s time to bring back the innocence of a seven-year-old. Time to rediscover our real strengths. And as you notch up the points for Fame and Fortune in your personal balance sheet, it may be a good idea to check the real score. And look hard for those other Fs—Family, Friends, Faith, Fun—that are there but probably being taken for granted.

Years of neglect and of being taken for granted may make these Fs hard to spot but they are there. Waiting to be seen. And savoured.

So the next time you look at yourself, count the Fs carefully. And never mind how many you can count the first time, remember there are many, many more.

Friends, family, faith and fun—these are just some of the things in our lives that our minds take for granted and get conditioned to miss out on.

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