Husain Journal

You or I or anybody can get as successful as he dreams to by doing a simple thing. And, that simple thing is meditation, or being fully present in the moment . Many people think that meditation is the practice of sitting quietly in a secluded corner, paying attention to your breathing and mentally scanning all the parts of your body. It means that you shut off yourself from all external stimuli and internal triggers so to cancel out all the bustle of this ever-speeding world. While this is true, many folks also are of the view that you can’t meditate while you’re Fixed in traffic Engaged in any mentally demanding tasks Having food or coffee However, pause and reflect… Isn’t meditation another name for being fully present in the moment – of pouring the purest of your attention on whatever you’re doing at that specific moment? If you’re having a juice, pay attention to its taste, colour, texture. How it touches your lips, how it slides down your throat, what se...

Mark my word…Your productivity would shoot up and go off the ceiling. You know that life will become a lovely, thrilling dream then. But is it possible? Do humans with the same flesh and blood ever manage to do it? Yes and yes. Armies posted at high risk areas do it. The tiny minority of the best, who know how to make things happen and who are habitual of grabbing it – the achievers – do it. Unfortunately, the rest (the vast mediocrity) don’t do it, because they choose not to. And if we refuse to settle with the rest, we too can work with the best of our potential – operating with 100% energy every single second while we work. Remember, those army men, those successful entrepreneurs, those wildly prolific writers aren’t from Mars. Since we too have the same blood and bones and flesh, it clarifies that we too have the energy to work and perform with our 100% alertness each very second, but we have the lazy habit of slipping into restful lifestyle. Just think t...

And the question without further delay– What if you get only 4 hours a day for working? Not a minute more. 4 hours mean 4 hours – working for a minute more is going to give you a heart attack. Sound foolish? But the truth is that throwing on yourself challenging questions and then letting your mind answer them brings you incredibly closer to success. As your mind kicks around in hammering out solutions, you uncover a cluster of mind-quickening tactics implementing which amazingly ramps up your progress. I habitually ask myself challenging questions. By the time I get their answers, I hit upon an eye-glittering treasure trove filled with gems that can speed up my progress manifold. Recently I asked myself: How am I going to work if I have only 4 hours a day to focus on my writing? The following solutions bubbled up to the surface. And though I primarily focus on ‘writing,’ you can replace it with ‘work’ or to whatever you want to fill the blank with. 1. Putting...

Will it surprise you if I tell you that you already have everything you require to get successful? For a moment, it might even look ludicrous to you. But maybe, by the time you reach the end of this post, you might get convinced of your foolish, imaginary fears that are holding you back in the trenches you have forged for yourself. Maybe by the end of this post you’ll get convinced that you don’t need more talent, more skills, more connections, more of nothing which you’re presently hoping for… To your astonishment, you might instead uncover that what you need is to break your mental barriers, the ghosts and enemies for success that you have housed in your heart. Ready? Just bear with me for I’m going to be harsh and brutally honest with you. Your fears! 1. You fear hard work Admit it, you could be not working with your full potential because you fear hard work. This is the case with me. If I argue with myself honestly, I’ll know that I could have performed man...

Is writing really hard? I think so, but if we practise it since our very childhood, it can get natural for us. We rarely and very rarely feel a hurdle in talking. But if we’re asked to write what we talk, we’ll begin to feel an obstruction. My daughter is of 2 years, and it’s a real struggle for her to speak. She hems and haws and gasps and checks herself multiple times before uttering 1 little broken word. This is with all the children. But as they touch the age of 3, you can’t keep them from talking and twittering and cheeping about all those innocent nothings. Do we ever tell them that talking is tough? That it’s meant just for a tiny privileged few? That they’ll have to be really lucky and talented and gifted to learn it? No. Never. But this isn’t so with writing. Well-intentioned teachers and parents tell us that writing is terribly complex. In writing, they say, we need to care deeply about punctuating and spellings and all those cobwebby rules of semantics....

“Forget safety. Live where you fear to live. Destroy your reputation. Be notorious.” Rumi It would be just the right thing to bravely put up my writing on the blog, and let people judge. Certainly, some folks aren’t going to find my posts useful, but for their sake I can’t hold myself back in the trenches. It’s said that a tiny minority of likers of a product make it super popular. Therefore I need to keep this truth in mind that only a tiny minority will appreciate my posts; not everyone is going to get bewitched. In truth, it’s not even practical. If I’m honestly and thoroughly honing my craft of writing, it’s appreciable because I’m doing something worthwhile. But amid this hustle and bustle of burnishing my craft, I must see to it that my passion to amass more money and power doesn’t go overboard. The desire for money and power has to be in proper limits because it’s the pomp and glitter of this desire which blindfold people. Yes, it makes us careerists, ambi...

Ever wondered how some people crank out blogposts after blogposts and books after books – though they too have the same responsibilities and the same writing time? The mystery is that even though they’re superfast writing machines, their writings are picture-perfect and massively popular. If you were to write like them, you presume, your writing quality will suffer. You perhaps think that while writing slow you make a bunch of mistakes, and therefore if you speed up your writing process, there will be many blunders slipping through the cracks and killing whatever effectiveness you have. Right? Wrong. Here’re a cluster of top tips that will remarkably ramp up our writing effectiveness and change us into superfast writing machines. 1. Slam the door Not only the door of your room, but also those multiple windows of distractions. Admit it, we work in the culture and climate of distractions. There’s your phone with all those new and fancy apps. You have your emails. Fac...

Ever noticed how few writers draw so vivid images by their writing as if you were watching a film? Ever smelled that mouldy basement odour, setting your teeth in the creamy coatings of that thick chocolate, hearing the screeching of that broken bench, and felt like writing with the same appeal? Well, I’m intrigued by the idea of showing images in my writing instead of just furnishing information. Painting moving images through our writing connects to our unconscious mind and addressing all the senses of our reader. “When you trust images to do the work for you, most of what spills on to paper is unconscious.” Adair Lara Want talking about twinkling stars? Instead of telling that the stars were twinkling, show their reflection on the rippling waters. Drawing pictures on paper isn’t that easy. It requires a great effort of our concentration, of being present in the moment to observe things around. If we're saying that ‘The weather was inclemently cold,’ we...

Maybe you would have come across a great advice and had even felt its fascinating merits tapping the core of your heart. But, lack of implementation or mental laziness – or whatever you call it – had kept you from plucking its fruitage. The same happened with me when long time back I heard the super successful blogger Jon Morrow advising his readers to give subheads to their pieces. To my joy, recently I was shaken by the idea of doing whatever is presently in our hands to scale up our progress, so I started to take this top tip in earnest. Here’re 6 benefits that come when we begin to use subheads in our works: 1. They give clarity to the reader William Zinsser said that the reader’s subconscious need is for order and to feel that everything is fine at the helm. If this need of his remains unfulfilled, he feels deprived of the clarity that he searches for. He feels put off and looks at the nearest opportunity to click away from the piece. With proper subheads, poi...

Want to make your points stickier and more impressionable? Tie them up with something which the reader is so familiar with that he can feel it like the beating of his heart. Because he knows in his bones how hard is a rock, he will quickly grasp what’s it to have a rock-solid confidence. Because he knows like the flow of his blood how pure is the morning dew, he will better understand it if you liken it to a lady’s tears. Branching out from the same tree of comparison, metaphors, similes and analogies are 3 fruits of language, as old as expressions. They’re figures of speech, so anchored in our daily talks, that we don’t even notice that we’re pulling them out. If sprinkled with care, they add juice and flavour to the prose. But if they get in the hands of those who know not how to use them, they’re like blunt blades that don’t trim the grass neatly – instead they make it look untidy. Talking about the difference between metaphors and similes: A metaphor says A is B, w...