“It is the quality of your consciousness at this moment that is the main determinant of what kind of future you will experience…

Any action you take is secondary. “ 

— Eckhart Tolle, the author of The Power of Now 

 “Quick! Quick! Quick!” Time is ticking… 

You’re freaking out. 

You’re overwhelmed with so many things to do, but feeling paralyzed. 

You find yourself randomly jumping from one thing to another and then to another. You just want to jump into the last step and hope that a miracle will save you.  But it’s usually not the case… 

 “Quick, quick, quick!”- Whenever you follow this voice, either in a testing room or in your life situations, remember, you are about in trouble; in a testing room, you are more prone to make many mistakes in a row; in daily life, doing a task or making a decision with haste can result in serious consequences, which may take many hours, even months or years to resolve. How we do a task is what exhausts our energy, not what we do.

What to do? 

·      1st: Stop! Yes, stop doing anything, if you don’t want to keep messing things up. “Slow motion gets you there faster.” – You might already hear this saying. 

·      2nd: Take a deep breath! (or three, if you have 20 more seconds) 

·      3rd: Look at the whole scenario or the question again. Don’t deny any facts appearing in the “scene” you don’t like to see. Then, ask: “What is the most important thing I have to do NOW?” - Keep looking at the whole context until you CLEARLY SEE that most important thing. Finding the right “most important thing” to focus on at each moment is like finding the correct door that leads you to your destination in the safest and quickest way.

·      4th: Only focus on that ONE important thing and do it until you get it done. Then, go with the next important thing that needs to be done. The key here is: ACCEPTING all the facts and only focus on doing ONE clear task at a time. If your attention spreads all over the place, you will lose mental power. Just centering your consciousness on one thing at a time, you will solve any complex problem or situation more effortlessly.

The source of all frustrations is worrying about a result while rushing through doing! That is very interesting about the human mind! In fact, there is no result existed somewhere for us to get. There is only action and the by-product of the action, so-called result. The result is in the action; the result IS the doing. But our mind just wants to finish the doing as quickly as possible and hopes for a miraculous result at the end! Our eyes always look toward the future for a result. There is nothing!

The source of all results is HERE and NOW!

Why?

Whatever you do, you only can do it here-now, this tiny present moment. The end result you get at the end of a process is actually the accumulated result of many tiny results, born out of tiny moments we are doing the work. You can see the quality of the end result by seeing how you are doing the work now.

Recognizing this fact is the key to have marginal improvement effortlessly. Marginal improvement is the key to obtain an extraordinary result by improving a little bit, say one percent, every day. (You can read examples of the miracle of marginal gain in Chapter 2)

Whatever goal you are targeting, you already have it now by checking whether your mind is in it at this moment. You can ask yourself: “What am I doing?” “What am I thinking?” “Are they supporting the goal I’m targeting?”

If you want to create a masterpiece, try to make one tiny “micro” masterpiece at this moment. If you want to have a revenue of one million dollars from selling a product, try to sell it for one customer for ten dollars. If you want to have a great quant score, try to learn from one question you are solving in depth.

Meta-awareness is the realm of all possibilities

 “It (awareness) helps us go from subjective experience to the openness, the true reality. This openness becomes the source of all possibilities. This openness also changes the firing patterns of the brain. You can have a new way of being.”- Says Dr. Dan Siegel, a professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine and the founding co-director of the Mindful Awareness Research Center at UCLA.

When you stay in subjective experience, you stay in your familiar mental channel created by repeated thought and emotion. Normally you don’t see this. So, you identify yourself with this narrowed filter.

For example, you had failed several times on math tests in your elementary schools. You became afraid at math. You then brought this fear with you to your middle schools, high schools or even years later. You made it a part of your identification: “I’m a bad math student.” Every time you touch something related to math, the emotion of fear came up. You gave up easily. This again confirm your belief “I’m bad at math.”

But one day you came across a math teacher who had very interesting ways to tackle math issues. That sparked your math interest. You then recognized the beauty of math: a “tricky” math question can be a work of art! It became thrilling when you discovered that you could have many ways to tackle a question, as long as you saw its nature. From being fearful of math, you became a fan of math. You broke the identification as a bad math student.

That happened to me. Above is my real experience.

Meta-awareness helps you see that you are living through a narrowed filter created by the past experience and supported by familiar emotions. This filter is, in fact, very small, just like a leave that covers your eyes; you only see what appears on the leave. But when you take the leave out of your face, the vast sky is there, wide open.

Meta-awareness helps you remove the filter, and the sky is suddenly revealed to you. This sky, this openness is the realm of infinite possibilities. Meta-awareness helps you see where you are in the “sky” and how to choose a new experience. You’re not being doomed by the past. You are the creator of your own destiny.

That is the true miracle!