Virtuosity

Maybe you want to achieve something challenging in your life. Maybe you want to accomplish something complex. Perhaps you want to shape your life according to overarching goals liberated by serenity, faithful to your heart, and connected with a continuously humming motivation.

Then you will notice one thing very quickly…

It is difficult to create something complex or extensive

And it is especially difficult when we rely solely on spontaneity, impulsiveness, and divine fate. Because if we rely on the motivating power of our micro-tasks, then we may move quickly and probably with drive. But we are just as likely to end up in the middle of nowhere.

The new website, a marketing campaign, and the Bachelor’s or Master’s thesis require smooth processes that do justice to the complexity of the respective task. These processes include different approaches from the field of project management, approaches from the field of time and task management as well as a culture of mindful impulsivity.

With such effective management of our processes, we unlock important skills But we rarely tinker with our projects in a vacuum or on a deserted Robinson Crusoe Island. We usually exchange ideas intensively with others when it comes to our work and productivity. That is why it is crucial that we learn to communicate effectively and smoothly.

Here we focus our attention on the question of how we can effectively influence others. But the crucial skills of communication lie in other areas. And fortunately, we have access to these areas that we can’t possibly have with other people. In addition to smooth productivity and effective communication, there is still one last area that we need to take care of if we want to accomplish complex things.

This area is so close to us that we tend to overlook it. It’s about our cognition.

We must go beyond the scope of what we allowed ourselves to be indoctrinated with in the form of memes, beliefs, and knowledge by authority figures in education, religious contexts, and family. This is the continuous inventory of the stories we talked about at the beginning.

We need to continuously develop the content, dynamics, and quality of our thinking. It is about the courage to think our own thoughts and to follow the trace of insights that takes us into a deep exchange with ourselves and the world.

We are allowed to ride on the shoulders of giants. It is best to choose these giants ourselves and consciously. It is best to climb on their shoulders ourselves. We should be wary of the giants with winning smiles who want to put us in their sack and kidnap us.

When it comes to our cognition, it’s also about taking our creativity, our imagination, and our inspiration seriously. It’s about taking our enjoyment of tricky problems seriously. It is about providing our ability to solve such problems with appropriate riddles.

Finally, it is a matter of constantly developing our skill of self-reflection. Because self-reflection is of great importance when it comes to achieving essential things and accomplishing great things.

Virtuosity and great achievements are life possibilities that we can choose

Productivity and project management, effective communication, and ingenious cognition – it sounds as if we have gathered the indispensable ingredients for a successful life. And I convinced myself for a long time that my happiness and success in life depended on achieving great things and achieving productive mastery.

But productivity, communication and cognition simply point to the possibility of living that virtuoso life that all modern fairy tales of success, life success and all-encompassing happiness are about. But these fairy tales are simply what they are: fairy tales.

They are stories that deal with heroes, their adversaries, challenges and struggles, defeats and successes. They are stories that carry a deceptive promise in their happy endings. They would have us believe that there is extensive and terminal happiness at the end of the rainbow. Gold and jewelry, eternal love, or eternal life – and then everything is fine.

We love stories

And sometimes we want to turn our lives into such a story and be the hero of that story. And that’s perfectly okay.

However, it seems important to me to recall one thing: our happiness, our easiness, and our love of life do without heroism and heroic events. Happiness at the end of the rainbow is an illusion. Unless it is about a person who is faithful to his heart, celebrates himself 480 times a day for the tasks he has accomplished and lives in deep connection with the present moment.

Because these are the qualities we really crave in life. We long for happiness, meaning and ease.

The motivation we talked about in this course gives us access to happiness. The question remains as to how we can find meaning and ease.