300 is a nice movie. Admittedly, the movie is mostly blood, gore, screams and half naked men with great abs, yet it is a great movie. The quality of the movie, however, is not what this post is about. This post is about something I realised as I was watching the movie.
In one scene, King Leonidas, and his 300 men, meet a group of Arcadians, led by Daxos. Daxos is dismayed at seeing only 300 men, and he tells Leonidas that he was expecting the number of Spartans to be at least as much as the Arcadians. At that Leonidas asks three Arcadians what their profession was, and the answers he gets are potter, sculptor, and blacksmith respectively.
Spartans, of course, were soldiers by profession, each and every one of them. That was exactly what made Spartans a formidable fighting force.
The lesson to be learnt here is simple.
If you want to be good at something, treat it as if it is your profession. There might be circumstances beyond your control that might be forcing you to do something else for the moment – to earn your daily bread, let’s say. But, do not let that distract you from doing what you were “born to do”.
Treating something like a profession entails commitment, practise, training and self-confidence.
You need to be committed to your thing because that is the only way that you can continue to do the thing even if you are not getting paid for it. If your means of livelihood is something other than what you want to be, with time, the desire to do the thing you want to do might just fade Away. Your daily job might leave you with “too little time” to pursue your dreams. Work, as they say, has the ability to expand into the time available.
If you want to be good at anything at all you must keep doing it, till it comes to you naturally. So, the need for practice hardly needs to be underlined.
Self confidence is important because it is the only thing that will help you take the plunge when the time comes. Most people today seem tired of their daily jobs, but they keep on doing what they do because they worry about losing whatever it is that they have. A litttle voice tries to remind them about other, better, things they should be doing, but this voice is easily stifled. Self confidence can amplify this voice and help you leave your boring job, and do what you have always wanted to do.
So, What is your profession?
Leave a Reply