The Weakness of Positive Emotions

I was giving a pep talk to my colleagues yesterday, when I had an interesting realization - we fail at achieving our positive targets because of the weakness of our positive emotions.

Interesting words, "positive emotions" and "positive targets"...  Let me clarify.  Negative emotions include anger, vengeance, fear, desperation, etc.  Negative targets are the targets we seek being driven by our negative emotions - say the desire to hurt someone, desire to save someone, to escape from a scary place, and so on.  Positive emotions include enthusiasm, care, ambition, etc.  They are usually propelled from within us, and not by some negative situation around us.  Positive targets, ones that emerge from these positive emotions, include the desire to grow, improve, become slim-n-fit, help, etc.

We all know the story of the lady who, on finding her infant trapped, gets a miraculous bout of energy out of nowhere, and succeeds in saving her child.  We know countless stories of weak people exacting revenge on big villains.  We ourselves get driven when we are desperate - when we are chased by a dog, or when we have to give a critical examination - we know no fevers, no ailments, no tiredness.  Yet we do not have this desperation when we work for our careers, our products, our pro-active fitness plans, and so on.

For most of us, positive emotions are much weaker than negative emotions. People who can strengthen their positive emotions - who can maintain a resolve even when no desperation exists - end up succeeding.  I read once that Azim Premji and Narayana Murthy work 70-80 hours a week.  The President of the United States puts in no less.  Follow Mukesh Ambani or Bill Gates - you will find no difference.  It's not that they won't survive if they don't work this hard - they have far surpassed levels of achievement that most of us dream of.  They succeeded, and continue to succeed, because they have reinforced their positive emotions.

It is uncommon to find positive emotions succeed.  When we try to build our careers, we allow social occasions, travel excursions, health issues, family problems, TV shows, pretty much every little thing, to distract us.  We therefore fail to achieve great successes of the scale that people tend to reach through fear or vengeance.  And it is therefore unsurprising that positively successful people are also uncommon.

We need to ask ourselves - why can we not wake up at 4 AM and put in 12 or 14 hours of work even if we don't have external pressure?  It is fine if we accept that we are not serious about our positive ambitions - that we wish to achieve them by fluke if at all - rather than apply halfhearted efforts that are bound to fail.  Let the serious amongst us realize this common weakness, and choose to apply thrust towards their positive targets no less than the miracle energy we tend to receive under duress.