We take on the belief that we need to subdue our lower desires and discipline ourselves to do something we might not enjoy doing at the moment in order to achieve a desired goal in the future.

Many great achievements have been accomplished through this disciplined action, but is this truly the summit at which the highest human potential could operate? Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a distinguished Hungarian Professor of Psychology and Management raised the notion of “flow” or the zone. In his study of creativity and happiness, Csikszentmihalyi defines flow as the mental state of operation in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity.

Flow theory has many deeper aspects that are worthy of exploration but the crux of the matter is that the highest level of activity occurs when doing and being become one. Why do some people seem so fatigued? Because they are unable to sustain continuous effort and eventually burn out.

On the contrary, those who truly excel, not only can sustain their success in the long run but seem to even be revitalized and full of energy, it has become some sort of an “effortless effort” for them.

So, how do you make your activities effortless? By shifting from doing to being. Success becomes not what you do, but who you are!  High achievers such as Roger Federer, Leonardo Da Vinci, Albert Einstein, and many more, have functioned from that place, which all of us might have encountered at one point or another in our lives where we were so immersed in the task at hand that we lost all track of time.

The question now becomes: How do I shift from doing to being? This will involve us breaking some major, deeply ingrained habits that have not served us well in the past and build new success habits. The biggest habit we must break is the habit of being ourselves; we literally must become a new person because as Dr Joe Despenza said, “Our personality creates our personal reality.” Or as Aristotle put it in words thousand years before: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence,  then is not an act, but a habit”.