I have decided a word ‘focus’ for this year and really want to work towards it. So far, my focus act is at every time, visualize specific end of current task and work towards it. Focus always remind me story of Arjun and Drona and Parrot and his bow and arrow. This has been told since my childhood. Whenever my mom used to scold me for study, she used to tell same story. Focus like Arjun. But, childhood had limited zoom out and zoom in capabilities. Meaning to get separated from any thing and looking it as a third person. Such skills, are getting improved as we get the experience and practice.
Recently, I am DSLR fan and Whenever, I hear a word focus; this picture always come in my mind.
Lens
This is basic 18mm-52mm lens of my DSLR camera. Everybody, using lens to focus on particular scene! That scene may be, flying object, running bird, man, wife’s smile, her particular position, mount rainier, falls, etc. Point to be noted, before focusing, I observe the present nature. Get involved with it. Feeling so grateful being here. And then there is my wish to capture particular scene! At this time, I realize my goal.
Let’s understand focus with help of camera, let’s go on journey. Camera, a device to capture an image. Very specific goal for his lifetime, take a picture on click, store it and perform pre and post operations on it. It has lens, to zoom out and zoom in. There are very specific lenses for specific occasions. E.g. 50mm lens for portrait photography.
Zoom in let me focus on particular object, to identify details of it and I can do it repetitively to find more features in detail. Eg. If there are 100s of flower in the garden. In order to grab beauty of a flower, I need to go closer and zoom in accordingly then click! On other hand, to understand context of flower, beauty of overall region or scene, I sometimes zoom out. E.g. landscape images.
In order to take a clean/nice photograph, I need to perform two basic operations, zoom in and zoom out. Once area of interest identified then I just need to do intended task; that’s a Click!! Note: there are many functions available in the camera to enhance photograph, like, ISO, image size, type, brightness, contrast etc. These are just to make area of interest more beautiful and enhance output quality of an image. But, for simplicity we are considering basic operations as above mentioned.
E.g. Zoom out view showing me some details about tulip land
But if i zoom in then
Analogy
Can I really map camera, lens’s, zoom in and zoom out functionality in my life as a tool? Yes. If I consider my life as Camera, whose purpose is to dream and complete it then zoom out and zoom in can help to understand those karma neatly. These dreams might be duties to be completed. As lord Krishna said, every moment, human being is doing his ‘Karma’. He can’t live and escape from ‘Karma’ then doing it properly is the primary duty of any human being. I am completely agree to this logic and based on that my purpose of life is to complete my ‘Karma’.
Sometimes, somebody will guide you to identify your karma or many times, you need to lead your life and identify your karma for good of the human being. Imagine, if camera is taking picture but cutting some portion of it? Rather than focusing on interested area, if it is taking picture of something else? Do you really want to use such a camera? Can you imagine? My answer is, simply, NO, NEVER! Why anyone want such incomplete thing! This similar logic is applicable to me as a whole. I simply can’t do any work incomplete!
Zoom out
Second, if I consider my work as scene to be captured. Specifically, end of the work! In order to first visualize end of the work, I need to apply a lens over my work. Let me assume that I have infinitely powerful lens, which is my current (present) time and context, by using it I can zoom into my expected work or zoom out as many times as I want before starting my work. Looking at work from top as a third person then I can understand why I am doing this, what I want to achieve? Boundaries? Asking more and more questions to understand end result will help you understand scene in complete manner. what I am trying to say is that; zoom out will help to understand high level purpose of your work!
Zoom In
Zoom in to focus on specific feature or functionality of work. Once you fixed these two lens then you have understood your scene. While going forward you might do some zoom ins though or might be zoom out. But second time operation would be very similar. Adjust these lens till you completely understand expected end result. so, I can see functionality/features/beauty of it. I create journey of it and remember every time.
Action
Third, keeping end result in front of me, I can now start the work. Which is nothing but Clicking! “Khichhicccc”. After pressing click button, it executes many operations repetitively, continuously till expected criteria met.
Conclusion
Overall, Zoom in and zoom out are really important tool to understand given work neatly or even to make decision on any issue.
Other useful focus related sources
- Really good examples and I am sure you will get motivated after listing to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77RubAueWjg
- Explained good process to follow https://hbr.org/2012/01/train-your-brain-to-focus/
- Life hacker post explains some more details http://lifehacker.com/5895509/train-your-brain-for-monk-like-focus
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