Author: petripp@gmail.com

A question often raised when someone does something remarkable is, “How did you do it?”. The answer is often, “I don’t know, I just did.”.

The reason for this answer is that one cannot describe the situation with words because usually, the mind wasn’t involved in the action and the action was thought-free. One might understand that the action came from instinct, was natural to them or came from consciousness. Whatever words are used to explain the reason, the common thread is that the action wasn’t performed using the mind.

Often, these great achievements are preceded by repeating the situation multiple times and when the opportunity comes, one just nails it. However, in cases of emergencies for example, the situation might occur for the first time. The mind has an important role in these preparatory tasks, such as planning, analyzing, information gathering, etc.

Take a salesperson or artist as an example. When they are at their best, the sales pitch or creation just comes from somewhere without pondering. However, this moment is preceded by learning the product or painting technique in which the mind is involved.

Because the mind—or actually, the absence of the mind—has a significant impact on achievements, mental coaching is popular. Virkee doesn’t offer coaching, but we provide effective training for active doers to improve their performance in their actions. Take a look!

Finland is the world’s happiest country in 2024 based on a UN report. The report has a holistic view of how society and the environment affect people’s perception of happiness. Other Nordic countries are also top-ranked.

You have a company, ‘My Life Inc’, of which you are the managing director. The company is doing fine, but some of its Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) show poor performance. For example, one indicator shows that sick leaves have increased and another shows declining productivity. You investigate your company’s appearance and understand what is needed: more happiness.

As the managing director, you assign your Chief Operating Officer (COO) the task of acquiring more happiness for your company. Your COO conducts a search and finds the UN’s report. He investigates it and solicits bids from top-ranked happiness providers. After a week, he comes to you with the bids so that you can make a decision. You want the best for your company and decide to choose Finland as your happiness provider, despite it not being the cheapest option.

You move your company to Finland and start monitoring your KPIs. Some of them improve, but the most important ones do not. Confused, you book a meeting with your COO. He doesn’t understand the issue either and reanalyzes the situation using all the available data. The results confirm that your company has the best happiness provider money can buy.

Your COO, in this case, represents your mind, which is doing a perfect job. This situation indicates that outsourcing a happiness provider doesn’t achieve the best results. At this point, many companies re-evaluate their fundamentals, such as: What business is My Life in? What are the values of My Life? Your COO cannot answer these questions but is likely to be the loudest participant in the meeting where these issues are discussed. To maintain control in the meeting, you should be in charge of your mind.

People who have aged gracefully are usually honored in some way. However, being honored itself is a concept and doesn’t matter much in the end. What matters more is that we can see from their attitude and outlook that they have been living a full life. They are simply vibrant.

Many of them were born into environments that aren’t rated highly in the world’s happiest country reports and hadn’t avoided all the hardships of life. So instead of looking at how average people live, we must look at the outliers.

When searching ‘aging gracefully’ on the web, we receive a great amount of good tips on how to do that. An essential part of these tips is how we deal with and handle situations in our lives. If we are living in the world’s happiest country, the environment has a positive effect on aging gracefully, but in the end, it is all about the individual’s own responsibility—how they are dealing with their life. That cannot be changed from the outside and if not naturally in shape, it requires personal inner work.

The outliers mentioned before can handle their life situations gracefully, after all. If asked, they can give tips on how they do it and usually those tips are simple, sometimes ridiculously or annoyingly simple, like ‘don’t worry, be happy’. But don’t let the simplicity fool you, because it’s the key.

I was once asked, ‘What is the best spice?’. Chili, pepper, garlic, oregano, mustard and others came to mind, but I knew none of these would be the best. No, hunger is the best spice.

We cannot control everything that happens to us, but we can control how we respond to those situations. If something bad happens, resisting it doesn’t make it go away; it only makes things worse. This is because one must then carry both the situation and the burden created by resisting. Resisting is what creates those unwanted wrinkles to us.

By living life as it comes, one enjoys life without resisting circumstances, constantly benefiting from the best anti-wrinkle ever.

Next time you go out, please make an observation about the faces you see. Some are happy, but many are anxious. Observe the faces of children too; they are mostly happy. Why is that?

Concepts, words, names etc. are extremely handy for making sense of things and communicating with others. Before we knew the concept of ‘hunger,’ we cried and were given milk. Now, we might say, ‘Let’s go eat something.’ If we just cried now, our colleagues wouldn’t understand us as well as our mothers did.

However, if we start to blindly believe in these concepts, not only positive outcomes will occur. For example, if we believe that ‘work is crummy’ and hold onto that concept for decades, yes, we will likely have an anxious expression too.

A concept itself is neither good, bad, nor anything else; it simply exists. You might not like it and therefore label it as ‘crummy’ living with that belief.

However, if there are creases on the face because of anxiousness, it isn’t bad; it just is. The reason we are talking about this is that those creases might be a sign that they aren’t living a full life. Even though happiness is the best anti-wrinkle remedy ever made, those creases might not fully flatten if they’ve built up over decades, but the feeling is much better!

Butterfly flew under the terrace glass. It tried to find a way out but kept hitting the glass over and over again. Instead of trying to go up, it would have just needed to change direction and go one meter straight or 50 cm down to get out. But this dance is easy for the butterfly; it tried and tried and, of course, eventually found its way out.

Accomplishing things just feels great, and tackling hard tasks feels superb—it energizes us. Usually, accomplishing tasks requires a strategy learned from the butterfly: persistence and flexibility in changing directions.

When something drains your energy, it’s a clear sign that a different approach could be beneficial. This often happens at work and while weekends and holidays provide necessary breaks for recovery, we tend to continue in the same direction. Often, the impetus to change direction comes from external forces, such as getting fired or falling ill, which force us to consider alternatives. Virkee offers a proactive way to shift direction by taking charge of one’s own mind. This approach removes the extra burden created by our thoughts, resulting in more energy and the ability to explore new directions based on your own perspectives, not those imposed by others.

Then there’s the aspect of perseverance. People are generally happy when they accomplish something. Why? Listen to them—it’s usually about doing, visiting, acting. Rare are the stories that go, ‘I am living a full life by doing nothing.’ However, words can be misleading. When you are in charge of your mind, you become a master of being. This means that every action—whether doing, visiting or acting—feels like being and it doesn’t drain your energy; it replenishes it. Then, whatever you face, you don’t give up; you either continue to dance to find a way out or you change your direction.

For the butterfly, it was the latter case. It tried for many minutes without showing any sign of exhaustion until it reached the edge of the glass and flew away. It didn’t drop to the terrace fully exhausted and then walk to the forest using the stair-step.

I often find myself speaking with a determined tone, saying things like, “I will/won’t do that.” However, I’ve noticed this approach often doesn’t hold and the situation remains unchanged. To overcome this challenge, I’ve found it helpful to add a time period to my inner decision-making (e.g., “I will/won’t do that today“). Somehow this reduces the amount of willpower needed and makes it easier to maintain the decision. Over time, performing this inner decision making using willpower can lead to the formation of a habit, which is beneficial as habits are powerful.

Good advice is also to make a plan on how to achieve the required goal. This plan will guide behavior in the needed direction, leading to good habits without less willpower usage.

Approach I’ve found even better is to stop when I realize I’m making an inner decision, which is just a thought. I let that thought to go and instead change my focus on what needs to be done to achieve the goal I’m contemplating. This shifts the mind directly to a worker role where it performs best. The mind can then solve the given problem without needing to dominate or guard a particular decision thought (willpower), which isn’t actually necessary at all, because what truly matters at this point is action. So no willpower needed in this approach!

Jari Parantainen from Noste.fi emphasized in a lecture at the beginning of 2010 that tackling a customer’s irksome task ensures you’ll always have a job.

Take a moment to observe your workplace and notice how many people try to avoid challenging and irksome tasks. When someone finally takes on such a task, they might find themselves feeling annoyed during the work, possibly even into the evening and the next morning.

However, some tasks simply must be done and for those who are willing, there will always be opportunities.

Remember, it is your mind that labels a task as irksome and unlikable. You have a choice: you can agree with this view and avoid the task or tackle it and feel annoyed. Alternatively, you could choose not to believe your mind’s negative chatter, complete the task and go home happy, knowing you’ve achieved something others shy away from.