How can dissatisfaction be good for advancement? A little different subject that I thought of writing today. With advancement in life, with goals being achieved, with following the laid down processes and practices, we often come to a stage where we start feeling happy and talk about settling down. But the fact of the matter that remains unresolved is, is this the end of our journey or is this the place we always wanted to achieve? Or is there more to traverse?

Some of us may feel, this “more to achieve”, “more to earn”, “more to advance” is nothing but greed. May be we are right if this “more to ___” of ours confines itself to “more than him”, “more than them”, “more than the neighbor” or “more than my friend who used be less than me at some point of time”. However when this “more to ___” is compared to “more than myself yesterday”, “more than myself one year back”, “more than what I achieved till today”,  the whole equation changes and it becomes a competition with no one but self and that’s nothing but advancement in own life.

However this above advancement is not possible if satisfaction with what we have today engulfs our own wish of becoming “more than myself yesterday”. And that’s possible when a pinch of dissatisfaction remains with whatever we are achieving that drives us further. Specifically I am mentioning “a pinch of dissatisfaction” and not more since too much of a dissatisfaction will not help us to move ahead but remain within the boundary of past that will take away our confidence level.

Why to create dissatisfaction: There are some immediate dangers of not creating dissatisfaction –

Complacency: There is maximum chances of being complacent when we are satisfied ie successful. We stop thinking differently, we stop acting differently, we stop talking differently but expect better results since expectations have gone up due to the success we only brought.

Being proud: This is another danger that comes from being satisfied. When we achieve something that to us is the best, we start talking more about us, and start looking at others with a different eye and thus soon land up on a day when we successfully prove the proverb “Pride comes before a fall”

How to create such positive dissatisfaction:

While dissatisfaction is considered to be a negative trait, positive dissatisfaction is something that drives one forward with learning from the past. While one cannot create such dissatisfaction, he can always compare his achievement with an imaginary perfect achievement since there is no work that can’t be done a little better, a little faster, a little engaging. Here while comparing, it’s not the end result that should be compared always but how that result was achieved since by doing that work in a better way, while the same result might have been achieved, some stories of how this was achieved could have been written and that journey is nothing but an advancement and those stories thereby open up opportunities to some other doors of advancement.

How to limit yourself from being over dissatisfied:

This is another area which is extremely important since being too much dissatisfied is also road that takes us to downfall.  In the journey of bringing pinch of dissatisfaction to our own success, many a times we forget that the competition to do better from yesterday is actually with our own self only and not with anyone else and thus end up in comparison with others in similar position as we are, and that brings a kind of rivalry / negative dissatisfaction in us. So in this journey, its important how we evaluate ourselves with our own yesterday, how we plan our next move in comparison to our own move yesterday, how we bring a better mechanism of thinking in our own life that will drive us towards advancement than our yesterday and finally how we correct ourselves at every small milestones we lay towards the larger advancement.

What to do now?

Wow, I have been little dissatisfied with my own achievement and today I achieved something more. So now what?

Answer is , simply repeat the whole cycle once again and once again and once again …