A great Japanese warrior named Nobunaga was going to war with a fierce enemy with only one-tenth the number of men the opposition commanded. He knew that he could win the fight with a well-planned strategy, but his soldiers were in doubt.
On the way, the leader stopped at a Shinto shrine and told his men: “After my visit to the shrine I will toss a coin. If the head comes, we will win; if tails, we will lose. Destiny holds us in her hand.”
Nobunaga entered the shrine and offered his prayers. Then he came forth and tossed a coin in front of his men. Heads appeared. The soldiers were filled with confidence and were eager to win the battle.
The Battle went on for 18 days. Nobunaga’s army fought with their limited manpower and resources. They fought with great conviction and certainty about the outcome. Finally, they could able to defeat that fierce enemy.
“No one can change the hand of destiny,” one of his attendants told him after the battle.
“Indeed not,” said Nobunaga and showed the coin which was doubled with heads on both sides.
The Human mind works in a peculiar way. Rather than true potential, it works more on self-confidence. Thats the reason Swami Vivekananda, throughout his lectures, stressed on developing will power and self-confidence. He used to say, “believe you can drink all the water of the ocean, believe you can defeat all the strongest persons on this earth, believe you can do anything and everything on this planet”. If you just glance through the Vedas, Upanishads, Purana, and mainly Mahabharata, you will see the ultimate winning of those persons who have strong SANKALPA SIDDHI. Krishna says, don’t worry about the outcomes. If you start thinking about results, your arrow won’t be having that precision and power, you can’t hit the right target. Work without attachments.
UPSC CSE is also a game, where you have to consistently put efforts and perform on the battlefield(exam day). You need to believe that you are going to win this war. Sometimes, it seems like we are cheating our self. It will be weird to convince ourselves about success when we have so many backlogs of chapters, pending syllabus to cover, poor performance in the mocks. But our mind works like this: “If you believe you can do, you will do. If you believe you can’t do, you won’t do”.
