Friends that were close once, and then stop being friends.
Friends that we pick as friends, but later on we move on from them. Because we never saw them for the fact that they never deserved to be our friends.
Friends where almost everything is right to the point of trusting each other blindly, and then one fine day your friend thinks you are plotting a move.
I have unfortunately stumbled upon an unwanted yet much-needed truth of life, which is you will lose relationships all of the time. Friends, family, and all other relationships you didn’t expect to lose, in ways you didn’t expect.
But I do think it is important to sit with yourself to mourn the loss of those relationships. Like kids do. By mourning I do not mean literally crying, but to allow yourself to process those emotions. And do that over and over again.
It demeans their hard work, toil and tears to merely being gifted and blessed, instead of building the success that lead them to being called “talented”.
The alternative way of respecting someone’s success is to say a version of “You seem to have put in a ton of hard work in here.”
It shows you respect their hustle and the fact that they earned it.
Earning and inheriting do not lead to the same destination.
Many decades later, though, someone on social media said:
“I do not read books. I do not workout. But hey, I am cool.”
The social media has democratised communication and access. This also comes with the choice for us to pick whom to listen to. More importantly, whom not to listen to.
Coaches like George Raveling and Tim Grover have written about Michael Jordan in their books, on how he wanted to improve even the most little things in his game. One of the most loved chapters in James Clear’s Atomic Habits is the chapter of British cyclists — on how they went on to win a championship just by making tiny changes in their lifestyles. Clear also shares a similar story in the addendum workbook to this book. The best leaders I have witnessed in corporate rooms are always learning and doing new things, instead of merely being irresponsible towards learning.
Those are the kind of people you need to read. To purposefully surround yourself with.
And move on from “smart, cool and charismatic” people who lack the slightest courage to read books and workout.
Let us say you are 100% right and the other person is 100% wrong. And I do not say this in the ego way of life but in the way of logic. Let us say that you were right all along the way.
But if you letting them win makes peace in the conversation, I don’t see anything wrong.
The only person that can afford to do it is someone who is so fulfilled from within that them winning this argument is immaterial.
Although, one might think that if this is a relationship that you interact with often, this way the other person is going to dominate you. I believe that if you really have a relationship of faith, trust and love with them, you will find a way later. If it is a relationship that losing some conversations makes you think you are a forever loser in the relationship, that was not a relationship to begin with.
Type 1: They are the brightest connoisseurs of excellence. Always doing more than they are required to. Without ever being asked for or being promised a compensation for the extra. Their work is their signature, and hence, they leave an unconscious positive impression wherever they go. Usually less than 1% of the workforce.
Type 2: They do their work as they are supposed to. No nagging, no follow-ups, yet no excellence either.
Type 3: Them doing the work after multiple follow-ups and requests is an achievement in itself.
The distribution of type 2 and type 3 is usually a function of the hiring decision of the company and the mindset of the leader.
It pays monetarily to be in type 2 and 3. It pays your soul to be in the type 1. At least for the work you care for.
When you diminish it just to end goals (which are important too), you are never living ever. You are postponing fun to tomorrowland.
Let us say you postpone fun to weekends and then actually have it. But then your mind will be again stuck in hoping to get to another goal over the week/when you get back to work.
All work, hence, should be boiled down to one common mantra: Have fun today.
How you do it is something you already know. It was the “fun” element that you needed the reminder to.
We all have acted as one at some point in our past.
So when someone else is acting like one around you, protect yourself from them. While blessing them in your heart instead of holding it up against them.
When things between two people have a collision, there are just two ways to go about it:
You felt something was off, it hurt you, and you be an adult and communicate about it. And solve it by having a conversation where you make the other person feel safe while putting out how you felt. The tonality matters a lot here.
The second option is you realise the hurt is not worth it, so you resolve it within yourself. Your love and conversation with the other person is pure and pristine as before.
Sometimes we unknowingly tend to go with the third option, which is an amalgamation of both, and hence breaks trust in that friendship. You are mad at them but you do not communicate, and then when they ask you, you give them a piece of your mind, because, hey, they asked.
Any relationship in family or friends or anyone else is our responsibility. Sometimes when we do not heal the pain of some of our relationships, we bleed in those relationships that didn’t cut us, as a quote goes. Or we might think they cut us too, because we did not know that sometimes you can avoid cuts by being adults.
Being an adult is conversation about pain or self cancellation of pain. Venn diagram of no conversation and no cancellation is not how adults operate. The third option is only cutting you more. And you are already anaemic from the bleeding that has already happened.
I am writing this after just having listened to Sundar Pichai’s speech at AI Impact Summit at Bharat Mandapam.
And it made me think how leaders speak.
Their words are measured. They talk about the things they are doing. They bring their team along. They do what they do the best and are not about becoming the best at everything else (like Sundar does not care on speaking by memorising). And, they inject a little bit of humour too here and there.
Even though all of this is practised, someone who does not believe in these things could not ever execute them so well.
It reminds me of the Wankhede WC trophy celebration, when the Indian Mens Cricket Team had returned from Barbados after winning the T20 Word Cup 2024. There was a clip that went viral on the internet of the entire team singing “Maa Tujhe Salaam”, where Virat and Hardik were at the front. Someone from the audience threw their t-shirt at Hardik, and the other players behind him started laughing off at that gesture. But Virat, Virat Decent Kohli did not even happen to notice it. Or perhaps did not find it worth laughing off. If that is not leadership, I don’t know what is. Not to forget, he was not the “official leader” anyway.
Leadership is a choice you make, and the choice that eventually becomes a part of you instead of being just a loose creature.
We all are strong enough to draw boundaries. We all have drawn boundaries. Everyone at work can treat us a certain way. And not treat us a certain way.
But when our parents critique us, we are liberal with them. We don’t raise our voice, mostly not even our concern. That is our love for their love, I guess.
What I am trying to say is that at a subtle level we all love being critiqued by our parents. We look forward to it. We crave it. It keeps us on our toes. As it should.
In 1947, my grandparents bought their first home after partition. My father, uncles and aunts (aka Buas) were born and raised there. So was I and every single one of my siblings/cousins.
Around the year 2000, both my uncles vacated their parts of the house. Ten years ago, in 2016, my parents also moved out from that house to the new one they currently live in. Yet they decided to keep the old one, for the memories.
But life has a way of serving you surprises when we least expect it. Around the pandemic, our business suffered a bit to an extent that my father was finding it difficult to pay the EMIs. I was also going through a career change and was in a similar situation. Now the situation is very different for both of us, but it wasn’t the case in 2020-21.
My father eventually decided to sell off the old home, pay off the loan of the new home, and not worry about EMIs every month. We did exactly that. For the first few months, he was trodden with guilt and helplessness. He unfortunately thought he could not even save a home.
Over time, I think he sort of moved on. My mom kept nudging him that no house was worth trading for his peace of mind and mental and physical health. To me it is the boldest thing my father has done ever.
I can say he moved on because some two years ago he sat all of us sisters down and told his life regrets. Notwithstanding what he said, I am glad the house was not one of them. I would like to hope so at least.
The reason I am sharing this with you is that sometimes we are all stuck to our childhood way too much. In a way we do not even realise. Truth be told, it still blows my mind away that till date whenever I have dreams that have my family, they are always in that old house and never in the “new” one which is a decade old now.
I see so many people stuck to some part of their childhood things, pieces of past that aren’t pristine anymore, and even houses that are homes long gone. At some point, it all makes sense to move on. At least from things we have zero control over. My father still is filled with lores of how things used to be when his parents were around. And that’s fine too. It’s a part of him. Yet he is someone who is always planning for the future, making things happen, giving us advices which he wish he had.
This is the picture of the ruins of the house that used to be our home, after it was sold. I haven’t shown it to anyone in my family ever (the irony of posting it on social media is not lost on me lol).
But we are so much beyond and better than the things we owned, the things we had and the things we could be.
Once we know that, we create a version we could have been but never were. It is all in our choice, in our agency, of what we pick from the past and use it in our present to enslave our future or to enlarge it.
Most of us have to make that choice every single day.
A picture of a team offsite pops up on my social media feed. The team is decked up in a queue filling their plates from the buffer lunch.
It makes me wonder, so much of the wonders in our lives are a consequence of breaking the queue of what everyone else does.
If you eat healthy, you will carry your dabba from home to eat along with your colleagues. You have broken the queue.
If you want to get a job, you will reach out to the decision maker in the company. Instead of waiting for the HR to get back to you. You have broken the queue.
If you want to sit at home and do meetings only if you want to, step-by-step you will build a client base, a home office, a pipeline of work that supplements exactly that. It might mean you have to break the chain of job hopping in lieu of creating a life on your own terms, but with wisdom, work and working on the side with your main job, you have broken the queue.
So much of life is about remembering the fact that when you go inside instead of following the world outside, you have broken the queue. And that is exactly what life is about.
When we go out there into the world, it is a fact that not everyone will agree with you or resonate with you.
Sometimes things may go worse and you might not have the easiest conversation with your client.
I would still say it is not the most mature thing in the world to go out there on social media and put out a version of “I was good. My client was bad.” In most cases it also projects you as a reactive human who lets their emotions get the better of them.
Learning the lessons, using those lessons in future assignments and learning to draw your boundaries are some of the ways you can escape the same tyranny again.
Being the torchbearer of someone else’s flaws never helped anyone, including the flawed.
It breaks my heart to see writers I have been following for over a decade to succumb to writing their books via AI.
They perhaps seem to think that no one is noticing. Or that writing via AI would make their writing (presumably) better. Spoiler: It isn’t. Or that they think that they should outsource writing to an LLM and do something more meaningful themselves.
I only wonder, if a author thinks something else is more important than writing, what is the point of even playing that game?
As a reader (and writer and a book ghostwriter of bestsellers that have never used a single word of AI), here is what I think:
That the author did not do the emotional labour to think through the difficult parts of the book.
That the author did not have the understanding of their own thoughts, let alone providing the clarity to their audience.
That the author really does not care about a connection with the audience, and all they care about is capitalising on their past success, which was either through their previous works or millions of followers.
Art was hard even when Shakespeare used to write. Art is hard now even when we write on laptops lighter than Shakespeare’s pen. It is the journey of going through that hard which makes art worth consuming.
