Raw. Real. Unfiltered. Daily blogs. Often, less than 100 words
Give yourself some time, space and nothingness.
Be okay with being free.
Know that you have your spark and you can reignite it anytime it is unable to stay inside. But for now, it is okay to stop putting timelines on yourself for a while.
Slowing down helps you eventually get faster and also go longer.
We are going to have differing opinions from everyone at some point of time.
What we can still offer them is grace.
Disagree with grace.
Do not let your anger control you.
Let your curiosity guide you.
Focus more on getting to the right solution, not trying to prove yourself right.
Think of a win-win.
Only the humble survive.
You can win any disagreement with love.
Read Robert Greene and Chris Voss.
Before you take a step forward, leave your childhood patterns at the back door.
If someone is sharing a problem with you looking for a solution, it is certainly your problem too, even if it is none of your business.
Also, if it is not your problem and you use the exact same sentence, there is a bigger problem to be solved than the real problem itself.
When I look back at my life, I have been blessed to achieve some good degree of success, right from the early start.
Yes, there have been failures too (who does not have them), but the graph of what I have received has been fortunately tilted towards me.
Yet I believe everyone’s success has a lot of backstage events that do not come to light.
One of my biggest failures is no one in my family celebrates me. Forget celebrating, there is no acknowledgement even. If there is a tiny teeny bit of awareness to them about what I achieved, it gets washed off in “you are too young, too unaware, too immature, and we want to warn you against this cruel world.” The only result of this is that when the world is actually cruel to me, I do not tell them ever.
Everyone is so caught up all the time in their problems, that anyone who lives their life without narrating their problems is an alien, a perpetual non-existent being for them. It vanishes a tiny femtometres of my smile each time, when they do not realise the battles I fight to smile a little before them, so that there could be some sort of happiness in their lives.
I understand that sometimes life is a little partial in awarding its problems, but how does it get down to not celebrating your own family? I guess life awards its problems too, in the uniquest ways.
People often worry about the death of their immediate family. They rightly label it as their biggest fear. But no one talks about the hundreds of thousands of deaths of family that happen while the family is still alive.
And while you and I cannot do anything about it, if ever life gives you a chance to celebrate your family or friends or close ones or anyone else, may you realise how big of a success you are, to truly celebrate someone else’s success.
Meanwhile, I try to erase the memory of someone in my family stowing away my box of my new iPhone (when I had bought it 2+ years ago) when I showed it to them with joy, because they could not afford it back then.
You never know how one irrational decision of yours can have a snowball effect of years of misery for someone else.
You never know how someone else loved you so much (the last four words stem out of me as I read All Too Well lyrics of Taylor Swift yesterday) that they sort of trusted you with ever lie you said, ever promise that was fake, every action that had no intention.
You never know how many people in your family, especially those younger than you end up copying you, and then unconsciously become unkind to the world and themselves.
Kindness is the easiest thing to do, because it is our inherent nature. We crave for it when we don’t get it. Yet kindness is the hardest thing to do, because it does not get rewarded often and easily. Mostly it doesn’t even get acknowledged. But if you are not kind, who art thou?
Cranky
Dismissive
Unempathetic
Forgetful
Disturbing words/actions/both
Careful
Kind
Calmer
Cheerful
Nice human being
When we say “in your element” for you, what defines you is who you really are.
Is it a good thing for everyone around you that you are “in your element”, or they are glad you aren’t?
On days you are overwhelmed or there is too much manager’s schedule, too little of a maker’s schedule, how to cope?
One useful strategy I have come to understand is do one small thing to move the needle forward.
Could not be 4 hours of deep work that day, but could we do 4 minutes of deep work that day?
One of my favourite lines from James Clear is “every action you do is a vote for the person you wish to become.”
So when you do those 4 negligible minutes of work on super busy days, you are telling yourself that you do meaningful work each day.
And you never go against your self-image.
A high profile woman I know recently recommended that I must watch the Rajkumari show of Nayab Midha.
She knows me for several years, is well travelled and out of all countries she has visited, she only told me Japan is something I would love. And that’s right, there is this special connection (not yearning) I feel towards that country, that I have never felt for anything else, even though I haven’t visited the place.
With that trust, I looked up the next show of Nayab. I also sent it to someone in my family who is a big fan. She coincidentally happens to be in Delhi on that day, so I tried my best to convince her.
But life has other plans even when something is visibly all aligned, and she refused to join in.
Here comes the interesting part: In my mind, I did not sit and overanalyse their thought process. I did not tell myself anything about what they could have, should have, would have. I also did not do a quiet PhD of their patterns, which is usually my default for life so far. The best part is none of this has got anything to do with me going alone (I love being alone), it has all to do with me simply thinking where I didn’t need to.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a sign of growth.
Forget overanalysing, I did not even under-analyse.
I do not have tips on how to reach there, but when you do, nothing is more liberating.
A lot of us try to attribute our miseries to childhood experiences.
Something our parents did or did not do, and a lot of it comes down to affecting our behaviours and choices as adults.
I have been reflecting on this for years, and I have concluded that at some point all people will face tribulations of life, even if their childhood was a fairytale sans trauma.
(On a side note, though we do not get to control what happened to us as kids, we get to make different choices, undo patterns and redo self confidence as adults.)
Yet life will come and question us over and over again. Regardless of what was our past.
This means our present has power.
This means that even though miseries are always going to knock the door of our life, our presence has power too.
You are a different person today. You can choose to not be a miserable person today.
Learn the lesson.
Figure the next right step.
No one gained a thing or two by dwelling on the past or hoping for it to be different.
Keep moving forward. Rinse and repeat.
But over a period of time, if you continue believing a lie, it becomes a self-fulfilling truth.
It all begins in the mind. And ends in the mind.
The first tier is for drizzle kinda rain.
The third tier is when it is raining cats and dogs.
It is the second tier where you have to make the decision whether to use it or to switch to first one (if it is not too harsh of a rain).
Funnily enough, my middle class mentality makes me think that I should use the first tier, even when the rain calls for the second tier.
The battle of the first and the second goes on for a while, until it is finally time to go on to the second tier. Then too, each time the wiper moves fast, you undo a bit of your “you deserve less” mindset.
It amazes me that a car wiper also comes with its lessons on our deep grained psychology.
Boys that come from good families.
Boys that go on to have good education.
Boys that apparently their family is proud of.
These are the boys that often go on to damage good girls.
Not perhaps with the intent of damaging them.
But with just the thought of having fun, a side thing, someone to talk to, someone to message, someone to vent out their frustration on, someone to speak to without ever listening to, someone where they just take and take and never give.
Boys that believe that with money and making a few calls to the girl (of course when they are bored) they have earned the right to do anything to this girl’s mental health, emotions and her life. Because hey, according to them, this girl just doesn’t exist. This girl is just a girl who is his “friend”, because you cannot call a less-decent noun to an educated girl.
It is not that these boys intend to damage these girls. But what else do we name this act of selfishness done to cure one’s loneliness temporarily, while permanently damaging the other person?
To do anything wrong to any human being, especially when they trust you is the biggest form of hollowness, selfishness and narcissism. All of which is masked under kindness. And the phone calls this boy makes (always at his own convenience).
Girls, please know that:
I feel a strange longing, a need to belong there. But the biggest and the best learning of me going to retreats over the years is that you cannot “pay” your way into going there anytime.
You go there only for 4-5 days when a retreat comes up, learn and meditate as much as you can, and come back and transform your life. Our goal, then, is to make our lives so enriched that our transformed life helps others.
I call it the joy of longing your home, away from home.
We should try to get our family and friends rid of it.
Even if they do it out of love, a part of me believes there is an absolute pressure to perform, to make the other person like what you did for them.
I have never done it for anyone else, so forgive me for being so naive, if I am one.
But once-a-year surprises are honestly scary. What if whenever we talk to that friend or family, we really listen and care? What if we are a bit kinder in our messages to them? What if we stop talking about ourselves a lot often and be curious about them?
Isn’t all this better than a once-a-year surprise?
Loving people and making them feel good isn’t wrong.
Just that if you do it on one special day, the weight of it stays on so long that we forget the tiny things of the other 364 days.
Loving people and making them feel good should be our year long responsibility (and joy) for them.
Learn from them.
Let them make you terrific.
Do not waste your pristine present and fruitful future for a pathless and painful past.
Dinner in the golden hour.
Watching birds go back to home (wherever that is).
By the time dinner is done, the pink-blue sky is now laden with darkness, yet visible clouds.
Ah, the joys of a slow life.
A lot of people prefer reading paperbacks instead of Kindle version. I get it. I also do the same, despite having a Kindle device of my own.
But when once a blue moon a good book is available for 2-digit-INR on Kindle and 4-digit-INR on paperback or hard cover, it only makes sense to go for the Kindle version.
Especially if it is apparently a great book and you cannot miss out on that. The risk is lower and the wisdom is often disproportionate.
Having belief systems is good, only as long as they serve you.
This morning we drove at 5.15 am for over an hour to the mountains.
And it was hands down the best drive of my life. Ever.
The wind was so perfectly blowing that I was enjoying my window seat view. It wasn’t too harsh for me to close the window. Just Perfect. In capital P.
The best thing was while the sky was slowly turning blue, the glittery sparkling moon of the last night was still in its full form. Not the white-kind of moon that we see in the mornings, but the glittery moon of the nights was in full form in the morning.
I did not click a lot of pictures, but these are really good. The moon’s picture does not do justice, because a few minutes back it was sparking even more. The kind of stuff you can never prepare for, it only shows up by surprise. But it only shows up when you are willing to access nature all of the time.
Today is 3-year anniversary of me going out on my own.
So, 3 learnings from this stint:
1. If you are high agency, have worked hard in your jobs in the past, and have a bit of savings (at least a year), you are going to do almost fine. I did not need savings, thank God, but just the fact they existed helped me from making desperate decisions.
2. The life of an artist is different from the life of an entrepreneur, with a little Venn overlap. My active choice is the former. You have to keep reminding yourself which one is yours.
3. The best thing going out on your own is you can go 5X your usual speed or slow down just because you want to. The self-confidence that you build through your skill eventually helps you in deciding your attitude too.
Thanks to everyone who chose to work with me, buy my books, refer me to beautiful opportunities, and still continues to do all of these. You bring food on my table and peace to our entire family. And for that, I am truly, truly grateful.