True richness to me is having the ability to wake up to this, even at your home.
When I was a kid, my uncle, aunt and cousins used to live in a government quarter, which was legit surrounded by an infinite jungle.
But as grown ups you realise these are the real wealths of life.
Of course money is important, as I always say, but that money should be put to use for making your mornings peaceful. I am blessed to be living in such a place at home as well as my parents’ home, maybe because at some level you find what you are looking for.
I truly wish more people make time to live around at least a few plants and trees, sunrise, and a terrace to walk around. To me, hanging around at these places have helped me make more material riches.
I often want to run away from travel preparations. Even if it sometimes means minimal preparations for leaving for my hometown.
I was about to diagnose myself with anxiety yesterday, as I came back from hometown a day before and now in just 30 hours was going for a very short meditation retreat.
But then words of Marcus Aurelius came into my mind, where he says:
“Today I escaped anxiety. Or no, I discarded it, because it was within me, in my own perceptions — not outside.”
Never go into an important (or trivial) meeting with an empty stomach. A fed stomach (and not a fed up stomach) leads to a functioning, rational brain.
When you see yourself going on the side of anger (no matter how much needed), shut up. You can communicate the things later when you are quieter but getting antsy under aggression is something that will inevitably make to your “regrets” section in your autobiography.
For those who don’t speak, give them a chance to.
For every opinion, look at what is being said instead of who is saying it.
Keep it short and to the point. A meeting is for getting things done, not a journal to rant.
After the Diwali of last year, I travelled to Dubai with my cousins.
It was a short five-day trip, with each day packed to the brim.
In the image: Day 0, landing in the evening. On my right is my bhabhi. I give up on rishtedaars but never on getting my steps done 🙂
We started Day 1 on high note, covering several major attractions, stopping and enjoying 6-7 places, clicking pictures, and ending the day with a visit to the Burj Khalifa.
In the image: Asking my brother to click at least one good picture, on Day 1. I will spend my entire life wondering what purpose does the Museum of the Future serve. But for now, here is a picture in that wonder of Dubai, which my brother thinks is a good picture, to which I strongly disagree.
We returned to the hotel quite late, I put up a child-like drama that I did not get any picture, especially in the Dubai mall with Burj Khalifa in the background, and slept even late.
The next morning, as I was performing suptapadangushtasana, I fainted.
And I don’t remember anything that happened after that.
When I woke up, I was lying in bed, surrounded by all of them. For the record, it was my elder bro, bhabhi (his wife), their 5yo daughter and my younger bro. There was absolute memory loss of that one hour or two or whatever had transpired between my fainting and regaining senses.
These three were rightly convinced that I was unfit for travelling that day.
So they dropped me at another cousin’s home, who had coincidentally landed in Dubai the night before, with his wife and their 11yo daughter.
We all come upstairs in their home. They showed me the guest room. And I slept like a baby. This was little after the noon.
When I woke up, it was already dark. It was around 7 pm. I had an array of messages from my cousin whose home I was staying at, that the fruits are kept in fridge (my bro knows his sister well :D), and that they were at Dubai mall, and would be back in a while.
So I took a banana and a thepla with curd that my bhabhi had kept for me, and sat in the balcony of their Burj-Khalifa facing apartment. Alone.
It turns out, I have always looked for some bit of solitude in my days. It is my fuel. It is my best friend, my way of life, my oxygen.
And here I was, that the solitude walked up to me in ways I had never expected.
Sitting in that balcony I was nothing beyond joyful and peaceful. Filled with gratitude that even when I was unwell in a foreign land, I had family to drop me to another family, who made sure I was surrounded by food I love. I even enjoyed the musical fountain show of Burj Khalifa, where they played Baby Shark :))
In the image: Dinner with a view, baby!!!
It turns out, you always find what you are looking for, sometimes even unconsciously and unexpectedly.
I am someone who loves solitude more than anything else.
I knew for sure I was not going to find my pockets of solitude in this trip, mostly because we were going to Dubai, not an ashram. I was okay with it. But somewhere, somehow, even in the most surreal ways, solitude found me.
The way my body found it by falling ill is obviously a reaction to too much work or travel, and too little rest. And the idea is never to promote getting to this level of exhaustion.
But no matter what you do and whatever happens to you and whatever falls apart, what you are innately looking for, even when you have not asked for, is looking for you too. Make what you can, of this info.
In the images: Chilling around with the fam when they came back from their shopping. I also got my pictures with Burj Khalifa background. Like I said, you always find what you are looking for 😀 Their 11yo was having fun in Aquaventure World and later on a cruise with my other cousins, on my ticket 🙂 We are Sindhis, we never let our money waste, even if the person in whose name the ticket is bought has fainted :))
People do not wake up in the morning and say, “Today I am going to ruin <Insert your name> ‘s day.
Trust me, no one is conspiring against you, even if you feel so.
Which is why it is important to get out into the world with a mindset of positivity that can handle any pain that these pointless people actually throw at you.
But if you are already angry, anxious and atrocious, you have lost the battle even before it began.
Going for a walk instead of sitting on your couch.
Drinking a lot of water.
Moving on from a friend who did not say a goodbye before moving on.
Walking in a park for your mental health.
Waking up in the morning and exercising before the day takes over.
Loving your parents but not becoming like them.
Putting aside money for your future, however bleak at the moment.
Bringing joy to the table, whichever table you walk to.
It is good to do things for which you might not often fetch a medal for, because the right thing is the right thing even when no one is watching and even if no one cares.
“Anger is like a hot coal. It burns the person holding on to it,” observed Buddha.
And it also burns the person who did not ignite it, because the person holding on to it has decided to not let it go.
Sometimes when we are angry with someone, we inflict that on everyone else. Sometimes then when we are not angry with anyone, that anger becomes our default setting.
This makes us inflict anger on everyone, regardless of what they did or did not do.
Your relationships and your mood are not that cheap, are they?
When you go to a store of H&M or Uniqlo, the checkout experience is seamless. I believe it is for at least two reasons:
They do not ask you to get a membership.
They do not ask if you want a bag, they give you a bag by default, because the bag is free.
In a Pantaloons or a Shoppers Stop outlet, you are asked both of these.
It almost makes me reconsider revisiting them, because you do not want to say these polite no’s over and over again. Also, once a customer has landed in our store and is reaching the end mile of making a purchase, it is wisdom to know that future sales are going to be driven by how good your product is, not by selling memberships or charging for a ₹10 paper bag, a better quality of which comes for free at H&M or Uniqlo.
To begin with, I understand that the former two have a different audience than the latter two. I am also aware of the fact that the “free” bag is built into the prices of the products at H&M and Uniqlo, which are definitely on the higher side than Pantaloons or Shoppers Stop.
Yet the customer does not care about what is the price of your product. Pantaloons or Shoppers Stop could easily increase the price of every single SKU by ₹10 and lose no customers, while they could make the bag free. Also, if the product is no good, no customer is coming to “use their membership card” even for which they might have paid for.
The customer cares about good product, hassle-free experience, and not being pushed for “further sale” after they have made bigger financial decisions already during shopping.
Making money is not an evil object. Not caring about the customer and milking them after they have already milked themselves is.
The world is designed to keep you unfocused. Open any social media and you will figure. Thus, you have to create a world around you that keeps you focused.
Focus is boring. But focus is where the bucks are made.
Show me any successful person and I will show you the focus they put in. It need not be academics, but whatever they succeeded in, they focused at it.
The best way to get focused is to find what you are genuinely interested in. And then devote time and execution to it.
But that is not the only way. A lot of the times when we focus on the work we are blessed with, it increases our focus too.
Always have something to do that you can chill around doing, when you get bored. Book, table tennis, outdoor games, if nothing else, go clean your closet and bathroom. If you skip this, you are likely to scroll miles on your phone.
Focus builds the internal confidence to not get affected by what naysayers do or say. Your blinkers are on, and that is it.
There is always going to be a new movie, a new tournament, a new family riot, a new that is there at the doorstep of your focus to make it scatter around. You must train your mind
That is where reading (and not watching) good content helps. Your mind knows what to learn, and actually has the space to learn it.
Lastly, focus is like good health. You have to earn it daily. Yet the past compounds. You can go by a small deviation here and there. But eventually consistency, saying no a lot (so that you can say yes a lot) are the keys.
Oh, btw, you have more fun when you are focused more. Having fun is directly proportionate to the focus you have.
When I moved out of my last job, I was clueless what I’d do next.
Or to frame it differently, what I knew for sure was I’d be a full time writer. I knew it for sure in my bones, in my soul, in my heart. Just that there was zero idea how.
Unlike my usual tendency, I did not push myself to figure life out the next day of leaving my last job. I simply swayed through my day. And the only thing I did around 4.30 pm that day was write my daily blog.
I started this blog in 2016, exactly 10 years ago. But out of the 2,946 blogs here in the last 120 months, the last 1,000 blogs have been here in the last 1,000 days (or ~33 months). In a continuous streak.
This is the home I return to, everything else I do at work is wandering. As much as wandering and travelling is necessary, we all need a home.
There have been clients who read this blog and onboarded me to ghostwrite their books, because they could trust me with their life stories.
Most importantly, I don’t follow the world, the algorithms, the latest tool out in the market here.
The biggest mistake we make is believing a fool would become wiser with logic and/or intuition.
Foolishness is a choice, resulting from a culture of self-created walls of “I am the best”. You cannot every help someone get better who already thinks so.
I came across a recommendation of following James Clear on Substack, and I subscribed to him immediately.
The next step asked me if I want to recommend him.
Now, I am VERY picky about recommending newsletters, even if they are from my favourite people. But with Clear, I recommended him without batting my eyelid.
Because I am 100% confident of the content he is going to put out on Substack (whenever he starts doing that) is going to be excellent.
What is something people are going to be 100% confident about you, that they put their stamp on it just by seeing your name?
Every single day, we are allowing people to form a perception about us. The worst (and the best) part about it is they often don’t notice how.
What is the choice you are giving people to make about you, every single day?
