Get in emotional action. Own your life, and inspire others to do the same.
How to grow more?
How to have more money?
How to grow spiritually?
How to…?
The answer to having everything in life is:
What are you giving in order to have it?
Do you believe you deserve it?
Have you helped enough people realise what they wanted to?
People will not understand you. They will expect from you, yet they won’t probably reciprocate it.
What to do then?
Should you also reciprocate?
Well, we all have tried it and it never worked.
The only thing that could be the solution for everything, every single thing is to keep yourself strong from inside. It’s an insurance no one could take away.
Like every insurance, you have to pay consistent premium (aka learning) in order to actually avail the benefits.
Like every insurance, you will have to stop frivolous spends (hanging around with those people) to be able to pay premium without fail.
Anger is something that serves none of us.
Why we do it, is like scolding a child. Won’t work.
Why not ask yourself: “How can I be calmer and under self control in these situations?”
We get the life, we sign up for.
Today I stumbled upon the failure resume of Ankur Warikoo. Was a wonderful peep into why this man is so humble despite having achieved so much in life.
Basis that I decided to prepare a failure resume of my life so far. Not about career as he did, rather what has made me strong so far.
I am often told by a lot of people:
“You’re too strong!”
“You understand things quite deeply.”
Also on the last day of my first job, my then boss (who had never said it), said me: “My indirect guru!”
While all these things may seem elating, this 28 year of life span has taught neither to be super-happy on appreciation, nor to be super-sad while being criticized.
Yet I was not born with this strength.
Here’s how I happened to develop it:
2002: Class VI – My then best friend found a new best friend all of a sudden. Not only I was friendless, I also sat in a corner while all others played basketball in games period.
Lesson learnt: I started becoming friends with everyone – na kaahu se dosti na kahu se vair. And bam! Started enjoying school life unlike ever before.
2003: Our whole family has decided to go to a park on a Sunday evening. Maa and sisters have prepared dahi bhallas and aloo tikki to be eaten up there. I am ready with my badminton and best hair band. My masi and my cousin have also come home – we will all enjoy together.
Just half an hour before we are about to leave, Papa says we won’t go. He blabbered some reason which I could intuitively feel were not right. He just said no means no.
Lesson learnt: I always make it a point to take my nephew / nieces to park – no matter how much I want to rest. They just know one thing: “If masi has committed, she will take us to the park and play with us.” (Without phone.)
2010: IIM – A, where the world goes to fulfill their dreams, I signed up for a nightmare. Went there for a day-long conference, and met the first person I fell in relationship with.
He liked nothing about me – absolutely nothing other than my skin colour. He became friends with my cousin, used to talk with her while I had already been thrown out of his life, and above everything – threw me out of his place on our last meeting.
Lesson learnt: Not yet bro, I had one bigger jolt to learn the lesson.
2011: The sister just older than me, who is also the closest one – gets engaged and married. After her marriage she faces some problems in her own life, because of which she couldn’t devote time to our relationship.
Lesson learnt: Learn to channel your loneliness into solitude. That’s when I fell in love with books for eternity.
2014: Nana died. I was one of his favourite kids. I go through all his last rites peacefully, strong as a rock. It came out naturally, didn’t have to do it.
Two weeks later, my Mom asked me: “Where do you bring so much power from? You didn’t even cry! I helped myself a lot just by looking at the way you conducted yourself and knowing what Nana meant to you!”
Lesson learnt (this time a powerful one): Keep filling yourself with power, over a period of time it will become automatic.
2016: Okay, this is the second jolt. Was exactly the photocopy of the first guy, with additional splice of anger, blame game and a ton of blackmailing.
I considered myself lucky to finally be able to get out of that.
Lesson learnt: Your life has a pattern. If it is following a pattern you aren’t proud of, reflect over it and change. (Disclaimer: Neither of these 2 persons were bad – they were just not right.) Also, learnt to say no gracefully and without any guilt.
2017: This is when I have started journaling a lot. Have started listening to God’s words. Have made a relationship with him. He is right there for me, every single time.
2018: Me and my best friend were supposed to go to Goa in January. We booked our tickets in July itself. Excitement was at its best. We were just reverse counting the days.
Somewhere around November, another friend of hers also books her tickets with us. I feel resentful in the beginning – it was a trip for both of us. Yet, I thought it was immature to react so much, and of course, my excitement belongs to me. I continued being excited.
In December 2017 I texted my friend: “Yayyy!!! Next month finally Goa!” She replied with a cold message, and asked if her friend would hamper our enjoyment. I said yes she would, however let’s focus on what’s working.
She said it’s better not to go then.
Cool. I cancel my tickets. She also tries to, yet since the refund is negligible, she decides not to cancel it.
Later around Christmas, she pushes me to book my tickets again. I choose not to, price is 4X now.
On the day of her take off, I am in a meeting onsite. Couldn’t take her call. Saw her message later that she just wanted to talk. I went back to my hotel room, call my sister, and cry a lot. A lottt.
Lesson learnt: To love your friends without any condition. We are still very good friends. Yet conditioned my mind to accept her where she is, instead of laying a bunch of expectations on her.
Also, I make God my bff now. We are just the best since then.
That’s it people, some small takes in this big picture called Life.
Gary Vaynerchuk, who posts a lot about optimism and hope, said once: I wish people could share their real struggles with everybody – the world would be so much lighter and happier if it happened.
That was the very reason I shared these struggles with you. Not to brag about what I went through. People have been through worse. Yet, when we know the process we honour the result and respect the journey.
Nothing is natural other than nature. We have become who we are.
From tomorrow, we’ll go back to possibility and power! Hasta-la-vista baby!!
New friends.
When you find new friends of course you feel great, you feel like you have arrived home.
Yet at the same time it’s it would be great to remember that those friends help you make you a bigger version of you, a better version of you.
Would be wise to not be like them rather being just the best version of you. Balance of love. Best of both worlds.
Hard work is easy.
It’s a choice.
One that you make when life offers you options not to be honest.
When you do make that choice, you’ve already won.
Hard work to understand yourself and others, and honesty to live by that.
Yesterday I received a call from someone who usually does not talk with me. Also, I avoid talking with them because they consistently criticise me for my life choices. (Fun fact: This was not an ex :D)
However, instead of being more mindful, I happened to answer their call. And they followed suit – to give me opinions and tell why my life choices are not right.
This usually does not bother me, however the person on the other side was someone whom I respected in the past. A lot.
I finally hung down the phone and got myself back to normal through self-talk.
Today morning when I called up home, Papa asked: “Why are you appearing so out of place?”
While I ignored that question and drifted our conversation to other things, I finally told him everything.
Here’s how he responded to me:
1. You do not have to ignore their calls, just decide what you will pay attention to or what you will not pay attention to.
2. It may so happen that out of 10 bad things they say about you, one of those things really happen to turn out in your favour.
3. Learn to listen to critics, they are more valuable than friends, because they make you realise the importance of self-love.
Learning from wisdom and experience of elders truly collapses the learning curve.
PS: Love yourself, no one else is going to change their opinions to love you.
It may so happen that a well wisher has a totally different opinion about your life than what you have.
The thing is if you stand by yourself and you believe in your idea and you believe in the fact that you have explored all possible options and then taken this step because you’re proud of it, then my friends please do not get carried away by someone else’s opinion.
Your life has to be lived by you.
Your standards of happiness are something you should stand for, instead of expecting someone else to create those standards of happiness in themselves so that you could live by them.
That is a very very dangerous place to be.
In all the things that everyone describes as “normal”, we all have one thing that we DON’T do.
Even if everyone in the world is doing it, we don’t do it.
In “Thinking, Fast and Slow”, the author Daniel Kanheman talks about why we tend to lower down the volume in the car while searching for parking spots – because parking requires a thought process and even music comes as a distraction.
It is such a subconscious process, that we hardly realise that we do
it. As it comes to doing weird things with my life, I can never work with music.
Nor can I read a book accompanied with music.
Not even meals :/
That focus is a necessity for me, and music comes in when I am seriously sitting idle or (the good old days) when we were allowed to drive on the roads:)
Like most people, I DON’T listen to music “at all times”!
The goal is to be so internally fulfilled that even though you may have time, you don’t want to scroll Instagram.
The goal is to respect your introversion and work in a team simultaneously.
The goal is to look at what’s working in others versus where they lack, as this is what a loved one does (with some occasional nudges here and there).
The goal is to have an understanding. The understanding that fortunately comes from within and through reflection, not external factors including OTT or social media.