You know if it is right or not.
Wrong does not require efforts. Right does.
Efforts or nothing. We make a choice every single minute.
Tag: change
For several years, I’ve seen Oprah repeat Maya Angelou’s words:
When people show you who they are, believe them!
I for the longest time used to think that this was not right.
And proved myself wrong over and over again.
Oprah was very very right about what she said.
When people show you they’re mean, believe them.
When people show you they’re kind, believe them.
When people show you they’re angry, believe them.
And while you do believe them, continue believing in your own power to be super focused and powerful to what you radiate out to them. You be you, perhaps they will show you a better side of themselves.
The most important person in a relationship is You.
We build trust by doing what we do for them when they are not around. That builds respect.
Respect is what we do for them when what they do is not what we want to do, yet we do it because we love and respect them.
Read the above line twice. It is important because this is why most relationships falter.
For a kid, the parents would never abuse them.
Until they do. For every interaction they have with their kids.
The abuse, sadly, is something which could not be filtered for profanity because it does not use profane words.
It comes in mild words and powerful programming like:
“You won’t be able to do it.”
“Don’t do this. You will fail.”
“You are no good.”
Parents keep telling this to kids, until it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
None of us had a perfect childhood. That’s not the problem, that’s the solution.
Because now we have the pen to write the script. As difficult as it may sound, we all write our script daily.
We may choose the script today. Since it is presumably not going to be a repeated one, it is going to take efforts. Yet without efforts, do you want your today to be equally self abusive?
It is a disease not restricted to a few people.
Rather, there are very few people who don’t suffer from this.
Well, what to do if you want to be one of those few people?
a. Being kind even when you have the right to be unkind is an unprecedented advantage.
b. Replacing “you’re an idiot” with “I think there is a miscommunication” lets the other person know that they’re not unwanted.
c. More than anything else, when we move around the world with the backstory that we are the hero and our role is to make others rise, instead of being the villain who wants everyone to fall down.
Split personality disorder is real and more rampant than we ever thought. What we need is a decision to have a personality we would be proud of.
And to live to that personality when things inevitably don’t go vanilla.
When I had initially learnt to cook, I’d multiply the amount of water and spices by the number of people who were eating the food.
Since I knew the perfect ingredients for my dal rice, i.e., what I cook for myself in Noida – while cooking the same for my parents at home I’d just put 3X water and salt.
Thinking it would work.
Except that it didn’t.
It requires lesser water than 3X of a single person’s water. It is just building up.
In life if we want to do something that seems humongous, we just need to begin the difficult process. As we keep taking small steps, we realise in the latter half of the journey that later you don’t have to make those 3X or 4X of efforts at the start.
The compound interest of your efforts will be more than enough to make you reach the destination.
You just need to start. Will you?
Strictness does not mean rudeness.
Strictness also does not mean lack of a great bond.
Strictness also does not mean lack of respect.
However when work is to be respected, accountability must arise.
When we let people know the inherent measure of respect, we create a space for them to respect themselves.
If someone screws up their work, chances are they’re already feeling bad.
They came to you to know that it’s going to be okay!
Let them know of that ❤️
Your idol is doing something you don’t want to be doing.
The world is telling you to do that just doesn’t feel right!
Someone in the extended family is teaching how to betray others.
Everyone has their opinions and what they say is right where they are.
You do your own thing. Not because it’s hard. Rather because it’s difficult to be like someone else. When you are you, you will work harder than it is required, and you will feel zero fatigue because you are living by your own values.
Even if it is the same boring stuff every time, you know when you know.
To face failures is great.
To share it is greater, because you are being vulnerable.
To share it with those who will make fun of it and perhaps treat you with disrespect – shows you need to change your circle.
You really want to speak everything bad to that one person.
Except the fact that, that bad won’t change them either. It would just make them worse off.
You want to talk with that one person who does not want to talk with you.
Except the fact that, even if they start talking with you they won’t respect you anyway.
You want to change that one family member whose habits you’re not proud of.
Except the fact that, even if by a miracle of Aladdin’s Ginnie, even if they change – is your happiness always conditional on other people?
You want your team to love you.
Except the fact that, everyone loves only couch potato. For someone who is “doing something” will never be liked by all.
You want to….
Except the fact that, there will always be a “yang” to every “yin”, and vice versa.
Walking on the path of truth, is the only journey you’d be proud of!
Think of a recent WhatsApp group chat.
You were away while that chat was happening, and you read the conversation hours later.
When you’re done reading the chat, how do you feel?
Invariably your emotions are exactly same as those being exchanged in the chat.
The chat is simply written conversation. No one “said” anything to you. Yet now you feel those emotions.
Everything you read is just a thought.
Why not you write thoughts to yourself?
Why not read every single time, what you want to hear?
It’s easy. It’s simple. It’ll take just 15 minutes for you.
Will you? The answer depends on how serious you are for your life.
Agreeing with people is great. Every single human needs validation more than anything else.
However if you want to go ahead in life, you need to learn to tell what could be better – in a way that it does not offend the other person.
Everyone wants to get better. And if we see something that could help them get better and conceal it, we are making them worse. Nothing could be worse.
Easy versus critical, yet the truth.
We think we know everything.
Maybe we are right.
Until we are not.
The best way to challenge our assumptions is to start knowing more.
To know more means you don’t know everything. Which is a beautiful place to be.
What if we challenge our assumptions? Not our beliefs and values, rather our assumptions.
And the virtuous cycle continues!
I love imli chutney. Whenever I go home, I just being a can filled with it, prepared by my Mom.
Since we are in the middle of a lockdown and I am unable to go home, today I asked Maa to teach me how to make chutney.
What she described as a process took me 90 minutes just to crush the tamarind! Pre and post processes notwithstanding.
Process. Journey. Of going through the crushing process. Of just going through it.
Going through it.
Kobe died.
Irfan died.
You and I survived the corona.
Do we need more examples to start living life?
If any question had a straight answer, life would not be the way it is today.
And the way it is today, is how it is supposed to be.
The meaning of life is to fall in love with the process. The meaning of life is to take action, only then you will enjoy the pauses.
If you feel lost, if you don’t know where do you want to go, if you don’t know what’s next, here’s the reality: you can find it.
You have found out a lot of answers in the past.
If you are willing to take action, you will figure out the answer.
If you are not taking action because you are lost, then you have already lost.
No action = Assured Failure
Action = Experience or Success. Both are valuable.
What are you thinking of lately?
What is it that is making you weak?
What is it that is making you strong?
How can you think your way out to becoming strong versus weak?
So you all may have started new habits during quarantine and also gave up on many of them.
Here’s the way to keep up with a habit:
Show up till Day 3. Not for one day, not for two.
When you show up on Day 3, you will gather the momentum to continue it further.
Always works. If you do the work.
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”!