Married to complete engagement with everyday life?

 

What are the ingredients of a ‘good life‘?

 

Is it money? An important job? A beautiful house? Leisure time? These metrics seem to be at the receiving end of our obsessive focus, leading us astray without us either realising or wanting to acknowledge it. Work contributes to our anxiety and pressure and the fall back of our free time is immersed in a backyard called blue screens.

 

“If we really want to live, we’d better start at once to try..if we don’t, it doesn’t matter, but we’d better start to die”- W. H Auden

 

The choice is simple. Between now and the end of our lives we can choose either to live or to die. Biological life is an automatic process, as long as we take care of the needs of the body. But to live in the sense that poet Auden refers to above is not something that will happen by itself. In fact, everything conspires against it. If we don’t take charge of its direction, our life will be controlled by the outside which will ensure that we are marching to a different beat, nothing of which is our own. Biologically programmed instincts will use it to replace the genetic material we carry, the culture will ensure that we will propagate its values and institutions and other people will use as much of our energy to further their own agenda- with no compunction on how all these would affect us. We cannot expect anyone to help us live. We must discover how to do it ourselves.

 

To live‘ is NOT just biological survival. It must mean to live in fullness, without waste of time and potential, expressing one’s own uniqueness, yet participating intimately in the complexity of the cosmos.

 

Life will mean what we experience from morning to night, seven days a week, for about seventy years if we are lucky or more if we are very fortunate. So, the best strategy is to assume that these seventy odd years are our best chance to experience the cosmos and that we should make the fullest use of it. For, if we don’t, we might lose everything; whereas if we are wrong and there is life beyond the grave, we lose nothing.

 

Finding flow will be at the sweet spot where one is not restrained by the accident called ‘birth’ and the accompanying allies in the script called gender, social hierarchies.

 

As James Clear puts it “Life is harder when you expect a lot of the world and little of yourself. Life is easier when you expect a lot of yourself and little of the world “.

 

Ready to engage with everyday life?

 

ENDS

The Heard Mentality !

 

“Wisdom is the reward you get for a lifetime of listening when you’d have preferred to talk.” – Doug Larson

 

The greatest problem with communication is we don’t listen to understand. We listen to reply. Deep listening is an act of surrender. We risk being changed by what we hear. The most critical part of listening is to understand what is at stake for the other person(unlike the typical ‘elevator pitch‘ that we have been brought upon over the years). One that can be called a ‘pattern interrupt‘. Because the brain remembers(in a world full of distractions)what it least expects. So, deliver the unexpected.

 

Listening is NOT about what you think matters. It is about what matters to them. A great way to begin is to start losing yourself in their story. Go along with their tide of highs and lows. As soon as you start feeling unmoored, try to pull yourself back into your body, like returning home.

 

It is as if you have trained your imagination to go visiting. Once the story is done, you come back into your skin, your own worldview and introspect how you have been changed by that visit.

 

The velocity of being is best exemplified by movement. Keep moving. Because the best option is always off the market and never on the radar.

 

The easy thing we end up doing is being judgemental and critical. Time to give up on that.

 

To quote a Chilean saying ‘criticising a musician is easy but it is more difficult when you have a guitar in your hand‘. If everybody is hearing alike, then nobody is listening. Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.

 

Listening, not imitation, may be the sincerest form of flattery- Joyce Brothers

ENDS

The bull run and taking stock!

 

No, sorry to disappoint you. This has nothing to do with the stock markets and bull runs therein. And in any case I have zero competence to talk or write about shares and bonds, commodities or metals. That will be gross over-indexing on my part.

 

 

What I am referring to do is the conventional practice of bullfighting. Extreme action enthusiasts might find the sport fascinating but we are not going there.

 

 

Often these days, the most used expression across demographics(brought on by the ‘ collective coercion of modern life in the Republic of Not Enough ‘ ) is ‘ overwhelmed ‘. Pulls and pressures, expectations and conforming, getting by and getting a buy in, standing for and standing out, keeping up and upkeep, all of it (make no mistake) contribute liberally to the cause(or should it be curse?).

 

 

Back to bullfighting. The drama is conspicuous. The matador and the bull. The frenzy and the chaos. The anticipation and the suspense. Contrary to popular perception, the bull is least dangerous when it is enraged (that is when the matador is in power) and the most dangerous when it is calm.  When it finds what is called the ‘ querencia ‘. That is the time when it is a potent threat for the matador. In that state of calmness. When it can tap into its full strength.

 

 

We can draw parallels here. Most of us operate this way. The perennially frantic mode. It’s the default established. Moving from one distraction to the other. Busy trying to be busy. Emails, meetings, chores- being all over the place with no clear sense of direction. Almost what one would call in advertising as ‘ spray and pray ‘. A state of calm is miles away and hence the strength, the focus, the energy and the attention as well.

 

 

Under the onslaught of this self-inflicted pandemonium, in the arena of your life, you are only reacting to matadors and perceived  crises. In the process, your true inner self lies deeply buried without getting a chance to express itself. Thinking and responding gets compromised. The domino effect being poor decisions and worse outcomes. Like being trapped in the arena of conflict with no escape possible.

 

 

Taking the elevator down to the fully knowing self, which has been quietly observing it all is the key. A domicile called the inner self. Finding it makes you the most powerful version of yourself. Where you can be deliberate. Purposeful. Most prepared to battle the matadors in your life. Because you have centred around YOUR intent. This shift from reaction to action connects you to your essence, your querencia, your source of strength. And in the process, you don’t just survive the chaos. You thrive in it.

 

ENDS

 

The deficiency=identity syndrome!

 

If only we knew that learning something new is a default worth pursuing?

 

Our beliefs and our actions are conjoined twins and almost inseparable. The former shapes the latter.

 

” I can never learn Spanish, I don’t have an ear for languages “.. ” Risk taking and number crunching is not my forte, I can never be an entrepreneur “. Because such thinking highlighting deficiencies is highly robust and powerfully self-reinforcing, they begin to become our identity. 

 

And because the belief is so deep rooted, you will do everything in your power to come in your own way and not learn and fail at learning the new language or embark on the journey of being a business person. Such self-sabotage acts as a virtual loop going back to strengthen the original belief. Time to realise that ‘ the obstacle is the way ‘.

 

As Emil Corian quoted ” Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory “.

 

“We are what we are because we have been what we have been.” “When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.” “To become what one is, one must not have the faintest idea what one is.” “Self-knowledge is not knowledge but a story one tells about oneself.” These curated quotes from the likes of Sigmund Freud, Lao-Tzu, Friedrich Nietzsche & Simone De Beauvoir, in that order, beautifully summarises the strong co relation between deficiency and identity.

 

“Whenever two people meet, there are really six people present. There is each man as he sees himself, each man as the other person sees him, and each man as he really is.”- William James

 

ENDS

The trap of the full s..t..r..e..t..c..h all the time !

 

” My attitude has always been, if you fall flat on your face, at least you’re moving forward. All you have to do is get back up and try again “- Richard Branson

 

Contrary to public perception, acceleration can also happen by taking the foot off the gas pedal. A marathon is never run on full flat out mode from start to finish. By doing that, you also take the risk of hurting yourself. The undulations include planned decelerations and accelerations. That way, you have a far greater chance of finishing the race rather than drop out mid way.

 

 

The opportunities for change and growth comes during periods of acceleration and deceleration. When you are on full stretch mode all the time, the shortcuts, the potential, the synergies, the opportunities etc get overlooked. A one dimensional outlook of being at full tilt all the time is like missing the wood for the trees.

 

A state of high alert(which is what being at full stretch demands) deprives us of the opportunity and the flexibility to ramp up or scale down based on context or situation. We short change ourselves in the process.

 

 

The ‘ jury for productivity ‘ in the court of modern life would have us believe that being at full stretch is the need of the hour, every hour. Don’t fall for it.

 

 

Burnout is not a badge of honour!

 

 

ENDS

 

The ‘Surprise Factor’ in Daily Surprises

 

Psychology 101 would have this to say ” The brain remembers what it least expects, so deliver the unexpected “.

 

 

If you do not expect the unexpected you will not find it, for it is not to be reached by search or trail. If one were to give into the naughtiness of phonetics, the word surprise itself ends with prise (easily identifiable as prize). Surprise is the greatest gift which life can grant us.

 

 

A stream of beautiful experiences remain hidden in the untried, the untread, the unexplored. Be it an unusual concept car parked in a mall, a work of art, a new item on your restaurant menu, the conversation that you have with your daughter..distill them from the routine and see the essence that stands out. When we begin to wear a lens that looks at things NOT in the way you think it to be but in the way it actually is, without any bias or prejudice, pleasant surprises begin to present itself.

 

 

“What a lovely surprise to finally discover how unlonely being alone can be.” – Ellen Burstyn

 

 

A quick Pop Quiz – Do you prefer when:

 

A) Things go according to plan?

B) When the unexpected happens?

 

Most of us pick control and predictability. Yet research reveals a counterintuitive truth: surprise is the key that unlocks growth, innovation, and connection. It is also the secret ingredient in our best memories.

 

 

Surprise is perhaps the world’s least understood and most intriguing emotion. Shifting our perception of surprise lets us thrive in the face of uncertainty. Surprise acts as a shortcut that turns a typical product into a meaningful experience, a good idea into a viral one, awkward small talk into engaging conversation, and daily life into an adventure.

 

 

Our understanding of predictability needs an upside down look. Embrace the unpredictable and engineer the unexpected.

 

 

Ready to be surprised?

 

 

ENDS

 

NOstalgia: ” Past Perfect ” or past perfect?

 

” Everybody is entitled to her own nostalgia “- James Wolcott

 

 

Nostalgia has this strong fixation with the status quo. The fetish for things to remain the same. Mired in the belief that the past was perfect. Are you sure?

 

 

Disintermediation is nature’s strategy. Something that is unstoppable. Culture changes, technology advances, people’s expectations change- and the old gives way to the new and gets left behind, whether voluntarily or involuntarily.

 

 

It is not just the gadget brands( of course they resort to planned obsolescence ). Everything comes with a shelf life. The technology that we are struggling to come to terms with now will soon be a relic as something new will invariably replace it. Moving on from the past is a given certainty, whether it is moving on for the better remains a question.

 

 

Nostalgia is a beautiful lie dressed up in sepia…the saddest form of glee. It is, be definition, the least authentic of all feelings, an ephemeral composition of disjointed memories.

 

 

Nostalgia is like a grammar lesson; you find the present tense but the past perfect. Where we often visit the land of lost content, you see it shining plain, the happy highways where you went and cannot come again. The vice of the aged, a seductive liar..a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or some of some past period or irrecoverable condition.

 

 

Nostalgia and a growth mindset are at loggerheads, so it is not a Hobson’s choice. Nostalgia is the enemy of optimism..

 

 

Either you believe nostalgically that the best years were in the past..or you believe optimistically that the best years are in the future.

 

 

Time to go past the past!  Knowstalgia?

 

 

ENDS

 

Going from Words To Worse?

 

Way back in 1998, Ted Nicholas wrote a book called “Magic Words That Bring You Riches “. Ted was a copywriting and marketing legend and his book is extremely relevant not just for the serious entrepreneur and copywriter but for people from all walks of life.

 

 

The single most important aspect of your life is your ability to communicate. Unlimited success and wealth is as simple as using the right words to reveal herein. These magic words work as if by magic!

 

 

Everyday parlance may not value the weight and impact of these words and hence they are an endangered species, fast being relegated to a bottomless pit. Let’s list some of these magic words first and see why we seem to be missing the wood for the trees.

 

 

Please

Excuse Me

Sorry | I am Sorry

Thank You

May I?

You are welcome

 

As you can see these words or phrases are not tongue twisters or heavy to articulate. Still they get the royal ignore. Is it because people have a sense of entitlement and thereby feel that they need not use them? Is it typical power dynamics and not wanting to consider themselves lower in the pecking order of hierarchy? Is it the absence of culture and appropriate upbringing that makes these words superfluous in their scheme of things?

 

 

Courtesy costs nothing, but buys everything.”- Hazrat Ali ibn Abu-Talib A.S

 

 

One difference between savagery and civilization is a little courtesy. You would have experienced these often as we trapeze through life’s rat race. You hold the door open for the person behind you and he walks past without even a hint of an acknowledgment, let alone a thank you. You are left feeling like a door knob. You set up a meeting for someone with a person of influence and she manages to get a big contract with that introduction. What do you get? Forget a finder’s fee(that was never the expectation), you are not on her contact list any more!! You are in a queue like a lot of others and this individual goes right up to the front and behaves as if he is the privileged special emissary of the Lord and the rest of us are less than ordinary mortals. Excuse me? And please don’t get me started on road rage!

 

 

Have you seen the snap of the finger at restaurants when the self appointed high and mighty calls out to the waiter? The least you feel like doing at that time is to distance his finger from it’s roots once and for all, but then seizures of  homicidal tendencies do not a civilization make.

 

 

So who | what is to blame for this kind of obnoxious behaviour? Upbringing, K-12 education, organisation culture, life’s rat race, the perennial mercenary quest??

 

 

That said, we can all make a start. Now. May I request you to do that? Thank you!

 

 

ENDS

 

The Jury is Out: Burnout or Boreout?

 

 

Ideally neither. But, then it is not an ideal world.

 

 

Modern life comes in the way of rest and sleep. Contemporary society sets the benchmark for lesser mortals wherein if you are not Type A, then you are not good enough. The productivity narrative is overwhelming and concepts like FOMO only add fuel to the fire.

 

 

Unlike what the ecosystem would have you believe, burnout is NOT a badge of honour. The perennial quest to be invincible, Machiavelli or Herculeus is all encompassing. Burnout is when you are all the time overstimulated. Our culture glorifies burnout as a measure of success and self worth and that does not help in any way. The implicit message is that if we are not perpetually exhausted, we are not doing enough. As if the great things are reserved for those who bleed. For those who almost break.

 

 

As high achievers we are conditioned(conned?) to believe that the path to success is only through relentless work. And if you have to overachieve the only way is to overexert, overdo and overthink. Getting ahead doesn’t have to as hard as we make it out to be. There is a better way.

 

 

The best way to accelerate is to take the foot off the pedal.

 

 

If one were to attempt defining boreout, it would go something like this: Boreout is an informal term for a state of dissatisfaction and demotivation one may experience due to being bored at work. A state wherein repeatedly completing tasks you consider to be pointless or meaningless. When you can’t find value|meaning in your work, you feel understimulated. High levels of anxiety, depression and stress are frequently associated with boreout. If you frequently procrastinate — putting off important tasks in favor of other instantly-rewarding activities — it could be because of boreout.

 

 

The rise of ‘quiet quitting‘ is a fallout of boreout. Especially amongst the GenZ’s entering the workspace. Quiet quitting has nothing to do with quitting your job. Instead, you only do the work necessary to do your job successfully, often what’s listed in your job description.

 

The toll of long hours depends on how you feel about them. People are at elevated risk of depression, anxiety, depression, sleep problems, high blood pressure and cholesterol when they burn the midnight oil based on obsession- but not when they based on passion. There’s also evidence that obsession predicts greater conflict between work and and the rest of life: you struggle to disconnect from your work, which leads to burnout.

 

 

We are neither robots nor a manufacturing plant. Creativity isn’t produced..you run into it, you discover it. And that happens during moments of slack, not hard labour.

 

 

Take back the passion. And out with burnout and boreout!

 

ENDS

Do You Think There Is a Problem with The Word ‘Library’?

 

To set the stage, let’s take a little journey back in time to the origins of libraries to trace how they came to be what they are today. Libraries, of course, are a result of the invention of writing. So far as we know, the Sumerians invented writing—cuneiform, which was wedge-shaped writing on clay tablets—about 3000 b.c. in the cradle of civilization, between the Tigris and Euphrates River, now present day Iraq.

 

 

I know English is a funny language and the tongue doesn’t have a bone. Which is why phonetics could convey something that we are not supposed to interpret but yet we will.

 

 

Breaking up the word library, in the phonetic sense of the word, it would begin with ‘lie‘ and then ‘brary‘. Truth be told, that is a lie. Nothing could be farther than the truth. A library is the delivery room for the birth of ideas, a place where history comes to life. A library is like a salve, a retreat, a treasure trove precisely for what lies inside it. A heady mix of ‘dine in and take away‘.

 

 

So, I won’t lie. Would ‘ truthbrary ‘ be a better term for a library?  Let the rant continue. Read on..

 

 

Library is the place where our self life has a shelf life. The happy domicile at the intersection of the self taught and the shelf taught. Libraries are the great equalizers in combating the digital divide and the information divide. It is the last man standing amongst institutions that are part of the public good.

 

 

“The only thing that you absolutely have to know, is the location of the library.” Albert Einstein

 

 

The perennial, uninterrupted, democratic access to information is the be all and end all. Which is what you find in a library. Books. That are weapons, of mass construction!

 

 

“At the dawn of the 21st century, where knowledge is literally power, where it unlocks the gates of opportunity and success, we all have responsibilities as parents, as librarians, as educators, as politicians, and as citizens to instill in our children a love of reading so that we can give them a chance to fulfill their dreams.” Barack Obama

 

 

A lot of us have taken libraries for granted. They have been integral to our education, to our life, and obviously, to our careers. Being in libraries and using books has been normal; libraries as places have been “like home” to us. I’ll bet most of you have had the same experience with libraries, be they school, public, university, medical, hospital—or whatever. Truth be told, libraries have been an integral part of our lives. Truthbrary!

 

 

I don’t think I’ll be able to help you find that.
No librarian, ever.

 

 

ENDS