It’s not about equality.
Consider this:
Two junior surgical residents being trained to do a surgical procedure by a senior resident.
One junior resident is nervous and needs extra help. The other not so much.
When its a matter of life or death of a patient, things become so much clearer.
The job of senior resident is make sure both junior residents perform their bests in order to save a patient. So, the junior resident who needs more help will get more help.
Survival of the fittest isn’t always the best approach. That’s not what we’re about as a civilisation.
As a civilastion, the strong help the weak. That’s our moral obligation.
A rough equation for stressful living
Humans perhaps are the only animals that can anticipate future events or relive the past, and feel emotions in response to them.
Humans are definitely the only animals that get stressed out just thinking about the potential of stressful events.
Stress is a product of the need to ‘survive’
Humans live to survive.
Invisible Outliers
Often-times, the graphs we use to make decisions have these alien things on them called outliers that don’t fit in with the rest of things.
These outliers stick out like a sore thumb for us decision-makers because they change the nature and shape of patterns. They follow the yellow paths.
And yet, outliers, I would argue, are the most invisible (unless of course, one is specifically studying them). We choose to ignore the new possibilities and probabilities that they generate.
Here’s why:
Because we’re path-dependent.
Catering to the status-quo gives the biggest bang for the buck or is the most effective way to deal with things
We don’t know how to problem-solve without contorting the shapes of things.
So, we choose to steamroll against the nature of the graph instead!
**
Think of outliers as the pull of the rising tide. Prepare for it.
Rest and Replenish: Taking days off and other alternatives
If you’ve a job anything like mine, I‘m going to assume you’re having fun every single moment that you’re doing or thinking about your job.
When you’re at work, you go all in no matter what. Because it brings you joy.
You cannot, for the life of you, imagine it any other way.
And that’s how work should make you feel.
In the same happy vein,
"If work is fun and you love doing your job, you could do it all day, any day, forever. Because it shouldn’t feel like work.”
—….atleast so I believed until this morning.
Nope.
I realise now, the obvious. That that’s a romantic notion. Energy is a finite source apparently :0.
The (absurd) truth is, if you want your job to not to feel like work, you should actually treat it like work.
No matter how fun the work is, there is merit in building some discontinuity into it.
And when I say building discontinuity, its the gaps in doing work, (or the illusion of gaps) that help you come back to work with a renewed hunger to serve and contribute, and have fun while you’re at it.
For most, “building discontinuity in work” to rest and replenish one’s energy resources might look like taking days off and/or not working on weekends.
I wish it was that simple for me..
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Heard of Sisyphus?
Sisyphus is the guy who lives life to the fullest, hates death (metaphor for ‘rest’) and defied it twice, and was condemned to a meaningless task for the rest of eternity.
“A face that toils so close to stones is already stone itself! I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end.”- Albert Camus
Now, the story of Sisyphus paints a little bit of an extreme picture about work. But I paint it anyway because for me its a stark reminder to fiercely protect the joy work brings me.
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Okay for those whose brains aren’t fashioned to compartmentalise things and who think about everything all the time, how on earth do you action ‘rest and replenish’?
How do you rest and replenish for the thing that you find great deal of joy doing?
I have no ideas so far. So I welcome yours.
Siblings and separate rooms.
75 years ago, one pair of twins were separated at birth. They were separated because the father thought that they weren’t identical. He thought that they didn’t want the same things. Now a wall exists between them and they live like neighbours. Neighbours!
But both apparently have their peace.
Happy Independence Day India and Pakistan. Thanks Great Britain for nothing and everything.
Fossilised ideas.
Ideas die when unexamined. Ideas die when held onto tight. They suffocate in the tightness of our grasp.
Think of an idea as a butterfly. Pretty and very frail. If you’re open to it, you would hold out a closed fist (or an open hand) for it to land. You would admire and examine it up close and then let it fly. If you want to study it, you might build for yourself and the butterfly, an epic enclosure. That would let it breathe.
That, for both the idea and the butterfly is a less cruel end.
But, what happens when you draw your fingers in together, onto that butterfly?
You would crush it, would you not?
Those ideas that we think are worth holding onto so tight, for long enough that they become fossillized, I wonder what they are?
I wonder if its worth fossilising them ourselves- the beauty of such butterflies.
Bapu, the nation’s father.
August 15, 1947. That’s 75 years ago. One man successfully inspired an entire nation to its freedom. A nation with perhaps the most diverse yet the most-divided people in the world.
I have questions. I’ve always had my doubts about the stories that outshone all others.
What did he do differently to others who came before him?
Why is he such a big deal?
Why is he revered so much? So much so, that to this day he is remembered as Bapu (which means Father).
What is it about the experiments that he did with his life that makes it all add up to a successful story worth telling and celebrated for 75 years?
I think what I am looking for is the math behind it all. There must have been something about either him or the time he lived (or both) that must have inspired an entire nation’s peoples to become activists…something I think is there that is worth learning from in our world.
Gandhi- who is this dude?
Move one and a half steps at a time.
This is becoming the place where I make unacademic hypothesis about things
We’re Humans. To be exact Homo sapiens.
And so biologically and by definition, we are programmed to survive. Not to exist. But, survive.
We are genetically hard-wired to sense a challenge and run for our lives.
And when we do things that don’t speak to this important verb i.e. survive, we’re doing ourselves a disservice. I think.
And when I think of survival. I think-”MOVE!”
Movement speaks to surviving more that anything else.
So, this is my hypothesis (and I have no means time this morning to chase after existing research on this..)-
I think our brains think we’re doing okay when we are moving to survive.
**
Do it this to move, to be okay, to survive-
Take one and a half steps at a time. (And yes I am suggesting we do a weird limp.) Because-
one step at a time- makes me pity myself. Me thinks- Is this all I can achieve?
two steps at a time is just pushing it a bit much.
One and a half- is just right. Be it moving in exercise, or moving in terms of getting things done, movement inspires movement. The half step is key in that incompleteness of the task at hand makes you want to complete it.
Skip or limp, I don’t care. But the measure is one and a half of whatever.
When Routine breaks
Predictability is a good thing. We feel safe in it. And when done right, routines can do wonders for your overall productivity and health.
Interestingly, when we aren’t feeling so great, one’s routine is the first thing that suffers and breaks. One small thing cascades into a series of things that warps the shape of your routine. And sooner or later, you’re feeling much worse than when you started spiralling.
For the most par, a broken routine has the opposite effect on you and your day….…unless its broken with intention.
The efficacy of routine, I notice, double when its broken and reborn with reason.
Some encouragement to new language-learners.
Although, I now consider it one of my greatest privileges, until a few years ago I hated learning languages. I hated it with ever ounce of my being.
Because learning new languages came out of necessity and at life-threatening costs. My dear grandmother who doesn’t speak any English, started me on that journey with an innocent request.
She said in my mother-tongue, “Learn, please. If you don’t learn the language, consider me dead-like ”.
Lesson 1 : Watch Cinema.
In the first year of my learning my mother-tongue, I consumed a whole lot of cinema to learn the “layman’s vernacular". I'd put my language to the test in the arguments I would have with my cousin closest to my age. In the last such argument, I unknowingly called him a “Son of a b’’ch” . I was 7.
It’s fair to say, for my uncle and aunt, I am their least favourite niece amongst the 13 others. The good thing is, them promptly showing me the door meant that I had mastered the accent.
**
Lesson 2: Pay attention to questions.
I had to learn my next language in a new country.
My poor Indian mother bent herself backwards trying to teach me Hindi for a good ten years of my school life.
Because this was the rule - One must graduate schooling with elementary proficiency in atleast one national language.
Before the first Hindi test (of my life), I was a proud eight-year old going to make my mother proud. I knew every single answer by heart.
When I received the question paper though, it was a whole new story. I was a weeping mess. Because, idiot me forgot to memorise what the questions looked like!!
**
Lesson 3: Read out Loud.
In one class, my Hindi teacher wrote on the blackboard a word that meant - ‘bangles’.
This was the drill-
Teacher writes a word
Kids read out loud in one voice
Progress to new word.
Pretty simple, right?
Only, because I struggled to read that quickly, my voice was usually the echo after.
The entire 4th grade class reads- “BANGLES”
My loud, delayed voice reads in an accented Hindi - “UNDIES!”
Lesson learnt. Read out loud with the vowel signs.
The win-win kind of habit games.
Low stakes. High consistency. Perhaps in other’s eyes, ridiculously slow improvement.- That’s my strategy for writing and this blahg (still debating the name by the way).
And, somehow, this strategy seems to be producing. (Not perfection at the outset. But growth over time.)
Intentional practice rolls over. It snowballs and collects on itself over time.
If there are habits that serve you in the long run, make a long term investment in them by making it a public thing. Because people want to keep you accountable. They want to see one of two things- see you win by never breaking that chain, or win themselves a momentary pleasure of seeing you break the chain. Either way its a win-win for you.
When PURPOSE doesn't grow in your garden.
A subtle jab at “Motivation Hub’ or Motivation Hub-like hubs on YouTube.
Purpose apparently make lives ‘worthwhile and full of meaning’ .
No hate against purpose, but capital PURPOSE, wherein-
you know exactly what you would enjoy doing the most for the rest of your life
you know your ‘gift’- what you want to give to the world;
the kind that gets you Nobel Peace prizes or written into history,
(the kind that I and secretly you too cringe at.. enviously)
is hugely uncommon. I would argue even an illusion.
The rarity of PURPOSE in this world of abundance…. its the biggest irony of ‘em all.
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What do you do when capital PURPOSE just doesn’t seem to be growing in your garden?
Well, for starters,
(and this is as old as the hills)- Grow small-letter purpose in the small things.
small-letter purpose is a seed buried in the everyday. Its free and everywhere and needs to be nourished by effort.
For the layperson, its in the documents they string together with passion; the emails they write with an intention to serve; its in the meals made for family; its in the paying attention to health to be one’s best self.
Its all those small, seemingly trivial things that you do with over-the-top dedication and passion that add up eventually.
“The sum of parts is greater than the whole”, remember? - or the other way round. But the point is..
Stop watching Motivation Hub :)
or better- stay optimistic about your own life’s purpose while your at it.
Being here is all the permission you need
My alterego, who is a very rich successful famous white man telling me to step the hell up. I should probably pay some attention.
“
Secretly you may know yourself to be a bum….
The person who searches entire buildings for a phone that’s in the back pocket of their jeans. The person who has a degree in hand but doesn’t know what to do with it. The person who has an idea but doesn’t know if its good enough to be announced. The person who believes they are undeserving of opportunity and success, and the right to make their own way.
And so you believe you need to wait for someone’s permission….
Permission that might come in the form of validation or
actual permission itself- to do things; to start change; to be successful.
Yeah.. Stuff that! Life goes by too fast for that kind of waiting.
If you’re here, if you see a challenge and you have got most (if not all) of the skillsets to serve it, then take the initiative and do it anyway.
“
My alterego, who is a very rich successful famous white man is basically asking me to take his job. I’ll take it.
“Subbed” to the university.
A case against a subscription- based university. P.S. We’re nearly there.
Imagine university on a subscription. You pay for a class for as loonggg as you wish to take it. And the promise the university makes to you is that you stay skill-relevant in your field.
I’ll be honest, there is a great deal of ambition in that imagination. I dig it. (Most of it atleast)
But here’s the thing. If this is the future of the university, I think we just might have just managed to make the university invisible.
The attitude towards subscriptions in general
Look I’d love to go to university for free and forever. But making university “almost free” forever through subscription models- that I worry about little. Because most people have low to nil commitment towards subscription- based services.
What I see is this - Higher education learning will inevitably become a procrastinated chore when its simply there for us to attend to forever.The better subscription
As a layperson would you rather a distance learning course from the elite universities of the world or the university in your hometown, when-both are the offer the course you want from the comfort of your bed, and
both offer the same thing- endless access to updated content.
Subscription- based universities will probably just scale up a battle that already exist (the battle that is- “which is the most elite university?”) If all universities fall hard for the industry-based learning and MOOC trend, you’re swimming right into the mouths of the bigger fish, the sharks of the industry.
People have worried about the university for ages and I’m still hopeful and optimistic that they will stick around. But only so long as we remind ourselves that- universities are a gift to the region. When you remove region out of the equation, you make universities more invisible than they already are.
Many things but no-thing.
Observation
If you've got, in your arsenal, a number of tools that do very useful things, and if you can name them and what they can do;
how the tools work together to do one job, good for you. Because you’ve got your life figured.
If not, that’s okay. You’re a jack of all trades.
Pickled: the art of getting into trouble.
An observation-
This is most of us-
We want to be unique.
We want to have meaning and purpose in our lives.
We want to have an impact and make a change.
We want to die with no regrets
We want to be the best version of ourselves for those who we love.
Yet, most of us, myself included, underperform in those aforesaid things which matter most to us. I think its because we don’t do trouble. We don’t like thinking through the twisted, the complicated, the cringey, the difficult bits and we hate stepping on toes. We love to play it safe.
And while most of us spend our lives “wanting ”, there are the greats who “are” those things; those who actually live up to their desires in life and make change. And these are the people who get into an awful lot of trouble.
Now, let’s park the question of character to the side for moment. This is the most important bit so we’ll come back to it at the end.
'Getting pickled’ is an art. When you get in trouble to make an impact, you make people think. Sentiments and thoughts change in the process of trouble. Systems might change. There is endless possibility in trouble, if your intentions are right and carry weight. Getting in trouble, is a result of taking a chance. If you want to create so much as a tiny dent in this world, it might be good idea to practice this. Trouble.
But,
Try to be polite the whole time. Have a chat with Miss Conscience and see if she approves. If step on people’s toes earnestly apologise, say sorry, and explain why trouble is the way.
Work Martyrs
You know this but choose to ignore it anyway.
In the name of work, productivity, and achieving more, we’re feeding a beast that eats into our wellbeing and relationships.
You know that. And you also know I’m not describe anything new here.
Also this- most of us don’t know how to get around overworking as a long-term solution and it doesn’t help that we’ve got an awful lot of distractions in our lives. We don’t know how to get by without overworking and destroying our long-term well-being. Yet. And just sometimes actively thinking about, experimenting and setting some rules* can be the best precaution against committing the unforgivable.
Research suggests that doing more than 3 hours (or 2 hours 53 minutes to be exact) of work of any kind- be it writing or reading or teaching or doing exercise, is counterproductive.
But this-
Here’s an idea. Structure your day in such a way that you don’t do more than 3 hours of the same kind of work**.
As an example, if you’re an academic in the university, let’s say- you’ve got 8 hours of sleep (6+ 2 hours of beauty sleep if you’re lucky) then with the remaining 16 we “batch-cook” tasks
3 hours at most of writing- no more than that.
3 hours of self-care- doing things that keep you healthy- exercise, eat (please), etc.
3 hours at most of family and socialising- even for an extrovert, more than 3 hours can be draining.
3 hours at most of meetings. (This is for your best.)
3 hours at most of admin work. (I hope you’re not doing 3 hours a day of admin work in the first place)
you get the gist…
Tasks fill up time. So you determine the time. And my guess and best bet is- you don’t need 3 hours to do most buckets of things.
Remember the goal is to not overwork.
*be reasonable and evidence-based as far as possible. :)
**of course there’s terms and conditions- like mothers. Yeah not sure this applies to you.
Also, I certainly acknowledge my privilege here but it applies nevertheless.
Solid Ideas.
Corny but a necessary reminder
Some ideas, are pithy, they have substance to them and carry weight.
Then there others- those that are a bit like dandelions. They are very pretty but when the minute you catch them, they crumble (no hate to dandelions). Most of the time such ideas are those that you test a million times in your head but forget to test.
The best ideas are the ones that have been tested and tossed and turned with others. These ones you share and think with your family, friends and collegues. These ones catch on to people. These ones age like fine wine.
Left-centered or straightforward.
You already know this..
With regards to communication, there’s only two ways to do it. Only two.
You can either be straightforward, or you can be left-centred.
Pros of being straightforward:
It saves time- both your’s and everyone else’s.
It helps you spell out your wants and needs.
If you’re into showing how passionate you are about something, being straight-forward is probably the way to go.
Cons of being straightforward:
There’s only ever the thinnest fine line between being passionate and being angry, cruel or pushy.
If its a touchy subject, you risk hurting relationships with your straightforwardness.
Pros of being left-centred:
It’s a good approach for touchy subjects. ( It makes sense to get the dry leaves out before you light the campfire. Otherwise the campfire turns into a bushfire.)
You can keep it “light and polite”
Cons of being left-centred:
You always got to think about and craft the fluff
Never enough time to be left-centred.
Sharking it!
Well, we never stop, do we?
We have to keep swimming.
Through piles and piles of paper piles. Or emails.
Or things to do. Or commitments.
And we lie to ourselves… that everything will be out of control if we stop.
If we stop, we cease to breathe.
But actually, do we?
Does the rest of the world stop for you? -No.
Can it run without you? -Yes.
Does it mind you taking a second to breathe? -No.
So, why are you a shark?
Why don’t you stop and breathe? Why do you have to keep swimming?
Try it. Give yourself permission.
Stop first.
Then breathe.
You will notices the tingle of air through your lungs.
Is that what you’re scared of?