koolhead17
There are multiple ways of seeing an issue. Sometimes those are not issues but improvement advice. It is too easy to get carried away and get on to the argument and screw up a friendship.
Our mind acts like a magic box and; how we react to a problem. The situation shows us the way forward.
Being open-minded and understanding the other side helps. Every adversity comes with ways to tackle it. We have to keep type one brain or monkey mind while handling it.
Schopenhauer was a crazy philosopher in all sense. His writings were blunt, brute, and to the point. He wants us to think within, focus on our consciousness. Our life is as we see the world around us. The bumper sticker, achievements, medals are of no use apart from shoving the ego.
Who is happier? A healthy poor or a sick king?
Pain and boredom come with social structure. A poor has pain while rich is bored, which prompts him/her refuge of anything from creativity to vice.
Schopenhauer also talks about the importance of health in our life. He stresses on daily exercise: physical and mental.
Reading him bought back every other philosopher in front of me from Diogenes to Socrates to Epicurus to Epictetus.
I read the Aeon article followed by The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer
The more I think about life, it feels like a destination less train journey full of surprise. We are on a ride. It can be good, bad, or ugly. In sum total a mixed bag. That true north, that made in heaven things are not real. It is sold to us by the materialistic marketers.
The sooner we realize that the journey is dull, painful the better we will have our mindset in place.
Murakami in his book said: Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional. I feel the same about life, journey. It reminds me of stoic philosopher Epictetus: things in our control and things not in our. Most externals are not in our control, how we react to it is what we have in our hand.
What can help in leading this journey is knowing that it is painful and our aids can help us in minimizing it. This aid can be our friends, believers, parents, and mentors.
We single day is a surprise, things will break, people will not respond as expected. But this is not the end of life. The journey must go on. It is like our life has every piece of philosophers teaching from Epicureans to Stoics to Schopenhauer or Nietzsche.
We are living in a fast-paced world. New-age companies like tinder, Amazon, Slack, Uber has it in their DNA. Pace is the mantra for Gig-economy. At the same time, delivery agents and warehouse workers are turning into slaves.
Build fast and break things are the new age startup, growth strategy. Hire and fire are the new norms, humans are mere resources. We want to ship a new product, add 50 developers, and deliver it ASAP. Everything is just on paper and numbers, be it growth, income, or market share. We care more about marketing, buzz, and vanity metrics rather than solving real customers’ pain.
I understand everyone wants to be the first mover and reap its benefits. It is the new ways companies are built-in the modern era. But my limited learning suggests this practice has resulted in toxicity. We have become hyper-competitive and forgotten the virtue of empathy, love, care for each other. We are robots and, the only distant goal of success is a material wealth of bumper sticker in the business card. I have been part of the same rat race for over five years.
In my current life, I am living my life at a slow pace. As a team we are happy and so are our paying customers, it is just they know about us and, we are giving them discounts for their cooperation. Developing a product or an organization is not like building a house by adding bricks. Apart from vision, mission, and philosophy, it is a human relationship that matters, love, empathy, care, and belief in every stakeholder. From customers, team members, cook, the cleaner: all have to be on the same page. It is okay to let go of some customers, opportunities in the short run for collective consciousness, and overall well being. Our believers will stick with us for eternity and, we will grow with them.
Growing up with parents and grandparents in a Hindu family, celebrating festivals has special meaning. It is not about prayers, bowing to the gods alone. It was also about the grand feast and meeting relatives, cousins.
Mother and Grandmom will be on fast. I think not even having water. They would prepare lots of prasad items, mostly made with ghee, flour, and sugar. I would out be out shopping with my father: fruits, sweets, and flowers.
Sometime in the evening, we will get fresh, wear new clothes and sit in the pooja room. Mom would smear forehead with Chandan and sindur. The central part of Chauthi Chand is a moon god. In the evening, we all gather on our rooftop or aangan, and with fruits and flowers look up and pray to him. There were some years when moon god would play hide and seek with us. Thanks to monsoons and clouds. Every year it would rain. I remember the sadness grandma or mother would have because of it. They would wait for hours hoping that someway, they would get to pray the moon.
After the pooja, the whole family will join the grand feast, that would be the time when mother and grandma would touch salt. Our plates would be full of poori, sabzi, kheer, and sweets. My favorites: aloo poori, daal poori, and spicy sabzi and kheer in the end.
I had a call with my mother and promised her from next year; I will be with her. I think I am missing them all today.
Our country is so unique. We have so many gods in Hinduism that while one part of us celebrates Lord Ganesha today, others celebrate the nature, creator, and powerful moon.
I was out yesterday to bring back some old-time memories in the market.
Sometime I wonder who runs our economy, we humans or gods.
Happy birthday to me. I am 35 years old today, can’t thank enough to the creator. It has been a great ride so far: breathing and all body parts are intact. I have a company of great friends, mentors, and believers. What else do I need?
Today will be like any another day: run/breath/coffee/calls(team/customer)/reading.
Justbooks folks have started calling me Ruskin Bond fan. I have bought 90% of his books for reading from them. My friend’s joke saying that I am recreating my childhood, in all seriousness, I am catching up with it. While growing up, reading was the last thing for me. We were small-town boys happily playing cricket, gilly danda of stealing mangoes in summer from some orchard. On some occasions when grandparents would visit, they would give me some money. It would go for a samosa or buying comics: Nagraj, Doga, Sabu, Chaca Chaudhry. There was only one comics shop in the city at the railway station.
Why do I like reading Ruskin Bond so much? I kept asking this question to myself again and again: because I could relate my childhood in his stories. Our brain is a crazy beast and, it likes and dislikes via past association.
I can relate to bathing in streams, borewells to stealing sugarcane, carrots from the filed of others. I can relate to walking hours without any purpose, I could relate to the constant confusion of what I need from my life. I could relate to love, pampering via my grandparents.
Reading Ruskin Bond is like Alice going to her wonderland. Everything of the present switched off and in dreamland. Reading Ruskin Bond is detaching from the cobwebs and walking down the priceless memory of the past.
Can you match the salary of your team member with what your well-funded competitor has offered him? Some people move for better pastures and, you cannot stop them. Change and moving on is a continuous journey of our life. We have build capitalism, our society on money and most follow it.
On the contrary, what you can do is provide a culture of love, empathy, creativity, fearlessness, and openness. And team members who believe in your journey and like these incentives and challenges will stay with you. These people will be the ones who will be an integral part of your organization, co-owners, and stakeholders. They might be perfect but no less than great humans and contributors in the journey.
Money is not the only thing in humans existence and living off well. Running a startup is challenging and is full of shock and paranoia. All we can do is minimize the risk of failures. We need a team of believers who lead from the front.
There is an India where we still celebrate Holi, Diwali, and smaller festivals.
There is an India where eating out once/month is a celebration.
There is an India where less is more.
There is an India where a child gets incentivized for a new dress by scoring well in exams.
There is an India where parents sell lands to see sons/daughters study, get educated.
There is an India where farmers are dying because no one is buying their crops or, they have no water for harvesting or all their earnings lands to the loan sharks.
There is an India where 70% of vegetables are thrown after bazaar for cattle because there is no refrigeration.
There is an India which still listens to Vivid Bharti or All India Radio
There is an India where people travel on bullock carts and where there are no schools or hospitals.
There is an India where people die bedridden because they cannot afford to go to the city.
There is an India where people are killed in the name of caste, religion.
This India is a mute spectator in the country’s progress and needs more love and attention.
I have been noticing some trends in the sales process. I have been able to connect and close most of my sales via the referral. In some cases exiting customers vouched for us and in many other friends whom I helped one or the other way in their journey.
The relationship I built in my journey in the past decade is coming back from all corners and helping me. I consider myself lucky.