High

I used to laugh at people on being high on sugar and all. Yesterday I had a meeting after which I ended up at Glen’s, a bakehouse in town. I ended up eating red velvet cake and cappuccino.

Hours after that I was buzzing. I was laughing, chilling and writing texts to friends and was on call. I ended up writing, planning and drawing so many things. I ended up sleeping at 4 am and felt like trash when woke up.

Slept again in the afternoon and feeling much better. I did some reading and realized I was on the sugar rush. I am going to be more careful from now on about consuming the quantity of cake, looks like even a slice is too much.

Creativity

I understand capitalism means slogging our ass. But when it comes to creativity, it requires a clear head and calm state of mind.

Can laziness make you creative? A life without daily todo or productivity hacks?

I could use signaling and share quotes of successful folks who were misfits and lead life on their rules. They were successful in their fields of arts, psychology, literature or philosophy.

Coming back to myself, not having a schedule/reminder on weekends makes me more creative. This can also be my confirmation bias since my Sundays are for overeating, reading and drowning in caffeine.

What do you all think? Help me in finding some answers.

Social psychology

Social psychology experiments are a fashionable field. The celebrated author, psychologist Daniel Kahneman won a Nobel prize. He also happens to be the author of the best seller: Thinking fast and slow.

I got to know about this field via Freakonomics and Hidden brain podcast. I was hooked to Social psychology. Fast forward, 600 days later I feel most of these are gibberish and unproven.

I wonder if these authors and researchers did controlled observations and experiments for grants or publishing books.

While watching the marshmallow experiment on YouTube and listening to the research outcome the question kept hitting me: What if the kids were fed marshmallows in all their meals, a week before conducting the experiment.

Power posing, affirmation, similarity, fear, persuasion, etc are all packaged and sold to us.

Thanks to the society signaling, social media noise and smartphone (because we are dumb), these authors are leaving more impact on our consciousness.

Control

Epictetus wrote enchoridian centuries ago.

The paragraph where he mentions what things we have in our control and we don’t have has been a principle for me. I consider lucky getting to know about it, soaking it up.

Many things we do in our lives with our best efforts. But if we decide the result or expect the outcome in our favor and it goes opposite we get miserable. At times anger takes over.

Going by Epictetus, I know it is a difficult life to lead. Leaving outcome aside and focusing on putting the best effort. Life is more content. We do not regret not trying.

Life with action as prime motivation does more wonders that has a goal.

Timeline

I met Akshat sir today. I have known him since 2004. He is my college senior and more like brother to me.

Meeting him was so refreshing. We were lost in past, so many memories kept flowing. It was like going back in a time machine.

We spent the whole day together over coffee/lunch/pizza. He is heading back in a few days.

We realized how all our worries, anger or insecurities were of no importance. We were kind of rebel and misfits in our college days and we have no regrets.

The day flew by like few seconds. I am sure many of you would have witnessed the same in your life.

Positive

Being positive is key to success in this journey of life. At every juncture, we have to choose our path and not being positive will let us down.

I was a super pessimistic human until a few years back, then thunder lightning struck. Why am I doing this?

In the end nothing matters, we all die. Some leave a legacy while others find a mistake in everything.

The feeling of positivity has fueled what I call radical fearlessness. I am feeling a better version of myself.

In every situation, my mental model reminds me: nothing can go wrong, I am breathing and all my body parts are well intact.

Capitalism

My tweets and previous posts must be signaling about my disliking towards Capitalism. To clarify, I am a product of capitalism. So having a biased approach against it is irrational.


This independent life of mine, the freedom to do whatever I like and wherever I can travel is part of Capitalism. The meritocratic rise of you without your caste or fathers reference is one such example.


Like our life Capitalism also has the other side aka consumerism. The industry of need creation. The constant reminders by advertisers on what we should eat, wear or buy. The imaginary mirage of earning more on account of killing present life is what I hate.

Disruption

My ear hurts everytime I hear about disruption. I don’t understand why marketers, growth hackers, VCs, journalists or entrepreneurs make use of this.

How can we disrupt something when in reality we are rebuilding it on the same base.

Should disruption be not called progress? The enablers of any market become better with time.

Disruption sounds like nuking for growth.

Read

There is a saying: You are what you read. I subscribe to this philosophy. Past few years have been great, I have been reading in bulk.
I have also realized most of the new age writing: productivity, efficiency, and self-help writings are old wine in new bottle.
Some of these best sellers are personal experiences or summary of research papers. Nobody knows if they will work in real life.
I have decided to limit my reading this year. I will spend more time re-reading some of my favorites.