Help

We all need help. Asking for help is not a sign of fear. Our life is not a self-help book. We should reap most from our circle of competence.

Asking for help is wise, it saves your time. You get expert in that specific domain telling you what and how about it.

Some of us read and fell for 10000 hours ritual, which made the author rich.

Why do we have to fake it and not seek help?
Is our ego so important?
What about the life of people and co-workers we are leading?
Are we not cheating on them?

Seeking help is not about ego depletion or guilt ride. It’s about holding the hand of a perfectionist and getting a job done.

Anonymous

In 2018, being anonymous is a crime. Everyone wants your identity, even the government.

Your tiny little phone keeps track of every single minute of your movement. Then you have applications like Tinder, Uber and others. All whose service depends on location.

I have no clue if it is good or bad. I have nothing to hide.

While most of us like our identity, selfie, and social sharing. Some of us are not comfortable with it. The reason can be the social barometer and glorification of our youth or skin color.

This group is intelligent, smart and open-minded. Still, there is a big division.

Why is such a division?
Are we the ones responsible for it?
Have we made them anonymous?
Why is not using social media uncool?
The constant urge of updating our whereabouts is cool?

Are we more lonely than before by being bolder?

I have no answers.

Plan

We plan about our life, future, career, marriage.
Some of it goes as expected while most does not.

Some of us celebrate out of the hits and move on with the misses. They are a happy lot, more realistic.

Many of us feel sad and blame our luck. We blame others.

Why do we blame and become miserable when things do not go as planned?

Our life has limited time, why can’t we move on and learn from our failed plans?

Success

Is there any template available to be Successful? I know many have written in length and some made worth fortune on the topic.

But what exactly is a success?

* Finding a soulmate?
* A billion dollar exit?
* Being right in predicting Black Swan occurrence?

Socrates drank hemlock and lived on a life seeking self-knowledge.
Plato talks about know thyself.
Epictetus says a man should live in accordance with nature.

Is success all about being right with predictions, bets. Is fast-paced communication affecting it? Has our decision-making window shrunk? Have we become biased and prejudiced?

How many of fallen victim for :

* Everyone is watching X on Netflix. It must be good. It turns out a shit show.
* As an investor, everyone is investing in that hot idea and a passionate founder.
* Friends booked a flat and I should follow them.
* You have crossed 30, get married or you will die single.
* You need to be working 18 hours and be passionate. That will make you succeed.

Tata and Reliance would have had the different fate in Whatsapp, Quora or Twitter era? Entire would have advised Jamsetji Tata or Dhirubhai Ambani what to do to become successful.

I doubt they would have wasted time listening to startup podcasts. I doubt they have wasted time reading Steve blank, Ben Horowitz, Tim Ferris, Paul Graham or Peter Thiel.

Or was it sharp focus, perseverance, persistence, some luck, close friends and customers? Or was it the customers and users who believed in them? Or were they solving a real problem and delighting their users?

What made them successful?

Missing

Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky have written in length about human bias. How we make decisions and how biased we are.

Today is Dussehra, a Hindu festival. I am missing my parents and food. My brain is taking a tour of the past.

Another instance, flashlights at the back of an auto made me miss Mumbai.

Walking on the crowded Koramangala street, the smell of scent reminded me of a friend.

Are these mere coincidence?
Aren’t all these are things of the past?
Why is my brain acting trippy and taking me to memory lane?

Is it because our brain is super lazy, does not like making much calculation.
Does it like to be on autopilot?

Loneliness

How many of us crave for more people in our life?
How many of us want to be part of social gathering?
How many of us miss our childhood days? We were experimenting more without any fear.

With the emergence of the internet and smartphones, we are more connected than before. But from inside we have drifted apart. The relationship we make in the virtual world is transactional.

We are all alone in this crowded world. The rate is even more in the developed countries. The older people tend to suffer most from it.

Older days, we had joint families and took care of each other. Everyone had same friend circle and commune, as no one like now moved out of the village for seeking jobs.

The current scenario is :
* Ailing father is living on his own. He is sick and pays to a maid for taking care.
* Married son is living in another city with his wife/kids. He visits once a year to see his father.
* Young son is struggling to make his life. He is alone in a big city and consuming liquor and narcotics to cope with his loneliness.

This drift and social phenomenon of loneliness are driving us all crazy:
* We are more restless sleepers.
* Suffering from blood pressure
* Our aging has accelerated
* Our immune system has weakened.
* Our cognitive system is on an easy decline

Is there a middle ground? I don’t know.

Happiness

In 2018, everyone is selling happiness. Be it Tinder, new bigger iPhone or your boss. Writers have become millionaires by teaching you how to be happy.

What exactly is happiness, is it something one can buy or own?

For some getting extrinsic appreciation acts as motivation. This is what has made all social media apps so valuable. The quest for receiving social appreciation fuels happiness. These people share everything in public: eating, meeting, traveling, running, et al.

I am not judging the seekers of extrinsic happiness. We humans are different.

There is another group. The ones who like living with themselves. A private life, happy in their own little-isolated world. External appreciation has no role to play in their happiness.

Which one are you?

Cascading anger phenomenon

Let me explain the Cascading anger phenomenon with an example.

1. Shyam is a software developer.
2. One morning he gets a SPAM call. He gets furious.
3. His maid offers breakfast for him. Shyam shouts at her because it has little extra salt in it.
4. Shyam takes his car, shouts at his watchman because he takes a minute to open apartments door.
5. Shyam is getting late, he over honks and gets in a fight with a bike rider.
6. Shyam in all anger and agitation reaches office. He asks his team for update an update and shouts badly at all the peers missing deadline.
7. Later in the day, Shyam participates in a customer call. He screws it badly and gets in verbal spat with an internal tech lead. The customer wants Shyam out of the project.
8. The dream of Shyam, settling in America is gone.

Later at night, Shyam does days introspection. He realizes how he screwed his entire day all because of one SPAM loan call.

He also realized how his action affected a dozen other people around him. He has doubt if he made an ass of himself.

That is when Shyam calls him best friend who is jobless, but happy. His friend explains him about “cascading anger phenomenon”. On learning, Shyam promises never to fall for CAP aka “cascading anger phenomenon”

Our life is limited, our friends and people should matter to us. We should not let our anger affect our loved ones.

Obsession

1. We are obsessed, since birth we are taught to be obsessed. It can be family values or maintaining the leftover fame of our forefathers.
2. We are granted name along with religion/caste, yet again we are told to be obsessed about the same.
3. We enter school and taught math, science, English again we are told to be obsessed with our learning.
4. We enter college you end up forcing yourself being obsessed.
5. We fall in love. Our harmonious relationship gets fed with control and obsession.

What do you think?

1. Is this obsession our ego?
2. A society fed reward system?
3. A disease making us go mad like street dogs?

Our life is in our hand. Who are we to control others? Why is this prejudice or bias?

Results of unmet obsession:

1. We turn into a psycho.
2. Get angry and depressed.
3. Become pessimistic.

Ooh. But media feeds you to be obsessed. Your investor, co-founder wants you to be obsessed.

Life is too short. Live it in peace. Think, observe, read and work on acquiring self-knowledge.

Dreamers

Are we on our own?
Who dictates on our course of action in life?
Our thoughts, our dreams, what we want to be?
Is this life we are living, is this what and how we wanted to live?

Every 40-50 years world gets an outlier. Someone who gives a fuck to the status quo.

Benjamin Franklin, Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, Jamshedji Tata, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Steve Jobs, and Henry Ford. There y are all on the list.

They had a dream.
They believed in it.
They changed the world for good.
They made the lives of others better.

Our current system wants everyone to join the rat race. Do same daily chores. If you are a parent, let your kids explore, think and do things which are not normal. Our world needs more dreamer.