Experiences, Experience and More

I used to think, this is not how I would spend my life. Running around, chasing something which I may or may not want, oppressing myself with day to day grinds, living almost the same day, almost the same place over and over again and calling it life.

Long back, when I was young and stupid, I used to think this life is not for me. But, reading a letter I perhaps wrote in 2012 when I started my career, I realize, I am already living the kind of life I was kind of trying to consciously avoid. 

Don't get me wrong, it is not that I am not happy. Perhaps I am. Perhaps I am supposed to be. I have a good job, pays well, I live in the IT capital of the country and I have some skills that can continue to fetch me fairly good life. 

But then, in spite of all that, when I look back at myself; what I used to be 6 years back, I feel this is not what I wanted. I don't know what I did want but I had told myself that I would do something different. I know I am way off. 

May be that guy at that age did not really understand what to expect from himself or may be I got it all wrong and haven't yet figured out and learnt how to live. Yes, it is possible. There was no lecture on how to live, in my school, college or even my post graduate certificate course. No one really told me because may be there is no single way. Even having a framework around it would have helped but nah, nothing. 

Anyway, let me put on my PM hat now. Yes, we have a problem, but if we really try to put this in the AIPMM new product development framework, we should be able to arrive at a product that should be able to help. I think I need to focus on the problem more. 

Why exactly people like me think that they wanted a different life. If I dig deeper I think I can say that because when one is young, the intensity of hopes and ambitions are high. What one can achieve in life is at Level 8 and one himself is sitting at Level 0. Sure, being at Level 8 sounds so much fun but reaching there has a different path.

The path that is difficult, full of rejections and failure and if you look at it, it never looks anything remotely like Level 8. Hence everyone gets deceived and thinks this cannot be it. This can never be the path to where I want to go. Everyone then looks at the path that looks amazing at the moment, we are unable to look ahead and see where this beautiful looking path is going to take us.

We start walking on that path and after a while perhaps, we realize, Oh, this is certianly not going to take me to Level 8. We panic, we try to look for other paths. The cycle repeats and then yet again we look for another path and so on.

Before you know it, you are done with 5-6 years and you are happy but you are nowhere near to Level 8. 

Now, you may ask yourself, do you still want to go to Level 8, because the path is still dirty and difficult or you would rather stay on the path that you currently are on, which by the way is very comfortable?

Everyone has these choices. And most people fantasize about Level 8 but do not prefer to go down that atrocious looking path, they would rather stay on their comfortable Levels.

What would I do? I don't know. I am scared of losing my current level in pursuit of Level 8 that I may or may not achieve.

I may change my mind. Well, we will see.

What am I up to?

I came across my friend Deepak's blog and something interesting caught my attention. He has a specific page that tells about what he is doing now. His inspiration for such a page has been http://nownownow.com/. It is interesting and surprising to see that this /now page is a revolution! I went to Deepak's Now page (link here) and decided to write a blog post about it and to also create a similar page for myself.

Well, recently I have been tied up and have not been able to manage my time well. But I am slowly getting back on track. I have been using www.toggl.com to help me track my time and of course www.wunderlist.com and www.getpocket.com have been my favorite tools.

Wunderlist is well, a To Do list and Pocket helps you bookmark your links and manage them better to revisit them and hence manage your learning better.

I keep myself occupied with Business Analysis, Product Consulting, Product Management and learning about these all the time. Recently I also have found myself interested in knowing about what people like Elon Musk and Sam Altman are up to. I am actively following the growth of smart cars, self driven cars etc. I am also blogging at Faichi's official website. 

Oh yes, I also have been reading books and happily running Pune Book Lovers Club. I am currently reading

1. Totto Chan - English translation of a Japanese book. This book is very famous though.

2. Thinking Fast and Slow - I am very slow in reading this.
3. Zero to One - Interesting insights

I am active on Twitter these days, please follow me @ayushtweet.

Cheers till the next time!

My Poetry Sucks!

I am totally embarrassed about the stupid poetry I have put on my blog. I haven't written anything good for a long time now. I am requesting you to please don't read any poetry please? I will put a good one as soon as I write, I promise you.

Weekly Habit Experiments

I have been in Pune since September 2015 now and I got to know that here Gudi Padwa i.e. Hindi Calendar new year is a grand festival. It is celebrated with a lot of zeal. I thought I should take this opportunity to try something new and become a better person. 

Now, many of you must be thinking that this is something we all think of doing in every new year. Yes, that is true, I have always been making a list of habits I need develop, the achievements I want to see in the new year, the milestones I want to achieve, so on and so forth.

Well, yep the only problem was that the list of 2015 looked a lot like the list of 2014 and so on and hence I thought this is not going to work at all.

Hence, I thought this Hindi New Year can be an opportunity. I knew I can’t commit for an entire year so decided to try for something really short a duration and settled for one week.

So, here it is, my weekly experiments have started from 4^th April. Now, I wanted to begin with something really small. I just randomly thought how it would be like to not speak any cuss words for a week and yep, that is what I decided for the first week. I had to follow this No Cuss Words rule till 10^th April i.e. 7 full days. If you think it is easy you may go ahead and give it a try yourself.

Anyways, so how was my experience and how did it go? Well, for firsts, I think the week ended really quickly and I faltered for a total of 5 times. I realized that initially I indeed was, quite frequently saying cuss words in my mind but wasn’t just speaking them. But over a period of a few days I realized that I started using some other words to better explain, rather than the cuss words. I seriously recommend you to give it a try.

This was a good experience by the end of the week. I had two decisions to make now, first, what should be the next experiment and second, whether or not should I continue with the previous one. I decided to try no sugar+ green tea daily for the next week and also decided that since it was not difficult so I would just continue the previous experiment too.

So, for the next week i.e. 11^th April to 17^th April it had to be No Cuss Words + No Sugar + Daily Green Tea.

The week obviously has ended so you might be wondering as to how did it go. Well, No Cuss Words went really good, though I stopped keeping the count of the faults because I found doing that insignificant. No sugar regime has been strictly followed and quite easily actually but this Green Tea Daily has been difficult and I think I could only follow it for 3 days out of 7. I think the reason being that following this involved preparing green tea and I have been too lazy to do so.

Anyways, I have continued all three experiments for the subsequent week too and it has been going well. Though I had to add another habit and I wanted to try Daily Meditation but I have failed at that too.

Now, for the coming week I have decided not to add any habits and to carry all four of these habits to this week and see how that goes. If at all everything goes fine. I will start adding more habits, else I will drop some of these.

Current habits to pursue in the next week starting next Monday i.e. 25^th April 2016 are No Cuss Words + No Sugar + Daily Green Tea + Daily Meditation. Hoping for the best!

Book Review: Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

Best thing about this book is simplistic language. When the ideas being shared in the book are complex and difficult to understand and relate to, it really helps to have the ideas in a simple language.

The story is fairly gripping in the middle of the book and starts on a comfortable note too. I would say that the ideologies shared, especially at the end of the book are somewhat difficult to imbibe or even understand in one go and it does require to read them again. Presumably the thought of the author is to give the readers a small insight into the concept and hence this book can just be a beginning for the readers to think on such lines and then explore more by themselves. This book is indeed a short read but it makes you think time and again and hence I would say this is an impacting book to me. Certain sections of the book (some specific conversations) are extremely enjoyable and hence I would surely want to read the book again. I highly appreciate that the author seemed to have ensured that any religion aspect is not touched upon. To conclude, this is a must read book. The book is publicly available online, you can go to http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2500  to get the book. Also, I am happy to announce that this book is going to be the first specific book being discussed in Pune Book Lovers Club.

Why make a fuss?

It’s been a while since I wrote something, elsewhere or on this blog. It literally feels like the fountain pen being used after years. The ink has dripped through inside but is unable to dribble through the nib of the pen, and smoothly on to the paper. As you try to write, you scratch the paper and mildly damage the nib. Just like the ink, I have thoughts in my mind but am unable to carve them out into words.

Why? What happened? Has it not been a good time in the past? Am I so engrossed in the day to day life that I forgot how to express in words? No, I did not; well, I hope not.

I know that the wheels are a little rusty now, but they sure can still move. It will take a little time, I will need a little inertia to push myself and that indeed will take some effort and some pain.

Pain, oh yes. That, we always experience; every time something begins (or ends) that little word pain is like the threshold energy we need, to get started, to begin and to endure.

So, what is there to exaggerate in this? Why make a fuss?  Is this the first time I am experiencing this? Surely it is not. There is nothing new in this. Also, don’t other people undergo the same and just still keep going? There is nothing unique about it.

All you got to do is keep going. Can anything else help? I highly doubt it. But, given my little experience of life and of people, I might be wrong. Over time, everything fades away, just like the early morning fog, like it was never there, was just a dream.

Yes, the visibility is currently low, it is indeed hazy all around; there are some things to remember and there are some to forget. But all I need to remind myself is that; this too shall pass, this too shall pass.

It's easy to feel hopeful during the good times

Hope. It indeed is one of the strongest emotion human beings can conceive. It defies reasons and logics and keeps our spirits almost unnaturally and impractically alive when we need it the most. I recently came across a wonderful graduation speech given by the lead female actor in the movie “The Amazing Spiderman-2”.

“I know we all think that we are immortal. We are supposed to feel that way. We are graduating, but like our brief four years of high school, what makes life valuable is that it doesn't last forever.”

“What makes it precious is that it ends, we know that now more than ever, and I say it today of all days to remind us that time is luck”.

“So, don’t waste it living someone else’s life, make yours count for something. Fight for what matters to you, no matter what, cause even if we fall short what better ways is there to live.”

“It's easy to feel hopeful on a beautiful day like today, but there will be dark days ahead of us too. There will be days where you feel all alone, and that's when hope is needed most. No matter how bad it gets, or how lost you feel, you must promise me that you will hold on to hope. Keep it alive.”

“We have to be greater than what we suffer. My wish for you is to become hope; people need that.”

“And even if we fail, what better way is there to live? As we look around here today, at all of the people who helped make us who we are, I know it feels like we're saying goodbye, but we will carry a piece of each other into everything that we do next, to remind us of who we are, and of who we're meant to be.”

--- Gwen Stacy

May we all get the strength to realize and attain hope when we need it the most because it indeed is something which is deeply imbibed in all of us but, it’s just that we tend to forget this fact when we are going through the ‘not so sunny’ days of our lives.  

Youtube link to the speech: Here.