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I was dusting up some of my very old books and stmbled upon a philosophy book (one of my favorites) and flipped through it and saw i had the following underlined.

“blaming any exterior conditions in our lives as the culprit behind our feeling tied down or captive or helpless is like getting angry at our shoes for being laced too tight”

If only that was as easy as loosening up the lace…

You know its the season for commencements so there is lots of speeches flying around the internet. Some OK, some good and some very good. As I was reading through Small Giants and the references to WholeFoodsMarket, I stumbled upon John Mackey’s Bentley College Commencement Speech. It is a well written one and from someone who has accomplished something very meaningful in life, I really think he nailed the key aspects of life.

The best part of the speech that hit the home run for me personally was the part about fear. I know I am fearless when it comes to certain things. I mean, I will do a bungee jump without much fear. I will also go down a black diamond trail even though I am not a good snowboarder (and fall head over butt, 20 times before I reach the base and I am still well and alive!!!).

But I do fear! I fear about myself and my potential and potential failures. Jack used the phrase “…sometimes even fear of our own potential greatness”, I got to beleive we all have the potential for greatness but we question it…(why? – thats a blog for another day)

…“Fear doesn’t really exist outside the mind. We can dissolve it there as well. We will need to learn how to do this if we really want to be free in life and stay connected to your heart.” – Thank you! Jack! for that insight.

I am a self-reflective person; by that what I mean is, I look internally for answers as opposed to externally. This behavior doesn’t work well amongst some of my family and friends, naturally. Perhaps, it is due to my deep interests in both eastern and western philosophy. I have read many a books, spoken to wise and learned elders and in that process, learned an iota about how to live. I have to emphasize “iota”. But even with that, I know I am enjoying the fruits of living a life with a little bit deeper understanding of “soul” and “self”. I can go on with it but lets save that for another day when I am much more qualified to speak to it. There is enough said and written already by wise men of the east and west and so one must spend more time reading and most importantly, “contemplating”.

The other day, I picked up “The Art of Living” by Epictetus.

I love to pick up browse through the library book shelves, for an extended period, and eventually pick one or two at the end to read. That process in itself is very self-satisfying for some reason. It is as if I have found a treasure or something. Not only the title of this book intrigued but the name Epictetus really grabbed my attention. The back cover of the book read “Epictetus was born into slavery about 55 CE…”. If someone has said something about art of living about 2000 years ago, and we are still reading about it, it meant, it survived the test of time for at least that many years and so must be somewhat useful, if not fully relevant to today’s life. The book is in fact an interpretation by Sharon Lebell, so even the relevancy part must be taken care of.

Its a well written book with lots of insights for better, but the key message in the book is simple and already well known :

“Accept what we cannot change” – Just know that we cannot change or control most of the external events and other’s behaviors.

“Muster the courage to change the things we can” – It is absolutely certain that we can totally change one thing in this world all by ourselves; That one thing is what we think about everything around the world. However, as silly as it sounds, one needs a lot of courage to change one’s thinking!

“…and pray for the wisdom to know the difference” – This is the key because if we don’t understand what things are in our control and what is not, we will be wasting our time and energy on “wrong” things. Incredibly so, many of us are putting our time on earth not knowing this difference.

Its a simple thing : ‘Everyone wants happiness‘. The more I think about it, I realize that the least common denominator of the wants of every single person is ‘happiness’. I try to extend that argument and say ‘the unlimited list of things we want is not really what we want, but really the means to the real want ‘happiness’.

It made sense to me…every want is a means to that one end want : happiness. So it appears as if that all we want is the happiness itself but are fooling ourselves by wanting many other worldly things hoping the pleasure we would feel from getting whatever we want would give that happiness. The reality is that the bottom of that list grows faster than the top and the all pleasures fail to give lasting happiness.

But, wait a minute? happiness is an abstract term and there will be at least 5 billion definitions for it…right? Nope, thats the point…the 5 billion definitions are simply the statement of the means to that one happiness.

Alright, I know I am driving everyone crazy here! What the heck is happiness then? In one definition, it is a transient state of mind! Note there is not one but three keywords here: transient, state, mind. Transient state because it is never permanant. If we all will ever be permantly happy, we all will be holiest of holy saints, who they say once existed! It is a state of mind because it is inside us and not ouside. Hindu philosophy says Brahma purposefully hid happiness at the deep core of our mind, the last place and most difficult place to find it!

When we search outside there are zillion things to find and we would need a million lives to finish that search. Lets say, we all agree with that principle and start searching inside. We would soon realize that there is not much inside to search. Of course, you say. I think we would soon reach a point where we might finally realize happiness is nothing more nothing less than emptiness!

True laughter is a way for true happiness. Art of Living’s Ravi Shankar says “Just laugh, smile. Life has no purpose, no mission. It is a game. It’s a play. Life has no message. Life itself is an expression of joy. There is nothing you have to do. Every- thing is being done by the Big Mind.”

OK! now go watch “Rang De Basanti” 🙂

Swami Satchidananda of India : “If you run after things, nothing will come to you. Let things run after you. The sea never sends an invitation to the rivers. That’s why they run to the sea. The sea is content. It doesn’t want anything. That’s the secret in life.”

I am reading through “Seven habits of highly effective people” yet another time. The greatness of this book is it is a lifelong read and everytime I read it after a few years gap, I understand it even better and recognize my strengths and weaknesses clearly.

As I was passing through the Habit 3 today, I read about Stephen Covey’s favourite essay ‘Common Denominator of Success’. Intrigued, I ran a search on google. [I don’t recall doing this the last time I read this book, so makes me think that it must have been a time long long ago before Google!]

The Common Denominator of Success by E Gray is perhaps a motivator for S. Covey. I tend to think a lot of what S. Covey had written in his book is captured in the short essay by Gray. It is very convuluted and difficult to read and assimilate but points to a simplest reasons for success.

Habit is so powerful that it morphs into our character when we have done it long enough. Habit is not only external physical habits but also the mental thoughts and responses to external stimuli. Every thing good and bad about every individual is an acquired habit. The process begins by acknowledging them and making conscious efforts to address them until it becomes subsconscious at which point we already own it as a part of our character. Most important of all, ensure that every habit is aligned with a purpose, an emotional and sentimental purpose for life.

I am sure everyone of us have heard of “Follow your dreams”. Most people ignore it either because they don’t dream of anything or they don’t believe their dreams are realistic (unachievable). A few people believe in their dreams and follow it and almost always “dreams come true, if only you follow it”.

Human mind has the capacity to dream beyond impossible frontiers and our brain has the capacity to realize it, but only our heart has the capacity to believe that dreams can be realized. Without true belief, nothing is ever accomplished.

Think about this for a minute: Everything around us exists because someone someday somewhere dreamed of it and followed it and made it into a reality. Someone dreamed of sending voice without wires, I wonder how many of us appreciate that dream when we take a call while driving. Someone had a dream that man can fly and I wonder how many of us appreciate that person when we board a flight. Someone dreamed of connecting computers to make them talk exchange data with each other, I wonder how many of us appreciate when we check our emails or shop at Amazon. Centuries ago, someone dreamed of a ink and paper, I wonder how many of us cherish that dream today when we hold a picture or a book. Of course, the list is endless.

I don’t mean we all should stop everything spend years just appreciating all those people and their dreams. I think all the above are the reasons that everyone must dream. Big and Beyond. Not just dream, but hold on to them tight, believe it and follow through. Are you dreaming? Are you dreaming big? really big? Do you believe in it? Do you follow through?

What if one doesn’t dream or doesn’t follow their dreams? Someone else will, for sure. After all, the only thing we bring with us when we are born is our ability to dream. This life is our only chance to follow those dreams. Many millions don’t realize it, but few million do and the world continue to be a better place to be, one dream at a time.

“If you can dream it, you can do it” – Walt Disney

[Image from www.oneshare.com ]

Good judgement comes from experience;

Experience comes from bad judgements.

Dr. Zimmerman’s collection of insights on various topics ranging from customer service to leadership to ‘balancing life and stressful work’…

A couple from his list that stuck a chord with me :

Your life will be determined by your priorities or your pressures.

Take time for rec-reation before your body makes time for wreck-reation.

If you know your “why,” any “how” is possible

Don’t be content with “average.” That means you’re as close to the bottom as you are to the top.

All well said, isn’t it? Now, lets get back to Being, Knowing and Doing

The current issue of Business 2.0 has a very useful artilce titled “My Golden Rule”. A quick-take from 30 luminaries in today’s American business about which single quality they would consider as their golden rule for sucess in business and life, in general.

Leadership qualities can’t be learned by reading an article or a best-seller but by consciously building one’s character from the best-practices of other successful leaders. Lets incorporate those habits at the micro level on a daily-basis, we will eventually be a “Leader” at the macro level.

We search for happiness in eager anticipation and joyful memories, but it may be life’s simple and everyday gifts that sustain our contentment.

This Psychology Today article, though a bit lenghthy read, has some insightful arguments, specifically from a nobel prize winning professor of psychology at Princeton, on how we can be more happier than we think we actually are.

Very early in my boyhood, i had chosen a principle to live my life by. I didnt consciously chose it to be so, but an often seen advertisement on television and newspapers for the “Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC)” had a simple tag line that sunk very deep in my heart and soul. At some point during my early adulthood, I was lucky enough to understand what that meant and I chose to call that as one of the key principles to live my life by. Ever since, I keep saying that as often as I could to remind and reinforce it. And that principle is : “Life is too wonderful to be spent worrying”

“A Russian astrologist who says NASA has altered her horoscope by crashing a spacecraft into a comet is suing the U.S. space agency for damages of $300 million, local media has reported.” – CNN News.
reminds me of this :

“Only the guy who isn’t rowing has time to rock the boat.” – Jean-Paul Sartre

Scott Berkun has a nice essay on “How to pitch an idea”. While the whole essay is pretty good, I like these insights which I sure will find extremely useful “…until the concepts and hard parts are fleshed out enough to demonstrate that the spirit of an idea is matched with specifics, the idea doesn’t have much of a foundation. People can dismiss it quickly just by asking 2 or 3 basic questions. Always remember that moving from an interesting but vague idea, to specific and actionable is the difficult part of creation and invention.”

On one of his other good essay he writes “Maturity, in part, means accepting things that truly can not be changed for what they are. Wasting time being angry at the ground for being dirty, or the ocean for being wet is absurd, right? “

His observations on work and life and the balance is very true based on my own experience “work does not have to define life. Work can be at the center of everything if you choose, but there are many other ways to live happy, fulfilling, meaningful lives. ….I had never thought about it, but for much of my adult life most of my pride came through the workplace. But then in this one particular experience, the workplace became so uncomfortable, so depressing, so frustrating, that I found I couldn’t be happy until I found ways to invest *less* of myself at work. It took me a long time, and lots of suffering, to figure this out (I’m quite stubborn), but when I did I discovered a new kind of solution. I needed to depend more on my life outside of work, with friends, family, community and interests, to make myself feel complete and happy. Then no matter how bad things got at work I had a place to go where I was safe. My self-esteem began to come from places other than the workplace and I became a better person for it.”

“A paradox: You need a great team of people with diverse skills to perform a symphony well, but no team has ever written a great symphony! … While cross-functional teams are key players in defining and implementing incremental innovation projects, cross-functional disruptive individuals tend to be key players in defining radical innovation projects.” – from Radical Innovation: How Mature Companies Can Outsmart Upstarts.

Read it a few times and lets put it at the back of our minds and churn it…something should emerge…

Sometimes we forget what we know. On those occasions, we need a simple reinforcement. When that comes from a person who has accompolished more than ‘something’ in life, it goes into your heart like a razor.

With pride, I recommend you to read this Commencement address by Steve Jobs at Stanford.

Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary. If Steve Jobs could do it with this, why not you? us?

The world is too big for us. Too much is going on, too many crimes, too much violence and excitement. Try as you will, you get behind in the race, in spite of yourself. It’s an incessant strain to keep pace…and still, you lose ground. Science empties its discoveries on you so fast that you stagger beneath them in hopeless bewilderment. The political world is news seen so rapidly you’re out of breath trying to keep pace with who’s in and who’s out. Everything is high pressure. Human nature cannot endure much more!

true. right? The stunning truth is that this was written in the editorial ‘The Atlantic Journal’ in the June of 1833! A mere hundred and seventy two years ago! Google it yourself. Looks like whoever wrote that editorial a century and a half ago had unknowingly discovered the eternal truth about life. So, come on, lets not insert our heads in the sand and gripe. Hope, optimism and perseverence are the way to go. We can find million reasons to not to do something, but there is only one life to do anything.
[Title inspired by Hoobastank]

You know multitasking right? Yes, its the same that I once described as reading this blog while taking a bite off your sandwich lunch your lunch still listening attentively to what your next cube lady is murmering on the phone when a tiny notification pops up at the bottom of yoru screen from yahoo reminding you that your mom in online! Arent we happy we do all that? Perhaps, we shouldnt be according to this article.

Life interrrruptered!

multitasking is….consistently counterproductive, often foolish, unhealthy in the long run, and when driving, relatively dangerous.

With more and more technology, contrary to what one would expect, we’re only working longer and harder, and certainly more stressed. Should we take a break? I am sure each of us shout a big YES.