Connecting the dots

Do you remember how you felt when someone out of the blue helped you without asking for anything in return? Let me share one of own experiences when I was on a job hunt in my final year of post graduation. There was a senior of mine who graduated and we were not connected. Now as far as my memory serves, I was good with him but don’t remember him helping me in any manner. He helped me connect with 3–4 companies, without me even asking for help. He reached out to me and was constantly helping me during the process of applying & interviewing. Did I land with a job he helped me apply with? Yes, I did (ended up not joining because of some other reason) The point I want to highlight here is it was very pleasing to be helped by someone in a tough process, I was shooting 5–10 mails on some days just to get an opportunity. I am grateful to him. Now, I don’t know why he helped me but I know that it taught me a big lesson in life, “help someone for no reason and without expecting ...

Failure is that one word that scares the sh** out of me. I am sure it does the same to a lot of us. It’s not very difficult to guess why is it so? My bet is its due to the fact that society rewards only and only success. It views people who fail as miserable. It highlights stories of successful people only, no matter how many failures they might have encountered. Beyond this, we are hammered with all our life that the society will acknowledge only your success so you better not fail if you want to be famous or known or recognized in the society. How do we change this? My idea is it starts at home. Accept that failing is okay, normalize it and learn. Treat failures as value-adding lessons, it teaches you things that success will never teach you. The pain of failure is sweet if you accept it, learn from it, and give a better attempt to it next time. How do people become successful? by failing and trying again and again until they get what they want. Let me share a story w...

“Corona Virus” I am sure its difficult to find someone who has not heard about this pandemic. How won't one it's all over the world, take first place beating all of our other problems? It has bent our ego, made us stay home, stopped our routine made us come to a standstill for a while now. The world has however adapted to live in conditions with this virus, started resuming normal life with a lot of changes which now we call it the new normal. I want to talk about the time we were home with our family, the time we spent with them. I would like to share my own example here, to begin with I was away from my family for past 7 years. I used to visit them at festivals, holidays and vacations. I had not spent more than 2 months with them since last 7 years. I had forgotten how it felt to stay with them. I am sure a lot of people might have a similar experience in terms of spending time with our family. One thing it has clearly taught me is I owe almost everything to my paren...

One of the greatest gifts we humans as organisms have is the human mind. It is different from what other species have because of the variety of tasks it is capable of pulling in a short time. One of those capabilities we have is the feeling that we experience largely due to the ability our emotions provide us. To feel happy, sad, joy, fear, greed, etc. is a virtue we fail to acknowledge at times and take it for granted. Imagine what would you do if you wake up one day and are unable to feel any of these. This would take away the gift of life. To make this simple imagine this -we work so that we spend our time doing something productive in return to feel good about ourselves and earn so that we can buy things, in turn, to make us feel good or give us comfort which again is to make us feel good. Now if you can’t feel good what would be your motivation to do anything in life? We spoke about the feelings that we go through and we understand them very well because we have the first-h...

  You serve a purpose in the life of each person that you stumble upon. We may often not realize it, no one might even acknowledge it. One way to think of this is if it dint serve a purpose we wouldn't be there and it probably wouldn’t have happened.  We’re short-sighted because we are wired to be like that, often missing the bigger picture which is difficult at times to see clearly. Parts of the puzzle don’t fit together according to us our mind cannot process it all. On of the mental models which come to my mind here is complex adaptive systems i.e millions of different moving parts interact with each other (we obviously don’t even know which parts might have caused a certain thing to happen). To avoid shortsightedness we can do two thing either sit and reflect on situations whenever possible and let your system 2 (ref: Thinking fast & slow — Daniel Kahneman)do the work or let things play the way they do because at the end of the day it works out in the b...

Markets & Life Fall free-fall, almost everything in the Indian and global markets was falling like there is no bottom in March this year and now it's rising as there’s no limit. Don’t worry while the market in the short term falls or rises let's take time and connect a few life concepts to the markets and try to change the way we view it. 1. On Unpredictability : can you predict what’s going to happen tomorrow or on any day after that with 100% accuracy? Leave alone the percentage but with any accuracy, can you? You can’t, now you still plan for tomorrow and that vacation and your future?  Predicting the market movements is a waste of time because there are millions of people, institutions, algorithms interacting and each have varied timelines ranging from sec to years to decades and hence varied return expectations. This leads to severe unpredictability.  Unpredictability is as normal as anything in life yet we take comfort in planning and get uncomfo...