A lot many people and especially so-called successful people usually downplay the hard work they have put in or over-exaggerate the effort that went into it but no one hits the sweet spot per se. This creates either anxiety or gifts overconfidence to the listeners. It is understandable that it is subjective and cannot be captured by words. However, deliberate misguidance is dangerous and toxic which is done by the biographies written under the handheld mentoring of marketing and PR agencies.
Next time the founder of a start-up says his/her story, take it with caution. The garage origin stories are all usually lies.
Inverted
Maintain a not-to-do list, create an uncomfortable log that keeps a record of what are the uncomfortable things that you did in a day, prepare an ingratitude list, write down bad mental models, dream about the anti-vision of your life, jot down how not to retire, document the 10 ways to embarrass yourself, plan the worst day of your life, sketch the 7 habits of highly worst people, dress in the weirdest way, think about the baddest diet to be on, note the easiest way to ruin your health, compose the ugliest tune and melody, watch and read all-time lowest rated movies and books respectively, find the horrible financial advice, send letters, put the worst picture on Instagram, discuss on the idiotic topics possible, start a difficult conversation, debate on controversial topics and ask silly and the most basic questions.
Improvement
One of the best tips I ever got is don’t reject what is already working. If reading a physical book is fine for you then don’t go for kindle or playbooks, no matter how cool they are projected to be, for the sake of upgrading your reading.
The mobile in your pocket can do everything you want. Wake you up at 5 A.M., play your playlist, make a call for you, screen videos, and take amazing pictures of your face. There’s no need of changing it. You are not missing out.
If you can do silent meditation then there’s no need for a Headspace subscription. I see people constantly changing pens to write even though they liked the previous ones. Why abandon something when it’s doing the job for you? Why update when there are no bugs?
Necessity
Friedrich Nietzsche in “Twilight of the idols” says that he who has a why to live can bear almost any how. We can apply this on a micro scale to reframe our goals and achieve at least a few of them. Post planning an action, whether it is going to the gym, writing, blogging, podcasting, painting, or building, we need to sit down and ask why we need to do a particular thing. Why should I save the money instead of buying the overpriced t-shirt? It might seem obvious but actually, it is not. If we don’t have any particular reason behind what we are doing, we might easily get influenced by great marketing or fall prey to poor pieces of advice.
New year resolutions like journaling and meditation too fall away after a week as they are not necessities for you. You could have simply wanted it as it is the new cool thing or read it in a newspaper. The consistent action that we demand from the body and mind also demands a consistent answer from you. My friend recently said he wanted to do cycling and bought a decent bike from Decathlon. After 3 days, he decided it quit as it was not “his type”. Likewise, why should you start a business? Is it for the freedom that money gives or Is it really bringing value to people or Is it something else?
The recent trend is complaining about the rat race of 9-5 jobs. However, If asked why people wanted to quit then many find it hard to give a solid answer except for the usual workload, creativity, fun, boss issues, and EMI answers. Having clarity on the “Why” gives you not just strength but also keeps away a lot of mental trash and negativity that you perceive from doing a task, either through conditioning or unconscious reasoning.
Potential
Our past experiences and belief systems largely shape our view about the potential we have in our heads. The fact of the matter is even you don’t have a clue about your own potential. Just because you haven’t aced some math test in your high school or bombed the essay when you wrote your college application, it doesn’t mean you fail today as well nor does it mean that you can never improve the damn game. A lot many carry previous failures and treat them as the standard benchmarks that one can never cross in our lifetimes.
If people laughed at you when you gave your first business presentation or when you did some stand-up comedy at the local club, then it only means you couldn’t perform well at that time and you got some work to do. By no means, it is your static capability.
Fear
One of the biggest negative things about fear is it makes you blind to all the opportunities that are available to you at the moment. In fact, the solution in the form of a great job or money or person could be right in front of you and we may never grab it to pull ourselves out of misery. And also obviously, this limits our circle of experience and the actions we take daily. Without fear we see life with floodlights and with fear we look at it with a flashlight.
Paradoxical
Desperation doesn’t work. The harder you try to be happy, the lesser you’ll be. The more you try to be trustworthy, the lesser you appear as one. The greater you try to conquer fears, they eat you up more deeper, and likewise,
the more you aspire to impress, the greater the chances that others simply brush you off aside. The classical example is love. More the love, more the suffocated the others feel, lesser the love you get in return. Love grows in freedom, as they say, is 100% accurate. Isn’t it?
Do less, get more. Eat less, and live longer. Forget and you will find. The simple is the highest sophistication. Minimalism is meaningful. Got it?
This also reminds me of the famous Indian king Ashoka who gave up wars because he waged too many wars in the first place. I guess the law of diminishing returns kicks in.
Life and Meaning
At some point in our lives, probably after a tragedy or so, for at least a brief moment, one stops and asks the damn question- What is the meaning of this life? Our consciousness somehow cannot fathom this wonderful existence without a grand purpose behind it. Maybe because we never trust someone especially when they give a free gift like life here without scheming something fishy. We always expect something in return when one does charity, despite what people say. Help always demands acknowledgment even if it is a humble thank you but how can god or someone up above give away something precious away freely or with a massive discount like in a china shop to us? The ego’s suspicion expects a solid answer for all this.
Speaking strictly from egoism, life is neither a blessing nor a charity given by someone. We are part of creation that somehow for some wild reason developed metacognition and consciousness that developed a fragile ego that could for a brief moment in time separate itself through an illusion and think that it is different and great. For the existence, we are in no way different from an asteroid moving randomly in space.
Arthur Schopenhauer for this exact reason warned us not to enquire about meaning in life, as it leads to disillusionment as everything in life and everything we value is transitory and vanishes away like a soap bubble as soon as we try to grasp and grab it.
It is correct. As long as we are slaves to time, change, and decay. It is not worth it. And moreover, what does one do even if he or she knows the purpose and meaning of his/her life? We get satisfaction and die. Hence we just long for satisfaction which roughly translates to the release of chemicals in the brain. How is it different from the satisfaction we get after watching a TikTok video or a YouTube short?
In short, one should not waste this brief time on earth over this useless question when it is nothing but ego playing a trick on us for mere chemical reactions.
The one thing
In mathematics, multiplying by zero gives us a zero. No matter how complex the multiplication is, if in the end it is multiplied by a zero, we end up with a zero. It’s a powerful metaphor that we can apply in life. Even if we take high-value productive choices consecutively like acing tests, going to a top-tier university, learning life and job skills, taking good enough risks, and landing up with a good enough business to take care of, one bad choice like the zero will spoil everything and make the pack of cards fall just like that. It could be doing drugs or cheating or stealing and selling the company’s secrets, one wrong friendship, or something else. The point is one thing if it has the good potential can blow up everything that one has built thus far. Thus, beware of the zero.
Boiling frog syndrome
Small, steady, and incremental changes are often ignored and tend to go unnoticed. If someone takes away 1$ every day for 365 days from our bank then it doesn’t matter to us and it is not attention-worthy enough. We step into action or focus only when 365$ is taken away in a single day even though the quantum of the amount is the same except for the time. The frog too as the myth says jumps out of a pot filled with boiling water but stays comfortably in normal water even though we slowly raise the temperature to a boiling point that might kill it.
Thy Vox 