Category: Self help

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A Bridge Too Far: When Dreaming Takes a Toll

Last week I found myself up at about 2am, incapable of falling asleep. There I was, in complete silence staring at the ceiling above me. It had been a long day and my mind raced from one thought to another as I played back a highlight reel of the day’s events in my head. I thought about all the things I had set out to accomplish that day. I thought about those I had been successful in accomplishing and those I couldn’t quite get to. “They’ll just have to wait till tomorrow,” I thought to myself.  Somewhere in the erratic nature of all that thinking I was doing, I started to think about the future and where my life was heading in general (I’m sure I’m not the only one who has found themselves obsessing about life at wee hours of the night). That led to me observing the evidence of where I am in life right now compared to where I thought (or had planned) to be and as much as I hate to admit it, part of me was overcome by fear. Fear that thirty or forty years from now,  I would have ultimately failed in the pursuit of my goals… that I would have lived in a fantasy world where I thought anything was possible, only to be left holding an empty sac at the end of it all.

Sometimes I tell myself I would be happier if I didn’t try to dream too much…I would be happier if I just tried to keep things simple. Maybe part of this is true. Ambition can be a double edged sword. It can be an internal engine that drives you and makes you dig deeper than you ever thought you could in the face of adversity. It can also be something that weighs you down… a thief that robs you of your ability to be happy…a dictator that unequivocally prohibits you from living in the moment.  How one safeguards against ambition becoming the latter is maybe discussion for another day. All I want to say right now is that I recognize the ebbs and flows of emotions that come with daring to have dreams and pursue them.

As I stared up at the ceiling and continued my internal dialogue, I couldn’t help but take my mind back to my college days when I lived with my uncle. We had a porch at the back of the house overlooking a forest of trees that acted as a blanket, shielding what lay on the other side from plain sight.  Many nights I would sit on that back porch for a bit and stare at those tall trees. They were a metaphor…the trees were the unknowns and what lied on the other side, was my future. As I sat and stared and tried to imagine what was on the other side of those trees, I would also think about my future, what the coming years were going to bring and if I was ultimately going to be successful in life.  These days that is not something that I do a lot. Yesterday’s future is my present today and over the years I have learned to focus most of my energy in simply following through on strategy an execution to achieve my desired outcomes. As a result, the sense of fear I was experiencing in that moment though not a stranger, was like a long lost acquaintance that I had not spoken to in a while.

I guess that is why I decided to write this down. First, to acknowledge that fear. I recognize it and I need a little bit of it to keep me sharp. Secondly and more importantly, to encourage myself to keep going. It is human to fear, but it also human to defy the odds. In my late teen years I went through a period where the first thing I did every morning was to recite aloud to myself the words of the Richard Rodgers’ song made popular by the Sound of Music movie. Today, I will conclude by typing aloud those words once again:

Climb every mountain

Search high and low,

follow every byway, every path you know

Climb every mountain,

ford every stream,

follow every rainbow, till you find your dream.

A dream that will need ALL the love you can give,

every day of your life, for as long as you live!

God bless the dreamers everywhere.

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I Promise: 10 promises I have made to myself

“We want people to make guarantees to us, but we are not willing to make guarantees to ourselves.” The first person I heard say this was Dr. Eric Thomas and listening to him I couldn’t help but say to myself, “you know what, he’s right!” I’m sure you’ve seen countless commercials on TV where they say a product is going to do something and if it doesn’t, you have a 30 day money back guarantee. Now let’s say hypothetically speaking that you purchased one of such products and it failed to deliver.  You would walk into the vendor’s store to return it with complete confidence that you’re going to get your money back because of the GUARANTEE that was made to you. You expect it. It is an afterthought. In fact it would not be far- fetched to say that you demand it. Failure of the vendor to live up to this guarantee may lead to you becoming visibly agitated or angry because you expect him/her to be accountable. But what guarantees are you willing to make to yourself? What are those promises that you have made to yourself which you expect to follow through on irrespective of the circumstances happening to and around you? Do you hold yourself to the same degree of accountability like you would that vendor when it comes to these things?

Today I thought I would share 10 promises that I have made to myself. They are things that I have and continue to condition myself to follow through on come rain or sunshine.  They are my own. They may be different from yours, but if you’ve not picked up the habit of making certain guarantees to yourself, I encourage you to give it a try. Enjoy:

I Promise to have commitment: Decision, Action, COMMITMENT. These are the building blocks of a new identity. When you get to the point where you want to change a certain thing about yourself, it will usually go something like this: you get to the point where you feel you cannot lie to yourself anymore. You’re fed up and may be slightly irritated with yourself and you decide that something has to change. You take some action to effect that change. All of a sudden you have this burst of energy. It’s like you have a new lease on life. That energy lasts for a while and you’re cruising, but then it starts to wane. This is where commitment steps up to the stage. When the energy fades, all that is left is the measure of the man/woman. You must remember why you wanted to change and you must see to it that commitment is reinforced periodically.  There is not a once and for all shower that keeps you clean and free of dirt permanently.  You get dirty, you shower again. If you will make it to the other side of change, of a new identity, you’re going to need commitment.

I promise to show consistency: One of the beautiful things about life is that if we look around and pay attention, there are always lessons to be learned and reinforced. From the little drops of water from a leaking pipe that eventually fill a bucket, to a savings bank account that compounds over time, life does its best to explain the concept of consistency to us. A little effort sustained over a period of time is much more beneficial than a seasonal herculean effort. As a trivial example, I remember when I got to the point where I wanted to make working out a permanent fixture in my life. At first I was pushing myself hard, spending about 2.5 hours at the gym daily. I would lift weights for about an hour and a half and then hop on the treadmill for another hour. But I also noticed my gym activity was infrequent. I would be consistent for 2 months and then disappear for another 5 months before returning.  When I sat with myself to find out why I was so infrequent, I realized that subconsciously I dreaded going to the gym because I had made it so grueling and taken the fun out of it. Simply put, my 2.5 hours of pushing myself to the limit everyday while they were awesome in terms of body results for the short period of time, were not sustainable. I made a simple tweak to cut my gym sessions to an intense 1 hour a day for five days a week. This enabled me to be more consistent which yielded better sustained results in terms of body goals as opposed to sporadic ones. The longest I have been absent from the gym since then is about 2 weeks, as opposed to 5 months.

I promise to have focus: There may be some arguments to be had here, but most of the successful people that I have studied seem to have a common trait: an uncanny ability to zero in and focus. In science we are thought that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. It can only be converted from one form to another. Simply put, energy is a finite resource. If energy were infinite then we would pay no mind to how it was expended. The fact that it is however, means that we must pay attention to how we allocate our energy in order to maximize the results we seek. Certain things you give your energy to will take you closer to your goals. Certain things you give your energy to will pull you further away.  Zig Ziglar always talked about how you must avoid being a wandering generality and be a meaningful specific instead. Figure out what you want and where you’re trying to go in life. Pay attention to the activities and people that get you closer there, and focus on those.

I promise to show urgency: You’ve heard it said many times… without urgency, desire loses its value. There simply isn’t much more I can say to articulate that better. A sense of urgency helps you attack your goals in a manner that you otherwise wouldn’t. There is no time like the present. One of the things that I’m looking and hoping to get better at over time is cultivating a deeper sense of urgency when it comes to the goals I set.

I promise to have clarity of vision: I spoke at length about this in an earlier blog post in July. Vision is such an underrated skill to have, that it is often overlooked. I rank it up there with the dexterity of a decorated gymnast or the athletic prowess of an Usain Bolt. At any point in the day, be it my first waking moment or some other random time, if I am stopped and asked, I want to be able to clearly state what the vision for my life is, where I am going and where I see myself in a number of years. The sooner I can do that, the sooner I can get to work.

I promise to push myself and work: When I was growing up, my dad would always say to me “be sure to make hard work your best friend.” All these years later, those words still echo in my head from time to time. Some people say work smart, not hard. Fair enough. But make sure you show up and work. There are certain things that I want to ultimately be defined by, and hard work is one of them. When we make demands of life, sweat equity is not a bad collateral to have.

I promise to have gratitude: Here’s the secret of gratitude: it will ALWAYS cause a shift in mental paradigm. That shift in mental paradigm causes a re-infusion of energy that gets you going and chasing again. It is hard to be in a state of “woe is me” when you have gratitude. Whenever I feel beat up or feel like I’ve got nothing left to give and it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to pack it in and give up, I try to find 2 or 3 things that I am thankful for. They may be small or seem inconsequential, but I just need enough to get me going again.

I promise to value the principle of time: Time, just like energy is finite. It is the one thing that you cannot get back. I always maintain that the greatest indicator that you truly value a person is that you are willing to give them some of your time. I try to have a deep respect for time, and an understanding that it cannot be retrieved. This understanding dictates the way I approach certain things. As a trivial example, I work when I work, and I play when I play. I am always searching for better ways to allocate my time in order to maximize results.

I promise to be a decent human being: It is my firm belief that after all is said and done, the greatest thing you can invest in while on earth, is people. I believe in kindness absent of being continually taken advantage of. I believe in going the extra mile if it can make someone else’s day just a little better.

I promise to always welcome challenge: The only reason you graduated middle school and then high school and possibly college was because you passed the tests along every step of the way. The only reason a person graduates from riding a bicycle in the park to being able to operate a motor vehicle on the interstate at high speed is because they passed a driver’s test. Life is no different.  Life is dynamic…always happening. It has ebbs and flows, peaks and valleys. I have come to believe that those moments that seem like valleys are there to test me. They are there to teach me something. To state it differently, problems are simply opportunities for growth. If we can pay attention to the lessons we have to learn and approach each discomfort with the right attitude, we can come out on the other side better than before. I do not run from challenges. I welcome them, I learn and I grow.

I will conclude with the question I started with. What guarantees have you made to yourself?

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This One Time at a Bar

There she was, legs crossed sitting across the bar. Not quite with her back to me, not quite facing me. Her striking slender side profile was conspicuous, hypnotic and as inviting as a condensing cold jar of lemonade on a scorching hot summer day. From my vantage point I could see that she had silky smooth skin that had been kissed by the sun and curves so carefully placed, it could only have been done by a master geometrician. “What a beauty! I must go over and say hi,”I thought to myself.

You see I had been fueled by a capricious burst of energy when I walked in here and its hold over me did not seem to be subsiding anytime soon. Caution be damned! I approached the lady in the bold print dress with red high heels, pulled up a chair next to her and said “Excuse me miss. Is there any chance you work for UPS? Because I could have sworn you were checking out my package”.  She let out a chuckle and rolled her eyes in an unamused manner while remarking “you’re one of those guys huh?” Before I could think of a quick witted response, she beckoned me to have a seat.

As soon as I sat, she leaned in to the side of my face. My heart palpitations at an all-time high, she whispered in my ear with a sultry raspy voice…”You’re a lucky one. I’m a genie in the form of a goddess, and I’m in the mood to grant 3 wishes. What’s on your mind?” Still in my live on the edge mode I simply replied “Wine, dine and sixty nine….but first I must know your name.” “That’s four wishes” she retorted, but “for you I will make an exception”.

Seemingly more comfortable with each other, I ran my index finger gently up and down her shoulder while she drew light circles around my thighs. There we were, on an island amongst the sea of people in the room, lost in conversation, oblivious of anything around us.

She told me her name was Today. She said she had an equally beautiful sister named Tomorrow, and being that I was now at ease, I suggested a ménage a trois with all three of us. She told me her sister Tomorrow was a little more reserved and was not a sure promise, so to focus on what was in front of me…her, Today! With quiet waters all around us, I hung on to her every word as they dripped eloquently from her lips like honey from a tipped jar.

A few feet away from us Mr. Society had started to unleash a drunken tirade on a few unsuspecting patrons. You see he always had these expectations of people who visited the bar. People usually conformed because no one wanted Mr. Society picking on them. Every once in a while though, you had a rebel come through who would not conform and had no problems challenging his expectations. No sooner had that died down when Anxious Alex started to scream loudly at his cell phone. From what I could gather, there was a shipment coming in at the port tomorrow and there was a chance no one was going to be there when it docked. Anxious Alex was a supervisor for the Ports Authority and he earned his name because he worried about everything, from work to who was going to clean up all the mess left behind after the county fair. All these things were starting to distract me from the vision of elegance before me that was Today. If I was going to command the full attention of this damsel, a change in scenery was a necessity and so I promptly asked her if she would like to take a walk. This meant that we had to give up the coziness of the bar, but neither I nor Today cared much about this.

We went down to the beach and watched the people sun tanning. We went to the farmer’s market and observed all the beautiful commotion around us. We even picked up a few fruits to smell them. We rented bikes and rode across the city. It was like we were seeing the city in a light we had never done before. Being with her, it was like time stood still. Nothing mattered, just me and Today. It was about to be sunset, and we were determined to catch the perfect view. So we hiked up a cliff till we found the perfect spot to perch. The sun was magnificently radiant, dressed in her orange best as she began to take her momentary leave from the city for a night away from prying eyes. There was no one in sight. Just myself, Today and the overwhelming feeling of peace, quiet and serenity. It was beautiful. It was special. From the corner of my eye I could feel Today staring at me, so I turned and asked “What”? She smiled gently and said “We should really spend more time together”. With full conviction I replied… “You know, I was just thinking the same thing”. THE END

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I’ll See Your Uncertainty and I’ll Raise You Some Passion: The Subject of Passion and How to Find It

Follow your passion! If you’re like me and you’ve had the fortune of sitting through a commencement speech a time or two, then you’ve surely heard this theory espoused in one form or another. It is the stuff of motivational speakers everywhere. Year after year, thousands of graduating seniors be it at the college or high school level are challenged to follow that thing that lights a fire within as opposed to necessarily chasing a big pay day. If you’re also like me, in addition to all the challenges that the future posed, one major consternation was figuring what exactly your passion was in the first place. I read a book a long time ago where the writer put it like this: “I’ve never been afraid of hard work. I just needed to find the right vehicle for success.” I remember reading that and thinking to myself “at least someone out there knows my plight.” In reality, this problem of figuring out a person’s passion is more common than most of us think. The aching feeling of hopelessness that is a by-product of not being able to figure out what exactly one is supposed to be spending their life doing is something that plagues many youths (and adults) across the world today. So instead of relentlessly talking about following your passion, maybe a more useful discourse to have would be how exactly we go about finding our passion in the first place. Is there a science to finding one’s passion? Is discovering your passion something that manifests itself as some sort of an epiphany where one day you go to bed aimlessly roaming and the next day you wake up, the light bulb goes off and you’re instantly sure without a shadow of a doubt what your passion is? Or is passion something that is peeled back over time to reveal itself? I don’t have all the definite answers, but I can share with you some things I have learned in my journey of figuring out how to identify what exactly my passion is or should be.

The first advice I can give with regards to how to find your passion is to do away with the myth that falling in love with a passion is going to be sudden and swift. In actuality, more often than not, a first encounter with what might eventually lead to a lifelong passion is just exactly that….a first encounter! It is no different than meeting someone who might turn out to be your life long partner for the first time. There is that initial exchange of pleasantries, but after that must come a period of sticking with it, trying to deepen your knowledge about the other person where you might find that there are so many other facets to this person you didn’t know about in the beginning which may make you like them more or less. Simply put, what may become a lifelong passion does not start out as a passion. It starts out as an interest. In her book titled Grit, Angela Duckworth puts it like this: “passion for your work is a little bit of discovery, followed by a lot of development, and then a lifetime of deepening”.

The second bit of advice I can give kind of expands on the first: passion (or interest in its nascent stages) is not discovered through introspection. Instead, interest is triggered through interaction with the outside world. Angela Duckworth whom I referenced earlier talks about how the process of discovery can be sometimes messy and inefficient due to the fact that you can’t predict with certainty what will capture your attention and what won’t. Don’t force interests on yourself. Without experimenting, you will be hard pressed to figure out which interest is going to stick and which won’t. Most people have heard the saying that “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” the implication being that we must take care of work before we play. In most contexts, this is accurate. However, when it comes to interests, the reverse is actually the case. Before hard work comes play. To put it in another way, nobody (even a person with a high degree of self-discipline and ability to follow through) is going to work doggedly on something they don’t find intrinsically interesting.  Before the development stage which requires some time, energy and sacrifice, there has to be a period of messing around, triggering and re-triggering interests.  A high number of the most accomplished of experts start out as unsure beginners.

For my third advice, if you’ve found something that sparks your interest, I would encourage you to stick with it for a little bit and not give up at the first sign of turbulence. This lends itself to the idea of development and deepening referenced above.  In advanced geometry, we often talk about the concept of Spatial Reasoning.  It refers to the ability to project objects into space and think about them in three dimensions, and to draw conclusions about those objects from limited information. I want you to think about your interests as these objects and metaphorically project them into space. Explore them from different angles. Discover the nuances which were not readily apparent at first glance. Dedicate yourself to spend the time, energy, sacrifice, hard work and self-discipline required to do this.

To drive this point home, I will summarize by sharing a bit of my own experience with these ideas (my writings are meant to be a form of introspection after all).  In my everyday life I automate complicated systems so that they can function with little to no human interaction. However, I did not always want to do this. My earliest ambition in life was to become a soccer player as I was (and still am) head over heels in love with everything about the game.  As I grew older, I would watch my dad go to work every morning, smartly dressed in a suit with his briefcase in hand. I liked the look of this and would often imagine myself all grown up in a suit, shaking hands and closing big deals in the financial sector. This combined with my affinity for books naturally led me to have an interest in business and accounting. As I progressed further in my education, I found a real love in mathematics. The result of being pulled in different directions was that at the end of high school, I still wasn’t exactly sure what direction I wanted to pivot my life.  I finally decided that while I seemed to love math, I needed something with a bit more variety which would mean more opportunity in the future but still had some math in it. So on a whim, I decided to experiment with electrical engineering.  Even there, I faced more challenges as it offered so many lanes and it all felt a bit inundating. In my junior year of college I considered switching majors and even went as far as starting the initial process. However, that year I walked into a control systems class, and a spark was lit. Not a flame, just a spark. I was intrigued by the fact that with some math and some programming, I could in some sense play god to complex machines and systems and give them a sense of autonomy. I explored this spark and while there were some tough moments, it gradually started to become more than an interest to me. It started to become a passion. What has followed since those years has been an unrelenting quest to further develop and deepen this passion.  I was 19 years old going on 20 before I would learn my first programming language or write my first line of code (kids today write their first line of code at about 11 or 12).  Today I have written code in about 9 languages all of which were self-taught with the exception of 1. I am still pushing myself to hone in on my skills by learning new languages every day, and figuring out better ways to use the skills I already have more efficiently. In general, I continue to experiment as I try explore other interests and try to discover new passions. For one, I have always had a thing for books and writing. These blogs in some way are a form of experimentation for me as I try to explore that interest and see if it leads to a newly found passion.

Your interests may have nothing to do with books or anything technical, but the principle remains the same. The first stop on your journey to finding your passion begins with experimenting with your perceived interests (discovery). You must explore and experiment outwardly with freedom and without putting any pressure on yourself. Don’t be afraid to try things. How do I know what to even try? Here’s how:  Ask yourself some basic questions. What do I find myself thinking about? How do I enjoy spending my time? What do I find absolutely unbearable? Begin with the answers you’re surest of and build from there.

Cheers!

* I don’t normally do this, but I would like to take out time in this week’s blog to give due credit to Angela Duckworth. Her book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance in my opinion has some of the most compelling and articulated material I have read on the subject of Passion. The second section of the book talks about growing grit from the inside out.  Chapter 7 deals specifically with interests, and some of the ideas in that chapter have been repeated in this blog post. She does not sponsor my blog, but I highly recommend this book as a must read for everyone.

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To Treadmill or Not to Treadmill: Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Fulfillment

So there I was, idly wasting time, browsing the internet looking for some mild relief from the boredom that I was currently experiencing and then I saw it! Some Hollywood executives were in talks to do a remake of the Child’s Play movie series. For those of you unfamiliar with this series, it stars the iconic child slashing doll Chucky… a toy doll who had been possessed by a serial killer which proceeded to wreak havoc across kid’s bedrooms in America. Reading this news quickly bolted my mind down memory lane to my childhood watching the Child’s Play series. I would be curled up in a ball of horror and suspense as I waited with anticipation on what terror chucky was about to unleash on an unsuspecting child in the next scene. What started out as a simple trip down memory lane quickly gave way to full blown nostalgia as I began to reflect on my childhood and the years I spent growing up. That in turn got me thinking about life in general… the expectations you have of the future as a kid, some innately conjured and others surreptitiously implanted by our environment and larger societal norms.

You see the conventional roadmap on what life is supposed to be like is pretty straightforward. You go through rigorous years of getting an education, from kindergarten to middle school, and then to high school. Then you go off to college to get a degree. If you had parents like mine, after your first degree you better go on to get a graduate degree. Then you enter into workforce and hopefully because of the degree you’ve obtained, you get a decent paying job. Time waits for no one and the clock is constantly ticking, so after a few years of working that job, you get married, buy a house and pop out some kids a few years after that. You go on to have a glittering career after which you retire at about 60 or so. If you’re lucky, you get a gold watch or something of that sort from your company for years of diligent service. By this time your kids are somewhere on their own journey on this conveyor belt of life. You on the other hand are now looking forward to the next phase. Hopefully you have enough money saved up in your 401k and other investments where your lifestyle doesn’t take too much of a hit. Sounds familiar doesn’t it?

Now while there is absolutely nothing wrong with the scenario I have described above, the point I’m trying to make is that it is ‘conventional’ and is not always the key that unlocks happiness for every individual. More importantly, too many people either in a bid to fit in with the rest of society or for a fear of exploring the restlessness within them pointing them to a different path go through the motions in life waking up every day feeling miserable, mentally exhausted and having to summon more energy than they required the previous day to get through the day. It’s like drowning in a pool of societal expectations where every once in a while you muster enough strength to come up for a gasp of air before you are sucked back in by its cross currents. Or being on a treadmill where it slows down for a couple of seconds for you to catch your breath before it picks up speed again, going twice as fast as it was before and you have no idea how to get off the treadmill. Simply put, life is this ladder that you can’t climb fast enough to keep up. This is the exact predicament shed light on by the writer of the song The Storm is Over when he laments “I’ve been racing for years, and there’s still no finish line.” You’re barely starting to find your feet career wise and now you feel the pressure to get married from family, and all your friends seem to be getting hitched. 30 is around the corner and you know you better have kids by then. Your parents want their grand kids. Your grandparents too, and if you’ve been reading the medical journals, the health risks only get steeper at that point. You better hurry!

What if in an alternate universe, you stopped to really think about your life and ask yourself what would really make you happy? What if you stood on the mountain of the days you are living out right now, and looked over the horizon to your latter years….what would have given you your greatest sense of fulfillment? Is it having a 9 to 5 job or doing something else? Is it having kids or not? For some they will find happiness and fulfillment in the conventional life map and time stipulations dictated by societal norms and again, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. But for the ones that seem like they’re gasping for air, what if you could challenge yourself to get off the treadmill….get off the ladder and start living life on your own terms and based on your own timelines?

Now some people may say to me listen, that all sounds well and good, but it is simply rhetoric. At some point rhetoric has to match reality and the fluffiness of such thinking is laid bare. To put it simply, we live in the real world and bills have to get paid. People have to do what they have to do to soothe the loneliness that plagues the human condition. To such people I say yes, I hear you. We do live in a real world. But, I also believe that in that real world everyone who bothers to pay attention has an internal compass…an inward north star that ultimately points them towards that which will bring them the greatest sense of happiness and fulfillment as they go through this human experience. So do what you can to take care of everyday responsibilities. But make exploring that compass until you are without a shadow of a doubt clear on where it is pointing you your highest priority.  You will find no greater zest for life, no greater energy to wake up and take on each day than when you spend each moment in the pursuit and cultivation of the path that your north star points towards. At that moment, life ceases to be a treadmill moving at steadily escalating speeds. At that moment, life becomes a road trip with you as its most esteemed passenger, where you have the full autonomy to stop, take in the beautiful scenery and admire the landmarks along the way, smell the roses, then get back on and keep traveling.

Cheers!