First step towards change

I read somewhere that the first step to success is to change. Repeating the same routine, going through the same motions day after day cannot achieve anything. “Every day is exactly the same” by Nine Inch Nails has echoed through my mind for the past year. I just did exactly what I had been told and lacked the will to change my schedule. I simply waited for a miracle to happen.

Well a year on that miracle has yet to happen. And today I just can’t get myself to listen to that song anymore. I hate the lyrics and know that I need to initiate the change. At work I have become more organized and that’s helped me to get more done. But work isn’t the end of my lives and I refuse to let the change be limited to that. The next steps in my life need to address other aspects. There are a lot of nice “To-Do” items that I have wanted to get around to. My problems are procrastination and ADD. I just can’t seem to focus on anything long enough to get it done. Well hopefully that changes today.

My list of “To-Do” items will now have a priority and time line by which they must finish. Once I get One Note access at work, I will also keep tabs on how the progress of each is coming along. Wish me luck.

Eureka - Does it happen

Disclaimer: It’s the middle of the night (3:09 AM to be precise). I cannot be held responsible for writing something that makes no sense.

When do we reach our limits? Does one have a eureka moment of enlightenment?

Back in the day I decided that I would be better than the rest. That I would not participate in the rat race but would rather excel and chart my path. Somewhere along that journey I got lost. Not only did I lose directions but I also lost my destination.

There is only hope today. Hope of finding my way back. The problem – Hope is not a plan.

The following questions need an answer

- What

- Why

- How

When is not an issue. Once I know the what and how, the why will dictate the when automatically.

Future holds a lot of things for us. Sadness I hope plan is not one of them. Tomorrow brings a new day, a new light. Sounds cliché doesn’t it. The first reaction of anyone hearing that would be tomorrow will be no different. Stop kidding yourself. Things won’t change in a day just because you want them to.

[This is the part of the article where I would write something profound to shut those pessimists up. But I don’t care to. I write this because I want to and not because someone needs to read]

Tomorrow will bring a change for me. Simply because I choose so. Before EOD tomorrow, I will have a plan for the next week. The what and the how will be decided. I can’t decide why as yet because the what needs to be significant enough to decide the why. For now this will have to do.

What should we chase?

It's been a while since I wrote. These are just some random thoughts

What is important enough to us to chase?

Financial Security -
As I look at my life, I am well settled for a 25 year old. Having a reasonably well paying secured job, I have the luxury to spend money if I want to. Not that I can buy a Lexus tomorrow, but I don’t need to rethink my finances if I spend $1,000 on something I want. The problem – I don’t think is a significant achievement. There seems to be more to life than making ends meet. May be it’s just the fact that I have never experienced financial hardships, but to me life is more than just worrying about what is the source of your next pay check.

Dreams -
During this trip back to India, I met two friends who chased their dreams in two different ways. L was working in a call center and decided to make the most of his dreams there. When I had known him, he was working as the floor operation manager at one of the Mumbai call centers. 5 years on, he is now the VP of a call center (I don’t know if it’s at the same call center). He is only a couple of years elder to me, and though working in an industry traditional looked down upon, nobody can deny his achievements. And he is happy.
The second case is T. He is working as a freelancer for a media graphics start up. His life lacks everything that mine has. He lives in literally in a slum in Bandra in an area that I didn’t know existed (he lives close to where I lived during my engineering, but I never knew there was a slum there). Honestly saying, I don’t know if I could struggle through those conditions to achieve my dreams. But he is.

Prestige –
All of us want to feel important. We want to believe that our existence makes a difference. I believe I have reached that position at my current employer. I am the SME (subject matter expert) for my part of the application and regularly help others. But look beyond the small world of my employer and I don’t exist. If I look to what I think I want to do in life, my current work is not contributing to me being able to make that transition. If I were to search for job profiles of what I want, I do not make the requirements.
It may be a mix of these. I don’t think an individual can be happy unless he chases his dreams. Getting up each morning, you should feel like you want to go to work. The sad part, most of us don’t. Though my sample set is a small one (only my friends), over 90% of them don’t like what they are doing. They do so only to make ends meet or because society expects them to do so.
I still think I want to risk it. At the risk of ending up in the financial position of T, I want to reach the mark that L is at (my friends).

A lost soul

As I walk through the jungle, I realize I am alone. I seem to have left my group behind. Don't really remember which at which turn it happened; but as I kept moving forward, they did not seem to keep up. I should have looked behind. Should have told them - "here is where I'm heading". But then again, I never knew where is it I was going. As I traversed through the horde of paths available to me, I kept trying to find my way forward. Left at this juncture, I am faced with the choice again. I could traverse back a bit hoping to find the rest of them but the uncertainty of success scares me. I think I want to just keep moving forward. Sometime, somewhere this path will lead me to... To what I do not know. May be I'm destined to be a traveler all my life. In any case, I can't stand still. Let me pack my bag pack and move, for now with uncertainty.

A Torn Soul

A broken heart, a shattered goal. All that remains is the final blow. You know you’re in deep shit when your life seems to have been reduced to a mere existence; reduced to a routine that you follow every day. This year has been harsh on you. You lost your love, you lost your will, hell you even lost yourself. All you wanted was to be happy. To share a smile with someone; with someone who left you crying alone. You know you need to win, but how does one win against oneself. This fight seems to be a lost cause. From the looks of everything around you; from the look of the existence known as your life, it seems you’re destined to lose. Destined to not achieve your goal.

Destiny is playing a cruel game and you seem to be the preferred choice for the role of guinea pig. If sadness was an entity, then the lyrics from Alan Seeger’s rendezvous come to mind.
“It may be he shall take my hand
And lead me into his dark land
And close my eyes and quench my breath--
It may be I shall pass him still.”

Its new year’s today. A fresh start, a new resolution, may be even a new dream. So hold my hand, and stand by me. Look sadness in the eye and walk into to the light. To survive is to endure and prosper; take an oath to survive. I don’t believe in petty resolutions. Things that you forget after you recover from the hangover. I know you want to survive. As I sit by my bed to say grace, I wish that you do the same.

Aim-less direction

We all have a routine that we daily adhere to. We get up, get ready and then head out to our job, school or just stay at home and repeat the routine of cleaning up the house etc. The same activities are done over and over again, just the content associated with the activity changes. A typical sentence in an SD’s (software developer) vocabulary is “I already fixed bug #X,Y,Z last week, this week there are bigger issues bug #A,B need to be addressed while a new bug – bug number #C has come up.” That’s all that we have become. Earlier our routine was a part of our lives, now our lives have become a part of our routine. We move your lives around to fit these pre-set “schedule”. Very few fight the paradigm anymore. Those who do are either revered as “mavericks” if they succeed or “losers” if they fail. Richard Fuld was hailed as a maverick when he brought Lehman brothers out of crisis, and now as the investment banking giant crumbles people question his judgment and his ability to lead.

As we grow, we kill our ability to learn. Lethargy and lack of self belief lead us to mindless and aimlessly follow the path ahead of us. With little or no idea behind what our objective is, we travel the path set to us by the bounds of society. Slowly we change. We accept that our existence is to traverse that path. We believe that the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is what we really want. (After all, most if not all paths that society has defined for us, have their goal set as money). We crush our dreams and then set these goals as our dreams instead. In a seminar held at my company, the speaker asked us “what is the one thing that you really want to do but just can’t time for?” Different people had different answers but one thing remained common, most of them knew that they really wouldn’t be pursuing that goal anytime soon. He asked us to, many agreed but I am sure if you ask them now, most of them would not have acted upon it.

I did. Thanks to a friend of mine – Miranda - I did. A month later I was jumping out of a plane and experiencing the thrill of a gravity free fall over 10,000 feet in the air. I owe that to her. Consider it whatever you want (lethargy, busy schedule) but I didn’t know where to begin and somehow I just wasn’t making enough efforts to find out. But she knew. She gave us the info and a month later Eric, Molly and me were jumping out of a plane.

I tend to question my existence a lot. Perhaps more than what is healthy. But now I stand at the juncture again where I want to know “where am I heading?” or slightly re-phrased “am I where I wanted to be?” Most people wouldn’t know the answer to that question, some will. I don’t. And again I don’t know where to start looking. All I know is that this time I don’t want to be lazy and let life dictate its terms. This time I want to stand up, take notice and decide what I want. I might make a wrong decision, I might make a mistake but this time I don’t want to let circumstances lead my life, I want to lead it. You can be scared of making a wrong decision and never take one, but to me no decision is wrong unless proven so. I know what will happen if my decision ends up being a wrong one – absolutely nothing. No one decision can dictate what happens to my life and what happens to me. Shit happens, but I am a fighter – I’ll always make it through.

Hmmm – the most useless word in the English dictionary

I really want to find and beat up the guy that added the word [/sound] hmmm to the English dictionary. It adds nothing to a conversation at the same time signifying nothing. It could mean the person is just trying to grasp what you say, but more often than not just means the other person has nothing to contribute to the current discussion and wants you to either change the topic [without the other person contribution to the change, lazy as he/she is] or end the conversation. Repeated usages have caused more conversation to be ruined than any other word in the English dictionary. I just hate that word.