Tidbits – Path to Success and Road to Failure!

The path to success is seldom found navigating the route of minimal risk or least resistance. And when found, such success seldom offers a sense of accomplishment. Often, when found easy, no one sees it as success any more.

In contrast, the road to failure is fairly easy to find. All one needs to do is to stop trying. Also, it is fairly easy to stay there. Once you get there, you just need to stop steering and be on auto-pilot.

Tip of the day – How to live …austerity with nature!

Use natural resources available to you as if you’ve borrowed them from your children, not like you’ve inherited an abundance of it from your parents.

Tidbits – Search and Find...

There are interesting lessons to learn from how curious language constructs, when they are not definitive and are open to interpretation, have ended up molding human behavior and beliefs beyond repair. 

It is amusing to note that a large section of the population has interpreted finding happiness as the logical culmination of an elaborate search process! At the other end of the spectrum are the ‘happiness practitioners’, who, perhaps correctly, are of the opinion that you can only find something if it was lost in the first place – happiness, therefore, either is or is not!!

Tidbits – Education.

All the education in the world is focused on helping you understand every spoken or written word. And the world around you. That is the paradigm of knowledge. This is education that can be imparted. The sources could be all the books and literature that is out there and the medium could be a classroom or a seminar. The subjects to be learned here are definitive and the success of the learning process can be tested through traditional tests and graded as we know it all too well. The questions here are ‘how’, ‘what’ and, surprisingly, even ‘why’.

The other kind of education comes from understanding the interplays between you and your environment. On a daily basis. As you live life. If you are aware enough to sit up and take notice, that is. This education is experiential. It helps you understand yourself, what the world means to you and what you mean to the world. This is the paradigm of wisdom. Wisdom helps you understand silence just as well as the spoken word. This education is imbibed, not imparted. The source here is your life and your experiences. The medium is the entire ecosystem that you exist in. The subjects here are open to interpretation and there is no definitive right or wrong answer to questions. What worked in one situation may not in another. What is right is one situation may be wrong in another. Most things in this paradigm are relative. The premise is dynamic and moving. The questions here are ‘how come’, ‘what the...’, ‘why not’ kind.

Neither kinds of education can thrive without the other. What’s the point of all the education of the first kind if it cannot be applied effectively to impact lives? And what’s the point of all the education of the second kind if you do not understand the phenomena that belong to the first kind so as to interpret the experiences?

Some interesting read on this and related topics -

http://www.forbes.com/sites/sap/2012/08/15/what-is-the-purpose-of-education/

Tip of the day – How to live …appeal to your senses!

Take a short break from your routine, step back from the environment you are right now in, take a few deep breaths and just look around all the people around you. Wherever you are, whatever you do, it is likely you would find folks interacting with one gadget or the other. Someone on a laptop, another snuggling on a couch in front of a television, yet another browsing, talking, reading or texting on a phone or simply jogging with a headphone listening to music. Look for how many folks you come across who are enjoying the experience of their primary act for that moment and look for how long they stay with it before getting diverted. Chances are that they would be in minority!   

Reading about music is not quite the same as listening to it. Listening to music is not quite the same as playing it. Reading the preview or review of a movie is not the same as watching it. Watching a movie in an unknown language with subtitles is a far cry from watching a movie in a known language where you can follow the dialogues.

If you see the photograph of a beautiful or exotic flower, you are visually energized. It is not nearly the same as touching and smelling a flower. Rose fragrance appeals to the olfactory but is not the same as holding a rose to your nose. Watching a coffee ad on television is not the same as smelling it brewing! Reading through a recipe book with instructions, ingredients and illustrations of a recipe isn’t quite like eating it. What’s a wine if you do not get to smell or taste it?

Seeing photographs of snowy mountains is never the same as breathing the mountain air with a chill in the winds and seeing the enormity of it from its midst. Watching a documentary of wild animals in a dense forest with a commentary in the background does not convey the absolute silence or pitch darkness or when they are broken while in the jungle. The most beautiful images of the beaches, the sunrise, the waves and tides cannot give you the feeling of standing on a beach with the warmth of the sun on your back and the din of the waves and the infinitum of the horizon and the salty humidity of the coastal climate.

It is said that you ‘experience’ something when there are at least 3 senses involved in any single act. I would extend that argument to several acts that appeal to almost all senses we know of. But the crux is that one needs to go out there and experience it. Any amount of time spent watching, listening to or reading about things you like and love cannot measure up to experiencing it in person. There is an urgent need for people to go out and live their lives in the real world, be aware of and to experience everything around them…to appeal to their senses! Evolution has shown us that faculties that are not utilized for generations could eventually turn vestigial. The electronic generation runs a risk of beginning the process of doing precisely that to our species…by going virtual!

So go out there and live your real life…by appealing to your senses!

Tip of the day – What’s your destiny?

The relentless march of multitudes of people towards what they are convinced can be changed, their destiny, needs closer examination. By definition, destiny is predetermined, something that will necessarily and inevitably happen, and is fore-ordained.

So what’s all the fuss about trying to change one’s destiny all about, then? What does this mean to folks who are in hot pursuit of goals and are driven by milestones?

In simple terms, the pursuit has to be for the right things. If destiny is predetermined, there is no need to pursue it. One can pursue a variety of other things that make the journey fulfilling, exciting and worthwhile – health, wealth, knowledge, fame, happiness, friendship, peace of mind, to name a few. You cannot change destiny but you can alter the course to it.

Folks who set out to alter destiny hit the wall sooner or later because their purpose is flawed. People who seek fulfillment in the journey, set goals, targets and milestones around finding those ‘other things’ along the way, not at the end of it. And, tell you what? These are folks that do actually end up achieving a lot more in their lives. They end up altering the course. And filled with fire and passion, they continue to march along unfamiliar terrain charting their own paths. And their destiny does change. No, not in absolute terms, no! But surely in terms of what the world thought their destiny would be.

Mind you, these two categories of people put together, and in their own rights, are a thin minority. The vast majority goes through the motions and does not spare a thought along these lines for at least the better part of their lives. And, not surprisingly, they are not a point of most discussions anyway.

A few examples of the first category of people who set out to change destiny can be found in folks who waged wars and conquered territories to get there. Their kick was not in the journey. The destiny was in the end. And it certainly panned out so! And some from the second category, who did not set out in the pursuit of the theory of relativity, or the concept of gravity, or creating works of art that would be displayed to the world at the Louvre, or being the first heads of states, or founding the largest corporations of the world at different times till date. The list is endless. But these folks got there in pursuit of finding fulfillment in the journey. You would find enough examples across all walks of life, in your own lives, if you look hard, that vindicates the point.

So what’s your destiny?

Tip of the day - The knowledge hill in ignorance land and the theory of relativity that applies there.

The journey up the knowledge hill from the base of the land of ignorance looks like this -

I know little

I know what I know (1 in 5)

I know what I know and can talk about it in detail, with authority (1 in 10)

I know what I do not know (1 in 100)

I know where to find what I do not know and am inclined to know it (1 in 200)

I know where to find what I do not know and have read/tried to learn it (1 in 400)

I have understood what I tried to learn (1 in 1000)

I can apply what I have learned in most situations that warrant it (1 in 10000)

OK. The numbers may vary but the message does not get diluted. This is reality. The lower rungs of the hill are all about awareness and the slope is gentle. Awareness is the most rudimentary step in the pursuit of knowledge. And all one needs to climb the knowledge hill is to think and act. Plain and simple. But it takes commitment and effort.

Are there many such hills? Of course, for every sphere or field of knowledge, there exists a hill. Do we have successful folks, rich folks, knowledgeable folks, smart folks at all levels of this hill? Yes, we do. That is where the theory of relativity comes in. To every person at every level of the hill, except the base of ‘I know little’, there are a bunch of folks more knowledgeable and a bunch of folks less knowledgeable than them. What you do with them determines all the other attributes like success, richness, smartness et al that we briefly mentioned. You could exploit the lack of knowledge of the lower rung(s) to achieve some of these. You could learn from the rung(s) above to fill the knowledge gap and climb the hill. You could monetize your knowledge. You could socialize it. Whatever you do, it would be by choice as you go up the hill.

What do not exist at the bottom of the hill are choices. What does exist, even there, is opportunity.

All you need is to reach out to the folks just above! And if they aren’t helping, you know what they are in it for!!