The growth of internet and technology has made the world significantly smaller. It has given us the ability and tools to learn from each other and collaborate at a scale that was unimaginable even 50 years ago. On the other hand, it has also made it easy to get instant answers. While learning from another person’s life experience is essential, there is a wealth of knowledge to be gained from going through the process ourselves. This applies to everything from our profession to existential questions.

Recently, I came across a sentence in a book that spoke to me. I paused for a few moments to reflect on it in the context of my personal experiences. As I continued to read the subsequent text, I realized that the author had actually intended to convey a completely different point. But this interpretation didn’t reduce the significance of mine. If I had just read the footnotes from someone else’s reading, I would not have been able to gain the insight that I did.

We never know when we might get such opportunities. Neither can we grab every one of them. So we should attempt to do it wherever possible.

Because the journey is often more important than the answers themselves.

Life is always going to throw problems at us. It is inevitable. Instead of trying to deny our troubles, we should focus our energy on accepting them and working through the situation.

Avoiding problems does not create happiness. The process of solving them does. We will become stronger and wiser for having gone through it.

Given that life is going to be a series of difficult situations, our effort is better spent on ensuring that we have an upgraded problem at the end of the last one. That is an indication of growth.

No number of successes can teach us the necessary lessons that facing a difficult experience can.

Striving for perfection makes us set higher standards and motivates us to improve. It is usually seen as a “good failing” to possess, but is it really?

There was once a carpenter who was approached by an expecting father to build a cradle for his kid. The carpenter envisioned an image of a perfect cradle and started working on it. But he was not satisfied with the final piece and started all over again. The father came to get the cradle the day his son was born but the carpenter sent him back saying that it was not ready yet. For the next two years, the father kept coming back but was always given the same answer. Eventually the child outgrew the crib and the father stopped coming. The son grew up, got married and became an expectant father himself. The grandfather-to-be went back to the carpenter to collect the old crib. But it turned out that it was still not ready because the carpenter couldn’t perfect it!

Even though this story talks in extremes, it is not far from the truth. The yearning for perfection can sometimes result in one of two things. Either (a) we don’t release the final product and thereby lose a crucial window of opportunity or (b) we never start on it because that perfect image is too hard to achieve.

As with most things in life, perfection is a trait that requires balance. The deterministic questions to ask here are what and why. What is the metric I am using to measure the quality of my work? And why am I aiming for this higher standard? We need to frame a clear reason, evaluate it and then use it as fuel to improve. The motivation for improvement should be a growth metric and not perfection itself.

Because perfection for perfection’s sake is narcissistic and ultimately meaningless.

The earlier we fail, the easier we bounce back.

The only thing that can reduce the gap in relationships is understanding each other’s point of view. The important distinction to make here is that understanding doesn’t equal surrender. It simply makes us more receptive to what we hear and more open to work towards an equitable compromise.

Rifts in relationships are not resolved by declaring who is right and who is wrong. On the contrary, it is achieved by finding a win-win situation, the first step to which is understanding.

We have a natural tendency to extrapolate on our most recent experiences and apply them to new people we meet. If someone didn’t respond favorably to a gesture or question and indicated that it was too personal, we immediately assume the same would be true for the next person we meet. We censor our words and guard ourselves closely in subsequent conversations. We do this because we feel exposed and vulnerable in such situations.

But in reality, everybody has his / her own boundaries. We have to judge each person’s comfort level individually, based on our personal interactions with that person alone. This is an important distinction to make because the deep vulnerable moments are when powerful bonds get forged and valuable insights are gained.

Thankful to have learnt this very unique perspective from someone who emulates this approach and has reaped benefits because of it.

Logging hours at work is one of the most mundane tasks that most of us don’t like to do. But if we look at it from a different angle, it serves as a good process to study and modify our working patterns to be more efficient.

Don’t view timesheets as a requirement from the management or the company. See it as a tool to capture the distribution of time (and effort) spent.

How much time am I allocating for learning and growth?

Why is so much time being spent in this project?

What patterns can I find that have the scope to be optimized for efficiency?

And many more like these.

Once we change our perspective, we will also alter the way we log our hours. We will customise it to answer questions about our efficiency and fine-tune it to improve our productivity and growth. It also gives us incentive to make this a daily habit so we can continuously take stock and iteratively improve.

Time is the most valuable investment we can make in our lives. We should do it wisely.

It takes consistent time and will power to build a habit. But it is very easy to break one. For almost every routine we try to form, we will face this challenge, especially in the initial days.

When that happens, obsessing over the break in routine is counter-productive. Even trying to make up for the lost days is actually detrimental. Because we need to put in more time and effort to make up for lost time, it only increases the entry barrier to resume. Instead, if we tried to just continue the habit from the present moment onwards, we have a higher chance of rebuilding the routine.

I followed this piece of advice recently. I didn’t blog one day and with each passing day, the pressure of writing enough posts to make up for the lost days made it harder to continue. But the moment I decided to just let go of the past and resume from the present, I was able to begin writing again.

Thanks to my sis for this valuable piece of wisdom.

Hope for the best

A sentence I have been hearing at work lately. Too often for my liking. It reiterated to me how hope cannot be a strategy.

Hope should be used as fuel to bridge the remaining gap after we have done our best to influence the variables in our control. If we use it as our go-to mantra right from the offset, it just serves as an excuse for not doing our best. And if we have serious failings in our strategy, they will eventually catch up to us.

No amount of hope can be a substitute for the time and effort needed to do a task the right way.

When facing a crossroad, there is no bad choice. Just life lessons whichever path we choose.