Skip to main content

On Life

What is the kind of life you want to lead? This is a question I have asked myself. And in this context, I liked this article.

Very often in the pursuit of our career, we forget what we want to do. Or we simply cant given the demands of a career. And what we want to do might be as simple as spend more time with children, parents. It might be getting better in an art or craft. It might be following a passion. It could be anything.

He suggests a few things that resonated with me: Read books, Become a learning machine, Start a side business (not the multi level marketing kind please).

But primarily, stop chasing vanity goals (material) and chase goals of self improvement (getting better at some thing - maybe one thing, maybe two things)

I couldnt express it better than him, so here is the excerpt that resonated with me:

B+ is finding something to aim for and going all-in on it for as long as you can. It’s not about the outcomes. Success doesn’t make you happy. Vanity goals make you happy for a very short time and you get used to them. But you can play the ‘pretty damn good’ game until you die.
Imagine this type of life.
You’re not a millionaire, but you do something you really enjoy. Not even passionately in love with, just enjoy. Every day, you get a little bit better.
Some days, you have breakthrough epiphanies that make you feel euphoric and during those epiphanies, you think back to when you first got started, how hard it was back then, and how it all seems so easy now. You find new challenges that make you feel like a beginner, you level up the skill, and you go through the process all over again.
Do this throughout a lifetime and you can look back proudly, not on what you have or own, but what you’ve done.
With the freedom your skills provided you, you also got to have some amazing experiences — some trips you wouldn’t have been able to afford otherwise, more free time and flexibility to enjoy your spouse and children, connecting with a wide network of like-minded people and building friendships from your passion.
Imagine that type of life.

I am sold, though to be fair, this was my approach all along. I am working on a few skills and a few things at the moment. I have a few passions that I work on. This was a timely read...
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Be Civil. Make nice!

Popular posts from this blog

The man who saved Pumpelsdrop

This was a story we had in college if I am not mistaken. Perhaps it was in school, but a delightful story it was. The story goes somewhat like this ( reproduced from here ), but the college version we had was slightly different from this.  I t was a dull, gloomy and a depressing morning in a town named Pumpelsdrop in northern England. The Great Depression had brought all the businesses to a standstill. The bored automobile dealer was spending time alone, as usual. But, this seems to be an unusual morning as an odd entity (customer) appeared on the horizon. A man in a bright suit walks up to the dealer and says, "I need to buy a Rolls Royce Phantom II. We have a business conference coming up and I need to impress my customers". Then proceeds to pay 10% of the deal with a single check for 2000 pounds. The rest he says will pay when he takes the delivery.   The auto dealer was stunned. He was delighted to hear that someone is holding a business conference of some kind and
Post a Comment
Read more

The Mintzberg triangle

At a recent training, someone spoke about the Mintzberg triangle. I located it here . Image from that page reproduced here. The page linked above has a better explanation of diagram above, but what intrigued me was that the triangle exists for practically anything. The facilitator referred to this in the context of facilitation. Of how facilitation has science, craft and art to it. That is so true,  I thought. Worth a thought! Need to read of Mintzberg though...
Post a Comment
Read more

Waigaya and Sangen Shugi - Honda

Two big takeaways from Driving Honda were Waigaya and Sangen Shugi. A few days ago, we were working on a strategy module for a company. As we leafed through old and new theories and books around the same - one comment which caught my eye was Henry Mintzbergs comment where he says "Strategy is like weeds, it has to grow all around your company" A lot of times organisations dip into their pool of employees (and sometimes customers) and solicit ideas from them. This happens either at an offsite or a meeting or some quarterly review and the ideas pile up. Most companies today have an innovation program that encourages bottom up ideation. Many of these ideas are future strategy - provided someone is listening. Sometimes these ideas are not immediately implementable - but if one keeps looking, there might be valuable stuff in there. And if (post such programs) ideas die very often, the motivation of someone to keep doing it will also diminish. Waigaya is what Honda call
Post a Comment
Read more