Incident 1:
When I was in school, once just before the summer break, my teacher asked everyone to maintain a diary during the vacations and write everyday whatever we did. When we came back from the break, this is how my diary looked.
Yes, all the pages had the same content, just a little bit of change in timings. Okay, the truth is that my day started at 10AM and ended at 10PM with the entire day spent playing and watching cartoons. But that’s not the point I want to make here.
Incident 2:
A few years later, 2nd year of my BTech. One day a senior asked me – kal ka kya karne wale ho?
I responded with a strange look, the look didn’t mean – I don’t know, it meant – How would I know?
No, he wasn’t asking to invite me to a party, he wanted to know how would I make the most of the next day. The fact is like other batchmates, I didn’t know
Now I use Ohlife daily and the reminder mail lands in the inbox with the subject line ‘How did your day go?” And mostly my response starts with ‘Okayish day….nothing major …. ‘ and the story continues. Yes, once in a while I am really excited about this Ohlife mail, like the day we launched Moneno, but that doesn’t happen too often!
What do I/you/all-of-us do on weekends? Booze, movies, sleep, cleaning? Thats it!?!
14 years have passed this way.
Today if my ma’am asked me to write that diary it would be like:
Wakes up. Walks to office. Works/tweets/facebooks simultaneously. Have meals sometimes. Walks back home. Eat. Sometime read. Sleep.
My ohlife now often has “Nothing New” written over it. Every time i write that i am reminded of Steve Jobs’s Stanford commencement speech.
“If this was the last day of your life, would you still do what you plan to do today? And when the answer is NO for too many days……”
My problem is even bigger. I dont know what i am going to do! Yes of course work, but do i know exactly what am i gonna do?
I read a few articles, have a lot of unread articles opened in various tabs, often i have 50-70 tabs opened and because of twitter, end up increasing that unread count each passing day. And then suddenly one day the browser gives up, read crashes, and i ask myself, do i really need to restore all those tabs? What if i don’t? No, i never have an answer to that question, primarily because i don’t even remember what tabs i had opened! And because of fear of losing something important that was to be read, i always end up restoring all those tabs and the same cycle repeats.
What happens next? Of course, this entire bigger cycle repeats. And then in the daily rut of things, forget about whats actually happening in life. Whats important to note here is that:
Not that i am doing bad at my work. Not that i am doing something i don’t love, I really enjoy my work. Not that i am living someone else’s life. Not that i am not making money. Not that i am away from friends. Achieving, attaining a lot of things, i still feel i am kind of lost. Something’s wrong!
How can i sense that? My creativity has taken a beating. I get irritated and angry a lot often. I feel i am not doing enough. In the longer run my productivity decreases. And apart from all that, i often end up feeling/thinking what i’ve just written!
You are missing the community. You're missing a cause. GNU/Linux era is over, you need a cause to which you can dedicate yourself.
Maybe yes but am not sure if that will solve the problem
It will.
Abhinav
Abhinav: i so believe, that you do not have your life-goals template in place.
Good or bad, life's like as you describe for a lot of us wanting to big meaningful things, but circumstances do not enable us to expand beyond what we're doing at the moment. I feel this sort of a feeling is emanating from a dissatisfaction with the limits we have to our circle of influence. I have had the same for all these years. And tweeting and blogging about it got me nothing but appreciation – for a heart wanting to touch more lives – from a few people who could relate to it (as i am with you). But such appreciation gets nothing but a false sense of vindication of being on the right path, and a bit of ego-boost if i may say; also a sense of being a “martyr”, if you know what i mean.
There is a saying in new age spirituality which suggests that the
Universe gives you what you can manage/handle currently; as you increase
your competence, you begin to deserve and get more. While “luck” plays a huge factor, i believe this thought to be true and deeply profound.
To make any meaningful change in what our current reality is, and where we want it to be, the difference is setting goals and moving forward, one-step-at-a-time, one-baby-step-at-a-time.
The goals sheet is the only difference if we're going to suck juice out of life, or whether life is going to suck juice out of us. (wow, that is an original one, nahin?!)
Amen 🙂
And how do we make this life-goals template? And importantly – implement that template and make sure we are actually taking steps towards it rather than just tweeting/blogging?
Btw, yes, that was a good original one 🙂
If you want, on 15 Januaray 2013, to look back and say, “2012 was pretty ordinary year”, without having any measure – good or bad – for it, then go on as you are. If not, change something. The only tool i learnt at CIAM is the *Goals sheet*, which must translate every Friday/Sat/Sunday evening into a week plan on your calendar, covering nearly all, or atleast steps from a a lot of the areas that you wish to achieve in this year.