Subtle things

What works ultimately - hard work or destiny? People who believe in one or the other can provide ample examples of the side that they follow or advocate. And each of those examples would make sense. When you hear stories about people who truly succeeded by working on themselves, hard work wins. These are stories of same people who clearly faced hard situations. Situations where even a strong person may give up. They worked hard towards achieving something but failed numerous times before they were finally greeted by success. I'm reading a book 'Mastery' by Robert Greene these days and actually it's the second time I am going over it (mostly with my markings from the first reading though). It offers several examples from real stories of great scientists and explorers such as Charles Darwin, Michael Faraday, Benjamin Franklin to name a few, who received the success and recognition by which we have always known them, only after several hardships and lessons learned alon...

Nowadays, we can get advice from anywhere and everywhere. It need not be from meeting someone in person but the digital world offers numerous other sources as well - blogs, videos, articles, forums. I myself read a lot of articles and I'm very fond of watching interviews. Over the course of time, I have found that we can even categorize advice. One set is absolute in nature in terms of how it applies universally to every person regardless of his or her current situation. Guiding someone on the importance of honesty or being kind to others. This is the behavior that each one of us would like to conform with. The question that I raised in my post here is in the context of another set - which may work for some people but not for everyone. The same advice of following your heart and choosing a career that you feel passionate about may not be possible for someone who is really trying to make ends meet and so on. As another example - we all understand and read about the importance...

You have set some goals and are determined to pursue them. Started to work towards them. Got success one day and feel motivated to work harder and keep going. But then, on another fine day, something happens and you don't feel like doing it. May be you are tired or running low on confidence in your abilities. Your feelings at that moment offer enough reasons to allow yourself to digress from what you had once decided. You choose to go with how you are feeling and put off the task for sometime telling yourself that you will come back to it. What just happened? I would say the race between self-discipline vs. motivation has just begun.  Self-Discipline involves giving higher importance to what you  think  or have once decided is important and not how you  feel  about it in the moment.  Now one may wonder that if someone is not motivated or passionate about working on something, then how can you push yourself. You will do it halfheartedly and then re...

Have you come across situations where you find yourself in no mood to take any advice? When no words of wisdom seemed to comfort you? The theme of this post is to share some of my thoughts on dealing with such situations. A lot of these come from my experiences (so do not assume them to be unbiased) and the lessons I learned - not while going through those rough times but once I got through them and looked back. You're not wrong if you are thinking that this article is no less than a piece of advice and so if you are not in a mood for it now, I know that feeling. I hear you! #1: First of all, accept that you are going through a rough patch. At least acknowledge that inside your heart. You may not want to share your problem with people outside and this can be for any reason. May be you do not have the right set of people around, it may be because you like to take time before sharing your problems or any other reason for that matter. Sometimes we tend to enter into a denial ph...

Telling someone - "I am busy", do we need to put some thought before using it in our communication? I have started doing so recently and would like to talk about that here today. There are different ways and situations where we hear these words - I am really busy . Let's take two such scenarios. First, when we are having a casual conversation with someone and the person asks about how are things going. The other case may be when a friend is trying to reach out to you and you have not been able to get back to him/her even after your friend's repeated attempts. Eventually, when you meet after few days, you try to shrug it off by saying - Hey, sorry could not respond. Was busy . There's a difference in the two situations and I started this post to share about how the overuse of this word, "busy" can harm our connections. So, I will l imit myself to the discussion of the second situation. I feel that in this case, essentially what we are telling t...

I recently lost my iPhone.  After 5 days and 9 hours of solo driving without phone, "I found it"! I was driving to meet my family and thought I had lost it at a service plaza. So, when I reached my uncle's place, he traced the plaza's number and called them.  To my surprise, a pleasant one, they said, they have it and I can pick it on my way back. They asked me few identification questions to see if its my phone. I was like, great! But then I realized that I will be going on the other side of highway on my way back. On most highways here in US, you may have to drive 20-40 miles before you find an exit. So, as the next thing, I figured out the route. Luckily it wasn't that bad. Then, finally on my way back, I stopped there. Only to find out that the phone they had was not my phone! I was so disappointed. I mean, I was literally waiting and was positive that I will get it now. My next worry was that I still had 330 miles to get to my place ~= 6 hours more ...

Not all our prayers get answered. Right? Sounds relatable? Well, the quote below made me re-think. I enjoy spending few minutes on articles related to personal development and life in general. I read them almost every other day, if not everyday. Here is one of the many that I came across today. If you ask for something in your prayer and you get it, surely, your prayer has been answered. But think about those times when that does not happen . We get disappointed and a series of "Why-What-How-Where" flood our mind. We get entangled in questions of - Why did this not happen? Where did things go wrong and so on.  The lines in the quote above sums it all. Seems like we need to change our idea behind praying to get answers, both when - we get we asked for in our prayer and also when we did not .  - Dippy