Taking stock of the passage of time

Just after my 27th birthday, I wrote my first medium post. It was imaginatively entitled ‘27 realizations after 27 years on this planet’. It is so far down in my list of stories that it took me a while to find the link to it.

Well, I just had another birthday go by, so here I am taking stock of my life, and in the process, noting down the seven most important things I’ve learned in the intervening time. What a difference a few years makes — I’ve whittled those 27 down to just 7!

Source: pexels.com

1. Gelato is awesome — It is a high calorie frozen dessert, and it has loads of sugar. It isn’t good for health. It is relatively expensive in a country like India. But you can’t ever have too much gelato. It’s helped me gain weight after I had lost a lot of it owing to an infection, and it helps me feel good after a long swim on a hot summer’s day. Gelato is so light, you don’t ever feel like you’ve overdone it. When in doubt, Gelato. (Bonus: It is quite often ‘fat’ free) (Bonus no 2: it changes taste as it changes form from semi-solid to liquid, often while you’re eating it on a warm enough day)
2. ‘Follow your passion’ is horrible advice — It is easy advice to give, usually well intentioned, but it seems not to have been well thought out. Singularity of purpose is good when you are trying to escape a burning building, but not so when trying to build a life. For starters, passions are always moving goal posts. You like technology in your early twenties, and then art in your thirties. You love cricket in your teens and then develop a fascination with golf when your waist in inches exceeds your age in years. Or is it the other way round? The truth is, you will always be passionate about multiple things at any point in life. Those passions will change as you go through life. There is no point trying to spend finite energy in following one passion. Give your various passions a chance to come through in the way you live your life. It’s simple.
3. There is such a thing as ‘too much self help’ — I fell in love with the self help genre in my early twenties. I first read Awaken the Giant Within by Tony Robbins when I was 21 and loved it. It really did help me change my perspective about the world, and how I interacted with it. After about a decade of having read practically every self help book ever written, I feel like I have wasted a ton of time on consuming and not enough on creating. I have read all kinds of books — how to get rich, how to get laid, how to get a dream job, how to build a startup, how to build a side hustle, how to start a main hustle, how to start a conversation and the list is as long as you’d like it to be. They’re all basically the same — they tell you why you’re not content, how the author felt the same way a decade ago, and what the author did to correct the situation. All self help can basically be summed up as:

‘The universe moves when you move’

When you get moving, literally everything changes. If you don’t know what I mean when I say ‘get moving’, read this. (Actually, read it even if you know what I mean)

(I haven’t actually read every self help book ever written, just fyi)

4. At some point, life will shit on you — And I mean, it will literally sit on you, straddle you so you can’t move more than a muscle, and let rip as if it has explosive diarrhoea. The kind one gets when you’ve eaten at a joint you shouldn’t have after a long night of partying. And you will feel like you’ve never felt before, experience emotions you’ve never experienced before and begin to question almost everything you believe in. YOU WILL STINK. If you have never had life shit on you, worry not, it is coming. It is coming and it will happen when you are least expecting it. It will happen when everything in life is going swimmingly well. But when it does happen, the veil will be lifted for good. You will finally be able to see. I can’t comment on what you will see, but you will see further and better than you have before. Of course, you might get depressed after life has taken an ill timed dump on you, but that is part of the process.

The ill timed dump that life took on me was when my Dad died. From being a carefree 25 year old who believed he could take his time to figure life out, I was thrust into a world where I had to face up to the fact that my Dad owed more than a million dirhams in debt. He had never spoken to us about his investments (or his debts!), and so in addition to trying to deal with his loss, we had to deal with paying back debt we didn't even know he had taken. All assets (that we knew of) were liquidated to avoid imprisonment or some variant thereof (this was Dubai after all) and to pay off debt that we didn’t even know we would have to pay back.

But, you know what? It’s all good. In a way, I am glad that life took a big ass dump on me at the age of 25. My childhood was too easy, and my parents did everything in their power to shield me from life’s irregular excretory patterns.

But now that we’ve had time to recover, rebuild and introspect, I am quite happy to have gone through some tough times. At a relatively young age. It has taught me how to persevere. It has taught me the value in thinking long term. And most importantly, I know how to value the good times because the bad times can be pretty brutal. As Winston said, if you’re going through hell, keep going.

Also — lest I forget — like you, life has different varieties (i.e. smell, texture, colour and viscosity) of dumps. Some are sudden and instantaneous, no warning whatsoever. All one can do is to hope to get to the WC in time. At such times, you literally shit your pants. Others can be seen coming and are more long drawn out, sort of just easing out of your rear end at a pace that is irritating. In other words, the intensity and the length vary.

5. You can do and have everything, just not all at the same time — This is probably the most actionable advice my uncle has given me. Or at least the most noticeable as life goes on. We all want to do / achieve / have multiple things / experiences / wants. But there is no point in trying to do / achieve / have all at the same time. You need to focus. On one or maximum two things / aspects / businesses / people at a time. Focus is good, but too much focus often leaves room for not much else, and if you’re not hedging your bets, then you should be ready to accept a higher probability of absolute failure. Logically, more focus should result in increased rates of success, but I have found that success is so often impacted by so many extraneous factors that more focus can often lead to an abrupt dead end. I am well aware that all the self help books tell you to ‘go all in’ and ‘work 120 hour weeks’, but you can be just as successful going in with half the chips and working half the hours.

6. School is generally useless, except for the bits that are useful — I have run a school for the last 6 and a half years, and am about to start another one next year. I also attended school when I was younger. So I’ve spent enough time both as a student and as a teacher. School for many people can be incredibly useless because of the intense focus on academics and technical knowledge. The school I attended was heavily focused on academic success, and academic success will almost always fail to make you a good human. This is already a long post so I will elaborate on why, soon, in another post. In general, any school which focuses on academic achievement is a waste of time for students and teachers alike. This is becoming more of a ‘truism’ since all knowledge is freely available on the internet. So why bother with school if all that the school provides is knowledge that is already freely available? How often do you pay for a product or service when you can get it for free in another, similar form? Exactly, you pay only when there is an X factor.

What is that X factor? The bits that are seriously useful are all of the softer, invisible aspects that you can’t judge from reading a brochure or a website. Teachers that really understand children, children who get ample opportunity to express themselves in class through discussions or even general chit chat, a focus on values, teachers that help students inculcate a habit of self examination and so on. Most people go through their entire school lives without having had a chance to really explore and express themseves. That’s a waste of a school education. If you want to call it that.

7. Your map of the world determines where you will go — Without getting overly metaphysical, your beliefs about how the world works will essentially determine how you experience the world. This is particularly crucial when you start something new (a career, a business, a project). In the case of a business, you need to have an unbiased view of reality in order to successfully put out a product or service that people will buy. You can’t let your beliefs and needs temper your view of what the world is. It is what it is, and you need to reexamine your map of the world often enough to ensure that you are not being blinded by your own assumptions and beliefs. Science has discovered that we see only what we want to see.

When I was doing my Masters, we once had a class on ‘entrepreneurship in action’, and the lecturer was talking about how beliefs can be the difference between success and failure. He went on at length about how our beliefs determine what we see and observe in the world around us, and how entrepreneurs miss objective data points as they’re constantly on the search for information that validates their hypothesis about the world, and they don’t look for enough objective data to invalidate their wrong hypothesis. While he was talking, a second lecturer entered the room, and the first lecturer picked up his bag and left the room, telling us that he had to give something to his wife (who was waiting outside). A couple of minutes later he came back. I sensed something was different about him. Ten seconds later I realised he had changed his trousers! I didn’t say anything, but was curious why he might have done that. Had he pissed in his trousers? Twenty minutes later, he asked the class if anyone had noticed something different about him. The class was silent. My hand shot up immediately — ‘you’ve changed your trousers’, I bellowed from the second last row. The rest of the class had not noticed this. Why? What were they looking for that I was not? And why was I looking at the man’s trousers, when I should have been looking at his face while he spoke? A great book on the subject is ‘Deviate — the science of seeing things differently’ by Beau Lotto. I highly recommend reading it.

Long story short — you see what you want to see. So if you want to change what you see, you need to change what you want to see. That takes work! One way to do this is to meditate regularly. I’ve done it regularly for 3 years now and I feel like the way I see things has changed radically — I started meditating before Beau Lotto told me about how the brain constantly plays tricks on itself.

I’m done. Thanks for reading! May life shit on you so bad that you become the wisest, kindest, most compassionate human you are capable of becoming. In other words, I hope you’re shitting up to your potential! ;)