Posts

Making room for reflection

There is another aspect of this that I do not want to overlook. If I spend every minute doing something, when do I get the chance to understand what I am doing? If I keep working, responding, reading, and trying to improve, I might become very busy without becoming much wiser. I need space to reflect. I need moments when I am not trying to produce anything. I need to sit with an idea, read a few pages of a book, or simply allow my mind to settle. This is not a contradiction of concentrating on what is in front of me. If the time I have set aside is for reflection, then reflection is what is in front of me. If I am reading, I should read. If I am resting, I should rest without constantly worrying about what I could be doing instead. The point is not to turn every minute into another productivity exercise. The point is to live each minute with greater awareness. There will be times to work hard and times to stop. Times to speak and times to remain silent. Times to help and times to step ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Be Like a Tree: Build a Life That Takes Years to Grow

 Today, I looked at a tree and started thinking about life. A tree doesn't become what it is in a day. It takes years of sunlight, water, and growth. Much of that growth happens quietly. Nobody needs to applaud the tree for it to keep growing. Nobody needs to validate its progress. It simply continues. I think there is something important to learn from that. We often want our lives to change faster than they possibly can. We want to become better at our work, build a strong body, develop meaningful relationships, and become people we respect. But we want the results immediately. We want to see progress, receive appreciation, and know that our efforts are leading somewhere. When those things don't happen, we start doubting ourselves. Perhaps we aren't working hard enough. Perhaps other people are doing better. Perhaps we need to change everything. But what if the answer is sometimes much simpler? What if we need to keep doing the right things and give them time? The work nob...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Need for Space

There comes a point when doing more is no longer the answer. You can fill your calendar. You can keep working. You can respond to every message, attend every meeting, solve every problem, and still feel that something is missing. What may be missing is space . Space to think. Space to read. Space to understand. Space to ask whether the things we are doing actually matter. That is where I find myself right now. I don't think I need to stop working. I don't want to stop learning or creating. I want to keep getting better. I want to become a better engineer, a better thinker, and eventually a better leader. But I also need to slow down. I recently started thinking about The Inner Game of Work again, because the idea feels particularly relevant right now. The outer game is about getting things done. The inner game is about understanding what is happening inside us while we do them. And perhaps the next stage of growth is learning to play both games. Stop Reacting One thing I have ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Raw: Bhagavad Gita through my lens

Every time, I am lost, confused, and need an idea of where to go in life, I turn to one book and that is Shrimad Bhagavad Gita. I am quoting a paragraph that I learned from it, "He who remains serene in Cold and heat, pleasure and pain, honour and dishonour, for such a self-controlled man the Supreme self is properly established, that is, present in the form of the Self. The Yogi who is content with knowledge and wisdom, who is free from perturbation and has conquered the senses, to whom clay, stone and gold are alike, he is said to be united with the Supreme.....", further more it goes on to say, "He who has the same regard for friend, companion, enemy, the indifferent, the mediator, the hostile, and kinsmen, as well as for the righteous and for the sinful, he is the best". Beautiful.... the book teaches so much beyond self control. It teaches us about regarding everyone alike. Whether that's your manager or whether that's your colleague. Everyone should be...
Post a Comment
Read more

Insecurities

 Here I am writing again. I was a bit tired today and watching sports is also quite not the best thing that I should be doing. I know for a fact that in today's world a lot of things can take our attention away but it's okay. It's okay for the attention to go away if it comes back. Today, I am trying to think what to write. I wanted to talk about how insecurity and attention really matters. For an example, when I was doing nothing today, I was just feeling insecure. Insecure of the way I look, insecure of the way I dressed, insecure just in general for no reason. We all have insecurities, sometimes about our body, sometimes about our dressing sense, sometimes about acnes, sometimes some other fragile things in ourselves.  I want to tell you the reader, that you know what, it's okay to be insecure. It's okay to feel insecure of yourself. In today's generation there are many ways to numb your insecurities, through youtube, through netflix, through scrolling instag...
Post a Comment
Read more

Fearless

 I usually have thoughts that I get after pickleball. We started playing pickleball with a group of friends and as we were playing with a few folks, I realized that I was becoming a bit too self conscious about the way I was hitting the ball. I was worried if the ball goes out, I was worried if the ball goes towards the net. But well, as things started, I also think that my body was not warmed up during teh time. But once I started hitting one shot and it went out, we were pretty much okay. We were like okay, that can be out, but we need to be okay with hitting that shot out. Sometimes we might also get a point through that. I removed my fear of failure by actually failing. That brought me to the conclusion that in order to win either in pickleball and in life, we need to remove our fear of failure. The voice inside our head that tells us we are not good enough. You know what you are already good enough. The fact that you learned to walk and crawl by yourself through the simple pro...
Post a Comment
Read more

Rules

 The One-Hour Rule I opened a hard problem on my laptop: a data pipeline that kept dropping records under load. I stared at it for a few minutes, then reached for my phone. One notification became a scroll through social media. When I came back to the laptop, the problem felt unfamiliar again. I reread the same notes, felt the resistance, and closed the screen before anything real happened. Nothing dramatic had gone wrong. I had simply watched a slow leak of attention drain my focus, the same way I have watched it drain a hundred times before. That pattern led me to the one-hour rule: I choose one thing and sit with it for a protected hour. No phone beside the laptop. No switching to an easier task when the work becomes uncomfortable. No pretending that checking messages is part of solving the problem. The hour is small enough to begin, but long enough to get beneath the surface. At first, I treated the rule as a productivity technique. Over time, it became something more. The hour...
Post a Comment
Read more