Life

The Meaning of Life

March 16, 2019 | 11 Comments

One of the best books I have read on the pursuit of the world’s highest peak, Mount Everest, is George Mallory’s Climbing Everest. George was possibly the first man to summit Everest (nobody knows whether he did it), almost 30 years before Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay began their ascent.

It was during his third expedition to the Everest that he lost his life, last seen about 800 feet from the summit.

Anyways, all his writings on climbing are collected in Climbing Everest, which started out as letters to his wife Ruth. One of my favourite parts from the book is when George shared his response to one question asked by a journalist about why he would risk his life to attempt to reach the Everest.

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Choosing NOT To Fail

May 16, 2018 | Leave a Comment

I have learned a lot of life lessons just seeing my daughter grow up. Like when she was just a year old and was trying to take her first steps and repeatedly fell down, she tried again…and again…and again.

Sometimes she laughed. Sometimes she cried. Sometimes she laughed and cried at the same time. But she kept trying and trying…laughing and crying.

She did not label her experience. She just enjoyed it.

Unlike us adults, our babies don’t know the possibility of a failure, so they happily keep falling down until one day they take a few steps, and then a few more. Before long, they’re jumping and running. All their trying pays off.

They fall but never fail.

As grown-ups, what if we also simply choose not to fail?

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Stop Being So Busy

May 15, 2018 | Leave a Comment

As we coast through our lives day after day, being extremely busy at our obligations, we are absent from our selves. The idea for most of us is to do than to be. And thus, life seems short because we all have so much to do.

But then, “Life is long,” wrote the Roman philosopher Seneca, “…if you know how to use it.”

In his brilliant treatise written 2,000 years ago, Seneca wrote…

It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.

So, while there’s a huge mass of time ahead of us, it passes much faster than we think. Our kids grow up fast. We get gray hairs before we’re done getting our bearings on life.

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Before You Quit Your Job

May 13, 2018 | 27 Comments

Getting out of your comfort zone is the most difficult thing in the world to do. But then, the thing that I learnt early in my life (thanks to an advice from someone I respect a lot) was that the time to quit your job is before it starts to feel painful.

The worst time to quit is when the pain is the greatest, simply because decisions made during great pain are rarely good decisions.

So, sometime in 2010, I decided to quit my job just as I was starting to get comfortable in it. That comfort was leading me to stagnation, and thus pain. I quit in 2011.

That my spouse was strongly by my side – not just emotionally, but also rationally – was an important factor that helped me in my decision making. Our second child was on the way when I had decided to quit, but that acted more of an incentive than a deterrent to quitting my job. The thought of taking care of my kids, and seeing them grow every day, encouraged me to move fast in this decision.

Shortcuts

May 11, 2018 | 11 Comments

It is human nature to want to get a job done as quickly as possible. Like you cross the street between intersections instead of using the zebra crossing. Or you jump a fence instead of using the gate.

It is not your problem!

Most of us have grown up being told that it’s important to accomplish as much as we can. But what we often aren’t told is that rushing can result in accidents, errors, and more time spent in the long run.

It is often not worth it.

Warren Buffett, the investing legend, says, “No matter how great the talent or efforts, some things just take time. You can’t produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant.”

This rule applies to almost every sphere of life. Some things just take time.

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