My Notes - Vishal Khandelwal

The Best Career Advice I’ve Ever Received

July 7, 2020 | 6 Comments

Over the past 25+ years, I have received a lot of wise career advice. Here are the ones that have served me well.

Always do the right thing. The best life one could live was not one in which a person did big, great things that influenced the lives of millions, but one in which you made a difference in the part of the world you touched, no matter how small. A life in which you helped only one person because that was the only opportunity you had to help someone else was just as great a life as that of someone who changed the lives of millions. ~ My Papa

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary. ~ Steve Jobs

Look for the job you would take if you didn’t need the money. You really want to think about what will make you feel good, when you get older, about your life, and you at least generally want to keep going in that direction. ~ Warren Buffett

तस्मादसक्त: सततं कार्यं कर्म समाचर |
असक्तो ह्याचरन्कर्म परमाप्नोति पूरुष: ||

Translation – Without being attached to the fruits of activities, one should act as a matter of duty; for by working without attachment, one attains the Supreme.

~ Bhagavad Gita: Chapter 3, Verse 19

Meditation on Mortality

September 15, 2019 | Leave a Comment

Five times a day for the past twelve months, an app on my mobile called WeCroak has been reminding me I’m going to die.

It leaves me without any doubt when it surprises me at unpredictable intervals with the same blunt message – “Don’t forget, you’re going to die.”

The creators of this app have based its reminders on what the citizens of one of the happiest countries in the world, Bhutan, meditate on. They remind themselves of their mortality five times a day.

Humility

September 13, 2019 | 2 Comments

In The Apology, the Greek philosopher Plato wrote that the oracle at Delphi had pronounced Socrates the wisest man in Athens.

No one was more astonished and disbelieving than Socrates himself. So, he immediately set out to disprove the oracle by finding a wiser man. Here is what Socrates found as he met a few supposedly wise men…

I went to one who had the reputation of wisdom, and observed to him – his name I need not mention; he was a politician whom I selected for examination – and the result was as follows: When I began to talk with him, I could not help thinking that he was not really wise, although he was thought wise by many, and wiser still by himself; and I went and tried to explain to him that he thought himself wise, but was not really wise; and the consequence was that he hated me, and his enmity was shared by several who were present and heard me.

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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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Minimize Your Regrets

May 22, 2018 | 11 Comments

“The cost of being wrong is less than the cost of doing nothing.” ~ Seth Godin

One of the nice books I came across recently was Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths. In one chapter, the authors talk about Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.

Before he decided to start Amazon, Bezos had a secure and well-paid position at the investment company D. E. Shaw & Co. in New York. Starting an online bookstore in Seattle was going to be a big leap — something that his boss then advised him to think about carefully.

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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