The book ‘Monk who sold his Ferrari’ starts with a hi-fi, big shot lawyer, walking away from his life. He disappears into the Himalayas and becomes a monk. Why? When the lawyer suffers a heart attack, he pauses to look back at his life just to realise that no matter how wealthy he was, how successful he was, he was still unhappy. ‘What do I need to become happy? To be content in life? What do I need?’, he disappears to find the answers for these questions. This concept is not new in Hinduism where it is known as ‘vairagya’. Unhappy with life, a person abandons everything in search of peace, to identify what they actually need in life and want from life.
Archives for March 2016
Hybrid System
A few days ago, I realised I worked better when I wrote down the tasks I wanted to get done that day in a notebook and ticking them off from there than directly referring to them in Omnifocus. This lead me to buy a softcover moleskine with which I fell in love with. At the same time, I happened to open an old notebook where I had written a few passages from a book I was reading then and towards the end, added my thoughts on those passages. I didn’t even remember I had done this. But, it was so good to see the author’s thought and mine side by side, that I wished I had written more. From there started a desire to add more notebooks to my workflow. This raised a problem, albeit a first world one. I just didn’t want my highlights, quotes I collect, thoughts I write in different places. I wanted one solution, preferably. I could not decide if my workflow should be digital or analogous. I was debating both the sides. I started making points.