A Thinking Man

Reflections on Life

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Lost Perspective

Filed Under: Philosophy

Santosh, a friend of mine, sent me an email a couple of days ago. I altered it a little (to fit the blog) but ensured the message was not lost in translation. The email:

The demise of one of my colleagues, whom I just saw yesterday evoked a fear as only death can and pushed me to think of what really matters to me in life? I went to the office in the morning, unaware of Maggie passing away, but when I saw tulips on her keyboard, I was taken aback. I wasn’t sure whether I was sad that she passed away or that it reminded me of my own mortality.

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Keep it Simple

Filed Under: Philosophy

I’ve been a hoarder all my life. Born out of insecurity, I wanted to stock all the stuff I wanted to. This, “What if I don’t have money tomorrow? Let me buy all I need to survive in this apocalyptic world” insecurity has been the driver to my consumption. New book? Buy it (even though I have 20 others to read), new CD? Buy it (before it goes out of stock), New clothes? Buy them. I piled, piled & piled stuff away. Then, came the problem of organizing and maintaining. CDs needed stands & pouches, clothes needed cupboards and so did all the other stuff I was buying. Then CDs gave way to DVDs which gave way to Blurays; Books to Kindle ebooks; Old clothes to new. Now, when I enter my room I find a CD I did not listen to, a book did not read, a shirt/trouser I did not use – all unmet commitments, not to mention clutter. But, fuelled by consumer culture (more is good) and lured by sexy advertisements I continued buying more. ’Till I took over more responsibilities.

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Living Forward

Filed Under: Productivity

When I first read about ‘putting first things first’, it made a lot of sense. Just figure out what you want your life to look like and reverse-engineer your life from there. See what needs to change/accommodate it to make that ‘end of your life’ vision come to life. Want to see yourself as a millionaire at 60? No problem. Calculate how much you need to have/invest by the time you are 50, 40, 30, etc., and, work towards those goals to ultimately become a millionaire. And, if you are already at 30 with a huge gap between your goal and reality, change your life to meet your goals. It’s as simple as that. But, life seldom works this way. We (atleast most of us) cannot just drop all our commitments and take a path leading to our dreams. Our lives are more complicated than that. What do we do then?

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Two years of Blogging

Filed Under: Personal

How to start a successful blog? The internet is full of experts advising on the topic. I’ve had this blog for two years now with April 30th marking my two year anniversary. When I started writing, I was plagued with number of doubts (not that I don’t have them now) – do I have enough to say? Do I have something new to say? Or at-least a different approach to say things that’ve already been said? I put aside all these and started on my strong belief that I had to write, I had stuff which I wanted to get out of my system, to put things onto paper. So, I made a list of topics I wanted to write about and started this blog. I confess ’had only 10 blog post ideas with no guarantee I would pen a 11th one as I started, but nevertheless, ’ploughed through. During these initial days, I also read up all on ‘how to create a successful blog’ on the internet which boiled down to these few key points:

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