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Sorry, lot of things are going on at this moment. I will catch on the pending posts this week.

-Saran

The last three months of our lives

After I saw Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture, I went to B&N and bought the book. It is such a terrific book that squeezes your heart and brings out the deepest fears.  After I read the book, one question lingered my mind – If I had only 3 months to live, will I still be doing what I am doing now? I started writing down what all things I wanted to do in life from my childhood days and found out that I have not accomplished a single one so far. I have done other things that qualify as good, but a childhood dream is special because it is imagination at its best. As a child, we never think of problems and only think of possiblities. As adults, those possibilities and dreams get linked to problems and reasons what we cannot accomplish that.

I am an entrepreneur at heart. If I have found ways to implement some tough challenges against several odds in various phases of my life, I am pretty sure I will find ways to achieve what all I dreamed when I was a child. It is just time to adjust the sails and pace myself towards those golden dreams.

Results Vs. Process

When the focus is on enjoying the process of doing something rather than the actual results itself, the results turn out to be better. I have noticed that in myself and others. From my childhood days and even when I was in my early years of PhD, the focus was on results. I wanted to come first in class or a competition, write a paer about “how this technique kicks ass (result)”, etc when the actual goal should have been to learn something and enjoy it. Result driven approach used to put so much pressure on me. I always was thinking about the final outcome and if it did not come that way, it would make me feel very bad. Along the way, I discovered that the actual happiness is not in the result but in the process. That is the reason, to this day and to the amusement of my wife, I say that I only value my PhD for what it has taught me, not for the degree itself.

What are results? Most part of this approach (excluding the elitist few) is driven towards showing others what we are capable of. In that process, we put unnecessary and unrealistic pressure on ourselves. When this factor goes out of our lives, we start living the life we want to happily and passionately towards what we believe in. This is a small point but makes a huge difference.