Season’s Greetings & A Happy New Year

Season’s Greetings

The Alchemy of Acceptance

Life can be frustrating and full of obstacles with desires for a different life constantly disturbing your mind; or life can be fulfilling, full of opportunities with a constant flow of gratitude for the gifts you have; the only difference between them is, acceptance, and living in the Divine will.

Stress comes from regretting what was, resisting what is and worrying about what might be. The secret to happiness in this life, is not to mind. To be accepting of the reality of each situation in each moment. Even if we don’t like it. Even if we don’t approve of it. Even if we don’t want it .

Acceptance of what is happening will make you non-reactive, quiet and peaceful. “Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them, that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.”

The reality is that which is actually happening, and we are part of it. It is the truth unfolding before our very eyes. The moment we accept and harmonise with this truth we are free from the power of fear. So, accept the reality of the moment and respond with love, respond with compassion, respond with wisdom. Don’t build a fantasy life around your personal views and opinions as to how everyone and everything should be. They are not the truth; they are only the conditions for your unhappiness. So, let go of this limited way of living and be one with the reality of the moment.

The sting of pain is not in the pain but in our non-acceptance of it. We feel it should not have been so, but it is – that is the sting. There is a saying, “If you accept a situation it is as it is, if you do not accept it is as it is”. Wanting things to be other than they are, causes suffering. Non acceptance is disturbance in mind. If you argue with reality, you’ll lose every time. The moment that judgement stops through acceptance of what it is, you are free of the mind. You have made room for love, for joy, for peace.

Acceptance means it is arising out of your own awareness, not out of the teachings, scriptures and so-called masters roaming all around the world. It is your own understanding. In fact, when it is your own understanding, even the word ‘acceptance’ becomes futile.

This moment – this silence, the birds in the trees, the sunrays reaching to you: is there any question of acceptance? It is simply happening. It is not a theoretical mind discipline. You are not sitting here with a forced discipline. You are sitting here in this enormous silence without any effort. It is so beautiful that any effort will destroy it.

Let me repeat it in another way: Do you love with effort? Are you compassionate with effort? Are you living with effort, breathing with effort? Is there any effort in your heartbeats? Just the same way, the whole of life becomes a spontaneous flow. Your perceptivity, your clarity decides which direction to move. But there is no effort, because effort implies you are divided, one part of you is trying to take you in one direction, another part is trying to take you in another direction. Then comes the effort. And I cannot conceive that a man of effort can ever be in tune with existence. With whom are you fighting? Effort is a fight.

Whatever you resist you become. If you resist anger, you are always angry. If you resist sadness, you are always sad. If you resist suffering, you are always suffering. If you resist confusion, you are always confused. We think that we resist certain states because they are there, but actually they are there because we resist them. Accept it, and don’t be identified. When you accept you remain above, you remain beyond. When you fight you come to the same level. There are some things and situations which can be changed, but there are some things and situations which cannot be changed but only accepted.

Acceptance is the door to transcendence. Non acceptance is pain, as it’s a Resistance. The portal to Transcendence is Acceptance.

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Overcoming Pandemic Boredom

Are you facing pandemic blues, sitting on the couch like a lump of coal wondering why life is passing you by? Being bored with life is a hard pill to swallow and many people don’t know what to do with themselves when they are given a few moments of peace. This does happen with everyone, once in a while, and it’s really difficult for some people to come out of this situation.

There could be one or more of the following few reasons you might be bored with life :

You are shying from calling people on phone or connecting with your friends online or social media. Despite staring boredom in the face, you continue to turn down perfectly good opportunities to connect with people. What’s up with that? If you don’t have anything better to do, why don’t you call a friend or family member to chat and share some thoughts? If you don’t connect with your friends at least once in a while, when you go looking for them one day, they might not be there. Consider adding new friends to your circle and shake things up a bit. Otherwise, you’ll be forever bored with your life. There’s a whole wide world out there and if you aren’t in it, you are going to remain in a state of chronic boredom forever.

You think changing out of your yoga pants is too much work. Let’s face it, yoga pants changed the landscape of being a homebody. It’s just too easy to slip those suckers on and live in them for days and days. Some people have even tried to get away with wearing them to work and companies are starting to make dress pants out of the same fabric so more people can be comfortable. But come on, life isn’t all about comfort. It’s also a lot about having fun and if you are living at home in the same sweat pants you’ve been wearing for days, you might need a life makeover. Change into a pair of jeans and get out in the world, of course, strictly follow the pandemic protocol. Safety of life and good health are far more important than boredom.

You feel terrible and you look even worse. If you’ve let yourself go and feel like buying bigger pants is too much effort, you are going to be in for a rude awakening. We often like to play the victims in our own lives and letting ourselves go, making ourselves sick with food and drink is an easy way to allow yourself to hide from the world. It perpetuates a chronic cycle of regret and fear. You fear being seen like that and you regret feeling like that and so you just keep eating or do whatever it is you have chosen to dull your life with and things don’t get better.

You aren’t taking any actions. You know the saying, “you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take”? Well, it’s true. If you aren’t doing anything to change your life, how on earth do you expect it to change? You are not alone in thinking that hope and prayer will bring about new entertainment and options into your life. Many people are sitting on their hands waiting for the right time to make a move. But the time is never right and boredom will continue to fester. Things don’t get better unless you make them better.

Boredom vs. Depression. It’s a common misconception amongst people that their lives are boring. In truth, people who believe their lives aren’t full of opportunity or challenge may actually be experiencing something more difficult to manage. When life looks lackluster all of a sudden, it might be that you are experiencing bouts of depression or even anxiety. We’re not doctors, but it’s important for you to pay attention to what might be going on under the facade. Depression is a real possibility if you aren’t just bored, but don’t find joy in anything you do; in particular, things that used to bring you joy no longer help to make you feel alive. This has to do with the fact that depressed or anxious people may conceal negative thoughts prior to being bored, so when they have free time, their mind starts to wander into negativity. Yet, it’s important to realize that not all boredoms are the root cause of depression.

You think you are better than people. You might not even realize it, but you might be avoiding people and places and things because, in some way, you think you don’t need them to be happy. If you look at a certain group of people or events and think you don’t need that to be happy, you might come to find that you are wrong. It’s hard to turn the mirror on yourself and acknowledge that you’ve created this life for yourself; after all, who would want to be bored and lonely all the time? But it does happen. We think that if we continue to play the victim, someone will save us. Life, unfortunately, doesn’t work like that.

You aren’t willing to do things alone. If you have to wait on someone else to entertain you in order to go out for dinner, see a show, or even take a walk in the park, you might be waiting a long time. You need to get used to doing things alone in order to take responsibility for your life and frankly, to enjoy your own company. If you can’t be happy alone, how do you expect others to make you happy? This is a classic case of not knowing what you want in life and relying on others to give it to you. That’s a slippery slope because you will turn to others to provide structure, joy, and even advice in your own life.

You might actually enjoy being bored. Have you ever stopped to think that you are bored because you want to be bored? After all, there are some benefits to being bored. A study published in the journal Academy of Management Discoveries found that boredom can spark individual productivity and creativity. In the study, participants who had gone through a boredom-inducing task later performed better on an idea-generating task than those who completed an interesting activity. The bored participants performed better than the others in terms of quantity and quality.

Some tips and suggestions how to deal with a boring life.

Do you look at your life and think, “what have I done?” Do you wonder what’s out there just waiting for your attention? Do you, more often than not, find yourself just slumping back into the couch for another movie marathon Friday night?

It’s time for a change. If life has got you down, you might consider ways to breathe some new life into your routines. Life is anything but boring and if you think it is, you are doing it wrong. You’ve only got this one life to live so get out there and make the most of it! Here’s what to do when you’re bored and start having an amazing life!

Take responsibility. If you’re bored with life, will you take responsibility for getting yourself out of this funk? I think taking responsibility is the most powerful attribute we can possess in life. Because the reality is that YOU are ultimately responsible for everything that happens in your life, including for your happiness and unhappiness, successes and failures, and for the feelings of boredom that you currently have. Courage, perseverance, honesty, and above all else taking responsibility, are the only ways to overcome the challenges that life throws at us.

Try one new thing each week. If you are on the fence about trying new things, start small. But start. Don’t keep doing the same old things and expect life to change. You need to shake things up to make life interesting. If you hide away from the world, you’ll miss out on all that is bright and beautiful and wonderful. Start by trying one new thing each week. Set a date and time and get to it. Whether you decide to try new food, visit a different museum, drive to another town, or read a different genre of books than you normally read, little changes can add up to one heck of an exciting life.

Strike up a conversation with a stranger. One of the best ways to add some adventure to your life is to talk to strangers. Find someone who is sitting alone in a coffee shop or at a restaurant and introduce yourself, ask if you can join them, and talk to them. It might feel strange at first, but that’s okay. It’s supposed to. The whole point is to make yourself feel different things than you normally do. Talking to other people helps you understand more about the world, learn new things, and of course, make new friends.

Write down the good things that happened to you. Gratitude can go a long way in helping you see that life is not so boring after all. We tend to take the good things for granted and don’t focus enough on what’s going well. We do focus, however, on a lot of little negative things and blow them way out of proportion. Get into the habit of writing down positive things in your life and you’ll soon find that more positive things come your way. Or, as is usually the case, it’s not that more positive things come, it’s that you find more things to be positive about. What a concept!

Take up a new exercise routine. If you really want to shake things up in life, physically shake them up with a new exercise routine or workout. If you aren’t doing any physical activity at all, start. Start with just a walk around the block. It’s fun to think of yourself as someone who exercises and takes care of themselves, but the work of actually doing that is sometimes overwhelming. Being bored is a great trigger for exercise because once you get into the routine of it, you’ll find all kinds of other ways to keep moving and having fun. You might take up hiking or rock climbing, skiing or swimming. Life is anything but boring when you are on the move. And as an added bonus, you’ll feel great!

Become your own life coach. If you’re feeling bored in life, then you need direction. You need to figure out where you want to go in life. A popular way to do this is through a professional life coach. Bill Gates, Anthony Robbins, Andre Agassi, Oprah and countless other celebrities go on and on about how much life coaches have helped them. Good on them, you may be thinking. They can certainly afford one! Search online how you can find a way to receive all the benefits of professional life coaching without the expensive price tag.

Date more. Get out there and start flirting. The more people you meet, the more you’ll have fun. You don’t have to date every single person you meet, but dating more frequently certainly gives your boredom a run for its money and keeps your calendar full. If you aren’t doing anything else anyway, why not go out and meet new people who might turn into potential relationships. You never know where that kind of thing can lead, but if you don’t change your ways, you can bank on it not changing at all. If your love life is boring, it’s because you want it to be boring.

Find out more about yourself. If you are tired of living a boring life, but don’t particularly like the company of other people and aren’t interested in dating right now, you might want to spend some time getting to know yourself in a deeper and more meaningful way. You can take a class, start a reflective practice, read self-help books, take a road trip by yourself, go on a singles cruise, find a library and go there to listen to quiet music and relax and think about how you want your life to look. Get to know your emotions. If you’re angry and you want to let it go, ask yourself, why am I angry? Take up journaling or channel your thoughts into drawings or paintings. You don’t have to rely on other people to help you live an interesting life if you are willing to go out there and live on one your own!

Take a class. If you can’t entertain yourself, and you feel like you are at the end of your rope, get out and let someone else entertain you. Take a class, enroll in a course, or sign up for a workshop where someone will fill your time for you. Getting out of the house can help stimulate your senses in its own way, but engaging with other people who are working toward a common purpose can make you feel like you have something to focus on again. Boredom is a real problem when you can’t find ways to solve it, but taking a class is a way that you can keep on moving without having to do a lot of the work yourself. If you are suffering from depression or even anxiety, following someone else’s lead will take the pressure off of you.

Find a new friend. If doing your favorite things don’t bring you joy anymore and you are bored with life, find a friend who can help you see the silver lining in things again. The great thing about hooking up with a friend is that they can reduce boredom just by being near you. Sometimes, you just need to know you are not alone in order to pump up the excitement in your life. Reducing boredom isn’t always about filling every second of your day with entertainment. It can be about spending as much time as possible enjoying life with people that are important to you. Nobody said you had to be doing things together. You can just be together.

Set out to do something you’ve never done before. If you are looking for ways to spice up your life, but friends are few and far between and you can’t find a class that interests you, try getting out of town and doing something you’ve never done before. Now, if you are feeling overwhelmed by change, don’t worry. You can take small steps to try new things. Boredom can be reduced if you look for ways to test the waters and try things that can help you learn new ways to live and to look forward to life again. Giving your life a facelift doesn’t have to include radical change; it can include small steps.

Walk it off. If all else fails, and you can’t put your finger on what’s going on, get your walking shoes on and take to the great outdoors to think about where you are and where you want to go. Sometimes, boredom is self-induced because we are trying to procrastinate about something else. Rather than sit around and die of boredom, get out and walk it off and try to figure out what is going on that you are really avoiding. Another night of binge-watching a mediocre show is not how you need to be spending your time. A little exercise never hurt anyone and it gives you something to do

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Stop Distractions – Manage Your Inner Triggers

We’re blessed with pocket-sized supercomputers that connect us to anyone and everyone, and a buffet of information. But there’s a dark side: those same gadgets distract us, often at the moments that matter most. Of course, smartphones didn’t invent distraction – they’re just the latest culprit. Before that, we blamed television. And before that, it was the telephone, or comic books, or the radio. Go back more than 2,000 years, Socrates was even criticizing the written word, for causing ‘forgetfulness in the learners’ souls. Still, our present feels different, with the sources of distraction seeming greater in number and more ubiquitous. One study showed that when two people are talking, the mere presence of a smartphone resting on a table is enough to change the character of their conversation.

Distraction, in other words, is a symptom of a problem – not the problem itself. Those deeper and systemic reasons – such as an inability to cope with fear, anxiety or stress – deserve our concern, because it’s only when we start to address them that we can make real progress. When we begin to understand what we’re trying to avoid by clicking over to Twitter or checking the news for the 10th time today, we can begin to address the issue itself, and not medicate it through more distraction. We also begin to appreciate how habitual the act of avoiding discomfort via distraction can be, and how much it’s become a part of how we work and live.

The good news is that there’s something paradoxical about discomfort: it’s actually the best tool we have for evolving and developing as a species. Feeling bad isn’t actually bad; it’s what helped us survive. The American psychologist Roy Baumeister and his colleagues observed: ‘If satisfaction and pleasure were permanent, there might be little incentive to continue seeking further benefits or advances.’ If we didn’t feel bad, in other words, we’d never achieve good.

As often as not, distraction is your brain ducking challenging feelings such as boredom, loneliness, insecurity, fatigue and uncertainty. These are the internal triggers – the root causes – that prompt you to find the comfort of distraction and open a browser tab, Twitter or email, instead of focusing on the matter at hand. Once you identify these internal triggers, you can decide to respond in a more advantageous manner. You won’t always be able to control how you feel – but you can learn to control how you react to the way you feel.

Once you understand the depth of distraction, you can start to manage it and improve. It turns out that being able to focus on the subjects and people in your life who matter improved everything from your health to your happiness to your productivity. Being indistractable can lead you to not just change your life for the better, but also experience life fully. Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as flipping a switch and bam presto! However, it’s eminently doable. It can be done a million different ways, but here are some points I’ve found important :

Master your internal triggers. A lot of writing about distraction focuses on the surface issues: how to turn off notifications on your phone, how to reduce the apps you use. That is all well and good, but the process of becoming indistractable runs much deeper. You will discover that if you started with the tactics – such as eliminating technology – then you’d just find other ways to distract yourself. So, focus on what I call ‘mastering internal triggers’ – what discomfort were you avoiding by turning to social media or your phone? Then work on those distractions and build your work habits around them.

Make time for traction. You have to make a schedule that’s not driven by ticking off your daily to-do list, but instead helps you achieve the things you value most. That could be spending time with family, friends, work, hobbies – anything. But the point is to organize your time around these domains – specifically, around the things you say you want to focus on. When you’ve found it helpful to be explicit about those values then to turn those values into a time.

Hack back external triggers. Ironically, it’s in our work environments that we’re often distracted from doing our work. This is doubly true today, with more of us working at home where we’re mixing the personal with the professional. Take a good look at the notifications that you have activated, both on your phone and on your computer. Think about how many different interruptions you have during the day. Are all of these necessary? You won’t miss these external triggers, and the paradox of eliminating a phone screen update when you get a new Tweet or turning off news alerts is that, in most cases, you won’t notice what you’re missing. Your brain, however, will thank you for giving it one less distraction from whatever you’re focused on.

Prevent distractions with pacts. Make an agreement with yourself or others about how you plan to spend your time. This is a useful strategy for getting over that final hurdle, and it often involves accountability to systems outside of yourself. Make a bet with a friend to spend your time the way you say you will. Use third-party apps to block websites that you know pull you away. In the same way that making automatic contributions to your retirement accounts sets you up for success, you can tackle behaviour change by using pacts to take momentary willpower out of the equation.

Do it consciously. We can change our focus without doing it intentionally but it works much better if you do it intentionally. Doing it accidentally is like blindly stumbling upon something amazing — I wouldn’t count on it, but if you wander around long enough, it’ll probably happen. Instead, make it an intention to consciously shift your focus in this area.

Think about what you want to do. Do you want to be a person who writes every morning? A person who only eats plant-based foods? Someone who buys very little? Write it down: “I am a morning meditator.”

Intentionally start doing the actions. Set up visual reminders, phone reminders, whatever you need to do but start doing the things that you now consider to be important and would do with this new version of yourself. If you’re a runner, go run.

Be the new version of you. Doing the actions is one thing, but you might be doing it while thinking that this is so not you. Instead, do the actions as if you were already that person. See yourself as the runner, the early riser, the writer. Feel it in your being. Stand as this person.

Reinforce it by appreciating yourself. Each day, have a minute where you look back and see what you did. And appreciate this about yourself. See that you’re already shifting. “Yeah, this is happening, good job me!” We tend to focus on the bumps in the road rather than the progress we’re making.

When you falter, think about what this new version of you would do. Even a Zen teacher misses a day of meditation sometimes. That’s a part of life. We don’t always do things “perfectly” and as planned but a Zen teacher wouldn’t miss a day of meditation and then just give up. She’d just sit the next day. A runner will get back into it even after a week of disruption or distraction (maybe due to visitors, illness, travel, injury, etc.). Don’t think of the disruption as proof that you’re not a runner, but instead approach the disruption as if you are a runner.

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Pandemic Blues and Being Happy Again

Happiness is often a goal that people don’t believe is achievable. The human life is riddled with pain and discomfort and it seems sometimes that no matter how hard we try we can’t get ahead. You feel trapped and unsatisfied with the way life is treating you right now, or the way life has turned out and all you want is an escape from the hurt and pain.

Unfortunately, you won’t find happiness outside of yourself. It’s not at the bottom of a beer bottle or in the arms of another person. Happiness really does come from within, which is why it is elusive for so many people. We think things and people make us happy, but the truth is that we can make ourselves happy.

You’re not alone If you are feeling lost and full of sorrow instead of happiness, you can turn things around. Regardless of the reason you feel unhappy, all you really want to know is that you can be happy again. Here’s how you can overcome the sadness ( of the pandemic or otherwise) and find happiness in your life again.

Identify When the Change Happened. The first step in getting back to happy is to determine if you have ever really been happy in the first place. If you agree that yes, you have been happy at one point or another, you need to determine what happened and what changed. What was the moment of change for you? Did something happen at work? Did your spouse leave you? Did you get into debt? Did you just wake up one more and feel blah? You need to know when your life shifted.

In Bronnie Ware’s bestselling book, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, she reported that one of the most common regrets people have at the end of their lives is that they wish they’d let themselves be happier. This indicates that people feeling happiness is in their control if they allow themselves to do things that make them happy. According to Dr. Lisa Firestone, in Psychology Today, “many of us are more self-denying than we realize.” Most of us believe that doing activities that “light us up is selfish or irresponsible.” According to Firestone, this “critical inner voice is actually triggered when we take steps forward” that reminds us to “stay in our place and not to venture out of our comfort zone.” If you can confidently say that you have never been happy in your life, you need to release yourself from that hold and give yourself permission to allow happiness to come from within you.

Don’t Fake it. The next step is to not try to fake happiness. Fake it ‘til you make it is not real life. And we are trying to cultivate real happiness here. Happiness doesn’t mean being happy all of the time. By the way, life is full of ups and downs, so don’t strive to feel good all the time. In fact, according to Noam Spancer , one of the main causes of many psychological problems is the habit of emotional avoidance as it “buys you short term gain at the price of long-term pain.” Being alive means having the privilege to feel all of the feelings and have all the thoughts humans can conjure up.

When you try to block all the feelings that are allocated to you as a human, you don’t get to experience life to the fullest. Happiness is just one piece of the puzzle, albeit an important one. So, don’t fake happiness. It’s worth waiting for.

What’s Standing in Your Way? In order to discover your happiness and allow yourself to experience the full gamut of being human, you need to determine what is standing in the way of your happiness? You might be inclined to point the finger at another person. You might even think it’s your job, lack of money, lack of opportunities, childhood, or even the education you got because your mother suggested it to you 20 years ago; none of that is real. You are standing in your own way on this one.

As mentioned above, happy people aren’t always “happy”. According to Dr. Rubin Khoddam, “Nobody is immune to life’s stressors, but the question is whether you see those stressors as moments of opposition or moments of opportunity.” It’s a tough pill to swallow, but once you get on board with the fact that you are the only thing standing in your way of happiness, the road forward gets a whole lot easier. After all, there are many different definitions of happiness. What’s yours?

Be Kind to Yourself. As you carry on throughout this journey, you need to recognize the points in which you can be kind to yourself. It’s easy to beat ourselves up and declare that nothing is good enough. The Harvard Health Blog says that “gratitude is strongly and consistently associated with greater happiness.” “Gratitude helps people feel more positive emotions, relish good experiences, improve their health, deal with adversity, and build strong relationships.” Practicing gratitude as you follow your own lead will help you see that there are lots of things in your life that are worthy of your attention and work to create happiness in your life and in the lives of others.

You need to be nice to yourself. That doesn’t mean having bubble baths and buying new clothes, although that stuff does make you feel good. Being kind to yourself is about giving yourself the space to figure things out for yourself. Gratitude is not just one of those hippy-dippy things that people do to be cool. Gratitude is something that can profoundly change your life for the better. Even when the cards are stacked against you, the way in which you play them and approach the game can mean the difference between a happy life and one filled with regret and shame. If you are working on being someone who is happier in their life, gratitude is going to help get you there. This includes being grateful for the difficult and uncomfortable times. There are lessons in every aspect of life and when you let yourself experience them fully, you get to where you want to go.

Determine What Happiness Will Look Like for You. Dr. Rubin Khoddam says that “regardless of where you are on the happiness spectrum, each person has their own way of defining happiness.” So many of us are chasing other people’s definitions of happiness. In order to find happiness again, you need to determine what that looks like for you. The hard part is that we often adopt our parents’ or society’s version of happiness and strive to achieve those visions in our own lives. That can lead to a great deal of unhappiness as we come to find out that what others want is not necessarily what we want. And then we have to be brave as we decide to step into our own lives and figure things out for ourselves. What do you want your life to look like? You need to know.

Accept the Difficult Things into Your Life. Remember that life is not all butterflies and rainbows and that you only get rainbows after it rains, and butterflies only appear after a caterpillar has gone through a tremendous transformation. Struggle is required in human life in order to find the sunshine. We don’t just wake up happy, we need to work for it and work on it. When you allow struggles into your life and don’t dramatize them, you can make the most of any situation and grow from it, like the caterpillar turning into a beautiful butterfly.

There’s no point in feeling bad about feeling bad, says Kathleen Dahlen, a psychotherapist based in San Francisco. She says accepting negative feelings is an important habit called “emotional fluency,” which means experiencing your emotions “without judgment or attachment.” This allows you to learn from difficult situations and emotions, use them or move on from them more easily. Once we see the rainbow – or the result of our struggles – we often forget how bad the rain was. While most people searching for happiness want to get to the fun faster, they are not willing to sit in discomfort and learn things about themselves. People who are truly happy are those who have come through the fire and lived to see another day. We don’t live happy lives tucked into bubbles and closed off from the hurt and pain of being human. We need to feel all that there is to feel as human beings in order to be happy. After all, without sadness, how can you know when you are happy?

Believe You Can be Happy. The most important step in finding your happiness again is to truly believe that you can be happy. It might look different from what you imagined, especially as you start out on this journey equipped to go forward with a new attitude and new goals of what your life can look like. But you need to believe it is possible. If you continue to tell yourself that you’ll never be happy, you’ll never find your happiness again. You deserve all that you want in this life, but you need to believe it. Nobody is going to make you happy. No object, thing, experience, advice, or purchase will make you happy. You can make yourself happy if you believe it. According to Dr. Jeffrey Berstein, in Psychology Today, trying to find happiness outside yourself is misguided as “happiness based on achievements does not last long.”

Don’t rush through life. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but you can’t see the beauty if you are rushing through life. Research suggests that being “rushed” can make you miserable. Yet on the other hand, some studies suggest that have nothing to do can also take its toll on you. However, the balance is just right when you’re living a productive life at a comfortable place. Therefore, it’s important to have goals, but we don’t need to be in a hurry all the time to get things done. It leaves so much wasted time on the journey not soaking in life. Happy people feel their way through life and they allow the good and the bad to penetrate into them so they can have the full human experience. Stop and smell the roses isn’t just some old-time advice that sounds nice, it’s real-life advice that can help you be happier.

Have a few close relationships. You don’t need a hundred close friends, but you do need one or two people in your life who matter and who are there to help pick you up when you fall. This might be a spouse, your parents, a sibling, or a friend from down the street. Having a few close relationships has been shown to make us happier while we’re young, and has been shown to improve quality of life and help us live longer. So, how many friends? About 5 close relationships, according to the book Finding Flow,    “National surveys find that when someone claims to have 5 or more friends with whom they can discuss important problems, they are 60 percent more likely to say that they are ‘very happy’.” However, perhaps the number isn’t as important as the effort you put into your relationships. We all need someone to remind us we are not alone in this life, and to help make us smile when things have gone sideways. Happy people have someone they can count on. It makes them feel safe and secure to know that they can turn to their person during their time of need, and to celebrate the wins when they happen. Connection makes for a happier life. If you are seeking happiness, don’t head out on the journey of discovery alone. While we can walk this world alone, it is always more fun to spend your precious time with people, doing things that bring you joy. When we are surrounded by people we love and who love us, we feel safe. When we feel safe, we are more likely to let things slide off our backs, are less likely to let drama take hold of us, and are more likely to see the good in people. We have a trusting circle that we feel protects us, our interests, and we feel safe to be ourselves.

Buy experiences, not things. You might be inclined to head to your local shopping center when life is getting hard; a little retail therapy never hurt anyone, after all. But does it really make people happy? Sure, you might get a quick-fix of pleasure, but you know as well as anyone that the happiness derived from buying things doesn’t last.

Dr. Thomas Gilovich, a psychology professor at Cornell University, has been researching the affect of money on happiness for two decades. Gilovich says, “one of the enemies of happiness is adaptation. We buy things to make us happy, and we succeed. But only for a while. New things are exciting to us at first, but then we adapt to them.” If you feel the urge to spend money, spend money on experiences. Go see the world. Live your life on planes and trains and in the car on the road to nowhere. According to Gilovich, “our experiences are a bigger part of ourselves than our material goods. You can really like your material stuff. You can even think that part of your identity is connected to those things, but nonetheless they remain separate from you. In contrast, your experiences really are part of you. We are the sum total of our experiences.” Get out and find out what life is made of in other places. Spend time in beautiful parks, on challenging walking trails, and by the ocean as much as possible. These are the places you’ll find your happiness, not the mall.

Don’t rely on other things or other people to make you happy. It’s not your job’s job to make you happy. If you are miserable at work, it’s because you are making yourself miserable at work. Happy people know that there is life beyond the walls of the office and that they don’t need to derive any value about themselves from the job that helps them earn money. The money they earn helps them live a better life, but it’s how they choose to approach that life and use that money that makes them happy. Your spouse, children, and family are not responsible for your happiness either. When you take full responsibility for your happiness, you’ll find that you move closer toward what it is you want in life.

Get moving. Research suggests that physical stress can relieve mental stress. The Harvard Health Blog says that aerobic exercise is key for your head, just as it is for your heart, “Regular aerobic exercise will bring remarkable changes to your body, your metabolism, your heart, and your spirits. It has a unique capacity to exhilarate and relax, to provide stimulation and calm, to counter depression and dissipate stress. It’s a common experience among endurance athletes and has been verified in clinical trials that have successfully used exercise to treat anxiety disorders and clinical depression. If athletes and patients can derive psychological benefits from exercise, so can you.”

According to Harvard Health, exercise works because it reduces levels of the body’s stress hormones, such as adrenaline and cortisol. It also stimulates the production of endorphins, which are natural painkillers and mood elevators. Exercise helps keep the body strong and the mind sharp. Exercise your brain and your body with thoughtful reflections about your life, where you are going and how you are going to get there. Exercise your body to keep yourself ready for the amazing life you are going to live. A lot of research has been done that shows that people who exercise on a regular basis are happier. Running a 4-minute mile might not sound like a lot of fun to you, so don’t do it. Find somewhere to take a leisurely walk and enjoy the company of yourself, your breathing, and the sound of your feet on the ground.

Follow your gut. When a hospice nurse was asked, in the Top 5 Regrets of the Dying, one of the common answers she received was not being true to their dreams. “This was the most common regret of all. When people realize that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled. Most people had not honoured even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made. Health brings a freedom very few realise, until they no longer have it.” We can’t be happy if we don’t trust ourselves to fulfill all of our desires, wishes, and dreams. If you rely on others to do things for you, you’ll be waiting a long time to be happy. Going out there and going after what you want is not only exhilarating, but rewarding. Sometimes, you don’t find happiness at the end of the journey. Sometimes, the journey is what brings you happiness. Trust your gut and you’ll find that you are not only capable of making yourself happy, but that your adventures to find what is on the other side of those feelings are worth the journey.

Practice mindfulness. American Psychological Association defines mindfulness “as a moment-to-moment awareness of one’s experience without judgment”. Studies have suggested that mindfulness can help reduce rumination, reduce stress, boost working memory, improve focus, improve emotional reactivity, improve cognitive flexibility and enhance relationship satisfaction. People who are happy are very aware of themselves and how they show up in the world. They understand that they are in control of what happens to them and how they interpret the world. They spend a lot of time being mindful of themselves, their surroundings, and their options in life. They catch themselves when they are playing the victim and they are not satisfied with letting themselves off the hook when things get hard. Mindfulness is the key to unlocking a world of possibilities in your life. It can take a lot of practice, which is why it is called a practice and is something that you can do every day in order to lead a more fulfilled life.

Learning about ourselves. Happy people don’t just appear; they are made. You need to make yourself into a happier person. But that can take work. And the work you do doesn’t always mean that you will find out things you like about yourself. According to Niia Nikolova, a Postdoctoral Researcher of Psychology, knowing ourselves is the first step in breaking negative thought patterns, “Recognising true emotions can help us to intervene in the space between feelings and actions – knowing your emotions is the first step to being in control of them, breaking negative thought patterns. Understanding our own emotions and thinking patterns can also help us more easily empathise with others.”

Learning about yourself is a tough road to walk down, but the happiest people in the world don’t live in oblivion. They are authentic and authentic to themselves. The only way to become authentic is to face the music. If you want to be a more patient person, you need to practice patience. You don’t just become patient. If you want to be happier, you need to practice being happy. Makes sense, right? But you first need to know why you aren’t happy. That requires courage and the bravery to look yourself in the mirror and find out why you aren’t letting yourself live your life to the fullest.

Look for the good in people. Being happy doesn’t mean you’ll be happy all of the time. Happiness is a state of mind, not a state of being .You will experience difficulties along the way, and you will encounter people who rub you the wrong way, make you feel irritated and who just down right annoy you. When you see the bad in people, you tend to hold grudges. However, the negative emotions associated with grudges eventually give way to resentment. In turn, this leaves little room to be happy, according to Mayo Clinic. Letting go of grudges and see the best people has been linked to less psychological stress and a longer life. There’s no way of knowing what people mean to say or do, so the best thing you can do is when you feel like you have been hurt or wronged is to take responsibility for your thoughts and feelings and to see the good in their intentions.

While others may hurt us, most people don’t mean to: it’s how we react that causes us hurt and anger. Happy people know that others can’t make them feel anything. Our thoughts guide our feelings. So, look for the good in people and then look for the problem you have with the situation and fix it from within. These things will help make you happier. Other people won’t.

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Mindfulness and the New Normal

Everything seems relatively normal and comfortable, except that constant twitch in the back of your mind that’s saying, “It’s time to make some changes.” Far too often we travel through life on autopilot, going through the motions, accepting what is, and having every day pass like the one before it. As our new reality unfolds under the circumstances imposed by COVID-19, it continues to reveal a number of socio-ecological challenges. We seem to have mastered the perfect recipe for chaos: a global ecological emergency, humanitarian crises, and to top it off, a pandemic of epic proportions. We need to learn how to practice mindfulness in a manner that reduces suffering for all beings, in both the present moment and the post-pandemic future.

Researchers are finding new applications and interventions for mindfulness practices to enhance individual well-being, including the reduction of stress, anxiety, and depression. Mindfulness means maintaining a moment-by-moment awareness of our thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, and surrounding environment, through a gentle, nurturing lens. When we practice mindfulness, our thoughts tune into what we’re sensing in the present moment rather than rehashing the past or imagining the future. Some of these practices have demonstrated promise for improving numerous aspects of human health and collective well-being, especially during the times of widespread crisis. It has been found that these practices can increase compassion and empathy, which are not only essential traits for supporting both individual and collective resilience but also in nurturing feelings of interconnectedness and reducing risk factors for loneliness and isolation which has become increasingly important. Where do we begin to make sense of the current times? Or more importantly, how can we move towards a positive systemic shift that leaves no one behind? For this to be conceived and pursued, the ways by which we define, practice and apply mindfulness, need to be reexamined, and in some cases, transformed.

Here are a few simple suggestions for those who want to break free from the mold and truly live more of their life – to experience it and enjoy it to the fullest, instead of settling for a mere existence.

Appreciate the great people and things in your life. Sometimes we don’t notice the things others do for us until they stop doing them. Don’t be like that. Be grateful for what you have, who loves you, and who cares for you. You’ll never know how much they mean to you until the day they’re no longer beside you. Truly appreciate those around you, and you’ll soon find many others around you. Truly appreciate life, and you’ll find that you have more of it to live.

Recognize those who love you. The most memorable people in your life will be the ones who loved you when you weren’t very loveable. Pay attention to who these people are in your life, and love them back, even when they aren’t acting loveable.

Be thankful for all the troubles you don’t have. There are two ways of being happy, satisfied and contended – one is to have all you want, the other is to be satisfied with what you have. Accept and appreciate things now, and you’ll find more happiness in every moment you live. Happiness comes when we stop complaining about the troubles we have and offer thanks for all the troubles we don’t have. And remember, you have to fight through some bad days to earn the best days of your life.

Embrace change and enjoy your life as it unfolds. The hardest part about growing is letting go of what you were used to, and moving on with something you’re not.  Sometimes you have to stop worrying, wondering, and doubting, and have faith that things will work out. Laugh at the confusion, live consciously in the moment, and enjoy your life as it unfolds. You might not end up exactly where you intended to go, but eventually you will arrive precisely where you need to be.

Choose to listen to your inner voice. Life is a courageous journey or nothing at all. We cannot become who we want to be by continuing to do exactly what we’ve been doing. Choose to listen to your inner voice, not the jumbled opinions of everyone else. Do what you know in your heart is right for you. It’s your road, and yours alone. Others may walk it with you, but no one can walk it for you.  And be sure to appreciate every day of your life. Good days give you happiness, bad days give you experience, and the worst days give you the best lessons.

Choose your relationships wisely. The best relationships are not just about the good times you share, they’re also about the obstacles you go through together, and the fact that you still say “I love you” in the end. And loving someone isn’t just about saying it every day, it’s showing it every day in every way. Relationships must be chosen wisely. Don’t rush love. Wait until you truly find it. Don’t let loneliness drive you back into the arms of someone you know you don’t belong with. Fall in love when you’re ready, not when you’re lonely. A great relationship is worth waiting for.

Love yourself too. If you can love children, in spite of the messes they make; your mother, in spite of her tendency to nag; your father, even though he’s too opinionated; your sibling, even though she’s always late; your friend, even though he often forgets to return what he borrows, then you know how to love imperfect people, and can surely love yourself.

Forgive those who have hurt you. I forgive people, but that doesn’t mean I trust them. I just don’t have time to hate people who hurt me, because I’m too busy loving people who love me. The first to apologize is the bravest. The first to forgive is the strongest. The first to move forward is the happiest.  Be brave. Be strong. Be happy. Be free.

Ignore other people’s negativity. If you allow people to make more withdrawals than deposits in your life, you will be out of balance and in the negative before you know it. Ignore unconstructive, hurtful commentary. No one has the right to judge you. They may have heard your stories, but they didn’t feel what you were going through. You do not have control over what others say; but you do have control over whether or not you allow them to say these things to you. You alone can deny their poisonous words from invading your heart and mind.

Be who you really are. If you’re lucky enough to have something that makes you different from everybody else, don’t change. Uniqueness is priceless. In this crazy world that’s trying to make you like everyone else, find the courage to keep being your awesome self. And when they laugh at you for being different, laugh back at them for being the same. It takes a lot of courage to stand alone, but it’s worth it. Being you is worth it!

Do things your future self will thank you for. What you do every day matters more than what you do every once in a while. What you do today is important because you are exchanging a day of your life for it. Make sure it’s worthwhile.

Accept the fact that the past in not today. Don’t let the past steal your present and future from you.  You might not be proud of all the things you’ve done in the past, but that’s okay. The past is not today. The past cannot be changed, forgotten, or erased. It can only be accepted. We all make mistakes, have struggles, and even regret things in our past. But you are not your mistakes, you are not your struggles, and you are here now with the power to shape your day and your future.

Let go when you must. It’s not always about trying to fix something that’s broken. Some relationships and situations just can’t be fixed. If you try to force them back together, things will only get worse. Sometimes it’s about starting over and creating something better. Strength shows not only in the ability to persist, but in the ability to start over again with a smile on your face and passion in your heart.

Enjoy the little things in life. The best things in life are free. There is absolute joy and wonder to be had in the simplest of moments. Watching the sunset over the horizon or spending time with a family member. Enjoy the little things, because one day you may look back and discover they were the big things.

Leave enough time for fun. Sometimes you need to take a few steps back to see things clearly.  Never let your life become so filled with work, your mind become so crammed with worry, or your heart become so jammed with old hurts or anger, that there’s no room left in them for fun, for awe, or for joy.

Hoping and wishing you a smooth transition to the new normal and a happy life free from stress, anxiety and depression.

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Stop Lying Yourself

Lying to others is wrong, but lying to yourself is an absolute tragedy. The worst lies are the ones we subconsciously tell ourselves. They’ve been ingrained in our minds by bad external influences and negative thinking. Next time you decide to unclutter your life and clean up your space, start with your intellectual space by clearing out the old lies and negative self-talk you often recite to yourself.

Some of these lies which you should immediately stop telling yourself are :

I don’t have enough yet to be happy. In every mistake and struggle there is a message. Some people miss the message because they’re too busy berating themselves for the mistake, or fretting over the problem. To be upset about what you don’t have is always a waste of what you do have.  The happiest of people aren’t the luckiest, and they usually don’t have the best of everything; they just make the most of everything that comes their way. The reason so many people give up is because they tend to look at what’s missing, and how far they still have to go, instead of what’s present, and how far they have come.

My dreams are impossible. Don’t let someone who gave up on their dreams talk you out of going after yours. The best thing you can do in life is follow your heart. Take risks. Don’t just make the safe and easy choices because you’re afraid of what might happen. If you do, nothing will ever happen. If you keep doing what you’re doing, you’ll keep getting what you’re getting. Let your dreams be bigger than your fears and your actions speak louder than your words. Do something every day that your future self will thank you for.

I am stuck with people who hurt me. Life is too short. Look out for yourself. If someone continuously mistreats you, have enough respect for yourself to leave them. It may hurt for a while, but it’ll be OK. You’ll be OK. Oftentimes, walking away has nothing to do with weakness, and everything to do with strength. We walk away not because we want others to realize our worth, but because we finally realize our own worth.

My failed relationships were a waste of time. There are certain people who aren’t meant to fit into your life. But no relationship is ever a waste of time. If it doesn’t bring you what you want, it teaches you what you don’t want. We rarely lose ‘friends’, we just gradually figure out who our real ones are.  Never force someone to make a space in their life for you, because if they know your worth, they will surely create one for you. And remember, when you’re up, your ‘friends’ know who you are, when you’re down, you know who your ‘real friends’ are. It just takes a little time to figure it all out.

Things will never get better. There is no person in the world capable of flawlessly handling every punch thrown at them. That’s not how we’re made. In fact, we’re made to get upset, sad, hurt, stumble and fall. Because that’s part of living – to face problems, learn, adapt, and solve them over the course of time. This is what ultimately molds us into the person we become. When you find yourself cocooned in isolation and cannot find your way out of the darkness, remember that this is similar to the place where caterpillars go to grow their wings. Just because today is a terrible day doesn’t mean tomorrow won’t be the best day of your life. You just got to get there.

Failure is bad. Sometimes you have to fail a thousand times to succeed. No matter how many mistakes you make or how slow you progress, you are still way ahead of everyone who isn’t trying.  Don’t get so hung up on one failed attempt that you miss the opening for many more. All of your ideas that don’t work are simply stepping stones on your way to the one idea that does. And remember, failure is not falling down; failure is staying down when you have the choice to get back up. Always get back up! Oftentimes, good things fall apart so better things can fall together.

Great things will come to me effortlessly. We are who we choose to be. Nobody’s going to come and save you; you’ve got to save yourself. Nobody’s going to give you anything, you’ve got to go out and earn it. Nobody knows what you want except for you. And nobody will be as sorry as you if you don’t achieve it. Never leave your key to happiness in someone else’s pocket, and don’t wait on someone else to build your dream life for you. Be the architect and keeper of your own happiness.  The more you take responsibility for your past and present, the more you are able to create the future you seek.

My past is solely indicative of my future. At some point, we’ve all made mistakes, been walked on, used and forgotten. We’ve let people take advantage of us, and we’ve accepted way less than we deserve.  But we shouldn’t regret one moment of it, because in those moments we’ve learned a lot from our bad choices. We’ve learned who we can trust and who we can’t. We’ve learned the meaning of friendship. We’ve learned how to tell when people are lying and when they’re sincere. We’ve learned how to be ourselves, and appreciate the truly great people and things in our lives as they arrive. And, even though there are some things we can never recover and people who will never be sorry, we now know better for next time.

I never need to meet anyone new. It sounds harsh, but you cannot keep every friend you’ve ever made. People and priorities change. As some relationships fade others will grow. Appreciate the possibility of new relationships as you naturally let go of old ones that no longer work. Trust your judgment. Embrace new relationships, knowing that you are entering into unfamiliar territory. Be ready to learn, be ready for a challenge, and be ready to meet someone that might just change your life forever.

I can’t live without those who are gone. If someone comes into your life and has a positive impact on you, but for some reason they can’t stay, don’t mourn for too long. Be thankful that your paths crossed and that they somehow made you happy, even if it was just for a short while. Life is change.  People really do come and go. Some come back, some don’t, and that’s okay. And just because one person leaves, doesn’t mean you should forget about everyone else who’s still standing by your side.  Continue to appreciate what you have, and smile about the memories.

I’m not ready because I’m not good enough yet. Nobody ever feels always ready when an opportunity arises. Because most great opportunities in life force us to grow beyond our comfort zones, which means we won’t feel totally comfortable at first. Stop berating yourself for being a work in progress. Start embracing it! Because being a work in progress doesn’t mean you’re not good enough today; it means you want a better tomorrow, and you wish to love yourself completely, so you can live your life fully. It means you’re determined to heal your heart, expand your mind and cultivate the gifts you know you’re meant to share. You are ready. You just need to start.

I have way too much to lose. In the end you will not regret the things you have done nearly as much as the things you have left undone. Trust me, you’d rather look back at your life and say, “I can’t believe I did that ” instead of, “I wish I would have…”  It’s better to think “Oh well,” than “what if.”

It’s better to have a lifetime full of mistakes that you learned from, rather than a heart full of regrets and empty dreams.

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Protagoras’ Paradox and the Great Corona

The Sophists in ancient Greece were a class of teachers who, for a fairly high fee, would instruct the affluent youth in politics, history, science, law, mathematics and rhetoric as well as the finer points of grammar and history. The man named as the first Sophist, and certainly the most famous, was Protagoras of Abdera (c.485-415 BCE) best known for his claim that “Man is the Measure of All things” and that the gods’ existence could neither be proven nor disproven. While Protagoras, like those who followed him, charged exorbitant fees for his services, a story is told of how the great Sophist was once outsmarted by one of his pupils and this tale came to be known as Protagoras’ Paradox.

Protagoras agreed to instruct a poor young man, Euthalos, in law and rhetoric free of charge on the condition that he would pay the Sophist’s fee in full if, and only if, he won his first court case. Once Euthalos had completed his course of study with Protagoras he assiduously avoided taking any cases at all. Protagoras, finally out of patience with the young man, took him to court for payment and argued, “If I win this case, Euthalos will have to pay me what he owes me. If I do not win this case then Euthalos will still have to pay me because, under our agreement, he will then have won his first court case. Therefore, no matter what the outcome, Euthalos will have to pay me.” Euthalos, however, contested this claim, stating, “If I win this case, I will not have to pay Protagoras, as the court has declared his case invalid. If I do not win this case I still do not have to pay as I will then have not won my first court case. Therefore, no matter what, I do not have to pay.” This is known as Protagoras’ Paradox, which ever way you look, both have equally convincing arguments, one can go either way in supporting the teacher or the student and would not be wrong. This argument (for which no solution was ever offered in antiquity) came to be known as the Paradox of The Court and a resolution to the question is still debated today in law schools as a logic problem.

We, in the present day situation have an uncanny similarity to this paradox. The Protagoras’ Paradox succinctly captures the paradox of our times when the coronavirus COVID-19 is affecting 212 countries and territories around the world . Health and economic issues aside, the virus is playing havoc on our social fabric. Projected figures of the death toll due to the coronavirus, from Harvard to Imperial college, are based on complex calculations beyond the comprehension of most of us. Equally baffling is the downward or upward revisions by the same institutions. It is truly an infodemic within a pandemic. While the value of a human life can never be compared or quantified with economic cost, there is enough evidence to suggest a direct qualitative and quantitative relationship of economic wellbeing with life.

Those in the medical practice often come across such situations, either in making diagnostic or therapeutic decisions. One physician recommends a course of treatment based on scientific evidence and another recommends a diametrically opposite course, again, based on medical evidence. Right or wrong, but some merit would exist on both sides. Often the physicians are having an internal struggle to make a decision about the most appropriate course of action, Protagoras and Euthalos are arguing in their minds and the horns of dilemma are tearing them apart.

This essay was prompted by someone’s tweet , ‘hope the cure is not worse than the disease’. I hate to say, but I find some merit in this tweet. In our global attempt to flatten the COVID curve, one must hope not to flatten the global economy curve. The question is what’s the best way forward. Do we continue lockdown for a very long time and wipe out our economies or let a few 100 million die and keep the economies going ? One group recommends ‘total lockdown’ to break the transmission chain, based on the evidence from China (they managed to control the spread of the virus by ruthless lockdown and 3 months later they are telling the world that the disease has been controlled in Wuhan). On the other hand, the other school of thought is divided on graded isolation and protection of elderly and the very young and those with co-morbidities. They believe in letting it spread amongst the young and healthy, hoping that the disease will ultimately be controlled when we achieve ‘herd immunity’. The medical community is divided in these two groups. To enforce complete lockdown or graded isolation?

To complicate the issue, the epidemiologists have joined the bandwagon with their own interpretation of statistical analysis saying that if we don’t opt for a complete lockdown then a million people will die in 1 year. No, say some more, like 90 million will die in 1 year. Whose data analysis is correct ?  Some suggest do nothing, nature will take over in a few months and all will be well, they quote historical data to justify their recommendations. On whose inputs should we base our disaster management strategy.

Then come the economists with their doomsday predictions. If this continues after May, our medical resources will be overwhelmed, agriculture will suffer, food shortages will occur and all production will come to a standstill. There will be an economic crisis of the proportions that world has not seen ever. So, break this lockdown nonsense and let’s get back to work as usual.

What will our political masters do? My guess is they will listen to medical experts, epidemiologists and economists and then decide what course of action will ensure their survival. What will get them people’s votes and they will run with that. At present, ‘lockdown’ finds favour with them. UK had to abandon the recommendations of the medical community about graded response because of the people’s perception that the government is not doing enough to protect the citizens. So, screw it, lets go with total lockdown if that’s what the people want. Gradually people will get tired of lockdown and demand to let the life go on. Then, with equally convincing arguments the governments will say the time has now come to lift the blockade, we have controlled the contagion, we have won. Unfortunately, the costs in either case will be huge in terms of both, lives and money.

Who are we going to blame for this pandemic? Pandemics come out of nowhere and go the way they came. When all this ends- and fervently hopes sooner than later– proponents and opponents of every action will undoubtedly claim to be vindicated and pat their own back even as distinction between experts and astrologers will increasingly get blurred. Didn’t Malthus predict that when population would overshoot the earth’s sustainable capacity, natural calamities and disease would restore the balance? It is really a perplexing situation and no one seems to be correct or in the winning mode. The Protagoras’ Paradox is as true today as it was then.

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Rewire your Brain with Happy Thoughts

Have you felt like insults stick more than compliments? The answer is that it is just how our brains work. Nastiness makes a bigger impact on our brains than happy thoughts. It is due to our brains ‘negativity bias’, a phenomenon by which we have a greater sensitivity to unpleasant news and bad experiences. When we experience negative stimuli, there is a greater surge in electrical activity in our brain. In turn, our attitudes are more heavily influenced by negative news than good news.

The good news is that you can still stand up to your negative thoughts and learn the habit of happy life thinking. Using the following techniques, you can rewire your brain to think more happy thoughts.

Teach your brain to see the positive. Remembering the bad things will make you miserable. But if you will teach your brain to see the positive in every situation, it will make life easier for you. Showing gratitude for the good things is perhaps the most powerful happiness boosting activity. Not only will it make you happier, but it can also make your life better and for everyone around you.

Do what you are good at. The secret why starving artists are happier is because they use their ‘signature strengths’. These are the things you are uniquely good at painting, playing instruments, and the like. Using your signature strengths often increases happy thoughts. So, think about what you are good at and do it often. It is the secret to experiencing more ‘flow’ at work and in life.

Spend time with people you like. Happiness is more contagious than unhappiness. If you spend time with the people you love – family and friends, it will bring about happy thoughts. The happiest people are those who have strong relationships. So, make the most out of your life and spend it with them. Not spending more time with people, we love is something most people regret the most.

Give a lot. Have you noticed that when you give, it makes you feel good? It is because giving makes us happier than receiving. You don’t have to give money; it can be anything. You can give time, effort, doing nice things; it can create a feedback loop of happiness in your life.

Get busy. Sometimes, you don’t usually do what you love. We just do what is convenient and easy for us, for example, sitting on the couch watching TV does not really make us happy. When you get to work and do what you love, you are happier. It’s because when your mind and hands are busy, you are focused. A wandering mind is not a happy mind because it can lead to negative thoughts. Thinking and working can beat sad feelings.

Now, these were some of the techniques using which you can train your brain to think happy thoughts. Again, here are a few ‘happy thoughts’ which can help you get out of a negative thinking slump.

The difficulties are not permanent. By thinking that “this too shall pass and life will go on,” you are redirecting your focus away from the negativity of the situation. This is an excellent thought to entertain to counter all the other thoughts that are arising.

Good things will happen. Life is not all negativity. When bad things happen, it is certain that good things will come soon. You may think you are battered with trials and tribulations, but the rain will stop soon. Remind yourself that there will be better days. Doing so will help you to keep going and to keep searching for the light at the end of the tunnel. By entertaining happy, positive thoughts during these black days, you are rising above the negativity.

I am loved. When you are down and feeling lonely, remember that there is/are someone(s) in this world who love you. There are a lot of people who think about you, care about you, and want the best for you. They are your friends and families. Allow yourself to savor how powerful and breathtaking that is. Let the feeling of being loved give you a sense of warmth, peace, and happiness.

I am intelligent and capable. All of us are born unique. No one can be you except you. You were born with the ability to think, to problem-solve, to create, to analyze, to achieve, and to survive. Do not listen to the lie that you are worthless. You have plenty of natural and learned talents and skills. So rather than focus on what you cannot do, focus on what you can do to be successful.

Everything happens for a reason; everything leads to something better. If you are a person who believes that your life is predetermined, then good for you. However, this thought has nothing to do with destiny. Instead, it is a brilliantly encouraging thought that will bring happiness. It will help you accept the bad things that happened and look forward to the lessons it brings. It will also open yourself up to start searching for meaning in the difficulties you faced as well as being optimistic about what will happen in the future. When faced with a bad experience, it is easy to blame ourselves. But if we entertain this happy thought, it encourages us to shed off our role as a helpless victim. Once this process has kicked in, our mindset will go from victim to victor.

Smooth seas do not make skillful sailors. You’re always best when things are the worst. We must remember that setbacks and difficulties cannot be avoided. Instead of wallowing in self-pity, we must use these experiences as opportunities to grow and become a better version of ourselves. As they say, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. So, whatever happens to us will ultimately help us become a stronger and wiser person. There are a lot of people who have started shining in the brightest light during times of great despair. In fact, without the challenging hardship, they wouldn’t be the person they are today. They’ve come out with great characters and unshakeable willpower.

When one door closes another door opens. Sometimes, life closes a door and we can never open it again. We experience “bad season” – our business fails, we get fired from our jobs, or our loved ones leave us. It can also be in the form of missed opportunities but remember for everything that is taken from your life, you will gain something new. What you do is not to remain standing in front of the door that closed because it will bring resentment. Instead, try to seek new opportunities and be positive about the future.

You are the only one you can compare yourself with. The problem about comparisons is that they are unjust and can make you feel insecure. Most of the time, you lack the right metrics to compare the accomplishments of your life with those of other people. We also tend to compare our weaknesses with other people’s strengths, our poverty to other people’s affluence, and our incapability to other people’s power. The truth is that you are unique – you can do what others can’t. Just like an axe that cannot cut hair and a scissor that cannot cut wood, we all have different strengths.

Comparisons cause dissatisfaction, discontent and great levels of unhappiness. Instead of comparing yourself to other people, compare your own progress with your former self. See how you have grown and developed as a person. When you compare yourself to your previous version, you will realize the important accomplishments of your life, instead of letting other people’s accomplishments drag you down.

When you train your brain to look for the silver lining in every situation, you’ll notice that you quickly catch yourself in negative thinking. With that, it will be easier for you to automatically reframe your thoughts to something more positive.

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Vibration

Vibration in quantum physics means everything is energy. We are vibrant beings on certain frequencies. Every vibration is equivalent to a feeling and in the world “vibrational”, there are only two species of vibrations, positive and negative. Any feeling makes you broadcast a vibration that can be positive or negative. Here are  a few things (and suggestions) that may affect your vibration frequency from the point of view of quantum physics.

Thoughts. Every thought emits a frequency to the universe and this frequency goes back to origin, so in the case, if you have negative thoughts, discouragement, sadness, anger, fear, all this comes back to you. This is why it is so important that you take care of the quality of your thoughts and learn how to cultivate more positive thoughts.

Your social circle. The people around you directly influence your vibration frequency. If you surround yourself with happy, positive and determined people, you will also enter this vibration. Now, if you surround yourself with people complaining, gossiping and pessimist, be careful! Indeed, they can reduce your frequency and therefore prevent you from using the law of attraction in your favor.

Music. Music is very powerful. If you only listen to music that talks about death, betrayal, sadness, abandonment, all this will interfere with what you are feeling. Pay attention to the lyrics of the music you listen to; it could reduce or enhance your vibration frequency. And, remember, you attract exactly what you feel in your life.

Things you look at. When you look at programs that deal with misfortunes, death, betrayals, etc. your brain accepts this as a reality and releases a whole chemistry into your body, which affects your vibration frequency. Look at things that make you feel good and help you vibrate at a higher frequency.

Atmosphere. Whether it’s at home or at work, if you spend a lot of time in a messy and dirty environment, it will affect your vibration frequency. Improve, if you can, what surrounds you and organize and clean your environment. Show the universe that you are fit to receive much more. Take care of what you already have.

Words. If you claim or speak wrong about things and people, it affects your vibration frequency. To keep your frequency high, it is essential to eliminate the habit of complaining and bad mouthing about others. Avoid drama and bullying. Assume your responsibility for the choices of your life.

Gratitude. Gratitude positively affects your vibration frequency. This is a habit you should integrate now into your life. Start to thank for everything, for the good things and what you consider to be bad, thank yourself for all the experiences you’ve experienced. Gratitude opens the door for good things to happen positively in your life.

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Work-Life Balance

Workaholics are often praised rather than looked down upon. Many admire the hard work and grit they put into bettering their career prospects. While being a hard worker is indeed a necessary trait to succeed, it’s essential that we realise just how important our lives outside of work are.

Good for your health. People who overwork are known to experience what is commonly called a ‘burnout’. This happens when too much of your mental energy is dedicated towards stressful and demanding tasks. This can even lead to more severe problems such as high blood pressure, heart disease and mental illness such as anxiety or depression. Chronic stress can be more harmful than you think it is, even if it seems to be having little of an effect on you.

More time for yourself. Dedicating all your time to work is often at the cost of the other important aspects of your life, such as hobbies or any other leisure activities. Most workaholics are guilty of using work as an excuse to procrastinate other obligations, like going to the gym or working on a potential side project. You shouldn’t have to sacrifice too much of your personal time to be a good employee. Having a life outside of work will leave you more fulfilled with what you have achieved. After all, what’s the point of having a lot of money if you don’t have the time to spend it?

Improves your relationships. Another important trait of healthy individuals is maintaining wholesome relationships with the people they care about. This could be your family, your partner or your best friends. Having the time to build upon and strengthen your relationships is necessary for your well being. Don’t be that guy who missed your anniversary dinner or birthday party for a frivolous work event.

You enjoy the work you do more. When you devote all your time to a single thing, you don’t allow yourself to appreciate it. Being able to take time off work is essential to ensure that you enjoy the time that you do spend working. The little bit of time you spend away from the office could be just what you need to re-spark the passion you do feel for your job.

Makes you more productive at work. This can seem counterproductive, but it has been proven to be true. A balanced work-life relationship allows you to perform your best when you are at work. This is because being able to switch off, once in a while, will give you the necessary boost you need to get back when you need to.

Think of all the times you’ve taken a break from a complicated task only to come back with fresh energy and a recharged drive to tackle the issue. Productivity is present in limited amounts. Use it wisely.

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Our Uncertain Reality

The Golden Buddha

In the mid-1950’s, the leaders of Thailand decided to build a new highway into their largest city, Bangkok. The highway would pass through an area with relatively low population density where an old broken-down temple stood. The government purchased the property rights to the old temple and the surrounding grounds, and agreed to let a few local monks move a 500-year-old white stucco statue of Buddha to a safer location.

The stucco Buddha was absolutely immense in size and weight. It stood nearly 11 feet tall, with a 6-foot circumference, and weighed in at nearly 15,000 pounds. So the local monks worked with the government leaders to arrange for a large crane and transport to safely move the stucco Buddha from the old temple grounds to a new home on the other side of the city.

A couple weeks later, when the crane was actually in the process of moving the stucco Buddha, it was clear that everyone involved had miscalculated the statue’s weight and fragility. At one point, a turbulent wind gust forced the crane operator to bring the stucco Buddha back down to the ground with a hard thud. The massive idol cracked open in several places the moment it hit the ground, and the local monks screamed and pleaded for all crane operations to be halted for the day. Then, tarps were placed over the cracked statue to protect it from ensuing turbulent winds.

That evening, one of the monks was still very disturbed and couldn’t sleep a wink. So he put on his windbreaker and returned to the stucco Buddha with a lantern. He wanted to evaluate the damage to his sacred and holy idol. As he peered under one of the tarps and through a crack in the stucco, he noticed something odd buried several inches beneath the surface of the statue.

He picked up a mallet that the crane operator had left on the job site, and carefully chipped away at a small, loose piece of stucco that was wedged in the crack. When that loose piece of stucco eventually fell to ground, he peered through the now larger crack and was absolutely amazed by what he saw. So he returned to his monastery, woke up his fellow monks, and asked for their immediate assistance.

He told each of them to wear a windbreaker and bring a lantern and a mallet. Together, they returned to the stucco Buddha and, working against the winds, they began to chip away at the enormous sacred statue they and their ancestors had idolized and protected diligently for 20 generations.

When they completed their work the next morning, they all stood back in astonishment and gazed at what, together, they had worked tirelessly to uncover: their giant stucco Buddha statue wasn’t made of stucco at all. Instead, it was made of solid gold. And today, in the year 2020, the Golden Buddha—as it is now known—remains the largest known solid gold statue in the history of mankind.

In today’s dollars, just the price of the gold alone that makes up this behemoth of a Golden Buddha is worth more than $250,000,000.

Life’s Turbulent Winds

As Einstein so profoundly said, “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”

Of course, there are dozens of life lessons we can gleam from the seemingly impossible true story of the giant Golden Buddha. But, at this moment, let’s just reflect on Einstein’s sentiment.

Reality is frequently inaccurate, and in the long run, the eyes see only what the mind is prepared to comprehend and discover.

We as a species are forever fighting through turbulent winds and chipping away at the layers of figurative stucco in our lives—layers of new truths hidden beneath old ones. And isn’t it funny how we can wrap our minds so tightly around things and fit them into our own version of reality? Sometimes for hundreds of years straight before we are forced to see things differently?

So, let that sink in right now. Life is a series of natural and evolving updates to what’s real. What we know to be true eventually changes, because time and growth both demand it. Don’t resist these changes; that only creates sorrow. Instead, choose to soar in life’s turbulent winds.

New Discoveries & Realities

Truth be told, sometimes you simply need to let go and accept the feeling of not knowing exactly why things happen the way they do, or where your journey is taking you. And you need to train yourself to appreciate this freedom. Because it is only when you are suspended in the air, with no clear destination in sight, that you force your wings—and your mind—to open fully so you can fly.

And as you soar around you still may not know where you’re traveling to. But that’s not what’s important. What’s important is the opening of your wings and mind. You may not know where you’re headed, but you know that so long as your wings are spread, and your mind alert, the turbulent winds of life will guide you forward to new discoveries and realities none of us can even fathom right now.

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Courtesy : Marc Chernoff

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Season’s Greetings

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Healing Stress

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Guru Nanak Dev Ji’s 550th Birth Anniversary

Today, the world is Celebrating the 550th Birth Anniversary of Guru Nanak Dev Ji. Guru Nanak Dev Ji was the first Guru and founder of Sikhism. He was a poet, a religious teacher, a social reformer, and a householder. Guru Nanak Dev Ji rejected the path of renunciation and emphasized householder’s life (Grista), instead of materialism. The service of mankind and faith in ‘One’ Omnipotent God are the basic tenets of Sikhism propounded by Guru Nanak Dev Ji. A social reformer, Guru Nanak Dev Ji upheld the cause of women, downtrodden, and the poor. Nanak was content to be a teacher. He made no claims to divinity or to kinship with God.

Guru Nanak (1469–1539) was the son of a petty official living in a village some thirty miles from Lahore. He took to studying the Hindu and Muslim religions almost from his boyhood, and found himself constantly involved in argument and discussion with itinerant holy men. Although he married and reared a family, the urge to find spiritual truth for himself proved too great. He temporarily abandoned his family and became a wanderer. He fasted, prayed and meditated. After many years of ascetic life, thought and contemplation, he felt qualified to convey his experiences to the people. He started with the simple statement: ‘There is no Hindu, there is no Mussulman.’ He took as his companions a ‘low-caste’ Hindu and a Muslim musician, and the three went preaching from hamlet to hamlet. The Guru composed his sermons in verse, which his Muslim colleague set to music and sang with the lute. He was strongly opposed to asceticism involving renunciation of the world.

Guru Nanak Practiced What He Preached

Guru Nanak Dev Ji’s teachings are eternal and universal. He practiced what he preached – the principle of selfless service to others – and set an example for all of us to emulate. They are as relevant today as they were 500 years ago. He expounded the Three Guiding Principles of “Naam Japana”, “Kirat Karni”, and “Vand Chhakana” that inform Sikh ethics and way of life. The principles mean ‘repeat God’s name’, ‘be ready to engage in the labour of one’s hands’, and, ‘be willing to share with others what one has gathered. His teachings fired the imagination of the Punjab peasantry and a large number of followers gathered around him. At first, they were merely known as his disciples, in Sanskrit shish. Sometime later these disciples became a homogeneous group whose faith was exclusively the teachings of Nanak. The ‘shish’ became the Sikh (corruption of the Sanskrit word). Nanak was content to be a teacher. He made no claims to divinity or to kinship with God. ‘I came in the course of nature’, he said, ‘and according to God’s order shall I depart. ‘Guru Nanak made people come to him, not through a sense of remorse or repentance, but as to one who was at once warm-hearted and understanding – a friend and a father.

He did not invest his writings with the garb of prophecy, nor his word with the sanctity of a ‘message’. His teaching was essentially a crusade against cant and humbug in religion, and he had the courage to pattern his life according to his teachings.

Guru Nanak Got People to See the Ridiculous Without Being Ridiculed

The success of Nanak’s mission in the short space of twenty to thirty years of teaching calls for comment. It was partly due to the fact that the ground had already been prepared for him by the Sufis and the Bhaktas. It was chiefly due to his own personality, in which he combined a gentle disposition with a stern and uncompromising attachment to principle; humility with a conviction of the greatness of his mission; and, above all, a kindly sense of humor, with which he got the people to see the ridiculous without being ridiculed. He made them come to him, not through a sense of remorse or repentance, but as to one who was at once warm-hearted and understanding – a friend and a father. He did not spare himself from his humor: When I am quiet, they say I have no knowledge; When I speak, I talk too much they say; When I sit, they say an unwelcome guest has come to stay; When I depart, I have deserted my family and run away. When I bow, they say it is of fear that I pray. Nothing can I do that in peace I may spend my time. Preserve Thy servant’s honor now and hereafter, O Lord sublime.

Two incidents in his life illustrate his method of approach. He went to bathe in the Ganga as all devout Hindus did. The Brahmins bathed and threw water towards the rising sun as an offering to their dead ancestors. Nanak faced the other way and threw water in the opposite direction. When questioned, he answered: ‘I am watering my fields in the Punjab. If you can throw water to the dead in heaven, it should be easier to send it to another place on earth.’

Guru Nanak Strongly Opposed Asceticism

On another occasion, he happened to fall asleep with his feet towards Mecca. An outraged priest woke him up and rudely drew his attention to the fact. Nanak simply said: ‘If you think I show disrespect by having my feet towards the house of God, turn them in some other direction where God does not dwell.’ As he himself had combined his mission with the domestic obligations of a husband and father, he advocated a way of life which allowed for the discharge of civic obligations with the spiritual. He was strongly opposed to asceticism involving renunciation of the world: Religion lieth not in the patched coat the yogi wears, Not in the staff he bears, Nor in the ashes on his body, Religion lieth not in rings in the ears, Not in a shaven head, Nor in the blowing of the conch shell. If thou must the path of true religion see amongst the world’s impurities, be of impurities free.

There are no totally reliable accounts of Nanak’s travels. By the time his biography came to be written, sixty or eighty years after his death, a mass of legend had been built around incidents of his life. He apparently travelled all over India and even as far as Persia or Arabia. His life was mostly spent in bringing Hindus and Muslims together. His personal success in this direction was remarkable. He was acclaimed by both communities. When Guru Nanak died, his body became a subject of dispute. The Muslims wanted to bury him, the Hindus to cremate him. Even to this day, he is regarded in the Punjab as a symbol of harmony between the two major communities. A popular couplet describes him as Guru Nanak Shah Fakir, Hindu ka Guru, Mussulman ka Pir. The following that Nanak had created in his lifetime could at best be described as a group dissenting from both Hinduism and Islam. It was left to his successors to mould this group into a community with its own language and literature, religious beliefs and institutions, traditions and conventions.

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References : ‘The Sikhs’ by Khushwant Singh, Harper Collins India.

Happy Diwali

Universal Laws of the World

If something is true in one field it’s probably true in others. Restricting your attention to your own field blinds you to how many important things people from other fields have figured out that are relevant to your own. Here are a few laws – some scientific, some not – from specific fields that hold universal truths.

Littlewood’s law: We can expect “miracles” to happen regularly, because in a world with 7 billion people the odds of a one-in-a-billion event are pretty good.  John Littlewood was a mathematician who sought to debunk the idea of miracles being anything more than simple statistics. Physicist Freeman Dyson, who from what I gather named the law, explains,    ”Littlewood’s law of miracles states that in the course of any normal person’s life, miracles happen at the rate of roughly one per month. The proof of the law is simple. During the time that we are awake and actively engaged in living our lives, roughly for eight hours each day, we see and hear things happening at a rate of one per second. So, the total number of events that happen to us is about 30,000 per day, or about a million per month. With few exceptions, these events are not miracles because they are insignificant. The chance of a miracle is about one per million events. Therefore, we should expect about one miracle to happen, on the average, every month.”

Littlewood did most of his work in the 20th century. He would, I think, double down on the law today because social media has opened the door into other people’s lives and given tail events a spotlight like never before. Daniel Kahneman has a related take: “Human beings cannot comprehend very large or very small numbers. It would be useful for us to acknowledge that fact.”

Gibson’s law: “For every PhD there is an equal and opposite PhD.” In law and public policy, the observation that equally qualified expert witnesses can come to opposite conclusions. There is no field this doesn’t apply to, and it happens for three reasons. One, is that there’s nuance and context to almost everything involving people, so experts can seem like they’re coming to different conclusions when discussing a variation of the same topic. Harry Truman said he just wanted a one-handed economist – “Every time you come in here you say, ‘On the one hand this, on the other hand that.” But that’s how most things work. Gibson’s law is triggered when an expert – often in an innocent attempt to simplify for a lay audience – tells one side of a story that has many sides, offsets, and counterbalances. A second, is that training and data can be overwhelmed by ideological beliefs and life experiences. This is especially true in fields that study people. There are no conservative meteorologists or liberal geologists, but we happily accept the equivalent in economics and sociology. A third, is that incentives are the most powerful force in the world. They not only get people to say things that aren’t true, but actually believe those things if it’s in their career interest to do so.

Brandolini’s law: “The amount of energy needed to refute bullsh*t is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.” Coined by Italian software developer Albert Brandolini, who also refers to it as the Bullsh*t Asymmetry Principle. Prevalent in every field, the non-satirical version acknowledges four truths: 1.People don’t like to admit not understanding something, so when confronted with nonsense they are more likely to nod their heads than say “I don’t get it” – especially in a group setting. 2. In law, the reason the burden of proof lies with the prosecution is that it’s often impossible to prove something didn’t happen. Outside of the courtroom the opposite rule prevails, and the commentator is allowed to give an opinion but the critic must debunk him with evidence.3.There is a thriving market for bad commentary because they give readers intellectual cover against their own biases, prejudices, and incentives. When many people want bad commentary to be right it becomes harder to convince them that it’s wrong. 4. The barriers to entry to publishing an opinion have dropped precipitously in the last two decades.

Goodhart’s law: When a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure. Charles Goodhart is an economist who recognized that once a central bank set a specific monetary target, the historical relationship between that target leading to the outcome they want breaks down.    ”[T]hose subject to new policies and regulations will react in different, and often unexpected ways, [and] also takes cognizance of the fact that, having set a new policy target, the authority involved has some reputational credibility attached to successfully meeting that target, and thus may adjust its own behavior and procedures to that end.” One reason this happens in other fields: once a goal is set, people will optimize for that goal in a way that neglects equally important parts of a system. Task your company with hitting a big sales target and customer service may wither as the goal cannibalizes employees’ attention. Or they’ll game the system to meet a goal in a way that distorts the benefit of achieving that goal. Investors set quarterly earnings goals for a CEO to meet, with a huge incentive if they’re exceeded. Then stuff like this happens.” [General Electric] for two years in a row “sold” locomotives to unnamed financial partners instead of end users in transactions that left most of the risks of ownership with GE.   The sales in 2003 and 2004 padded revenue by $381 million … critical to meeting GE’s end-of-year numbers. This is a cousin of observer effects in physics: It’s hard to know how some things operate in the real world because the act of measuring them changes them.”

Dollo’s law: In evolution, organisms can’t re-evolve to a former state because the path that led to its former state was so complicated that the odds of retracing that exact path round to zero. Say, an animal has a tail, and then it evolves to lose its tail. The odds that it will ever evolve to regain a tail are nil, because the path that originally gave it a tail was so complex. This affects businesses, too. There are things that, once lost, will likely never be regained, because the chain of events that created them in the first place can’t easily be replicated. Brand is one. Good brands are hard to build, requiring the right product at the right time targeted to the right users who want a specific thing, produced the right way by the right people, all done with consistency. Once lost brand is very hard to regain, because the odds of building a successful brand in the first place were so low to begin with. Teams can be another. Success is often personalized among one person, discounting how important members of their team were to winning. Many star employees have joined another firm, or gone out on their own, only to realize how much of their prior success was due to the unique team they were on, not necessarily their individual skill that can be replicated elsewhere.

Parkinson’s Law: Work expands to fill the time available for its completion. In 1955 historian Cyril Parkinson wrote in The Economist, ” IT is a commonplace observation that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Thus, an elderly lady of leisure can spend the entire day in writing and dispatching a postcard to her niece at Bognor Regis. An hour will be spent in finding the postcard, another in hunting for spectacles, half-an-hour in a search for the address, an hour and a quarter in composition, and twenty minutes in deciding whether or not to take an umbrella when going to the pillar-box in the next street. The total effort which would occupy a busy man for three minutes all told may in this fashion leave another person prostrate after a day of doubt, anxiety and toil.” His point was that resources can exceed needs without people noticing. The number of employees in an organization is not necessarily related to the amount of work that needs to be done in that organization. Workers will find something to do – or the appearance of doing something – regardless of what needs to be done.

Several corollaries exist. One is that expenses expand to fill an income. Same for expectations and success. In IT, data can expand to fill a given level of storage. My phone used to hold a few hundred photos; now it holds many thousands. I’ve taken advantage of that storage increase by filling it with many thousands of stupid photos I’ll never care about.

Wiio’s laws: “Communication usually fails, except by accident.” Osmo Wiio, a Finnish journalist and member of parliament, coined several laws of communication, including,“If a message can be understood in different ways, it will be understood in just that way which does the most harm.” “The more communication there is, the more difficult it is for communication to succeed.” “In mass communication, the important thing is not how things are but how they seem to be.” Wiio made these laws in the era of carefully hand-written letters. Multiply them by 10 in the emoji and social media intern era. I could elaborate further but no one would understand.

Sayre’s law: In a dispute, emotions are inversely related to what’s at stake. In 1973 the Wall Street Journal wrote,”Academics love to lay down laws. One of the more famous is attributed to the late Wallace Sayre of Columbia University. Sayre’s Third Law of Politics—no one seems to know the first two, or whether there even were a first two–holds that “academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low.” As far as I can tell no one quotes Sayre saying the line himself. But like many smart sayings it found a deceased owner and never let go. The logic might go something like this, wwhen the stakes are actually high people within a culture have a pretty good track record of putting more of their differences aside for a common cause. You bicker when there’s little downside to doing so.  The part of your brain whose bandwidth deals with threats doesn’t like to stay still. There’s a baseline level of stress people need in their lives to keep their minds alert, and if they don’t get it from legitimate sources, they’ll find something meaningless to fret about. Many of you know a trust-funder who validates this theory.

Stigler’s law: No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer. University of Chicago statistician Stephen Stigler coined the law. For consistency he says he stole it from sociologist Robert Merton. Stigler writes in his book Statistics on the Table, ” Examples affirming this principle must be known to every scientist with even a passing interest in the history of his subject; in fact, I suspect that most historians of science, both amateur and professional, have had their interest fueled early in their studies by the discovery (usually accompanied by an undisguised chortle) that some famous named result was known (and better understood) by a worker a generation before the result’s namesake.”

I think this happens for two reasons. One is that few discoveries happen in isolation. Most are combinations of existing discoveries that solve a new problem with an old invention. In his book How We Got to Now, Steven Johnson writes,” Innovations usually begin life with an attempt to solve a specific problem, but once they get into circulation, they end up triggering other changes that would have been extremely difficult to predict … An innovation, or cluster of innovations, in one field ends up triggering changes that seem to belong to a different domain altogether.” Combining other people’s work into something you get credit for happens within companies, too. Bill Gates put it: “Steve [Jobs] and I will always get more credit than we deserve, because otherwise the story’s too complicated.” The other – and more applicable to Stigler’s law – is the long history of the crowned winner being the person who communicates an idea the best, not whose idea is the best. A pop psychology book will always sell better than deep academic research with original discoveries because people are busy and lazy and want to learn about a topic with the least amount of effort required. My impression is also that 90% of “viral” content that gets recognized is luck, the product of just the right promotion by just the right person at just the right time.

Mill Mistakes: Assuming the familiar is the optimal. James Mill was a 19th century Scottish economist who reasoned that a constitutional monarchy is the highest natural form of government. He had his logic, and arguing whether its right isn’t the point. In his book At Home in the Universe, Stuart Kauffman makes a good observation, ”James Mill once deduced from what he considered indubitable first principles that a constitutional monarchy remarkably like that on England in his day was obviously the highest form of government. One is always in danger of deducing the optimality of the familiar. Let’s call this a Mill-mistake. God knows we all suffer the danger.” Assuming the familiar is the optimal requires extra skepticism because what you’re familiar with will create the most coherent story in your head, giving it extra credit points over other ideas that might hold more water but are harder to contextualize. Daniel Kahneman writes, ” Neither the quantity nor the quality of the evidence counts for much in subjective confidence. The confidence that individuals have in their beliefs depends mostly on the quality of the story they can tell about what they see, even if they see little. We often fail to allow for the possibility that evidence that should be critical to our judgment is missing—what we see is all there is.”

 Hickam’s dictum: Problems in complex systems rarely have one cause. Occam’s razor in medicine guides doctors to a diagnostic rule of thumb along the lines of, “If there are several explanations for a patient’s symptoms, choose the one that makes the fewest assumptions.” It’s known as diagnostic parsimony. Doctor John Hickam once pointed out the limitations of this rule: “Patients can have as many diseases as they damn well please.” His observation was that a patient is statistically more likely to have a few common ailments than a single rare one, so the push to get to one grand underlying cause can lead to false precision at best, misdiagnosis at worst.

The human body has 11 systems, 79 organs, 206 bones, and 600 muscles. The global economy has 7 billion people and 200 million businesses. So, you do the math.

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Courtesy : Morgan Housel @ collaborativefund.com

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Truths of Life

The route to our destination is never a straight one. We take questionable turns and we get lost. But it doesn’t always matter which road we embark on; what matters is that we embark. Either way life will likely get a little complicated, and bring unexpected hurdles and changes. But that’s okay. Sometimes you have to stumble and feel weak for a little while to realize how strong you really are. The following are just a few simple truths we learn on the road of life…

• Real friends won’t ask you to change who you are. The right people for you will love all the things about you that the wrong people are intimidated by. Don’t change so people will like you. Be patient, keep being your awesome self, and pretty soon the right people will love the real
• Cheating is a choice, not a mistake, and not an excuse. If you decide to cheat, and you succeed in cheating someone out of something, don’t think that this person is a fool. Realize that this person trusted you much more than you ever deserved, and they learned a lesson about who you really are.
• The past can’t hurt you anymore, not unless you let it. Forgive and move on! Forgiveness allows you to focus on the future without combating the past. Without forgiveness, wounds can never be healed, and moving on can never be accomplished. What happened in the past is just one chapter. Don’t close the book, just turn the page. Cry when you must and push forward. Let your tears water the seeds of your future growth and happiness.
• Adversity will come to every person at some point. How you meet it, what you make of it, and what you allow it to take from you and give to you is determined by your mental habits and personal choices. In short, you can’t change the cards you were dealt, just how you play the hand.
• Sometimes things fall apart so better things can fall together. When things fall apart, consider the possibility that life knocked it down on purpose. Not to bully you, or to punish you, but to prompt you to build something that better suits your personality and your purpose.
• Someone else doesn’t have to be wrong for you to be right. Keep an open mind. The highest form of ignorance is when you reject something you don’t know. We all have our own unique path and feelings. When you judge another, you do not define them, you define yourself. It’s one thing to feel that you are on the right path, but it’s another to think that yours is the only path.
• Everything has been just the way it needed to be. In life, we do lots of things. Some we wish we could take back. Some we wish we could relive a thousand times. All of these things, positive and negative, have taught us important lessons and have collectively made us into the person we are today. If we were to reverse or adjust any of them, we wouldn’t be who we are; we would be somebody else. So just live, make mistakes, make memories, and take chances. Never second guess who you are or where you’ve been.
• Silence is often the loudest cry. There’s always some truth behind ‘just kidding,’ knowledge behind ‘I don’t know,’ emotion behind ‘I don’t care,’ and pain behind ‘It’s okay.’ So, pay close attention to how people feel, especially those you care for most. And remember, silence is often the loudest cry. Sometimes what a person needs most is a hand to hold and a heart to understand.
• The difference between where you are and where you want to be, is what you do. What you do today is important because you are exchanging a day of your life for it. Don’t wait until everything is just right; it will never be perfect. There will always be challenges, obstacles and less than perfect conditions. But with each step you take, you will grow stronger and stronger, more skilled, more confident, and more successful. So, start doing what you need to do today. Life is a courageous journey or nothing at all. We usually can’t become who we want to be by continuing to do what we’ve been doing.
• It’s not who you are that holds you back, it who you think you’re not. Judging yourself is not the same as being honest with yourself. Don’t sell yourself short. You are capable of great things. And don’t ever let someone else make you feel like you’re not good enough. If they can’t see how amazing you are, then they’re the one who’s not good enough for you.  Their approval is not needed.
• Right now, is the only moment guaranteed to you. Smile through the hard times, even though it doesn’t always seem to get any better. A smile is the first step to fixing things. The trick is to enjoy life by noticing what’s right. Don’t wish away your days waiting for better times ahead. Right now, is the only moment guaranteed to you. Right now, is life.  Don’t miss it.

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The Art of Mindfulness

The world doesn’t need another nasty person because it already has more than enough and there’s no shortage of rude people out there. What it needs are people who are polite, modest, agreeable, and kind. In short, people who are mindful and charming.

The good news is that mindfulness is an attitude and a skill that you can learn.  Most people, have trouble turning on their charm but they don’t have to worry even if they are not innately charming. Here are some easy-to-master tips on being mindful and developing an attitude of mindfulness :

Respect people. When people meet someone who is respectful, they will feel naturally drawn to that person. When they find someone who respects their opinion, their point of view, their experiences, and whatever else they’re trying to communicate, it will make them feel important. You don’t have to always agree. Showing respect is enough.

Show a little vulnerability. The beauty of showing vulnerability is that it makes us more humane. There’s no reason to hide it. Charming people don’t try to win unstated competitions with the people they meet. There’s nothing more charming than owning up to your vulnerabilities and rising above them. Charming people compliment, get impressed, ask questions, feel excited, and are willing to admit their weaknesses.  In short, they don’t compete with other people’s achievements. They are not afraid to let their defenses fall because they know their weaknesses don’t control them.

Talk less, listen more. One major sign of superficial people is that they talk about themselves all the time. But a charming person listens more than he talks. You can cut out all of the distractions when you talk to someone because by just listening to the other person you are giving importance to him. When someone is talking, it can be tempting to interrupt especially when you have the same experiences but, it is selfish and rude to do so. By listening more, you will earn the trust of the person divulging sensitive information to you. And, this is backed by the research conducted by the State University of New York.

Remember people’s names. How awkward it is to forget other people’s names. I’m sure you have felt that sinking feeling when you forget someone’s name, especially if it is someone you really should remember. Of course, our memory fails us sometimes. Nobody’s perfect, right? However, charming people remember names. They try their best to remember even small details. For the other person, there is nothing sweeter than hearing their name. It makes them feel they’re important enough to be remembered by you. When you’re first being introduced to someone, repeat their name back to him or her. That’s enough to emphasize that at least you care enough to remember them. What matters most is that you made an effort to remember.

Practice the right body language. Communication is not only through words  but also through body language. When talking to someone, a charming person’s body language exudes quiet confidence and openness. Their arms are open and their legs are relaxed, which makes them approachable. If you have a problem in this area, work on being comfortable in your own skin. Most people who tend to cross their arms could be revealing insecurities and the fact that they are uncomfortable.

Use the right tone of voice. Your tone of voice is also incredibly important. Communication experts always mention the “7-38-55 rule,” first posited in 1971 by UCLA Psychology Professor Albert Mehrabian: 55 percent of what you convey when you speak comes from your body language, 38 percent from your tone of voice, and a paltry 7 percent from the words you choose. Therefore, avoid shouting or coming across as aggressive. You can do this by using a relaxed and gentle tone of voice. Be assertive but without being defensive or aggressive.

Use the right words. Keep conversation friendly and professional at all times by using polite language. Try and keep every word positive. Talking about polite, professional and happy things will draw people to you. Whenever you notice yourself complaining or being negative, try to stop yourself and reframe it something into more positive. Overtime, you’ll get in the habit of being more positive, and less negative.

Smile. When you smile, others feel comfortable. Everyone loves a happy person, right? Your happy state of mind will shine through and will make you very likable to others. Grumpy or disinterested people scare people away. You never know all the good that a simple smile can do. In fact, a smile can literally rewire your brain to be happier. Psychologists at the University of Cardiff in Wales found that people whose ability to frown is compromised by cosmetic Botox injections are happier, on average, than people who frown. Likewise, NBC says that research suggests that a smile spurs a powerful chemical reaction in the brain that can make people feel better.

Praise others instead of getting involved in gossip. There will be a time when you meet people who love to gossip. These are people who talk about others in a negative way. At the very first sign of gossip, run away. If you can’t, just don’t get involved. Instead, say something really positive about the person they’re talking about. If you want to charm people, steer clear from backstabbing and gossiping. It’s not nice and it only creates toxic energy. Never be afraid to compliment people directly on their face. Research shows getting a sincere compliment gives us a similar positive boost as receiving cash.

Find other people’s interests. If you find yourself in a situation where the conversation is slow, try to discover the other person’s hobbies or passions. Make it about them and not about you. Ask about their hobbies. Do they like basketball or baseball? Do they like traveling? You will know when you find a topic that they’re interested in because it makes their eyes light up. When you do, ask lots of questions and be genuinely interested in their passion.

Look for common ground, if possible. If you find yourself in a heated argument, take a step back and assess the situation more carefully. To avoid escalation, try to find some common ground. Do not be too aggressive when other people don’t accept your opinion because they are entitled to theirs. Instead of arguing over your difference of opinion, you can agree to disagree. Charming people take time to put themselves in other people’s shoes. More agreeable people are viewed more positively than those who engage in arguments.

Do not use your phone when talking to other people. Your Instagram/Facebook/Twitter feed will survive without your careful supervision for five minutes. It is a basic social etiquette not to look at your phone every now and then when you are talking to someone, because that’s rude. Any situation that commands your attention should have it in entirety. For example, if you’re being confided in or someone asked for your advice on an issue, then give them your undivided attention. This person trusts you – don’t blow it off.

Mind your manners. There’s a reason why we were taught to say please and thank you. It makes us likable and charming. Be appreciative of those actions that others do for your benefit. If not, the law of karma will get you. Have you heard of the “Waiter Test”? If you really want to know how an individual treats people, look more at how he interacts with the waiter than how he interacts with you. This test says how you treat waiters and waitresses can say a lot about your own personality. Yelling and screaming at an employee serving you will make others around you think you’re an elitist jerk. Charming people respect everyone, no matter what their status in life is , they treat everyone with respect and kindness.

Use the power of touch selectively. Touch, doesn’t mean the sexual touch. What I am referring to is the non-sexual touch which is a powerful way to convey what you mean. For example, when you’re congratulating someone, shaking their hands or patting them gently on the shoulder or upper arm can help reinforce the sincerity of your words.

Meditate. Meditation is taking control of your mind. Practicing mindfulness to achieve a heightened sense of self. Mindfulness will help you perceive and affect the emotions of those around you. In fact, researchers at Emory University have developed a form of meditation called cognitive-based compassion training which has been proven to increase empathy.

Be happy. Last but not least, being happy makes other people happy too. A happy person can light up any room that he walks into. Nobody wants to be surrounded by negative and toxic people. On the other hand, everyone needs friends and allies who are positive and upbeat. To be a charming person, always look on the brighter side of things. It’s because charm comes from all things nice and beautiful.

In conclusion, charming people can woo and wow people without overdoing it. They stay cool and don’t make life all about them. They gladly avoid the center of attention and make the limelight shine on those who deserve it. They do not brag about who they are and what they can do. Mindfulness is an attitude and a skill that you can learn to make your life better by keeping others happy.

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