Category: Inspirational

A Little Journal That Changed My Life

Neera

Years ago, I came across the idea of keeping a gratitude journal.

Dutifully, I bought a small spiral notebook and started writing three things I was grateful for

They were not big things, but little things like the yellow rose in my garden, the air-conditioning in my car, and a new pair of shoes that were sleek and comfortable.

That practice didn’t last for long.

I stopped and started several times.

Years later, when I was going through a bad patch in life, I stumbled upon the spiral notebook while going through my closet.

Rather than chucking the partially filled notebook into the bin, I opened it and started reading the entries.

Half an hour later, I was sitting on the floor, leaned against the closet, tears rolling down my eyes.

There were so many good things that happened in my life, and here I was agonizing over the little stuff.

Rather than feeling like a victim of fate, I saw how many blessings it had bestowed on me.

A gratitude journal may not seem a big thing while you are writing it, but over time, it becomes a powerful reminder of all the good things that happen to you.

I still don’t write in the journal every day. But it has got a permanent place on my bedside table and now and then, I pick it up, and jot down the three things I am grateful for.

Image by the author

If you haven’t got a gratitude journal, I strongly urge you to start one.

It will change your life.

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The First Principle Thinking

Neera

In 2002, Elon Musk began his quest to send the first rocket to Mars. He ran into a major challenge right off the bat. After visiting a number of aerospace manufacturers around the world, Musk discovered the cost of purchasing a rocket was astronomical—up to $65 million. Given the high price, he began to rethink the problem.

So, he asked himself, what is a rocket made of? Aerospace-grade aluminum alloys, plus some titanium, copper, and carbon fiber. Then he asked, what is the value of those materials on the commodity market? It turned out that the materials cost of a rocket was around two percent of the price he was quoted.

Instead of buying a readymade rocket for tens of millions, Musk decided to purchase the raw material at a fraction of the cost and build his own rockets and SpaceX was born. Within a few years, SpaceX cut the price of launching a rocket by nearly 10x while still making a profit.

Musk used first principles thinking to break the situation down to the fundamentals, bypass the high prices of the aerospace industry, and create a more effective solution.

First principles thinking is about acquiring knowledge about a problem or a thing by knowing its first causes by decomposing it into its most basic elements. They are the first causes. The final cause is about the purpose that the things serve.

“I tend to approach things from a physics framework,” Musk said in an interview. “Physics teaches you to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. So I said, okay, let’s look at the first principles. What is a rocket made of?

The normal way we conduct our lives is to reason by analogy. We try to find out what other people are doing or by asking if has it been done before. With first principles, you boil things down to the most fundamental truths and then reason up from there.

How can we utilize first principles thinking in our life and work?

Let’s look at cooking. There’s a big difference between knowing how to follow a recipe and knowing how to cook. People who know how to cook understand the basic principles that make food taste, look, and smell good. They have confidence in troubleshooting and solving problems as they go—or adjusting to unexpected outcomes.

That’s what Julia Child, the renowned Frech Chef, did all her life. Rather than just following the recipes, she understood how every element of French cuisine worked.

If you can master the first principles within any domain, you can go much further than those who are just following recipes.

Over two thousand years ago, Aristotle defined a first principle as “the first basis from which a thing is known.” It is a basic assumption that cannot be deduced any further.

It is a fancy way of saying “Think like a scientist.” Scientists don’t assume anything. They start with questions like, What are we absolutely sure is true? What has been proven?

The first principle thinking requires you to dig deeper and deeper until you are left with only the foundational truths of a situation. It is one of the best ways to reverse-engineer complicated problems and unleash creative possibilities.

Break down things into smaller levels and then make something completely different from it. That’s what Bernard D. Sadow did. For centuries humans have been carrying their stuff in bags. We have had trunks, leather bags, and suitcases. They are heavy to lift and carry. Then in 1970, Bernard D. Sadow used the first principle thinking and came up with the idea of adding wheels to them. Now nobody carries their suitcases at airports anymore, they wheel them.

Rather than the ‘monkey see, monkey do,’ approach, apply the first principle thinking to solve your problem:

  1. Identify your problem.
  2. Dig deeper and deeper into the problem, breaking it down into its most essential concepts (the first causes).
  3. Reassemble them from the ground up, thinking of all possible ways they can be reassembled (the final cause or the purpose they serve).
  4. Choose the best solution.

“I don’t know what’s the matter with people: they don’t learn by understanding; they learn by some other way—by rote or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!” — Richard Feynman

Notes On Boredom

Neera

We are so scared of being bored these days.

I come from a time when there was no TV, no internet, and no smartphones. We had long summer vacations but nowhere to go. We hardly had any toys, very little reading material, and no video games.

Yet, I don’t remember being bored.

We played outdoors, invented games, and were extremely happy to sit around and do nothing. Being idle was not a taboo and the term ‘bored’ was rarely used.

The trouble is that we live in an age in which we never get the chance to be bored. All the entertainment we could ever dream of is at our fingertips, waiting on the phone in our pocket.

I think the time is ripe for us all to recognize boredom as the delicacy it is. Here’s a quote from Leslie’s piece, How Boredom is becoming anything but boring:

I think boredom is almost a luxurious thing, a decadent thing. To allow yourself to be bored is almost like a pampering thing. I think boredom might make a comeback. I can see a boredom ranch: ‘Come here and be bored!’

Austin Kleon wrote in Steal Like An Artist:

Take time to be bored. One time I heard a coworker say, “When I get busy, I get stupid.” Ain’t that the truth. Creative people need time to just sit around and do nothing. I get some of my best ideas when I’m bored, which is why I never take my shirts to the cleaners. I love ironing my shirts — it’s so boring. I almost always get good ideas. If you’re out of ideas, wash the dishes. Take a really long walk. Stare at a spot on the wall for as long as you can. As the artist Maria Kalman says. “Avoiding work is the way to focus my mind.” Take time to mess around. Get lost. Wander. You never know where it’s going to lead you.

He stole ‘stare at a spot on the wall’ from psychologist William James and turned it into an exercise in The Steal Like An Artist Journal:

Image Source

Jon Kabat-Zinn, an American professor emeritus of medicine and the creator of the Stress Reduction Clinic and the Center for Mindfulness, says, “When you pay attention to boredom, it gets unbelievably interesting.”

Meditation can be considered an extreme form of boredom, yet everyone knows its benefits.

Henry David Thoreau used to go for long walks in the woods, something that could be an extremely boring exercise was his source of daily inspiration.

David Sedaris used to write on the back of the placemats in the IHOP in his hometown of Raleigh while waiting for food. It played such a large role in David Sedaris’s collection of diaries, Theft By Finding, that the publisher used it as promotional postcards. (The New Yorker published an excerpt with the title, “The IHOP Years.”)

Notice the circling of letters in the words WANDER and WONDER.

Wandering (physical or mental) leads to wondering.

Image Source

Here is what others are saying about boredom.

“The best way to come up with new ideas is to get really bored.” — Neil Gaiman

“I’m a big believer in boredom. Boredom allows one to indulge in curiosity, and out of curiosity comes everything.” — Steve Jobs

“Being bored is a precious thing, a state of mind we should pursue. Once boredom sets in, our minds begin to wander, looking for something exciting, something interesting to land on. And that’s where creativity arises.” — Peter Bregman

“I’ve noticed that my best ideas always bubble up when the outside world fails in its primary job of frightening, wounding, or entertaining me.” — Scott Adams

“Boredom is your window… Once this window opens, don’t try to shut it; on the contrary, throw it wide open.” — Joseph Brodsky

“Creativity is the residue of time wasted.” — Albert Einstein:

Boredom is the birthplace of genius. —

I think boredom is the beginning of every authentic act. Boredom opens up the space, for new engagement. Without boredom, no creativity. If you are not bored, you just stupidly enjoy the situation in which you are. — Slavoj Zizek

Boredom is what used to be called idle time.

We all need idle time.

To wake up in the morning and have that feeling that the whole day is yours. No morning rush. No usual cleanup. No tidying up to do. To slow down. To do absolutely nothing.

Being idle is frowned upon in today’s society. We are so much under pressure to keep doing something all the time that we have forgotten the importance of idle time.

Contrary to the common belief that the ‘idle mind is the devil’s workshop,’ the idle mind is the germination ground for ideas.

Creativity thrives on boredom

Rainer Maria Rilke writes in Letters on Life

I have often wondered whether especially those days when we are forced to remain idle are not precisely the days spent in the most profound activity.

Whether our actions themselves, even if they do not take place until later, are nothing more than the last reverberations of a vast movement that occurs within us during idle days.

In any case, it is very important to be idle with confidence, with devotion, and possibly even with joy. The days when even our hands do not stir are so exceptionally quiet that it is hardly possible to raise them without hearing a whole lot.

But it is Tom Hodgkinson who has tackled the subject head-on in How to Be Idle: A Loafer’s Manifesto. He starts with:

In 1993, I went to interview the late radical philosopher and drugs researcher, Terence McKenna. I asked him why society doesn’t allow us to be more idle.

He replied: I think the reason we don’t organise society in that way can be summed up in the aphorism, “idle hands are the devil’s tool.”

In other words, institutions fear idle populations because an Idler is a thinker and thinkers are not a welcome addition to most social situations. Thinkers become malcontents, that’s almost a substitute word for idle, “malcontent.”

Essentially, we are all kept very busy . . . under no circumstances are you to quietly inspect the contents of your own mind.

Freud called introspection “morbid” — unhealthy, introverted, anti-social, possibly neurotic, and potentially pathological. Introspection could lead to that terrible thing: a vision of the truth, a clear image of the horror of our fractured, dissonant world. He goes on to say:

“Idleness is a waste of time is a damaging notion put about by its spiritually vacant enemies. The fact that idling can be enormously productive is repressed. Musicians are characterized as slackers; writers as selfish ingrates; artists as dangerous.”

Robert Louis Stevenson expressed the paradox as follows in ‘An Apology for Idlers’ (1885)

Idleness . . . does not consist in doing nothing, but in doing a great deal not recognized in the dogmatic formularies of the ruling class.

Long periods of languor, indolence and staring at the ceiling are needed by any creative person in order to develop ideas.

A conclusion I’ve come to at the Idler is that it starts with retreating from work but it’s really about making work into something that isn’t drudgery and slavery, and then work and life can become one thing.

Let the children be bored at times

Victoria Prooday, a world-renowned educator, and motivational speaker, writes about modern-day parenting and the impact of a high-tech lifestyle on a child’s nervous system. According to her we should let children be bored at times and don’t feel guilty about it.

“By constantly entertaining our kids, we are stealing their childhood and creating major obstacles to their future success. We are not allowing them to learn to tolerate quiet times and discover ways to overcome boredom. It is still reversible. Let them be bored at times and don’t feel guilty about it.” — Victoria Prooday

Hope you allow boredom into your life.

Some other related articles:

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/what-does-boredom-do-to-us-and-for-us

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-boredom-is-anything-but-boring/

When Your Passion Becomes Your Obsession

Neera

There is a difference between passion and obsession.

Passion is a positive word that leads to growth, self-improvement, and perhaps one’s purpose in life; obsession, on the other hand, has a negative connotation about it, which could lead to being out of control and even mentally sick.

When you are passionate, everybody cheers you on, “Oh! you found your passion. Great! Be passionate! Follow your passion! Reach your goals! Live your dream!” People encourage you because they think you are on to something.

But when you are obsessed, they go, “Why you gotta be so crazy? Why do you spend so much time on [thing]?” Why can’t you be reasonable about it?” “You don’t have to be so preoccupied with it, it’s just a hobby (or a job, or a sport), isn’t it?”

When you are obsessed, people think you are nuts.

In life, you have a choice. You can either be passionate or obsessed.

Both choices are fine.

Being passionate about something is being in love with life.

But being obsessed with something is living life at another level.

I chose to be obsessed.

I don’t know when my passion for writing turned into an obsession.

When I started writing, I found the activity so calming and fulfilling that I became passionate about it. I dedicated time to it and strived to improve. As I became better and better at giving words to my thoughts, I started feeling good about my writing.

I could pour out all my frustrations, my negativity, my fears, my anger, my joy, and my daily happenings into my diary.

And that was when the problem began.

Something inside me changed. I craved writing all the time. I had to write every day. The day I didn’t write, was a day that didn’t exist for me.

I would rather write than attend a party or meet a friend for coffee, or go for a swim, or go for a walk.

My passion had become an obsession.

The Cambridge dictionary defines passion as an extreme interest in or wishes for doing something.

While an obsession is something that you think about all the time.

A passion is “extreme” but the aspect of time isn’t present.

An obsession stays “all the time”.

I think about writing all the time.

I work on getting better every day. I don’t rest. I can’t let it go. I am not content with my progress. I want to get better. I can’t accept the level I am at the moment. I know I could be better. I will continue to work on it until I reach the level where I want to be.

If you really want to achieve something worth achieving, you must get obsessed.

If you are not obsessed, you are not operating at your optimum potential.

If no one thinks you are crazy, you are not there yet.

You are not there yet until somebody in your life says, “Jee! you really care about this in a crazy way.” That’s when people see your obsession.

The weirder you are, the more committed you are to focus on your thing.

Obsession forces you to stay focused.

Obsession makes you keep going when others are partying, socializing, having fun, sleeping, or simply fitting in.

Obsession empowers you to find new ways to learn, to push your comfort zone, and to push yourself beyond what others or even you thought was not possible.

I love this quote from one of Bukowski’s numerous letters:

My dear,

Find what you love and let it kill you. Let it drain from you your all. Let it cling onto your back and weigh you down into eventual nothingness. Let it kill you, and let it devour your remains.

For all things will kill you, both slowly and fastly, but it’s much better to be killed by a lover.

Falsely yours,

Henry Charles Bukowski

I will rather let writing kill me than give it up for a mediocre life.

Are you passionate about something?

Is it turning into an obsession?

If You Think Your Writing In Not Original, You Need To Know About Helsinki Bus Station Theory

Neera

“The secret to a creatively fulfilling career lies in understanding the operations of Helsinki’s main bus station,” said Finnish-American photographer Arno Minkkinen, back in 2004.

Helsinki Bus Station Theory had been circulating among photographers for years before Oliver Burkeman brought it to a wider audience through an article in The Guardian.

To understand the theory, imagine this:

You are at a bus station. A big bus station that is cleaner, environmentally friendly, and inviting.

There are two dozen platforms, and from each platform, several different bus lines depart.

But for a kilometer or more, all the lines leaving from any one platform take the same route out of the city, making identical stops.

“Each bus stop represents one year in the life of a photographer,” Minkkinen declares.

You pick a direction — maybe you focus on making platinum prints of nudes — and set off.

Three stops later, you’ve got a nascent body of work. You take those three years of work on the nude to [a gallery], and the curator asks if you are familiar with the nudes of Irving Penn.

Your work looks very much like Penn’s.

Annoyed to have been following someone else’s path, you hop off the bus, grab a cab… and head straight back to the bus station, looking for another platform.

A few years later, something similar happens. This goes on all your creative life: always showing new work, always being compared to others.

What’s the answer?

It’s simple.

Stay on the bus.

Stay on the f*#king bus.

The point Minkkinen is making is when you find your work resembles someone else’s, or you’re on someone else’s bus, traveling someone else’s path, don’t go back to the bus station at the very beginning completely reinvent yourself and start from scratch. Instead, stay on the bus.

At a certain point, your path will split off into something new.

It’s the separation that makes all the difference.

Once you see the difference in your work from the work you so admire, it’s time to look for your breakthrough.

Suddenly, your work will get noticed. Now you are working more on your own, making more of the difference between your work and what influenced it.

Your vision takes off.

There are two reasons this metaphor is so compelling:

  1. It vividly illustrates a critical insight into persistence.
  2. It points out the perils of a world that obsesses with originality.

“More often than not, originality lies on the far side of unoriginality.” — Austin Kleon.

Helsinki’s theory suggests that if you pursue originality too vigorously, you’ll never reach it.

Sometimes it takes more guts to keep trudging down a pre-trodden path, to the originality beyond.

“Stay on the f*#king bus.”

Notes On Inspiration

Neera

What is Inspiration?

The Oxford dictionary defines it as:

“the process of being mentally stimulated to do or feel something, especially to do something creative.”

Or

“a sudden brilliant or timely idea.”

Inspiration is not a skill.

It can’t be learned or mastered.

It is divine.

You could call it God, you could call it the Universe, or you could call it your super-conscious.

Once you accept that, you can learn how to tap into it.

You think you came up with a brilliant idea for that book, or for that song, or you were the genius who came up with the invention, but you did not.

You were simply the conduit.

There is a higher power, and that higher power has been whispering in your ear. She’s been telling you and pushing you and inspiring you to make that happen.

That is Inspiration.

Michael Jackson woke up at three in the morning and called his manager. “Butterflies, Butterflies.” Michael cried.

“Michael, what the hell is going on? It’s 3:00 AM,” said his manager in a sleepy voice.

“I got this idea for a song. It’s about butterflies.” said Michael, “I have got to write it.”

Exasperated, his manager said, “Michael, it is three am. Can this wait till tomorrow morning?”

“No, if I don’t write it now, Prince will.”

Inspiration comes in the form of intuition.

When you show that you have the intention to listen to it, and you’re going to start moving toward whatever is beckoning you, Inspiration removes the roadblocks.

So you don’t set goals. Your goals are not coming from society. They are not coming even from you. But they are whispered to you.

You hear whispers.

You have these little intuitive nudges you feel when you are showering or waking up in the morning. Bang! An idea for that next blog post. Or an idea for that next product. The idea for the next course. It just hits you.

This is Inspiration.

When we are inspired, we feel a deep sense of connectedness with all life and with all human beings.

With this sense of connectedness, we open up to intuition.

What is Intuition?

If you ask any high-performing CEO or any entrepreneur — how did you come up with an idea, they would say it was just my intuition. I just had this feeling in my gut.

So for many people, intuition is a sort of elusive gut thing that can’t be explained.

How did they know something?

How do you know something intuitively when no one else does?

Intuition is one of these words that gets thrown around a lot, but not many people know how to cultivate the skills to be able to hear their intuition on a daily basis.

— Emily Fletcher

And here’s the reality.

If you don’t have a daily meditation practice, it’s very hard to tell the difference between your critical mind and your intuitive mind.

Our left brain, the critical mind, is always screaming at us.

And it’s very hard to hear your intuition or your critical mind screaming at you.

Because your intuition doesn’t scream. It whispers.

But if you are tuned in, as you do during meditation, you can hear your intuition.

This intuition gives us inspiration.

And inspiration leads us to our intention.

And when we start following through on an inspired idea, luck comes to our side. Inspiration clears the way for us.

But we got to be listening. Our antenna needs to be attuned to hear the whispers. Whispers can come in any form. As an idea in the shower, or a nudge in a seminar, or as a YouTube video.

You never know.

You got to be ready.

When we are constantly going, I suck, I suck, I suck. Why I don’t have 1000 subscribers still? Why am I making no money? Why is my book not a bestseller? We can’t listen to the universe’s whispers. We are too busy listening to the chatter in our own heads.

Meditation is how you tap into intuition.

And so what meditation does is that it starts taking our right brain to the gym every single day.

Your right brain is the piece of you that is in-charge of intuition.

Think about intuition and creativity as a Wi-Fi network, and our right brain is the router. Our right brain is the piece of us that allows us to connect to the collective intelligence of the left brain is the actual computer. Right.

You could have the fanciest computer, you could have the most developed intellect, and you could have such an incredible life experience. But imagine how much good a computer is going to do you just sitting there not connected to the internet.

Now, imagine you connect that computer to the internet. How much smarter it becomes. How much more capable does it become because you’re exchanging ideas? You’re able to sense other people’s desires. You’re able to hear how nature actually wants to use you to deliver your fulfillment.

You could be naïve enough to think “writing” is the purpose of your life, but it may not be so. The universe might have something completely different for you and writing is just a medium.

The universe will reveal your purpose to you when it’s ready. And when it thinks you’re ready.

You got to learn to accept it.

And you got to learn to wait. To keep your antennas attuned to the universe so that you could hear its whispers.

The universe doesn’t shout. Neither does it issue job descriptions or duty statements. It whispers. It says, write that book. Start that business. Here is the melody. And you need to be attuned to it to hear those whispers.

Recap

There is a bigger, never-ending source from where all creativity comes from.

We all could tap into this resource.

This resource is Inspiration.

Inspiration speaks to us in whispers.

We need to be tuned to it to be able to hear it.

You do that through meditation.

Those who hear it regularly call it intuition.

This inspiration gives us the intention to create.

And when we accept its invitation, it clears the way for us.

Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.

We have the extraordinary ability to evolve emotionally, mentally, and spiritually throughout life, taking on new ideas, thoughts, philosophies, and ways of being and living.