Kapil's Take

This video is amazing, brilliantly told and what an inspiration. I won't say more,… You must watch this video!!

So on September 4th, 2011, I performed on stage a Shayari. I used a very unorthodox style of reciting it. It was more on the rap side, but not completely because according to the rules of stage performance set for the event, participants were not really allowed to sing. And although some people would argue otherwise, but that really would have been considered singing.

I think I did well, considering I only went through the whole thing from start to finish 3 times before the actual performance.

People laughed and it was received well, which was a pleasant surprise. I really did not expect anything. All I knew was I wanted to do this and I did it. It all started off as a joke, and then I thought.. hmm.. maybe I should do this.

Some people were offended and I’m sure of that because I saw it with my own eyes…Oh well…

And this makes 3…First,… jumping off a 30 feet cliff without even ever daring to jump into a swimming pool, off the dock into the river or a lake….then sky diving…. and then ..not just public speaking… shayari in front of a few hundred people.

Summer was officially AWESOME!!

One last word before I let you enjoy the show,…Courage is not the absence of fear, it is the ability to take action despite the presence of fear!

And Every time you do it! You grow stronger!

It has been quite some time since we’ve been living in the information age. We have already quite matured in the web 2.0 and online social network age. I’m sure you’ve heard so many times that we are just bombarded with information from everywhere. I call it the “excessive information age”. All of us are now more than ever so easily influenced by everything and everyone around us from all sorts of social media, and at the same time we are getting confused by all this noise.

It is almost inevitable that we will have to evolve. We are pushing limits of our social and logical cognition. If you really think about it, the situation almost requires quick judgement and adaptation. Stability almost seems nowhere to be seen, and for thousands of years in our evolution, stability is the one thing that we have experienced and adapted to. Our environment(by this I mean our day-to-day activities, by which I mean interaction online and interaction with computers in general) is changing at such a rapid pace that our minds are getting pushed to this quick form of adaptation. Cultures all around the world seem to be blending too. So what we learned while growing up might not necessarily be very useful when interacting when we start encountering people from different races and cultures around the globe. But we are learning and evolving now more or less a single unit.

What does all this mean. Well if you go to the theory of evolution and natural selection, this is what I think is bound to happen. Success in this time and age depends on quick, rapid yet correct action. You can either make it or break it in a few actions, sometimes in a matter of weeks, and crazily sometimes even in a matter of days.

What is needed in this age is not a 1000 hours of research to make a decision, as some people do when chosing a product, a service, a house, or a job. What is required in this age of excessive information is intuition and instinct to make a correct judgement and to be able to do it quick AND TAKE ACTION, at the same time being aware of  the risk of burning out too quickly. We are seeing instant successes – it no longer takes decades to reach a level that most people dream about, it takes a few years and sometimes just a few months, or in some extreme cases just a day, or well… just a single video of less than 5 minutes on this thing called ‘YouTube’(I’m sure you’ve heard of it)

I don’t see all of this as luck. I see all of this as evolution. People who might seem like they don’t have the slightest clue about what they are doing are becoming instant success. It is my belief (and please don’t sue me for this) that these people are instinctively driven to behave in a certain way, or to act a certain way.These individuals who posses this instincts to act in a quick and correct way will become successful, and to some ‘intelligent’ hard working people this may seem very scarey, because you no longer need to get a degree, or a Phd to get ahead in life(actually who am I kidding, that never was the case anyway).

What am I saying here? I’m saying, natural selection will take place because conditions have changed and the rules that applied in the past for success (and ultimately survival) don’t apply now. With these changes in the conditions in our ‘environment’ natural selection will pick out the new winners, who are instinctively driven by and towards quick correct actions.

I haven’t really found it a very useful strategy to learn from your failures. Every time I realize that I have made a mistake or that I have really failed at something and decide that this is the particular lesson I have learned from it, I really don’t really seem to learn a lot or that it really doesn’t help me a lot. I have only learned how not to fail again, but haven’t really learned how to succeed in that particular situation. I mean, really think about it. Do you really want to know all the ways of how not to fail, or would you rather learn a few techniques that help you succeed and master it?

For the past one year I have been reading, listening and watching a lot of self help, or self development material. My understanding of peak performance, about different tools and strategies to achieve your goals, how to set your goals and how to determine what I really want in life has expanded to an extent to which I can safely say I can write a book now from what I have learned and from my own way of thinking. And for some reason there always seems to be something lacking. It helps me a little, but then sometimes(not always) I fall in to the same rut; into the same old habits.

Just two days ago I was thinking about all my successes in the past. Actually I have done that a lot of the times in the past. I think about all my successful moments in life and keep wandering, what was it really that made the difference. It has been many months, and for some situations I can even say it has been years since I started inquiring about what it really was that made the difference. There have been times when success seemed so easy to attain. Two days ago I made some very key distinctions that resulted in my quick and easy success.

1. I knew exactly what I wanted and believed without a doubt that I could achieve it. Failure not only was not an option, it just didn’t exist in my mine; I could not even imagine what failure in those instances would be like.
2. I just did it! I did not plan, or think, or ponder, or come up with a strategy.
3. It was fun, enjoyable and exciting. No matter how difficult it would have seemed from a third person view point, I did not see it as work. It was so much just natural.
4. I was focused on the end result, and every step I took was in the direction of what I wanted, and every step that took me away from it was quickly eliminated.
5. I did not look at temporary set backs as failure. I took it as, since this doesn’t work, the set of possible guesses was getting smaller and I was getting closer to success.
6. Once I believed I had succeeded, I tested it! And started using what I learned from it.

According to me, these are my key 6 steps that I have used unconsciously to succeed. What is or was your success strategy? I’m sure everyone has their own strategy; their own algorithm of success. Scrap out the old belief that you have to fail many times to succeed. Before I knew this idiotic concept of learning by failure, I was actually successful in a lot of things that I did. When I started learning from failure, I was actually failing more and succeeding less. You know what they say, “I was born smart, education made me stupid”.

The Paradoxical Commandments” by Kent Keith(Mother Teresa Version)

People are often unreasonable, illogical, and self-centered;
Forgive them anyway.
If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives;
Be kind anyway.
If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true enemies;
Succeed anyway.
If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you;
Be honest and frank anyway.
What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight;
Build anyway.
If you find serenity and happiness, they may be jealous;
Be happy anyway.
The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow;
Do good anyway.
Give the world the best you have,
and it may never be enough;
Give the world the best you’ve got anyway.
You see, in the final analysis,
it is between you and God;
It was never between you and them anyway.

This to me is probably one of the most accurate definition of success. In 1904, Bessie Anderson Stanley wrote the following definition of success in Brown Book magazine:

He has achieved success who has lived well, laughed often and loved much; who has enjoyed the trust of pure women, the respect of intelligent men and the love of little children, who has filled his niche and accomplished his task; who has left the world better than he found it, whether by an improved poppy, a perfect poem, or a rescued soul; who has never lacked appreciation of earth’s beauty or failed to express it, who has always looked for the best in others and given them the best he had, whose life was an inspiration, whose memory a benediction.

’3 Idiots’ is a movie about the education system. It was a very enlightening experience as it brought back some memories of the past. Some good ones, and some not so good ones. It made me realize that through this whole process of ‘growing up’, maturing and building my career, I had forgotten the true nature of life and the things that we do in life. It made me realize that my perception of reality had drastically altered from the time I was in high school to now, and that I needed to fuse my experiences of my past and present to have true growth by re-realizing purpose.

The movie is about a brilliant young lad and the journey of him and his friends through engineering college. The main character is fun loving, brilliant and a person who is passionate about learning. The movie teaches us that the whole purpose of a school system is to teach and nurture young minds. But schools and students have fallen into this tangle of results, grades and achievement and a popularity contest among friends which ultimately has become a meaningless phase of our lives which instead of enlightening us has become a burden of requirements. Requirement to achieve grades, requirements to be agreeable to professors, requirements of future expectations from employers, from parents, from friends and from the individual students themselves.

No one really thinks about true purpose. What drives me, what empowers me, what is my true passion in life, what can I learn and experience to have a greater value of life? These are quality questions, but instead our lives are ruled by ‘Which university is more popular? What are my friends doing? Which degree is marketable? Will I get a job? What do I need to do to get these grades? How much money will I earn with this degree?

When you truly come to think about this, you will realize that it’s not just the education system. Even after graduating and going out in the field we are always trying to answer these meaningless questions. How many people are doing what they truly love doing, what they are truly passionate about and what in their gut feels to them like their true nature? I would guess not many – whether it be art, business or their profession.

Realizing true purpose gives meaning to our lives and everything that we do. Purpose is really the life force of our existence, and without it we might as well all be dead.

If you haven’t read the title of this post, I suggest you read it, or read it again if you already have. How many of you have set targets and made new year’s resolution? I can safely say that majority of you must have at least tried twice, and almost all of you have failed!

Now, now,…I am not trying to put you down. But let’s really face the fact. Coming up with a new year’s resolution is like setting up a plan to fail. The amazing thing about new year’s resolution is that it’s a collaborative effort of mass failure, because everyone is setting goals and almost everyone is failing to follow through. Hey… I was one of them. (The key is I was)

Why then do we do it over and over and over again? I don’t quite know the answer to that haha,.. but I am an observer and all I know for sure is that its there and its very evident. I’ll tell you how I escaped this mass murder of goals(sorry for sounding too graphic). Now for those who know me, know that there is always a story behind what I say or do. So here it goes.

It was last year of high school in algebra class and my teacher, Mr. Stewart, a person who I’m sure has inspired many, told the class something that has stayed with me ever since. I don’t remember his exact words, but the idea goes like this: common sense will get you no where. It may get you through, but it won’t create change, and it won’t create progress. Uncommon sense will! If everyone does the same thing, and the same thing over and over again, nothing really big will happen, because we will experience the same things over and over again.

History has told us that it was attitude of uncommon sense, things out of the ordinary that created break throughs and created leaps in progress. I have used this way of thinking many times in my life, and this time I am sharing it. I did not set a new year’s resolution! But what I did was I¬† set my goals in November 2009. Why?

1. Because of uncommon sense and the hope of progress tied to it.
2. And another thing I learned in high school: Newtons laws of motion.
3. Building Resistance – something I realized later.

Reason 1:

Everyone sets new year’s resolutions and almost everyone fails at it. I did not want to be part of it, and I thought uncommon and decided that I will set my goals away from the time everyone sets them to pull myself away from the collective efforts of failure.

Reason 2:

I’ll try to simplify this. Imagine you’re sitting in your car and press on the gas paddle full tilt. For the first few seconds you’re struggling to get your car to full speed, but a few more seconds go and you realize that small amount of force is required for every little change in acceleration, i.e. then it becomes easier to accelerate. And the faster you are moving the harder it will be to stop!

So I started off in November, and by the time it was January I already had momentum, so the parties, food, drinks and the fun-filled holiday spirit in December did not stop me – slowed me down at most.

Also, here’s why New year’s resolution is a bad idea. You’ve already partied too hard, eaten too much and probably drank too much too and you’ve had so much fun that it becomes seriously difficult to seriously look at your goals in January. Forces are already acting against you, so you need to apply more force to have little acceleration towards your goals and slow progress dampens your spirits and sooner or later BLAAHH!! You give up!

Reason 3:

Building Resistance. If you set your goals in November, like I did, you have already gone through the parties, the fun, the food and drinks and you realize that you still have momentum¬† in January. This boosts your confidence and increases your resistance to your outside world. It’s like building muscles or getting flu shots. This is something that I realized later and oh yes it feels amazing!

So here’s why you should NOT set a new year’s resolution!

Benjamin Franklin once said, “Time is money”, and for the longest time we have lived with it. I guess that is the easiest way to describe what time is, because there is no real thing that we can relate time to. Money in our world is very important, and so is time and perhaps that is the best metaphor to create- “Time is Money”. Today I read something that I think will change my life profoundly. I will never be the same ever again.

Time is actually more important and more precious than money. Money is something you can make, earn, win in a lottery or borrow. But what about time? No one can manufacture time, no one can earn time or borrow time; time is the most precious thing in the world.

Its October 1, 2008 and I am feeling great. What’s so special about this day? Most will say, ‘There’s nothing special about this day’, but a few will say, ‘This day is special, just like every single day of your life!”.

And yes I will also say that every single day of your life is special. I’ve been going for my early morning power walk consistently for almost a week now, and BAM! I’m feeling great. I started this almost more than two weeks ago, but I was not consistent. Now I just make it happen; I do whatever it take for me to get up in the morning and go for my jog/walk.

Never try to do something. Just do it! The reason I like Nike shoes or shirts or whatever is because it says ‘Just do it’. Now I’m not trying to promote Nike wear, nor am I getting paid for it..haha… I wish I was. But just think about it. If you’re telling yourself, ‘Comon you can do it’ or ‘I’ll try to do this’ or something like that, how many times have you notice yourself actually doing it?

More often then not you might not end up doing that thing you wanted to do. So just go out there and do it!

I am so excited with my morning walk routine that I’m spreading that energy to others. Today while I was walking(I usually jog, walk stretch, throw punches in the air – whateverit takes to keep me moving), I saw this guy who was maybe in high school walking with his bike. That’s right he was WALKING with his bike.

I asked him as he was passing me by since we were walking in opposite directions, ‘Is there something wrong with the bike?’.

He said,’No’.

I said, ‘Then you should be riding your bike, not walking with it”.

He said, “Ya I know, but I’m just lazy”.

So I got all hyped up. By this time we had already passed each other, I turned and said, ‘Ride the bike’. He smiled a little, acknowledging that he should.

Than I said,”Ride that bike, Ride your bike. Comon you can do it. Righ that bike. You can do it!”. And I got all excited and told him that.

This guy, got all so hyped up, he turned and looked at me and I saw him smiling . I could see the excitement on his face. He got all hyped up, as if to tell himself, ‘He’s right. I should ride my bike.’ Then he paddled his way up hill.

So now I’m thinking to myself, “Wow, it actually worked”. There were few other interesting encounters with a few people today. But this was the highlight of this morning.

Among other things – what can I say about net beans. Its so much better than eclipse! I was even using cssedit by Macrabbit on mac, and I thought it was a wonderful tool – something worth paying for. But Netbeans does an even better job at it (I think) AND ITS FREE!!

And there are other things that have happened, but this blog will just turn into a recording of my life if I talk about all that. SO coming to my conclusion. GREAT THINGS HAPPEN WHEN YOU’RE READY FOR A CHANGE!!It all started from me finally making the move to upgrade my site and do an extreme make over.

Who knows what great things are waiting to happen for me . All I can say is, I’m ready for a change and ready for great things to happen!