The Folly of Self

Over a period of time (perhaps 6 months into my first job) I have learned or shall I say trained myself to learn from other's experiences. Vicarious experiences occupy a special in my learning inventory. I read...I observe....I listen and then I reflect. I realize there is so much to know and there is so little I know. If I can leverage the experiences/knowledge of others I can add a world of knowledge to myself. As I have interacted with people or read books or listened to songs, there have been statements that have stuck to my memory. I am just gonna reproduce some of them. I might have read them somewhere or might have just come up during my conversation with people. Some of them are really funny, some serious stuff. Whatever it is, they have stayed with me for perhaps the content or the context or for the individual who said them. I am putting some of them down here. Wherever possible I have tried to quote the source. The source for me is where I first read or heard of the same. Some of them form core of my operating philosophy. So here it goes:

1. "Success and Work are binary in nature"
(Jeffrey Immelt, Chief Executive Office, General Electric Corporation)

2. "Success is an episodial phenomenon"
(Prof. Mukul Gupta, he was my Professor of Marketing at Management Development Institute, Gurgaon)

3. "I was moving and the Train was thinking. Or was it the other way round???"
(One line poem I wrote with some other people while on way to Mumbai to make placement presentation 2001)

4. "What more could I have done?"
(Bob Nardelli, one of the prospects for taking over from Jack Welch on being informed by Jack Welch that he is not the one. Picked it from Jack Welch's book, "Straight from the Gut". This one may not reflect a lot but when I read the last chapter of the book, the emotion just stuck to me.)

5. "There is always place for visionaries. It called the 'top'"
(Read it in one of the Accenture Surveys)

6. "The Paradigm of the Paradox of the Paranoid"
(Gaurav Goyal [Friend at MDI], he suggested that I should write the book with this title)

7. "When the children go to parks with their Male Fathers"
(Girish Menghani [Friend at MDI] espousing what later we christened as the four quadrant parental relationship model)

8. "Have you ever had a dream that you were so sure was real. What if you were unable to wake from that dream. How would you know the difference between the dream world and the real world"
(Morpheus to Neo after he gives him the red pill to get him out of the Matrix in the movie "Matrix")

9. "What is real? How do you define real? If you are talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then real is simply electrical signal interpreted by your brain"
(Morpheus to Neo explaining to him what is the Matrix in the movie "Matrix")

10. "Son! your ego is writing cheques your body can't cash"
(Tom Cruise (Maverick) being admonished by his commander after helping Couger to land in the movie "Top Gun")

Thought I don't often listen to music, I heard this song from Baz Luhrman. Its perhaps the best piece of advice I have ever come across. Here is how it goes....

May be you’ll marry, maybe you won’t,

May be you’ll have children, maybe you won’t,

May be you’ll divorce at 40,

May be you’ll dance the funky chicken on your 75th wedding anniversary…

What ever you do, don’t congratulate yourself too much or berate yourself either

Your choices are half chance, so are everybody else’s.

As Good As It Gets

Long back, I saw this movie Terminal One. Tom Hanks and Tom Hanks and Tom Hanks all the way. Lovely movie loosely based on this real life character who is holed up in Charles De Gaulle at Paris. If you haven’t already, go watch the movie…you wouldn’t regret it.

The movie set me thinking and I have been trying to put form to my thoughts. You may not like what is being written so stop here go on to something else and get rid of the incoherence (as u may deem it) that follows. For all those who dare of venture beyond please do so at your own peril and if u do reach the end please drop me a line to let u know u did by penning your thoughts on the comments section.

Getting back to business, it’s amazing how simple things leave one dumbfounded every once in a while. Why is simplicity the hardest thing to live up to? Simple is beautiful then why do we aspire for the complex? Anyway that’s perhaps a mute point for a lot of us and perhaps one that doesn’t deserve too much attention. What if guys we were holed up in a terminal space of our mind and not allowed to view what lay ahead for us, how would we know what is the difference between inside and the outside (reminds me the of dream sequence in the Matrix) How does it feel to be a hostage of our own thoughts. The tough deal is we don’t realize of the captivity till we get free of it. Some of us don’t even realize once we are set free.

As much as my humble cognitive abilities allow me, I feel we are all holed up in some terminals of our mind. We are not as liberated as we think we are. I work with a group of really talented bunch of people. Wouldn’t give them up for anything. I see them everyday going about their work. Smiles, frowns, pain, happiness all of it in true blood and sweat. I watch them struggle with themselves. Fight with what they are and what they can be….a fight to the end I hope. I can best summarize the whole experience with a statement that one of the folks often throws up at me:

“I can see only as far as I can see.”

How do you liberate one from the bounds that he/she places on him/her? I would perhaps say you can see only as far as you want to see.

We are all mired in the daemons of our own creations….restricted by bounds we place on our self…justified by explanations our mind cooks up for us and we choose to believe. As for me, I am the worst of the lot. I am engulfed in incomprehensible, amorphous, futile and divergent thoughts. But hey what can I do. I am what I am and we are what we are and that’s what keeps us hooked on to one another. Isn’t this beautiful? I find it pulsating.

Sometimes I find it amazing…mere acceptance of the current state absolves me from the responsibility of changing it.

I don’t know where this is leading….I don’t even know how to bring it all together. Lemme finish with part of this song that I heard sometime back…

"I have been searching my soul tonight. I know there is so much more to life"
"I have been searching my soul tonight. Don’t wanna be alone in life"
"Baby I have been holding back now, my whole life. I have decided to move on now"
"Gonna leave the world behind. I have been searchn for my soul tonight"

The Failure of Success

As a part of out thought session, Mindscape we got engaged in discussion about success and failure. I am reproducing a piece that Uday wrote. I would describe him as a modern thinker influenced by what he knows and more importantly what he knows not. Here is the reproduction of his thoughts.

"Success is not about buying adequate number of Lottery tickets & Failure is a series of Mistakes "

Many people have quoted success in numerous ways…In words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Success is To laugh often and much; To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; To earn the approbation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; To appreciate beauty; To find the best in others; To give of one's self; To have played and laughed with enthusiasm and sung with exultation; To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived - This is to have succeeded.

Was Emerson able to summarize all that we mean by “Success”? Or for that matter who has?? Bhaskar Borah a young corporate executive from a well-known MNC says “God did not define success to make our lives interesting”. If that is true then let’s agree that success is always contextual. There are no ‘absolutes’ when it comes to success, in other words one man’s fruit could be other’s poison.

Now let’s delve on other phrase ‘buying adequate number of lottery tickets’. As we understand buying lottery tickets is equivalent for covering one’s chances or bases on the journey to success. A high number of lottery tickets buying customer reflects a risk averse behavior and minimizes chances of failure. This again boils down to who will decide what’s “adequate” for anyone rather than the individual him/herself. Doesn’t everyone give the best shot for the ‘desired success’ within the circumstances that are prevailing? Circumstances that one is in and the choices that one makes is a vicious circle. We get into certain circumstances because of the certain choices and then make choices which lead us to specific circumstances.

So, Success definitely requires buying lottery tickets. But as we know, ‘There are no free lunches” the price of buying lottery tickets is any or all of these-time, money & energy. But, is that all what it takes for success? One buys lottery tickets spending time, money, energy and perhaps something more and success dawns upon his/her world?? Guess not, don’t we all know of someone or the other that despite paying the “price” and still been deprived of success? The ingredient still missing for success to shine are the transcendental forces or what we normally refer to as destiny. Robert Boyle’s Academy winning picture of 2008 “Slumdog Millionaire” was a about a child from slums in Mumbai winning 20 million rupees in a tv game show. The film’s tagline was as “It’s all written”. As someone said “Whatever you do, don't congratulate yourself too much or berate yourself either - your choices are half chance, so are everybody else's.

Having got the interpretations, here is what the discussion is about: Is Success about objective, and everything else is secondary; or, do the efforts engaged in achieving the objective have a prominent role. Going for the former, a school of thought would be that success, by its basic connotation means achieving the objective against a certain context: a set of circumstances and defined time frame. In a marathon, how fast you ran did not differentiate you unless you were the one to finish the race, and ahead of others. If a slow moving tortoise is able to finish ahead of rabbit, we at the end of the day, have tortoise as the winner. Similarly, by putting a bet against all the possible directions, if I am able to catch the one which takes me to the goal, is that any less worthwhile than someone else’s success who put lesser number of bets?

Well, it does, so says the other school of thought. They say, success is not just about achieving the objective. The very meaning of success, according to this view, is picking the winning bet. This essentially means that you are picking it from a sizeable pool of potentially failing bets. Now, if you were to be given an opportunity to pick and check all of these bets, what is success quotient there? Where is the risk and reward of picking the winning bet? The very concept of success got diluted here. It just moved from a potential success-failure proposition to a mundane task of going through all the alternatives. Unless there is risk of failure, does success really completes its meaning?

How about some examples and intriguing questions? In generic meaning of success for a scientist, from the eyes of society at large, is John Nash a successful scientist? Is he more successful than Ramanujam? Nash wrote one paper and received Nobel Prize vs. Ramanujam worked through his life to come close to one. Is a B Grade movie maker who makes sure that every movie that he releases gives him 50% RoI successful? Is an A+ movie maker who comes out with one movie in 3 years with 25% chance of 1000% RoI more successful? Are they comparable in the first place?

How about taking help from the other part of the statement? Since Failure is largely perceived to be an exact opposite of Success, it may give us some way forward.

What is failure? First of all, we do have it in a specific context. Failure of someone could be decent level of success for someone else. As understood at the basic level, failure is referred as “not achieving the defined objective”. Do you call someone a failure the moment the first thing goes wrong? Doesn’t our own experience tell us that many a times such wrong-things are substantial learning experiences and game changers. In other words isn’t failure a stepping stone towards success. Guess, it is repeat of such mistakes. Not a one off recurrence. Rather, a series of them. But when do we know that a failure is conclusive? When is the “series of mistakes” complete? When an ant tries going up a hill and falls down umpteen number of times before finally conquering it, isn’t that a complete series of mistakes? Isn’t that failure, success defined in some other way ?

It takes many to fail for one to succeed. One Narayan Murthy has thousands of other entrepreneurs having tried and failed behind him. Doesn’t that mean that the very connotation of success, as we understand it, is defined by these failures. Well, that seems to indicate success and failures are just about perspectives. Would you spend the rest of your life in prison as a rich or famous or powerful man or a free man on the road as just anybody?

Well, we are still inclusive. Why are these two statements together in the title? Maybe they have an interrelation and complete each other. Or, maybe they are there just to tickle the intellectual nerves. Let’s reflect. While the former is conclusively inconclusive about the importance of process, the later is inclusively conclusive that process is important, in achieving the objective. (If that sounds like an oxymoron, it meant to say that in the later statement, it is sure that process is important, but we are still not definite how that gets defined. And when is the definition complete). The definite interrelation between the two is about the process vs. objective.

Essentially that translates into the eternal debate of destination vs. journey. What is more important? While the spiritual souls will jump on the simple conclusion that it’s the journey, haven’t we heard by lesser mortal, which definitely outnumber the “high sprits”, that destination is more important. Only when we move up in the hierarchy of needs you can even think of importance of subtler elements. And many of us pass over the world in achieving those small little objectives.

So has the whole discourse been started for the reader to contemplate and choose which category he/she falls into? Or is there propaganda to promote one over the other? Is there more to it than what appears on the face? Is there an attempt to change the way think? And change the people at large? So essentially a societal change.

Maybe yes, maybe no, but we definitely shall sum it all with….
“Sometimes you're ahead, sometimes you're behind. The race is long, and in the end, it's only with yourself. !!”

Question of Answers...

Does a Sunset End when the Sun sets...

Does a Three Day event Last Three Days...

How Long does a Moment of Love Last...

How Much Time is Too Much time...

If Little Knowledge is Dangerous then why is Ignorace Bliss...

Where does existing stop and living begin...

I wish I had answers to some or all of the above...but then on second thoughts am I really looking for the answers...do I really need the answers. If it is the "question that drives us", which I believe it is, then I need to search for new questions.

We are bounded by our what we can see or have seen (someone told me that is experience). I guess its time to liberate the thoughts from the realm of possibilities and impossibilities...

Bon Voyage.

Vikas