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.