Rutul Dave

I have had this quote from Martin Luther King, Jr written down in a document on my desktop. I call it “Find a calling and then deliver”.

If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, ‘Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.’”

It’s a great quote and it’s what we should all strive for in whatever we do.

Now check this guy out:

Saying he is enjoying what he is doing would be an understatement. He might be a DJ who does this day in day out, or he might be a school professor who got hold of a DJ system on a Friday night. Whatever the case, he obviously is absolutely enjoying what he does….passionately.

When was the last time you did something and enjoyed so much? When was the last time you worked in your job as an accountant, as an IT administrator, as a clerk, as a receptionist, as a middle manager, as whoever and had so much fun doing it.

The key is to do whatever you are doing and give it all. That’s for the work that you are doing. And for your own self, go ahead and enjoy the $hit out of it while you are giving it all.

We are what we think, what we say and what we do.

Most of us are good at what we think. It’s natural, and you probably have to do the least.

Some of us are good at what we do, execute, make things happen, build, create, whatever. It’s probably the least natural, and you have to do the most.

Right in between what we think and what we do is what we say. That includes how we say it, and to whom.

Yes, most of us struggle the most in speaking, specifically to an audience, generally more than one person. I know this from personal experience. And I have made a plan to change that. Scratch that; I have made a plan to excel at speaking, specifically to an audience of more than one person.

One of the things I intend to do is to use this space to note down these lessons in speaking.

I am guilty of letting it get to a point where I don’t even remember the last time I wrote.

I have been so busy living life, that I haven’t had time to live life.

Writing here has been that part of living life that I haven’t been able to do. Writing here has helped me in more ways than I can quantify. Maybe that is the reason why it took a hit when things got busy.

Here are some of the thoughts that failed to develop and be written about over these months…

• Something about a ‘happiness equation’ in life. Your happiness is a function of all the things in your life. What if you could figure out that equation? Using concepts of statistics, the various independent variables, things, situations, people, etc that affect the dependent variable which is ‘your happiness’. You would use regression, you have the data. Track everything that goes on in your life over a period of time to make the dataset decent and then off you go, run a regression.
• Something about ‘what we do’ versus ‘what we do well’. Seems like we are the sum of those two things. A successful person is the one who has the opportunity to be able to do more of the things he/she does well than other people.
• Something about ‘being in the moment’. If you could do everything you do by ‘being in the moment’, every thing you do would be a lot more richer. I wonder why it is so freaking hard to do though….

In programming, asynchronous events are those occurring independently of the main program flow (statement courtesy of wikipedia).

In life, it seems the challenge is trying to live a synchronous life within a world that is asynchronous, driven by events occurring outside of your path of execution.

A few days ago I wrote about being spent. Maybe this will inspire you to be used up….

“This is the true joy in life. Being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one. Being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of aliments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community. And as I live it is my privilege, my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die for the harder I work, the more I love. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me it is a sort of splendid torch which I’ve got a hold of for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.”

-George Bernard Shaw

When I look at cursive writing, my first impression is that the information expressed is informal, unorganized and honest. It did not come from an organized process, research and design.

When i think of why I write here, it’s mainly because rather than letting the thought marinate inside my head, I might as well say it out, doesn’t matter who is listening. I hadn’t done that till certain circumstances/experiences in life gave me the environment for it. So I look at these as said-out-loud/shouted words by my mind.

I believe I have identified the right title for my “unorganized thoughts” posts here - shouted cursives

Anger, depression, sadness are the outliers of human emotion and feelings.

As humans, we experience emotions and feelings through out our lives. From the moment you are born, to this point in life, we go through way too many experiences and situations. Yet from that large sample of data, we choose to make so many decisions when we are extremely happy, or angry, or devastated. Even with my primitive knowledge of statistics, this just seems like a bad idea; we are making important decisions from data that are outliers.

Your emotional median is the emotional state you are in through most of your life. Can you learn to identify your emotional outliers?

Are you spent today?

Are you physically spent? Are you emotionally spent? Are you mentally spent?

Did you do what ever you could, and then some more in what ever you were doing today?

What is the value of the three one dollar bills, five fives and three twenties in your wallet? Absolutely nothing. They have no value until you actually use the cash for something, spend it.

So, what is your value?

All your skills, are your talents, all your intelligence, all your physical abilities have zero value, unless you spend the skills, the talents, the intelligence and your body each day to make something happen.

Ask yourself tonight before you go to bed, are you spent? If not, will you do everything you can so that tomorrow night, you can say ‘yes I am’.

I know I am going spend myself each and every day.

Not relevant to what I wanted to talk about, but I like these set of words from a song I heard

how am I feeling? it’s hard to explain

it’s like underwater breathing; swimming in rain

Back on topic - If you are focusing on success, two words whose value is underestimated usually; brevity and imminent

Somebody else’s belief in you is not because you are already successful, it’s the understanding that success in your case if imminent. If you manage to convince somebody else with brevity that your success is imminent, you are golden. Simple, but not easy.

im·mi·nent (m-nnt)

brev·i·ty

Good to see that my reasons for writing here align with what Seth has to say about blogging.