deepcontemplator

thinking deeply about things that matter

Author: Suhas

  • The importance of being able to articulate well

    The importance of being able to articulate well

    Being a frequent listener of podcasts, I am both amazed and in awe of how effortlessly articulate few people are. It is a greatly useful skill to be able to clearly and concisely convey your thoughts and ideas and effectively land them.

    You need to have good ideas, but the aspect of having a great delivery associated with it matters. It decides whether your idea will be heard and come to reality or not.

    I do want to build on my articulation skills and am working on it. It does take effort and practice. This post is not about how we can build the skill, but about why it matters, as seen from the outside.

    Firstly, being able to convey your ideas effectively saves a lot of energy. Incomplete and haphazard communication can result in back and forth. If your message is not clear, it can lead to unwanted deciphering and misconstruing of the message intended. Prevention is better than cure applies even in communication!

    Effective articulation, be it spoken or written word is an art in itself. Of course the greats novelists of the world of literature have honed this to the maximum. They can build entire layered inner and outer worlds of a character beautifully and masterfully. A lot of aspects are deliberately left out to make room for interpretation.

    Good communication or storytelling helps in building trust and cooperation. Of course the content matters, but just having good intentions and useful information is not enough. A lot rests on how well we are able to effectively articulate why the idea matters and how its relevant.

    Hence it is a worthwhile endeavor to constantly improve your articulation skills.

    And get your ideas heard, loud and clear! 🙂

  • Be generative

    Be generative

    In the current times, it can be so easy to passively live away your life consuming content. There is nothing wrong with this. However to achieve anything worthwhile, you need to assimilate and integrate your learning and lived experience and generate energy, ideas and work from it.

    Being generative and producing work performs many functions –

    You find your voice

    Actually going and doing something consistently helps you discover your voice. Constantly putting yourself out there signals to yourself that you matter and your ideas matter.

    You build the momentum of creation

    By forcing yourself to be generative, you are constantly looking for ideas which you can use and bring to fruition. This builds on itself and creates momentum to sustain and grow further.

    Its a way to teach yourself

    Its always said that the best way to learn something is to teach it to someone. By teaching someone, and in the process generating words, notes, conversations puts into test how much you have understood the topic.

    It might be one thing to abstractly understand algorithms, but actually writing it down and explaining it step by step to someone and convincing them why it works is totally different.

    So go ahead and weave in moments of being generative along with learning and growth.

  • Word of the month – advocate

    Word of the month – advocate

    advocate (v) – to speak in support of an idea or course of action

    The past month I was thinking of how advocating for what you believe in and stand for is so important. It might come naturally for a few of us, and for others it might be tough to build this skill.

    We might find it easier to advocate for someone or rally for a cause someone else starts fighting for. You might find it comfortable to hop on a bus which someone else is already steering.

    However, we get the most scared when it comes to advocating for ourselves.

    And we matter. Our ideas matter.

    At times, it might be us who needs an advocate the most.

    To be able to advocate for oneself, we firstly need to be clear on what matters to us. It takes reflection, questioning and self awareness to understand our own core values and beliefs.

    If you are prone to self doubt and low self esteem, it might be particularly hard to self advocate and drive results in the direction which best suits us.

    The journey of self advocating is bound to have failures, embarrassment and disappointments. Just accepting this can make us more resilient and realistic about the effort involved.

    We need to slowly and compassionately persist.

    Consistently stand up for ourselves and what we believe in, and how we view the world. Having allies and learning from people who are good at advocating for themselves will be helpful.

    In the end, we owe it to ourselves to make us and our ideas be heard and seen in the way we deem fit and right for us.

  • Modern life and its pulls

    Modern life and its pulls

    Modern urban life, combined with digital revolution and social media comes with some interesting predicaments.

    Whether you embrace it, or completely abhor it, the following pulls would have definitely touched you, just by the fact of being a person living in this world.

    Optimize

    Everything is up for optimization!

    What started as efficiency and scale improvements in the Industrial age has continued to keep its hold on the human imagination. Where we are unable to change the hard realities of physics or biology, we tend to optimize.

    Maximize

    Then comes the paranoia of maximization. We can now measure a multitude of variables, like the steps one takes in a day, or simply the number of followers.

    Its assumed that with these measures, more is better.

    We are looking on how to maximize every aspect of our life including how to get the maximum out of our relationships.

    Monetize

    Money gets a bad rap in modern times. But when you set out to do anything, the worth of an activity many times gets judged based on how much money it generates.

    Even free play, a fuel for creativity can be measured on its eventual monetization capacity.

    Of course money is a necessity to survive in this economic world. Paradoxically, having a sufficient amount can free your from the vagaries of economic world as well. We should not romanticize a life devoid of money even to cover basic human needs, which could be harsh and difficult.

    The takeaway

    None of the above aspects are inherently right or wrong.

    In fact at some point in our lives, or in some domain, it might be the best to focus on these. We might need to monetize some talent of ours or maximize the gains we get from an exercise regimen.

    However we need to be aware of how the modern world subtly pushes us in these directions in anything we do.

    Just by being aware of these qualities, you can hopefully, mindfully choose when to engage and when to continue in your ‘subpar’ activities in the eyes of modern world.

  • Striving vs living – finding the balance

    Striving vs living – finding the balance

    It can be sometimes be addictive to keep working on ourselves and strive to be a better version. Never living the life which we currently have as a result.

    It is important to be aware of areas where we need work. Where there is room for growth. And we can consistently work on these aspects.

    However, we should not forget to live the life we already have, as we strive to be better.

    It is a delicate balance.

    On the one hand you are fully aware of your challenges and rough edges. On the other, you fully embrace your present self providing yourself validation and compassion.

    In present times, its easy to fall into the trap of constant striving. There are many signals from media, society hammered into us on how we are not smart, beautiful or social enough. Many of them are based on completely false narratives, but its a hard task to avoid this constant humdrum.

    So remember to live your life completely even as you continue on your growth journey. .

  • The secret to reading more books

    The secret to reading more books

    Inspired by the book Show your Work!, I have started to post images of the books I am reading. Another advantage of having physical books is that they lend well to photographs too! 🙂

    On one such post, a friend asked me how do I manage to read.

    One aspect is about finding time in your life to read. But in this post I want to highlight another aspect which keeps me coming back to reading.

    Reading can at times become difficult, especially if you are stuck with a not so interesting book! Life happens and you can lose touch of reading, and it can be difficult to get back.

    One trick which helps in such scenarios is to be surrounded by books!

    That doesn’t necessarily mean having a library overflowing with books, but always have a To read book pile.

    I usually read one book at a time, but have 3-4 books in the queue. And always looking around for new ones. The never ending pile acts as a forcing function to get back to reading. After all you have spent money on buying those books, or have to return the books to the library unread. Making loss aversion work for you. 🙂

    And if you get bored with the current book you are reading, you can always look around the next set to get a peek of what’s coming! It helps make reading exciting and hopefully long lasting.

    So maybe use this tactic next time. Having a pile of unread books lying around. Not to signal shame of something incomplete, but the opportunity to venture into unexplored worlds hidden in those books!

  • The limits of to do lists and planners

    The limits of to do lists and planners

    There is the oft quoted
    Failing to plan is planning to fail

    So we end up planning our days by the minute with things to do. There are many apps and planners which help you do this (to the extreme sometimes). You are asked at the start of the year/month/week to meticulously plan ahead, tack your daily habits like water intake, reading, watching shows and all. In return, at least implicitly, the promise is that by becoming an ultimate task slayer, you become a happier person.

    I have had my trysts and multiple false starts with such planning apps and planners. You firstly spend a lot of time trying to find the perfect app or planner which is customized to you. Sad news is – there are none which will perfectly fit you. There are many apps though which can work for you. 

    The important aspect however is how much pay off can you expect from tracking your days as a series of To Dos.

    As with many things in life, we go through seasons and cycles. There might be times when you are in the productivity mode and the whole month is filled with ticking off items on your to do list. Then there are extended periods of slump, where maybe you get 2-3 things done in the entire week. And that is okay.

    We do not have to be chained to never ending to do lists. 

    Our worth is not determined by how long the to do list is or how many items we are able to tick off.

    My experience with planners have been lackluster to say the least. I realized I am better off without them, and a simple to do list for the week, quarter, year suffices and mostly gets the job done.

    However, like any other tool in your life, be open to trying something new. Something which probably can make your life simpler. If it works for you, adopt it, even in a big way maybe!

    But the tool should not become an end in itself. Its a mean to achieve something greater. Definitely there are many worthwhile and important things in life, which you go ahead and do anyway, and may not figure in your to do list!

  • How to be less uptight

    How to be less uptight

    You want to things to be always prim and proper. With proper decorum. You get frustrated with minor inconveniences. Life problems can be stressful to handle at the best.

    The truth however is that life’s difficulties touches everyone in their lifetime. Isn’t the whole growing up, being mature, about being more resilient when life happens.

    1. Understand that things go wrong (and more often than you think)
      Even with best intentions, best plans, sometimes you get punched in the face. And that’s okay. It doesn’t mean you are a failure. It doesn’t mean everyone around is constantly judging you. When things don’t go as expected, accept it, and continue anyway.
    2. Its not your responsibility
      Yes, most things you are fretting about, let go. They are not your responsibility. Unless you are fully responsible of taking care of another living entity, like a child, pet or someone sick. You don’t need to get the house in order before guests visit, you are not responsible for always having to put up a cheerful and happy persona. You are allowed to have human emotions, and its healthy to show them in a safe space.
      So stop taking blame and apologizing for everything which goes wrong.
    3. Learn to be adaptable
      Things keep changing all the time. Try to be as adaptable and accommodating as you can. If any situation or person does expose your rough edges, give yourself enough grace and compassion to fully accept it. Think about how you can learn more about the situation and react better next time.
    4. Read, travel, meet people
      Learn, interact (and live their life vicariously via fiction) with people different from you. You learn how things go bad even with the ‘perfect’ people or circumstance. The more you can expand your worldview, the softer you become to yourself and those around you.
    5. Understand the finitude of life
      After all, an average person has around four thousand weeks in a lifetime! So is it really worth worrying and stressing about how the waiter irresponsibly doused a whole glass of mango milkshake on you.
      Many a times, its best to be just amused on how life can be so unpredictable and in the most random ways.
    Laugh at the minor misfortunes and live beautifully anyway.
  • Choosing inaction

    Choosing inaction

    Most of our thought is usually around stories of what we can or should do. Or what we could have done differently. We are caught up in this loop of how effective we can be in our world by our actions. And, action speak louder than words too!

    After years of endless ‘doing’, there comes a time when you step back and try to make sense of it. You realise yourself pushing, pulling, exerting all that effort on many areas.

    You realise the importance of choosing not to act. When we consciously do not affect anything and just let things be.

    You let go of your need to control everything and put ‘things in order’. You begin to see how things are already good the way they are.

    Even if things are not exactly how and where you want it to be, its beneficial to take that occasional hour/day off where you are not trying to change things.

    Silence or inaction does not mean apathy. You do not have to endure hardhips or toxic behavior by remaining silent. But when you are on the always on mode, you need conscious stepping back.

    Not everything is broken, and not everything needs to be fixed, at least not by you.

    So, just let things be, once in a while. Take that time off to just sit by yourself and let your existence come into the fore. Without dousing it in to do lists.

  • A note about solo travel

    A note about solo travel

    Traveling solo is one of the few things which gets a lot of marketing on social media and among young adults. It is projected as this ultimate soul searching tool, one which can be liberating and empowering. Maybe it is for some or at some time in one’s life. But if you are unable to travel solo, are you really missing out? Is it a must do? That’s complicated.

    I never felt the need to travel solo, or even travel in fact. If you mention that you don’t like traveling, its assumed that you are not serious about your growth. But is travel the only way to grow and expand your world view?

    So it was quite unlike me when I decided to go on a solo trip recently. I had quite some trepidation and inertia on should I even travel anywhere on my vacation days! But Internet seemed to advice that best way to spend your off days is to have a change of scenery and go as far as possible from your current environment!

    Solo travel does have its moments. I had a few interesting conversations. I got to travel at my own pace, customize the itinerary entirely without having to worry about anyone else’s needs. It was peaceful and fulfilling.

    Is solo travel the salve for everything? Is it really meant to give you something radical which you can’t figure out in the comfort of your own house? Maybe not. At least that’s not my experience.

    Travel, solo or with family or friends has its place in one’s life. It can be entertaining, relaxing, enlightening, humbling, any/all of these. But it can also be lonely, disorienting, tiring, uninspiring. Even a successful trip will be interspersed with these low points.

    So if you wanted to travel solo, go ahead! Maybe traveling the world solo is something you always wanted to do. But in no way is traveling the only way to become a better human. Definitely you don’t need to travel solo for it.

    We need to trust our intuition and follow its light for any activity in life.

    Always remember how much any activity can help us. As always, you can do too much of even a good thing.