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I grew up liking the company of people… always wanting to be around others…. May be that is how I chose sales after college… but I left that profession a few years later… when I moved into management and Agile…. but over the past few years I have become much distant from people… I am…
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I recently crossed the 200th episode of the Penpositive Outclass Podcast. If you have been following this blog my podcasting process has been a daily journal writing followed by the Podcast the next day. I have been journaling on my personal blog https://vinodnarayan.com/ I have been doing the Journal for 139 consecutive days and I…
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Yesterday I was watching an Indian movie and in that a person in a running train walks up to the door and tries to open it. When asked she tells that she wanted some fresh air… She cannot open the door and so remains inside. As I was watching it…. I was thinking how dangerous…
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Don’t we all have our share of madness? I think so… Some of the madness is so common that we think it is the norm… And some we hide though it is so OK… we hide it because we find it uncommon… We have this urge to gel in with the crowd.. to blend into…
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We will never be able to do everything we want….and I get that… I hope you do too… but the bigger problem is saying No to some of the things we want to do.. Remember we spoke about value trade-offs…. Even when we are able to find the value and do the trade off.. there…
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There was a 2019 book by Marcus Buckingham ‘Nine Lies About Work’ that he had coauthored with Ashley Goodall.. I highly recommend you all to read it…. In fact the Episode 9 of the Penpositive Outclass Podcast was about that… The book again came to my mind recently as I started reading and writing about…
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Two days back as part of the Penpositive Journal on the Penpositive YouTube channel… I did a video on The Great Resignation… some personal thoughts… I did not have any intention of repeating the same thing here.. but it was interesting to note some comments that came on my Social media Channels and I thought…
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A day can be bad for many reason.. today was one such… today means the day I am writing this blog… I am not sure which day you will read this… May be you will read this on a bad day for you…. I usually don’t have much reasons to feel bad on a day….…
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‘You need to work on the stronger branch’… I heard this phrase a few days back… I am not sure if I read it or I heard it… Either way I loved it… The context in which I heard it was on career and work… it was talking about identifying the stronger branch among our…
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Does Multitasking work..? or even better… is there any workable multi-tasking… Growing up I have heard two different sides on the Multi-Tasking debate. One was that it is perfectly ok to multitask… because things don’t need to be perfect and the other was obviously.. don’t multi-task.. even Leonardo Da Vinci was not able to do…
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What choices do we have in our life…? Many…..? Multiple…? But our choices vary… it is tied to who we are.. our privileges… where we live… And so many other factors that impact not just our choices.. but also their availability to us. Choices in one way or other have always fascinated me… may be…
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“Are you ignorant?”… if someone asks us that, we might get offended. but we all know that we cannot be knowledgable about everything. There are definitely more things in this world that we are ignorant about than what we are knowledgable about… same goes with experiences. We often have an issue owning up our ignorances…
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In the era of Social Media and cell phone cameras and live streams.. do people fear being exposed. Apparently people’s life taken out of context can also cause trauma. I was thinking about this the other day… When do we feel exposed and why do we fear we might get exposed. Exposed in itself means…
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I have always considered myself to be low on willpower. And recently the topic of willpower came up in a conversation with friends. Usually I try to change the topic as I personally feel I have less of a willpower and that was my way of coping with that vulnerability. But I guess it depends…
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Tradeoff is a word I often use… while talking and while writing…. because a lot of what we do is in a way a trade-off. but yesterday I was thinking about Value Tradeoff. Because any Tradeoff is associated with a Value….. or a perception of value.. value gained and value lost…. For those who are…
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We live at a time when focus is a rare commodity. It is not about focussing on what is difficult to focus.. but even the easier things seem hard to focus. I never needed effort to focus on Movies… I just love them… But that is not the case now. Watching movies have always been…
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Life is not a race or a test to get perfect scores.. It is not a Gymnastics act either.. even though many of us might feel it is at times…. Life does not give you perfect scores. But as human beings we are obsessed with it. I was trying to think if I have ever…
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Talking about death is not considered the best thing in most cultures.. but there are many cultures where death is discussed… As mortals I think we all need to think about ourselves in deathbed and imagine how the world around us should be at that time. How we should feel… and how others would feel……
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There are times when I question myself…. if I am on the right track…. What we navigate in life is not always black and white and there are so many grey areas. The question is if we are on the right track and it repeats itself. And we need to answer.. but it is not…
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We all have limited time… though when we are young we think otherwise. The first time we hear death or see it we know life will end but we always feel that is a long time in the future. We have time.. And then years later it dawns on us that we have to be…
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Tough is always considered better than Weak. I was also taught that anyone can be tough. And I honestly believed that. Till I started thinking otherwise. I believe in Darwin’s theory or evolution… I don’t believe in any other story… but when you look at our human life from a survival of the fittest point…
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With the Advent of Social Media… everyone seems to be a philosopher… in a one line motivational quote they seem to solve all world problems. Motivational Quotes are a big thing on all major social media…. Even I do it at times… But sometimes it is a bit too much. I am not saying Motivational…
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It is October and in just over two months we will be getting into a new year and a week before that we will all be flooded by New Year Resolutions and how the year was and how the coming year is going to be and so on. But the question is why should we…
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I really loved my daily commute which started at the end of December 2010 and continued till August of 2012. I used to commute for 2 hours daily back and forth to office. And I loved it. No I am honest… I loved it.. Why…? There are many layers to why I liked it. The…
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Pandemic was a time when many people who had not done remote work started doing it. I was someone who had experienced remote work for several years in my career. But that did not matter because it was different now. I started remote working immediately after college when I started out on my own assembling…
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When I look back at life that has passed, I often wonder if there is any event or moment that I want to relive. I have never got an answer. There are places I surely don’t want to go back again.. but relive? I don’t know…. to be honest… The challenge while looking back… especially…
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When I was a student I never knew about the word ‘unlearning‘. Even the other day when I posted about unlearning, someone asked if that was a real word. We live in a time when unlearning has become so important than even learning. And why is that? The world we live in is said to…
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I started working for the first time in a large corporation 5 months shy of my 40th birthday. Spending 17 years in the Tech field working in small companies and unsuccessfully running my own ventures. Finally there comes a first day at work kind of experience after 17 years of working. The place I got…
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In 2010 I was at a crossroad with a mounting debt, no clear idea of a possible career even after spending 17 years in an Industry that has been booming all the while. In short I did not know what skill of mine can be sold or projected as being employable. On a September day…
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There are decisions we take in our life that can cost us either immediately or in the long run. I have experimented a lot with my career and also made decisions and if I look back it has had its impact. I think it would be nice to reflect back. There is a price…. The…
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Find a way to get paid for your passion and you will not work for another day. That is what I have heard over and over again. You must have too… And magically your Passion and work becomes one and the same. How beautiful is that. Definitely worth trying. I have tried and failed.. not…
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Work is the biggest part of our waking hour. For some folks the sleeping hour is so minuscule that work is all they have in their life. So Why do we work? Next few days I want to share with you some personal thoughts about work every day. I sometimes feel an alternative to work…
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One should learn from failures they say… true but my problem is choosing from all those failures in life. But even more my problem is I have kept on repeating a few things with out any attempt of learning anything. Why would that be? I often wonder… why would someone be doing that. You know…
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After 100+ days of writing and daily podcasting, I have started thinking about style. Is that something your develop? Should one be bother much about it. If you are trying to publish something yes. But if you look at it as a Journal should style matter. Can you manufacture style in journaling. Will that not…
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It was last year… as the world was amidst the pandemic.. deaths mounting… no end in sight.. No news of vaccine.. at least for the common people like me. When hope was scarce, I got to witness an act of honesty. from a total stranger. During the Pandemic I had created a course on Agile…
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The first time heard about the sunk cost fallacy, I felt like quitting every crap I was doing then. To be honest it felt like I was in this never ending journey and the things that I dread repeating itself. But that was a few years ago.. And Yes I quit what I was doing…
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The excitement of joining a new company might have changed a bit I feel. During the past one and a half years most people who joined across the various levels of the corporate machinery must have joined remotely and started delivering value in a remote setting. It is both interesting and challenging. When the Lock…
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We all know that machines and software can stop working.. we humans also slow down and stop working.. But machines and software get fixed faster than we humans do. In the present time if machines and software go down humans are impacted more than ever. I made a post on instagram in the morning and…
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How should a homework conversation with your kid go. What are the things one should keep in mind as a parent? What questions should we ask kids? Is there even a need for such a conversation? Well, to be honest I have no clue if there is a ‘one size fits all’ answer to these…
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Kids don’t get their driving license till they are a certain age. They are not allowed to drink or smoke. There are restrictions that the system puts on them. Even when they start driving the insurance costs are so high because the system considers kids to be high risk drivers. And yet we sometimes want…
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Whenever you ask people how the day was, they say Busy… Busy Busy and I wonder… is it really busy. Do people feel happy or unhappy when they are busy. I sometimes feel it is not about busy but being meaningfully busy. If what we do is not meaningful then it does not matter whether…
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Today Marks the 100 days, I have been writing every single day and it feels good. Thought I will take some day to reflect on this and also see where it should take from here. As I had started the blog and after a 3-4 weeks I thought I should use this as a podcast…
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The beauty and satisfaction of working as an Agile Practitioner is that even while there is so much chaos around you, very often you stumble upon a new way of doing things that adds value to the team. I have been an Agile Practitioner working with companies large and small for over 10 years. For…
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Active Learning is a process I define as a very engaging intentional focussed form of learning which then would manifest in such a way that every act of consumption will result in some form of learning. In my opinion this becomes ever more important in current times when mindless content consumption can drain us all…
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Toothaches are one of the worst feelings. Well, all pain is bad and the worst is what we have experience right now. No I am not having a tooth ache but I went to see the dentist. And that too.. by accident…. how weird is that… A few days back my wife gets a text…
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Growing up I was so afraid of darkness and being alone. It could have been the stories that I heard, movies I watched on TV or may be even what I read. We lived in a two story house and even going upstairs alone while people were in the house was kind of difficult. As…
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Distance… How do we measure them… why do they exist? It denotes space… but we also need Time… We all have our ideas about distance. they are short or long… but they are so only if we connect them with time.. We believe that distances are supposed to be covered.. travelled… that is their real…
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This Podcasting exercise daily has been rollicking fun. When I started this and then when I decided to do this daily, I had no clue how long I will continue doing this daily. But to be honest it is really adding value to the way I view the world. My last post was 16 days…
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There are many people we know or have known or met in our life. Some people we never meet again. Some people we never know when they leave the world. And some people we learn have left us after some time. What do we feel when we learn someone is no more Yesterday my newsfeed…
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There are generic ideas of what healthy can mean. But in my opinion what it means at age 20 or age 50 and what it means at age 90 can be different. But I think the best would be to start thinking of what would being healthy mean for me 2 years from now. And…
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You need to eat healthy… Did you have your vegetables today… You need all the different colors in your diet.. where is the green here… And then when you lift the green circle piece in your colorful cereal.. they say it don’t count… diets… I hate diets, but I realize how important they are. Yes…
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There is always a routine but some we realize some we don’t. Some naturally become part of us and some naturally we end. But again some routines we need to cultivate and then evolve over time. I was always a morning person. Or I should say staying late at night is not my natural self.…
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There are things we thought we could never do in our life and then we start doing it. We feel good… We also start translating that to other things in life. Things move on… When I was a kid, in order to give me company, my dad also joined me for Karate. He was probably…
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Having some physical activity everyday or at least 3 to 5 days a week is what we hear people say. And there are people who do it and those who don’t. Those who do it also have their own routines and what they consider as their type of physical activity and how strenuous it should…
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To be correct always is not possible; To always be wrong is also impossible. The only practical option is to continuously learn and unlearn. But who cares.. everyone just wants to be correct…. all the time…. I think we human beings have this constant struggle to be correct. From younger age we have been told…
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I have had several instances in life where I have had to start from scratch. It did not feel that great always. But recently I heard this phrase “Starting from Zero is the fun”. And that got me thinking, why would it be fun? I think there can be fun for some people but not…
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Stress is a word I started hearing more when I got into my thirties and from then on, it is a word that I have often used and heard in both my personal and professional life. I also don’t remember my parents having a chat with me about it. Did we stress less back then?…
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When we consume content do we even bother if it is relevant, valid, true, factual, current. We are bombarded with so much content and information that it needs double the time to figure out if it is something we can rely on Looks like the topics I have for my blog and podcast are coming…
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I grew up sharing food with my classmates and continued to do that while I was working. Till I came to US and figured people have their own dietary restrictions. Even then we had our small group that will sit together and share and eat. And yes this was when we used to go to…
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I feel like saying something today. tomorrow I might change my stand and people might say you are contradicting your past stand. In a world where contradiction is seen as a very bad thing… is it ok for people to contradict what they say? Contradiction means ‘deny the truth of (a statement) by asserting the…
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Some days you are very tired and you have valid reasons for it. For me when I get tired like that, it also kind of stops my energy in many things including writing this blog. But then some activities have to be done to get the tiredness behind. I am tired for a reason. I…
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So cheating is bad… But can some cheating be ok. Now don’t start thinking about all the kind of cheating you have done in life. Because we use the word cheating in a lot of different ways. As of now I am cheating. I started this project 80 days back and the plan is to…
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I keep talking about continuous learning, but then when someone asks me what are you learning, I might have to think. Do books I read count? Does Articles I read count? What about conversations? Videos.. movies?.. just work…? Learning needs a structure I agree and so I am thinking I should pick a topic for…
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There was a time in the past when even short durations could fit in large and meaningful conversations that hang around in your mind even after it is ended. They open up spaces inside us where we can fill in new knowledge and even use that to unlearn some of the things we already know.…
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There is the creator economy. I am not sure if it is for everyone, but I think everyone should create. Becoming a Creator is not about having a million followers. It is much more personal and valuable than that. I have been creating content in the sense of the word since 2005 with this blog,…
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Suspended straight jacket escape is one of the most famous Houdini trick. Yesterday I felt that writing did such a trick for me. It helped me tremendously… to get out of a mental space I was stuck. Not just that I also learned a few things interesting about me. If you remember my post yesterday,…
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There are feelings that are tough to explain in words. I have such incidents at times. It is weird but I will try to explain it here. or attempt to put it in words. There are certain parts of my life that is more like a maze and I sometimes wonder where my space in…
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“The world is changing” He shouted… “I know it dammit” I shouted back at him.. “So what are you going to do about it” he wanted an answer as if he was standing at that tip of change. I kept quiet and looked around me… I had to think.. Change is all over us and…
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Is that a long journey…? in 2020 just before the pandemic broke I was at a teacher’s training institute in my home town in Kozhikode, talking to new teachers who were leaving the college that year…. and this was one of the question I had in mind. The Journey to being a teacher is what…
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A November Sunday was the Novel I wrote… around 56 thousand words… completely written in a moving train as part of my daily commute to San Francisco in 30 days in a November in 2011. Not sure if I should call it a Novella instead of a Novel Every year folks come together to write…
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I read carl Honore’s ‘In Praise of slowness’ sometime in 2011. I read that after I heard one of his TED talks. I can’t say I have consciously practiced that. But years later when I look back, there are elements of me that has had an interesting pace. Last one and a half year a…
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I am a big fan of 30 day challenges. Doing something for 30 days. This can be anything from exercising or walking to cooking or blogging. Anything you can imagine and you can put that into a 30 day challenge format. Yesterday I was reflecting on all those 30 DC that I have done. I…
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If there is one thing that I have learned being an agile practitioner for the past 10+ years is that Iterations are so powerful. Not the duration in which you do the iteration. But just the process of iteration. And yes retrospect at the end of it. For me I guess over time it has…
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Is being honest easy for people. We all know that honesty is the best thing to do and yet there is so much dishonesty in this world. Many cases people even rationalize the action and don’t consider them as dishonest. So is being honest a struggle? I can tell from my personal experience. I have…
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Today as I was driving my son to school, we were listening to the American Life Podcast that narrated the plight of an Afghan family trying to get out of the country. A heart wrenching story explained through the conversation of two people. Listening to that my mind went back more than 4 decades to…
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I don’t know if you have felt this way. Your enthusiasm of being at work on the first day is burst like a balloon by people who tell you have bad things are…. what kind of a mess you have gotten into… OK may be not day 1 but as you go by the week.…
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Yesterday I was thinking about all those things that excited me immediately after college. Just one of those weird trips I make into the past. And I was surprised with what I found. To be honest my excitement was that I was out of college. I lacked any sort of long term plans or perspectives.…
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They say just go cold turkey… In terms of smoking… just quit… don’t do a reducing the smoke…. just quit… if not possible take help… I have had my long struggles with the habit. I realized you can trick your brain and this is something a friend of mine told me. He said don’t think…
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The question is becoming even more relevant with time. May be it is because there is choice. In olden days the choice was non existent for a majority of people. The elite always had choices. That is why we see that when the masses toiled in fields and factories… the elites dabbled on poetry and…
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I am not even trying to ask myself who are my true friends. In a world where everything is a friend request… who are our friends? Are they the people you interact with daily or is it those who just are there when you need them. For that to sink in I might have to…
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Before I start I want to tell you all that, this is what I think now and I might change my thought down the line when I understand life better. Like many others I also grew up hearing that ‘follow your passion’. If you start getting paid for what you like to do then you…
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I am sure you would have heard this term ‘Learning machine’ to talk about oneself or others. The first time I heard something similar to this was probably in the movie First Blood where they refer to Rambo as a ‘Killing Machine’. We have come a long way from aspiring to be a ‘Killing Machine’…
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Transformation means a thorough or dramatic change in form or appearance. And I get it that most transformations that are evident and get popular in social media and so on are transformations of appearance… And it is interesting to note that even for human beings the transformation is always hailed as physical while the major…
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Yesterday when I wrote about Toxic Positivity there was another Toxicity that was bothering me. This is Toxic Productivity. In the same way as the other, Toxic Productivity is this obsession with being productive in every waking minute we have in the world. May be even increasing the waking hour we have. Productivity tools and…
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Recently we have heard this phrase called toxic positivity and it is rampant on social media. For those who do not know what toxic positivity is, it is this obsession with positivity…. the concept that every individual should give a positive spin to everything that happens in life. This sometimes has a toxic effect and…
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This is a Parent’s chronicle. You want to read my son’s narrative you can go to his blog and read 44/365 My first day of school After one and a half years I had to suddenly find 1 hour of time that did not exist in my schedule. And that too in the morning. So…
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Recently I see many articles on employee mental health and even companies being concerned about it. Also companies have been started to just address this space. What I am not sure is if it has always been a concern or the pandemic just made people discuss this more. We used to discuss stress at work…
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First let me give you some background. A few years back I did a writing project with my daughter. Every day I would give her a question and she would write me an answer. She was 14 back then. We continued that for a year… yes 365 days. This was a big learning experience for…
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Today as I went for my morning walk I was listening to a podcast in which they were mentioning about looking good and exercising and how it helps people in how they feel and this thought popped up in my mind. More than feeling good and being good the social media seems to be more…
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Change is always an interesting topic for me, may be because we talk about it a lot in our agile world. But the change I wanted to talk today is about personal change. It is true that on a personal level change happens always. Some knowingly and some unknowingly. And at other times we have…
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After I finished reading Daniel Kahneman’s Noise…. I felt I wanted a break. There was too much to process in that book. My choice was to spend some time with fiction. But then I thought how about switching to Memoir. That is how I got hold of Elizabeth Nyamayaro’s amazing memoir ‘I am a girl…
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Sometimes a thought comes to your mind and refuses to go away. As I struggle to make sense of it… as I try to understand where that thought came from and what its significance is it continues to grow… And it gets uncomfortable. I am not sure if you have had that similar feeling. Now…
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When I was a kid I think I had way less of generation gap with my parents. It was like we all lived in pretty much the same world. We watched the same movies.. we were interested in the same news about the world. We even had similar tastes and food and so on. Not…
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It runs in the family… family has your back… we are all a big family…. beyond our own ideas of a family… big or small.. over the years we have been come across many references of family. Always family is something that is close to you or brings you closer to someone else in this…
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Now at 50 when I look back, one question that comes to my mind is have I wasted time. The answer is yes. There have been so many instances when I could have used my time better. May be it was because I did not know back then what I know now. So even if…
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I did not stop podcasting.. just stopped adding stuff here daily. I have been podcasting daily all this while and it has been fun.. Over the past few weeks I had episodes on travel, on food, exercise, social media, cinema and so many more. Short under 10 minutes…. most of them are around 6-7 minutes.…
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So I have made a change in routine. I am not sure if I have mentioned before that my morning routine starts with a 2.5 miles brisk walk followed by my coffee and writing this post. I do another 2.5 miles during lunch time that helps me clock 5 miles and 10000 steps daily. I…
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Yesterday we were invited to a small gathering.. a party to be precise… after over 1.5 years this is the first house visit in a way… no we did go to our cousin’s place for a birthday party… But this was the one in which it felt like old times for a while.. Amazing hosts..…
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As a content creator one of the most amazing and useful feature I use is the block feature. But the general thought of blocking is negative… personal I find this a very positive feature. One that enables us to keep people who don’t behave away from your content. I know there are folks who would…
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I know that some people mind find the title weird especially when lot of people have been talking of the ills of social media. And I do not deny it has its problems. In fact I myself have personally felt that and also feel that every now and then. But that is not my point.…
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