To do the dishes now or to put them off till later. To make the bed first thing in the morning or to put it off till the night. To have salad or a burger for lunch. To workout or laze around. To watch TV or to go out and meet new people. To meditate or to excuse yourself for one day because you're tired/sleepy/have had a long day...
...To do the right thing or not to...
I've realized that life is all about these small decisions that we make everyday. This is what decides how your life will turn out. People often worry about or think too much about the big decisions or the big goals that they have in life. I think that life determined more by these small things. Once you start making the right choices about the small things, the big things start falling into place.
It's often these small things that are harder to achieve. Make your bed first thing every morning. Meditate everyday, no excuses. Workout. Read. Meet new people. It won't kill you if you don't catch the latest GoT episode for once.
I’m currently reading ‘The Little Prince’ (‘Le Petit Prince’ in French), by Antoine De Saint Exupery. The narrator starts by telling a story from his childhood when he was 6 years old. He talks about a time when he drew the following picture:
and asked the ‘grown ups’ if his drawing scared them. They answered, ‘Why be scared of a hat?’ He then tells the reader that his drawing was not a picture of a hat.
‘It was a picture of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant. Then I drew the inside of the boa constrictor, so the grown-ups could understand. They always need explanations. My drawing Number Two looked like this:
The grow-ups advised me to put away my drawings of boa constrictors, outside or inside, and apply myself instead to geography, history, arithmetic, and grammar.
The ‘grown-ups’ failed to see the boa constrictor- they only saw the hat. They failed to realize that a simple seemingly hat-shaped brown structure could represent a zillion different things. There are multiple ways to see the same problem, or, in this case, the same drawing. Yet all they could see was the hat. And when they were shown a more explicit drawing, they dismissed it, perhaps thinking it was ridiculous. But no, it’s not that ridiculous. What’s ridiculous is when you don’t use your imagination.
Today, in trying to solve the world’s most pressing and challenging problems, we need to be able to see things in different ways. To go beyond what is obvious and visible. To imagine all the possibilities. Not just to come up with innovative solutions but more importantly, to first be able to correctly identify the problem, and be able to look at it in different ways. In trying to come up with new ideas to solve a problem or design a new feature for a product, a lot of people engage in ‘brainstorming sessions’, where you typically sit in groups, perhaps with a whiteboard, and try to come up with as many solutions as possible for solving the problem, which is great for generating new ideas. But I think before that, it’s important to spend time with the problem. As Albert Einstein once said: “If I had an hour to solve a problem I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.”
‘The Slow Elevator Problem’…
Now, imagine you’re a landlord of an office building in New York in the 1930s. And the employees in the office complain to you that the elevators are slow in the building, and threaten to leave if nothing is done about it. Now this is a serious problem, you could end up losing your tenants if you don’t fix it. You’ll probably call your team of engineers and get them to come up with possible solutions to make elevators faster. But that’s not what this one particular landlord did when faced with the same problem.
You might think that the problem is that the elevators are slow, and the landlord should get better machines and make them faster. But is that really the problem? Or rather, is that the only way of looking at the problem? Here are some other possible perspectives:
a)The tenants are not good because they complain a lot, so they should be fired.
b)The threat of leaving is the problem- if the landlord offers the tenants something else in return for not complaining/threatening to leave, it may solve the landlord’s problem
c)Or…The tenants don’t like to wait for the elevators. It’s the waiting, and the boredom that comes with having nothing to do while waiting, that’s the problem. This is exactly how the landlord saw the problem. So he decided to install mirrors in the elevator waiting areas, to give people something to engage themselves with (admiring themselves in the mirror), whilst they waited for the elevators. And it actually worked. The installation of mirrors was made quickly and at a relatively low cost. The complaints about waiting stopped.Today, if you’ve noticed, it’s fairly commonplace to have mirrors outside elevators. And that, is how this practice started.
Again, what looks like a hat may not be a hat, it may be a boa constrictor digesting an elephant! If we have a hammer, we tend to see everything as a nail, but it may not be a nail, it may be a hole in the wall, or a leak in the pipe, or any one of a hundred and forty six other things. We need to open our minds to see things differently. To go beyond the obvious. To use our creativity to think of different approaches and perspectives to the problem at hand. Had the landlord tried to make elevators faster, he would have ended up spending much more money and resources, but all he did was install mirrors and the problem was solved.
Lesson: Don’t try to build faster elevators. Use your imagination to get to the root of the problem before trying to fix it.
*This post was originally published on uydmedia on November 6, 2015...
“All of humanity’s problems, stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
~ Blaise Pascal.
In today’s hyperconnected world, most of us tend to dread the thought of being alone with ourselves. We find it so hard to let go of technology and other people. In the past, people used to spend time with themselves at least in the mornings- now, we have someone to talk to even in the toilet. No, this is not a rant about how technology is taking over our lives, there are plenty of those already. What I instead want to draw your attention to, dear reader, is solitude.
First, let’s define what we mean by solitude. Sitting alone in a room checking your phone is not solitude, even if you’re reading the news. Solitude is different from being alone. Being alone is when you are with no one else. Solitude is when you are with yourself. It’s a subtle difference, but very important to understand.
But most of us never experience this kind of solitude, we are always talking and listening to people. There are so many voices which we are forced to hear. More often than not, these voices impact our decisions. ‘This guy said this job is amazing, therefore I must pursue it.’ ‘He said this professor’s class is an easy A, so it must be.’ ‘Someone else said it’s hard- what should I do?’ ‘All my friends are dating- why am I single?’ These are all thoughts which go through people’s minds. But notice one thing. They are all results of other people’s thoughts. Furthermore, people also keep providing us with unsolicited remarks of what they think of us- Someone who needs your help that day may tell you that you’re really smart. The next person may say you’re a nutcase. A salesman says you look pretty, your gym trainer says you’re really fat. This keeps happening on a daily basis. Our minds keep accumulating these often contradictory statements. That is why we find ourselves unsure of who we truly are. If there is so much noise outside from so many voices, how will we hear our inner voice?
Even the decisions we make often tend to be the results of other people’s thinking and not our own. The image we have of ourselves tends to get shaped by what other people say about us. And this keeps changing, because people are fickle, and their remarks keep changing. It’s like looking at different kinds of mirrors – none of which show you who you really are. Our true self gets enshrouded in the accumulation of all the external noise, our inner voice gets buried deep within. We must break away from all of that, even if for a little while, in order to get to know who we are. In the silence that comes with solitude, we will be able to look within and hear our inner voice. That, dear reader, is why solitude is important.
But to be in solitude is difficult. We will have to know ourselves in our nudity. We have to ask uncomfortable questions. We have to dig deep into ourselves. That is why we often start doing something when we find ourselves alone. We shy away from asking who we really are. We don’t want to go down the unexplored road. We want to keep believing in this version of ourselves which has been created by the labels of society. It has become our identity- and we do not want to strip it down. But we must. For only then will we uncover our soul. Only then will we see the real person inside us. Only then will we hear our own voices and not of the demons that have been fabricated by our minds as a result of what others have told us.
Ruth Krauss, the famous American writer, wrote “Everybody should be quiet near a little stream and listen.” To be in solitude, disconnect from everything and everyone, sit down, and listen. Listen to the internal noise- thoughts of the past, the future, things you had to get done, emails to be responded to, and all else. Listen to these thoughts and let them pass like clouds over a mountain. Eventually, you will find your peace, and you will be able to see the real color of the stream that flows within, and hear the voices of your soul.
More than a 100 internship applications in the last six months. At least fifty automated rejection emails. No responses from the rest. Not a single internship offer.
Am I particularly under-qualified? I don’t think so. I am a Sophomore majoring in Computer Science with a decent 3.8 GPA. I have participated in hackathons and done side-projects. Sure, I’m not from Carnegie Mellon or Stanford. I am at the University of Rochester, but hey, it’s not your local community college. And sure, I’m not a US citizen. And yes, I am looking at a paid internship. These factors do make it harder, I know. But I dropped my resume at more than hundred companies. You’d think at least one of them would respond. With the exception of Google, not a single company responded (I interviewed with Google for their Software Engineering Internship but didn’t get through).
My friend from another college who had managed to get a paid internship after his Freshman year, told me this back in September: “Dude, just keep applying. It takes hardly two minutes. It’s all random. Think about it mathematically. If you have a 5 percent chance of getting an interview and if you apply to a 100 places, you’ll at least get 5 interviews.” I said, “Yeah, that makes sense”. And so I applied. To more than a 100 companies. But I heard back from only one. What went wrong? Was I just really unlucky? … Possibly. Or it’s that the big companies now are getting thousands of applications and don’t even bother to look at most people’s resumes and it’s a game of luck with the odds of your resume getting noticed by recruiters being as slim as that of Trump’s wall preventing Mexican immigrants from entering the US.
But let’s say hypothetically, that I might have got lucky, and maybe five or more companies had selected me for interviews. Would it have been worth it? I am not so sure… I spent a lot of time searching for companies I didn’t know about, filling out applications for positions I wasn’t sure if I was interested in, hoping that once I get an internship I would figure all this out. I realized all this time I was focusing on the wrong thing- sending my resume and getting a paid internship instead of building relationships, pursuing my passions, learning about different fields and getting experience. Getting a paid internship and getting experience are two completely different aims. I can get experience by simply approaching the people who are in the company or field I’m interested in and offering to work for free. After all, the purpose is to learn and to discover what I’m interested in. Then why wait for a paid summer job which locks me for three months when I can start figuring things out right now and then reach out to those companies I am actually interested for work I’d actually like to do.
I have switched gears now- instead of sending applications to random companies, I have decided to focus on building relationships, doing the things I love, growing myself, and getting experience by offering what I can do.
… Lessons Learnt:
If you apply online to big companies, your resume goes into a big pile, and odds are, it won’t get noticed. If you want to get noticed, go through someone who works at the company, or knows someone at the company. If you don’t know enough people, first work on building relationships…Don’t know where to begin? Reach out to alumni of your college. I have just started doing that. I emailed four alums and all of them responded. I ended up having phone calls with three of them, and one of them even connected me to the COO of a startup which I’m really interested in. Sure, none of them has offered me a job yet. And they may or may not in future. But the idea here is to build genuine, meaningful, mutually beneficial relationships, which is a much more worthwhile goal to pursue in the long run, as opposed to searching random companies and sending your resume.
Focus on growth. Grow your skills. Expand your network. Offer what you can do for people. And sooner or later, an internship opportunity will come your way, either through someone you know or through the work you have done in the past. The nice part about his approach is that even if it doesn’t, you will still have mastered new skills and built invaluable relationships which is an even bigger win than landing an internship.
It has been a long time since I blogged. I used to blog regularly and I loved it. I would often write personal stories and the lessons I learnt from them. Other times, I would write motivational posts, which, now that I look back, might show a false bravado: After all, who was I, a fifteen year old kid who hadn’t accomplished much in life, to write these words of motivation which are usually associated with the greats like Steve Jobs, or Michael Jordan. (I have, in fact often quoted these two icons in my blogs. ) Sometimes, I ended up writing posts that were very intense, other times posts that were very personal. And, at times, they sparked judgments of all kinds from people I knew, including my friends and relatives. I became self-conscious. I started to get bothered. I started to censor everything I was going to write. Gradually, all the candidness, the honesty and the originality had gone from my writing and there was nothing left which I could say without worrying about what kinds of possible judgments it might evoke. So I stopped, and restricted myself to the occasional outpours of emotion in my diary.
But now I realize that giving voice to your thoughts is no crime. It is a beautiful thing. There is no right or wrong in that. So I’m not going to worry about people’s judgments any more. I will write, and I will post: about my life, of the little I know about the world, of the things life teaches me. Often, I will also write to inspire both myself and you, my readers. It might sometimes be personal, sometimes intense, sometimes stupid, occasionally funny…but I will try my best to honest, nonetheless.
A message to anyone who ever reads my blog:
There is no particular reason as such you should pick reading this blog over watching Netflix. I am only a college student. I haven’t cured cancer. I am not a national level sportsperson. I am not the next Mark Zuckerberg and I now have the humility to know that (Yes, I used to think I was..). Just another college student who has travelled ten thousand miles from his home country and wants to make it ‘big’ in life. (Whatever ‘big’ means to you..I’m still discovering what it means to me..And I believe this process of discovering will continue throughout life)….
And now, to sum up, (in ‘The Social Network’ style): ‘Let the hacking blogging begin.’
