November, 2022 - Suresh Dinakaran's Blog

Being an employee of our own myth!

We are all frauds! Forgive the blatant articulation.

To quote Wikipedia ” The master race (German: Herrenrasse) is a pseudoscientific concept in Nazi ideology in which the putative “Aryan race” is deemed the pinnacle of human racial hierarchy. Members were referred to as “Herrenmenschen” (“master humans”).

Creating is hard for every last one of us– including for the ones from the allegedly superior Aryan race.

If you think creating is hard, try grave digging. Or coal mining. Infinitely harder. Do you think miners stand around all day thinking and talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? Certainly not. They just go ahead and do it ie dig!

Throughout life, you collect data points or dots. And you probably don’t have a clue how these dots will connect in the future. As Steve Jobs said, you can only connect these dots looking backward. But, you can only collect them going forward.

In our daily lives, too many of us favor the comfort of conviction over the discomfort of doubt. The result is that our beliefs get brittle long before our bones.

Without the mistakes we make, the decisions we regret and the experiences that didn’t live up to our expectations, we would be very short on material for our creative work. These things are all just ingredients for your soup, material for making meaning and making art.

The creative process, just like the creative life, isn’t linear. We don’t know how each of our life experiences will impact us down the road. With each step forward, the view changes, the landscape shifts and the horizon offers a different dimension. The most insignificant of our experiences and life’s little skirmishes at the moment can serve as the most informative (and even inspiring) ones in our future.

Our creativity is not something that someone can give us, gift us or take away. It’s something thats always within us. Whether it’s the degrees we earn or the jobs we hate, every experience offers us seeds to plant for the stories we tell.

Life doesn’t pause or stop to make room for our precious creating time. So, if you are running your own life’s employment exchange, show up and ship out!

ENDS

Trapped in the WHINEyard?

The only thing that whining or complaining does is to convince other people that you are not in control. Helpful? Far from it. And for all those who are under the mistaken impression that whining burns calories, sorry to disappoint you..it doesn’t!!

Whineyards grow only sour grapes.

Come to think of it- whining is a seductive package deal. When it works, it gets us attention, lowers expectations, it gains sympathy and it forces or coerces people to identify with our pain.

When whining becomes a habit, we need to continue it- so we begin to interpret events as opportunities to prove that our whining is justified.

People hate being around a whiner when the selfish desires of the habitual whiner becomes clear. As Lord Jeffrey put it so eloquently ” The tendency to whining and complaining may be taken as the surest sign symptom of little souls and inferior intellect “.

It would be great to remember that our complaints, drama, victim mentality, whining, blaming and all of the excuses that we come up with has never taken us even one step closer to our goals or dreams. So, time to let go of the nonsense, let go of the delusion that we deserve better and go earn it!

Our shared reality is the world as it is, and the whiner isn’t actually being singled out. The best way to make things better is to WORK to improve them, NOT demand special attention and treatment.

If you woke up this morning with more health than illness, you are far more blessed than the million plus people who will not survive this week. If you can read this blog then you are far more fortunate than the millions who cannot read it at all.

Optimists run the risk of being disappointed now and then. Whiners are always disappointing!

Nobody is going to invite you and say ‘ here’s some cheese to go with your whine “- so, you know what to opt for- and whynot?

ENDS

Words Worth!

It’s only words and words are all I haveTo take your heart away…crooned Bee Gees in their seminal classic single Words way back in 1968.

Make no bones about it. The tongue has no bones, but is strong enough to break a heart. So be careful with your words. Words can inspire. And words can destroy. Words, they have the power to build people up, confine people to where they are, and break people down.

It may not be an exaggeration to say that words create worlds. Remember that words are free but how we use them is what may cost us dearly.

“Words have energy and power with the ability to help, to heal, to hinder, to hurt, to harm, to humiliate, and to humble.” –Yehuda Berg

Acknowledging the power of spoken words is a fundamental building block to many self-help as well as mainstream therapies. For what we say out loud is a guide to what lies within us. If our talk is critical, cynical or destructive, then we tend to find we think about ourselves in a similar way.

Words connect humans to one another, navigating across time and space, in a profound and impactful way that nothing else can achieve. The written word allows for the sharing of ideas, philosophies, memories, events, and stories.

As one scholar puts it, “writing codifies speaking, thus turning words into objects of conscious reflection”. In other words, writing ideas makes them more concrete to us, and by mulling written words, we are better able to internalize and understand them, and to allow them to affect our behavior.

If we understood the awesome power of our words, we would prefer silence to almost anything negative. That is what inspired the adage ‘ Silence is golden ‘.

The power of words in history can never be under estimated. Words have transformed nations be it the Magna Carta or the Declaration of Independence. These texts show how the simplest of things – nothing but paper and ink – can be imbued with immense power by those who forge them.

Then there are the works of fiction and tales of writers like Dickens, Austen, Twain, Hemingway, Woolf, Orwell, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, and so on that have been enjoyed and admired throughout the ages. They continue to exert great influence over society right into the modern era, performed on the stage, adapted for the screen, and studied in great detail by readers worldwide.

Imagine the world without newspapers, dictionaries..vast swathes of the public would have been uninformed, literacy levels would not have found some of it’s feet that it is comfortably standing on now.. the works of Mary Wollstonecraft helped to lay the groundwork for the feminism of today, while iconic figures of the past like Martin Luther King Jr made use of their own writing abilities to bring to life a more equal and understanding society.

Great philosophers like Socrates, Kant, Plato, Descartes, Hume etc used their works to help us change our conception of the world around us. Political musings and journaling helped us understand the French Revolution or the American Civil War without which those key events could have played out differently.

Written words continue to hold great power, even in the digital space. Short messages and personal stories shared across social media led to the rise of massive global movements like the Arab Spring, Me Too and Black Lives Matter, while aspiring authors continue to share their tales on a bigger scale than ever before.

At a time when all of us can head online and get our message across to millions at one go all over the world, the power of words have never been greater.

The human tongue is a beast that few can master. It strains constantly to break out of its cage, and if it is not tamed, it will run wild and cause you grief. Words are seeds that do more than blow around. They land in our hearts and not the ground. Be careful what you plant and careful what you say. You might have to eat what you planted one day. Not exactly the kind of diet that you would savor.

ENDS

Why 5% > 95% ?

No. The arithmetic may not look right. Contrarian and defies established norm. Yes.

But, dare I say, this is the new math.

A lot of our attention and effort is spent and invested in trying to onboard the laggards and the lurkers.

And it done by dumbing down. Offering more incentive. Creating urgency. Re-posting. Hustling to see if they would take some action.

Certainly not worth it. And very frustrating for anyone who leads.

Progress operates on a different GPS. It has a different route to take.

..then huge things would begin to happen.

The 95% who lurk and remain non-committal will almost always lurk. Thats okay.

The energy and the emotional labour has to go into the 5%. The place to focus on.

Because when their persistent, consistent and generous action begins to add up, change happens. And that may bring the lurkers along. And who knows, even activate them. They will catch up when they need to.

The chasm will get bridged at its own pace. And that’s perfectly fine.

There’s nothing wrong with the laggards and the lurkers. Remember, they are potential action-takers.

But for now, our focus, action, respect and gratitude is for all those people who are already showing up. And shipping out. Which is the 5%!

So, let’s stop falling over ourselves to dumb down. Average it out. Trying to appeal and please everyone and anyone.

When you seek to engage with everyone, you rarely delight anyone. And if you’re not the irreplaceable, essential, one-of-a-kind change maker, you never get a chance to engage with the market.

So, seek your MVA(minimum Viable Audience). This would be counter to what are taught (or expected to learn) in the ‘ School of Capitalism ‘ , but this is the simplest way to do the work that matters, impacts, changes and leaves an inspiring legacy.

Now you know- Why 5% > 95% ?

ENDS

Time Paws!

“Time is what we want most, but what we use worst.”

Sounds very contrarian but rings true what Leo Tolstoy quoted in War and Peace ” The Two Most Powerful Warriors are Patience and Time “.

Time: it’s free, it’s priceless. You can’t own it, but you can use it!

You can’t keep it, but you can spend it. Once lost, you can never get it back.

Either you are using time. Or it’s using you. You can watch the clock, but if you do that, it’s watching you.

Clocks have an agenda. They were never a part of the natural human condition. They are a recent invention of the Industrial Age. And the very fact that they have an alarm built is a clue. Rings a bell?

It’s definitely possible to put time to good use. But, if we are without a compass and a goal, we can find it using us.

Whenever you are stuck searching for the optimal question to ask, remember, ‘ Getting started changes everything ‘- and the time to start is NOW.

The invention of the calendar was to keep the outside world at bay and reclaim the agency we lost– to respond instead of to react.

There’s reason to be aweptimistic– and nothing better than tomorrow! To embark on the ‘ journey to better ‘.

ENDS

How about changing your ‘ mailing address ‘ ?

When you look back at life, do you pat yourself on the back or turn your back on life?

We never forget the postal address of our past. Where we often mail metaphorical letters. Mostly letters of beration. Admonishment. Of the mistakes we made. Of the wrong decisions we took. Regretting the missed opportunities. Spending valuable time wallowing in self-pity.

Often taking the easy route or short cut to blaming our younger self for the mess we may be in.

Let’s do something contrarian. Begin with changing the mailing address. What would you be saying to your future self? And how would you feel when you read that letter in a few months or few years from now?

May be you would realise that the crisis or cataclysm that you are facing right now did not turn out as badly as you feared. Maybe you would express some optimism that you could convert to action. And maybe you would develop some empathy for your past self, who was just doing the best you could.

So, let’s change where we where we post to. Begin at the destination and travel back to a better address. A future back perspective is a much better one than a present forward one.

Nothing is a mistake. There is no WIN. Or no FAIL. There’s only MAKE. Not everything that can be counted counts; and not everything that counts can be counted.

In an expanding universe, time is on the side of the outcast. Those who once inhabited the suburbs of human contempt find that without changing their address they eventually live in the metropolis. Karma has everyone’s address. Yours is in the mail now.

Yesterday has passed. We can treat it as a gift or an asset from our previous self. Having said that, there is no gun on the head. You don’t have to accept it if you don’t want to. Tomorrow is a bigger, better opportunity. But, if you are still defending that stuck project of the past( where you have sunk in big emotional labour among other things), you are not making headway as you can’t show up for the new better. Oh! that sunken feeling!

ENDS