Life is a Race! If you don’t run fast, someone will crush you and overtake you.
A famous dialogue from one of my most beloved movies of all time, 3 Idiots
It’s a really long article. I invested a lot of time coming up with these points and putting my thoughts to words. Hope you are able to take away some good stuff from this and hope this helps you out !!
Life is Not a Race
Note: The most important point that we don’t realize is that life in fact is not inherently a race. It is we who make it a race and bring about this feeling of competition.
Right from the time we were born, we were taught that we need to come first. First in class, first in sports, first in extracurricular activities, etc. We are in a constant state of comparison with our peers. In this process we actually limit our potential.
Let me cite a simple example. Suppose the highest percentage in a class is 85 % and a kid gets say 87 %, his parents will be elated with his performance for the sole reason that came first.
What we don’t realize is that he probably had the capability to score 90+. And in case the maximum potential for our kid is say 75 % and despite that he gets a 77 %, we tend to scold him.
Why? because there is a student who performed better than them.
We take this sense of competition everywhere we go. People can compete on just about anything. Consider this: there are two families A and B. when family A visits B, B makes about say 5 dishes for lunch. (And yes, this is in fact counted).
Now, family B happens to visit A in the future and in case A makes a lesser number of dishes than what B made, then it is considered to be a sign of disrespect. Trust me, this happens.
Note: Life is like a car ride from a source to a destination.
No matter how fast you go and who accompanies you, you will reach your destination. People will keep getting in and getting off of your car as you continue down your lane.
Some people will be driving their cars at a higher speed than you. Do not pay any heed to them because if you happen to beat one person, there will always be another one to beat and in case you become the best (i.e. the fastest in this case), you will always have the insecurity of maintaining your position at the top.
So stop competing with others and instead focus on building your abilities. Focus on building stronger relationships and living life to the fullest because Hey, YOLO!
Relationship or Business?
A lot of problems in our lives are there because of a lot of expectations we have from our friends and family members etc. Let me give you a very simple example of how expectations ruin relationships.
A very naive example where expectations destroy relationships is a common neighborhood scenario. We decided to help our neighbors by helping them organize an important family function. Helped them with preparation, invitations, and stuff. Roles reversed, the same did not happen. The neighbors were disinterested in helping us out and we develop a grudge against them as we expected them to pay back. Sad but true !
That’s a very big problem in relationships.
We give loads of love, but we also expect a lot of that coming back. We expect a lot of stuff from a lot of people and that is where it all goes wrong.
Note: Relationships simply mean give, give and only give. Business means give and take. It’s up to you to decide what you consider it to be.
Who is the real us?
A typical professional’s day appears to be one that has literally been programmed into their memory. They do the same things over and over again, in the same manner, in the same sequence, and still knows that what they are doing is probably shitty and is still willing to do that for years at a stretch. The life of a typical IT person is somewhere on these lines:-
- Get up (Same time every day).
- Prepare breakfast (Same old same old. No surprises here :p)
- Reach office round about 9 a.m. Every single day without a leave.
- Work your ass off the entire day for 12-13 hours at a stretch. They probably don’t even love the work they are doing, but still do it.
- Toady to your manager.
- Come home late at night exhausted from work.
- Sleep.
This seems to be a script fed to a robot and it executes this every day without any exceptions.
But who is the real us?
The one that we put on when we go to work every day amidst the pressures of our everyday life or the one we display when we are jumping around in the rain with our friends?
Pay small attention to this.
Take a break from this monotonous routine and you might be surprised with what you find. You will realize that you have been a part of the wrong race this whole time and that you need to participate in a different race moving forward and in that race, you won’t be mediocre anymore.
Empathy
In our day-to-day lives performing the same laborious mundane tasks over and over again can be extremely overwhelming. So much so that we always try to find an answer to the question
“What’s in it for me ?”
We always look for opportunities that would benefit us. In the process, we even tend to hurt others and if someone is facing a problem or has a contrasting viewpoint, we tend to go all out against them and criticize them for being different. My suggestion?
Step in the shoes of the other person and try walking a mile. Be empathetic to them. Prove the cynical ideology of people wrong by understanding others’ viewpoints as well and understanding them and at times even accepting them without letting your ego get in the way.
Health is wealth
For us, software developers, spending hours at a stretch in front of a computer screen is completely normal. If you work at a startup, the stress levels and the time you spend in front of a screen are even more.
Because of this, a lot of us suffer from back pains and stiffness, and various other types of maladies.
Still, we don’t pay much heed to our health. Health somehow does not become a priority for us. There is always something better to do than exercising or shaping up our bodies.
It is only when the doctor tells us “Enough, if you don’t exercise now, you might be bedridden for life” do we start to consider this thing called health seriously.
If you can’t get off the bed in the morning yourself, how will you work all day long?
Who will take care of you in your old age when things will get even worse?
You will end up spoiling your job, relationships and everything you once loved will flush down the toilet because? (No points for guessing !!).
Health is indeed Wealth!
Travel
One of my favorite topics. Could write about this for hours and still not get bored. The phrase You only live once. Live life king size and the stuff, are boring cliches in today’s time.
We have heard this about a thousand times or more in our lives but still, we keep living the same monotonous lives. We always think about vacations but somehow this is something that keeps getting postponed.
We are never able to gather enough funds and find out a suitable time to escape into paradise (well that’s really what travel is).
I’ve stumbled upon so many blogs and articles here on Medium itself and I can’t emphasize enough the fact that traveling is something that rejuvenates us, rekindles us from the ground up, gives us a new perspective on life, reenergizes us, helps you shun off the diffident you and add life to your lifeless life.
Recently I’ve been reading about this new kind of job profile for remote workers and developers and it’s known as a digital nomad.
Note: A digital nomad is like a normal developer except he does not stay in one place for a long time. Instead, they keeps moving from one place to another like a nomad. Learning about problems people face, building solutions for them, and most of all, traveling a lot.
Sounds fun right? Do you have what it takes to quit your day job and become a digital nomad?
Editing this now, in 2022 feels so surreal. Digital Nomad does sound like more of a norm these days than it was way back in 2014. Aight, back to the old me.
Stop asking “Why me ?”
Life is a complete roller coaster ride. It almost never proceeds according to our expectations. Life is never what we want it to be.
Someday we are elated and on cloud 9 as something happened unexpectedly and someday we are down and feeling as if it is the end of life for us.
When we are down, and I mean utterly depressed or something, we do tend to ask this one question from God and that is
Why me God? Why? What have I done to deserve this?
We almost never get an answer to this question and with time our wounds heal (or at least we forget about them). I would urge you to stop obsessing morbidly over this. Let me quote a small excerpt I found on some blog:-
Arthur Ashe, the legendary Wimbledon player was dying of AIDS which he got due to infected blood he received during heart surgery in 1983.
From the world over, he received letters from his fan, one of them conveyed: “Why does God have to select you for such a bad disease?”.
To this Arthur Ashe replied: The world over - 50,000,000 children start playing tennis, 5,000,000 learn to play tennis, 500,000 learn professional tennis, 50,000 come to the circuit, 5000 reach the grand slam, 50 reach the Wimbledon, 4 to semi-finals, 2 to finals. When I was the one holding the cup, I never asked god “Why me?”.
And today in pain, I should not be asking GOD “why me?”.
Focusing on what you have
Let me tell you a story to put across my point. There are two men. Let’s call them A and B. They meet over coffee one day and apparently, A is upset over something. He is really sad. Now B starts to interrogate straight away and asks
“Hey man, Why do you look so upset? What happened? Everything okay ?”
A says that he had an uncle who just passed away. He left him a fortune of Rs 50,000. B is confused. He says
“I don’t understand. You should be happy mate. 50,000 is a huge amount.”
To this A replies
“No, you don’t understand. I have another uncle who just passed away leaving behind a fortune of Rs 10,00,000”
On being further confused by what is going on, B asks
Dude, shouldn’t you be celebrating. Rs 10,00,000 is a huge fortune. You couldn’t earn that kind of money in a lifetime !!”
A continues further by saying
“No man. I have yet another uncle who passed away yesterday. :( And he left behind a fortune of Rs 50,00,000”
Now B is losing his mind and being completely baffled by what is going on, he bursts out saying
“Are you out of your freaking mind? Why so sad when you have so much inherited money? Why dude ?”
To this A says
“Because I have no more uncles left to die!”
The moral here is that if you always focus on what is missing in life, you are bound to be miserable
If you are patient enough to read up to this point, do show some love by liking and recommending this article !! Cheers :)
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