I’m Akash, your friendly neighbourhood life hacker.
I have been observing Akash these past few years and here’s what I see,
He’s infinitely curious
He’s always trying to learn something new, figure out how things work, and understand the world around him.
And he’s always in awe of the world around him.
He’s trying to be an experimentalist
He’s learnt that the brain is remarkably responsive to experience. If he asks it to exercise every day, it gets better at exercising. If he asks it to worry, it gets better at worrying. If he asks it to concentrate, it gets better at concentrating. Not only does it find these things easier, but it actually remodels itself based on what he asks it to do!
So he’s trying to experiment with different approaches to thinking and living.
He’s naive
- 18 Me: Oh man, 16 me was so naive… I’m so much more mature now.
- 21 Me: Holy cow, I can’t believe how naive 18 me was. I’m so much more mature now.
- 24 Me: OMG, 21 Me was just a kid. I’m so much more mature now.
- 25 Me: Oh wait, I’m just as naive as all past me were!
It’s so easier to think that we were in the dark yesterday but we’re in the light today.
He’s learnt over time with experience that he’ll always be naive cause the number of things to learn is infinite. And that’s awesome!
He tries to live in the present
He tries to fully and trully be aware in the present moment. And when he’s done it right he feels trully alive, completely unbridled by the past/future.
Besides, he’s realized that you can only be in present anyways. Past is history, and future is composed of nows.
He’s trying to be mindful
He’s trying to be very mindful about what emotions he’s feeling and what’s happening in and around his body & environment with utmost sincerity and gentleness. He’s learnt that lot of the problems he’s facing is just a consequences of not processing and assimilating the emotion he’s feeling in the moment.
He has a thing for startups
He doesn’t know why, but he’s just fascinated by them. They’re the epitome of juggling an absolute ton of things like product, marketing, sales, finance, operations, etc. And he’s always been fascinated by people who can do that well. And he believes in his core that it’s never just the individual, or the team that makes a startup successful, that seems impossible, no it’s definitely a force (vyavasthit: result of scientific circumstantial evidences). And people, teams are just one of the evidences. So many other evidences need to come together for things to happen!
He’s learning to give more
He’s learnt over time that every time he gives something to others, the world rewards him with the absolute more of the same thing he gave. And he’s observed it in all aspects of life. For example, the more he helps others with confidence, the more confident he becomes. The more he donates to charity, the more he gets back.
It’s like, the world is a mirror, and it reflects back to him what he gives to it. And he’s learning to give more.
One caveat: he’s also noticed is that it doesn’t work if you give with an expectation of getting something back. It’s only when you give without any expectation of getting something back that the world rewards you with the absolute more of the same thing you gave.
He likes to do what he loves
He’s learnt that you don’t get to own the results, only actions. So he just tries to do the work today, and let the force (vyavasthit) take care of the results.
He’s learning to embrace failure
Growing up he’d been labelled as a smart kid and developed his identity around being smart. It worked out fine when he was a kid, but as he’d grown it became an absolute crutch for him cause he never learnt other skills absolutely necessary to succeed in life like persistence, resilience, and grit.
So he’d run away from anything that’d make him look incompetent or stupid as that was unacceptable to him cause in his mind he only had one thing going for him, “being smart”. Problem was, literally everything new you do in life makes you look stupid, and so he’d run away from everything new.
He’s been working really hard to let go of this identity of a “smart kid”, and learn that world actually rewards experience and competence rather than intelligence. He’s been trying to reframe his binary thinking of smart/stupid to experience/inexperienced cause if you’re inexperienced you just have to put in more reps, and failure doesn’t seem so daunting that way!
He doesn’t take himself so seriously
He has tendencies to get very anxious so he keeps reminding himself that the force (vyavasthit) will take care of him no matter what. I mean there are infinite things going on in and around him in this universe at any moment from the tiniest motor neuron tranfering energy to a cell in body to unbelievably gigantic stars (that can contain 5 billion suns) in our universe that diffuse lights for millions of years, and everything just works somehow. He trully believes that he’s just the guest of vyavasthit in this world, So he just tries to enjoy life and be fully alive in the moment.
He just needs to take a leap of faith.