Tag: life

It’s okay to be indisciplined, A lesson from Viktor Frankl’s life

“I am unspeakably tired, unspeakably sad, unspeakably lonely…In the camp, you really believed you had reached the low point of life — and then, when you came back, you were forced to see that the things had not lasted, everything that had sustained you had been destroyed, that at the time when you become human again, you could sink into an even more bottomless suffering.” — Viktor Frankl

I remember reading A Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor a few years ago, and there is one story that made a huge impact on me. He talks about asking if someone saw his friend, and a person points to the smoke coming out of a chimney in the camps and says, “There is your friend, on his way to heaven”.

Viktor Frankl, who survived the camps, who survived atrocities that give me chills even as I am simply writing about them, felt lonely, he felt hopeless, he felt tired. Not when he was in the camps, but in fact when he got out of them.

We don’t give ourselves the room to fall out of line. We tie ourselves to so many goals, so many things, and when one thing doesn’t pan out the way we planned, we get completely derailed.

Cal Newport, in his book Slow Productivity, mentions that “focusing on fewer tasks and making longer-term goals allows us to give ourselves the space to fall out of line once in a while.”

Well, it’s not just about having fewer goals. It’s about understanding that discipline and progress go hand in hand and could simply be measured in the time period of “years,” not days.

On a day-to-day basis, we can let things slide as long as we don’t get stuck right there. As long as we choose to get back out there and start working towards our goals.

Our beliefs make us who we are. If we think that we don’t have any more room to grow, then we don’t.

Here is something really interesting Ryan Holiday mentions in his book Discipline is Destiny:

“In addiction circles, they use the acronym HALT — Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired — as a helpful warning rubric for the signs and triggers for a relapse. We have to be careful, we have to be in control or we risk losing it all.”

Let’s just take a minute to think about all the times when things got out of hand. Were we stuck in any of these “HALT” stages?

I know I definitely was.

The point is, “It’s okay to let go sometimes. It’s okay if you have to do that involuntarily, even. It’s okay as long as you get back to it, get back to do the work that you were put in the world to do, as Marcus Aurelius would probably say.”

The pendulum of work-life balance

For 70 years Queen Elizabeth attended countless ceremonies and parades spending thousands of hours standing straight, with balance.

She said:

One must plant their feet like this. Always keep them in parallel. Make sure your weight is evenly distributed. That’s all there is to it.

Shivam, but what does that have to do with work-life balance?

Well, everything.

Here is a popular myth about work life balance that I think you might have remembered reading about what the Queen said.

Work life balance is all about 50-50. 50% focus on work and 50% focus on life.

Well, you and I both know thats not how the world works. And trying to achieve a 50-50 split is not only a futile effort but also one that will make you sadder. It will take away all the excitement that you have for life and for work.

And we don’t want to be salty people now, do we?

Look, life is uneven, it’s unpredictable. So how can our strategy to deal with it be so “rigid”?

Harvard’s Jeff Karp puts it like this:

I realized that if we start to look at everything in life…like everything is on a pendulum, and you start to step back and visualize that, I think it can be incredibly empowering.

This “pendulum life” is something we have to work with.

The pendulum simply keeps swinging. Sometimes dramatically and sometimes barely. There are weeks when work consumes all our day and goes on well into the nights too.

Your calendar might literally look like a game of tetris. But then there are also times when life wants it all, a sick parent maybe, a kid who needs attention or maybe all we need is simply a little bit of time to breathe.

The swing is natural, its supposed to happen.

And that is exactly what Queen’s advice secretly teaches us. Balance is not about freezing ourselves into a 50-50 state of mind.

It’s about distributing our weight evenly. And the definition of even would change based on where you are standing. Cement floor, slope of a hill, climbing a mountain.

The trick here is being aware of the pendulum. Acknowledge when the pendulum is swinging wide towards work, and when towards life.

Lean into it but also be prepared for the pendulum to swing back to the other end too.

For years my own resistance towards acknowledging the pendulum has caused unnecessary stress affecting life and work. Just by understanding this and focusing on the rhythm we can have the balance we need and truly want.

Balance is not about being still with one thing.

It’s about the sway and a pendulum doesn’t apologize for moving.

Neither should you.

The Tooth Fairy Is Real

Yes, it’s true.

If you grew up in US you know what I am talking about.

You believed with all your heart that the tooth fairy is real.

And every time that tooth under your pillow turned into a dollar overnight you reinforced your belief in the power of tooth fairy.

Maybe you even knew that it was your parents who were making the exchange, but you chose to ignore it and still have a ray of hope.

As a child, the power of imagination is all that you have and you protect it from being destroyed until a few hundred people in your life have told you you’re crazy, it’s not possible, be realistic etc.

Let me put it this way, when you stopped believing in Santa Claus, tooth fairy etc. presents stopped showing up.

Even though Santa and the fairy aren’t real, real presents showed up until you had the belief.

If not your parents then your friends or else people around you want you to get what you believe in.

It’s not a surprise then when people like Steve Jobs, when vocalise their vision and their dream and their imagination other people work their asses off for their dreams.

People like Steve believed in their dreams so much that others around them want to make them happen.

It’s not going to be easy, some people are going to belittle your dreams, but then some people are going to do whatever is in their power to make your dreams a reality.