Archives for October 2015

If you don’t ask, “why this?’ often enough, somebody will ask, ‘why you?’

Do you treat most problems and situations as closed ones with set rules, rather than as open ones that can be played with?

If yes then sooner or later you are going to be irrelevant in your field of work.

Following rules and processes are useful but don’t let them become a mental block.

Creative thinking may simply mean the realisation that there is no particular virtue in doing things the way they have always been done.

Constraints are usually considered as roadblocks to success.

But it’s not uncommon that a challenging problem with a small budget or a tight deadline makes you more resourceful.

So constraints can be a powerful stimulant to the creative process. 

You may even want to add a constraint or two to make a problem more interesting or speed up your progress.

Limits are an artist’s best friend.

The idea of retirement has been oversold in the modern society. 

Sitting by the beach on a yacht isn’t retirement, it’s an illusion created by consumerism.

You may want retirement from a profession or field of activity, but never from the work.

Work, a meaningful one though, brings the real long term joy.

So retire, but don’t stop working!

How do you break a bad habit?

You can’t. Warren Buffett says, “The chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken”

What you can do, however, is to replace the bad habit with a good one.

There is a limited space for habits in our mind. Either it can be occupied by bad habits built by life long ignorance or good habits built with conscious awareness.

So start working on new habits and the old habits will disappear on their own.

Heraclitus said, “Expect the unexpected or you won’t find it.”

When we venture off the beaten path, we increase the odds of finding things which are more exciting than what we were originally looking.

Introduce some unplanned turns in your life journey and let the serendipity of life open new doors of unexpected opportunities.

That’s how many scientific discoveries were made, when people followed their curiosity without expecting to find something and stumbled upon path breaking ideas.

Become and explorer once in a while.