2017 Memoirs: My Learnings from Life

Life experiences teaches you such important lessons that, at times, you are baffled by the impact that these experiences leave on you. The year 2017 has been that kind of a year for me where I have gone through deep personal loss, learned new skills that I had never thought I would venture into, been surprised by the power of clarity & motivation in leadership. All these experiences had a profound impact on me and, as I reflect, I am convinced that 2017 is one of the most significant year of my life thus far.

Personal Loss

I lost my father this year after sudden deterioration of his health, followed by two months of intense medical battles in and out of hospital. He was under critical life support for last 3 weeks of his life and finally I had to take the most difficult decision to let him go. He was a symbol of strength and comfort for me like any other father to a child. Right from my childhood, I was paranoid with the thought that one day I will have to lose him and had always come out of that thought cycle by deceiving myself that there is lot of ‘time’ for that day to come. Finally, that quantum of time gave up on me this year and to make matters worse had to see him suffer and lose all interest in life. This difficult and painful experience of mine had taught me some life lessons that I believe will shape me as a person for years to come.

Purpose of Life – lead by WHY

As I sat through enormous hours in hospital, worrying and thinking of what will happen next for my father, I could also ponder on my life and what I could be thinking on my last days. I did realize that as a person I feel more satisfied by a purposeful journey than looking only at the end result. If I look back at all my successes and failures in life (however small or large that may be), I am more satisfied by my journey towards a goal and most dissatisfied by the lack of purpose and effort associated with my failures. Even some successes to me are a pure ‘fluke’ and I don’t feel happy if I have not traversed a significant path in attaining the same. This gave me a new perspective of purpose in everything I do or want to do. Getting the WHY answer is so important in whatever we do or pursue in life. I think I have found a good answer to my WHY question and embarked on my journey of life with a new sense of purpose.

Take responsibility, take decisions and live with it

The biggest stagnation in life is when we do not take responsibility of things happening in our life and eventually do not follow up with decisions to move forward. All of a sudden, when my father’s health deteriorated, I was in a state of denial and self-deception that things will be back to normal soon. Even when the doctors started to apprise me with reality, I first doubted their intention and fought the fact that my father will never be back to his normal self. When I had to take certain decisions on medical procedures that needed my consent, I panicked, wished it away and took time to be mentally prepared to think pragmatically. The thought of ‘Why Me?’ prolonged for multiple nights and finally I stopped thinking about myself and started thinking from my father’s perspective. Nothing is happening to me, but everything is happening to my father and I had to take decisions for him and not for me. That realization changed everything. I came back to the hospital determined and decisive. Something changed in me permanently.

Importance of human relationships

I think most of us undervalue the importance of human relationships in our lives. I am definitely one of them. On the day of my most difficult decision of life, I had the most important learning on human relationships. I have always been blessed by very strong relationship within my family – spouse, children and parents. But for the first time, I had reached out to some of my friends and colleagues whom I had connected emotionally in the past at various stages of my life, but was not actively in touch. Very unlike of me, but still I did what I felt at that moment. I had reached out to my close college friend who lives in the same city, but we have not talked even on phone for more than 5 years. Similarly, had reached out to couple of my colleagues with whom I have not connected personally for many years. To my utter dismay, they left everything that they were doing and stood by my side during that difficult phase of my life. I felt inner calmness and became mindful of my existence. A big learning for me is not only to build and nurture good human relationships, but, more importantly, not to lose any good relationship that I had built just for nothing. I was amazed how easily I could connect with these people and it felt like we were very close always. Relationships make life worth living for sure!

Health and Time: Top priorities of life

I had got my top priorities in life all wrong thus far. I was spending most of my time in ‘running the show’ in office and remaining personal time mostly procrastinating. This deep personal loss brought in a new realization that only two things can get me where I want to be – Health and Time. If we can put these two things as our topmost priorities and manage these to work towards fulfilling of our larger purpose of life, then the entire journey becomes so enticing. We spend so much time on ‘urgent’ daily chores that we end up neglecting our ‘important’ to dos. Since then I have planned time for my important activities, when I cut myself off from daily chores and only concentrate on these activities. Have started investing in myself significantly and that is giving me immense positive energy. Furthermore, have added a weekly routine of physical activity which gives me the feeling of being fit and does produce a ton of positivity and mental energy.

Coming out of comfort zone

I was under depression following such a personal loss and was looking for something to digress my attention and thoughts. Professional life was same as usual and at home there was a void. In flash of a moment, I got myself enrolled in a beginner swimming class in the apartment complex that I live in. To make matter even more challenging, the adult beginner class was at 6AM in the morning and me, being a night owl, had to struggle. I was very afraid of water right from my childhood and that was the main reason that I had never learnt swimming despite multiple attempts in my childhood. Initially, I thought I was not in the frame of mind to jump into such a big challenge which I do not enjoy naturally. But I gave myself time till one month to see where it takes me. Though, initially, I was the slowest learner in the batch, things changed when I started enjoying inside water. After crossing many mental hurdles, I could learn swimming, though not one of my best skills, but still something that I am immensely proud of today. This was never in my ‘bucket list’ and yet new-found satisfaction overwhelmed me. I could zoom out my thoughts, looked at it from a distance and figured out that magic happens outside your comfort zone. I guess it was time for me to shake things up personally and professionally.

Power of Clarity & Motivation

With realization of purpose of what I do and what I want to do, came new initiatives that I decided to drive in my work life. As a large cloud operation, we had to heavily focus on automation. However, most of these were point automations and not beyond conventional thought process. After couple of initial brainstorming sessions with my direct management team, we thought it’s time for us to shift our goal post and think big. We had collectively decided to plunge into projects that will focus on implementing Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning in solving some of our most teething problems in cloud operation. I was very skeptical on how engineers will accept these additional projects as the team was very busy with their daily work and overall utilization of the team was very high. I had no means to free any of their bandwidth in the short term and the only way we could progress on these new initiatives is for all of us to do more, keeping our day job intact. I was very sure in my mind that I cannot force these new initiatives on my team and motivation to pursue these initiatives must come from within. Me and my management team focused on communicating the purpose and picture of end goal of our initiatives to engineers. I also went one step further to openly state that these projects will have no bearing on individual’s career progress and hence everyone has a right to say ‘No’ and walk away. I did not want these initiatives to become a conventional bragging point on paper for performance evaluation exercise, but something where the purpose is deep rooted and driven from inside.

Then came the major surprise for me. All these discussions catapulted into a sense of new excitement within the team (engineers and managers alike) and then emerged new set of leaders who took initiatives on their own and started driving some of the most aspirational projects in AI/ML space. People invested their precious time in learning new skills and transformed them without any force or conventional supervision. I ended up leading a team of self-motivated, driven bunch of individuals who taught me very important lesson in my life. If we focus on giving clarity to our team towards a new path, make them a part of bigger goal and build a culture of, what Satya Nadella has famously said in his book ‘Hit Refresh’, ‘learn it all’ and ‘growth mindset’ then magic happens and human minds are unleashed towards achieving greater heights. I could proudly say that together we had raised the bar for ourselves in 2017 and, most importantly, these were all driven bottoms-up!

Finally, I would like to end with a BIG THANK YOU to all who have helped shaped my life – family, friends, colleagues, teachers, mentors who all have had a tremendous impact on me in 2017.