Nineteen !

(A repost of my blog entry from last night, written for my daughter who turned nineteen yesterday . Sharing it here for my younger friends)

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On days in your decades ahead, when life pauses at careless bends and threatens to slow you down , something will make you turn back to an age, a certain year in your life which, like a robust fortress, will then be concealed behind a giant curtain . It is that year when you knew that something dark and dangerous and mysterious was waiting for you beyond that curtain, and if you crawled and moved over to the other side, your old songs might all die. And a new song will be born. Something like the month of September - When the summer has passed, but is not missing yet. You can smell the fall but can’t see it yet. And you might even imagine winter, but not fret about it yet . That’s what makes Nineteen as special. The in-between birthday. The odd-uneven year. The age where you might even decide to forgive your parents , bury your rebellion & consider returning home to consolidate & celebrate yourself. Maybe even give God a chance , for the first time ever. And smile , over your midmorning coffee, bidding goodbye to a friend called childhood.

So , like every year, here follows a dad’s lecture, his nineteen cents for your nineteenth birthday. As always, this list is not exhaustive in itself but is more reflective of my current state of mind ( And my reading over the past few weeks - Kahneman, Taleb, Seneca, Daniel Levitin - to name a few) . Also, like always, I won’t embarrass you by posting a link to my last year’s lecture from my blog archives . I hope you might remember some of it still !

1. “Soccer moms are the enemy of natural history and the full development of a child.” – Edward. O .Wilson. Whenever possible, challenge norms that rally the herds and the nerds. Life unfolds like a random and messy adventure that is full of uncertainty, danger and unpredictability. Academics is the mere cosmetic build-up of your tomorrow, your entry pass to the match. The real tournament begins thereafter, and will test you beyond the structured doctrines of academia. Learn to embrace storms, possibly even fall in love with them. Stop believing in scholarly absolutes of black and white. Most of life lies outside such absolutes.
2. In a world that is doing an overkill on exhibitionism, go contrarian. Work on propriety, a certain dignity that defines you. People will always be more interested in what they don’t know about you, than what they do. An intelligent person always displays less than what she is. Fools do the opposite.
3. Heroism is conduct , not victory or defeat.
4. If, at forty, you have become what you dreamed to become at fourteen, you have been a success. If, at sixty, people notice your absence more than the presence of others at a party, you have led a good life.
5. What you learn by way of your own experience , you will remember. What you earn by way of your own capabilities , you will keep.
6. Never trust the public display of goodness by an elitist hypocrite who puts up a ‘trending’ victim’s picture on his social media profile, immediately after his last post that was about his Paris holiday, and follows it up with his next post, about a wine tasting event. A third of these fakes lie with their mouths, a third – through their tears, and a third – through their 140-character empathy on their convenient and easy-to-use Twitter handles. Any empathy or love without effort and sacrifice, is a con.
7. There is a café called Lindy in New York that prides itself for its cheesecake. However, the real reason why it is famous is because, over the past many decades, physicians and mathematicians have validated a peculiar heuristic that evolved from there. Apparently, this is a place where artists would assemble to discuss the work & fate of other artistes. And it has been observed ( and proven multiple times over) that a show that lasts 100 days on Broadway, is likely to last for 100 more, and a show that lasts for 200 days, is likely to last for 200 more. And so on. Known as “Lindy Effect”, this phenomenon has established time and again, that non-perishable things such as concepts, impressions, social trends etc tend to obey the law of time, that is - if something has worked for X units of time in the past, chances are that it will work for X more units of time in the future. So while fads might come and go, the core basics of human existence will stay consistent. For a quick check – do a Google on the highest selling books or the most loved movies of the past century. You won’t find the latest bestseller or the last Billion dollar grosser movie on the list, but you are surely going to find the time tested classics there, which have survived the bullshit filter of many generations. As is said - Laws will come and go. Ethics will stay. Fashion is temporary, class is timeless.
8. You don’t need to finish every book you begin. You can always leave a book midway to start another. You can obviously return to the first book some other day , rekindle your interest & read it through . Or you could again start it from the beginning , and discover it with a brand new view . Don’t feel guilty about the unread books in your bookshelf. They are just reminders - that your perspective, just like you, is work in progress.
9. Do not envy the lucky imbeciles in the race of life, especially when you are going through a low-luck phase . In the end, the good guy wins. Be the good guy.
10. A sweaty door-to-door salesman has a hundred fold higher value in this world than a tie-wearing executive who sits in office from nine to six . The former does real work and peddles possibilities of things that can go right in this world through his products and services. The latter sits in an air-conditioned office and tries to imagine why things might go wrong in the world, and who , at the slightest provocation, embarks on lengthy discourses on every subject – from raising kids, to building fitness ( patting his own pot belly) , to how the world should avert the next financial crisis . Turn to the former for inspiration, and the latter, for entertainment.
11. “ A single cockroach will completely wreck the appeal of a bowl of cherries, but a cherry will do nothing at all for a bowl of cockroaches “ – Paul Rozin. In the years ahead, you will encounter both cockroaches and cherries, often more cockroaches than cherries. Eliminate a cockroach from your life as soon as you spot one, and you should be okay.
12. Education may or may not make a clever man cleverer, but it can surely make an idiot intolerable. Beware of the educated idiots, and there are far too many out there.
13. In your life ahead, your analytical friends will follow science, the creative and sensitive ones will pursue humanities. The leftover mass will study management. This means that while the ones from Group one and two find solutions for the problems of mankind , the ones in Group three will be selling solutions first and then inventing problems to fit them in. The principal problem in the business world today is that we have too many managers and too few originals who roll up their sleeves and go to work.
14. Never trust a liberal spouse, a conservative lover and a left-leaning liberal who discusses the stock market during a picnic.
15. “If there is unrest among criminals and intellectuals in a kingdom, the king must be doing something right” – Chanakya. Do not trust opinions planted by armchair theorists and career journalists. Their primary profession is to complicate simple things in life and obstruct progress at all costs , simply so that the status quo can carry on and they could live comfortable lives by doing nothing tangible. If you need to trust an opinion maker, make sure he / she has a day job outside of his / her cause, so that his / her core philosophy is not corrupted by lure of commerce.
16. “Muscles without strength, friendship without trust, opinion without risk, change without aesthetics, age without values, food without nourishment, power without fairness, facts without rigor, degrees without erudition, militarism without fortitude, progress without civilization, complication without depth, fluency without content ; these are the sins to remember.” – Naseem Nicholas Taleb
17. “We are more often frightened than hurt; and we suffer more from imagination than from reality.” – Seneca. In a world that is getting more and more sensitive and ‘intolerant against intolerance ", sometimes even manufacturing intolerance so that they can protest against it - step back, take it easy and smile. There are far more important issues to worry about in this world than the latest Twitter war on today’s intolerance debate.
18. Once in a while, we all need to think out of the box – true that . But if everyone is trying to think out of the box at all times, like what we see these days, something must be seriously wrong with the box, as quipped Malcolm Gladwell somewhere . Like I mentioned in point no. 7, the box is Lindy and 75% of your life should pass through Lindy. So don’t beat yourself down if you are 'regular and conventional'. That just shows you will outlast most freaks.
19. “Most of the moments of our life - and I calculated, you know, the psychological present is said to be about three seconds long; that means that, you know, in a life there are about 600 million of them; in a month, there are about 600,000 - most of them don't leave a trace.” – Daniel Kahnemann. At the end of a day, try and take stock of your life moments and what happened inside them. Record some of the noteworthy ones in your journal. Read your journal every Sunday morning. You will see that the week that follows will be cleaner, luckier and worthier than the week that you left behind.

Welcome to the last year of your teens. Hereafter you can’t even blame your teenage for your mood swings ! You are an official grown up now :)