other Things that Matter....with an Apology

A day after the previous blog was published, a colleague and a friend, @Amit_Bandivadekar, told me that while he was satisfied with the way the tempo of the article was built up, he felt that the blog concluded in a whimper. I agreed - so, with an apology to the reader, here is another attempt to elaborate this topic with an intention to do it justice.

In my previous blog (https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/other-things-matter-rama-nimmagadda/), I spoke about how “lessons/competencies” from one aspect of life can be applied in other aspects and great results can be had. I listed out a set of examples of other things that could matter. But how do I determine those “other” things that matter to me (I referred to “running” as a personal example but how many people really indulge in running – not many – so running may not be that ‘other’ thing for many).

Here is what I believe to be the features/characteristics for that “other” thing to matter:

• It should mean something to you. It should be important to you in some way
• It has ability to provide tangible benefits to you
• You can see yourself spend significant amount of time/energy on this
• Your progress on it is measurable, preferably objectively
• It should involve incremental learning; in other words, it should allow you to challenge yourself progressively
• It allows for possibility to identify role models and observe/learn from them
• There is possibility to engage a coach or a mentor

For those familiar with the concept of “deliberate/deep practice”, they would have already related these principles with deliberate practice. I’m extending the premise by proposing that “deliberate practice” in any field has potential to sharpen the individual in other fields (and life in general)

Investing oneself meaningfully in other things that matter, one can enrich one’s perspective towards life and living, let alone other benefits such as building well-rounded competencies

To bring these features to bear, here are a few real-life examples:

• Running: When I started to run many years ago, my ultimate running goal was to run 5K non-stop. I have come a long way from there but cannot dust off the enormity that the target of 5K felt like, all those years back. In my running pursuits, I have built up an ability of taking up seemingly impossible targets, methodically achieving them and progressively taking even bigger challenges. I could carry this ability to my professional career seamlessly. From being barely able to handle myself to leading very large teams, it was a journey punctuated with difficulties and seeming unsurpassable obstacles. It took time and effort, mis-steps and happy accidents, pain and self-doubt, small successes and celebrations.
• Investment journey: Lehman brothers – initial greed to lot of study to building conviction to long term orientation to meaningful returns; I still remember very vividly my first night-out at Lehman Brothers (to prepare for an ad-hoc Tri-Optima exercise – OTC derivative position reconciliation exercise – remember that, anyone?) just one day before Lehman filed for Bankruptcy. This was followed by unravelling of Western capitalist order, what later has been christened as “Great Recession”. Of course, stock markets stabilized within a couple of years and then began what probably is the biggest bull market of all time. Lehman Bankruptcy forced me to determine the length of time that I could live without a job. As it turned out, it was a pitiful two-month figure. Years of working and earning did not amount to much savings after all. I started my journey of financial prudence in the ensuing years, stumbled a lot, many rookie mistakes and finally stabilized. I learnt a whole lot about power of execution, discipline, compounding and conscious decision making. Today I am not just in a much better financial position to tackle a crisis but have become disciplined, conscious and long term oriented in everything I do in life.
• Reading books for “pure pleasure” to “relatively intellectual curiosity” to “real learning”: I do not think I will ever be able to exaggerate the usefulness of reading. From my own experience and few others that I know, I can confidently say that reading furnishes and develops your creativity, enhances your knowledge, widens your perspective and as you begin to identify areas of your interest, it deepens your knowledge, makes you wiser and subconsciously alters your behaviour and approach in life.
• My friend, @Mandar Khire, is an avid photographer. Professionally, he is a Software Engineering Development and Delivery manager and when not working, he dabbles in photography. Most of the pictures I have used for my blog posts are taken by him. He was able to bring the “art” side of his personality to designing and architecting scalable, durable, resilient and complex software systems (he builds payments processing platforms) only after exploring and developing his artsy side in photography. Photography requires a seamless balance of ‘art’ and ‘technical’ competence. Through conscious and extensive practice under guidance from his mentor, Mandar was able to challenge, explore, nurture and develop strong foundational competence which he was able to carry over in other aspects of his life.
• I approached an ex-colleague and a friend, Bharat “Barry” Krishna, to get his perspective. Bharat is a new-age polymath. By day he is a Technology Product Manager and at all other times, he dons various personas indulging in his passion projects – he runs a film-explanation site (https://www.thisisbarry.com/) and he is an artist (musician and choreographer). He gets to meet and build friendships with people from very varied fields. Over a period of time, these forays helped him build a radically expanded and much more balanced worldview and he was able to re-prioritize his life’s activities that are allowing him live his life fully. As a side note, I can bet that you will hardly be able to find anyone who can match Barry in energy and vigour.

I have had the good fortune of knowing a bunch of others who would be perfect examples in the current context but respecting the format of this format/medium (blog), I will limit myself to these examples for now.

I will conclude with an earnest belief of mine: 

Life is too ephemeral to not let your heart fly.

#OtherThingsThatMatter