Author: animeshjmathur

Games – constraints – enjoyment

constraints, ego, Energy, problem solving

As children we love playing games. If we don’t have any games to play, we even create our own. Even when we create our own games, we tell the others about the “rules” of playing the games. You can’t have any game without rules because then the children won’t know how to play.

However within the rules, the children have so much fun and so much creativity. Even professional sports have well defined rules , but each player playing the game, is different in the way she plays. We love sports simply because we see how players use their talent to win against the competition.

However when we are faced with challenges in our work life, we end up thinking of all the constraints because of which we are not able to achieve our dreams and goals.

If we were to think of problems and constraints as rules of the games that we are supposed to play , wouldn’t life become much more enjoyable and fun. We would be at our creative best in trying to find a way out of the situation.

Children don’t have a fear of losing therefore they find different ways to win within the situation. If they lose, they dust it off within minutes and are ready to play the next game.

Our problem is that our ego comes in the way and we adopt a fixed mindset. This ego creates fear, which in turn stops us from trying out different things.

If you have been reading my blog posts, then you will know that fear is a way that our brain plays games with us so that it can conserve energy.

As with games, the more you practice the game, the better you become. Similarly the more problems/constraints you work on the better you become at solving them. Go at them with ferocity

Till next time then…enjoy life

Carpe Diem!!!

Financial Independence  – Happiness revisited

Financial Independence, Happiness

This post will move in two directions.  I have been seeing an advertisement on television where there’s a philosophical point being made by the protagonist about wanting money under any circumstance to enjoy life and her husband talking that money is not the only thing in life.

Its something similar to “money can’t buy happiness” or “money is the root of all evils”.  Like I mentioned earlier these are philosophical points with no end to debates especially in countries like ours where over the last 75 years people have seen massive poverty and are only now coming out of it.

Good Health and Happiness are very closely related. If you’re happy, you will generally be in better health and will fall sick less often. I have written multiple times earlier also that Happiness is not the destination,  its the journey.  We should be enjoying the journey and be happy.

Recently I was reading a book Gap and Gain by Dr. Benjamin Hardy and Dan Sullivan.  In this book Ben talks about how long term toxic stress and unhappiness can cause your lifespan to reduce dramatically. He’s given examples of various studies to showcase this. They also mention how people with less toxic stress are able to fight infections better and stay healthy longer.

While not all causes of toxic stress are related to money, in a lot of cases , the lack of money causes discontent which leads to toxic stress. One of the primary reasons for divorce is also lack of Enough money, the operating word being enough, which is subjective for different people.

So while “money can’t buy happiness ” its the next best thing, because it can help keep a lot of the stress causing items at bay. So if you have money to ensure that your basic needs are met and you don’t have to struggle for the basic things in life, then you have less reasons to be unhappy. There will always be some people who will find reasons to be unhappy, but that’s another story.

When I write about financial freedom or financial independence I write from the perspective that you should have enough money so that your basic needs are met and that you don’t have to be a slave of money.

Till next time then….make money work for you and get financial independence.

Carpe Diem!!!

You just said YES – You just said NO

Affirmative action, dreams

On my smart phone, I used to be inundated with different kinds of pings every few minutes. Initially they were all sound and visual alerts.

Now I have these two bad habits. One I get distracted extremely easily and two I keep saying Yes a lot. I think the second one has to do more because of my stupid EGO. Anytime someone talks about how valuable my input is, I end up saying yes. With Alerts on your cellphone its a double whammy.

The Alerts first of all disturb you and take your attention away from whatever you were doing and second , quite a few times you end up reading the message the alert is showing (which means you are saying yes to reading the message) because it seems to be something important.

About three weeks back or a little more, I read the book Indistractable by Nir Eyal. One of the things with all these Apps that you use on the phone is that the moment you down load an App, by default the settings allow Alerts to appear. Initially there’s one App , then another and then there are another 20 and all of them are pinging you. You don’t realise the damage these innocuous things cause.

Coming back to the book, Indistractable, Nir, simply asked to go to the settings and to switch off the alerts. It took me less than 3 minutes to switch them off – if you. know where to go and do it. Initially for the first few days I was very anxious that I might miss out on something important when the phone didn’t ping.Over a period of the next one week, I got used to my phone not ringing. Now I watch for my SMSes or WhatsApp messages every 3-4 hours. Nothing before that. For some specific sender’s, I have got the alerts still active, but of rat e rest its gone.

What I realised was that each time I saw my phone , I got pulled into something or the other and then before I know, I have already spent another 10-15 minutes on non-essential activities.

Each time I was saying YES to looking at the alert and then the news and then something else, I was saying NO to my concentration, I was saying NO to finish what was important rather than what was urgent for someone else.

This doesn’t mean I have become super effective. Hardly. But this has taught me to start eliminating as many things which cause me to say YES to things which are so called urgent.

At the end of the day, you are, the results you produce. If you end up saying YES to these unnecessary items, you will end up saying NO to getting your results. You will not be able to chase your dreams because you will end up chasing multiple rabbits going in all directions.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

White sugar – not listening to my own advice

Energy, Health, sugar

I must have written multiple posts on the drawbacks of eating white refined sugar. Along with corn syrup it is one of the biggest killers in modern life, being a direct cause for blindness, kidney failures, obesity etc. The biggest problem is that all the sugar related diseases crop up suddenly. They keep getting bad to worse in the background and then suddenly appear when the situation has deteriorated to such an extent that I have seen people suddenly lose their eye sight or a small wound suddenly getting infected with gangrene and having to be amputated.

We are having the festival of Diwali , in India, going on for the last 4-5 days. We Indians have a sweet tooth. The amount of “sweet” dishes we have in each of our different cuisines is mind boggling. If you think of at least 16 different broad regional cuisines and at least 30 different sweets in each cuisine, you are looking at close to about 500 different types of sweets. In addition we now also have different kinds of chocolates, cookies and cakes / pastries.

Now during the main festival on Thursday, we had a whole lot of sweets of different kinds which were had laid out. I ended up eating a lot, because there was a huge variety, I got tempted and wanted to try all the items. I actually didn’t realise that I was consuming so many since they were all so tasty. At the end of the day, I am also human and I given in to temptations.

The next day when I got up in the morning, I was feeling so “low” on energy, that I was worried what was wrong with me. After having a couple of glasses of water, I started feeling a little better and started thinking for the reason. Then it struck me that it was the sugar which was playing games with me, since I had eaten so many sweets.

I am flabbergasted that I had not heeded my own advice, I keep telling everyone not to have white sugar based products and generally I have given up on eating all kinds of items which have sugar or corn syrup in it. But I did not listen to my own advice and paid a price for it.

If feasible always avoid white sugar and corn syrup and be more healthy.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!