You may say that even the simple act of consuming food looks like a lot of work. Initially, it may look like one, but once you start reaping the benefits of this choice, you might be amazed by its profound simplicity and long-term gains.
Trying to get positives out of 2020 might look as hard as making milk from almonds. We may still be struggling today, but there are opportunities we haven’t fully seized yet, and the potential we haven’t fully realized yet.
It’s true while learning alone can’t help us succeed; the life lessons from the year 2020 can help us prepare better for an uncertain 2021.
My personal 20 life lessons learned in the year 2020 are enlisted as follows.
The problem with most of your stressful experiences is that they all eventually cease. Those experiences in themselves do not cause any suffering; it’s your aversion to them that makes you suffer.
If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it, and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.
And it has nothing to do with your coding ability A team of code-breakers has solved a cipher attributed to the Zodiac Killer. David Oranchak, a US-based software developer, Sam Blake, a mathematician based in Australia, and Jarl Van Eycke, a programmer based in Belgium, managed to crack Z340, a 340-character cipher that’s one of four such …
During the early days of my career, I had this habit of solving people’s problems, especially those close to my influence area. This was a habit I developed while growing up, thinking this was the best way to support friends, colleagues, and subordinates who asked for my help.
I always felt that helping people get better at doing their job was a great thing to do until I was proved wrong.
I realized that this habit of mine was making me extremely tired in the long run because I was always racking my brain to come up with solutions and ideas. Besides, I wasn’t creating the best possible space for other people to think effectively about their problems.
One day, one of my colleagues came to discuss an urgent issue.
Even Nature spends plenty of resources on what might be called ‘perception-hacking.’
Berries and fruits that want to be eaten develop a distinctive coloration and an attractive taste when they ripen.
By contrast, caterpillars that don’t want to be eaten have evolved to taste disgusting to their predators.
If you care to dig deep inside yourself, you might find that most of your perennial struggle with self-discipline is nothing but a manifestation of your own inadequacy — perceived by both you as well as people known to you.
We often shy away from taking responsibility for our behavior. We tend to label ourselves as someone who had been a failure when it comes to sticking with good old self-discipline.
For instance, if you have always struggled to keep your weight within an acceptable range — a yardstick of your own creation, you see it as an excuse to default again.
We often have this tendency to see things in binaries.
Right/Wrong, Good/Bad, Wife/Girlfriend, Life/Death, you get the drift!
But what makes these binaries such an irresistible proposition?
For starter, it’s comparatively less taxing to deal with the option of this and that. And for the rest of the minorities, going beyond the binaries makes for a decent trap to feel more like an intellect.
Co-founder of one of the home-grown Taxi hailing Unicorn was once asked,
“What is Success, according to you.”
And our ultra-successful entrepreneur gave an unconventional reply; he said,
Essentially, creativity means spotting an opportunity to improve things by combining things from different domains.
The German philosopher Hegel put the idea in its grandest terms: we are creative, he wrote, when we ‘strip the world of its stubborn foreignness and adapt it to our needs.’
The problem isn’t that we don’t want to be authentic, nor is it that we don’t buy into the fact that authenticity leads to more success.
The fact is that most of us do long to be everything that we really are.
The real problem is that few of us know how to dig deep within to find that place in our lives.