Building Skills to Survive In Any Universe

Would you survive if you were put in a different Universe?

What does it take to survive on any Universe? Do you have enough skills to make a living if stripped out from your current zone of operations? Think about it for a while. I always ponder upon this thought that “Why am I working in a different country?” Is it merely because of the Extractive Political Institutions back in my country (which is not the case) or do I lack skills? The answer can be very subjective and debatable but I would like to settle for the later(since I don’t have to build many hypotheses — Occam’s Razor and I know I will be highly biased)

I will start with my personal account, I was on a linear path like the majority of kids in India. Passed school, did graduation and was recruited by a Singapore based company and finally moved to Singapore in September 2014. I am sure this is like a dream come true for any Indian parents as they feel proud and it immediately lifts your family image in the society you reside. As a graduate, I got the opportunity to be a part of the most prestigious projects of my field and my thinking process died a little further. Dopamine was on the rise. It’s a funny fact that I didn’t allow my brain to think about myself for almost 24 years since life was running in a simulation designed by the same society I live in. I partied like an animal(I was just 24), splurge money like I am running an absolutist government of Ghana. It was an experience of its own and I am pretty happy that I did enjoy that part. On the side, I was picking up and dropping hobbies like crazy starting with Djing, Music Production, Photography ( almost dropped it), etc. A friend of mine called me “Inconsistent”, and it’s true that society doesn’t like inconsistent people as I mentioned in the other blog post. At that moment, I neglected that comment letting my conscience die a bit more since she “sounded” right. I struggled to keep anything consistent through out my life probably because I lose interest or I was just not motivated for it after some time. I was getting curious? Why am I doing this job? What if I lose this job? Why am I not able to be consistent with any of the other skills? Why all that was happening? Why I can’t just accept that I have a job and other privileges and incentives? Why there is a need to do something hard after I am back from my job? At some point, we all look for answers to these deep questions, Isn’t? Some just keep quiet and accept their (unloved) daily routine

An Almanack:

Life was dry as dust (some people get confused between futzing and creating value). I was venturing into every aspect of available wisdom but none was being helpful. As they say, persistence is the key and around this time, I was introduced to this man named “Charlie Munger” and that was the turning point in my life. Now if you have never heard of him, and you know that your unloved routine is what you were born for then you are already on the right track. If you need rational clarity in your life, I would suggest you ditch “those self help airport shelves books” and read his “Poor Charlies’s Almanack” over and over again until you absorb every single word in that book (I am still absorbing because it’s a difficult book). Mr Munger, is the just the starting point of my book but I am glad that I managing my 20’s in a way that I will not be clueless in my future. From that particular point, I started dropping all the ideas that I felt inconsistent with. It’s hard to detach yourself from an idea knowing that its not working. I spent the next 2.5 years filtering out skills that will make me survive in any country and through it I will find my purpose. One of Mark Twain’s quote that really moved me was:

“W”henever you find yourself on the side of majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”

Things have changed for better but most importantly I am giving a lot of time to myself, examining my life (I am very sure the majority of us don’t think about ourselves enough). Those voices in my head are almost gone but I know I won’t attain complete wisdom if I don’t let every single drop of fear out from my mind. Fear of losing a job, loved ones (apart from the feeling that I will miss them), of becoming poor again (how you will start if you don’t have a mindset), of what people will think about me after they finish reading this sentence. Take a moment and think of those fears that are controlling you and stopping you from doing something you always wanted to and jot them down on a paper. Being a part of a pluralist economic institution makes us take things for granted and in that process, we don’t work towards knowing our real “Intellectual Curiosity”. Why an idea of “starting a billion-dollar company” sounds so intimidating to us! Is it fear? Indeed it is, and the worst part, we let it control us till the very moment we die.

“Some people die at 25, but aren’t buried until 75” — Benjamin Franklin

In this Digital Age, everyone is looking towards making money from the day they come across phrases like “Drop-Shipping” or “Amazon FBA”. I have attended programs like that and there was one common thing that I noticed among all the participants “Desperation”(many of the participants were in their late 40's). None of us care enough to even understand what our intellectual curiosity is. What is there in the long term? It was there, at that point, I understood that there are two kinds of Desperation — One that is “extrinsic”, which makes you add value to humankind and the other “intrinsic” which makes us add value only in our lives. At the start, its obvious to have intrinsic desperation but I believe that we are incomplete if we lack extrinsic desperate mindset. As Naveen Jain said, “In order to have a billion-dollar company, you need to solve a 10 billion dollar problem”. That 10 billion dollar problem will not even be jot down on a paper if you don’t have an extrinsic desperate mindset.

“I think, therefore I am”

For quite some time now, I was reading about the concept of “time”. I was searching for a hypothesis that resonates with my idea of life is a bowl filled with water. Every good decision taken will act as a stone and lift the water up (knowing yourself) and every bad decision being an animal drinking up some water. On a philosophical level, I came across the fact that we always seek. We seek a “Good Future” therefore future exists, thus exists the “good past” but on a scientific basis, I came across this beautiful concept of “Time being a Spiral”. That was my moment. We come across the same issues over and over again in our lives, think of procrastination. It arrives without fail and it’s no different from yesterday. Every good decision made, will take you up in the spiral and vice versa.

Look at our education system, we spent almost 18 years of our life in order to get paid by some limited liability organization that we only heard through some source. How many good decisions did we take during those 18 years? The time feels like linear (where it went kind) because we didn’t take many good decisions. I always ponder upon this thought of what skills would I like to attain if given that 16 years of the window again. What skills would you have dedicated those 16 years to? Be honest and think whether your current dollar per hour rate is doing justice to the time you gave away learning the majority of skills that you are not using right now!

Money V/s Freedom

What are you running after — Money or Freedom? Aren’t we supposed to chase the later one, or taught how to achieve it? How can one become independent in order to have some time to think or to indulge in certain activities that can kill one’s ignorance. I have learned this lesson the hard way, “Money” is just a tool, what I am chasing is “Freedom”. Any money earned at a cost of your ignorance being sustained is not worth it. Definitely, it won’t help in fabricating the extrinsic desperate mindset and it is that region, where money, freedom, curiosity exists together.

Start building that can make you survive on any universe and aim for “Freedom”

Happy Learning !