Lessons from the East: Part 1

I am going to post some of the quotes from the book “Who Will Cry When You Die?” here. It will be a set of ten to twenty bullet points spanning over one or two posts. As I said in my previous post as well, it may not make much sense here but at least might act as an impetus for someone to grab a copy themselves and devour the ideas.

1. Discover Your Calling: When you were born, you cried while the world rejoiced. Live your lives in such a way that when you die the whole world cries while you rejoice.
2. Every Day, Be Kind to a Stranger: Nothing can be further from the truth than believing that in order to live a truly fulfilling life we must achieve some great act or grand feat that will put us on the front covers of magazines and newspapers. A meaningful life is made up of a series of daily acts of decency and kindness which ironically adds up to something truly great over the course of a lifetime.
3. Maintain Your Perspective: To live happier, more fulfilling lives, when we encounter a difficult circumstance, we must keep shifting our perspective and continually ask ourselves “Is there a wiser, more enlightened way of looking at this seemingly negative situation?”
4. Honor Your Past: I would much prefer spending the rest of my days expanding my human frontiers and trying to make the seemingly impossible probable than live a life of comfort, security and mediocrity. Further, I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one reaches in life as by the obstacles he has overcome while trying to succeed.
5. Take a Weekly Sabbatical: Organizing your life so that you get to do more of the things you love to do is one of the first steps to life improvement.
6. Get up Early: Few disciplines have the habit to transform your life as does the habit of early rising. There is something very special about the first few hours of the morning.
7. Take More Risks: I will make you this promise- on your deathbed, in the twilight of your life; it will not be all the risks you took that you will regret the most. Rather, what will fill your heart with the greatest amount of regret and sadness will be all those risks that you did not take, all those opportunities you did not seize and all those fears you did not face. Remember that on the other side of fear lies freedom.
8. Always Carry a Book With You: If you have not read today, you have not really lived today. And knowing how to read but failing to do so puts you in exactly the same position as the person who cannot read but wants to.
9. Practice the Action Habit: All too often, we spend our days waiting for the ideal path to appear in front of us. We forget that paths are made by walking, not waiting.
10. Keep Your Cool: Anyone can become angry- that’s easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose and in the right way- that is not easy.
11. Get Good At Asking: He who asks may be a fool for five minutes. He who doesn’t is a fool for lifetime. Remember, the person who asks for what he wants at least has a chance of getting what he wants. The person who does not ask has no chance.
12. Develop You Talents: The weakest among us has a gift, however seemingly trivial, which is peculiar to him and which worthily used will be a gift also to his race.
13. Create a Pure Environment: The first step to become a happier, more serene person is to manage your thoughts and purify your thinking. One of the best ways to begin this inner work is to improve the quality of your personal environment.
14. Write a Legacy Statement: “Spring has past, summer has gone and winter is here. And the song that I meant to sing remains unsung. I have spent my days stringing and unstringing my instrument.” These words were written by a man whose heart was filled with regret over a life half lived. Rather than singing the great song he was destined to sing, he spent his days preparing and waiting until things were just right before he acted. Sadly, that time never came.

 

Managing Conflicts

If you have lived enough in this earth then it is no surprise to have felt that your ideas, your needs etc are direct opposite to that of the other person. There can be numerous conflicts that you may encounter with people, difficult situation you are put into etc. This post is not aimed at highlighting conflict resolution tactics and techniques but just stating that the problem exist somewhere and have a discussion about it.

The main common reason behind conflicts in life is perhaps miscommunication. Lack of cohesive ideas and thoughts favor conflicts.

The first thing that may come to your mind when someone asks you to come up with a solution to resolve conflict is to work out a compromise. But is it really the Holy Grail in our endeavor to resolve conflicts. Perhaps in the longer term, it may not prove to be one. It may not prove satisfactory to both parties at conflict.

If ever people were good at reading minds, then they could have effectively put themselves in other person’s shoes and tried to weigh the situation with regards to all the conflicting possibilities.

Wordle For this Site

Comic Strips!

You cannot miss this one – Mad Dog Mary
Another Good One – Mad Dog Mary
Worth Taking A Peek – End Of Ace

Twitter – Twittering the Tweets!

Twitter allows us to quickly exchanges messages with our friends from the web, IM clients, phone or from other applications via its API. The Twitter application vertically scaled itself from zero to millions of clicks per seconds in a matter of few months and consequently had to suffer from the scaling problems owing to its Ruby on Rails implementation. However, the scalability was eventually achieved by extensive caching which seems to the popular solution for all the ROR high traffic web sites.

In one way, for me Twitter is a subset of facebook providing a specific functionality in the simplest manner. Coincidentally, my facebook question to my friends is same as what Twitter is all about – ‘What are you doing now?’ People do complain and question twitter’s business value by saying that in general why should they be interested in what others are doing unless of course if you want to follow somebody special who is voyeuristic enough to deserve that degree of attention. Maybe the real usage of twitter is still unclear and the associated business model needs to find a concrete direction. How about holding a business meeting by means of twittering which means that I can be gambling in Vegas casino’s and attending a business meeting simultaneously – now that is what we call food for thought. Time will only tell whether Twitter in its present form has the capability to replace IM’s, be a unique social networking tool or may be give blogging softwares a tough time or a new dimension. If not, then can it be a starting point to achieve all that.

Just for the record, I got my first follower today and it is none other than Paulo Coelho himself, now that does add to my interest in this piece of software.