Month: May 2010

Divorce after 40 years – a story..


An elderly man in Mumbai calls his son in New York and says,
‘I hate to ruin your day son, but I have to tell you that your mother and I are getting a divorce; 40 years of marriage.., and that much misery is enough!’

‘Dad, what are you talking about? the son screams.

‘We can’t stand the sight of each other any longer.’ the old man says.

‘We’re sick of each other, and I’m sick of talking about this, so you call your sister in Hong Kong and tell her!’

Frantic, the son calls his sister, who explodes on the phone.
‘Like heck they’re getting divorced,’ she shouts, ‘I’ll take care of this.’

She calls Mumbal immediately, and screams at the old man, ‘You are not getting divorced. Don’t do a single thing until I get there. I’m calling my brother back, and we’ll both be there tomorrow. Until don’t do a thing, DO YOU HEAR?? and she hangs up.

The old man hangs up his phone and turns to his wife.
‘Okay’, he says, ‘It’s all set. They’re both coming for our anniversary and paying their own airfare!!’

—
No man / woman , busy in this world all 365 days.

The sky is not going to fall down if you take few days LEAVE and meet your dear ones.

OFFICE WORK IS NOT EVERYTHING IN LIFE AND NEITHER IS MAKING MONEY.
—

Ha ha! Good reminder.. :D

Stimulus: Here’s something new to do; Response: I can’t do it..

I’m not sure how often this happens to you but this happens to me a heck of a lot. Every time there is something new, I find myself (mentally) going through this conversation..

For eg: At a call..

Someone else: Rohan, I think this new thing is a good idea. Why don’t you take it over..

What follows is a mental battle..
—
Oh, but I’m going to be on vacation in 4 days..
When will I have the time?
Will I be able to check my mail even..
Hmmm.. tough..
Let me not commit..
I CAN’T DO IT!!
..
But wait..
What if you can..
Why bring it up unnecessarily…
Hmm..
Let’s try it and go with the flow..
(Reluctantly..)
—

Me: ‘Yes.. Sure. Happy to help!’

More often than not, ‘I can’t do it’ is only a state of mind. Of course I can! Once I choose to do it, I will find a way nearly always.. but the problem is getting over the initial resistance and inertia.. Even if, for example, my concerns are valid for the above example and I am going to be out of station, that’s only a 2 week temporary thing. I can take the system till then and leave it a little better than I found it, can’t I?

What I’ve also realized is the validity of the quote –
‘If you want something done, give it to a busy person’

—
Need to catch myself and get a more positive stimulus in due time. After all, what else can proactivity and initiative be about?

Meeting my Math Coach..

Met my math coach 2 days ago..

Had a flurry of questions for him..

He cleared them all in barely 5 minutes..

with a nonchalant ease, and an expression of ‘Come on, I expect you to be struggling with tougher questions’..

After those 5 mins, we settled down to having a chat..

Catching up, updates about other friends he had coached, school, life etc..

I left meeting him with a warm fuzzy feeling inside..

I realize now that it was because I felt welcome..

Felt welcome in his school like one of his own 5 years after having learnt under him..

I doubt if even the school where I spent my final 2 years studying would welcome me the same way..

All these years, he’s been there and welcomed me just the same way..

Don’t we all love that.. the feeling of familiarity when some things don’t change?

My math coach.. I owe him a lot.. and I’m proud to be associated with him..
—
My Math coach taught a group of friends and me the subject in my 12th standard. He’s a wonderful person, a head teacher at a different school and a person with a wonderful reputation. He’s always lived up to that reputation with utmost integrity.. Always been humbled by his humility..

It’s always wonderful meeting him!

Reason, season and lifetime – friendships explained..

I’ve always been intrigued by the nature of some relationships. Especially, as we grow up, and time passes, we tend to have some relationships that bloom with time, some others that fade away. Sometimes, some end for no good reason.. just when we felt things were okay. What I was also curious to understand is how do we know when someone is here to stay, or not..

The answer, of course, is we don’t. And I found a lovely explanation to this that I managed to share to a few friends. Given it was a rather badly formatted HTML email, I was lazy to put it up. Today, Arati’s post inspired me. So, here are the screenshots.




—

Hope you like it as much as I did! :)

It’s the process, stupid!

I was giving further thought to why I was making the silly mistakes I’d mentioned in this post.

And I realized that it’s the absence of a process that is the problem. This task, for example, involved sending a few emails and small mistakes in these emails are easy to make.

A simple example of how that could be avoided is by creating a simple checklist system for such a task that I refer to at every point. In my current mode of operation, I am working from memory and when that happens, we go into auto pilot and tend to lose the alertness that would accompany doing such a task otherwise.

The best thing about a process is that it can be replicated. Just doing a good job with something can’t.. and we’re much better off making a system than doing a good job because the latter simply means we will be stuck with it for the rest of our lives without a hope of passing it on..

—
I love holidays! They give you so much time to think.. which would normally never happen. Believe it or not, I have a queue of such thoughts to be translated to blog posts that I’ve put down. :) Would never happen during normal busy times..

The mistakes that are annoying are not the big ones..

they’re the small, silly ones that we know we could have fixed..

I feel the impact of these tasks right at the moment. I have wondrously managed to screw up the same task in two consecutive weeks (i.e. this week and last) and every time, I’ve become creative with making a new small mistake.

Argh.. this absolutely annoys me. It isn’t where I want my level of operation to be but I guess, there’s no point getting emotional about the mistake, rather focus on how to fix it.

The best I’ve come up with is to give myself a $10 for any mistakes made when carrying out the task.. hopefully that should plug the hole!

Every task is indicative of our ability.. whether we like it or not..

At this point, I clearly do not like that thought.. but hey, fighting reality is a losing battle..

Here’s to better tasks done then! :)