akbar

Being Myself

Today I had another productive meeting with David. We talked about how procrastination is so common and David suggested some cool techniques which I plan to follow for the next 1 week to see how it works out. It all has to do with taking one small step at a time. I also need to make sure that 1 little step better be focussed and firm. I have to keep in control my distractions. I agreed that when I was following ‘The Now Habit” book – I enjoyed my working states of 30 mins each. The way it works is – I would work for 30 mins with no distractions and then take a break and repeat.

So here are some guidelines for myself to remember while I am on my path to this:

Keep the end in mind
Take small steps
Give and enjoy my 100% during that small step

In this process, I discovered that all the time I am trying to be someone else. All the time I am trying to follow someone else. This has happened somewhere in my life and I didn’t notice it. I am so stuck inside of it that I didn’t even realize it. I also want to practice being myself and being forgiving with minor mistakes I commit.

Swami’s beautiful quote

If you leave pride, you become dear to all; If you conquer anger, you become free from worries; You become prosperous when you control your desires. You attain happiness only when you conquer greed.

– Divine Discourse, 14th April 2001

It’s all about principle

Today I had a wonderful meeting with David as a part of our weekly meetings. It was such an amazing process of learning for me. David is this highly motivated guy who can nicely charm anyone into his inspirational talk. We were talking about BDD(Behaviour Driven Development) and took a small task and broke it down to a BDD format. If you look it up, there are no books yet on BDD. The very little literature is some blog posts and some observations on websites. But it’s an outgrowth of something called TDD – Test Driven Development.

So, anyhow all during the meeting I keep on thinking that I am going to come across some book that will tell me exactly how to do BDD. But today I realized that doing or implementing BDD based upon a book or a blog post is nothing but working on a ‘practice’. It doesn’t mean that I actually grok the ‘principle’ behind BD. So this whole process I underwent with David really helped me to see the principle behind it and just work on it. Our own implementation of BDD will be our own ‘practice’ of the general ‘principle’ – which is perfectly ok.

But I just had to know that and learn it. Realizing that is such a powerful experince to me. I am thankful for the learning.

The Producer’s talk

In his great book called – The Now Habit – Niel Fiore describes how producers differ from procrastinators. Here are 5 common sentences that needs to be replaced in procrastinator’s language.

I have to ==> replace with ==> I choose to
I must finish ==> replace with ==> When can I start?
This is so big ==> replace with ==> I can take one small step.
I must be perfect ==> replace with ==> I can be human
I don’t have time to play ==> replace with ==> I must take time to play

This book has such a unique take on procrastination. Everything he talks about how and why people procrastinate – I can relate to. I have a plan setup for the next one week. I will be following the techniques taught in this book and see how I fare.

Creative Ideas Abundance – CIA

There are creative ideas everywhere – just hanging on above ready to be plucked and used. I can get over my ego-self and get hold of the creative ideas abundance!

Project Rhino

I have a great opportunity at work to hone my Javascript skills. We are productizing an amazing and simple piece of web software and it pretty much involves converting basic Coldfusion, inline javascript code to make it a pure javascript library. It is going to be fun and I am excited that I would learn javascript the proper way and use it in a object oriented fashion. I like to call it my own little ‘Project Rhino’ –

Baby Nephew

I had a second nephew today! I am so happy – all the prayers have been answered. Thank you Swami.

A new start

I have always went back and started things around. And this time around it is happening once again with blogging. There have been many changes in my life in the past 3 months. Very deep personal changes. I think I am a new person and with a whole new outlook on life. This is going to be a new start for that new life. I am going to choose to be honest and direct in here. This would be my new home for my thoughts, ideas and digital life.