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In our parents’ generation, it was a privilege to be a specialist.
To be the best and fastest in the world at one thing was the only way to survive.

With unlimited opportunities in the information age, things have reversed.

As someone who wants to climb the corporate ladder, your role is managing people instead of core work.

This needs breadth, experience and understanding of work, in addition to core skills.

Thus, becoming a generalist comes with possibilities of broader spectrum and a stronger profile.

If we are a generalist, we have a speciality of taking different paths.

We’re confused about what to do in life.

And college education certainly hasn’t helped.

Why not explore our way through life, instead of being in a hurry to settle down? 

Try out stand up comedy and share videos, and look at the reactions of people.
Create music if we love it, and see if others resonate with it
Get internships in design or coding, if that is what intrigues you.

It is better to be lost and busy in the chase of finding yourself, instead of being lost and busy in the rat race of never knowing yourself.

You have two ideas for your startup, but not sure which one.
Or perhaps two job offers.
Or two career options, and you cannot decide. 

You are looking for a solution, but to no avail.

What if we looked for questions instead, whenever we were faced with a dilemma?

Why do I want to make that decision in the first place?
What would change for me because of that decision?
What do we want from that decision?

Looking for questions instead of solutions is asking questions about the problem.

There are some days when Instagram is down.

Sometimes Facebook is, WhatsApp is, Twitter/X as well.

I remember when that happened with Google, we all lost it.
“Dependency” was the word of the day.

We suddenly didn’t know what to do.
How to spend our time. 

All we kept doing was check the platform incessantly, showing how much we depend on it.

The next time a platform goes down, try a crazy thing: Go for a walk.
Your world is what your eyes see, not what the screen shows! 

We own the screens we own. Not the other way round.

I will spend time with my family later.
That email is important.

I will say “I love you” to my loved ones later.
That love for work is more important.

I will call my parents over the weekend.
Grind on the weekdays is more important.

I don’t have the time!

We don’t find time; we make time.
Because we will never know when we will run out of it.

One of the mistakes we make early in our lives is feeling morally obligated to help others.

If we have something that they don’t, maybe we could help.
And when we do offer our help and that still doesn’t help, we feel we must have done something wrong.
Thus starts a vicious cycle of self-blame and self-criticism.

Except that it helps no one.
And certainly makes no one happy.

When we really want to help others, we could start with listening.
Not trying to help, instead just listening.
And being positive.
While we may still not be able to give them “things”, we will still give them the right vibe.

A rather unusual way to help others is to be happy yourself.

Go to college, get your education, and chill for the rest of your life.
The biggest lie that was ever told and sold to us.

Why do we go to college?

To learn something? Not really, everything is accessible online.
To get a degree? We could do it from correspondence.
To run away from parents? Maybe that would never help.

We go to college not to learn things, rather to develop an attitude – an attitude of a student.

Once we know how to be a student, we’ve taken the best thing out of college
We go to college to learn how to become a student whenever we have to!

As a kid, three of us from school decided to speak in English, so that we could get better at it. 

Initially it was embarrassing because what we spoke wasn’t refined.
We were speaking in English when everyone around us spoke in Hindi.

My two other friends gave up on the idea within a week.
I persisted for a year! 

When a lot of people ask me today about my fluency in English, it stems from that one decision. 

One decision to continue speaking English because I wanted to.
One decision to dust myself off, even if it came with being laughed at.

As Naval Ravikant says, “Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life.”

The way to get the results you want is to persist even when you aren’t getting them now.

Imagine that a ship sank with only 5 surviving out of the 100 that were onboard. 

When asked what happened, how the ship sank, and how the 5 of them managed to survive, we will have just these 5 stories to hear. 

The stories of the 95 dead will never reach us. 

That is called survivorship bias.

Every startup funding round that we hear of in the news are the stories of people who survived. 

Everyone else’s stories – those whose startups couldn’t survive, or startups that are not doing well right now will never reach you.

It will always drug you into believing that only good things happen in startups.

The story you’re hearing is the part of the story who lived to share the story.
It’s just a part.

You’re scared of losing your job.
Or getting out of that relationship.
You fear having the most important conversation with your parents.

However, what is it that you are really scared of?
What drives that fear within you?
What leads to that paralysis?

No one can answer that for us.
Only our introspection would.

If we don’t sit and introspect, we live with that fear forever.
If we do, we get to the real fear, which isn’t as difficult either.

When we know what we are truly afraid of, handling it becomes a simpler task.