So, the new year is here. Happy New Year. The day has been fabulous to say the least. In that sense, the year has started off on a great note. The very first thing I did in the morning was a pending DIY worktable. The work is not complete, but is about 50% complete. And this is great, because this is what I want to do the rest of the year – do stuff myself. ...
It’s almost a tradition now that I am writing a birthday post every year. This year, I am a little late for the post. I wanted to think through and reflect on the year that just went by and set goals for the year that is looking at me now. Staring at me, for I haven’t started anything yet! 2014: Last year was good. I had two targets for 2014. I achieved one. I missed out on the other. But I pulled off a third that came unannounced! This is actually a proud moment for me and the wife. We came to Singapore with multiple major agendas: finance, family, business and life. I guess we took care of the finance to some extent. Of course, these are sliding targets. They keep moving along with you and perhaps never quite complete unless you hit the jackpot or sell your company to Facebook/Google. We did neither, so we expect the sliding window to continue with us. I had consciously avoided setting any targets for myself last year. As a result, it looks like I did achieve my targets 😉 ...
So I figured out how the pain balms work – it starts burning your skin so much that you forget the pain and start worrying about the burn and fall asleep. Sleep heals the pain. Of course, I am kidding.
I want to learn to sell. I get this feeling that selling is perhaps the most important activity in any business. And by sell, I mean getting out there and meeting people and talking to them and probably persuading them. I haven’t, in my 30+ years of existence, ever initiated a conversation with a stranger. I usually take 1-2 days to even become comfortable talking professional stuff. It’s usually quite some time before I would engage in casual chats! So, what I am seeking to do is just the opposite of who I am! ...
So I came across Myer Brigg’s type indicator test when I was reading something on Quora. The geek that I am, I had to try it out first. I haven’t read up about it yet, but I felt the need to write something I noticed. And so here it is. This test is sorta like a psychometry test. I was told, during interview days just after finishing engineering school, that these tests were used to identify your personality, whether you were clear in your head or some such stuff. I never actually gave one, but was always preparing myself for one. It so happens that I quickly learnt to locate the patterns and game the test! ...
Last friday was the first time I ever wore a jacket. Not that the situation demanded one, but I knew it wouldn’t look too odd if I did. I always loved to wear a jacket, but given that I spent most of my time in Chennai, just wearing a formal attire with leather shoe would make you like you are over-dressed for more occasions. Mostly the folks higher up in the value chain got away with the jackets and us engineer folks generally looked best in our dirty jeans and some stupid tee. ...
Strange as it may seem, I seem to have fun with absurdity. Everybody does, to some extent. But sometimes I have fun at somethings that don’t even catch the attention of my wife. To the extent she now believes I am a tad weird in this topic. For instance, a few of these one liners gets me to laugh every single time! Most people are immune to it after the second or third times! ...
It feels good, sometimes, to know that you were not the only one to make certain mistakes. Or that you were not the only one in your situation. Sadistic as it may sound, I think I just got to talk to another person who shares my story. While I wish him the best in his endeavors, I wish I had known him earlier or spoke more often. For a fact, when I told a few of my friends in Cognizant that I was leaving the company to research at IITM, most of them said – “you gotta be crazy! why would you waste your life? And what can IITM give you that CTS cannot already? Just talk to your manager and get one or two onsite opportunities and you’ll be just fine!”. Sometimes I have wondered if they were correct. But the experience and inspiration I got from my stint at IITM is unparalleled. Nothing to look back and regret. ...
A good friend shared this article with me – Why I want you to steal my ideas. If you didn’t already know from the title, this one is by the renowned blogger Seth Godin. I love Seth’s work and I read his blog regularly. Some of his writings are very thought provoking and makes you want to re-evaluate your stand on many day-to-day things. Here is my favorite line from the above link. ...
Rohini and I have been on a movie marathon recently. We caught up on quite a few movies after a long lull. I am going to quickly summarize my thoughts here. The first one in the series is “Jobs”. We were quite bored one Friday night about 2 weeks back and decided to catch a movie. After a lot of thought on what we’d want to see, we decided to catch up on Jobs movie. While I don’t have a great memory of the movie, I really would give it to the make-up team. Kutcher looks uncannily like Jobs in a lot of the shots and so do the lead cast. That was fantastic. Some of the points seem to have departed from whatever little I have read of Jobs’ life. So I didn’t quite like the distortion. Verdict: its ok if you haven’t seen this one. Perhaps, “pirate of the silicon valley” is a little more interesting! ...