Five things I learnt from: 2019

Shubhankar Nath
Personal
January 3, 2020

I have written a couple of blogs on my site by now - I pick a book, try to comprehend it and share with you all of what I loved the most about it, business as usual. But this blog is different, this one is very personal! Books are not the only things you could learn from, there is a far better teacher - TIME. Time is that witty stern teacher which will never stop teaching you lessons, there is just no escaping it. Every year end we get excited to welcome the new year, we set up goals, we look forward but the year that is waving us goodbye is also the oracle, if you could just turn your gaze. But then why should you invest your time in reading my quotations? To be honest, I cannot give you a convincing answer. But based on a whim, I would say maybe reading my list gives you a map to the hidden treasures time has sowed in your path.

People

Humans are undeniably the most dominant species on the planet. But why? They are not the mightiest nor the smartest to ever walk on the planet. What do you think will happen if you and a gorilla are put on an isolated island? Who has a better chance of surviving? But if you put a hundred gorilla and a hundred of us, we will not only start an agricultural revolution but also domesticate the gorillas. This is what makes us most significant species on the planet, our collective strength, collective execution, collective intelligence not individual accolades. Thus, it is in the very anthropological nature of our species to be social. From our family structure, to fashion, to the idea of nation works just because we think, believe and perceive in something collectively. Humans and their relationship with each other are much more complex than gorillas but nevertheless we have one common ground - relationship make an individual stronger. Relationship make the space-time fabric in which our identity takes existence. Your relationship with your friends, family and colleagues push you to make the best version you, they keep you in check and maybe if you are fortunate enough, at times, lend you a shoulder to rest upon for all your nuisances. In a research by LinkedIn in 2017, eighty percent of high performing professionals said their professional networking is one of the most effective weapon in their arsenal.

Here is a principle I learnt, you can use to improve your relationships – become a giver and expect nothing in return. Adam Grant, who is a professor at Warton says people behave in three of the reciprocity styles – taker, matcher and giver. Takers are highly competitive; they believe it is a dog-eat-dog situation. Givers give more than what they take, they believe the best in other people. And most people are matcher, they simply match the reciprocity style with which you will interact with them. You might argue, will it be smart to be giver in a world where you might be exploited by a taker? Yes! you will be hurt or exploited by a few takers at times, but those will be small encounters. Your yields as a giver will be far worthier than a taker in the long run. Strike meaning in every relation you have, get to know people around you better, be kind and prosperity will never leave your aid. Karma is a bitch only if you are.

Books

Understanding. Nature has given this one ability of humans so much importance as if this was our sole purpose. Humans have the largest cortex among all primates which give us our ability to understand and function in the world. But what are we doing with this blessing? This question has scratched the inner membranes of my conscience for so long. The brain feeds on input. What will happen if instead of the episode of your sitcom, you fed it some black and white pages? You will be reborn!

Here I was with a resolve to read to read fifty books a year. Spoilers – resolution thwarted. But it was not totally luckless. Reading a book changes the way you view the world, makes your discussions galvanizing and keeps that large cortex in best health. You cannot replace a book with a video or a blog about the topic. A writer while authoring a book needs to years of experience in the field and on top of it does research and works for months to produce the best of his / her knowledge (I do not read fiction as much). The sheer volume of hard work and determination needed to compose a book makes it charming enough. How much effort making a video needs in contrast?

Sl.no	Book Title	Author
1	The Autobiography of a Yogi	Paramahansa Yogananda
2	Originals	Adam Grant
3	Motivation Myth	Jedd Haden
4	Sapiens	Yuval Noah Harari
5	Astrophysics For People in a Hurry	Neil deGrass Tysson
6	Micromastery	Robert Twigger
7	Enlightenment Now	Steven Pinker
8	A brief History of Time	Stephen Hawking
9	Make Time	Jake Knapp & John Zeratsky
10	The Iracus Deception	Seth Godin
11	Give and Take	Adam Grant
12	Solomons Code	Olaf Groth & Mark Nitzberg
13	A World of Three Zeros	Muhammad Yunus
14	Triggers	Marshall Goldsmit
15	The Pope of Physics	Bettina Hoerlin
16	The meaning of Life	Emily Esfahani Smith
17	Gene	Siddharth Mukherjee
18	Brain Rules	John Medina
19	Gun Germs and Steel	Jared Diamond
20	12 Rules for Life	Jordan B Peterson
21	Big Magic	Elizabeth Gilbert
22	Factfulness	Hans Rosling
23	21 Lessons from 21st Century	Yuval Noah Harari
24	Mindset	Carol Dweck
25	Essentialism	Greg McKeown
26	Lean In	Sheryl Sandberg
27	Educated	Tara Westover
28	Endurance	Scott Kelly
29	The Last Lecture	Andy Pausch
30	The power of habit	Charles Duhigg
31	Man’s Search of Meaning	Victor E. Frankel
32	A Sense of Style	Steven Pinker

Here is a list of all the books I read in 2019, arranged in order. I cannot emphasize enough about cultivating a reading habit. And if you have fragile habit endurance like me, just look an external hedge to keep yourself in check – mine is writing for my blog.

Failure

Dr. Jonathan Crane famously said, “There’s nothing to fear, but fear itself!”, and since you have no idea who he is, do google him up. Failure is not as bad as it sounds like, in fact the real enemy is the fear of failure. There is no harm in failing, there is harm in not trying. Which, I am sure you know already – and so did I. But no one told how to fight that fear, right?

The best suggestion I can give you is to change your worldview from fixed mindset to growth mindset. Whatever traits, culpability or difficulties you have, you can overcome it if you wish to. Your growth has a parabolically increasing functional relationship with the amount of effort you put in. I was someone who was so terrible at sports that I use to be Umpire voluntarily, just to save myself from embarrassment. But when I let go of what others opinionated about me and genuinely put in some hours, I realized I am not that terrible too, it was just my mindset holding me back.

Same goes true for what you think of others, if you are un-affectionate towards somebody, it is most probably because you do not like a certain behavior of that person. Maybe you do not like a certain Bob because all he does is talk. But that is not the totality of Bob, it is his one behavior that you do not like to put up to but most not often we end up saying ‘You should stay away from Bob’. Isolate the person and the behavior and you will hit an epiphany that world is not a bad place and there is always a hope that people can grow.

Actions

If you broadly observe what your day to day actions are, it is just of sum of habits compounded. Our brain instead of spending cognitive fuel on making decisions falls back to previously made decisions and deluge us into what is called a habit loop.

Problem phase		Solution phase
1. Cue	2. Craving	3. Response	4. Reward
Your phone buzzes with a new text message.	You want to learn the contents of the message.	You grab your phone and read the text.	You satisfy your craving to read the message. Grabbing your phone becomes associated with your phone buzzing.

The loop feels inescapable. But breaking out from a habit should not always be about major changes. Jeff Olson calls it the slight edge – the small disciplines that will help you fight mediocracy. Just so that you can relate more to it, I have listed a couple of tweaks I made in my life. You can pick anything that resonates with you. These small disciplines will not show instant results but when compounded it will morph to be titanic. The slight edge that makes you a sharp knife.

Having a slow morning: Mornings are most productive time and if you are not using for your retrospection and self improvement; you are losing out on a treasure. To have a slow morning you need to wake up early instead of rushing into autopilot. A lot of people think it to be more difficult than it actually is. What if you had a morning 7 a.m. flight to Goa? How would you plan your night?

Picking up a hobby: To say that I have zero artistic qualities is an overstatement. But I had declared a war with mediocrity. So, I picked up the easiest and cheapest way to sketch – pens. And if you read the first line of the paragraph again and look at the compound interest, I will say – I played a royal flush (best hand in poker).

Make Calls: Set a time aside during your weekends just to make calls. Not only to your spouse or close friends but to your distant relatives, elderly people in your life and long-lost friends. It will make you someone very hard to forget.

Observe

I kept this section at last as this is the part that is most difficult to pour into words. To observe is absurdly-meaningful, remarkably-rudimentary and cannot be expressed without bulldozing some oxymoron. Let’s look at it this way that to understand how stars work, one needs to understand the atom similarly to understand the world, one needs to understand the mind. To concur the world, you need to concur the inner. You might think that you are in control of what you are doing with your mind and body, that you are the auctoritatis, but try to silence your mind for two minutes you will realize who is in control. Ostensibly it seems to be a very easy thing but being effortless is the most difficult task. Training a monkey to be still is easier than to train your mind not to wander off.

And what will we find when we really observe ourselves? The answer is best left to curiosity.