Posted on June 25, 2013 in The Life And Times

The sum of small parts

I have an attention span of maybe 20 minutes. For as long as I’ve indisputably been an adult I haven’t gotten really good at doing something, and I usually blame this 20 minute attention span. The few things I’ve got good at doing are things I can do for hours, but such things are few and can be counted on the fingers of one hand. I’ve known for years now that there’s another handful of things that want to get good at but I’ve made depressingly little progress since I’ve started working. Work is another great thing to blame my lack of accomplishment on.

I’m not going to try and use this twenty minute span rather than fight it for a while. I figure, if I do 20-30 minutes of 3 things I want to get better at everyday, that’ll only take an hour to an hour and a half. These twenty minutes should add up to something in the long run, and this time will mostly come out of time that I sit wondering, “what do I do today” after getting done with work. There’s even studies that show that doing half an hour of something everyday is better than doing three hours of it once a week because of neural pathways that get reinforced and neurons that fire in your sleep and other-such-convincing-biological-stuff.

I practiced scales on the guitar for half an hour yesterday and fifteen minutes today. But even those fifteen minutes felt pretty good. I also spent around twenty minutes writing this blog post today so that’s something. You should keep your fingers crossed and hope this isn’t just another blog post about a plan to do these things that I always wanted to do that gets forgotten about in a week.

Posted on May 11, 2011June 17, 2012 in The Life And Times

Unemployment update

Yesterday was my last day at Sterling, I’d been working there for almost two years. This brings me right back to unemployment. It was unfortunate that I didn’t really have much time to be unemployed after I was done with college. My interview with Sterling was only a few days after my last exam and five days later I had to start work. I didn’t even get a decent vacation. I’m gonna make sure I do it right this time and remain unemployed for a significant amount of time.

The Indian Institutes of Technology have a Joint Entrance Examination which is labeled as one of the toughest exams at that level. Lacs of students compete for around five thousand seats. I gave this exam after my 12th and I’d spent many months studying for it. The exam was two months after my 12th board exams and almost all I did for those 2 months was prepare for it. I’ve never been the studying kind but this time it was easy because almost everyone I was in contact with at the time was also giving the exam and I really liked what I was studying. At the end of it I didn’t get into any IIT and got a 12009 all India rank, but that’s not what I want to tell you about. The day after the exam I woke up in the morning and I had absolutely no idea what to do next. The freedom was exciting and liberating and a little unnerving at the same time. The only objective for every day of my life until then had been to get as much studying done and suddenly I didn’t need to study at all. My friend Shiv Kumar called me that day and said the exact same thing. He said he was helping his mom with chores in the kitchen because he had nothing else to do. I eventually got used to having all my time as free time for the two months that followed, in which I did almost everything you’d expect a sixteen year old to do. Those were two of the best months of my life.

Today was nothing like that day. Today I woke up with half a dozen things on my mind. I’d already made more plans for the day than I could keep and more importantly, I needed to start planning my immediate future out and start doing things that will keep me from needing another 9 to 5 job. I need to start doing these things before my enthusiasm begins waning. I need to have at least some of it worked out before I begin to forget how much having a job with fixed timings sucks.

I used to put off things I wanted to do in college for later because I thought that I’ll be better equipped to handle after being done with college. Those things only got harder to do once college was done. If you’re still in college and you’re reading this then please believe me and do all those things you may be putting off. It’s not worth it to worry about how many people think you’re too young and whether you’ll do it wrong.

Today wasn’t a bad first day of unemployment for me. I didn’t do much until the evening, but then I ran 4.03km in 25 minutes which I think is pretty damn good after not having done any real physical activity for the last six months. I have the structure of a plan for what I’m going to do worked out in my head, I just need to put it down somewhere and fill in the details. As a part of this plan, I need to share it online and update how much progress I make on a blog and be brutally honest while doing it so that I don’t drift along aimlessly. I don’t think I want to do that here. I want to make a brand new super-cool website for myself and put up a blog there. So there, that’s my task for the next few days. Draw out my plan and put it up on my new blog.