Learning right from wrongs

January 30, 2021

Learn from the mistakes of others! You can’t live long enough to make them all yourselves. – Chanakya

Life will not give us much time to try all the options to find the best possible answer/solution for problems life throws at us. Everyone is not blessed with the best opportunities to learn from the first or first few experiences. There is no right or wrong answer to the problems in life it is the perspective of one’s situation. For me, I was/am blessed to being part of things that were not right in my perspective or majoritarian society.

This article is merely my observations of life. I had a mixed bag of options/attempts/opportunities so far in life and this rant does not concern the best things that cropped up in my life. I would rather say, situations lacking the right or better approaches to problems in life. Deeper introspection of one’s life events/actions make us understand things that propelled us further and things that snowballed to impede our growth. Quoting Steve Jobs – “We can only connect dots by looking backward”, I am just attempting this approach to understand rights from my wrongs.

We (at least I) tend to see the value of something only when it becomes scarce. I had to realize the importance of things by doing an abundance of the exact opposite, by actually making it scarce.

Few of the things I learned/understood by doing it wrong, some or most of it might seem obvious to you –

Wasting my (precious) time on things adding no value to my life thought me to value time. Time can never be earned, it can only be spent.
I had a deep antipathy for socializing, I adored being a one-man army but now I realize the importance of it. Somebody making you part of their tribe is the highest calling one can have.
I am impatient and anxious in life and work, which got me nothing and nowhere besides headaches. I have come to value the calmness that makes any problem in life approachable and solvable.
I never lived fully (maybe when I was a kid) with my current consciousness, always on the edge worrying about the next and previous moves in my life. Due to which I could never immerse myself in any activity, which made me understand the importance of a focused mind at work and in life.
Most (or all) of life I have lived for and with external validations, these validations contradicted with my belief system, changing in the process to questioning my own identity. I now understand the liberation and freedom of not having to prove.
I always tend to expect something from others (usually a thing that shall add value to me) in the conversation else I tend to have lesser conversations with the individual but this has scarred me to live in isolation and self-doubt. I am letting go of expectations from conversations to listen and appreciate the other side for their time and wisdom.
At work, I learned the importance of focus and time from people interrupting me and my team during intensely focused work. I have also learned the importance of words, less is always better.
Venting about something and/or somebody is a curse in disguise, it might give relief but subconsciously breaks your character. I had to learn it the hard way and far better without it.

These observations are mostly from the last few years of my life or I could introspect my life only recently. None of the above things might apply to you but things can be avoided without taking hard ways in life.