Category: Value Creation

Bob is one of my trusted friends.
We became friends when he was doing MBA at Wharton School and I was a postdoc in UPenn.
We chatted last weekend on the phone and I came to know he was suffering from a long illness.
I am compelled to write this piece of content based on two conversations that I had with him, one last weekend and the second conversation almost a year ago.
I wish my friend a speedy recovery.
I remembered our conversation from almost a year ago which was somehow like this.

“Bob, you are a very good investment officer, you’ve created and delivered tons of value for the society,” I said.
“But sometimes I cry and sometimes I scream, and I feel pain and headache when I go home in the evening,” Bob said.
I asked “do you have any idea, why”?
He said, “I have no idea but I become drained and overwhelmed. I don’t have time to heal and relax, my relationship and health both are deteriorating.”
“Bob, everybody has limits in life, you are exceptional in your area of expertise, investment and banking, it doesn’t mean you can serve any number of clients in a day including your private networking session in the evening, and I know, they all like and love you and need you.
It’s not that you can serve more clients because they like you, your body which is your engine also needs self-care, good fuel as a diet, quality rest and sleep, and nurturing family relationships.
My friend, you have one body to work on in this life so you must learn how to say ‘no’ to at least a few things so that you can optimize your life and health for the long run,” I added.

It’s not only Bob’s problem, we all want to be liked by everyone, every family member, every friend, every relative, every coworker, and every community member.
This is the natural human psyche.
But at one point when we introspect our life we realize that it is absolutely not possible to be liked by everyone.
In the progression of life, we come across many things which are affected by not being little different than just being nice.

Being nice all the time is fool’s errand

Usually being nice to everyone and being liked by them is not our choice, it’s not going to solve our life’s purpose and meaning.
We must be strong first before making others strong so that flight attendants always say put on your mask first before helping others.
Being nice to everybody always basically becomes a recurring tool to lie to yourself.
It should feel energizing, empowering, creative, but if it feels exhausting and unfulfilling, then we have to stop being nice to everyone.
So relying on saying ‘yes’ to everyone and everything is a fool’s errand.

When we say ‘yes’ to everyone, we stop being our authentic selves and start to pretend to be someone which we are not, and that’s not going to serve us as we work to step out into different roles in life.
Saying ‘yes’ to everyone and everything might be ‘no’ for our physical and mental space or recreation and relaxation time.
That could also be ‘no’ for self education or self healing time or community or household contribution.
This could impact negatively on essential things like health, longevity, and prosperity depending on our choice and calling.
Remember, saying ‘no’ from our mouth is a complete sentence, it’s not a word.
But to do this we need practice and it demands a little bit of extra work.
It doesn’t come naturally, so we have to practice for it by starting with small things.
The bottom line is: If we move in the path that we want to be liked by everyone, we, most of the time, make bad decisions and remain unhappy.

Ultimately, these bad decisions drain time and energy every minute, pile up mental space, and promote nonsense that doesn’t matter to us anymore.
Most importantly, it ignores the essence of our life’s purpose which are basically, who we are and what we want.

Nothing happens until we decide when and how to say ‘no’ to at least a few things, we have to make a habit and just watch how our life revolves around and moves forward.

One lesson I learned is we have to set boundaries to say ‘no’.
Boundaries aren’t about saying ‘no’ to my friends, family members and coworkers.
Boundaries are about saying ‘yes’ to myself.

All we need is an enforced boundary to protect our health, time, joy, peace, and fulfillment.
Just be clear and mindful, it’s our job to protect us mentally and physically, nobody else’s.
Boundaries are to serve our purpose and goal, not to hurt other people around us.

The habit of saying ‘no’ comes with an alternative mindset

One way to associate with the habit of ‘no’ is to make it a ritual by associating with the right people as per our life’s goals and desires.
This association teaches us to prioritize the important stuff and let go of many others.
At one point in my life, I always hung out with wrong people who were not strong enough to make good decisions about health and longevity.
They were always tired and lethargic by hustling and running all day, no proper diet, no quality sleep, no exercise, no mediation.
And everytime I used to say ‘yes’ to these people, I was also draining myself in my private life.
So, this is one of my own personal experiences.
We have to find a group of people who challenge and inspire us, we have to spend time with quality people, and it will change our thinking.
The habit of saying ‘no’ comes with an alternative mindset and inspiring people’s association helps to cultivate this mindset.

Research says that the people we habitually associate with determine as much as 95 percent of our success or failure in life.
Upgrading our association with quality people is about making choices that make us feel amazing and fulfilling.
Recalling Jim Rohn’s statement, “we are the average of the five people we spend the most time with.”
Remember, no one ever reached Mount Everest alone, there is always a squad to accomplish a goal.

Ronald Burt, a professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of business says, “most successful people are labeled as “brokers”, they move between different networks, pass information around and build bridges between groups.
We must be this kind of brokers to create and deliver values in the society.
From my own research, these people say ‘no’ 99 percent of the time and say ‘yes’ only one percent of the time.
Once they say ‘yes’ in anything, they always live with that decision.
Keep in mind, always ‘yes’ to everyone and everything robs our dreams.

Warren Buffett and Seth Godin on ‘no’ advice

Warren Buffett, one of the most successful investors of all time, says, “the key to success is to say ‘no’ to almost everything. The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say ‘no’ to almost everything.”

By making a habit of saying ‘no’ take our productivity actually up rather than down.
More mental space will be created by saying ‘no’ to many things.
What do we do with our new mental space?
It’s up to us how to use this free mental space.
We may not know immediately because dot connections in the mental space haven’t been discovered yet and real pictures don’t exist yet but eventually we grow neural connections and discover why we said ‘no’.
For example, if you would have asked anybody in 1990 about Facebook and Google websites, mobile applications, data analytics, and online merchandising, what would those people say?
They would say, “ this guy is sick, doesn’t know what he is talking about.
Facebook and Google are the result of new mental space and new neural connections by saying ‘no’ to many things by Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin.

By saying ‘no’ to many and ‘yes’ to few invites new neural connections that bring creativity and fulfillment.
Creativity and fulfillment involves breaking out of established patterns in order to look at things in different ways.
So to do this we must practice ‘no’ to many things.
We make habits gradually and build life on it and act on the basis of how we perceive the world.
Just skip your regular 30 minutes of mundane running for five days and try meditation, you will know what your body is looking for.
We start to see the world and our life as they are at the moment, not as they were and they will be.
Saying ‘no’ requires us to be present and gives us a fresh, positive perspective of the world.

Seth Godin, an author and prolific innovator says, “just saying ‘yes’ because you can’t bear the short-term pain of saying ‘no’ is not going to help you do the work.”
By the way, his book ‘The Dip’ has had a huge influence on me.
This book is mainly about quitting and focus.
Focusing our energy and our reserves on something we can be proud of and put our name on without using the sentence “I can’t” is an invaluable lesson.

Conclusion

The more we invest our ‘yes’ into mundane things, the more rigid our life becomes and the more sufferings we invite.
So please try to stop living always on auto-pilot, learn to say ‘no’ at least a few times and ‘yes’ to quality things that bring a healthy and joyous life with purpose.

Yam Timsina, PhD, writes primarily on health basics, scientific progress, social upliftment, and value creation.

“The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present.”
-Abraham Lincoln

My friend said, “my father recently passed away. When my father was in deathbed, he talked to my mom and me to say good-bye. My father could barely speak. I remembered, my mom was crying all the time during the entire conversation.”
“At one point my father drew me closer to him and whispered to me in my ear, “son, don’t live life like what I did. I’m telling you now, I didn’t do many things right in my life. I didn’t do many things right for your mother, your sister, your younger brother and for you. Son, promise me you won’t be outsourced or offshored like what happened to me.”

This conversation with my friend shocked me and I started to think how does anyone carry one past life experience so heavily till deathbed.
This conversation compelled me to write this content.

I understand losing our job to outsourcing and offshoring is no more fun than losing it to a robot and automation in the future.
Outsourcing means a company hires a third party to do our job.
Offshoring means a company replaces us with someone else in a different country.
Offshoring currently appears the far bigger problem to many expensive countries like USA jobs.
The recent study suggests that a quarter of all jobs could be offshored in coming years.

Let’s put this into perspective why this is happening so quickly.
First of all, we are no longer in the industrial age, we are in the knowledge worker age, this will eventually bring down the industrial age workforce.
Now we have to be open to knowledge workers and their productivity and it can happen anywhere on the planet because of accessible technology.

When we face a challenge, we tackle it, which is called success.
And suddenly we face a new challenge but we try to tackle it in an old way which no longer works for some reason, this is called failure.
We have to understand that today’s knowledge worker age is different from past industrial age models.
This is one of the big reasons for outsourcing and offshoring which will remain prevalent in today’s knowledge worker economy.

Do you think that the big tech companies are spending money on machines and equipment or knowledge?
Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft alone spent a combined $125 billion in R&D in 2020 and it’s increasing every year after that.
These figures are larger than the total country budget in many parts of the world.
These companies are not treating humans as machines and equipment, they are treating humans as potential knowledge power.
They are playing the game of human knowledge transfer across many fields on the planet.
If we start to think and manage people as equivalents to machines and equipment then there is a serious problem.
Human beings are not things, as Stephen Covey said, humans are four dimensional in nature: body, mind, heart, and spirit.
The new knowledge worker age at present is emerging at a rapid pace by giving equal opportunity to each of the four dimensional human components.
They are basically the combination of four intelligences that we have: physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual.

We have a highly productive economy with a highly productive workforce in the USA.
But our workforce isn’t productive just by virtue of everyone with a college degree, because college degrees still have many reminiscences of the industrial age.
Sixty four percent of the US population never get a college degree.
Just for the sake of information, in Switzerland, this is even higher, 75 percent don’t have a college degree, yet they are far more productive on average than USA workers.
So, somewhere something needs to be re-evaluated.

In the recent past, a college degree was a prerequisite for employment in cutting-edge companies.
That’s no longer the case at present and probably will be more in the future because knowledge, nowadays, is found everywhere, not confined only in college classrooms.
The world has changed and is still changing.
New knowledge is being distributed globally via the internet technology, we are no longer constrained in a particular area, school, or university for specific knowledge.
We can take Harvard and MIT courses, if we want, from Kathmandu and Johannesburg at the same time.
Just check Apple, the giant trillion dollar company.
Half of its new hires haven’t graduated from college but they might have real world application knowledge or Apple trains them once they get hired.

If we go at the core of our human potential and spirit, there is certainly no college diploma needed for becoming amazingly successful.
Here are a few examples of amazingly successful people without fancy college diplomas.
Apple’s founder, Steve Jobs, Microsoft’s founder Bill Gates, Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg, are the richest people on the planet as proof.
Here is another astounding list of top multi-million and multi-billion dollar companies whose founders didn’t go college or didn’t make it through.
Twitter, Fitbit, WhatsApp, WordPress, Tumblr, Square, Stripe, Spotify, Oracle, Napster, Uber, Dropbox, Virgin, Dell, DIG, IAC, just to name a few.
Many of them are top technology companies in the world and they do businesses based on knowledge workers.
The point I’m trying to make is that a college degree is not the only means to success in today’s knowledge based world.
Let’s be honest, I’m not discouraging any of you or your children from attending or finishing college.
I myself have a PhD and Ivy league training.
But what I’m saying here is my understanding based on my last 15 years of research, reading, work, visit, communication, and whole life experiences in poor, developing, and most developed countries.
My whole purpose is to change the conversation to real knowledge or education that gives real value to society rather than a diploma on the wall.

One more time, I’m not saying lightly, as I said I’m a PhD and Ivy league trainer.
I think higher education is of enormous individual and social value.
But we can receive a fine college education anywhere if we become intentional about our core career, values and success.

One more point, we can’t eat and live with the prestige of school that we attend, especially in the future, which we always emphasized in the past.
The person who stands out in the society would be irrelevant to his educational degree or background very soon.
For example, where the person went to college or, indeed, whether he or she finished college or not, those factors won’t be huge.
Highly successful people work their tails off, they learn on the work what’s required to accomplish their tasks. They think about big problems, try to solve these problems, and end up becoming very successful themselves.
Because of these traits, they make financial independence no matter what their precise educational background is.
Remember, elite Ivy League schools gather many successful people from across the globe; they rarely make people successful in their classrooms.
In many cases, connections matter in today’s interconnected world but that helps to access the first job.
But if we aren’t performing up to good standard expectations, then the Harvard or MIT sweater that we like to wear won’t save our job in the future.

Successes are built on trust and power of knowledge transfer, but most of us think more in terms of me, my wants, my needs, my rights.
This “my” mentality doesn’t help in this global knowledge age.
Many successful businesses are run by the diverse economic rules of the global marketplace and many organizations are run by the respected cultural rules of the knowledge workplace.

Keep in mind that nobody is a whole chain in today’s knowledge world.
Each one of us is a link of a chain.
But if we take away one link and the chain is broken.
You guessed it.
Core sciences and medical sciences are no more isolated sciences and are more connected to information technology.
For example, one whole body MRI powered by AI can detect early stage cancer, brain aneurysms, Alzheimer’s, visceral fat, and liver fat.
Similarly, business, finance, and accounting are equally interconnected to information science.
Software drives today’s economy and software requires very few assets to generate large income streams. Many physical assets are becoming more and more irrelevant.
Today, we need each other’s expertise to be happy, healthy, and successful in any area.
We need someone and someone needs us.
Isolated islands we’re not anymore.
To make this thing called “life” work, we gotta lean and support, relate and respond, give and take, reach out and embrace.
These all are core human values in the knowledge worker age.
Let’s just take Facebook.
Why do you think that Facebook has over 2 billion users?
Because humans are hungry for a strong sense of connection.
Unfortunately, Facebook is not meeting the need for authentic intimacy at the moment but it’s still connecting us anyway so that Facebook is growing every single day.
At the moment, the majority of people show only the best parts of their lives on Facebook.
Who knows, in the future, people might bring their real or worst parts of lives on Facebook and could be the real world education platform for many of us.
Facebook is a global tool for us, how we use it is up to us.

One more example of the knowledge world, how it is shaping us, we are learning new and new things on the web each and everyday so quickly.
I was watching a TED talk the other day from Sam Berns on you tube, I saw how life treats some of us.
Sam was born with Progeria, a rare genetic disease that speeds aging by a factor of eight.
I didn’t know about this disease at all but now I know through technology.
Progeria is triggered by a single devastating typo in our DNA code.
That one mutation floods the body with progerin, a toxic nasty protein that weakens cell nuclei.

Recently, I read a research article, again on the web, about the relationship between the brain and gut as a two way street.
I knew that, in patients with Alzheimer’s, the gut microbiome gets out of balance.
When researchers altered the diets of mice in a study, they found a dramatic reduction in amyloid, killer trash of Alzheimer’s, and neuroinflammation.
They take these bacteria from the gut, figure out which metabolites within them are useful and make them available to people.
I learn all of these from my comfy sofa, no need to go Stanford’s library or attend professor’s classroom.
This is the power of the new knowledge world, we can get whatever we want from our living room.

At present, I am also learning to meditate through an app at home.
I don’t have to walk to a meditation center, I don’t have to pay money to meditation instructors, I don’t have to drive and spend money on gasoline, but I just need internet in my phone or laptop.
Remember, meditation is an important lifestyle habit to establish.
It is a process, when our mind wanders in this busy world, we have to bring it back to our focus, that could be a word or breath, or sound but we have to bring it back over and over.
Everybody’s mind wanders, no question but only the regular practice of bringing it back, over and over, makes it powerful.
Researchers at Harvard University found that meditation alone can change the expression of genes that regulate inflammation, programmed cell death called apoptosis, and oxidative stress in only a few weeks.
Many studies have shown that our brain waves become more coherent when we meditate.
It increases the gray matter in the frontal cortex of the brain which is related to working memory and executing decision making.

Here is a small snapshot of how we can become resistant proof of outsourcing and offshoring.
Let’s say you are happily working as a financial manager.
Ask yourself the basic question.
Do I still enjoy my quiet and sober clients?
If the answer is no, increase the knowledge in other occupational areas, otherwise digital advisors will replace you soon.
If the answer is yes, study the global financial market.
Who knows, maybe the financial business in India could use your service.

One final note, I would like to add.
All of these founders or CEO’s of these multi-million or multi-billion dollar companies that I mentioned above who don’t have college diplomas know the value of real knowledge.
They read a lot, they experiment a lot, they research tremendously.
And almost all of them meditate so that they remain focused to solve our problems to make our lives easier, and eventually we make them amazingly successful financially.
If we don’t want to be outsourced and offshored then let’s learn a little bit from them.

Thank you for your time.
– Yam Timsina

“A man has two lives to live, and the second one begins when he realizes he only has one.”
– Confucious
One day many years ago I was having an especially bad day at my teaching job. I was in school late in the evening. I called my wife and said, “I’m sick of this crappy job, not by the job itself but by its corrosive working environment. Let’s quit this job and run away to the USA. I’m not entirely sure I knew how to go to the USA at the time.”

My wife said, “Sounds like a pretty good idea. I can help you to research how to go to the USA and if successful, I can also help you to buy the air tickets too.”

One year later from that phone call, the lovely Macomb city of Illinois welcomed me. I was learning I’d need to be careful what I suggested around this woman I married.

She is my hero not because she is a great wife, although she is.
She is my hero because she is a great human being.
She takes the time to care about people in her life.
She talks little but thinks distinctly beyond the periphery.

When I was a PhD student a while back, at midnight around my PhD qualifying exam, pregnant with our first baby, she sensed I was struggling to cope with the incoming baby, life and, of course, the hectic pressure of research proposals. She paused, and then, in that tunnel of life circle, told me to spend less time staring at what’s in front of me (the book), and more time visualizing the outcome.
Having a clear image of the outcome, as she suggested, in my mind pushed me going.
It gave me clear purpose, direction, and intent.
I remember many of those life lessons from her during the course of living.

Jack Canfield said beautifully, “ Everything you want is on the other side of fear.”
I sometimes think, “really.”
What is the other side of fear?
Most of us: fear of losing our job, fear of losing our investments, and most importantly, fear of losing our loved ones.
I understand, we can control some fears, we can minimize some, but some we can’t.
This is one of the basic rules of life.

As humans, we have one obligation to society.
To ensure we, and our parents, sons and daughters, are not a burden to others.
The rest is our personal choice.
Make your own and make the world a far more interesting place by picking one choice at a time, influence others by that choice and live the life happily ever.

How to make personal choices is another hurdle in our life.

We have to deep down to understand how choice appears in our mind?

I would like to share a parable about the monk and the minister.

Two very close friends grow up and choose their quite different paths in life.
One becomes a monk and the other a rich and powerful minister to the king.
After many years they meet in a place.
As they continue talking, the minister uses pity words on the monk.
He continues, “if you would have learned to serve the king, you wouldn’t have to live this poor monk life.”
Monk replies, “if you would have learned to live on monk life, you would not have to be a servant to the King.”

I guess, the essence is, the majority of our lives fall somewhere between monk and minister.
It’s up to us whether we want to go closer to the monk or minister side.
Personally, I want to go closer to the monk side.

Choosing to do something is the single most powerful tool we have for navigating this complex world we’ve created.
Understanding it mentally is critical.
If we choose something to master, the chosen task becomes a wonderful servant. If we don’t, it will surely make us servants.

“But dad,” my little daughter inquired.

“I know choice is important. I just don’t want to spend my life thinking about it.”
“Many people in this world have much more to do with their precious time and mind than thinking about a single choice. We have to build roads, discover medicines, break world records, create amazing technologies, teach new generations, and establish new businesses,” she added.

I told her, “take time, pick one at a time and start doing.”

Here is one more example, from my personal experience, of how choice appears to us.

Recently, I experienced some health issues in my body, and no doctors clearly diagnosed it so far and I chose to read about body, disease, and nutrition.
I was looking for some answers myself.

I realized.
We are at the point of transition.
I believe we are moving forward from a focus on survival of the fittest to sustainability for all.
World is challenging us to use our essential creativity and shared wisdom to address problems from new dimensions, new structures, and new concepts.
We definitely have to reinvent ourselves along the way.
These thoughts came to my mind once MDs were unable to diagnose my problem.

Initially, I never thought that our body and mind works this way, but my mind forced me to read things that are relevant to me in the current circumstance because, the bottom line, I have to live healthy and happy, if I can.

I learned some interesting facts about our body which are related to my current health issue.

I learned one defense system in our body: microbiome.
We have 40 trillion bacteria in our body to defend our health.
One special bacterium, Akkermansia mucinophila, is very important out of trillions of bacteria in our body.
It is key to control our body mass, metabolism, and immunity.
Lean people have more of these bacteria in their gut than obese people.
Pomegranate, cranberry, turmeric, green tea, and chili pepper help this bacteria to grow in the gut.
These foods make the intestine secrete more mucus making the gut environment better to thrive.
Foods like kimchi, sauerkraut, cheddar cheese, and sourdough bread are very good for our microbiome system.

In reality, our bacteria eat what we eat.
They metabolize the food and drink we consume.
After that they create either beneficial or harmful byproducts that influence our health.

I learned about another defense system in our body: immunity.
Foods like blackberries, walnuts, and pomegranate are very good for our immune system.

I learned about angiogenesis in our body, which I had no idea before how it works.

Angiogenesis is the process by which 60 thousand miles of blood vessels are formed.
If all our blood vessels were lined up end to end, they would encircle the earth twice. Remarkably, it takes only 60 seconds from the time your heart pumps out a drop of blood for it to circulate throughout the body and back again.

I learned that soy, green tea, coffee, tomatoes, red wine, and hard cheese influence our angiogenesis.

Green tea contains a bioactive compound called epigallocatechin-3-gallate (EGCG), which is a potent angiogenesis inhibitor.
It reduces abdominal fat and waist circumference.
Foods like turmeric, soybeans, ginseng, and broccoli all prevent unwanted blood vessels from supplying nourishment to cancer cells, and they suppress the growth of fat cells too.

I found an amazing fact that Asian people, especially Japanese, live so long, why?
Probably, because they consume lots of soy, vegetables, and tea in their diet.
“Really”, I thought.
These foods reduce the chance significantly to lower risk for developing breast and other cancers.

As we embrace our life choices, whatever is yours’, I invite you all to share our life experiences, knowledge, and wisdom.
Deep inside us, we are designed to share our wisdom with the global community to make it a better place.
It is this great energy with our choice in life the Universe that drives communities, cultures, companies, and countries to new heights.
The more we can put our good energy with our choice into this great unfolding, the better off we all will be.

We owe it to each other to make this a rewarding place to live called the world.
I love to read about body, health, disease, and nutrition, though I’m a chemist by training.
What’s yours’?
Together, we will continue to change the world, one person and one choice at a time.
It is time for us to slow down, breathe, and push on our choice.
What we do certainly makes a difference, and we have to decide what kind of difference we want to make.
Remember, you owe it to yourself to live a life you richly deserve with your own choice.

Thank you for your time.
-Yam Timsina

“Let food be thy medicine” -Hippocrates


“Three years ago, a fellow came in. He explained that he wasn’t here simply for a coffee, but also because he had heard that I’m a food expert. ‘I don’t know a thing about food, nutrition, health, and any of that stuff,’ he confessed. ‘The only thing I know about health is to eat different varieties of vegetables throughout our life. The rest of it makes no sense to me”, Jacob remembered.
By the way, Jacob is a 96 years old man still running his coffee shop in Nampa, Idaho.
He still works 10 hours everyday.
“Even a sleeping person doesn’t relax as much as a vegetable eater does. It’s about being alert and international in what we fuel our body,” Jacob continued.

“We cannot do a lot of things in life. One thing we can do everyday that has a massive influence on our health and longevity is the decision about how to run our lifestyle.”

Jacob’s story made me remember two very close friends of mine during my undergraduate years.
One became a civil servant and the other an entrepreneur.
Both had a passion in their respective areas, both would work very hard to achieve it.
But, both had completely different lifestyles, they modified their lifestyle according to their passionate occupation.
My friend who became an entrepreneur had amazing interests and attitudes.
I saw on him that being an entrepreneur is more a lifestyle as much as it is a job because you never escape your tasks on holidays and weekends.
I saw my entrepreneur friend tired from it but he wouldn’t just quit.
He carried it all, both the success and the failures.

But my friend who became a civil servant had a lifestyle of dedicating his holidays and weekends to his hobbies like hiking and spirituality.
He would spend an ample amount of time practicing and reading books on body, food, and spirituality.
He reduced his intake of animal protein in such a way I was amazed.
In front of my eyes, he changed his lifestyle in a quite different direction.

What I saw in both was a dream, the motivation, and the commitment to grow and evolve their respective profession to meet the changing landscape, survive ups and downs, and create a sustained satisfaction in life.
That was due to adoption of their different respective lifestyles.

Seeing them growing in front of my eyes, I realized that time, not money, is the scarcest resource.
Believe it or not, our time dictates our lifestyle.
Successful civil servants means managing time very carefully and understanding the essence of life, serving people all the time.
I’m sure hiking on weekends and reading books on nutrition is not fun for many, though, he chose the style amazingly.

Successful entrepreneurs sometimes get rich, but they are also deeply motivated by the desire to accomplish worthwhile things: to create, to make a difference in people’s lives, and to leave a legacy for future generations.
I learned that the most successful embrace, that could be civil service or entrepreneurship, both weights are not just as a way of doing business but as a way of lifestyle.
There is a popular saying which fits both of them.
Preparation does not guarantee success, but a lack of proper lifestyle will almost always lead to failure.
My entrepreneur friend became very successful and rich in a short time.
Unfortunately, he died prematurely due to illness.
He died of complications of atherosclerosis.
After his death I knew that the most common diet-related diseases of the cardiovascular system are hypertension and atherosclerosis.
He died not by other reasons but by his poor focus on his body, especially poor nutrition, and overall negligence.

There are many factors of illness in our life, we don’t see it in our journey, but one dominant factor is our everyday fuel.
Yes, everyday fuel, our food.
Food is a fuel in our body that drives our engine.
If we don’t pay attention to it and ignore it then our engine doesn’t go far and doesn’t run longer.
Even if life is busy, we don’t have time, please, create time for our everyday fuel, just don’t go with the flow whatever you find on the way, think twice before putting in our engine.

Yes, yes, and yes.
Today’s world is fast paced, we are busy with our work and schedule, we don’t have time to think about our food, we have to travel, so on and so on.
If we are not serious about it, there is so much confusing information everyday from media reports.
We have social media, we have smartphones, just one click away.
We don’t verify the information, we just go with it.
One day fat becomes good, the next day it’s bad.
One day you get a report that says to avoid carbohydrates in your meal, but the next day you hear that whole grains prevent cancer.
One day you hear that a little wine is good for our hearts, but too much is bad.
And we don’t know what amount is too much or what amount is little?
To be honest, which information is actually correct?
We don’t know and we don’t have time to study and research because we give very little priority on what we eat.

Interestingly, while I was writing this article, my wife said, “I don’t want to seem cynical, baba, but if it’s so easy to focus on what we eat, why isn’t everyone doing it?” she asked.
“Lack of knowledge. You and I talk about this all the time. Our schools don’t teach food skills. Our family members don’t talk about good foods. And just as important, there are very few places that an aspiring learner can turn to,” I added.

A lot of foods are not actually healthy as advertised in the media.
I would give one example.
One diet called the Atkins diet instructs people to consume a lot of fat, animal proteins, and tells people not to eat carbohydrates like rice, bread, pasta, or potatoes.
Yes, avoiding carbohydrates keeps insulin level low, and people indeed lose weight quickly. But large quantities of animal proteins and saturated fats expedite atherosclerosis.
That’s what happened to my dear entrepreneur friend that I explained earlier.
Remember, my friend died earlier, but he died slim.

Another lifestyle change for healthy living is fasting.
Very few people are aware of it.
Fasting is not a secret part of life, it is also a part of a good lifestyle for good health.
During fasting, our body draws upon our body’s “storage “, first glycogen in the liver, then fat in the fat stores, and to a lesser extent protein in the muscles and connective tissues.
Our body produces ketone bodies, which are essential second fuel sources for cells and the brain.
Fasting is a conscious renunciation, a controlled and self -determined experience of deficiency.
That’s why successful fasting increases self-efficacy.
During fasting, we overcome an existential hunger in a way that gives us physical and mental strength.

If we do fasting then we also need a healthy diet when we are not on fasting.
But the biggest question is, what makes our diet healthy?

Few tips are here which I’ve learned, though, it’s just the tip of the iceberg.

We should eat whole grain products as our main course in our diet which are excellent sources of fiber.
They also contain B vitamins and minerals such as magnesium and zinc, because they still hold the sprout, bran, and the outer husks.

We should eat a lot of vegetables in our meal, a lot more, actually, lower amounts of fruits is ok but not vegetables.
One vegetable I would mention is Beets.
Regular consumption of it protects the vessels in the gastrointestinal tract, beet juice lowers blood pressure, and improves athletic performance, which I experienced when I was running for marathon.
Leafy greens, cruciferous vegetables, avocados, pumpkin, bell peppers, tomatoes, legumes, peas,and lentils can not be avoided.

We should eat a lot of healthy fats from olive oil, canola oil, nuts especially walnuts: the queen of nuts; pistachios, peanuts, flax, and, of course, almonds.

Fish is not important in our meals as advertised, meat should be a small part of our diet or even no part at all. It doesn’t matter whether we eat meat or not if we eat a lot of different vegetables.

We should eat a very small amount of dairy products and eggs in our diet.

We must take some species, especially, the queen of spice: turmeric; ginger, saffron, onion, and garlic. No compromise on these spices.

Please avoid at all costs: donuts, pizza, burgers, and potato chips.
Run, run, and run fast.

One thing is certain that some illnesses are inevitable, not everything in our life can be controlled, but we can do a lot to prevent chronic illnesses from developing, and thus enjoying a greater age in good health like what Jacob is having.
For this goal to achieve, in my view, we need two things.
Let’s make a healthy lifestyle a personal responsibility, let’s be the owner of our healthy life.
Let’s make sure that without a healthy diet, excellent health is impossible.

Thank you for your time.
-Yam N Timsina

“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” -Lao-tzu

Do you know Aesop from Aesop’s Fables?
I guess, you probably remember a lot from your childhood.
He has been with us alive for a very long time.
Really a very long time from the past, ancient time, at least, think of more than 2400 years ago.
I don’t know how much you know about Aesop, he was a slave, who lived in ancient Greece from 620-564 B.C.
He was eventually freed from slavery because of his amazing story telling abilities.
His more than 600 fables are equally amazing and magnificent today.
His stories are equally inspiring and creative for us today.
My question to you, was he a genius?
Probably you say – yes.
He became a genius in story telling no matter what the circumstance was, as being a slave.
Even though he was slave, he was constantly imagining stories.
He used to imagine stories very consciously all the time.
Remember, words here, imagination and consciousness.

Humans learnt to lie an hour after they learned to talk, this is another example of how genius our mind is.
Think of any life events, why does each event produce either positive or negative effects at the same time?
For example, for me loud music is irritating, it excites my temper and pressure but for my daughter it is delightful and vibrant.
Why?
I don’t know.
I remember one of my neighbors, divorce became traumatic for him because it was unwanted for him and he was trying to avoid it by all means.
But last week my cousin’s friend got divorce and it was a desired and happy moment for her.
This is another example of how our mind takes the same event as a happy or stressful moment for each of us differently.
Because our mind is a genius in itself.
The only thing we have to do is how to react to the moments accepted by our brain.
The difference between ordinary and genius minds is that the latter learns how to react with each life event very early in its development by its intuitive and imaginative practices.
Think of the imaginative process of Aesop.

Our mind is very complex and the way it works is not only amazing, it’s very instructive too.
When we have a small amount of information to work with and if we work with great intensity, we can break it down into microscopic details.
Our mind has the capacity to do so.
Once we do gradual incremental training in any task, our unconscious understanding of the information regarding the task becomes sufficiently advanced.
We generally learn how to trust our physical and intuitive intelligence to handle the technical component of the task.
At any moment, our conscious mind can zoom in on very tiny amounts of data.
This awareness of how our brain works is applied by many great human minds in history.

The world of communication and the world of processing communication is very different but still our mind does it very smartly.

Genius is nothing but the love of doing something from inside without any immediate incentive or gain. Obviously, there could be tangible as well as intangible incentives in the long run.

Like Aesop, what do you think about Thomas Edison?
Was he a genius?
Probably you say- yes.
Thomas Edison tested more than 1600 substances before he found tungsten as the most effective element to be used for his iconic discovery of the incandescent light bulb.

What do you think about Mahatma Gandhi?
Was he a genius?
You might say, of course.
He single-handedly overcame the British Empire, the great force in the world then.
Gandhi was quite aware about the intrinsic dignity of a human, the right to freedom, sovereignty, and self determination.
Gandhi always believed that human rights aren’t granted by any earthly power, they are ingrained in the nature of humans because they are inherent in their creation.
But still, it took him a very long time to instill his thoughts to the general public.

What do you think about Bill Gates?
Is he a genius?
You would definitely say, yes.
Remember, he only ate and did coding all night without sleep in the early days of Microsoft.

What do you think about Elbert Einstein?
Was he a genius?
Of course, all of us think so.
Remember, Einstein’s name is associated with so many peer-reviewed publications which appeared to be wrong.

Let’s take the current iconic figure Elon Musk.
Is he a genius?
You would probably say yes.
By the way, he has slept many nights on the floor of the assembly lines of a car manufacturing company.

Everybody has only one destination, which is to go from ‘here’ to ‘there’.
Every step has to have a reason to originate from.
Everybody has dreams, pains, and sufferings to promote evolution, that’s what Thomas Edison and Mahatma Gandhi did consistently in their lifetime.
Evolution always forces us in a new path, new direction, and a new destination although the whole process of transference is very lengthy and tedious.
How many times did Thomas Edison and Mahatma Gandhi hit bottom before they learned a lesson?
Maybe hundreds or maybe thousands or even more.

Remember, genius is a sheer quantity of human suffering, it’s very difficult to comprehend, but it moves slowly within our mind, very slowly, by inches, by feet or maybe by meters.

I’m a scientist, I know the pain of testing a few substances if something is not working.
The patience for testing 1600 substances by Thomas Edison in the lab is not ordinary, it’s genius.
Basically, the genius mind enjoys doing it, and is really interested in knowing more about something which anybody does intrinsically everyday.
This happens because they make their choices from their values, those values are their intrinsic motivators.
It’s one thing to conceive of the light bulb or give people the right of freedom but it’s something else to make it happen.
Genius is motivation and motivation is the energy to make a thing happen.
Motivation in humans is derived from meaning and purpose as in Edison and Gandhi.
People whom we say are creative merely design, discover, write, paint, or sculpt.
But, they make it first within their own mind because they have already seen those images internally.
Just think about Aesop’s storytelling ability.

Remember, we don’t dance on the floor from logic, thinking or any intellect, we dance because we feel like doing dance.
Feeling is the first part of a genius.

Scientifically, genius means the source of creative leaps of awareness to all our consciousness.
It is the practice of becoming more aware of our consciousness each moment, each hour, each day, each week, each month, and each year with progression.
Do you feel love without fear?
Do you feel calm without resentment?
Probably less likely.
But why?
Have you ever tried to answer?
These answers come from genius minds, and only by practice by making ourselves in full awareness.
Remember, love has a higher frequency of consciousness and fear has a lower frequency of consciousness.
Very few selected people experience only love in their lives because they are aware that love could be masked by fear, which is noise.
Of course, these are genius minds.
For ordinary people the frequency of fear is so high that it overlaps the frequency of love, this is basically the low level of consciousness within us.

When we remain not conscious at all times, we might feel good or feel correct but in a completely negative or invalid mood.
Our consciousness is exactly the same as a musical note that we play correctly but at the wrong place in a particular song.

Einstein, Heisenberg, Bell, Bohr, Newton and many other great inventors were not actually born geniuses.
They knew and demonstrated that everything in the universe is subtly dependent upon every other thing around.
This is basically the indication of the full awareness of full consciousness.
Just think about the story of the falling apple, earth, gravity from Newton; he was not the first to see an apple falling from a tree.
This is the result of complete awareness of his consciousness.
They just reacted to the relationship of one thing over others in a different way than ordinary people.

Remember, our mind is a computer terminal connected to a giant database.
This database is our consciousness and our own cognizance is just a mere individual expression.
In reality, this database is the source of genius for which everyone has access.
The only question is how we utilize and understand the database for our purposes.

What counts for most people to be genius is not how much they know about databases, but rather how realistically they define what they don’t know about databases.
This ‘what they don’t know’ is awareness.

The bottom line: we don’t have to be genius in order to achieve satisfactory results in our lives. Genius is, we must recognize our own limitations and follow a course in life which is certain to work reasonably well.
Always keep our thoughts and practices simple like Thomas Edison and Mahatma Gandhi.
Don’t dream about anything without putting our feet first on the ground.
If anyone promises you to teach to be a genius, respond to your inner guard with a very quick no.
Keep in mind, it’s not going to happen anytime soon.
First, keep your feet on the ground, learn to walk, start running, keep running long distances, practice drinking, eating, and breathing while running.
Make sure you are fully aware of your consciousness of why you do the task, what you do, and how you do it, and just follow the process of genius.

By the way, I’m not a genius because I have not consistently followed what I just said in the previous lines.

I wish you all the best and goodluck for your journey to genius.

Thank you for your time.
-Yam Timsina

“If opportunity doesn’t knock, build a door.” – Kurt Cobain

I was traveling in a public bus.
She came and sat across from me.
She became comfortable in her seat, I smiled at her and she also responded with a soft smile with a waving hand.
Her return smile was a clear indication for me that our 8 hours journey in a bus is going to be very interesting.
We talked about ourselves, specifically our job and profession.
Occasionally our knees were touching each other when the bus was making different motions.
She said that she was a marketing officer in a sanitary pad business.
I told her about my scientific work in a multinational research company. I also mentioned our huge marketing department though I had very little knowledge about marketing.
I added, “I’ve only a vague assumption of how marketing works in our organization.”

“ I run experiments, I analyze and interpret data, I also document, publish, and preserve all of these,” I further explained.
I was curious, so I asked, “what exactly do you do as a marketing officer?”

She replied, “My work is very simple, how to build trust in public. Not only in the sanitary pad business but in any business, all marketing people try to build trust in the public. That’s what we all do.”
“In your work as a scientist, probably you largely depend on yourself, your knowledge and skill, but in my work, I’m mostly dependent on others, mostly in public,” she commented.
“Exactly, you are right, the majority of my work is solitary and bench work” I nodded.
“As a marketing personal, I don’t care that much about new products, new technology or innovations, what I care more is what products and services are going to be obsolete soon”, she clearly pointed out.

In response to my smile in the beginning, I’d noticed her smile was very attractive with her upper half clean and shiny teeth.
At that point I’d predicted that she might be outgoing and our journey could be a different experience.
Her style of engagement in our conversation was showing that she must be a pro by considering her overall enthusiasm and curiosities.

Smile is an amazing human expression.
It connects a lot of different things in our body and mind.
It generates oxytocin in our brain and that provokes a thought.
One simple thought produces ripple effects and generates many more thoughts.
And one good thought gradually changes into a trust.
When she said her main responsibility is to create trust in public, I was also trusting her as a genuine professional woman.
Actually she was absolutely not talking about her job, she was talking completely about her profession.
Remember, job and profession are not the same things.
Any job can be only an absolute transactional relationship because we work for the money or some tangible benefits or both.
When we become professional, we take pride in our work and accomplishments, we feel good about the people we work with, and the organization.
Most importantly, once our job becomes a profession, we work 24 hours in our mind.
The interesting thing about being professional is we look forward to a long time doing what we’re doing. We love to do things, we love to talk about what we do. Looking back, we say I’ve accomplished many things in my life, but I still have a long way to go, more things to accomplish.
She was purely professional, the way she was talking to me, the way she was bringing ideas, and the ways she was interested to know more about my area.

I saw a thirst in her tone, I saw a drive in her look, I saw calmness in her emotions, and I saw unwavering trust in her eyes.
It’s very true that trust creates harmony in human society and if we like to work on any such matter based on trust then the job no longer remains a job, it becomes a life-long profession very quickly.
If we don’t have trust then probably human society collapses and there would be no transaction in any form whatsoever.
There are always people working day in and day out to build trust in any circumstances or scenarios.

Do you buy shampoo from a company you have never heard of before?
I guess no.
Do you lend money to an unknown person?
Of course not.
Do you travel to rural Afghanistan?
Obviously no.
Who do you trust your running coach? A Kenyan or an American guy.
Of course, a Kenyan guy because you have many more reasons to trust a Kenyan guy as a running coach.
The only reason we don’t do aforementioned things is because we don’t trust the unknown.
We don’t trust a new company because shampoo directly touches our body when we use it. It contains chemicals, it’s sensitive so we don’t want to take risks.
We never lend money to anybody whom we don’t trust because we don’t know whether he or she will return it.
Money isn’t just a thing to buy, it’s also an emotional entity. It can make or break a relationship in a second. We should be very careful.
We know Afghanistan is mouldering with terrorism right now, so we don’t trust people and government over there.
These above mentioned scenarios can only be trusted by continuous work on them, as she said, work and build trust.

At one point, she said that marketing is a collective knowledge, it always moves from bottom up based on public trust.

Trust was ingrained in her blood as if she was born with it.
Due to this trust, she said, sometimes she works 10 to 12 hours in the street.
She said she feels tired so she goes on deep undisturbed 8 hours sleep.
She says if you work longer than regular hours, then you also need more rest, and sleep is the only rest, if you don’t sleep you suffer from mental fog and fatigue.
She warns that many people are not aware about this, they do hard work only by squeezing hours of required rest.
“We can live 14 maximum days without eating but we can’t live more than 12 maximum days without sleeping, now you can see the importance,” she pointed out.
She says that we only realize this later in life and we whisper I wish I could have done that.

When she was 2 years old, she couldn’t walk, her family was really worried.
As her mom said to her later, everybody around her, her relatives, her neighbors told her mom, she couldn’t walk all of her life.
The only person in her family, her elder brother who was 10 years old at the time, didn’t believe that she couldn’t walk.
Her brother played with her all day, pushed her to walk by holding her hand all day.
As her mom said to her, when she reached 3, making everybody surprised around her, she walked.
She remembered as her mom said, the only person that didn’t surprise at the time was her brother because he had trust over him that she would certainly walk one day.
In today’s world, people might say she had cerebral palsy, no hope.
Her brother became the top physiotherapist for her at that time.
Only because her brother had immense trust and worked for it.

She made a point that trust is essential everywhere, we had fewer airplanes in the past but we have more now because people trusted different tastes of flying. Marketing itself drives various tastes in public and that follows innovation.
She said we have to be very careful to know about the public and why they like something over others.
“Marketing is just a very small fragment of human psychology,” she added.
Once she said when we become bigger as a company or organization we stop innovation, we stop studying people so our products and services become mundane and obsolete very quickly.
As a student of marketing, she said, my eyes always remain curious about what people are liking and why they’re not liking.

Once our conversation became very friendly and comfortable, she became very emotional at one point and shared her journey.
She said that she wasn’t only a marketing officer, she was also a co-founder of her sanitary pad company.
“When I was 17 years old, I was walking, running, and selling the cheapest sanitary pads in rural villages all day. In those villages, most of the women never used sanitary pads. A lot of teenage girls had no idea what the sanitary pad was. They all were using old rags and the most damped and dusty, torn-out cloth pieces.
Most girls came from rural families and used to survive on less than $2 a day.
Many of them belong to lower castes called “untochables,” who had suffered years of discrimination.”
I still remember, one day one passer-by woman asked me,“Where are you from?”
She’s polite.
She asked me how I’m hoping to sell today.
With my confidence, I told her my aim is not to go home without selling at least one pad.
To sell at least one pad.
She was an adult woman, and looked at me as she was carrying her grandson by her waist.
“I’m sure you can sell at least two pads,” she said.
“There is a fine line between humbling and humiliating and I didn’t know whether I crossed that barrier or not.
From that day onward, my journey is continuously going unwaveringly.
By the way, that day I sold four pads,” she said.
She sighed and said I wish I could make a culture of sanitary pads in rural and uneducated poor girls’ society, as a running culture in rural Kenya, a football culture in rural Brazil, and a cricket culture in rural India.

In our conversation, she gave me very eye-opening data about our native country Nepal.

A 2016 report on menstrual health and hygiene management in Nepal found that a staggering 83 percent of menstruating girls still use cloth while only 15 percent use sanitary pads.

She also quoted the National Family Health Survey data from 2015-2016 from India, neighboring country of Nepal, that estimates only roughly 36 percent women (in all menstruating women) use sanitary napkins, locally or commercially produced.

She was quoting another data that 88% of women and girls in India are using homemade alternatives, such as old cloth, rags, or hay.

She was quite aware of the consequences of poor menstrual hygiene.
Of course, poor menstrual hygiene is one of the major causes of contracting cervical cancer, reproductive tract infections, hepatitis B infection, various types of yeast infections and urinary tract infection, to name a few.

Emotionally, in the middle of our conversation, she said to me that her mom died from cervical cancer when she was 13 years old.
“My mom died without seeing the sanitary pad,” she softly expressed.
She said, “I don’t want to tell and humiliate myself by saying what I used in my first menstrual period, I even don’t want to remember this.”

I could imagine what this work means for her.
She had no idea when this job turned into a profession and later a drive in her life.
When she was saying her first menstrual period she was looking through the window with moist eyes.
After going through all of her personal experiences, I understood her devotion, her drive, and her commitment in her work.
She wasn’t only doing her work, she was also trying to leave a legacy for rural girls and women.
How come a pure job turns into a profession, and subsequently becomes such a drive in our everyday lives.

“We have something unusual in our DNA which prohibits us from adopting a good drive that we trust.
I’ve learned a lesson long back from my personal experience, keep observing the world inside and outside my work. If I see someone is doing something good for the society, I take inspiration and I try to incorporate it in my life,” she said.

We exchanged our name and email address and we became, I guess, pretty close friends.

Laxxmi, my friend, says that she doesn’t care about being an odd person, what she really cares about is having a drive for a mission.
I fully accept that.
“What the drive gives us is the ability to do what we want to do in the way we want to do it, and that’s an amazing feeling,” she said.

Laxxmi, my friend, who is one of the most admirable people I’ve ever traveled with for almost 9 hours in a public bus, has a deep sense of mission that’s connected to the loss of her mother.
She once told me that God has taken my mom from me and given energy to make thousands of moms stronger.

One thing I learned from Laxxmi is that this drive for each of us in our lives is very personal.
Now I know why the drive for Mother Teresa was so different from Michael Jackson personally.

Thank you for your time.
– Yam Timsina

Never tell your problems to anyone, 20% don’t care and the other 80% are glad you have them. -Lou Holtz

After a long time, I met one of my friends in my old place, Philadelphia.
He was my dear friend and, of course, he still is.
He began to talk to me about how badly his career is going, he said that nobody gave him a tenured position after teaching 7 years in a liberal art college, and how difficult it was to publish papers in peer reviewed journals where nobody cared about his fundamental research.
He further said that everything was so competitive, there was no funding for fundamental basic research from any organizations.
He gave me a chance to respond after saying this: public as well as private funding moved to the cosmetic areas of science and technology where immediate returns became the prime importance.

He became emotional and shared all of it with me because I was in his heart as one of his close friends, so I told him, why do you always complain?
And, in addition, when I meet you, you always start by complaining every time.
What is the reason for your complaint?
Do you actually feel relieved after complaining of things that you didn’t get?
This is my request to you, my friend, please, learn how to stop complaining if you can.
Complaining doesn’t solve your problem, actually it doesn’t solve anybody’s problems, it just exacerbates our problems.

Complaining is a habit, in many cases it’s a way to express our ego which is inside us.
Truth to be told, people don’t have time at all to listen to our complaints.
They have their own shits to figure out and move in their lives.
They always have their own things to muddle.
We might think they are listening to our complaint, and they will save us, but they actually are not listening to us.
We may feel that they might give something to us after they listen to our complaints, but in reality, people are listening to our problem just for a moment in front of us. Once we are gone, they will forget about what we just said.
They come back to their own problems, they think about their own situations, and they have their own things to figure out rather than ours.
This is the world we are living in.
There is nothing wrong here, but we have to understand how the human mind works.
People were like this before we came to this world, people are the same now, and will be the same in the future too.
Leaving very few people, actually very few from a close family circle that you can count on in your fingers, people have no time for others.
People are centered around themselves, it’s not their fault, this is how we all operate to survive.
People spend time by themselves, and for themselves, this is the hard reality.

I met you after five years but in our first conversation you started complaining about your job and working situations without even asking me how I was doing.

Of course, it’s difficult to get tenured, it’s difficult to publish in peer-reviewed journals.
If it wasn’t difficult, everyone would be publishing it, by this time it wouldn’t be special and creative to become a tenured professor.

To become tenured you have to either publish or perish, this is more than a slogan now in academia. Filter one out of ten, shine one and garbage nine to survive.

I suggest you ask people who got tenure before you. This is the world of human beings, the world of human experiences, and most importantly, the world of human connection.
Always remember, human connection.
Don’t take it lightly, I’m not saying just two words, it’s a whole lot of different games.

My friend, in the real world, your tenureship is decided by two or three people in your organization. It’s not about what you know and how much you know, it’s always about who you know.
Above talent there is connection and empathy.
Talent is nothing, everybody is talented in this world in some way, this is in our genes but connection means everything for any situation.
Michael Jordan isn’t talented in computer science, and , similarly, think of Bill Gates on the basketball court.
Talent is an outcome of an over extended period of practice, dedication, and hard work in one specific area.

Everybody knows Bill Clinton, the most popular and successful president of US history, but very few are aware of his habit of calling one to two ordinary common people whom he met somewhere in a coffee shop or in concert before going to sleep through years and years.
This is the power of person to person connection.

Once I attended a seminar by the late Nobel laureate professor Robert Grubbs, I remembered him saying that when he was assistant professor in Michigan State University, he was having problems with tenureship.
He said that many of his colleagues at the time suggested to him that he could change his career track.
After hearing their suggestion he said that he changed himself more to know the rules of the game than anything else.
We have to know rules formally and informally pretty well before breaking them effectively.

I also have a unique experience.
Many years ago, I applied for a sales assistant job in one enterprise, but the manager rejected my application.
I asked him if there was any way I could improve my experience to get the job.
He replied that I didn’t have enough sales experience, especially in the electrical appliance business.
I desperately needed a job so I asked one singer whom I knew through one of my extended family members, a kind of budding celebrity at that time, to tell the enterprise manager for the job.
I reapplied for the job.
The enterprise manager called me the next day.
I asked the manager what special quality I have for the job.
The manager replied that for the electrical appliance business, fresh candidates do better jobs than experienced ones because we give them our own special training.
The enterprise manager had no clue that I was the same person applying for the job before.
I wasn’t angry with the enterprise manager at all, I was just learning how to grow wings by myself.

My friend, there is nothing wrong here in the process, any process never becomes transparent to everyone as long as humans are involved in the process.
The world was not transparent before, there are many dark stories, the world is not transparent now, and will remain the same like this for many many years to come.

If you are not tenured after 7 years of teaching, then you need to have uncommon solutions, and for that you have to look in uncommon territories. Keep in mind that you already pass the common territories.
We have to learn to be proactively skeptical in anything but, in your situation, you are showing more of a defensively skeptical attitude.
When we become proactively skeptical, we become more aware of things and surroundings, and consequently, we see more choices.
Please, accept this as my pure private analysis.
I’m no guru by any way.
We always like to do what others are doing but this works only if we are dealing in normal territories.
We have to learn to see the things that others are not seeing, especially when we are in uncharted territories like yours.

My friend, you need your position as a tenured person, keep in mind that only you need, nobody else needs because nobody sees what you see in your life.
I don’t know whether you need or you want this job as a tenured position.
Everyone has their own needs.
Everybody has their own wants.
But there is always a small overlap between this need and want, that is actually called interest.
In the US, when a kid turns 16, they need an iPhone and a car.
That’s not their need actually at the moment, that is their want.
But if we go deeper, this want is a lot bigger in different ways, this want is their symbol to begin their independent adult life.
This is an emotional change for them, but when their life goes on, they find a spot where this want converts into their need.

Accept this, in the beginning, every successful person imitates past successful people in the same field by making a very good human connection before they can innovate themselves.

My friend, teaching is not easy, research is even more difficult, and getting tenureship is more like holding a hot rod in a bare hand.
Here is the hard truth, 99.55% of PhDs will not become professors.
According to a study by the Royal Society of Chemistry, only 0.45% of all PhDs will ever become professors because there are almost no tenured track positions.
I know from my personal experience, up to now in my life, I have done the longest time job is only teaching.
Don’t be discouraged, teaching is not easy in itself, and in addition, research is becoming more and more business in academia.
But if you need a tenured position then you have to make both teaching and research a lot interesting for you.
A lot.
If your job is interesting for you, you will never complain about it to your best friend.

The general rule of life is: whatever we practice we will improve at it, only if the game is interesting for us.

Fifteen years of work experience comes only after spending fifteen years of time.
But our mind is so powerful, if our game is interesting to us, we can research, we can visualize, and we can calibrate the game.
Fifteen years experience can be cut in ten or five years too.
This could be possible only if we can train our mind how to be creative through human tools, human experiences, and human connection.

Remember, human connection is one of the best tools.

People will tell you many different things but the greatest truth behind human connection is: things always move only through person to person.

If the game is interesting to us, we will become experts at handling any tool including person to person.

I wish you all the best.

Thank you for your time.
-Yam Timsina

Get lost first and then find your destination, you get a completely different perspective of life; if not get lost now, then when? -Anonymous

There is a saying: doers learn to see but others learn to search.
My grandfather used to tell me, always associate with the people who actually have done the real work and gathered the real work experience rather than with those who actually teach but have never done the real work.
I wish I would have applied my grandfather’s words long back.
We cannot start a business just by listening to a lecture from a person who has spent years teaching business education in academia but has never run a business in real life.
Thinking about business is one thing but go and start a business is a completely different thing.
We never become good swimmers only by reading books on how to swim well, we become good swimmers by jumping in water and practicing swimming.
The difference between doing the real work and teaching the same means we excite the different parts of our brain.
This is really fascinating to me from my own personal experience because I’ve spent many years teaching the students but actually rarely did the same myself.
I have noticed that doers have three dimensional thinking but teachers and observers, most of the time, have two dimensional thinking.
I have also experienced that many times doers do more actual work and utilize their time very judiciously but teachers and observers do more network.
Work is way more important and powerful than networking for those who are especially involved in any kind of creation.
In reality, any type of creative work eventually itself makes a network, no need for extra time for networking, creation flows in different directions with invisible medium.
Work and networking have common misunderstandings among us because we always think that we have to network to show our work.
The truth is: any creative work always follows the network wherever we go.
Real creation speaks in itself, it attracts networks because it actually becomes the real reason for networking.

Remember, if networking doesn’t work, then only work will work.

One of the most important habits doers have is they always quantify anything in their lives.
This is so powerful to improve and upgrade anything in their lives.
If we know exactly how many glasses of water we drink everyday, then it has a huge effect on tomorrow’s drinking habit and overall health.
This is just one example.
If we know exactly how many times we become upset in a day and on what moments then it has a huge influence on tomorrow’s mental mood and overall lifestyle.
If we don’t quantify things in life then we reach nowhere, and we have no way of knowing how things are moving in our lives.
We have no measurement of ourselves.

Do something and make a habit to quantify. Quantification is our required qualification for self-improvement.

As far as we can experience and understand, there are three types of minds: thinking, doing, and being.
Thinking mind or our thought only doesn’t guarantee that we do the task. We certainly can teach and transfer thoughts to others by utilizing it.
Doing mind is different, it captures some of the features of thinking including positive thinking and thinking belief as well as some part of being mind.
Being needs actual work done in reality, only actual work done.
This is one of the reasons that doers have an edge over observers and teachers because the former are one step ahead in the mental process of the task than the later.
If we are on the stage of doing, we can see both sides, thinking and being, because we are on the edge.
Remember, if we are on the edge, we can see clearly what is on the outside but if we are in another place then we may not see things outside.
Edge is actually the rearview mirror of life, by looking at this we can see how we can go where we want to go.
If you are a doer, then you certainly can quantify the distance between how you can go to where you want to go.
In the process of doing actual work, our brain produces different chemicals than just thinking or teaching. When we associate more with the doer, our brain also anticipates the doer’s mindset.

Teacher performs the job by teaching the material to others but the doer does the same for herself or himself.
What doers do is they show up and do the work. They prepare for themselves, they read for themselves. They enjoy the process without expecting anything in return.
If we enjoy the process, we become a different individual every single day.

Author Austin Kleon has written a must read book “Show Your Work” and he shares about the importance of process rather than product, and the benefit of doing something small everyday.
This book is a must read book for those who are in the business of creativity.
Doer actually has the habit of looking at the minor details of the task they care about.
The key point for them is how to develop foresight and patience.
They develop these characters unknowingly with practice.

Doers also have a secret weapon they never tell to anybody but they just increase their knowledge themselves just by doing a little bit every time.
They are always honest with themselves, but don’t tell all of their secrets to anybody.
It’s essential to keep some of our secrets to ourselves as catalysts. Our little treasures, nobody knows outside.
Thoughts and big ideas are our own treasures to preserve to inspire us. Sometimes it’s better not to say anything about them, but to tell ourselves, and just do the work.
Doers are wise enough to recognize these precious moments.

It is true that doers may not get the desired goal all the time but every day they satisfy their inner thirst, they improve their inner self.
They see and experience their inner designer character daily.
Sharpening the inner designer character is contagious.
Creation itself is contagious.
Creativity is an indefinite resource, the more we look for, the more we find. This is the motto for any doer who devotes into any sort of creation.
Doers don’t anticipate any great creation but they do anticipate a different creation in their own imagination.
This is the reason Michelangelo viewed himself as a sculptor and created the Sistine Chapel Ceiling.
This is the reason that Charles Darwin took 20 years to finally publish his landmark work, the Origin Of Species.
This is the reason that Thomas Alva Edison, one of the most prolific inventors, held a total of 1,093 U.S. patents in his lifetime.
For some people, innovation is also contagious.
Take an example of Richard Branson, a magazine producer, who originated the idea of renting boeing and later started the airlines industry along with a series of other successful companies.

There is always one person that appears in my mind when I see the word doer: Winston Churchill.
He was a best selling author, painter, a gifted journalist at age 20, he became a member of parliament in the UK, subsequently, he became prime minister two times, and served his people.
As a prime minister during most of World War II, Winston Churchill rallied the British people and led the country from the brink of defeat to victory.
What a doer!
He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in1953.
A doer of rare versatility.

Do doers have a way of coming up with big ideas of creation and innovation in their mind?
This is a complicated question to answer but both creation and innovation lie in doer’s bucket list.
One of the ingredients of doers regarding creation and innovation is they have a good attitude upon invention and innovation which acts as a competence over their skill.

Another most fascinating thing about doers is they know everything is temporary in their lives, therefore, they don’t waste time regretting and debating.
They always know it and behave in the same way.
They know, we all are temporary, our life is temporary, our house is temporary.
Our money, our relationship, our cat, and our cows all are temporary.
We have an expiry date on us.
If we realize this every single day, we certainly become doer, we try to leave a legacy, and we live a great life.

Doers know that feeling good comes only after doing something good.
Feeling good also comes after reading or listening or watching something good, but feeling good after doing something good creates ripple effects in our lives permanently. Nothing comes close to this astounding experience.

Remember, it doesn’t matter what we say and teach everyday consistently, what matters is what we do everyday consistently.
As Maria Popova, founder and editor of Brain Pickings, said; nothing beats the consistency driven by the deep love of work.

Thank you for your time.
– Yam Timsina

Since the last couple of years, I have divided my life into three parts: the first is the time that I like to spend for me, just for me, only for me what I like to do, I don’t want to compromise on it.
Others might say I’m selfish because I don’t want to give this time to anybody else.
But nothing has touched me more than what my mind, heart, and body whispers me to do.
Selfish is a really complicated and difficult word to use.
This word leaves a negative precursor in our mind and thinking.
My mind and body always whispers simultaneously to me not to use the word ‘selfish’ to anybody else because you don’t know the other person completely.
Many of us use it too often, too quickly, and too lightly, but I don’t want to use it in such a way.
Let others use it in whatever form they want. This is their life, their thinking, and their choice.
But I don’t want to use the word ‘selfish’ for others, at least after using my two cents’ second thought.
If we avoid using the word ‘selfish’, I am sure we improve our non-judgemental curiosity and compassion a lot better.
This is a fast technological world, we all want to be super successful and super perfectionists so that we become superhuman superquick.
But, in reality, all we need in life is a lot less ‘super’ but a lot more ‘human’, this is more likely to happen when we don’t compromise time for our ‘me’ moments.
‘Me’ moment is a microscopic view of our life, it is not a selfish moment.
My picture of ‘me’ moment may look unusual for others but it is very common for me.
And I hope this should be the same for you too.
Here is a simple synopsis of my ‘me’ moment as an illustration.

I want to read Mark Twain’s ‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’ even though I am super busy.
I want to write about my first dad experience when my first child was born because something unforgettable happened.
I want to meet with my childhood friend in Seoul, South Korea because I’d spent my past 20 plus years with him together.
My tomorrow’s 5k running time is conflicted with one of my friends’ birthday party, but I want to run.
I want to listen to that specific song by Lata Mangeshwor several times when I am on my patio remembering my deceased grandma.
I want to travel this weekend, Naperville, Illinois to attend the writer’s club conference where I would have the opportunity to meet with Paulo Coelho, one of my all time favourite authors.
I want to meditate for 30 minutes at noon Sunday afternoon outside to elevate my focus level.

I learned that the best of me comes only if I push myself over the edge.
And this is possible only if I know myself better.
And this is possible only if I spend quality time on myself for my ‘me’ moments.

Remember, air hostesses always say put your mask first before helping others.
I hope you got the point.

The second part is for my family where I want to spend my time with my kids and wife.
Nothing is more important than our family. Most of the time, our life revolves around our kids, spouse, parents, and siblings.
I like to stay at home, play with kids, watch movies with them, travel with them, participate in activities that they want to be involved in and make them happy.
I know if I don’t do this now then there would be a list of more regrets on deathbed than my life accomplishments.

The third part is to dedicate time to my professional work.
This is the time for bread and butter.
Remember, this part is no less important than the above two parts by any means.
This is my work for living and that supports me financially and upgrades me every single day by learning something new.
By profession I’m a scientist so I need to be updated on new discoveries, findings, and innovations every single day.
To accomplish my professional goal, I need to work efficiently and smartly, otherwise, the aforementioned two areas of my life would be affected.

The most difficult part in life is to make balance in these three areas.
It doesn’t happen often, it needs a little bit of practice.
There are many reasons why it’s difficult to balance but I’m going to mention one which affected my life the most.
In our life, each of these three areas needs to grow without affecting the other.
But trust me, nobody is perfect and I’m not the exception.
There are a lot of people who are struggling for this balance.
I’m trying to make this balance but my life doesn’t know this balance automatically unless I teach and practice my life how to balance them.

This balance for me became possible only when I knew how to say ‘no’ very politely and gently to the activities which have no meaning in my life.
But the majority of us are very weak to say ‘no’ to, because we don’t want to offend anybody.
This is our human nature.
We have been taught since childhood not to say ‘no’ to others.
We look rude and undisciplined in society’s eyes.
If we don’t offend anybody by saying ‘no’ then we offend ourselves, so this is our conscious choice to whom to offend.
Nowadays if somebody invites me or proposes to me to go somewhere or to do something, and if I don’t want to go or don’t like then I simply say ‘no’, thank you for the invitation’.
I don’t give them any answer for why?
This is difficult but we must practice.
I don’t say and will never say, “oh I’m busy, I don’t have time.”
Remember, there are always 24 hours in a day, same for all, for me, for Elon Musk, for Joe Biden, for Oprah Winfrey, and for my 6th grader daughter.
It’s not true that I don’t have time, I have time but maybe not for that specific task.
I simply said, “little longer ‘noooooo’ with a nice smile, thank youuuu, though.”
This part is really hard if we don’t practice, I’m still working on it.

The most recent type of ‘no’ that I have learnt is no to political news. In past years the amount of time that I spent on political news is insanely high when I look back on my life.
To be honest, I never learnt anything from political news.

I absorbed everything just as entertainment, it didn’t help a single ounce to improve the quality of any area of my life.
Finally, I realized this is a total waste of time.

I found that spending so much time on political news is not helpful at all.
Most of the political news is intentionally motivated to hook, influence, and addict us, and finally make us morally and intellectually bankrupt.
Does it really matter to my life which party leader said what in where?
I don’t think so unless I’m a political leader or I make a living by doing politics.
Of course, there are exceptions.
But exceptions don’t rule our life.
Exceptions are just exceptions.
If we divert the time and attention that we spend on political news to the area of our interest in life that matters the most, we gradually move in the direction of our choice.
I’m not saying as a guru or any motivational speaker.
I belong to none of those catagories.
I make a living by doing science so I know little bit about the science of body and mind, and how they are connected chemically.
Largely, this is from my own personal experience rather than scientific facts.

Political news, I believe, is a two-edged sword.
On one hand, it gives us a world of entertainment from early morning that could be quite addictive and can go till late night; on the other hand, it tends to fill our mind with information which has no value in our lives.
Not very far in the past, I used to be a young person in a hurry because I used to watch a lot of news on CNN and Fox. All of that time was going from my actual ‘me’ time or family time or work time.
I used to think consuming CNN was not a waste of time because I’m learning.
Instead, I used to think that if I sit quietly doing nothing for a few minutes, that was a huge waste of time for me.
But I recently learned that how we look at our time spent also changes with time.
Maturity also teaches us how we are maturing daily, weekly, and yearly.

Now I understand that a pause to look into my own heart or mind for a few minutes daily is never a waste of time.
This is an investment of time in me and in my health.
In my view, this is one of the most rewarding investments we can make in our lives.
Remember, physical exercise does good in our body including health by its repetitiveness, but quietly looking at the mind is eclectic.

Political news is only good for career politicians who make ends meet doing politics or the job is related to it directly or indirectly.
Majority of news is motivated by specific political philosophy or by some hidden political agendas.
Journalists inform us of the twisted news which affects us physically and emotionally.
As far as I have understood, a journalist’s job is not to teach people, nor twist the news.
Their job is to let people know what exactly the news is, as it is, unfiltered.
It’s up to the people to decide the right and wrong and make their own decision.

There should be a clear alignment between what we do and what we think in life.
Our mind produces thoughts but our body produces feelings, they are different.
If we don’t align our thoughts with our feelings then we are doing something wrong.
Without this alignment, we never produce any tangible results in our life.
This indicates that we are doing something which is not sustainable, we are doing it for the sake of doing only.
That’s the exact moment I realized when I was spending my time with political news in front of a television set or on youtube videos.
I was involved and doing one thing by my feelings but my thoughts were completely different and were giving me different directions.
We humans have the power to pause and reflect, this is basically a habit to check alignment of our feelings and thoughts, no other animals have this power.
When thought, the work of the brain aligns with feeling, the work of the body, we are in the state of being.
This state of being is required to break any wrong habits in our lives.
I completely broke my habit of watching too much political news, opinion, and analysis after realizing the state of being in my life.
Though, again, I’m not perfect but moving in that direction slowly.
Knowing this state of being is one of the best tools to go from good to great in our lives.

What controls us is very important and knowing it is extremely powerful.
Sometimes, it’s very difficult to see a fine line between help and control.
Politics itself is a good discipline of life, it helps to carve our footsteps in society, but if we are not aware of its nature, it controls us very quickly.

Remember, If everything is politicized including our body, mind, and daily work then survival becomes our full time job.

We become deprived of our life choices if what we do all day is to fill our mind with political news.

Is survival our full time job?
Possibly, if we feed only junks in our mind.

Nowadays I would rather feed cheerios, milk, and strawberries to my two years boy, play with him, and watch with him than to watch political news.
I have watched ‘the boss baby’ multiple times with my son, I don’t know the exact numbers but surely many times.
This is a computer-animated comedy movie.
My boy especially loves the boss baby character so I’m watching it over and over again to make him happy.

Many dialogues and scenes are vivid in my memory.
These dialogues from the movie I use frequently at home to create a fun and healthy environment around the house.

Some of my favourites from ‘the boss baby’.
The ‘boss baby’ runs the company ‘BabyCorp’.
“Either you run the day or the day runs you.”
“Success is not linear, it’s a wild ride.”
“Aim for failure, then only you get success.”
“No, no Jimbo, puppies are evil, we babies are losing and puppies are winning.”
“Is this my team? A musclehead, a bunch of yes men, and doodlers.”

My personal favorite is,
“Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t – you’re right.”
Thank you for your time.
-Yam Timsina

I was very enthusiastic to learn about vipassana meditation.
I was listening to the meditation teacher who was about to give a real vipassana practical training.
Vipassana indicates “to observe things as they really are,” and that is exactly what I wanted to experience in my life.
This was the first time in my life I was in the formal training of vipassana meditation though I used to do it randomly on my own at home.
Our teacher told us to ask any questions that the participants had before the formal practical training.
In most of the programs, question-answer sessions are generally at the end of the session but in this program the question-answer session was in the beginning.
I asked my teacher, “I remain busy due to my nature of work, my mind is always occupied with things, so I often don’t get time to meditate and I generally skip. What do you recommend?”

The teacher said, “I’m not here in a position to tell all of you what to do and what not to do. That is your job. I’m here to share with you what I learnt through my more than two decades of meditation experiences.”

He further indicated to me, “You said you remain very busy all the time, that is very good for you, but being busy is your choice, I can’t help that. Therefore, I request all of you, never ever say I don’t have time, I can’t do this because I’m busy. You’re busy means the task you’re avoiding isn’t in your priority. In my personal view, busyness is a way to escape important things in life by completely substituting them with only urgent, semi urgent, and mostly mundane things. Urgent has immediate consequences but important has long term consequences so we need to balance both.”

He further said, indicating my question, “Can I ask you something? Do you have time for breathing?”
The whole participants laughed, I felt embarrassed and stupid, I said to myself why the heal I asked the question.
Teacher looked towards the organizing committee and asked, “how many people were supposed to be here according to your invitation response?”
Organizing committee representative replied, “around 40 people replied ‘yes’ to attend this session but only 28 people made it today and physically they are here.”
Then again he added the point, “Look at here, it’s not that only you are busy, there are so many out there who are also busy like you and they couldn’t make it today even though they said they would make it in the invitation reply. You made it, that’s great, thank you for being here.”

He elaborated more, “Majority of us don’t find time to do boring things in life such as meditation, but very few of us make time to do it. Just remember, many important things in life are really boring. So, it’s up to us whether we find time for it or make time for it. We don’t need to find time for meditation if we get the direct positive impact from it.”

“Whatever we are doing for a day, just stop for two minutes, close our eyes, and count our normal breathing, feel and observe it. How many times did we breathe in and breathe out?”

He said, “We did meditation for the day, we just did 2 minutes meditation, no need to suffer, no need to find time for it, no need to change our schedule. Let’s repeat this at least 10 days regularly, we will know what meditation is and what it does for us.”
“If we stop in 4 days without completing it’s dose, it won’t work.
Think of this way, what happens to our 10 days’ antibiotic dose if we stop in 5 days? Does an antibiotic work in our body?
What would your doctor respond if you say you didn’t finish the 10 days’ antibiotic dose?”, he elaborated.

This is what I learned personally from any kind of training in my life: once anything good becomes a habit, we have to treat it as a lifelong project.
The benefit would be exponential.
Once we start the project, we have to stop for a day when we still feel like continuing to do it and do it tomorrow, and day after tomorrow again.

Rumi has said beautifully, “What you seek is seeking you.”
We’re not only looking for our project, it’s also looking for us. We wouldn’t have had the desire for a project in the first place if some higher power or our intuition didn’t put it there.
This is a secret of success for any life long project.

Our teacher ended his session by saying, “if nothing works in your life, your daily routine of any good habit will work. I don’t have scientific backing at this point but your daily routine will change your biology, the nervous system.”

In 2015 in Philadelphia, I asked a very simple question to my primary care physician doctor in a follow-up appointment during the discussion of my lab test result.
He said to me, “you’re in prediabetic level, and your cholesterol is also slightly higher, you’ve to lower these numbers.”
I pondered and asked myself how did it happen? I always felt that I’m healthy but I never knew where and how I screwed up my health.
A sudden but random question came to mind, I asked, “doctor, what exactly this insulin is and why it’s not working in my body?”
To my surprise, my doctor said that insulin is a hormone and after that sentence, I simply saw only his blagging, he couldn’t answer it properly.
It was quite a shock for me.
He was above 60 in his age and doing medical practice for the last 30 plus years.
I directly came home from the clinic even though I had prior planning to go back to my office. I was preoccupied and thinking to myself only how I screwed up my health?

I was also a little bit frustrated when my doctor couldn’t explain the chemistry between insulin and my blood glucose level.
I remembered many years ago one of my teachers told me that 90 percent or more of the knowledge that we gather during our lifetime we simply forget, because we never use it.
The only knowledge we remember is that knowledge which we use by action consistently.
Sometimes we become contagious in our daily work without thinking much about what we’re doing.
Probably that’s what might have happened to my doctor. I’m not judging him and his competency, simply putting my thought on what I observed.

The number 121 mg/dL, my glucose level in blood, was bogging me so I called another clinic and made an appointment for the next day.
In the USA, at least, we have the privilege to change our primary care physician if we want.
I didn’t change my physician but saw the second physician for my lab test in a different clinic.
On the morning of the second test day I intentionally ate a peanut butter sandwich with two pieces of whole wheat bread. I also ate a bowl of cheerios with two percent cold milk, and 4 pieces of strawberries on top of it.
I also drank hot tea made from boiling water, two percent milk, tea leaves , and 2 spoonfuls of sugar.
I took my glucose test for the second time, I got 117 mg/dL.
Nurse said to me, “your number is not bad, the doctor will tell you what steps you need to take.”
I remember the first glucose test number 121 mg/dL was on fasting but this number 117 mg/dL is after eating.
“Why is this discrepancy?” I said to myself.
I guessed that these numbers keep changing according to the time difference between my eating and testing time.

Without telling my wife, otherwise she would tell me I was a nerd, I also took the third test after two days in the third clinic, I got 115 mg/dL.
After this test, I didn’t care much about these numbers, I knew these numbers could not represent my body mechanism.

If you are serious in your health and make your health a number one priority in your life, never ever settle with one doctor, one test result, and one medical equipment for any kind of diagnosis. Any of the above can give you errors due to various reasons.

After knowing these numbers I realized that my life is somewhere else, at least not in these changing numbers.
Truth to be told, I’m neither escaping nor skipping these numbers, I’m simply trying to see what is inside these numbers.
The beauty of life isn’t in managing desired numbers, beauty is in making the desired numbers, therefore, I made health a number one priority in my life.
If we only manage life, we have to avoid vanilla ice cream our whole life but if we make life we don’t have to avoid vanilla ice cream in our life.
Let me confess this, vanilla ice cream is damn good, if you can’t eat due to your numbers then you are missing the taste of life.
As a result of this life philosophy that I breathe everyday, my glucose level has consistently been under 100 on fasting for the last 5 plus years. How I did this could be the topic for next time.

Keep in mind, our life always runs on track, we know the upper number, we know the lower number, we also know what is the correct number.
More than that, our doctor and nurse also keep reminding us of these numbers quite often.
But, we never try to know what exactly these numbers do in our life.
We never try to understand these numbers in the bigger picture, if there is something wrong with these numbers we never try to fix them keeping them in perspective, we only try to manage them.
I’ve seen many people around me only managing these numbers without knowing how the desired numbers can be made.

If we are stressed out because of these undesired numbers we’re living in the past, if we’re more anxious only about the desired numbers, we’re living in the future. But if we know what these numbers do in our lives and how to make them ourselves then we are at peace, we are living in the present.

The numbers in our life are a language, they are just symbols, they don’t have absolute meaning.

My 121 number that the doctor gave me for the first time was just a representation of an instant fraction of a second’s snapshot of my body mechanism.

One of my trader friends used to tell me the numbers on the screen about his stock, he used to say that the numbers on the screen are not real, it is a representation of an instant fraction of a second’s snapshot of millions of people who are doing transactions worldwide at that moment.
“They keep changing 24/7, don’t trust them,” he told me.
My friend said to me, “If you know the language of these numbers on the screen and its mechanism for your stock, you might become the next Ray Dalio.”
I said, “whoopee.”
The real game of life is to read the language of numbers and move ahead.
Our life is somewhere else waiting for many more important things, at least not in these tiny bits of snapshot numbers.
The goal is to know the whole language by all of the numbers which can reinvent us.
These tiny snapshot numbers from here and there are like random words which don’t make any sense until we join them together and make a complete sentence that gives the full meaning.
I’m learning to live by a quote of a man who inspired billions of people on the planet.
“I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.” Mark Twain.

There are two types of people in this world. One category is those who are against the change who are kind of managing desired numbers and the other category are those who are for the change who are kind of making desired numbers.
They both have one thing in common: their conviction, therefore, the whole world is in balance.
The most beautiful thing in life is to accept wherever we are, then only we can evolve.
We don’t have to go either for change or against the change aggressively, we have to evolve through in between.
The process of evolving is basically the adaptation in life.
Once we adapt with something good, use it otherwise we forget it and become useless.
The beauty of evolving in between change and against change is that we don’t have to copy any other people, we don’t have to copy our teachers, we don’t have to copy our parents, we don’t have to copy anybody who made successful things before.

We have to learn from their genuine causes why and how they started in the first place.
Evolving means learning some specific thing for a specific purpose in life.
It doesn’t mean just to be educated which is very simplistic, it means to be genuine and practical with laser focus.
We can learn by any means, we can learn by asking simple questions, we can learn by reading, we can learn by doing, we can learn by sitting in silence, and we can learn by travelling. There are so many options.

The most important thing I am learning is by asking questions, by asking simple questions, that is one of the tools of human evolution in the 21st century.
Therefore, don’t be afraid to ask a simple question in any circumstances.
When I was a graduate student, there was a small get-together in our professors’ house. Everybody was talking about the GPA requirement to enter into a lucrative profession.
I asked my professor, “Professor, what was your GPA when you were an undergrad?”
He laughed and said, “not good.”
That answer gave me a moral boost that everybody in this world is a working progress.
Ask the dumbest question that you have in your mind if you don’t understand anything in any situation.
Who knows that single question might change your whole life.

When I was a postdoctoral researcher in Virginia, I used to teach chemistry for sophomores as a side hustle. I had one student from Saudi Arabia.
He was an average chemistry student but a very good swimmer.
One day I asked him a very simple question, “Though I’m your chemistry tutor, can you be my swimming tutor?”
Until then I didn’t know how to swim, but now I’m a reasonably good swimmer, at least I don’t die by drowning. This happened to me by asking a very simple question.
One day he took me to his swimming club where I met many very good professional swimmers along with some coaches.
During a casual talk I asked them, “Who is the second best swimmer in the world?”
Nobody could answer it.
They only knew the top swimmer in their field: Michael Phelps.
Then I realized that what is the difference between the number one and number two swimmers in the world?
“What is the secret of this number game?” I asked myself.
Why do we remember only the number one swimmer but not number two or number three at least?
I am still struggling to get the answer of these numbers.
I remember one of the best performers in the world saying, “Number one spot is always overrated. My number one spot is infinitesimal. This universe was here billions of years ago, and will remain many many thousands of billions of years more. There were many great performers in this universe before me, and many many more will be afterwards. Number one spot is nothing for me, it’s a tiny snapshot of my total performance career.”

Thank you for your time.
-Yam Timsina