Category: Value Creation

“Talent hits a target that no one else can hit, genius hits a target no one else can see.”
Arthur Schopenhauer, German philosopher

An Ivy league degree is not the secret sauce of success.
Only you as a unique human mind are the secret sauce.
Our tenacity, grit, and discipline are secret sauces.
Our critical thinking and relationship skills, our real world experiences rather than old and outdated academic textbooks are the secret sauces.
Our willingness to unlearn the obsolete and uptrend rate of new learning is the secret sauce.

If we go to the core value of each human mind, success is all about our freedom.
Having freedom means we can choose whatever we want.
We can choose our places to live, careers to pursue, even our own customers, relationships, and experiences.
Freedom is success.
Freedom gives you the power to choose who you love, and when to leave if you need to.
We want to be free in all directions, but generally many of us want to be free mainly in four areas of our life: finance, health, relationship, and happiness.

Seth Godin, the author of new book “This Is Strategy” says, “We are free to choose what we want. Every strategy requires choice. And those choices often involve saying ‘no’ to things we could do, but won’t do.”

I strongly recommend to watch the documentary “Borrowed Future” as an example to understand how our freedom is paralyzed by the dark side of the student loan industry and how the system is built to work against us to kill our financial freedom.
At the moment finance is the number barrier for freedom for the public.

Imposter syndrome kills both excellence and genius

What is the biggest inhibitor of your freedom at the moment?
There could be many inhibitors for you but one for me was imposter syndrome which I didn’t know back then, and to be honest, still I have.
I’ve a doctorate in the field of my specialization, I’ve Ivy league postdoctoral training, I’ve multiple certifications and training.
I’ve taught and supervised thousands of students up to now, I’ve worked in multiple places, I’ve run multiple marathons.
I’ve a family with a wife and three kids. I’ve done hours of exercises and meditations in one sitting but still I feel I’m not qualified enough.
What is this?
Many of my close friends say I have imposter syndrome.
When I heard this for the first time many years ago, I was like what is this?
And one of my close friends reassured me that I have it.
He said, “Imposter syndrome is not any kind of mental illness, it’s a feeling of anxiety, stress, and especially of low self-esteem.
You have so much knowledge and real world experiences inside you to share with others but still you hesitate to do that, you feel inadequate.”
I said, “really.”

Few months ago I read a very fantastic book “The Big Leap” by Gay Hendricks.
This book is fascinating to describe human competence and genius.
Generally we all fall in the spectrum of some kind of competence in life, the only thing is that we sometimes don’t know where we actually fall in that spectrum.
That could be a zone of incompetence, competence, excellence, and genius.

Most of us live in the zone of excellence throughout our career because we become good in one profession and don’t want to know or explore our zone of genius.
We may not be aware of this genius zone in our lifetime if we are not conscious about it.
Because we have no clue of the genius zone in itself of how it appears and shapes in our lives, we never try to know it either.

The zone of genius is the area of innate skills and capacity rather than learned skills.
I am still not one hundred percent sure about it but what research is showing is that gradually learned skill dominates our life and innate skill disappears gradually over time if we don’t use it.
Some people take learned skill as a stepping stone to nurture and flourish the innate skill.
These people become great visionary and thought leaders like Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein.
Once we know this skill and recognize it, we can definitely sharpen it immensely.
And, most importantly, what I realized is that our imposter syndrome kills both our excellence and genius zones but it kills genius zones way faster.

The amazing thing is that the area of competence gives us linear progress but the area of genius gives us exponential progress.
If you really want to go deeper, please read this Time’s article by Walter Isaacson, he is also an acclaimed biographer of Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein, and an author of the new book Elon Musk.

Feeling of laziness and uninteresting work

One of the killers of not knowing the area of genius in our lives is our own feeling rather than truth.
We always say “I am lazy” but that’s not true if we go deeper to understand it.
Most of the time we are not lazy, we are just tired for various reasons.
Mainly, we become deprived of certain things like quality sleep, body hydration, good diet, and mental-physical exercise.
This bodily imbalance is more than a lazy feeling, it is more of a body exhaustion.

We always have to accept certain things in life because we are living beings.
Eight hours of quality sleep, a well hydrated and nourished body, physical and mental freshness from daily exercise and meditation are inevitable research proven facts.
These are the secret sauces not to have any lazy feelings.
Steve Jobs was a spiritual person, spent hours on meditation; Albert Einstein used to play violin and piano.
Why do you think these people spent time on these things?

Second reason for feeling lazy is we are not interested or excited about the work that we do.
Basically our body isn’t showing any lazy symptoms but we are not doing any interesting work for the mind.
Remember, doing interesting things or interesting work is very personal.
For example, I love to read about human psychology but one of my friends loves mathematics which is very boring for me.
My daughter spends hours in her design work without getting bored.
Interest is different for different people, please know it, from where the clue of genius opens.

Let’s see one more example which is also related to my interest.
I’m always excited about reading books, if the book is interesting to me.
Mostly I’m only interested in reading books on paper, they must be physical products for me.
I don’t read books digitally because I feel lazy and distracted. Digital books don’t interest me at all.
But, I don’t read physical newspapers, I read all of them digitally.
These kinds of habits are personal, unique and make our tasks interesting and exciting.
The bottom line is: if something is interesting then only we go deeper, and in this regard everybody is different for their specific task as the interesting task.
That is the beginning of habit creation in interest in our task.

Connection of interest with physical and mental well being

Remember we have to invest in our mental and physical well being at a higher level to do interesting work for a longer period of time.
How do you do this?
It could be anything as follows which actually I follow no matter what, and I have to do it everyday in some form.
I invest 20 minutes in a small walk everyday.
Or 20 minutes of short cycling everyday.
Or every alternate day in 4 to 6 miles running.
Or everyday in 20 minutes of yoga or exercise when I start my day.
Or every night before bed for 20 minutes of meditation.
And I also invest every weekend in either a longer hot shower or oil massage or sun bath or any social activities like cooking club, book club or any activity that is my area of interest.
Don’t take anything that you don’t like or you are not interested in.
And most importantly, I also invest my time on quality foods, especially varieties of vegetables and fruits throughout the day.

Remember we must have energy and vitality to do interesting things in this wonderful world and this is only possible by being healthy.

Always evaluate the interest based on the enthusiasm level that comes while doing the work, not according to the nature of the work that you are doing which somebody assigned to you.

Will Smith, actor and producer says, “Money and success don’t change people; they merely amplify what is already there.”
In my opinion, a healthy body and interesting work amplify both excellence and genius.

Interesting work amplifies innovation

When our work is not interesting to us, it’s hard to innovate.
When we talk about innovation, we always think about only technology but innovation is not about only technology.
Innovation is a mindset.
Technology is just one piece of innovation but innovation as a whole is development of new ideas and its incorporation to the mission of the work as we move forward.
Innovation is fresh thinking and direction for the future.

Technology is just a known unknown piece of innovation.
It is known because in many cases, we are certain that technology will develop and change society, human behaviours and psychology but, as an unknown part, we never know fully how it does the work.

Innovation is empowering people and developing skills.
Developing skill is another piece of innovation which is a known known piece of innovation.
It is a known known piece because there will obviously be challenges but we also know that we can acquire and master through training and knowledge to combat these challenges.

Innovation could be in anything like process, structure, pricing, product, or services development.
Innovation is a flexibility and is not only a promise, it is also a result.
Innovation is 24/7 work, never stops and never ends even if it doesn’t produce results within a specified timeframe.

Conclusion

The world is changing faster and faster than we ever imagine, we must change with it otherwise society will change accordingly and leave us behind.

Remember, today’s world is run by storytellers and storytelling is an important skill to master.
It’s not manipulation, lying, and exaggeration, it is another kind of human innovation to influence our society.
The innovation of storytelling is to create an emotionally and rationally strong case for new ideas and thinking.
So in today’s AI driven world, the skill of storytelling is another tool in our innovation toolbox.
Remember, AI can provide information but AI cannot become emotional and empathetic, can not generate interest and curiosity in us, only you and I can.

Chip Heath and Dan Heath, authors of “Made to Stick” say beautifully “simple” is finding the core of the idea and for our idea to endure, we must generate interest and curiosity.”

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

People have a tendency to overestimate anything in a short period of time.
This is very normal especially in today’s fast paced technology driven world.
We’ve read that many great people are very patient and make relationships with long term goals and long term success.
Probably our normal mind cannot grasp the mathematics of compound effects quickly in different parts of life.
That may be the reason great people always say we overestimate what we can do in a year but underestimate what we can do in ten years.
In reality, many wildly specific innovations, projects, and life goals take a long time to build and grow.
We always measure the value of people at the end once we know the results.
That is just the stage of recognition, validation, and confirmation of the compounding effects by society.

Warren Buffette, Daniel Kahneman and slow thinking process

Warren Buffette, the chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, became a billionaire investor only at age 56 even though he started the investment business at a very early age.
At age 11, he bought three shares of stock of Cities Service Preferred for him and his sister.
He said that he read every single book on investing in the Omaha library, some of them even twice, before making the stock purchase.
He eventually sold them and saved $1,000 to reinvest at the age of 14.

The essence is, in order to build something gigantic which nobody has built before, it takes a long time and an unwavering path of perseverance.
It will push people to leave certain things like instant gratification and comfort zone, which means reaching the other side of the mental zone through the process of slow thinking.

Daniel Kahneman, Nobel laureate and author of “Thinking, Fast and Slow” says “The world makes much less sense than you think. The coherence comes mostly from the way your mind works.”

There is a hard correlation between uncertainty, creativity, and long term success.
Because our brains are wired to crave certainty, but great achievements come from uncertainty and risk.
I think it all comes down to a slow thinking process, a willingness to experiment, an eagerness to unlearn the obsolete, and sharpening the human mind.

Daily habits bring values

To be able to sustain for a long period of time, we should be very mindful of our daily habits like nutrition, sleep, exercise, and stress.
Because these are fuels to run the human engine for a very long period of time.
How we think affects how we feel emotionally.
How we feel emotionally affects how we behave externally.
How we behave externally affects how we feel physically.
How we feel physically affects how we perform our work for an extended period of time.
In this series of changes of emotions there are multiple decision making processes which are heavily influenced by our daily nutrition, sleep, exercise, and stress.

Daily habits affect the core areas of our life, especially health, relationships, and passion.
The truth is that everything affects and impacts everything else remaining in life.
These are strongly interdependent and integrated for sustainable value creation.
For example, we cannot keep enjoying the task for a long time if we are not passionate about the task.

Fear is the result of toxic and reactive life

If we don’t know how to ignore toxic things and toxic people in life we suffer and we never sustain long term goals.
Learning to ignore means being proactive and laser focused for the things that matter in life.
A reactive life is the most painful life, we must learn not to be reactive over anything.

There are many practices not to be reactive but I generally follow one and it’s working for me.
If I receive a good message on my smartphone, I reply quickly but if it’s bad news, I don’t reply because I risk responding carelessly.
So I try to keep my negative feelings in check by not responding to the negative message immediately.
Because when we take time to respond, we move towards a slow thinking process and are less likely to make mistakes.

When we start to ignore toxicity and negativity, we start to light up our darker side in the mind that sees the long term goals and prosperity.
We start to feel no fear at all.
I have a personal experience of it when I was running a first marathon.

Marianne Williamson, spiritual leader and author of “A Return to Love” says – “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light not our darkness that most frightens us.”

Beating fear also comes with the habit of ignoring bad circumstances.
Phiona Mutesi, four time women’s chess olympian from Uganda, grew up in one of the poorest violent slums but emerged as one of the world’s best chess players.
She lost her dad from AIDS when she was three years old.
After a few years, she lost her sister and then she dropped out from school and couldn’t read and write at age 9, eventually became homeless.
She said, “Chess is a lot like my life. If you make smart moves you can stay away from danger, but any bad decision could be your last.”

Research shows that mental practice is almost as effective as true physical practice and doing both is always more effective than either alone.
Brain research shows that thoughts produce the same mental instructions as real actions.
Mental image affects many cognitive processes in our brain.
Motor control, attention, perception, planning, decision making, and memory are some of them.
Brain always gets trained for actual performance during visualization and thinking.
People like Warren Buffette, Daniel Kahneman, and Phiona Mutesi are experts at avoiding fear by doing mental practice over and over again.

Elizabeth Gilbert, a journalist and author of “Big Magic” says “ Fear, I recognize and respect that you are part of this family, you are absolutely forbidden to drive.”

Another inspiring example on how to deal with fear comes from Darwin Smith.
Darwin Smith, the former CEO of Kimberly-Clark, was given less than a year to live due to nose and throat cancer, but he lived 25 more years, most of them as a CEO.

Integrity and honesty as core values

Nobody lies to us more than we lie to ourselves.
If somebody lies in public, comes home and stands in front of the mirror but cannot look at the mirror, it means there is an integrity and honesty problem.
If we are not true to ourselves, we can feel out of whack in life.
A life of integrity and honesty is always an extension of our personal values.
Personal values bring long term values so we have to bolster them, we have to find our essence so that we can utilize our potential.
This is the real difference between real and fake people.
We like people who always value humor, compassion, and respect equally both in public and in private.

Business ethics in organizations

Nowadays, not only people, even business organizations hide many things in front of the public.
It is a business gimmick.
They do this because they know we love instant gratification.
Why don’t they reveal the details is surprising.
Because we don’t care or are unable to calculate the long term effect of it.
For example, do you actually know the exact mathematical algorithm for credit score calculation?
The only thing credit card companies say is what percentage of different factors is accounted for in the calculation but not the exact formula.

We know that a high credit score doesn’t indicate we are good money managers, we are just good debt managers, but they don’t say this.
The American corporate world has hypnotized us and we love and enjoy living in the dark hole.
Probably we become more happy when we get our first credit card than our first kiss to our significant other.

In 2021, scientists in MIT used fMRI technology to examine brain activity during the moment of purchase using credit card, they focussed on the reward center of the brain called Striatum, which releases dopamine.
This is the same part of the brain that is activated by addictive drugs like cocaine and amphetamines.
This is another proof of how much we love instant gratification.

Dave Ramsey, personal finance guru and the author of ‘The Total Money Makeover‘ says “The credit card is the cigarette of the financial world.”

Conclusion

Great people are patient as well as visionary.
Great vision without great people, most of the time, doesn’t work because people have the navigating power for the changing world.
People always come before vision, strategy, tactics, technology, and anything else.
These all are only parameters to recognize, validate, and confirm the value of people after a certain time.

Walter Bruckart, former VP of Circuit City was asked once what are the top five factors that lead the transition from mediocrity to excellence of any enterprise.
He answered, one would be people, two would be people, three would be people, four would be people and five would be people.

Best people on biggest opportunities is one way to aim for enduring success.
Another way to access the immense success is to put the best people on the biggest problems.
Ultimately, these are the best parameters to value great people.

It is very difficult to value people in the beginning but later value appears in different forms when society recognizes, validates, and confirms them.
The only thing is whether we play the game of patience or instant gratification.
Valued people built enduring greatness through a blend of personal humility, perseverance, and professional will.
Warren Buffette is the cumulative compounding effect of many many decades.
Daniel Kahneman’s Nobel prize is the compounding effect of many many decades of passionate work on psychology research.
Similarly, Phiona Mutesi’s accomplishment is the compounding effect of multiple unwavering decisions despite many terrible circumstances in her life.

The bottom line is we all are valuable whatever we do and wherever we live.
Each one of us has something to show, nurture, and contribute.
The director of the hospital or the janitor, both are contributing to run the hospital smoothly.
It’s up to the society when and how each one of them will be recognized, validated, and confirmed as a value creator.

It’s so true that a valuable life means we don’t wait for society to recognize, validate, and confirm what we do.
We just go out and do many things.
What keeps us going is other valuable people around us who are changing the world and bringing value.

Happy New Year 2025 to all of you.

Yam Timsina, PhD, writes primarily on health basics, scientific progress, social upliftment, and 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.
I’m still thinking is it possible to carry such a regret in life all the time.

Outsourcing and offshoring the jobs

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.

Erik Brynjolfsson, professor of Stanford and author of “The Second Machine Age” says,  “how people can remain valuable knowledge workers in the new machine age are straightforward: work to improve the skills of ideation, large-frame pattern recognition, and complex communication.”

I strongly recommend to watch Erik’s TedTalk “The key to growth? Race with the machines.”

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.

Human beings: a combination of body, mind, heart, and spirit

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, the author of “The 8th Habit” 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.

College degree doesn’t bring success

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.

Today’s knowledge world is a link of a chain

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.

We have to understand 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.

Conclusion

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 and be a value creator.

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

“Be the change that you wish to see in the World.”
-Mahatma Gandhi

My ex-girlfriend said, “I feel so sad and pessimistic about the World. I couldn’t do anything for my mother when she was alive.”
Though she was my ex-girlfriend, we are very good friends now.
As we all know, time is the best teacher in our lives but no regret, lives move on.
I Interrupted her and said, “My friend, can I ask you a question?”
“Question, sure,” she replied.

“How often do you get these feelings of pessimism and sadness? I believe you didn’t have this habit when we were together,” I asked.
She said, “What do you mean “how often”? What kind of question is this?”
Once again I said, “Do you remain pessimistic all the time or few times in a day like early in the morning or late in the evening or most of the week or month or one or two times in a season?”

She paused for a moment and then said,” I guess I remain pessimistic and sad all the time, especially after my mother’s death.”
She felt pessimism, sadness and guilt about her situation, working too hard and not having enough time for her mother.

Guilt, loss of mother, and Alzheimer’s disease

In “Guilt, Shame, and Anxiety” the author Dr. Peter R. Breggin, MD, talks about how to take back our life, get rid of negative emotions, and follow our principles to find happiness.

Dr. Breggin says, “Obeying negative legacy emotions is like feeding wild critters. They will take over and grow in power until we have unmanageable beasts trying to overwhelm us from inside our heads. We need to stop feeding the squirrels in our heads. We can start by refusing to listen or respond to them.”

My friend always felt sad about not being a good enough daughter.
I said, “Can I tell you something?”
She nodded.
“We have to change our focus from what happened to our father or mother or sister or brother to what we can do for all fathers and mothers and sisters and brothers who are alive now.
We have to find a way to connect to help the ailing fathers and mothers, sisters, and brothers who are alive now.
This is the only way to get rid of your sadness and pessimism,” I said.

When my friend was a child, her mother was everything for her.
When her mother died, her mother didn’t know who she was.
Her mother died by her side with a disease called Alzheimer’s.
“I will never forget this moment in my life when my mother died in my arms without knowing that I was her daughter,” my friend said.

Alzheimer’s disease is the dominant form of dementia.
There are at least 50 million people suffering from it worldwide and at least 6 million only in the USA.
This touches roughly 10 percent people over 65 and more than 33 percent over 85 and up.
This disease kills more Americans than breast and prostate cancer combined.

By the way, a bit of science behind Alsheimer’s disease.
It is a serious plumbing problem in our brain.
We suffer from neuroinflammation and that leads to loss of brain function.
When the aging brain is unable to drain away the unnecessary protein that accumulates over time, billions of neurons die.
The neuroinflammation fuels the build up of two very specific proteins that cause plaque in the brain, amyloid and tau.
The cerebral cortex of our brain which is a center to our awareness, memory, language, and consciousness become non-functional.

Dr. Rudy Tanzi, PhD, a key expert for Alzheimer’s disease and professor of Neurology at Harvard University says, “we have to make a few things a habit to reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s.
First, we need enough sleep which is mental floss that clears out amyloid naturally from the brain.
Second, we need social interaction that cuts Alzheimer’s risk by twofold especially when we enter adulthood.
Third, we have to control the stress which releases cortisol chemicals that cause neuroinflammation and kills neurons.”

Quality of life and sharing intimate emotions

Good health is our foundation, no question about it.
My friend was physically healthy and active but she was still missing the quality of life.
Our quality of life is based on healthy mind, healthy thinking, and our perception about it.
Quality of life means stopping whining, worrying, complaining, and regretting.
It is spending quality time with family and quality friends, one more time quality friends. We have to know the difference between friends and quality friends.
Quality life means giving, connecting, and sharing our honest and intimate emotions.
Just think about when you can not share your intimate emotions with your dying parents as a son or daughter, what does it feel like?
My friend was carrying the same emotions all her life.

But the truth is, we don’t know how many days we have left in front of us but we absolutely know how to use the remaining days, which are under our control.
The quality of our life is the quality of our everyday emotions.
It’s good to occasionally focus on what we missed but we shouldn’t make it a habitual thing.
If we always focus on what we don’t have, we never sustain happiness and quality in life.

Tony Robbins, a motivational speaker and author of “Life Force” says “We don’t experience life, we all experience what we focus on and the meaning we give to it, so we have to be very selective how we operate daily.”

Happy life, optimism, and future

My dear friend,
We had a very memorable past and we are quality friends now so today I would like to take you on a journey back to history.
Probably, it will help you as well as others why we should be optimistic and happy in life moving forward.

In the time of early hominids, one million years ago, our ancestors would enter puberty at age of 12 or 13 and by the time they were 28, they were already grandparents.
The average age of early humans was only 28 years old.
In the middle ages, the average human lifespan was 35.
In 1900, the average lifespan was mid-40s.
Today, we are touching 80.
This is one snapshot of our life that tells why we should be optimistic and happy.

Let’s take another small picture of human life.
In 1347, we had the most fatal pandemic, bubonic plague, that killed around 200 million people.
Nobody found a cure of bubonic plague.
There was another pandemic in 1918, Spanish Flu, that killed at least 50 million people worldwide.
This virus is still around so we take an annual flu shot every year.
Recently, COVID-19 happened and hundreds of thousands people died but we discovered a vaccine for it in 12 months so that many of us survived.
Many advanced technologies like mRNA vaccines, high speed data connectivity, supercomputers helped to design, test, and distribute COVID-19 vaccines worldwide so that we controlled the loss of COVID-19 pretty quickly.
For this progress, big technology companies like Amazon, ZOOM, Google helped tremendously.

I remember, a few years ago, I would go to the library to find books, journals, or any literature. Today, I use Google.
Not only that, today, everyday, people around the world search on Google 5.5 billion times. These technology applications are a part of our daily life around the world.
And most importantly, everyday, the use is bigger and bigger.
As a result, the majority of the world searches, shops, chats, banks, and performs many everyday activities online.
Our life has become faster and better.
Technologies have saved our time, money, and made our lives easier and better in many ways.
The amazing thing is that they have made our lives interactive globally.
My friend, this is another reason we should remain optimistic and happy. We are progressing all the time.

One more snapshot regarding our health and well being.
In 1981, we paid half a million dollars for 1 GB hard drive storage.
Today, it costs us 1 cent per GB.
In 1971, Intel’s first computer chip used to cost us $1 per transistors, and there were 2300 transistors.
Today, we have Core i9 and has 7 billion transistors in less than a millionth of a penny each.
Our smart phone now is more powerful than any country’s computational power in the early 90’s on the planet.
We have exponential growth in technology and we are not stopping.
We have 5G mobile service now, but we are not stopping. We are going in 6G soon and that can download 142 hours of Netflix in a second.

This fast technology will be life-changing for the health sector.
We can upload health and exercise data or get help from AI wherever we live in the world.
Just think, at the moment we connect more than 125 devices to the internet per second.

Conclusion

Very soon in future, we will have the ability for real time monitoring of our health from sensors in our body.
Sensor measures everything from blood glucose to blood pressure to micro RNAs that indicate an impending heart attack and the quality of our sleep, diet, and lifestyle.
All of these information will be uploaded to an AI which monitors and advises our exact health status.
My friend, we should not be pessimistic, we should be optimistic all the time, that’s the only reason we are human, and we are here.

This is our opportunity to grow in science, technology, and human health.
As Dr. George Church, professor of Harvard Medical School says “Exponential technology growth is especially effective in biology, which is now an information science.”
He is one of the hard core believers that even we, humans, can reverse our age.
This far we’ve come now.
There is already precedent for it.
Dr. David Sinclair, PhD, Harvard professor and author of “Lifespan” says “there is a backup copy of youthful information in the cell that we can access which gives us the ability to reboot cells.”
The crux of this discovery is if we can do this in mouse cells, then we can do this in humans.
There is a possibility that we can reverse our age.
I’m just reminding you, my friend, this is the time to be optimistic and happy.

Let’s not take anything for granted.
When we find a bigger cause in our lives, we heal physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually, and that is the ultimate goal of living.
I wish you all the best, my friend.

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

“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 a very 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 tiring 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 you are exhausted, and it’s a pretty good idea. I can help you to research how to go to the USA and if possible, I can also help you to other stuffs 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.

My relationship with my wife and our choice

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

When I was a PhD student at The Ohio State 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 work. 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 papers and 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 a clear purpose, direction, and intent.
I remember many of those life lessons from her during the course of difficulty.

Jack Canfield, speaker and author of “The Success Principles” 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 have a 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 many obligations to society.
But the primary one is to make sure we, our parents, our 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 livable place by picking one choice at a time, influence others by that choice and live the life happily ever.

Hurdle of choices in life

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’ve read a parable about the monk and the minister as following.

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

“But baba,” my wife 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 just thinking about a single choice, does it make sense? We have to build tunnels and airports, invent drugs, create amazing technologies, teach new generations about computer and AI, and launch new businesses,” she added.

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

Process of picking a health choice

Here is one 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 that I am at the point of transition.
I believe I am moving forward from a focus on survival to sustainability of all.

World is challenging us to use our own essential creativity and shared wisdom to address problems from new dimensions, we have resources in a fingertip.
We have power now to reinvent ourselves along the way.
These thoughts came to my mind once MDs were unable to diagnose my health 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 want to live healthy and happy, if I can.

I found some interesting facts about our body which are related to my current health issue.
I appreciated a lot one defense system in our body, the 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.

The mechanism is our bacteria eat what we eat.
They metabolize the food and drink we eat.
After that they create either beneficial or harmful byproducts that influence our health.

I found the key role of another defense system in our body, the immunity.
Foods like blackberries, walnuts, and pomegranate are very good for our immune system.

I found the relationship between common food and 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. In 60 seconds, our heart pumps out a drop of blood for blood vessel to circulate throughout the body and back again.

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 many diseases especially at old age.

Conclusion

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

We owe each other to make this a rewarding place to live called the world.
I love to read about psychology, health, disease, nutrition, and business for value creation even though I’m a scientist by training.
What’s your choice?
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 pick a 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.

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

“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. 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 in his coffee shop.
“Even a relaxed sleeping person doesn’t enjoy as much as a vegetable eater does. It’s about being proactive and intentional what we take to fuel our body.

“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 continued.

Passion and lifestyle

Jacob’s story made me recall two very close friends during my graduate years at The Ohio State.
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, health, food, and spirituality.
He reduced his intake of animal protein in such a way that 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 unique 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 health is not fun for many, though, he enjoyed it wholeheartedly.

Mason Currey, an author of the “Daily Rituals” teaches two very important things in life: how to structure our day to get things done, and how to feel less weird for living the way we all do.

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 anything civil service or entrepreneurship, both are not just as a way of doing business but as a way of lifestyle.

There is a popular saying which fits both of these situations.
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.

Busy schedule, illness and food habit

There are many factors of illness in our life, we don’t see them 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 and keeps us moving.
If we don’t pay attention to it and ignore it then our engine doesn’t go far and doesn’t run longer, there is no question about it, the only question is when.
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.

William Li, MD, a world-renowned physician and author of “Eat to Beat Disease” teaches how to thrive by unpacking how the body’s own systems respond to what we eat in busy life.

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 and sharing this content with my wife, she 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?”
“Lack of knowledge. You and I talk about this all the time. Our schools don’t teach food skills and nutrients. Our family members don’t talk about good foods. And just as important, there are very few places that general public can turn to,” I said.

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.

Fasting is a healthy living

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 takes our body’s storage, first glycogen in the liver, then fat in the fat stores, and to a lesser extent protein in the muscles.
Our body produces ketone bodies, which are essential second fuel sources for cells and the brain.

Fasting is a conscious sacrifice, a controlled and self-determined experience of deficiency.
That’s one of the reasons that 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?

Conclusion

Few tips are here which I’ve learned, though, these are 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 different vegetables in our meal, a lot more, actually. Leafy greens, cruciferous vegetables, avocados, pumpkin, bell peppers, tomatoes, legumes, peas, and lentils can not be avoided. 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 during my marathon training.

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 are extremely important.

Fish is not important in our meals as advertised in the media. 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 remain pretty healthy.

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

We must take some spices, especially, the queen of spice: turmeric. For ginger, saffron, onion, and garlic, there shouldn’t be any compromise.

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

I strongly recommend to read “The Nature Cure” a book by Andreas Michalsen, MD, PhD, that teaches about the science of natural medicine.

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 longer 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 choice, let’s be the owner of our healthy life.
Let’s understand that without a healthy-diet habit, excellent health is impossible.

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

“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