I said, “you are a very good friend to me, I know, but I’m interested in her for a different reason. Do you understand?”
He wasn’t happy with what I just said, he nodded without any reaction.
I didn’t understand why he was constantly interfering in my personal life even though he has been my genuine friend for the last 7 plus years.
I needed some personal space, some privacy, and some lonely time to plan my future life.
I wanted to go to dinner with her but he wanted to join us. How could I say don’t join the dinner with us? He’d been one of my best friends through all my undergraduate and graduate school.
When he said that he wanted to join us for dinner with the two of us, me and the girl of my choice, I felt that he’s no common sense. I told myself, “why don’t you understand?” For the first time in my life, something different was going to happen. I was going for dinner with a girl of my thoughts, I needed to go alone with her for some breakthrough talks.
I couldn’t understand my friend’s behaviour, I was quite confused.
“What’s wrong with you?” I screamed to myself in my room.
For a long time he’d said that he would help me in various junctures of my life because we’d fighted many causes together.
Later I felt that he was quite unusual, I couldn’t clearly understand his motive, I was only thinking whether he was doing this knowingly or unknowingly. I needed some private time to settle my life but his action was creating trouble for my plan.
Why did he always want to associate with me everytime?
Was he crossing the fine line of friendship?
I never understood.
I remembered, 2 years ago, he told me, “I’m 28 years old now, I feel very awkward, and insecure. I don’t know why I’m not happy with my existence.”
“There is something wrong inside me, I never told you about this awkwardness, insecurity and suffering. I’ve been having this insecurity for the last several years, I’m being weaker and weaker every single day.” he added.
Being one of his close friends, I told him, “you’re strong, you’ve an Ivy league MBA, you’ve just started a corporate job, your life has just started, but your problem is you take everything very seriously.”
“You think a lot, I would say, you do unnecessary thinking, designed thinking is good but excessive unnecessary thinking 24/7 isn’t good for our healthy body and healthy mind, that’s your problem, you’ve to fix it.”
“You have to make things a little bit easier in life so that our body and mind communicates, life takes its shape the same way as every other living thing does, life matures itself with time, everything takes time to reshape.” I showed positive vibes.
I remembered his response, he said, “Sometimes I feel more rebellious with my family and society, I’ve this scary feeling all the time, I don’t know why?”
When I heard the news that he is in hospital, I couldn’t move, what happend, and later knew that he attempted to committ suicide.
“That’s beyond my imagination, what’s going on in his life” I screamed.
I couldn’t believe this. I helped him in so many ways to see things in life and he helped me in the same way.
We used to share a lot of things, both good and bad. But why this time I’m in the corner and he made such a horrible decision to abandon everything including his own life.
Anyway, I knew that he survived, he is recovering well gradually. I’m happy.
I talked to his family members but nobody knew anything on how and why he took such an unthinkable terrifying step.
My mind was bogging me all the time to know why he attempted such a heinous crime.
I decided that I will go deeper and will find it out.
He was in a hospital bed, he was recovering gradually, and the doctor said that he would be fine after 2 to 3 weeks, he needs a lot of physical and mental rest.
I went to the hospital and told him, “if you think I’m your good friend then you can’t hide it from me. Please tell me what is inside you that is eating you everyday all the time.”
Please tell me.
I saw tears in his eyes.
He said in one sentence, “I’m gay, but I want to live.”
Silence.
No words.
I filled the gap of silence, “so what?”
“I have gay friends, I occasionally chat with them in social media. They are very genuine and responsible, they are living happy lives, they’ve contributed a lot for society.” I said.
“Is this the only reason that led you to take in such a heinous crime to kill yourself?” I asked.
“I would say this, my friend, you attempted to escape from your own suffering but you’re about to give incurable long-lasting suffering to your family, you didn’t do justice here by not sharing with me about your suffering, I knew you were in pain but you chose to fight alone and wanted to have a trophy of suffering.” I further added.
He grabbed a napkin and wiped his tears.
My friend, we all will die one day so we need to plan our death, then only we live this life freely.
If we don’t plan our death or if we forget that we will die one day in future then we are not living.
You are gay, you accepted it, but I don’t know what bothered you so much to let the world know about this?
This your gay life isn’t your choice.
God made you gay, so where is your fault here?
You cannot change your genes, you cannot change your hormones, and you cannot change your brain.
You have no power to change the complexity of interconnectedness between your genes and hormonal biology.
Biology is a natural force which is beyond our control, but culture, religion, and other beliefs are human-made myths so they keep changing.
My friend, we still have a caste system in hindu community, we still have untouchable humans in this world, we still have a race system in American society.
We still cannot prosecute husbands in more than 50 countries of the world even if they rape their wives because they don’t have such legal mechanism, husbands still think wives are their properties, things, they own them.
These above facts are only ‘tip of the iceberg’ of human myths but sexuality is pure biology, it’s not a myth.
Eventually biology always wins, it’s only a matter of time.
My friend, you and I had the same biology until puberty but after that, god gave you a different path to go and me a different path.
Though we say all humans are created equal, in reality, we are born with different genes and we gradually evolve unequally based on those different genes, hormones, brain, and external environment. But I am sure we both can live our lives in our own way.
Why don’t you accept who you are and show the world who you can become and what you can offer to the world?
You might be depressed because you are not like me. You want to be like others, you want to be like the majority of us. My friend, this is BS. Your biological identity is your authenticity.
The meaning of life is unconditional but you are making it conditional by attempting to commit suicide.
If somebody is killed by some external factor then death has some justification but if we kill ourselves then our death has no meaning, no justification.
Suffering and dying are inevitable in our lives but if we kill ourselves by our own weak thoughts then we’ve not understood death.
My friend, you don’t know what you can offer personally to this society yet, but if you become weak to fight against the social myths then you’ve not learnt anything from Tim Cook, who leads one of the most powerful companies, Apple, as a CEO on the planet.
He is a gay.
If you become weak, what do you learn from Anderson Cooper? He is a gay.
Every aspiring journalist on the planet wants to be like Anderson Cooper in the field of journalism.
What do you learn from Tammy Baldwin, she is a US senator, one of the highest public offices of the most powerful country on earth.
She happened to be a lesbian.
My friend, this world has given to all of us a special quality in a special form. In this world there are many buildings, they all have unequal size doors. If you are stuck in one door and can’t go through then you have to go around to find another door through which you can go. But this is your job to keep looking at various doors.
This also applies at your home and if you can’t go through then you might have to take the initiative to modify the doors at your home.
In fact, your house is your home, remember all houses may not be homes, you stayed there for 28 years, that place isn’t only home for you, it should be a heaven for you.
We are Homo Sapiens, this means we are social animals. All of our social features including happiness and suffering originate from family.
Our biological identity should not be characterized by hostility and mockery.
My friend, you must start the conversation about your biological identity with your dad or mom or sister or brother about who you really are, and what you really can offer to this world.
I request you to start the conversation with one person first whom you trust the most and move ahead in life.
Once you start the conversation in your family as who you really are, they start to make space for you, this is how our identity revolution begins.
Remember, Claudette Colvin was 15 years old when she refused to give up her seat to a white woman on a crowded, segregated bus but this incident led Rosa Parks to revolt again and now we all know the history of the 1950s civil rights movement in the USA.
Any movement needs space to wiggle and it also needs time to wiggle but somebody should start somewhere to make a move.
Life shouldn’t be complicated but it doesn’t mean it has through road-signs all the way to the end.
My conversation with my friend suddenly stopped once I saw his dad entering the hospital room.
His dad sat next to him and comforted his son’s forehead with his hand.
His son closed his eyes but I saw tear droplets in his eyes.
I greeted ‘goodbye’ to both dad and son and assured my friend to come tomorrow again in the evening.
My whole life with him from high school to this day was revolving in my mind. I reflected back, I saw so many things correlated now, every single incident is making sense now which I couldn’t understand then.
I felt bad for what I said and did for him in the past, what other friends did and said to him, and what society did for him. Of course, it’s past now, it’s gone, nothing can be done. I learnt, realized and murmured to myself why God offers life so mysteriously.
I promised myself that I will do whatever I can, I won’t let my friend die again.
I used to read books randomly when I was undergrad, I wasn’t a systematic and aggressive reader then, but when I started my graduate career, I became very interested in reading books far from my core expertise of chemical science.
I became an aggressive reader. I joined book clubs. I knew that I developed my mental faculties broadly to understand human values and society by reading diverse books written by priceless minds.
After returning from the hospital I was looking at something in one of my old boxes but my eyes caught a book on the shelf by Dr Viktor Frankl “Man’s Search for Meaning”.
I remembered that this book I had received from one of my friends as a birthday gift.
I’d also discussed this book in the book club in the past.
Inside the book, there was a written note from my friend who gave me the book “this would be a nice companion when you are suffering in life.”
I reread a few pages from Viktor Frankl’ book. I read, “The meaning of life always changes, but it never ends. The meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than search within oneself.”
I realized that probably my friend searched the meaning of life within himself but never tried to discover, as a result, he chose a route to committe suicide.
Viktor has a vivid explanation of an individual’s experience in a book as a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp. The most important aspect I like in the book is the view of an author, who is a doctor, for love, hope, responsibility, freedom, and beauty. These all can be found in both nature and art as tools in suffering and depression.
I told my friend that you are gay but this shouldn’t be the reason of your suffering.
There is nothing wrong with it, and it is given to you by another force, nature or God whatever you can say.
When you were a child, your dad made everything for you, he made a roof for you, he provided food on the table, he managed clothes to wear, you received all the love and care but now why do you think that your dad won’t accept you as a gay son?
Ultimately, your gay gene is an extension from your dad. Isn’t it?
Next day I handed him the book “Man’s Search for Meaning” by Viktor Frankl and said to him that this book could be a nice friend to you while recovering in the hospital bed.
I asked him a series of questions intentionally, I thought this might help him to reveal more who he really is.
Why are you afraid to open up your identity now?
What is the worst that can happen if you open up your identity?
Why are you depressed now?
Who do you think is the most helpful person in your life now?
What is the meaning of your life?
These might be difficult questions to answer for him but I’m sure he can tackle all of these hurdles one by one.
When we remain depressed we always feel like we are not being treated fairly in this world. We always think that this world has done something wrong with us.
We always assume that we don’t understand things even after taking a long time of study but other people will understand things quickly.
If we start to think this way then what happens to those tens of thousands of others who are gay who have no education, no jobs, but struggling in society every single day?
My friend, this world is neutral, this world isn’t biased, this world doesn’t recognize rich and poor, strong and weak, educated and uneducated, gay and straight.
This is our duty to find out which role we are playing and where we fit. This understanding is critical to lower depression in our life.
Once we become depressed, we not only become unhappy ourselves, we make so many people unhappy around us.
Depression is like gas in an empty room, it doesn’t matter how much gas flows inside the room, it will eventually fill the room.
If we are depressed for any reason, it doesn’t stay only with us, it ultimately spreads like a virus all over our family, our relatives, and our close friends.
We have to understand that suffering and happiness both are byproducts of our life journey. They are basically not the targeted end products. These both must occur during our lifetime. We cannot keep only happiness and exclude the suffering or vice-versa, this is not going to happen at any time.
Think of this way, our body loves good and nutritious food but our body also stores feces until it can be defecated.
Mostly, we remain depressed because we have fear in our mind, fear of not becoming somebody, fear of not achieving something, fear of chronic disease which we don’t have yet, fear of the future which we don’t know yet what it looks like, fear of losing something which we actually don’t possess yet, and most importantly, fear of not being accepted by society.
Fear prevents us from living in many many ways.
But if we really want to see the other side of the fear, there is nothing, it’s a clean slot but we cannot see it until we jump on fear first.
Fear is such a brutal and chronic emotion that we completely forget that we can live by eating only rice and beans in this life.
We completely forget that we can live by eating only oatmeal, by drinking only water throughout our lifetime if we want.
We completely forget that we can live by wearing two jeans and two shirts for many many years to come.
We always remain depressed thinking of something negative in our lives but our mind actually stores nothing negative if we practice only positive in it.
Last year, my friend sent me a birthday card via email, he’d written on the card, “God broke my power of love for opposite sex but I always strengthened my power of love for the same sex. I’m happily married, a mom now with two wonderful kids. Thank you so much for everything that you did for me. Happy Birthday to You”
Thank you for your time.
-Yam Timsina
Why are you afraid to ask the GPA of your professor when he/she was an undergrad?
I was very enthusiastic to learn about vipassana meditation.
I was listening to the meditation teacher who was about to give a real vipassana practical training.
Vipassana indicates “to observe things as they really are,” and that is exactly what I wanted to experience in my life.
This was the first time in my life I was in the formal training of vipassana meditation though I used to do it randomly on my own at home.
Our teacher told us to ask any questions that the participants had before the formal practical training.
In most of the programs, question-answer sessions are generally at the end of the session but in this program the question-answer session was in the beginning.
I asked my teacher, “I remain busy due to my nature of work, my mind is always occupied with things, so I often don’t get time to meditate and I generally skip. What do you recommend?”
The teacher said, “I’m not here in a position to tell all of you what to do and what not to do. That is your job. I’m here to share with you what I learnt through my more than two decades of meditation experiences.”
He further indicated to me, “You said you remain very busy all the time, that is very good for you, but being busy is your choice, I can’t help that. Therefore, I request all of you, never ever say I don’t have time, I can’t do this because I’m busy. You’re busy means the task you’re avoiding isn’t in your priority. In my personal view, busyness is a way to escape important things in life by completely substituting them with only urgent, semi urgent, and mostly mundane things. Urgent has immediate consequences but important has long term consequences so we need to balance both.”
He further said, indicating my question, “Can I ask you something? Do you have time for breathing?”
The whole participants laughed, I felt embarrassed and stupid, I said to myself why the heal I asked the question.
Teacher looked towards the organizing committee and asked, “how many people were supposed to be here according to your invitation response?”
Organizing committee representative replied, “around 40 people replied ‘yes’ to attend this session but only 28 people made it today and physically they are here.”
Then again he added the point, “Look at here, it’s not that only you are busy, there are so many out there who are also busy like you and they couldn’t make it today even though they said they would make it in the invitation reply. You made it, that’s great, thank you for being here.”
He elaborated more, “Majority of us don’t find time to do boring things in life such as meditation, but very few of us make time to do it. Just remember, many important things in life are really boring. So, it’s up to us whether we find time for it or make time for it. We don’t need to find time for meditation if we get the direct positive impact from it.”
“Whatever we are doing for a day, just stop for two minutes, close our eyes, and count our normal breathing, feel and observe it. How many times did we breathe in and breathe out?”
He said, “We did meditation for the day, we just did 2 minutes meditation, no need to suffer, no need to find time for it, no need to change our schedule. Let’s repeat this at least 10 days regularly, we will know what meditation is and what it does for us.”
“If we stop in 4 days without completing it’s dose, it won’t work.
Think of this way, what happens to our 10 days’ antibiotic dose if we stop in 5 days? Does an antibiotic work in our body?
What would your doctor respond if you say you didn’t finish the 10 days’ antibiotic dose?”, he elaborated.
This is what I learned personally from any kind of training in my life: once anything good becomes a habit, we have to treat it as a lifelong project.
The benefit would be exponential.
Once we start the project, we have to stop for a day when we still feel like continuing to do it and do it tomorrow, and day after tomorrow again.
Rumi has said beautifully, “What you seek is seeking you.”
We’re not only looking for our project, it’s also looking for us. We wouldn’t have had the desire for a project in the first place if some higher power or our intuition didn’t put it there.
This is a secret of success for any life long project.
Our teacher ended his session by saying, “if nothing works in your life, your daily routine of any good habit will work. I don’t have scientific backing at this point but your daily routine will change your biology, the nervous system.”
In 2015 in Philadelphia, I asked a very simple question to my primary care physician doctor in a follow-up appointment during the discussion of my lab test result.
He said to me, “you’re in prediabetic level, and your cholesterol is also slightly higher, you’ve to lower these numbers.”
I pondered and asked myself how did it happen? I always felt that I’m healthy but I never knew where and how I screwed up my health.
A sudden but random question came to mind, I asked, “doctor, what exactly this insulin is and why it’s not working in my body?”
To my surprise, my doctor said that insulin is a hormone and after that sentence, I simply saw only his blagging, he couldn’t answer it properly.
It was quite a shock for me.
He was above 60 in his age and doing medical practice for the last 30 plus years.
I directly came home from the clinic even though I had prior planning to go back to my office. I was preoccupied and thinking to myself only how I screwed up my health?
I was also a little bit frustrated when my doctor couldn’t explain the chemistry between insulin and my blood glucose level.
I remembered many years ago one of my teachers told me that 90 percent or more of the knowledge that we gather during our lifetime we simply forget, because we never use it.
The only knowledge we remember is that knowledge which we use by action consistently.
Sometimes we become contagious in our daily work without thinking much about what we’re doing.
Probably that’s what might have happened to my doctor. I’m not judging him and his competency, simply putting my thought on what I observed.
The number 121 mg/dL, my glucose level in blood, was bogging me so I called another clinic and made an appointment for the next day.
In the USA, at least, we have the privilege to change our primary care physician if we want.
I didn’t change my physician but saw the second physician for my lab test in a different clinic.
On the morning of the second test day I intentionally ate a peanut butter sandwich with two pieces of whole wheat bread. I also ate a bowl of cheerios with two percent cold milk, and 4 pieces of strawberries on top of it.
I also drank hot tea made from boiling water, two percent milk, tea leaves , and 2 spoonfuls of sugar.
I took my glucose test for the second time, I got 117 mg/dL.
Nurse said to me, “your number is not bad, the doctor will tell you what steps you need to take.”
I remember the first glucose test number 121 mg/dL was on fasting but this number 117 mg/dL is after eating.
“Why is this discrepancy?” I said to myself.
I guessed that these numbers keep changing according to the time difference between my eating and testing time.
Without telling my wife, otherwise she would tell me I was a nerd, I also took the third test after two days in the third clinic, I got 115 mg/dL.
After this test, I didn’t care much about these numbers, I knew these numbers could not represent my body mechanism.
If you are serious in your health and make your health a number one priority in your life, never ever settle with one doctor, one test result, and one medical equipment for any kind of diagnosis. Any of the above can give you errors due to various reasons.
After knowing these numbers I realized that my life is somewhere else, at least not in these changing numbers.
Truth to be told, I’m neither escaping nor skipping these numbers, I’m simply trying to see what is inside these numbers.
The beauty of life isn’t in managing desired numbers, beauty is in making the desired numbers, therefore, I made health a number one priority in my life.
If we only manage life, we have to avoid vanilla ice cream our whole life but if we make life we don’t have to avoid vanilla ice cream in our life.
Let me confess this, vanilla ice cream is damn good, if you can’t eat due to your numbers then you are missing the taste of life.
As a result of this life philosophy that I breathe everyday, my glucose level has consistently been under 100 on fasting for the last 5 plus years. How I did this could be the topic for next time.
Keep in mind, our life always runs on track, we know the upper number, we know the lower number, we also know what is the correct number.
More than that, our doctor and nurse also keep reminding us of these numbers quite often.
But, we never try to know what exactly these numbers do in our life.
We never try to understand these numbers in the bigger picture, if there is something wrong with these numbers we never try to fix them keeping them in perspective, we only try to manage them.
I’ve seen many people around me only managing these numbers without knowing how the desired numbers can be made.
If we are stressed out because of these undesired numbers we’re living in the past, if we’re more anxious only about the desired numbers, we’re living in the future. But if we know what these numbers do in our lives and how to make them ourselves then we are at peace, we are living in the present.
The numbers in our life are a language, they are just symbols, they don’t have absolute meaning.
My 121 number that the doctor gave me for the first time was just a representation of an instant fraction of a second’s snapshot of my body mechanism.
One of my trader friends used to tell me the numbers on the screen about his stock, he used to say that the numbers on the screen are not real, it is a representation of an instant fraction of a second’s snapshot of millions of people who are doing transactions worldwide at that moment.
“They keep changing 24/7, don’t trust them,” he told me.
My friend said to me, “If you know the language of these numbers on the screen and its mechanism for your stock, you might become the next Ray Dalio.”
I said, “whoopee.”
The real game of life is to read the language of numbers and move ahead.
Our life is somewhere else waiting for many more important things, at least not in these tiny bits of snapshot numbers.
The goal is to know the whole language by all of the numbers which can reinvent us.
These tiny snapshot numbers from here and there are like random words which don’t make any sense until we join them together and make a complete sentence that gives the full meaning.
I’m learning to live by a quote of a man who inspired billions of people on the planet.
“I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.” Mark Twain.
There are two types of people in this world. One category is those who are against the change who are kind of managing desired numbers and the other category are those who are for the change who are kind of making desired numbers.
They both have one thing in common: their conviction, therefore, the whole world is in balance.
The most beautiful thing in life is to accept wherever we are, then only we can evolve.
We don’t have to go either for change or against the change aggressively, we have to evolve through in between.
The process of evolving is basically the adaptation in life.
Once we adapt with something good, use it otherwise we forget it and become useless.
The beauty of evolving in between change and against change is that we don’t have to copy any other people, we don’t have to copy our teachers, we don’t have to copy our parents, we don’t have to copy anybody who made successful things before.
We have to learn from their genuine causes why and how they started in the first place.
Evolving means learning some specific thing for a specific purpose in life.
It doesn’t mean just to be educated which is very simplistic, it means to be genuine and practical with laser focus.
We can learn by any means, we can learn by asking simple questions, we can learn by reading, we can learn by doing, we can learn by sitting in silence, and we can learn by travelling. There are so many options.
The most important thing I am learning is by asking questions, by asking simple questions, that is one of the tools of human evolution in the 21st century.
Therefore, don’t be afraid to ask a simple question in any circumstances.
When I was a graduate student, there was a small get-together in our professors’ house. Everybody was talking about the GPA requirement to enter into a lucrative profession.
I asked my professor, “Professor, what was your GPA when you were an undergrad?”
He laughed and said, “not good.”
That answer gave me a moral boost that everybody in this world is a working progress.
Ask the dumbest question that you have in your mind if you don’t understand anything in any situation.
Who knows that single question might change your whole life.
When I was a postdoctoral researcher in Virginia, I used to teach chemistry for sophomores as a side hustle. I had one student from Saudi Arabia.
He was an average chemistry student but a very good swimmer.
One day I asked him a very simple question, “Though I’m your chemistry tutor, can you be my swimming tutor?”
Until then I didn’t know how to swim, but now I’m a reasonably good swimmer, at least I don’t die by drowning. This happened to me by asking a very simple question.
One day he took me to his swimming club where I met many very good professional swimmers along with some coaches.
During a casual talk I asked them, “Who is the second best swimmer in the world?”
Nobody could answer it.
They only knew the top swimmer in their field: Michael Phelps.
Then I realized that what is the difference between the number one and number two swimmers in the world?
“What is the secret of this number game?” I asked myself.
Why do we remember only the number one swimmer but not number two or number three at least?
I am still struggling to get the answer of these numbers.
I remember one of the best performers in the world saying, “Number one spot is always overrated. My number one spot is infinitesimal. This universe was here billions of years ago, and will remain many many thousands of billions of years more. There were many great performers in this universe before me, and many many more will be afterwards. Number one spot is nothing for me, it’s a tiny snapshot of my total performance career.”
Thank you for your time.
-Yam Timsina
Why is pain so beautiful?
Two years ago I read a book “What I talk about when I talk about running” by Haruki Murakami.
Different people have different tastes and different perceptions on other peoples’ experiences but many core values always remain the same.
That’s the reason all 8 billion people on the planet have unique experiences to live and share with the world.
Many times each author expresses his or her emotional, intellectual, and physical experiences in their writing.
Haruki’s book is one of the best books I have ever read where he portrays his life sincerely as a writer and a runner.
I rarely repeat the book but this Haruki’s 175 page book is one of them.
Though this book is based on his running life, the nuggets in the book are extremely valuable in every aspect of our normal life.
One such nugget, my personal favorite, is: “the most important thing we learn at school is the fact that the most important things can’t be learned at school.”
This book reminds us many times that we are limitless in life.
The author Murakami is a tremendous human being, a novelist, and later turned into an unstoppable long distance runner.
He’s run dozens of marathons in many places around the world including ultramarathons.
He started his running at age 33, which is already a huge inspiration to all of us.
At this age many other people, especially in sport activities, generally start to think about retiring.
I remember from the book, at one point he was running an ultramarathon in Japan, thinking about 62 miles to finish which he was running for the first time in his life.
In the middle of the ultramarathon, he passes the finish line of the marathon, 26.2 miles, and he reads the words on the side of the hoarding board.
The hoarding board says, “this is the finish line of a marathon.”
This was the first time Haruki was running beyond a marathon finish line in his life so that he was having a unique experience of post marathon run.
After passing the marathon finish line he says to himself, “I’m not a human, I’m a piece of machinery.”
He was running to finish 62 miles but he kept saying the same words again and again, “I’m not a human, I’m a piece of machinery.”
He finished 62 miles comfortably.
As we all know, any machine doesn’t bear any pain but produces only beautiful products, the Murakami machine produces only beautiful experiences.
After absorbing Murakami’s life, I realized there are many things that are inevitable in life but pain and suffering is a personal choice.
He talks about forced pain and desired pain in our lives.
Forced pain is something different and in many cases not beneficial, but desired pain is amazing, it is a real pain indeed but makes us happier once we start to love the process of pain.
Marathon running can never be a forced activity, it can only be an individual’s desired activity.
Not many people can run a marathon, only very few selected people can run.
And running a marathon multiple times is unthinkable for many ordinary people.
It’s not only strong will power that is required for marathon running, it’s the love of the process that makes marathon running beautiful.
Once we know how to release the pain from the body, the void appears inside us and is very beautiful, that’s what Murakami says life is all about.
There is so much physical and mental pain to finish a marathon but once we pass the finish line, there remains only joy.
No words how to express the feeling.
There is only joy.
Murakami said, “The only thing that comes to mind after finishing a marathon is how I can run better next time.”
The mind becomes more repetitive, more patient, and a lot more disciplined.
Think about this, if this becomes habitual in life then where do we find the pain?
Another runner, Phil Knight, founder of NIKE, author of ‘Shoe Dog’, was also famous in track running, though he was a middle distance runner, he used to run 7 miles every morning from his work to home in his early life.
Phil Knight also says that runners have no destination, their destination is their path where they are running.
Phil Knight started running at a time when people used to tag ‘weirdos’ for them.
It wasn’t a socially accepted athletic activity then.
Murakami and Knight both agree that to make pain beautiful, we have to follow the motto: “be yourself.”
‘Be yourself’ means be far from the crowd, be far from competition, be far from comparison, and be far from rejection.
Murakami had a decent restaurant bar business before giving up everything to become a professional writer and professional runner.
Phil Knight revolted to his family, especially to his dad and visited dozens of countries around the world before giving up his father’s decent media business.
When he was visiting Japan for his shoe business concept his mother dropped him off at the airport and wished him saying ‘be yourself.’
When we become our own uniqueness, as the slogan ‘be yourself’; pain and suffering no longer bothers us, it only becomes the motivation for the final destination.
Amelia Boone, one of our all time heros says, “I’m not the strongest. I’m not the fastest. But I’m really good at suffering.”
If we cherish suffering, life becomes marvelous.
Learn how to cherish the suffering.
Kudos to Murakami, Knight, and Boone!!!
In my own personal experience as I also run quite often, people who love running and run regularly have keen attachment to a few things.
In reality nature has given us two healthy feet to move our body, in that sense we all are born to run whether we run or not.
In addition, when we run we also become grateful to our two healthy feet so that our pain of running turns into a beautiful destination.
When we run we become grateful to oxygen in the air so that our pain turns into a beautiful breathing resource.
When we run we become grateful to our healthy body and healthy mind so that our pain turns into a beautiful thought.
When we run we pass objects, pedestrians, trees, and many other things, these passing things make us a connection which is humanity so that pain dissipates from the body.
This may be the reason there is a saying that if we run a marathon in our lifetime, we will never die from a heart attack.
I’m not sure whether it’s true or not but it definitely has some validity.
Many years ago I had a friend from India, he was a graduate student in computer science.
One evening many of his close friends gave him a party in his apartment, it was his 31st birthday.
I also attended his birthday party.
Few friends offered him different kinds of alcoholic drinks so he drank quite a few mixed drinks.
He was fine at the time when we all left his apartment around midnight, he greeted us good night.
The next morning his mom was coming to see him all the way from Bangalore, India.
He was excited to pick her up at the airport, he was constantly checking the flight time to make sure her flight was on time so he also set an alarm clock to remind himself that he doesn’t oversleep.
His diabetic mom was travelling alone because his dad expired 3 years ago due to a chronic kidney disease.
She could barely read in Hindi, an indian language, she couldn’t speak English, she couldn’t make telephone calls by herself.
After arriving at the airport at 8am in the morning, she took help from airport people and called multiple times on her son’s cell phone.
Her son didn’t pick up the call.
Due to a mixed alcohol hangover and probably by an alcohol reaction, he wasn’t fully conscious at around 8 am and woke up only at 11 am.
Though he knew the night before that he had to go to the airport to pick his mom in the morning at 8 am.
He saw more than 50 missed calls on his cell phone within a 3 hours period from 8 am to 11 am.
He was very sad but anyway he drove towards the airport.
He was devastated at this point not by anything but by his own irresponsible behaviour.
He told me, “he had so much pain in his body, he was shivering due to pain thinking about his diabetic mom.”
He said, “his mouth was dry, his headache was moving all around his head.”
He had a panic attack, his body pain was so severe that he pulled over on the side of the road for a couple of minutes.
He drank water because his body was dehydrated due to excess alcohol and he also washed his face with cold water.
Finally after 45 minutes driving he reached the luggage claim area at the airport, he saw his mom laying down on the bench.
He sighed, his eyes became teared.
He walked closer to his mom, he saw his mom’s face from a little close distance, he reached to his mom but couldn’t speak, mom also didn’t say anything, she only smiled.
Once he saw his mom on the bench at the airport and when she smiled, he said to himself, “Why is pain so beautiful?”
Few minutes ago, his body pain was excruciating, his headache was moving all over his head but once he saw his mom’s smile everything became clear, he had not even an ounce of pain in his body and in his head.
He only experienced beauty now, the whole pain is gone.
Once he approached his mom, he bent down, he touched her feet, and started to cry.
He sat flat on the bare floor at the airport and broke down, he couldn’t control crying.
His mom didn’t ask any questions, she wrapped his head around her arms, she didn’t ask why he didn’t pick up the phone, she didn’t ask why he was late, she didn’t ask what happened?
Finally he drove his mom to his apartment.
When they reached the apartment, he asked his mom, “‘Maa, can I tell you something?” ‘Maa’ means mom in indian language.
His mom replied, “sure, beta.” ‘Beta’ means son in indian language.
He touched her feet one more time and said, “Maa, I promise you I would never ever drink alcohol in my whole life from today onwards.”
His mom replied, “beta, I’m 62 years old now, I’m illiterate, the only degree I have in this life is trust. I trusted your dad and lived the fullest life when he was alive. I gave you birth, you are my everything now in this life, if I don’t trust you then who do I trust?”
Both mom and son smiled with teary eyes and entered the kitchen.
Thank you for your time.
-Yam Timsina
Just ponder, are you addicted to any of these: politics, religion and sex?
Recently I attended a virtual scientific conference.
I usually participate in these kinds of conferences when time permits me.
I work on science so I make a living doing it.
One of the speakers in the conference, a business management guru, said, “never ever talk about politics, religion, and sex in business networking session.”
I grew up in a society where people blindly follow politics and talk about it as a pastime.
I have seen a conflict between brothers, between sisters, between aunts, and uncles within a close family circle due to the favor and disfavor of their political affiliation.
I remember one particular incident regarding this between two brothers which is still fresh in my memory.
Both brothers were claiming that each of their political parties is the best one out of many others.
Both brothers were claiming that their political leaders are the best.
Their dad was an ordinary countryman, not highly educated but an literate, occasionally used to ask ‘why do political parties make us fight?’
He used to reflect and think, ‘is politics always bitter and divided?’
“What kind of lacking I had to raise my sons?” I frequently heard this whisper from his mouth.
Dad was unaware how politics enters into our life and ruins the profession of our living if we are not careful about it.
I was also quiet and just observing the argumentative political fight between two brothers with no verbal expression.
Elder brother was saying, “my political party liberated more people than any other political party so it deserves to form the government.”
The younger brother was saying, “my political party has made the most progress and development in the country than any other party in the history of government. My political party protected the country during many difficult junctures of foreign interventions so it deserves to make the government.”
It’s worthless for me to spend time on who is wrong and who is right and this is not my intention here because both brothers were not politicians by profession.
They didn’t make a living doing politics because the elder brother was a high school teacher and younger brother was an accountant in a private firm.
I didn’t say anything to either brother during this heated political debate.
I simply said, “each of you are saying I am right because each of you has a huge ego; ego of severe political addiction.”
“You are not saying I am right, your ego is saying I am right.”
“When you are addicted to something your ego always bolsters,” I added.
“You are not saying your brother is wrong, your ego is saying your brother is wrong because addiction suffocates the judgement.
I just added to the elder brother, “Hey brother, you’ve shared many things with your younger brother, you shared the same house and same parents with him, if you can’t align your political thoughts with him in a family, then how would you align so many other thoughts in your professional life?”
He didn’t respond.
Interestingly, during the middle of this intense argumentative and corrosive political fight, the elder brother’s daughter ran over and said to her dad, “dad, why don’t you say ‘sorry’ to uncle?”
Her dad paused, looked at his daughter and became speechless.
His daughter was just 13 years old.
The whole verbal political fight turned into silence.
His daughter was still insisting to her dad to say ‘sorry’ to her uncle.
Eventually, her dad said ‘sorry’ to his younger brother and both daughter and her dad left the scene.
When the word “sorry” comes out from our mouth in any situation, amazing things happen.
Serotonin produces and stabilizes our mood.
It also helps to change our behavior to make us feel good or at least comfortable.
Most importantly, we win over our ego when we say ‘sorry’.
Our relationship whatever it is, in this case brotherhood, wins over ego.
The word ‘sorry’ teaches us that family relationships are way more important than a conflict due to mere political ideology.
Not to mention politics, religion, and sex are the most sensitive and divisive part of people’s lives but they shouldn’t disrupt our family values and relationship.
We learn to create human values from inside the family to promote and uplift one another in the society.
Remember, the best time to make our family relationship stronger is actually before we need it.
We have to create value in an existing relationship rather than just capture the value from it.
Always nurture the value of brotherhood by thinking of small actions that you were involved in the family when you were young, this helps to push the edges of the relationship further.
There are many things in life that we have to prioritize but there are very few things which we can not prioritize and have to take in parallel, our relationship with family is one of them.
Think of this, your son is 4 years old and you are in medical school. You can’t prioritize your medical school over your son and say once I finish medical school I would start to love my son very much.
You can’t do this, if you do this you will regret in life even after having your medical degree.
Whatever happens in our life, our relationship with family should move in parallel.
Grudges and divisive arguments in the family are for those who are very short-sighted and can’t control their emotions.
People who forgive and say ‘sorry’ are generally far-sighted and can control their emotions in the family.
I requested both brothers who were fighting over the choice of political parties to go home and change the question to “is any political party wrong instead of saying my political party is right?” “Ask yourself, does any political party have a wrong manifesto?”
Always remember, no political parties are bad, each one has only a different path to reach the best society.
Similarly, no religions are bad, they are only the different forms of expression of human beliefs.
Quote, I am pondering, “Your well being, success, and humankind is reflected in the religion you are practicing right now. Don’t change your religion,” -Dalai lama, an author, spiritual leader, and nobel laureate.
In the similar way, we all know what sex is, how it works, and why we need it.
Do we really need to go deeper in it?
I don’t think so.
Each of these categories; politics, religion, and sex has extreme ends, we don’t have to go there, we absolutely don’t need extremes if we don’t make a living on these things.
If we make a living on these things then it would be a different scenario, for example, professional politicians, religious leaders, or adult movie makers.
Keep in mind, the beauty of politics, religion, and sex is always in the middle for those of us who don’t make a living on these things.
If we start to consume every piece of information regarding politics, religion, or sex, we surely become addicted and its very difficult to break.
Trust me, this is garbage, we don’t need it.
After coming to the USA for my higher studies, I experienced and saw some of the very unusual things.
On presidential election day in the USA, the entire country works and remains active on its business, it’s not a holiday. It shocked me initially.
I went to the grocery stores, and people were working as usual.
I visited public and private offices, people were working as usual, public transportation was as usual.
School and colleges remain open as usual. Nobody talks about the ongoing election. If you bring that subject up, people smile and say “let’s see who will win.”
Only during election night, we will see how people are divided into two parties almost equally half as democrats and republicans.
Donald Trump, the former president, wanted the supreme court to overturn many states’ election results so that he could stay as a president in white house for 4 more years.
This is the country where the supreme court denied the petition filed by former president Donald Trump to overturn the state election result with one-line ruling as follows:
“The application for injunctive relief presented to Justice Alito and by him referred to the Court is denied.”
Amazingly, the general public has no interest in the inside business of the supreme court.
There are no phones, no cameras, and no journalists allowed in the supreme court.
One line final decision by the judge.
This was also a big surprise for me to know how the judicial system works.
I’m bringing these aforementioned two cases here just to smell the perception of ordinary people with various other professions towards politics and the judicial system.
How does it happen? I have no clue, I’m still studying this.
This may be one of the reasons that american economy is still so vibrant that none of the organizations or businesses are politicized.
My one line understanding is this: if we politicize the workplace where we work for a living then it is highly likely that we become addicted to politics.
And same applies to religion and sex too.
One way to get rid of addiction from politics, religion or sex is twist a question away from “I and my.”
Once we do this we generally get completely different answers because our ego doesn’t control us.
If we reorder or rephrase the same question excluding ‘I and my’, we get a distant view of life, even though the motive of the question still remains the same.
With this approach, in many cases we solve very difficult problems, especially political and religious problems, there are many examples of it.
When we are angry or in disagreement with someone, we have to change the question and ask ourselves a different version of the same question.
Problems are not always solved by just asking the correct question to others or ourselves because there is no question which is wrong.
Problems are generally solved by reordering the same question so that we see different parts of the same problem.
Once we reorder the same question, different parts of the brain trigger and we get completely different answers.
Remember, when we argue or when we confront, we lose our control, this is normal and natural.
In life how we react to what happens determines who we are.
By the time we react, we already rearrange our thoughts, we rearrange our expressions more than what we initially had.
Once we take a question or answer away from us personally, we become more free and accepted.
Why does Elon Musk, founder and CEO of Tesla, think such a humongous and unpredictable task?
Why does he think 200 or 500 hundred years from now?
He thinks of colonizing mars for human settlement, because he is taking both questions and answers far away from him, because 200 or 500 years from now, he won’t be alive. We all won’t be alive. Legacy also comes into play when we go far personally from our question and answers.
The world we are living in right now is made by those who twisted the existence then, who ventured the unknown question, and those who thought about the uncomfortable question in their own new way.
When we reorder things, creation appears.
Rearrange the sofas in your living room, your mind says, wow, it’s gorgeous because your mind identifies the new creation.
Renew, refresh, reshuffle, reselect, reshelf, redecorate; all they have amazing things in common.
They change the dynamics of our brain.
They help to see things from different angles.
The Pareto principle also indicates the same: only 20 percent of anything produces more value, 20 percent comes from reselection.
20 percent of words of any language are mostly used in any conversation.
20 percent of stuff in our home we use again and again.
20 percent of products of any company sell over and over.
20 percent of spices the chef uses again and again to produce amazing dishes.
20 percent of our questions have the best answers.
The remaining 80 percent of all of the above are mundane and can not produce valuable outcomes.
Remember, when you say “I and my,” it’s mundane, it doesn’t produce the most valuable 20 percent result so that reselect your question.
Think of it this way, sugar is an essential ingredient in our life.
We need it to survive. But if we over consume it then it converts into more fats and that is the main culprit of our many health problems in modern life including cancer.
Overconsumption of anything is bad, including sugar.
Overconsumption is against the principle of reselection.
Don’t over consume anything in life including politics, religion, and sex.
Reselect the same so that we don’t over consume.
Let’s start by using one spoon of sugar instead of two spoons in our morning tea or coffee.
Let’s consume coffee or tea only two times in a day instead of four times.
Let’s consume the news only once in a day rather than to follow every piece of news during the day.
There is also one reason why we hesitate to reselect because we are social animals.
We tend to be skeptical of new questions and uncomfortable with change.
We are likely to stay with the same old question about anything.
We are likely to challenge anything new.
This is our nature.
We feel so comfortable living in a small echo chamber: the same old friends, the same colleagues, the same road to go home, the same food everyday, and the same kind of entertainment shows on TV everyday.
We are afraid of reselection.
If we have any new information coming in our mind, we have to trust it but we always have to verify it.
Verification is the reselection of the same old with new eyes.
Remember, we all will die sometime in the future, sad but true, and the desire to make us important all the time is just human nature.
That’s the reason we always say, ‘I and my.’
Accept this fact that we have to reselect our statement excluding ‘I and my’ even if we are right.
When we start to develop this skill we make a habit of saying “sorry” to the people.
To say ‘sorry’ is an acceptance that I’m accommodating you for my mission, you are more important than me, and I listen more than I talk.
We can’t beat human nature unless we know how to accommodate other humans.
There is another misconception out there that academically sound people are always right and they know more because we see these people leading in many places, we see these people on the stage, we see these people all over the places trying to control others.
Forget about their academic degrees; PhD, MD, or MBA if they are not using their expertise in the field where they make a living.
I’m sure you’ve also seen and worked with so many of these people who have these degrees but are the most absurd and polarized in society.
I have personally seen and worked with so many of these people who have PhD, MD, and MBA but are the most argumentative, short-tempered, arrogant, corrosive, and politically motivated.
I’m not saying all are bad, what I’m saying is, don’t follow them blindly.
Just believe, our formal education never prepares us 100 percent in the real world.
I believe I have some credit, at least, to say this.
I’ve spent 5+ years in my PhD and 4+ years in my postdoctoral training.
We must have real world experience to be successful in the real world.
This is not only by me, this is also by those who are successful in the real world who don’t have PhD, MD, and MBA but are generous, collective, and logical.
Apply the principle of reselection for these people too if they are influencing your lives directly or indirectly who have these tags of PhD, MD, and MBA after their name.
Real world education means starting a grocery store, traveling far from home without much money, driving a taxi to survive, and running 5K for the first time if you’ve never run before.
Real world education means studying your mind about what comes in the middle of your 5K run.
Real world education means trusting the gut and intuition and applying the feeling of that 5K run that never comes by sitting on the couch at home.
Just one living example, John Paul DeJoria, an entrepreneur and the founder of the Paul Mitchell line of hair-care products, started his business career with a loan of just $700 with a high school degree. He now owns a business empire worth $3.1 billion.
If we are involved in real world education, it owns us and we are more likely to quit the different forms of addiction in our lives.
Our gut, our intuition, and our real world experience is more powerful than the advice of PhD.
Asking many questions in life is a choice but tweaking the same old question over and over to get the new result is a decision.
Real world education is nothing new, it is the application of tweaking of the same old question to see our lives with a new lens.
Reorder the same old question in different forms and avoid things which are not important in life. This is called focus.
There are two types of real work we can do in this world depending on our personalities.
We can either work as a CEO of our own company or we can work for a CEO’s company.
If you drive your own taxi or if you own a grocery store, then you are CEO; if you are accountant or lawyer in a firm then you work for a CEO.
Both are equally important, choose what suits you the best.
We have to choose where we fit the best depending on our own personality.
Similarly, we can also select to work in two sectors: public or private.
Both are equally important, also depending on our personality.
Be either a public servant or work in private firms; be kind, be generous and always make a habit of saying “sorry”.
I personally prefer the private sector because it teaches us entrepreneurship in life.
If we know entrepreneurship, we can live freely wherever we go.
Keep in mind, we spend the 1st half of our life time learning and the 2nd half in working based on 1st half’s learning; this isn’t going to work in the 21st century and after.
This concept of education has already stopped working because it is based on the 19th century education system dictated by the industrial revolution.
Entrepreneurship is one of the tools to win over this old education system. The important thing is that it teaches us how to adapt to the fast changing environment. More than this, it teaches us how, where, and when to say ‘sorry’ to others.
Always remember, “sorry” doesn’t mean you are wrong, it only means you might not have reordered your old question.
The best time to say ‘sorry’ is when you realize that you are only a single dot in a sea of billion other dots, if you realize this at your core you never get addicted in anything including politics, religion, and sex.
Thank you for your time.
-Yam Timsina
“When she’d propose to marry me, I’d be happy, I’ll wait”, I simply chuckled, don’t know why?
He was in high school in grade twelve, so called intermediate second year then.
Our other dear friend was also in the same class but she was a little bit quiet.
She used to talk only about classes, teachers, subjects, home assignments, and exams, nothing more than tidbits about school life.
Occasionally, she used to go for snacks during break but only in a group of friends.
He was my dear friend and was interested in talking beyond that boundary of school tidbits, he was interested in talking about life, relationships, and future plans.
But it never happened because he was unprepared, he was scared, he didn’t have any maturity on how to express feelings or love to somebody else.
As far as I know, he never expressed his feelings to her, he always kept inside himself until he left the school.
Occasionally he shared his feelings with me but not with her.
He absorbed his feelings internally, I am not aware when and how he released it out.
I don’t know how he’s living his life nowadays but recently I made a connection with him via Facebook. Thanks Zuckerberg.
I’m sure there are many people out there who are in the similar situation as my dear friend.
I hope this content will help them.
Feelings convert into pain very quickly if it doesn’t get space to sprout.
After more than two decades now, I figured out how somebody’s feelings and love towards another person dissipates and infects the person internally.
If we live carrying the unexpressed feeling in life, this would be the road to disaster, this could be one of the root causes of our unhappiness.
Bronnie Ware, an Australian nurse and an author of “The Top Five Regrets of the Dying” a phenomenal book which is translated into 27 languages talks about unexpressed feeling as a number three regret of dying person.
Number three regret the dying: “I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.”
Few months ago, I remembered that my younger daughter insisted that I go to play with her in the park.
She told me to leave my cell phone at home. I was a little surprised but I could understand.
I asked her why to leave phone at home.
She said that you don’t interact with the park and you don’t enjoy it if you have your cell phone with you.
At that moment I told her, sure, I will leave the phone in the car and I will engage fully with the park.
I spent 30 minutes with her in the park without my cellphone but I saw her cheering face which I’d rarely seen before.
When I came home, I re-evaluated and mostly regretted how I spent the past years with my daughter.
The main reason I was happy that day was because I made my daughter happy by tweaking my small habit to allow her feelings to express.
She expressed quite a number of concerns and feelings during our 30 minutes park tour.
Like it or not, we are living in the world of instant gratification.
Our cell phone has become a tool of instant gratification.
We are caught up in the hustle and bustle of modern life.
We need everything instant, we have e-tickets, we have express check-outs, we have fast food drive-through.
We have microwaves and we need food in a few seconds.
We expect anything to happen in a few seconds to a few minutes.
We don’t expect to wait.
This pattern of life is making us more unhappy than ever before because we are losing the grip of life slowly, we are losing patience very fast.
I’ve also observed the other reason for our unhappiness, “the culture of more.”
We are living in “the culture of more.”
We have one nice house, we need a couple of more including vacation house.
We have one bike, it is working perfectly for our purpose, we need at least two more of different styles.
We have one car, working nicely, but we need one more luxurious car.
I am not against these luxurious things, I personally love them but I’m against the sense of their control in our lives at present and regret when we turn older. I wish I could have lived differently.
What we forget here is we have only 24 hours in a day, we can’t stretch it, we have just 24 hours, that’s it.
When we have more things to take care of, obviously we need to earn more money to maintain these things; a vacation house, a second bike, and a luxurious car.
We have to sacrifice more time to earn more money, not only that we have to also give extra time to maintain these extra things regularly.
Buying is just a first step, major responsibilities come after buying. We have to renovate the vacation house, we have to change the oil in the second bike and second car regularly.
These extra things are soaking all our personal time, sometimes knowingly, sometimes unknowingly.
When we create a little free space in our mind then only happy hormones roll the ball on us.
All our emphasis is going more on changing oil in the car rather than changing oil in our body.
Oh, today, I can’t go to the gym, I have to change oil in my car.
Oh, today, I can’t make dinner, I’ll eat frozen pizza because I have to finish the wall painting in my beach house.
All of these “more things” are making us stressed out, remember, we’ve only 24 hours in a day.
We don’t eat nutrient food because food is not our priority, we don’t drink enough water because dehydration goes unnoticed.
Our health is crumbling down because all the time we are hustling out for more things.
We easily become tired due to all of the above, we slept less, we spent less time with our kids and spouse.
If you don’t spend more time with your kids and spouse, you remain unhappy. This is a fact.
For those who don’t have kids or spouses, have a pet and spend time with it, a miracle happens in your life.
Keep in mind, more is not always better. If you know how to distinguish ‘the culture of more’ with ‘culture of enough’, you will remain happy throughout your life.
Our body stops communicating with our mind when we have no clue what meditation, gratitude, and mindfulness are, and how they balance our life.
We never dedicate any time for these things because all of our time is consumed by noise around us.
Meditation, gratitude, and mindfulness teach us a secret of life, here it is: our past is already gone, our future has not been written yet, the only thing we have is the present, so be happy and enjoy it to the fullest.
After a certain time we start to look outside for happiness, outside of our inner life.
By the time we know there is something imbalance in our life, it’s already too late.
Happiness is not outside, it is inside us.
Remember, outside may bring pleasure but it doesn’t always bring happiness.
Understand this fact, happiness is not pleasure, you can certainly buy pleasure for a certain time but you cannot buy happiness.
Think of the time, in school, asking your teacher why you had to learn national geography if you had no intention of using it in real life. Probably, your teacher might have said that you need to learn national geography for your brain development or college preparation or harsh case scenario, “because I said so.”
Now you are an independent adult with a fully mature brain.
Your teacher’s answer doesn’t apply to you any more.
Therefore, you don’t need to fill your mind with useless information.
Always believe what you see and what you do or plan to do, not what others tell you to believe.
You don’t need other people’s approval all the time in your life.
Information is already overloaded due to finger tip’s digital access.
What kind of value are you producing by remembering the names of all the rivers and forests of your country in 21st century’s education unless you are participating in a national quiz competition?
Now you are an adult, if anything that isn’t interesting to you or relevant to you by any means, don’t consume it.
Only consume what is relevant to your life.
Create an extra space in your brain by taking only things or experiences that are relevant to your life.
Don’t let junks walk all over your mind.
Happiness comes from things that matter to you, not from junks.
Happiness is a state of mind, to be happy we have to change our mind.
The interpretation of happiness is highly subjective and it is not an exact science.
Some people read Playboy to become happy, some people read physics to become happy, and some people read companies’ legal and financial reports to become happy.
Some people sing songs to become happy and some people do fishing to become happy.
You get the picutre, why there is so much variation in happiness because it is internal, it has nothing to do with other people’s choices.
We cannot find any good tool to quantify the level of happiness.
If I get my thing then I would be happy is basically an illusion.
If you are not happy now before getting the thing, you will not be happy after getting that thing also.
You must be happy first to get things, otherwise you will stretch your expectations all the time that never end. If it never ends then you never become happy.
Many people think that a lot of money makes them happy.
But in reality people who don’t have money think this way only that a lot of money makes them happy.
I am sure you have seen many people with a lot of money but still unhappy, they are unhappy because they still want only more money, I have certainly seen many of these people.
Here is the fact.
Money itself doesn’t make us happy, it is just a paper with pictures on it, but it gives us freedom and security.
We can utilize money to get freedom according to our interests that make us happy.
If we have nothing to do during our free time, then we again become unhappy.
Money is an amazing tool, one tool out of many, that provides us things and experiences that make us happy, treat it as such.
Happiness also comes from growth, it comes from trying new things, it comes from taking educated and calculated risks in life.
Learn to take big risks, learn to survive big failures. But most importantly, learn how to win big in life so that we can give back to society even bigger.
When we give to society, we become the happiest person because we make other people happy.
Think about your happiness level when you make your kids or your spouse happy, what do you feel? Just go a little bit further to make your neighbor or your community happy, you feel a rush of flow of dopamine and serotonin in your body.
Why didn’t my dear friend propose to our classmate in grade twelve?
Because he didn’t have courage to ask, he didn’t have a risk taking attitude.
Worst of all, what could have happened if he had proposed to her, either she would say yes or no.
Either answer would produce no harm to both of them, but by not taking the risk of asking he got only regret.
Imagine the movie industry and stock market, which movie is going to be a blockbuster and which stock is going to be a 100 X multiplier, nobody knows.
Nobody knows what’s going to work. We can just guess, an educated guess. We can be lucky by an educated guess.
But people who dedicate themselves to making movies or people who invest in the stock market keep doing the same thing. They just don’t expect only the best result, they enjoy taking educated and calculated risks, and when they win, they win big.
Remember, regret of not taking risk is permanent but risk itself is temporary.
People always doubt what you say because these are words but people always believe what you do because these are actions. Happy people love actions not words even though actions are risky.
We all have innate observational and investigative skills for any kind of actions, the only thing is we have to explore by using it.
Once you start exploring, you become more interested to explore more, you start to make flow of your exploration.
This flow institutes a happiness inside you.
Many celebrities are brand-conscious and we have a culture of following them on social media.
I’m not against following the ideal person but I’m against following blindly.
They all wear Gucci items and we try to imitate their persona.
They wear Gucci because they get paid from Gucci to attract the poor and middle class.
This comparison doesn’t make us happy because we are not celebrities, their personal values and our personal values are different.
I have seen former first lady Michelle Obama wearing a pair of J. Crew sage green leather gloves to hold the bible for her husband before a worldwide audience of 140 million plus on TV to be sworn in as America’s first ever African American president.
She could wear Gucci but she didn’t, she wore items from an ordinary retail store.
She did this because she is real, she is not a pretender.
I have seen Barack Obama also wearing J. Crew bow ties many times.
The Obama family declined brands, they showed their love for mass consumer retailers.
Only Louis Vuitton and Gucci don’t show our personality, they are just symbols of luxury.
Remember, luxury is not happiness, it is only pleasure.
To become happy, we must be authentic based on our priorities and values, not by comparing ourselves with Gucci wearing celebrities.
Understand this, you don’t possess happiness, you have to create it according to your own standards.
It is absolutely internal based on your personal expectations and reality.
If you are unhappy, immerse yourself in life with some passion.
We, as humans, came to earth almost 1.2 to 2 million years ago before the modern humans, Homo sapiens, appeared. At that time, there was earth, dirt, soil, rocks, and some plants on the continent.
Many animals appeared and disappeared but why did we humans always thrive?
Because we have a passion for progress, but animals don’t.
We have an amazing brain in our head which other animals don’t have.
The science about our brain is still mysterious, we barely know how it works, but when we associate our passion with it, it works fabulously. Don’t ask me how.
Passion ignites us, passion gives us a reason to live.
Once you have passion to live, you start to marry to yourself first before you marry anybody else.
Now you find a reason to live, you always remain happy.
Connect and engage your passion with your family, friends, and colleagues.
Start small, but start now, once you start, you will know exactly what to do, how to do, and when to do.
This passion would be your happiness project.
We have seen many happy people buying time with their passion but unhappy people waste time complaining about everything.
The mother of John Lennon, the evergreen artist of the Beatles, once asked her son, “what do you want to be when you grow up?”
John Lennon replied, “I want to be happy.”
Remember, if you love somebody, just propose today, take the risk and ask, don’t wait for the day that never comes in reality, the so-called tomorrow.
Accept the result and move on, you won’t regret, you feel proud that you asked, you will remain happy irrespective of the answer from the other side.
Good luck everyone, always be happy.
Thank you for your time.
-Yam Timsina
Aa a scientist where do you see: branch or root?
What do you think about Sir Isaac Newton?
Was he a genius thinker?
Of course, yes.
Did he invent the law of gravity by miraculous experimentation?
Of course, not. It was by a powerful rational creative thinking.
As we all know, gravitation existed well before Newton’s time in this universe but the whole world was unaware of it.
There was gravity at the time the universe was formed.
The law of gravity was a ghost before Newton but he made it living.
That’s why Newton became the greatest scientist of all time.
Ghost is imaginary but living is usable that influences and prospers our lives directly or indirectly.
What about instantaneous change?
Did it exist before Newton?
Of course, yes, but it was again a ghost before Newton.
It was also imaginary before Newton but now we have the whole world of calculus, the extension of instantaneous change.
We are utilizing the whole world of calculus in different forms.
When we think about science, we still largely think only about invention.
Our curriculum, school, college, and society knows science mainly through invention and teaches us the same thing from the very beginning.
The younger generation is quite unaware about the other side of invention which is innovation.
At the same time, our society must teach innovation as the extension of invention in our institutions.
Unless we make people aware about innovation from the very beginning, society mixes invention and innovation and we never distinguish their priority.
As a matter of fact, invention and innovation have different core meanings.
Invention is a pure science but innovation is a business of value, the value which is flexible and can be rediscovered again and again.
Invention expands human knowledge but innovation utilizes it and accelerates human values and prospers us.
As a professional scientist, I see a huge knowledge gap even among the scientific community regarding the concept of innovation in both business and science.
Business itself is a branch of science, and innovation drives it forward.
There is still a wrong perception among ordinary people.
We are not fully able to make them understand the concept of business and innovation.
Business and innovation complement to each other.
They think business people are crooks, they loot the poor and they become rich.
As a matter of fact, business is a group of many different people.
It is a community of scientists, innovators, customers, employees, and suppliers.
All are integral parts of interconnectedness.
This is a business of innovation.
They all have specific missions but work together to prosper the human society.
If only one part is out of balance, then it affects others and would make our society unsustainable.
If scientists make supersonic jets available to travel space, then how many of us have access to go there matters because it affects our life and society directly and indirectly.
Innovation comes into play when ordinary people feel its influence in their lives.
The Wright brothers invented the airplane in 1903, the first commercial flight took place after 11 years in 1914, and the whole world changed.
Scientists may tell you a great deal about science but they tell you nothing about the future of innovation because innovation is a product of time.
Innovation captures great science and makes our life easy and comfortable.
Scientists must acquire innovation to lead not only an easy and comfortable life but also a happy and healthy life.
If we look back at the history of science, there is an endless series of stories of genius scientists who created inventions but then died broke and largely unhappy.
At the same time many other innovators utilized their inventions and made millions.
There are many examples of these situations, please allow me to go into some few modern examples.
Julius Lilienfeld, an American physicist and electrical engineer, patented the first transistor, but AT&T got the credit for the first working transistor.
Intel is earning billions of dollars from semiconductors, which is a product made based on the transistor.
Charles Babbage, a mathematician and philosopher, invented the first computer, but IBM innovated it and developed software applications for it.
IBM created an enormous and durable business serving billions of people across the globe, and is also earning billions of dollars.
In 1990, Alan Emtage, Bill Heelan, and Peter J. Deutsch, all students at McGill University at Montreal, Canada, invented the web content search engine but Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin became the most successful innovative winners.
They utilized it as their core business, they perfected it, they are serving billions now, and already became billionaires themselves.
Just think of our life without Google today.
It’s hard to produce many Newtons and many Einsteins as inventors in society.
Our society has certain limitations to produce this type of genius.
This also equally applies to innovators who generally perfect the inventions and change the livelihood of the general public.
We still have a confusing perception that innovation includes only grandiose scientific advancement. But in reality, innovation is a small idea, mini-management, little twist on supply chain, and a continuous thought about people’s life.
For every Bill Gates and for every Elon Musk, there are hundreds of innovators who are still working but have little or nothing to show to the world.
They started something, they failed, and they never tried again.
Failing means to give up, throw in the towel, but to keep trying is not failing, innovation is to keep trying.
Jennifer Aniston and Sandra Bullock worked as waitresses before they became Hollywood icons.
There were thousands of waiters and waitresses in the USA who never got a casting call from Hollywood.
During their time as waitresses also, Jennifer and Sandra were working mentally for acting.
They never gave up.
Hard work beats talent if talent isn’t put into mental work.
As invention, innovation is also expensive and it requires sustainability otherwise innovative efforts will disappear after a certain time.
We have to reduce risks in research otherwise there is a high chance of going out of business.
You can assume why big pharma buys potential small drug companies so that they can minimize their research effort.
This is done to reduce the risk and at the same time they can accelerate late stage development of small buying companies.
There is a high potentiality to go in the market fast.
There are many other versions of risk reduction on innovation.
When we think of big companies like Apple, we assume that they invest so much on design and development but they invest way more on patent litigation in comparison to pure research and development.
Pure research and development has no guaranteed result on stipulated time but still needs continuous emphasis for future advancements.
In science, sometimes, pure research and development also invites serendipity.
Artificial organs and black holes are unexpected discoveries but airplanes and automobiles are expected discoveries.
When there is an unexpected finding, it always becomes a promising area of innovation because there is almost no competition.
They are mostly the by-products of other major invention efforts so that there is no investment cost associated with.
Remember this, nobody starts invention and innovation with the hope of serendipity, it just happens as a by-product of continuous effort.
Failure is a recurring part of any research.
Any scientist who adapts all possible conditions to himself or herself, every single result depends on that person’s thought, emotion, and working model.
This is the reason scientists are sometimes quoted as unpredictable people.
Unpredictable basically indicates the freeflow thinking patterns.
Thinking pattern in innovation is amazing which is key in producing valuable results.
Most of us see only branches of the tree because they are up above the ground, no mental pressure.
We can not see roots because they are underground, needs more digging to see.
We don’t have time and energy to see roots, we see branches, enjoy it, and pass-by.
Whether you are an innovative scientist depends on why and where your focus is: on root or branch or both?
Innovative scientists also try to estimate the root and its underground spread while watching the branches on top.
The extension of root is new knowledge, new invention, and new science.
The decoration by the branches is a new innovation.
Root represents fundamental knowledge but branch represents more of an art than science.
Branches still need the support of root but they can give us many beautiful things in our life depending on how good interior designers we are.
Stronger the root, more the branches; more the branches, greater the selection of artistic decorations.
We ultimately want all: strong roots, strong branches, and beautiful decorations.
Innovative world doesn’t see only black and white, it actually sees in shades of gray.
To adapt to the innovative world, one must be curious and interested in learning.
We must see things from others’ views and find out nuggets in people before judging them.
Everybody says that diets of salad and fruit contain fewer calories, there is nothing new but the hidden part is both foods are less attractive eating materials.
We don’t like to eat.
Our psychology is that we are more tempted to eat chocolate than salad.
Innovation also lies in that borderline of hidden and known facts of human psychology.
We all know scientists are trained to design experiments rather than to develop people systems, but innovative scientists do both.
Emotional intelligence (EQ) is a tool for innovative people, it is bigger than talent (IQ).
Emotional intelligence teaches us to collaborate with new dots which were unknown before to take a new direction.
Why did Bill Gates and late Steve Jobs adopt a daily meditation routine?
Because they wanted to excel in the world of innovation.
Emotional intelligence navigates society through which innovation emerges.
Innovation is our need to make our life easy.
Majority of us pretty quickly know the cost of a bottle of water in Walmart stores because there is a price tag but very few of us are able to estimate the value of the same water in the desert or halfway through a marathon because there is no price tag.
Cost comes from IQ but value comes from EQ.
We have no prediction of the future, we have only ideas from the past.
This is called literature search in research.
In any human project, the future we are trying to predict will indicate a past but a different past, another past having very little sameness of the previous past.
The people in the past, people in the present, and people in future would be different in various ways.
Understanding of this interconnectedness is innovation.
There is a beauty in the interconnectedness: innovators should be more eager to play with it.
R&D is the heart of Innovation.
We must see the continuity of existing products and services.
We must set priority on either the long run of existing product with less emphasis on R&D or short run of existing product or service with high emphasis on R&D.
This is a difficult choice but innovation seeks this distinction and balance.
Any technology company who does business for us if that doesn’t add new features or products continuously, they lose their customers and audience over the time.
If we aren’t emphasizing R&D, then innovative people will leave the company. This is a big risk in the sustainability of businesses.
If innovative companies stopped hiring new talents for research and development, their existing products would be obsolete very soon and there is a high chance that companies would go out of business.
We must seek the competitive advantage in research and development.
It could be more patent production, it could be a new kind of technological advancement.
If it is by patents, after a certain time, they will expire and the company’s competitive advantage will disappear.
If it is a technological advantage, there is always the threat that another newer technology will replace the old one.
And both are very true.
This is the main reason why Microsoft always competes with Google and Facebook always competes with Twitter.
Today’s advanced technology may become tomorrow’s obsolescence, if we don’t rediscover technology constantly.
Martina Navratilova, the greatest tennis player of all time, has said, “what matters isn’t how well you play when you are playing well; what matters is how well you play when you’re playing badly.” This clearly applies in research and innovation.
Slow and boring is also sometimes very good, especially in scientific and innovative development, be slow but always keep moving.
If you want to be an innovative scientist, be a good scientist first with enough scientific understanding and make a habit of watching branches of a tree with artistic flavor.
Remember, innovation is art on science.
As a scientist, if you acquire artistic intuition, you will become innovative.
Innovation is flexibility, innovation is change which makes our life exciting.
But we must be careful of change. If we have to constantly change in different ways without meaningful purpose then we are destined to fail.
This is no fun at all in both personal and professional life.
As always, innovation needs correct but slow change.
Progress is always slow and always boring.
Enjoy this boredom everyone because after boredom we have to rest, and after rest we will rediscover ourselves.
Thank you for your time.
-Yam Timsina
After all he is your dad, why don’t you forgive him?
Few years ago, I had a colleague in my office. He was older than me, he was also more experienced than me in various ways, in life as well as in career.
One day in our informal chat he told me, he hasn’t spoken to his dad for the last 7 years.
I became so awkward and surprised to know how one can pass 7 years without talking to his dad who is living just 300 hundred miles away.
He continued, “yes, I haven’t spoken with him since our family feud broke out.”
Without going into specific detail I asked him, “have you seen any family which is untouched by any kind of feud?”
His reply was simply to ignore my question.
In reality, there is no family which is free from any kind of feud.
Feud can be major or minor but we all go through this.
We all have problems, we all have things to resolve but it doesn’t mean we stop talking to our dad and mom.
In the middle of our conversation he suddenly asked me another question, “what did I do last weekend?”
Instead of giving him the straight answer I asked him, “what did you do?”
He said, “I went to the botanical garden with my daughters.”
I further added, “Do you imagine the same situation as you have with your dad at present between you and your daughters in the future?”
He unequivocally said, “no, it’s not possible, he continued that he is different than his dad, he was raised by his parents in wrong way, and he is raising his daughters in different way than how he was raised by his parents”
He was blaming his dad in various ways but I didn’t comment at all. I just listened because I don’t know his dad. I simply knew that he was talking about his dad to me.
Nonetheless, I couldn’t remain silent without asking, I asked, “who is more educated and resourceful now compared to your dad when you were growing up with him?”
He simply avoided my question and didn’t answer.
We all devote our time with our kids, we want to raise them in such a way they would become successful and independent when they grow up.
As parents we don’t expect anything in return, this is how human generation transforms, progresses, and moves.
This is the beauty of generational transformation.
I asked him, “Does your daughter know you don’t speak to her grandpa?”
He said, “Yes, she knows it but she never brings that up in the family.”
Whatever happened to us in our family in the past, especially with our parents, whoever is involved in the fedu either dad or mom, whoever is faulty either dad or mom, we must forget it and forgive them, and move on.
Dad is dad. Mom is mom.
Remember, this life is a gift our parents gave us. Period.
Nobody can replace them in this generation.
We are here, we are alive, we became the luckiest product of the luckiest winning sperm and winning ovum.
This chance is rare.
We became the luckiest of all.
Think about this, the probability of us being born is at about one in 400 trillion.
One in 400 trillion.
Isn’t it luck?
If this isn’t luck then what is it, I don’t know.
One thing, keep in mind, whatever our parents did in the past, they did according to their capacity, knowledge, and resources available at that time.
They might have made major or minor mistakes while raising us, whatever it was, just forget it and forgive them. Period.
They gave us this amazing life.
If you haven’t spoken to your dad for a long time, just pick up a phone and call, start the conversation.
If you haven’t visited them for a long time, give them a surprise visit.
Drink a beer with your dad if you can, if not drink tea with him in the nearest most beautiful and expensive restaurant.
Express the experience, tell your parents that you love them.
When they see you in front of them, they will forget the past feud, don’t bring that up.
Start the conversation fresh.
There are only three things you can enjoy in life: best conversation, best food, and best experience.
Always remember, we all die but our parents will die before us leaving all the family feud behind us.
You always see them growing older than before.
This is emotional but a fact.
Our family feud is temporary and it is due to ego but if we don’t forgive our parents the regret will remain forever.
That will remain as a scar in our heart.
Regret is permanent, this regret will eat us from inside throughout our life.
Humility and forgiveness are human tools to uplift our life.
They serve the best for human endeavors.
If we fail to forgive the mistakes then there is no way we can grow as a free human being.
This also hampers our ability to improve our other skills to upgrade our own life.
We often mix ego with confidence but they are very different.
For some people it takes a few seconds to distinguish whether they are egotistical or confident but for some other people it might take a longer time to differentiate.
If we are able to separate ego from confidence from inside then only we can recognize our identity.
It’s alway better to be confident than to look confident, because both take the same amount of time.
The research of social science also suggests that forgiveness is a multi-dimensional trait and takes into account self-understanding and awareness, as well as openness.
Ego ruins us, confidence talks loud but humility and forgiveness whispers.
We need many more whispers for a free and happy life.
So first and foremost, forgive your parents unconditionally.
Secondly, if you can, forgive your ex-spouse, ex-boss, and ex-friend unconditionally.
Once you forgive them, you feel amazing, you don’t know what they feel but you feel free, you feel you are winning at life.
Humility and forgiveness are inherent human characteristics which are different from other acquired human skills.
In many situations, people choose advisors or life coaches or mentors to acquire various skills.
But advisors don’t help to acquire inherent characteristics.
Their role is to find out how to reach our life goals, how to make reasonable plans, and how to stick with the plan.
They don’t help to find out what our inherent characters are.
Nowadays, technology has become an integral part of our life to connect.
There is nothing we cannot find on the internet as information.
The Internet has become an extension of our behaviour.
The way we are living our lives these days is heavily influenced by technology and smartphones.
There are both pros and cons of it.
It has become a massive timesaver for us in many ways.
It solves a lot of problems quicker, there is no doubt about it.
In the meantime, technology has also become a huge distraction for us if we don’t know how to react to our human emotions.
Similarly, technology is also helping us to be more reactive than proactive, making us poor thinkers and poor decision makers.
It gives ads 24/7.
The commercial motif of technology is to distract us more and more with ads, mostly with attention grabbing items, news, and notifications.
If you cannot hold information for a certain time to absorb and analyze and show your reactive attitude too fast on the internet forum then you degrade your inherent character.
You become too reactive to people whom you don’t like, places where you have never visited, and circumstances which you have never experienced.
When technology rules us in many ways, we must focus on where it doesn’t rule us.
Humility is to pause and think before making any judgement or reaction.
Forgiveness sits on the corner of humility.
Reactive nature invites more distraction and leads to a habit of multitasking which is absolutely bad for real solution oriented people and deep thinkers.
Keep in mind, there is a difference between problem oriented mindset and solution oriented mindset.
Multitasking might be good for mindless things but harmful for a solution oriented mindset.
Only we can multitask but our mind cannot multitask, that’s the reason we shouldn’t watch iPhone while crossing the street.
As always, our mind cannot multitask, otherwise a moving vehicle doesn’t hit us while watching the screen on the street.
I started this piece of content with the relationship between son and dad, but please allow me to go a little deeper why we keep bitter feelings, acrimony, and ego inside us.
According to psychologist and Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, there are two types of thinking processes.
Fast thinking and slow thinking.
Fast process recognizes patterns automatically, quickly, and effortlessly and tells quickly what happens next and what to do next.
When the sky is predicted to fall and you cannot save it then the fast process says run, but for the same situation slow process says relax.
Slow process instructs us: reduce the fast intake of outside information, be calm, and don’t be reactive quickly.
Fast process only informs us “ what happens next? What to do next?” “Where to go?” but the slow process instructs us “how to handle next?”
But for a slow process to happen we have to wait, we have pause, which we don’t do most of the time.
Humility and forgiveness comes only in our life if we practice to adapt to the slow process.
Our relationship with our parents must be a slow process, we should not be quick to pull the flowers because we might end up watering the weeds.
Remember, life’s too short to wallow in the weeds of negative vibes and self-pity.
Slow thinking process always allocates attention to beautiful flowers, but the fast process might invite the weeds.
Slower the process, the higher the chance to reach a rational decision.
In reality, our decisions often originate in a fast process which in most cases lead us to the wrong track.
I believe that’s what happened to my colleague and he is living carrying the acrimony over his dad.
Forgiveness is an essential human quality which can be improved everyday by practice.
Most often ego appears as confidence and corrodes us, that confidence which comes from ignorance rather than from knowledge which is very dangerous.
Fast process also nurtures ignorance and ego.
We have a natural tendency, our emotion is inversely related to our knowledge, the less we know the more excited we become, the less we know the more confident we sound.
This is the reason that religion, politics, and love act in the same way.
The real followers of these disciplines always remain steadfast regardless of any kind of circumstances, evidence or consequences.
They are called blind supporters.
Political followers become like smokers.
Smokers become addicted to tobacco by the nicotine, but the real health risks come from inhaling burning tar.
In an underdeveloped society where people are less educated, political leaders feed the tar to the general public all the time so that they keep fire on for their motivated political agendas.
When a politician has a criminal record, or a history of cheating people or even just feels above the law, we as public must stop following them and think slowly.
If our mind remains in the middle of good and bad, most of the time we do bad stuff.
Philosopher Hannah Arendt has said beautifully, “most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.”
Crook politicians don’t suddenly sprout a sense of responsibility, that is possible only when the general public starts to think slowly based on social merits.
If we think slowly and act slowly, we always select fewer but better choices.
It helps us to separate ideas from the person, and let ideas fight to each other, but not the people.
When the superior person gives order to the inferior person, the inferior person stops thinking and starts reacting.
Because the authority or hierarchy shuts down our mind.
This is how our mind works and we can not go deeper, this is natural but we can change it by practice.
There is no guarantee that the order from the superior person is correct but our mind takes order in such a way that there is no alternative of higher authority order.
But if we pause and think slowly, one single word or one single sentence or one single idea could change our existing mindset and we become better decision makers.
While testing the general theory of relativity, Albert Einstein said, “ if a single one of the conclusions from it proves wrong, it must be given up.”
Just one counterfact is enough to show that the scientific theory is wrong.
If you can not forgive your dad unconditionally, then your theory of life is wrong and you will remain wrong forever, you will never be happy, healthy, and wealthy again.
Therefore, always and always forgive your dad unconditionally.
Thank you for your time.
-Yam Timsina
More than a decade’s married life, why did they separate?
Life is amazing and we don’t understand its gist until we see it crumbling in our own eyes.
Very early in my career, I worked as an assistant in a refugee camp.
I’ve vivid memories of these crumbling lives.
When we talk to refugees who lost everything, who ran from their home to save their families; the role of our life becomes crystal clear.
We dedicate our whole life to protect our family and to do so when you flee abandoning your home, your property, your relatives, and your own land, you definitely feel like you are dead.
If we’re born in Bhutan, we would feel the same.
If we were born in Syria and our house is bombed to shambles, we wouldn’t hold any dreams in life.
How can we see any dream from a burning house?
This is very emotional but it is a fact.
One of my long-time friends and his family emigrated to the USA from Cambodia.
He had a very beautiful wife and two wonderful daughters 11 and 14 years old.
If we were born in Cambodia and have seen the killing fields where Pol Pot slaughtered three million people, we would visualize life very differently.
When we have these kinds of painful negative vibrations in life, it makes us realize that even if we are born into a very poor family of a poor country, we have won some amazing things in life.
We definitely feel we are winners in life because fate didn’t make us refugees.
My friend and his wife saw and experienced many similar devastating moments in life.
They saw so much carnage, killings, they fled from their native country, they emigrated as refugees, they settled in a new country, their kids are growing in a new environment and still need a lot of support and care.
Unfortunately, my friend and his wife decided to end their 17 years of married life.
When my friend told me about this, I couldn’t believe it.
It was shocking and beyond my expectations.
In 2019, we heard the news of Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos, the wealthiest couple on earth, 25 years of marriage ending.
Recently, we also heard the news of Bill and Melinda Gates’s separation, another globally powerful couple, after 27 years of togetherness.
I was taking these news as normal and tried to digest thinking that these are everyday news.
But, in reality, this recent news of Bill and Melinda’s separation helped to refresh my friend’s old story.
I couldn’t take my friend’s separation easy because I was involved physically, mentally, and emotionally with their separation.
I’ve experienced tears in my eyes multiple times when I was playing with their two little girls.
They were very small and innocent, they weren’t mature enough to experience what life is throwing behind them.
As I learned a lesson from them, it’s very difficult to change our core values in life.
If we are developing our core values in opposite directions under the same roof, then separation is inevitable.
To identify it, as a couple we must have a dedicated contemplation.
After a few weeks, I asked my friend, “Why did you both make this painful decision?”
He replied philosophically, hard to understand for me at the moment.
He said, “Your core value in life is a white horse, you can paint it with black stripes and you can call it zebra for other people but not for yourself. No matter what the color tells to other people, the horse would still be a horse for you.”
He further added, “We as human beings, cannot choose our core value by its external appearance. Me and my wife nurtured different sets of core values over the time. I’m not saying they are bad but they don’t align with each other now”
I asked, “How come you didn’t know then and you know now?”
He added, “My friend everything is time, you don’t expect apples tomorrow by planting apple seeds today. We need to plant it, water it, care for it, and wait to get apples. I am sure me and my wife planted the right seed but couldn’t care and couldn’t water it properly so that the plant died before it could give us apples.”
I like a quote from Mahatma Gandhi, “Your beliefs become your thoughts, your thoughts become your words, your words become your actions, your actions become your habits, your habits become your values, and your values become your destiny.”
Now I’m adding here, if your destiny is different than your spouse, sooner or later, your marriage ends.
When my friend got married 17 years ago, he hadn’t heard the word prenup.
His parents and grandparents used to tell him to get married with the girl who is in your level as much as possible.
The question was in his mind, what kind of level?
It’s very complicated, he couldn’t understand it, the level could be professional, financial, emotional, intellectual, or physical.
He didn’t pay much attention either because he had no idea of personal values at the time when he was getting ready for conjugal life.
Marriage is a tough game, pivoting is the name of the game.
If you can not pivot, you will definitely lose.
Marriage doesn’t grow itself; it needs time, effort, and consistent dedication from both partners to mature.
Any person can kiss the supreme success in his or her professional life but may experience the rock-bottom in his or her marital life.
We can take examples from multiple professionally successful people like Bill and Melinda Gates, Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos, Elon Musk, Donald Trump, just a few who failed miserably in their marriage.
Marriage in itself is not a final human product, it is a continuous working product.
Nature has given it as a working contract, work on it until you die.
Nowadays many rich people get married with prenup.
I’m not against prenups, it’s a product of real society, but marriage is more a human aspect than business or financial transaction.
When you are in prenup from the beginning your mind and emotion works differently.
The advantage is you can sincerely work to make your marriage great but there is no guarantee that your other partner will work equally on your marriage.
Prenup could change each partner’s mindset pretty quickly.
Prenup certainly contains some kind of pre-existing notion regarding your finances.
Recently, the two richest couples on the planet, Bill-Melinda and Jeff-MacKenzie, got divorce.
It became a national and international headline because both couples have touched billions of lives through their work.
In spite of their pinnacle success in their professional life, both couples failed miserably on their marriage.
This is definitely a sincere lesson for all of us, relationships are damn hard.
Professional success never predicts personal happiness and success.
We certainly believe that both couple’s marriage was pristine, both couples didn’t have a prenup, and their marriage was faithful from the beginning.
It doesn’t mean marriage with prenup is faithless, it only means dedication and respect was alive more than finances.
To be honest I learned more about marriage and relationships from my friend’s divorce than my own 15 years old marriage.
I got a chance to study and analyze very closely about their relationship because I was quite familiar with the couple.
In marriage the possession of an insight from only one partner is not sufficient.
We can only benefit from this eternal relationship if both partners have the insights.
We must go through all hindsight, insight, and foresight.
Lack of trust and respect crumbles the relationship, especially marriage.
The problem is, trust is an intangible quality.
It can not be quantified in our life in the same way as we can look in our other activities.
Trust creates order in our married life but lack of trust creates a lot of chaos.
When we trust somebody, that person goes into our heart and communicates with our mind.
That trusted person is called a spouse.
Marriage is a long journey with a lot of ups and a lot of downs.
We cannot pay equal attention during ups and downs in our lives, otherwise we wouldn’t remain an emotional creature.
At peak up and bottom down, marriage has a high chance to bring a necessary evil.
I call it necessary but evil because during this long journey, there comes something which is unpleasant or undesirable but is essential to succeed in the relationship.
This evil tests us and we must pass it as a couple.
Very few of us see the existence of this necessary evil coming.
We never plan and prepare for this evil. Marriage fails if we don’t see the existence of this necessary evil. This evil can be both pain and happiness.
Marriage is not only chocolate and cake, not only burning candles, it also includes the shadow under the burning candle.
Many of us take marriage lightly, we don’t dedicate time to grow this relationship because we take it for granted.
We assume it as a free lunch, and we never foresee the risks associated with it.
And many of us have no idea how to minimize these risks even if we have little knowledge about these risks.
And most importantly, we don’t see these risks until it becomes too late to face.
When you have a habit of walking together for 5 minutes as a couple in the evening, you reduce this risk.
When you write a paragraph of something and your spouse read aloud, you reduce this risk.
These are very simple steps but we never apply, we have ready made answers, oh, I know but I don’t have time.
Well, nobody has time to do everything in life, but we must have time to do necessary important things.
Marriage is an important thing.
Higher the society, more educated the couple, more is the risk in marriage.
There is data on that but I’m not going into the details.
It is virtually certain that the risks will show up from time to time.
Unfortunately, we cannot know when and how they will appear or how long they will last or how severe they will be.
A necessary ingredient for successful marriage is to have the discipline to adhere to our relationship.
We have to ignore a lot of noise and a lot of emotions fueled by the circumstance.
Marriage is our choice not a circumstance so that if any hurdle, pain, happiness or emotion comes through circumstance, we have to deal with it. Plain and simple.
We should not be overconfident with our marriage.
Oh my wife is different, oh my husband is a different kind of person.
Please, be humble, head down and work on.
Be patient and never stop working on your relationship no matter what.
Don’t make your marriage just familiar, make it safe.
There is a difference between familiar marriage and safe marriage.
Familiar marriage is full of words and appreciation from both partners; but safe marriage is full of actions from both partners.
Married life, of course, is complicated and difficult, but if we work one step at a time, it becomes marvelous.
Spend time with your spouse on the dining table, not with your screen.
Hold your spouse’s hand for 30 seconds and tell two sentences about the food you are about to eat.
Whoever wakes up first in the morning, kiss your spouse on the forehead and start the day by saying good morning.
It takes only 30 seconds to do this but you will be amazed how fast your 30th anniversary knocks your door.
Make it a ritual not a habit.
Most of the success in married life is in just remembrance that you are married.
There is nothing new in married life but we must make something new everyday. This could be as simple as this: brush your teeth together for one minute.
Remember, never ever turn your desires into needs, by doing this your married life crumbles.
Always and always enjoy your life in desires.
I wish you all the best.
Happy married life.
Thank you for your time.
-Yam Timsina
Be humble, dump your envy, and never ever compare yourself to anybody else.
Bob said, “I am stuck here in my office but my school friend Robin is in Vianna enjoying his life”.
He further added, “I saw his facebook posts recently”.
These are everyday gossip we hear all the time in all places.
Because we don’t have time to compare our lives to our past self, but we always have time to compare our lives to other people’s lives.
If we compare our life to others, we get nothing but envy, the worst enemy of all.
Remember, knowing, doing, and then realizing what you knew and what you did, is the most powerful edge in life.
Not spending time to realize where you were is certainly the road to failure, and road to unhappiness.
We don’t spend time in comparison of knowing, doing, and the final realization of the outcome in our own life.
Our comparison to other’s lives only creates dissatisfaction.
Envy is the cancer of our mindset, we can become influenced negatively so fast by the success of others.
There is nothing wrong with this attitude because it it natural but it hinders our self-reflection and self-growth.
Abhi is a corporate CFO.
Natasha drives BMW.
But, I drive a Chevrolet.
This pattern of thinking is the key to our frustration.
Who we are as individuals, what we actually want, and what are our core values become overshadowed when we compare ourselves to others in various things.
BMW might give a little more comfort in our body while driving, but both are tools to solve our problems in the same way and most importantly both are not different to ingrain mental experience.
The funny part is our mind doesn’t distinguish BMW and Chevrolet, it only absorbs experience of driving.
It doesn’t mean I am against BMW, I am just against comparison.
We are so quick to idolize ourselves to Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Tony Robbins and think that their path to success is our key to happiness.
But we never review our everyday activities, habits, and especially diets.
Envy is a difficult human emotion, we all feel it.
It’s really hard to manage if we become prey on it.
Envy also takes our focus off from our own work and passion.
We completely erase our own goals and are attracted to passing-by shiny objects.
When we have envious feelings, we try to copy someone else’s success, we completely forget our own path.
We forget that there are different paths to reach the same destination.
False comparison is actually the cause of envy, we shouldn’t compare our first chapter of a book to someone else’s final chapter.
We shouldn’t compare fictional stories with non-fiction stories because both have different sets of target readers.
Each of our life has different paths to lead different destinations.
Mahatma Gandhi never compared his revolution with other rulers across the world who used force in their demonstrations.
In his time period, no rulers were doing peaceful demonstrations across the globe.
He was exceptionally good to follow his sheer determination, not to follow what others do.
Mahatma Gandhi, in his famous “Quit India” speech inspired every single indian to liberate themselves from British rule without using violence through peaceful protests.
Mahatma Gandhi is not only the inspiration of individuality but also the symbol of wisdom.
When we compare ourselves to others, we can’t differentiate among information, knowledge and wisdom.
Information is simply facts or data or somebody’s opinion; but knowledge is information of value.
If we are unable to differentiate these two, then we will remain foolish even though we watch news all day on television.
Similarly, knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit but wisdom is not putting tomato in a fruit salad.
Never ever think that having an abundance of knowledge is the same as having an abundance of wisdom.
The actual understanding of relationships among these elements: information, knowledge, and wisdom is possible when we stop comparing our lives with others but only with our own past self.
When we compare ourselves to others we become envious, we start to work more.
Most of the time grossly, not with a cool and calculated mindset.
We think working more might be the only option.
We confuse ourselves and think that more is better.
We forget that more is never the substitute of better.
Better is always better.
This feeling inside us comes when we are free from comparison.
Envious people also start to work more in negative perception and the more work turns into fatigue.
Fatigue leads to compromise in our health, family, and friends.
It’s definitely not better.
If we aim for more in a corrosive environment, we invite stress, conflicts, and deteriorating health.
But if we aim for better with self-reflection, we invite greater freedom.
Multiple scientific research has shown this trend over and over again.
I remember the conversation between two dads in one of the conferences where I was also a participant.
One dad said, “I rarely get to see my kids, that’s a risk you have to take in life.”
Another dad replied, “Is it really worth it?”
The first dad added, “I have to make payments for my BMW.”
The second dad again replied, “Chevrolet runs the same like BMW but the difference is Chevrolet gets time to give rides for your kids but BMW doesn’t.”
I just listened and laughed but didn’t respond.
The conversation was hilarious and worth-consuming.
However, there is also a good part of envy which is the result of comparison.
Sometimes envy becomes like a forest fire, we all know envy isn’t good, but it also stimulates some part of our human growth.
The forest fire burns the old trees to make space for new trees.
The heat of the fire pops open the seeds so new trees can grow.
Same happens with envy.
Just as a new tree can’t grow while the fire is still burning, a new you can’t grow higher while the current envy is still inside you.
However, as soon as your current envy dies down and a new you begins, the next you take off.
Envy also diminishes trial and error from our life, we just compare the outcome.
We hope for the best, and only dream.
And, oh, we develop the habit of comparing ourselves to others during lunch and dinner.
Anything great in our life is a process of trial and error.
We try something, we see results, if happy we continue, if not we eliminate.
Science is so fascinating that it doesn’t allow us to prove anything, it only allows us to disprove our thoughts by results.
We can accept and keep working on the remaining thoughts until we can’t disprove it.
But if we become envious by comparison, we disprove it without working.
We never try, we never take even a small risk of working to disprove it.
Risk taking is essential to sooth our envious character.
We all know there is still a chance, one in a million chance that when we go on a car trip, we may die.
But, we don’t, however, let it stop to visit our dad.
We don’t let it stop to visit our grandma.
Or do you?
Then why are you afraid to take even minor risks in life?
Take a risk and sooth the envy.
Remember, we all came into this world naked and we will leave this world naked, we are here to fill the gap of birth and death by our own choices in life.
Be humble, dump your envy, and never ever compare yourself to anybody else.
You are unique in this generation, there is nobody like you on the planet.
Thank you for your time.
-Yam Timsina
Who is behind you?
A teacher and a student were out for a walk.
Student saw a fox chasing a rabbit.
Teacher said, “The rabbit will get away from the fox.”
“I don’t think so,” the student replied.
The teacher said, “The fox may be faster, but the rabbit will elude the fox.”
Student asked, “Why?”
Teacher said, “Fox is running for his lunch, but the rabbit is running for his life.”
So the hidden question is what is the motive behind the run?
The motive behind the run always wins, if it is with purpose, sometimes winning may not appear immediately but eventually it will.
Then, why do we all run everyday?
To go through the day.
Most of us make our day as our immediate goal, but it doesn’t limit us to run for the real purpose of our life.
Very few of us really understand or try to understand the real purpose of life, but each and every one of us should have some kind of purpose for our life.
Purpose is a drive.
We can’t make our day only for lunch or dinner even though lunch and dinner are equally important.
Abraham Lincoln ran for the sole purpose of his life: to preserve the union and freed the slaves.
Franklin Roosevelt ran for the sole purpose of his life: to lift the people out of a great depression and helped them win a world war.
BP Koirala ran for the sole purpose of his life: fight for humanism and social justice.
Nelson Mandela served 27 years in prison but never stopped running for democracy and social justice.
If we only chase for everyday lunch or dinner, we will never taste real life.
Extraordinary achievement and legacy is directly determined by not how fast we run, but by knowing the goal behind our run.
Powerful runners aren’t made in gyms, they are made from something they have deep inside them- a desire to run.
They have both a desire to run as well as the will, but the will must be stronger than the running skill.
This is the difference between running for life and running for a day.
If we’re running to lose weight for external reasons like to look slim for a wedding or anniversary, then we might reach our goal but the problem is we may gain weight back as soon as our wedding or anniversary ends.
If we’re running for life, we want to lose weight to feel good and to become healthy forever.
In the later case we definitely make slow progress at first but achieve sustainable results in the long term.
When we see a medical doctor, we see at least ten year’s knowledge accumulation related to medicines. That medical expertise they develop over time is by running consistently for at least 10 years.
It’s all motive for a gradual accumulation of knowledge.
One of the best ways to make the decision to run for life is by following or choosing a mentor.
Mentor is not simply our casual advisor.
He or she is more than that.
Mentor is somebody who has already walked the road we are willing to walk and he or she sees us as his or her past self.
Mentors help us to run our life course easily on track if we become able to choose the correct one.
Nobody knows our ultimate ceiling for our prosperity, so mentors teach us not to worry about it, they remind us it would just be a waste of time.
Rather than to know the ceiling of success, they help us to focus on one thing at a time.
When Sabeer Bhatia stepped on the soil of the USA, he had only $250 in his pocket, but he was running for a dream.
He created Hotmail, later Microsoft giant bought Hotmail for $400 million.
Sabeer Bhatia was running for his dream because he had Farouk Arjani on his back, the mentor.
Mentors are very special people.
Our interests and passion are two different things, most of the time we mix them up together.
Mentors help to convert our interest into passion and create value out of it.
Nobody offered a job for Walt Disney, pioneer of the animation industry, later his brother Roy appeared to be his mentor and gave him work at an art studio.
Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart, had no money for any business, his father-in-law appeared to be his mentor and gave him $20,000 to start a retail business.
Albert Einstein had Max Talmud, he not only taught Einstein math, science, and philosophy but also ate either lunch or dinner with Einstein family for six years.
Mentoring forces us to implement new thinking, new skills, and new relationships. Without a mentor these tasks don’t seem natural at first but mentors force us to see them as natural even though they seem unnatural.
It’s very hard to act naturally for yourself.
Mentors can see unnatural things as naturals which we might not see.
No one can run alone, everybody’s gasoline has limited time but each successful runner has somebody behind to refuel.
Somebody standby in the gas station.
It’s the truth.
That somebody is your authentic mentor.
Even Oprah Winfrey, media personality and philanthropist, had Jeffrey D Jacobs as a mentor.
John Lennon of the Beatles had George Martin as a mentor.
One thing mentors remind us is that our most important appointment each day is with ourself, and we shouldn’t miss it.
Our appointment with our mission.
One secret thing that mentors teach us is that we can’t please everyone, there is no way.
We shouldn’t try it.
If we try to please everybody, there is guarantee that the one person we won’t please is ourself.
Our time is finite so we must keep pleasing ourself first.
Mentors are incredible people to reassure us that we aren’t missing these appointments everyday to please ourself.
Mentors will help us to find the right direction in life as well as finding the right action.
The real mentors will also help us to keep our relationships with friends, family, and colleagues in perspective and our daily actions on track.
What we shouldn’t forget is that they have already walked down the same road we’re walking or planning to walk.
We can research, model, benchmark, and trend their experiences for our success.
The research and experience of mentors is the best place to start our own life.
Most of the time we hear people saying that you are very smart but we rarely see them saying that there were many smart people before you so you study them.
These people who did before you, who walked before you, would be the best mentors.
Some mentors are living but many of them are dead but still they can guide us through their legacies, works, and publications.
Our job is to study them and build our actions on the back of their studies, their successes, and their failures.
Seeking a mentor is also hard work. Of course, it takes time but if we are serious about our life, it’s doable.
Generally we think life is about finding ourself but mentors help us to create ourself.
And one thing, never confuse with this, mentors are not advisors or consultants.
They are not.
Period.
Advisors and consultants charge money but mentors work free for you, but their value is priceless.
When you have a mentor on your side, one plus one almost always equals something greater than two.
It’s never too soon or too late to have a mentor.
Commit to achieve excellence.
Having a mentor gives us the best chance possible.
Always associate yourself only with great mentors who are going to lift you higher no matter what.
But just keep in mind, finding the right mentor certainly takes time, if you don’t have anybody right now.
It needs little extra effort, just keep working for that.
I wish you all – the best.
Thank you for your time.
-Yam Timsina