Time for the next move

Life so far has been pretty fair to me. It threw many challenges in my way but every time I felt I hit a dead end, it opened many doors from unexpected directions. Just two more months now at ISB and I would be fulfilling one of my cherished dreams - receive graduate degree and throw my cap in the air.

Bonus article: Learn to experience
Sometimes I feel that life is amazingly simple. It just expects some simple things from you and in most cases fulfills one's expectations without much fuss.

But as we go ahead in life, it becomes so difficult to follow the simple basic rules, not that we don't know them but sometimes we don't care about them or sometimes we try to engineer them too much. I think this is the case for everything that is simple. We take for granted that if something is simple it can't be great but if we do a reality check we find that all the amazing things are nothing but simple.

Many times we read a book or listen to someone and expect to learn all the secrets of success. But we forget that one can never fully learn from experience of others. We can internalize something only when we experience it, only when we go through it. I think this is one reason a lot of emphasis was placed on Abhyasa in the traditional Indian learning model of gurukula. You listen to someone but you question it and then practice it to learn it by yourself. Ekalavya - one of the characters in Mahabharata proves that with practice you can master something on your own that others even with spoon feeding can't.

Most of us keep cribbing that we didn't have the opportunity to learn something because of situations but we fail to see the opportunities that lie around us day-in and day-out. I have seen that overcoming the fear of failure and putting oneself in a situation of vulnerability is the only way to experience and learn. Only when you open your mouth would you know how foolish you are; you have to be careful where you are opening your mouth though.

I would suggest a one-week test for those who believe in what I said above and I request you to write back to me about the results. Let me detail the one-week-plan-to-learn-learning from experience-from-day-to-day-activities:

1. First identify what you want to learn/master the most. Most of the times we want to learn things that are very close to what we are doing as we get maximum benefit from that. For example, many of us would want to learn how to interact with new people in a friendly way. Though this is not rocket science, from what I have seen, only one in ten would be able to do this easily, nine others would be trying to engineer this and then fail miserably.

2. Identify opportunities where you can experience this skill/behavior during the day. This opportunity could be at office or at home or anywhere. The setting is not important but understanding where you could get this opportunity is important. For example if you want to master negotiation skills, it is not necessary that you need to have big corporate deal to observe, you can as well get this opportunity on your next shopping trip or when you buy vegetables next time or even when you meet your boss to make some request, you just have to identify a situation in which there are differences in opinion.

3. Develop observational(experiencing) skills. This is one skill I have benefited a lot from. I have read about this technique long time back but can't recall where. What you have to do is while you are sitting or standing on ground, imagine that you are able to leave your body and reach the ceiling of the room you are in and observe yourself and everything around from 5 feet above. You can practice this skill whenever you are alone and this could be your first learning experience. You not only observe but also need to start taking a mental note of things

4. Do some reading about the thing you want to learn. A lot of has been written about anything and everything that man ever needs to know to live happily and with the help of google one can easily find information about anything. Grab some good material and go through it and note down things that you feel are important.

5. Get started. You know what you want to learn, you know when you can get an opportunity to experience it and lastly you know how to experience it and the next step is go for it. Prepare yourself and then go through the situation while observing what is happening and trying to deliberately do things that you want to which you normally would've avoided.

6. Review and reinforce. Once you go through an experience, you have to review and see if you have experienced it and whether you could learn/change something. You need not do it formally with a pen-and-paper; even a 5 minute self-review is good enough. At the end you need to decide how many more times you need to keep doing this consciously before you can become naturally yours at it.

I think it's time for me to stop now and see if some of the blog readers actually try this and give me a feedback. Bye for now and don't forget to wish me good luck.