Tag: global connect

Managing your Intellectual Graveyard.

~ Parimal Aluri ~ Leave a comment

The human mind is the birth place and the reason for all that is around us and within us and it also is the eternal graveyard for all those things that didn’t manifest (for good or worse) and for all that we didn’t become! Join me here as take a quick trip to understand what this graveyard of our mind seems like and how it nourishes us even through the power of seemingly dormant ideas and experiences! Sounds creepy, but that is what humanity has arrived to be- in some or the other form- facts being stranger then fiction! So here we go!

Philosophers for long have stressed on the value and the potency of the human mind- whether to create lingering masterpieces of art, to raise kingdoms that seemed eternal or the aspect of bringing in utter destruction and misery to humanity- each of these facets have been nothing more but the coming alive of human mind and more importantly the human intellect held within the mind being deployed to manifest what it aspires! This is the space of living ones’ dream, ambitions, so on and so forth and being able to make that indelible mark in pursuit of immortality- the reasons could be right or wrong- again that remains to be at the mercy of the viewers lens and frame of context about what is being studied! But our story really starts as this episode ends!

As long as people are able to flush out what they think either by their expressions or by acting them out, the mind tends to remain dynamic, engaged and productive (which can be a matter of debate, simply because the aspect of “productivity” is a function of the contextual frame and who you are, as you witness the same!). The problems start as the minds begin to get stuck and drowned in their own ideas and thoughts as they get pushed deep within the confines of the mind and soon enough the mind begins to resemble an intellectual graveyard! You see, every human being is constantly abuzz with a hundred thoughts each day and within these few stick on and within that bucket, yet a few get experimented upon and if the idea is really a contextually relevant one than it goes into execution and thereafter it’s measured by defined metrics to be called as a success or a debacle! As the rejected or unused ideas and thoughts begin to stall and stagnate they get moved to the graveyard within your mind and unless they are able to be re-designed or resurrected in some way- their final resting place here is final and if this graveyard is not tended to aptly, it can unleash havoc to wreck even the most potent and brilliant ideas and thoughts and end up creating more chaos and anxiety rather then allowing one to bask in the glory of their potent idea or thought! So what is really happening around here?

The human mind and it’s efficacy is all about having a dynamic forward balance between the ideas that work and the ideas that have stalled (for whatever reason it could be!). As long as the mind is able to keep progressing ahead, things are fine and like the case of many of our lives- it is the instance of daily struggle and strife to overcome what we must to reach where we ought to! It is only when the dynamic of moving ahead is much much greater is that magic happens and great ideas give birth to great actions and thereby equally great manifestations! But when this does not go this route and as minds falter and fail owing to the pressure of more and more failures or stagnation of ideas (rather inability to deploy them as intended) these redundant ideas and thought begin to flood the mind and drown the mind from within leading to more chaos and turbulence. This in turn goes a long way to adulterate the quality and character of the emerging potent thoughts and thereby begins to skew the very originality of an individual and thereby with every idea, every thought the individual begins to move away from what really is the essence of the individual and begins to embrace acquired circumstantial relevance! This is why the size and depth of the intellectual graveyard matters!

As the mind begins to get cluttered and strewn with the corpses of the failed and faltered past-ideas and thoughts, it soon starts to loose it’s potency and efficacy on what it can achieve as it’s approach begins to get fogged out and this is what makes the intellectual graveyard so interrupting and dangerous- it simply stalls or tries to stall efforts made by an individual to re-focus and rejuvenate each and every time an attempt is made! So what’s the way ahead around this? What can be done?

Well, the only meaningful way to do something around this is to ensure that the graveyard is managed to a size and depth so that it doesn’t develop the power to interrupt the ongoing progressive intellectual pursuits. For this to happen it is very important to practise complete burial of thoughts and ideas and practise detachment (like so many belief systems do!), unless this complete surgical clean cut from the failed and faltered efforts and past is not done completely every effort and every attempt to move ahead and latch on to progressive and forward thinking will be blocked and challenged by the un-serving bygone spaces residing within the graveyard of the mind!

How this is achieved,well that will depend individual to individual and context to context since, each one of us is as unique as we can be and hence there is no real text book or one size fits all solution to solving the challenges poised by the intellectual graveyards!

I leave you here with these thoughts for now, urging you to practise what you must and can to manage your own little graveyard well enough so that it doesn’t overpower your today to dictate your tomorrow!

Ciao for now, will be back soon with another one, until then stay wise and keep thinking to manage your own little graveyard well!

Social Divergence: A story of our times.

~ Parimal Aluri ~ Leave a comment

The wealth of nations’ must never be about and can never really be about how opulent the opulent have become- rather it has to be a story of how richer poverty has got and how much higher as it climbed up the ladder to sustainable quality of life and aspirational meaningful opulence! Join me here as take a fleeting look into this space and try to decipher what really drives nations’, who are the powerhouses and what is that is right and so wrong about this space! So here we go!

Irrespective which nation you live in, chances are that as soon as you cross, what I call as the “Circle of Opulence” you will be struck by abject contradictions and challenges that seem to land up in front of you from some bygone era! The holidays are around the corner, if you can move (if it is safe, and allowed to move around), do try to move away from your radius of opulence (I presume that’s where you are), and observe what greets you! This circle of opulence can mean different things across different societies and even the very definition of opulence can range from as simple as being alive to enjoying the latest eclectic wine or having that latest gadget or business jet to fly around in! So how does one come to know that they are within the circle of opulence and and how does one know as they move out of it?

Well, it’s really simple, if you have the five things that are “good to have” and already have access to “the need to have”, chances are you are living “the opulent life”. What these “good to have” and “need to have” are will vary from society to society, but importantly- they will help you know how deep within the Circle of Opulence you are in and how far the edge of that is. You see, when you hear people speaking about the “up’s and down’s of their financial fortunes they are basically getting moved around – still within the circle of opulence- the only thing being as their fortunes deplete they begin to drift towards the edge of that circle and as they begin to amass wealth they begin to re-assert and plant themselves firmly towards the center and sure enough, each society will have their own definition of the center and highest manifestation of opulence and so also about the edge! This is from where all struggle, strife emerges in a society, the ones’ outside the radius want to get in, the ones’ inside want to gravitate towards the center and amass the most for themselves- what is right and wrong, is all contextual, what is absolute within this frame is the fact that, each society has just so much space at the center of the circle, within it and around it and as struggles ensues, you witness the victors and the defeated strewn all across this landscape. This is the very essence of humanity’s existential paradox, where everyone wishes good for the other but seldom facilitates that bit! Think around it!

All this ends up creating divergence within the society and although having diversity within societal blocks may be a good thing, but add to that a dash of divergence and if your further allow that too run amok, you will start to see issues emerge! What this does is, it further reinforces thoughts and feelings (which may not be always be true) among different people within a given society the feeling of being left back, neglected, intentionally side tracked and so on and so forth and when that happens, the human mind begins to look for patterns and tries to develop reasoning for what it experiences and this is how false narratives and incorrect assumptions begin to take birth. If this was not enough, people at the center of the radius, within and around it do what they can do build narratives majorly to stop people getting into that radius and at at times to shed off the exceed within the radius and this is the playground of politicians and policy makers who do what they- at times to help and some other times to harm- but each time they do what they do- they almost always end up helping few and harming few- who gets helped and who gets harmed- well that again is a contextual story! So what next?

Well, as long as societies go about doing what they do, oblivious to what is really playing out, the why and the who, the daily struggle and strife that we witness, will remain, intensity may vary society to society- but this ongoing discontent and chaos will ensue. Sure enough, I am not urging you to believe in any utopian or hallucinatory concept of a perfect place, society or nation, simply because imperfection is the hallmark of humanity and nature alike! So as long as the struggle is to correct what must be and what needs to be- it’s I presume a fair game- but the society must too think alike and a majority of it- when that happens- you have what we call a revolution, the arriving of a new age! When there is a disconnect among the various elements and narratives end up being competing and conflicting rather than being unifying and reinforcing- you have a society which is stationary yet travelling in all directions at the same time with a net result of being regressive rather being progressive! So what’s the plan?

The onus of course correcting a society resides with each one of us, however small that effort may seem, it is only when every element within a society aligns itself for the larger belief and direction that societies will commence to move in a decided direction with commonality of vison and purpose, sure enough this is a tall order and that’s the reason why mass movements that usher in change are so few and far in between! Societies do take time to arrive at a consensus!

What we must not forget is the abject paradox of the lives of humans around us- it is not only the opulence of material wealth, but it also is about the opulence related to the creative expression of the human mind- because that too is a benchmark of humanities progress! What hampers human progress is this paradox, you see, like I said in my previous article, we all come from the same bucket and the more complicated the bucket gets, the more chaotic, yet colorful our lives end up becoming! The human dexterity and ability to prevail over this space and put it to some sane use, is what actually defines what we are, collectively and individually and that further spells out where we will be and as what in the times to come!

The next time, you come across someone less fortunate then yourself, know a few things well, you too are part responsible for allowing that to manifest around you,simply because you are all part of the same social framework- you may not have intended for that to play out- but whatever you did intend for has manifested what you see around! I have for long believed that charity is a way to reduce the burden of guilt to a limited extent and that is what unfortunately it seems to be; as we witness,the way things emerge across societies in the world today! I leave you with these thoughts for today, urging you to take some time to reflect and figure out where do you reside as far as the circle of opulence is concerned and where are you heading- towards the center or are you getting edged out!

Ciao for now, will be back soon with another piece! Until then stay wise and stay anchored as you are meant to be!

Failing is natural and Success should be too!

~ Parimal Aluri ~ Leave a comment

Before you want to jump in try to tell me that “I sound like I have lost it”, well do go through my earlier piece which talked about failure by design! In the mad race that we get ourselves into- for all the valid reasons that you and I may have, what we fundamentally tend to forget is how we got to the point where we are and why do we tend to stagnate after sometime at a point we are- whether that’s we here we rise and stay or whether it is a point where we come back to after rising and racing ahead- each of these aspects conveys one singular message- that message is about- failure being natural and success being something that we have to strive for! No one is urging you not to succeed, but the fact remains, unless you don’t fail safely enough and timely enough, you will never be able to gauge and arrive at the point which defines what success is meant for you! So here we go!

The story of human evolution has been a story of many failures and few successes, and for the reason who we are, we are naturally programmed to latch on to what works and do away with what doesn’t- well that is safe and fine until you reach a point of trying to “reinvent the wheel” and this is where problems begin to manifest! Walk into any bookshop or a library that you are allowed to visit, choose any subject area- what do you see, tons and tons of books written about success, how to get there, who got there, how did they get there, when and why- thats is what is – when you go back to history-m even within those books that speak or embrace success- very rarely do they talk in depth on the human aspect of failure that those individuals would have dealt with before touching success- whether they were great scientists,army strategists, innovators, creative souls- whatever they would have been- no where will you ever easily find the fragility of the human side to who they were written and documented in detail especially when it comes to moments of failure and distraught they faced. What this goes to do with our minds- is that we begin to believe on a few “captured” and “observed” instances of these success stories and as we try to extrapolate them to our contextual realities- we start to believe that we will be successful, because they were, altogether forgetting the individuality aspect of the person involved and the realities of their world when they walked the planet!

The observant human mind can get easily tricked, remember your school days when friends said they may get a B for the project work and land up with an A+ and you are left wondering what you failed to read! Well this is what keeps playing out through and around your life- whether it is your high school, college, work place, business, service unto society or just being plain yourself- the human mind simply cannot always capture what it observes holistically and is default to reinforce pleasure and delete pain (as long as it is not a threat to existence) and this is from where divergence begins and failure begins to become “the bad thing” and success anyhow begins to become “the only thing”!

As time has flown through civilizations, the reason why success has been given the crown and failure a back seat could have different reasons! These could be as simple- people around would not have been keen to know about the failing part, it would not have got recorded the way it should have been or simply for the fact (which is evident even today) that what ever mattered was “getting things done” whoever they came by! Sure enough, humanity has made great strides, but what this has led to is having the burden to lead and create pathways for human kinds progress on the shoulders of a few to dictate the lives of the many! Look around you, chances are that the society you live in is a chronicle of a few who have written the fate of the many within it and this is exactly what happens when people don’t give the time they should to learn from failures well enough by knowing the human story within!

Needless to say, we all are witness to the maxim, “Reaching the top, is easy, being there is the real essence of success”; what does this tell you, well, the plain truth that if success that isn’t as natural as what failure is, it always will be a struggle to hold onto it and a lot energy will simply get sapped up for being there! Let me explain, we have villages after villages at the foot hills of the Himalayas, having the formidable Sherpas living there- that is natural- they are acclimatized through the centuries to live and exits at altitude above 18,000 feet, but when they go climbing the great Himalayan peaks, which are basically a definition of “success” for the mountaineers, but for them are nothing else but a walk in their back yard- albeit a harsh one! So you see what is a great achievement- read as “success” for the mountaineer is a routine walk in the park for the Sherpa- that is what happens when success is not natural and this is why it becomes so difficult to retain it, even if you achieve it- simply because it isn’t natural!

Now, if you were to see the other stories of success, like the great works of art, creative expression through writing, building and innovating- these are the examples which are the real essence of success- but if you were to measure these by the myopic yardsticks that govern our lives today, all of these would seem to be nothing! Unless success too is natural and blends into who you are, you will always have to witness a never ending struggle to retain and manage it- whether it is the position you have at your workplace, whether it is getting your targets, whether it is completing a set of paintings- unless what you choose to do is not naturally aligned to who you are, you will always end up being limited as far as who you could have been and who eventually end up becoming! So is there something called natural success? A state of being successful sans being stressful or insecure of loosing it! Well read on!

Natural success, like failure, is silent, potent and lingers on- whether it is recognised or not and the individual who lives it- knows that well enough- irrespective of what others perceive about it! Have you ever heard about a surgeon who threw party after every successful surgeon? Have you ever heard about a Teacher- who got depressed when few students didn’t achieve the grades- well probable not! The reason for this is that both the surgeon and teacher know very well that essence of natural and real success resides in the simple space of doing what is being undertaken to the best of ones’ ability and knowing that people will continue to perceive to the best of their abilities to perceive and nothing clouds reality like perceptions do! The surgeon or the teacher doesn’t have to take an effort to save every life or send every kid to The White House (all though they may like it that way!); all that they need to stay glued upon is the fact that, they are deploying their skill to the best of what they can and hence they remain unflustered, calm and composed not being insecure or worried about their “success”quotient”!

The modern day narrative and definition has taken the whole essence of success and everything that goes along with it to a very limited and time sensitive space- the yardsticks, metrics to measure also go on to ensure that there is always a hunger for more and more with no real meaningful end in sight and this makes even what has been achieved meaningless in the future! The only people who are immune and are able to stay safe from this maddening and unwise spatial orientation are those who are able to define and calibrate their stories of success and failures built on the bedrock of their own intrinsic attributes and on the individuality that they bring along!

It is these rare eclectic species of humans in the nooks and corners of the society who go on to define the essence and meaningfulness of real success- the natural way and this is why when you visit that art gallery, that fine-dine heaven or read through those well written stories- you feel elevated- because each of those creative expressions arise from the inner solitudes of who these people are and with every story they weave, they are able to shed a bit of themselves into every bit of what it is! If you thought this is limited only to creative people-well humans are creative in what they choose to do, scientists, engineers, doctors, teachers, writers, you think of it and each one of them is- the only catch being each one of them can deploy or will deploy their individuality and intrinsic essence to a limited extent for different reasons and this what goes on to differentiate the ordinary form the extra-ordinary and some stories fade away in months and few linger on for centuries as personification of success- the natural way!

I leave you here with thoughts, urging you to connect with your essence of meaningful success which is measured not on the yardsticks given around to you, but rather on the yardsticks that you think they ought to be measured upon- only when you do that- you will be comfortable being successful and will you be able to enjoy the success the way you are meant to!

Ciao for now, will be back soon with another piece soon! Until then stay wise and stay successful!

The Bucket Effect.

~ Parimal Aluri ~ Leave a comment

I sure know it’s a Monday morning, but what stops us from sparing a few minutes to drive some sanity through the insane lives that we get served on a platter! Whether it is the dumbness that you are fighting off, or brilliance of a mind that keeps you on your toes, each one us at all the time is dealing with some mental energy to the best we can and at times this space is easy and at other times this is what bogs you and me down! Join me here, as we get to decipher what really saps us and what really excites us and what is that we can do (if there’s anything we can!) to ensure we spend more time around staying excited (of course in meaningful ways!) rather than being sulking and wondering at what will hit us next! So here we go!

Choose any society, any nation, you will find the same gradation of humanity- the rich, the poor, the intelligent, the dumb, the right aligned, the left aligned, the non-aligned and sure enough, the “I don’t know who I am and what I am doing” types! What this basically signifies is that, since the times that humanity has been developing on constantly evolving, if there has been any one thing that has always been there until this day is the “Inequality of contexts”, you see no matter how much those government’s or the corporate HR teams keep shouting about “Equal opportunity” the fact is that ends as long as you have the physical resemblance of being a human! So unless you want to be loading sacks or doing some job that calls for mechanical or physical abilities, that whole crap around “Equal Opportunity” means really nothing, simply because each one of us have “Unequal Minds” and for the sake of argument, even if we were to assume of two people having the identical minds the deployment and execution of what is held within the mind will always differ! So that’s as far as fairness of humanity goes in any direction- basically no where! But why should this intrinsic societal disparity emerge?

You see, as human societies evolved- the fruits of labor were not shared through a AI driven model, they were done in as primitive and as human ways as possible, the mightier (either through the mind or through power) always have retained the most and this continues till this day, if you thought it doesn’t happen in your corporate world or the governance model that your nation follows- you will be off target by miles! Even the performance management systems and reward mechanisms through organizations are almost always skewed in favour of the owners/ majority stake holders (right or wrong, doesn’t matter), likewise with governance- you will always find leader’s personal incompetence rewarded by the office that they agree to hold! A case of rising to their levels of incompetence! So where does all this lead us to? Well that is the space of what I call as “The Bucket Effect”- where societies and the people living within end up getting calibrated to the levels of agreed incompetence! If you are wondering if this is good or bad and how this impacts us, well read on!

If you imagine our world to be one large bucket and we have within that different buckets resembling the different social groups that we have as nations and then further smaller buckets based on whatever social stratification that is followed within there. Now you and I are among one of the many drops of water or honey or whatever you want to call that liquid and this is from where contextually you and I do what we do- whether it is inheriting the way of life, belief’s, the pursuits that we end up with, whether they be of self expression, creative, work, vocation whatever that all is – is within the bucket that you and I are in to begin with! It is only as you begin to outgrow your bucket that then you begin to nudge others around within that bucket through your value- creative or nuisance and soon enough you are seeking routes and ways to jump into other buckets (read societies/ nations) where you think, you will be more welcomed and will possibly have a better way to creative self expression that you want to manifest!

This is the long and short of all human strife and struggle, the need and urge to be known, to pursue fame, opulence and indulgence- some of us are able to achieve that space within the buckets that we are in and a majority of humanity lives and dies in the same bucket, praying on the death bed- that if there’s a next life perhaps we arrive in more aligned and meaningful bucket (which seems to be from your point of observation) and the show just goes on! Few of us end up overgrowing our buckets to an extent that we can control and dictate the rules of the bucket- read- business tycoons and the political class and then we have those odd few who are lucky enough to jump across to another bucket- read societies/ nations through migrations/ asylum and actually end up realizing the dreams and aspiration simply because that bucket was more aligned to what the individuals urge of self expression has been! This is the essence of the bucket effect and the story of entire humanity as simplified as it can be! So what next?

Well, if you have understood, the story so far, the singular point is that, “don’t sweat and struggle for what is not”! Once you know your bucket well, and you know where you reside in that bucket, it will be clear for you to know whether you really have the potential to grow within the bucket, control the bucket, outgrow the bucket or change the bucket and once you have known intrinsically, what is the potential that you hold within, you will be able to progress just fine by calibrating the right amounts of efforts for that to happen, because any more will not make any difference and any less, you will be alone responsible for being where you are!

A lot of struggle and wasteful effort is only because people don’t calibrate who they are to what they aspire to be! No one is questioning the human ingenuity, but unless aspirations and desires are calibrated you and I end up standing on the shores hoping for the waves to cease! Calibrated pursuits whether they be for work ambitions or creative expression, as long as they fall in line with an individual’s ability, the bucket that one is in, sure enough people will be able to reach their aspirations, touch the skies and etch themselves in human history! If you observe, a lot of stories of success within buckets and those of across buckets are almost always of self- expression and creative excellence- whether it is the field of arts, science or technology, unless the foundational spark of uniqueness is there, the story of human growth- collective and individual will stall and stagnate! Buckets- societies and nations which fail to nourish these human pursuits more often than not regress and those who nurture them always progress!

I leave you with these thoughts here, urging you to take some time off and reflect to figure out which bucket are you in and where you are and what is that you can possibly achieve within that bucket or by being in some other one; human life is too limited to have wasteful pursuits that don’t add up to anything either for yourself or for the society that you are in! Sure enough, you may not have got to choose your first bucket, but you can make a choice either to make the best within it or change your bucket as and when you can!

Ciao for now, will be back soon with another one, until then stay wise and stay connected!

The secret of resolutions that work.

~ Parimal Aluri ~ 1 Comment

Finally we move closer to that time of the year, when all of us either by choice or by accident end up making resolutions, which hardly a few of us are ever able to stick through even the first month let alone the year! Join me here as we try to understand what makes some people realize what they set out for and why is that many of us get stuck, or hijacked into pursuing and doing things on the list which were never there even in the top 10 to begin with! So here we go!

If we were to assume, that each person always wants to be good, do good and share good and if that was to be the first line in everyone’s resolution- what a wonderful place the world would be! Isn’t it? But you and I know it very well that, this is something that never happens and whether you like it or hate it, in a way is good that things don’t go that way, else the world would be a hue of shades of one singular color or thought! Well coming back to why people falter and fail with resolutions, well one of the most fundamental things about this is the fact that, all of us are designed to fail, some sooner others later! You see, the whole aspect of success is not about never failing or faltering, it is always about that single instance which stands ahead of all your failing and faltering which goes on to become your definition of success. No one remembers, how many times a scientist failed (except the scientist), but all remember that one time when things went well and something amazing resulted out of it. So how does it go?

Simplicity: Most often people who are able to achieve anything meaningful in the context of the frame through resolutions always aim for simplicity. Simplicity of objective, or what they aspire to achieve. So you, see once you have a straightforward clarity around what is that you want to achieve- that thought itself helps you to de-clutter and stay focussed. The space around simplicity of goal or objective goes on to provide and empower and individual’s clarity of action and focus on the task. Don’t mistake these to be a easy goals, they could be as challenging as you may want them to be, but what remains at the foundation is the fact that they are always simple in the essence of the objective or what needs to be achieved.

Intrinsic Orientation: More often than not people who have achieved anything meaningful are the ones’ who have been self-driven, basically what that means is a mindset, an approach to life in general and all the things that matter, which is uplifting and propelling forward. This intrinsic orientation is vital, simply because you may have the most amazing thought around you, but unless you don’t defeat your inertia and make that first step, even the best of ideas will fade away with time as lost opportunities or missed chances!

Compelling Need: The human mind being what it is, only makes the effort when it is vital and to tell it that what you aspire or seek to achieve is vital , you need to either have a plain talk by tricking it with a gratification model, or incentivize the rewards staggered in proportion to the milestones achieved! Unless the mind doesn’t get the answer to “What am I to gain”? nothing will ever happen! You may argue, that isn’t the mind, the same very person? Well, sure enough, but this is what uplifting self-talk and wise mental conditioning is all about! It’s only when you reinforce your thought and belief systems and make them a natural default for your mind that you will be able to approach the whole space of wanting to complete your resolutions not because only you have to do them, but rather now you want to do them!

Influence: The chances of your resolutions’ success directly depends on what the area of influence will be! The more greater the influence you think, your achievement will have, higher are the chances that you will be able to deliver and succeed! You see, when you set up yourself for easy wins and easy gains and when no one’s watching or going to know about it, unless you are one those rare species of authors, philosophers or scientists, who keep doing what they do without caring a bit for anything or anyone else, I bet you will always want the world to know what you are upto and where have you reached on that journey! The primitive desire and hard wired human mind always seeks to show off what has been achieved, whether you hunted a wild boar five centuries back or achieved the sales target three years ago, you want to narrate stories and brag about what you achieved- same goes with resolutions, the more opportunity that your resolution provides you for bragging, greater are the chances that it will be pursued empathetically till you succeed, simply because that urge to narrate that story is simply too high tom let go off!

Challenge Level: Another factor which goes on to determine whether your resolution will come alive or not, is the challenge level. Each one of us sets up resolutions to the level where our competence trims off or our Incompetence begins to appear! Like everything is life, all of us are good to a point and there is a differential when it comes to do this. You see no two people can do the same thing exactly the same way, even if all things around are the same and this small incremental difference too plays a big role in determining how we will finish what we set out to achieve! As long as your resolutions make you stretch and flex your competence and abilities you will be just fine and you will be in all probability able to hit your goals! The moment you aim too low or aim too high, your resolutions soon begin to become meaningless either for the lack of challenge and the “x” factor that comes along with it or because it is simply too overwhelming and seems like a mountain simply impossible to get around, over or through! The damage is more severe and long lasting especially when resolutions are aimed at something which is completely utopian and even rationally impossible to attain!

The Art of Finishing: The chances that your resolutions will succeed increase as you begin to visualise and plan the finishing of the achievement. Basically as long as you are able to see how you are going to conclude and finish and it that bit seems doable and rational chances are you will complete them, but if the last mile seems fogged out, chances are you will want to abort your journey the moment that happens, either because you have lost the game plane or now that you don’t seem to know how the end will manifest, you want to simply move away! you may call this also as the “cold feet syndrome” but it happens, often people start with something to achieve and as they progress they begin to realize they have chewed off more than what they can swallow and well needless to say they have to decide either to force feed themselves to spit it out- eitehrways a not very helpful situation, especially when it comes to setting up business goals!

Meaningfulness: Well not to sound philosophical, but the chances of a resolution seeing the light of the day increase when they are meaningful in the context of not being rational or sane, but in the context of being able to add meaning and value to what you choose to do, are doing and what is that you will want to do as you achieve what you have set out for! You see, many resolutions simply fail because not the effort was lacking but rather the controlling factors which govern them to be manifested are almost always external and beyond the individual’s control! You see a goal or resolution of having less than 1% defect in deliveries done by you is meaningful, but if you add to that a clause that by doing so you will earn a 10% raise, the whole idea gets defeated simply because whether you get that 10% is something that you simply can’t control!

I leave you here with these thoughts, the list could have been longer or perhaps even could have been a book, but than each one has their won idea of heaven and hell so I leave you here to explore that part for yourself!

Ciao for now, will be back soon with another one soon! Make a resolution that is as meaningful as who you are!

Be In the “Now”.

~ Parimal Aluri ~ 1 Comment

You have had books written, best sellers written, seminars, team games, outbound programs, workshops and what not around this concept, yet so much of humanity continues to struggle to stay “in the now”! Join me here as we take a fleeting look around this subject and try to decipher if this is really a meaningful approach and if it is so, why and when does it work and when does it fail! So here we go!

To begin with, we must understand and try to decipher from where do the references to the whole concept of “Be in the Now” some in to play! Well there are two broad areas, one is that this concept is not as modern as it seems and there are references to the value and attribute of “being in the now” across different forms of faith, religious writings and belief systems in one or the other way across societies all the time, in fact all the great progress that societies have made have been when “they have been in their now” and whenever they have lost focus and raced far too ahead or regressed far too back, societies have faced problems! But I will leave this ancient civilizational aspect here for now, simply because all modern day approach to this concept banks of this old wisdom albeit with a twist to suit the modern times and societies that exist and needless to say adding a touch of further improvisation or confusion based on who is communicating this message! But what is the real content and message of this space?

As humanity evolved, societies realized through their way of living, what worked and what did not- there have been wise philosopher’s through the ages who went on to endlessly observe and record of how human behavior impacts the surroundings and when does work become meaningful and meaningless, when does it create value and when it doesn’t, when does thinking change into day dreaming and when does ambitions become mindless hallucination! As the wise people kept getting better and better through their observations around humanity and human enterprise, as kingdoms and empire got built and destroyed,as societies became opulent and bereft of opulence, one thing that stood out singularly was the fact that- all intelligence, wisdom, thinking and enterprise will be wasted unless and until it is executed- even if the result is failure- for from there alone will it be possible to improvise further again and again until success- that is- the desired result can manifest and see the light of the day! For this to happen, it was important to not only bank of knowledge (which basically is all but the past) and be able to apply that to the current context of people and resources for a thought to fructify into something meaningful (read intelligence). This is indeed the simple and real essence of being “In the Now”, the ability to apply Intelligence on the acquired knowledge to solve a challenge that provides a solution to alter something that is there in the “NOW”!

So, you see, “Being in the Now” is more about being connected with the realities and truths around, needless to say each one’s is going to be different and meaningful and the inability to decipher that bit leads to perceptions and more often than not we take those snap decisions/ judgements in all that we do paying heed to these perceptions- which are not always what the truth is and this is where the divergence commences and people begin to struggle to remain in the “now”! Human societies the world over whenever have portrayed creative excellence through art or science- always were slow and not as fast paced as we have them today and if you look carefully the quality of creative excellence (which is supposed to be the epitome of human expressions) has all but deteriorated inversely proportional to the acquired pace that a society or individual has got hooked up to! More faster you go, the less you are able to think right and that is why, so many “experts” wanting you to attend their workshops/ seminars and basically tell you to “slow down” , unless that is not done, neither can you meaningfully connect your acquired knowledge to the available intelligence that you have and nor will you be able to pursue anything meaningful with any contextual clarity! So what next?

Well, simple, don’t waste your money attending “Be in the Now” workshops and seminars unless you know what you are getting into! You will emerge just as you went in! Unless an individual or societies make a directed effort to attain a specific goal and unless they deploy their intelligence while engaging it with the available knowledge- staying in the now- will become fruitless and the mind will have no other option but aimlessly either wander into the bygone’s or get consumed into some futuristic hallucinatory thought process!

For “Be in the Now” to work effectively and on an ongoing basis, it calls for much discipline and effort until it becomes your natural orientation. It is only when you begin to get ample clarity of what serves you and what does not, does magic begin to happen! It is an exercise in de-cluttering your life like nothing else, doing away with meaningless and un-serving family, friends, talks, thoughts, aspirations, desires each and every of them, some are easier said than done, but this is critical, unless you free your mind from the accumulated garbage of life around you, it will almost always function at sub optimal levels, leaving you always struggling between your past- present and future and hence your wanting to be “In the now” will always seem to be elusive and stressful!

The “now” can be empowering only if it is deployed and worked upon in the way that takes you closer to your meaningful aspirations! Once you have decently de-cluttered your life, your mind will have more band width to deal with what is around you- your ability to observe and inference in the “present” will acquire a completely new level of potency and that is how you will begin to know that you have arrived “in your now”. You will start to see meaningful patterns- that nourish you and at the same time you will be able to identify patterns that seem helpful but are actually robbing you off vital time and energy for no real reason! As you continue to work and move ahead with this kind of awareness and ability to sieve through fleeting moments with a sharp focus- you will be able to stay more and more in the moments that you behold and deploy the best you can at all that you do- whether it is your office desk job, the novel that you are writing, the painting that you are at or perhaps just the travel you are embarking upon or even may be that meaningful dialogue at business or that time with qualified friends and family each of these elements will begin to create more value and in return you will be to create more lasting value!

I leave you here with these thoughts for now, so that as you race ahead for your much awaited weekend, perhaps you will be able to think about “how you want to be in the Now” and for what and in case you are the lucky one who already has been practising and thinks is “in the now” , well make it more potent, is all that I can say! Human lives are nothing more than fleeting moments- what we are able to create through them goes on to signify many different things at many different times in different contexts- there is nothing right or wrong about how you choose to live- what is wrong- is not correcting when you know you can and you should- especially when you have options around you that can amplify your creative excellence further, and one such potent approach is being meaningfully and intentionally, “IN THE NOW”!

Ciao for now, will be back soon with another piece, until then stay wise and stay plugged into your today!

The anatomy of a crisis.

~ Parimal Aluri ~ Leave a comment

For some strange reason the world seems to have ended up being an ongoing performance in crisis management! Whether you label those crisis situations as political melting points, ecological and environmental matters, social concerns or challenges, whether it is the access to a desired quality of holistic life, you name it and you will be pretty sure, not to find one but many similar crisis unfolding around our planet at any given time- the only thing in nature that comes close to this kind of continuous unfolding of uncertainty are the lightning strikes and thankfully as yet we can’t blame humans for that as yet! Join me here as we try to understand this space of “crisis” and make an attempt to the see singularities and commonalities irrespective what type of crisis you witness and why there’s almost always more than meets the eye, no matter what label has been attached to a developing situation! So here we go!

Like those relatives or people that you generally dislike, crisis more often than not- whether small or big always emerges with it’s own operational eco-system comprising of people, resources and technicalities, it is often the failure or a fault within one or multiple of these elements that actually to begin with is the root cause as to why a crisis precipitates in the first place! To this context when you add the whole socially agreed concept of “It’s a busy life”, well chances are that way too often you are crossing a road looking at the wrong side of it and it is only a matter of time that you will be struck by a vehicle- read crisis! So why would anyone a crisis to form, let alone play havoc?

You see, one of the most fundamental and important corner-stone’s of being human in the times that we live today is “The challenge of being able to accept what is, the way it is”! Push back from you chair right now, or head to your balcony and spend a few minutes and try to see how fair you have been in accepting life as it was given to you and how fair were you in doing that? Chances are that like most of us you too would have put up your best foot forward to change and alter the contexts around you to “suit” what your aspirations are, well nothing wrong with this, this is how it is supposed to be, but when you have a huge baggage of misplaced aspirations riding of fatalistic optimism, then you have a serious problem at hand and this is the point from where the crisis in your life will begin to manifest in the area where you have been trying to pursue something that basically isn’t there or even if it is there, it’s not meant for you! No one is asking you, not to be ambitious or not pursue your dreams, that in fact is the very essence of human expressions and of being human, what you mustn’t do is submit to mindless intellectual hallucinations and pursue mirages which manifest nothing but chaos and turbulence! Allow me to explain!

Say, you want to be a pilot, cool nothing wrong and now say, you come from a not-so-good space and you have to struggle- great (for once you achieve your goal you will value it even more!); well part of life- that is what the pursuit of ambitions is all about isn’t it? So in this case the crisis will not be ability to continue education, raise money or qualify as a pilot- all those or milestones that need to be accomplished – after struggle and strife- because the goal is to seek the ambition. The real crisis will commence when you try to do all this, knowing well you are not cut for the job and carry on just because your friend is a pilot- so you want to be! Trust me I don’t even want to be anywhere close to the plane where we may have a pilot like that, let alone be cruising 10 miles above! You may want to argue that people can be trained and they will qualify eventually- well sure they will but at what cost and what risk! If you want more clarity around this, do catch up with some great reports of air disaster owing to human factors and you will know what I mean! Let me ask you one thing, would you to a surgeon for a heart operation who is new and has accidentally killed a few or will you trust the fingers of a skilled surgeon who charges a bomb but has done thousands of procedures with no fatality? Yes, the young surgeon will grow and be better with time, the question, is “Do you want to put your life on the line and manifest a crisis in your life?”

You see a lot of crisis that emerges and comes to strike us whether it is at Individual level or at a collective societal level is almost often owing to treading into areas which are either best left alone or approached by people who are professionals and know what they are venturing into! You never ask a Clown to lead an Army and nor do you ask trained marines to entertain you at a circus- while at a personal level both can do that, albeit in their own way! So you see, crisis is never really about the universe or life wanting to get even with you, rather it is a factor of being in the wrong place with the wrong people and for all the wrong reasons! In fact, even if one of these factors is right, still the other two will have the potency to foment a crisis unless people who in the thick of the things are not alert and careful at what they are!

The other reason why crisis become what they do, is the contextual truth of the surroundings and the inability of the people within to read that right! You see, you may have a dumb boss, a great leader, a messed up economy or a pot headed neighbour- but if you aren’t able to decipher the real picture behind these visual cues, you will more often than not end up taking a route of confrontation rather than trying to unravel what resides behind what seems and instead of solving one issue, you will more often than not add up a few more layers onto the existing one like a nicely done Rainbow cake- which you can’t have!

The fast paced lives that all of us are (with or without choice) compels us to make those (sometimes inaccurate- well most of the times!) snap decisions/ judgements (read- prejudices) and that’s more than enough to create issues that don’t solve the existing one but begin to grow on them to achieve crazy complexities! Hence its becomes vital that to stem a crisis in the very beginning, as the practise of mindfulness suggests, step back, take a pause, rise high and take a good look at what things seem to be and try to deduce what they really are! It is only when you act upon situations holistically with a comprehensive view and understanding that you will be able to solve a problem in the right way and completely stalling it from becoming a crisis in the long run! Quick fixes and an amateurish approach are almost always a recipe to accelerate crisis!

By now if you are starting to think that humans are victims of their inability to read fellow humans or situations around and them by unwittingly allow crisis to foment- well nothing could be farther from the truth! In fact it is the potency of the human mind turned on in the wrong way for a right purpose (read self-serving) is when things can begin to go horribly wrong (read crisis) and too real quick! More importantly it does not always have to be the malfunctioning mind of an individual- when that happens losses are limited to the span of influence and area of control of that singular mind- which is now failing and faltering; but when you get a collective group of people with dysfunctional minds and views that ham can be dangerous and in fact that has been the genesis of many a war, conflict, social strife and unwanted human suffering more than anything else!

So you see, a crisis really in a way is a manifestation of dysfunctional human minds- individual or collective and the potency of that emerging criss will always be proportional to the extent to which the minds have gone wrong and how deep and wide their influence is carried! So is there anything that can be done? Is there a way to avoid crisis completely? Read on!

Well, crisis can be only avoided/ limited or mitigated as long as they are created by self-serving and psychologically malnourished humans, when it comes to the crisis created on account of nature- read natural events- floods, earthquakes, landslides, tsunamis and so on and so forth, you can limit those events becoming into a crisis as long as you agree to not be in or around nature’s path! If you still remain insistent about that home atop a mountain with a sunrise/sunset view or that beach front- well rest assured once in your life time nature will reward you with a bonus issue of “nature’s fury” and all that you would have put in- those millions of dollars will vanish in minutes- you will really lucky if you made it out in time! Crisis emerging from nature are not because of nature by itself- they are largely because of human interventions and people getting into places where they should not be in the first place to begin with!

So, if, by now you are really wondering, what is that can be done and not, well things are pretty simple and that’s where the real challenge is! Crisis manifestation is a combination of attributes- it could be a creation of human kind or nature and based on what that is, you nourish the human mind to health- individual and collective as a society and respect nature as you should and get away from where you have no business to be in! As I said, these are the real steps, simple but very very difficult to implement and follow and guess as long as that goes on- unhealthy minds will keep creating one crisis or the other in one name or the other- labels are a aplenty- the sad part is life is not forever- so whether you want to expend it completely this way or want to create something more meaningful and of value-more that is the choice that each ne of us has and we must appreciate that in the context of what that is and can be!

I leave you here with these thoughts, for now, allowing you time to manage the crisis that you are either dealing with or planing to create! Take some time off, step back, soar high and try to sieve your apparent context from the real one and avoid that unwanted crisis and think before you plan to create one!

Ciao for now, Stay wise and stay clear of crisis!

The endless journey between I & WE.

~ Parimal Aluri ~ Leave a comment

The story of our lives, each one of us, is nothing more then the endless trials, errors, success and failures that each one of us sets ourselves up either at individual levels or at a level of being part of some team.Join me here as we explore this space and try to understand what is the real essence of being in the “I” or the “WE” and when should we be where and what happens when that works for us or against us! So here we go!

When we are kids and going through our school lives- in the very early stages, even as we are still trying to make sense of what and who we are, we are told about the value of being assertive and being vocal and visible in different ways time and again! As you grow a little wiser and learn to flex and stretch you ability to self-assert through ways which are allowed and not, you soon start to get a dose on the relevance and value of “social care”, and how the “WE” is greater and stronger than the “I” kind of a parable and well sure enough, falling prey to the social conformation bias with the remining innocence that one may have- pretty soon you start to say “ok” to adjust play second or third or no fiddle at all simply to conform to the idea and belief that “WE” is more important than the “I”!

If you thought this piece of crap of being compelled to choose and adopt to either the “I” or the “WE” ends with your education, well sadly it doesn’t! The extent and the intensity with which the constant coercion continues goes on to permanently damage every bit of “I” and every attribute of the quality of collaboration that can be extended into the “WE”! even as people step into the corporate world to serve a business or step into the social arena to serve humanity! We actually end up in a world where damaged Individuals collaborate to collectively screw up the world further together and with time the world goes into that bit deeper rut and keeps getting nudged into spaces of being beyond repair in different areas at different times! This is not because there is a flaw with the “I” or the “WE” approach, the manifestations of all humankind problems are because the inability to know when is the time to allow the “I” and when to allow the “WE” to take charge!

At one stage of life you are told that “I” matters and soon enough you are told that “WE” matters, well the real thing is that both of these matter in the context of what the purpose is and what is at stake! There is no way of looking at life with an approach of either “I” or “WE”, it has to always be a blended approach of being “I” and “WE” in response to what stands in front of you to challenge and what is that you are supposed to create or offer to the world and the social context around you! Let me explain! As you embark to pursue your career in the initial days and years, sure enough you would be appreciated or reprimanded based on your performance more than the team;s performance, this is the space where your “I” approach is being evaluated and improved or rather you are made to improve so that business goals are met. Something similar to your primary schooling! As you grow and mature in the chosen job or vocation, soon enough, if your “I” has been empowering and meaningful, you will be given the responsibility to lead a few and soon enough you begin to get answerable not only for your standalone “I” but also for the collective “WE” that you represent and are accountable for! Unless you have understood and mastered your “I” you will fail and falter with the “WE” each and every time!

When it comes to the larger play of society- perhaps representing a community/society or a nation, the power of “WE” and the promise of “WE” over-rides whatever your “I” may be! The corporate world is pretty calibrated and metric driven, your “I” will only be given so many chances and as soon as you begin to falter and fail even the “WE” camouflage will not be able to rescue you from the eminent ejection- this is the space where CXOs begin to get fired and asked to leave! When it comes to the world where public support is garnered through competing narratives and promises and stories of hope, unless the people and sensitive elements do not see value in the collective “WE” they will not rally behind you, no matter how iconic the story of your “I” is and this is the real truth- the trial by fire when it comes to wanting to be a public figure- the constant scrutiny and evaluation is often too much then one can handle and with time those who can’t often fade away form public memory and the glitz simple because the “WE” did not accept or need the “I” or the “I” has already served it’s purpose and will be ejected like an idea whose time is bygone!

People often spend their whole life, trying to adjust their “I” to the “WE” and vice versa , not realizing ever that the real trick is to allow both of them to be there and evolve with the dynamism of the contexts around! The greatest fallacy is perhaps the idea to exchange or trade away your “I” for the “WE” or the other way around, simply because you need both of them at different times on an ongoing basis and the audience for both of them are almost always different and you then have a choice to choose which audience is more meaningful and valuable to you over the other and for what frame of time! It is only when you are able to apply this principle that you will find it easy to be self-asserting and open to ideas and wanting to lead others’ ideas with as much as ease as those of your own!

The real essence of life is about finding a progressive equilibrium with regards to applying the “I and the “WE” and knowing when to deploy which of these and for how long! History is replete with examples when Individuals have been iconic and when they have failed miserably, likewise there are examples of achieving greatness through group-think and precipitating disasters through it! The only real way to go about is to embrace the “I” and the “WE” at the right time to the right extent and ensuring you allow both of them to develop and thrive as the dynamic times around us constantly demand a new version and potent “I” and “WE” with every new sunrise!

I leave you here with these thoughts, urging you to take a pause and reflect what is that you have been deploying more? The “I” or the “WE” and what has worked and what has not!

Ciao for now, will be back soon with another one! Until then stay in the now and use what you must, your “I” and “WE” are as unique as who you are!

Distributed Leadership through People.

~ Parimal Aluri ~ Leave a comment

The last few years have seen the rise and rise of something that I like to call as “Distributed Leadership”, other names to this space are “people movement”, “leaderless agitations”, “apolitical unrest” and so on and so forth! Depending on which part of the world you reside in and how allowing the government of the day is, you will come across the example of Distributed Leadership in varying degrees of intensity, aggression and intent. Join me here as we take a quick look into what this is all about, and how we can tap the energy of this attribute to work for us and when can it falter and how do we keep it under check? So here we go!

The past few years, in fact quite a few of them, the world has been a witness to unrest, agitation and rift among various sections of societies and more often than not the collective voice of people has been directed towards the people who govern (or should I say mis-govern), what has largely changed is, unlike earlier times, when these were lead and systematically planned by one political outfit or ideology to topple the other, this time around many of these agitations and unrest episodes have been the strong, uncensored, relentless and direct simply because these were the voices of people who were not engaging with a stronger opposition as individual members of a society, but rather as a collective team of individual leaders- this is the dawn of “Distributed Leadership”.

If you are wondering why would this happen, when societies most of the times have ideologies to voice out societal concerns and raise issues with those who govern; well it is precisely when these fail and when people have lost all faith and trust in them that they are not left with any other option but to take the things into their own hands and formulate and come up with virtually “leaderless collective” which goes on to play a pivotal role in the emerging fabric of a new reorganized social fabric!

When people begin to loose faith among the elected/ nominated leaders and their leadership, they are left with no other choice but to take things into their own hands- call it coercive empowerment if you like, but when this potent force is used well, timely and for a just cause, even the most seemingly unrelenting governing bodies seem to get ready to come to the table for discussions and finding a mid-way- this in social space is known as public face saving! Well we have witnessed this, union movement, union talks with governing bodies of large organization, in the more recent times, the ability of professional bodies and trade organizations to negotiate and arrive at solutions which are more workable all of these are nothing but an impact of the leaderless movements and stimulus which begin everything that finally reaches on a potent table to find the way ahead! The question here is, why would elected or nominated leaders not do what they have been elected/selected to do and perform? Why would they want things in society to reach these levels?

Leaders are human too and they will fail for sure, the question is never about, “If they will fail; it is always about “When will they fail” and life being what it is, sooner or later even the best of leaders that you may have will be presented with a challenge which simply ends up being beyond their capacity to resolve- either there is limitation through Incompetence- Intrinsic or by virtue of the wrong people who have been allowed to rally around the Leader. Whether you consider a small organization having 100 people or large corporate houses or even perhaps the running of a nation- the failure of leadership is only possible when leadership Incompetence begins to precipitate and once that happens it is only a matter of time that as alternatives within the working frame collapse one after the other- society gets more and more restless and eventually you have these mass protests and voices on the street communicating what matters the most- as long as they are heeded and understood, there is still time to salvage the leader and the leadership, but for some real insane reason if leaders get advised to embark on the confrontational route- well total collapse of the leader and the leadership is eminent – sooner or later- because instances like those are never forgotten neither forgiven from the public memory once they are etched!

Another great blessing in disguise emerging from the space of people movement is the promise of a whole new breed of leaders, who are driven by set of values, principles and believe in the cause that they stand up for and are ready to brave what comes their way- sending out important signals to the community that they now have alternatives, which are importantly connected with how the society feels- which by itself is so vital to bring about any meaningful change or transformation that governing bodies may want to embark upon- whether they are community services of the government’s of the day or large organisation with considerable community foot-print in a given area.

If you think that people movement is always about those protests on the roads- well think again- it happens all the time- that blog you follow, that writer who inspires, that Ministry which motivates you, the fellow worker who makes you want to join the team, the stories you want to let your kids and the future generations know, factors like these and many other go on to ensure that when the times get tough, people will rise, slowly but surely and in whatever limited way they can- If they can’t be on the street they will through their thoughts or actions, no matter how small they seem to be- collaborate, communicate and engage to keep the momentum going on, like the ashed out cinders in a fireplace- always warm enough to provide that spark and rekindle a new fire- that is what the essence of distributed leadership through people really is!

Nominated or Elected Leaders are comprehensively powerless until and unless they have this loyal base which goes on to work all the time promoting and striving to live up to the promise of what has been communicated from the very top! Say the leader of a nation appeals to their citizens to make that nation great again! Well unless citizens don’t add to the equation and do what each one of them can do in their own small or big way- the dream will always end up being a dream and if you really begin to experience change and an impact- then you surely know that there is this huge army of nameless leaders who are slowly but effectively contributing to the cause and ensuring that dream gets to see the light of the day!

If you are wondering can this space of People led Leadership movement be kept under check, well the answer is YES and NO, Yes, if it seems to threaten the fundamental fabric of a society or nation or tends to bring about great danger to humanity, the the nominated and elected class will clamp down- hard and fast and NO if the incompetence levels have been so terrible that they are actually putting the society and nation at risk to a point from where recovery seems impossible! As with a nation, likewise with other facets, as long as the threats are low to moderate and not a severe threat people movements will come and go- with limited impacts, but when the the threats seems to be severe, they sustain, linger, and tend to keep coming back for one or the other reason on an ongoing basis and to make matters complicated- the more effort that is made to clamp them down- the more resurgent they seem to become! There is never an absolute right and wrong when it comes to humanity and the truth always lingers somewhere between the extreme options that a society is always presented with!

I will leave you with these thoughts here, urging you to witness the next people movement/protest/agitation/ rift through the lens of leadership incompetence and social rewiring- for that is what it really always is and will be! Sometimes it happens dramatically on the streets and other times it is happenings in quiet corridors of power and the shop floors of factories when people assume Individual Leadership- no title- no designation- Leadership by Action to support and further the cause that they have aligned themselves to! This is the real secret about how human societies make progress even through the most challenging and daunting times and every time we miss to see this, rest assured we miss out on vital cues to decipher and decode what’s unfolding in the future- both the short term and the long term of it!

Ciao for now, will be back soon with another one, until then stay wise, stay safe and be the Leader that you can be and always remembers Leaders don’t need labels- they earn them as they do what they set out to do!

The Gate-Keeper.

~ Parimal Aluri ~ Leave a comment

The humble gate-keeper’s are the root cause for all the progress and problems that we see all the time as they manifest and play out around us! Whether its is about writing the story of political success or disasters or it is about organisations doing well at one point and then going down the drain in a few years, among the many other contributing factors, the silent passive role of the gate-keeper is almost always one of the reasons for all that manifests- it is the space when “too much” or “too little” from the gate-keepers goes on to create and manifest realities that no one want’s to embrace! Join me here as we undertake this journey to understand what really happens when gate-keepers misfire and what is that we can do to plug that bit so that we don’t end up fighting battles which are best avoided!

Unlike popular belief, gate-keepers are everywhere and every level, whether you want to start with your home, the community you live in, the work place that you go to or the business engagements that you are part of or if you are lucky enough to witness the building up and falling down of political fortunes of politicians and nations, each and every space around these aspects of our life are driven by gate-keepers- their effectiveness and balanced thinking is what propels societies collectively further and ahead and when they get mentally fatigued or confused, well, yes the social segment impacted begins to seem like a part of a zombie apocalypse movie! So what do these people really do, or should I say what is that they are really to do and why and how that helps to begin with?

Well, the easiest example of gate-keepers that you and I would have come across would be those fabled folks from the “HR” departments or from those “secretarial” areas where we spend much of our corporate life either hiring/firing people, dealing with them and their real and apparent skills (those mentioned on the papers) and trying to make that sale (once we are able to get appointments!) respectively! But it is is spaces like these of the corporate world oblivious to the C”X”O’s team and the so called “A” Teams or “Strategic Thinkers” a lot of talent gets wasted and a lot of incompetence gets added even as the higher ups continue to keep writing theories and attend conferences and networking events speaking about how they and their organization is ready for the future! We all have come across the normal painful and dumb practise of the “HR” wanting to know how long an individual will last, if selected and so on and so forth, not realizing that they are in fact hiring because a person who has left the organization was the one they had selected because that person was going to hang around for a long time! Then you have other instances when “empowered groups” are asked to validate new ideas (even as they suffer from some severe intellectual incomprehensibility) and many great ideas are either then killed before they come alive, or the people with great ideas leave and start on their own or worse still this educated evaluation body ends up selecting the worst idea (which is in line with their limited understanding and intelligence) thereby setting up the organization for its own slow and systematic demise.

The problems with the gate-keepers begins as soon as you end up having the wrong people to keep the gates! You see, over critical, over anxious people are really never too dependable when it’s crunch time, for they will screw up for sure and the magnitude of their stupidity can cause damages worth millions- which at times are even not realized unless that new competition comes up and that’s when the people say, “Oh that person used to be working here, next to me!”. Organizations end up paying the price for having the wrong gate-keepers and at times this folly can be fatal to the enterprise’s existence! But then why would anyone in their right mind end up deputing the wrong or an intellectually stagnated gate-keeper?

Well the, answer to this question we must realize that intelligence as a currency is worthless if it is not updated and fine tuned to what the contextual reality is in the moment and needs to be validated and certified on an ongoing basis, this is what makes intelligence so fragile and both- useful and useless at the same time! Don’t believe it ask your friend who had to deal with a salesperson for an hour on a Monday morning, simply because the secretary got outwitted to end up giving that appointment! As far as inability to comprehend the “next big idea” well the whole world is full of examples of how erstwhile colleagues ended up being business competition, simply because someone did not pay heed and attention when it mattered the most! In all probability because someone said, investing that time on an idea- whose time had not arrived- was not worthwhile- all this as “they thought”!

If you thought, corporate gate-keeping was damaging enough (when not practiced the right way), imagine or should I say don’t imagine the kind of mess it can lead societies and nations into when governments of the day end up having intellectually starved officials/ bureaucrats as gate-keepers and policy collaborators for them! This is what empowers corruption, slyness, chaos and ambiguity and whether you are a developed nation or an emerging one or a small nation- doesn’t matter- each nation and society on this planet has this rare breed of failing and faltering governmental gate-keepers in equal measure to the level of political incompetence and societal indifference that is played out! The only aspect (where it differs from the corporate world) about governmental or political gate-keeping going wrong is not about another nation picking up an idea- but ending up providing other nations with multiple opportunities on account of one mistake at gate-keeping related to one subject matter! So if you run a nation, now you know why a lot of politicians end up ruining the nation rather then running it! When multiple gate-keepers fail one after the other even if the political outfit or the government of the day has the best intentions to provide great governance can come to a nought and fail miserably!

By now if you are thanking your stars and thinking that gate-keeping and problems arising from improper or reckless gate-keeping are limited to the corporate world and the political universe, well think again- with like everything else that is human- believe it or not- this gate-keeping begins at home- like charity does and the innocent looking approaches of “not this”, “do this and not that”, go on to often calibrate potential of individuals and end of the day, before you realsie you have already ended up walking on a path which is nothing what you would have really wanted to – had you got a choice- which is what great gate-keeping always does provide!

Great gate-keeping and great Gate-Keepers are often iconic simply because the value that they are able to create by what they effectively do is astronomical- whether it is the ability to get the right candidate to lead a community or a society, or the ability to spot a fine talent who can be then molded into a visionary corporate leader or that finesse to know the next solutions and services that society eagerly awaits- each and every space around factors like these and beyond is often dotted around with some fine gate-keepers who are constantly sieving and evaluating the “next best story” over the horizon. It is their ability to tap into the idea whose time has come at the time that one should- is what makes them truly iconic and a blessing for humanity the world over! So what sets these iconic gate-keepers apart from the mediocre ones’?

Intent and Interest- Iconic gate-keepers are like those curiosity driven babies who want to constantly explore, evaluate and understand what the surroundings are communicating- through people and through objects and through patterns that come and go! This ability of wanting to know more alongside a laser sharp focus on what is that they are hunting for- whether it is talent, Corporate leaders, a Political successor, a great takeover, whatever that is on their agenda- is what makes them so potent and successful- sure enough being human and the fact that they deal with humans- they too will fail at times – but what matters is that their success rate and success magnitude far outweigh their losses and hence what stand out almost always are the stories of the wars that they have won and not about the battles that they have lost!

I leave you here with these thoughts for now, allowing you to practise and reflect upon your own individual style of gate-keeping and do ponder about the times of your life when gate-keeping helped you and when it backfired and how all of that has helped you become who you have become until now! The story of gate-keepers and gate-keeping is a story of humankind’s endless pursuit to reach their aspirations and doing it in the most effective and efficient manner!

Ciao for now, will be back son with another one! Until then be the gate-keeper you want to meet when you knock on the gates- that you desire to be opened for you!

Embracing Incompetence.

~ Parimal Aluri ~ 1 Comment

I would have with ease chosen the word competence over incompetence, but this one is all about Incompetence and if 2020 was nightmare owing to a pandemic, the next one 2021- will be another pandemic, a pandemic of failing leaders and faltering competence! Join me here as we take a quick look around this bit and try to understand the what is likely to unfold and what is that we can do or not do about it. So here we go!

No matter where you stay and what you do, chances are that either you have been at the receiving end of the societal incompetence issues or you have unwittingly contributed to manifest and accelerate them- only to come back to bite you! Whether it is the problems that you are facing with the meaningless barrage of rules through the pandemic- some of them being absolutely stupid and dumb! or it is about the new found and ever increasing challenges of engaging with more and more dumb people reporting into you and you reporting into- all of this is nothing more but the curtain raiser to the new age of human incompetence that all of us are going to end up embracing in the times ahead! For a few of us that will be a choice to deal with,but for the majority of human kind this is going to be an inescapable nightmare to deal with day in and day out and well, I have not yet added that incompetence creeping into your inner circle of family and friends for as and when that manifests- you will really have no place to hide or run! The only blessing being at least you have a choice to decide on your inner circle and if you end up making the insane choices- it will only go on to speak more about you rather then the people that you have ended up adding to your life!

The plain and simple fact remains that human incompetence is neither rare nor uncommon, in fact it is perhaps the singular trait that binds humanity like none other! Surprised? Well don’t have to be! Each one of us is always working at our levels of acquired incompetence, sure enough none of that is static and levels of incompetence will keep altering based on the dumbness and intelligence that people garner along the way! So how does it all begins and where does this all start? Well read on!

Incompetence is a societal phenomenon- for the simple reason that incompetence doesn’t work or show up in isolation! It is only when there are some agreed and given metrics to which things don’t measure up, is that the whole concept begins to get noticed!Societies too on their part don’t necessarily promote incompetence, but the established norms and agreed way of life and work contribute to a great extent in ensuring that there is a systemic replacement of intelligence with dumbness over a period of time and this is what really acts as a fuel to the fodder of incompetence and believe it or not all of this begins in our homes and schools!

Incompetence is systematically drilled down through schooling and parenting and later on through the so-called work culture to ensure that every valid bit of sanity and intelligence is done away with and people learn to settle for mediocre experiences in all that they get to do! This is why, people settle for the whole “ok” and “will work” or “will do for now” maxim even as they end up paying for a service which is supposed to be “best in class” each and every time! remember the last time you picked up your favorite handset and as it crashed when you rushed to the service centre what that experience was like? Well, chances are you would have received a far different learning about humanity and the whole concept of “smart marketing” would have left you wonder-struck!

You see, the incompetence that you get to witness play out all around you is not a factor of the dumbness of the individual or the collective group think (which again resides on the individual dumbness of people in the group), but rather is a factor of the success rate to which the minds of these people have been numbed to such a point that for everything in the world- they have to and need to only reach out for their favorite web browser and whatever garbage that throws up is the divine gospel of their life! But why does this happen, aren’t people with working minds suppose to be suave and wise? Well, certainly they are supposed to be, but when these very minds are systematically hacked and programmed to think and relate in a templated pattern of recurring and recycled thought patterns, they are never able to see anything original and every attempt to present these blinded minds with meaningful context goes for a toss, simply because these blinded minds are simply unable to latch onto anything original and they are automatically driven towards templated patterns and programmed thoughts. This goes on and on, and over a period of time our very potent minds, ends up just being an execution device rather than being a thinking powerhouse with a substantial loss of the ability to discern ,debate and think the way they should!

As societies strive to create more and more artificial intelligence, the natural intelligence is all but going to be surely wasted and that wasting intelligence often manifests and plays out as incompetence. Competent Leaders often struggle as they get incompetent team members to work along with and often competent workers get walked over when they have incompetent bosses to deal with, and if you are among those lucky yet unfortunate mid-level souls and should be sandwiched between two layers of incompetence above and below- well your life soon enough starts to look like a lunatic asylum from the Hollywood movies and that nightmare is strong enough to shake up even the most resolute and determined people around! Incompetence, as I said earlier need not necessarily mean the absence of intelligence or wit, it simply means the presence of overwhelming inertia to take that effort to do away with the cobwebs of the mind, stand up and question what is being presented and seek alternative pathways! The human mind- being the ardent follower of conservation of energy- relishes on the idea of rest- as long as it does not threaten your existence in the world and that innate hardwired animal brain- has a front row seat to the dumbness and stupidity of your life! This is one reason, why once you grow incrementally wiser, and as you look back at your poor life- you at some point will really stop and wonder- “wtf”, “how could I really do that”, “did I really do that” and so on and so forth!

Incompetence, if you ask me is a lifestyle disease- a dis-ease emerging out of the compelling need of not wanting to use one’s brain and rely on what an online search throws up or what the neighbor’s cat whispers! It is within these alleys that humanity is ending up doing great dis-service to it’s potential- both the individual and collective potential and as the equilibrium of the society keeps moving further and further into the space of being incompetent from being sporadically incompetent to consistently incompetent- societies begin to witness the exodus of the few remaining wise people around- for they realise there’s no medicine to this illness and the only remedy resides in the ability to safeguard their remaining intelligence and wit and apply it in societies and contexts where that would be welcome and rewarded the way to should be!

Societies the world over are progressive or regressive in proportion to their incompetence! As long as societies are able to check the growth and pace of incompetence by staying valid and competent, things are fine and these societies are needless to say innovative and leaders, if and when the equilibrium is altered and incompetence takes a grip, societies begin to experience regression and before that a puzzling stall as far as its directions and aspiration is concerned! So what’s the way forward?

The plain truth remains that the story of human incompetence is a social problem and it is something that we have allowed (willingly/ unwillingly) to grow and manifest both individually or collectively in different areas and spheres of our lives and needless to say this very incompetence then comes back to bite back at us through accidents, mishaps, errors, mistakes and what you have and then there are these two words to describe that space, “human error”. Incompetence is not a factor of someone being un-intelligent or dumb, rather it is a telling sign of intelligence not being used or rather being abused – using what you must for reasons other then what you must use for! You see, technically you can make a potato pickle, but we don’t do that!

To conclude for now, the only thing that we need to always remember is that Incompetence is not the absence of intelligence or with but rather the non-application of it for reasons that could be intrinsic or external. The way to defeat this, is to compel people to think and force thinking to arrive at alternative routes, innovative solutions and only when this approach becomes a new pattern, is that people will be able to stall the onward march of incompetence and ensure that solutions and approaches delivered and applied are always a product of applied intelligence and wit and not artificial intelligence driven by the inertia of incompetence! Sure enough, the times ahead will be more and more cluttered with examples and manifestations of incompetence all around, the only reassuring fact that will prevail within that space will be the beacons of intellect and wisdom shining in between those dim lit areas of humanity where incompetence seems to rule the minds!

I leave you here with these thoughts, urging you to think for a moment, what is that is driving you- is it your inertial incompetence or is it your directed intellect and wit!

Ciao for now, will be back soon with another article, until then stay wise and stay safe!

Meaningful Hustle.

~ Parimal Aluri ~ Leave a comment

As we begin to draw the curtain over 2020 (what a year it has been!), what better time then now, to take that pause, hold that glass of wine around a wonderful fire-place and think around the hustle you have been through and try to identify what and which of those have been meaningful! The inability of people to connect and involve in meaningful hustle is what leads them away and farther from what they need to do and should do to stay aligned on the path that takes them to their aspirations! Join me here as we try to understand this space and ponder around how and what we can do and not do to ensure that our hustle stays purposeful and meaningful! So here we go!

We are all thinking and living beings, what that implies is the fact that what unfolds around impacts us all within and how those events soak within goes on to reinforce or shake our belief and value systems. A lot of this manifests because of pursuing hustles which, at the end of the day mean nothing and add absolutely nothing to our lives- forget about adding any value to anyone else around! So now the million dollar question- what are these meaningless pursuits, can we know them and how do we manage them?

If there’s one thing that we can all be thankful to 2020, it will be about the fact that the year has humbled humanity like nothing else! The year has been simply a masterclass in allowing people know what really stays back and what doesn’t- whether it has been about people, work, passion, hobbies or anything for that matter- the year showed us all “what really matters” and this is the pivot from where, we can further explore the space around “Meaningful Hustle”. As a coach, sure enough there is no reason to dictate and create myopic opinions about what is right and what isn’t- as I keep saying each ones’ truth is fundamentally and contextually relevant to the individual. However, what must not be ignored is the truth that a lot of odd corners that people get stuck into are nothing but a consequence of pursuing what should not be in the first place! This is nature’s equivalent of standing by the sea shore and expecting no waves!

Our daily lives are peppered with small victories and small losses from time to time and more often then not, the less successful people are those who are consistently wining the wrong battles of lesser or no consequence and loosing all the crucial ones’ and the reverse is true for the people who emerge as “successful” as defined by the society that they move around in! So what is it about those un-meaningful hustles? Many and most of those un-meaningful hustles are nothing more but a result of misplaced aspirations, pursuits which arise from the space of social compulsions, misplaced optimism and not to forget a complete failure to understand oneself and the contextual reality within and around! Let me explain! Remember going to that odd piano class or that guitar class because “x” went, or joining that regarding club because “y” was doing it- now if these were the experiences of your school or college days- and if you are lucky enough to see how many of those “x” and “y” have got anything to do with their piano or guitar in life- you will know what I am saying here! This is yet not much of a problem, because growing up years are all about experimenting, trying, failing, learning and moving ahead- but when this approach drags on into spaces of life in a measure which is perhaps not healthy and for the wrong reasons is when problems really start to manifest and that’s when hustle begins to get un-meaningful!

Take the case of our favorite topic- the pandemic- how much of all the hustle and sweat that you ended up spending on that was worth doing what you did! If you want an example from another quarter- run through the myriad of scenarios that have always been playing out at your work place- whether being there or through remote work- what do you see- well in all probability you see a mix of meaningful and wasteful hustle day in and day out and the balance between the meaningful and the wasteful one goes to speak a lot about the people that are on that boat and where that boat is going to eventfully land up- I mean whether it’s going to meet an iceberg or dock at a harbor of choice or get a makeover from being a passenger liner to a newly acquired pirate ship – well all of that eventually will depend upon the only single factor- that is what meaningful hustle people put in and how much wasteful hustle is limited!

Unless and until your hustle is directed to meaningful pursuits- you run the risk of turning your life into a “I could have” statement rather then allowing it to be “I can and I will”! Sure enough, no one is not asking you not to fail, failure is very much the basic ingredient to realize success and as a matter of fact success is only as proportional to the extent and amount of failure that one experiences! All those pursuits, each one of them that do not add value to your life ( as in your life- not your job, your contexts around, this is about U) are nothing else but meaningless wasteful pursuits and hustles that end up being the ultimate self-created drag which simply doesn’t allow you to soar high enough as you could have without them and reach further enough (given the intrinsic potential that you have!).

Meaningless hustles that emerge from within based on intrinsic aspects can be corrected with focus engagement and calibrated measures, what really are dangerous and more damaging are the ones’ that begin to creep in based on social compulsions, peer pressure and the senseless craze and compulsive urge to enact/do something because someone else has said or done! This is many steps ahead beyond the innocent looking arena of copying, mimicking someone- this is the space where people often tend to pursue some imaginary hallucinating idea/thought and end up selling themselves a future which doesn’t exist and while doing so end up ruining their present and endangering their future! The easiest way to avoid all this un-serving crap is pursue hustle that is meaningful and the good news is that meaningful hustles connect and create magic really very quick- sure enough time may be required to garner that material wealth and fame that the societal standards have laid out for defining and calibrating success, the fact remains though- the moment you connect to something meaningful- you know that second itself and you instantly feel being drawn in and nourished by the meaningful pursuit that you gave immersed into!

Meaningful Hustles are almost always Intrinsic, sure enough there can be and will be instances of being inspired externally, but that first compulsive connect has to arise from within and when that happens, is only when can anyone go ahead and pursue something meaningful and worthwhile! Don’t rush to think this is the space of some mad psyched out philosopher talk, this is is real, simple and each one of us knowingly or unknowingly are part of this every passing moment! Why do you feel great when you see that favorite food or yours’ or why do you feel elated when you team hots the bull’s eye, why do you feel great when you are heard and appreciated- well chances are that in each of those instances you have witnessed that your choices- your thought and your effort has been recognized and you have been practicing or doing what you do with each one of those instances out of a belief that each one of those instances nourish you and elevate you in a way or the other- whether that’s an ice-cream which helps you wade off a hot summer’s day for a few hours or it is that appreciation from your manager which helps you carve your a future for the next few years- either ways the whole element of being able to add “Meaningfulness to your hustle” around these things comes from within you and that is possible only and only if you are connected firmly from within and know how much to soak in, what to allow and what not to allow and this is the space where all the magic happens and people are able to sieve meaningfulness from un-meaningfulness and the more often you practise this, the more pro you end up at being able to decipher and decode what is your true hustle and what is not- what is that you must latch on to and what you must not get into!

This effort and practise goes on to make the journey of your life that much more lighter, relevant, creative and one that adds value to yourself and everyone around you simply because you are then proactively and even sub consciously connecting only with tings and people that matter in the sense of being able to create meaningful pathways by embracing meaningful hustle to help you reach your aspiration and desires sans the melodrama and baggage, which so many end up carrying for no real rhyme or reason right upto their graves!

I really don’t want to or like to get into the space to dictate or spell out what is meaningful and what is not- simply because that is private and personal to each one of us- given the unique beings that each one of us are- humanity must never forget one fundamental truth of our times-that we are similar but we are unique and that’s as much as we can get some sense of being the same and different- everything is wrapped up in that statement! As long as we are able to respect this fact and cater to it as we must with empathy and respect- everything will be fine- the moment we try to pluck the chords around this, we get music and at times noise and from there ensues the wanted and unwanted chaos of what human kind is all about!

I leave you here,with these thoughts, urging you to connect within and around to seek what brings you more closer to the really meaningful hustle of your life and do what you must to stay locked on that- for that alone is what defines who you are what you are and what legacy you cherish to leave behind!

Ciao for now, will be back soon with another one, until then stay wise and pursue what you must, nit what you can!

The problem with “Problem”.

~ Parimal Aluri ~ 1 Comment

As we race about our lives, each day, each one of us is dealing, solving, creating or fixing a “problem” or at least what seems to be one! Join me here as we unravel with this space and try to understand the humble origins about these problems, why do they even emerge, when, where, the how and the why of it and as we sieve through this space, we conclude by trying to know if there’s anything that we can do about it and if the answer to that question is a “yes” what is that must be done! So here we go!

The very mention of the word problem, brings forth a range of emotions- depending on who you are- what your psychological construct is- either you will race ahead towards it or avoid it as much as you and as often as you can or end up having reactions and responses somewhere between those extremes- something that changes with the nature of the problem and the context of what it is to you! That’s how it is supposed to be and that is how it always will be! The whole story begins post this space! What we do and not do about the problem arrives much later! What we need to first understand and decode is what is it about the problem- how and from where does it all begin and come alive?

Humanity has been a saga of success and failures! Each time success has been more than failure, humanity has progressed and each time humanity has had more failures than success, it has regressed! This perhaps is one of the most fundamental of all the truths of our lives and without any discrimination is applicable universally, sure enough the impact felt will be more or less with the progression and regressions, largely depending upon who you are and where you have landed yourself up in the complex web of life!

Problems are nothing but a situation which arise when not expected and/or in the way they present themselves which compels us to think a way through/around/over it to re-establish the “normalcy” to what we were used to before the “problem” knocked our door! Let me explain! In the current situation around the world, what do you see- as I see and as so many of us witness- the pandemic- now the pandemic has been a “problem” on different levels- health, fatality, disruption of the earlier way of life and more significantly the way it hints at disrupting our future- which by itself is so dynamic and uncertain- for that is what the future is supposed to be! So where is the real “problem” in all of this? Is it the Virus? Is it the space of falling sick and dying? or is it the disruption of our way of life?

If you were to wear the philosopher’s hat, grab that cup of coffee and look with some calm and poise about all that is unfolding around you- you will understand the virus was or never will be the “problem”, it is our “attitude” and “approach” to life while it lurks around us is what is the real problem; for that alone determines the ability, extent and intensity to which our lives can be altered in the Now and in the coming times ahead. You see, the virus can only become a “problem” if you and I were to behave arrogantly, recklessly or with gross disregard especially as it lurks around (and when we know that it lurks around!). For it is only this action of recklessness that can put us in the direct path of self-harm and harm unto others which then becomes the real “problem” and from thereon it just starts off a never ending spiral of one problem to the next. So you see the virus is not the problem– it is how you and I behave and what we do and not do that either manifests a problem or keeps away a problem from manifesting! Like with the pandemic so with almost every other area of your our lives! Once you understand how to decipher the right way “what the problem really is” that is when you will be able to manage and control your present to move ahead in a controlled manner to the future that you aspire to realize.

Whether it is the so called problems that you face in your personal space, the work area, with people or with yourselves are often nothing more then ghosts of your own making and the real problems always tend to hide away in this fog of ambiguity and the pursuit to solve something that is not a problem is what majority of humanity is eternally entrapped with even as the real ones’ keep lurking within and around all the time- waiting for the right time to strike and catch us by surprise, at times when we least expect them to arrive! The real essence of dealing with a problem begins by learning the art and science of identifying and defining the problem the right way to begin with! So how does one get to identify a problem the right way? Read on!

It begins with the ability to know about yourself well! Surprised? Well don’t be! The fact remains that, to deal with anything and everything around you and people around you, the very first thing that is of prime importance is your ability to be self-aware- knowing who you are, what your construct is and when you have a fair sense of what and who you are- it becomes easy for your to align yourself to people and life around you- it becomes clear and simple to know what serves you and what doesn’t- this step helps you do away with “problems that seem to be when they aren’t” and what this then helps you get a clear sense of is “the real problems” and once you have developed this ability to identify them well in advance, and on an ongoing basis (like a weather radar onboard an aircraft) you can choose and plan out the only three options that anyone and everyone has when it comes to dealing and managing a problem- go through them, around them or over them!

Problems more often then not, are not what they really are, often they are the amplification of the games that our mind plays upon us and at times are nothing but the ghosts of our own imagination! Problems tend to become real problems only and only when people tend to misjudge, delay to act or resolve or even worse fail to recognize them altogether! The only way to stay ahead in the game of deciphering problems is by building a formidable understanding about yourself and the contexts around which you operate and move about! Like trained soldiers, the human mind becomes a potent weapon when it is allowed to figure out patterns that don’t seem to make sense and to decipher what doesn’t seem to be where it is supposed to be! To have this potency, the first step is to provide the mind with a blue-print of what normal dynamism seems like and it is only when and as this is done on an ongoing basis that the mind will get sharper by the hour and with every passing challenge to identify and figure out the real emerging issues and challenges among the many seeming problems around you!

Self-awareness and contextual alertness provide the much needed depth and sense to differentiate real problems from an apparent problems and this alone can help us to move ahead in a direction that we are ought to! Based on who you are and the context that happen to be the truth of your life, each ones’ definition and ability to deal and engage with real meaningful problems changes and that goes on to change the narrative of success and failure as well! When people spend more time and energy in dealing and engaging with real meaningful problems and are able to overcome them, then magic happens and success is manifested, when people spend more time battling imaginary problems- which are nothing but their minds tricking them in proportion their incompetence-cognitive and behavioral!

If there is any one singular fact that has remained constant with humanity through the ages, it has been the fact that “problems” of today become the “routine” of tomorrow and this goes on! The essence resides in the ability to engage timely, meaningfully with aspects that matter and which must be dealt with (especially when they hint disruption to harm the future). It is the diminishing ability to decipher and engage effectively with real problems which is the real problem! The ocean waves don’t harm the ocean- it is the nature of the waves and the rhythm which has the potential to either provide life or take that away!

I leave you here with these thoughts, urging you to engage and engage well with the real problems that you have on your hand so that you are able to overcome them to create a meaningful and worthwhile tomorrow! Problems are as unique as the person that they meet up with and this is what makes our lives so interesting! All can bake a cake, only a few are able to earn millions through a business, Think about this analogy, the next time you are getting overwhelmed or complacent with a problem at hand! Your problem is the cake that you need to bake, your way to get the flavors of the future that you aspire for!

Ciao for now, will be back soon with another one, until then decode your real problems and create a meaningful tomorrow!

The Leadership Code.

~ Parimal Aluri ~ Leave a comment

Our lives are constantly touched by leaders- directly or indirectly; they are altered, manipulated and directed by the aggression and subtlety that leaders bring along with them and their style of leadership then goes on to manifest and determine the flavor and texture of the group that is being influenced! This group could be your family, your work place or the society at large- a nation perhaps- whatever it is, make no mistake, it is the choices of the leaders that go on to dictate how you and I see the next Sunrise! Join me here as we take a quick walk through and try to decipher the Leadership Code- the very essence of Leadership which separates Good Leaders from Great ones’! So here we go!

I have written in my previous articles about the need and genesis of leadership per say- why and what of it- how humanity always seeks and needs Leaders’ – this piece is all about taking it a step ahead and understand that critical Leadership Code- The code that creates impact, sets new directions and leads to new pathways and destinations for a society or the people in the context and how this very code can be absolutely destructive and sub-serving when deployed by accidental leaders or when even the best intents are executed in the worst possible manner!

Given the nature of a blog, I will be intentionally keeping it short and sweet and urging you to add further, based on what you have experienced as a Leader (who leads) and perhaps as a Leader (who follows a Leader), frankly I don’t but the idea of Leaders creating Followers’ that is the last thing you ever want Leadership to be or a Leader to be!Whenever you see something like that- just move out of that confining and narrowing space, for it will come back at you hard and fast- it is not about if- it is always about when!

If you ask me, what is the Leadership Code and the essence of it; well it is everything that you would have seen playing out among Great Leaders (not Good Leaders)! I share with you a few of those secrets/ observations here, which I have either been an observer of or have come across through my years of engagement and reading with leaders- who have been leading their lives and of people around them – either in the small pockets of society or on the big centre stage of world politics and business! So here they are!

Create a powerful sustained narrative: One fundamental corner stone of Great Leadership is a continuing and compelling narrative- which reinforces the beliefs and values of those die-hard followers and more importantly creates those important spaces for the undecided to come in and join your bandwagon! It is critical that this narrative and it’s content is supported by subsequent actions and the narrative should within carry and hint at the actionable areas- else- people will see the bluff and in no time- all the struggle and effort taken to reach the space of Great Leadership will begin to crumble and in no time- the regression from Great to Good to Nothing will be set off!

Great Leaders and Great Leadership is Infectious: One common feature across the board- when it is about Great Leaders- is the fact that they are all highly contagious- infectious; sure enough we are in the times of a pandemic- but trust me- if you ever walked around or with these rare breed of leaders- their persona, charisma, way of life and leadership is all compulsively infectious and that is an unmistakable streak of some Great Leadership at play! This is where all the learning happens and this is the space where Followers are converted into the next line of Leaders! How well the rub off is what goes on to decide whether the next line of Leaders is Good or Great!

Great Leaders Simplify: Unlike Good Leaders who operate on different levels of secrecy (with regards to guarding their knowledge and special art and skills- with regards to leadership), Great Leaders- almost always are open, transparent and have this one unique unmistakable ability to simplify and de-clutter- on an ongoing basis- whether it is the content of their talk, a column that they write or a message that they want to send across- they are simple, clear, crisp and powerful! This build trust and clarity of thought and action across levels and cadres and the by goes on reinforce their Leadership and keeps it nourished, well oiled and potent at all times- with or without power!

Great Leaders embrace failures and risks: Great Leaders embrace risk and failure- what is crucial though is that, they almost always embrace calculated and measured risks and failures! Very rarely they play blind- when that happens- it is a turning point in the history of the world! Good Leaders (typically the corporate world is replete with this variety) almost always stay away and steer clear from risks (even calculated ones’) and almost always want to dabble with only things and work that gives them success (even if that is 1%), never will you see them dabble with something that has never been done, something that has a low chance of success and so on and so forth! Well there could be valid reasons for that, but this is what separates the Good from the Great! History of the world is never written by operating from the comforts of the known spaces- new beginnings always are created from spaces where the known perimeters end!

All Great Leaders, Listen: Don’t mistaken, I don’t suggest that other Leaders are deaf! This listening is different and very potent- this is the space of directed listening and intentional listening. This is what provides Great Leaders with depth of frame and context, when people engage with them- this is what helps them set focus and be able to see far ahead into the future than anyone else! Potent Listening is much beyond paying attention to what is being said, it is also about listening to the why of what is being said and how and what can be done about what is being said! As the old wise adage goes, The more you listen, the lesser you need to speak! The problem with humanity is that majority of us are only listening to the point or to the extent of what we want to hear and this where everything goes horribly wrong! This is why we end up living and experiencing lives and leaders which are sub-serving and myopic!

Great Leaders choose to win Wars over Battles: As Great Leaders know the value of embracing failures and risks, so do also know the value of winning some and loosing some, what makes them so potent and effective is their ability to know which to loose and which to win! This trait goes a long way to make Good Leaders move up to become Great Leaders and when there is an error of judgement in this space, needless to say Leadership legacies are created and destroyed in proportion to the damage incurred!

Great Leaders practice proactive Empathy: Great Leaders know the value of investing in others, that way they ensure that their ideas and plans are not only accepted but also improvised by the people who embrace them and for this to happen, they need to practise and display proactive empathy- the art and science of knowing what the other person feels, thinks and does by being who they are and every Great Leader know, unless this vital step is not completed, nothing of greatness can ever be achieved or lived by anyone!

Great Leaders live their Values: All Great Leaders live the values that they believe in and in a sense are the living embodiment of the values that hold close to their heart! Great Leaders stand for something that they believe in and something that is intrinsic and non-negotiable to them for any reasons and their whole approach, attitude and action is aligned to this. This is what helps Leaders create more potent leaders over Followers, as the Values and the benefits of embracing them becoming evident and worthwhile, in no time you have a whole mass of humanity aligning themselves to the very same Values and what you then have is the pinnacle of Great Leadership- where the whole society seems to resonate with the singularity of a cause and belief which stand strong and firm on the foundation of the Values that are being cherished!

Great Leaders speak less and act more: Although it may seem contradictory, this is a fact, every Great Leader that you cherish, no matter how much news byte they offer or not, the fact is they are always in the action and in the thick of the things more, much more than how much they speak and communicate! Great Leaders know, that for them to be successful and relevant, every word that is spoken needs to be backed up by action and that’s why they choose to speak less, but frequently and keep displaying actions of their earlier words which goes on to reinforce their commitment to the audience that they hold sway upon and that further provides the much required fuel to sustain and further develop their Leadership by amplifying their Followership base!

Great Leaders take efforts to reach out!: All Great Leaders know the power to forgive and forget! They know when it is okay to forgive and when it is okay to forget and when it is vital to do both! This is what helps build empathy and at the same time display generous attitude to one and all and make a clear, visible statement about them as a Leader and about their Leadership style and Value systems! All Great Leaders know the power of connecting people and bringing them together, because it is only when many believe and embrace what is being communicated that societal change happens and manifests and unless there is a comprehensive okay from across the sections of the society, even the most noblest of intents will end up being defeated and that’s why reaching out is so vital and critical, whether you lead a nation or lead an organisation, unless the last person is won over to your side, it is never done!

Great Leaders know when it is time to exit!: All Great leaders know, that what they are pursuing is an endless pursuit and cause which is firmly planted on few core ideas, beliefs and values and importantly that journey must continue even after they no longer are at the helm of the affairs. Hence all Great leaders invest and share what they can and must among those who they must all that is vital to ensure the continuity of the ideas and values of what is being pursued even while they are firmly in the saddle and even as they call the shots! This ability to share and empower others without any hesitation is perhaps one of the most important hallmarks of Great Leadership! Great Leaders plan their exit even as they start to build and work upon their ideas right from the beginning! Great Leaders know the value and merit of the second line and they always have that around- so that no matter what happens the idea and the belief always lives on and that is the very essence of any Great Leadership model or the hallmark of being a Great Leader- the ability to influence long after you are no longer physically available!

I am sure there could be many more facets that go on to create the aura and magic of Great Leaders and their equally Great Leadership, but I leave you here with these thoughts, for you to reflect and perhaps add further on what you thought were other vital elements that went on to make a Leadership that you came across Great! I have intentionally not put names to the “Great Leaders and Great Leadership or even tried to suggest examples of Good Leadership, simply because all of those observations are always contextual and why I see through the lens of my intellect may not always be the same for someone else and every truth is equally justified from the lens of its beholder!

I leave you here now, urging you to connect with the passive Leader within you and the active ones’ around you to embark upon the journey to experience Great Leadership by being a Great Leader! Remember everything related to Leadership always starts by Leading yourself first! Be the Leader you always sought! Begin the journey to seek your Greatness and the first step to that is, to define the Leader in you and the Leadership that you want to bring with you!

Ciao for now, will be back soon with another one! Until then stay wise and keep inspiring!

Choose a finish-line.

~ Parimal Aluri ~ Leave a comment

Whether your are running for the presidency of a nation or for that coveted corner office with a panoramic view or simply wanting to clear off something that you are in the midst of; each one of those instances will have their potency and meaningfulness only and only if there’s a defined finish-line to what you choose to do and it is often the essence of those finish lines that goes on to define what that journey was all about and whether it was the realization of the aspirations with which it began or was it another living nightmare all of that will only be defined by the finish-line- that you choose! Join me here as we take a quick look into how and why finish lines are so critical and more often then not more important then the journey or even the results that one begets as they go about it! So here we go!

Ever since we have been kids, even as we go about living the lives that we have got, knowingly or unknowingly we end up working our way to one finish-line unto the next and that journey in a way also takes us to our graves- sooner or later, well that depends a lot on what you do during that journey that you have decide to be part of! Let me explain! Much of humanity is about following the norms laid by societies that we live in(whether we like it of hate it, there’s really only son much that often people can do about things and when you do stand out- there are only two outcomes- If you are a powerful outlier- you are termed as a classified idiots/ an oddity and left alone and if you happen to be one of them who can be walked over- rest assured you will be a door-mat in a blink of an eye! You see, societies are built to conforming standards and it is only as long as people are conforming that societies exist and one fundamental part of this whole societal conformation crap resides in the space of the preset and predefined finish-lines!

Depending on which part of the world you are, the story of your life will be similar when it comes to: education- where your finish line is either 15, 16 or 17 years of education, jobs – where your finish-line (at the start of your career) is getting to a wage of “XYZ $ per day/per month/per year), if it is about your family life- your finish lines could start with “age of marriage, number of kids, ownership of houses, vehicles, getting old- ensuring your kids stand on their feet….so on and so forth!” So, you see, our lives are basically and intertwined web of “finish-lines” which have their own flavor and when one of them is disturbed- even though that may be a momentary one- you have the ripples felt across the whole web that you have ended up weaving by virtue of begin who you are! The bigger, the better, the larger that you end up becoming in life- farther these ripples reach and it sets off a resonance which tends to keep on oscillating and swaying ever single web associated with some aspect of your life and this goes on endlessly and this is what the real essence of human life is- trying to balance the finish lines and their pathways on an ongoing never ending basis!

You may want to argue that, if this is not life then what is, well sure enough this is life- but my question is very simple- do you really need those many finish-lines to begin with? Think around it- for the one dear life that you have- does it really makes sense to complicate the way we actually end up doing it? What is the point of having so many check boxes and finish lines- when you are going to miss the whole flavor of the journey simply to tick it off your “Life’s to do list” I mean really? Is the story of your life really all about that alone? Is that how you want it? So what is really unfolding around and within our lives- why do we get trapped walking into scenarios where as soon as we pass one finish line, we set ourselves up for another and that never seems to stop? Whys does this happen? Read on!

Sure enough, I am not suggesting you to be any less aspirational or ambitious, neither am I asking you to bury your creative spark and lead a mundane life with no glamour or flamboyance, all I am asking you to do is define and agree to draw the lines so that your finish lines don’t end up finishing you off in the game of endless desires and mindless pursuits! Some of the finish lines that we have subscribed to are more often then not societal and there is hardy anything that you can do about it! Say if you are born in India, then even to think of education anything less then 17 years, would be an unpardonable crime! even if that education ends up adding no value, context or sense to your own personal life and vocational pursuits, but that is what as a society we have given unto ourselves and as yet, we don’t see any light of those aspects changing! Contrast this space to the the more liberal and open societies of the west- where every bit of what one desires has to earner- either through self earned wealth or through merit and the rewards there are instant and longer simply because everyone does not go in for a 17 years of mindless education and people truncate this first finish line of education- simply by being practical and sensible and exercising a choice for their life with regards to this one finish line pertaining to education and thereby straightway avoid all the other subsequent ripples that may arise!

As with education, so with every other facet of our life, whether it is the jobs that we pursue, the kind of family life that we cherish for, the way we define opulence and class, each and every bit of this is nothing else but a disguised statement of what our finish line is and when we say we have crossed it! What largely goes missing is the essence of the effort taken to reach that line and end of it, was all of that really worth it! You see, I have come across hotshot bankers who had a coveted MBA followed by a full time Bachelor’s In Engineering! Well, now if you always ever wanted to have a great career in banking or the business side, even a comprehensive master’s in Commerce or Economics or Accounting Practices provides more than what one would have ever needed to be on the top of the game in that sector! But the societal biases and need to conform ends up pushing people doing all kid of stupid things all the time! End result well a certificate which just sticks in your face- letting you know every now and then the wasted time, money and effort all of what went in to come to a big zero- in the present context that one is in! Sure enough Knowledge never goes waste and no Knowledge is bad- but again the question is if you always wanted to be a banker why would you want to first qualify as a mechanical engineer! Think about it!

When it comes to our office spaces, things are no different, we always want that corner office, many a times the moment we reach there, we want to be actually out of that office! The moment we have that house of our dreams, we realize that our dreams were ordinary! and we embark upon pursuing something else! Well instances like these and many more go on to make those finish-lines eternal even as we have mortal bodies to deal with and needless to say, the story of old age of many people is more about the un-reached finish-lines rather then being able to talk about the few finish-lines that were cherished for reached and enjoyed! So what is the right way around here, what is amiss, how can we be aspirational, ambitious yet content to limit the number of finish-lines that we can speak about heroically in the twilight tears as we wait for our call! Well read on!

Well, if you really want to hear from me on this, you have to start by being Authentic! Unless and until you are able to discern and agree to what you can (really can with the stretch and without it), you will always be hounded by the endless finish lines! It begins from within, within each one of us to know well and really well- about who we are- the essence of being who you are- as an individual as a component of the society that you have got to live in and from that point alone can you deduce what is that you aspire for, why and how much of it can you really achieve and what is that you must do to reach that place and how do you stop and sustain when you reach the pace where you want to be! This simple, yet powerful way of deducing and pondering is the real and effective way to not only have few finish-lines, but also ensure that the ones’ that are there are genuine, meaningful and once you reach them, they begin to add value to who you are and begin to be part of the definition of who you want to be known as! This also allows one to calibrate ambition to reality and ensures that mindless pursuits are nipped in the bud and all available intelligence is used to serve and achieve the meaningful causes and pursuits that one must address to reach the finish-line which now displays the potency to define who the individual is as one reaches that line!

I leave you with these thoughts here, urging you to decipher and read the finish lines that you have passed by and see for yourself how many of them were meaningful and how many of them were futile pursuits! As long as you have your breath there is always time to re-align and re-focus on the finish-lines that matter and stay away and stay clear from all of those which seem tempting but may be outright pointless especially when it comes to the value that they can add to you and for the people around you!

Ciao for now, will be back with another one, until then stay wise, stay safe and pursue the finish lines which make a real difference to who you are and for the people around you!

The Fluid mindset.

~ Parimal Aluri ~ Leave a comment

Beyond the realms of technical definitions of human behaviour, attributes and attitudes there resides a fundamental space and how this space is nourished goes a long way to determine how individuals are able to manifest what they desire and stamp that unique authority of who they are by what they choose to do! Join me here as we unravel what the fluid mindset is all about and how being fluid is not about being disoriented or lacking focus, but rather having the potent ability to prevail over multiple aspects and situations through shifting laser sharp focus! So here we go!

The human mind is a genius by itself, even without considering whether you want to put it to use or not! With an innate ability to learn and improvise, there is nothing out there in nature which comes anywhere closer to what it can manifest! Yet, it is this very mind which also is responsible for the untold misery that humanity has faced from time to time as civilizations have risen and fallen. So what makes the human mind so potent, whether it works for us or against us? It is the singular aspect of the ability of the human mind of being fluid which alone makes it what it is- a formidable ally or a die hard enemy based on how you want to use it or mess it up!

The fluidity of the human mind or rather the ability and the extent to which it can stay fluid has always defined the great achievements and the hardships that humanity has ever gone through! Fluidity of the human mind or the”Fluid Mindset” is not about having superlative intelligence or being wise than the other person- sure that helps, but it is more to do with the way the brain is harnessed to deliver and manifest what the aspirations of an individual are! So what is a “Fluid Mindset”? What are the indicators of having one or missing one? Well read on!

The human mind has this innate, natural ability to flex and stretch- whether it be something new to learn or a new problem that needs to solved or whether it is about making something that is routine interesting- the brain (if you allow it to do so!) has the ability to spring up surprises and provide options when everything else seems closed and locked away! This becomes possible only and only when the mind is allowed to wander and experiment and importantly fail and record those failures. Failures and hard knocks are the only incentives that a fluid mind ever demands, simply because these are what go on to make the mind more fragile, spontaneous and alert on an ongoing basis and the ability of the mind to discern between competing priorities becomes sharper then ever before!

If the mind is allowed to deal with uncertainties and new world;y engagements, it simply thrives on these opportunities and sharpens its ability to evaluate and create value as required for the individual to begin with and then for the others around! Let me explain! I hope you are one of those who like that ice cream or that piece of chocolate- well what do you do when you get an access to the favorite one and have a bunch of new friends around you? Well, mostly you will end up suggesting, offering, selling or singing about why you like that ice-cream or that chocolate so much! Why does this happen, even when possibly no one has asked you to do what you do- in terms of promoting that ice-cream or chocolate that you are so excited about! Well, your fluid mind just has gone overboard to share the goodness of what you experience with the people who are around you- because your mind thinks they are worth of experiencing that moment- just like you are! Likewise when you are with someone (whom you don’t technically hate, but not like either) the very same mind will keep that excitement mellowed down and play a flat card- indicating to the others around you that “well whatever” is the state of your mind! When actually you are relishing on the feast that you have hit upon all for yourself!

The essence of fluid mindset is all about allowing your mind to mind it’s business of what it is good at- dreaming and imagining! History and our modern lives too are a testimony to the fact that, all that we are touched by or we end up getting touched with, has at some or the other time being a story of human dreams or imagination! Those dreams and that ability to imagine have been held and envisioned by individuals who were able to embrace and sustain that vital, yet subtle fluid mindset! It is not about having a wandering aimless mind, it is rather about empowering that wandering mind to build meaning out of what it sees – whether that seeking is intentional or accidental! Great manifestations of human intellect have only become ever possible because of this ability of the mind to keep moving, stay seeking and decipher all that comes its way so that it formulates and creates sense around all that it senses and empowers its ability to be potent at discerning all the time!

The fluid mindset has the power to liberate and bind at the same time! Liberate from the templated and structured thinking patters and ability to bind to vague, uncertain, untested and new ways of thinking and expressing oneself! It is when these new pathways are walked upon that magic gets created and we see them manifest in the usual ways of creative or innovative breakthroughs all around us!

The sliver of difference between a fluid mindset and meaningless hallucination resides within the content and the contextual space around what is been dealt with! When there is a problem in this seemingly small attribute great imbalances are created and often you find people end up pursuing all through their live some utopian idea or a thought with nothing ever manifesting to see the light of the day! Human failure is all about the inability of the human mind to build over the fluid mindset which is so intrinsic within each one of us- make it too thin and wide- you are aimlessly wandering without any meaningful beacons to guide you either from within or externally, make it too narrow and deep- you are likely to get stuck with a structured mindset of conforming into the ever present traps of conformation biased based thinking and hence no matter how great your potential you end up trimming your levels much below then what you can actually achieve! It’s like flying an airplane well lower then its trim altitude- result-burns more fuel and needless to say that flight always encounters more turbulence at that lower altitude as you keep dealing with one weather front after the other all through the flight!

Humanity- most of it is actually an entrapment of fixed- structured thinking patterns and why this happens? Well, given the pace of our lives that we have given unto ourselves and the kind of routine patterns that we chose to adhere to- either by choice or by compulsion, we are really left with very limited choices and a mind that is anything but fluid! This is sure enough part required but the problem begins as this “part required” tends to occupy a major part of our lives and our thinking patters! Unless an effort is made to break away and strike a balance between structured thinking and the fluid approach, life almost always end up being more average then what it can be simply because the magic of the fluid element is lost under the burden of structured thinking!

The potency and efficacy of fluid thinking doesn’t imply that we need to do away with the structured and fixed thinking patterns, not a bit since those patterns are required for the routine decisions and way of life, fluid mindset is all about being able to create and weave magic through the ordinary times by unleashing an extraordinary approach and way to a situation or a challenge and thereby being able to manifest something that is unique and unlike anything before- some call this as creative expression, while some terms this as innovation and for the plain speak this is what refer to as individuality or being unique by virtue of being able to express the wholesomeness of who you are!

Fluid mindset has the power to create magic and help individuals reach their zenith of expressions whether creative or not, that depends on what is being held within and what manifests subsequently, but this is the very essence of the whole approach to beholding a fluid mindset- that of allowing your mind to flex, stretch, dream and imagine so that you are able to get that one fleeting moment which creates lasting value for yourself and others even as you go about your life through the routine patterns of work and play using your regular structured way of thinking!

I leave your here with these thoughts, urging you to take that vital pause and decipher for yourself that right balance between having fluid moments and structured moments so that you lead and live an empowered life that you always so much have cherished and aspired for!

Ciao for now, will be back soon with another one, until then, allow your mind to flex and stretch and bask in the moments empowered by your fluid thinking!

Creative Fatigue.

~ Parimal Aluri ~ Leave a comment

I did tell you sometime back I will write something around “creative myopia” well, here we are! No, don’t jump to think this is only meant for those eclectic designers, and creative folks, in fact there is much more to this whole space and whether you are able to use a color pencil or not, creative fatigue manifests in funny ways- whether you are an artist or a teller at a cash counter- the day you get hot by this space of creative fatigue- life begins to slip away as you have known it and the same exciting burger that you so cherished,starts to look pretty ordinary! Join me here as we take a tour down this route and understand what is creative fatigue, why does it happen, what is that we can do to manage it and why all of that is so vital irrespective who we are!

Humanity and it’s hallmark or stamp of authority is nothing more then the pockets of creative excellence here and there! Think about it, whether you live in the top 10 cities of the world or some quaint town in the countryside- what drives us is the quintessential space of being able to find solace and sense in the contextual surroundings that we live about and when those surroundings stay exciting and dynamic- is when our mind is stimulated and empowers us to keep thinking to keep that dynamism alive and when that surrounding fails, we stagnate- intellectually and creatively! Let me explain!

Remember the first time when you saw that train pull into the train station, or you saw that airplane take off high above your shoulders, what was that moment like for you (I am assuming you were a kid then), liberating and something magical right? And as you grew up and began to decipher the science and art behind those instances what happened- well chances are if you have already killed that kid in you- you would have all but lost that excitement of seeing that train coming in or that airplane taking off- simply because those instances now, no longer stimulate or “wow” your brain, well sure enough makes rational sense, but it is within these spaces when you are able to still retain that kid like excitement to seek joy and happiness even as you grow up- that you will be able to see some different context and who knows bring in that creative stroke of a genius and create something altogether new or add lasting value to what exists around you!

If you want to get a sense of examples of creative fatigue, you need to first understand the space of creative magnificence! Creative opulence through architecture, buildings, technological solutions, designing of processes, creating lasting value through access to resources and empowering the ability to think beyond the now and allowing people to dare to dream and fail forward, these and many such thoughts, attributes and attitudes to life go on to make what our world really is- a creative melting pot! Whether it’s that great skyscraper or that piece or music or that communication that melted your heart- each of these has the hallmark and stamp of creative excellence and this is what helps to build hope, give pathways and chart the course for the future of humanity. This is an ever ongoing dynamic space which flows with it’s own highs and lows and problems of creative fatigue begin to emerge as this flow starts to get dammed for reasons that are not natural to the process of that creative flow!

Creative Fatigue begins as societies start to get lazy! Yes lazy and lax, and contend with what is there and not wanting to go to the next place or the next best place,imply because the comforts of today outweigh the hardships of today for an unknown future! How does this play out? Well just look around you, if you are in middle of a residential block or a business district in your city, what do you see- buildings and buildings built to the same specification and exactly the same way- sure you can argue the plot size is same the approvals are the same, still what stops from making them with a strong identity for each one of them? Aren’t Architects supposed to breathe life into these structures? Move ahead and get into corporate world- what you see, similar broad based actions taken at certain levels accompanied by the senseless play of designation labels- which proclaim a lot but mean nothing! Look closely what do you see in the space of imparting of knowledge, education, training, year on year students learn the same things and move ahead (irrespective whether the contextual validity of what has been taught has remained or not!) Sure enough contextual background is much needed as we advance and move ahead as a society but that does not mean we end up having graveyards of creativity in our back yards even as we want to plane the design for the front lawn of our house!

Typically societies, which don’t compel themselves to stay ahead on the creative curve to embrace the next big idea, moment to moment, often fall back on older ideas and though process and keep on endlessly tweaking and working over them, at times to such a point that it starts to get outright boring and an intellectual pain rather then a creative gift of any kind! The easiest way to come across this is the crazy world of communication- yes- that space where the marketeers rule and leave no stone un-turned to sell what they want- irrespective whether you need it or not and doing that by telling you stories which at times are magical and creative and more often outright dumb, boring, condescending and absolute pieces of intellectual hallucination, in plain speak outright dumb! When creative fatigue sets in this world- you end up forgetting the product or the service and just remember the music or the lyrics and never really know what it was actually for! A classic case of the bridesmaid being one step ahead of the bride! As creative fatigue sets in, societies suffer from an intellectual diarrhea of unimaginable proportions, everything starts to get painted in the same color, tonality, conformation biases are stronger then ever, rules are made, re-made and just keep adding up, with no one ever knowing whether the rules are for the people or whether the people in the society are for the rules that have been made!

As comical it may seem, when creative fatigue sets in, it can turn outright deadly and fatal for the society! Think about it, if as an Individual if you were to loose that creative spark and now multiply that by thousands who go on to make the society in which you live- what do you think is going to happen? Yes, more sulking, more downward spiral and reinforcement of a common belief that nothing can be done and no good will ever happen and it is when societies reach these spaces that all the negative thoughts and attributes begin to get a hold on the value and belief systems and that begins to gnaw the society from within with each passing moment and the damage that is unleashed with time is simply beyond repair and often fatal!

If you happen to be in a society where challenging the norm is becoming increasingly difficult and if you come across many people around you saying , “what difference will it make” for every idea that you share, you have your first clue that you are seriously with the right mind in a wrong market place! Creative Fatigue starts as societies and elements within the societies start giving their golden “ok” for anything and everything simply to have that task moved out of their way- not bothering for once to realise the impact that it will have! Sure enough, I am not suggesting that every building in the neighborhood has to be an architectural design marvel or every aspect of work has to be reactive and there needs to be some entertainment in allow that we do- well surely none of that- we don’t want our doctors or cops dressed up and showing up like clowns- but the fact remains we don’t want people to unnecessarily live a monotonous and more then serious life either! You see, there has to be that balance- a dynamic balance which keeps yup the buoyancy of a society so that it moves forwards and stays progressive no matter what the hardships and no matter what the challenges that it needs to overcome! This is the essence of dealing with and managing creative fatigue before it can run amok and do irreversible damage! So what’s the plan? You may ask!

The plan is really to be alive, being alive and being connected with the people around you and that is around you, for that is the very essence of what will empower you with the spark to break the norms and set standards and benchmarks in whatever you choose to do, whether big or small , once in a life time to every day of your life and this space of empowered application of creative thought alone is the way to stall and stop the setting in of creative fatigue! As along as you stay committed to find something new, better and more effective and more impactful to communicate what you do and follow in life as your way of creative expression, you will hold the flag of creative renaissance high and ensure that no stalling comes your way and you keep advancing and more importantly keep inspiring everyone around you on your journey! Sure enough, not every moment can be a moment of creative excellence, but every moment can be and must be the one of creative inspiration and that is what alone can set the course for individuals and societies to seek and manifest what is missing and make things more meaningful and purposeful thereby keeping the pursuit of creative thinking and creative expression alive and vivid as ever!

I leave you here with these thoughts, urging you to do your bit to stall and keep away the elements of creative fatigue that may come your way- knowing the creative person who you are and do what it takes and as it takes to keep that creative inspiration always high and always alive- so what even if you are going to build only one masterpiece in your lifetime or so what if your work is plain and monotonous- it is the ability of recognizing that speak- which can inspire creativity as you go about your life is what is needed and for that- you can be almost anyone doing any job you think is fine and yet be someone creative and more importantly someone who inspires others to be the same!

Ciao for now, will be back soon with another one! Until then stay creative and keep inspiring!

Allow Thinking to be Intrinsic.

~ Parimal Aluri ~ 1 Comment

Thinking- the space which defines who we are and will become with the passage of time. Thinking that empowers us to create history or become part of it, which has the power to liberate us or bind us into timeless shackles of our own imagination and the ghosts that emerge within our minds. Thinking is perhaps the only one singular virtue which sets us apart and helps each one of us get that unique intellectual signature which has the hallmark of our unique thinking design all over it! Join me here as we take a fleeting look into what makes thinking so intoxicating and empowering and how something like that has the power to liberate and bind us in the same context of time but in a different context of arrangements around us! So here we go!

If there has been ever one thing that had the potency and the power to differentiate each one of us decisively, it is that intrinsic ability to Think! As simple it may sound, trust me there is nothing more complicated then this bit over here! The reason for that exceeding level of complexity with a simple act of Thinking , resides not in the ability to Think or not, it resides in the ability to be able to Think Intrinsically from the very core of who one is, as an individual and as discerning human! This is what is the holy grail of meaningful thinking is all about and this is what makes this so complicated and for the majority of us almost always a case of slip between the lip and the cup!

In the rushed lives that all of us lead, we are ever faced with that challenge of requiring to take decisions like that, hiring people, firing them off, picking up stuff for the home, planing that vacation, going for that event, that award ceremony, those bills that need attention, the modern human brain is simply working at its peak capacity – if I may say so- when it comes to enforcing the mind to take decisions like- now and here! You see the human brain was never designed that way, it was always designed to observe and record , calibrate and then decide- how fast and how rapidly these events unfolded and at what frequency well that would largely depend on what situation an individual is- say you are out there on the primitive woods and been stalked by a predator- your brain is going to race up and make you take those fight or flight decisions based on its assessment of the threat and your abilities to deal wit it, likewise if you have to select two packets of bread from a super market shelf- well- it’s going to allow you to take all the time in world that you need simply because it knows there is no urgency unless you are about to collapse out of starvation! This intrinsic default mechanism has of late, been put to much lesser use- in context of the ability and the quality of decisions that one can make good vis a vis what we end up feeding the mind with and the kind of decisions we ask it to make! Let me explain!

If you were to sieve through the last 1000 years of humanity and tried to find when were the greatest observations and intriguing questions were ever asked- chances are you would land yourself in the times of great civilizations, prosperous kingdoms which alone allowed the human mind to explore the fullest potential to question and more importantly Think! Think as in really think- not the mundane thought process of “What I tell my boss?” or “when do I get the next pay check”. Sure enough people back then would have been there who would have had similar challenges and questions bothering them as well, the only change for our times now is that more of us are engaged into Thinking about things that don’t really serve us and very few , very few of us are really asking the most pressing questions and Thinking as we should! This skewed off take between the overpowering density of useless thinking and very limited valid thinking is what keeps on drowning away any relevant voices that a society may have and thereby ends up pushing societies into that singular direction of less servicing and myopic scenarios.

Sure enough, I am suggesting we move to societies where we all have only philosophers asking finite and potent questions and finding the answers to these questions and we go about our utopian world just discussing! No, not a bit, what I am trying to share with you here is the compelling urgency that each one us must pay attention to make a choice to ask at least once in a while (if not often) some pertinent and valid questions which bring some justice to the fabulous thinking machines that each one of us has been gifted with! It is only when you allow that space to ask and get surrounded by intriguing questions once in a while that your brain will be stimulated enough and forced to come up with answers to perplexing observations that are beyond the routine and thereby provide your brain with that very much needed dose of stimulation to keep it abreast and tuning it to be always leaning and looking forward rather then only relying on past experiences and accumulated knowledge repository that is available at disposal on the click of a button!

The whole idea of allowing Thinking to be Intrinsic, is to allow it to be free of any pride or prejudice coming in either from the individual or from the surroundings that one may be in- for once that happens, then you are no longer thinking but rather aligning your observations and thought process to certify and validates what is around and what you desire for and this is where the fundamental disconnect happens and you are then entrapped for ever in a never ending circle of self- gratifying thinking either for yourself or for the people and things around you! Another level of conformation and compulsion just to get a sense of belonging among a groups- which again happens to be a hallmark of what humanity is!

Sure enough, you don’t need to think- the intrinsic way to buy that ice cream or those movie tickets or have that vacation, Intrinsic Thinking is for the more compelling questions about your individuality- about what you are – who you want to be as you transform through the stages of life and what is that you aspire and what to leave after you as a legacy that you have created- even if that has to be limited only for your family tree- if the stakes are higher and you have ever thought about influencing a society or a nation- then needless to say you need to have and embrace this space of Intrinsic Thinking more often then the others around you and need to also ask the right questions to have the right answers coming back to you in the time that they must! Thinking loses it’s potency as the quality of questions fall! Poor questions lead to poorer answers and thereby miserable solutions which lead to a myopic understanding of the life around us and then we are always left in that short served context until that next person arrives on the scene who asks the right questions, making it possible for the right answers to come in and thereby bring in the much needed change that the society would have been waiting for! So what is it that really makes Thinking Intrinsic? Well read on!

As I said earlier, It has to come from within and has to be pertaining to something that is compelling and which seems urgent in the context of the answers that the questions may provide- this is the space where great research, philosophical enquiry, scientific validations and myth busting takes place! Intrinsic Thinking is perhaps the purest form of thinking by staying focused on a perplexing question of high quality and then compelling your mind to provide equally high caliber answers/ solutions which are able to provide solutions or pathways which seem to deem fit to the quality of question asked in the first place! Once this is achieved (which in itself is a huge ask), what follows through the implementation of the solutions, needless to say is almost always in line to serve the greater good for humanity on a big scale! Use this Intrinsic Thinking with the wrong questions and what you get is the power to unleash hell on earth and cause misery to the millions around you! Intrinsic Thinking is all about carving a pathway to empowered thinking to allow individuals and societies to lead empowered lives by answering compelling questions in a way that high quality solutions and answers are found!

What happens when we do away with and shun this effort to allow and make way for Thinking in an Intrinsic manner? Well, you get what you are facing now! Screwed up ideologies, competing value systems and an omnipresent overbearing haze of ambiguity and myopic thinking across all levels within the society- right from individuals to the highest offices that a nation may have! When this happens, needless to say, everyone suffers, then it all falls back down to the scale of the majority- if the majority are wise – who practise Thinking the Intrinsic way- you still have a chance to think in an authentic manner and keep your head above the water line- but like it happens- if you are in a crowded society replete with idiots and dumbness, well you will have no other option to save your intrinsic thinking to just ensure you don’t get killed and walked upon over by the dumb-wits all around you!

I leave you here with these thoughts and urge you to mark that moment when you would want to deep dive into thinking by the intrinsic way and come up with some great answers for the great questions that you would have challenged and then race ahead to apply those finding to live an empowered life and perhaps also lead others through the empowered way!

Ciao for now, will be back soon with another one! Until then stay wise and keep Thinking the Intrinsic Way!

The fallacy of festive celebrations!

~ Parimal Aluri ~ Leave a comment

If you ever wondered why you wait for the whole year for that one big festival ( whatever that you want to choose and define as one for your sake!) and then ended up being more miserable towards the end of it, well this quick piece is just for you, to help you know why after the highs get higher, the lows are simply unfathomable! So join me here as we unravel this space of humanity and try to know why and when do celebrations fail and what is that we can do about that bit, if we want them to linger on as something to look forward to in the real essence of it!

Humanity is perhaps the only other thing alongside wine that tends to get exciting with time! to know the fallacy of festivals, we need to take a step back, in fact, quite a few steps to try un and understand how the whole concept of festivals perhaps evolved- no I am not an anthropologist, just plain uncomplicated stuff based on common sense and science and sure enough you can read about this in more details by going through the favorite books of your choice of human geographers or anthropologists- whatever comes easy to you!

So the story starts right at the very beginning, when humans were able to form the very first types of ordered societies – the very first time! to monitor and create order within those- coupled with the existing and evolving belief systems/ values (which were developed over time), the dawn of festivals was ushered in! Back then festivals were more of a method to mind societies so that the element of cohesiveness and divergence was visible and was always within the allowable limits as set by those who ruled those societies! One way of doing that effectively was to align these festivals to the broader belief systems/ value systems and make them as a bench mark for social conformation! So typically, if you were part of society that broadly believes in the belief or faith type”A” then alongside with the duties and responsibilities of following that faith/belief the rewards would be these much sought after festivities which would further more work to reinforce the ongoing prevailing value/ belief systems (as they have been rewarded with the festive spirit!) All is well until this point as societies are still fragmented not much inter connected among each other and there is a more or less a steady space as far as the mix of the value systems/ faith/ belief followership within the social frames that exist. This ensures that festivities are held orderly with a purpose with an intent and with a solemn reaffirmation of realignment to the broader cause of the established belief/ value system of the said society!

Now if you were to move ahead in time, say the more evolved societies the age of the Kingdoms around the world, what you witness is a racemic mix of belief systems and value definitions leading to multiple approaches to festivities, the definition of the whole concept of a festival and this is the time in history where festivities begin to compete among each other as a mark of opulence and progress by one set of value/ belief system over the other in a given social construct! This is that point of inflection where, societies which failed to manage and keep these competing ideologies and their assertion through festivals in balance that problems have begun and festivities rapidly began to drift away from the ancient path of being aligned to the puritan belief system/ value system to something altogether new- the embracing of the narrative of the rulers/ governing establishments on how and what the festival must be and when and how it is defined as successful, a grand one so on and so forth! This is how festivals and the celebrations around them stepped into the modern age- already skewed away from what they really stood for to begin with!

Irrespective where you live and what you believe or not, if you take that fabled pause and ask yourself how much of value addition have the festive celebrations done to your own personal life through the years of your life- chances are that you would have too felt the diminishing value of their impact, sense and sensibility like the diminishing value of money! This is nothing to suggest that the value of the festivals or their celebration would have diminished with time, but rather the method, the way and the impact of the conduct has certainly undergone a sea change which has furthermore added to skew festivities and their associated celebrations more further away from even the fundamental belief systems/ values to which they would have been rooted! It’s a classic case of enjoying a party not knowing for what it is and by whom it is! This singular aspect then further easily destroys the remaining core of the celebration and then what we are eventually left with are shadows which are larger than what the festival would have earlier been and more irrelevant then ever! How does this all pay out and manifest? Well read on!

Choose a value systems/ belief system/ faith whatever you may want to refer it as , and seek one festival associated to that system and check for yourself how the values of that festival have eroded with time! You will be surprised when you take a pause to reflect to see that how even you have ended up unwittingly contributed if not accelerated to making those celebrations more and more irrelevant each time that you celebrated more and more! No, the problem is not the celebration of the festival, it is the problem with the changing narrative and the method that has been implemented to define celebration which has created more problems then anything else!

I have intentionally not mentioned any names for the faith systems or the value systems, simply because that sets in prejudice and then one things will lead to another and the whole essence of the subject will go astray! You see, there was never, nor is neither will ever be a problem with the celebration of festivals aligned to belief systems/value systems that’s fine, the challenge starts as the way and method of these celebrations begins to slip away with each passing year and more importantly at times takes or manifests exactly the opposite forms of what the original intent would have been! The result? More and more shopping competitions around every festival, more and more of “display”, “senseless consumerism” and “needless unwanted one upmanship in one way or the other” the result, more fractured societies and and more confused individuals, who know they are celebrating, they know what but sadly none one ever knows what is the right way and what is that should be celebrated!

This is why the moment the “New year” is ushered in come January 2nd and it is aback to to the same old grind of whatever you have grinding upon or been ground into! The moment that instance, the moment those high days of the festivities are over, there is this bounce back to the routine norms of sharing “displayed celebration” over social media handles (which has now assumed sort of compulsive obsessive disorder space now!), those senseless bithcihng around with friends (well that’s a whole new definition now a days!) and family and that non-stop gauging and comparisons of opulence and gaps in the furniture which just go on and on until the next big festival hits home, calling for another celebration and this mad circus goes on with no end and no real rhyme or purpose! All simply because, the original ethos and the connect around them have been forgotten and lost, some intentionally, some accidentally and overall this leads to depleting value and belief systems and that downwards spiral leads one thing to another which eventually leads to societies- where some or the other segment is always celebrating something or the other- whether that makes sense or not! You think you know some society like this? Well! Stay Blessed! and Stay Safe then! So what’s that we can do?

Simple, get back to the basics! That’s the only way to salvage any remaining sanity that a society can possibly do, especially when it comes to aligning festival celebrations to what they ought to be- celebrate a festival- a path way of thought, ideology, belief, value system and you know what the best part is, all of that can be done without needing to have a shopping festival , a discount sale, a selfie contest, posting on social media, none of that is anytime needed and that is perhaps the only way to take your time away from these non productive and senseless pursuits and align your self to the more pressing and more real matters pertaining to the festival and the values/ beliefs that it brings forth and do what you can, to spread the warmth through those timeless values and that, if you ask me is the real essence of the festive spirit and anything and everything to do with celebrating festivals!

I leave you here with these thoughts, urging you to connect with your value systems/ beliefs in a more authentic way so that once you are plugged in right, you can reflect all that matters right and importantly in the way it is meant to be! Festivals and celebrations are no doubt the hallmark of humanity in terms of the civilizational and societal progress, but all that only makes sense only and only when there is meaning to those celebrations and there is a definite method to the madness! Life by itself is no less then a celebration! Celebration of moments form one unto the next and the only meaningful way to celebrate is to utilize the fleeting golden moments as wisely as one can and create values around which outlast the time in which they were created! Think again the next time you head on to celebrate something, take that pause and see if you are living the ethos of that festival by the way you choose to celebrate it!

Ciao for now, Will be back soon with another one, until then keep the festivities on and if nothing else practise the art and science of celebrating life for what it is and what it can be!

Learn to navigate the 99.99% crap!

~ Parimal Aluri ~ Leave a comment

As if the pandemic and a slowing global economy before that was not enough, we now have a whole community of morons and absolute idiots communicating and selling everything and anything promising everything but what a service or the product can do with that timeless 99.99% tag line somewhere around the communication!Join me here as we take a quick look into the what and why of this whole menace which seems to crop up each time humanity is faced with some odd, as if this was the elixir for which the pandemic had to happen for! What is really the unfolding and why do we, as humans individually and collectively get sold into this carp of 99.99% over and over again like a never ending roller coaster ride! So let’s move ahead!

Before you think, that I am one cynic of marketing, well I am not, what I am a little cynical about is, how people can be so gullible to buy into some stupid idea sold by someone who thinks they have been brilliant (while they are actually the ones’ who hang around on the edge of an average IQ which is fast diminishing with every weed and smoke that they consume!) which is anything but the truth! So from where does this whole crap of 99.99% emerge? Well to be honest, I did not have the time to do a thorough research, but my generous scientific and common sense based guess is that, sometime back somewhere in the streets of marketing some idiot would have done, at some point in time that unthinkable folly of claiming something to be 100% and would have ended up with tons and tons if law suits and claims, because of which this is the holy pathways that has been ever chosen- which is as senseless as the earlier one! This is so for the singular fact that no one really knows 99.99% of what! Sure enough, the labels and the packaging have all the technical narratives and explanations around “ideal conditions”, “test conditions”, “temperature, humidity conditions” so on and so forth, but still does not assure anything worthwhile or mean anything sensible that a scientific and rational mind may find it to be meaningful and welcoming! If you ask me, I think this is the biggest lie under the guise of marketing that has always been played over and over with consumers- whether they are consuming that priced cigar or that expensive piece of real estate or that odd perfume which is also labelled as “limited edition”! This whole 99.99% crap plays on one fundamental framework of the human mind- that intrinsic urge of the human brains to seek comparatives and alternatives (hardwired since our days of evolution to get the best of what we can in a “what if” scenario).

As the brain applies this frame to evaluate options that it is presented with (not that all of them have to existential choices- which they are turned into by those hyper smart catchy lines of a communication piece- at times hitting well below the belt of decency and ethics!) it ends up seeking short comparatives- data points, narratives, stories and as it does that what better and impactful then a few numbers- especially when they can be rounded off just below that magical 100, just a decimal or a few decimals short of it and there you go, you have a a great “stuck on” situation, wherein even an uninterested person is now going to stay for that extra fleeting second to know what that new crap of 99.99 % is about for this time! Let me tell you one thing, If you have someone that you care about in an ICU and your doctor wants to tell you the chances-you always want to hear is 100% and not anything short- simply because then you know that some shit is about to hit the roof- yet when the same garbage is served in a polished plate for some seemingly trivial product or service (which rip your wallets off using a baby face communication style) you are all ga ga and ready to lap to up like there is no tomorrow! So what is happening around with your mind? Why does it buy a set of numbers for one instance and relax for the other one?

Marketeers know this facet of the human mind too well to let that go (discount it, should I say!) you see the human brain, when left unto is more smarter then you! You see, the human mind is a powerful tool and runs on a very powerful sub-conscious engine, but when you begin to use it- the way you use it or not use it- greatly reduces the efficacy of that tool to help you and more often then not ends up harming you because the quality of choices that you force your brain to follow and there by the resulting actions take you onto a different route altogether! This is one of the reasons why not every scientist ends up being an Einstein and not every painter ends up being a Picasso! The moment your subconscious mind is fed with the 99.99% crap it knows it is all hog wash and relegates it as too trivial to engage with- basically it is telling you that this is all glorified garbage! But what happens here is that your interference and that dire need to socially conform to the masses around and ensure you don’t look like that child who missed out on that party “I was here”, “I too was here” kind of narrative nonsense buys up that crap and even as your brain may not want to, you end up splurging and buying that 99.99% of crap- knowing well all that it is being sold and all that promise of 99.99% has nothing to do with what the product or the services does and if there’s anything worthwhile that’s going to ever help you stay safe or sane it is going to be your own intrinsic unadulterated intelligence when applied right!

When the human mind notes that it’s laziness will not kill you, at times knowing your habit of overthinking and stretching, cribbing and sulking it simply gives up and gives into that stupid act of buying that dumb communication which promises a 99.99% free of virus, dark spots, blemishes, stains, surface cleansing and God alone knows what all! The sad part of all of this, people end up thinking they are being smart- when actually their own minds have really given up them from within , knowing that there is no end to this fool’s way of thinking! You see, you may have the most sophisticated brain on the planet, but if you decide to not use it for the purpose it was built and designed for, well you alone are to be blamed! if you buy a candles to keep your fire place warm! Well wait to see how wax shapes your melting future right in front of your eyes! So you may say fine, so what’s the problem if no one is getting killed? Does it really matter? Is it really that big deal?

Well ask any qualified psychologist and they will tell you, how big deal a conditioned mind can be especially when it is programmed and conditioned to crap theories and stimuli which go on to make it a wreaking machine rather then being a creative powerhouse! Through the story of human evolution, all greatness of the mind has almost always been achieved either in compelling situations of dire needs and existential crisis of societal proportions or these minds have flourished in times of serene calm and grandeur that made the minds to create and craft wonderful pieces of expression through science and arts! At no time was a mind ever able to produce a masterpiece which was calibrated at 99.99% of anything or something! Did you ever hear any scientists say that their discovery or innovation was 99.99%? I hope not! Deploying the human mind to read through the discount labels and 99.99% communication is nothing but an abuse of the magnificence of what the human brains is able to offer and gift us with! So what next?

Well to begin with allow science and common-sense to prevail! Sure enough if something doesn’t kill you enjoy the idiocracy around and smile about the dumbness around you (much needed in these times) but guard your mind- guard it fiercely from getting conditioned and receptive to these kind of false narratives and the only way to do that is to study the whole narrative of the 99.99% crap and see how the communication has been camouflaged and how smart of lousy that seems to the mind! This exercise alone will keep you mind ever more vigilant and ensure that the next time you get another piece of crap in your mail, you exactly know how to decipher what is not been said and what really the message is! As long s you are able to do this bit, your brain will be able to decipher and sieve through the onslaught of misdirected narratives and stories and promises which are anything but the truth and what’s more, you will be as sharp as you must and should be- no matter how dumb or idiotic the surrounding around you seem to be! Magically enough, the more you use your brain through the frame of enquiry and questioning based on rationality and science- you will begin to see dumbness and idiocracy more and more vividly and trust me, you will be entertained like no one else would ever have been! You will actual start to wonder if there has been a sudden surge in your IQ levels (which is unlikely of course) or is it that now you are able to see with more clarity all the crap that was always pushed towards you, simply because you took that small effort to change the frame of looking at the communication coming your way and did not lap it up as it came!

Well, I leave you here with these thoughts for now, urging you to see around your horizon to find instances of these 99.99% stories that are still nudging into your life all the time and see what is that you want to do about them, lap them up or decipher them and have a hearty laugh! These 99.99% stories are in a way also an indication of failing and falling creative opulence that humanity is now left around with and is reflective of the fact about how creative myopia sets in! Well, now if you want to know what is “creative myopia” all about, well I say, let’s look into that space some other time, perhaps the next article!

Ciao for now! Will be back soon and until then stay 100% at whatever you are and let that mean something sensible! Just remember you don’t want a doctor or that pilot flying your planet to be on anything less than 100% around you!