NOTES:
When you are continuously displaced, you make friends easily. You have low expectations from the unfamiliar; hence you are more pleasantly surprised than frustrated when faced with life's many ups and downs. You explore everything around you, develop curiosity - new lands, customs, food, and ways of doing things begin to draw you in.
You learn to survive on the strength of who you are, just for this day, today.
You build ingenuity in order to survive.
You trust strangers and hence, strangers trust you.
You build intuitive capability to sniff trouble - which can tell you when to leave a bar!
You become an interesting person, because you have lots of stories to tell.
Finally, you learn to move on.
"The world is not divided between the living and the dead, there is no difference between what is animate and what is inanimate,' she once told me during our teatime conversations. 'Shabda (sound) is brhma (life),' she added. Seeing that I eas unable to comprehend, she knocked on the surface if the dining table, twice, gently and asked, 'Where did the sound emanate from? Was it just my hand? No, it was the table replying to my knock. If I were to knock on any other surface, the sound will be very different, varied each time. It is the way the seemingly inanimate world speaks to you. There is brhma in everything. As long as you are willing to knock, even the inanimate will respond. Each time, without fail. Where there is shabda, there is brhma. Animate and inanimate are distinctions born of perception. In reality, everything is living."
There are two futures, the future of fate and the future of desire, and a man's reason has never learnt to separate them.
No other profession teaches you the true worth of your own abilities than a sales job. The reason is simple: the outcome is completely binary. Either you have made a sale or you have not.
Silicon Valley Indian Professionals Association (SIPA)
From Dr. Mitta I learnt that the first rule of managing is to listen. This is something most bosses find difficult to do because they do not know that in order to listen, you must first suspend all judgement. As chief technology officer of the corporation, Dr. Mitta was an epitome of accessibility. The juniormost engineer could simply walk into his office, pull up a chair and sound out what could be sometimes the most absurd technical idea or a trivial pesonal issue. Dr. Mitta would always listen intently before offering his advice.
He also taught me the meaning of humility, that knowledge and arrogance are antithecal. To be a good leader, one must first be a good human being.
Dr. Elliot Jacques first coined the term mid-life crisis in 1965 in a study of creative geniuses. He found that during this period there are abrupt changes in lifestyle or productivity. It is accompanied by a desire for change brought on by fears and anxieties about growing old.
In the Panchatantra, there is a story of a poor Brahmin who sees an old tiger in a forest. The tiger has a golden bangle in his paws and offers it to the man.The man is frightened and doesn't want to go near the tiger. The tiger moans that he is too old to hunt and kill and is now at the end of his life. He is toothless and his claws have all but fallen. The tiger wants to make penance by offering the bagle to a good man so that he can atone for a life of violence. he requests the Brahmin to take a dip in the pond nearby and receive the bangle from him so that he can breathe his last. The animal sounds so genuine, the poor Brahmin pities the tiger; he believes the story. He enters the pond, only to get stuck in the mud. The tiger promptly devours the Brahmin. The question is: Who killed the man? Is it the tiger or the man's greed?
Many years later, I read Otto Scharmer's book U Theory that reminded me of the sessions at the shore house. In many ways, our work during the two days was like travelling 'through the U' as Scharmer tells you - an experience of 'sensing' in the beginning as you travel down the U, 'presencing' as you settle at the bottom and then the experience of 'realizing' as you move up the right side of the U. The process is what he calls 'leading from the future'. As you move from sensing to presencing, you first learn to let go, before you can 'let come'. Answers often jump out of the stillness of your mind.
Uruguayan team's air-crash case study:
In October 1972, an Uruguayan rugby team had chartered a Fairchild F-227 to get to Chile. Flying over Argentina, the plane met with rough weather over the Andes and crashed and many aboard dies on a snowbound peak. The people who were in the fuselage escaped miraculously as the rear section slid out on the snow. What followed is a tale of hope and hopelessness as the survivors went through a seventy-two-day ordeal during which they had to, at one stage, eat the flesh of their dead compatriots in order to stay alive. Through this real story of courage and determination, powerful leadership lesson emerged. Through the course of the crash and the return to civilization, those who finally made it underwent live lessons in leadership, emergent in a situational manner, witnessing power shifts within the group from one phase to the next.
Mother Teresa once said, 'God does not require us to succeed, he only asks us to try.'
Growth brings with itself a struggle between the centrifugal forces that want to explore the boundaries of limit and the centripetal forces that want to hold on to what is the core. Unless the two are in harmony, there is inevitability of an organisation caving in under its own ambitions.
Leaders need to view infrastructure at three levels: the physical, the intellectual and the emotional.
'Never think of retirement.' He explained that is was necessary to live a full life. Never think of retiring,' he repeated. 'When you get older, begin to reduce your work. Work less. But do not give up work.'
Everyone wants to earn a million, build a house, send the kids to a good school and retire. It is such a wasteful thought. All we need to do is to take a walk in a busy marketplace one morning and look at the number of daily wage earners who are looking for the opportunity to work. yet, thousands of us who do not have to deal with such uncertainty want to simple stop working! We do not realize how lucky we are to be able to get up in the morning and go to someplace where work awaits us.
Open your mind before you open your mouth.
Go kiss the world
• It’s all in the mind
• The power to receive
• To get, you must first give
• Connect with people
• Life is constant negotiation
• The slippery slope of over-achievement
• The marginal person is important
• Passion is what passion does
• The power of resilience
• The key to happiness is not money
• Look beyond yourself
• Real men say sorry
• Learn to forgive yourself
• Self-doubt is positive