Having the fanciest pair of studs on weak legs are not going to make you a good player. Waiting on the tools without practicing your game is a detrimental waste of your time. Important is to get good with what you have and build up on it until you can have better tools to put to use.

The most amount of push while swimming in breaststroke is the one you get on finishing one loop cleanly by connecting your legs. Leave it half and go for another stroke, thinking the hands or the kick of the legs are more important and you squander the benefit generated by the least amount of effort that comes from completing a loop cleanly. The last push that allows you to cross the finish line, be it in a sprint or a project will be the one that you will benefit most from.

Sometimes you just need to be in the garden and eat the fruits that it has to offer. Just by the mere fact of enjoying the fruit, you spread the seeds for more growth to happen.

“History never repeats itself; man always does.” - Voltaire Our identities are made up of the stories that we tell ourselves. In the present we are just a sapien, almost identical to the next sapien in the room. But we tell ourselves that we differ a lot from each other, that our race, our cast, our religion, our nationality, our class and n number of other things make us what we are. The things that we are born with or around us in our past, we recall them into the present a

Working consistently and persistently on tasks can also be a great way to generate new ideas. We often tend to think that sitting in a cottage by the forest, finding the solitude or time to think without any actionable commitments is the only way to come up with creative thoughts. But it is more likely that you will come across an idea in the midst of the ‘doing’. An idea for a film can come up while fixing your bike, looking at a vegetable vendor while doing grocery shopping

What does not kill me, makes me stronger - Nietzsche I recently noticed that its not ‘you’ in the quote its ’me’. Nietzsche refers to himself, knowing he has the capacity to learn from his failings and change himself to be stronger. He knows that he can use the failures as the raw material to provide himself a strength which he never had before. He knows he has the humility to learn. If we think that anything that affects us detrimentally, by its own happening, makes us stron

Often we stop ourselves far from the limits of what is achievable. Our fear of losing it all at the end of an effort keeps us from running altogether. Sometimes the fears are legitimate but often times not. Each serious endeavor requires one to give it their all to achieve something that is accessible at the end of the tunnel. It is a risk and a gamble, but if we think about losing it even before we begin, we create invisible shackles to our minds and souls. It is in fact the

Of great importance is the monetary value that one decides upon for one’s work. Often we are blinded by our privilege in accepting low paying projects. While the project itself generates great value - monetarily or in creating presence for the client, it seldom meaningfully adds to anything more than spare change in our pockets. We might be tempted to do these projects for the prestige they bring, a passion that aligns to ours or worst of all, speculated future work. As our r

There‘s a lot of hoopla around the insider and the outsider in the world of art. For a field that is obsessed by critical thinking, it is rather strange that one should be judged by the geography that one is born in. One’s cultural belonging is not necessarily exclusive to the person, privileged (or doomed), to have geographically been situated in a particular part of the world at the time of exiting the womb. It is just one of the many heuristics that we fall prey to on a da

“A genius is the man who can do the average thing when everyone else around him is losing his mind.” - Napoleon It just struck me the other day that the word ‘extraordinary’ is in fact made up of ’extra’ and ‘ordinary’. The person who is ‘extraordinary’ or ‘the genius’ as Napoleon puts it, is a person excessively grounded in the ordinary. A grounding that roots him. The persistence of an unwavering mind, constantly progressing in the thing that it believes to be pursued, is c

There is a specific and intense joy of belonging to the task that one is doing. Probably there is no other way to enjoy any task than knowing that nothing more is important at this moment to do. Often times our joys are sucked out by parallel tasks running in our mind. I’m dropping my brother off but I‘d rather have spent a slow early morning in bed. I’m sitting here writing a story but that e-mail is more important to be sent. I’m spending my afternoons cooking, instead of g

Forgetting is the price we pay for remembering - Matthew Walker ( Why we Sleep) An interesting aspect of sleep that I always intuitively knew but recently read more into was forgetting. Matt Walker says: the capacity to forget can, in certain contexts, be as important as the need for remembering, both in day-to-day life (e.g., forgetting last week’s parking spot in preference for today’s) and clinically (e.g., in excising painful, disabling memories, or in extinguishing cravi

One responds to their environment all the time, knowingly or unknowingly. A pothole in the road makes a biker steer away from it, untimely rains make everyone huddle under cover and a raging pandemic makes the populace hole up in apartments. There is nothing special about it. But there is always a second layer of response to the events unfolding around us. A layer of idiosyncracies, where one does things that are not necessarily needed to be done in that particular way. A lay

A major shift in thinking about work is the shift from a ‘have to’ to ‘get to’. I learnt this from a productivity class I took recently. A ‘have to’ task feels just by definition much more responsible and a ‘get to’ task feels more playful. We all start many endeavors in our lives that we enjoy doing. But when we make our dreams, our profession, we unfortunately move from our playful ‘get to‘ zone to a more responsible but dry ‘have to’ mode. Eg: I get to draw 5 pages of comi

The weight of memory keeps her from finding joy - Neil Gaiman (Fragile Things) its next to impossible to not be weighed under memory. It is the source of what we can expect from life, our fears, our anxieties and our hopes. All deeply rooted in the past and not much to do with actuality. While life plays songs with the randomness of a radio, our minds think in planned playlists based on past knowledge. We see what we are looking for and only allow novel experiences to flow th

In art school as beginners we had this philosophy driven into us. ‘Get the bad drawings out of your system’. And its such a great way to look at our everyday doings. We fear we might not be good and that fear paralyzes us from actually doing the work. Be persistent! Get those 100 or 1000 bad pages of writing out of your system and good writing is just after it, get those bad dishes you cook out, get those blog pieces, bad films, bad music, bad dancing, bad anything out of you