Every five years

A few lessons

I read this tweet and it really clicked for me:

I think it is a useful mnemonic to think about structuring your life in a way which is just long term enough that you can entertain the idea of risk taking and experimentation, without making it too vast an undertaking as to be overwhelming. 

It also suggests the possibility that you don’t have to do the same thing throughout your life, but instead you can break it into chunks of personally relevant pivots.

And lastly: that doing something meaningful usually takes time.

The number five also holds relevance in my life. I studied in college for exactly that many years, and that felt like a good amount of time to spend in a place, see everything it has to offer, and also to leave with a peace in your heart that you made the best of it you could.

In half a year it is going to be five years since I graduated, which is almost five years that I have been in the corporate world, which (I think) I have spent in a unique way. I have spent almost all of it in sales, split between two very different industries and states (automobile, FMCG, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu respectively). I have technically not held a desk job and have spent a lot of time on the road, in flights and in markets. It has been an interesting vocation because it requires so much intuition, influence and practicality. It can also be frustrating, but I find it mostly fun.

Inspired by the aforementioned tweet, I wanted to write down five things I have learnt in this phase of my life, both work wise and otherwise - 

1. Live what unfolds

I wrote this in a previous post once (The Plot) and traces of it exist in almost all my work because I genuinely struggle with it, but I tend to look for meaning and fit everything that happens in my life into the plot points of a “good” story. Unfortunately, life is too big and this endeavor has turned out to be a frustrating one because, surprise surprise, life does not care to be the next Harry Potter book and will in-fact, take turns and even halts while plot twists go whooshing past, not caring that they could have made it into your story.

So embrace the things that do happen rather than trying to fit it into boxes of what should or would have. This will also lead you to more inner peace and contentment.

2. Less ego, more success

When you are just starting out, it is good to divest from your ego and put that mind space into self improvement and kindness. It will feel odd but it will keep you going for longer because eventually the game will start to feel rigged and only the ones who keep putting themselves out there without fear of embarrassment will win.

If you don’t see yourself as very important, the stakes will be lower and then you experiment more, don’t get attached to the results, and that keeps the ball rolling. It can lead you to a life of more joy and less regret. 

Less ego will also make you a nicer human, which you truly owe to the world with all the privilege granted to you.

3. Develop hobbies. And traveling can’t be the only one

There was almost a year, oh the perils of bad mental health times, that I kept a gratitude journal. When I was flipping through the journal a few months later, two points were repeated the most - exercise, and words. I was grateful for the time I spent reading something, writing something or working out.

I think it has to do with the fact that any hobby is enriching, and everyone has personalities and subjectivities suited to different ones. While mine at that time ended up being strength training and reading self-help, I realized in another phase that I enjoyed cooking and painting too. And in another phase I just wanted to read fiction all the time. 

Hobbies enrich the soul and ideally you should not expect yourself to be very good at them. That is partly the fun.

Also on that note, yours truly being very guilty of it too, whenever I open Instagram I see people posting about travel. I think travel is great and I love it too, but I think being in your 20s and earning, it is quite easy to conflate “traveling” with “doing something” but sitting in cafes and taking flights does not by itself mean much. Not all traveling is the same and unless you find ways to engage yourself with the places and people of the place you are in, it can be a passive endeavor. 

I have been watching Bourdain documentaries, and Patti Smith’s memoirs are always a reference, and I am starting to realize that traveling has to be challenging and uncomfortable and a bit ad hoc, and it has to be a way of living, and only then you kind of get into the grime and magic of what it is about. And real, long term travel is not as glamorous as the holidays we mostly take.

4. Document your life

I forget things. It is a whole issue. And so, one of these days, I was browsing my old finsta (fun insta?) and was surprised by the amount of the last two years of my college life and the pandemic days I had documented there. It was so different from what I remembered, and I was so grateful that I captured pictures and wrote snippets of my joys, frustrations, meals, adventures, hopes, times. It made me remember how far I had come and the ways in which I was still the same.

Life goes by fast and it always helps to document what you live. It is a great time capsule, and it puts a lot of stuff into perspective. 

5. Don’t do life alone

This is a difficult one. It took me 4 years of isolating myself emotionally to realize that life is simply more fun when you let people in, and when you are not very skeptical of everyone and their motives. There is a Taylor Swift quote I love in which she talks about how she cannot get back the time she spent locked up in her home and that in many ways she is more trusting now than she was six years ago.

I really related to that. I mean life sucks anyway, but if you open yourself up to people and just live with more of a “yolo” mindset, people do end up surprising you and sometimes in good ways. Also, a huge part of adulthood is realizing that you have to learn to live with both the good and bad in other people. You cannot ever have lasting “perfect” relationships.

And so I think, don’t do life alone - welcome connections in whatever form they come and be open to meeting people halfway. You never know how much these connections can end up nourishing you and being portals of adventure and memories.

All of this, it makes life worthwhile.