Tag: random thoughts

  • Distracted Moments

    There are times when the idealistic bull that I see about people’s expectations from their marriages and relationships in general make me want to puke. It goes well beyond just a mild annoyance or a light giggle because it is so pervasive that it makes me wretch. The reason why it has that effect is because it is spewed by those with barely any experience in an unsupervised setting. People that have yet to experience life outside of earshot of their parent’s nurturing stares or comforts of home should really stop short of telling others what they should or shouldn’t tolerate or expect in life or their relationships.

    It’s not a romantic novel waiting to be cracked open, nor is it a fairytale waiting to be lived. Consider this…if the life you’ve been exposed to so far has already made you yearn for such idealistic outcomes, imagine how much more you’ll yearn for when you’ve had that many more experiences behind you which will open your eyes to realities you always thought belonged in someone else’s life?

    Every mistake that you thought you made just once because you’ll know better in future suddenly slaps you with a different glove concealing its cynical lesson that needs to be taught. Every foul-mouthed man or woman that you saw bitterly cursing others or their mere existence suddenly  becomes a point of anxious familiarity rather than a source of pity on a good day. Suddenly they possess the voice that is stifled within you but your cultural subscription prevents you from betraying the facade that is proper.

    Life is not a romantic notion that needs to be pursued. Every single expectation you have will be tested within breaths of you feeling that sense of accomplishment. Accomplishment and fulfilment will be ever elusive because the more you learn, the more you yearn. The greater the detail you notice, the greater the void you see between what you are and what you always wanted to be.

    Servitude, even if embraced with total abandon will not yield the fulfilment you seek. It is like filling that leaking bucket and at times you can fill slightly faster than it leaks, but it always leaks more than the sum of your efforts to fill it. That is how people are. That is how we all are. We only appreciate what is for as long as the sense of comfort it gives is felt by our fickle souls. Once that moment is passed, it quickly fades into a rose coloured yearning for moments to come that we hope will meet the exaggerated memory that we caress of lesser moments that passed.

    The longer the period between what has been and what needs to be, the more intense that slip into the slump of unfulfilled expectations. The very same expectations that we built on the exaggerated recollections of moments that we never fully appreciated while we were mentally distracted by measuring what was being presented against what we presented to others before, or what we believed we deserved in the first place. And so the beauty of the moment is lost, but whose loss is only ever truly grasped in grey moments that finally allow us to be detached from the distractions of that moment for long enough to realise the truth of what we didn’t notice.

    Regret always comes too late. Idealism just ensures that when it arrives, it is accompanied with the tunes of the ballads that stir that longing for what has been so that we are consistently distracted from what is, while stupidly yearning for what will never be.

  • Don’t Judge Me

    I’ve re-typed this first sentence more times than I care to count, and each time, like this time, I felt the inclination to delete it because it seemed to talk to an audience, rather than a simple expression of what is on my mind. But I can’t keep deleting because it only increases the anxious clutter in my head relative to what needs to be expressed. The fact that I have forgotten how to express my thoughts without considering how I want my words to be received is beyond debate. I’ve got to embrace the whore in me that seeks such attention or engagement, despite my good intentions.

    At some point I convinced myself that sharing my thoughts with a receptive audience would be the only circumstances under which I would find it easy to pour forth my ramblings. I guess that’s what happens when you repeat a lie to yourself for long enough. Eventually, you believe it. I’ve never needed an audience before. The outpouring of thoughts and emotions were entirely for selfish relief and not to garner attention or affirmation of any sort. Somehow, it was more therapeutic that way as well. Again, the feeling of wanting to delete these thoughts is threatening to guide my hand to dump this post in the trash.

    I am on the outside as I am on the inside, albeit slightly more composed. But my apparent composition is not an untrue reflection of my true state because despite being conflicted, it is a perpetual confliction rather than a fluctuating one. Therefore, considering the constant, composed is a disposition that easily disguises perpetual perturbation. Perhaps there is no difference.

    My apparent annoyance with my surrounding circumstances is often assumed to be a lack of appreciation for what has been achieved due to my focus on what remains to be achieved instead. I guess that is the judgement that is most often passed by those that celebrate mediocrity. They are the ones that easily judge my restlessness to be inflexible expectations that are supposedly unrealistic, while failing to see how my anxiety escalates at the realisation of how much more I could have achieved instead. It’s the curse of the realisation of death, although many times that realisation escapes me as well. However the more my capability grows, the more I find myself identifying ways in which I should be benefiting others instead of laying lethargically on the couch feeding my brain with interestingly useless information.

    Don’t judge me for my incoherency in this post, or in my life. There are simple things that are daunting for me. My point of reference is very different to most. I walk into a room of unfamiliar faces and my senses are overloaded with the new, and often disruptive energies of people I have never met before. It numbs my conscious mind for the time I am in their presence, until I eventually get a moment to myself when I am able to wade through the muck of their pretences that they maintain simply to avoid being seen.

    People do that as a matter of course. We defend ourselves in front of others but feel no regret or guilt for the unwarranted defence because it is the norm. Society is composed of a necessary insincerity in light of the dishonesty that we’re faced with. But it seems the dishonesty is what warrants the insincerity as a defence mechanism, although the defence is what feeds the dishonesty. I’m exhausted just contemplating this cycle of insanity. I wonder what came first, the need to defend from fear of being vulnerable, or the vulnerability that resulted from a broken promise? Regardless, it is the norm, and living idealistically like I tend to do so often, it is inevitable that I will be faced with recurring disappointments, and just as likely, I will disappoint those that live realistically instead.

    My perspective is no less sane than yours. While mine is fuelled with naivety, yours is fuelled with the distrust that wreaks through this world. I choose to be the stranger to that filth, at least consciously so. However, I’m quite certain that when I’m lacking in mindfulness, I am as much tainted by that wretched stench as much as those whose insecurities and mediocrity I despise.

    My head hurts. It’s a dull familiar ache. One that has no beginning, but promises to only end when the inevitability of death finally provides it with the assurance of reality that it seeks. Until then, it will hurt, I will be distracted, and the chasm between me and the world will only continue to widen, until eventually I step into the abyss created by my own gluttonous appetite for that which others do not see. That is, the truth of me.

  • From Virtual to Reality

    I launched a new forum at the office this week. It’s called the Thought Leadership Forum. I know, it sounds clichéd, and it probably is. But that is the extent of the cliché. I’ve often felt frustrated at the lack of real life engagement about the many ideas and philosophies that I debate at length with myself on my blog wondering if any of it has any real  life value. How much of it is simply idealism that entertains or encourages from time to time, versus how much of it holds practical value in helping others to rise above the lethargy that has become the hallmark of many lives these days?

    So I decided to be bold (perhaps recklessly stupid instead) and opened up the debate to more than 60 of my colleagues at the office. It was daunting to even consider this but over the last year and a bit I’ve been experimenting with sharing my blog with various people around me. People that often seem to want advice or even just to engage about topics that I am obviously passionate about. At first I felt a sense of trepidation which didn’t last any longer than it took for me to realise that their validation was of no consequence to me. There was always the risk that they would ridicule my ramblings, but strangely enough most have lost interest in a very short space of time. Some have commented vaguely on the content and the topics but none have engaged meaningfully about anything that they read.

    That in itself provided an insight into my fears and assumptions, as well as their sincerity about wanting to truly challenge the stereotypes that they’re often prone to whining about. I focused on the former since I’ve realised that trying to convince people to take themselves seriously is a futile effort. People only ever take themselves seriously after they’re faced with a grave challenge in their life that forces them to question their significance to those around them, and more importantly, when they’re forced to face the truth of what they claim to stand for. It takes a defining moment of sublime struggle to cause us to question our purpose or our understanding of ourselves. At moments like that we realise what dreams we were holding on to but rarely, if ever, nurtured.

    And so I set out to start the debate in the first session of the Thought Leadership Forum that I launched and was pleasantly surprised at both the turnout and the level of engagement. It’s early days, and there is nothing to suggest that this initiative might even survive beyond its second session, but the fact that I was able to force people to stop and reconsider their long held perspectives about common issues that we often take for granted on a daily basis is a really good thing. It was encouraging to see how many were confident enough to make statements about what they believed were universal truths, only to stop and give a nervous giggle when it was challenged because they realised that they didn’t necessarily consider it from that perspective before.

    Perhaps, selfishly, I needed to take this blog from virtual reality to reality in order to test the water about my personal beliefs and its relevance to the average human being. Perhaps this is my way of determining whether or not there is merit in writing that book after all, or if my thoughts and ideas are simply pedestrian by nature and instead of causing people to sit up and listen, it may instead cure their insomnia. Perhaps this is the beginning of a new chapter in my life where I aspire to influence people in reality rather than to continue to hide behind the comfort offered by the nuances of virtuality.

    People are strange. Sometimes, almost as strange as I know them to be.

  • Filled to the Brim

    Given my recent overload of pressure and work at the office, I found myself facing the realisation of what determines my capacity to deal with what is thrown at me each day. I found myself having conversations in my head about how I’ve had enough, how I’m not willing to put up with the crap any longer, and how this is all pointless. However, I couldn’t fend off this nagging feeling that that was just me setting limitations for myself. I was determining when it was enough, often long before it really was.

    There is a physical limitation that is also breached at some point which results in physical fatigue or exhaustion that simply makes it near impossible to function effectively. But the more I considered all this, the more I realised that I was setting a limitation for myself long before I arrived at that point of true physical exhaustion. It reminded me of a study by Dr Tim Noakes that confirms that our brain tells us that we’re tired long before we reach a state of being physically fatigued even though we are capable of much more. That poses a significant challenge to the perspectives that I’ve held on to for so long. I always assumed that being able to read my physical symptoms would be the surest way to make informed decisions about my emotional well being, but it turns out that it’s not as straight forward as that.

    And so I contemplated my current frustration with the on-going seemingly endless cycle of pressure that we’ve been under for more than a month now, and each time I felt like indulging myself with the defeatist proclamation of ‘I’ve had enough’, I knew that I was still capable of dealing with more. Funny how my attitude determined when enough was enough rather than any real physical or emotional constraints I was faced with. Through this painful exercise of working with some of the most amazingly inept resources I’ve ever had to contend with in my career, it has become obvious that what I am capable of is far from what I am tolerant of.

    I guess the focus needs to shift towards improving my tolerance and therefore my abilities to navigate around issues that challenge my tolerance levels, rather than to constantly focus on subject matter competence and relationship building. However, I suspect that this is really just scratching the surface of a bigger issue that lies beneath, that being the issue of self-worth, confidence, and emotional intelligence, each of which have a myriad of supporting issues as well. Yet again, a vicious cycle emerges. What remains clear though is the fact that I determine my capacity long before anyone else is able to push me beyond my own limits. This cup is far from full, although at times it serves my purposes to present myself as having reached a threshold that is reasonable to be considered a limitation of wits and patience for any reasonable person.

    Even in that there is little comfort, because in so doing, I am reminded that I am merely comparing myself to the mediocre, rather than striving to exceed such levels of complacency.

  • If Wishes Were Horses…

    I was reminded of that old proverb tonight. If wishes were horses, beggars would be riders. That’s how it often feels for me in life. Fortunately these bouts of wishing for what never was usually subsides within minutes, and rarely does it ever extend into hours or days. But that I wish or yearn for beginnings that were not intended for my life is something I can’t deny. Most of all, I often find myself wishing that I had sources of wisdom to draw on as I progressed through my years and my life experiences.

    Becoming an adult in a harsh world is difficult enough without such guidance. Finding your way amidst the jeers and ridicule of many while maintaining a single-minded focus on what you aspire to be is enough to try the tenacity of an angel. But I’m no angel, and fortunately the realisation of that struggle only hit me much later in life, well beyond that exhausting stage which made it somewhat more bearable. Perhaps that is the blessing of being oblivious at times.

    However, such struggles are never to be presented in single item purchases. They always seem to come in bulk purchases. Reflecting on those early years seems almost as if I had an idyllic existence at the time if I were to compare it to what was to follow. Painful lessons were learnt in my efforts to become a husband, and later a father. I’ve often felt twinges of remorse and guilt at the thought of the pain unleashed on others during those years of growth, but my saving grace is the knowledge that whatever I did, I did sincerely and out of genuine conviction for what I believed to be the right thing to do at the time. That’s all we can expect from anyone, isn’t it?

    Behaving maliciously is a sign of an infinitely more troubled soul than mine and I shudder at the thought, so as long as I don’t stoop to such levels, I guess I can take comfort in the fact that I am not truly jaded or bitter yet. The cynicism though, is open for debate. The wisdom accumulated through years of unaided struggles can easily be wasted if we’re quick to assume that we were being punished, rather than being educated. Without such trials, mediocrity and fragility would have taken me in a sweeping motion to a place that would have seen me dependent and needy of support structures reserved for the frail of heart, and timid of mind. Yet from a young age the innate resilience of my spirit kept me going. It has always been a sense of resilience that I could never take credit for. I did not sow it, nor did I nurture it. In fact, it nurtured me.

    And now, after all these experiences that have shaped me into who I am today, I still feel lacking. I wonder if the weight of being independently resilient with nothing more than faith to rely on will eventually wear away at my resolve and render me brittle and fragile at a time when the weight of this life just becomes overwhelmingly burdensome. Faith must remain my companion if I hope to survive this ordeal of life with any measure of dignity that may remain. My greatest fear is that at some point I may be faced with the harsh reality that perhaps I got it wrong all these years. Perhaps after all my resolve, my self-proclaimed philosophies of life, and death, and my supposedly informed perspectives of what makes us human, and what gives life purpose, perhaps at some point I will be disemboweled by the truth of what was, and the realisation of how far off the mark I was. And suddenly, the reality of death and the purpose of life will seem like a story very different to the one I just lived, with barely a breath left in me to try again.

  • Managers, Leaders, and Collaboration

    Rather than quote case studies on this, I prefer to share a few random thoughts on what has proven to be effective for me and the teams that I have worked with. To unlock collaboration, you must abandon team meetings. It might sound counter-intuitive, but it works.

    Setting up regular meetings (like the ones that generally set the tone in most projects) run according to the text books of ‘best’ practices, sets the expectation that collaboration beyond your immediate accountability is constrained to only that time set aside for the meeting. When we provide structure beyond just delegations of authority, or accountability for delivery, we hinder performance and encourage individualistic approaches to dealing with problems facing a project, or a team. In other words, we inadvertently push the agenda of the hero rather than the team and we create the perfect climate and culture in which heroes thrive. Getting recognition for your efforts in a team setting of the type described here is a further catalyst to encourage lone-ranger behaviour rather than creating an environment conducive towards collaboration.

    Leadership by facilitation is a powerful skill that can unlock potential in teams and individuals in ways that no amount of coaching or mentoring will be able to equal. The reason why this is seldom practiced is because most leaders are managers first, before they are leaders. In more than two years of running a software testing team, among other functions, we have yet to have a real team meeting. Even when we had ‘team meetings’, it was ad hoc and focused on a specific concern or issue of alignment that needed to be addressed, rather than having a team meeting for the sake of meeting with the team. Regular informal interaction between team members that is focused on clearly defined objectives always yields much better results than dictating who is responsible for what. How often haven’t you seen bright individuals recede simply because they felt overwhelmed by the heroes and bullies in the team?

    Consider this. When you have a team meeting, the agenda usually includes items focused on providing feedback on outstanding actions, allocating new issues to someone for resolution/action, or providing general feedback to staff about what has transpired since the last meeting. All those agenda items confirm only one thing to me. Team meetings are focused on the allocation of individual responsibilities rather than team goals, but are disguised to look as if it’s a team effort that is taking place. To prove this, look around the table at your next meeting and see how many people adopt a sheepish grin when asked about whether or not they read the minutes from the last meeting?

    The moment we avoid establishing routine interactions, we set the scene for spontaneity. I work with various guiding principles in mind that inform the way I engage with others. One of it states that every individual is competent until proven otherwise. Another says that every individual is a mature adult until proven wrong. And yet another favourite is that every individual has an innate need to be recognised for their contribution while being allowed sufficient latitude to employ their personal flair of creativity in the way they arrive at the set objectives. These principles always foster a culture of mutual respect, accountability, and transparency. People clam up and become territorial when they feel like their significance is threatened or questioned. That significance is often challenged if they have reason to believe that their competence is being doubted or questioned.

    More often than not we don’t directly challenge anyone’s significance or competence, but the way in which we trust them, guide them, allow them to act independently, and respect the delegation of authority that we provide them with, collectively reveals how seriously we consider their input or their contribution. You’ll never be able to engage in a meaningful way if you’re managing by team meetings, because just as that sets the expectation for team members to primarily be accountable to that forum, it also sets the expectation that the manager of that team is only expected to engage meaningfully during that session as well.

    The more I try to isolate collaboration and aspects relating to leadership, the more they seem to become intertwined, and perhaps in that there is much truth as well. A manager will be prone to taking a rigid approach towards managing the outputs of a team if that is the limit of their confidence in being able to command the respect and commitment from the team. A leader on the other hand will feel much more inclined to trust, and provide principled leadership that encourages individual-level collaboration and accountability that align with the project or organisational objectives, without feeling a need to enforce their idea of how those objectives should be reached.

    There is an inherent desire in every one of us to want to contribute to a greater purpose. A leader will demonstrate, and therefore share their passion for the organisational goals which in turn will inspire their subjects to aspire to contribute towards the stated goals. However, a manager will assume the role of defining the individual components required to achieve that goal, and will subsequently delegate accountability for those components and then simply expect compliance in the achievement of those goals.

  • When I chose to be educated by the school of life, little did I know that my mentor would turn out to be my tormentor

  • Why Time Travel is Probably Not Possible

    The concept of time travel, in my opinion, is more a desire founded in the weakness of us because of our collective regret over missed opportunities rather than a practical and needed solution to any of mankind’s ills. We struggle to live in  the present, to be conscious, and to be grounded because of the constant distraction of what we have yet to do or achieve, which makes it quite ironical that one of those distractions is our pursuit of the ability to travel back in time so that we can right the wrongs we spawned when wondering about some other time or place.

    The more I contemplate the concept of time travel from a purely logical perspective, the less likely the possibility of achieving it appears to be. There are a number of theories that abound by respected scientists that suggest that it is physically possible, but they remain theories, and hence what prompted me to develop my own theories to disprove this misconception that serves as nothing more than a fairy tale.

    I find it difficult to believe that we’ll ever be able to travel faster than instantaneous. What I mean is, we may be able to break barrier of the speed of light, but in doing so, we will only ever get as close as is humanly possible to moving from one place to another in an instant, or moment, or split second, however you wish to measure it; but we’ll never get there before we’ve left our point of departure.

    The entire concept of the speed of light being the holy grail for time travel is mistaken. We assume that simply because the light reflected off an object has not reached us yet, it means that it exists in a different dimension. It doesn’t. The fact that the light is still en route does not change the fact that the object is still physically in the same location. Stated differently, if I were to accelerate faster than the speed of light, chances are that I will find myself in a place of darkness because the light that I left behind is still catching up with me. Imagine the disappointment on the face of the man that eventually breaks the speed of light only to find himself bumping into objects that he can’t see because the light reflected off them has not reached him yet?

    In fact, even in that scenario there are flaws. That would assume that the objects whose reflected light can no longer be seen are all located in close proximity to the origin of his travels. Think about it this way. If I were to travel faster than the speed of light in a horizontal direction, only light emanating from sources in a similar trajectory (so to speak) would be left behind. However, and light traveling vertically would still reach me because I would be crossing their paths and not traveling away from them. So in order for me to reach that point of darkness, I would need to be traveling away from every light source in every direction simultaneously, or else I’ll always be crashing into other light sources.

    That all sounds really complicated so perhaps here is an easier way to explain my point of view. Traveling faster than the speed of light will only make me outrun the light itself, and will not make me travel through time, since time itself is not even measured by the presence or quantity of light. Time is simply a constructed unit of measure that is independent of our definition of it. We could call it 50 other names and define 100 different units of measure to measure it as opposed to the standard seconds, minutes, hours, days, and so on, but it would not change the very essence of time itself.

    Whether or not the light of an object is visible does not stop the entropy experienced by the object. In other words, I won’t remain forever young if I simply lived in a dark room all my life. So the fact that the light that should otherwise be reflected from my body is not visible, does not make me absent. It simply makes me out of sight but still present. So this entire focus on the speed of light to make time travel possible is simply absurd. We measure changes by the elapsed time of the event. We improve our productivity by more meaningfully using the time we have available. And then we delude ourselves into believing that we’re getting better at time management, when in fact we’re getting better at managing our lethargy and procrastination.

    Time is not what we need to conquer, but rather ourselves, our arrogance, and our pride that suggests that we’re so powerful and infinitely resourceful that we have the wit, the intelligence, and the capability to conquer any physical construct we find in our path. Time is not physical. It is not a liquid, a gas, a solid, or any other variation of matter in between. In fact, it’s not even matter, and doesn’t matter either. It’s the actions we do in the moments that pass that determine how well those moments were spent. When we lose sight of that, we end up trying to find ways to escape the reality of death by believing that we are capable of cheating it, starting yet another cycle of lethargy and procrastination to do that which matters, while falsely assuming that we’re engaged in endeavours that will improve the quality of life of mankind.