Category: Learning

Goals! “You must set goals in life”, productivity gurus have been shouting from the roof.

I think goals don’t work for me. Because of the timeline pressure associated with it. It makes it hard for me to give my best.

Another thought that scares me is what will I do after I have achieved my goal. The most obvious answer usually is set another (more ambitious) goal. It is a never ending cycle of constant pressure, void and disappointment.

I’m not saying goals don’t work. Or you shouldn’t set goals for yourself. You definitely should. And they work best if you understand how to set them.

When I set goals, I consider them as milestones I want to achieve, they work best for me.

On top of the milestone, I believe in making a system. Let me explain, what do I mean by making a system.

A system is something where you take on an atomic activity and do it every day. For example, reading one page every day, writing one paragraph every day, and so on.

And systems are infinite in nature and they produce compounding results in the long run. It might feel in the moment that no visible improvement is happening but it’s only after following the system for a sufficiently long amount of time one can feel its effect.

I had never heard of the term ‘healthspan’ before. I thought all of the humanity is narrowly focused on increasing the lifespan, if not becoming immortal.

Healthspan means the length of life lived in good health without any disease. Investment in improving your healthspan will almost always result in improving lifespan.

One interesting observation that came out from studying ceneterians was their ability to resist disease. And not just resit by a few years but a few decades. That’s how they were able to live longer.

So if there one thing that you can take away from this is to gear your actions towards activities like exercise, nutrition, etc, to delay the onset of any chronic disease as much as possible.

In school, a misconception was circulated that news is an acronym for ‘North East West South’. And I believed it because the logic that news is information that comes from any and every corner of the world, was convincing.

As an adult, I find it funny, how easily we would believe anything as kidswithout cross-checking it. Surprisingly, even as a mature adults, we still do it today: believe the news blindly and get anxious.

The full form ended up teaching me a meaningful lesson. Since the news comes from all directions all the time, does every piece of news have an impact on our lives? May be not. Then what’s the point of involving ourselves in something that is nothing more than noise? It’s noise that makes people anxious, worried and deaf to real sounds.

It’s been more than 6 months since I watched the news and it has only made my life better both mentally and emotionally. Just like we keep food fast, try a news fast. Challenge yourself to not watch news for some time and see the difference it makes to your wellbeing.