My professor had last day told the story of his friend who finished MBBS, Post Graduation, and some specialty, got married, had a kid, and at the age of 30 something, when everything was “settled” got a myocardial infarction. Don’t put health behind anything else, he said. And don’t go running from the next day, he said too.
But, selective hearing at its best, when I woke up at 5.45 today, I had to do something useful. First I read one page of my textbook and just as I was about to go back to sleep, I got the idea to be running again. That’s exactly 3 months past the last time.
Why do people have so much difficulty in doing what they are supposed to do? I had for a long time believed that people forget what they’re supposed to do and get involved in random distracting things. But if that was indeed the case, to-do lists must have worked like magic. But to-do lists don’t work. They just grow and grow and grow.
If it’s not about remembering, maybe it’s a problem with the way we recall what we’re supposed to do. A to-do list is a bare short description of what we’re supposed to do. It doesn’t give us the entire context of what was going through in our mind when we jotted it down. It takes away the motivation.
Maybe that’s why multi-tasking doesn’t work too. We need to enter certain “modes” to do things. When we’re supposed to be learning, we need to be motivated and comfortable to read. That is a different mind set when compared to when we’re supposed to be writing something creative. It is probably difficult for the mind to switch from one mindset to another.
That’s probably why meetings, community calls, hackathons, etc leads to far more productive output than people left on their own produce. When you invest half an hour or a day to get your mind into a particular situation, it is filled with the motivation, the back-story, and the context of what it is supposed to do. And then, doing what we are supposed to do becomes easier.
I have been learning d3.js since yesterday. It is a cool thing.
The road to kukralli has changed a lot. There are now beautiful pavements on either side. And kukralli itself has been decorated with flower pots on the sides at entrances.
The pelicans are now floating on the lake. Maybe the pollution has come down a bit. And there was this kid running with loose shoes, not exactly lifting his legs while running, but dragging them. His shoes are probably gonna get worn out much sooner than he wants them to.
And there was this white labrador dog which was so scared to jump across the roadside drain. The owner had to walk parallel till there was a small bridge across. Stupid dogs.