Kilgore Trout

Every choice, every action is a wager you make to yourself. You bet your time on which task to take, you bet your reputation over your projects to choose. Every moment, by taking action or staying numb in inaction, you are making a wager. What do you plan to to bet today?

Beginning of this semester I had decided to be rock this semester. I was all motivated and ready to put plans and executing them. It was all going very well. I was waking up in the morning, attending classes, and keeping up with my work while having fun and doing other things too. I was sure on the path of 

I noticed that right after my university mid semester break, things started to go off balance for me. I was bunking classes, lagging behind in my work, sittign on my ass all day and basically not doing anything. I would wake up late, spend a lot of time over the internet; basically sitting alone in room and not do anything. I would barely get anywork done. It took me a long time to get back on track and bandwagon ahead, and I was swamped with all the work that I had ignored earlier and things went ugly. 

So here I am thinking to myself, how can I avoid this situation.

And I have come to a realization that could be based solely on my own experience, but I think everyone can draw something out of it. It is the way you start your mornig. If you get off your bed and get ready, take a shower and get to work, your day is already off to a productive start But if you sit on your ass, dilly dally and don’t get off your room you are just stuck there.

The problem is how to do it consistently. Well, it is something I am still figuring out. A few ideas, maybe ask a friend or family to check on you. Keep a reminder to tell yourself. 

I am going to try both and see what works. 

Good luck to me  :)

For a while today, on Twitter feed, you could only see your own post. 

I think it was twitters way to cutting out all the noise of other tweets and put a mirror in front of us and see what exactly are we spewing forth. 

I don’t think Twitter would want people to realize that!

Day three highlights. 

Hours of Work: 6/8 (9

Exercise: No

Clean Room: Yes

Update: Yes

Plan for the next day: Not yet

So moral of the story:

1. Run in the morning. 
2. Stay in Library, and you ll keep on studying.

So for the first day of beast mode 50 my rating is: Good! 

Day two highlights. 

Hours of Work: 4/8 (Don’t wanna include the lib session on e-resources as work

Exercise: Yes

Clean Room: No

Update: Yes

Plan for the next day: Partial

Waking up in the morning was surprisingly easy. All you had to do was to sleep on time. And now that I had woken up, I just made up my mind to go run. This was one activity which I would have procrastinated on, I went running to the SRC tracks, despite the rain. Sitting in SRC in the morning sun and breathing the fresh the air cooling the lungs, felt so good. 

I could have worked more today. 8 hours is already an ambitious aim. Some of time was taken in at NOC for the open house briefing, but I got to meet some interesting people, so YAY!

By the time it was 6, it was hard for me to keep my eyes open. As I made my way to science lib to get some books for FYP, I was already sleep walking. I guess it was the effect of the run in morning finally wearing me off. I kinda dozed off in the lib. Not cool.

So moral of the story:

1. Run in the morning, its absolute fun. 
2. Try to streamline your day more. Especially towards the end of the day. 

So for the first day of beast mode 50 my rating is: Good! 

Progress report

Ok, well, I have worked a lot today. But that means I ll have to discount the stupid amount of time wasted on the P&G talk. 

Although some stuff she said about Passion, Finding your talent, Knowledge etc.

I am too tired to type much… I ll be back again later on the full report…

I have been living my life in too much of an ease lately. I am going to try something. Since this is my final year, final sem in college, I wanna go down with a bang, not a whipmer. So here are the lists of my aims for the next 50 days

1. Work 8 hours a day. 1 hour a day for finding a job For this sem, to just make it a decent second lower I ll need an average of 4.0+ in all my subjects. And I want it. ‘Cuz I would wanna graduate with some of that second class honours. Really. 
   Besides, 8 hours a day is the amount of time you would work for just a few months from now. I need to have experience in making full use of that time. I don’t want half assed amount of work put in. But I am willing give myself some time to adjust to the habit of working for that long with results. 
2. Sleep for good 6-7 hours a day. No compromise
   Sleep is something that has been suffering for a long time. I think it is a rule that in university, your sleep will be a bank from which you can make withdrawals of time for your partying, last minute assignments, and a little bit of social life too. However, proper sleep still rules. No really. When you have a proper sleep cycles, your body and brain regerates properly over the span of the night and your next becomes better. It’s like magic. 
   Social life can be handled during the rest of the day.
3. 2 Hours of my day will be spend in some form of exercise. Coz I am too fat. Yes, I said it. I know it has been problem for a long time that I have gone fat. Like a fat fuck. All I am promising is to spend 60 full minutes on exercise. the other time i have given myself to prepare and relax from the activity. More on this later.
4. 30 mins managing my room
   I have noticed that the clarity of my thoughts is proportional to the messiness of my room. With a cleaner room, I get ready to work much faster and don’t procrastinate. Just 30 mins of time won’t kill me.
5. 30 mins planning the next dayCrucial thing that I have been putting off far too long. My days must be organize and I should decide what I can do over the week and review if my major goals are being met or not.
6. 30 mins updating this log.
   By the end of this, I would wanna see how this whole Beast Mode 50 felt. So there.

That leaves me with 4-5 hours for meals and personal hygine and socializing. I hope I can spend it all well. 

WOODY ALLEN:  That’s quite a lovely Jackson Pollock, isn’t it?

GIRL IN MUSEUM:  Yes it is.

WOODY ALLEN:  What does it say to you?

GIRL IN MUSEUM:  It restates the negativeness of the universe, the hideous lonely emptiness of existence, nothingness, the predicament of man forced to live in a barren, godless eternity, like a tiny flame flickering in an immense void, with nothing but waste, horror, and degradation, forming a useless bleak straightjacket in a black absurd cosmos.

WOODY ALLEN:  What are you doing Saturday night?

GIRL IN MUSEUM:  Committing suicide.

WOODY ALLEN:  What about Friday night?

GIRL IN MUSEUM: [leaves silently]

One thing that has always intrigued me is why creators end up earning less than the sellers. Why would I say that ?

One of my classes in Bachelor of Engineering is Engineering Ethics. Engineers are supposed to follow a strict code of ethics as human lives are stake if their job is botched in the minutest sense. Which is why you don’t worry about being electrocuted when switch on a bulb in the morning, worry about falling down when you sit on chair, worry about bus brakes failing while you are driving a car, or worry about the road collapsing when you are on it. We take the safety of all engineering products almost for granted, almost with an implicit understanding that engineers would have done their work in making it good for you. But can you say the same about your investments?

After the financial crisis in the US, there was whole hooha about the financial system.”Regulations, Regulations” were shouts from everywhere.  Now I would be lying if I said I totally understand how it all started, but it is pretty obvious that things can go wrong in such colossal scale when someone was making “bets” out there knowing very well to be vouching for failing, bad investments. 

Imagine an engineer a deliberately selling a saying yes to a low quality cement because he benefits from it. Or a mp3 players that will stop playing after 100 sogn plays. You see how wrong it is. Yet, there is nothing wrong with people making such bets on their own products in the financial markets! I get that high risk securities will get you high returns. But hey, do your due dilligence on the matter and understand that its not just your money at stake here. There are countless people who will be affected if you don’t do your job!

Oh one excuses given by the bankers then was, “Oh but we didn’t know that this would happen”. As hard as it is to believe this statement, it still doesn’t justify anything. The reason is is as simple as this: don’t taking and selling high risk securities if you don’t what you are doing. And you know who follows this ethics in real life? Yes, you got it right, an Engineer. It is wrong for an engineer to recommend anything to his client that he is doesn’t have an expertise in, or is unsure of. Does an engineer know if a new design of brake will fail. But hey, if he is not sure, he doesn’t go around selling that until someone testifies. Again, I do realize that it is not as clear-cut black-and-white when it comes to finance, but could you not just warn? Or stop your foolish greedy investments.

So you think only engineer’s duties have lives at stake and banking and finance is immune of it? WRONG! After the meltdown, think of how many have been left without a job or a home. Their lives are severely affected, even though they are not dead. How many died of hunger? The bailout came from taxpayer’s dollars, which has caused a whole new problem of deficiet financing for the Congress. This has led to Congress to cutting programs that provide heating to the homeless and other essential things. How many would perish in the winter?

Sigh. Apologies for the melodrama. But someone has to say this. Bankers, wake up and own up to your mistakes. You don’t deserve those fat paychecks and huge year end bonuses, especially when they come from borrowed money. You should be tried for lack of ethics just like every other person found guilty of lapse of ethics. Although not formally set, there is a need to form a treatise of minimum Financial Ethics that have to followed by any financial instiution. Any deviations from the ethics must reported and duly acted upon. 

It is a funny world, where an Engineer (creator) earns less than a Banker.

You know what, I don’t need to tell you all about the whole system of information overload that going on this world. You know, the whole devour media whenever you can, mobile devices that keep you connected everywhere, carrying your life in a tiny piece of technology that is small than your hand yet you check it the first when you leave your room. You have been told enough by the “internet-is-awesome-and-you-can-find-it-everywhere” bandwagon. The whole reason why you are reading blog is because of the whole overload of content that pretty much permeating your life. 

So why would I mention this whole thing? Two particular reasons for looking for things have emerged. The first is the eternal thirst of getting things right, or as some can call, information. Stuck in a stupid argument about the Barack Obama’s first school? Whip out your cell phone and google it. Don’t know how to install Wireless? Browse through 10 forums and you ll get the answer. We have become efficient fact checkers and finding entertaining stuff online. Not too hard. Extremely fun. Good for everybody?

Well, but there are times when you look for something else. Everyone is looking for a something else and I don’t mean in the sense of finding North Korea on the Map of the world. Most of the time,  they don’t know what it is. It just comes in when you are looking at some stupid video and realize you have wasted too much. Or when you find someone talking about passion and you realize that your life is going nowhere and you need to get some sense out of all the stimulus that is coming in your brain. And because (I believe) we are stuck in finding all answers for facts on the search we begin looking through answers for these questions as well. And it starts a vicious cycle of feeding more information to brain to process to find something that is seeking sense to all influx of information into our head. 

Then begins, for some (myself included), a whole journey of finding people with experiences who are sharing it (mostly for free) and us trying to figure out how it relevant to us. Hence cometh the TED videos, self-help blogs and the whole economy that is counting on you feeling better about yourself. No harm done. Surprisingly beneficial to some. Good for them.

Some call it finding themselves some call it finding your passion, some call it life goal, some call self actualization. I call it clarity. Clarity is the need in us that wishes to see what we are exactly and what path are we leading up to in our lives. It is like a Mum an’ Dad checking up on you ensuring that you aren’t doing anything that ll hurt you, even though it could be slightly mischievous. 

But this is what I am gonna say to clarity. Screw you. I know you are all well intentioned. I seek you and I would love to have you. But guess what, I wanna take a little bit of risk in my life. Instead of looking out, I am going to look a bit in and say, ” Eh, I think I am doing what I feel like and love. In the moment. And I will see where it takes me.”Of course preparation will take you places, but all the places you think you wanna be. But one chance encounter, is all it takes to change your live view. Disagree with me on this? I am fine. Just what I think. I can’t deny preparation would be important, just like 10,000 tries of Edison, but I ll let my luck come like divine inspiration of Tesla’s AC Generator. 

Making big huge changes can be extremely daunting. Trust me I have tried.

Instead, its better to go small, bit-sized actionable piece of advice to get your shit together. 

As a undergraduate in Final Year, I am having hard time getting one. I compiled a little bits of advice I just received to apply for jobs

1. Confused which industry/sector or job type is the best fit for you? 

You don’t want to go through your first job wishing you were working somewhere else. Hence it is important to figure out the best fitting job for your skills and personality. The best way forward is to sit down and think about your skills, interests, achievements, and goals. Making a list of all of them helps in figuring out what kind of job and work environment will be good for you. 

But many times it gets very hard to decide which area or field you should focus on. The sheer number of variables to consider can leave one pretty much clueless. If you are lucky, you would dig something out from the internships you have done or projects you have taken. But for the rest of us, it is kind of hard to really make that choice from the 3-4 years College Experience (trust me from where I stand, it doesn’t seem that expansive). In that case, 

2. Consider asking your close friends. 

Ask about 4 -5 friends from different groups to get a good mix of opinions. Your close friends have a surprisingly good grasp of your traits than you think, and even if you don’t seek to follow it is good to just hear an honest opinion of your self.

Make sure to ask them about 

1. Your Strengths
2. Weaknesses
3. Most suitable job roles for your personality
4. Any person/contact in the role you like.

3. Keep an excel sheet of all the places you have applied to

While you are looking for job especially in your final year, you will apply to so many places that you yourself will not be able to keep a track of all them. 

An excel sheet to keep a track of all that, is an AWESOME idea. Apart from the company and position, make sure you write 

1. the date you applied to, 
2. date you plan to  follow up,
3. Date of Interview
4. Status of application

So to get started on it 

1. Start making the lists in point 1 NOW. If you are too busy then set aside some reflection to make the lists. 
2. Call, SMS, email, your close friends (more than 2) to meet them to discuss this. 
3. Start that excel sheet right away. 

If you are successful in getting anywhere, I will be more than happy to hear about.