Playing Candy Crush Taught Me All This

Do you know what Candy Crush Saga is? Yes? Good.

For those who have been living under a rock, it is an addictive game, where you join three/four/five shapes of similar colors and complete certain objectives in the game. 

Right now there are some 400 levels of the game, and the game is huge in terms of the money it is earning and also in terms of its reach. 

Every time I am in Delhi metro, I see people leaning against doors or sitting with their phones or tablets in their hands, playing Candy Crush, going through the levels again and again. 

It is a brilliant time killer, and if not checked, it can be an equally brilliant time waster, too. There is a lot that creative individuals like you can learn from the game, and apply those principles to maybe become better at what you are doing and what you want to do. So, what are these principles?

Patterns

Success in Candy Crush largely depends on seeing and recognizing the repeating patterns on the screen, predicting them, and creating situations so that the patterns are in your favor. 

And this, is easily applicable to anything in life. From business to relationships, if you look around, human behavior is pretty predictable. Some people will never listen to you, others will latch on to every word you say. Knowing how people behave in patterns, is the key. This is how people predict the future.

Connections 

Connections are the currency to success in Candy Crush and in real life too. And it's a very give and take kind of relationship. You send lives to your Facebook friends and they'll send lives to you. 

Heck, they'll even help you out when you're stuck at intermediate levels. Similarly, help enough people in real world, and sooner or later, help will come back to you when you need it the most.

Habits 

What is the one thing that you want to do every day? If there is no luck factor involved (lot of luck factor in Candy Crush, though) in it, you cannot help but get better at that activity. 

Example: your mom can definitely cook better food than anyone else in your house. Why? Cuz she has cooked for almost every day of her life, probably three times a day and she can't help but be awesome at it. So, decide what you want to do, and then do it. On repeat. Even if you suck at it at first, if you do it every day, you'll get better. 

Giving Up is NOT an option:

Yup, the Level 65 of Candy Crush is a bitch. I spent almost a month at that level when I was playing that and through that time, all I could think of was, when can I get back to my tab and play that level again. 

So, whatever you're doing in life, don't give up before you've tried absolutely to the point of failure. And the only real failure is giving up, which, is not an option. Because, whatever it is, people before you have done and people after you will do it again. And, as I said in point A, it's all about patterns.

These are just some of the things that I can think of right now about the game and life, I am sure you can think of more comparisons.

The gist here is that you can find life lessons and inspirations from even shitty, irritating, potentially useless things like mobile games that are just time killers.

How you view the world is up to you.

Five Things to Consider Before Quitting Your Job

Short version of this post: Do you want to quit your job? Then do it. Seriously, don't think too much about it, if the thought has come in your mind for one or the other reason, there is no point in really hanging around. You can do a lot of things once you're out of the job. Or you can sit at home and be a Twitter troll (which is just slightly worse than being jobless)

Now, most people think of being jobless as without work, because given the state of our society, job=work. 

Which is absolutely fucking wrong. 

On your job, you're working for someone else, you are hired for your skills and time while you grow older and more cynical, stuck in a comfort zone of things.

But let's assume for a minute that you've decided to quit your job, and you want to plan it out properly like the cool fox that you are. Here are the things you need to do in this specific order.

1) Take your parents and your significant other in confidence. This is very India specific. Unfortunately, we live in this kind of society where your neighborhood aunties and relatives are more concerned with what you're doing or not doing than you might be. If you're going to be jobless, these are the two parties on which you might have to depend if things go belly up. So, better to have their complete support before you put in your papers.

2) Figure out your monthly expenses. Seriously, pick a piece of paper and pen, and write down every repeating monthly expense. This can include rent, internet bills, newspaper bills, commute expenses, daru/chicken/cigarette/drug expenses, book buying expenses, and anything else that is specific to your lifestyle. Arrive at a basic monthly figure of money and multiply it by the number of months you intend to chill the fuck out and not earn any money.

3) Learn to Live like a Monk. Monks are cool, serious people who do not fuck around when it comes to minimization of expenses and their impact on everything. Though, I have seen modern monks with Macs and iPhones, chugging Red Bull in posh Delhi malls, we are not trying to be those kind of monks. We want to be monks that don't splurge and spend money whenever they have some free fucking time to browse flipkart. Seriously, online shopping is satanic. People don't realize, but they end up spending shit loads of money. Learn to avoid buying shit from your debit/credit card. Learn to use cash only. Money management is the only way to do okay in the months where there is no cash inflow, only outflow. Money the price you pay for chilling out. No free lunches in life.

4) Decide what you want to do with an eye on the future. None of us know what the future is going to bring, but preparing for the intended outcomes in mind never hurts. So prepare for things you want to do before you quit your job. You want to write a book in break time? Start writing and looking for publishers. You want to study further, figure out the universities you want to apply to. You want to learn a language, how are you going to do that. Break time is not really break time, it's serious time where you finally are the master of your own time, so figure out what you want to do and how you're going to do it, the break time is for doing things, not figuring out anything.

5) Jobless is not workless. I am going to give you a new word: workmore. Yes, that's one word and I just made it up because I don't give a fuck. You're going to have to workmore in order to maintain your chill and your level of freedom that you get in your time away from slavery. Your job is not work and the work you do is not a job. Get into that mental state of thinking where you are able to look at different money acquiring opportunities and work on them. 

Remember, no one became great by sitting their ass in a comfortable chair in an air conditioned office. A job will not make you great. Doing great things will make you great. If you do great things at your job, your colleagues, managers, or your boss is going to take the lion's share of credit. 

And the bitter truth is that, if you're going to be without a job, it is going to be difficult. Go into this mentally prepared, unless you've got amazing amounts of cash hoarded away or you're extremely shameless, being jobless is never an easy task. So, be shameless, too. That's awesome in its own way.

Oh, and if you fail in all your efforts, there is always the option of doing another job. If they ask you what you were doing in the break months, say you were soul searching or learning new skills. Whatever, doesn't really matter.

I don't know wtf i am going to talk about in my next post, maybe how to get a job. 

haha

Is this insomnia?

There is a brilliant Megadeth song called Insomnia. While Dave was writing that song, he visited medical classes to learn more about the disorder and there he learned that insomnia is not the inability to fall asleep, but the inability to stay asleep. A person with insomnia might wake up up to ten times a night. 

Or something like that. You can look it up, the story is out there on the Internet. 

In Fight Club, our humble narrator also suffers from insomnia and spends his nights ordering shit he doesn't need from late night television shopping networks. Palahniuk does a really great job of describing the physical as well as mental condition of someone who is suffering from insomnia. There is a certain beauty to it. 

I should've been asleep now but I'm writing this on my phone. I just realized that the text on this app doesn't scroll as you type under the keyboard. Feature bug? I don't care. 

I'm still in delhi and I am slowly accepting the fact that I might have to be here for the coming considerable time. I don't have to like it, though. But I guess if I hate this city a bit less, it can be helpful. 

It's funny that no matter how old you grow and however much experience you have in dealing with shit, there is always new shit that you can learn. 

Anyway, I hope that I am not an insomniac. Sounds cool, but sucks to be one. 

Does your name suck?

I tweeted something about names yesterday. How our primary name that is on all documents and that is almost everything that we associate ourselves with. It's a pretty fucking important sequence of words and sounds. Right, it is 'almost' the only thing constant and consistent from the moment we're named to the moment we take our last breath.

So, your name, is pretty fucking important. Now consider this: you had no fucking say in choosing your name. What if your parents secretly hated you and gave you a shitty name? What if they were not as creative as you are, and they gave you a run of the mill name? What if the pandit who chose the first letter of your name from some ancient book was fucked out of hit wits on some drugs?

All I am saying here that it is pretty much possible that you got a raw deal when it comes to the most important word in your life; your name.

This is the reason why many people go for a name change later in life, because they know and understand that they got a rough deal here. Now, going for a name change comes with its share of problems. All the documents address you with your old name and people know you with your old name. I mean, one day you're a Neha or a Gaurav and the next day you tell people that your name is Azifucktooth or Bhambarbhoosa. That just doesn't scan, right?

I think we should be allowed different names for different games. For school, maybe kids can have some shitty studious name, but for their college years, something cool and awesome and for their office years when they've to be all responsible and shit, they should have some responsible name. Right? I don't know.

What do you think? You wanna change you name? huh? Really? What would your cool name be?

Game of Emotions, Two iPhones and Moaning on Twitter.

There is no power in the house right now because some electricity department dudes are messing with the wires in the street and power would probably be out for another hour or so. After messing around for the previous hour, I wanted to do something that looked or felt like work, so I finally got the table out, got a chair and here I am writing this. I'll post this once the power comes back and the Wi-Fi is back on.

I've been bitching and moaning on twitter about n number of things. Because it's kinda fun to do so and you also find out that there are other bastards who have it worse than you. For every person posting a picture of their latest phone, there are two who are using dumb phones to access twitter through dabr or something even lower than that.

But the real addiction is when you start posting tweets through SMS. When you don't care about your phone bill or remaining balance, but you just *have* to get those thoughts out. How bad can it be?

Why not get a diary and write it all down? Because, there is no audience for a diary. There is an audience for tweets. Of course, twitter is a game of audience. I have a spare twitter account that is followed by 29 bots. I sometimes tweet from that account. Now, I am the same, my thoughts are the same, but it's not as much fun as tweeting from an account that is followed by some 5k people. Eyeballs, attention, hate, love, emotions, it's all a game of emotions. Everything is about emotions. Once you understand that, you can explain anything.

If you scanned through my twitter page, you'd find out that I moan and complain about certain things on repeat and it's all related to my laziness. No job, which is evident as I've put jobless with my handle. I write that in my bio, too.

I often moan about how I have not one, but *two* 3GS phones. It's slightly interesting how these two came in my possession, I've been meaning to do a post about them from quite some time. Maybe next post will be it. Another common gripe that I have is apps not compatible with iOS6. It's all related. All realted to my laziness. But the good thing is that sooner or later, I'll be forced to get out of the lazy mode and get cracking and working on things that need working and I like to believe that right now I am heading towards that work-zone, even if its baby steps and not a sprint. I'll get there.

Now, before I started writing this post, I wrote down a list of ten things that I need to do. So, I have something to keep me busy in the coming days. Yup, that's really about it. Just a general update and thoughts about things.

It's Women's Day today, why it is so, I don't know. If anyone knows, enlighten me on twitter @69fubar

Image from the oatmeal dot com

funnier than my blog, yeah

Cubicle Monkey in a Rat Race

At times , realizations hit you all of a sudden. 

It's not a gradual process like getting fat, guess that's why they are called sudden realizations. There is nothing like a gradual realization because those are not fun either. 

You can see those coming from miles away. 

I had a sudden realization this morning. Which was this: as I don't have a job anymore, I'm not a part of the rat race. 

I go out of house and I see people of my age, losing their hair, their health, their mental peace over what? Money? A fake sense of stability? Some kind of bragging rights over their friends? 

If it's about making money, then doing a job is a lazy fucking way to go about it. There is no stability in any kind of job either. Your boss can fire you at any moment. 

It took me seven years to realize this. 

Why? Because I was fucking stupid and in many ways I still am. 

When you're doing a job, you're not making money. You're getting paid a set amount for your skills. Your boss is the one making increasing amount of money from your hard work, time and efforts. Your boss is making money by leveraging your mental well being, your youth, and everything good you have. 

For real. 

And you're supposed to be thankful for that? Are heart problems in your early thirties worth any amount of money? Is losing your fucking hair worth a promotion? Is dying early worth any xyz types of words before your name? If you say yes, then let me pay you whatever money you want and let me just kill you right now. Right? Because that's what you're doing to yourself, but in a gradual manner and when your sudden realization hits you, it just might be too late. 

I hope these words raise questions in your mind. Because for all I know, I might end up doing a job whenever my money runs out and whenever I come back to read this post, I should and must feel like putting in my papers. 

Consider this my timebomb to myself. 

I fucking hate cubicles

just another story