The Death and Rebirth of Blogging

Look, I'll be very frank with you. Most of us never really had any patience for blogging. That is why you see more people wasting time on facebook and twitter than people on Blogger or Wordpress. Why? Because twitter and facebook are relatively easy to manage, the reward is instantaneous and hey, if your tweet or fb post bombs, you can always write another one.

Blogging was never meant to fight with these new mediums of expression/validation or whatever you might want to call them. Blogging is something different. It's something you do out of love, it's something you do because it feeds your soul. You might or might not seek validation or approval from others, but it's mostly because you feel you want to say something and you feel that it's important.

Blogging is not inane like a silly tweet about breakfast or dinner, because it takes some amount of effort, time and gumption to write a post. Hey, even if it is a post on a teenager's blog with meandering thoughts or rambling something in the title, that shit took more effort than a tweet and for that reason alone, I'd go and read it.

About death of blogging

As it goes on the internet, blogging as an activity dies about three times every year. You can google the phrase and you'll get countless hits that blogging is dead and tweeting or facebook-ing or pinning pictures is the new shit. I beg to disagree. Blogging can never really die, it just goes to sleep, maybe and wakes up again. I like to think of it as ebb and flow of a tide. Things happen and when those things cannot be expressed in 140 characters or the confines of a facebook post, people blog. Whether those things are personal or on a larger scale, they make people think, they make people move their fingers on their keyboards like lazy spiders, but shit happens and shit gets posted.

There are still people out there who are much more busier than you or me, plus many of our friends combined, but they still find time to write a blog daily. Seth Godin, James Altucher and many others, you can look them up.

So, here's something I am going to try. I am going to put an alarm on my phone for 10 PM and I'll write a blog every day that alarm rings.

I don't know what it will be about, but it will be about something. 

21 Reasons Why I Hate Facebook

1. People lie on facebook...
2. ...a lot
3. Comment trees with irrelevant discussions that you get notified for. WHY!
4. People tagging people who are not in picture. WTF, why?
5. Couples posting PDA messages to each other. Ugh
6. Marriage pics where no one invited you or you didn't go.
7. Honeymoon pics. Why should anyone else give a fuck about your honeymoon?
8. Baby pics suck, cuz only a mother can love that face
9. Vacation pics! Yeah, you went on a vacation, stop showing off!
10. People checking in at different shitty places
11. People pimping their blogs on Facebook
12. People pimping their business on Facebook
13. People pimping their political opinions on Facebook
14. People sending game requests for a game you played only once
15. People posting three year old jokes to appear witty
16. Advertisements that look like posts from your friends
17. Chat. If I wanted to talk to you, I'll do that in person.
18. The stalkers liking pictures from 2009. DA FUCK?
19. Strange privacy options that you just can't figure out
20. People asking for Likes on their whatever pics
21. People asking why you unfriended them when you meet them in real life

I just looked over these reasons and realized that I hate all kinds of things that people do on Facebook. 

I am off to delete my account.

Fuck facebook

Rubik's Cube - Lessons I've learned.

I got my first cube in 1997. 

I remember the thing very clearly in my head. It had white skeleton and the pieces were of different colors than a regular cube. One of the sides was pink! When I got to play with an actual, official Rubik's Cube, there was no pink side to it. I played with that cube in 1997 and finally managed to solve one of the sides. 

It was a big achievement for me cuz I was a just heading into teenage and no one in my friend circle had even seen a Rubik's Cube, let alone solve it completely. I finally broke that cube by rotating it too much and then I learned to put it back together again. I put back all the pieces in all the right places and then I had a completely solved cube, but of course, I knew I had not done it the way it should've been done.

I bought more cubes over the years, cheap copies that had screws in them, that got stiff and then broke apart in pieces if I rotated them too much. I bought small 2x2 cubes that were attached to keychains, and I bought a jumbo cube that was bigger than a coffee mug. I tried them all, and I couldn't solve it. 

By that time, we were all on the internet, and I tried looking up solutions online, but I never had the patience to sit quietly, read everything and try out the solutions. I always had an unsolved cube in my house that I spun few times every month or so, but I never solved it. I wanted to feel that pride of solving the cube on my own without looking at any guide or online solutions. That pride held me back and I still had an unsolved cube in my possession.

The WHY of it is really funny, and now that I have had some free time in my head, I've given it some thought. The wanting to solve it was not enough. The feeling of wanting to be proud for solving it was not enough. 

The excuses that I gave myself were not the results that I wanted to see. So I finally opened the guide that I had downloaded years ago, and gave it a read through. I applied the moves given in the guide and voila, solved cube. 

Now all that remains is to learn those moves so that I can finally solve the cube without looking at any kind of guide. There are three things that I learned from all this.

1) You have to give up the pride.

2) You have to take help from where you can.

3) Your actions have multiple consequences.

Right now, I have a solved cube and there is still a slight feeling of unrest in my head. Because as they say, it's never about the destination, but it's about the journey and there are many more journeys ahead...

and here is a Rubik's Cube Solution Guide if you're looking for one

PDF link, right click and choose save as.

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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