Another Perspective on Stability

Stability in our lives is something that most of us intuitively seek out. Mr. Kukunoor, it turns out, has a very different perspective on stability.

Nagesh Kukunoor was a featured speaker in IIT Madras at this year's Saarang festival (2011). He narrated the story of how he came into movie making. He was working in Atlanta, GA, as an environmental consultant, leading a comfortable life. However, he harbored this lifelong desire to make movies though he had no training in it whatsoever. Mustering up courage he quit his US job, sold off all his stuff and moved in with his parents in Hyderabad, India. Using his own savings and his credit cards, and with a lot of assistance from both his parents he wrote and shot the movie "Hyderabad Blues." After starting out slow, the movie really caught on and Nagesh Kukunoor made a name for himself as a director.

Based on his own experience, Nagesh Kukunoor came to believe that stability (and the comfort that a regular paycheck brings) works actively against those who want to pursue their passions. He believed in this so strongly that he named his own production company SIC – which stands for Stability Is a Curse. He has gone on to make around a dozen movies under this banner.


PS – In that talk, Nagesh also narrated the story of trying to get Hyderabad Blues sold. India's Star TV expressed interest in the movie. Nagesh who had run out of money once the movie was made, and was headed back to the US asked for Rs. 2 lakh, which is quite a small sum. But Star TV refused to pay that and Nagesh dropped the asking price to Rs. 1 lakh. The network again refused and in desperation Nagesh said he'd settle for 0.5 lakh. The network wouldn't even pay that. In the next few weeks, the movie got picked up by a couple of international film festivals. Within months, Star TV came knocking and paid Nagesh Rs. 50 lakh (100 times his last asking price) for the rights to broadcast it.

RetiredSyd's "Most Enjoyed in 2010" List

When I read Sydney's blog, Retirement – A Full Time job, it often feels as if I am reading my own thinking. In her clear manner, she explores the same topics that I am intrigued by. She was recently interviewed by NPR, and has a blog in US News called On Retirement.

Here is her response to my post request – her list of the things she has most enjoyed in 2010.

Sydney's Most Enjoyed in 2010 List:

1) Baby Luca (after my friend suffered several heartbreaking miscarriages, her dreams finally came true),
2) A month in Manhattan on a home swap (and in particular, learning to love baseball with my husband at Yankee's Stadium),
3) And just in time to watch our own SF Giants win the World Series!
4) Enjoying three trips to Las Vegas with incredible friends (and icing on the cake, coming out a few hundred dollars ahead)
5) Knowing that 30 million uninsured Americans will be able to get health coverage,
6) The chance to meet wonderful new readers through an opportunity to blog for U.S. News,
7) Enjoying a little part-time work for fun people that I admire,
8) Ram's link to HBR's "How Will You Measure Your Life?" That article made a huge impact on me.

Sydney

If any of you do create your own list, do send me a copy and I will be happy to post it here.

Related Post:
Requesting your "Best of 2010" List

A Proxy for Growth

[Written in April 2010, just prior to leaving India]

Looking back at this last year spent in India, it often seems like I haven’t grown at all. I had the time to do anything I wanted.

As a small consolation, I did attempt to answer one question:
Who am I if all the usual parameters that define me were taken away– things like my job, my home and my home town?

In my reading, I came across a phrase that I liked – "loosed of all moorings" and I jotted it down. So who are we when we are loosed of all moorings?

In my case, I chose to visit India and spend time in different cities to learn the answers. In ways that I couldn’t have anticipated, this past year has been a time of renewal, of stock-taking.

Most of the changes that occurred have happened inside my head, in my thinking. At one point or another, everything seems to have changed, at least a little. My idea of what work should be like, the reasons for working at all, of who is family and of who my friends are, of where my home is when I don't have a "base" anywhere to return to, of where my roots are (is it geography or the ideas that I align with?), and of my constantly evolving ideas on volunteering and service to community.

One thing has been common in all of this -- I have had to re-evaluate all of these beliefs. First, I had to admit to myself that my thinking was full of stereotypes, and then to try to work my way past these stereotypes and "borrowed values" that I have been carrying around for years.

Perhaps that is growth.

HBR: Measuring One's Life

It is difficult to resist an article that is titled "How will you measure your Life?" Especially if the writer is a Harvard Business School professor. In addressing the class of 2010, Prof. Christensen lays down three important questions and proceeds to logically tackle them one by one.

[...] To find cogent answers to three questions: First, how can I be sure that I’ll be happy in my career? Second, how can I be sure that my relationships with my spouse and my family become an enduring source of happiness? Third, how can I be sure I’ll stay out of jail?

I especially liked his "allocation of resources" section, where he suggests that we think about using our limited resources (personal time and energy) to shape our life strategy. This is where I repeatedly slip up – by spending way too much time on things of little import.

Because of the author's faith, the article has undertones of religion. But for those of us who consider ourselves secular, the message is still the same. Overall, well worth reading and passing on to others.

Related Posts:

• Traits of a Rich Life
• Retirement Inspiration from Steve Jobs?

Embracing the Paradoxes

On some days, this whole experiment of buying time at the cost of many other things feels light and fun, but on other days it seems to be a serious undertaking. Gretchen Rubin, in her book 'The Happiness Project' verbalizes the paradoxes I feel really well.

"I kept running up against paradoxes. I wanted to change myself but accept myself. I wanted to take myself less seriously – and also more seriously. I wanted to use my time well, but I also wanted to wander, to play, to read at whim. I wanted to think about myself so I could forget myself. I was always on the edge of agitation; I wanted to let go of envy and anxiety about the future, yet keep my energy and ambition."

Gretchen in her blog has a post on the Paradoxes of her Happiness Project.

I am a sucker for 'Happiness' books. Gretchen Rubin, in her book, takes a simple concept (one full year of trying out different happiness-boosting techniques) but writes it in a memoir and slice-of-life style to produce a highly engrossing organic narrative. The book succeeds because she hasn’t let the structure come in the way of her story.

Even though I have only started the book, I highly recommend it to those interested in the subject.

Traits of a Rich Life

Cal Newport, in his post, points to previous research as identifying three traits that must exist for a person to feel that they have a rich life.

Thirty years of research has identified the following three traits to be crucial if you want a rich life:
· Autonomy — control over how you fill your time.
· Competence – mastering unambiguously useful things.
· Relatedness — feeling of connection to others.

My mnemonic is ARC (Autonomy, Relatedness and Competence) for these three. Looking back now, I can see that a big reason I left my job was my perceived lack of autonomy. I did have the freedom to pretty much choose my own projects, but I still had to show up and be there for long hours, and that tied me down in many ways.

Just one small caveat that a list of this kind shouldn’t be taken as the final word – several other traits can also be included and it will still sound like a very logical ingredient for a rich life.

What I like about these three in particular (ARC) is that we can choose to work on supplementing whichever trait we feel is lacking in our lives.

Related Post: The Competence Trap

The Right Time for the Roses

I am finally learning to slow down, sometimes. It's taken me a year and a half to get here. It seems that the achievement imperative is very deeply inscribed in our psyches. We are so well programmed to get things done, to be productive, that it is not at all easy to fritter away time and not feel guilty about it.

But because these days I have the time, occasionally, I will nurse a cup of coffee (15 minutes), will read an issue of Time from cover to cover (2 hours), or read a book slowly (several days).

One consequence of this slowing down is that it often seems to me that my friends and acquaintances are not taking the time to savor things. I know why this is, of course. They cannot afford to be indulgent because they are busy being good citizens, diligent workers and responsible parents.

And I am not sure that I should be asking others to slow down. Because it is not clear to me how things will eventually end up. It is very likely that while I stopped mid-career to smell the roses, my diligent but harried friends are the ones who come out smelling like roses.

And I would have to end up paying for being so indulgent. So I might have to end up paying for it one way or another – perhaps with a very low standard of living later on, or perhaps by having to work in my advanced years, or in other ways that I don't even know today.

Years from now, when my time to pay up comes, I hope I do so without self-pity. Not grudgingly but gracefully, accepting that I might have been too fast in my eagerness to slow things down.

So How Will this Experiment End?

A good experimenter does not pre-suppose results. The job is to observe carefully, record the observations unaltered and only later retro-fit theories that explain the results obtained.

But what works in science doesn't always work cleanly in the human sphere. So how do I think this "experiment in retirement" will end?

I suspect that sooner or later, I might revert back to a corporate life, with earnest promises to myself "to never forget the many lessons learned." And to everyone who asks about my time off, I will tell them that "I won't give up that experience for anything."

Whether I will say that because I really believe it or because none of us likes to admit failure in any endeavor, I really don't know.

For now, I am enjoying the time immensely. The experiment goes on.

What are these posts about?

The title of this blog is not accurate. It is difficult to be accurate while also being succinct.

When I was setting up this blog, I couldn’t possibly name it "An Attempt to Give Up A Regular 9-5 Corporate Job In Order to Obtain Lots Of Free Time, Pursue Leisure and To Get By with Occasional Paid Gigs." So, I went with something reasonably catchy.

But I hardly ever use the word "retirement" in conversations with respect to myself. I now feel that the words 'retirement' or even 'sabbatical' are too blunt for what I am attempting to do.

When I look at what ties the posts in this blog, I see two of my obsessions recurring.
They are 1) Financial independence and 2) Getting free time.

Actually, even those two are not very accurate. What I am really interested in is getting to choose how I spend my time (autonomy over time). And for most of us, that is only possible if we take care of the money question. In this blog, financial independence is narrowed down to 'freedom from dependence on a monthly paycheck.' So these are the two central underlying themes that I post about.

Staying Sharp: One of my big fears is that an unexercised brain will quickly go to mush. As our world gets increasingly complex, I especially worry about how I will stay sharp. Under the broad label of intellectual stimulation I post about puzzles and games.

Getting inspired by those who are trying very different lifestyles: I am fascinated by people who are trying out unconventional things, shunning traditional routes. Since we can't all try everything out, we have to learn from others who are trying to move off the conventional grid in small and big ways, and maybe find a few aspects to incorporate into our own lives. So I sometimes post about that.

The specifics of how each one of us can get away from a dependence on a monthly paycheck varies from person to person. So my posts are about a few basic financial guidelines and also about my situation.

I also wouldn’t presume to tell others what to do with the free time once they get it.

But why is getting autonomy over time so important?

Because deep down I believe that if all my friends and all the readers of this blog get autonomy over time (full control over how they choose to spend their time), each one will eventually get around to "doing good." Sure, the definition of doing good in society will vary for each of us. Doing good, as I repeatedly find, is actually not straightforward, and I sometimes post about that.

Staying sharp, and learning from others about how to get control over our time so that we can perhaps do a little good.

These are the things I post about.

The Data Driven Life - The emerging self-tracking movement

"One of the reasons that self-tracking is spreading widely beyond the technical culture that gave birth to it is that we all have at least an inkling of what’s going on out there in the cloud. Our search history, friend networks and status updates allow us to be analyzed by machines in ways we can’t always anticipate or control. It’s natural that we would want to reclaim some of this power: to look outward to the cloud, as well as inward toward the psyche, in our quest to figure ourselves out."

This is from an article in The New York Times by Wired's Gary Wolf. I do a bit of self-tracking myself, but the people mentioned in this article take it to the limit. Ben Lipkowitz's life-logging project logs everything he's done in the last 5 years in categories. People are tracking time in 2-minute segments, tracking every idea one has had in the last decade, tracking their physical location using GPS. This is way beyond what we would normally see in Facebook entries and on Twitter. Looks like we have a whole new field of data analytics emerging.

I track things in the hope that I can analyze the data some day in the future and perhaps learn things about myself. I had no idea that there were so many other self-trackers, and these people are obsessed. Check out the fascinating article.

Creating a “Year In Review” document

For over 10 years now, in early January of each year I create a “Year in Review” document about the year that just got over. I have shared bits and pieces of it with a few others, but I primarily write it for myself.

For 2009, you should definitely try and create a similar document for yourself.

Back in 1998, when I started to feel that the days were just running together and that all the years were getting “stapled together” as one, I started creating these personal Year In Review documents.

Whenever I have read my review documents a few years after they were typed up, I have always come away learning something and invariably being surprised about how faulty my memory is. I can’t be sure, but I do believe that these documents have subconsciously helped me to change course.

My review document is 1 to 3 pages long. Here are some of the “easier” categories to include in a Year in Review. A few sentences each about:
Your family: Additions/losses/get-togethers in 2009
Professional: Your job, your bosses, close colleagues, key projects, conferences, skills learned in 2009, kudos received that you are proud of.
Travel: Where all did you manage to go, what’s still at the top of your “must visit” list.
Personal Finance: How you feel about your earning, savings and expenditure. Any investments you tried, their results and what you hope to do in the coming year.
People: Who did you meet and spend time with this year? People who influenced your thinking and who had an impact on you.
Entertainment/Arts: Books read, movies that had an impact, music concerts attended, songs and albums that you got.

And then there are categories that I make up. Personal projects (and hobbies), new things I get temporarily addicted to, volunteering attempts etc. Often I include new internet sites that I discovered and spent time on that year. (For example, this year I am including a section on TED Talks because they were such an important part of my life in 2009.) Since mine is a Word document, I sometimes include a few photos. I have also started adding things that I was disappointed with about myself in the year gone by.

This document is not at all like the “Annual Performance Report” that we create at work for our annual review with our supervisor, where we play up everything. Your Year in Review is just for your eyes.

Give it a try. You might enjoy writing it more than you initially think.

Ten years from now, around 2020 or so, when you look back at your 2009 list you will be thanking yourself. Creating a “Year in review” is a gift that you give to your future self.