The Need for an Affiliation

Here's a practical tip for those who are seriously considering quitting their jobs and trying other things for a while.

Not long ago, I was telling my friend SR about the difficulty I was having in responding when people asked me what I did. "So what do you do?" they'd ask and I would stumble and dance around in trying to give a clear answer. I also began to notice that my "Profession" gets asked in practically every form I filled out.

Often, saying "I don't have a job" or "I'm on a sabbatical" or "I'm just taking it easy for a while" is not appropriate. It also invariably leads to more questions that I might not be in a mood to entertain.

When my friend heard this, he said, "Man, what you really need is an affiliation. I fully get what you are trying to do, but an affiliation is very important in this society."

With each passing week, I saw that he was absolutely right. When responding to the what-I-do question I began to notice that I was always associating myself with some group or profession. I would tell some people that I was a freelancer or a part-time consultant or a volunteer. All of these were true but I was implying a greater affiliation than there actually was. Not because I wanted to lie or mislead, but mostly to stave off questions.

So here's my tip: Before you quit, and if at all possible, make sure that you still keep some professional affiliation going. Offering to volunteer (where you see ways you can add value) is the best way I know of to gain affiliations. It doesn’t have to pay, or be full time, but it will certainly make your transition a little smoother.

Skills for the survival of the civilization

Back when I was in grad school and a teaching assistant, my students would demand why they had to study "useless things which they'd never use anyway." I used to wonder about this myself sometimes and so I never had a good response.

Recently, in an welcome address by a professor, I heard something that I wish I had heard years back. It would have certainly given me a perspective I didn't have when in college. Let me explain.

As a student in engineering college, I had several courses where I had to learn esoteric things that I knew I would never ever even remotely use in my professional life. So why were they insisting that these things be included in the syllabus?

The best explanation that I could come up with was that in an attempt to make better engineers out of us, our engineering college was teaching us "problem solving." I told myself that even though we wouldn’t use the exact thing being taught, we were becoming better problem solvers. But that explanation always rang false and was never quite satisfactory.

Prof. M S Ananth of IIT Madras was giving a welcome address to a group of professors who were attending a workshop on NPTEL, the program I volunteer at.

He said that people should realize that there are two types of skills. One set is the skills needed for the survival of the individual. Vocational training institutions do a very good job of teaching these, and we can all readily see the value in these skills, because they help us earn a living.

The other set, he said, are skills for the survival of the civilization. These are equally important and shouldn’t be neglected. He felt that institutions of higher learning shouldn’t waver from teaching these skills. And those of us who are learners or researchers, no matter what our field is, should have faith that we are adding to this skill set in incremental amounts and continue our work.

Skills that are needed for the survival of the civilization – I had never heard it phrased quite that way. Wish I had heard this 20 years earlier.

Movable Feasts – A Behind the Scenes look

Managing the kitchen has been an interesting experience when moving from city to city every couple of months. A few people have asked me how we manage the cooking part. We do eat out frequently, but we mostly cook our meals. We can't eat out 3 meals a day, every day.

Back in our apartment in Chicago, we had lots of utensils and kitchen appliances. Since we are now restricted by luggage that we can carry by ourselves, we move around with a very limited amount of utensils. Our kitchen stuff fills about half of one suitcase.

We are forced to be very strict with what we can cart around: 2 dinner plates, 4 bowls, 2 cups and a few spoons. (It is sort of like what they hand you at the start of a week-long Zen retreat, or like going camping, but for a really extended period of time.) We have one small pressure cooker, 1 frying pan, a few stainless vessels, a knife and one flat griddle for dosas, and a few more microwavable plastic takeaway containers for heating and storing.

There's pretty much a checklist for the items in our first grocery shopping in each new place – rice, sugar, salt, cooking oil, instant coffee and a few ready mixes to start things off. We carry a small bag of spices which we refill as needed. Fresh vegetables are plentiful in India. We started out managing with long-life UHT milk cartons, but there's enough competition among milk vendors so now we get milk packets delivered to our door each morning.

What we now have is surely much less than 20% of what we once had in our kitchen. And what has been a revelation to me is that we are managing quite fine. I don’t feel the lack of those other things except on rare occasions. If we desire something fancy, we have to eat out. We have even hosted dinners for others (with some borrowed vessels and cutlery).

We are very Spartan about adding to our kitchen acquisitions now, which implies that we must have been inefficient before, buying lots of redundant stuff.

And the big lesson (to me) is that cutting back and adjusting to a having a simplified kitchen has not been as difficult as it once seemed from the outside. You just have to be mentally prepared.

Short Stay Rentals

We're now in Indore, having completed our stint in Chennai. The plan is to stay here for around 1.5 to 2 months.

In Indore, we wanted a furnished place to stay in. We tried to find something in Indore from Chennai, but nothing was working out. However, on our first day here, we learned of a furnished apartment. A couple, who are distant relatives of a distant relative were visiting their son in Singapore and we could rent their 2 bedroom apartment. And it worked out. So this is the fourth city where we were fortunate enough to be able to find short-term accommodation.

As someone who cares about optimized resource utilization, it occurs to me that there must be 1000s of such homes and apartments that are kept locked up and being under-utilized. At the same time, there is a decent sized demand for these apartments. Someone should be able to figure out a way to tap into this and create a marketplace.

GatesNotes - A site worth visiting

I recently found out about this site – TheGatesNotes. In it, Bill Gates shares the things he’s reading, viewing, working on and thinking about. It is sort of like a blog, but it has a lot more material.

The whole site is very aesthetically laid out – with his travels, his reading and even several of his conversations shared with the readers.

Under the title “What I’m learning” I found out about The Teaching Company. Bill Gates endorses them with very high words of praise. I plan to check out the “Big History” course and the two economics courses he mentions when I get to the US later this year.

We live in good times, where a good majority of the readers of this blog can have access to the same materials (books, CDs, DVD’s) that the richest of the rich also consume.

On the 5th of Feb, he has posted another article about The Teaching company.

Do take a look at the GatesNotes site and see if anything appeals to you.

Thanks to Nandita P. for the pointer.

Link: Planning Out Your Year in Detail

This is related to the previous post about creating a year-in-review document.

Charles Kirk of "The Kirk Report" has written about the importance of taking the time to plan out the coming year. He is a trader and writes from that point of view, but I could relate to everything in the post. (Most of us only have vague hopes for what we'd like to happen this year.) His is a much more rigorous approach, in a post titled: Create A Vision For Your Life.

Thanks to Kalyan for the pointer.

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.