Are you lucky enough to be lucky?

Having a hard luck is one excuse that we all give when we fail to do something in life; whereas we just forget to appreciate our good luck when we succeed. Can luck really be good or bad? There have been numerous debates over the sheer existence of luck. I believe, there are two types of people when it comes to believing in luck - the ones who do, and the ones who don't.

Successful people deny its existence, as they believe you can create your own luck and guide your destiny. Whereas the not-so-fortunate say - luck is all what it takes to be successful. When a person wins a lottery or a jackpot at a casino in Las Vegas we say " She just got lucky!". But when another person wins the World Championship in boxing we say it's her talent that helped her win. Why does the boxer's luck not come in the focus then? Successful individuals are masters of seizing the opportunities but isn't it their luck that provides them these opportunities, to begin with?

Once Harsha Bhogle an adept Indian cricketer and an extraordinary cricket commentator described the difference between Talent Vs Attitude in his address to students of IIM-Ahmedabad. He spoke about an example which really amazed me - that of a footballer and her talent. He described a footballer who plays the role of a striker(a forward on a soccer team) in her team. She waits patiently for her co-players to pass the ball to her and has very little time to convert it into a goal(sometimes just a single kick has to do the magic!). She keeps adjusting her positions throughout the match so that she is present at the right place at the right time(I call it - @RP@RT). Now it's her talent that helps her to be in those positions and not her luck. Her luck does play a role, but not as significant as her talent.

We try to associate luck with various such synonyms as destiny or intuition or fate or chance. But luck is really none of these alone. It's probably the super-set of all of these. Luck is when you get a chance to follow your intuition and your destiny favors you. It's when you consciously leverage your skills to make yourself available @RP@RT. Nobody is bestowed with 100% luck. Likewise, nobody achieves success only with her talent. It's the combination of both that helps individuals succeed.

So what really is Luck? Can we rely on it? Can we be sure that luck will favor us if we work hard? Not always! But the key is - to not depend on luck and do what it takes to succeed, without bothering. There is a dramatic saying in Indian Bollywood films - "Agar aap kisi cheez ko sache dil se chaho to pooree kainat usko aap se milane ki koshish main lag jaati hai ", which means - If you genuinely want something from the bottom of your heart, the whole mankind buckles up to help you achieve it. We think it is true in case of the most successful people around us like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs or the more recent one - Mark Zuckerberg. Was it their talent that helped them distinguish themselves or was it their luck? It's hard to tell. I would leave it upon you to decide for yourself because -

"You can't connect the dots looking forward you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something: your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well worn path "
 - Steve Jobs, Stanford Commencement Address, 2005

I love the way you Lie!

The most clichéd and well known proverb in English language is "Honesty is the best policy", yet none of the policies - neither corporate nor government, seem to embrace honesty. We expect governments of countries to be transparent or large Multi-National Corporations to be honest to us. We expect people surrounding us to be frank and open about their feelings. When we enter any organization we wish to read our bosses' minds or at least those of our colleagues so that we do not fall prey to organizational politics. We expect everyone to tell us the truth and not conceal their thoughts, thus making this world a better place.

But let me ask - how many of us are honest to even ourselves, keep aside the outside world? The answer would be a number far less than we wish to have. Then why are we so afraid to be honest? Why is it such a difficult affair to be honest? Why is honesty such an extinct virtue in today's world?

We come up with convincing excuses like - "it’s a highly competitive world", "why be honest when no-one surrounding us is", "being honest is passé and being street smart is the in-thing", or the most dishonest line - "who said I am not honest? I really am, swear to god!". But who are we kidding! If all of us were even truthful to ourselves half the problems we face in today's world wouldn't have existed. We are so afraid to be honest that we choose to live in a bubble: a bubble that becomes our comfort-zone, and within that zone, we lie to everyone around us(including ourselves) to appear happy and successful. Kids lie to their parents and parents are the ones who teach kids to do that in the first place. Employers lie to employees and vice versa, and being dishonest has become such a commonplace. 

If only we can all take the initiative to just be honest ourselves and not expect others to be. We might face problems and the urge of being otherwise would be too tempting, but if we overcome that phase and imbibe truthfulness in us and make it a way of life, imagine the impact! Social revolutions do not upsurge by massive preaching but by singular efforts of individuals who truly believe they can create an impact. Honesty defines the character not of the weak, but of the strong. Who we really are, is what we should preserve and should portray, not a wanna-be perfect person, don't you think?

Blog numero uno

As i start writing my first blog, it's quite a mixed feeling.. A feeling of Excitement - because it's my first attempt at opening up to the world in the true sense(unlike twitter, where you have to restrict your sentences to 140 characters..i mean, how can anybody express their true emotions with a character limit!!) mixed with a flavor of joy of sharing knowledge and a tinge of fright - because it's quite intimidating to actually put your thoughts in ink and surface it to anyone on the World Wide Web(the www). Though some people blog with relative ease, i feel a sense of responsibility i owe to myself for sharing my thoughts, which i hope are unbiased,pure and true to myself. 


Having said that, it's quite amazing that we are experiencing a time, in which a simple guy like me can sit in Mumbai and punch in words, and someone remotely far can read them without having to know anything else about me except these three set of characters - ekmind.blogspot.in. This level of interfacing was unimaginable a few decades ago, but to the people belonging to the current Internet age it's a way of living. It's so easy for strangers to talk to anyone around these days and make friends, we feel, but this whole experience of talking to people over the internet is taking our lives to a superficial level. Today people wish their friends on their birthdays and anniversaries over Facebook and send cards via eGreetings, but how can an electronic message or a virtual card ever replace a hug or a shake hand? The personal touch to relationships is losing and we have nobody else to hold responsible but ourselves. We think we are making it easy for strangers to talk and make friends using the internet but what we are really doing is distancing ourselves from the already close ones using the same medium. Facebook, we say, has changed the way of socializing for good, but has it really? Earlier the friends who used to personally meet on weekends to catch up on the latest gossip, now sit online and chat to 10 more friends on the internet, but the essence of communicating with another person is missing. In this innovative age I wish we reach a stage, in which instead of our messages reaching another person we could personally transport in time/space(more like a 'time machine') and reach the desired place as quickly as our messages reach today. I earnestly hope that we will have something similar in the future and all these social networking sites are a stepping stone towards it. If it does come true humans would have crossed the biggest barrier known to them - time, but if it doesn't, we would really be living in a hypothetical world losing the most natural thing about us - physical interaction with another human.