20 Lessons from my 20s: Lesson 3 – setting courageous goals

When I started 2019, I wrote in my journal: “This year cannot be the same as the two that proceeded it”

When I got to the end of 2017, and end of 2018, I had a mild sense of dissatisfaction as I looked back on each year. Sure, I’d had a lot of good moments – holidays, family time, the hikes I did so many weekends, all the new friends I’d made. This was good, but it was not good enough. I’d made almost no discernible progress professionally or in my hobbies. There were items I had been procrastinating for ages.

In January 2019, with frustration as fuel, for the first time in a long time, my monthly expenditures exceeded my income as I went all out to achieve some long-asleep goals. I booked ski lessons, an improv course, my wisdom tooth removal surgery, flights for a few weekends away. I booked my practical driving test, got my California driving licence (only took me 2.5 years of living in California!). This month I made that booking for Patagonia’s W trek for this December (a trip I’d wanted to do since I heard about it in December 2016 and had been waiting for some magical moment for it to be magically booked without me booking it/for someone else’s schedule to be aligned with mine. Realization: I don’t need to wait for anyone, I can go by myself).

The change has been a mix of having goals, planning for them and having the motivation and the means.

Some variables that facilitate goals are out of your control. Your task is to make sure you capitalize on the environment when it is favorable, and not be too harsh on yourself when you simply can’t (e.g. don’t have the money). Other goals are well within your control but you procrastinate due to lack of courage.

At business school and at various training courses at work, I wrote a few letters to my future self with some goals and reminders as part of mandatory exercises. When they were mailed to me several months/a year later, I opened them and was disappointed at what I’d written. In the business world, there is such a practice as “sandbagging” targets – it’s when people set targets pretty low so that they are confident they can meet them and secure their bonus. I had sandbagged my life goals. Some of the letters practically read as “I hope you’re still alive, and working out like twice a week”. Ambitious.

Recently, a few months ago, something clicked in me. I was pushing my clients to be ambitious. “Aim for the moon, land among the stars” I told them every day. “It’s ok to fail but let’s fail trying”.

I realized I owed myself the same ambition.

It is scary to declare even to yourself, let alone others, that you have big dreams. Sometimes those dreams feel so unlikely to be achieved and it seems like the odds are stacked against you so you’d rather pretend to yourself and to others that you didn’t have those dreams in the first place. There is a simple equation that characterizes happiness:

Happiness = Reality – Expectations

I now believe a balanced approach is needed towards this equation.  Too much emphasis on keeping the expectations low is the lazy short-termist option. You avoid working hard to enhance your reality, but at some point, your real expectations catch up with you. If you’re an intelligent and capable person, you can only placate yourself for so long by compressing expectations.

No doubt, the barriers to getting a reality you love are numerous, and far greater for some of us than others (for ethnic minority women, things are objectively harder).

I had so many excuses: No one else values environmental issues so I can’t achieve my environmentalist contribution goals. I have massive overhead in San Francisco on account of my apartment rent, so I can’t take as much travel time-off and go to the destinations I wanted to. I don’t have enough time to work out so I can’t get to the level of fitness I want. I can’t cook and won’t cook so I can’t eat as healthy as I want.

Be stronger than your excuses

It’s easy to set the bar low and then walk over it, it takes spectacular courage to set the bar high and fail. And you will absolutely fail. Brenee Brown tells it like it is in her Netflix special “The Call to courage”. People are often energized after her talks and say “yes, I will take risks now, and risk failure”. She points out that when you live with courage, you don’t risk failing, you assure failing. Hopefully, you don’t fail at everything you set out to do, but even if so…

…In 2019, I decided I’d rather fail climbing Everest than succeed in walking in a park.

20 lessons from my 20s: Lesson 1 – know what you want, say what you want

Until my 30th birthday (Dec 7th 2019 is the plan) I’ll be documenting some of the things I’ve learnt in my 20s. I’ll be as honest as possible within the constraints of this being a public blog!

Lesson 1: Know what you want, say what you want

“Tell me what you want, what you really really want” – Spice Girls

In her book How to get sh*t done, Erin Falconer writes a sentence that struck me: “Not saying what you mean will inevitably weaken you”.

Knowing what you want in the basic sense is easy for everyone. I want to be a billionaire, with a deeply meaningful career, make my own money and be able to support my family, have an amazing partner, an inspiring global network of friends and have several eco-lodges, and look amazingly youthful, strong and elegant, and then a bunch of other stuff that would make this sentence untenable in its length. And I want it all NOW/yesterday.  The problem lies in the fact that you can’t get everything you want so you have to know what you want to pursue within the constraints of reality, which necessitates prioritization, and prioritization is hard. So quite often without prioritizing explicitly, we muddle through the years of life, not getting enough of what we really wanted.

When we don’t know what our priorities really are, we also communicate incorrectly to those around us all the time. In my 20s, I would often say things I didn’t mean to people around me like: “I don’t mind” (when I did mind), “I’m not offended” (when I was offended), “I can do it by X deadline” (when I couldn’t do it by X deadline and would then be killing myself to meet the deadline or asking for an extension and feeling guilty), and “I’ll think about it” (when I already knew the answer or was never going to think about it because it required too much courage to think about it and I didn’t have the courage in present state). There’s a lot to unpack in here, but I think fundamentally one of the core reasons we don’t say what we mean is because of a lack of clear priorities. Who’s happiness are you prioritizing? Yours or someone else’s? Who is priority at any given moment? Are you prioritizing freedom or the comfort of conformity? You can’t have it all, it comes down to priorities, and then the courage to say no to things that aren’t highest priority.

“Don’t say yes when you really mean no” – Paulo Coelho

So what I aspire to in my 30s is to a) be more conscious of my priorities  b) challenge my priorities — will this stack-order of things actually make me happy? and c) communicate more clearly what I want, what I really really want

 

 

 

 

 

Emotional self-sufficiency: one individual’s definition

It was a Friday evening, where the sunset might have been beautiful, but I barely noticed, because I was in a hurry as I often was. I was running and brisk-walking (not fit enough to run the whole way) for my 7 pm appointment with my therapist.

Hurry has been a big theme in many of my blog-posts and a theme in my life sadly. For many posts, I’ve written about dating. I was in a hurry to find someone. In my career, I am in a hurry, working 70 hours a week and then some.

I didn’t have the same urgency to know myself as I did to know others. As I sat in my therapist Flora’s office, looking at her sparkly jumper, quietly judging it as an odd choice for a therapist, she asked me how things were going with my boyfriend. “We broke up” I said. She looked surprised. She knew how much he’d meant to me.

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The full contents of a therapy session are personal and confidential, even for someone like me who often blogs about their personal life. But the theme of this post is a question Flora asked me in the session: “What does emotional self-sufficiency look like for you?”

I was at a loss of thoughts and words. I probably had thought about it but I couldn’t remember. Or maybe I’d never thought about it because I was always so busy trying to be sufficient in my job, sufficient in my friendships, sufficient in all the tedious logistics that go into maintaining a modern life, and I’d never consciously tried to be emotionally self-sufficient myself.

I’d had the easy way out because I had a family that was very emotionally supportive and a caring network of friends. I am the type of person who messages people constantly during a day. If I see something funny, I want to share it. If I feel stressed, I whine to someone.

“I don’t want to burden people any more,” I told Flora. I didn’t want to be that daughter who couldn’t give her parents joy because 70% of the time I called them it was because I wanted to complain about things. I didn’t want to be that person who couldn’t enjoy a moment without it being shared.

I am not going to say I was acute in any form of being reliant – quite the contrary, I am actually fairly independent. I live by myself. I’ve moved house many times by myself. I fly around for work every week. I pull off insane logistical feats hopping from work to training to conference to a wedding across continents at times. I’ve been to many museums by myself, admiring exhibits at my own pace. Whilst all those things deserve credit, let’s set the bar higher – there is a difference between being superficially independent and being emotionally self-sufficient.

I’ve always preferred to have someone with me. Once when I was wondering around Denver Art museum by myself, I felt myself pining for company. There have been many times in my life when I’ve needed a break, wanted to go on holiday, had the destinations in mind, and not gone because I don’t want to go by myself.

So what is emotional self-sufficiency? As I reflected long after having left Flora’s office, I came up with 4 key elements:

1. The ability to enjoy a moment by yourself without wishing someone else was there with you
2. The ability to choose who you interact with and when
3. The ability to console yourself when you are feeling down
4. The ability to accept the hard truths of life

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1. The ability to enjoy a moment by yourself without wishing someone else was there with you

I enjoy a good mural. I’ve enjoyed many a mural by myself. But you’ll notice that those murals have often ended up on Instagram, shared with hundreds of people. I’ll be honest – the desire to write a blog, the amount I post on Instagram, Facebook – are all manifestations of my inability to savor a moment that isn’t shared.

Some people post to show off, I post for the feeling of shared experience it gives me. Social media gives people an artificial sense of connection, a feeling of not being lonely. That’s why it’s powerful stuff and valued at $Billions.

The exercise I set myself now is: To go somewhere, do something magical, and not share it with anyone. Not tell anyone, not post about it. Just live with it as my gift to myself. It all sounds very poetic – but it’ll be one of the hardest things I’ve ever done if I pull it off (and you’ll never know if I do!)

2. The ability to choose who you interact with and when

“There are some people I want to tell in all the detail about the break up” I told Flora, “but there’s some friends I can’t even bear to tell because I feel they’ll be secretly happy”.

Despite all the raving about how many friends we all have and pontification and assertion around “well if they were a real friend…”, friendship in its purest form is a very high bar and a scarce resource as precious as diamonds. There are many people in your life who you hang out with frequently, enjoy brunch and gossip with, but they redeem themselves from your personal failures because it makes them feel better about themselves. There are many people who are wedded to painful narratives that involve all things failing and so when you fail you confirm their narrative and create cognitive consonance for them.

Among a certain breed of people, the ones who are in and out of relationships constantly (me??),  there is a group narrative that forms a la Sex and the City that something lasting isn’t possible. The narrative says that in every partner and relationship are red flags or landmines just waiting to go off and blow the whole thing up. As much as I love that deep yet toxic show, these are the men and women who I didn’t want to talk to in any depth.

Then there were friends who came to me from a place of genuine concern and love, friends with whom our friendship is underpinned on a long-term commitment for us to be there for each other through thick and thin until the end of our lives here. Those are the friends who had a different narrative in their head for me, a narrative of hope. Those are the friends for whom I was an open book.

“Isn’t that a big part of being self-sufficient? Knowing who to interact with when?” asked Flora. I nodded, it most definitely was.

3. The ability to console yourself when you are feeling down

For major decisions, one of my favorite things to do is to call people for advice. I think it’s one of the healthiest practices – more information enables fewer assumptions and better decision-making. Diverse perspectives are valuable –  if what you are doing by seeking others is information/perspective- gathering.

If your “advice” calls are actually about people consoling you, you’re a) a drain on other people and b) putting yourself in a weak position in life.

External consolation is a drug. If the supply is cut off, you can go through a lot of pain. External consolation goes hand in hand with external attention. Needing attention beyond a limit can be symptomatic of a lack of self-love and self-respect.

So the first step to consoling yourself is loving yourself. Forgiving yourself for past mistakes, forgiving yourself for not being perfect at present. I recommend this book I read ages ago called “Love yourself like your life depends on it” by Kamal Ravikant.

Society often misinterprets self-love as ego. Self-love and ego are related but different, and I think many of us suffer from too much ego and too little self-love. As independent as the concept of self-esteem seems, I disagree with those that interpret self-esteem to derive solely from self. One would be delusional to think highly of oneself if everyone around you thought you weren’t that great. Instead, I think self-esteem can be cultivated through hanging out with people who will see the good in you without being “yes” men/women. This means the people you are friends with, who you date and who you work with are key to your self-esteem. 

One of the greatest gifts that my last relationship gave me was more of an ability to love myself. With the backdrop of our human culture, self-love is hard, especially for women. Women are constantly told we’re not good enough, not attractive enough. We have so much to fix via smiles, fashion, manicures, hairstyles, hair coloring, anti-wrinkle cream etc. The men out there who love women for who they are and not what they look like are few and far between. I was fortunate to have dated one of them long enough for him to positively impact my self-esteem.

The second step I find is just putting things into perspective all the time through logic. 2 key logic arguments are most helpful:

• You have more choice than you think

As I was talking to Flora about how overwhelmed I was with all the things in my life, I realized 80% of them were by choice. I had enrolled myself in the rat race I was in. It wasn’t forced upon me to say “yes” to many of the extra-curricular stuff I was doing at work, I had chosen to take on speaking engagements etc. because I had wanted to…it would take a while to ramp down but I could turn off the tap of stress when I wanted to.  

• Don’t sweat the small stuff….and it’s all small stuff

My last boyfriend was an aerospace engineer. On our second date, I’d looked into his big blue eyes as he talked about Mars and a hypothetical scenario of streaming a football game from Earth and how long it would take for someone on Mars to know a goal was scored on Earth.

I’d always found space comforting, the concept of a big Universe, the unknown, possibilities, grandeur beyond the stretches of my imagination. Complexity beyond what I could ever fathom. Many amazing things in life are paradoxical – thinking about the universe was exhilarating and comforting at the same time.

Whenever you have problems, sometimes zooming out to the hundreds of millions of years of Earth history, and the fact that Earth is a tiny speck in the Universe can help you realize: it’s all small stuff

4. The ability to accept the hard truths of life

“I don’t accept his death” I told a friend 2 years back about my grandfather’s passing once. It had been about 2 years since he had passed away at the time. My friend was confused on what to say. My granddad had clearly died. And here I was plain and simple saying that I did not accept it. What did that even mean? It was like saying I didn’t accept that the sky was blue. I wasn’t at a mad hatters tea party… but I kind of was.

I have lived in similar forms of denial all of my life. Everyone has. My last boyfriend gave me feedback that sometimes I was acting entitled. “I don’t know why you feel entitled to a high-paying job that isn’t much work, that let’s you do something deeply meaningful and good for the world, that job doesn’t exist. And you feel entitled to a house in the most expensive property market in the world.”

An easy life doesn’t exist, and yet many of us feel entitled to it.

We’re so disappointed when things are going wrong like parents ageing or falling sick, siblings that we fall out with, relationships that fall apart, unemployment, injustice in the world.

At some point, to be emotionally self-sufficient you have to accept some fundamental truths:

• Life is hard. As the Buddha said hundreds of years ago as his first truth: “Life is suffering”
• Life isn’t equally hard for everyone because life isn’t fair – outcomes vary massively among all organisms and people don’t get what they “deserve”. The number one rule of the universe is randomness
• Some problems have no solutions/acceptance is the solution which is very hard to get to
• Death is irreversible

As we grow older we start to accept #1 because we accumulate more heart-breaking experiences like personal failures, breakups, deaths, tragedies and hardships.

But what holds us back from being emotionally self-sufficient is we constantly look at others (and mostly on Instagram which isn’t even an accurate representation of anyone’s life) and say ‘Oh but that person has it so easy, they were born rich and don’t have to worry about money’ or ‘Well lucky that person traveling around the world with their partner’ because we haven’t accepted the painful truth #2 that life isn’t fair.

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So that’s what emotional self-sufficiency means to me, what does it mean to you?

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Notes

*Flora is not my therapist’s real name. Below are some articles I read AFTER writing this blog-post (the order there is critical 🙂 )

References

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/out-the-darkness/201303/self-sufficiency-essential-aspect-well-being

Becoming Emotionally Self-Reliant

https://www.bustle.com/articles/147230-6-ways-to-be-more-self-sufficient-independent

There is a difference between self-sufficiency and being cut off from the world. This article is a helpful reminder to not take self-sufficiency too far either:

http://www.smallgreensprouts.com/itrsquos-time-to-end-the-myth-of-emotional-self-sufficiency.html

My fav quote from it: “No-one makes it alone. And no-one—unless they’re the sole survivor of a plane crash in a jungle—should even try”

http://www.thelawofattraction.com/become-self-reliant/

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