Making Plans

Jan 27 2012

Life is not a TV series

When there are problems, life doesn’t stop. Things still happen. Life goes on.

So it turns out that it’s not a good idea to stop everything else and work on just one problem.

That means that even when a really big event happens in life, you can’t just focus on that. The everyday things still happen. You still have to go to school/work, you still have to eat and drink, you still have to do the dishes and laundry, you still have to spend some time every day with friends and family. You can’t ignore any of these ‘tiny’ things just because something ‘big’ happened.

In TV series’, there’s usually only one big problem every episode that the hero needs to fix. He can afford to forget about his daily chores while he figures out how to solve that one thing. Life doesn’t happen like that. Everything else still goes on.

It took me a long time to realize it; that you don’t have to solve the problem before you can get back to your life. This way of thinking is one of the cores of the perfectionist mindset. This mindset was slowly destroying me.

If I don’t complete it, I can’t move on from it, and therefore, I can’t move on with life.

False.

It turns out that any problem can be ignored and life will still go on. It might not go on well, but it will still go on. You can fail exams and life will go on. You can have cancer and life will still go on. Loved ones might die and life will still go on. Your life will go on and the life of everyone around you will go on.

Right at this moment; as you’re reading this; a whole bunch of different thoughts are flying through your head. Most probably you’re disagreeing with what I just said. That’s okay; it’s what I call your ‘first reaction’ to whatever I just said. Catch as many reactions as you can, write them down before you forget. What did your mind say to counter the concepts I just mentioned? Here are some common ones (and by common, I mean what went through my own head):

  1. That’s not fair.
  2. I shouldn’t have to deal with other things when I’m down/vulnerable.
  3. Why isn’t the universe stopping for me? I need time to deal with this heavy stuff.

Life might have its own rules, but I don’t think anyone has figured them out yet. So what makes you think that one of those rules is for life to be fair? What makes you think that when you’re down for the count, the whole boxing match should stop until you fix your life and you get back up? Why does everyone need to be “understanding” of what you went through and treat you specially?

These were the questions that I asked myself when these ideas first occurred to me. This is an example of me “taking the red pill”. Ask the questions that might make you realize that all this time you might have been living your life wrong.

I realized then that I had somehow started believing that I deserved some of these things I just mentioned. That it was somehow a right that the world was obliged to give me. That the world should ‘pause’ for me. And if I didn’t get it, I felt betrayed by… by ‘something’. And I didn’t know why…

When problems happen, we press pause and tell ourselves that we need to fix this issue before we move on.

Pressing “Pause” for the big problems

At this point, you’re probably thinking to yourself,

That’s ridiculous, people don’t try to “pause” life. And even if they do, I never do this kind of thing.

Well, let’s see then. Have you ever crammed for an exam? Crammed to the point where you didn’t bother socializing or doing your laundry or thought about your family for a few days? Then yes, you’re ignoring normal life and expecting it to “pause“. After a few days, you expect to come back to normal life and “un-pause” and just continue on your merry way.

Or have you spent a few weeks working on a big project and ignored everything else in your life during that time? It’s the same thing. You’re “pausing“. You expect to “resume” life later.

Or perhaps you have a family problem where you need to be off from work or school for a while. You expect everyone and everything to let you off, and that you can just forget everything in life while you take care of this problem. You feel that you deserve it because if not life “wouldn’t be fair”. Ok, so let me ask you again:

Do you think you might have “paused” life before?

Now, let me make it clear that I actually agree that it’s great when people make allowances when you have problems. And help you out. Or give you space. But it becomes a problem when you start to expect it and feel that the universe is obliged to pause for you and help you out when you are down.

When we start to feel like this, we start to behave as if life “pauses” for us automatically when we have a problem.

Everyday pausing and procrastinating

We do this on a smaller scale in our everyday life. When a small problem comes, we don’t move away until we deal with it. Then another problem comes and we rinse and repeat.

Let me tell you a story:

This is the story of a young man who wanted to get into shape. So he told himself that he would, just as soon as the time was right. After a few months, New Year’s rolled around and he finally said to himself, “This is the perfect time to kickstart my exercise with a New Year’s resolution“. But then, he has to find a good gym to join.

So he looked for one, and after many weeks, found one. Then he thought to himself that he needs the right workout clothes (because you can’t just look sweaty in any old clothes now, can you?). So he went out and got himself the right ones.

Then, of course, he wanted to make sure he was doing the right exercises, so he just HAD to spend a few weeks first researching an exercise regimen online.

That vaguely fictional story is a story that’s repeated around the world. We lie to ourself. We procrastinate. We ‘pause’ our exercising because we convince ourselves that we have to solve a problem first before the plan can go on. Just like we sometimes convince ourselves that we have to solve a problem first before life can go on.

Don’t forget the big picture

Life is killing you, one detail at a time

Okay then, here’s what I’m really trying to say from all this. Don’t forget the big picture.

Don’t get caught up in looking for a job so that you can save up money to buy exercise clothes so that you can exercise. When you worry about those details and put everything in a sequence like that, you’ll never get anywhere. You’ll waste so much time worrying about the details that in the end you forget that the whole point of this whole thing was to get some exercise…

Small problems occur all the time. This means that your time will be so filled up with handling the details that you miss the big picture. This is the humdrum of daily life. Everyday, you’re focusing on these small small things and worrying and obsessing over every single one.

Like in this xkcd comic here, sometimes we find a method to solve the problem. Then, rather than solving the original problem, we zone in on that ONE SINGLE method and spend an ungodly amount of effort trying to execute that method perfectly. We forget that we can just ‘ring the doorbell’. We forget that the original purpose is to get the guy to unlock the door, instead of trying to figure out how to remotely change the volume on a computer through the internet.

Conclusion

Let’s recap.

Life doesn’t happen in a nice sequence like a TV series.

  1. Problems don’t come to you one by one and you can’t ‘pause’ everything in your life to solve this episode’s problems.
  2. When you tell yourself that you HAVE to do something first before you move on to the next step… check again. Maybe you can already do the second step even if you haven’t completed the first.
  3. Make sure you’re solving your original problem. If you find yourself fixated on sending out resumes when your original purpose was to exercise, then you just might have a problem…
  4. Yes! Have priorities. No, don’t forget everything else.
  5. It’s ok for the world to pause for you and give you space when you have big problems. Just don’t expect it and then feel betrayed when it doesn’t happen.

Well…. so far this made sense in my head. I wonder if it made sense to you?

By Lutfi Torla • Featured, Making Plans • 0 • Tags: , , , , , ,

Oct 23 2011

I have read and agreed to the terms and conditions…

The world is fast-paced nowadays. There’s barely enough time to get everything done, much less enough time to double-check everything and make sure that you know what you’re getting into. It’s a world of do, do, do.

Step back and smell the roses

You hear them say it, and you know you’d like to, but you just don’t have enough time. The next big project is just around the corner, and there’s another debate this weekend, and you already have 3 deadlines on the horizon and on and on and on… And so, when decisions come around, we sometimes don’t research them properly.

We feel smart. We feel like we know what we’re stepping into. Changing jobs? Buying a house? Furthering your studies? Getting married? Most people I know will research how to do it. I believe very few ever try to find out how it is to live in the shoes of someone who woks in that company. Or is a house owner at that location. Or is doing his post-graduate studies. Or is married. You get the picture.

I know the facts. I’ve got Wikipedia.

We’ve turned into a society of

I have read and agreed to the terms and conditions…

because with all the world at our fingertips, with all the articles and expertise of the world on the internet, we’ve started to feel like we know it all. Wikipedia has given us data and facts about every possible subject, and we’ve confused having the facts with being  smart and knowledgeable. We don’t bother reading the fine print to understand the consequences of our choices. Rather, we just press ‘NEXT’ and expect the world to have prepared a way for us. Newsflash: sometimes… there isn’t a way.

Sometimes, you step into your decision and only then realize what you’ve gotten yourself into. Well then, too late. You already agreed to them, didn’t you? The terms and conditions of making that decision in the first place.

It’s a wide world out there. Before I graduated and stepped into that wide, unforgiving world, I was lucky enough to have a sister who was candid enough to tell me how the world really was. Specifically, the working life. I’d heard stories before of people going back from the office late and having to work weekends, but they never really bothered me. After all, they were stories.

Thank God for my sister

But my sister made me understand what those stories really meant. It meant late nights pleasing a boss who couldn’t care less about you (seriously, if you were fired, do you think he’d keep your position empty in protest? Hah, good luck with that), weekends spent in a cold office, far away from the light of the sun, and 2 hours of commuting back and forth daily (that’s 2 hours out of 18 waking hours, thankyouverymuch. More than 10% of my valuable time). Lucky for her, she didn’t have to go through all that, but she told me stories of those who did. It’s a miserable existence, when the whole purpose of getting a job is to help you live a happier life in the first place.

So the question was, before I entered the workforce, did I read all the terms and conditions of my choice? Or would I join the industry expecting an ideal job, only to be rudely awakened by the harsh realities of life? I did my research. I didn’t ask about salaries and how fast I could get promoted (although that was important too). I asked about working hours and commuting distances and whether I could ever live with myself doing that job. It wasn’t for me. I read the terms and I didn’t like them. I just couldn’t see myself as a salesperson selling technical things or as a technician installing products at the client’s offices. I wanted to be an engineer dammit! I wanted to do research and make new inventions, I wanted to find problems in society and find new ways of solving them, I wanted to be an engineer!

Facing a decision

So, facing a decision, I made my choice. And it’s a choice I’m happy with so far. It let’s me do what makes me happy. And I’m glad for that.

By Lutfi Torla • Making Plans • 2 • Tags: , , , , , , ,

Oct 7 2011

You don’t “understand” until you’ve answered the question

In my science-related endeavours, there’s been one thing that has been absolutely true. I might think I understand, but I won’t, not really, not until I’m actually able to answer the question. Back in school, I’d listen to my teacher who was speaking in front and I’d think to myself, “Ok, I understand that”, and then zone out and read a different book instead. I found out very quickly that I was wrong.  After half an hour, she would tell us to pull out our exercise books and do some questions. That’s when you’d see me looking back at the textbook, trying to figure things out.

That little bit extra…

In physics, and in math especially, you require an extra skill besides just “understanding” to fully understand something. In debating, I never faced this problem. When I joined debating in my undergraduate days, it was a simple process of listening to something in a debate and understanding it. And using that understanding, you could pretty much explain and debate the next time. But the sciences require an extra skill. The skill to know if the answer is reasonable.

This is an odd thing to say, but I’m sure it’s true. When you take up law or economics or political science (themes debated heavily in varsity tournaments), you’re bound by reality. There are no moments when you would ever think of a person being able to float, or walk through a brick wall. The hard sciences are slightly different. In order to understand the universe, we have to look at it on a different scale, either very big (physics and cosmology) or very small (biology, physics and chemistry). It’s beyond a human to properly understand those concepts so we do it the only way we can. We cheat.

How do we cheat?

We cheat by not imagining everything at once. We forget the magnetic fields and the sunlight and whether there’s a brick wall in our way and just look at the muscles moving in a person’s leg. Does it matter if he’s walking off a cliff? Nope. We cheat by thinking of tiny atoms where you can apply “energy” to it and it will move faster and faster, without ever asking, “what energy is this”? We cheat by making things so abstract, that they lose their link to reality. So what happens is a situation where you make up a question about a boy running 200 meters in 5 seconds. Impossible, I know, but there you go.

And this is why answering questions are so important. It lets you practice questions and get a feel of their limits. What numbers are reasonable? How should the calculations look half-way through? What are those numbers you’re calculating?

I don’t have to calculate! That’s what my calculator is for!

In this day and age, we have powerful calculators and computers to do the dirty work for us. When I say “calculating”, I don’t mean adding and subtracting. Calculating is about understanding the numbers you’ve put on the paper and knowing what they represent. If you don’t know what the numbers mean, you’ll never be able to use them at the right place and in the right way to make meaning out of things.

Taking that previous example of a boy running 200 meters in 5 seconds. That’s a real question I did. In the middle of my calculations I had the number 200 and 5 and I was supposed to calculate speed. So I divided 200/5 and got the answer as 40. 40 meters per second. Ok, no big deal right? Then suddenly I looked back at the question and realized what I was calculating. This wasn’t a car or airplane moving at high speeds. This was a simple boy. And somehow he was moving over 200 meters in 5 seconds! 40 m/s! That’s crazy. And most of the time I wouldn’t even realize what I was calculating because it’s been abstracted so much. I later found out I messed up a step and it was supposed to be 200 meters over 80 seconds. Much more reasonable.

Answering the question

So what happens once you’ve “answered the question”? It means that you took the question, understood the meaning of it, were able to extract the relevant numbers, and use them appropriately in the calculation of the answer. This SHOULD mean that you truly understand. Congratulations.

Hold on…

Wait a second, now that I think about it, it applies in life too. There are so many concepts and quotes that are spouted all the time. But we never follow them even when we “understand” them. Worse, we don’t follow them even when we know them to be true.

Life lessons you’ve heard before:

  1. Be good to your parents
  2. It’s easier to take care of things on time (Don’t wait till the last minute)
  3. Love what you have
  4. There is nothing to hold you back, except yourself (Be confident)
  5. Know what you want
  6. Sometimes you have to say no (Be assertive)
  7. Ask questions
  8. Your health is your life (Take care of your health!!!)
  9. If you never act, you will never know (Take risks sometimes)
  10. It doesn’t matter how much you know unless you can explain it (Learn to speak well)

Unfortunately, a lot of these things we only know intellectually. We think we understand them, but we don’t really. It’s only when, one day long after you first heard it, something big happens to you and you go, “Oh wow, my mom was right”. That’s the moment you really understand the importance of that life lesson. But some people will forget it again afterwards. They’ll have a brief flash of understanding, then they’ll just forget again. It’s only when you apply it that you can truly be counted as having learnt the lesson.

So don’t just listen to all that excellent advice your parents have given you. They love you, you know? “Answer the question” and apply these life lessons.

Then, and only then, will you “understand” life.

By Lutfi Torla • Featured, Making Plans • 4 • Tags: , , , , , , ,

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