Not having so many goals, doing nothing much is sometime biggest gift you can give to yourself. This was a plan for this year. I would say this year comes with lot of awareness about self on all fronts. Yes, 2020 was a special year not only for myself but for entire population in world. Corona virus causing the Pandemic left no stone unturned to keep people stay alone at their homes and many losing their employment. Many more adverse effects that we are aware of. If one could sustained this year, wow you have done the job well. Many of us get the chance to spend major chunk of this year with our family, working from home office and binging prime & netflix due to available time. What most comes out of this period was enough time to think through, reflect back on our lives and being able to take some good decisions out of it. As we can guess nothing much has been attained this year, but lot has been done in terms of reflection and coming out somewhat different and clearer in 2021
Before diving into 2021, let’s review 2020 in bit detail
Jan 1, 2020 started with cycling 51.3 kms in 3:27 hrs.
Yes, this was the longest ride I have ever done.
Devil’s circuit was yet another feather in my feat where physical challenges was enormous. Crossing 9/15 challenges was victory for me. If you don’t know much about this event, watch out this snippet. It was a true test of perseverance, physical and mental strength. A great way to overcome your fears. I got to know the areas where i lacked strength in and needed to work on. Yes, it was a great day with lots of bruises & pain but smile at the finish line. Remembering from the time of Tuffman, I completed this challenge without taking much risks to finish injury free yet enjoying every bit of it. Really looking forward to more such events in future, meanwhile, here is the sneak peak of it.
This was the time before corona wave started in India, which then bring lots of things to pause, but came with lot of time for what was never been thought and lots of self realizations. I become more lazy afterwards but learned it is not so challenging to adjust in different environment when needed. 1 thing I realized that we think we can do something like going after our passion, calling an old friend or just cleaning our house when we have time available, but it is not the truth. Having lot of time available with us gave the hard lesson it is just our will and priority to do certain things not time which we keep using as an excuse.
Last week of 2020 when I went to meet my friends in Panchkula, I dedicated 1 day again to ride a bycycle with Pankaj & Navdeep till Pankul water point (place named by and after my 2 artists friends Pankaj & Vipul who just stumbled upon that place randomly). It was a tough ride going via Burj Fort. I was already behind my fitness regime and hills on the way shows mirror to my fitness level. But it was fun, and Navdeep & I agreed to ride bycycle till Morni hills 1 day. We’ll soon do it bro 🙂
Travel: HAHA
Running:
Though I had a good time to invest for running, but that Tuffman injury didn’t allowed me so. Yes, I also admit I was not so active in working through healing which i started in Q4 of 2020. I get a chance to consult ortho and get my tests (X-rays, blood test, MRI) done and reports comes out to be pretty normal. My max run was just 10k that too took more than 1 hr to complete. Yeah, too bad it is but I admit my bad for not working aggressively towards it.
Books:
Though I had a good time to read books, but only completed few as focus was not on reading much but reflecting & getting answers to lot of things.
In 2020 I read:
Emotional Intelligence
Walk like a Buddha
Turn the Ship around (In progress.. a leadership book)
Now comes the best part, my learnings of the year 🙂
As I written above, this year was to struggle getting answers about yourself, getting to know your personality more and clearing some mental layers to clarity. It involved lot of thoughts going in mind, lots of reading, watching vides, and best talking with many close friends. I wouldn’t say i progressed a lot but a lot more than i ever done in rest of my life.
Here are some of my fav tweets from the year 2020:
T1: Intensity makes a good story. Consistency makes progress. Most people need consistency more than they need intensity.
Intensity:
-run a marathon
-write a book in 30 days
-silent meditation retreat
Consistency:
-don’t miss a workout for 2 years
-write every week
-daily silence
T2: On funerals, loss, grief, friendship, and support:
It’s not about knowing what to say. It’s about being there when nobody knows what to say. The only thing people need to hear is, “You are not alone.” And that doesn’t require words. It just requires your presence.
T3: Made a hard but right decision, it’s okay to feel sad for sometime.
T4: Life is a game of identifying what is worth suffering for.
T5: Meditation helps. Exercise helps. Loved ones and friends help. But by and large, fighting off the wolves is a process that you have to accept and endure.
T6: No, you’re not dramatic. It’s just one of our thinking errors. It’s difficult for us to judge a crisis while we’re in it.
T7: it’s not what you say, but how you say it that matters #Communication
T8: True strength is the courage to admit weakness.
T9: When you get into uncertain situations, skills don’t apply – we lean on our attributes
T10: You are in the right relationship, if you want to make the other person happy. You are in the wrong relationship, if you have to make the other person happy.
T11: Do not marry a Woman unless you would be Proud to have a Daughter exactly like her.
T12: Self-care doesn’t need to be a to-do in our planners, expensive or need a lot of stuff
T13: There is a big difference in saying thank you and feeling thankful.
T14: In an increasingly distracted world, what is now an underappreciated edge over others is the ability to think, read and reflect deeply for hours without getting seduced by digital dopamine hits.
T15: In large organizations, incompetence usually hides behind loyalty & processes.
T16: And I am more of a public introvert but private extrovert
T17: If you’re high energy, you will be successful in anything you spend your time on. Therefore, building and maintaining energy must be priority 1
T18: #Leadership As a leader, you have to let go of fears and consequences you could face personally if you are doing the right thing
T19: Work from home employment is somewhat like long distance relationship. If there is no true care and affection and deeper reason to be resilient, it will fall apart.
T20: Most people don’t like improving because it requires taking a step back. Usually you’re doing something wrong and have to fix a bad habit. This requires results to be worse temporarily before they improve One step back two steps forward.
Want to read more of it, I tweet as @varunbagga8
Also sharing some of my good reads:
Books that every engineering manager should read
Don’t solve problems if you want to be a great manager
Shortest self help book you’ll ever read
7 beautiful ways to waste your life
Don’t take life so seriously, stop overthinking everything
Crying is a sign of emotional intelligence and it’s necessary
How to become a better storyteller
And 1 twitter thread by Ankur Warikoo
Further I tried to get more idea into my personality. Here are the top 3 things I learned about my self:
- I am an public introvert and introvert can become good leaders over notional thinking that all leaders must be extrovert in nature.
- I am Highly Sensitive Person [HSP]. It is estimated that around 15-20% of population have this trait. Those who gets overwhelmed easily, have difficulty facing high stimulus and feel the emotions heavily be it happiness or hurt. And in contrary to belief many people might have that being emotional makes you weak, I strongly believe it not only only makes you strong but also more humane.
- Minimalism: If 1 thing that I loved learning this year was concept of minimalism. Wow, I just loved it. Living minimalism via decluttering physical, mental and digital space is just awesome. It frees up your mind from lot of things. Though, I am not pro in this but I am loving the journey and will definitely like to take this further.
I would plan to write more of these important stuff as separate articles because they deserve it 🙂
So, what’s my plan for 2021 ?
Not everything we plan goes as it, see 2020 as an example. But, to provide direction we still need some focus areas and idea is to build habits that will help move towards those focusses. This year, I am planning to get married. And it is such a big thing, I have no idea how my priorities will change due to this. So, less of much challenges or plans except this yet I have few areas where I want to focus on:
- Knowing more about self – I remember reading a beautiful piece “Purpose of your life is to find purpose of your life”, which requires knowing yourself as better as it could be.
- Minimalism – What helped my keep focus on less but important things will be continued focus for 2021
- Running – How can my love be left behind. I will aggressively be working to get into the root cause and heal my injury so that I can work to achieve my running goals in future 🙂
Till the time we meet, have happy 2021 !