Maybe it’s time to change your glasses
#42 - the middle of summer
Hi there,
Sunshine, sips of water and a summerly slumber - it’s been a quiet week.
I’ve mostly just been at home, scrolling Twitter, watching cricket, helping out around the house, and journaling a bit more.
Visits out of the house included the nearby Hindu temple, glorious in the bright light, a book fair with stacks and stacks of diverse books (bagged a few for the months ahead! 🙂), and a supermarket, where I was amazed by the sheer rich number of colourful brands nowadays, all jostling for spaces in the brightly lit store, looking for a new home.
At least I’m putting no filter on my life - all true, boring stories!
Highlight of the week: a delicious feast of chicken and fish at the weekend! Although I may not look it, I am a (non-veg) foodie. So, 6 days of veggies, owing to Hindu rituals and customs was difficult, a challenge I am surprised I endured. Guests coming over yesterday means plenty left over for today 😋
Looking through the bag of goodies a friend had given us at the weekend, Mum and I found a box of Indian sweets, a type from the catalogue-wide range of Indian delicacies that had overly generous dollops of sugar. My mum said, “Oh, sweets”. I said, “Each one is a visit to the dentist’s 🦷 ”
Ding! Content idea 😁💡
My mum also refuses to buy advent calendars at Christmas. When we ask, she says, “You eat a chocolate everyday and then visit the dentist after Christmas”
Before having braces, I loved chocolate, Dairy Milk, Ferrero Rocher topping my taste buds’ lists. But now, my mind resists them, especially now after my orthodontist deemed my teeth ‘poor’ last time I saw her. It made me think about how we perceive things and how this depends on what we believe in.
Perception, or the way we view the world, is everything. It is the lens through which you analyse and make meaning of the things happening around you. It is what shapes your reality and experience of this journey called life.
Wellandgood.com summarises it well: “we believe what we perceive to be accurate, and we create our own realities based on those perceptions. And although our perceptions feel very real, that doesn’t mean they’re necessarily factual’
We all have a unique perception, or view of the world, that we get to own, mould and perfect.
Here are 3 scenarios where there is a helpful and a counterproductive response:
You ‘have to’ do something vs you ‘get to’ do something. I learnt this from Ali Abdaal, who mentioned a Seth Godin blog post. I’ve applied this to watering the plants: rather than seeing it as a chore, I understood that I get to make these beautiful plants live and prosper into producing beautiful flowers, giving great joy to us all, especially my mum. Ali spoke about the time he had to do an injection for a woman as his shift was about to end.
Seeing something as an opportunity vs seeing something as a threat. Linking with the idea of a growth mindset from last month and turning perceived obstacles into chances, you can choose to see that presentation in front of an audience as a stage to showcase how good you are. As Simon Sinek says, like athletes and other high performers, see the nervousness as excitement. It’s all in how you
seeperceive it. For me, I saw catching COVID as a point to reassess priorities and also to clean out my room and computer 🧹Half glass full vs half glass empty. Classic example of optimism and pessimism that we’ve all heard of. Always choose to see the positive side of things. Yes, it is boiling at 36C, but at least I’ve got a fan. Bringing it back to a real-life example, I was thankful that I didn’t break a whole tooth during hockey earlier this year.
I’ll leave it there - there’s sufficient ideas for you to ponder over. Although my notes have a few more thoughts about changing perceptions of people, we’ll save it for another time 😉
You have the chance to choose to create the world that you want to live in, and it starts by altering how you want to see and think about the occurrences around you - in a positive or negative light. Your thoughts and beliefs affect your view of the world around you and your ‘personal reality’. Your experience of life then affects your thoughts and feelings.
Book of the week 📖
I’ve worked through Learn to Earn: A Beginner's Guide to the Basics of Investing and Business, been a while since I finished a book in a week. There’s quite a lot of ‘fluff’ or maybe it’s just that I’m too accustomed to cutting it out normally 😉 Next up is fiction (I try to go 2 Non-F, 1 F, to mix things up and make sure I am reading for pleasure as well); I bought a book at the charity shop last week, it awaits my company
Podcast of the week🎙️
Lessons from Selling Morning Brew for $75m at 28 - Alex Lieberman on Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
Morning Brew is a 5-min trip around the news; Alex built and sold it at a hefty sum. Here’s some lessons he learnt along the way, very insightful.
Article of the week📰
Is Netflix’s best hope an acquisition by Microsoft?
Our love-hate streaming supremo has been in the news the past year after a dip in subscriber numbers. In the age of mega acquisitions by Facebook and Elon Musk, could this one be the next? Might it be that we see a spin-off about Microsoft Word married PowerPoint? Find out above.
A back-to-basics walk through of how big stars are made, and how heavy elements are formed.
Quote of the week💬
"Either you run the day, or the day runs you." - Jim Rohn
You are wise enough to change your mind about everything around you; change it for the better.
What has gone has gone. What’s to come will come and will be fine. All is well - stay in the present.
Adi
Thanks to this article by D.Wallace for some ideas.