Of delayed milestones and choosing to live

End of a calendar year always makes me want to reflect and account for it. I guess this is my way of trying to summarise the value of the time that was spent and not let it go unnoticed.

Like one of the things that I learnt this year is that when people tell you to live your life as if this is your last day - they are basically asking you to do an impossible task. (Until humans learn to time travel that is.)

I think that if I knew today really was my last day, I would possibly make a few different choices. 

But in reality you can never know that. And you cannot choose individual moments, you always choose a moment along with its consequences. 

I tend to choose moments with consequences I am prepared to live with (and not have to die the next day). Some of them maybe regrets. Some unfulfilled curiosities. And some impulsive risks. Of course since consequences are in the future, you can only make a guess. Though many times it is not that hard to extrapolate, sometimes you could miscalculate. You still do have to live with it. 

(And then it boils down to how objective you can be about making mistakes, learning and moving on. But I have already written extensively about my learnings about making mistakes before.)

Another thing that happened recently, again left me quite pensive.

I had a few hours of panic and self doubt after speaking to a very good friend. It seems I have not been achieving any of the expected milestones in life and I was starting to feel a bit like a student with learning disability who keeps falling back in class.

I soon reasoned with myself that milestones are not absolute. Just like the notion of truth is not absolute. It is more like a probability, given a set of conditions/constraints and depends a lot on the subject. 

But with that I also realised that unfortunately we still do need our own personal goals/milestones to give us a general direction (or the much overused term 'purpose') in life. And equally importantly, we also need to space them in such a way that every now and then we are rewarded with mini achievements. 

Below are some of my high level goals which have been consistent over pretty much the last decade (some are in fact carry over from the last two decades really!)

1. Visit Antarctica.

2. Publish my book of verses.

3. Be able to innovate/invent as an engineer.

4. Understand what terms like freedom and happiness mean to me.

5. Do whatever it takes to feel alive.

(Of course I also have little ones which I hope are increasing my chances of getting to the big ones one day.)

Otherwise, 2013 has been less adventurous than usual so far (of course everything could change in the last month!). However the number of interesting people I have met this year has surely gone up and I have managed to sneak in an address change in the last minute, so life is still interesting. There were also some healthy doses of farewells, disappointments, embarrassments and even tiny victories which have kept me going and left me wanting more.

Always a good way to end, I think.

The accidental grown-up

Lately I have been getting this sneaky feeling that I have been growing up without me noticing or giving it much thought. I have always felt stuck in the past and resisted growing up or taking responsibility. But looks like it is happening with or without me acknowledging it. 

I hadn't thought much about influencing youngsters before, because so far I was the youngster. I remember how my life and attitude towards life changed because I met some of my 'seniors' in that vulnerable period of my life. The period of life, when I took everything in like a sponge. I was always drawn towards people who wanted to do something more than just a 9-5 job. Who were passionate about what they did, and who always wanted to make a difference. They inspired me and I wanted to imitate them. Eventually I may not have ended up doing exactly what they did, but in many ways they defined my future direction in life.

And in a similar way, when the other day a junior colleague asked me why I do what I do, I did not hesitate telling him that it is because I loved what I did. Interestingly he told me he is doing what he is doing for the 'money', to which my response was 

'Money should be the by-product of doing what you love, not the objective'. 

He gave me a skeptical look. Our conversation was cut off due to someone else walking into the room, but I hope he will process what I said in his own time, and not just discard it as just another grown up lecture. 

The conversation made me realise, that I have the power to influence and affect others around me, and some of them are six, seven or even ten years younger than me. When I speak to them, they look up to me. I am no longer just a friend or a colleague, who is making an off handed remark. But my words are shaping their future even if it is in smallish way. 

Having said that, it is also easy to fall into the misconception that as a grown-up we know everything and that we know better than the youngsters. I could begin to take myself too seriously and start lecturing, something that I have hated about some of the grown-ups that I happen to know. 

So, all in all this phase of transitioning into a grown-up so to speak is a dangerous one. And something I didn't think I would have to think about quite this early in life! But there is a hidden responsibility that comes with it, and I guess I always have to remember (as wtp reminded me today) that

'To be able to teach, you have to be able to learn'. 

A good engineer

I have often wondered what makes a good engineer. And the answer that comes to my mind is :

A good engineer is someone who genuinely cares. Everything else can be learnt. 

But I don't think this is a complete answer. And needs to be extended a bit. This post in a way is a personal reminder for myself for the days I feel lost and defeated and am not sure why I am doing what I am doing. I also hope it will help new graduates and young students realise their true potential and not get disheartened with the impending tryst with the '9 to 5' life. It does not have to be like that.

Curiosity I believe is the second ingredient to this mix of essential elements. Mix a person who genuinely cares about solving a certain problem, with another who is curious about how things work or don't, and there you have quite a powerful combination.

Next comes dedication and determination. It is all very good to want to solve a problem and want to find out about how you can do it, but what is the use of it all, if you cannot keep at it. Not every problem can be solved quickly. Not every curiosity lead to answers. It is easy to run into dead ends and lose enthusiasm. Personally for me one of the key quality of a good engineer is to be able to persevere in spite of the road blocks, discouragements, and multitudes of challenges that one is sure to face. And these challenges need not even be solely technical. I find it important at such times to filter out the surrounding noise and focus on the real problem that I am trying to solve. And this is where 'caring' helps. I find that if I genuinely care about solving the problem, it makes it easier to ignore all the noise surrounding it.

The next essential ingredient that comes to my mind is the passion to learn and humility. No matter how smart a solution you think you have come up with, it is possible that someone else can do it better than you. In fact keeping an open mind is very important in order to better evolve in an industry/world where new technology/talent/ideas are being born every second. You cannot keep up in the long run, if you don't learn and adapt quickly.

And while talking about learning and adapting, the complementary skill I would add to achieve a healthy balance is innovation. Thinking out of the box, taking risks (because of what you believe and not just to be 'different') and having the courage and confidence to go against the flow of existing way of things is absolutely essential for a good engineer. At the end of the day, the reason we exist is to hopefully add some real value to the world and in some way create our own little legacy. The bigger the impact, the greater the value addition. Although this is not to say solving small problems is not an achievement in its own right. Because it most definitely is. And it may well be a stepping stone to solving much bigger problems in future.

There are a few more personal favourites that I would like to add to this 'super engineer' mix.
One of them being automation. An engineer should be able to identify what can be automated and optimized and what needs concentrated brain power. If a machine can be made to do what you are doing, then you are not really adding a lot of value.
The second one is to be able to switch between stepping back to understand the big picture and then zooming into the details and nitty-gritty of the problem itself.
The third for me is to ask why and to challenge myself at every point. Why do I want to solve this particular problem? What is the benefit? Is it quantifiable in any way? This gives more meaning to the work I do and it adds to the reasons to 'care'.

I am sure there are several other key ingredients, but the last one that I will add in my list today, is good communication skills. This is not last on the list, because it is less important, but more because I have seen cases where people lacking many of the above key ingredients get away in life only on the basis of being able to 'speak well'. The harsh reality of life is that it is not enough to simply care about solving the problem, but you also have to know how to sell your solution. If you genuinely believe that you have something valuable to contribute to the world, you have to take the pain and the effort and speak up, and speak well. Or else it will be lost to the world with you.

And finally as a personal test, maybe all we need to do is ask ourselves this question:
Do I get high on solving problems?
If the answer is yes, it probably is a good starting point. The rest of above ingredients are just nudges in the right direction.




p.s.These points can be extended to what makes a good professional, but I have chosen engineers in particular here as I want to establish a firm boundary for the context of this post, and stick to the set of humans, that I relate to the most.

Updating this as I learn more...Sometimes just being a good engineer is contrary to being able to survive in the current state of corporate world. Caring may make us good engineers, but caring too much makes us vulnerable and open to hurt. I am not saying hence we must not care. I am just laying down the consequences as is.

Mistakes - the good, bad and ugly of it all

I have always been of the opinion that mistakes play a big part in teaching us important things in life for real and for ever. However I recently realised having this opinion does not necessarily make me better at handling my own mistakes.

One silly incident from my childhood comes to mind. I remember once getting 98/100 in a subject in school. I was relatively happy since I had topped the subject in my class. However when I came home and joyously informed my parents about it, the first thing my dad asked me was 'Where did you lose the 2 marks?' I was immediately ashamed, angry and sad all at once. I could not quite fathom why the bigger number 98 did not matter to him? Why was I being asked about the 2 marks that I lost? Why were we discussing my mistake and not my achievement?

I guess I know the answer to that now. This is how it is in real life. If the expectation is of 100 then anything less than that is a failure. But is it realistic to expect 100? Maybe not. But for many of us, our mind has been trained since childhood to aim for 100. And sometimes this training from childhood surpasses any logical reasoning of reality and makes us over react to our mistakes. Instead of dealing with them like they are a stepping stone to a greater understanding, we punish ourselves for slipping.

I am writing these thoughts here, because I think it is important that we teach our children and ourselves the importance of making mistakes, being able to accept them and finally dealing with them. While it is good to discuss and analyse what went wrong and why, I also think it is important to not make a child/person feel so scared of making a mistake that he/she is too scared to step outside his/her comfort zone and take on new risks and challenges. Excessive fear of making mistakes can make us dull, overly cautious and close minded. Also sometimes the mistakes we make drive us towards alternate solutions and fuel our creativity.

However, as we grow up, the consequences and repercussions of each mistake gets bigger (sometimes in reality and sometimes simply in our heads). And really it is the attitude that we develop as a child which helps us get through some of our difficult phases in adulthood and keep a sense of balance in our lives.

Like in my case, I feel I should have learnt a bit more about perspective and big picture and not let every little 'up' and 'down' swing me one way or the other so drastically. I still think it is right to aspire for a 100, but maybe have a better understanding of what '100' means to me rather than to absolutely everyone around me.



In fact, thinking about it now, considering I am in the business of minimizing error (Control systems), theoretically I know exactly what I should be doing. Decrease sensitivity towards noise, learn from previous mistake (feedback) and concentrate on getting to set point as fast as possible. How I translate that in real life is of course the real problem to solve!