Being intelligent can be dangerous

Whenever I complained about the college 'system' and things, I knew deep in my heart that there must be something wrong in me too that makes it a problem - "it takes two hands for a clap" they say.

Today, I came across this page: Your high IQ will kill your startup
It explains at least part of (what was) my issue.

People who are born intelligent start off life with everything easy for them. They don't have to work hard to get good grades, they never really have to do much to get ahead. The major challenge of early life is school - and school is designed for average people. So intelligent people just breeze through.

But there is a point where every intelligent person faces something that requires more than intelligence. It requires hard work, it requires the ability to fail, it requires being able to do tough tasks, boring tasks. For the first time in their life, in spite of their intelligence, these intelligent people are challenged, and they start failing. Like when they first attempt to create a startup.

And that's where most of them retreat. They focus on things they can't fail on, and ignore the other important things. They start to blame other things (like the school system). They procrastinate. They refuse to face new problems because they know they will not be able to handle them, and this does not fit into their worldview that they are invincible.

Thankfully, the "things they can't fail on" I chose in college were things like programming competitions and 'robot' making experiments, which turned out to be a not-too-shabby choice. Still, it's good to be honest to ourselves and realize where we screwed up. I hope I've learnt to digest and climb over failures these days, or at least am learning to do that.

I also found a similar link meant as a letter to Linus as he was exhibiting the above syndrome: Curse of the Gifted. Try to generalize the things there while reading, instead of reading in Linux's context itself. I especially liked this part:

"there will come a time when your raw talent is not
enough.  What happens then will depend on how much discipline [...] you
developed *before* you needed it, back when your talent was sufficient
to let you get away without."

It would seem I did not develop much of that discipline, but I'm trying to make up now. It's never too late in life to do the Right Thing.

Good deeds

A lot of good deeds go undone every day because someone is shy, uncertain or hidden in a crowd. The best thing you can do with your life is not to help others (though that's great) but to step forward to help in the first place. It's the hardest part - after that, helping becomes easy.

 - from this wonderful thread on Reddit. Highly recommended read, will enliven your hope on humanity!

I'm taking baby steps now, but I too need to step forward soon. Time's flying by, and I'm realizing that if it's not now, it's probably never - I don't want to be just another lump of meat that does things only to feed itself, and I'll probably become that if I don't start living the life I want NOW!

Edit: Just read the other comments in that awesome post. Very highly recommended read, will probably change your life and mind a little for the better.

A series of changes

Warning: This post is entirely about me (the ‘traditional’ kind of blog post) and has ended up like a Confessional. :) You might find it boring (in fact you probably would).
I’ve been undergoing a series of changes, all for good. It was high time these changes happened, before life got too awful.
You know the best part of my life so far? It was my High school life. I was proud of who I was, and life was going smooth. Higher secondary wizzed past, and I started seeing changes then itself. But college was the worst part of my life. I was totally unlike myself and I hated myself like anything. Despite a beautiful love story, lots of exploration into domains I had not seen (I started dabbling in philosophy, higher mathematics and many other things in college only), and unbelievably great friends (I don’t think there ever existed a class with a wider variety of great characters), college left me with only a bitter taste at last.
I don’t know what exactly the problem was. Yes, I chose the wrong course, but I don’t believe that was the entire reason. I believe whenever something goes wrong in life, it means something has gone wrong in you. Perhaps I became too ambitious. I was putting a lot of pressure on myself to become an expert in both computer science and electronics (yes, I tried that a while before I gave up), and at the same time was trying to change my introverted nature and seeming unfriendliness. In retrospect, it was an impossible situation, as life is all about tradeoffs. I wanted to be everything at the same time.
I think that sums up the problem. I was trying to fit in contradictory personalities within myself, and hence my mind was left as a battleground constantly in war. Every time someone told me I was a good person, a part of my mind, the part which did not like who I was at that point, told me “Huh! Yeah, right, like hell you are!” You know where that would lead? An ever worsening mind that keeps losing good qualities simply because it believes it doesn’t have them. Add to this a heartache that no one really understood me, and you have a recipe for disaster [what a cliché old phrase! :) ]. Every time a good friend talked as if I was bunking classes for fun, my heart sank a bit lower. I tried, a few times, explaining that I was going through tough times and none of it was fun, but gave up after some time. There were very few people who I felt really understood me (Vineeth was one of them, thanks dude). I woke up with no dreams for the day ahead, I went to bed with no satisfaction most of the days, and I was only half-conscious in the time in between. That’s why I missed many of the joys of college life, and instead of being the best time of my life, it ended up being (hopefully) the worst.
Yikes, that was a lot of negativity pouring out. But, like I said at the beginning (still remember wat I said?), I feel I’m changing for better. If you keep trying to get better, life definitely sends you support in some form. I got it in the form of an illness that gave me some compulsory time-to-think, a vacation at home that reminded me of who I really was, and a good understanding friend. I’m starting to view myself positively, have started reading self-help books again, am trying to do everything with utmost concentration, and am trying to be friendly and loving towards everyone.
In short, I’m trying to be… myself!
Edit: Came across this quote immediately after posting this: "Calm down. Breathe. This isn't the end of a beautiful love life that ended suddenly, this is the beginning of the rest of your goddamn life, and it's only going to get better from here." Well, thanks, life, for your beautiful coincidences. :)

Do Religions forbid you from enjoying life?

An Archbishop writes:

Modern man’s concept of happiness has not changed much since primitive times, ie. happiness is when I acquire more material things from others, and unhappiness is when others take my property from me.
Even if we leave aside the morality of this concept, it is still flawed in its essence because no matter how much property, power, public recognition, and pleasures we amass, it will not bring us happiness. Material objects cannot bring true happiness, only taedium vitae, after which a person is overcome by depression even more than before.

If you have lost something near and dear to you, you'd know how very true those words are.

Every material thing that we desire for brings only pain to us in the end.
Still, why do we continue to do it? We tell ourselves that it is all part of it. We think that without desiring for things, we'll not be enjoying life, that we'd be like robots.

And these saints and people like them seem to give support to it - they give up desires and live like paupers. This is not to blame them, to them there's no need for money or comforts, so they live without them. But for us, outside observers, it appears as though they're living a dull life that you and me surely won't want.

And this is why most of us stay away from religion... It feels like giving up our happiness willingly, which no fool would do.

But... shall we think for a moment? How many sages have you seen who think and write very clearly, who have great minds and brains? You might have heard of Vivekananda who was a very lucid speaker and writer, who understood a lot in science and even memorized whole encyclopedias without effort.

Don't you think it's a bit of contradiction if we say they do something not even a fool would do? Isn't it strange if they all were to be senseless in this one thing alone? Why would such intelligent people give up everything for nothing?

If you sincerely think about that question, you might get a suspicion they might actually have had some reason for what they did. Now, let's think about what they taught and followed.

They taught to take everything that comes as the Will of God. They didn't say don't enjoy things, they just said don't get lost in enjoying, then you'd suffer later when the thing is not there. Keep yourself a little detached from things always, that way you can remain sane always.

How about that for a philosophy of life? Enjoy things when they come, but no worries when they aren't there either. It's a Win-Win situation. Won't you love it?

When they said give up your material belongings, they didn't actually mean throw them all out into the Ganges and become penniless. Some real physical giving up might be needed in some cases to break mind's addiction, but that's not the real goal here. It's like this: if you feel you're getting addicted to the Internet, and want to break the addicitoin, you can probably do it better if you remain off the computer for some days rather than if you continue to be on the net every second, right? The same way, though the actual objective is getting the mind not to depend on some thing, physically taking it away is sometimes necessary to enforce that. If you get very stable in being unattached, those things might be returned to you, because your mind will no longer get affected by them.

And from time to time, life itself gives you big shocks to remind you that you aren't supposed to get too attached to things. Now, I don't honestly get why life (or God or whatever) does this, why it wants us to get detached (there are theories like Advaita that, if true, might explain this), but if this is the state of affairs, it's wise to make the best of it right?

And you know what, life treats you like you'd treat a little child if you're a teacher - life gives you blows only when it wants you to learn something and you refuse. If you learn the lesson yourself and show to life, it pats you on the back and gives chocolates. And believe me, life's chocolates can be very sweet. :)

Now, don't get attached to even that sweetness, just enjoy it, and move on. After all, that's all life's about. :)