The Element of Exploration and Its Hope for Helping Us Escape Same-Old Same Old

Sailing Out In The Ocean by Shari Weinsheimer

Who says we have to take whatever is given to us as given?

That our lives have to be limited to same old same old?

That new paths were not meant to be traveled?

That glass ceilings were not meant to be shattered?

That horizons were not meant to be expanded?

And boundaries changed?

To explore is to discover.

And to redefine.

We have the freedom to put on different glasses and hats and experience the world from a different perspective.

Through travel.

Through books.

Through watching TV with an observant eye.

Through talking to people from all walks of life (Socrates style).

Through creating something and exploring what that something does.

For us.

For others if we have the courage to allow them to experience it.

A piece of music

A painting

A story

A sculpture

A tapestry

A dish

A bottle of wine

A speech

A performance

A blog post.

We don’t know the fate of anything we bring into the world.

It’s an exploration.

We must be prepared for anything.

To be tested by indifference.

To be delighted by complete and utter praise and approval – think Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love.

To be startled by outrage - think Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses.

The worth of an activity is not determined by its popularity, or its effect on our net worth, our status, or our power.

Exploration is worthwhile in itself.

It expands our horizons. 

What is growth after all, but expanded horizons?

Recently, I met an IT professional who has a secret passion to learn to decorate cakes.  I would never have learned of this. It’s only when I told her Tanita works at Baskin Robbins that she jumped up and said, “oh, does she decorate cakes?  I so badly want to learn to decorate cakes.” She could hardly contain her excitement.

What’s your secret passion?

Exploring doesn’t mean we have to become good at what we explore.

It only means we want to get involved and find out more about it.

If we become good at it and take to it like a duck to water or a gardener with green thumbs, that's great.

But we should give ourselves the freedom to explore without the burden of success.

Whether it’s trying out a new recipe with the help of YouTube, or learning to decorate a cake at Michael’s, or exploring new ways of eating and living, we should relish the learning and ask for nothing more.

In mid 2010, I quit my full-time job.

A series of explorations followed.

Wondering what to do, I thought I might explore getting Xactly Administrator Training.

Problem was Xactly training offerings were for Xactly customers only.

Fingers crossed, I picked up the phone, called the Xactly trainer and appealed to her. I said, "I am a Commissions Analyst who is unemployed and would like to  make myself more marketable. If you let me do the Xactly Administrator training paying on my own dime, it would help me get a job."

Score 1 for asking. It worked.

Xactly introduced me to Don Gootee of Solution Partners. I joined his Xactly implementations team. 

I was involved in 3 full implementations with them. Solution Partners also gave me the opportunity to do UAT testing for Salesforce.com. I did this 2 years in a row.

Then along came Spectrumbiztech.

Spectrumbiztech is a visionary company and they offer a whole spectrum of SPM services covering all the different popular solutions: Xactly, Callidus, Varicent, Nice, and more.

Spectrumbiztech sponsored me to attend Varicent training and I am now on an assignment through them at a company which uses Varicent.

I have also written White Papers for Spectrumbiztech.

On the personal side, I have many exciting explorations to talk about.

This blog is one of them.

It is now 230 posts long and counting.

The posts on Minoo Jha Life Strategies include many popular guest posts.

Here’s the list by the different guest posters:

Ajay Sachdev

The Magical World of P G Wodehouse

A Short Stint In Advertising

Cricket, Glorious Cricket

Oh Bangalore – Part 1

Oh Bangalore – Part II

Oh Bangalore – Part III

Anita Saran

A Fresh Perspective on Pets

Cindy Pinkston

Cindy’s Corner

Letters to Lucas

Flying Lessons

Reprising Joyce Kilmer

Laundry Day

How to Say Goodbye Part 3

Don Gootee

Here’s your 25 point Checklist for Success

Gurshuran Summan

Feet Planted

On Writing Well

Jacinta Correa

Kushboo

A Facebook Face-off

Jim Cobb 

Gleanings From The Teaching Company

John Paraskevopoulos

The Importance Of Language Arts

Colors of Life

Juliet Pinto

Audrey 3

Shantel Chavez

On Writing Well by William Zinsser

Thanks to all my guest-posters.  I appreciate the extra oomph you’ve given Minoo Jha Life Strategies.

About a year ago, I spread my wings from blogging into book reviewing, which intimidated me at first, as any new exploration will.

I have written 10 Amazon book reviews.  My first book review was of Anita Saran’s On Becoming Vegetarian – One Woman’s Experience.  My latest book review was of Ajay Sachdev’s Oh Bangalore.

Food has been another area of exploration for me.

There was the Green Papaya discovery.

And sushi – for which I have to thank Don Gootee and Tanita.

And the deeper dive I have done into Vietnamese food, thanks to my friend Helen.

Nina and I have had an ongoing love affair with Asian food as you read in my post The Unites States of Friendship Part 5.

She introduced me to Fey in Menlo Park, where I was able to explore the spiciest and scrumptiousest Sichuan cuisine. She also introduced me to Bay Leaf in Sunnyvale, where I was able to explore Indonesian fare for the first time. Craving Dancing Fish or Stink Bean? You should start your ignition and head to Bay Leaf.

I have also explored new ways of eating at home thanks to my friend Julia.

Of course, reading being one of my favorite activities, I’ve explored a lot of new books in the last few years.  I’ve made mention of Socrates, A Man For Our Times, How Will You Measure Your Life by Clay Christensen and Three Little Steps by Trevor Blake.

I owe a special debt to Richard Nelson Bolles’ What Color Is My Parachute?  It filled me with hope and encouragement and gave me ideas.   You can read more about what this book has meant to me in Can a Book About Job Hunting Show You the Path back to yourself?

Any area of our lives has the potential for exploration.

After making some foolish investment mistakes and flaming out – as I explained in my post How I Lost A Thousand Dollars on Donuts – I decided to explore a completely different strategy – as I explain in my post Yoga For Investors.  This strategy has served me well.

Of course, exploring will result in bloopers sometimes – that’s par for the course. If we decide we want to avoid all the pitfalls, we won’t be able to explore at all. We have to take a chance, even at the risk of making a fool of ourselves.

The most satisfying of my explorations has been in the field of the spiritual.

My friend Gerri, whom you first met in United States of Friendship Part 2 introduced me to her Bible Study class. I’ve been going there off and on for the past 2 years.  It’s been a wonderful exploration.

I also started meditating in late summer of 2010.

Meditation has brought me the rewards of peace and acceptance and cheerfulness and stoicism and connectedness.

Exploring is all about being open to experience.

And meditation has made me more open to experience and accepting of anything that happens to me.

Don’t think that when you explore, you have to have one plan and one set of ideas.

You can have a palette of plans and ideas and go with your gut.

You can leave room for improvisation to happen.

Did you know that the titles and endings of many movies are left open till the very end of filming and in fact, several alternate endings are often filmed with the final one being selected just before the final edit?

Further, directors do not stick to the script and many scenes happen by happy accident.

“I’ll have what she is having” the memorable line uttered in the restaurant scene in When Harry Met Sally is one of those happy accidents.  Billy Crystal came up with it when the scene was being shot, and everyone liked it so much, the director decided to include it.

I also found out something interesting about Al Stewart’s hit Year of the Cat album.

The entire music and orchestration for all the songs was scored and recorded (with the help of Alan Parsons) before Al started work on any of the lyrics.  What’s more, when Al got down to writing lyrics, he wrote 4 alternate sets of lyrics for each song.  So Year of the Cat and On the Border might have been Foot of the Stage and Ships in the Night - if things had turned out differently.

Apparently, throughout his career – Al has approached song-writing that way - writing 4-6 sets of lyrics for each one and then making a selection from those.  For inspiration, he cracks open an atlas.

What a way to go.

Exploration should be fun.

It should be about going with the flow.

It’s okay to start down one path and veer off onto another.

I do that almost every week.

I start writing a post about one thing and then halfway into the post, I veer off and a different thought stream leads me to write a completely different post.

This week I started writing about sportsmanship, and here I am, completing and publishing a post about exploration.

We can become more exploratory in everything, including in our significant relationships.

If we’ve always related to a child, spouse or partner one way, we can start relating to them in another way.

For instance, we may want to light a fire under our kids because we feel they lack ambition, drive, purpose and focus.

There are two ways to do this.

We can be critical and nagging and insulting – this is the arsonist way of lighting a fire – we are trying to burn them with our words, brandish our opinions and judgments on their minds.

Or we can be encouraging and supportive and guiding –a source of light and warmth.

If you’ve never explored being a giver of light and warmth to your child, perhaps you can explore that now.

When I explored a different way of relating to my child, I was very happy with the results.

Some of my most satisfying moments have come from exploring different reactions to emotional stimuli.

I am not always successful with avoiding a negative reaction, but when I am, I find it liberating.

When I was a child, I was over sensitive and if you said boo to me, I would cry.

As I grew older, though I was able to stay composed outwardly, I continued to be over sensitive – I would just bottle it all up inside.

Now that I’ve learned to meditate, I am becoming less and less sensitive, and I find a way not to identify with the slings that are hurled my way.

Once, I was in a discount store and I suddenly crossed from browsing the shelves on the left of the aisle to the right.  I got in the way of a rough looking couple.  The husband was clearly annoyed and assuming I didn’t know English, he commented to his wife about me, “Bozo”.

The old me would have been very upset for the rest of the day.  The new me knew the guy didn’t know better.  It was even quite possible he would change as the years went by.

I changed, didn’t I?

I will end this post with the opening lines of the post.

Who says we have to take whatever is given to us as given?

That our lives have to same old same old?

That new roads were not meant to be traveled?

That glass ceilings were not meant to be shattered?

That horizons were not meant to be expanded?

And boundaries changed?

To explore is to discover.

And redefine.

Put on a different pair of glasses and a different hat and experience the world from a different perspective.

Life’s more fun and gratifying that way.

As always, thanks for reading and have a great day and week…..M…..a Pearl-Seeker like you.

The Element of Numbers and Its Hope For Getting the Math In Our Lives Right

Graphic based on Acoustic Guitar by Petr Kratochvil

I am into numbers.

Sort of.

I know the world population is over 7 billion and the US population is over 300M.

I know the population of San Jose is 1M.

I know the percentage of the worldwide population with a college degree. It is 6.7%. Are you one of them? Congrats.

Of the 93% who don’t have a college degree, many are getting along just fine - whatever the reason they do not have a degree.

Some may not have had the opportunity.

Others may have dropped out. Deliberately. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg are among them.

Yet others may have gotten side-tracked along the way.

I was sidetracked by a guitar.

Wondering which country has the highest percentage of college-educated people in the world? I can tell you that too.  It happens to be Russia. 53.5% of Russians have a college degree.

Numbers are important.

One of the reasons President Obama was voted into power was because of a number.

15% of the US population had no health insurance when Obama was voted President.

Obamacare is the President fulfilling his promise to the people who voted him into power.

Numbers open our eyes to problems.

How many of us were happy-go-lucky about our health until a routine physical changed that?

We were told our blood pressure was too high and we were at risk for heart attacks and strokes.

We were made aware that a blood pressure reading higher than 80/120 was unhealthy – 80 was the upper limit for diastolic and 120 was the upper limit for systolic.

Some of us (and if we are Asian American, there’s a good chance) may have been delivered the news we were pre-diabetic.

A blood sugar number higher than 70-99 mg/dl put us in that category.

Our doctors cautioned us about diabetes and the associated risks - nerve damage, blindness, heart attacks.

Cholesterol is another biggie.  We were told our total cholesterol should be under 200 mg/dl and our HDL should be above 60 mg/dl.

Yes, when it comes to health, numbers tell the story.

It starts with a few simple numbers early in life – the fact that we all need 8 hours of sleep and normal human temperature is 98.4 degrees.

Then it expands from there.

From health to education to many areas of our lives, numbers tell the story.

We aim for an A on a test, but we get a B.

“But I studied so hard,” we think to ourselves.

But we got a B. It means we got between 80 and 89% of the questions right. If we had gotten 90-100% we would have gotten that A. Clearly, we didn’t study nearly well enough. We should call a spade a spade.

We ask kids “What’s your GPA?” and “how much did you score on the SAT?” because during high school and college, numbers are the only way to tell how someone is doing.

When we first enter the working world, all we want is a foot in the door. So we might even work for free, if it were legal.

But once we have gained experience and credentials, numbers start playing into our decisions.

We evaluate every potential job based on how much we are going to get paid. 

We are interested in the total package - salary, vacation and benefits.

It’s only as we move further in our careers, we begin to care about other things– challenge, flexibility, convenience, cachet, prestige, meaning.

We stop looking purely at numbers.

If people go from strength to strength professionally, or manage to hold on to their jobs in tough times, we applaud them.

We also start admiring stick-to-itiveness.

I changed jobs frequently, especially in my first career as a copywriter. Today I think back and wonder.  Would I have achieved as much, if not more, had I avoided those frequent changes.

Of course, I do not regret starting my creative shop Purple Patch. It was a blast.

Depending on the kind of work we do, and where we live in the world, we may find ourselves involved in a fight over numbers.

Currently, fast food workers in the US are fighting for an increase in their wages.

American women fought for equal pay for decades until the Equal Pay Act was passed in 1963.

One of the reasons I have become interested in numbers is because my work involves numbers.

I am currently a Sales Performance Management Consultant. My job involves crunching loads of numbers of spreadsheets every month and then loading data into Xactly or Varicent, which are popularly used software programs used for sales commissions.  I also help companies with their Xactly and Varicent implementations and their UAT testing.

I have also had to think about numbers in my personal life. Some of these numbers are real exciting.

For instance, I can't begin to tell you how exciting it was to write the 100^th post on Minoo Jha Life Strategies. 

I did a series of posts to commemorate that milestone.  Reaching 100 – Part 1, Reaching 100 – Part 2, Reaching 100 – Part 3, Reaching 100 – Part 4.

Today, it’s hard to believe I am on my 229th post and counting.

I am also interested in numbers as it concerns money management, because I know we can make some big personal money management blunders if we don’t know the numbers.

We can buy too much insurance, or buy too little.

We can withhold too much tax (and get a big refund) or withhold too little.

We can pay through the nose to buy something on credit, or be smart and pay as little as possible.

We can be smart about debt and use it strategically, or be foolish about debt and get into messes and try to borrow from Peter to pay Paul.

We can save and invest too conservatively, barely keeping up with inflation, or we can take on too much risk and lose a lot, even lose it all.

Whether we invest in real estate, commodities, stocks or bonds, or save our money in bank accounts and CDs, there are numbers involved and we have to be wise to them.

Every year, we will need to make decisions based on the opportunities available, the risks involved, future projections and our own personal situation - and we can only make wise decisions if we understand the numbers.

We have to look at the risks, returns, tax and legal implications of any investment or expense we are considering on the basis of what the numbers are telling us.

Yes, it is important to get the numbers in our life right.

I have written several posts on financial lessons learned, including 4 Lessons Learned From Spinning in the Rain and 4 Lessons I Didn't Learn From a Certified Financial Planner and A Retirement Planning Formula You Won't Find On Oprah.

Now when it comes to life questions such as “Is it worth spending x amount of hours every week to do Y (spending 8 hours a week to write a blog post, for instance)?” or “Should I marry this person?” or “How much does working from home equate in money?” numbers may not be a useful guidepost for us.

Not everything can be bought.

Not everything has a price.

We ourselves, cannot be bought on certain things.

For instance, we may have family heirlooms or personal treasures which mean so much to us, we will not part with them for any price.

We may give them away as an act of love (think of the 1972 Gran Torino owned by Walt Kowalski), but we will not allow anyone to name a price for them. 

They are priceless.

Likewise, many people will not be bought on their religious beliefs and observances.

In one of the best books of the last few years, How Will You Measure Your Life, Clay Christensen tells us how he risked losing his place on a sports team and upsetting his teammates by refusing to play any games on Sunday. It went against observing the Sabbath so Clay refused to do that.

Clay could not be bought on that.

I am very grateful to my friend Julia for helping me realize that some things are priceless.  You can read what I found out was priceless from this United States of Friendship post.

Each one of us benefits from examining what we are willing to be bought on and what we are not willing to be bought on.

Because when we look back on our lives, we will be proudest of the things we refused to be bought on.

Everything is not about money in life.

Love isn’t about money.

Steve Jobs met his wife Laurene after noticing her in the front row at one of his speeches at Stanford University. He asked her out to dinner that night.

Here’s what he had to say about that day:

"I was in the parking lot with the key in the car, and I thought to myself, 'If this is my last night on earth, would I rather spend it at a business meeting or with this woman?' I ran across the parking lot, asked her if she'd have dinner with me. She said yes, we walked into town and we've been together ever since."

When it comes to successful marriages and successful partnerships, one plus one does not equal two, but an infinite amount more.

The underpinnings of many great human achievements lie in great partnerships.

In things big and small, having the right team-mate, or coach, or spouse, or mentor can change our lives.

We should not underestimate the impact of the people in our lives.

When I joined Toastmasters, I was mentored by a Toastmaster whose name was Lorraine. She was a fantastic mentor and sounding board.

If not for her feedback and input, I might not have completed my CTM in a year. I also might not have been able to step us to the podium and deliver between 10 and 15 speeches so confidently.

Lorraine played a big part in my success as a Toastmaster.

So before I completed my CTM, I wrote and delivered a speech to thank her.  It was called When One Plus One Does Not Equal Two.

Who do you have to thank for where you’ve got in life?

Who have been the co-passengers who have helped you move forward and had your back when you needed it?

Who has helped you focus on your strengths and not let your weaknesses hold you back?

Would you have been able to spread your wings if not for the presence of these people in your life?

If meeting the right person at the right time changed your life forever, you must never forget it.

Take time to express thanks for them and to them often.

And even when they are not in your lives anymore, say a silent thanks to them and celebrate the day you met them.

Some of us will want to graduate from being helped to becoming helpers.

There's a book for that.

One recommendation is The Mentor's Guide by Louis J Zachary.

However, before we can even think of becoming a mentor, if some of our behaviors are sucking the confidence out of the people around us and damaging their self-esteem, we need to work on getting over that first.

Ultimately, we want to create positive experiences for the people around us and leave a legacy of positive memories.

It’s something each one of us needs to think about and then ask ourselves, “which are the areas in which I need to change?”

Read my posts Path to Change and How to Become a Low Maintenance Person for ideas and inspiration.

Clearly, we need to get the areas of our life in which the numbers matter right and the areas in our life where the numbers don’t matter right as well.

We should pick one area in each sphere to work on and start with that.

One good thing will lead to another.

That's for sure.

As always, thanks for reading and have a great day and week……M…..a Pearl Seeker like you. P.S. Thanks to Ajay, Ananda, Badri, Jacinta, Patty, Rosie, Subhakar and others who commented on my last post.  Much appreciated!