The Element of Discovering Yourself Through Writing and Its Hope for Learning About Life

In the garden of my childhood home was a guava tree. For years, it did not produce any fruit. Then suddenly one year, there were guavas on the tree. Urchins ran into our cul de sac to steal guavas from our tree.

When I think of my writing, I think of myself as that guava tree. For years (and years), I was not able to produce anything. Then suddenly in December of 2010 something stirred.  I was able take up my pen again and start this blog.

What happened to me in those barren years when I could not write? I am not sure, but I have learned something from that time.  I have learned even if there is a long gap when you do not do something, if you start again, you can quickly get back in the groove. I made this happy discovery when I got back into writing again.

Writing is filled with discovery.

I made the first discovery at the age of 7, when I started writing.

The first discovery I made was that love can make a fool of us at any age.

I Love Sammy

An American missionary family had moved into a house in our lane. The family had 5 boys, the youngest of whom was an endearing and impish 9 year old called Sammy. My sisters and I would go over to play at their house.  We especially liked to jump on their trampoline.

Soon my 7 year old heart was bursting with a secret I could not keep just in my head anymore. “I love Sammy”, I wrote on a scrap of paper. The note was discovered and merciless teasing followed.

Love had made a fool of my young heart.

My next discovery was that not everything one sees should be written about.

A Kiss is just a Kiss. Or Not

I used to be taken to the movies.

When the kissing scenes came on, I was made to cover my eyes.

Perhaps, I peeped.

Perhaps by the time I was told to cover my eyes, I had already seen too much.

One of my sisters met the love of her life, and started dating. Soon after, these words mysteriously appeared on a wall of our house, “I saw X kissing X”.

There was a scolding. The words were hurriedly removed from the wall. I learned not everything we see should be written about.

Go Straight to Jail.  Don’t Pass Go

The next discovery I made was actually about signatures.

In 4^th grade, homework was assigned to us in a special book called a homework diary. Every day, before school ended, the teacher would write our homework on the blackboard. We would copy out the homework in our homework diaries.  When we got home, we were supposed to show the homework diary to our parents and get their signature on it.

I decided it was best for all concerned, if I signed the homework diary myself, and not show it to my mum.

When my teacher realized I was doing this, she hauled me to the principal. One of my older sisters was summoned. The principal wagged her finger at me and told me what I had done was a forgery. She said grown-ups could go to jail for doing that. “We must give her an appropriate punishment so she learns not to do this again” said the principal.  “You will stay after school and write the following sentence 100 times:  “I will not copy any one’s signature.”  “I will not copy any one’s signature.” “I will not copy any one’s signature.” Got that? ” I got that.

Glory Days

Then glory days started. I learned I could write something and it could bring me glory. The SPCA held a state-wide essay contest for elementary school students.  The topic was “My Pet”. I won 2^nd place in my age group.  Nobody was expecting this, least of all me. I didn’t have any experience with a pet. Yet I was able to write from imagination and win.  I was thrilled.  My family was thrilled. I felt like a mini celebrity. There was one less than bright moment connected with this win. The school was worried I would come shabbily dressed to the awards ceremony. I understood this, when they sent a note home with me a few days before the ceremony. It said “When your child comes to the awards ceremony, please make sure she is in a clean well pressed uniform, her shoes are polished and her hair is neatly brushed and plaited.”

The Power of Words

Winning the My Pet essay contest was the beginning of my love for everything and anything connected with words.  By the time I was a teen, books and words had become my life. My family noticed and encouraged this. They introduced me to the British Council library, and got me a membership there – one of the greatest gifts they could give me. That, and a Scrabble game for one of my birthdays.  

The Not So Fun Teen Years

I entered my teen years hopelessly shy, and tongue-tied in the presence of company. I preferred writing to speaking, and I had to fall back on my writing again and again to make any kind of impression on anybody. My writing-centered life led me down some creative paths and some rabbit holes. One of the rabbit holes was developing a one-sided crush on somebody.  When I couldn’t hold back my feelings, I wrote a long impassioned letter and mailed it.  I regretted this instantly.  If you express your feelings to someone verbally, they can stop you after you utter the first foolish sentence.  Send a letter, however, and you have given them pages of utter foolishness to read.  I could not look this person in the eye for a long, long time.

The Big Words Phase

Then there was the Big Words phase. This was another rabbit hole. Mangaloreans tend to use big words, but they can still be understood, when they talk or speak.  I went through a writing phase, when I cared little whether I was understood.  All I wanted to do was please myself with my impressive vocabulary. I now have a theory about why I was doing that. Anyway, I had 3 sisters away at college, and I bombarded them with letters filled with exotic, unfamiliar and foreign-sounding words. I was put in my place when one of them wrote to my mom and said, “We don’t understand a word of Minoo's letters.”

The Light at The End Of the Tunnel

Then I discovered I could submit unsolicited articles to newspapers and magazines. This is when I stopped being a nuisance, and began to do something useful with my writing.  I wrote humorous middles, skits, children’s stories, essays, and sent them off. Some of these submissions were accepted and published.  Also, around that time, our friend Janet taught me and my brother David the rudiments of the guitar.  I began to compose songs in my spare time, writing my own lyrics and music, taping myself with a cassette tape recorder.  This music phase lasted 3-5 years. Between the compositions, and the writing, and the English language lessons I gave foreign students, I was able to keep my mind off the one thing I was supposed to be doing that I was not doing - attending college.

Love Stories

Plato said, “At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet ”. Though I was often in tears about my personality problems, and being able to write and not speak, I found love.  Though it was not everlasting love, each time I found it, it felt like true love, and I was inspired.  I expressed my feelings through cards - Hallmark type cards with poems and puns and jokes – that I would create myself. This led one boyfriend to say to me, “Minoo, you should think about becoming a copywriter”.  I remember asking him what he meant. He pointed to a billboard and told me copywriters did that. I said, “I would sure like to do that.” Little did I know, within a matter of years, I would be interviewed for a copywriting job, get accepted, and start writing for a living.

Writing For a Living

What was it like to write for a living? With every campaign I wrote, I felt my credibility (and reason for living) was on the line. I wanted my work to be the silver bullet – I wanted the target customer to drop everything for the product I was working on, I wanted to make the consumer open her or his wallet, I wanted to make them a loyal fan for life. But I was to learn that just because you want something badly doesn’t mean it will happen. When I ran Purple Patch, I did a direct mail campaign for a client who was holding a garment show. Very few people turned up at the show and she sold almost nothing.  I got a massive headache from it.

The Case for America

When I decided I wanted to move to America, I wrote impassioned letters to my sisters to sponsor me.  They tried to dissuade me, believing in their hearts I would have a hard time in America and would not get the lucky breaks I had experienced in India.  I exchanged several letters with them, and when they realized I would not back down, they caved.  And so here I am.  You know all about the American chapter of my story from this blog.  I got into the SPM field and have been there ever since.

Never Say Never

Eventually, I would learn to conquer my speaking fears at Toastmasters. I completed my 10 CTM speeches, and participated in 3 Toastmaster contests.  I also plucked up the courage to deliver a Money Workshop at an elementary school.  Through this, I learned the wisdom of “Never Say Never”. 

And now here I am, today writing this blog.

Roald Dahl once said, “I don’t care if a reader hates one of my stories, just as long as he finishes the book.”

Thank you for reading to the end of this post. If you are longing to write about your life journey, hopefully you found some inspiration.  You've read my story. I can't wait to read yours.  I will end with a quote I hope will get you going soon, “A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.”

As always have a great day and week…….M…..a Pearl Seeker like you. Thanks to Ajay and Subhakar for their comments on Facebook and thanks to the rest of you for your votes.

The Element of Constraints and its Hope for Focused Creativity

I meditate on asteya. Asteya is one of the yamas (ethical precepts) of yoga.

It means taking from the world only what you need -- without greed, excess or wastage.

I am far from where I want to be when it comes to asteya, but I get a little better every day.

Recently I spotted a can of beets and a can of pineapples in my kitchen cupboard. The cans had been sitting there forever.  I had picked them up and never gotten around to using them. They were a glaring example of not living by the principles of asteya.

But now I looked at the cans and decided “Enough is enough.  I need to use these cans and not let them lie around gathering dust anymore.”

Of course, there was the challenge of what to do with them.

I thought if I  opened the two cans and mixed the ingredients together - they might pair well. But the pairing needed something to make it work and taste good. 

That made me think about fruta picada – the Mexican street vendor snack they sell at the Beryessa Flea Market.  It is a mix of chopped fruit dusted with lime and chile.

“Fruit chaat, that’s it,” I thought, “All I need to do is add some chaat masala to the beets and the pineapple.” It worked.

This got me thinking about the avocados I had in the fridge.  “I wonder how they would taste with chaat masala,” I thought. I gave it a whirl. This was a successful experiment too.

Encouraged, I wondered what avocado pani puri might taste like.  I typed avocado pani puri into the Google search box.  Several recipes came up.  Avocado pani-puri turned out to be a great spin on pani-puri which is traditionally made with boiled potato and garbanzo beans.

Thanks to constraining myself to use up all the canned food I had at home, I experienced one culinary breakthrough after another.

Constraints lead to creative breakthroughs because they force us to think in new ways.

When you have to make do with what you have and nothing more, you find a way to make it work.

Whether our constraints are time constraints, resource constraints, information constraints, talent constraints, skill constraints or action constraints, when we have any of these constraints, our imagination and ingenuity is called into play.

Jonah Lehrer says: “The imagination is unleashed by constraints. You break out of the box by stepping into shackles.”

It was a constraint that led Archimedes to his famous principle which states: Any object, wholly or partially immersed in a fluid, is buoyed up by a force equal to the weight of the fluid displaced by the object.

This is the story…..

King Hiero II gave some pure gold to a goldsmith and commissioned him to build a votive crown with it.  However, when the crown was delivered, the king thought it seemed a little light and suspected the goldsmith might have kept some of the gold for himself and substituted silver for it in the crown. He asked Archimedes if there was a way to confirm his suspicions. Archimedes’ constraint was he could not damage the crown. He would not be able to melt it down into a regular shaped body to calculate its density.

How Archimedes solved this is a classic example of how a constraint forces one to be creative.

While having a bath, Archimedes noticed that the level of the water in the bathtub rose as he got into it. Archimedes immediately understood that this effect could be used to determine the volume of the crown. All he had to do was submerge the crown in water. The crown would displace an amount of water equal to its volume. Then by dividing the mass of the crown by the volume of water it displaced, the density of the crown could be obtained. If cheaper and less dense metals had been used by the goldsmith, the density of the crown would be lower than the density of gold.

Archimedes was able to confirm the king’s suspicions.  The goldsmith had indeed been dishonest and substituted some of the gold with silver.

Any challenge is more intellectually stimulating when there’s a constraint.

Have you ever thought about why you like detective stories?

It’s because the detectives in these stories operate under extreme information constraints.

They typically have a big puzzle to solve and very little information to go on.

But by being observant and making deductions from every little scrap of information, they are able to piece together the solution to these big puzzles which are given to them.

Recently, I watched the pilot episode of Sherlock on Netflix. Throughout the episode, Sherlock deduces all sorts of things based on very little information.  In the episode, besides making several brilliant deductions about Watson, Sherlock has to uncover who or what is behind several happy people committing suicide by consuming the same pill. I won't tell you more.  Watch the episode if you get a chance.

Games and puzzles would be no fun without constraints. We either need the constraint of time, or the constraint of resources, or the constraint of action to get intellectually involved in a game.

In chess, each piece can move only in certain ways. This is the constraint.  As soon as people become good at chess, they set themselves a time constraint as well.

Time constraints force you to think fast.

Many games would be half the fun without the time constraint factor.

I think back to the days when I used to play Pictionary with my friends in Chennai. Half the fun was being under the gun to make your team guess the word before the sand ran out in the timer.

People who are fast at games can get exasperated by players who don't like to play with a time constraint.

My friend Mira was one of them.  Whenever I played Scrabble with her, she would go “hurry up, hurry, up, hurry up, you are taking so long.” My slowness was a drag to her.

Since I started playing Merriam Webster Scrabble Online, I am faster with my Scrabble moves.  Time is of the essence in playing Merriam Webster Scrabble Online, because your points really go down if you take too long on a move.

Information constraints are a major form of resource constraint.

When you invest in the stock market, for instance, there’s no way to know if the market will go up, down or sideways after you invest.  If you invest in individual stocks, it’s even worse.  You do not know how the company is being managed and if the forces of change are about to take that company down. You have to be able to act without this information.  What’s a person to do?

Faced with this constraint, I found my own creative answer – and it was Pascal's Wager.

Here is an explanation of Pascal’s Wager from Wikipedia:

Pascal's Wager is an argument in apologetic philosophy which was devised by the seventeenth-century French philosopher, mathematician, and physicist Blaise Pascal (1623–1662). It posits that humans all bet with their lives either that God exists or does not exist. Given the possibility that God actually does exist and assuming the infinite gain or loss associated with belief in God or with unbelief, a rational person should live as though God exists and seek to believe in God. If God does not actually exist, such a person will have only a finite loss (some pleasures, luxury, etc.).

I had an epiphany that Pascal's Wager could be applied to anything in life, even investing in the stock market. Because you don't know if the stock market will go up or down, given the possibility it could go up, a rational person should elect to have at least some money in the stock market.

If you are having a tough time making a decision because of information constraints, see if you can apply Pascal’s Wager to your decision like I did.

I owe the fact that I did not panic when the Dow went to 6000 in 2009 to the fact that I had already accepted the information constraint which characterizes the stock market and to the fact  I had found my own creative answer to it in Pascal’s Wager.

If Archimedes owed the Archimedes Principle to the constraint presented to him by the king’s votive crown, we will all have victories we owe to constraints.

The advertising campaign of my career was the result of a constraint. 

It was for a brand of condoms, and all the initial creative ideas were considered too risque or too tame. 

The challenge of coming up with the right campaign presented 2 constraints. The first constraint was how to achieve excitement without crudeness or offensiveness.  The second constraint was how to develop on an already existing idea of associating different colors with different days of the week -  an idea which the account manager thought had potential, but just needed to be creatively reworked.   It was these 2 constraints which led to the development of the final campaign, a huge and instant hit. 

If you want people to think creatively, set them constraints. Tina Seelig regularly does this in her entrepreneurship classes at Stanford.  In one class, she divides her students into teams and gives them five dollars of seed funding in an envelope.  They are given any amount of time to plan what they are going to do with the money, but once they open the envelope, they have two hours to generate as much money as possible. This constraint forces the students to be creative with the limited time and money they are given. If you read her book, What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20, you can find out how inventive people can be under these constraints. One team generated $650 in 2 hours.

Seelig says: “Workers are puzzle builders, they get stuck when missing a piece. Whereas creative people are quilt makers — they can fit anything together.”

Indeed, the number one thing which was required from me back when I was a copywriter was to be able to quilt things together.

If we are not able to perform within constraints, we can be disqualified in some circumstances.

Athletes have to compete with the constraint of not taking any performance enhancing drugs, otherwise they will be disqualified.

When you play statue, you are constrained to not move. The minute you move, you are out of the game.

When I was in Toastmasters, sticking to the time limit for a speech was one of the constraints. 

You could not be more than half a minute under the stated time limit for the speech, or go more than half a minute over the stated time limit for the speech. 

If you were participating in a Toastmaster contest, you would be immediately disqualified if you were over or under time. 

I had to learn to speak within the allotted time, before I was able to participate in, and win the Toastmaster contest I told you about in my post How I Lost a Grand on Donuts.

Constraints lead us to cut out fluff.

When I developed my money workshop for the students of Bertha Taylor Elementary, I set myself the challenge of avoiding technology and sticking to just pen and paper.  My goal was to create a workshop I could administer virtually anywhere – even around a table in someone’s backyard; thanks to creating the workshop with these constraints, I was able to deliver it to my friend Sharon's children in just such a setting – someone’s backyard.

We should embrace the opportunity for constraints and turn them to action. Whenever we are given a constraint, our first thought may be, “it's impossible” “can’t do it with that kind of budget”, “can’t do it in that time”

We should replace these thoughts with “How can we achieve this?”

The Tata Nano is a result of a constraint.  The inventors set themselves the challenge of creating a car that would cost just $2000 dollars. Of course they had to think very differently in order to do that, which is why they had to model it more on a helicopter than a car.

The Jaipur foot is the result of a constraint. The inventors set themselves out to design an affordable prosthetic. The Jaipur foot costs only $45 to make and is fitted on 16,000 people across the globe every year.

The book Green Eggs and Ham was also the result of a constraint. Dr. Seuss was challenged to come up with a book using only 50 different words. Green Eggs and Ham was the result.

The above examples, all very different, explain the amazing things that can happen when you have a constraint.

Constraints are not just a passport to originality, but often a key to progress.

  

Producing under constraints leads people to break with tradition and prejudice.  For instance, until World War 2, American women were prohibited by law to work after they got married.  However, when World War 2 started, and there was an acute labor shortage, since so many men were off fighting, and extra hands were needed to produce arms and ammunition, the American government relaxed the law about married women working. Large numbers of married women joined the American workforce for the first time, and the path was set for the eventual freedom of women, single or married, to be able to work.

So how do you become more comfortable with constraints?

Be open to making decisions in spite of them.

Welcome the opportunity to make decisions with any kind of constraint - Incomplete information.Time constraints. Resource constraints. Skill constraints. Talent constraints. Action constraints.

Thrill to the challenge of doing more with less.

Get intrigued by the idea of solving puzzles with little to go on.

Trust that you will find the answer.

Hopefully, when you do, you won’t be in a bath-tub like Archimedes.

Why?

You don’t want to be running naked in the streets shouting “Eureka”, now do you?

As always, thanks for reading and have a great day and week….M….a Pearl Seeker like you.  Thanks to Goldwire Ananda, Ajay and Rosie for their comments on Facebook on my last post The Element of Everyday Miracles and Its Hope for Reveling in the Mystery of Life.  And thanks to all the rest of you for your votes.