Chaotic surprise. The sudden realisation that what you assumed to know is not “known” to you in the sense that you had believed. It comes with a sense of “feeling lost” coupled with the anxiety of solving for the unknown. We encounter these scenarios more often than we think in the day-to-day rigours of life.
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For us humans, life is a complex domain in which we are born and then have to learn how to operate while doing it. We learn to live life while living life. All the major aspects of life have this wide range of complexity that cannot be narrowed down to a fixed proposition. So, how do we cope? In a conversation with Samantha Willman, we explored the role of family in this odyssey and the different ways it influences our relational capacity in the long run.
When in a peaceful state, it’s important to pay attention to the conditions that bring about that stability, for they are what hold it up. Often, we tend to relax when there’s stability and focus on our desires, which can undermine the privilege of stability. However, this is precisely the time to observe how that stability came to be. Peace or balance is an anomaly in a dynamic environment. In a recent conversation with Oana, we explored this thought and discovered some profound insights about the conditions of stability.
In the information age, we are becoming less analog and more digital in our ways of being to keep up with the ever-changing digital world in which we live now. However, while digitisation is spreading into everything we do and requiring us to partner with technology and morph into Yuval Noah Harari’s “Homodeus”, we continue to struggle to balance digitization with the analog part of life and the world. In a conversation with Daniel Garner, we explored the question of how to handle the loss of obviousness that we used to have before the digital world emerged and some strategies that could be helpful in regaining a more balanced pace of being.
Every now and then, we find ourselves face-to-face with versions of ourselves that we do not like. There’s some sense of inadequacy that is not clearly articulated to us when it manifests. In a conversation I had with Oana, we explored how we find ourselves in such a scenario and some of the strategies that have helped us work through them and get to a more harmonised state.
Have you ever felt trapped in your own life, unable to live on your own terms, yet having to follow guidelines prescribed to you? As we mature, we reach a place where we recognise that we have a particular nature of expression unique to ourselves. It’s like a resonance with the spirit of who we are, emerging from a sense of failure to fit anywhere. No matter what experiences we accumulate or skills we learn, we inevitably find that we have our own way of doing things—our signature style that marks everything we touch.
The journey starts with identifying those unique gifts through noticing and taking seriously one’s preferences for excellence. Many a time, we undermine our individual preferences with respect to fitting in and social belonging. However, this comes at the cost of suppressing our innate desires, which sometimes can be the spark of the gifts within us that are there to express our excellence. When we respond to that spark and take it seriously, it often comes with a clear vision of a potential reality that could manifest.
In life, we all have a taste for excellence and mastery. It’s as though the most true things are embodied through practicing excellence and mastery. However, the journey to the place where one has elegantly embodied excellence and mastery is challenging. In a recent conversation I had with Stephen Musoke Senkomago (a.k.a SMS), we explored this theme and learned a few things.
When cultivating excellence and refining our crafts, a good example always comes in in handy. It serves as an ideal we can aim for so that we can side-step mediocrity as we navigate the journey of our careers. In a recent conversation with Bashir, we explored his mentorship work and the value of setting a good example in a given domain of work.
It all starts out with an “allowance” of our selves. We have to allow our selves to be. What this means is that we have to acknowledge our strengths and weaknesses because they define the limits we have to surpass and the tools we can use to do so. In a sense, this can be our current brand, who we currently are. It’s important to know this because then the difference between who we currently are and who we intend to become starts to show. For example, currently, I’m a person who loves writing down my thoughts in blog posts, and I’m working towards becoming the person who talks through these thoughts with others in dialogue to unpack them and learn from others. There’s a clear difference between who I am and who I want to become.