A memoir to 2021

With all the hyped talks about New Year, New Me…make your plans and smash your goals I’m getting overwhelmed by the memories of 2021 and this blog post might just be a diary entry for future self or an inspiration for me and the readers.

Even though it’s so powerful to see people creating defined goals and working hard towards it, I’m an old school girl. I believe in making the most out of each day, being 1% better everyday and seeing where life takes you. Nevertheless I gave into the fomo of setting a dedicated goal for myself on 31st December last year, and read up on different new resolutions people made. Out of those, reading books sounded easy, so I decided to read 10 books this year. I said to myself I’ll just pick the smallest books and read them up, and if I still can’t, I’ll pick things from my favorite genre…or just listen to them. Anything to make myself feel accomplished 😛. Did I read those 10 books? let’s find out in this list of things I actually did.

1. Learnt Vipassana from Dhammathali jaipur. This is the perfect foundational guideline one can have for their life. For quite some time I’ve been fidgeting on ideas about God, Life’s purpose, the cycle of birth and death. While Dhamma does bring peace to the soul, it also teaches you strong foundational values on how to live life, what it’s purpose should be, and what to consider a success. Have you ever stepped back and thought about what your successful life would look like? I’ve been blessed to know early in life that my life’s purpose wouldn’t be money, or fame, or power. It’s going to be as simple as leaving the world in a better place than I was born in. And alongside empower people to find their life’s success. This is going to be my wholesome success criteria for many more years to come.
2. Mentoring: A major satisfaction of my professional journey is to help people get placed in the top-tech companies. My mentees inspire me to do better, they’re highly energetic, hustlers and it is so much fun to speak to them and discuss their problems and together we work on finding solutions and making hiring more inclusive. What started with a small idea is now my most impactful contribution to the tech industry, since these mentees I’m sure would become the future leaders of the industry. My Scaler profile.
3. Minimalism: In all my pre-professional life years, I wanted the costliest bag, the latest iphone, basically every luxurious thing my eyes could see and I always dreamt of building a life where I earn and get these. So, as soon as I started earning I was splurging money on brands, buying insane amounts of clothes, shoes etc. It is in the year after watching a few good documentaries on minimalism that I understood carbon footprint is not the kind of legacy I’d want to leave behind. I’ve happily removed the tag of shopaholic and am slowly moving to being a minimalist. Simple philosophy- If you can borrow it, don’t buy it. If you don’t absolutely love & need it, don’t keep it. Pass it on.
4. Blogging: This year after listening to Abhimanyu Saxena whom I’ve diligently followed, I started producing content. Will be forever indebted to the amazing audience who has appreciated me, made me a better writer, and given so much love to my blogs. My aim is to write so much tech content which is so extremely easy to use that literally anyone can grasp it’s content and quickly implement it without going into the buzzword jazz.
5. Youtubing: I wanted to learn about different aspects of business. Of how startups get created, and then go on to become billion dollar businesses. What are their challenges and how did they handle those business decisions. For this I watched ThinkSchool. Excellent case studies with good depth of research papers. Tells you a lot about psychology and how small differences make big outcomes. Also, Dhruv Rathee doing an amazing job with a wide variety of content on travel, history and factual news.
6. Investments: This was the first year I invested heavily into the stock market. Last year was all about learning the terms and understanding how this thing works. I’m still figuring things out here but much more financially literate than what I originally started with. Not burning my money into FD’s now, even saving my folks from burning their money.
7. Interviewing: I always wanted to be on the other side of the table, to get a sense of the responsibility and to be a better interviewee myself. Took 15+ interviews this year and it was a wholesome experience. At the end of the interview I’d always ask for feedback ofcourse mentioning that this wouldn’t hamper their feedback as it is already locked. Some learnings and a lot of love pouring in from the other side 😃
8. Documentation: Before this year I hated documenting anything at my organization and personally never wrote a single word about my life, it’s trajectory or anything. A major shift has happened here. I learnt the importance of documentation while a new team got onboarded to our product and I had to take in calls from each member of the team since there was just no documentation. I Learned this the hard way and now I’m a documentation advocate. I diligently write documents about any new thing I’ve done in my workplace or my personal life achievements and motivate others to do the same. My online profile documented here.
9. Netflixing intelligently: Yepp, that’s a thing. Rather than binge watching fiction, this year I saw some incredible documentaries which helped me learn a lot about history, psychology (Babies are smarter than humans). Some very deep-rooted biases I’ve had that I’ll try to unlearn. Some excellent series recommendations would be: The Platform, Erin Brockovich, What Babies Know, The Imitation Game, Inside Bill’s Brain: Decoding Bill Gates, Bad Boy Billionaires, Masaba Masaba, The Social Dilemma, Take Your Pills, The Bleeding Edge, StartUp, Seven Years in Tibet. Yes, I watch a lot of Netflix 😅 love it, can’t get enough of it.
10. Reading Books: I’ve successfully completed my target for this year. The list goes like: Tuesday’s with Morrie, Rich dad poor dad, Atomic habits, ikigai, Becoming, Everything is fucked (a book about hope), Hooked, Netflix no rules rules, The monk who sold his Ferrari, Subtle Art of not giving a fuck. I’ve bought many more books, joined a book club and am still trying to develop a habit to read daily. How many books do you think I should target this year? :)

Apart from these I did a few small but impactful changes like moving to bangalore and setting up a house myself. This was difficult and a lot more time consuming than I had anticipated. For 2 months I tried to cook, clean, set things up, with my day job and being tiresome would be an understatement for the experience. Nevertheless, I enjoy living alone, and embracing every bit of it. My family and I haven’t felt so close in the last decade and this year bonded us all really well. Shoutout to my kickass family with grandparents being pro Taash players to sister and niece bringing in Gold Medals in the house.

If you like this article, please hit the claps button. Also would love to hear feedback and get some good suggestions for my new year resolutions. Let’s connect here.