To do's and To be's

Aravind, my cousin in the Uk got himself a new macbook and we're talking on skype a lot these days and inevitably, we seem to come back to talking about the same things again and again.

I'm not complaining, but it seems to be the flavour of the season now. For us atleast..

We keeping asking each other where we want be and what we want to be doing there.

Those are some big questions, but figuring out the answers to that seems to be taking up all of the limited processing power between my ears.

So far, we have experimented with a number of ways to answer these questions.
1. Financial approach: how much will you save by doing x, y or z. in a, b or c locations.
2. Happiness approach : what makes me happier? India/europe, working for, entreprenuer, auto/other etc.
3. reason approach : reasoning each possibility with why I want to do it and what gives me that idea.

Long story short, we're still lost. Atleast me, I'm clueless about my decision. I know what I will do if the situation is a:get a job and stay in europe or b:go back to india and I dunno.

Yesterday though, we came up with a predicament. There are mainly 2 types of people in the industry that we see everyday.
1. Those with immense potential who think they are stuck or held back by the place, people or policies
2. Those who aren't extremely talented or gifted but are completely immersed in their work and don't care about options, they are just soldiering on with the job at hand and are getting better and better at it. These are the people who make for ideal employees who have blinds on either side and believe the sole purpose of their existence is to serve their employees or perhaps advance their career prospects with no apparent goal in sight or any great objectives to reach. Average joes at best, but eventually best in class employees. You often find yourself working under such people, I know I am.

Now, the fact that bothered us was that every waking minute of our day is being so badly eaten by the big picture of things to achieve and accomplish. That these time is just passing us by in getting things the best that we are ignoring or are just passing a number of things that we could've done better.

Rather than extrapolating to aravind, let me try to give you an example of whats happening with me. I'm on a limited time contract with the company I'm working for. I have hundreds of strategic problems in my life and with a contract that gets over within the next four months, confused and scared to say the least.

Thanks to the constant bother in my head about what I would rather be doing, I'm not doing very well what I'm supposed to be doing at this moment. The fact that, Right now, at this moment, I should be sending applications, but I'm blogging. Sort of summarises what I would like to express.

Therefore, I resolve to make sure that I focus on the to dos and its scheduling and not the to bes.

Thats not to say that I will not be working on the to bes. God yes, I have dreams and goals and a red ferrari with my name on it, but I wont let my to bes squash my to dos. Ideally, your to dos should flow into your to bes, but until then. I trust this approach will serve me well.

I have a number of thoughts on developing my to bes but its not for now, I have applications to send, shirts to iron and an office to get to.

Until then,

Cheerio