It has really be a long time since I’ve posted any information to sneaker.org. And so I figured it probably begs some explanation as to what is going on here. And so this blog entry is actually going to talk about why I haven’t been writing.

In a nutshell the reason I haven’t been writing is s combination of factors. The primary reason is probably the return of ambivalence in terms of what information I can and cannot share in a public medium. Several people who I know and interact with on a daily basis know of this site and probably – from time to time – read it as well. That is good, but sometimes it is also the cause for a lot of second thoughts. My style of writing has been such that I try to stay away from specific incidents and mentioning specific people, but the fact remains that the incidents and more likely the people who are part of those incidents will know when I am talking about them regardless of how much I try and veil the specifics. Or it may just be that since I know what and who I am writing about, I feel paranoid that if that person reads it he / she would know as well.

There are other reasons as well – timing is a big one. I feel that there is a sort-of reverse statute of limitations on when I can write about certain things – i.e. there are some things that I cannot write about while they are currently happening – in real-time since putting my thoughts on the topic would be hazardous. Whether it is work related or personal… for somethings it may be better to allow some time to pass. The flip-side of course is that then the entries will never be as charged as they would be otherwise.

Furthermore, I think for some of the issues I would eventually like to discuss here, I am not done formulating a position on them. And they just require a lot more thinking and also more experiences in order to really know which way I stand on some of them. I guess it’s a work in progress.

It definitely hasn’t been easy to not have my usual venting valve open and instead have it squeezed tight. But hopefully over the next couple of months the timing and the thinking should all like up so that I can actually write more openly about some of the things. I think I might actually try to start on a couple of things sooner than later though since I seem to tend to forget otherwise interesting blog-topics if I don’t write about them soon.

One of the things that Richard Feynman mentioned in his anecdotes in Surely, You’re Joking Mr. Feynman and What do you care what other people think? was to treat everything in life as an adventure and an experience. My guess is that in the heart of hearts Feynman was as much of a geek and an introvert as the next person and his telling himself to take everything in life as an experience and an adventure was his way of getting himself to do things which he would otherwise be hard-pressed to undertake.

This hasn’t been the first time that I came across that concept. My mom’s been tried to din the same thing into me for years now and one of the sayings in my school journal used to say: Life is an experience… live it. However, the concept behind taking risks and essentially doing things which would go against the grain of preserving one’s image is something that definitely doesn’t come easily to me.

People (including those close to me) have over the years developed expectations of how I act, behave and how I would react to things. But the truth is that the “expectations” that they have developed are based on a façade and they really do not have any idea of how I would really react to behave under a given situation – especially if I wasn’t always trying to live up to their expectations. My external reaction is often determined by what people expect of me in a given situation, and not what the nascent reaction would be. So it’s a catch-22. A chicken and egg proposition. People expect me to react a certain way and therefore I do thereby reinforcing their expectation of how I should be acting. The net result is that I often come of giving people the wrong impression of what I really want or think.

Recently, I’ve tried to make a concerted effort in order to do things which people would not normally expect me to do – because I believe it’s about time I stopped worrying about what other people expect me to do and instead do what I think and feel. Of course, that’s a lot easier said than done – and every so often I find myself taking two steps forward and one step back and sometimes – one step forward and two steps back, because it’s not easy to reset expectations.

Blogging is simply one form of doing things which people would not expect me to do. I doubt anyone I know would have thought that I would go out and start publishing my thoughts in a public medium, let alone be talking about things which I do not even discuss with people in person (including this). The others I’ll refrain from mentioning here, since it’s something people will just have to figure out for themselves and some … maybe not.

People play games. Everyone does. I don’t think there is any person who doesn’t play games. Because it’s all relative. You may not play games as much as the next person on one thing, but you probably do in another. I think over time we realize that it’s necessary to play games to protect our selves. Because if you are completely open about what you really think or want, chances are that someone is going to walk all over you. It’s just become the way things are.

Business is a game. Sales is a game. Relationships are a game. You posture one way or the other in order to try and get the desired result. My cousin was stressing most of the day because she wanted this guy to call her. But of course she couldn’t call him. And likewise… if you make the first move, you’re implicitly losing the power struggle. Right?

That is how things are. I accept that. But doesn’t mean I have to like it. I would so much prefer to be able to be in a position to say this is what I think, this is what I want without having to worry about what people think, what it does to my competitive position, what it does for my emotional exposure – so there really is no such thing as Free Speech. Yes, you are physically free to say what you want, but you are intellectually, emotionally and rationally bound by your own mind to never be able to practice Free Speech.

On Jay Leno / Conan (one of those late night shows) every once in a while, there is a segment which says “What they’re really thinking?” or something similar. That would be both wonderfully amazing and scary at the same time, if you had the ability to really know what people are thinking behind their actions and their words… the whole truth and nothing but the truth… for once.

When I was in highschool some of the subjects I hated were History and Social Sciences (Civics). One of the things that we were made to learn as part of the curriculum was that after independence in 1947, one of the things India adopted was a series of five year plans in order to help outline the development of the country. We had to learn the key milestones for each five-year plan.

Well, recently – and I forget who reminded me of this – it was probably Varun – that I seem to be operating in five-year plan mode. I spent five years at Carnegie Mellon. I’ve now spent five years running companies. And I think what that tells me is that it’s time for a change. And time for me to start thinking about the next five year plan. Now, it would be too presumptuous of me to actually map out anything beyond five years… because that would be assuming things and assumption is the mother of all fuckups. I’m definitely a subscriber of (or at least trying to be) the micro-economics saying that my professor in undergrad would keep repeating in order to drive the point home – “In the long run, we’re all dead.”

So all my planning and all the markers I decide to set must fit into the time frame of a five year plan. I think I’ve figured out what I want to do for the next stretch, but unfortunately, I’m not at liberty to go into that just yet. In another couple of months I’ll be able to talk about it some more.

The bar has been raised. The marker has been set.

Several weeks ago, someone asked me: “Why do you keep raising the bar?” And I didn’t have an answer. I just felt I had to do it. I didn’t know for what. I didn’t know what the heck it was that drives some of us to never be satisfied. Enough is never enough. There is always more. There is always better. And along with it there is always this sense of failure. This sense of inadequacy.

I didn’t know how to answer that question. Because rationally I could see the argument aht we are our own worst enemy as we are never satisfied with what we’ve done or what we can do because as soon as we’ve done it, we start thinking that whatever we’ve achieved is not enough and eventually make ourselves miserable all over again. But as I’ve mulled over this question now for several weeks and seen myself push things to the limit, I think I may have an answer to why we do it… or at least to why *I* do it.

Victor Frankl in his book, Man’s Search for Meaning made several astute observations. You’ll find a whole lot of them documented in the Eavesdropped! section. One of the key observation he made was: “It is a peculiarity of man that he can only live by looking to the future — sub specie aeterniatis. And this is his salvation in the most difficult moments of his existence, although he sometimes has to force his mind to the task.”

What Victor Frankl said is basically that the reason why we raise the bar is because we need something to look forward too. It is part of our search for meaning. It’s the need to have markers which when we cross we can say we got there. It is something to keep us from thinking about the futility and pointlessness of life otherwise in the absence of these markers. It’s our reason. And yes, though we may make things difficlut for ourselves by moving the end marker up each time… we do it so that we can keep going.

I had to create my own new marker. I needed a new marker. And hence I had to raise the bar. I just don’t know how to do it any other way. And if someone does, I wish I could learn from them. because otherwise there is no rest.