Akash

I’m Akash, your friendly neighbourhood life hacker.

You know, I too have been trying to figure out who Akash is! A few years ago I realized that the best way to know him is to just observe him. And that’s what I’ve been doing these past few years. Here’s what I see,

He’s infinitely curious

He’s always trying to learn something new, figure out how things work, and understand the world around him.

And he’s always in awe of the world around him.

He’s trying to be an Experimentalist

He’s learnt that the brain is remarkably responsive to experience. If he asks it to exercise every day, it gets better at exercising. If he asks it to worry, it gets better at worrying. If he asks it to concentrate, it gets better at concentrating. Not only does it find these things easier, but it actually remodels itself based on what he asks it to do!

And so he’s trying to experiment with different approaches to thinking and living.

He’s naive

It’s so easier to think that we were in the dark yesterday but we’re in the light today.

He’s learnt over time with experience that he’ll always be naive cause the number of things to learn is infinite. And that’s awesome!

He tries to live in the Present

The present moment, no matter how painful, is never unbearable. What is unbearable is what he thinks is going to happen in five hours or in five days. This ability to see into the future and reflect on the past is a double-edged sword. It’s an absolute gem at helping him evolve but if he’s not careful, it can make him miserable. So he tries not to be anxious about tomorrow, tomorrow will look after itself!

He has a thing for Startups

He doesn’t know why, but he’s just fascinated by them. They’re the epitome of juggling an absolute ton of things like product, marketing, sales, finance, operations, etc. And he’s always been fascinated by people who can do that well. And he believes in his core that it’s never just the individual, or the team that makes a startup successful, that seems impossible, no it’s definitely force (scientific circumstantial evidence) that plays a vital role. People and teams are just the carriers of that force.

He’s learning to give more

He’s learnt over time that every time he gives something to others, the world rewards him with the absolute more of the same thing he gave. And he’s observed it in all aspects of life. For example, the more he helps others with confidence, the more confident he becomes. The more he donates to charity, the more he gets back.

It’s like, the world is a mirror, and it reflects back to him what he gives to it. And he’s learning to give more.

One caveat he’s also noticed is that it doesn’t work if you give with an expectation of getting something back. It’s only when you give without any expectation of getting something back that the world rewards you with the absolute more of the same thing you gave.

He likes to do what he loves

He’s learning to just do what he loves without caring much about the money aspect of it cause,

But if he’s been doing what he loves then he’d have loved what he’s been doing. And that will satisfy him so deeply that the result must either be called success or recognized as something even more enriching.

He’s learning to embrace failure

Growing up he’d been labelled as a smart kid, and so he’d developed his identity around being smart. It worked out fine when he was a kid, but as he’d grown it became an absolute crutch for him because he never learnt other skills absolutely necessary to succeed in life like persistence, resilience, and grit.

And so he’d run away from anything that’d make him look incompetent or stupid as that was unacceptable to him cause in his mind he only had one thing going for him, “being smart”. The only problem was, literally everything new you do in life makes you look stupid. And so he’d run away from everything new. And that was a problem.

And so he’s been working really hard to let go of this identity of “smart kid” and learn that world actually rewards experience and competence rather than intelligence. And so he’s been trying to reframe his binary thinking of smart/stupid to experience/inexperienced. Cause if you’re inexperienced, you just have to put in more reps. And failure doesn’t seem so daunting that way!

He doesn’t take himself so seriously

He has tendencies to get very anxious and so he keeps reminding himself that the force will take care of him no matter what. I mean he doesn’t even have to think about what happens after he eats a meal, his body just takes care of it. And there are so many things happening in and around him that he doesn’t even have to think about and it just happens.

He just needs to take a leap of faith.