This post is NOT going to help you in any way!!!!

WOW, either you are really bored or then you are like many of us (including myself) for whom Ben Johnson aptly quoted ‘care killed the cat’ (yes, that is the original proverb), since even though I have clearly mentioned that this post is NOT going to help you in any way, you still decided to open it.

Well, now that you are here let me tell you why this post might not help you or rather why I might not be able to help you in any way. See, first of all I am writing this post more for myself rather than anyone else. I am in my early 40s and I feel what I am going through right now is perhaps what’s called mid-life crisis. See I had big dreams and ambitions and goals for myself when I was a bit younger. I have met some of those goals, but a lot still remains to be achieved. I have had some successes and quite a few failures and through a series of these posts, I would like to do a bit of self-introspection, and figure out what I can learn from this (if anything at all) and what can I do differently or better as I move forward to not repeat these failures again. If you the reader, can also learn something from this, then good luck.

I can and I will definitely share things that I have experienced and if some of these things help you then brilliant. But I am not going to claim that I will solve your life’s problems, because I have enough baggage of my own. I can only hope that you will learn from some of the mistakes that I am going to share here and hopefully you’ll not make the same mistakes. But if you don’t learn anything from this then hey…I warned you in the beginning only ‘this post is NOT going to help you’ 😊

There are already way too many self-proclaimed gurus out there who write/talk about everything, they have a billion followers, their posts have been read a trillion times and they have already helped a gazillion people. These gurus can teach you:

- How to plan your finances (provided you share a part of your finances with them, directly or indirectly — hey they need to manage their finances as well 😊)

- How to get a promotion at your workplace (they got so many promotions, that they decided to write blogs fulltime)

- How to earn money from writing blogs (well, they must really love competition)

- How to……bla bla bla (this I can’t challenge)

But, I am neither a guru, nor have I attained some kind of enlightenment in my life. What I have collected thus far is a set of experiences and that’s the only thing I am going to talk about.

Since you have read this far, let me introduce myself further — I am just an average Joe, who has a lovely wife and a brilliant kid, I have a regular 9–5 job, and I live in a moderate suburban house, I drive a regular car, and try to keep up with my mortgage. I have a decent degree, and have been working in large multinational companies for last 20 odd years, and consider myself to be fortunate that I still have a job in these super rough times. All in all, there’s a lot going on in my favour and I should not be complaining or cribbing about anything right now, but for some reason that I can’t figure out, at times I feel that I have achieved very little in my life. Actually, I am not even sure if that’s true, since I am not able to define what more would I live to achieve — is it more money, is it a better house, is it a better car or is there something else???

I don’t have any data to refer to here, so let me refer to my gut feeling here and say that I believe I am not the only one in this state of mind. There must be others out there in similar situation who feel the same like I do. So how do we get out of this never-ending conundrum, where despite having so much in life, we still want more — but at the same time we can’t define what is that MORE that we want.

Having done a bit of a self-reflection lately, I can’t say that I know for sure the reason why I am in this situation, but I think I can easily pin point at least 1 reason that has led me to where I am today — COMPARISON

We love to compare our lives, our achievements, our failures with others, and without ever knowing or realising the journey that others have taken to reach where they are, we start to feel bad about ourselves. We complain, we make rash decisions and we blame others, rather than trying to figure out what’s the point of all this comparison.

The thing is that we make these comparisons on all different fronts, and we have been making these comparisons pretty much throughout our life — right from school to college to job and I reckon this will continue even when we retire.

If I look back at my professional career thus far, I have worked for 4 multinational companies and if I am honest with myself then the main reason why I moved from 1 company to another was I got into this comparison trap — my colleague got a promotion, but I did not. My colleague got an expat contract, but I did not. My colleague got the highest performance evaluation, but I did not. My colleague got this, my colleague got that….and so on. And, I am quite sure not even for 1 sec did I actually think that perhaps those colleagues got all that potentially because they were more suited or better — I just felt betrayed and felt that everyone was conspiring against me, which of course is NOT true.

Recently I read a book by Mark Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck (full disclosure: I am not getting anything in return for mentioning this book here), and without going too much into the details, the way Mark explains things in his book, really made me question why do I give a f*ck about everything — why do I care so much about what others think and why do I keep comparing myself with others. I know its easier said than done, but I have been trying very hard recently to stop drawing comparisons as much as possible, and honestly, I can feel the difference, more so mentally than anything else. If we can just look at all what we have, rather than what we don’t have, its going to make a massive difference in our everyday lives. This is not to say that we should not have ambitions or not try to reach higher goals, but let’s be realistic with ourselves, not everyone is cut out to be the next Bill Gates, or Mark Zuckerberg. There’s nothing wrong in being average.

I know I still have a lot to learn and actually lot to unlearn and most important thing for me personally at this stage in my life and my career is to figure out what makes me and my family happy and strive towards that. For sure, comparing my personal and professional life with others is definitely not going to make anyone happy.

See, you have now spent so many minutes of your precious time reading this far just to realise that its OK to be average — told you, this post is NOT going to help you in any way.