Facebook - my year in review

https://www.facebook.com/yearinreview/anirmukerji

Work Life Strategies that really matter

Every year for the last decade, I’ve spoken to MBA graduates returning for their one-year reunions. As predictable as the annual return of swallows to San Juan Capistrano, graduates who flock back to campus bring with them real-world anxiety over three things:

1) Work – doing meaningful work;

2) Companionship – finding a life partner, or figuring out life with their partner; and

3) Balance – dividing time and energy between work and family

This weekend, my own business school class marks its 40-year reunion, and the issues won’t have changed much. While for many of us, life’s ups and downs may have rounded off the sharp edges on those same apprehensions, they remain the struggles of our lives.

If any of us in the class of ‘73 has had success in four decades of dealing with these existential concerns, it’s because we recognized the truth of the following:

You can’t do it all yourself. Those who’ve done well will likely have one significant quality in common: They’ll have joined (or formed) the right teams. After picking the best players, they’ll have shared their own successes, and celebrated the successes of others. As Chicago Bulls coach Phil Jackson advised a young and wildly-talented Michael Jordan, “Let the game come to you." After Jordan committed to being a team player (though not always as the nice-guy), the Bulls won six NBA World Championships. In the same way, realizing that both business and family life are “team sports” will help with finding a team-centered life.

Life is a marathon. A meteoric rise right after grad school is impressive, but long-term success is far more satisfying. Life is a marathon, not a sprint. Quick success sometimes goes to people’s heads – and makes them forget everyone who helped them get where they are. In the 1980s, after good fortune and good times made many folks wealthy, real estate markets collapsed. Some panicked; others dug in -- and dug out. It turned out that no one was as smart as they thought on the way up (or quite as dumb as others thought on the way down). But steadfast efforts when the chips were down revealed character not apparent when things were going well.

Bouncing back is key. Scanning reunions for grads once deemed “most likely to succeed” may not reveal the ones who did. Brains and ambition help, but it’s a never-say-die resiliency that allows people to move forward through life’s inevitable setbacks. “Most Likely To Bounce Back After A Fall” might have been a better yearbook category.

Give before you get. Real friends give without calculating a return on their friendship. So do spouses. Even salespeople first give information and authentic assurances in order to make sales. And while children require that you give, give, and give some more, they can return something far more valuable than you ever gave them — the chance to pass on the best of what you know, and the best of who you are, to the next generation. We end up caring about things for which we sacrifice. So, finding opportunities for giving goes a long way to relieving personal and career anxieties – which can be rooted in the desire to get before we give.

Don't underestimate refuge and recovery. I’ve never met a career-driven person who’s found peace in work alone. You need a space for refuge – a way to be alone, to recreate, and to recover; or things can go south. Letdowns are inevitable; so make sure you meditate, pray, stay active, or have a close friend in whom you can confide. Making sure you have the time and place and support for recovery is not selfish. It’s essential.

Wealth, power, fame and influence – perhaps all well and good – don’t reliably deliver satisfaction or meaning in life. I submit that meaning comes from the ability to look back with pride, and to look forward with peace, knowing that those we’ve worked with and cared for are better off for having known us. If recent graduates could be sure of these, they might choose to live with their team in mind.

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Love is Life

Love is life
By Vithal C Nadkarni
After spending 75 years and $20 million, the Harvard Grant Study boils down to one straightforward five-word equation, "Happiness is love. Full stop," says George Vaillant in Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study.
For 40 years, the psychiatrist led the study that tracked 238 men at Harvard who were
sophomores between 1939 and 1946. Candidates included US President John F Kennedy
and The Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, whose identities were kept secret. The writer
Norman Mailer and composerconductor Leonard Bernstein were among those rejected.
The absence of Eve's daughters from this sophomoric sample skews the study.
However, the result seems to suggest that without women, or without love really, no man can
call his life complete or contented!
Those who never gained intimacy with a partner; those who never matured or had learnt to draw
contentment from their work were the subjects most likely to rue over spilt milk in their later life. Vaillant has cogent advice for those sighing
over "lost opportunities" of the road they hadn't taken: reframe the question!
Ask not what you might have lost but focus on what you have gained by taking the path that you actually travelled. There is absolutely nothing out
there in the bush. The only bird that will ever be in your hand is the one in your palm right now.
What if one didn't have anything there? Then it is never too late to go for it, says the shrink highlighting his secondmost significant finding:
people can change a lot; find happiness even in their 60s, 70s and 80s. Just don't say die.

what facebook is as per Doghouse diaries

what facebook is as per Doghouse diaries

Tarun Tejpal and Arushi

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/11/rise-fall-tarun-tejpal-2013112591511692817.html

Tarun Tejpal and the sentencing of Arushi's parents are the centre of the storm in India


http://www.thestar.com/news/world/2013/01/26/aarushi_talwar_murder_a_look_at_one_of_indias_most_notorious_cases.html?app=noRedirect

The reporting in the story above seems biased

Child happy to receive new shoes - what joy

100 wisest words

Butterfly and Cocoon

Sometimes struggles are exactly what we need in our life. If we were allowed to go through our life without any obstacles, it would cripple us. We would not be as strong as we could have been. And we could never fly.




A man found a cocoon of a butterfly, that he brought home. One day a small opening appeared in the cocoon. He sat and watched the cocoon for several hours as the butterfly struggled to force its body through that little hole. Then it seemed to stop making progress. It appeared as if the butterfly had gotten as far as it could, and it could go no further. The man decided to help the butterfly in its struggle. He took a pair of scissors and snipped off the remaining bit of the cocoon... and the butterfly emerged easily. As the butterfly emerged, the man was surprised. It had a swollen body and small, shrivelled wings. He continued to watch the butterfly expecting that, at any moment, the wings would dry out, enlarge and expand to support the swollen body. He knew that in time the body would contract and the butterfly would be able to fly. But neither happened! In fact, the butterfly spent the rest of its life crawling around with a swollen body and shrivelled wings. It never was able to fly.

What the man, in his kindness and haste, did not understand was that the restricting cocoon and the struggle were required for the butterfly to be able to fly. The butterfly must push its way through the tiny opening to force the fluid from its body and wings. Only by struggling through the opening can the butterfly’s wings be ready for flight once it emerges from the cocoon.

"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."

"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."

Antoine de Saint Exupery.

Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power

Gallup's questionnairre

Gallup has formulated a questionnaire on "how engaged are you". A good fit will mean that you answer yes to all the below questions

1. Do you know what is expected of you at work? 

2. Do you have the materials and equipment you need to do your work right? 

3. At work, do you have the opportunity to do what you do best every day? 

4. In the last seven days, have you received recognition or praise for doing good work? 

5. Does your supervisor, or someone at work, seems to care about you as a person? 

6. Is there someone at work who encourages your development? 

7. At work, do your opinions seem to count? 

8. Does the mission/purpose of your company make you feel your job is important? 

9. Are your associates (fellow employees) committed to doing quality work? 

10. Do you have a best friend at work? 

11. In the last six months, has someone at work talked to you about your progress? 

12. In the last year, have you had opportunities at work to learn and grow? 

Seinfeld: Kramer on Marriage

We should stop to consider the consequences of blithely giving this technology such a central position in our lives

The great thing is, the sentence is really just a reminder to the listener to worry about whatever aspects of the technology they're already feeling alarmist about, which in their mind gives you credit for addressing their biggest anxieties.

"What you are is what you have been. What you will be is what you do now."

"What you are is
what you have been.
What you will be is
what you do now."

What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist - Rushdie

What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist - Rushdie

Tennessee Williams on love

“Nobody sees anybody truly but all through the flaws of their own egos. That is the way we all see ...each other in life. Vanity, fear, desire, competition-- all such distortions within our own egos-- condition our vision of those in relation to us. Add to those distortions to our own egos the corresponding distortions in the egos of others, and you see how cloudy the glass must become through which we look at each other. That's how it is in all living relationships except when there is that rare case of two people who love intensely enough to burn through all those layers of opacity and see each other's naked hearts.”

It's so hard to forget pain, but it's even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness - Chuck Palahniuk (Diary)

Living with Less. A lot Less

The Original link http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/opinion/sunday/living-with-less-a-lot-less.html

Living With Less. A Lot Less.

By GRAHAM HILL

I LIVE in a 420-square-foot studio. I sleep in a bed that folds down from the wall. I have six dress shirts. I have 10 shallow bowls that I use for salads and main dishes. When people come over for dinner, I pull out my extendable dining room table. I don’t have a single CD or DVD and I have 10 percent of the books I once did.

I have come a long way from the life I had in the late ’90s, when, flush with cash from an Internet start-up sale, I had a giant house crammed with stuff — electronics and cars and appliances and gadgets.

Somehow this stuff ended up running my life, or a lot of it; the things I consumed ended up consuming me. My circumstances are unusual (not everyone gets an Internet windfall before turning 30), but my relationship with material things isn’t.

We live in a world of surfeit stuff, of big-box stores and 24-hour online shopping opportunities. Members of every socioeconomic bracket can and do deluge themselves with products.

60 countries on a plump shoestring hacking global travel from Mahesh Murthy

inspirational quote

“Goodbye, said the fox. And now here is my secret, a very simple secret. It is only with the heart that one can see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye." - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

Really

Jerry Seinfeld lets it rip about"Really"

psychological facts

Public Holidays in India

Public Holidays in all States of India

Very useful to know the various public holidays in the various States of India