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Won’t it be a great fun to be nobody? Like Jaqen H’ghar. A man with no ego. A man with no “I”. A man who “is not” but exists. Suddenly all the problems for the man disappear. Because there is nothing to protect. There is nothing that hurts. The man is free. Free from expectations and free from pain. Gautam Buddha was truly nobody. After he set off from his palace in search of the real truth, he practiced meditation for a long time and found the ultimate secret to becoming nobody. After realization, he told his disciples, “I have found out the true reason behind my births and that is ‘the desires and expectations’ in my mind. Now that I don’t have any, there is no reason to take birth again.”

                Leave aside the journey to the “Moksha”, but can we at least try to be free of our expectations and stop getting hurt every now and then? Can we stop being always covered with glue, so that we stop making everything that we like to stick to us? Off course, we have practiced it a few times but we fail to carry on. We are not sure if we are yet ready to give away the temporary pleasure in setting off the journey to a perpetual one. We fail to give up dragging ourselves through the mud of immediate gratification. We know we get dirty but we don’t want to get out of it. Wallowing appears more attractive than getting ourselves cleaned up.

                Are we so weak? Definitely no. Are we underutilizing ourselves? Might be. Great men like Gautam Buddha, Swami Vivekananda, Saint Kabir have shown us the way. Are we afraid to walk? May be. Are we not aware of the path itself? Some of the ignorant between us definitely are. What does it take to walk on the path? Strong will power.

                One of the books I read last year, “Emotional Intelligence” quotes a research done at Stanford a few decades back. They gathered kids of age 6 and put one cookie in front of them. They had two options. Just sit and wait for 10 minutes. If they sit patiently, they would get another cookie at the end. But they would not get another cookie if they ate up the cookie in first 10 minutes. The kids who waited patiently for the whole time were much successful in their life decades after, irrespective of their IQ. What really matters is the emotional intelligence.

                If we know the truth that every intelligent man on this planet speaks up, should we be stupid enough to not accept it? May be not.

 

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Suppose you have bought movie tickets for an upcoming movie which you are eagerly waiting for since a month. A day before your plan, you get to know really bad reviews for the film. While you are thinking about the reviews, you see a book in your book shelf. You had ordered it a month back but didn’t really get time to open it. You will finally get some relaxed time tomorrow to read that inviting book if you don’t go to the film. What do you choose?

Sunk cost fallacy is the psychological phenomenon which compels people to make a choice based on their past investment in something, rather than the future benefits. We do many things in our life because we have invested so much in it, that not doing it feels like a big loss. But in fact, continuing doing it is what makes bigger losses to us, because we keep investing more and more resources in a lost cause.

Just because you have spent a lot of your time in doing something, doesn’t mean you keep doing it. Just because you have invested a lot of money in a business, doesn’t mean you keep adding more money to it to extract nothing. Just because you have put a lot of your emotions in a person, doesn’t mean you keep trying to make that person a part of your life. What really matters is whether your current decision will give you benefits in future.

Past investments are deceiving. We try to rip the returns for past investment by avoiding to invest resources in a better cause which can yield much better benefits. Past investment is what something’s long gone. You don’t have it now.

It would be a wise choice to avoid the bad film and spend time reading really good book. Invested money is gone. Now don’t ruin the precious time to recover lost money!