Sash, Morning Rituals, and Productivity
Travel meant less reading but here are some interesting pieces that I came across:
I wasn’t aware of the story of Sash Simpson till I came across this piece, and what a story it is! He grew up as a beggar in India and then ended up running one of the most prized Canadian restaurants (which is currently suffering during the pandemic). While the whole story is almost an unbelievable fairy tale, what stood out for me was how Sash worked his way up while recognising that his life has been based on a chance encounter with orphanage workers. “It’s all timing. Either one second earlier, one second later, and they might have missed me,” he says.
I am a believer of an organised morning routine and mine involves skipping the phone for the first hour, and instead spending some time meditating and doing yoga. However, not everyone is a convert yet as I discovered in this essay in The Atlantic. Marina Koren who wrote this piece calls herself ‘morning-challenged’. She writes that ‘morning routines have been repackaged as sacred rituals, safeguarded from the cursed bits of the rest of the day’. I tend to agree with that as otherwise I end up in a reactive cycle for most part of the day except for the first hour or so. Koren has reached a slightly different conclusion, where she believes that she “would be better off embracing scattered mornings and pinpointing the bits and pieces she could simplify, rather than mimicking someone else’s morning routine, no matter how nice it looks from the outside”. We all have different needs and different ways to meet them. The essence however is how to give the best start to the day when things are most in your control than the other way around.
Then this piece from Ramit Sethi has an interesting take on productivity. The central point here is that instead of cramming in more things to do, try eliminating some of the bad habits which are time sinks. It’s an interesting take on the same challenge of how do we create more in the 12 hours we get in the day (rest is for sleep and essentials). In his case, he started by going light on emails, stopping things that he didn’t like (for example, giving up books he didn’t enjoy midway, which would be a huge time saver for me as well), and finding an alternate approach to working hard. About this last point, he proposes, “we can treat work like high-intensity interval training at the gym. When it’s time to run, run HARD. Go all out, until your lungs burn and muscles quiver. However, when it’s time to recover, RECOVER.”
A quote that I came across:
“When haters go after your looks and differences, it means they have nowhere else to go — and then you know you are winning”
— Greta Thunberg
