An Advice To My Younger Version

One of the essential shortcuts that we love to apply on our computers is “Control” + “Z”. Imagine your life without this capability. How difficult will it be if you fail to “undo”? However, we are blessed to have this privilege in our digital lives, not our actual lives.

While it is impossible to turn the wheel of time, we can still learn lessons that were invisible to us then.

Instead of grappling with my decisions, I decided to put a mature lens and dive into the ocean of events in my life to review my younger self.

As I closed my eyes and spent some time with myself, I was able to identify four inter-related areas that summarised my past. And I realised that these areas have had a profound impact on my present and may affect my future as well in a good or bad way - who knows?

Taking a deep dive now to review my actions and decisions if they could have been dealt with in a better way :

1. Relationship: my younger self loved making friends and building everlasting and unconditional relationships. Some relationships failed, some succeeded. The failed ones had one common thread - “trust deficit”, sometimes from my end and sometimes from the other. The ones in which others had failed were the ones who had taken over my virtual “remote control” for their advantage. I also faltered big time. The inability to filter out toxic relationships at the right time could have averted some disasters in my life.

• Advice to myself - “be pragmatic in relationships as well, while respecting emotions and sentiments.”

2. Career: it wasn’t common back then to hear people saying “follow your passion” or “do what you are good at”. The most logical approach toward building a career was to follow what others were doing and try to be them rather than you. Amid bright minds, sweating day and night to crack the IIT JEE (Joint Entrance Examination), did not seriously take someone dreaming of joining the armed forces. That distracted me. Lack of focus left my dream to be an NDA (National Defence Academy) cadet falling like a house of cards on the floor. And I did the most obvious thing - joined the bandwagon.

• Advice to myself - “stand for yourself even if the winds are blowing in the opposite direction. Never ignore the voice of your inner conscience, for you may have to regret later in life when you can’t undo your decision.”

3. Money: I wasn’t a spendthrift, but I lacked financial prowess. Managing money prudently wasn’t my cup of tea. And the biggest mistake was the lack of vision and strategy to grow my money and build an asset for the much needed financial freedom in the long run. A lot of hard lessons learnt over a while have now given me the power to appreciate the beauty of “compounding effect” from seemingly small yet powerful actions.

• Advice to myself - “understand that your needs are different from your wants. Plan for the long term, allocate your funds and by all means, learn to invest early.”

4. Time: it took a while to break the myth about time. Time is a depleting asset - if I had this simple clarity, I could have been better off in all the other three areas mentioned above. Roughly 30,000 days we have on the earth. What we do about it is a personal choice, but the choice better be wise. In my case, it wasn’t. I failed miserably by not allocating my time for productive things, i.e. reading books, learning new skills and building healthy relationships. I was “spending” my time rather than “investing” it.

• Advice to myself - “invest your time and resources that will yield meaningful rewards while making a more significant impact on your and others’ lives.” Of all the lessons that I’ve learnt, the one that touched me hard was learning to “conduct autopsies, without blame” - a best practice suggested by Jim Collins, the author of the book - “Good To Great”. In his systematic study of successful executives from fortune 500 companies, Jim finds that the ones who transformed their organisation from “good” to “great” were the ones who found it highly healing to talk about their mistakes in public without blaming others.

I think anyone can adopt this practice. Having done the same, I must admit it is indeed very healing.

What advice would you give to your younger version if you intend to retrospect?