Nonlinearity rules our world, and human minds are often too simplistic and shortsighted to comprehend it fully. People in general will agree that happiness is a (if not the) goal in their lives. However it is ironical that in spite of aspiring for happiness, they still wouldn’t be honest with themselves to pursue that goal single-mindedly. Why honesty and authenticity is important in life? Well, that’s a different post altogether, but briefly speaking, in the face of our inherently meaningless lives, why will anyone prefer a dishonest life over an honest one is beyond me. At least, one should be honest with oneself, if not with the entire world.

An example of such dishonesty is the utter ignorance of what freedom is and why happiness cannot be ensured without freedom.

What really is freedom anyway? I’m talking about freedom in a very broad sense. Doing work for someone else, having a job or loving someone has nothing to do with freedom. Freedom is NOT doing whatever the heart desires right now. Freedom is the possibility of doing whatever the heart desires right now. Freedom is the possibility of breaking free, if and when needed. Freedom is the confidence of not being chained in an unhappy state. Pursuit of freedom is to continuously ensure that one is not relenting control of life to any person or any sort of circumstances.

No one but you has any right on your life.

What limits freedom?

Inherently, everyone is free. Slowly, society and its associated conditioning creeps in and binds one to behave in certain paradigms. For example, freedom is easily limited by the following:

Moral commitments about the future. If you promise someone about something, you ought to stick to it, even if it means restriction of your freedom. Why morality and future commitments take precedence over freedom is an important topic and it deserve a fuller treatment in an another post. Briefly speaking, in order to maximize happiness for everyone (hence to maximize your own happiness, averaged over a lifespan), expectation of reciprocity is what should drive our world. If I deviate from my commitments, I should not expect other people to stick to their commitments. However, if other people’s commitments and honesty is important to my happiness, I cannot and should not renege on my commitments.

This means that one should be careful about the future. Promising someone about something far in future is not a good idea because closer to the present a commitment is, more confidence you have to fulfill it without impacting much of your happiness. Who knows which commitments of yours conflict with your future. When such a conflict appears, at that point you don’t want to run away from your commitments just because you didn’t have foresight not to promise things you can’t fulfill.

Government, state and the law. Perhaps the gravest limitation on your freedom is from the laws your don’t agree with. Due to facticity, this is especially interesting because you don’t choose the country you are born in. You are simply thrown into a set of laws that you are required to obey. Your only hope is that in the country you are born in, freedom is a value that is vigorously defended. For example, if you happen to be born in Indonesia and you don’t believe in God, you’re in big trouble because being an atheist is a punishable crime there. In such case, what do you do? Do you lie about your beliefs? I say no, you should NEVER lie if you uphold authenticity in life as a key value. So, there are really two actions you could take: a) Don’t speak up and refuse to talk about your beliefs (apparently, even that is not possible in Indonesia. You have to choose among one of the five state “sanctioned” religions.), or b) fight for your freedom, even at the extent of getting executed for blasphemy and other such nonsense.

States and governments have infinite more power as compared to the individual, so if one’s freedom conflicts with their rules, his only option is to defend his freedom and absorb a lot of discomfort that arises from this conflict. As long as one goes down fighting for his ideal, I think it is honorable and totally worth it.

This is also why we should promote and talk about freedom as much as possible. Governments should understand the concept freedom better than anything else, otherwise they don’t deserve to remain in power.

Respect and love trumping rationale and logic. I’m sure many of us have been in situations where our own happiness and freedom conflicts with people we love and respect. But sacrificing one’s freedom and feeling unhappy about it, simply to avoid a conflict with people we love is just very wrong. Nobody but the individual himself/herself has the right on his/her life and freedom. That’s why I say disrespecting parents is the mark of a thinking man, and one should be ready to ditch relationships (if one hasn’t committed unconditionally), and why we should not have heros in life.

I’m not saying that we should not love or respect other people. We should be as kind hearted and full of love as we can. However, we should have a very clear awareness that we love ourselves more than anyone else, and if others intrude on our freedom, we should be ready to break ties and let go without many emotional hangups. Whenever there is conflict, we should listen to arguments that others put up, but if we don’t agree with their rationale and logic, just out of respect or love, we should NEVER do something that restricts our freedom.

Ego combined with shortsightedness. Freedom dissolves entirely when someone else sets the rules of the game and one follows him/her blindly, out of ego or peer-pressure. Such confused actions do not constitute freedom. That’s slavery to the universe. A simple example is probably related to money and work. If your friends are pursuing an MBA and you do the same just because you think you might get left out if you don’t enroll in an MBA program as well, and you fear that your friends may start making more money than you in that case. So out of fear induced by your friends’ actions, you do something you never wanted to do. Would you call it a free choice? Your friends are setting the rules, and you are just following those rules unquestionably.

In business context, same is with competition. In my startup, the reason I consciously avoid looking at the competition and then do things they are doing is because I do not want someone else to dictate how I run a business. Even if I don’t act on what I observe, the mere act of knowing what the competition is up to creates a subconscious bias. If competition raises funding, does that mean out of fear we raise funding too? If raising funding was an independent decision, I’d be happy but if it were done in response to some events you I don’t control, that is simply relenting my life and freedom to others.

Why people are happy if they make poor choices related to their freedom?

This is interesting. Actually, the relationship between freedom and happiness is probabilistic. You could be chained, yet the point of unhappiness may never appear. Many chains of love, respect and commitments in fact usually cause a lot of happiness. However, when things go worse, only then such chains are noticed and cause extreme amounts of unhappiness because one wants to break free yet one cannot do so without being dishonest to oneself and to the world. And dishonesty and inconsistency of one’s value system is what causes incurable unhappiness. In other words, if things are going good, freedom takes a backseat. However, we should always be concerned about absolutely the worst case to ensure in those dark and trying times that we have always chased freedom, so we have been authentic to ourselves, it is just that now circumstances have gone sour. This thought alone gives a lot of happiness and confidence in the worst of periods in life.

How to ensure freedom?

One ensures freedom by taking decisions that ensure if at any moment in future one decides to do whatever the hell one wants to do, one is able to do that without being dishonest and without failing at any past commitments. So, commitment becomes an expensive currency that should be thoughtfully used, if at all. For example, following situations ensure freedom:

• If you are working for someone, this means being ready to quit at any moment without any notice or with a minimal notice (if you have committed to that)
• Future is as uncertain as it can get, so this means not signing up for something that won’t let you change direction if that seems to be the most appropriate one in future
• Having courage to even stake your life if freedom is intruded by state or others. Many freedom fighters such as Bhagat Singh understood the concept of freedom very clearly and, even though they died in the process, they were actually free within themselves while others lived (probabilistically) unhappily or happily, but forever chained. And those chains could any time cause immense amount of unhappiness. Is a chained life really worth living?

What does freedom ensure? Why is it a value worth dying for?

What freedom ensures is that you, and only you get to decide about your happiness. It detaches you from external, could-have-been-controlled factors that cause most amount of regret. Freedom ensures you a regretless life, which gives confidence to be happy even in the worst of circumstances. Freedom lets you become an individual capable of conquering the world, all by himself.

Freedom is self-confidence in the face of complex present and uncertain future.

Actually, anyone can be free by saying any time fuck-it-I-don’t-care without doing any deep thinking about future commitments. However, that is not moral. Morality is a higher ideal as compared to freedom. Morality is a given.

Many decisions that relate to freedom ultimately end up being counter-intuitive to what society expects. For example, striving for freedom means probably failing at trying to do a startup than taking up a nice, cozy job. It also means disagreeing with people you love and respect, even at the expense of leaving them. It means maximizing possibility of future freedom (remaining bootstrapped) by letting go of short-term happiness and comfort (raising VC funding). However, being able to say fuck-it-I-don’t-care while still remaining true to your commitments, value system and morality is the greatest source of joy!

Since the effect of freedom on happiness is probabilistic, all we can hope for is to maximize it and leave the rest to uncertain and complex turn of future events. Future may bring happiness or unhappiness. However, we will always have the comfort of having made the right decision of ensuring we are free and hoping it leads to happiness.

It’s interesting how poets, writers, artists and philosophers have to go through their daily ablutions. They have to eat, drink, defecate and clean their bodies every now and then, actually, in fact on a regular basis. A writer may sit in a café for a few hours, churn out some of his best work and feel like he has been transported into a universe where words come alive and his characters are real, but as soon as his coffee finishes and the waiter presents the cheque, he is jolted into the same world he inhabited a couple of hours ago, a world that is very much his. The same world where he was born. The same world he started despising for its endless boredom and repetitious chores that drearily inhabit it.

However, that world is the only true reality he has got. The longing to step away from our everyday lives and get transported into a magical land is so strong that many of us give up little beauties blossoming all around us to chase a scene that doesn’t exist. We read a character sketch truly engrossing, or we watch a movie where lovers are kissing with the Eiffel tower at the backdrop and soft jazz playing melodically through the gentle cool breeze and we sigh and say, gosh this is lovely. Why is that scene lovely and why you watching a sitcom all alone, eating popcorn on a regular Wednesday evening not lovely?

I presume it’s because we’re overly familiar with ourselves. We are bored of being with ourselves. We are bored of our homes. We are bored of our offices. Our own life appears humdrum. But consider this. Imagine your very own life being cast into a movie, a beautiful, magical movie. A frame shows you arriving home, tired and jaded, and you meet your lovely life and instantly the frame zooms into that little glass trinket you have on your dining table, and guess what, the trinket is shining, cutting white light into millions of colors onto the table and the frame then shows the sun setting in the backdrop and probably a Beatles song is illuminating the whole scene. Won’t you find that magical? I do.

We usually miss a lot in our life. The longing to be somewhere else, to be with someone else, and to become someone wrenches our souls so much that we forget that we are someone else for someone out there. What we find as boring might be the most fascinating thing ever. Someone out there might be envying us right now.

The longing for the magical never ends. The longing never culminates. It’s temporary and constantly changing, but our very own world is permanent. Once you force yourself to come to terms with the reality that engulfs your life, our very own world becomes magical.

You are the lead character in a movie, the protagonist in a novel, the subject of an art piece, and you are immortal in your own life. Stay happy, spread bliss and enjoy the fuck out of your every day life!

I love you.

Expectations are interesting in forming one’s identity. As the CEO of an A/B testing software startup, I am expected to behave in a certain way. I am expected to be on Twitter (@paraschopra), constantly devouring and commenting on funding news on TechCrunch, participate in lean startup discussions, track and gossip on movements of Apple stock and debate on how India can have interesting startups as well. If I’m a cool CEO, I will be expected to hang out at places like Hacker News and Reddit. Within local startup community, I’m expected to frequent startup events and chat about latest and upcoming startups and things like what can be done to improve the “ecosystem”. All in all, the mere label of ‘CEO, software startup’ describes majority of who I am and how I spend my time.

Now, add an additional label like ‘A/B testing‘ or ‘marketing’ and you’d end up describing the remaining modicum amount of my identity. Most people defined by labels of similar fashion. Someone is an MBA grad from Harvard, and you’d guess what sort of person s/he must be. Someone is into fashion? Ah, s/he must be attending fancy parties. Someone is a journalist? Oh, must be an interesting person to talk to. Did you graduate from a design school? OK, so Where’s your portfolio?

I find it immensely demeaning to label people, and I consciously work hard not to judge people from such labels. So what if someone is a doctor, can’t s/he be playing in a death metal band during free time and weekends? Can’t startup CEOs have interest in Nihilism, digital evolution and comics, all at once? People can, and should, be much more than a few labels they get associated to.

Human identity is infinitely complex and fluid. I say complex because (even though most are afraid to do so) people can behave in unpredictable ways. I say fluid because the self can be changed at any point of time. A religious person can become an atheist once given the right exposure. (And I have seen people change drastically). In spite of this essentially indefinable human nature, we all use labels that conveniently abstract and compress information about people.

People don’t have to be something

We tend to label people because it is very convenient for us. If we see a person dressed in leather jacket and having pointy hair, we’d immediately call him or her a “Punk Rocker” and associate many other attributes automatically. However, this is demeaning to the individual being judged because s/he could be anything s/he wants to. S/he could be a punk rocker who is majoring in neuroscience. It’s OK to have incompatible tastes in life. That’s the fun of being a human.

You are actually a constantly evolving mix of numerous attributes. Your ideas, your aesthetic sense, your dressing style, your take on worldly issues, your interest in metaphysics, your liking for movies (and many other elements that compose you) are to be defined by you, and not a label. What society likes to do is to take one of your (major) attributes and simply extrapolate it to the other ones. It’s easier for them to see (or worse, expect) you behave in a specific sense. Would anyone care to hold megabits of information about you? They want an easy to understand label that fits their mental models so they could sleep well at night knowing that the world will behave in an orderly way, they way they expect it to behave.

But you don’t have to care. Don’t help the society stereotype yourself!

The proper functioning of the world is none of the business, especially if it comes at an expense of your freedom and your definition of your identity. However, interestingly, part of the problem of this stereotyping lies within us. And that’s because probably we’re the first ones to stereotype ourselves.

Many people in search for their identity end up hopeless and anxious, feeling they don’t know who they are and where they are placed in this universe. That moment of uncertainty is precisely when people fall into the trap of stereotyping themselves. They take a hard look at their (randomly stumbled) professions or passions and try to construct their identities around the way they’re expected to behave in such professions or passions.

Take for example an accountant who likes soccer. He has friends who are accountants who like soccer. He reads blogs and articles on accountants and their lives. Best practices. Tips. Tricks. And articles like 5 best vacations for accountants. He dresses formally in the morning, goes to office at 9 am, does minor chitchat with fellow accountant colleagues on lunch, comes to home at 5:30pm. On the weekends, he likes to watch soccer or go for movies. Life is easy, fun, simple but eventually the accountant gets bored and jaded and he wants to try something new and interesting (hey, sculpture sounds fun!), but unfortunately now it’s too late. He’s fully convinced that he’s an accountant and that means he’s not supposed to indulge in art.

As long as the accountant is happy with his life, I’m fine with the stereotype (after all, what else does one need from life if not happiness). However, I have major problem if this stereotype starts impacting the well-being of the person, once it starts crushing the freedom and potential of the person who merely happens to keep books for a company. The complex feedback loop of the society trying to stereotype the people who want to be stereotyped is quite apparent, but it need not be that way. If you’re an accountant (or an MBA grad or an investment banker or an artist), you don’t have to be necessarily defined by that label. You can be anything you want want and you need not take anyone’s approval to nicely fit into labels the society tries to apply to you.

Shock the goddamned society!

One easy way to not fall into trap of stereotyping is to actually keep people guessing who you are. In fact, by constantly changing and exhibiting varied interests and behaviors, you would actually be send a very clear message that you cannot be defined. (A fact that is essentially true for all humans.)

Go for scuba jumping when you’re 80. Have an obsession for human skulls. Love black lipsticks. Become a hipster, or don’t become one. Fantasize about working at a sweatshop, barely able to survive. Write boring poems. Admire villains. Be devoutly religious and research on particle physics (or, actually, maybe not). Do whatever the hell you like to do and do it often as society doesn’t take a lot of time to form opinions. Always push the boundaries of people’s expectations. If they think you’re normal, become weird. Once they start thinking you are weird, suddenly become normal. Shock the hell out of people and do it regularly! If for nothing else, please do it for the lulz (since nothing matters, all we want from life is a constant dose of lulz).

The point, of course, is not to be a contrarian for the coolness sake alone. Well, if you’re happy that way, fine. But it’s not cool to be a contrarian knowing you’re faking it and actually feel unhappy/pressured to keep up with that contrarian label that is now you. The point, however, is to be whatever you want to be, believe in whatever ideas you want to believe in and be as incompatible as you want to be without caring what the world thinks and how people may judge you.

As long as you’re happy, moral and indefinable, it should be fine.

So, do you promise to do at least one activity that is completely unexpected of you? I promise that the entire episode would be super enriching, maximally fun and you’d definitely thank me for hat! Did I just write hat? Which hat? Maybe I meant that. Or, maybe I didn’t.

I have a friend who thinks time is running out for her. I’m sure she’s not alone, a lot of people share that feeling; I definitely was one of those people who constantly worried that life isn’t moving ahead at a pace that I’d be proud of. Everyday before sleeping, I’d look back and wonder: ‘Gosh! Did I just create a presentation today? How would it help my career?‘. Then I’d have nagging thoughts such as these: ‘Oh god, I’m 25 and I haven’t experienced Sky Diving yet and I haven’t even learnt how to play a guitar.‘ Then when I read about revolutionaries, artists, writers, philosophers and scientists, I couldn’t help but think if I’m wasting my youth chasing money and creating software while I could be a guerrilla artist instead.

The what-I-could-be-doing-instead syndrome

Having a list of interests, goals and wishes is by no means bad. In fact, I have a list of things I’d want to do by the time I turn 30. However, such list merely serves as a gentle reminder of what I like to do rather than what I should be doing. If the only role your goals (or such lists) perform is to constantly make you feel worthless or unaccomplished, what’s the point of having such a list?

Why passage of time makes one worried?

On this fine Saturday late morning, for the past one hour, I have been sitting idle while drinking a cup of milk and listening to some dubstep and classic rock mix. Yes, I know, instead of this I could be making plans, pitching to a new customer, watching guitar lessons on Youtube, refining my book’s manuscript or doing a number of other activities to make “progress” in life. But here look at me, all I am doing is listening to some pretty good music, scribbling a few random thoughts and in general feeling immense joy. Should I feel guilty of not doing something worthwhile? Am I really “wasting” my time or is this life in its core essence?

Eons ago I thought that one should feel guilty of not solving world’s greatest problems (Having re-read my post, I think I was — and, to a large extent, still am — inclined towards solving great problems because of the challenge and fun, but not because of any inherent value contained in solving such problems). Now I have come to believe that the passage of time makes one worried when an individual expects to do something great in her life but by sheer odds finds herself to be leading a pretty ordinary life. In fact, since the definition of great is always changing as one keeps achieving greatness, no matter what one does, there’s always something more to be done in life. So what if one is an accountant engaged in a standard 9-5 job? Isn’t it personal greatness as compared to millions who have to struggle daily to put food on their tables, let alone affording the luxury of going to school and graduating as an accountant?

Should I be mistaken, let me clarify my position. I’m all enthusiastic for great goals such as “one day I will travel the world or write a book or do my own startup or will take my startup to an IPO”. But if you feel worthless right now for not having made sufficient progress, consider that even after achieving these goals, you will keep on feeling like shit because by then your goals would have changed to something even greater. Once published, a mere book with your name as the author won’t satisfy. Now you would need to write a bestseller book! What if your book debuts as #2 on New York Times list but you still feel it isn’t as great as it could have been? Only if you had put in some more effort, it could have been #1. Or if your startup does IPO eventually, there’s always a company in the competition that is doing better than you! Isn’t it true?

You have to choose to be happy in spite of non-achievement (or achievement) of goals.

And since no matter what you do, there’s will always be something else you could be doing, key is to relax, go easy on yourself and just enjoy the phenomenon called life. (But don’t let this pressure to be happy actually make you unhappy! It’s OK if you are not happy today, there’s always a tomorrow.)

Why we actually have an infinite amount of time in life

Like myself, if you subscribe to the philosophy of Nihilism and consider that life is inherently meaningless, you should find this worry about time passing away dissolve pretty easily. Consider this truism that you didn’t exist before you were born and you will of course not exist after you die. You don’t observe time when you are non-existant. So, essentially, for you, whatever time you spend living is all the time available in the universe. To clarify, for example, if were unable to complete your assignment today and (god forbid), you die tomorrow, you won’t be there to notice the tomorrow and then of course the non-completion of your assignment wouldn’t bother you. Similar is the case with all of the life’s great goals. It’s nice if you achieve them but it’s totally fine if you were unable to do so as it really doesn’t matter after you die. Regrets people have on their death beds don’t matter to them once they die! They (and everyone else) should go easy with their lives because: a) they never really had much freedom to influence their lives; b) as long as they are happy now, the past doesn’t really matter and future won’t matter after their death.

Clocks and anxiety

In spite of all such rationalization, looking at a clock does make one anxious. At least for me, clocks generate anxiety to act. When I look at a clock and see that the time is 3 am, I immediately ask myself if I should be sleeping? Or, if it’s 9pm on a Saturday, shouldn’t I be out partying? Why am I wasting my life doing things? What else could I be doing right now that is best optimized for the current hour and day?

It used to be like this until one fine day I decided to remove clocks from my home and disabled time on my MacBook Pro. If only my iPhone would let me disable showing time on homescreen, god knows I would do that in a jiffy. Instead of push-based time where photons reflecting from the clock constantly reminding me of passage of time, what I want time to be is pull-based. For example, if I’m bored, I type ‘time‘ into Google and know what time and day it is. I realize that running a software business with such idiosyncrasies doesn’t take one far but I rely on reminders to tell me if I have a meeting or a commitment rather than regularly looking at time and then wondering if I have a meeting. Pull-based methods let one be in control of time rather than time controlling one’s life and activities.

Conclusion: it all boils down to happiness (as always!)

I believe that the only thing a person can reasonably aim for is to be happy. If you buy that theory, it makes absolutely no difference to what you are doing as long as it makes you happy (ideally, while staying within the bounds of morality and not impinging on others). So the feeling of time running out is nonsense because it relies on an assumption that future will be happier than the present, but ironically the only people who worry about time running out are the well-to-do ones (have you ever stumbled across a poor chap who’s worried about this?) and for them happiness does always remain in future! (Side note: I really like a phrase and it goes something like this: “Future is the source of all worries!”)

Don’t complain, relax, listen to some french jazz and maybe sip a glass of wine too. Trust me, there’s nothing better you could be doing right now!

Most of us tend to take our world and its inhabitants for granted and we tend not to put a lot of thought into what is what. For example, while growing up as a child, as soon as we become aware of the world and our surroundings, we are told that people are either good or bad. In our adolescence, our categories become a little more well defined. Depending on our inclination (and here’s the key, as you will see later) we may either regard children who do well at studies as good kids, or we may instead idolize cool kids who bunk classes and have fun all the time. So early in our life, what makes us fall into one group and not the other?

Growing still more, we may happen to find ourselves good at a specific activity. Some can tell extremely funny jokes, others can play piano, some excel at tennis, while others may score fantastic grades and secure admission at a top-notch university. Fast-forward a few years, and we stumble across something called career. Then it suddenly dawns to us that people we grew up with would end up with so much different lives and careers. How did this happen?

If you are an investment banker earning a million dollars a year while your kindergarten buddy is now a carpenter, should you feel pride? Or should you feel wonderment about what’s so special about you that you deserve making a million bucks? Wait, do you really deserve it?

What is facticity?

Quoting Wikipedia’s article on facticity:

In the works of Sartre and de Beauvoir, facticity signifies all of the concrete details against the background of which human freedom exists and is limited.

And here’s an alternative definition:

Heidegger discusses facticity as the thrownness (Geworfenheit) of individual existence, which is to say we are “thrown into the world.”

The way I like to see facticity is the influence our world exerts on us without our consent. There are multiple ways to analyze this effect. An obvious one is congenital or genetic influences and disorders. For example, if a person happens to have born blind, that condition is a fact and it is something he hasn’t chosen for himself. He just happened to find himself blind. What this also means is that people with normal vision should not feel superior or pride over blind people (but of course feel extremely lucky) because normal vision at birth is not something they have chosen. They were simply given this trait. The same goes for other attributes of body like beauty or fairness. As a beautiful person, one may get privileged treatment at work or in society (thank you, evolution!), but it would be a silly mistake to think you deserve all that. Or even worse, the assumption that other mediocre looking (and hideous) people are inferior in some sense. They’re not since they happened to find themselves with a particular face.

Facticity goes even further than mere influences at birth. Do you remember how you become friends with that particular person you call now your best friend? Chances are that you just happened to sit with him or her on your first day at school or college. You didn’t survey all the people in your class or college or locality before zeroing into your best friend. As they say, it just happened. Again, there’s nothing to be proud about having that particular person as your best friend.

Influence of genetics

Intelligence, personality, predisposition to commit murder, love for a particular genre in art and literature and (heck!) even preferences for financial investment schemes have been demonstrated to have genetic influences. The field of behavioral genetics is littered with examples of how much influence our genes exert on our behavior. And fortunately (or unfortunately) our genes is not something we choose — we just happen to find ourselves with a particular set of genes.

This of course does not mean that genes dictate our behavior. Genes merely predispose us to certain types of behavior. How we eventually turn out is a curious mix of our genetic predispositions and facticity (influence of independent events happening around us).

What all does this have to do with free will?

Given who we are is solely determined by our genetic predispositions and our historic interaction with the environment we happened to find ourselves in, we must admit that free will as we know it does not exist. Sam Harris has written an excellent book justifying my stance (it is just 96 pages, so go read it!), but allow me to put forward a simple scenario showing why I agree with him.

Let’s imagine you are given a very simple choice:

There are two pills that taste the same but differ in color. One is red colored, and the other one is blue colored. You can only pick one candy, which one would you pick?

OK, so my question is just another way of asking what’s your favorite color but it is nevertheless an important question on the subject of free will. Imagine you pick the red candy and I ask you why did you pick the red candy. Here are all possible responses you could give:

• I just picked a color at random, and it happened to be red
• I like red color (or alternatively, I hate blue color)

There are two levels of apparent free will here. First you decided whether you will choose to prefer one color over the other. If so, you decided which color you prefer. The first choice between picking at random v/s picking preferred color really depends on whether you have a preferred color or not.

If you never cared about colors, that could be due to several reasons:

• You are blind, or
• You are red-blue color blind, or
• You genuinely don’t care about colors or your preferences of them

The first two cases are easily explained and it is obvious how physical conditions limit the exercise of free will. But the third case of indifference is interesting. Why would anyone be indifferent towards colors? The same question is actually applicable to choice of a particular color: What is the basis of choosing any color at random v/s choosing red v/s choosing blue?

There could be several answers to this question:

• I like blue color because it soothes and pleases me. This effect is not something you have chosen, the blue color just happens to create a calming effect for you, and that’s that. If you can calm yourself by free will, why do you need blue color? There may be a genetic predisposition for you to like blue color.
• I like red color because I like sunsets or my whole neighborhood is full of red buildings and I have caught fancy of the color. . Again, this effect is not something you have chosen by free will, rather you happen to live in an environment which led to you to like red color. (There is definitely a genetic predisposition here too)
• I just don’t care about the color because I’m depressed and this trivial exercise interests me the least. The mental state of mind is not something you choose. If you are depressed, you are depressed because of factors outside your control (genetic and environmental). Again no free will here.

If the only difficult answer to tackle seems to be I chose XYZ because I like it and I’m free to exercise my free will. If you think carefully, this answer is superficial. When asked to justify the choice, the buck stops at irrational preferences. No matter how vacuous, I-just-like-this answer does seem to hint at presence of free will. But science disagrees with this viewpoint. Assuming the I here is the I you feel conscious about, research shows that our brain makes a decision hundreds of milliseconds before we become conscious of it. Our brain then plays a neat trick of convincing us that it was a decision made out of free will. (Why it creates that illusion is probably due to evolutionary survival reasons, or it is a result of evolution of consciousness).

The famous Libet experiment

Benjamin Libet did the pioneering experiment in this field (neuroscience of free will) where “he asked each subject to choose a random moment to flick their wrist while he measured the associated activity in their brain”. And what Libet found was that “the unconscious brain activity leading up to the conscious decision by the subject to flick his or her wrist began approximately half a second before the subject consciously felt that she had decided to move.” What this means is simple: even though we feel we have made a decision out of free will, it has already been made on our behalf by our brain.

Important conclusion: free will is nothing but an illusion.

But does this mean our lives are pre-determined?

No. Even though free will does not exist, people, ideas and thoughts do exist and change our lives in a very real sense. Due to involvement of seemingly infinite variables in our environment, our future is largely un deterministic. (At atomic level, I don’t know if universe is deterministic or not, but at human level it definitely is not). I have previously blogged about this in my post titled Luck, Randomness and Success. However , recently I have realized there’s a nice metaphor about how I think about our lives and choices we make. Here is how it goes:

I like to see everyone’s life as a unique trajectory in the space-time. When a person is born, he or she is put on a unique trajectory (because of his or her unique genetic, economic, societal and cultural conditions). Unknown to the person, every passing second, his or her trajectory is changed every time s/he encounters a new person or an idea. He or she changes other people’s trajectories by his/her thoughts and actions, and other people change his/her trajectories by their actions. It’s a complex interaction that makes lives non-deterministic, but without involvement of any sort of free will. Some trajectories are pleasing (an individual is happy, moral, etc.), some trajectories are not pleasing (unhappy, poor, criminal) but since nobody chooses a particular trajectory, nobody should be appreciated or blamed for having a particular trajectory in life.

This very post is trying to change your trajectory in life and I cannot claim to have written the post out of free will. I happened to have read books on science, then neuroscience, then philosophy and I happened to have a father who is interested in all this and probably passed his “rationalism-preference” genes and has definitely passed his books to me. One thing led to the other and I happened to hold these particular set of beliefs on free will. Most importantly, I happened to find a block of time on a very fine Sunday evening to write about it and was not in a mood to watch a movie or TV. It just happened, but that’s not to say the idea of free will not existing is not potent. The idea has real power to change your views and ideas. That’s how potent it is, and that’s why I’m writing about it.

Consequences of (lack of) free will and facticity

If we accept lack of free will, we must stop (serious) attribution of consequences of actions to individual people. Yes, that is a radical statement but that is what it is if we accept the obvious conclusions. While doing a certain act, if the person couldn’t have done any different, why would you attribute any consequences of that act to him or her? I’m all game for spreading happiness and pleasure in the world, but when it comes to punishing, berating, or generally bad-mouthing particular people or particular types of people, we must remember that the physical or emotional pain is felt by an individual who happens to be like that and there’s nothing they could have done about it. Pain is felt for real, and it hurts.

The lack of free will also brings about other interesting consequences:

• The word pride or achievement is vacuous, and should perhaps not be used. If you happen to be an investment banker earning a million dollars annually and you feel you deserve it because you were born in a poor family and even then you paid yourself throughout college by waiting tables, you must remember that it is because of the unique trajectory you happened to find yourself on. Maybe you decided to enter the university because your neighborhood kid made it to a good college despite similar economic background? And then maybe your rational decision to mimic that neighborhood kid is due to your previous experiences of mimicking the right things and achieving rewards? I can go on and on and on ad infinitum but the key point is that you shouldn’t feel proud. In hindsight, you couldn’t have done otherwise.
• Attack ideas not individuals. A common mistake that atheists make is that they criticize religious people. Remember that there’s no point attributing choice of religion or adoption of God to a person. Rather, our aim should be to expose religious people to rational ideas that prove there is no God. Why criticize religious fundamentalists? Attack their ideas instead.
• Capital punishment, really? As I hinted above, any sort of punishment to an individual is wrong. The pain felt by that individual is real and it’s terrible especially when the individual couldn’t have committed a crime out of free will (because it does not exist). If a murderer does it due to lack of morals or due to economic pressures, it is not his or her fault. And if an individual does crime for pleasure or if his/her brain is wired that way, again that is not something he has chosen. I do see the point of punishment as an idea that deflects people from trajectories of crime, but the pain accompanied with punishment of any sort by society or state to an individual is simply cruel. There must be better ideas of fixing crime. Maybe create a moral society, cure mental disorders or just have a better economy?

Summary

Free will does not exist and if there’s a summary to the whole post, it is this: do not attribute consequences of actions to an individual, but by all means attribute them to ideas and thoughts because they influence individuals.

Edit: corrected the spelling of facticity. Thanks Hacker News.

When I started Visual Website Optimizer, my sole focus was on selling to small to medium businesses (SMB). However, since last two years, we started getting interest from a lot of enterprise prospects. Of course, if a Fortune 500 company contacts your fledgling startup showing interest to purchase your product, you will be very excited about this mini-validation of your product. However, dealing with large enterprises is a different beast altogether. They don’t work like your rest of your customers and selling them is very different ballgame. So, before opening the champagne bottle to celebrate, you should keep some key points in mind.

How big boys make a purchasing decision

The single most important point is that most enterprises take ages to make a purchasing decision. They will contact you today, you will happily reply asking if they want a demo/meeting and then they will become radio silent. After days or weeks, they will reply and probably schedule for a call to discuss your product. Sometimes this call is scheduled for the same week but sometimes those big boys can schedule a call 3-6 months ahead (yep, this has happened to us!). The key point to note is that enterprises can be slow in responding (even after showing initial interest) but that shouldn’t make you give up. Use a CRM, follow up regularly and you should be fine.

Assuming you finally get a time for the initial meeting and they are impressed, they will probably ask for a trial or pilot. But, again, no matter how much effort you put into putting together this pilot project proposal, they will remain radio silent for a while until they suddenly get back to you asking for another meeting with their IT team.

Enter the IT team: why and how?

You must remember that in enterprises it is never an individual that makes a purchase decision (especially if the deal size is >$1000/month). There are committees, managers and bureaucracies that you need to overcome. Once a specific group (say marketing department, in our case) shows interest and agrees to proceed with the trial/pilot, the IT department gets involved to ascertain everything is okay with your technology and it won’t conflict with their environment. Usually this phase is the quickest but sometimes IT department can raise some special requirements that your generic product may not be able to satisfy. (For example, one such requirement for us was the restriction on number of cookies we can set.). These special requirements may sometimes become a deal-breaker because if the IT says no to a pilot, it doesn’t happen, no matter how motivated other departments are. If you sell sales automation and the sales department is super-excited about it, the deal can still fall through if the IT says no.

However, assuming your product is indeed good, in most cases you will sail through these barrage of questions from IT. This will lead you to a live trial/pilot implementation.

Step towards success: implementing a trial / pilot for the enterprise customer

Whatever time you budget, the trial takes twice as much time. Big enterprise always have that unknown contingency lurking in the dark. Sometimes their systems aren’t ready, or they don’t have approvals, or the key people are on vacations. Since large enterprises treat trials and pilots as seriously as final implementations, you would need to make a significant investment of your time and effort to get it done. Just like in sales, where you should always be closing, during the trial too, you should always keep trying to get the customer start using it. By themselves, enterprises may get really, really slow at implementing or using pilots/trials.

Procurement: why do they exist?

Once your trial is completed, and the target customer (which may be an individual or a specific department within the big enterprise) wants to go ahead with your product, there are two ways the final purchase that can happen. If the sale price is low, say less than $1000, an individual generally can make the purchase on his/her personal card and later claim it as an expense from the company. However, if the sale price is high, individuals or departments do not have budgets for it and they have to involve a special kind of department with a very boring name called Procurement Department.

I imagine people working in the procurement departments have a funny job because things they are asked to purchase is not the things they end up using themselves. So you would find that the final stage of selling to an enterprise involves procurement department asking you for a quote and scope of services. Most procurement departments also innocently ask for discount, as if it is a requirement to do the sale. Under no circumstances you should offer any kind of discount to the procurement department because they have absolutely no influence on the purchasing decision. They are just there to facilitate the purchase. So simply tell them that you are not offering any discount, and if they ask for reasons tell them that it is a company policy.

Lawyers and Terms & Conditions

If the procurement department okays your big ticket purchase, don’t get impatient and still don’t open the champagne bottle. When lawyers get involved, the whole initiative can get derailed because of that one specific word you have in your terms. For SaaS and software products, the terms and conditions are generally standard for all the customers. (For example, terms and privacy policy for Visual Website Optimizer is public). However, some large enterprises would have their own “vendor terms” which would be completely different from your standard terms. Now, should you sign a custom terms document with each of the big enterprise customers? Unless you are prepared, I wouldn’t recommend that as it can become a big hassle in the long term. Even if the sale price is high enough to justify detailed negotiations on the terms and conditions, you should always get your lawyer involved. Don’t try to negotiate the legalese yourself because remember you are startup, and the other company is an enterprise. They have a large army of lawyers, you have.. well, only yourself. (Also remember that if your startup raises funding or gets involved in an acquisition, all the documents get scrutinized at the due diligence stage. So don’t sign the “standard” vendor terms document supplied by the enterprise just because it looks harmless)

Closing Thoughts

Selling to enterprises can be fun and for a young company, it is definitely a big achievement. However, following miscellaneous points should still be noted:

• SLAs (service level agreements): even if you do not guarantee anything to majority of your customers, enterprises would typically demand very specific SLAs for customer support and software uptime. Before promising, make sure you have resources and capabilities to honor that. Do not commit to an SLA just because the sale price is high.
• Phone Support: enterprises also typically demand phone support. If you are a small startup and founders do support, make sure you are capable of providing phone support even when you are in a meeting, having lunch or partying outside. Phone support is a big commitment, so only make it if you are ready to handle regular calls (because enterprises do love to call for even the tiniest of issues).
• Discounts: do not give discounts to enterprises. They value the solutions they use and cost is almost always a secondary factor for them. (This is also a big reason to have flexible pricing for enterprises so that a Fortune 500 company pays in thousands of dollars, not $15 that is your standard plan.)
• Ask for their logo or case study: if you must provide a discount or an additional feature or service, ask them if you can use them as a case study or at least put their logo on your customers page or get a testimonial from them. Always do barter, never provide discounts for free.

Hope you liked this short primer I wrote (based on my experience of selling Visual Website Optimizer to large enterprise customers such as Microsoft, AMD, Economist, GE, etc.) In case you have any specific questions about enterprise selling, please leave a comment. I will be happy to help!

Good luck with your first thousand dollar sale (:

Every day cannot be a party.
Every word cannot be pretty.
Every action cannot be weighty.

There is mundaneness all around us
we can either love it, ignore it, mock it
or write poems about it.

But, what we cannot do
is forget that ordinariness is real, and
still remain honest with our souls.

What we cannot do
is think we’re changing the world, and
still have time to laugh at funny jokes.

What we cannot do
is think we are making world a better place, and
still roll up the window at the beggar’s face.

And, what we cannot do
is feel we’re deserve to be special, since
there are billions of you out there right now.

You are a tiny, little improbability.
Just remain curious, interested, weird
and this may eventually pass.

Chief Executive Officer (or CEO in short) is that fantastically sounding job role that feels like a dream role to many. I used to fancy being a CEO one day and now when I am one (of Wingify), frankly it feels exciting and overwhelming. In fact, it is a big responsibility. A responsibility to make sure company grows, payroll is met every month in years to come, customers are happy, a brand is built, culture is well built and tens of other tasks. A CEO (especially in a small company / startup) can quickly get overwhelmed with all the different kinds of work he has on his plate. After all, in a way, everything associated with the company is in someway his responsibility.

So, what must a CEO do?

In the last 2 years of being a CEO of a nascent and growing company, I have come to realize that if a CEO focuses only on two key tasks and does them really well, all the work he thought he had to do by himself will take care of itself in a very efficient manner. These two tasks are:

• Hiring
• Setting Vision

Allow me to elaborate.

CEO Task #1: Hiring to build a perfect team

A CEO cannot and should not do all the tasks by himself. I know CEOs (including me) generally obsess over details and perfection, and in desperation end up doing quite a many things by themselves. Initially when the company is small, this is of course necessary. But as the business grows, a smart CEO should bring in more capable people than himself for well-defined roles and then set them free. This ensures that the business slowly comes to comprise of a competent and independent team that executes on the company vision (see below). I’m trying to do that for Wingify by hiring people for sales, marketing, engineering, product management and customer service roles. (Shameless plug: if you are smart and are willing to work from New Delhi, come join us!)

So, a CEO’s role should be to obsess on hiring competent people continuously. In fact, a CEO should strive to make himself dispensable for almost all the tasks in a business. Instead of meddling into sales, technology, finance, marketing, branding, customer service, etc., why not hire specialized people for these roles? However, it is important to obsess on hiring the right kind of people because the team that eventually gets built also determines the culture of the company, and ultimately the brand the company projects to the world. Hire good people and set them free! Everybody loves freedom to perform and deliver.

CEO Task #2: Setting company vision

No team can work without knowledge of the final objective. Without a clear idea of what a team is expected to deliver, even the smartest of people will fumble and struggle to deliver results (because, of course, they have no clue what results are expected of them!) So, while assembling and expanding a world class team, a CEO’s second and final task should be to show them a clear, cohesive vision of what the company expects to be. I’m not arguing for micromanaging the team, rather I’m arguing for deciding a strategic vision for the company and then letting individual teams set milestones for themselves to achieve that vision.

Once a company vision is set, different teams interpret the vision according to their own functions. For example, if the vision of the company is make $X million in revenue in next two years, sales, marketing, HR, customer service and other departments will decide what activities they need to plan in order to make this goal a reality. They will also set their own milestones and benchmarks. A CEO would need to overlook cross-team talk and guide it, but even that can be delegated. Strategic vision of a company could be of release of new products, entering new global markets or becoming a leader in a particular domain. But whatever the vision is, it must be clearly and thoroughly communicated to the whole company so that all the smart folks that you have hired and the teams that are operating can set their individual goals and milestones.

Once you hire a good team and show them a vision to work towards, your role as a CEO reduces to making sure everything is on track and meddling only when something seems to be going way off-track (say if an unexpected event happens in the market: a new competitor emerges or a new game-changing technology is developed or global recessions starts).

What’s missing in her life, mused Sheila. By all accounts her life was as normal as it could possibly be. She had a decently paying marketing job that a lot of her friends envied. Her projects were moderately challenging, work hours reasonable and she even had a cab assigned from office that dropped her back to home daily. As an external observer, you couldn’t spot anything dissatisfying about such a life. Yet, right now, staring blankly at her empty inbox and sipping a mildly fragrant coffee in a cheap, plastic cup, Sheila felt uneasy and out of place.

After being in a relationship for five years, she had recently married Ajay, a software engineer with Microsoft. It was an elaborate Punjabi ceremony and many relatives and friends attended the wedding; some had come from as far away as Singapore and Dubai. Wedding was a monumental event in her life and she has fresh, sweet memories of it. She thought it was a perfectly fine wedding and obviously she now has a husband that she loves, but still… she knew something was amiss and she couldn’t locate the source of her emptiness. Sipping some more coffee didn’t help her narrow down the real cause.

From an adjacent cubicle, she could hear a jarring noise made by a photocopy machine. This single, isolated noise in otherwise silent office was distinct and she was sure that everyone noticed it, but unlike her, nobody was even remotely bothered about it. Maybe, everyone else was busy with their work. With an air of boredom about this mundane observation, she gulped some more coffee.

Sheila thought a little Facebook wouldn’t do her harm. Work can wait, and anyway there is nothing world changing that she does. The mild excitement of opening Facebook quickly turned into a huge disappointment when she realized nobody, absolutely nobody had liked her last status update. Even though it had just been 2 hours since she had posted “Bored beyond my wildest dreams”, it should have at least got a single like by now. If not by anybody else, at least Ajay should have liked it! He was her goddamned husband. Sight of zero likes or comments on her status update made her very anxious, and hence, with half-twitched eyes and love-hate feelings, she quickly scrolled through updates of her friends: pictures, videos and check-ins that shouted how awesome everyone’s life is. She sighed, and got more flummoxed that she deserved to be.

These abstract, liquid thoughts made her feel guilty not because she was unhappy – she was still unsure if the unusual feeling was of genuine sadness or simple bewilderment – but because she couldn’t grasp what they were about. All she knew was that there’s something missing from her otherwise normal life. She was secretly craving for something that was perhaps out of her reach, but nonetheless at least she should have known the object of this craving. How can she reach for something that she has no clue about? This uneasiness about what the uneasiness was about was driving her even more uneasy. A self-fulfilling uneasiness, that is.

Sheila is generally too cool to bother with introspection, but this attraction for the unknown pounced on her again and again in the most humdrum of situations. She suspected this feeling is always there at back of her mind, but it definitely intensifies when she has a swath of time to pass. At times, even the funniest of the Internet videos appear shallow and forced to her. And at other times, her usual gossip with girl friends would bore her to death. This unnatural feeling wasn’t consistent, but it was very persistent. (She rationalized that, surely, she couldn’t be depressed or suffering from a mental ailment.)

Sheila loved it when she was absorbed in work. But absorbing and challenging work was no long term solace because it meant she would be forever dependent, and it also meant work would become an escape mechanism for her. But what was she escaping from and what more she wanted, she didn’t yet know. Knowing that was her first priority. Also, as if some other self was whispering in her ear, she was doubly troubled by that persistent simultaneous thought that she shouldn’t bother with these useless thoughts. Normal people don’t care, and she shouldn’t.

This infinitesimally tangled feeling brought a slight amusement to her lips – the same kind of unnatural amusement one gets when one thinks about his or her suicide, and realizes how absurd it is — yet can’t deny the validity of such an action.

Sheila’s coffee was almost over, and she quickly spotted a few new emails. With a huge sigh, she was glad her short work-break was over and that once again she can immerse herself in dailyness of life.

And like she had always been doing, Sheila very casually postponed confronting her real self to the next coffee break.

To her credit, at least she was brave enough to entertain such thoughts.

What’s the goal of life? Every one of us is an expert at answering this innocuous question. Some say life is all about compassion for other beings; some say it is about achieving greatness; some say it is about being a good father/mother/brother/sister, and yet some (like me) say there’s no goal in life and it is inherently meaningless. Who’s right, who’s wrong? We can do an endless debate about it, yet people’s opinion about what life is about seldom change. Opinions on life are not formed on an intellectual level, rather they arise from within and then we search for its justification.

No matter how much we disagree about meaning (or lack of it) in life, there’s one obvious fundamental fact that everyone will agree with. It’s almost a tautology, but while we’re alive, we exist, and this existence should rather be pleasant than be disgusting. So, every one of us in our respective ways, seek to be happy. Even for people who suffer tremendously because they believe in a difficult cause (say reporting from a warzone) do so because feel happiness at a deep, emotional level.

Happiness in life may come from passions, relationships, experiences, creative expression or achieving greatness. So even if we disagree on the goal of life, we can at least agree that ultimately it is happiness that we seek.

The key question for life then becomes: how to be happy?

There are two obvious ways: a) we all have our intuitions and ideas on what we think will make us happy; b) we can read books like Stumbling on Happiness or embrace movements like Positive Psychology to understand what scientific research says about happiness. For example, research says that people who are married are generally happier. Research also says that additional money, as long as you are living in poverty, actually increases happiness but once past the milestone of middle class living, the difference between making $50,000 a year and $50 million a year has hardly any impact on happiness.

So, from intuition or scientific research, we develop a number of hypotheses on what’s going to make us happier. Maybe a few additional friends will make us happier, or maybe cultivating a passion will do the job, or maybe entering into an intimate relationship is the best thing to do. All these plans for being happier sound too good to be true, but where’s the catch? If being joyful is so straightforward, why is only one quarter of population say they’re “very happy”? What about the rest? Are they not happy enough?

The pursuit of happiness: external v/s internal factors

In the pursuit of happiness, many of our activities involve depending on external factors, some of which may be beyond our control or influence. If we solely depend on such external factors for being happy, we risk facing rejection and failure, and hence negatively impacting our current happiness and limiting our potential future happiness. An example would be the scientific result that married people are happier. Now if the right person comes along, and you get married and thereby become happier, nothing like it! In pursuit of this goal, you can, of course, socialize and try increasing your chances of finding the right person. But what if that right person never comes and you never get married? Life is full of uncertainties and this is surely a possibility (however remote). Another example would be passions that are seeped in external factors. Suppose someone watches a lot of National Geographic Channel and is fascinated with the variety of experiences this world offers. He develops an internal idea that travelling the world would give him immense happiness, but if his life situations (maybe he is poor, married or bedridden, or maybe he is all) don’t allow him to travel, should he be less happy because of this fact?

Am I advocating resigning to one’s fate? Yes, and no. As long as you are happy, what’s wrong with resigning to fate? Though I’m not saying we shouldn’t try changing our external circumstances. What I am saying is that we cannot factors beyond our control, so it is foolish to rely on them to bring us happiness. Of course, we can (and should) always try to change external circumstances but we cannot put our happiness in jeopardy for that. If that external circumstance changes (by luck or effort), nothing like it and we should enjoy the happiness that comes along with it. But getting frustrated because you couldn’t move that rock which stands between you and happiness is quite childish. If the rock doesn’t seem like moving even after a great deal of effort, simply move on. You cannot blame yourself and feel frustrated because you couldn’t change the world or your circumstances.

Even better is the situation where you don’t need to move any rocks to be happy. There are many internal factors for happiness that solely depend on your own ideas, thoughts and emotions. One of the most important factors that impact your happiness is your outlook in life. For example, if you idolize greatness, yet are not able to achieve it, simply change your outlook. Look at happy people around you who have achieved nothing significant in life. Is their life any worse than those who have won Nobel prizes or founded billion dollar companies? Another factor you can control is being at ease with yourself. If you crave for external validation of your life, work and actions, you set yourself for disappointment and unhappiness. Similarly, if you crave for people’s company and don’t seem to get enough of it, you are setting yourself up for unhappiness.

I realize that evolution has constructed humans as social creatures who seek approval and company of fellow beings. But evolution never really cared about an individual’s happiness. It’s blind to my happiness as long as I reproduce. So, even though evolution makes it hard for us to being happy by ourselves alone, doing so is still preferable to the harder job of changing the world. Demanding the world that it should give you happiness is an act doomed for failure.

Tricks I use to be happy

One of the tricks I personally use (and still trying to get better at it) is to cultivate passions that do not depend on external world. I feel happy whenever I’m writing, so I try to write as much as I can (this post is an example of it). I’m a curious person and like learning about different fields (these days, it is psychology, philosophy, brain and mind), so I keep reading books (GoodReads.com is an excellent resource for suggestions) and articles on Wikipedia. I also like to constantly improve upon different aspects related to my startup Wingify (things like product features, user experience, customer support mechanisms, marketing tactics, etc.). Just making Wingify better than what it was yesterday gives me joy and, as opposed to something external like IPO or acquisition, improving Wingify is something that depends entirely on me.

My outlook that there’s no grand purpose in life and it is essentially meaningless make me not crave for possessions, wealth and greatness. Rather than depressing, my Nihilistic outlook is liberating and opens up easy paths for happiness. And my passions for writing and reading keep my busy and happy. My aim is to rely on myself to be happy and essentially detach my happiness from external factors that I cannot control. Note that this is not to say that I dislike wealth or greatness. I have respect for people who do great things, but I simply don’t want these things to impact my happiness levels. Similarly, it is not that I dislike socializing or don’t have friends. Far from it, I tremendously enjoy being with people. But I don’t want my friends or family to be sole determiners of my happiness.

Summary

The key to a happy life is to admire windfall of happiness but in absence and in spite of it, we should prepare ourselves to be happy even in a situation where all we have with us is ourselves.