Stay Happy, Stay Young!

"Age is not a particularly interesting subject. Anyone can get old. All you have to do is live long enough" - Don Marquis

There are very few certain things in life and aging is one of them.  We often hear many quotes like 'age is mind over matter, if you do not mind it doesn't matter', which basically encourage us to accept the old age and move on but we know better that since ages human has tried to find ways to stay and look as young as possible and the mankind has gone through some crazy phases in this endeavor.  

Recently I came across a philosophical guideline for staying young. Following are few things which anyone can practice;

1. Throw out non essential numbers such as age, weight, blood pressure measurement etc. Let the doctors worry about them.  That's why you pay them.
2. Keep only cheerful friends.  The grouches pull you down.
3. Keep learning. Learn about the things which interest you.  It can be computer or craft or even gardening.  Empty mind is a devil's workshop.
4. Enjoy the simple things in your daily life.  We encounter so many of such moments in our routine life.  All we need is to keep our eyes open.
5. Laugh often, long and loud till the time you gasp for breath or your eyes start watering.
6. The tears happen.  Endure, grieve and move on.  The only person who is with us till the time we are alive is ourselves.  Be alive when you are alive. 
7. Surround you self with what you love. It can be a pet, a hobby, family, friends.  Your home is your refuge.
8. Cherish your health. If it's good, preserve it. If it's not then improve it.  If its beyond what you can improve then get some help.
9. Don't take guilt trips.  If you feel like then take a trip to a tourist destination or to a foreign country but not to where guilt is.
10. Tell the people that you love them at every opportunity.

At the end we must remember that our life is not measured by the number of breaths we take but by the number of moments which takes our breath away. Stay happy and stay young!

Positive Thinking!

“A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity and an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty” - Winston Churchill

I am one die-hard believer of positive thinking and the changes it can bring about in any one’s life who chooses to practice it.  More often than not I personally try to practice it.   Recently, I came across a story of one such hell of a positive thinker.  Read on…

Jerry was the kind of guy you love to hate. He was always in a good mood and always had something positive to say. When someone would ask him how he was doing, he would reply, “If I were any better, I would be twins!”

He was a unique manager because he had several waiters who had followed him around from restaurant to restaurant. The reason the waiters followed Jerry was because of his attitude. He was a natural motivator. If an employee was having a bad day, Jerry was there telling the employee how to look on the positive side of the situation.

Seeing this style really made me curious, so one day I went up to Jerry and asked him, “I don’t get it! You can’t be a positive person all of the time. How do you do it?” Jerry replied, “Each morning I wake up and say to myself, Jerry, you have two choices today. You can choose to be in a good mood or youcan choose to be in a bad mood.’ I choose to be in a good mood. Each time something bad happens, I can choose to be a victim or I can choose to learn from it. I choose to learn from it. Every time someone comes to me complaining, I can choose to accept their complaining or I can point out the positive side of life. I choose the positive side of life.”

“Yeah, right, it’s not that easy,” I protested.

“Yes it is,” Jerry said. “Life is all about choices. When you cut away all the junk, every situation is a choice. You choose how you react to situations. You choose how people will affect your mood. You choose to be in a good mood or bad mood. The bottom line: It’s your choice how you live life.”

I reflected on what Jerry said. Soon thereafter, I left the restaurant industry to start my own business. We lost touch, but often thought about him when I made a choice about life instead of reacting to it. Several years later, I heard that Jerry did something you are never supposed to do in a restaurant business: he left the back door open one morning and was held up at gunpoint by three armed robbers. While trying to open the safe, his hand, shaking from nervousness, slipped off the combination. The robbers panicked and shot him. Luckily, Jerry was found relatively quickly and rushed to the local trauma center. After 18 hours of surgery and weeks of intensive care, Jerry was released from the hospital with fragments of the bullets still in his body. I saw Jerry about six months after the accident. When I asked him how he was, he replied, “If I were any better, I’d be twins. Wanna see my scars?”

I declined to see his wounds, but did ask him what had gone through his mind as the robbery took place. “The first thing that went through my mind was that I should have locked the back door,” Jerry replied. “Then, as I lay on the floor, I remembered that I had two choices: I could choose to live, or I could choose to die. I chose to live.”

“Weren’t you scared? Did you lose consciousness?” I asked. Jerry continued, “The paramedics were great. They kept telling me I was going to be fine. But when they wheeled me into the emergency room and I saw the expressions on the faces of the doctors and nurses, I got really scared. In their eyes, I read, ‘He’s a dead man.’ I knew I needed to take action.”

“What did you do?” I asked.

“Well, there was a big, burly nurse shouting questions at me,” said Jerry. “She asked if I was allergic to anything. ‘Yes,’ I replied. The doctors and nurses stopped working as they waited for my reply… I took a deep breath and yelled, ‘Bullets!’ Over their laughter, I told them, ‘I am choosing to live. Operate on me as if I am alive, not dead.”

Jerry lived thanks to the skill of his doctors, but also because of his amazing attitude. I learned from him that every day we have the choice to live fully. Attitude, after all, is everything.

Evernote - Your Second Brain

“For every minute spent in organizing, an hour is earned”

I am a reasonably tech-savvy person.  I also do have interests in the latest happenings around the World as far as the gadgets and technologies are concerned. This interest of mine, led me to discover one of the applications, which literally remembers everything and acts as our second brain. It is called ‘Evernote’.  What fascinated me more about this application was it’s support to most of the platforms, it’s simplicity and the icing on the cake….. It’s absolutely free (there is a premium membership option, more about it later). 

Evernote helps us to organize the information collected in various forms and from numerous sources.  It can be in the form of pictures, notes, ink notes, voice notes, web clippings, mails, PDF, excel sheets, word documents etc.  It stores your notes on ‘cloud’ so you can access it from any computer or smartphone or even your blackberry.  The people at Evernote has developed applications which can be installed on various platforms.  You can download applications for your laptop, mac, blackberry, iPhone, smartphone, desktop etc.  The cloud storage also helps in keeping your data in sync on all your devices.  I have Evernote app on my iPhone, my laptop at work and my Mac Book Air at home.  Till date I have around 600 notes which are synced and which are now accessible from anywhere in the world even from the laptop or a desktop where no Evernote app is installed as I can always go on their website and access my notes.  

Evernote employs OCR to allow the user to search for images according to the text contained in those images. Being able to search for text in images is a great way to save time. If the user needs to capture important information quickly, taking a snapshot for future reference is a handy option. Often, the OCR will even be able to read handwritten text in photos as long as it is fairly legible Finding the text, later, is easy because of the benefits of OCR. 

They have a browser extension for most of the commonly used browsers so at a click of button any web page is directly stored into our Evernote account.  Just think would you ever need a piece of paper now when you are collating information from web?

The most beneficial element of Evernote is it’s organizational system. The software contains several different ways to categorize information, such as Tags, Note Titles and Notebooks. Evernote allows the user to keep track of several projects at once with the “Notebooks” feature. The user creates and titles a notebook, then can further organize the information within that notebook with “tags".

Evernote has two memberships option.  One is absolutely free and another is a ‘premium’ one.  Premium member pays US $ 5 per month or US $ 45 a year but it comes with privileges such as a single note of up to 50 MB (free members:25 MB), monthly upload allowance of 1 GB (free members:500 MB), capacity to search for text in PDFs, faster sync speed.

For those that find themselves drowning in piles of sticky notes, Evernote is a much improved alternative to the former. The organizational system and OCR make it worth a look for those that are looking for help in organizing ideas at work, home or just bits of data from every-day life. 

Evernote website: www.evernote.com

Inspiring Story

“Fight with your strength and not with other’s weakness because true success lies in your effort and not other’s defeat”

How many times it has happened with us that we have lost all the hopes and have felt dejected? that we lack many things in us? that we are not good enough?  Well, I am sure if I think about it I will definitely loose count.  I recently came across a forwarded mail.  It has a really inspiring story along with a message for us to remember in all those difficult times when we ever feel dejected or small.  It goes something like this..

A 10-year-old boy decided to study judo despite the fact that he had lost his left arm in a devastating car accident. The boy began lessons with an old Japanese judo master. The boy was doing well, so he couldn’t understand why, after three months of training the master had taught him only one move.

“Sensei,” the boy finally said, “Shouldn’t I be learning more moves?”

“This is the only move you know, but this is the only move you’ll ever need to know,” the sensei replied.

Not quite understanding, but believing in his teacher, the boy kept training. Several months later, the sensei took the boy to his first tournament.

Surprising himself, the boy easily won his first two matches.

The third match proved to be more difficult, but after some time, his  opponent became impatient and charged; the boy deftly used his one move to win the match.

Still amazed by his success, the boy was now in the finals. This time, his opponent was bigger, stronger, and more experienced. For a while, the boy appeared to be over-matched. Concerned that the boy might get hurt, the referee called a time-out.

He was about to stop the match when the sensei intervened. “No,” the sensei insisted, “Let him continue.”

Soon after the match resumed, his opponent made a critical mistake: he dropped his guard. Instantly, the boy used his move to pin him.

The boy had won the match and the tournament. He was the champion. On the way home, the boy and sensei reviewed every move in each and every match. Then the boy summoned the courage to ask what was really on his mind. “Sensei, how did I win the tournament with only one move?” “You won for two reasons,” the sensei answered. “First, you’ve almost mastered one of the most difficult throws in all of judo. And second, the only known defense for that move is for your opponent to grab your left arm.”

We, human beings,do not realise the importance of what we have and we rue over what we lack in life.  We know life is not perfect for any one but it has to be made perfect with whatever we have been given and once we know this fact surely life will be a much more happier journey.

Ferrai World Live Show May 2011

Past - A Rear View Mirror

“One must always maintain one’s connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it.”

We all seldom indulge in brooding over our past.  We cry over the missed opportunities and repent over our mistakes.  We also nurse a grudge against some one because of an event of the past. In our heart somewhere we always have this feeling that this brooding over the past is a wasteful exercise and we are also certain that it would not lead us anywhere. Still we can't resist a slightest of temptation to indulge in this.  I agree that its not an easy thing to forget our past but I believe rather than brooding over our past we can put it to a constructive use and learn from these past bitter experiences.

Lets look at it in an easy way.  Those who drive vehicle would easily understand this metaphor.  Every vehicle has a rear view mirror.  How often while driving a vehicle we use this mirror?  I bet not more than 10% of the time.  It is used only as a matter of reference or as a matter of a guide to drive our vehicle so that we don’t meet up with an accident.  I believe same applies to our past.  We should think about our past and use it for our guidance while driving our life on the roads of present which are going towards our future.  We should use the past only to ensure that the mistakes we made then are not repeated in our present or in our future.  

Though we keep saying and hearing that ‘everyone learns from his/er mistakes’, we don’t actually implement it.  Our past experiences (mistakes) provide us with an opportunity to learn something for our benefits. We rather use it wisely than indulge in it.