Just to make an announcement of sorts, I have recently discovered that my area of interest currently is that of achieving ‘Personal Excellence’. It really excites me to know that I am expanding in all major areas of life like: Wealth, Work, Relationships, Health, Mental stability and peace etc.  I also realized that achieving excellence in only one of these areas and being shoddy in the rest is very difficult. Just like mediocrity seeps into every area of life, so does excellence. Truly successful people are great at a lot of things. Their character somehow shines through even the smallest of tasks that they do. The way they walk, talk, carry themselves and their vision speaks of success even before they have achieved it.

But to safely declare that this is now an interest that I am deeply passionate about took me roughly 32 years! But nowadays that’s what I read about most of the time, think about in my waking hours, study on the internet, practise it in every area of my life. So I guess that’s a good way of discovering what one wants to do with their time. What is that activity that occupies most of your waking hours? That’s what passion is. One of the reasons why artists and musicians are perceived to be somewhat obsessed and crazy is this: they take one subject and go to the deep end of it even if they continue doing that for days together. So basically it’s safe to assume that whatever occupies most of our time is what we’re headed towards becoming. The tragedy of our time is that most of us have not exposed ourselves to any variety of interesting things! In urban Mumbai today if you ask people their hobbies, what’s the most that we’ll get: reading, writing, watching TV (yes, apparently that’s a hobby), playing guitar/piano, painting/sketching…what else? How many of us have met potters, sculptors, clay-modelers, glass-blowers, martial-arts trainers? Our options are quite limited and no matter how independent we think we are, our society and its insecurities still seep into our system.

My life has been very unplanned in the sense that I have not followed the social calender nor the milestones that one is expected to reach by a certain age. I have taken a lot of risks, made heavy career mistakes, started learning an unrelated skill etc at a relatively late age. So even though I was always a musician, I didn’t really know the key to making a lot of money or ways to go about succeeding at my chosen field. But now I do. And now I am actually grateful to the past version of me for making those mistakes. Now the drive is stronger, I understand myself and the way things work a lot better. But most importantly after sifting through so many varied fields of interest I can finally settle with something at least temporarily until something more intriguing comes along and call in my passion.

Taking risks, trying out stuff is important. At the end of it you’ll at least know what you don’t like or don’t want to do! And this quote makes sense in that:

If you wait to do everything until you’re sure it’s right, you’ll probably never do much of anything – Win Borden

So, get out there today. Do something different. Be different. Sameness of our living days is defeating the purpose of being alive!