# Kunal Gupta — Full Content Index > This file contains the full text of all published writing on kunal.live. ## Unlearning (Personal Essays) ### The Table Chasing the best view Published: 2026-08-09 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/the-table/ The new patio furniture arrived last week, and I spent most of that morning quietly grieving something I hadn't lost yet. For the past few summers our balcony in Lisbon held a high top bar table pushed right to the edge, two stools side-by-side, facing out over one of the most inspiring views I've ever had.Thousands of rooftops, the river, the bridge, the hills behind it. My wife and I had spent many dinners on those stools, shoulder to shoulder, facing the city the way an audience faces a stage. The new outdoor table was lower though. Normal chairs, normal height. Which meant more banister and less city.I made my case over and over. From inside the apartment, the tall silhouette of the bar height table had always disappeared into the window; this new one would sit across the middle of it, a horizontal line drawn through the best thing we own. My wife listened to more of this than the argument deserved.Then the table came, and I sat down at it.The first thing I noticed was my feet. I felt grounded. My feet were flat on the fake grass we laid across the balcony floor, fifty meters above the street, which is a strange definition of ground and still works exactly like one. On the bar stools before my feet had hovered, hooked on a metal rung or swinging free, and I had never once thought about it. Sitting there with both heels pressed into that plastic turf, something in my lower half relaxed. The second thing was my back. The stools had low backs, so all those evenings I'd been holding myself upright with back muscles I never asked for volunteers from. Now there was a chair behind me doing the work. My body had been maintaining a posture I mistook for a preference.The third change took a few minutes longer to notice. Our chairs were now angled slightly toward each other rather than lined up in a row, so my wife and I could still see the city and also see each other. On the stools we had spent years talking to Lisbon with our voices pointed at the horizon. Now her face was in the conversation. The talking changed that first evening, went slower and further, and we stayed out there past the point where we usually went inside to find something to do.Nothing about the view had changed. The bridge was where I left it.Many years ago I read a small book called Slim by Design, and I still remember more of it than most books I've read since. The argument was that our kitchens, our grocery aisles, our restaurants and school cafeterias were all built in ways that quietly encourage us to eat more and eat worse, and that redesigning the room does more than lecturing the person in it. Smaller plates and smaller forks. Fresh food at eye level instead of buried in a drawer. A table by the window. I have no idea how much of the research held up, and it hardly matters to me now, because the idea moved into my kitchen and never left. The room makes suggestions. The body takes them.There's a version of this running everywhere in my life once I started looking. My yoga blocks live on the floor next to the mat instead of in the closet, and I use them. When they were in the closet, I did not. A water bottle sits on my desk within arm's reach, and I drink from it without deciding to. Notifications, sounds, the size of the monitor, whether the chair at my desk supports my back the way the new balcony chair does. Where the meditation cushion sits when I walk out of the bedroom in the morning. Every one of these was a choice, and almost none of them felt like one at the time.Most of my environment was assembled by momentum. Things landed where they landed, and then I built habits around them and called the habits my personality. I don't want to bring full attention to every object in every room all the time; there's a cognitive weight to that which would cost more than it returns. But noticing even a few of them feels different from how I used to move through my days. It gives me a little more agency. A little more sense that my experience of life is something I shape rather than something that arrives and gets absorbed.That's most of what I want, in the end. To feel like my life is mine. Not conquered, not optimized, just authored in small ways. The furniture, the phone settings, the height of a chair, the angle between two people who love each other. I do get to make those choices, everyday.I had been guarding the view from our balcony because the view was the reason I had bought the apartment years ago. What makes evenings with my wife on the balcony good though was never the panorama. It is feeling grounded, supported and connected.The city looks a little smaller from the new table and chairs. And we stay out there twice as long. --- ### Empty Spaces Taking time to think Published: 2026-08-02 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/empty-spaces/ Yesterday my wife and I drove twelve minutes to a hotel spa in our own city, the kind of indulgence we'd normally save for a vacation somewhere far from home. We treated ourselves to a full spa circuit, including hot baths, sauna, steam room, cold plunge, and then ninety-minute massages to finish.The hotel had been starred on our shared Google Maps for over two years, recommended by a friend and then quietly forgotten, sitting there unused every time we saw it. While she was reading about it online yesterday morning, I called on impulse, and when they said they had availability, we were in the car thirty minutes later.We used to do a spa circuit more often when we lived in Sydney, and something about moving between the heat and the cold always opened us up. As we drifted through the circuit yesterday, we started talking, about what a future house might look like, about where we might travel this winter, about places in the world we still haven't seen. The conversation kept climbing toward things that felt expansive and alive, and as we were called in for the massages, I made a joke to her. "Well, we clearly both have plenty of fun things to think about for the next ninety minutes." She smiled.Then I lay down on the table, and my mind went somewhere else entirely.It didn't drift toward a future home or the winter travels or any of the inspiring things we'd been dreaming about together a minute earlier. It went straight to the boring backlog of my week, replaying people I'd seen and messages I still hadn't answered and something I'd read on a website days ago, running through the quiet tally of my to-do list as if it had been waiting all week for the chance. A few times I tried to steer it back toward the exciting conversation, and each time it drifted right back to the mundane residue of recent days.Afterward, in the relaxation room, I turned to her eagerly and asked what she had thought about while on the massage table. She looked at me almost blankly, as if nothing worth mentioning had happened, and when she asked me the same question, I gave her the same answer. Nothing worth reporting. The massage had been wonderful, and yet my inner experience had been strangely dull.It took me a while to understand what had actually happened on that table. This was an empty space, and my mind, handed ninety uninterrupted minutes, had chosen not to compose symphonies but to do the quiet, unglamorous work of processing whatever had piled up. It wasn't wandering aimlessly so much as clearing a backlog I hadn't realized was there. My mornings that week had been rushed, the meditations shorter, the journaling almost nonexistent, so it made sense that my mind had a queue of unprocessed days waiting for the first real opening it could find, and the massage table was the first opening in a while.There's a rhythm to my days that leaves almost no room for this. When I'm not engaging with my wife, I'm engaging with someone else, in person or through a screen, and when I'm not talking to a human I'm often talking to one of my AI agents. When I'm not doing either of those, I'm consuming something, a podcast or music or some piece of information I've convinced myself I need, and when I'm not consuming, I'm deep in a task that demands all of me, chopping vegetables finely or carrying something heavy or fixed on the next small thing in front of me. There's always an input, and there's never a gap.For a long time I thought zoning out counted as rest, disappearing into a movie or losing myself in music at the gym, but I've come to see that isn't the same thing at all. In those moments my mind is unengaged and yet it isn't resting, because something is still coming in, the screen still lit, the sound still playing. What the rest my mind actually needs looks more like the massage table, where nothing comes in and the backlog finally gets to move.Years ago I read a few books about sleep, and one idea has stayed with me ever since is that much of memory forms overnight, that sleep is partly the brain's way of filing the day away, sorting through what happened and making sense of it. I've started to think the mind needs a version of that during the waking hours too, some way of processing what just happened before it accumulates into a backlog that ambushes me on a massage table. Making peace with the past, even the past few days, is what clears space for the future to arrive. Space for ideas. Space for possibilities.The rest of that day, we decided to stay off our phones entirely, no messages and no email and no feeds, and something in that decision felt lighter than it should have. We napped and walked through the city and ate a long tasting menu dinner and did an escape room, letting the hours stretch without checking anything, and by the time we got home I felt full in every sense, a little too full from dinner and ready for some space after a whole day together.We both reached for our phones then, but instead of scrolling through my messages I opened ChatGPT and started chasing an idea that had surfaced during the massage. Many thoughts had drifted through my mind on that table, but this one had lodged itself and wouldn't let go, and I spent the next hour deep inside it, turning it over and following it further than I expected to. It's something I'm building a prototype of today, and I know I never would have found it if my mind hadn't been given those empty minutes to dig it up.This morning I was at the grocery store with my wife, standing in line at the register while she was off grabbing a few last things, with nothing to do and nowhere to be. In the past that would have been an automatic reach for my phone, a reflex to fill the pause before it could even register as one, but today I just stood there and looked around at the people and the shelves and the ordinary hum of the place, letting my mind drift toward whatever random, useless, boring thing it wanted. I didn't try to make it productive. I just let the space be empty, and I was okay standing inside it. --- ### The Longest Hour The deciding took a second. The leaving took an hour. Published: 2026-07-24 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/the-longest-hour/ On a Wednesday morning, still half asleep in bed, my wife told me the plans she'd had to see a friend this morning had fallen through. After a short pause, I turned to her and asked if she wanted to go to the beach. "Really?", she looked at me with a surprised look. It was a small idea that arrived fully formed before my mind had a chance to argue with it.There's a particular energy that comes from a decision made in the space of a breath. My to-do list is never-ending, and the choice to set it all down for a morning, to do something for ourselves that served no purpose beyond enjoyment, felt almost mischievous. Are we really allowed to do this? Living in the south of Europe in the summer does that to you, the air carrying a permanent holiday mood, an open invitation to step out of the machinery of the week.The deciding took a second. But the leaving took over an hour and a half.I still did my meditation, and then my yoga, and then I ate a little something because I couldn't imagine walking out the door on an empty stomach, while my wife moved through her own sequence, her own small rituals that needed completing before the day could officially begin. By the time we actually stepped outside, a surprising amount of the morning had quietly disappeared, and I realized we had said yes to spontaneity in an instant and then spent an hour negotiating with everything inside us that wanted this morning to look like every other morning. So much for being free spirits.I noticed it and had to laugh, because it turns out we might still have some work to do on learning how to truly be spontaneous. The impulse arrives free and light, and then the execution drags along behind it, weighed down by routine, by preference, by the thousand small ways I've arranged my life to be predictable. We got in the car anyway, music on and windows down, driving toward a beach farther out than our usual one, in an area neither of us knew well, and that unfamiliarity did something to the whole morning. The half hour on unknown roads made a random Wednesday feel like the first day of a vacation, and when we found a spot to park and walked up over the sand, we were quietly congratulating ourselves on how brilliant and original we were, two people who had cracked the secret of the midweek escape.Then we saw that there were already thousands of people there, and it wasn't even noon. Families and umbrellas and the whole coastline claimed before late morning by everyone who had clearly figured this out long before we did. So much for originality. I felt behind the curve, a beat late to my own clever idea, and then a smaller, softer thought settled in beneath it: I was late, but I was here, and that was the part that counted.We found a cafe, with our feet in the sand, we ordered slowly, avocado toast and scrambled eggs and a small dish of olives, and my wife ordered a pastel de nata and slipped into the kind of good mood that spreads across a table and settles over everyone near it. Nobody was waiting for us, nothing was due, and there's a particular quiet that arrives when a morning has no shape you're obligated to fill.When we walked down to the water, my wife announced she wasn't going in, too cold, and she didn't want to get her hair wet, the usual reservations we all keep on hand for exactly these moments. We held hands and walked in anyway, surrounded by kids shrieking and old men floating and dogs paddling in circles, everyone thoroughly absorbed in their own small joy, and that collective mood did something to the temperature until the cold stopped registering entirely. We kept going until we were both fully in, and a smile erupted across my face, the grin of a child who has forgotten there was ever anything else to do, soft waves breaking against our bodies while we stood there longer than either of us had planned to.We dried off and walked back to the car and drove home, and the whole outing hadn't taken more than a few hours, efficient almost, and yet we found ourselves talking about it for the rest of the day, to each other and then to friends, the way you replay something that mattered more than its size suggests.The beach itself is nothing new to me, since I've been going most weeks this summer, and what stayed with me wasn't the sand or the water but the choosing, the willingness to say yes and then follow through even slowly, even an hour later than I would have expected. How many of these mornings do I actually get? I felt lucky in a way that was hard to hold, aware that this is a season of fewer responsibilities than I've had before and fewer than I'll likely have again, and that so much has to quietly align for a morning like this to be possible. These windows don't stay open forever, and part of me knew it even while I stood in the water.The simple moments keep speaking to me lately. Spontaneity doesn't require a grand plan or a far-off trip, and sometimes it's a Wednesday, a canceled plan, and an hour of getting out of my own way. --- ### Cute Cafe The whole day is a forward lean Published: 2026-07-19 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/cute-cafe/ My cousin was visiting Lisbon from Canada, and we were trying to find a time for the two of us to walk one morning while the rest his family were sleeping. They were staying at an Airbnb around the corner. I suggested 10:30am, expecting him to say yes, however instead he told me that was one of his favourite times of the day, because it was when him and his family would find a cute Lisbon cafe and just be present together.It brought a big smile to my face to read. Something about the plainness of it, the way he said it without any further explanation needed, and the way he'd clearly thought about it before. Later that morning, while on our walk, he said something similar about their whole trip. They'd crossed an ocean with the kids, and the moments he appreciated most weren't the big ones. They were the quiet, small ones. The unremarkable stretches where everyone was simply there, together, not rushing toward the next thing.That opened up a longer conversation between us about how happiness isn't really thought or achieved. It's felt. This quiet contentment that arrives when I'm present with whatever is happening and whoever I'm with. Not the past replaying, not the future being planned, just the thing or person that's actually here.It's the same feeling I experience in a flow state, when the worry drops away and I'm absorbed entirely in what I'm doing. And talking with my cousin, I realized how rarely I actually land there over the course of an ordinary day.I wake up, and before my feet touch the floor, my mind is already sorting through the day ahead, ranking what needs to happen. I sit down to meditate, and my mind begins reviewing yesterday, or chasing some idea that pulled me sideways. I begin a morning yoga routine that's so familiar that my mind wanders even further into my day. I make breakfast with a podcast in my ear, learning something I think I need to know right away. I eat with my wife and we talk about what the day requires of us. I open my computer, read the news, answer emails, check in with the AI agents building things for me while I slept. The whole day is a forward lean, one action tipping into the next.That's what stayed with me after my cousin left. The favourite moments of a day, a week, a year, maybe a whole life, tend to be the ones we least expect. They're rarely the ones we planned or paid for. They're the pause between the planned things, the coffee, the walk, the stretch of quiet where nobody needs anything. They're free, and they're everywhere, and I walk past them constantly because I'm busy building toward something that feels more important.And here's where it gets strange. My cousin found that mid-morning cafe feeling in Lisbon. To get there, he booked flights across the Atlantic ocean, arranged an Airbnb, coordinated schedules around several adult kids, took time away from work, packed suitcases, and re-arranged normal life. All of that machinery, all those expenses and logistics, to arrive at a quiet coffee with the people he'd be sitting next to anyway back home.The moment itself cost nothing. Everything around the moment cost a great deal.I've done the same thing more times than I can count. Flown somewhere far to finally slow down. Booked the retreat to remember how to breathe. Waited for the trip, the weekend, the change of scenery, before letting myself simply sit and be with someone. As if presence were a place I had to travel to, rather than something already available in my own kitchen on a Tuesday morning.I keep wanting to conclude that the arrangements are unnecessary, that I should be able to find the cute cafe feeling at home without the flights and the packing. And maybe that's true. But I'm not sure it's the whole truth. There's something about crossing the ocean that seems to give permission to pause. The trip isn't the point, and somehow the trip is also what makes the point possible.My cousin texted a day after they flew home. He said the trip had been wonderful, and the thing he kept thinking about was that mid-morning coffee. I read it standing in my kitchen, mid-morning, a cup of ginger tea cooling beside me on the counter, my wife somewhere in the next room. The exact moment he'd flown across the world to find was sitting right there in my hands, and I'd almost walked past it to answer his message. --- ### Lifejacket He had been begging to go to the pool, and Published: 2026-07-12 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/lifejacket/ He had been begging to go to the pool, and when it was finally showtime, he stood there at the edge scared to go in. My nephew, who was visiting us in Portugal a few weeks ago loves water. He had been talking about swimming for days. But standing there in the humid air, looking at the blue rectangle in front of him, something in him caused him to freeze. His feet stayed on the tile. All of his energy seemed to dissipate. His hands gripped the edge of the life jacket like it might float away without him.I recognized his look immediately. Not because I've seen it in other children, because it was mine, wearing an identical expression when I was a kid, waiting for someone to tell me it was safe.I was a scared kid around water. I eventually learned to swim, though not particularly well, and even now I carry that hesitation into every large body of water I enter. There's a version of me that never fully got over it. Watching my nephew freeze at the edge, I could feel that version stirring, remembering.My wife knelt down to his level. She talked to him quietly and didn't rush him. She got in the water first, waist deep, arms open, and let him watch her be fine. That afternoon he made it in. Just barely. Clinging to her, the life jacket doing most of the work, his eyes wide the whole time.The next day they went again. And the day after. And by the end of the week, the life jacket was off. He was moving through the water on his own, asking to go back to the pool, asking to stay longer. The fear hadn't disappeared exactly. Something had loosened around it. He had found a way to be in the water while still, in some quiet part of him, being afraid of it.What I noticed most was his joy. Not the joy of having conquered something, which is a more adult emotion. Just the plain joy of being in the water, doing the thing he had wanted to do all along, no longer stopped by the wall of his own fear.I've had that experience many times in my own life, in smaller and larger forms. When I first moved to Sydney, driving on the left side of the road terrified me. Every roundabout felt like a small crisis. I remember the specific tension of gripping the wheel too hard, of second-guessing every turn, of wondering whether I had chosen the right country to live in based entirely on which side of the road the cars drove on. And then, slowly, it became fun. A puzzle rather than a threat. A daily experiment I was running with nobody but myself.My fear of heights has been around longer. Once I decided to lean into it, I went skydiving. I went zip lining. I sat on the edge of a cliff and ate a picnic while my mind constructed escape routes. The fear hasn't left. But I've kept finding ways to move alongside it, usually because someone was there, coaxing me forward, or because I had committed publicly enough that walking back felt worse than jumping.Standing by the pool watching my nephew, I started to notice something I hadn't quite named before. There's a story I've absorbed from Western culture about fear, and about how we're supposed to work through it. The story goes something like this: notice the fear, sit with the fear, understand the fear, integrate the fear. All of the mindfulness, therapy, introspection and reflection I do helps me, however they all are fundamentally solo. The spotlight goes inward. The work is mine to do. If I'm not making progress, the assumption is that I need more awareness, more insight, more practice, more courage, more time on the cushion.But I've been aware of my fear of water for decades. Awareness alone didn't teach me to swim. My nephew wasn't sitting with his fear in some meditative posture. He was being coaxed into the pool by someone who loved him and knew what she was doing.There's a subtle assumption buried in the introspective model: that the more I look at my fear, the more it will loosen. Sometimes that's true. But sometimes the looking becomes its own trap. I become more aware of the fear without becoming any closer to moving through it. The spotlight illuminates the problem without offering a path out.Not every fear needs to be worked through. Some fears are honest signals that actually deserve caution. But when there's a real desire to move through a fear, when the fear is standing between me and something I actually want, what I've noticed is that I've almost never done it alone.My wife got in the water first. My friends were on the zip line platform. The instructor was strapped to my back during the skydive. Even in Sydney, learning to drive on the left, there was a whole city of people driving alongside me, silently modeling that this was possible, that they did it every day.The fear didn't need to be understood. It needed to be surrounded.Sometimes that surrounding looks like asking for help. Sometimes it looks like being pushed by someone who sees more clearly than I do. Sometimes it just looks like being in the presence of others who have already made the crossing. In the moment, being pushed doesn't feel good. It rarely does. But the alternative is standing at the edge of the pool for the rest of my life, growing increasingly aware of my hesitation and no closer to being in the water.My nephew left at the end of the week. His parents sent us a video a few days later. He was swimming, no life jacket, grinning at the camera. Whatever had happened in Lisbon had traveled with him.I don't think he beat his fear. I think he found out he wasn't the only one holding it. --- ### Play We had just finished dinner. Published: 2026-07-05 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/play/ We had just finished dinner. The plates were still on the table, our guest's legs swinging under his chair, my wife wiping something off his cheek.I felt a sudden urge and reached for my phone, opened Spotify, and turned the music up louder than I usually would in our apartment. Then I pulled his chair out into the open space of the living room.His tiny feet started to move. My not-so-tiny feet followed suit. What ensued was a full-blown, spontaneous dance party, the kind I'll probably remember for years to come.The next night, we did it again. And the night after that. And the night after that.My five-year-old nephew was staying with us for the past week in Lisbon while my sister and brother-in-law traveled to a friend's wedding in Europe. It was our first time we took care of him alone, and we had gone in bracing for something much harder than it turned out to be. Not because he was easy, kids are never simply easy, but because I discovered something I hadn't expected. He was fun in a way I hadn't quite let myself experience before. A fun that I think can only be found with your own kids or with family close enough that the distinction stops mattering.He was enrolled in a summer camp for the week. After the first day, I turned to my wife and said, I don't really want him to go to camp. I actually just want to play with him. I picked him up early on the second day. Earlier on the third. By the fourth and fifth, we didn't bother going to camp at all. We instead moved through Lisbon together, but mostly stayed home, and let the hours find their own shape.Eating a meal became a game. Brushing teeth became a performance. The bedtime routine had negotiations, plot twists, and small ceremonies. Things I do without noticing became, in his presence, things worth doing with attention. He was just curious. The ordinary was interesting because he hadn't yet decided it wasn't.Our apartment isn't set up for children. We don't have the shelves of toys, the play mats, the bright walls, the color-coded bins I see at my sister's house and at friends' homes with kids. I had assumed this was going to be a problem. A week in, I realized it wasn't. He found things. He made things. A cushion became a fort. A wooden spoon became a microphone. The music on my phone became a dance floor.After the second day of us keeping him fed, clean, safe and entertained, my wife said something to me in bed that night something that I'm still holding onto. My nephew was bringing out my playful side. Sides she was really happy to see me experience.I didn't realize it until she named it.Over the last few months I've been talking with my wife, my friends, my therapist, about a kind of seriousness that's been settling into me. A doing energy. The difficulty of sitting through a two-hour movie without reaching for something else. The subtle pull to make every open hour productive. Not workaholism exactly, but rather a slow narrowing of what feels acceptable to do with a day.And with my nephew in the house, that narrowing just dissolved. Not because I decided it should. Because there was no room for it. His energy displaced mine.I've written about play before, most recently after a night at an arcade in Lisbon with a friend. That night taught me something about presence, about how play removes the performance of adulthood for a few hours. But this week taught me something different. Play at the arcade is a destination. I go there to play. I leave and the play stays behind, waiting for the next visit.Play with my nephew wasn't a destination. It was a mode. It came with him into every room, into every task, into moments I would otherwise have treated as boring logistics. He didn't need special equipment or a designated play area or a scheduled activity. He brought play the way some people bring warmth into a house just by walking in.I keep thinking about that. About how many parents I know have built elaborate infrastructures for their children's play, and how much of that infrastructure might be about the parents' creativity more than the children's needs. My nephew wasn't lacking anything in our apartment. He had a wooden spoon and a cushion and two adults who loved him. That was enough.Maybe it's enough for me too.The playful energy I felt this week isn't going to come back by going to more arcades or booking more concerts. Those are good. They're not the thing. The thing is quieter and closer. It's whether I can brush my teeth the way my nephew brushes his teeth, with a small measure of interest in the fact that I'm brushing my teeth at all. Whether I can turn up the music after dinner without needing a reason. Whether I can let a meal become a game, or let a walk become a wandering, or let an ordinary Tuesday evening become a dance party, just because someone I love is standing in the room.My sister and brother-in-law came back and took him for the next leg of their European summer adventure. Our apartment is now quiet again. My wife and I sat at the table where we'd eaten a hundred meals before, and it felt, for the first few days, a little too quiet and still.The house is still empty of toys. It always had everything we needed. --- ### Stubborn I often forget how much my physical environment shapes my Published: 2026-06-28 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/stubborn/ I often forget how much my physical environment shapes my mental environment. This past weekend, I was reminded of this.My sister and her family were visiting my wife and I in Portugal, and we took the opportunity to drive up to the Douro Valley. Surrounded by gorgeous hills, a quiet river and a generous landscape that extended beyond the eye could see, I noticed how the environment helped us go deeper in our conversations and me in my reflections.After lunch one day, when the rest of the family had left the hotel restaurant, my sister and I were sitting alone together for the first time. "I'm surprised with how much you've changed since getting married", she remarked, seemingly out of the blue for me. Clearly, she had been pondering this for some time. "You seem to have learned how to accept things more easily now", referring casually to my stubbornness that she undoubtedly had become accustomed to since childhood.I felt the comment land somewhere in my chest before my mind caught up.I still see myself as quite stubborn. The word fits me the way a familiar coat fits. I've worn it for decades. My family knows this version of me, the one who digs in, the one who decides what he believes and then pursues it relentlessly. But sitting there at the table, hearing her describe someone else, I realized she might be seeing something I hadn't yet seen in myself.The conversation stayed with me for the rest of the weekend. I kept turning it over while walking the vineyards, while playing with my nephew, while watching the river move slowly past us. What had actually changed in me? And why?I started to think about my beliefs. How I form them. How I hold them. How rarely I question them once they're in place. So much of what I believe was handed to me before I could choose. By my parents, my teachers, the culture I grew up in. I absorbed it all the way a sponge absorbs water, without asking about what was coming in.The trouble is that beliefs rarely get questioned. They settle in. They become part of the furniture of my mind. And when my reality starts to diverge from what I believe, I have a choice I rarely notice I'm making. I can accept what's happening in my reality, or I can stay loyal to the belief and resist what's in front of me.For most of my life, I chose loyalty to the belief. That's what stubbornness really is. A preference for the inherited story over my lived experience.What's shifted, I think, is that I've started asking a different question. Not whether the belief is true, but whether it's still serving its purpose. Most beliefs were built to serve something, to protect me, to guide me, to keep me connected. The question is whether that purpose is still being met.A simple example: I grew up vegetarian. It became identity as much as diet. About one year ago, I started experimenting with eating chicken. Not because I wanted to abandon something, but because I'd been strength training for over five years and wasn't seeing the muscle growth I'd been expecting. Intellectually, I understood the need of more protein. Emotionally, the idea of eating chicken felt like a betrayal to who I was.The first few times were uncomfortable. The belief had purpose once. It connected me to my family, to my culture, to a way of moving through the world. But sitting in a Lisbon restaurant a year later, ordering chicken without flinching, I had to admit something. The belief wasn't serving me anymore. It was getting in the way of a goal that mattered to me now.Now I eat chicken almost daily. My body has started to shift in ways my wife notices, my trainer notices, my massage therapist notices. I haven't changed my workouts. I haven't added more hours at the gym. The nutrition changed, and my body responded positively. A belief I'd carried my entire life, one I would have defended fiercely at twenty, turned out to be more flexible than I'd assumed.The lesson is not about eating chicken. The lesson is about the courage to look at a belief and ask whether it's still achieving its purpose. It is much easier to keep believing and struggling than to challenge the belief and accept what's might now be true.Living in Portugal for over five years has done something similar on a wider scale. The way I believed a society, government and economy should function has been challenged. Almost all of it has been quietly disassembled by daily life here. The shops close in the afternoon. People take their time. Bureaucracy moves at a pace I would have found unbearable a decade ago. Some of my old beliefs about efficiency, productivity, the right way to live, have not survived the move from New York to Lisbon. The ones that have, I now hold by choice rather than inheritance.My sister's observation, I think, was about this. She wasn't saying I'd become less of myself. She was saying I'd stopped clinging to ideas that no longer served me. That likely haven't for a while but I needed time to finally let some of them go. Acceptance, from the outside, can look like softening. From the inside, it feels more like clarity. Like putting down something heavy I'd been carrying without realizing the weight.I'm still stubborn about plenty of things. The list is long and unflattering. But the practice I'm learning, slowly, is to ask the deeper question before defending the position. Why do I believe this? Is is practical for me to still believe this? Does this serve the life I'm actually living, the family I'm actually building, the world I'm actually in?If it does, I keep it. If it doesn't, I try to let it go.I don't need to be right about everything. I'd rather live in harmony with reality, the environment and the people around me. That's often the most practical choice I can make. --- ### Permission We were at a dinner party last week in Lisbon Published: 2026-06-21 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/permission/ We were at a dinner party last week in Lisbon, sitting around a long table with friends. The conversation had been flowing and at some point I started talking about a few of the projects I've been building lately and some of the questions I've been chasing in life. Someone across the table said it sounded like I was quite curious and asked me where it came from. I didn't wait. It's my father, I said. The answer surprised me, not because it wasn't true, but because of how quickly it arrived. There was no searching, no scanning through possibilities, no internal deliberation about how to frame it. It was just there, fully formed, as if it had been waiting underneath the surface for the question to call it up. My father is one of the most curious people I've ever known, and his curiosity shows up everywhere, with everyone. He asks questions of the taxi driver, the stranger sitting next to him on a long flight, the waiter, the person ahead of him in line. He doesn't strike them up because he's performing friendliness. He starts them because he's genuinely interested in what their day has been like, where they grew up, what they think about the thing they happen to be closest to. There's a particular quality to the way he asks. Most questions, even kind ones, carry a hidden frame inside them, and you can feel the other person preparing the response they think you want to hear. My father's questions don't do that. They're open in a way that feels safe, and you could say anything back to him without it costing you anything. The strange answer, the unflattering one, the one you haven't fully thought through yet, all of it lands the same way. He's not waiting to land a point or steer you somewhere he's already decided to take you. He just wants to know. I notice this most clearly by contrast. With many, including myself, there's a quiet tracking happening underneath the conversation, a constant calibration of how my words are going to be received before I let them out. I do this even with people I love. I do it with my mother, even now. I don't do it with my father. With him, I just talk. What strikes me is that I don't think he ever set out to teach me any of this. There was no lesson behind it, no moment where he sat me down and said curiosity matters, or stay open, or let people be themselves around you. He was just being himself, day after day, in the small moments of our ordinary life together, and I absorbed it the way kids absorb. Without instruction. Without effort. Just by being in proximity to it long enough that it became mine. I was in Casablanca with my wife last month, and the hotel was supposed to arrange our airport pickup that I had prepaid for, but when we landed there was no pickup waiting. We figured it out on our own and got to the hotel late and tired, ready to be done with the day. When we checked in, I gave the front desk manager direct feedback about what had happened, not unkindly, but not softened either, naming what had gone wrong and what I expected the hotel to do about it. I noticed my wife notice. She doesn't often see the side of me that's comfortable being direct with strangers, and once we were in our room, she mentioned it to me. Standing there, unpacking, I realized that I had been able to do it because I had seen my father do it, somewhere, sometime, in a moment I couldn't even fully remember. I just knew, in that moment in Casablanca, that this is what he would have done, and that made it okay. I gave myself permission. My father didn't just give me curiosity. He gave me a broader sense of what was okay, how to be in the world, what to ask for and what to expect, how to talk to people, how to take up space without apologizing for it. None of it was taught explicitly. All of it was modeled, in moments so ordinary I didn't even notice them happening. That feels like one of the most important things I've come to understand about what a father is, or maybe about what any parent is, or any person who spends years sitting next to a child who's still figuring out how to be a person in the world. The big things don't get taught. They get transmitted, through the way you talk about strangers, the way you respond when something breaks, whether your questions are open or leading, whether you say something when the hotel didn't send the car. My father wasn't trying to teach me any of it. He was being himself, and being himself turned out to be enough. There's something humbling in that, and something a little daunting too, because if the most powerful things get transmitted accidentally, through who we are rather than what we try to teach, then the work isn't really about figuring out what to say to the people in our lives. The work is about who we're being, quietly, day after day, in the version of ourselves that shows up at the dinner table, on the plane, at the hotel check-in. At the dinner party that night, after I said it was my father, the conversation moved on. Someone refilled a glass, the topic shifted, and we kept eating. But I kept turning the answer over in the back of my mind, sitting with how true it felt the moment I said it. My father gave me curiosity by being curious. He gave me hope by being hopeful. And he gave me permission to move through the world the way I do, by moving through it that way himself. He did it all without ever knowing he was doing it. --- ### Underground The Lisbon I knew was never the whole picture Published: 2026-06-13 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/underground/ Yesterday, my wife and I were walking through our neighbourhood during the Festival of the Sardines, the one that takes over Lisbon every June. Most years I've been somewhere else when it happens. This year we were here, weaving through streets thick with grilled smoke and music and people pressed shoulder to shoulder, sardines on paper plates, plastic cups of beer, the whole city out in its summer clothes.We kept telling ourselves we'd call an Uber from the next corner up. Then the next one. Each street we turned onto was closed to cars, barricaded, claimed by the festival. The further we walked, the fewer options we had.Unsure of how to get home, the thought came to me of taking the metro. I've never actually taken the metro in Lisbon. I've tried a few times over the years and something has always been wrong with it. Flooded once. Delayed another time. Closed for repairs the time after that. I'd started to assume the Lisbon metro was more of an idea than a reality, and I'd built my life around not needing it.We found the entrance and walked down. One level, then another, then another. Three or four flights below the street, the way the Paris metro descends. I had no idea Lisbon went that far underground. I had no idea what to expect at the bottom, no idea how to pay, no idea where we were going. We just kept descending.The platform was full of locals waiting for the next train. Phones out, headphones in, the practiced patience of people who do this every day. For them, this was Lisbon. This was how they got to work, how they came home, how their city actually moved. And standing there, waiting for the train, I completely forgot I was in Lisbon at all. It felt like New York. It felt like London. It felt like any of the big cities I'd spent years in, descending into the earth to be moved through it.The train arrived. We got on. And something tightened in my chest that I hadn't felt in a long time.I lived in New York for nearly a decade, riding the subway sometimes four or five times a day. I was in London last week and rode the Tube from a station that still feels familiar in my body. There's a particular sensation to standing on a crowded platform in a big city. The air pressure changing as the train approaches. The collective shuffle toward the doors. The way time gets organized around departures and arrivals rather than seasons or meals. My body remembered all of it instantly. Faster than I wanted it to.I came to Portugal to get away from this. That's the story I've been telling for five years now. I left the grind. I chose slowness. The Lisbon I'd chosen to see was cobblestone streets and steep hills and tiny cafes selling pastéis de nata. Espressos for a euro. Yellow trams clanking past at walking speed. A city that physically wouldn't let me rush.The metro had been running under my feet for all of those years. Full of people commuting because they couldn't afford to live where they worked, the same way they commute in every big city on earth. Lisbon is not actually a slow village built for tourists and expats. It's a city of nearly three million people, and most of them are not sipping ginger tea in a courtyard at eleven in the morning. They're underground, moving.I'd told myself the metro was unreliable. Maybe it was unreliable because I needed it to be. Maybe the broken metro was a story I'd been telling so I didn't have to confront the city that existed beneath the one I'd curated.Standing on that train, watching the locals stare at their phones the way I used to stare at mine on the F line, the old rhythm found me instantly. It hadn't been waiting for me back in New York. It had been here the whole time. The hustle wasn't a city I'd left. It was a posture I'd carried, and the cobblestones had just made it harder to notice.There's a version of this we all do, I think. We pick a place, or a job, or a relationship, and we tell ourselves we've chosen it for what it is. But often what we've really chosen is what it lets us not look at. The slow city lets me believe I'm slow. The new job lets me believe I've grown. The new relationship lets me believe the old patterns belonged to the old person.And then something closes the streets we usually walk. A festival, a delay, an unexpected detour. We end up somewhere we'd been routing around for years, and the part of ourselves we thought we'd left behind is already there waiting, holding a phone, staring at the floor, perfectly at home.We got off at our stop. Walked up the levels, back into the festival smoke and the warm evening, the Lisbon I recognized. My wife said something about how easy that had been, how we should use the metro more often. I nodded. I wasn't sure yet whether I would.Five years of telling people I'd outgrown the big city, and the big city had been running underneath me the whole time. I just hadn't taken the stairs down.The metro will still be there tomorrow. So will I. --- ### Size of my room Mistaking familiarity for the full picture Published: 2026-06-07 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/size-of-my-room/ I was sitting across from a friend at breakfast in London last week, the kind of morning connection that makes you forget you have somewhere to be next. The conversation had that pleasant looseness of two people who hadn't seen each other in a while. And then, somewhere between bites of avocado toast and sips of herbal tea, I checked the time and felt my stomach drop.I was going to be late.My next appointment was across town, and I was not going to make it. I miscalculated everything. The length of breakfast. The tube strike I'd half-registered when I landed. The morning traffic that was already moving the city into stillness. My mind started oscillating in that familiar way. Public transit, but the strike. A cab, but the traffic. Cancel, but then what was the point of being here at all. I ran through each option twice, three times, looking for the one that wasn't there. The trapped feeling of three bad doors and no good one.A younger version of me would have made a decision in silence, picked the least bad option, and moved through the morning with a low hum of stress humming under everything. I would have performed competence. I would have figured it out alone.Instead, I said to my friend, "Hey, I'm not actually sure what I should do for this next appointment."It was such a small sentence. But it landed in a different way than the silent calculation would have. Something opened just by saying it out loud.My friend thought for a moment and said, "Why don't you take a bike?"I laughed out loud. Biking in London, to me, was a category of activity adjacent to base jumping. I'd seen the bikers weaving through buses, the aggressive lane changes, the traffic flowing on the wrong side of the road. I knew how to bike. I did not bike in London.I didn't respond."Trust me," he said, noticing my hesitation. "Based on where you're going, it's really not that bad."I felt a familiar tightening, the small refusal that arrives the moment something unknown is offered. No, thank you. I have my reasons. But underneath it, almost at the same time, something else stirred. Curiosity. The faint pull of an opening I hadn't expected to find."I'll come with you," he added, sensing the hesitation.The fear didn't disappear, but it moved aside enough for something else to step forward. I said yes.We got on the bikes, and for the first few minutes my whole nervous system was on high alert. I tracked my friend ahead of me. The buses on my right. The cars behind. The other bikers slipping past. My shoulders were tight, my grip too firm, my eyes scanning for every threat I'd imagined for years.And then, somewhere on a quiet stretch of street, it landed. I am biking in London. I have been to this city dozens of times. I have walked these streets, taken these cabs, ridden these buses. And I have never once seen it from this angle. The same buildings looked different at bike height and speed. The same streets felt different. The city I thought I knew intimately had a whole layer I had never touched.We turned into Hyde Park, and the chaos of the streets dropped away immediately. The park was full of people walking in the mid-morning light, the trees holding the sound the way only parks can. My grip loosened and my breathing slowed. The flow state that comes with movement started to settle over me, and my mind began to wander, dream, expand. I had expected to feel locked down and fearful on a bike in London. Instead, I felt light.It struck me that this was what openness actually does. It doesn't fix the situation. It changes the size of the room I'm standing in.I had been in a small room at breakfast. Three bad doors and no good one. The moment I said "I don't know what to do," a fourth door appeared. The moment I said yes to the bike, the city itself got bigger. The Hyde Park stretch wasn't a new piece of London. It had been there the whole time, on every trip, waiting for me to arrive at it from a different angle.I think this is what fear actually costs. It doesn't just make me anxious. It shrinks the world to the size of what I already know. Every "no, thank you" trims the edges of the map a little further in. Every automatic refusal narrows the city, the relationship, the life I'm living until I'm operating inside a room so small I forget there was ever anywhere else to stand.And openness does the opposite. Not in a dramatic way. Not in a way that announces itself. Just by saying yes to one thing I would have said no to, the morning rearranged itself. The friend became closer. The city became larger. The appointment, which I made on time, became almost beside the point.London didn't change last week. I had been there dozens of times. The bike lanes had always existed. Hyde Park had always been beautiful in the mid-morning light. My friend had always been someone I could be honest with. None of it was new.I keep thinking about how often I've done the opposite. How often I've stayed in the small room of what I already know, mistaking familiarity for the full picture. How often the refusal arrives before the curiosity has even had a chance to speak.The size of my life, I'm starting to see, is the size of my yeses. --- ### The Checklist Reasons not to commit Published: 2026-05-31 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/the-checklist/ I called my parents yesterday and caught them in the middle of their new life. My mom was in the garden, hands in the soil, and I could hear birds behind her voice and the soft scrape of a trowel against dirt. My dad was somewhere inside the house, moving between rooms, calling out updates about something he was fixing. They handed the phone back and forth a few times, mid-sentence, the way people do when they're both too busy to sit down.And then, almost in passing, they started appreciating each other out loud, to me, about small things. I don't hear that often from them, not because it isn't there, but because forty-plus years of marriage tends to bury those small acknowledgments under the noise of daily life. They've been in the new house for a week, and I haven't heard a single complaint.It's not that there's nothing to complain about. A new house probably has a thousand small adjustments, the different light and sounds, drawers that don't open the way the old ones did, switches in unfamiliar places. There's plenty to grumble about if grumbling were the point, but the grumbling hasn't shown up, and I've been listening for it.It took two years to get here.For thirteen years, my parents lived in the same home, and about halfway through, they started renovating. The kitchen first, then the basement, then the bathrooms, then a new paint colour on the walls, then expanding garden. Each renovation was an act of care, and also, I think now, a quiet way of staying. The house got better in increments, and the question of whether it was still the right house never quite got asked.I started asking it about two years ago, and my wife joined in, and eventually my sister and brother-in-law did too. Then came the criteria, the list of everything the new house would need to have, and the list kept getting longer. New items would appear after every viewing, sometimes contradicting the items from the week before, and they would visit houses that were, by any objective measure, better suited to their needs than the one they were in, but the moment to actually decide kept slipping away.The list was never really a list. It was a way of staying still, a reason to keep looking without ever having to choose, because the comfort of the known is hard to leave, and the unknown asks for something the known never does.Then they found a house, and they called us the same day to say they wanted to move forward. The funny thing was that this house didn't meet half of the criteria on their checklist, not even close. What spoke to them was something underneath the list entirely, a feel, a few specific things the current house didn't have. They had reasons to do it, instead of reasons not to, and within a week the offer was in and the deal was done, faster than they could have talked themselves out of it.And then, almost as soon as the decision was made, the doubts arrived. Why are we doing this? Did our kids push us into this? Do we actually need to move? We didn't sell the old house, and we had long conversations about back-up plans, telling them that if they didn't like it they could always move back, or that we would renovate the old place to their liking and they could return in six months. We built elaborate safety nets out of words, because that's what people do when they're about to step somewhere new, and we need the parachute on the wall even if we never reach for it. Then they moved, and the parachute stayed on the wall.What I've been watching, from the other end of the phone, is the difference between making a decision and committing to one, and how much of the work and the growth and the value lives in the second part rather than the first. I've come to believe there's no such thing as a right or wrong decision, only the decision itself and what I do with it afterward, and if I hold back, the doubt grows and the pros and cons list expands and the reasons not to begin to outnumber the reasons to, until eventually I'm not making a decision at all but building a case against the one I already made.The same thing seems to be true on the other side of the choice. If I'm complaining about something, it's usually a sign I haven't fully committed to it, and the complaint is the residue of the part of me still arguing for the alternative. Once the alternative is set down, the complaint loses its reason to exist. My parents, in the week since the move, have set the alternative down, and the energy that was spent on the checklist and the doubts and the back-up plans is now available for the life in front of them.I called them again this morning, mostly just to hear it. My mom had moved on to another corner of the garden, and my dad was talking about a tree out back he wanted to do something with. They sounded like two people who had finally stopped looking over their shoulders at the house they used to live in. --- ### Creator's Mind What I needed help to see Published: 2026-05-24 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/creator-s-mind/ It took three attempts this year to get back to Quinta da Regaleira. The first time, traffic out of Lisbon turned a forty-minute drive into something that ate the entire morning, and we turned around before reaching Sintra. The second time, we made it to the gates and saw the line snaking down the hill, hundreds of people waiting in the sun, and I knew we wouldn't make it through before closing.The third time, last week, we arrived early. My wife beside me, two friends visiting from Canada with us, our tickets already booked, the late morning mist still hanging in the trees. I felt the same quiet anticipation I had felt five years ago when I had visited the last time, when I first came to Portugal and this place cracked something open in me. I had been carrying that memory around, wanting to know if it would still feel that way.It did.Quinta da Regaleira is the newest of the major castles in the hills outside Lisbon, built only about a hundred years ago but designed to look five hundred years old. One man inherited a fortune and decided to spend a large chunk of it expressing his ideas in stone and garden and tunnel. Winding paths, hidden caves, underground passages, wells that descend instead of towers that rise, lookouts that open suddenly onto views that take your breath.Nothing was optimized for efficiency, a rare experience in modern times. The estate was designed for people to get lost in, physically and mentally. We spent hours there and still didn't see everything.Walking the grounds, watching our friends discover it for the first time, I started paying closer attention to what was pulling me. I kept noticing the same things I had noticed five years ago. The man who built this thought outside the box. He did things that weren't the norm. He took real risks with his money and his reputation to make something that didn't have to exist. Those qualities are qualities I have spent my whole life reaching for. Seeing them expressed at this scale, in this permanence, felt like permission.My wife was moved too, but by something different. She kept talking about the forest. The fact that he chose to build in the middle of a mystical landscape, that he wove the trees and the mist into the architecture. She was drawn to the dark caves, the sense of mystery and the unknown. The little towers reaching up into the sky toward some higher energy. Those are the details that she felt drawn to.We were walking through the same place. Same paths, same stones, same light filtering through the same canopy. But we were each having a completely different experience. She wasn't noticing what I was noticing. I wasn't noticing what she was noticing.I had always thought of art as a way to step into someone else's mind. When you stand inside a building someone designed, or read a book they wrote, or hear a song they composed, you're inside the architecture of their thinking. You get to feel what it was like to be them, briefly. That alone is one of the great gifts of being human.But something else was happening at Regaleira, and it took my wife's response for me to see it clearly. What I was actually doing was walking through this man's mind and noticing the parts of him that matched the parts of me. The risk-taking. The willingness to be strange. The choice to be inefficient. I wasn't absorbing his creation neutrally. I was finding myself in it.My wife was doing the same thing, but with different parts of herself. The mystical, the nature, the reach toward the higher. Those things were also there in the design, but I had walked past them barely registering. We were each receiving from the same creation only what we already carried.There's something humbling in this, and something liberating. Humbling because it means I was never seeing the whole castle. I was seeing the version of it that confirmed who I already am. Liberating because what moves me is telling me something about myself I might easily forget.What we notice in other people's creations are what we are most inspired by in ourselves. They are the qualities we are reaching for, the qualities we maybe haven't fully given ourselves permission to live out.That man built a castle to express the parts of himself he couldn't say out loud. A hundred years later, I walked through it and felt my own unspoken parts being named back to me. My wife walked through it and felt hers. The same walls. Two different mirrors.The reason I keep coming back, the reason I planned around traffic and lines and poor timing for three attempts, is that it's one of the few places where I can hear that reflection clearly.The creative parts of me were already there. I just needed someone else's creation to help me see them. --- ### Thirteen Million The contribution was the connection Published: 2026-05-17 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/thirteen-million/ We arrived in Casablanca on a Friday afternoon, my partner and me, escaping Lisbon for a weekend of sun and somewhere neither of us had been before. The decision had been spontaneous, the kind of trip you book on a Tuesday because the weather looks good and there's no real reason not to. By Saturday morning we were standing in front of the Hassan II Mosque, and I was completely unprepared for what it would do to me.The minaret rises over two hundred meters into the sky, among the tallest religious structures in the world, and the mosque sits partly over the Atlantic on land reclaimed from the ocean to hold it. Inside, twenty-five thousand worshippers can pray at once, with another eighty thousand more in the plaza outside. What struck me first, though, was how ancient it looked, the arches and the geometry and the way the late morning light fell through the latticework, all of it whispering of something built five hundred years ago. So when our guide mentioned almost in passing that the mosque had been completed in 1993, I had to ask her to repeat it.I am older than this building.It was the second thing she told us that stayed with me longer. The mosque, she explained, had been built by the people of Morocco, and she didn't mean that metaphorically. King Hassan II had asked the citizens of the country to contribute, and over thirteen million Moroccans gave something toward it. Families pooled what they could, villages organized collections, contributions were tracked, certificates were issued, and the building rose from the collective offering of a nation that had been invited to make something together. She told us about her own family during the tour, an uncle who had given and a grandfather who still spoke about it decades later, and I noticed that the other guides nearby were doing the same with their groups. Everybody's uncle had a hand in it. Everybody's grandfather. A building feels old when it belongs to everyone who looks at it.I walked out into the afternoon light thinking about ownership, not the legal kind but the felt kind, the kind that comes from having put something in even if it was a small thing a long time ago. I thought about the company I used to run and the people who still talk about it as ours even after they've left, about student projects from university that stayed alive in people's memory because they had shaped them with their own hands. The things I felt most connected to in my own life were almost always the things I had been allowed to contribute to.And then I started to notice the reverse, which was harder to sit with. How rarely, these days, I let anyone contribute to mine.It's so easy now to not need anyone. Amazon delivers, Google answers, ChatGPT searches, and the friction that used to require asking a friend or a neighbor has been smoothed away by software that costs me nothing. When I do receive help it's usually transactional, a service I paid for, and the exchange is clean but the connection that comes with it is thin. I am efficient. I am rarely indebted.What I would have to give up to live differently isn't comfortable to name. The pride of self-sufficiency. The illusion that I don't really need help. The quiet defensive posture of someone who has gotten very good at handling things alone. Letting someone contribute to what I'm building means letting them shape it, which means the thing won't be exactly what I imagined, which means sharing the ownership of how it turns out.It also means the thing will feel older than it is. Lived in. Belonging to more than just me.The king didn't try to give his people a gift. He asked them to give one to themselves, and the asking was the gift. The contribution was the connection. The thirteen million certificates issued were thirteen million ways of saying this is yours because you made it.I am still working out how to ask. --- ### The Call The right to annoy her kids Published: 2026-05-10 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/the-call/ My mother called last week. She was trying to download a file from Gmail onto her computer and then move it to Google Drive, and somewhere in the process, the file had disappeared. Or maybe it was on Google Drive but she couldn't find it. The specifics kept shifting as we talked.I have been in technology for over twenty years. I build with AI. I run systems most people would find intimidating. And yet sitting on the call with my mother, walking her through the steps, I noticed something I have noticed many times before. From her perspective, even the simplest things are still genuinely hard. The file structure that feels obvious to me is not obvious. The icons that I read in a fraction of a second require translation. I get stuck too, sometimes, in the same places she gets stuck.There was a time when these calls would mildly irritate me. Not in a way I would have admitted out loud, but in the small impatient breath I would take before answering. The slight tone in my voice that I hoped she could not hear but probably could. The way I would solve the problem quickly and move on, satisfied that I had been helpful but not really present.This call was different. I was patient. We took our time. When we found the file, she said something warm and we kept talking for a while.A few days before, my partner and I were at a park in Lisbon for a Sunday afternoon picnic. There was a jazz concert nearby, and we were with friends I have known since before they had a child. I was around for their move to Portugal, the pregnancy, the birth. Now their daughter is here, running around in the grass, full of light.I asked my friend how she was doing. The words she used to describe motherhood were honest. The exhaustion. The way it changes everything about who you are and what you have time for. The hard parts that nobody really prepares you for. She was telling the truth, and the truth was that it is hard.But then I watched her playing with her daughter on the picnic blanket. The joy on her face was something I had never seen before in all the years I have known her. Not happiness exactly. Something deeper. Something that comes from a place I had not previously seen her access.Both things were true. The difficulty she described in words. The radiance I saw in her face. Motherhood seemed to hold both at once, and somehow neither one canceled the other out.My sister has been a mother for five years now. Her son just started school. She told me recently that he needs her less these days, and she is already starting to feel like she is missing him. Five years has become a real part of her identity, and now the shape of that identity is shifting again. The thing she gave herself to is moving away from her, gently, the way it is supposed to.Watching her, watching my friends, watching couples I know struggle to get pregnant in the first place, the long road of trying and waiting and hoping, I have started to understand something I should have understood a long time ago.I did not know what my mother went through. I knew the general shape of it, the way you know the general shape of any history you were not present for. But I did not know it. The trying, the carrying, the birthing, the early years when a child needs you constantly and your own self disappears into something larger. The years of being needed and the slower years when the needing changes and you have to find yourself again.I am in my forties. It has taken me this long to feel the empathy, the understanding, the appreciation, the respect that probably should have arrived much sooner. I cannot give those years back. What I can do now is answer the call when she has trouble with Google Drive, and not just answer it but actually be there.When she calls me now, asking for help with her phone or her computer, or just to hear my voice, I feel something I did not feel before.She has earned the right to annoy her kids. Whatever small interruption it is, whatever afternoon it pulls me out of, she earned it many times over in years I was not paying attention.I feel something similar with my wife's mother. Our relationship has been building over the last few years, quickly, the way these things build when you are no longer a child and you can meet someone as an adult. On a day like today, I notice how much respect I have for her too. For what she gave. For what she is still giving.The afternoon at the park ended with my friend's daughter falling asleep on the picnic blanket, exhausted from running. My friend looked tired and luminous at the same time. I watched her watching her daughter sleep, and I thought about my mother, and I thought about all the afternoons I must have fallen asleep somewhere while she watched me, and I never knew it. --- ### Plus One Curiosity doesn't always read the script Published: 2026-05-02 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/plus-one/ The invitation came and I said yes because I imagined my wife might enjoy it. An art gallery in Lisbon, an exhibition she wanted to see, and would I come along. I said yes because she might want to go. I didn't expect much of myself in that room. I was there to be there. The collection belonged to an Armenian businessman who had spent his life gathering artefacts. Six thousand pieces, some of them three thousand years old. The curators had paired his collection with haute couture across different eras, letting the gowns and the relics speak to each other. A bronze pendant beside a beaded bodice. A ceremonial headpiece beside a feathered hat. The fabric and the metal in conversation across centuries. We took the guided tour. Within twenty minutes I noticed something strange. I was the one leaning in. I was the one asking questions. My wife was enjoying it the way she had expected to enjoy it, walking through, taking it in. I was somewhere else entirely. One name kept appearing in the guide's commentary. Charles Frederick Worth. An English designer who set up shop in Paris in the 1850s. I had never heard of him. By the end of the tour I couldn't stop thinking about him. Worth didn't just make beautiful clothes. He redesigned the entire system around how creative work got made. Before him, dressmakers traveled to wealthy clients and executed their wishes. He flipped it. Clients came to his salon to see what he had designed. He sewed labels with his name into the garments, treating clothing as authored work. He introduced seasonal collections shown on live models, the first version of what would become the modern fashion calendar. The fashion industry as we know it was largely invented by one person in the 1850s. He probably had no idea. What struck me about Worth, standing there in front of his gowns, was that his vision wasn't aesthetic alone. It was structural. He looked at an entire industry and saw the script everyone was following. Dressmaker as servant. Garment as anonymous object. Clothing as one-off commission. Each of those was a story the field had told itself for so long it had become invisible. Worth saw the script as a script. And then he wrote a different one. I had assumed I was at the gallery as a plus one. The story I told myself was that my wife was the one with the interest, and I was the warm body next to her. But the room had revealed something different. Something in me had been waiting to be lit up by exactly this, by the courage of a person who looked at an entire system and decided it could be redesigned. The parallel landed quietly while I was still in the room. Worth had almost not existed, in a sense. He could have spent his life making dresses inside the existing system, executing other people's wishes, and we would never have heard of him. He became Worth because he stopped reading the script his industry had handed him. I had almost not seen Worth. I had walked in with a script of my own. That's not for me. I'm not really into that. That's more her thing. If I had followed it more obediently, I would have drifted through the rooms and left with nothing. The exhibit would have happened to my wife and not to me. I think about how often I've done this. Walked into rooms with a story already written about who I am in them. The networking event where I'm a founder. The dinner where I'm a husband. The conference where I'm an author. Each role comes with a script for what should interest me. Most of the time, I follow it without noticing it's a script. But curiosity doesn't always read the script. Sometimes it just shows up. I've spent most of my adult life building things. A company for fifteen years. Books. New projects now. What caught me about Worth, what made me lean in while my wife took the tour at her own pace, was the recognition of a particular kind of vision. Not the vision to make a beautiful object. The vision to see the system around the object and ask whether it served the work. That work requires seeing past the conventions everyone else has accepted. It requires the willingness to be wrong in public. And it requires a strange relationship to time. Worth couldn't have known that the labels he sewed into his gowns would become the foundation of a global luxury industry. He just made the choices that felt right to him, drop after drop into a pond whose far edge he would never see. The same muscle, I realised, was at work in both places. Worth saw past the script of his industry. I had almost not seen past the script of my afternoon. The scale was incomparable. The movement was the same. Noticing the story you're inside, and choosing whether to keep telling it. I walked out of the gallery into the Lisbon afternoon, the light soft against the buildings. My wife asked what I had thought. I told her I had loved it more than I expected. She smiled. She had known, I think, before I had. The unlearning wasn't about fashion. It was about how often I miss the thing in the room because I came in already knowing what I was going to find. --- ### Unwritten Rules A blank wall invites chaos. Published: 2026-04-26 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/unwritten-rules/ Last week, my wife and I took a street art walking tour in a part of Lisbon I almost never visit. A friend had gifted it to us, and it was nothing either of us would have signed up for on our own. The neighbourhood was a fifteen-minute drive from our apartment, close enough to feel familiar, far enough that I realized I'd been there maybe once in five years.The guide walked us through narrow streets lined with murals, explaining the difference between street art and graffiti. Street art is invited, the property owner has asked the artist to paint. Graffiti is uninvited. What struck me first was impermanence. These murals, some of them enormous, might last a year. Maybe five years at max. Weather erodes them. Construction tears them down. Other artists paint over them. I kept thinking about how few things I pour myself into with that kind of acceptance.The story that stayed with me though was about a school. There was a preschool in the neighbourhood with a large wall facing a busy intersection. For years, it had been a target for graffiti, and families started feeling uneasy about bringing their children there. The school tried the obvious approach, repainting the wall a fresh coat of plain color, but within weeks the graffiti would return. A blank wall in that neighbourhood was essentially an invitation.Then someone had a different idea. Instead of leaving the wall blank, they invited artists to paint a mural. Bright, bold, enormous. Children, animals, parks, a whole story sprawling across the facade. That was over five years ago. Nobody has touched it.The guide explained that this is one of the unwritten rules of the street art and graffiti community: only paint over something if you can do better. Nobody enforces this rule. Nobody wrote it down. And yet an entire community of artists, many of whom operate outside the law in every other respect, honours it consistently. It emerged from within, from a shared sense of what matters. It works precisely because it was chosen, not enforced.Walking back to our car that afternoon, I started thinking about rules in my own life. Not the legal kind. The invisible ones that operate so quietly they feel like facts rather than choices.For most of my adult life, there was an inherited rule I never questioned: I need to live in North America. Nobody said it to me directly. It was absorbed. My family was in Toronto. My business took me to New York, my friends spread across the context, my cultural context clearly Western, everything was there. The rule wasn't written on any wall, but it was painted across every decision I made about where to live, where to build.Moving to Lisbon five years ago meant clearing that wall. And clearing a wall, I learned, is its own kind of vulnerable. The school discovered this: a blank surface invites whatever comes along. When I stepped away from the inherited rules about where home should be, about what success is supposed to feel like, there was a period where anything could have shown up. Old patterns, new anxieties, the restless energy of someone who has torn something down without knowing what comes next.A blank wall invites chaos. A wall filled with something intentional, something chosen, earns its own protection.In my book Unlearning, I wrote about the sponge, how we spend our early decades absorbing the values and expectations of our parents, culture, teachers, society. The work of unlearning is wringing out that sponge. But what the mural taught me is that wringing out isn't enough. A blank wall is just an invitation for the next thing that comes along. The real work is filling the space with something you chose.The morning rhythm my wife and I have settled into, where I slip out of bed quietly while she sleeps, move to the study, sit with myself before the day begins. We never discussed this. It just became ours, the way a mural becomes part of a neighbourhood. The community I've found here, the writing practice, the willingness to be a beginner in a country where I have no history. None of it was inherited. And because of that, it holds in a way the inherited stuff never quite did.There is a quiet authority in a rule you chose. It doesn't need enforcement. It doesn't need repetition. The painted-over school wall needed constant maintenance. The mural just stands. --- ### Tested I had been studying with an intensity I hadn't felt in a long time. Published: 2026-04-19 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/tested/ Fifteen minutes into the Uber ride to the university, I asked the driver if I could speak to him in Portuguese. It came out before I could second-guess it, this quiet impulse to try. He said yes, and for the rest of the drive we talked, back and forth, in his language. About Lisbon, about where I was headed, about nothing in particular. Something in the car shifted, a warmth that comes when someone makes the effort to meet another person in their own tongue. I was on my way to take the Portuguese language exam, which is required for citizenship application. After nearly five years in Portugal, the test had finally made its way to the top of my list. I'd known about it for a month. I'd focused on it for only the last week. That week, though, changed something. For the last seven days, I had been studying with an intensity I hadn't felt in a long time. Not the scattered, half-attentive energy that fills most of my days, where everything gets a piece of me and nothing gets enough. This was different. There was one thing to do, and everything else could wait. It was remarkably easy to say no when I had a reason to. I allowed myself to not listen to voice notes from friends right away. I allowed myself to leave text messages unread, sometimes for days. Emails accumulated without the usual guilt. I asked my wife to help me with things I would normally handle myself. I shortened my health routines, the ones I usually protect with quiet devotion. None of this felt like sacrifice. It felt like relief. That surprised me. If saying no could feel this good, why did I so rarely do it? The honest answer, the one that settled in over the course of the week, is that my bar for saying yes is dangerously low. I say yes to people, to tasks, to my own impulses, almost unconsciously. Not because every request is urgent, but because declining requires a justification I rarely have. The exam gave me one. A concrete, time-bound, externally imposed reason to protect my attention. And with that permission, a kind of clarity I had been missing rushed in to fill the space. I realized I don't struggle with focus. I struggle with permission. The focus was always available. What I lacked was something important enough to override the guilt of turning everything else down. The exam became a container, and inside that container, I could finally hear my own priorities without the noise of everyone else's. There was another dimension I hadn't expected. The people around me showed up in ways that made the whole experience feel held. My wife was endearing the morning of the test, packing snacks into my bag as if I were heading off to primary school. I laughed and told her I think she needs kids. She ignored me and called the Uber. A Portuguese friend I'd seen the week before started texting me exclusively in Portuguese, refusing to switch to English. The night before the exam, he sent a message that was genuinely encouraging, the kind that lands differently when it arrives in the language you're trying to learn. A British friend who had passed the same test last year checked in on me daily, asking how the preparation was going, sharing what had helped him. My wife's parents sent a message. Our brother-in-law sent one too. I was doing this for myself, but I was also doing it for them. There was a sense of being cheered on that I hadn't anticipated, a warmth that turned a bureaucratic requirement into something that felt communal. Much of my recent life has been spent building with AI, live coding, working privately in a way that is deeply satisfying but also deeply solitary. The exam was a contrast. It pulled me back into the company of others, into a shared project with witnesses and supporters and people who cared about the outcome. The studying itself opened something too. Five years in Lisbon and I have been learning Portuguese on and off the entire time, but preparing for an exam forced me past the plateau I'd been resting on. Grammar I had been avoiding suddenly mattered. Vocabulary I'd been lazy about became necessary. And woven through all of it, I kept discovering the culture in the language, the way Portuguese encodes politeness, indirectness, a particular rhythm of living that I had only understood from the outside. So much of a culture lives inside its language. Phrases that don't translate cleanly, constructions that reveal what a society values, the way a verb conjugation can carry warmth or distance depending on the form chosen. Five years of living here, and the exam pushed me past a tipping point where curiosity replaced obligation. The language stopped being something I should learn and became something I wanted to speak. On the ride home from the university, an Uber driver glanced at me in the rearview mirror and asked if I teach there. It took me a moment to process the question. He wasn't asking what I was studying. He was asking if I was on staff. My age was showing, clearly, in a way I hadn't noticed from the inside. I shared this with my mum later that evening, and we both laughed for longer than the joke probably deserved. There is something tender about the moments when time makes itself visible, when the world reflects back a version of ourselves we haven't quite caught up to. I could have approached this entire experience differently. The exam could have been an obligation, a bureaucratic hurdle, something to resent and rush through. I almost did. But something in the preparation itself kept surprising me, kept offering more than I expected. The focus. The permission. The community. The culture embedded in the conjugations. The richest experiences of my life have rarely been the ones I planned for. They've been the ones I paid attention to. A language exam is a small thing. A week of studying is a small thing. But lived with attention, even the smallest things become full of texture, meaning, humor, and people showing up in the gentlest ways. The Uber driver on the way there had smiled when I stumbled over a word and corrected myself. He didn't switch to English. He just waited, patiently, for me to find what I was looking for. Most of the time, that patience is all any of us really need. --- ### Business Card The card hadn't aged a single day. Published: 2026-04-12 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/business-card/ A big smile crossed my face before I even understood why. My wife and I were upstairs at my parents' home, sorting through boxes that had been collecting dust for decades, and near the bottom of one I found a business card. My old business card.Glossy. Deep maroon red on the back, almost shiny under the light. The logo of Impact, a student entrepreneurship group I'd started twenty-five years ago. My name was printed on the front, alongside a title I must have chosen with great seriousness: Founder and President. There was a phone number, a fax number, and an email address. Everything a young person in the early 2000s would have put on a card to signal that he was modern, that he was real, that he meant business.The card hadn't aged a single day. The colours were crisp, the edges still sharp. I turned it over in my hands and felt something close to admiration. I was serious. Even then, before I knew what any of it would become, I was building something. The fax number alone told me how long ago it was, but the intention behind it felt completely current. That student who wanted to be taken seriously, and looking at his card, I think he deserved to be.My wife was watching me hold it, this small rectangle glossy paper from a life she'd never known. She didn't say much. She didn't need to. There's something about sharing a private artifact with someone who loves you but wasn't there for any of it. The object can become a bridge between the person you married and all the versions that came before.Further down in the box, I found a suit. A blazer, really, with trousers that matched in a way I clearly thought was sharp at the time. The fabric was heavier than anything I'd wear now, the cut generous in places where fashion has since learned restraint. I held it up against myself and realized it was bigger than me. I'm thinner today than I was twenty years ago, and for a brief moment I made a quiet deal with myself: these should never fit again.My wife looked at the suit and started laughing, warmly, the way you laugh with someone about who they used to be. She had comments about my sense of style back then. I laughed too, because she was right, and because the deeper humour was this: I genuinely thought it was good. I walked the streets of New York in my early twenties wearing that suit, pounding the pavement looking for clients, and I felt sharp. I felt like someone who belonged in the rooms I was trying to enter.The funny thing is, it worked. The clients signed. People took me seriously. Whatever the suit lacked in tailoring, the person inside it made up for in conviction. The packaging was wrong and the product delivered anyway. In hindsight, this is more reassuring than it should be.Deeper still in the box, I found yearbooks from middle school. Thirty years ago. The pages had that particular smell of old paper and ink, and when I opened to the class photo, rows of small faces stared back at me from what felt like another century. I handed it to my wife and asked her to find me.She found me almost immediately. Faster than I could find myself, which surprised me. I had to scan the rows, searching for something I recognized, trying to match the boy in the photo to the person I see in the mirror now. She saw me right away. Whatever it is she recognizes in me, whatever thread connects the man she marreid to the child in that photograph, it was visible to her in a way it wasn't as visible to me.I sat with that for a while. The business card, the suit, the yearbook. Three objects spanning different decades, none of them changed. The maroon was still glossy. The suit was still oversized. The boy in the photo still had that same face, caught mid-smile, frozen in a moment he'd long since forgotten.The objects hadn't changed. I had.There's something about physical keepsakes that photographs on a phone can never replicate. A city builds statues and monuments so that generations can return to the same fixed point and measure the distance they've traveled. The landmark doesn't change. That's the whole point of it. It holds still so that everything around it can register how far it's come.These were my private landmarks. A business card with a fax number. A suit that no longer fits. A yearbook photo where my wife can find me faster than I can find myself. None of them remarkable to anyone else. All of them holding something still, something fixed, so I could feel, turning them over in my hands, just how much I've changed.I closed the box eventually. Not everything went back in. Some things I kept out, placed where I could see them for a few more days. Not because I wanted to go back to who I was. Because I wanted to remember that he existed, that he was earnest and overdressed and brave enough to print a fax number on a business card and hand it to strangers.He got me here. The least I can do is admire his work. --- ### Gravity Some connections don't need maintenance. Published: 2026-04-05 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/gravity/ I was mid-conversation with a group of guests when I spotted them out of the corner of my eye, two old friends walking into the room. Something shifted in my chest before my mind caught up. A giddiness, almost childlike, the kind of excitement I haven't felt in decades. Probably the same excitement I would have felt at ten years old, spotting them across the schoolyard.The celebration was at a golf club in Toronto, about two hundred people gathered for an evening together, everyone dressed up, candles on the tables, the hum of overlapping conversations filling the room. Friends from every chapter of my life were there. Business colleagues, university friends, people from different cities and different eras. And yet, the moment those childhood friends appeared in the doorway, something in me reorganized. The room had a new center of gravity.I've known these people for more than half my life. That phrase sounds ordinary until it lands. More than half my life. There was a time when I saw them every single day, for hours, without ever getting bored. Our lives were simple then. We didn't have much to talk about in any grand sense, no careers, no countries lived in, no stories of reinvention. And still we never ran out of things to say.Since those years, I've moved to New York, to Australia, to Portugal. I've built companies, traveled through dozens of countries, shed identities and picked up new ones. Through all of that movement, these friendships didn't keep pace. There were no regular calls, no group chats buzzing with updates. I couldn't name their kids, couldn't say with certainty what they did for work these days. The ordinary infrastructure of staying close had quietly dissolved years ago.And none of that mattered. Within minutes of seeing each other, we were somewhere familiar, a place that didn't require catching up to reach. There was no awkward reintroduction, no performance of who we'd become. It was more like walking into a room I hadn't visited in years and finding everything exactly where I'd left it.Two of them, I learned, hadn't seen each other in twenty-five years. I had assumed they'd stayed in touch. When they told me they hadn't, I was genuinely surprised. Watching them talk, though, I wouldn't have guessed it. There was an ease between them that seemed immune to time, a warmth that didn't need recent context to sustain itself.What is it about the connections we form in childhood that carry this kind of weight?I think part of it is that those friendships were built before we learned to perform. Before we had titles or ambitions or curated identities. Before we knew how to network, how to position ourselves, how to be strategic about who we spent time with. We were just there, fully, with nothing to prove and nothing to protect. The connection wasn't built on shared interests or professional overlap or mutual benefit. It was built on proximity and presence and the simple fact of growing up in the same rooms.That foundation, it turns out, is almost impossible to replicate later in life. The friendships I've built in my thirties and forties are real, meaningful, important. But they rest on a different substrate. They know who I became. My childhood friends know who I was before I became anyone. There's a particular kind of safety in being known by someone who remembers the version of you that existed before you started constructing versions of yourself.Nobody checked their phones. Nobody seemed distracted or scanning the room for someone more important to talk to. There was a quality of attention that felt rare, a genuine curiosity about each other that didn't need to be manufactured. We weren't catching up on the details of our lives so much as confirming that the thing between us still existed.These friends stayed until the very end. Long after other guests had said their goodbyes, after the room had thinned and the energy had shifted from celebration to something quieter, they were still there. Each of them has kids, responsibilities, early mornings, every reason to leave. And they stayed.I've been thinking about why that matters to me so much. In a room full of two hundred people I care about, from every era and geography of my life, the ones who pulled me in with the most force were the ones from the very beginning. The ones who knew me when life was small and uncomplicated and entirely local.There's a nostalgia in that, certainly. A warmth that comes from remembering who I was and who we were together. But I think it's more than nostalgia. These friendships are evidence that something in me hasn't changed, even though almost everything else has. The part of me that felt giddy seeing them walk into a golf club in Toronto is the same part that felt giddy seeing them walk into a classroom thirty years ago.I'm still processing what the evening stirred in me. The easy intimacy of it, the way decades collapsed into minutes, the strange ache of realizing how much of life happens between the moments we share with the people who shaped us first. Our lives have grown in different directions, different cities, different rhythms. And yet the thread between us didn't snap. It just went slack for a while, waiting to be picked up again.Some connections don't need maintenance. They need only a room, an evening, and the willingness to walk through the door. --- ### Two Sides The impatience was mine. The urgency was manufactured. Published: 2026-03-29 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/two-sides/ I was lying on the massage table, face pressed into the cushion, when I noticed my mind had stopped steering.It had been ninety minutes of pressure and release, the therapist working through weeks of tension I hadn't realized I'd been carrying. Somewhere between waking and sleeping, my thoughts had loosened from their usual formation. They were drifting, reorganizing, replaying scenes from the previous week without my permission or direction. Not problem-solving. Not planning.I wasn't in the driver's seat anymore. I'd slid over to the passenger side, and my mind was taking me somewhere I hadn't chosen. There was something deeply unfamiliar about it, letting the thinking happen without directing it. Watching the scenery of my own week pass by the window without reaching for the wheel.The week before had been intense. Early mornings, the kind where I'd wake up before the sun with a buzzing energy that felt like motivation but was closer to compulsion. I'd sit down at my desk with my ginger tea still too hot to drink and throw myself into a project I'd been pouring weeks into. The hours stretched long. The output piled up. And by evening, I'd feel that particular exhaustion of someone who has been running hard on a treadmill and ended up exactly where they started.The next morning, the cycle repeated. Wake up early, feel driven, push hard, collapse by nightfall. There was a pattern forming that I couldn't see while I was inside it. The quality of my work was slipping. Decisions I was making weren't aligned with what the project actually needed, with what the people around me needed. I was moving fast in a direction that served one person: me. Both hands white-knuckling the wheel, convinced that if I just drove harder, faster, more aggressively, I'd arrive somewhere that mattered. My impatience had become so loud it was drowning out everything else, and I mistook that loudness for urgency.I thought I was pushing toward the work. I was pushing toward a feeling.The dopamine hit of finishing something. The satisfaction of crossing a line. The small, private thrill of proving I could make it happen through sheer force. None of these had anything to do with the project itself. They had everything to do with a craving inside me that dressed itself up as professional dedication.On the massage table, with the therapist's hands moving slowly across my face and scalp, encouraging blood flow in ways that had nothing to do with ambition, something shifted. My breathing slowed. My jaw unclenched. And in that unclenching, a thought arrived with the quiet clarity of something obvious that had been waiting patiently for me to stop talking long enough to hear it.The project needs sequencing. It needs patience. And the impatience was never coming from the project.The facts of the situation hadn't changed. The same challenges existed. The same people were involved. The same timeline applied. What changed was the filter through which I was receiving all of it. A week of fight-or-flight had narrowed my perception to a single point: get it done, get the hit, move faster. From a parasympathetic state, lying still in a warm room with nothing required of me, the same situation looked entirely different. There was a clear sequence. There were steps that couldn't be rushed without damaging what came after. The project didn't need more of my intensity. It needed less of my urgency.This is the part that surprises me every time, even though I've encountered it before. My sympathetic nervous system, my stress response, doesn't just change how I feel. It changes what I see. The same person, the same event, the same set of external facts can arrive as a threat or an invitation depending on the state in which I receive them. When I'm activated, the world looks like a series of problems requiring force. When I'm settled, the same world reveals its own order, its own timing, its own logic that has nothing to do with me.I have almost no control over what happens outside of me. The project will unfold at its own pace. Other people will need what they need. Markets will move, timelines will shift, surprises will arrive. But I have real influence over the state in which I meet all of it. And that state, I'm learning, isn't a minor variable. It's the lens through which every external reality passes before it becomes my experience of that reality.The week of pushing had felt productive. It felt like dedication, like grit, like the kind of effort that's supposed to be rewarded. From the inside, it carried all the textures of meaningful work. Only from a different state could I see what it actually was: a person chasing their own internal reward while the thing they were building quietly suffered for it.The impatience was mine. The urgency was manufactured. The project had been waiting for me to arrive, not as a force, but as a listener.I got dressed, walked out into the Lisbon afternoon, and felt that particular lightness that comes not from having solved something but from having finally seen it clearly. Our street looked the same as it had that morning. The light was the same. The sounds were the same. Everything outside of me was identical to the world I'd woken up in, restless and ready to push.The only thing that had changed was the one thing I could actually change. --- ### Two Bathrooms The things we optimize away are often the things we can't get back on purpose. Published: 2026-03-21 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/two-bathrooms/ The bathroom was barely big enough for both of us. My wife and I were brushing our teeth at the same time before going to bed.She smiled. I smiled back. There was a lightness between us, a flirtation that felt both familiar and distant, like hearing a song I hadn't realized I'd stopped playing. We used to do this every night. The closeness hadn't required effort. It had only required being in the same small room.Back home in Lisbon, we don't get to share a bathroom anymore.Our apartment has many bathrooms. The main one, connected to our bedroom, has two sinks. For the first few months after we moved in together, we used it the way it was designed. Side by side in the morning. Her products on the left, mine on the right. The ordinary choreography of two people getting ready in the same small room.Then I started waking up earlier. My mornings shifted toward five AM, sometimes earlier, and my partner was still deep in sleep at that hour. Running water, the electric toothbrush, the cabinet opening and closing. I didn't want to be the reason she woke up. So I started brushing my teeth in the second bathroom, the one connected to the room we'd turned into a wellness space where I do morning yoga and meditation.It made sense. It was considerate. It was practical.At first, just a toothbrush and toothpaste lived in there. A small outpost. Then the face wash migrated over. Then the shaver. Then the face cream, the sunscreen, the vitamin C lotion. Eye drops appeared on the shelf one morning. A nasal spray. A hairbrush. Hand towels, folded neatly, that I don't remember buying.Some items I moved. Some my partner placed there, quietly, without discussion. As if the apartment itself was deciding. Over six months, what started as a single toothbrush became a fully stocked second life, a bathroom that no longer felt borrowed but always mine.The thing is, it works. We operate on different schedules, different rhythms. My wife's standard for cleanliness runs a few notches above mine, something she would confirm without hesitation. Two bathrooms means fewer moments of friction, fewer small frustrations over a wet counter or a towel left somewhere it shouldn't be. The logistics of our mornings got smoother. The system became efficient.And something else happened that neither of us planned for. The flirting stopped. Not the big kind, not affection or love or closeness in the ways that matter most. But the small, ambient kind. The bumping into each other at the sink. The catching her eye in the mirror while she's doing her skincare routine. The playful argument about counter space. Those unscripted moments that happen only because two people are standing in a small room at the same time, doing ordinary things.I miss it. I'm not sure I miss it enough to move everything back. But I miss it.We travel often, my partner and I. Over the past year, over fifteen countries together. Hotels give you one bathroom, usually with one sink. There's no system to optimize, no second room to retreat into. The proximity is built into the architecture. That night in the hotel, the flirtation that surfaced so easily, it wasn't something we'd lost. It was something we'd designed out of our daily life, one reasonable decision at a time.On that same trip, sitting in a coffee shop one afternoon, I noticed something. Every table around us was occupied, but the room was almost silent. Nearly everyone was wearing headphones. Laptops open, worlds closed. Two people sat across from each other at the table beside ours, both plugged in, both somewhere else entirely.There's a difference between a coffee shop and a restaurant that I hadn't fully appreciated before. At a restaurant, you hear the couple next to you debating where to go on holiday. You overhear a birthday toast, a disagreement about the bill, a laugh that pulls you out of your own conversation for a moment. The ambient texture of other lives becomes part of your experience. At a coffee shop now, that texture has been engineered away. Everyone has curated their own private auditory world, and the room full of people feels emptier than a room with nobody in it.When did we start treating proximity as a problem to solve?The pattern is everywhere once you start looking. Noise-cancelling headphones that seal you inside yourself on a crowded train. Curated social feeds that show you only what already confirms your thinking. Grocery delivery so you never have to navigate the awkward dance of the checkout line. Separate bathrooms so you never have to negotiate the counter. Each one, individually, makes perfect sense. Each one removes a small friction. And each one takes with it some unplanned moment that could only have happened because two lives were briefly, inconveniently close.The things we optimize away are often the things we can't get back on purpose. Flirtation at the sink doesn't work if you schedule it. Overhearing a stranger's conversation loses its magic if you seek it out. The value was in the accident, in the unplanned collision of two people existing in the same space without an agenda.I think about our apartment, those two bathrooms, and I see a version of something much larger. The slow, sensible removal of every rough edge from daily life until the surface is perfectly smooth and strangely hollow. Nobody chose this. I didn't sit down one morning and decide to stop sharing a bathroom with my wife. A toothbrush moved. Then a face wash. Then everything else followed, one reasonable decision at a time, until the distance was simply there.My partner and I are closer than we've ever been. The love is deeper, the partnership stronger, the daily life more harmonious. Two bathrooms didn't weaken anything important. But they did remove something small and warm that only existed because of friction, because of inconvenience, because of being in each other's way.We come home from trips and return to our separate routines. She goes to her bathroom, I go to mine. The apartment is quiet and organized and calm. And sometimes, brushing my teeth alone in the second bathroom at five in the morning, I catch my own eye in the mirror and notice there's no one smiling back. --- ### Nostalgia Published: 2026-02-22 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/nostalgia/ I slipped back into the driver's seat of my old car in Sydney, the one I'd left behind when we moved to Portugal, and something unlocked in my chest. The leather felt familiar under my palms. The engine hummed the same way. For those first few moments, I felt like I'd stepped back into a version of myself I'd been missing. But that's not quite what happened on this trip. Not really. We were in Sydney for two weeks, my partner and me, visiting family and friends. We weren't staying in our old neighborhood. We kept moving between accommodations, searching for something comfortable enough to let us rest. The city I remembered and the city I encountered were two very different places. When I first moved to Sydney years ago, I arrived without much of a plan. That's where I met my partner. That's where I ended up staying far longer than I'd anticipated. Everything felt new then. There was energy, enthusiasm, openness. I was curious about everything. I paid absurd amounts for parking every day, but that meant I was exploring. I got lost constantly, which meant I was doing things that were new to me. The time zone difference created this unexpected gift: I felt less pressure to be "on," to be performing, to be constantly doing. Australia became a kind of sabbatical, a space where I could just exist. Driving that car again brought all of this rushing back. The memories attached themselves to the vehicle, to the streets, to the act of moving through that landscape. I could almost taste the version of myself who had driven these same routes with such wonder. But then there were the cockroaches. Two of them, in two different Airbnbs. There was the mattress that made sleep impossible, the jet lag that wouldn't relent, the shoebox hotel room in the city center where we finally found something tolerable but hardly ideal. Breakfast for two cost eighty-five Australian dollars. The humidity pressed against my skin in ways I didn't remember. Security guards stood in places that used to feel safe and comfortable. Police seemed to be on every corner, a response to recent incidents that had shifted something in the city's atmosphere. I felt this strange tension building. On one hand, I was flooded with nostalgia, with the warmth of good memories. On the other hand, the practical reality of being there was difficult, uncomfortable, sometimes unpleasant. Which version was true? I started to wonder about the mechanics of memory. How do I form these impressions of times and places? Why does my mind attach certain feelings to certain locations, to certain periods of my life? I realized I'd been attributing my experiences to external things when really they belonged to who I was. The joy I felt in Sydney wasn't because of Sydney. It was because of who I was when I lived there. That openness, that curiosity, that energy existed in me. The city was just the container. It's so much more convenient to say that a past job made me feel a certain way, that a past relationship created certain emotions, that a place or a trip gave me something. But I think that's wrong. Who I was in those moments allowed me to have those experiences. Nothing outside of me gave them to me. I am constantly changing. My partner reflects this back to me. My family shows me how I'm different now than I was even a few months ago. My friends notice shifts I can't see in myself. Even the AI I interact with seems to register the ways I'm evolving. Because I'm constantly changing, my experiences are constantly changing too. The same place can feel entirely different because I'm different. The challenge is making choices based on who I am now, not who I was. This requires real understanding. It requires letting go of past versions of myself and what they needed. It means becoming aware of and connected to who I am in this present moment, and trying to anticipate who I might become. The tough part is calibration. How do I honor what I needed in the past while recognizing that those needs might not serve me anymore? How do I make decisions based on current needs and future projections rather than nostalgic attachments? I drove my old car through Sydney and felt something powerful. But what I felt wasn't about the car or the city. It was about remembering a version of myself that felt alive in particular ways. That version still exists somewhere inside me, but she's been joined by other versions, other ways of being. Maybe the discomfort of this trip was necessary. Maybe I needed to see that the place itself wasn't magic. The magic was in who I was and how I moved through the world during that time. I can access those qualities without returning to that place. The openness, the curiosity, the sense of adventure, they don't belong to Sydney. They belong to me. I carried them there, and I can carry them anywhere. I don't have all the answers about how to navigate this. My best guess is to meditate more, to journal more, to stay curious about who I'm becoming. So much of life involves taking leaps of faith, making choices without complete information. What I can trust is my own resilience. I've moved through different phases before. I've adapted, changed, grown. I will continue to do so. The nostalgia I felt wasn't wrong, but it was incomplete. It told me something true about a moment in time, about a version of myself I valued. But it didn't tell me the whole story. The cockroaches and the expensive breakfast and the security guards, they were part of the story too. Maybe the real practice is holding both truths at once. The beautiful memories and the difficult present. The person I was and the person I'm becoming. The places I've loved and the recognition that those places were never really what I thought they were. I returned the car at the end of the trip. Walked away from it one more time. And I felt surprisingly okay about it. Because what I thought I was saying goodbye to, I'm learning I never really lost. --- ### The Concert Published: 2026-02-15 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/the-concert/ Last night, halfway through an Ed Sheeran concert in Sydney, slouched in a plastic chair, eating potato chips, I realized I was meditating. Not intentionally. Not in any way I would have recognized even a few hours earlier. The music was loud, too loud, and flashing lights swept across seventy thousand people packed into the open-air stadium at Sydney Olympic Park. Someone was talking behind me. People were standing in the rows ahead. My partner sat beside me, absorbed in the music. Above us, the sky was clear and wide, scattered with stars, occasionally interrupted by fireworks that no one had warned us about. It was not a meditation environment. It was, by every measure I've spent the last decade carefully curating, the opposite of one. I've been meditating actively for more than ten years. And over those years, I've built an infrastructure around the practice that I didn't fully notice until that night. The quiet room. The specific lighting. The temperature set just so. The right posture, the right clothes. Not eating beforehand. A particular time of morning when the world hasn't yet started asking things of me. I've treated presence like something that requires preparation. A runway that needs to be cleared before the thing itself can land. And I don't think that care was wrong. It taught me a great deal. But sitting there in that stadium, chips in hand, shoulders rounded, I started to wonder whether the infrastructure had quietly become something else. Whether the ritual of creating the perfect conditions had, at some point, become a subtle form of control. Another thing to get right. Another way of telling myself that presence is fragile and needs protection. Because there I was. In the loudest, most chaotic, most imperfect environment I could imagine. And something had opened. I tried to understand why. What was different. And then I noticed what wasn't there. My phone. I'd reached for it a few times during the show, out of habit, the way my hand sometimes drifts to my pocket without instruction. But there was no signal. Seventy thousand people, all trying to use their phones at once, and the network had simply given up. So I put it away. Not with intention. Not with the quiet pride of someone choosing to unplug. I put it away because it was useless. And without my phone, the exits closed. There was no scrolling, no checking, no drifting into a feed. No quick message to send, no notification to glance at. My partner was focused on the music, so there was no conversation pulling me sideways. I couldn't really move. The music was too loud to think over, too constant to resist. There was, quite literally, nothing else to do but be there. It struck me that this is what a monastery does. It removes the distractions by design, by architecture, by schedule. The concert had done the same thing, entirely by accident. The doors were different, but the room I'd arrived in felt remarkably similar. The loudness itself became a kind of silence. At first, the volume felt like an intrusion. But after a while, the wall of sound stopped being something to listen to and became something to rest inside. There was nothing to scan for, nothing to track. My mind, which usually fills quiet spaces with its own noise, had nothing to compete with. It surrendered. The way it sometimes does near the ocean, or in heavy rain. Not because the sound stops, but because the sound becomes so total that the mind stops trying to manage it. I thought about my mornings at home. The careful quiet I build. The deliberate stillness. How, even in that silence, my mind is often louder than Ed Sheeran's speakers. How sometimes the quietest room is the noisiest place I know. And here, in the loudest place I'd been in years, the noise inside had gone almost completely still. Ed Sheeran stood on that stage with a guitar and a loop pedal. Seventy thousand people. Relatively simple production compared to the concerts I've seen with towering sets and elaborate choreography. Just a person, a few tools, and a voice. There was something in his simplicity that mirrored what I was discovering in the audience. He didn't need much infrastructure either. And watching someone do so much with so little made me wonder what else I might be over-engineering in my own life. Seventy thousand people, all facing the same direction. All hearing the same songs. But each, I imagine, somewhere entirely their own. There's a particular kind of solitude that exists in a crowd, a way of being alone that doesn't carry the weight of loneliness. You're held by the presence of others without being asked to perform for them. Nobody needed anything from me. Nobody expected conversation or connection or even eye contact. I was free to simply sit inside my own experience, surrounded by thousands of people doing exactly the same thing. The concert didn't teach me a new technique. It showed me something I already knew but had buried under years of careful preparation: that I am capable of being exactly where I am, without any infrastructure at all. I just have to stop leaving. It's not that I need to choose to be present. It's that I need to stop choosing not to be. We drove home that night through Sydney's quiet streets, the ringing in my ears slowly fading. My partner was talking about her favourite songs from the set. The city was lit up and alive around us. I noticed, briefly, that I wasn't reaching for anything. Not my phone, not a thought, not a plan for tomorrow. I was just there. In the car. In the night. In the echo of something loud that had somehow taught me something about silence. --- ### Cloudy Skies Published: 2026-01-17 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/cloudy-skies/ This morning in Lisbon, I woke to darkness and cold. The sky outside matched something inside me, something gray and undefined. I rolled onto my yoga mat, settled onto my block, and tried to meditate. Ten minutes in, the cloudiness hadn't lifted. It had only become more apparent.So I stopped. I got up and reached for my journal instead.There was no plan, no intention to capture anything profound or worth keeping. I just started writing. The pen moved faster than my thoughts could arrange themselves into coherent sentences. After five minutes, I realized I couldn't even read my own handwriting.This should have bothered me. The whole point of keeping a journal, I'd always assumed, was to preserve something. To document. To create a record I could return to later and mine for insights or track patterns over time.But this wasn't that kind of writing at all.The illegibility felt like a feature, not a bug. I was writing to no one, not even to my future self. The words were leaving my mind and traveling through my hand onto paper, but they weren't meant to arrive anywhere. They were just meant to move.It reminded me of conversations I've had with close friends, the kind where we talk for hours and afterward I can barely remember what was said. The content dissolves almost immediately. What remains is just the feeling of having been heard, of having let something out into the air between us.My journal that morning became a kind of conversation partner who asks nothing of me and remembers nothing. The privacy was absolute, more complete than any other form of privacy I know.When I talk to my partner, there's love there, but also the reality of being known. She remembers things I've said. She notices patterns. She cares about what I'm going through, which means my words carry weight and consequence.With a therapist, there's professional distance but also professional attention. Every word is being received, considered, potentially analyzed. Even the act of speaking to an AI feels like it creates some kind of record, some trail of data that exists somewhere.But this scribbled, unreadable writing existed in a space beyond even my own judgment. I couldn't go back and critique it later because I couldn't read it. I couldn't ruminate on whether I'd expressed myself well or badly. The words were gone almost as soon as they appeared.I've been doing some version of this practice on and off for ten years, ever since I encountered Julia Cameron's Morning Pages in The Artist's Way. Her version is more structured than mine has become. Three pages, first thing in the morning, stream of consciousness.Over the years, the practice has shifted and adapted. Sometimes I write three pages, sometimes half a page, sometimes ten pages. Sometimes in the morning, sometimes at night when insomnia finds me. The form has become less important than the function.What I'm really creating is a space where vulnerability doesn't require courage. Where I can be messy and unclear and contradictory without having to make sense or be fair or consider how I sound.I am, without question, my harshest critic. The judgment I fear most doesn't come from others. It comes from the voice in my head that watches everything I do and finds it wanting. That voice is relentless and often unkind.But it can't critique words it can't read. In the speed and illegibility of my morning writing, I've found a strange loophole, a way to express myself that exists beneath the threshold of my own self-consciousness.After ten minutes of writing that morning, I noticed the internal weather had changed. The cloudiness that had interrupted my meditation was gone. I felt clearer, lighter. My body had relaxed in ways I hadn't noticed it was tense.The remarkable thing was that I couldn't even remember what the clouds had been about. What had felt so heavy and present just minutes before had completely evaporated. I had no idea what I'd written, what I'd been worried about, what had needed expressing.Nothing in my external circumstances had changed. The Lisbon sky was still dark. The apartment was still cold. My to-do list was the same length it had been when I woke up. No problems had been solved, no decisions had been made.But the way I felt inside had transformed completely. And that shift, that change in my internal landscape without any change in external conditions, felt like a kind of power.There's something deeply reassuring about discovering that I can alter my experience of the world through such a simple act. That I don't need anything to be different out there for things to feel different in here.The practice has become a kind of maintenance for me, like brushing my teeth or stretching. A way to keep my mental and emotional systems clean, to release whatever accumulated overnight or built up during the previous day.I think about how much energy I spend trying to change external circumstances. Trying to make things happen or not happen, trying to influence how others see me or what they do. All that effort directed outward.This kind of writing requires almost no effort at all. Just a notebook, a pen, and the willingness to let words spill out without trying to catch them or make them into something.When the clouds clear and the sun shines through, the beauty I feel inside has nothing to do with achievement or validation or getting anything right. It's just the relief of having let something go, of having created space where there was congestion.I'll return to this practice tomorrow morning, and the morning after that. Not because I'm trying to build a streak or maintain a habit, but because I know now what it feels like to wake up cloudy and write my way to clear skies.And because sometimes the most private conversations are the ones where nothing is remembered, nothing is kept, and the words disappear as soon as they're written. --- ### The Symphony of Life Published: 2026-01-17 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/the-symphony-of-life/ I ordered compression boots last month. The kind that zip up from my toes to my hips, inflate with air, and squeeze my legs in rhythmic waves for thirty minutes at a time. I'd tried them a few times at physiotherapy clinics, always leaving with that floaty, relaxed feeling in my limbs. When I discovered I could have this at home, on my own couch, whenever I wanted, something shifted. At first, I thought of them purely as recovery tools. My physiotherapist explained the science of compression, how it moves lymph and blood, reduces inflammation. But then she mentioned something about the nervous system, and I found myself going down a rabbit hole that changed how I think about almost everything I do. I realized I'd never consciously thought about my nervous system before. Not really. It was always there, humming in the background, dictating how I felt without my awareness. Like weather, I thought. When it's sunny, I feel expansive. When it's gray and cold, I contract inward. But here's what stopped me: unlike the weather, my nervous system is something I actually have influence over. This winter in Lisbon has been mild compared to the New York and Toronto winters I spent so many years enduring. Still, I've been using the sauna regularly, sometimes in the morning, sometimes at night. I started noticing how the timing mattered. A morning sauna left me energized but wired. An evening one settled something deep in my chest, prepared me for sleep. The compression boots do something similar. They don't just work on my muscles. They send signals to my brain: it's safe to rest now. The rhythmic pressure, the release, the predictability of it. My whole system exhales. Once I started seeing this pattern, I couldn't unsee it everywhere. The way I use my phone, for instance. Listening to a long voice message from a friend, or recording one myself, leaves me feeling grounded. There's something about the human voice, unhurried and intimate, that steadies something in me. But scrolling through a feed, checking the financial markets, rapid-fire consuming information? That's a different animal entirely. My shoulders tighten. My breath gets shallow. Food, too. Not just what I eat, but when. A few months ago, my partner and I spent three weeks in South India doing Panchakarma, an Ayurvedic detox protocol. The experience was powerful in ways I'm still unpacking. But looking back now, I think a big part of it was the regulation. Eating at the same time each day. Sleeping at the same time. The quiet, retreat-like setting that asked nothing of me but presence. My nervous system relaxed in a way I hadn't felt in years. Maybe ever. It was like a muscle I didn't know was clenched finally released. But here's what I'm learning: the goal isn't to always be in that relaxed state. That's not how life works. If I drove a car in first or second gear all the time, I wouldn't get very far. I need higher gears for certain stretches of road. The problem is when I'm always in fifth gear, redlining the engine. Everything becomes a blur. I miss the details, the subtle textures of experience. It's reckless, and it's exhausting. My system burns through resources it can't replenish. So I've been paying closer attention to what up-regulates me and what down-regulates me. Not to avoid one or chase the other, but to understand the rhythm. To see the patterns. Certain people energize me in a way that feels nourishing. Others leave me depleted, even when the conversation was pleasant. Certain environments hum with a frequency that matches mine. Others feel like static. None of this is good or bad, necessarily. It just is. I think of myself now as a conductor of an orchestra. Or maybe a film director, shaping the pacing of scenes. My nervous system is the instrument, and my days are the music I'm trying to compose. The tricky part is that there's no one ideal state. No single target to hit and maintain. That would be like trying to hold one note for an entire symphony. Music is beautiful because of variation. The rises and falls. The tension and release. The way a quiet passage makes the crescendo hit harder. My nervous system works the same way. It needs variability. Heart rate variability, they call it in the research. The ability to shift states, to adapt, to modulate. A monotone signal would just fade into background noise. I'd tune it out entirely. So I'm learning to read the signs. When I'm depleted, there's a flatness to things. Colors seem duller. Decisions feel harder. When I'm overstimulated, there's a jagged quality to my thoughts. They skip like stones on water, never landing. Bringing myself back to balance requires different things at different times. Sometimes it's the compression boots and their predictable rhythm. Sometimes it's the sauna's heat and the cold shower after. Sometimes it's just sitting still with my coffee in the morning, watching the light change on the wall. Sometimes it's knowing when to step into the higher gears, when the moment calls for intensity and focus. I used to think self-care was about relaxation techniques and bubble baths. And maybe sometimes it is. But more often, it's about this: understanding the symphony of my day. Knowing when to build and when to release. When to push and when to soften. The compression boots taught me that. Not through some grand revelation, but through thirty quiet minutes of rhythmic pressure and release. Through paying attention to how I felt before, during, and after. Through noticing. My nervous system has been conducting this symphony all along. I'm just finally learning to listen. To work with it instead of against it. To appreciate the music we're making together, one day at a time. --- ### Postcard Published: 2026-01-17 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/postcard/ Winter in Lisbon means I wake up before the sun does. Our apartment is still dark, and outside, the city sleeps under a blanket that hasn't yet decided to lift. I've spent the past two winters in Australia, so being back in Portugal feels like returning to a ritual I'd almost forgotten existed.From my window, I get to watch the sky prepare itself. Candy floss clouds gather and shift, waiting. The sun peeks from a corner it doesn't occupy in summer, offering these small glimmers of itself before committing to the full reveal.My energy shifts as the light begins to arrive. Something rises inside me that mirrors what's happening outside. The temperature climbs, the darkness retreats, and I'm left sitting in this warmth with my ginger tea, looking out at a view that people tell me is extraordinary.Our apartment sits at the top of a hill in the middle of the city, which creates this peculiar effect of height. From here, I can see thousands of buildings spread across Lisbon, the river, the bridge, mountains in the distance, but no streets. Not a single road is visible from where I sit. This particular angle means the building itself is invisible from below, a secret suspended in the air that exists only for those who climb the hill and step inside.Visitors often tell me that I live in a postcard. They mean it as a compliment, and it is one. The view looks like something sold at tourist shops throughout the city on small hand-sized pieces of card stock, the kind of image that captures what people imagine when they think of Lisbon, of Europe, of a life different from their own.But here's what I've learned after four years with this view: I forget. I forget that this is supposed to be special. I walk these streets that my North American friends find enchanting, and they're just streets to me. The view from my window becomes wallpaper. The postcard stops being a postcard the moment it becomes my everyday reality.A postcard only exists in relation to something else. It requires contrast. Without comparison, without the memory of somewhere different or someone else's fresh eyes seeing it for the first time, the extraordinary becomes ordinary. The special becomes standard.This realization has shifted something in how I think about difference itself. Most of the time, difference registers as negative in my body. The hotel bed that isn't mine. The restaurant food that doesn't match what I wanted. The way my shoulders feel tighter than usual, my lower back a little off.I mentally catalog these differences throughout my days, my weeks, my year. And my first reaction is almost always resistance. This isn't what I'm used to. This isn't what I prefer. The unfamiliar triggers something defensive in me, something that wants to retreat to the known.But sitting here watching the winter sunrise, I'm understanding that difference serves a purpose beyond discomfort. The purpose of difference is to remind me of what I have. When something shifts, when the familiar becomes unfamiliar even briefly, I'm given the opportunity to see what was there all along.It's not enough to notice what's wrong with the thing that's different. That's where I usually stop, in that place of complaint or annoyance. The practice is in taking it one step further, in asking what the contrast reveals about what I've been taking for granted.The hotel bed reminds me of my own. The restaurant meal points back to the food that nourishes me at home. The tension in my body highlights the moments when it feels easy and fluid. Every difference is a mirror held up to what I've stopped noticing.This is why I like having visitors. They arrive with fresh eyes and see postcards everywhere. They enter our apartment and gasp. They look out the window and pull out their phones. They remind me to look again at what I've learned to overlook.It's not about the objective grandness of anything. My view isn't better or worse than other views. Our apartment isn't more or less valuable than other homes. That's not the point, and it never was.The point is learning to see the beauty in what is. Not what could be, not what should be, not what exists somewhere else in someone else's life. Just this, just now, just what's actually here in front of me when I remember to look.I think about expectation and how it functions in my life. Every expectation carries within it the seed of disappointment. When I expect things to be a certain way, I'm setting up a measurement, a standard against which reality will inevitably fall short sooner or later.Disappointment lives in my body as tension. It deflates me, drains my energy, leaves me feeling smaller than I was before. I can feel it in my chest, this collapse inward, this sense of something being taken away.Gratitude does the opposite. Appreciation lifts something in me that affects not just my own experience but the space around me. It's infectious in the way disappointment never is. It generates energy rather than depleting it, creates possibility rather than closing it down.So I invite people in. I let them exclaim over the view, over the neighborhood, over the light that fills the rooms at different times of day. Their wonder becomes a gift they probably don't know they're giving me.They help me remember I live in a postcard. And this remembering is crucial because without it, I slip into a kind of blindness. I start to believe that this is just how things are.The sunrise this morning was pink and orange and gold. The clouds shifted and the light changed and the city below began to wake. I sat with my ginger tea getting cold and watched the whole thing unfold.I need these reminders. I need the contrast, the visitors, the returns after time away. I need difference to show me what sameness has hidden. The postcard was always there, waiting for me to see it again. --- ### The Great Reset Published: 2026-01-11 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/the-great-reset/ The Break BoostSomething unusual happened at my forum meetings last week. When the facilitator went around the table asking about issues and opportunities, there was silence. Not the uncomfortable kind, but something closer to peace. In twenty years of attending these peer-to-peer closed door meetings of like-minded people, I've rarely experienced a meeting where no one had problems to share. Just a month earlier, in December, we'd run out of time trying to address everyone's concerns. That's the norm. The table had been heavy with worry, packed tight with anxiety about health, money, relationships, business decisions. Now, sitting in the same chairs with the same people, the weight had lifted. Nothing had actually changed in the external circumstances of our lives. The problems hadn't been solved. They had simply become lighter. This wasn't an isolated phenomenon. I noticed the same pattern among friends, family members. Eventually, I recognized it in myself. The issues I'd carried into the holidays, the ones that had felt so heavy and urgent, had somehow dissolved without resolution. The holidays offer something rare in modern life: a collective pause. It's different from taking a personal vacation, where part of me remains aware that the world is still spinning, that others are moving forward, that I might fall behind. During the holidays, everyone stops together. The tribe itself pauses. This collective stillness grants a permission I rarely give myself otherwise. The fear of being left behind, that ancient anxiety about separation from the group, fades into the background. In that deeper quiet, something shifts. I start connecting with myself again, not the self that's constantly responding and reacting, but something more essential. Perspective returns, not through effort or analysis, but simply through space. I had real concerns going into December. A health issue that worried me. A financial problem that seemed significant. Other matters weighing on my mind. After the holiday break, after allowing myself to genuinely rest and recover, those issues hadn't disappeared. But their gravity had changed. The pull they exerted on my attention had weakened considerably. Sitting here now, I can barely recall what felt so urgent. That fact alone tells me something important about the nature of problems and the state of mind in which I perceive them. There's a physiological explanation for this shift. At the end of the year, many of us are living in our sympathetic nervous system, locked in a state of perpetual fight or flight. Every email feels like a threat. Every deadline triggers a stress response. The body doesn't distinguish between a missed deadline and a physical danger. The holiday pause allows a switch. The parasympathetic nervous system takes over, the rest and digest mode. In this state, I can see more clearly. Problems don't vanish, but they appear in proper proportion. What felt like a crisis reveals itself as merely a situation requiring attention. I noticed other patterns during this time. Spending days with family and friends, despite the occasional friction, generated something biochemically relaxing. My body released more endorphins. I found myself eating more freely, the usual rigidity around limits dissolving. This physical loosening seemed to mirror a mental one. Travel played its part too. Getting out of my typical environment, even for short trips, shifts my perspective. Not necessarily making things better, but making them different. And in that difference, clarity often emerges. New possibilities became visible that had been hidden by the constraints of routine. Back when I ran my company, I learned to schedule important meetings and outreach for January. Over fifteen years, I'd observed that customers were far more open to meeting during at the start of the year. Their calendars were open, and those open calendars seemed to create open minds. People said yes more readily. They listened more generously. The same pattern appeared in my dating life years ago. There was a palpable openness in January, both in myself and in others. A willingness to meet, to try something new, to take a chance that felt harder during the compressed urgency of other months. All of this has left me curious. How do I invite more of this open energy into my life without waiting another twelve months? How do I create these conditions more regularly? The answer I've arrived at is intentional structure. Not the rigid kind that creates more pressure, but the kind that carves out protected space. Regular retreats, perhaps quarterly or even monthly, designed specifically to shift my nervous system into that parasympathetic state. These don't need to be elaborate. The key elements seem simple: genuine pause, positive social connection, change of environment, permission to step away from the constant forward motion. A deliberate invitation to see things differently. What strikes me most is that I don't know what I'll need to see differently in three months or six months. I can't predict what problems will feel urgent or what perspectives will feel stuck. But I know I'll need the prompting, the reminder that there are other ways of seeing. The forum meetings taught me something valuable. Problems don't require immediate solving so much as proper perspective. When I'm running in fight or flight mode, everything looks like a threat requiring urgent action. When I pause deeply enough to shift my nervous system, the landscape rearranges itself. Some issues are urgent. Some problems require immediate attention. But fewer than my stressed mind believes. The great reset of the holidays reminded me that most of what feels critical is simply amplified by the state I'm in. I'm planning my first intentional reset for a few months from now. Not waiting for permission from a collective pause, but creating one for myself. A few days away, minimal agenda, space for my nervous system to settle and my perspective to shift. I'm curious what will feel heavy now that will seem lighter then. I'm curious what I'll see differently about my life when I step outside its daily container. Mostly, I'm grateful for the reminder that I don't have to wait for the world to stop spinning before I give myself permission to rest. --- ### How to Notice an Hour Published: 2026-01-10 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/how-to-notice-an-hour/ I woke up on a quiet Sunday morning to the kind of stillness that only comes with borrowed time. The clocks had fallen back. Daylight Saving Time had ended overnight, and somewhere between sleep and waking, I remembered: I had gained an hour and that's amazing.My first thought was pure delight. An extra hour. I had saved time. The phrase itself felt like a small miracle, a gift I hadn't expected. In a life where I so often feel like I'm losing time, wasting it, watching it slip through my fingers like water, the idea of gaining it felt almost holy.But then came the second thought, right on its heels: what will I do with this extra hour?I lay there in bed, my mind already racing through possibilities. The hour wasn't even mine yet and I was planning its expenditure. I could catch up on sleep, finally respond to those text messages from three days ago, tackle the dishes piled in the sink, finish the book I started weeks ago. The list assembled itself automatically, a catalog of all the ways I've been falling behind.This is what struck me: I wasn't thinking about what I wanted to do with this hour. I was thinking about what I needed to catch up on. The extra hour wasn't a gift at all. It was an opportunity to pay down a debt.The truth is, the hour isn't actually new. It's borrowed, shifted, rearranged. We didn't create time; we just moved it around on the clock face. But my mind treated it like found money, and immediately allocated it toward past deficits rather than present desires.I realized something uncomfortable then: I live much of my life in debt to time. There's always some version of myself ahead of me, perpetually out of reach, who has responded to all the messages, cleaned the apartment, finished the projects, been more disciplined, more present, more prepared. I'm always trying to catch up to that person, to close the gap between who I am and who I think I should have been by now.When did time become something I owed instead of something I inhabited?I think we're taught to see time as a resource. Something finite and precious that must be used wisely, spent carefully, saved when possible. Time management. Time investment. Time poverty. The language itself turns time into currency, and me into someone who's always coming up short.But what if time isn't a resource at all? What if it's a relationship?This shift in perspective has been slow for me, emerging mostly through mindfulness practice and the embodied experiences that forced me to be present. Sitting meditation. Long conversations with my partner where we lose track of the clock entirely. Cooking without rushing. Watching the sunset over the city while the light changes minute by minute.In those moments, time doesn't feel like something I'm using. It feels like something I'm with. There's a difference between spending time and being in time.Still in bed, I considered my options for this gifted hour. I could look backward and catch up, or I could look forward and invite something in. What did I want more of in my life? What would future me thank present me for doing?I know this sounds like a luxury, the kind of contemplation only available to someone who isn't genuinely struggling. And maybe that's true. But I think the real luxury isn't having the extra hour; it's recognizing that I have a choice about how to relate to it.The pattern extends beyond Daylight Saving Time. How much of my daily energy goes toward trying to catch up with intentions I set yesterday, last week, last year? How often am I running to meet some past version of myself instead of listening to what present me actually needs?Because here's what I've noticed: when I slow down, time stretches. When my partner and I sit together after dinner, talking about nothing in particular, an hour can feel spacious and generous. When I'm fully present with what I'm doing, whether it's washing dishes or walking to the store, time seems to expand around me.But when I'm rushing, catching up, running late, checking off items on a mental list of shoulds, time contracts. It speeds up. It runs away from me. I feel perpetually behind.Maybe time has nothing to do with the clock after all. Maybe it expands and contracts based on how present I am with the moment I'm in.Lying there, watching the light change on the ceiling, I realized something else: I hadn't actually gained an hour. I had simply noticed one. And in the noticing, in the pause before planning, I had found more spaciousness than any clock adjustment could provide.The real gift wasn't the extra sixty minutes. It was the awareness that time isn't something I need more of. I just need fewer reasons to escape from the time I already have.How much of my hurry is about genuine necessity, and how much is about avoiding the discomfort of being fully present? When I'm constantly catching up, I don't have to sit with what is. I can stay busy with what was or what should be.The only time I actually gain is the moment I inhabit fully. Not the one I'm planning for or recovering from, but the one I'm in. This one. Right now.I still haven't gotten out of bed, and all these thoughts are still moving through me like weather. The Sunday morning light continues to shift. My partner sleeps beside me. The hour I gained hasn't been spent yet, hasn't been allocated or optimized or used.It's just here, this moment, stretching out in all directions.Next year, when the clocks fall back again, I hope I remember this. I hope I remember that I already have enough time. I've just forgotten how to feel into it, how to be with it instead of against it.Maybe that's the real time travel: not moving forward or backward, but arriving fully in the only moment that ever actually exists. --- ### The Word That Works for Me Published: 2026-01-04 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/the-word-that-works-for-me/ One Word For 2026Our apartment in Lisbon was quiet during the recent holidays, as the world has settled into that strange pause between Christmas and New Year. But inside me, nothing has paused. I'm reading through a year's worth of journals, watching my own handwriting trace the arc of the past twelve months, preparing for the ritual I look forward to most: choosing a single word to guide the year ahead. I stopped setting goals years ago. Goals made me efficient, pushing me to move quickly toward something. But efficiency and effectiveness are not the same thing. Efficiency is about speed. Effectiveness is about direction, about moving toward what actually matters. And with goals, I found I sometimes would move quickly towards what didn't really matter. That's what my one-word intention practice has become for me: a way of identifying what matters, what feels true. Not what's out there in the world, demanding my attention, but what's in here, in the quiet space where I actually live. I've been thinking about control lately and about how little of it I actually have. I don't control what happens to me, or why certain events unfold the way they do. I don't control who enters or exits my life. I barely control when or where things occur. The one thing I have real control over though is the "how". How I show up. How I respond. How I make the hundreds of small and large decisions that, when I look back, compose what I call my life. Every day presents new decisions. Some feel small: what to eat, who to spend time with, which email to answer first. Others loom larger: where to focus my energy, how to respond when confusion or uncertainty clouds everything. The stakes feel genuinely high, this business of choosing how to be. That's where my one word intention comes in. It works like a compass, a lens through which I can view decisions. It doesn't tell me what to do. It asks me to bring some intentionality to the decision. With goals, I always felt like I was serving them. Working for them. Striving toward them. With a one-word intention, the dynamic reverses. The word serves me. It supports me. It offers itself as a tool, not a taskmaster. Last year, my one word intention was "inspire." Looking back, I see how it functioned as a filter. It helped me become more intentional about the people I spent time with, the projects I took on, and the places I went. I said no more than I ever had before. Not from a place of withholding or protection, but from a deeper connection to what actually inspired me, what made me feel alive and curious. I found myself seeking out new things: new people, new skills, new knowledge. I'd given myself permission to be inspired, and that permission changed the texture of the year. It shaped my choices in ways I couldn't have predicted. The year before, my one word intention was "flow." That one taught me about surrender, about letting go of my desire to control outcomes. It invited me to move with what was happening rather than against it. The experiences that emerged from that intention became life-changing, completely altering my trajectory. Had I spent that year gripping tightly to some goal, pushing toward some predetermined outcome, I would have missed what actually wanted to happen. For 2026, my one word intention is "leverage." It came to me through sleep, of all things, a few days ago. Over the past few weeks, I've been sleeping eight-to-nine hours a night consistently. This is not my norm. I've been a six-to-seven-hour person for as long as I can remember. And this extended sleep hasn't come from exhaustion or illness. It's just been happening. I feel rested. Light. Clear. And I realized that improving my sleep might be the highest leverage thing I could do for my health. Not the supplements, not the biohacking protocols, not the elaborate nutrition plans and expensive testing. Just sleep. More of it. That insight opened something larger. Leverage, for me, is about working smarter rather than harder. It's about being more choiceful with how I apply myself. I have certain skills and strengths, and many more weaknesses and blind spots. I'm at a stage now where I need to evolve from trying to be adequate at many things to focusing on being excellent at a few things. This is new territory for me. For years, I could throw my energy at problems and opportunities. I was younger then, and brute force was easier. Now I feel the need to be more strategic, more thoughtful, more deliberate. I don't have the same energy I once did. However I do have more skills, resources, experiences and confidence. The word "leverage" holds all of this for me. It reminds me to ask: where can I apply my limited energy for maximum impact? What deserves my attention? What can I stop doing because someone else could do it better, or because it doesn't actually need doing? I've been doing this practice for twelve years now. Each year's one word intention becomes my North Star, my anchor. It shapes the year in ways I can only see in retrospect, when I'm reading through another year's journals. What delights me most is when friends share their one word intentions with me, unprompted. When they've taken this practice and made it their own. There's something vulnerable about declaring a single word that captures how I want to grow, how I want to show up. And that vulnerability is part of what makes the intention setting practice work. Saying it out loud, sharing it with people who can support me, cements something. It makes the intention real, pulls it out of my head and into the world where it can actually do its work. It's a way to release the intention into the universe. To help inspire you to choose your one word intention for 2026, below are some of the words that friends have used to serve them in prior years. Acceptance Adventure Authentic Awareness Balance Bold Build Challenge Commitment Compassion Confidence Connection Control Courage Create Discovery Energy Explore Fearless Flow Focus Freedom Fun Giving Grace Gratitude Grounded Growth Harmony Heart Humility Integrity Joy Learn Light Open Play Positive Presence Relax Respect Self Love Serve Simplify Space Surrender Trust Zest --- ### One Question Published: 2025-12-28 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/one-question/ One QuestionNearly ten years ago, I sat across from a close friend at an Italian restaurant in Toronto. The pasta was rich, the kind that settles heavy in the stomach and makes the world slow down. It was December, and the conversation had that quality of year-end honesty, where the usual boundaries soften and the real questions surface. He asked me something I hadn't expected. "What's the one decision in your life that you're not making, right now?" Not what I should do, or what I wanted to do, but what I already knew and was avoiding knowing. The answer came immediately. Too immediately, really. I was CEO of my tech company at the time, and there was someone senior on my team I needed to let go. I'd known it for months, maybe longer. The knowing sat in my chest like something solid and undeniable, but I kept walking around it, pretending it wasn't there. That's what fear does. It doesn't make the truth disappear. It just makes me very good at not looking directly at it. I can't remember what my friend said his decision was. I've tried to recall it over the years, but that part is gone. What stayed was the question itself, lodged somewhere inside me like a bookmark I never returned to. A few nights ago, my partner and I hosted a friend over for Christmas dinner at our apartment in Lisbon. We made pasta, again that same heavy, comforting kind. The conversation drifted naturally into deeper water, the way it does when people feel safe enough to stop performing. I heard myself ask it. The question from a decade ago, the one I'd somehow never asked myself since. "What's the one decision I'm not making, right now?" And just like before, the answer was instant. Focus. One word, but it contained multitudes. I have projects scattered across my life like clothes I've tried on and left draped over chairs. Experiments, interests, possibilities. All of them real, all of them pulling at my attention. But I haven't picked one. I haven't fully committed. There's something safer about keeping everything in motion, about maintaining optionality. If I never fully choose, I never fully fail. Every decision to do something fully is also a decision not to do a dozen other things. And I've been avoiding that math. We talked for hours, the three of us. Each person at the table had their own answer waiting, as if the question had simply given it permission to finally speak honestly. The things we're not deciding are never really secrets from ourselves. They're just truths we've agreed not to look at directly. The next day, I was on the phone with another friend and found myself asking her the same question. Two things came up for her immediately, and as she talked through them, she remembered a different version of the same question. She described it like this: imagine my life right now is a movie or a game show, and there's an audience watching. What would they be shouting at the screen? What would be so obvious to them that they could see was not obvious to me? I love that reframing. It makes the question lighter, more playful, but no less penetrating. The audience can see what I cannot because they're not inside my fear. They're not tangled up in all the reasons and justifications and careful logic that keeps me stuck. Both versions of the question get at the same thing. They're asking about the gap between knowing and acknowledging. Between the truth that lives in the body and the truth I'm willing to speak out loud. Most of the time, when I think about fear, I think about fear of the unknown. The uncertain future, the unpredictable outcome, the what-if that spirals into anxiety. But sitting with this question again after so many years, I realize how much of my fear is actually fear of the known. I know what I need to focus on. I know which project calls to me most strongly, which one would require my full attention and commitment. I'm not afraid I won't figure it out. I'm afraid I already have. There's something about December that makes these questions feel necessary. Maybe it's the natural endpoint of a calendar year, or maybe it's the darkness outside that makes interior spaces feel more honest. Either way, the season seems to demand a different kind of conversation. When my friend asked me that question ten years ago, he wasn't trying to fix me or give me advice. He was creating space for me to hear what I already knew. The question wasn't an intervention. It was an invitation to stop pretending. That's what made asking it again, after all this time, feel so important. Not because I needed someone else's wisdom, but because I needed to practice the kind of honesty that only comes from vulnerability. The kind that admits I'm scared, that I've been avoiding something, that I don't have it all figured out. The decisions I'm not making live in a particular kind of silence. They're not absent, exactly. They're more like a persistent hum I've learned to tune out, background noise I've decided to call normal. But asking the question turns the volume back up. It makes the hum impossible to ignore. And once I've named it out loud, in front of people I trust, there's no unknowing it again. I don't know yet what I'll do with the answer this time. Whether I'll choose focus, commit fully, let the other possibilities fall away. The question doesn't come with a timeline or an action plan. It just comes with clarity, which is both a gift and a burden. What I do know is that the question itself is the practice. Asking it of myself, asking it of people I care about, creating space for those multi-hour conversations that go late into the evening. That's how I want to close out the year. Not with resolutions or goals, but with honesty. The decisions I'm not making will still be there tomorrow. But at least now I've looked at them directly. At least now I've said their names out loud. And that's the one question. --- ### How to Reset Published: 2025-12-21 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/reset-close/ I can still feel the warmth of last year's New Year's celebration in Sydney, standing by the harbour with my partner and our parents, watching fireworks bloom over the bridge. The year stretched ahead of me then, full of promise and possibility. Now, as this year draws to a close, I find myself blinking in surprise at how quickly it all went by.What I'm realizing is that sense of aliveness I felt in Sydney had less to do with what lay ahead than with how I had chosen to close the previous year. I had done the work of making peace with what was, and that clearing created space for what could be.For the past decade, I've practiced an annual ritual of bringing closure to the year. It's become as essential to me as exhaling, this practice of slowing down long enough to actually notice what happened. Not what I hoped would happen or wished had happened, but what actually was.There's an image that keeps returning to me. When I'm driving fast on a highway, the signs blur past. I can barely read them. The landscape becomes a streak of color and motion. But when I slow down, everything sharpens into focus. I can read the exit signs. I can notice the trees. I can decide if I want to turn.And that's what this time of year really is. A slowing down so I can read the signs of my own life. A pause so I can decide if I want to make any turns.I think of it as an inner harvest. All year, I've been planting seeds without always knowing what would grow. Some intentions sprouted and flourished. Others never broke through the soil. This is the time to gather what actually grew, to acknowledge the full crop of the year.A year ago in Sydney, I had so many intentions. Many dreams and desires for what this year could bring. Some of them manifested in ways that surprised me. Many of them didn't happen at all. And sitting with that reality, with both the fulfilled and unfulfilled, has been its own kind of work.What I've noticed is that it's easy to hang on to disappointments. The losses, the discomforts, the ways things didn't go as planned. They stick to me like a moth, catching on my clothes as I try to move forward. The human mind seems almost programmed to grip tightly to what went "wrong".Each new year offers a blank slate, a fresh start. But if I haven't made peace with the past, I don't start clean at all. I carry forward all that baggage, all those unfulfilled dreams and lingering disappointments. They colour everything that comes next.My process has become almost ritualistic in its simplicity. Yesterday alone, I called three different friends just to ask them about their year. How did it feel? What were they grateful for? What disappointed them? There's something powerful about speaking these things out loud, about getting it all on the table where I can see it.I've been journaling every day, asking myself the same questions. But what I'm most excited about is the archaeology of it all. Reading back through my journals and notes. Looking at my calendar, month by month. Scrolling through the photos on my phone, each one a small window into a moment I lived.This is how I recount and retell the year to myself. Not as I wished it had been, but as it actually was. The good days and the terrible ones. The moments of joy and the stretches of disappointment. All of it, the full spectrum of the human experience.Years ago, I learned a sleep meditation that has stayed with me. The practice is simple: while lying in bed at the end of the day, I watch my day in fast-forward like a movie. From waking up to brushing my teeth to breakfast to checking email to conversations with my partner to tidying the house to work to lunch with a friend to the gym. Every mundane moment, every small interaction.The act of mentally reviewing the entire day allows my mind to process it, to make peace with it. The day doesn't have to have been amazing. It could have been awful. The point isn't to judge it but to acknowledge it, to let it settle.When I do this, I fall asleep more easily. My mind is at peace because it has been witnessed. Nothing is left hanging, unprocessed, demanding attention in the dark.That's what I'm doing now, but expanded to the scale of an entire year. Over the next ten days, I'm giving myself the space to really focus on making peace with what was. With what happened and what didn't. With who I was at the start of the year and who I've become.How it happens feels less important than the fact that it happens. Some people might do this through long walks or conversations or creative projects. The method matters less than the intention.This practice of making peace with the past is what makes space for the future to arrive, unencumbered by what I'm still carrying.And there's a pleasure in it I didn't expect when I first started this ritual a decade ago. A kind of tenderness toward myself and the year I've lived. Not everything worked out, but I showed up. I tried. I lived through all of it.That's worth acknowledging. That's worth making peace with.And that is how I learned to reset. --- --- ### How to Fail Published: 2025-12-14 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/fail-arcade/ Last week in Lisbon, I found myself in an adult arcade with a good friend, trading the usual coffee catchup for bowling, air hockey and racing games.Something about the flashing lights and the clatter of pins brought me right back to childhood. At one point, locked in a particularly intense air hockey match, I noticed something: I was winning with barely more than half the points.The same pattern held in bowling. I'd win a game having only gotten 55% of the possible points for knowing down pins. My friend and I laughed about it, this low threshold where victory lived. Just over half felt like triumph. The rush was real, the satisfaction complete.Driving home that night, I couldn't stop thinking about those percentages. Something about them nagged at me, a dissonance I couldn't quite name at first.Then it hit me: in school, a 55% was failure. Not just mild disappointment, but genuine academic disaster. The emotions attached to that same number were completely opposite depending on context. At the arcade, I'd felt victorious. In a classroom, I would have been crushed.This got me thinking about life's scorecards.I've been actively investing in the stock market for past few years now, and recently I analyzed thousands of trades I have made. My win rate? 52%. That's it. Just barely over half.And yet, I've beaten the market and have done relatively well. 52% has been more than enough.If someone had told me at twenty that I'd one day celebrate 52%, I wouldn't have believed them. That number would have seemed like a mathematical expression of failure to any young person.The pattern continued as I thought back further. Over fifteen years of running a tech company, I launched seven distinct product lines. Three of them failed completely, generating no lasting value. Only four succeeded, defined as still generating revenue a year after launch. Again, just over 50%.And my business thrived and continues to today. Those failures didn't doom anything. They were simply part of the process of building products that did work well.I started thinking about baseball, a sport I've never played but whose statistics I've always found confusing. A batting average in the .300s, meaning hitting the ball successfully 30% of the time, is considered good. If someone consistently bats .400, they're an all-star, a legend. A 40% success rate.These numbers start to feel almost absurd when placed against my educational conditioning. To get into a competitive university program, I needed grades in the mid-90s. Anything below 80% was cause for concern, a sign something had gone wrong.The disconnect is impossible to ignore. Children taught that 80% and 90% is the baseline for success, when so much of adult life operates on completely different mathematics. We demand near-perfection in environments where perfection is actually achievable, then are released into a world where it clearly isn't.I cannot win 80% of the stock trades I make. I cannot achieve a 80% success rate as an entrepreneur with products I build. A baseball player cannot hit the ball 80% of the time. Regardless of the skill, intention, preparation or motivation. Reality doesn't work that way, and it does not need to. I can do just fine in life with a 55%.This leaves me with two competing thoughts, neither of which feels entirely right but both of which feel important. Either we need to stop demanding perfection from young people, or we need to make school harder.The first option feels more humane: adjust expectations, celebrate learning rather than flawless performance, acknowledge that mistakes are part of growth. But I'm not entirely convinced this is the answer.The second option feels counterintuitive, even cruel at first glance. Make school harder so that 55% feels like success. Design systems where failure is normal, expected, built into the experience.That's exactly what prepares someone for the texture of real life. We need to experience what 55% success feels like and have that sensation be positive, energizing, and worth celebrating.I became an entrepreneur at twenty, and it remains one of the most valuable experiences of my life. Not because I succeeded at everything, far from it. But because it taught me very young to be comfortable with failure. I learned to hear "no" without crumbling. I learned that getting things wrong didn't mean I was wrong.That education in failure built something in me I can't imagine living without now: resilience, humility, a realistic sense of what success actually looks like in practice rather than theory.The arcade games gave me that same feeling, decades later. The pleasure of striving for 55%, of knowing that winning doesn't require domination or perfection. Just slightly better than half is enough.I think about the emotional energy I wasted earlier in life, the anxiety that came from believing anything less than 90% meant I'd failed. How much of that was useful? How much of it prepared me for anything real?I'm planning to go back to that arcade soon, probably next week. I'm looking forward to it in a way that feels important to honour. Not just for the fun, though it is fun. But for the reminder that success has different shapes, different percentages, different feels.I'm grateful for every time I've learned this lesson: that winning means just barely more than losing, not being perfect. That four out of seven is plenty, that 52% can beat the market. These aren't consolations for mediocrity, they're the actual mathematics of building a life.Maybe the real skill isn't achieving perfection. Maybe it's learning to recognize when 55% is not just enough, but genuinely something to celebrate.And that is how I learned to fail. --- --- ### How to Enjoy Published: 2025-12-07 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/enjoy/ It was past two in the morning when I arrived at the wedding venue, tucked quietly inside the Art of Living campus in South India outside of Bangalore. The sky was still. A narrow road wound through the trees and opened into silence. Everyone was asleep. I hadn’t expected to get in so late. My flight had been delayed, and what had started as a mid-evening arrival became a night-long journey. When I woke up, I felt something I hadn’t expected, excitement. I hadn’t seen some members of my family in years, and even those I had, I hadn't been with like this.Walking into the breakfast hall that morning, I felt as if I had stepped out of time. There was a familiarity so immediate it didn’t ask for explanation. I was greeted with warmth. It didn’t matter that we live in different countries or keep different routines. There was nothing to catch up on. No need to explain who I had become, or what I’d been through. I was claimed by presence, not by updates. I belonged.In the distance, a temple bell rang, faint but insistent. Monks and seekers walked the campus paths in robes while peacocks called into the trees. An elephant walked by. There was a stillness in the surroundings that echoed something I hadn’t felt in India before. My family is from Delhi, a city alive with movement, bursting at its seams. Every visit before this one had meant navigating honking traffic, crowded markets, pollution and the layered loves and loudness of a city that breathes in millions. But this visit to India, I was nestled in a place that felt entirely different. A seasoned calm blanketed the air. Though thousands come here for spiritual retreats, teachings, and festivals, we stayed in a quiet corner of the campus, surrounded by space and sky.The three day wedding unfolded like a gentle wave. There was rhythm but not rush. Events flowed from morning to afternoon to evening. We dressed in different outfits, moved through ceremonies and celebrations with a lightness that felt both energetic and grounded. Despite every detail being planned, it didn’t feel rigid. It felt like a wide invitation, to participate, to observe, to be touched by small, beautiful things.Unlike the traditional largeness of Indian weddings, this one was intimate. I didn’t know many people outside of my immediate family, and somehow, that didn’t matter. It wasn’t about who you knew. It was about who you were with. And being with each other, fully, was enough.I noticed early on that I didn’t have strong cell phone reception. At first, this bothered me. I couldn’t share pictures with my partner. Couldn’t get messages to go through to friends. Couldn’t check email or the markets during breaks. I felt disconnected from what was happening elsewhere, as if I was missing something. But after a day or so, that frustration began to shift. In the absence of connection elsewhere, space opened for connection here. A quieter kind, undistracted. I started leaving my phone behind entirely. There was nothing to check. Nothing to escape into. I realized I had not lost signal, I had gained presence.There was a stillness I hadn’t anticipated. It came not from effort, but from absence. No notifications. No images of somewhere else. Just here.One afternoon, a cousin asked if I’d join a group Bollywood dance. I said yes before thinking it through. Soon I found myself in a room with a dozen others, learning choreography together, most people laughing, everyone speaking in Hindi. I understood almost everything and said almost nothing. And that was okay. I wasn’t there to impress or perform. I was there to participate. There was kindness in the air. Encouragement. Playfulness. I was pulled into the momentum of shared movement. There are few things more connecting than learning a dance together in a small room. We moved, messed up, tried again. Laughed. Listened. Tried not to step on each other’s feet.Participation asks for something different than commentary. It asks for willingness. For trust. For a drop of courage. I was thankful I had said yes.Each day blurred into the next in the best way. Conversations stretched across meals, between ceremonies, while getting ready. People took pictures, but no one posed. Stories flowed. Laughter echoed. I noticed how much connection comes from proximity, not activity. Being next to someone, doing nothing, says more than a message ever can. There were no summaries of the last year of our lives. No thoughtful replies. No curated thoughts. There was only time. And attention.The absence of my phone felt, oddly, like receiving a gift, one I didn’t ask for, but maybe needed. It reminded me that the deepest kind of respect we can offer someone is not in what we say or do, but in where we are when we are with them. Attention is presence. Presence is love.When the ceremonies had ended, when the final meal had been shared and people began saying gentle goodbyes, I could feel something had shifted. As I stepped back into the pace of ordinary life, my phone returned to life. Messages flooded in, alerts demanded attention. But there was a soft disappointment in that. A sense that something had closed. Something that had required no scheduling, no planning, no optimizing. Just an honest container that allowed joy to emerge on its own.I remembered a conversation I once had about the difference between joy and enjoy. Joy, it was said, is something felt alone. Enjoy, something held together. These days, they weren’t just joyful. They were enjoyed.And that is how I learned to enjoy. --- --- ### How to Two For One Published: 2025-11-30 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/two-for-one/ I was in Colombo, Sri Lanka this past week. Not for the cyclone or the record-setting winds that were making international news, but for a friend’s wedding. As soon as people heard where I was, they responded with worry. Messages came asking if I was safe, if the wedding had been cancelled, if everything was a disaster. Meanwhile, on the ground, the wedding unfolded without a single issue. It poured the entire day and night, and we all embraced it. People laughed, danced, and celebrated as if the weather were just another guest. Everything went on as planned. It was beautiful in its own way.Later that evening, I asked the groom how he felt. He shared all the emotions you’d expect on a wedding day, joy, relief, and gratitude, but he also mentioned everything he thought had not gone according to their plan. All the small imperfections he noticed, the tiny details that slipped away from the original vision. I told him that, from my point of view as a guest, I hadn’t noticed anything out of place, and that the day felt perfect. He seemed genuinely surprised. Our experiences of the same event were completely different. He was holding onto his expectations; I didn’t have any.This contrast continued throughout the day. After the ceremony, I spoke with the bride’s parents and asked how they experienced it. They described it as “controlled chaos,” and I could see why. For someone unfamiliar with traditional South Asian weddings, the constant drums, the sitar, the many priests guiding the rituals, the constant movement, all the guests talking, and the noise can feel overwhelming. When they asked how I experienced it, I told them it felt like the express version. I explained that the weddings I grew up attending in India would go on for hours, often late into the night, and that I have childhood memories of falling asleep on the floor during them. Compared to that, this felt quick, quiet, and simple.The same ceremony, two completely different interpretations, each shaped by what we had come to expect. The bride’s parents are used to short, calm, structured ceremonies. I’m used to long, loud, and endless ones. We weren’t reacting to the event itself; we were reacting to the comparison our minds were making.Later at dinner, someone commented that the food was mild. I found it spicy. So which was it? The only honest answer is: both. It depends on who you ask. This pattern shows up everywhere once you start noticing it.I once read about a couples therapist who would take a clock off the wall and hold it between the couple on the couch. Then she’d ask each of them what they saw. One would say, “It’s three o’clock.” The other would say, “It’s the back of a clock.” They were both describing their truth, as they saw it. They were looking at the same thing from different sides.These experiences reminded me of something I’ve had to learn many times in my life: people will not see things the way I see them. That doesn’t make them wrong, and it doesn’t make me more right. And I won’t see things the way others do, and that doesn’t make me wrong either. It’s simply how different perspective will collide together.Being around other people, whether a partner, family, friends, colleagues, or strangers, means living inside a world of competing perspectives. Disagreement and misunderstanding are built into the structure of relationships. There’s no way around it. But there is a way through it. The antidote is understanding. It is the willingness to be curious about someone else’s perspective instead of judging it. It is loosening my grip on my own expectations long enough to see that someone else might be experiencing the same thing in an entirely different way.What I’ve found is that understanding another perspective doesn’t take away from my own. It adds to it. Instead of seeing only what I see, I get to learn how someone else saw it too. It deepens my experience. I get twice the insight, twice the meaning, twice the richness. It’s a way to get a two-for-one deal in life.Life is a constant reminder that most things aren’t inherently good or bad, chaotic or calm, perfect or flawed. They simply look different depending on where I stand. And the more open I am to that, the easier it becomes to move through the world with less friction and more ease. The thing doesn’t change. But my experience of it does.And that is how I learned to two-for-one. --- --- ### How to Relax Published: 2025-11-23 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/relax-lisbon/ Parking in Lisbon is a particular kind of stress. Narrow streets built for horses. Sidewalks that double as parking spots. The universal gesture of frustrated drivers circling the same blocks. The quiet competition for spaces. The mental mathematics of whether that spot is actually legal or just temporarily ignored by police.So when my partner and I drove to a dinner last week with friends, I was prepared for the usual hunt. But as I pulled into a parking lot near their building, something shifted. A recognition. I'd been here before. Many times, actually. My hands knew the turn. My body knew where the ticket machine stood. My nervous system, which had been gearing up for battle, suddenly...settled.It was such a small thing. A parking lot. But in that moment of recognition, I felt my entire body change states.These friends are also expats, also travellers. They keep Lisbon as their base but are rarely here. We were comparing notes on recent trips, upcoming journeys, the logistics of lives lived in motion. We visit many corners of the world, yet here we were, in this small city, finding ourselves returning to the same place."I love the novelty of travel," my friend was saying, "but lately..." She paused, searching for words. "Lately, I'm exhausted before I even leave."I knew exactly what she meant. Not tired in the body, but tired in some deeper system. The part of us that's constantly evaluating, constantly adjusting, constantly asking: Is this safe? Where's the exit? What are the rules here?There's a switch in our bodies most of us don't know we have. The sympathetic nervous system: fight or flight, scan and assess, stay ready. And the parasympathetic: rest and digest, settle and restore, let go.I used to think these states were about actual danger. Tigers and cliffs and genuine threats. But sitting at that dinner table, I realized how much of life is spent in sympathetic activation. Not from real danger, but from newness itself.Every new city. Every unfamiliar restaurant. Every hotel room where I wake up forgetting where I am. Each one asks my nervous system to stay vigilant. To keep scanning. To never quite relax.Travel puts us in sympathetic activation. It's not bad, it's why travel feels exciting, expansive, and alive. Our senses sharpen. Colours seem brighter. We notice everything because our body thinks we need to.But it takes resources. Tremendous resources. A subconscious expenditure that happens whether we notice it or not. Our body is running programs in the background: mapping escape routes we'll never need, memorizing faces we'll never see again, trying to understand if that sound is normal or notable.It's draining when it's continuous. When you live in perpetual arrival, you never actually arrive.The conversation drifted to what actually helps us relax. Not the marketed version of relaxation, like spa days and meditation apps, but the real thing. The deeper settling."Reading an author I know," someone said. "When I recognize their rhythm, their voice, I just...sink into it.""Coffee with my regular friend," another offered. "The one where we don't need to catch up because we never really fell behind."I thought about my own list. The old Portuguese lady at the café who nods when I enter. The way my feet know the route to the farmer’s market. The parking lot that remembers me.When something is familiar, my nervous system relaxes. It almost doesn't matter if the environment is chaotic or calm. That busy café where I know the rhythm, where my body knows the acoustic pattern, where the chaos is familiar chaos, I can relax there more deeply than in a peaceful place I've never been."What about scrolling?" my partner asked. "That's familiar. We do it every day."But we all knew the answer. Scrolling social media, watching YouTube videos are familiar but not settling. The nervous system knows the difference. Digital familiarity keeps one in sympathetic activation. Always scanning, filtering, trying to separate signal from noise. Your thumb knows the motion, but your body never quite trusts the environment.It's the difference between a familiar parking lot and a familiar slot machine. One lets you rest. The other keeps you pulling the lever.Four years in Lisbon. Four years of saying yes to invitations, to events, to coffees with near-strangers who became familiar faces. The openness and curiosity that brought me here has, without my noticing, built something else: a web of familiarity.The people feel familiar now. The roads feel familiar. Not routine, but familiar. There's a difference. Routine can be a cage. Familiar is a foundation.I've started designing for this. Another suitcase that lives in the places I return to. The same brand of clothing so my body doesn't have to adjust. A travel pack where everything has its place. Not minimalism—portable familiarity.These might seem like small optimizations, but they're not about efficiency. They're about giving my nervous system permission to relax. To trust. To stop scanning and to start settling. To be present instead of vigilant.My friend's daughter reads the same book every night. Has for months. She knows every word, every picture, every place to turn the page. We call this childish, but maybe children understand something we've forgotten: repetition isn't boring. It's how you go deeper.We're taught to grow out of this. To seek variety, novelty, and growth through change. But what if some growth comes through return? Through knowing something so well that you can finally stop monitoring it and start actually experiencing it.As we left dinner, walking back to that familiar parking lot, I thought about my own patterns. How I tend to park in the same kind of spot, never the closest, always with an easy exit. Order the same kind of food. Choose the same kind of friends.Parking in Lisbon is still stressful. The narrow streets haven't widened. The competition for spaces hasn't eased. But I know where the parking lots are now. I know which ones remember me. And in that knowing, that small, unglamorous knowing, my body has found something I didn't know I was looking for.Permission to finally relax. And that is how I learned to relax. --- --- ### How to Play Published: 2025-11-16 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/play-games/ Last week, we hosted a games night in Lisbon. Friends were arriving, drinks were being poured, my partner was in the kitchen making dinner. And I was at my screen.Not just physically at my screen, but trapped in it. The day's to-do list had grown tentacles. Each completed task had spawned two more. Emails marked urgent that weren't. Decisions that felt critical but probably weren't. The peculiar gravity of the laptop that pulls you in even when you know better.It wasn't until thirty minutes after everyone had arrived that I finally entered the room. My body had been in the apartment the whole time, of course. But I hadn't been. There's a difference between being present and being there, and everyone knew which one I was.I sat down at the table, still carrying the day with me like an invisible backpack. Someone was explaining the rules to a game. Cards were being passed around. And then something shifted.Maybe it was the weight of the cards in my hand. Physical. Real. Simple. Our bodies know things our minds forget, that presence often begins in the palms.I made my move. A choice that mattered not at all, and in that absence of consequence, something loosened. My shoulders dropped. My voice got louder. I could feel myself taking off the day like a coat I hadn't realized I was still wearing.I've known some of these people for years. But watching them play, I saw something I hadn't seen before. Not different expressions, something underneath. The venture capitalist who couldn't decide whether to trade or not. The designer who became ruthlessly strategic the moment the cards were dealt. The quiet friend who turned into a theatrical bluffer. People becoming more themselves, not less.There's something about games that reveals us. Not our professional selves, not our LinkedIn selves, and not our dinner party selves. But something earlier. Something we were before we learned to be who we are.I watched my own competitiveness emerge. The intensity with which I planned three moves ahead. The genuine disappointment when my strategy collapsed. The surprising joy in caring about something that didn't matter at all.Games are also the great equaliser. We live in hierarchies all day. Who reports to whom. Who gets heard in meetings. Who makes the decisions. But here, around this table, the dice don't care about your title. The cards don't know your salary. Your move is your move.I've noticed how some of my friends have started reading strategy guides for board games. Optimization creeping in even here. The inability to just play badly. But then someone makes a ridiculous move, everyone laughs, and we remember: the point isn't to play well. The point is to play.Somewhere during the second round, I noticed something. No one had checked their phone in over an hour. Not because we'd agreed not to. Not because of some digital detox pact. But because we were engaged in something that created its own temporal reality.Turn-based time. "Your move" as a unit of measurement.The focus that emerged wasn't the grinding focus of work. Not the heavy attention of deadlines and deliverables. This was something lighter. Attention without tension. The kind of focus that energises rather than depletes.Hours passed without anyone noticing. Games as time machines, not taking us backward, but removing us from time altogether. When was the last time three hours disappeared without screens, without content, without consumption? Just humans, around a table, moving pieces.I used to think growing up meant putting away childish things. Now I wonder if growing up means learning to pretend we don't need to play.We perform adulthood so continuously, so convincingly, that we forget it's a performance. The serious meetings. The important decisions. The urgent everything. We've gotten so good at the role that we've forgotten we're playing it.But games interrupt the performance. They don't ask you to be professional or productive or even particularly adult. They just ask you to play.As the evening wound down and people started leaving, I felt different. Lighter. The day's earlier urgencies were still there, but they seemed properly sized now. The to-do list that had felt existential at 6 PM looked almost quaint at midnight.My partner was cleaning up the kitchen. I picked up the dice, the cards, the pieces. Such simple objects. But they had done something profound. They had returned us to ourselves. Not our child selves, but our playing selves. The selves that know how to be present without trying, how to compete without consequence, how to care without weight.Maybe that's what we lose when we forget how to play. Not innocence or simplicity, but a kind of fundamental presence. The ability to be fully in something that doesn't matter, which might be practice for being fully in things that do.The next morning, I opened my laptop to the same urgent emails, the same growing to-do list. But something was different. I had remembered something I'd forgotten I'd forgotten: I know how to play.And that is how I learned to play. --- --- ### How to Stop Published: 2025-11-09 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/stop/ We were sitting at lunch on a quiet afternoon in Lisbon. A friend was visiting, passing through for a few days, carrying with him the subtle weight of a question he wasn’t exactly asking, how to slow down. He spoke of a growing desire to step back, to soften his pace, to live differently. I listened. I nodded. I smiled.Then I paused.And in that pause, I began to wonder if I had anything true to say. It’s been four years since I stepped down from the role of CEO. Four years since I moved to Portugal and left behind a version of life that once pulsed with urgency. From the outside, it might look like I slowed down. But from the inside, the story feels less certain.Last week, I was in London. A city I know well. A city that knows me well, too. Almost without thinking, I filled my calendar. Booked back-to-back appointments. Walked fast. Talked faster. Fit it all in. And as the days went by, I realized no one had asked this of me. No one expected it. I did. I carried that rhythm with me, like an old jacket I didn’t realize I was still wearing.There was a kind of pride in the packed schedule. A subtle satisfaction in moving with speed. And yet, a quiet voice inside was asking: who is this for?I used to think slowing down was a destination. That leaving my title and office behind would be enough. That changing countries would change tempo. But the truth is, nervous systems aren’t updated by job titles or postal codes. Habits don’t surrender as easily as business cards do.Productivity, I’m learning, dresses itself up in new costumes. When it’s not work, it’s social plans. When it’s not meetings, it’s creative projects. Momentum doesn’t care about the source, it just wants to keep going.Which got me thinking: maybe I haven’t been slowing down at all. Maybe I’ve just been rebranding movement. Walking a little slower, but still circling the same track. What if the real shift isn’t in how fast I move, but in whether I move at all?A few days into the London trip, one of my planned apartment stays suddenly fell through. I found myself with a free morning, an opening in my day that hadn’t been there before. I thought I'd feel relief. Instead, I felt unease. That agitated impulse to do something with the time. Make the most of it. Fill the blank space.It was startling to notice just how uncomfortable stopping can feel. Not because there's so much to do. But because of how much of my identity has been built upon motion.There’s a kind of fear in stopping. Of becoming invisible. Of being seen as less useful, less successful, less relevant. We treat rest as recovery only when we believe we’ve earned it. As though permission must be granted.But what if stopping isn’t failure or retreat? What if it’s something else entirely?On flights. On silent retreats. In meditation. During fasting. These have become small training grounds. Moments where life slows not by choice, but by condition. My body, when offered stillness, doesn’t always welcome it. There’s discomfort. Restlessness. A buzzing under the skin. But over time, something loosens. Something softens. And in that softening, there's a remembering of something older than movement.I’ve started to feel that stopping isn't absence. It’s presence of a different kind. Not a void, but a clearing. Not an end, but a pause that allows something new to take root.Trees don’t slow down for winter. They stop. They shed. They enter stillness with a kind of grace not born from effort but from rhythm. And then, without effort, they bloom again. Nature doesn't try to find a better pace. It simply listens to its own internal seasons. Maybe that is what’s needed, not to force a slower life, but to listen for where life is asking to rest.Perhaps slowing down is still, in some hidden way, about achievement. Stopping, though, asks for something else. It asks for surrender.Not necessarily of everything. Even a single meeting left unscheduled. A moment not filled. A breath taken without intention. These can be stops.It doesn't have to be dramatic. It can be quiet. Gentle. A choosing not to move forward just for the sake of motion. A willingness to not replace what has ended with something new, at least not right away.Toward the end of lunch, my friend and I sat in silence. The kind of silence that comes not from lack of things to say, but from the weight of something understood. We smiled. Not in certainty, but in recognition.Maybe what we’re learning isn’t how to slow down. Maybe we’re just remembering how to stop.And that is how I learned to stop. --- --- ### How to Time Travel Published: 2025-11-02 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/timetravel/ This morning, I woke up naturally and peacefully. There was a stillness in the room that I couldn’t place at first. The light outside looked softer somehow, as if the sky hadn't yet remembered what time it was. The clock said one time, but my body insisted it was different.Then I realized that the clocks had changed. Daylight Savings.That small, strange ritual of shifting time forward or back. I had gained an hour this time.The thought made me smile. It was like waking up and finding a twenty-dollar bill in a coat pocket I hadn’t worn since last winter. A feeling of having received something, even though nothing really changed. Time, it seemed, had slipped me a gift.And almost just as quickly, came the next thought: What should I do with it?Like most gifts, it came with a subtle pressure to use it well. An extra hour. It could mean catching up on sleep. Replying to texts I’ve let linger too long. Folding that laundry in the corner. Reading that article I've had open in a tab for three days.It was revealing, this impulse to fill the time, to catch up. To not let the hour go to waste.That urgency exposed something: a quiet belief that I’m behind. Not just today, but in general. Always catching up. Always returning to undone tasks and unopened intentions, to versions of myself lingering in the past, requesting attention.Time so easily becomes something to manage, to optimize, to spend carefully. It becomes a kind of currency: traded, stored, budgeted. There are entire industries, philosophies, even identities built on “time management.”But I've started to notice that some of the richest moments in my life are the ones I didn’t try to manage at all. Sitting with my partner on the couch, saying nothing. Stirring a pot on the stove, lost in the rhythm. Watching the sky turn gold, then violet, then blue.Time seems to stretch in those moments. Maybe not stretch, exactly. Maybe it just stops being measured. And when it stops being measured, it starts being felt.That’s what mindfulness has offered for me. Not more hours in the day, but a softer relationship to them. The sense that time isn’t only about what I do in it, but how I meet it.Sometimes I meet time by rushing through it. Other times, time seems to meet me, when I'm still enough to notice.This morning presented a small but clear choice: I could spend the hour catching up on what I missed or invite something new into this space I’d suddenly found.That felt luxurious. Less because of what I’d do, and more because of the awareness itself. To hold time not just as a ticking clock, but as an open hand.It struck me, lying there, not yet committed to the day ahead, that I hadn’t gained an hour, I had simply noticed one.And maybe that’s all that’s ever happening. Time is neither gained nor lost, saved nor spent. It’s just here, waiting to be noticed.Next year, when the clocks fall back again, I hope I remember this feeling. That I don’t need more time. I just need fewer reasons to leave the time I already have.And that is how I learned to time travel. --- --- ### How to Diwali Published: 2025-10-19 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/diwali2/ Growing up, Diwali was the literal and figurative brightest time of the year for me. Not because of the fireworks or the lights, though there were plenty of both. But because of something quieter, something steadier. A sense of belonging. A sense of rhythm. Ritual.There were certain rituals that only came alive once a year. Decorating the house with candles and diyas, stringing decorations by hand, and helping in the kitchen with foods we never made at any other time of the year.Sweets that filled the home with their comforting scent before they ever reached a plate. The ritual of getting dressed, not just in new clothes but in the anticipation it brought. Staying up late, gathering in rooms full of conversation and laughter, sometimes skipping school the next day. None of it seemed extraordinary then. It was just what we did.But now, looking back, I see how much of what mattered could be found in the repetition. And how ritual, in its own way, etched memory into feeling for me.A ritual often begins as something ordinary. A gesture, a moment, an object. Lighting a flame. Sharing a meal. Cleaning a home. But done with care, and done again, it becomes something more. It becomes a way to remember. A way to feel anchored in who we are and where we come from. The power lies not in the act, but in the asking: what does this mean, and what does it remind me to feel?Diwali marks the Indian New Year, a symbolic turning of the page. It’s described as the Festival of Lights, a celebration of good over evil, of light over darkness. But these emotions aren’t just ancient, they’re current. Darkness today feels less mythical and more personal. It looks like burnout. Numbness. Loneliness. Disconnection. In this context, lighting a candle isn’t just a tradition. It becomes something else. A soft declaration that warmth is possible. That we still choose to gather, to care, to see light where it's hard to find.For a long time, I believed rituals were inherited. That they came pre-shaped by culture, by family, by history. But what I’ve come to understand is that while we may inherit the forms, what we’re really passing on is the feeling. The values. The spirit. Some rituals remain untouched because they still resonate. Others are softened, or even set aside. And some are entirely remade.This has become more real recently, in the quiet practice of building a shared life with my partner in Lisbon. Two sets of stories, two ways of doing things, gently converging. And a chance not to replicate someone else’s ritual, but to create our own, together. To preserve the essence without feeling confined by the shape. To ask: what do we want to feel? How do we want to celebrate? And what expressions feel honest to us, here and now?There’s freedom in that. And also a quiet responsibility. To be intentional. To craft not only celebrations, but rhythms. The little things count more than they seem. A morning coffee. A walk on Sundays. A pause before the day begins. A journal entry that no one else will read. These too are rituals. Repeated gestures, not of productivity, but of presence. Not to escape the world as it is, but to meet it more fully, and with care.This Diwali, I feel myself holding the past and the present together. Remembering a childhood version of myself who lit sparklers and watched the candles burn late into the night. But also noticing a quieter flame now. That of curiosity. Of gratitude. Of partnership. And with it, a simple question: what does this moment want to express through me?Not every answer is clear. But that’s never really the point. The ritual is not the answer. It’s how I listen, to something deeper.And that is how I learned to Diwali. --- --- ### How to Dubai Published: 2025-10-18 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/dubai/ The moment we stepped off the plane, something felt different. I couldn’t say what it was exactly, just that there was no friction. No pause. No lines. No disappointment. No hitch in the process that usually accompanies travel and immigration. We moved from terminal to taxi to hotel without stopping, without waiting, without wondering. Everything worked. And that felt like a surprise.Travel is a constant in life right now for my partner and I. A new country every month, more or less. I’ve come to expect stumbles at borders, bureaucracy in transit, an undercurrent of disorder that feels inevitable. So when nothing went wrong, when the roads were immaculate, the cars silent, the immigration process a mere glance into a scanner, I noticed the absence. The absence of aggravation. Of chaos. Of stress. And that absence made room for something else.There was a calm in Dubai. Not a sleepy stillness, but an active one. A city moving forward with so little friction that the presence of forward motion feels inspiring. People drive with awareness. Systems seemed to anticipate needs. A place designed, not just built.I hadn’t realized how accustomed I had become to expecting failure. To anticipating delays. To lowering expectations so as not to bump into disappointment. But here, things just worked. Not just once, but again and again. The gentle relief that followed each system functioning as it should had a cumulative effect. Like a nervous system remembering how to relax. Like trust rebuilding itself, quietly, in the simple act of things being ready when they’re needed.There was something else I began to notice. Rules, but not rigidity. Order, but not obsession. There was a logic to it all that felt human, not perfect, but sane. Like the people making the decisions had paused long enough to ask, “Does this make sense?” And most often, they seemed to answer, “Yes.”A few nights in, over dinner with my cousin who lives there, a conversation about governance emerged. About how leadership works differently here. Not as a function of democracy, but as something centralized, and in some way, more coherent. The public sector leads. The government isn't an observer or resistor of change, it’s the one driving it. Like a company thinking in decades, building a brand, investing in infrastructure not just for the next vote, but for the next generation.It felt surreal, this idea that a government could operate with the managerial clarity of a business. Ministries as departments. Leaders as stewards. A sense of order not for its own sake, but in service of something larger. A country as a company, not in the commodified sense, but in the methodical, clear-eyed, purposeful one.I ran a company as CEO for 15 years and understand at my core what it takes to think long-term. To have a vision. A strategy. And a purpose beyond the next quarter or cycle. This is maybe why I felt a deep respect for aspects of what I saw in Dubai.We visited a museum called the Museum of the Future. I expected something over-produced, a vanity project built for tourists. But it landed as something else entirely. A structure that felt not like an exhibition, but like a prototype. Rooms filled with concepts that, somehow, didn’t feel far off. Personalized medicine, reforestation strategies, vertical cities, archives of DNA in delicate glass casings. There was even a flying taxi, planned for pilot launch in just a few months from now.It felt like seeing what was once only speculative become visible. Plausible. Perhaps even inevitable.And that did something inside me. I found myself believing, not just in outcomes, but in the processes that lead to them. In the scaffolding behind dreams.The contrast, though, was most alive the next day. When we landed in Lisbon. A city I love for so many reasons. But that love was interrupted by a harsh return. An immigration line that stretched the length of the terminal. A grumpy crowd of tired tourists. No messages, no updates, no apology. Just a collective remembering: this isn’t a place where systems work. Not always, and not well.I found myself missing the future I had just left behind. And yet, I was standing in the present.This gap between what is and what could be held me. Both Lisbon and Dubai offered opposing reflections. One wrapped in nostalgia, beauty, and inertia. The other wrapped in ambition, clarity, and pace. They both told truths. And they both held a kind of seduction.In Dubai, we visited the Burj Khalifa before leaving. The tallest building in the world. At the base, a small shop sold miniature replicas, silver figurines that shimmered under spotlights. One now sits on my desk in Lisbon. A reminder of what momentum can feel like. Of what vision can build. There’s a quote from the man behind its creation, etched into the walls of the visitor center. “I had never built a building before. Neither had my father or mother. But we had a dream.” It was built in four years. It takes four years in Lisbon to get a permit to build an extension to a house.It’s hard not to smile at that. A simple truth. Nothing inherited except imagination.Dubai is not without its complications. No place is. And this reflection is not a celebration of perfection, but an acknowledgement of potential. That even in a desert, where life should be impossible, systems can be made to thrive. Not in theory, but in practice.Maybe that is the thing that stayed with me most. That possibility is not abstract. It’s physical. It’s breathable. It’s visible in polished roads and timed lights, in architecture that invites awe, in cities that feel alive not because they’re old, but because they’re intentional.We often speak of the future like it’s far away. Like it’s something to wait for. But sometimes the future is already here. Called into existence by those who dare to imagine it. Who dare to begin.And that is how I learned to Dubai. --- --- ### How to White Pajamas Published: 2025-10-12 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/wp/ The car rolled up to the gates, and I already knew the drill. It had been a year and a half since the last time, but the memory felt close. The warmth of the air, the smiles on each face that greeted us, the quiet dignity in their movements. A small ritual welcomed us, along with a clipboard and a pen. Within minutes, we were led to our room, and handed our first instruction: to put on our white pajamas.No explanation. No options. Just a reminder of what we had signed up for. This would be our uniform, day and night, for the next three weeks.There’s something disarming about being told what to wear. Especially when the choice is removed so completely. The color, the shape, the fabric. All decided.It felt oddly comforting.Maybe it was because so much else would be decided too. What we’d eat. When we’d eat. How often we’d see the doctor. When to rest, when to stretch, when to move. It’s a rare thing, to enter a space where autonomy becomes unnecessary. Even rarer still to feel at peace with that.This was an Ayurvedic detox program, called Panchakarma. Ayurveda, literally translated to the ‘science of life’, is a 5,000-year-old ancient form of Indian medicine that sees illness not as a disruption to be zapped away with quick fixes, but as something to understand, to gradually unwind.Less than twenty guests are taken in at a time at the hospital my partner and I went to. It’s not a holiday. It’s not even really a retreat. It’s a hospital. A gentle, comfortable and luxurious one. Where the primary prescription is silence, warm herbal oils massaged into your body twice a day, and meals made uniquely for your body’s state, determined each morning by the doctor’s assessment. We met with the doctor twice daily. And over time, I began to look forward not just to what he’d say, but to not needing to figure it out on my own.We didn’t leave the grounds. Not once for three weeks. There was nothing to buy, nowhere to go. No packages arriving, no errands to attend to. Devices are only permitted only inside the bedroom. Music, reading, talking are all not allowed during meals. Eating was intentional, focused and peaceful. Each guest at their own small table. Just food and focus.At first, all of this control felt strange. Mechanical. But soon, something shifted. The routine didn’t feel like restriction. It felt like rhythm.We drank only warm water. Ginger-infused. Sometimes plain. The taste, initially flat, began to warm me from the inside. After a few days, I noticed I wasn’t missing cold drinks, or coffee, or dessert. I wasn’t missing anything, really.The food was always prepared within the hour of being served. Fresh, simple, warm. No microwaves. No leftovers. Every meal nourishing in a way I hadn’t experienced before. Not indulgent, not sparse, just clean. I began to feel that in my joints, in my energy, in my sleep. Not because I slept more, but because I finally became aware of what it felt like to feel rested, instead of exhausted and crashing into unconsciousness each night.My partner and I shared a room. We’d made the decision to come together, and it added a dimension I hadn’t expected. The vulnerability of sharing everything, including bodily discomforts, emotional waves, fears, and fatigue, brought us closer than many conversations ever could. Small acts emerged from that closeness without needing to be asked. Those gestures became part of our language for the three weeks.There were moments when discomfort rose quickly. The treatments can be intense. They involve purging, not just metaphorically. Liquids going in and and coming out of most holes in our body. I didn’t need to react. I just needed to be still.Something about being cared for so completely, without needing to solve, manage, or even understand everything, was deeply emotional. There was a tenderness I didn’t realize I had been craving: someone asking the right questions, placing their hands with trust, making food not to impress or entertain, but simply to help me feel whole.After a few days, I stopped thinking about what day it was. Not in a relieved, vacation kind of way, but in a different way altogether. A slow dissolving of my sense of urgency. I began to use energy only when it was needed. And saved the rest for detoxing and healing.The transformation wasn’t dramatic. It was gradual. Physical signs came first. A leaner body, lighter limbs, clearer skin, less tension in my shoulders. But the deeper shifts continued unfolding afterwards. A quieter mind. A softer heart. A feeling of being safe, of being held. Not by any one person, but by myself.Last year, after my first time, I was so inspired by the experience that I wrote a short book detailing each day. I shared a draft with my parents, and they were curious enough to go later in the year. They still feel the benefits more than one year later to this day.Not everyone will find their feet arriving at a place like this. The time, the cost, the logistics, are not always accessible. This is also why I wrote a book as I believe that many of the practices and philosophies, despite being ancient, are as applicable to this day and even more needed in a modern lifestyle.The idea that silence can be healing. That food can be slow. That surrender is not abandoning ourselves but coming closer to who we really are beneath the choices and habits and preferences that usually define us.Wearing white pajamas was required. But over time, it began to feel like a gift. A way to disappear and unearth oneself in the same breath.And that is how I learned to white pajamas. --- White Pajamas: 17 Days at an Ayurveda Luxury Wellness Retreat is available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle. --- --- ### How to Action Published: 2025-10-04 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/action/ Most days, it's easy to focus on the surface. The task in front of me, the commitment in my calendar, the decision needing to be made. And so I go ahead. I move, I speak, I act. But lately, I’ve been pausing more often to consider what I’m actually bringing to those actions. What sits underneath them, influencing the action.There’s the action I take. And then there’s the energy behind that action. I've begun to notice just how different the experience can be when the energy shifts, even when the action looks exactly the same.Going to the gym has been a regular part of my routine for years. But recently, I’ve started to notice the quiet but powerful force that determines whether I leave feeling full or depleted. Some days, the energy is light, even excited. I'm curious to move, curious to see what my body can do, glad to have music in my ears and time to myself. Those days, I exert a lot of energy, yet somehow leave even more energized.Other days, I show up from a place that feels heavier. The motivation is fear. Fear of what might happen if I don’t go, fear of losing momentum, of not being enough. And while the workout may look the same from the outside, when I leave, I feel drained. Like something was taken, not given. Same action. Different energy.I’ve started to see this pattern show up in other places. In conversations, in decisions, in everyday interactions. Whether I’m responding to an email, moving through a crowded airport, or offering support to someone else, there’s always something humming underneath. I didn’t used to pay attention to this. But now I am starting to.A few weeks ago, I watched a young child being asked to clean up their toys. The parent’s words were kind, but the energy behind them wasn’t. There was stress, frustration, and impatience barely hidden beneath the surface. The child pushed back. Not against the request, but, as I sensed it, against the energy. It reminded me of moments in my own life when I’ve said all the right things but felt none of the alignment. And wondered later why it didn’t land.Behind every decision is a reason, but behind every reason is a tone. That tone isn’t always logical. It’s emotional, intuitive, wordless. It doesn’t always emerge in a coherent sentence, but it’s always there, like background music I didn’t know was playing until I leave the room.Lately, I’ve begun asking myself: what is my real intention here? Not the stated reason, or the justification, but the quiet motivation beneath the surface. Am I writing this because I want to share, or because I need to be seen? Am I saying yes from generosity or from fear of missing out? Am I praying out of surrender or out of panic?Sometimes the answers surprise me. And the simple act of noticing often shifts something. It’s not about correcting or editing the intention, not in a performative sense. It’s more like an unconscious pattern stepping into the light. The intention softens. Clarifies. Comes into alignment on its own.I used to think an action was enough. That doing the thing carried its own virtue. But now I’m starting to see that action is only part of the experience. The intention shapes the weight of it, its reception, its echo.There have been moments when I paused long enough to sense that I was about to act from fear. A speaking engagement accepted out of anxiety rather than joy. A message composed from insecurity rather than care. And I’ve found that bringing attention to this intention sometimes changes the action itself. At the very least, it changes how I feel about it.Even silence can carry intention. Not speaking out of restraint is different than not speaking out of indifference. And I think others feel that, just as I do.This reflection hasn’t made me perfect or consistent. But it’s made me more aware. And with awareness comes choice. Not a forced choice, but a natural one. When the action aligns with a true intention, it feels quieter. Lighter. Whole.It’s not about doing better. It’s about being honest. About noticing what I’m truly bringing to each moment. When I don’t, then fear, habit, or ego will decide for me.And that is how I learned to Action. --- --- ### How to Stretch Published: 2025-09-28 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/stretch/ It was a simple cue. To fold forward, lengthening the spine. One I’ve followed hundreds, maybe thousands of times before. But this time, my hamstrings resisted. The stretch stopped short of where I remember it landing. And without warning, a wave of frustration rolled in.Class had only just begun, but already my mind was somewhere else. Comparing, judging, remembering what once was. The awareness came with a slight sting. Not just in the body, but deeper. Something closer to grief.I’ve practiced yoga for more than ten years. I practically lived at the studio in New York for a season, completed my teacher training, found my people, my rhythm, and for a while, my purpose. It wasn't just a habit, it was home. I remember being able to glide into postures that now feel distant. Back then, showing up to the mat was effortless. Natural.Over time, things changed. I started going less often. At first, I explained it away. New gym routines, changing goals, shifting interests. There was some truth to that. And still, a deeper truth lingered: that maybe I had been avoiding the practice because in it, I could no longer hide from what had changed. My body, my limits, myself.It’s far easier to gravitate toward the things that feel good, that feed the parts of identity we’re proud of. Easier to convince myself that I’m still that person from before, somewhere underneath. That I’m simply choosing differently now. But sitting in that yoga class, I began to wonder if some choices have more to do with protection than preference.Avoidance is clever that way. It can wear the mask of mindfulness. Of strategy. Of maturity even. But sometimes, it's just fear, dressed up and given a name that makes it easier to live with.That class became a mirror. Not just for my body, but for other areas where I’ve noticed a similar softening. Mental focus that doesn’t stretch quite as far as it used to. A conversation that tires me faster than expected. A book I want to read that sits untouched. Long flights I now hesitate to take. Languages, Portuguese, Hindi, French, that once lived easily in me, now peeking out only in small fragments.Seeing this changing landscape within myself has been humbling. At one time, any limit was a challenge. Something to work with. Push through. Solve. The drive to overcome was a source of motivation, and, in some ways, identity.But something has shifted. The instinct to push has grown quieter. In its place, a new kind of response is emerging. Softer. Slower. Less about returning to what was, and more about meeting what is.Maturity, perhaps, isn't marked by how many limits are overcome, but by how many are recognized and embraced. By the subtle courage it takes to sit with the truth of one's capacity, without recoiling in shame or rushing to fix.Midway through that yoga class, my internal narrative began to change. The judgment softened. The comparison receded. I was still folding forward, still not reaching where I used to. But something in how I met the moment changed. The resistance wasn’t gone, but it no longer defined the experience.I began to see the limitation not as a wall, but as a doorway. An invitation into a different kind of relationship with myself. One where the body need not perform to be accepted. One where effort does not need to be proven.In that practice, a shift: from fighting to holding. Holding the limitation closer, not as a flaw to correct but as a shape to understand. The same body, the same breath, but a different awareness.Over time, what once felt like a limit becomes something else entirely. Not a boundary, just a shape. Not a failure, just a fact. And in seeing it without resistance, something else opens. Not wider, but deeper.I used to think growth was about getting stronger, faster, better. Now I wonder if it's about getting quieter, softer, truer. Learningnot to give up, but to give in to what is.The mat is rolled up. The postures are forgotten. What remains is a presence that wasn't there at the start. And that is how I learned to stretch. --- --- ### How to Listen Published: 2025-09-21 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/listen/ A friend was reflecting with me after a few weeks of travel that he felt depleted and worn out. I had also been traveling for a few weeks, yet I didn’t feel the same. I didn’t feel drained, I felt energized.We began tracing the shape of our experiences. Where had he been? Who had he been with? What had his days looked like? His voice softened as he spoke. Beneath the words, a quiet disengagement. It was clear the places hadn’t really felt like his, and the people, though familiar, weren’t those who met him where he was.Then he asked me the same questions. And as I described the past few weeks, I found myself smiling. I had been in settings that sparked something, new friendships, different perspectives. Even when tired, I wasn’t tired in a hollow way. I was tired in the full way, like after a good workout.It made me pause. How could two apparently similar circumstances leave us with such different experiences?We often speak about time. We often think about money. But rarely do we give much attention to energy. And yet, energy seems to quietly guide far more than either of the other two.Money is easy to measure. Trackable in numbers and statements, visible in balance sheets and budgets. Time can be organized, capacity calculated by blocks in a calendar. But energy, what is that? It doesn’t follow the same rules. It doesn’t sit still long enough to be charted.And yet, it has been becoming more important. Perhaps that's what begins to change as some of the other questions around money or time become more settled. Energy becomes the third resource. Invisible, unmeasurable, but unmistakably felt.I notice how much more I reflect on where it comes from and where it leaks. There are no tools for this. Only patterns. Sensations. Recollections. A sense of brightness after a conversation. A subtle exhaustion after another. A sudden alertness when starting a new project. A mysterious fatigue when continuing an old one.There seem to be three places I look when I try to notice my energy: people, places, projects.People are often the most unpredictable source. Sometimes, sitting with a friend I’ve known for years feels nourishing, effortless. We don’t even need to say much. Other times, the same connection feels strained, like something between us is misaligned. Often it has less to do with the other and more to do with me. My state, my openness, my capacity to be with whatever shows up. Meeting new people can be thrilling or tiring. It depends not just on who they are, but on who I am when I meet them.Places hold their own charge as well. Some cities pull something out from within, make a mind race, a spirit stretch. New York did that for me for years. But the same city that once lit me up began to wear me down. Everything required more energy than I realized I was spending. Lisbon, in recent years, offers a different rhythm. A slowness that feels restorative. But even peaceful places can become dull if momentum fades. Sometimes too much calm begins to press into stagnantly.Projects are perhaps where this exchange becomes most vivid. The joy of starting something new. The spark of excitement when an idea lands and begins to find form. I feel that often these days, particularly exploring things with AI. That current of curiosity that energizes. But projects are not immune to becoming heavy, when they ask for skills I haven’t yet developed, or when the purpose behind them dims. Administrative work, repetitive tasks, uninteresting priorities, all these feel like small but steady leaks of energy.What makes it more complex is how none of these areas are static. What gives energy today might ask for it tomorrow. The same person, the same city, the same work. Everything shifts in relationship to the season of life I find myself in. The same conversation that yesterday lifted me, today lands differently.And so I’ve stopped trying to manage my energy. Not because it can’t be done, but because management implies control. And control isn’t what energy seems to need. What I’ve started doing, instead, is listening.Just noticing. After a day ends, quietly asking: what gave something back? What quietly took something away?Not always acting on that noticing. Sometimes there are things that require showing up to regardless of the energy they demand. But in the awareness, I find something subtle recalibrates on its own. No need to optimize or restructure or intervene. Just attention. And attention, I’ve found, opens something far better than a plan.In the end, it was that conversation with my friend that brought all of this to the surface.There is no spreadsheet for this. No formula, no metric. Just a quiet question that rides beneath experience: does this give energy, or does it take my energy?And that is how I learned to listen. --- --- ### How to AI Published: 2025-08-30 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/somethingnew/ For the past few years, I’ve been orbiting the world of AI. I’ve written about it, built around it, and followed it closely enough that its changes feel personal. It’s something I genuinely enjoy, an intersection of curiosity and creation. And like many others, I’ve welcomed small ripples of it into my daily life.I’ve used chatbots to brainstorm, summarize, rewrite, organize. Each use quietly functional. A little faster here, a little smoother there. But always within the realm of the familiar. AI was helping me do what I already knew how to do. That made sense. That felt safe.But it also felt… flat.Faster didn’t necessarily mean better. Just quicker variations of an already known thing. And after a while, I noticed I wasn’t learning much. I was just moving through tasks more efficiently. The shape of the work stayed the same.Something shifted recently though. Without deciding to, I began using AI in a different way. Not to accelerate what I already understood, but to attempt something unfamiliar. A kind of quiet boundary was crossed. I started using it for things I didn’t know how to do. Things I avoided because I felt unqualified. Or incapable. Or simply unsure.That openness surprised me.At first, it was a technical observation. I have access to a tool that knows much more than I do. So why not use it? But the real question became emotional. Why hadn’t I used it this way before?It wasn’t about function. It was about fear.There’s a particular discomfort in not knowing how to do something. Not just the not-knowing, but all that surrounds it. Feeling exposed, unqualified, behind. Even when no one is watching, there can be embarrassment. The subtle pull to return to what is known can be strong.What made the difference now?I think it was a mix of things. Some practical. Some personal. Over lunch recently, a friend reflected something to me I hadn’t fully named. That to do something unfamiliar requires humility. A softening of ego. A willingness to not have all the answers, or any answers. It requires emotional capacity. Not just time, but energy. Space inside.For me, there was also a kind of remembering. I started a company at 20. I had no idea how to build an organization, raise money, hire people. Everything I did, I was doing for the first time. There was a lot I got wrong. And back then, that felt okay. The pressure to be polished hadn’t taken hold yet. Mistakes were expected. Even welcomed.I think I had unlearned that along the way with success. Grown accustomed to the illusion and identity of competence. The safety of operating inside a box labeled “things I’m good at.” It’s a soft trap. Comfort masquerading as ease. After all, doing what I’m good at feels good. It’s stable, predictable, efficient. But over time, it can also be numbing.I’ve noticed how rarely I give myself permission to try something I don’t know how to do. Not because the stakes are high. Often, they’re not. But because the fear of failing, of not being good, tugs quietly at the edges. So I stay inside the frame. Efficient. Capable. Stuck.But here’s what I’ve been discovering.When I use AI to try something I don’t know how to do—not to polish, but to explore—I find myself feeling something I didn’t expect: satisfaction. Even when it doesn’t work. Especially when it doesn’t work. Because when it doesn’t work, I try again. I ask a different question. I take a screenshot. I probe. I iterate. I learn.I don’t see these early failures as failures. They’re just part of the process. Like trying a new piece in a puzzle without knowing where it fits. There’s no shame in getting it wrong. There’s only information.And because AI doesn’t judge. Because it’s patient, immediate and available, it makes the process easier. Not less challenging, but less personal. I can be clumsy without consequence. That feels rare. And spacious.None of this is really about AI. It could be a person. A book. A blank page.It’s about something else. Choosing to try to do something I don’t know how to do. To experiment before expertise. To do before knowing how. To allow myself to be not good and to do it anyway. That’s not a technical capability. That’s emotional permission.And I’ve realized how deeply satisfying that is.Not because it’s productive or efficient. Not because it leads to something useful. But simply because it expands something inside. A reminder that I am not fixed. That I can try. That I can learn. That I can grow.And that is how I learned to AI. --- --- ### How to Unplan Published: 2025-08-30 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/unplan2/ There was a time, not long ago, when booking flights felt like a form of self-care. I would sit with tabs open, measuring layovers like puzzle pieces, lining up departure times with sleep schedules and sunlight. The choices felt precise. Refined. A satisfying kind of order would settle after clicking the final button. The destination was chosen. The plan was made. Some small corner of the future had been neatly put away.And yet, more and more, I notice how rarely life goes as planned.It’s not subtle. Looking back on the past few months, three out of every four flights I book, I don’t take. I cancel them. Change them. Move them to a different day, or a different city altogether. The destinations shift. The timelines move. The ideas that once felt so certain become soft around the edges.At first, it felt like a practical problem. Something to optimize. Better forecasting, clearer communication, more decisive decision-making. But something deeper kept nudging. An unease that this wasn’t about poor planning at all. This was about the need to plan in the first place.There’s something seductive about having a plan. It gives the illusion of direction, of preparedness, of control. When a flight is booked, there’s less room for doubt. When dates are in calendars and confirmations in my inbox, I can tuck them away. A kind of quiet knowing: I’ve done it. The future is accounted for.But it never is, really.I used to believe planning was practical. Economical. That flights were cheaper when booked ahead, that being early meant being smart. It turns out, that’s not always true. Especially in places like Europe, where price protections exist and common routes are well-traveled. Waiting isn’t necessarily more expensive. Sometimes, it’s quite the opposite.But even when it is more expensive, the trade-off has changed.There’s a cost to locking my future self in, from the vantage point of today. To deciding where I’ll want to be, what I’ll want to do, before I get there. The emotions I use to justify my plans—the logic of saving money, of protecting my calendar—are often just that: justifications. I find myself talking logic to defend a deeper need for certainty.And I’ve started to notice how emotional that need really is.Oliver Burkeman, in “Four Thousand Weeks,” writes that planning is how we try to control the future. I keep returning to that phrase. It makes me smile, partly because of how innocently true it is, partly because of how absurd it becomes once seen clearly. Of course the future cannot be controlled. Not entirely. And more importantly—why would I want to?What felt like effective travel planning slowly began to feel like something else entirely. A kind of performance. A script that became harder to follow as life’s tempo shifted. I began to wonder if the pattern was pointing to something deeper.Maybe the canceled flights weren’t mistakes after all. Maybe they pointed to something right.So much of the inner work I’ve done in the last decade—through meditation, therapy, personal reflection—has been about cultivating awareness. Presence. Closeness to reality. And that decisions made from presence will feel more grounded than decisions made from prediction.Maybe all these changed plans are not a failure to commit, but a growing capacity to listen. A willingness to say yes to what is happening right now, rather than what was planned.There are still moments when planning is necessary. Especially when involving others: family trips, group dinners, business meetings. When more people are involved, more coordination is needed. That’s real. But when it’s just me, or just my partner and I, that need softens.There’s more room to respond to the present. More room to let the present shape the plan, rather than forcing the plan onto the present.Sometimes that means booking a flight only a few days before leaving. Sometimes that means not booking at all. And sometimes it means changing something that, from a practical lens, "should" have worked, but from a deeper knowing, no longer does.It might cost more in fees. That’s okay. It’s a small price to pay for closer alignment to my reality.The shift, I’ve realized, is from control to freedom. Not freedom as chaos, but as responsiveness. Gentleness. Trust. The trust that life can be met in real time, not always prearranged. That clarity doesn’t always come months in advance. Sometimes it arrives on the morning of departure.And in those moments, I’d rather be free than prepared.The map still matters. But the roads that get drawn now are softer lines. They can be erased. Rewritten. Or simply walked, one breath at a time.I don’t always know exactly when or where I’m going anymore.But I feel closer to wherever I am.And that is how I learned to Unplan. --- --- ### How to Unpattern Published: 2025-08-30 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/unpattern/ The apartment was quiet when I returned. The suitcase waited untouched by the door, though I was already unpacking in other ways.Lisbon was exactly as I’d left it, the soft light through the windows, the smell of the summer heat lingering faintly in the air. Familiarity returned quickly. But something inside took longer to arrive. It was still somewhere up in the mountains.We had been in a small ski village in Canada last week. My partner, my parents, my sister, my brother-in-law, my nephew. A shared birthday with my sister, and a family vacation folded around it. Time together that felt both rare and full.What surprised me most was not the scenery, although beautiful and inspiring. It was the spaciousness of being together, uninterrupted. Not by time so much, but by patterns.Usually, when I’m with family, we gather in someone’s home. And in each home, something quiet and near-invisible takes hold. A pattern. Someone becomes the host. Someone becomes the helper. Someone becomes the guest. I often become tech support—fixing wireless printers, troubleshooting websites, rearranging apps.But this time, we were somewhere that belonged to no one. A rented apartment with unfamiliar linens, an oddly shaped kitchen, and walls that held no memories. For once, the house didn't tell us who to be.We shared meals differently. One person would start chopping vegetables while another found spices tucked behind mixing bowls. Someone had already done groceries without being asked. Someone else would quietly wash dishes while a game carried on in the next room. There were no plans. There was no one “in charge.” There was just movement. Exchange. Offering. Receiving.My nephew, just four and a half, seemed especially alive to it. Curious, playful. His habits didn’t settle in because they had nowhere familiar to land. In this in-between place, he didn’t fall into routines he’d learned at his home or at his grandparents’. He created new ones, and they looked like delight.That was when I began to notice what had really shifted. It wasn’t just our location. It was something subtler. It was the unpatterning.There is comfort in patterns. I’ve built many of them into my life here in Lisbon—mornings that begin with hikes, evenings that end with friends. Routines that make the ordinary beautiful. Routines that feel alive and chosen.But there are other patterns too. Ones I don’t always choose. Ones that choose me.Returning to my parents’ home can feel like stepping into a costume I outgrew. A version of myself shaped by relationships that once made sense, but now feel slightly out of rhythm. Nothing is wrong. Nothing is uncomfortable. But there is less space to move. Less space to reintroduce myself, as I am now.Environments have a silent authority. They hold memory. They hold expectation. And without realizing it, I often move to meet them.Some places invite a self I’ve carefully grown into. Other places summon a self long gone, but quietly preserved in the paint, in the couch, in the dishes we always use.That’s what made this family vacation different. We were together. But we had left the setting behind. And in that space, a different kind of relating became possible. A different kind of being.Comfort, without history. Presence, without prescription. Belonging, without blueprint.I began to wonder what it would be like to travel this way more often. Not just physically, but emotionally. To ask quietly before gatherings what space might allow for a new shape of connection? What setting could allow something unexpected to emerge?It reminded me that experience is always being designed, even when unconsciously. The environment is part of that design. It sets the stage, even before the first word is spoken.By stepping outside of our usual frame, a small miracle occurred: the frame did not follow us.And that is how I learned to Unpattern. --- --- ### How to Birthday Published: 2025-08-23 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/birthday40/ My sister and I share our birthdays, born just a day apart. Growing up, we celebrated together every year. She’s younger than me, but it never really felt that way, at least not to others. Maybe it was her confidence. Her ease around people. Everyone mistook her for being older.I didn’t mind. I was a shy kid, the kind who preferred the corners of the room to the center. I liked being near the action but not in it. Every summer, our parents would host a little garden party for our birthdays. There would be one birthday cake, and we’d blow out the candles together. Friends and family gathered on the lawn, and I remember it always felt festive without feeling overwhelming. What most people didn’t see was that I was hiding behind my sister. Letting the spotlight fall on someone else. And quietly enjoying that.Being a summer baby meant that school was out during my birthday. A small blessing, in that it saved me from the classroom song, birthday attention, and the inevitable cookies or cupcakes brought in to share. Our birthday parties had more of her friends than mine, but I didn’t mind. I had a few close friends, not many, but enough. What I remember most is the quiet comfort I felt in not having to perform happiness, or celebration. Not having to be seen.Later, at university, nothing really changed. Birthdays fell between semesters. A moment of stillness that didn’t ask for much. Conveniently placed for slipping by unnoticed. There was a pattern forming. Each year, I found subtle ways to avoid the weight of that particular kind of attention.But, eventually, the context shifted. I was in my twenties, living on my own, and surrounded by friends who showed their love a bit more loudly. Birthdays became occasions to celebrate in the way everyone else did. Parties, dinners, dancing, drinking, staying out too late. The kind of nights that live loudly and fade quickly. I enjoyed those moments. They were fun. But something always felt slightly out of sync. Like I was playing a part I hadn’t auditioned for. I still showed up, and I liked the version of myself who did. But something was missing.It was my thirtieth birthday that changed things.The day before, my sister asked what I wanted to do. Where I wanted to go. What I wanted to eat. Her enthusiasm was genuine. I normally would've answered quickly, but this time, I paused. Something felt different. Over the past year, I had begun meditating, and had started paying more attention to the feelings that surfaced quietly, without reason. What I noticed was discomfort. A kind of pressure that was hard to name. It wasn’t about turning 30. It was about the unspoken expectation I felt to make something of the day. To make it count.So I told her the truth. I didn’t want to celebrate.She was surprised. Maybe a bit confused. So I explained that I wanted a quiet birthday. No invitations. No toasts. No decisions about what to wear, what to eat or where to go. I turned off my phone the night before and decided to fast for the day. Strangely, that made things easier. Fewer things to coordinate, fewer boxes to check, fewer moments to try and perfect. I meditated in silence for three hours that morning and still remember some of the places I went. Memories that weren’t thoughts. Feelings that weren’t emotions. A kind of presence with myself I hadn’t felt before.Later that day, I went to see my family. We had cake, quietly. It didn’t feel like a birthday so much as it felt like a still point in time. A moment of returning home, not just to the people I grew up with but to myself. I spent the rest of that evening journaling.When I turned my phone back on the next day, messages flooded in, surprised friends, missed calls. I began replying, one by one. But I noticed that something had shifted. Connecting back to others now came from a place of deeper connection to myself. The reflection came first, the participation after.That was also the year I stopped drinking, and I suspect looking back, that also made my birthdays more memorable and more meaningful for me.That spontaneous birthday practice became a ritual. Each year, I would fast for the number of years I was turning. I would turn off my phone. I would meditate for longer than usual, write for longer than usual, and say less than usual. It became the way I reminded myself how to return within myself. I did that for seven years.And then, I moved to Portugal.I made new friends. Started a new life. And when my birthday arrived in Lisbon that first year, I felt something I hadn’t in a while. A desire to share. To celebrate, not to be celebrated. To gather people, not to be the center of them. So I rented a boat on the river in Lisbon. Everyone dressed in white. As friends stepped aboard, we collected their phones. We drifted down the river without screens, music playing, food shared, eyes meeting. Laughter. Conversation. Connection.Somehow I had brought the rituals with me into the gathering. The distraction stayed out, the connection stayed in. The next year, I did it again. More people. More joy. Still no phones.Last year, my partner surprised me with a trip to the Swiss Alps. It was quieter. Colder too. A summer mountain escape, a few close friends, silent mornings. Again, the outer shape had changed. But I recognized the same feeling on the inside.This year, I’ve celebrated in different ways, with different people. No single answer to what the birthday was, or was supposed to be. Just a moment, really, to notice how much I’ve changed.I used to think there needed to be a blueprint, a tradition to hold on to. But maybe that’s what birthdays are best at revealing. The gap between who I was and who I’ve become. A part of me still craves solitude. And another part of me craves connection. And they don’t need to be in conflict, anymore. The celebration with self and the celebration with others can coexist, so long as neither asks for performance.The places have changed. The people have changed. The feelings, too. But each year, the desire is the same. To return, to reflect, and to notice.Birthdays have become the mirror I forget about until I’m standing in front of it, wondering what’s changed. They help me remember that change is not something that happens once. It’s something that’s still happening. One quiet, invisible shift at a time.And that is how I learned to birthday. --- --- ### How to Be Remembered Published: 2025-08-17 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/remembered/ Recently, I found myself in a quiet corner of the Portuguese countryside, surrounded by twenty-five of my closest friends. Some who have known me for decades, others more recently. All of them, in one way or another, had walked by my side through different chapters of life. They came from different cities, Sydney, London, Toronto, and New York, to be with me to celebrate my upcoming birthday. Some had seen me stumble, some had seen me rise. Many had seen me change.There was light agenda for the weekend. My partner had taken the lead in organizing it, and somehow, the lack of structure allowed space for something far more meaningful to arrive. People connected easily, as if they had been meant to meet, as if the story of my life had been stitched together into the kind of gathering that needed no explanation.Lately, I’ve been working with a coach on developing a five-year vision. The intention behind it feels simple but daunting: to develop clarity as I enter a new decade, to deepen alignment between where I place my energy and define what truly matters for me right now. One of the exercises in this process involved writing my own obituary.At first, I struggled. The very notion felt strange. But surprisingly, what unlocked the exercise was asking ChatGPT to write a first draft based on what it knew about me. Reading what it generated created space for me to respond. Not with edits, but with presence. Soon after, I wrote my own version. I shared it with my coach. We reflected that while it captured my own perspective, it felt incomplete.Not long ago, my aunt passed away. After the funeral, my parents called me. They spoke not about the sadness, but the beauty of the words shared about her. And then they said something that stayed with me: “Why do we only share these kinds of things after someone is gone? They should hear them while they’re still here.”Back to the birthday weekend away with my friends now. Halfway through the weekend, I made a spontaneous announcement.I would host my own funeral. A living one.My friends were surprised, but after a moment of it sitting in, not surprised to hear that I would want to experiment with something like this. A friend stepped in to facilitate. He split our group of twenty-five into smaller groups. Each group was handed post-it notes and pens and asked to write a eulogy for me. Not from prepared thoughts, but from spontaneous presence. No time to rehearse, only time to reflect and write. While they wrote, he and I set up chairs for everyone outside beneath a wide patch of sky, with a beautiful view of rolling hills. After about thirty minutes, everyone was invited into our makeshift space. Music was playing in the background. My partner and I sat at the front. And then, one by one, each group sent one person forward to read what they had written.Some were funny. Some were tender. Some wrapped kindness in mischief and others unwrapped truths through tears. They spoke about curiosity, calm, and kindness. About presence over performance. One spoke about patience. Another about wonder. There was much laughter, and shared stories I had long forgotten.As I sat there, quietly receiving their words spoken in past tense, I felt something unexpected.I felt seen. Appreciated. Held. And also… surprised.None of the eulogies focused on the aspects of life I spend the most time on. My work, my health, and my relationship. Areas that occupy much of my conscious living energy were barely mentioned. Instead, what surfaced were subtler qualities. How I show up in a conversation. The way I create space. How I listen. The lightness I bring, even unknowingly.Afterwards, debriefing with a few close friends, I shared that observation. And they gently offered a reframe. Perhaps those domains of life I focus on so intensely aren’t ends in themselves. Perhaps they are means. Means to a more authentic self. Means to deeper connection. That the work isn't in being remembered for any one thing, but in being present with who I already am.And perhaps friends are the ones who see that most clearly.Family wasn’t there that weekend. Neither were professional colleagues. My partner didn’t speak. What was reflected back to me came from friendship alone. And there’s a particular honesty in that kind of mirror. It’s where nothing needs to be proven. Where the self can be witnessed without the scaffolding of achievement, responsibility or identity. I felt known in a way that words rarely allow. And what I heard, almost universally, were not just stories, but feelings. Unfiltered, unearned, freely given.At the end of the ceremony, I stood and gave a brief, impromptu speech. No notes. No idea what I was going to say until I heard myself say it. That I am not just me. I am, in some quiet way, made up of every person here. Every strength, every quirk, every moment of laughter I offer to the world is borrowed or mirrored from someone I’ve loved. I spoke of how each of their reflections helped me see myself more clearly. Not as a static thing, but as a living dynamic being, shaped by others with every passing year.I’m still integrating what happened that weekend. I’m still listening to what was said. And to what wasn’t. I walked away with a full heart and an open question. What are the things I chase now, that in the end may not matter? And what are the things that matter deeply already, but go unnoticed because they ask nothing in return?I’ll likely do this again. Not as an event. But perhaps as a practice. A way to pause and ask. A way to make space for reflection not just from within, but through the lives I’ve touched and been touched by. Not to be praised, but to be mirrored.There are truths about my life I can’t see alone.And that is how I learned to be remembered. --- --- ### How to Inspire Published: 2025-08-03 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/inspirenow/ For the past two weeks, I’ve been alone in Lisbon. My partner has been away traveling, and without shared presence or familiar routines to anchor the day, my calendar opened up. There were fewer dinners to prepare, fewer invitations to accept, and fewer movements around the city to make. The stillness wasn’t silent, but it was quieter than usual. And in that unexpected space, something unexpected happened.It didn’t begin with an intention. There was no plan to retreat or reset. But with fewer inputs from the outside, more attention turned inward. I found myself drawn to a new project—an idea I’d been circling for a little while but hadn’t completely stepped into. It's a different kind of creative effort than this blog, but something about it called for exploration. Slowly, then suddenly, I found myself deep inside of it.I didn’t think of it as work. In fact, I avoided calling it that. Maybe because I wasn't doing it for outcomes. There was no performance to measure, no deadline to meet, no one else waiting beside me. And yet, I was waking up buzzing, energized, thinking about it, and only it. Not with worry, but with possibility. It felt more like play—like the kind of play I remember from when I was twenty and building my business for the first time. Where the effort comes not from pressure, but from imagination.Some days, I’d spend hours entirely focused. No phone. No notifications. No email. No stock market. Well fed, well hydrated, and alone with my thoughts. Books piled beside me. YouTube videos queued up. Podcasts paused mid-sentence so an idea could be written down. It was deep work, but also deep learning. Probably the deepest I’ve gone in years.What surprised me most was not the clarity or the quality of attention, but the energy. Despite sleeping less, exercising irregularly, and spending less time socializing, I didn’t feel depleted. I felt the opposite. Inspired. Body, mind, heart, and spirit—aligned and alive. Not sustainable, maybe. But also not necessary to sustain forever. Sometimes a sprint is what’s needed. Not to escape life, but to remember a part of it.The satisfaction didn’t come from anything completed. It came from showing up. Not half-heartedly or cautiously, but fully. There’s something rare these days about giving something everything—not as sacrifice, but as self-expression. To try, just because it feels good to try. Without calculating if it’s worth the time, or whether it will amount to anything. Nothing was owed to it, and yet something inside wanted to keep giving.Learning like this is harder now than it used to be. Maybe because it feels less urgent. Or maybe because it requires more humility. Being a beginner takes effort. It asks for presence. But when that effort is made not toward mastery, just toward curiosity, the reward isn’t a result. The reward is the trying.When I would share this burst of energy with friends—when I’d talk about what I was building, what I was reading—I kept hearing the same word back: “inspired.” It made me pause. I hadn’t set out to inspire anyone. That wasn’t the point. But something in how I was living those days had a ripple effect. Not in grand gestures. Just in the quiet way a person lights up when they’re deeply engaged. And how, somehow, we notice.I’ve experienced this from others before—watching someone follow what moves them, and feeling a subtle ignition inside. Energy transferred without intention. Without knowing. The most inspiring people in my life never tried to be that. They simply were.At the start of each year, I choose a word. A one-word intention, like a quiet promise to myself. In past years, it's been words like open, space, build, flow. This year, the word was inspire.Until now, it hadn’t really landed. I hadn’t felt it in a way I could describe. I’d journaled about it. Thought about it. Wondered whether I had chosen the right word. But after these two weeks, something clicked. Not all at once. More like an unfolding. The connection between feeling inspired, and inadvertently being that for others, finally made sense.None of it happened through striving. That’s the part I keep returning to. The inspiration came through immersion. Through permission. Through less structure, and fewer demands. Less of everything, really—except intention.And that is how I learned to inspire. --- --- ### How to Remember Published: 2025-08-03 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/remember/ My birthday is approaching. And this one is an important milestone.I gave myself the summer to develop a five year vision for my life, as I enter a new decade and chapter. Not a rigid one. Not a plan. Something softer.For much of my life, I’ve lived with a plan. For fifteen years, I led a company as CEO. I planned in quarters and years. That type of planning was tied to outcomes—concrete, prioritized, trackable. This is different.The starting point for my five year vision surprised me. It wasn’t a question of what I want to build, achieve, or even who I want to become. It began with qualities. Ways of being. Not in the shape of my accomplishments, but in the shape of my presence. It is about how I move through life, regardless of when or where, or even why.So I started making a list of qualities that are important to me. It came quite easily. Now I am working with my coach to sift through them to discover which ones are the most important to me right now, and relevant to this next chapter of my life.In a recent conversation with my coach, we shifted from qualities to something else altogether. A prompt he gave me. A writing experiment I hadn’t expected: to write my own living obituary.Had it come at any other time, I might have hesitated. But the timing made sense. I’d recently been reminded of the idea by Tuesdays with Morrie, a book that I read many years ago. In it, Morrie, a professor facing a terminal illness, hosts a living funeral. He wanted to hear what people will say about him before he dies. A subtle rebellion against a world that waits too long to speak honestly and lovingly.And recently, my parents returned from the funeral of my aunt. When they spoke about the experience, they kept returning to one observation: how strange it is that we only seem to say these things after death. Why wait? they asked.So when the prompt came to write my own obituary, I felt a surge of energy pass through me. I had to do it.I’ve written every week for this blog for over ten years. I journal several times a week privately. I have written four books. Words are a home for me. However, when it came to writing my living obituary, my page stayed blank.It’s easy to write about an experience from within it. It’s harder to zoom out, to see myself from the outside. I didn’t know where to begin. Not because there was nothing to say, but because the exercise required looking at myself differently than I am used to. And maybe that was the point. Looking not out at the world, but across my life. Not forwards in time, but backwards.After a few attempts, I found myself turning to one of my AI assistants, ChatGPT. I gave it a single line: “As part of a reflection exercise, and knowing what you know of me, I’d like your help writing a living obituary.” I wasn’t sure what, if anything, would emerge. Six seconds later, a draft appeared.And I sat back. And I read quietly and slowly about my life.The words held a mix of familiarity and distance. They were about me, but not by me. There were facts about my life, but what surprised me was how present my hidden desires were embedded throughout. My hopes. My aspirations. My dreams. Not written in the usual future tense where they live in my journal and my mind, but in the past tense. As if they had already happened.It changed something in me.Sometimes, speaking about the future feels like building a story we may never enter. But reading that future as if it had already occurred, there was a strange intimacy in that. My ambitions felt less speculative, more lived. They felt, for a moment, like memories.When I journal, there’s always a sense of reaching, into the unknown, toward something unformed. But here, the past tense created a kind of grounding I didn’t expect. A possibility dressed as remembrance.Of course, the words weren’t perfect. They weren’t mine. But they gave me something to work with. A clay form. I’ve always enjoyed editing, and this now feels like that. A chance to shape. To soften. To reveal. And in doing so, not just to craft a better piece of writing—but to better understand myself in this moment in time. The prompt pointed not to the end of life, but to the center of it.It reminded me of how powerful it is to pause and look, not forward or inward, but from the imagined edge, backwards. The things that feel vague become visible. What I’ve value begins to reflect back towards me with more light.The obituary isn’t finished. And neither am I. But what emerged was clarity. And that is how I learned to remember.If you are curious to read it, simply reply to this email and I’ll send it to you. --- --- ### How to Low Stake Published: 2025-07-27 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/lowstake/ A few weeks ago, my aunt passed away. It was unexpected, yet not surprising. That strange space where the heart is broken open but the mind quietly nods. In the days that followed, we gathered—some in person, others from afar. There were phone calls, shared stories. A mixing of grief with gratitude.In the quiet that follows loss, emotion makes way for a softer kind of thought. Not strategic planning, not goal setting—just a murmur of something deeper. Something simpler.A family member said something that's stayed with me: “We all end up in the same place.” There was no drama in her voice, just calm. “We come with nothing, we leave with nothing.” A reminder I’ve heard before, and forgotten before. But in that moment, it felt less like advice and more like gravity. A truth that didn’t require agreement—it simply was.A few days later, I went for a long walk with an old friend in Lisbon. We hadn’t seen each other in a few years. He’s around my age, maybe a few years older. He walked me through his cancer diagnosis from two years ago, and the many moments of not knowing what would come next. He told me about the strength he had found and the grace he had grown into, uninvited.When I asked how this experience had changed his perspective on life, he smiled and said what I had just started to touch myself: “Most things aren’t that important.”That sentence keeps repeating itself.Most things aren’t that important.But my mind is good at making most things feel that they are important.There’s a habit I’ve noticed—one that lives quietly in my day-to-day. The gym session missed and turned into guilt. A stock market trade made, not for the sum of money but for the illusion of control. A late reply to a message, a small tiff in a conversation, or a dinner reservation gone wrong—each one has the potential to feel like more than it is. Like something is at stake. As if a single choice could jeopardize the entire direction of a day, or a life.There are moments, looking back, where the intensity I felt simply doesn’t make sense. The pressure to finish something. The need to be understood. The desire for things to unfold exactly as imagined. I remember days when, after not meditating “well”, I felt like my entire self-discipline unraveled. As though one “poor” practice erased a decade of showing up.And yet, there is so much—almost everything, really—that is actually low stakes.The disappointment of a meal. The annoyance of a flight delay. The frustration of a weak Wi-Fi signal. The uncertainty of a video call that doesn’t load on time. The inconvenient timing of an invitation. The mood shift after a lost sports match. The entire evening revolving around a show on Netflix.None of it really matters.But it can feel like it does. I’m slowly seeing that feeling and reality do not always hold hands.There’s a quiet liberation in remembering that. A freedom made not of apathy, but of perspective.When I remind myself something is low stakes, I don’t abandon effort. If anything, I feel more curious. More grounded. I allow space for surprise—to be delighted, even.And what I notice is that on the days I bring that mindset into what I do—whether it's walking into a meeting or ordering a meal—something shifts. I feel more present. More available to life. Less burdened by outcome. There's space for joy to enter, because I’ve stopped blocking the way with anxiety.The pressure has softened. And in that softening, I can still care. But I no longer have to carry.These recent brushes with mortality have been hard. And yet, I hold deep appreciation for what they’ve opened. The way they rearranged my perspective without asking permission. The way they trimmed the excess weight of so many imagined crises.This reflection is a way to remember. A kind of ritual integration. An attempt to stay close to the clarity that only seems to emerge when life itself interrupts the illusion of control.There is no neat conclusion. Just a clearer horizon. I am inspired to continue to remind myself that things are more often than not low stakes, versus what my mind tries to convince me to believe.And that is how I learned to low stake. --- --- ### How to Istanbul Published: 2025-07-19 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/istanbul/ We landed late at night. The taxi from the airport wound through streets we couldn’t see, only feel. The city was there, somewhere beyond the taxi window, but hidden in darkness. There was no sense of arrival, only motion through a place that had yet to appear. It wasn’t until the next morning that Istanbul revealed itself us. We woke up to the call to prayer echoing loosely across rooftops. My eyes opened to narrow streets filled with cafes, mopeds, clusters of people speaking languages I didn’t recognize. The air carried the scent of warm bread and strong coffee. _Something in me softened._ We were somewhere entirely new, though it hadn’t been felt until just then. We hadn’t planned anything. No itinerary, no must-sees. Just a spontaneous impulse followed through with. We had booked only two nights at our Airbnb, unsure if we would want to stay longer. **Seven days later, we were still walking those same cobblestone streets.** That first breakfast stretched for three hours. A spread of dips and olives, cheeses I couldn’t name, three kinds of eggs. Flavors that challenged what breakfast was meant to be. I told my partner, without hesitation, that it was one of the best breakfasts of my life. But it wasn’t just the food. It was the presence. And no one else at the cafe was on their phone. It felt like a different world. _The way time felt wide enough to hold wonder, without rush or measurement._ We spent the day wandering. Through shops filled with colour and texture and familiar things that felt unfamiliar in their setting. Through crowds that sounded like stories and smells that lingered. In Lisbon I had thought I had experienced cafe culture—until I saw Istanbul, where every second storefront offered some slowing of time, some invitation to pause. At some point, we found ourselves at the Hagia Sophia. A vast, cavernous peace held within stone. The building is 1,500 years old. Originally a cathedral, now a mosque—and at one time, the largest cathedral in the world for over 1,000 years. It had been standing for longer than I could fathom. Time had written itself onto the walls. Cracks, stains, chipped mosaics. But none of it diminished the beauty. In fact, it added to it. The age didn’t distract. It brought reverence. **A quiet respect for things that last not in spite of time, but because of it.** Later that evening, we booked a small boat tour—impulsively, like everything else that week. The guide spoke perfect English. Only a few of us were aboard. As the boat moved along the Bosphorus, the sun dipped behind the skyline, scattering pink and gold across the surface of the water. We listened to stories about the history of the city while watching it flicker between old and new. In that moment, I felt both suspended and grounded. _Drifting, but fully present._ **It was all unexpected.** Not just the beauty of the city, but how safe, calm, and nourishing it felt. On the way to the airport before the flight, I had called my parents. They had been to Turkey many years ago and offered warnings of safety out of habit. Be careful. It may not be safe. There might be discrimination. The words weren’t new. They echoed the vague anxieties that often accompany places we do not know. Too foreign, too unfamiliar, too uncertain. _My own hesitation came not from experience but from the stories I’d heard, the coverage I’d seen, the way places get flattened into headlines and hearsay._ But the Istanbul I experienced bore no resemblance to the one I had imagined. In its place was something vivid, generous, and inviting. **Nothing matched the map in my mind. And that was the gift.** It left me wondering: _what else have I misunderstood? What places, or people, or possibilities have I quietly put to the side—not from knowing, but from fearing? What stories have I accepted without living, filled in with artificial color, faded by distance?_ Last night I read something in a book about how we’re all like cameras. We arrive in the world with blank film. As we move through life, we capture images—moments, impressions, conversations—that shape what we believe about the world. Some of the pictures are clear and vibrant because they’re our own. Others are faint and washed out, taken not by us, but handed down: secondhand photographs of places we’ve never been, people we’ve never met, lives we’ve never lived. The more I thought about it, the more I started to see this trip not as a vacation, but as a new photo—one I hadn’t taken yet. One that replaced the old picture I had been carrying, unbeknownst to me. **And the remarkable thing was not that the real Istanbul was different from what I imagined. It was that I had finally given myself permission to look for myself.** Sometimes, it’s not about collecting more pictures, but about changing the ones we already have. Releasing the images built from warnings, letting go of inherited shadows, creating space for surprise. _What we believe can have more to do with what we’ve been told than what we’ve seen._ And the only way forward is to see for ourselves. There’s something about a spontaneous trip that creates intimacy, not only with a place, but with our own perceptions. Without plans, we notice more. Without expectations, we feel more. And when we allow a place to reveal itself on its terms, rather than ours, we’re reminded of how much there is beyond the edges of what we think we know. In many ways, the journey wasn’t just to Istanbul. It was out of a story I had quietly accepted. Out of assumption. Out of caution. And into wonder. **There are fewer things more disorienting and more necessary than being wrong in the best way.** It’s a reminder of how alive the world is when we let it be different than we expected. Sometimes, all it takes is a call to prayer at dawn, a plate full of olives, and a boat at sunset to remember how little we know—and how beautiful that can be. **Istanbul felt like a beginning.** And maybe it was. And that is how I learned to Istanbul. --- ### How to Progress Published: 2025-07-12 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/progress1/ This past week, I received the results of a health test I took a few weeks ago. Nothing alarming or urgent, but something showed up—something that had also showed up a few years ago, that I had thought was behind me. At first, I managed to keep calm. I feel good physically. The data says one thing, but my lived experience says another. So I focused more on what I was feeling than what I was reading. For about one day. **Then something shifted. ** The calm gave way to unease. The unfinished business of this health marker began to loom larger than I had expected it to. Despite all the work, despite the improvements I’ve noticed in my energy, strength, clarity—despite the consistent effort—it was still there. And, with it, a quiet question: _Why isn’t this fixed yet?_ That question soon became a feeling I recognized. _Frustration. Anxiety._ A familiar tightness that used to arrive with report cards as a child. The feeling of scoring 98%, but being preoccupied with the missing 2%. Noticing what hadn’t been achieved, rather than what had. It surprised me. Not because the feeling was new, but because I thought I might have outgrown it. **The expectation of perfection, it turns out, doesn’t retire peacefully.** _It lingers. _Disguises itself. Sometimes it speaks quietly, in the background. Other times, like this week, it steps forward and takes the mic. I’ve noticed this voice before. It shows up in places beyond health—in relationships, in work, in the expectations I didn’t realize I was holding. And **what it often brings with it is tension**. Not just in my body, but in the way life feels. _Everything narrows. _Options reduce. There’s a right way and a wrong way. A good outcome and a bad one. Progress becomes binary: pass or fail. And that’s when my energy starts to drain. That’s when I hold back from trying new things, from taking risks, from allowing myself to be surprised. Because if perfection is the standard, then trying becomes a liability. _That’s also when the most joyful parts of my life—the lightness, the spontaneity, the play—begin to lose their colour._ I’ve been wondering why this happens. Why the default is so often toward judgment, even when I think I’ve moved beyond it. And I suspect part of it is the residue from years of being measured. Schools framed learning as achievement. Work rewarded outcomes. Health became something to be quantified, tracked, improved. In all those environments, the lesson is clear: better is good, but best is safest. And so something in me continues to chase “best,” long after the reason for doing so has faded. But this week invited a different kind of reflection. As I journaled yesterday morning, I saw, with quiet clarity, how far I’ve come—not in terms of results, but in depth of care. I noticed how conditioned I still am to measure progress by what’s unresolved, rather than what’s being tended to. _And I felt, in that noticing, an invitation to see differently._ To see the daily choices—the early mornings at the gym, the quiet stretches, the red light therapy, the food prepared with intention—not as transactions toward perfection, but as demonstrations of self care and love. And when framed this way, something softens. I begin to feel more of the satisfaction I often bypass. I begin to see all the effort not as a means to an end, but as something worthy in itself. **This shift isn't unfamiliar—but it still feels new every time.** Moving from judgment to curiosity. From closure to openness. From wanting control to accepting care. It’s the difference between asking, _“Did this work?”_ and wondering, _“What is this teaching me?”_ There’s something beautiful in that wondering. Something human. And less machine. It doesn’t arrive with answers, but with space. **And in that space, growth happens—even when “results” do not.** This softening isn’t just inward. It echoes outward. The more I practice accepting the effort in myself, the more I begin to notice it in others. **I find myself focusing less on how others measure up, and more on how they show up.** Whether it's my partner, friends, colleagues—there’s a gentler gaze available. One that sees intention even when initiative falters. One that sees care even when outcomes vary. It begins to form a kind of loop. Recognition of humanity feeds compassion, which in turn, allows more of that humanity to be seen. _Less pressure. More space._ It’s not a final destination. I know the next time I receive a test result like this one, I may still feel the reaction. There may still be a moment of comparison, disappointment, desire for certainty. But maybe—hopefully—it will be softer. Less sharp. And maybe I’ll spend less time in that narrow space before remembering that my journey is not about perfection, but about progress. Not about being done, but about being here. **There’s a quiet kind of achievement in that.** The kind that doesn’t show up in test results. The kind that takes root slowly—in the way I stretch in the morning, in the way I breathe before I react, in the way I remember to be kind when it feel I should not be. And maybe the most perfect we can hope to be… is to keep going. And that is how I am learning to progress. --- ### How to Road Trip Published: 2025-07-06 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/roadtrip/ We didn’t know where we were going. What we did know was that we had set aside the time. _That felt like enough. _Not knowing the destination wasn’t a problem—it was, in a quiet way, the point. A direct flight appeared in our search, from Lisbon to Vienna, Austria. That seemed as good a place to begin as any. A few hours later, we went to the airport. After landing, we walked across the airport to the car rental counter, picked up the keys, started the engine, and drove. Not knowing what lay ahead was, at first, disorienting. But as the kilometers passed, it slowly became calming. There was no list of places to see. No pressure to arrive. Just a road, and time, and us. It was on the highway somewhere in Austria that we noticed it first. During a stretch of traffic, cars ahead of us began to move—not forward, but sideways. The ones in the left lane edged further to the left. Those on the right veered gently toward the shoulder. A corridor began to appear in the middle, empty but deliberate. It happened again. And then again. Only on the third occasion a few days later did we begin to understand—this was no coincidence. It was a quiet agreement between drivers, built into muscle memory. A space formed intuitively, in anticipation of an emergency vehicle that hadn’t yet arrived. _An unspoken collective act of care._ Which is perhaps what made it striking. We hadn’t read about it. It wasn’t in the guidebook. It only became visible by being there, and by paying attention. **That kept happening.** In Slovenia, we stayed at places that weren’t written about, where menus rarely included English and smiles carried most conversations. There were no gift shops or walking tours. But there was an intensity to the hospitality that caught us by surprise—people willing to help, not because they were told to, but because it felt natural. Everything worked. Parking machines. Public washrooms. Even fountains. Nothing extravagant. Just quietly functional. And when something didn’t work—like the air conditioning in our room—the response we received revealed a different layer of the place. “The system says it works,” the receptionist insisted. First once, then again. Offers to change rooms were made, and then reversed, based on the unwavering truth of the system's assertion. When a technician came the following day, he explained the design of the system in exacting detail—how it was intended for perfect conditions, how something small must have failed, how that failure rendered the whole thing helpless. _It made me smile._ Somewhere between the unyielding structure of Austria and the soft adaptability of Slovenia, I started to see just how much culture hides in the spaces between events. Not in the postcards or plates of food or museum exhibits, but in everyday assumptions. In what people notice. In what they don’t. In how they respond when a system breaks. **There’s a difference, I've come to learn, between visiting a place and being somewhere.** Travel often encourages the former—moving quickly, collecting sights, capturing proof. But this trip felt like the latter. We didn’t plan our route. We avoided highways. We stopped for any town that looked interesting, walked around until something pulled us in, and stayed longer than we thought we would. The best stops weren’t on any map. Each day, I limited myself to one hour online, usually in the morning. No email. No stock market. No messages. No social media. But what changed wasn’t how I used my time, it was how my attention softened. _Details I normally miss began to land._ The color of trees. The tilt of a road sign. The way light falls differently through a mountain valley. At a small gym, I used equipment I hadn’t seen before. Nothing complicated, just different. I found myself using machines in unfamiliar ways, pulled out of my usual routines. It struck me how habitual even my workouts at my home gym had become. Without realizing it, I was repeating the same motions, day after day. _Something about being somewhere new disrupted the cycle._ Forced me to pay attention again. In cities I know well—Lisbon, New York—it can be hard to tell what belongs. What’s made for locals versus what’s made to appear local for someone like me. But in Slovenia, that question didn’t arise. Small towns seemed uninterested in performing for visitors. Things were not what they were designed to seem. They were just… what they were. Without knowing if we’d continue driving or stay another day, we followed something that had less to do with logic and more to do with feeling. A kind of improvisation. It made things lighter. There was comfort in not knowing what was next. **There’s a spaciousness that comes with the unknown.** It doesn’t always feel good. At first, it can feel like floating—but over time, it can begin to feel like freedom. What does it mean to move through a place with no aim, no target, no arrival point? What shows up when there’s nothing to chase? Perhaps it wasn’t really a road trip at all—it was a permission slip. To pause. To notice. To lean into surprise. To be somewhere, without needing to prove that I had been. Maybe this is what it means to road trip. Not to get from point A to point B. But to move with presence, to dwell in curiosity, and to allow the road to shape the direction, not just the destination. **I left with no plan. I returned with no souvenirs.** But the world felt different. Somehow clearer—not because it had changed, but because I had started to look again. And that is how I learned to road trip. --- ### How to Bruno Mars Published: 2025-06-29 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/brunomars/ For as long as I can remember, silence has been my default. I’ve spent years seeking it—protecting it—in between conversations, around meetings, after long days. Silence offers space. And I’ve come to appreciate how much happens in that space. But recently, something shifted. My partner loves music in the way I love quiet. Slowly, the soundtrack of my days changed. I still don’t pay attention to the names of most songs or artists, or even the lyrics. But I recognize what I enjoy. And over time, I began to enjoy Bruno Mars more than others. Earlier this year, we went to Vegas to see Bruno Mars live. I’ve never been one to follow concerts closely. **But something about this experience stayed with me.** The seats were surprisingly comfortable—though almost unnecessary, since we stood for nearly the entire show. The energy was infectious. Everyone was on their feet, moving, singing, letting go. I don’t remember the names of the songs. But I remember the feeling. _Which, in the end, feels more important._ Before the show started, something unusual happened. As we entered the venue, they took our phones and locked them in small pouches. Pockets we carried with us, but couldn’t open for the next three or four hours. At first, it felt inconvenient. Disorienting. But then the initial discomfort softened into something else. It’s one thing to be without a phone. It’s another to be without a phone in a room with tens of thousands of other people who are also without theirs. There was no glow from screens. No arms raised trying to film the stage. Just people. Bodies swaying, voices rising, everyone there. I noticed something in myself—a flicker of an impulse. There were moments when I wanted to reach for my phone. Not to call anyone. Not even to share. Just to capture. I don’t post on social media, but even so, I quietly thought, “This would be a beautiful moment to record.” That impulse said something. About how deep the habit runs. About how fast the urge can pull us out of a moment, even just a little, to step outside it and preserve it. And yet, the simple reality of not having the option made everything feel more complete. **Nothing to do but enjoy what was unfolding.** After the opening track, he leaned into the mic and sang a song about the phones. About taking them away just for one night. About returning to the good old days, when we danced and laughed without having to hold anything in our hands. There was humor in it. A little teasing. But also something sharper—like we were being offered a glimpse into what we’ve forgotten. And I thought about how rare this experience has become. Not just being present, but being present together. Most modern concerts are designed with sharing in mind. Other performers, like Taylor Swift, have made it part of their strategy. Phones in the air aren’t a distraction—they’re marketing. The show doesn’t end when the lights go down. It lives on through stories, reels, and FOMO. It’s good for business. But this wasn't. There’s something economically irrational for an artist to ask people not to share. And yet, maybe that's why it felt so special. _Something about its inaccessibility made it more vivid. Unrepeatable. More real._ Later, at the gym, one of his songs came on again. And suddenly, I wasn’t on a rowing machine—I was back in that theatre. I could see the lights. The way he danced across the stage. The way we danced. Every detail came rushing back, not because I watched a video of it, but because I had lived it fully. There’s something ironic about that. That not **trying to remember might be the best way of remembering**. When I’m fully present, not just without technology but without being pulled into thoughts elsewhere, the memory doesn’t fade. It stays. It sinks in deeper. _It’s not a photo—I can’t scroll to it—but it’s mine._ What struck me most wasn’t just my own presence, though. It was the presence of everyone else. There’s something profoundly different when an experience is shared by a crowd all focused on the same thing. It felt a little like being in a meditation retreat—or a yoga retreat—where stillness and focus are collective, where silence isn’t lonely but full. But I’ve only ever felt that kind of shared presence in small groups. A dozen people. Maybe a room of fifty. **Never in a crowd of thousands.** And now, days and weeks later, what stays with me is exactly what didn’t get captured. What couldn’t be replayed. What couldn’t be posted or liked or remembered externally. It lives quietly inside me. _And maybe that’s the whole point._ Sometimes, the most vivid memories don’t come from the moments we hold onto. They come from the ones we fully live. And that is how I learned to Bruno Mars. --- ### How to Pizzeria Published: 2025-06-22 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/pizzeria/ I was sitting at home with no particular plans, my phone buzzing with the usual noise of group chats. One message caught my eye—photos of cousins from India traveling through Europe. They thought I was still in Australia. I picked up the phone, called them immediately, and said, “I’m coming.” A few days later, I was in Naples, Italy. They had been to a pizzeria the night before I arrived. “We have to go back,” they said. I didn’t ask questions. We waited in line for over an hour. Apparently, this was one of the original pizza places in Naples. _It had no menu._ Four types of pizza. That was all. When we finally walked in, the energy in the room caught me by surprise. Laughter floated through the air, not from the tables, but from behind the counter. A young woman tossing dough grinned, radiant and generous. A waiter tapped me on the shoulder, laughing, saying something in Italian I couldn’t understand, even with my vague memory of Portuguese. Then an older man shouted something back across the kitchen, and they both burst into laughter. **Something in me paused.** It wasn’t the pizza—though it was, without doubt, the best I’ve tasted. It wasn’t even the company, though being with family again, in a different part of the world, brought a quiet comfort. _It was something else._ The waiter—the one who was taking my order, in the middle of what must have been an exhausting shift—was happier than I was. _Less tired. More alive._ He wasn’t on vacation. He wasn’t traveling. He didn’t have the luxury of leisure time or the novelty of being in a new country. But he was lit up. At ease. Several shades more joyful than me. And it was contagious. Laughter reached our table in waves. Smiles began to stretch across our faces as we looked around and saw not just good food being served, but good energy being shared, without effort, without reason. _The next morning, while meditating, I could still feel it._ That joy hadn’t passed through me—it had stayed. A presence. A warmth. I started asking myself why. What gives that kind of feeling its staying power? **It wasn’t money. It wasn’t time. I have both**, and they weren’t what stood out. I kept returning to the energy of the people working at the pizzeria. There was a kind of satisfaction I sensed in them, the kind that doesn’t announce itself loudly, but can be felt unmistakably. They were really good at what they did. Not just making pizza, but being present, being together, holding a rhythm that made the whole restaurant hum. And they knew it. Not in a prideful way—but in an embodied way. Like a musician who doesn’t need to overplay, or a dancer who doesn’t need to perform. Just in it. For the love of the craft. I’ve felt that kind of satisfaction before. Moments from the past drifted in—launching a product at a company I once ran, where everything felt aligned; making guacamole one night for friends, having made it hundreds of times before, each step familiar, the balance of lime and heat just right; the end of a long meditation retreat, where the mind is quiet, the body settled, and presence feels deep and effortless. **There’s a particular kind of joy that comes from doing something well.** Not perfectly, but wholeheartedly. It’s less about the outcome and more about the grounding that comes with mastery—not a title or a credential, but a knowing in the bones. That night at the pizzeria was also a reminder of something else. The joy of doing things with others. The staff weren’t just in the same room—they were in rhythm with one another. Laughing across the floor, playing their parts without stepping on each other’s toes. It felt like jazz. Spontaneous but structured. Loose but connected. In contrast, I spend a lot of my time—with work, with content, with tools—talking to screens. Often alone. _It’s easy to forget the lightness of shared space, the subtle joy of small collaboration._ Team doesn’t have to mean a big organization. Sometimes it looks like making dinner together, or walking in silence with a friend, or even trading glances with a stranger on the subway—those in-between moments of unspoken human rhythm. And there was the simplicity of the whole thing. No menu. Four pizzas. A small room with old paint and mismatched tables. Nothing curated for social media. Nothing performed. Just what it was. I’ve come to appreciate how little it takes to create meaning. A simple ritual, repeated often, held with care. Morning tea. Evening walks. A few deep breaths before bed. When done with attention, these small gestures become more than routine—they become grounding. Like a sacred rhythm without the need for ceremony. **That pizzeria, in all its simplicity, has reframed something for me.** For a long time I chased the idea that joy lay just around the bend. More time. More freedom. More clarity. It’s easy to imagine it lives elsewhere—on quiet beaches, in future plans, in someone else’s life. But it rarely arrives in the places the mind expects it to. That night in Naples reminded me it can be right here. In work done with love. In laughter shared without reason. In something familiar done with care. Since then, whenever I see a pizza—even a basic slice from the airport food court—I hope to smile. Not because of what it is, but because of what it represents to me. A small, grounded joy. A warmth that doesn’t demand anything. A reminder. I take that memory as an invitation—to keep finding joy in the ordinary, and to let it spread. And that is how I learned to pizzeria. --- ### How to Escape Room Published: 2025-06-15 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/escaperoom/ The door clicked shut behind us. There was no turning back—not for another hour. The room was quiet, dimly lit, eerily detailed. That first minute held a kind of stillness I don’t often feel. For the next sixty minutes, I knew where I needed to be. And that, in itself, was rare. I’ve done dozens of escape rooms over the last ten years. Some more elaborate than others. Some with strangers, some with close friends. But every time, something shifts. For a brief moment, life becomes simpler. The world narrows. There’s a puzzle in front of me. A team around me. A clock above me. And nothing else. _What does it mean to escape?_ I’ve been thinking about that. At first glance, stepping into an escape room seems like the very definition of escapism. But the more I sit with it, the more it feels like something else. Something closer to stepping in than stepping out. It’s not an avoidance of life. It’s a clearer version of it. One that moves a little slower, feels a little sharper. There’s something powerful about choosing to close a door. About leaving the phone outside, the notifications behind. Meetings, errands, messages—all waiting on the other side of the wall. I didn’t need to check anything or be anywhere. I was exactly where I had chosen to be. **Locked in, yes. But also free.** It reminded me of that quiet clarity that comes at the start of a meditation retreat. Or the strange calm that settles in during a long-haul flight, thousands of feet above everything that usually feels urgent. _Sometimes, escape is a doorway to presence._ The more I consciously step out of regular life, the more available I feel to see it again with new eyes. And then there’s the simplicity. The rules are clear. The boundaries are evident. The goal is singular: get out. So little of modern life is like that. Most days blur with open tabs and half-tasks. Too many choices. In contrast, being in a space with limits—literal walls—creates a kind of permission to focus, to engage fully with what’s in front of me. In paradoxical ways, constraint becomes expansive. Over the weekend, I found myself caring deeply about a combination lock that guarded a fake treasure chest. I watched the clock count down and recalibrated our efforts with every passing minute. I was probably more competitive than anyone else in the room, reminding people of how much time we had left. It wasn’t about the prize. It was something else entirely: **the joy of taking play seriously.** As an adult, spaces to truly play seem to shrink over time. The ones where the stakes are low, but the effort is real. Where silliness and structure coexist. Where there’s space to try, to fumble, to laugh. It feels rare. And regenerative. What’s even rarer is the chance to collaborate without a formal agenda. Some of the people in the room were close friends I know from professional settings. But in this space, those dynamics disappeared. We weren’t leading anything or managing anyone. We were searching under rugs and tapping on walls, guessing wildly and getting things wrong. _It was vulnerable in a way I hadn’t expected._ Revealing and familiar at the same time. There’s an intimacy in being confused together. In pausing to think out loud. In noticing who rushes ahead, who slows down, who steps back. The escape room became a mirror—reflecting small truths about how we each navigate uncertainty. But it also became a container. A reminder that even without knowing, we could move forward. What surprised me most was how fully I cared about the outcome. Not passively, not as an observer. But as someone in the story. I realize how few experiences offer that now. So much of daily life is performed at a safe distance—watching, scrolling, spectating. **Entertainment often leaves nothing required of us. But this asked something.** I found myself admiring the room itself. The clues hidden in plain sight. The props and puzzles and hidden compartments. Someone had imagined all of this. Carefully. Creatively. Not just the story, but how the story would feel. _It reminded me of the first time I held a well-designed object and thought about the person who designed it._ And maybe that’s what stayed with me most. Not the puzzles or the locks, but the feeling of stepping into someone else’s imagination. Not observing it, but being enveloped by it. Participating in it. **There’s something sacred in that.** Eventually, the door opened, and the hour slipped away. We stepped back into streetlights and mild weather and the weekend’s to-do list. But something lingered. I don't think of the escape room as an escape from life. I think of it as a small reminder of what life can hold—when attention sharpens, when presence softens, when imagination leads. These qualities aren’t locked behind puzzles. They’re here, scattered quietly across the everyday. **Sometimes the challenge isn’t to find a way out. But to find a way in.** To notice when I’m paying attention. To feel when I’m playing, truly playing. To trust that collaboration can be aimless and meaningful. To remember that uncertainty isn’t always something to fix, but something to feel. _And to celebrate the moments, however short, when I step into someone else’s dream—and, for a while, lose track of where mine ends and theirs begins._ The door behind me closed once again, this time without a click. Not a lock, not a puzzle. Just a breath. And that is how I learned to escape room. --- ### How to Coldplay Published: 2025-06-08 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/coldplay/ The sun was still up. The crowd was already here. And yet there was a strange sense of quiet. Fifty thousand people in a stadium, but something delicate lingered in the air—a shared anticipation. It wasn’t loud, it wasn’t rowdy. It was… still. Like the moment before a wave crests. A stillness at the edge of something about to begin. I haven’t been much of a concert-goer. At least not until recently. But over the past few months, several people had recommended this particular performance. And when the opportunity came to see Coldplay live, I said yes—not out of fandom, but out of curiosity. Walking through the gates of Stanford Stadium, the energy was nearly tangible. Almost ceremonial. _A kind of collective readiness, not just for music, but for mood, for moment._ We found our seats. And then before long, the lights shifted, the first chords struck, and everyone jumped to their feet—where we would stay for the rest of the show. There were lasers. There were wristbands that flickered in perfect sync with the sound. Fireworks erupted behind the stage. It was, in every sense, a spectacle. And yet amid the theatrical, something simple emerged. **I felt present.** Not the kind of presence that tries hard to block out distractions. Not the kind of presence that meditates its way into awareness. This was effortless. It just… was. I wasn’t thinking about the messages I hadn’t replied to. I wasn’t wondering what time it was. I wasn’t reflecting on who I was supposed to be. I was there—feeling the vibrations underfoot, the cheers overhead, the music weaving through it all. Surrounded by strangers, yet attuned to everything at once. And I couldn’t help but notice the contrast. So much of life lately has been lived through a screen. Hours spent behind it, staring into sterile light, much of it in conversation with artificial intelligence. It’s remarkable what these tools can do. How quickly, how accurately, how endlessly. **But not how it feels.** This—this was something else entirely. Something irreducible. In this past year, I’ve found myself drawn toward more shared experiences—live ones. Whether it was watching tennis at the Australian Open or attending events at the Paris Olympics, I’ve come to realize how little I remember of the specifics. I couldn’t tell you who won a medal. Couldn’t share the final score of the match. I can’t even name the lead singers of Coldplay. Or their songs. Or recite a single lyric. **But I can tell you how I felt.** Surprised. Moved. Light. Alive. That’s what I’ve remembered from all these moments. Not the facts. Not the who or what or how long. _Just the feeling. The texture of emotion that settled into memory long after the event was over._ It reminded me of something I’ve come to believe: that it’s not the content of a moment that makes it meaningful. **It’s the emotional imprint it leaves behind.** A conversation with a friend. A bite of something delicious. A sentence in a book that lingers long after the page has turned. A walk in familiar light that somehow looks different on a new day. These small, ordinary things—when felt deeply—become significant. Not because they last. But because they’re felt. In a world obsessed with permanence, emotion remains beautifully fleeting. Impossible to download, catalog, or summarize. _Which may be the point._ There was something ancient in that stadium. Something human. It wasn’t just a band playing songs. It was a sea of people feeling something all at once, without needing to name it. An unrepeatable choreography of sound, light, and shared presence. That night, I couldn’t take much away with me. I had no setlist. I had no photos. But I had emotion—undeniable and vivid—and that seems to be enough. And that is how I learned to Coldplay. --- ### How to New York Published: 2025-05-31 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/newyork1/ I was in New York last week for the first time in five years. Before the pandemic, I had lived there—on and off—for nearly a decade. It was the kind of place I kept returning to, in part because it never stopped moving. But this time was different. I was visiting with my partner, walking the streets I once called home, pointing out buildings I used to live in, cafes I used to frequent, corners where memories once unfolded. The city looked much the same._ But I didn’t._ There’s something I’ve always believed about landmarks. **They don’t change so that we can see how we have. **There’s a quiet generosity in that. When everything around me stays still, I notice the movement within. Being back in New York, surrounded by the same skyline, the same subway stations, the same rush of energy, I was confronted with just how much I’ve changed in five years. **New York has always been a mirror for me. ** Not the kind that reflects how I appear, but who I am—or who I was. There’s something about the city that makes it possible to hold many versions of yourself at once. The one who arrived wide-eyed and hopeful. The one who left burnt out and disillusioned. The one who wandered through it in love. The one who tried to belong. It’s a city that doesn’t ask for consistency. Instead, it offers a kind of permission—to become, to reinvent, to try on different selves without explanation. I’ve been thinking a lot about identity since that trip. **About how some places shape us, while others reflect us.** And about how rare it is to find a place that does both. In most environments, we adapt to what surrounds us. We become who we need to be to fit in, to survive, to succeed. But New York feels different. It contains so many possibilities that it doesn’t force a single one. Everyone is becoming someone there, and no one seems to mind who that is. Still, nostalgia has its edges. Walking through old neighbourhoods brought a mix of comfort and discomfort. I remembered who I was the last time I was there—and what I didn’t yet know. There was a tenderness in those memories, but also a kind of grief. Grief for the version of myself who no longer exists._ Gratitude for the one who does._ I noticed something else, too—my knees. Within a day of arriving, they started to ache. Not terribly, just enough to get my attention. I was walking faster than I had in years, the city pulling me into its rhythm.** I realized I didn’t want to move that fast anymore.** Not just physically, but in other ways too. I no longer feel the need to rush toward achievement, to chase some version of myself I haven’t caught up to yet. _The pace that once felt exhilarating now feels exhausting._ There’s something liberating about noticing that shift. **It’s easy to mistake change for loss**, or to feel nostalgia as something we need to resist. But I’m learning to see it differently. Revisiting old places, or old versions of myself, doesn’t mean trying to reclaim them. Sometimes, it’s just about recognising how far I’ve come—_and letting that be enough_. Identity, I’m starting to believe, isn’t fixed. _It’s layered. _It’s shaped by place and time, by memory and movement. And it’s always in revision. I’m not who I was in New York five years ago. I don’t need to be. But I’m grateful for the chance to remember him—for the way he helped me become who I am now. Change doesn’t always need a reason. Sometimes, it just needs space. And the right place to reflect it back. And that is how I learned to New York. --- ### How to Prompt Published: 2025-05-23 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/prompt/ It happened quietly. I was sitting with a friend who knows more about finance than anyone I know. The kind of person I used to turn to for questions I didn’t know how to answer. But that day, I didn’t ask. The question was still there, in the back of my mind. I just didn’t feel the need to say it out loud. **That’s when I noticed it.** Lately, I’ve been turning to AI more often than I care to admit. Not for everything_—but for a lot of things_. Questions about history, science, travel, recipes, taxes, investing. Questions that once lived on the edges of conversations now find their answers in the calm glow of a screen. There’s something strangely comforting about it. _No judgment. No hesitation. No interruption._ Just space to ask anything, however naïve or obscure, and to keep going until things make sense. _It’s efficient. It’s convenient._ And, if I’m honest, it feels safer than asking a person. There’s a small shame in admitting that. A quiet embarrassment in realizing I sometimes trust the collective intelligence of the world’s human knowledge trained into a system, more than I trust the opinions of the people I know. Not because the people are wrong. Just because the machine never seems to mind when I ask again, maybe in a different way, trying to see if I get a different answer. But something else has been happening too—something I didn’t expect. As AI has taken on the role of explaining the world to me, **I’ve found myself asking people fewer questions about what they know and more about how they feel.** I’m no longer as curious about where they went on their last trip, or how they booked their flight, or what restaurant they recommend. I can find that online. What I want to know now is what it felt like to be there. _What changed in them. What stayed with them._ There’s a depth in emotion that no dataset can recreate. A texture in lived experience that no algorithm can imitate. In the past, I may have believed we are logical beings who occasionally feel emotion. I’m not sure I believe that anymore. More and more, it seems to me that we are emotional beings who sometimes use logic to explain what we already feel. In many of the circles I spend time in—professional, cerebral, head-oriented—so much energy goes into understanding._ Into knowledge. Into the mind._ It’s all very sharp. But it often feels like something is missing. What’s missing is the part that doesn’t need to make sense. The part that simply _feels_. A chatbot can tell me what the economic indicators were during a financial crisis. But it cannot tell me what it felt like to lose a job, to call a parent for help, to wake up with dread for six months in a row and still try to smile at work. A chatbot can give me ten ways to roast a cauliflower, ranked my nutritional value. But it cannot describe the smell in the kitchen, the memory it stirred, the pride in serving it to someone who didn’t expect to be moved by the dinner. These days, **I’m starting to ask different questions to the humans in my life.** Or sometimes, asking no questions at all—and just listening. _Waiting for something deeper to emerge._ Not the facts of someone’s story, but the feeling that shaped it. The emotion that lingers long after the logic has been explained away. And in that space, I find inspiration. That’s the word I chose for this year—_inspire_. Not to be impressive, but to be moved. To let something stir in me that I didn’t know was possible. And more and more, that stirring comes from presence, not answers. I still use AI every day. Maybe every few hours. But when I’m with someone, I no longer need them to be informative. I just need them to be human. And that is how I learned to prompt. --- ### How to Friend Published: 2025-05-18 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/friend-inside/ A few weeks ago, I sat down with a friend. I've known them for some time, long enough to notice the patterns in their struggles. This particular evening, it was clear they were caught again in a familiar loop. Initially, I felt a pang of judgment arise, quietly asking myself,_ "Is this someone I still want to spend my time with?"_ **I've long believed we are influenced by the company we keep.** It's a quiet belief, not one that demands immediate action, but something I gently hold as true. As I listened to my friend speak, my internal voice started questioning the energy between us. Their challenges were heavy, and in that moment, uninspiring to me._ I was unsure if this was a place I wanted to linger._ Yet, as we continued talking, I found my judgment softened, replaced slowly by a quiet curiosity. The longer I stayed present, the clearer my friend's world became to me. I asked questions, wanting to understand the "why" beneath the repeating patterns. As their story unfolded, my own past experiences surfaced naturally, echoing in my memory. Soon, I found myself sharing my stories—_stories of similar challenges, similar feelings, similar loops I'd known intimately._ As I spoke, an unexpected shift happened in my inner world. **My judgment quietly turned inward.** I recalled moments when I had been caught in the same loops, stuck and unable to break free. There was a flicker of self-criticism, but it quickly gave way to empathy. I genuinely understood my friend's place because I had occupied that very space myself. **Compassion replaced curiosity**, and soon I was invested in helping, motivated to offer the insights and strategies I wished someone had shared with me earlier. We spoke deeply, vulnerably, honestly. By the end of the conversation, I felt energized, inspired by what we had uncovered together. What started as a hesitant encounter had transformed into something uplifting, rich with shared understanding. In the days following, I found myself reflecting on that evening. My initial hesitation about spending time with my friend had been based on criteria that now felt superficial—how successful or positive or inspiring they were. But what I realized clearly was that the true measure of friendship isn’t about who my friends were externally. Instead, **it is about who I am when I am with them.** _Did I like me in their company? Am I proud of how I show up? Am I energized or drained by my own presence?_ This simple shift in perspective begins to illuminate many of my interactions. Recently, returning to Lisbon and reconnecting with friends I haven't seen since last year, I've been quietly observing myself. How do I feel in their company? How do I show up? How present, curious, and authentic am I? It’s more about me than it is about them, surprisingly. **Friendship is an invitation to vulnerability precisely because the stakes are low.** It's not transactional; there's nothing to achieve or prove. Friendship allows me to experiment with showing up fully, expressing myself honestly without the pressures of consequence. In this safe, gentle space, I can see clearly who I become around others. _And in many ways, learn about myself, my thoughts and my feelings._ Lately, I've liked that person—the one who listens deeply, who responds with compassion, who shares openly, and who learns eagerly. The judgment I once felt toward others now gently redirects inward as a question: _who am I becoming in this moment, in their company?_ **Friendship is less about choosing who is worth spending my time with and more about noticing how I feel around others.** How I choose to show up shapes the space we share. I am gently observing and appreciating who I become when I'm with them. And that is how I learned to friend. --- ### How to Become Published: 2025-05-10 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/become/ It is Mother’s Day. And it is her birthday. A milestone one. We are not in the same city. Not even the same country or continent. Yet in some ways, I feel closer to her now than I did when we lived under the same roof. There is something that distance allows. Without the logistics of presence—planning visits, checking in, trading updates—there is space for a different kind of reflection. I’m not thinking about what to gift her, or how to celebrate her. Instead, **I find myself thinking about who she is**, and how I’ve come to see her more clearly over time. When I was younger, she was simply “Mom.” Constant. Capable. The one who stayed up when I was sick, who planned birthdays, who made sure there was always food in the house and clothes in the closet. Her presence was so reliable that it became invisible. _Like light. Like air._ I never thought to ask who she was before all of that. Before she was responsible for anyone but herself. Before she became the person I now know so intimately, **but saw only in relation to me**. Over time, that has changed. Slowly, quietly, and without any one defining moment, I began to see her differently. I began to notice the woman behind the role. The quiet strength beneath her gentleness. The decisions she made that I never noticed, and the ones I may never know about. The way she has carried so much, and asked for so little. There is so much she gave that she never named. So many moments of care that were never called out as love, and yet, that’s exactly what they were. She never told me what she sacrificed. She never asked to be acknowledged. And now, years later, I find myself trying to name what she never pointed to—because it matters more than I knew how to say. I also see her in unexpected places now. In how I move through the world. In how I respond when someone needs comfort. In how I wait before speaking. In how I try, often unconsciously, to create space for those around me. **These are not lessons she sat down to teach**. And yet, I learned them all the same. There are moments when I hear her in my voice. Not because I am trying to sound like her. **Simply because she is there.** I notice her presence in my gestures, in my instincts, in the quiet ways I try to offer care. It’s not mimicry. It’s memory—etched not in thought, but in being. We haven’t lived near each other in a long time. The frequency of our contact has changed over the years. But her influence hasn’t faded. If anything, it has become more visible, now that I’m far enough away to see the whole shape of it. Sometimes, distance creates clarity. I didn’t set out to become like her. I simply grew. And in growing, I discovered that much of who I am was formed by who and how she is. By how she lives. By what she models, even without meaning to. I used to think that gratitude was something I needed to express in words. But now I see that gratitude can also be something I live. And maybe that is the most honest way to thank her. Not by saying it. But by becoming it. And that is how I learned to become. _Happy Mother’s Day and Happy Birthday Mom._ --- ### How to Blackout Published: 2025-05-03 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/blackout/ The lights went out. My partner and I turned to one another, surprised. There was a flicker of excitement in the room, a quiet curiosity for what had just happened. **No warning, no explanation—just sudden stillness.** It had happened once before, last summer in Lisbon, on a blistering hot afternoon. That time, the power had returned within twenty minutes. Our building’s generator had come to the rescue, restoring order before disorder had time to settle in. This time was different._ There was no generator. No return._ One hour went by. Then two. Then three. At first, we continued on as usual. Reading the news. Messaging friends. We even called my sister in Canada to say hello. But soon, even those thin threads of connection faded. **The cellular network went down.**_ Our phones stopped working altogether._ There we were—overlooking the city of Lisbon, without power, without signal, without sound. _The silence outside felt heavier than usual. _Not the hush of night, but something unfamiliar. Something that made us pause. A scene from a Netflix series came to mind. Robert De Niro in a story where a terrorist group orchestrates a one-minute global blackout—and the chaos that follows. The imagination didn't need much fuel to wander. There were echoes of lockdowns, old fears surfacing in new forms. And yet, despite the mind's tendency to forecast disaster, something else was happening, too. A kind of joy had begun to take root. **With nowhere to go and nothing to do, we turned our attention inward.** Not in meditation, not in theory—but in action. We began cleaning. Closets we hadn’t touched in a year were suddenly emptied. Cupboards were sorted. Items we didn’t remember owning found new places or were discarded entirely. It became a spontaneous spring cleaning—a ritual of care, of tending to our space. We moved food from the fridge to the freezer, hoping to preserve what we could, just in case this stretched into days rather than hours. It felt practical, but also symbolic._ Taking care of what we could, while letting go of what we couldn’t control._ Eventually, there was nothing left to clean. So we sat on the couch. And we talked. About the past. About the future. About how we were feeling, really feeling, not just the edited versions we sometimes trade in the midst of daily life. **There was a level of presence between us that felt different. **Not because we had made time for each other, but because there was no time left to fill. Nothing else called for our attention. _No screens. No notifications. No tasks._ My partner said her mind felt more at ease. Lighter. As if something invisible had been lifted. The mental weight of always being connected had dulled so gradually over time, we hadn’t noticed it. _Until it was gone._ No information to absorb. No messages to reply to. No one was waiting for anything. Except the person sitting right in front of us. We found our way to a game we both love—Monopoly Deal, a card game we rarely remember to play, despite how much we enjoy it. Candles were lit as darkness settled in. Our apartment transformed into something quieter, softer. After nearly ten hours, we found ourselves still on the couch, still side by side, reflecting. It had been a beautiful evening. **An unplanned invitation into presence. **A reminder of something we had almost forgotten. We both acknowledged it wouldn’t have felt the same if we were alone. Together, it became something shared. Intimate. _Unexpectedly meaningful and memorable._ A part of us didn’t want the blackout to end. But beneath that hope was another truth—what we really wanted was to keep feeling this close, this present, this unencumbered. We said we’d find ways to carry it forward. To carve out moments like this in our daily life. That was one week ago. Since then, the hours have filled up again. The pace has resumed. The intention, while genuine, has quietly faded. Many cultures have long embraced their own form of blackout. Whether through rituals, sabbaths, or silent retreats, there is wisdom in choosing disconnection before it is forced upon us. _I now understand why._ **Disconnection, it turns out, is not the opposite of connection. Sometimes, it is the path to it.** As someone who delights in the new—gadgets, software, AI—I feel no conflict in also loving the moments when all of that slips away. It’s not about turning away from the world, but turning more fully toward it. In its simplest, most immediate form. And that is how I learned to blackout. --- ### How to Start Published: 2025-04-26 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/start-now/ There is a certain kind of weight that does not show itself on the surface. It lingers quietly, pulling gently at attention. Some days it feels light enough to ignore. Other days, it hums in the background, asking to be noticed. For the past month, I carried the simple desire to refresh the website for Pivot 5, my AI newsletter. It was a small project. Something I thought about almost daily. Each time I met someone new and wanted to share the newsletter, I found myself pulling up the old site, feeling a small, familiar discomfort. A reminder that there was something unfinished. Something waiting. I kept telling myself it was a quick task._ I kept not doing it._ Yesterday, somewhere between East Asia and Western Europe, sitting on a long-haul flight, I opened my laptop. There was a rare feeling of determination. No fanfare, no special plan. Just a small window of willingness. I connected to the airplane wifi, opened a blank page, and began. Within forty-five minutes, the new site took shape. Nothing complicated, nothing revolutionary. Just simple, clear, and — for now — enough. After I hit publish, I closed my laptop and pulled out my journal. I sat with the question: _why had this felt so heavy for so long?_ It wasn’t that the work was hard. It wasn’t the time it would take. It wasn’t even the skills involved. The real weight had lived elsewhere — in the mind, not the hands. **There is a difference between cognitive load and physical load. **Physical effort is easy to spot. Muscles tire. Limbs ache. But cognitive effort is quieter. Decisions accumulate. Doubts pile up. Expectations build until even the simplest task feels like a mountain. For this website refresh, the cognitive load was heavier than the task itself. Every time I thought about doing it, I imagined all the decisions that would need to be made. What to say. How it should look. How it might be received. Somewhere beneath it all, a perfectionist voice whispered that it needed to be great, not just good enough. That if I wasn’t ready to nail it, I shouldn’t even start. It is not lost on me how often this pattern repeats itself. **The things that weigh the most are rarely the things that require the most physical energy. **They are the ones that ask for emotional courage, for the willingness to face uncertainty. In other areas of life, I have found ways to ease this burden. I love attending yoga classes, even though I could easily practice at home. I often work out with a trainer, not because I don’t know what to do, but because it feels lighter to follow. For years as a CEO, and even now working independently, life has required a kind of constant self-leadership. Always deciding, always setting the direction.** There is a certain fatigue that comes from always leading, even if only oneself.** Sometimes, it feels good to let someone else guide the way. To follow a recipe rather than invent one. To ask ChatGPT even the most basic of questions, just to lighten the load. _To not have to figure everything out alone._ There is a certain conservation of energy that happens when the cognitive load is shared, even slightly. **Starting is often the hardest part.** The mind can inflate the difficulty of beginning into something monstrous, while the body waits patiently, ready to act. Resistance grows in imagination, but shrinks in the doing. The experience on the flight reminded me that **conserving energy is not always about becoming stronger or pushing harder.** Sometimes it is about creating conditions that make important work feel lighter. Reducing friction. Building systems of ease._ Lowering the cognitive cost of beginning._ It also reminded me to have compassion for the parts of myself that hesitate. The part that delayed the website refresh was not lazy or careless. _It was cautious._ It cared about getting it right. Sometimes, delay is not resistance but a quiet form of protection — an attempt to preserve energy for when it might be most wisely spent. **There are no simple answers here**. Only open questions. How to recognize when to push through resistance, and when to listen to it. How to distinguish between the heaviness that protects and the heaviness that holds back. How to create more conditions where beginning feels lighter, and more days where the work flows without force. The energy to live, to create, to move forward — it is precious. Perhaps conserving it is not about holding it tightly, but about learning how to spend it wisely, and how to trust that sometimes, even the heaviest things are lighter than they appear. And that is how I learned to start. _If you are interested in keeping up-to-date on the latest in AI, subscribe now for Pivot 5, my AI newsletter here: _**[pivot5.ai](http://pivot5.ai) ** --- ### How to Anything Published: 2025-04-18 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/anything/ For a long time, I believed I could do anything. It was a belief that served me well. **It gave me permission to dream.** _To try._ To say yes before knowing how. I have long approached the world with the quiet confidence that, with enough effort, energy, or intention, anything was possible. And then, I tried to do everything. Especially in business, I fell into that trap—believing that **since we could do anything, then we must do everything. ** Why not chase every idea, pursue every opportunity, take on every client, build every product? I told myself it was ambition. I told myself it was vision. But over time, I realized it was noise. When everything matters, it becomes hard to tell what really does. It wasn’t sudden. There was no single moment of collapse or crisis. Just a slow, growing awareness that the energy I was spreading across many things was leaving us with little depth in any one of them. I was always moving, but rarely arriving. And the more we did, the harder it became to explain—to myself and to others—what we were really about. **I didn’t want to choose. **That’s what made it so hard. Choosing meant closing doors. It meant letting go of ideas that were exciting, even if they weren’t essential. It meant acknowledging that time, energy, and attention are finite. _It meant growing up._ We’re often told a story that anything is possible. But what that story leaves out is that everything is not. That’s the quiet truth at the heart of this reflection. **We can do anything. But not everything.** Tradeoffs are not something I was eager to embrace. For years, I saw them as compromises. As limits. As what happens when things don’t go to plan. But I’ve started to see them differently. Tradeoffs are not signs of failure. They are signs of choosing. Choosing what to focus on is not a weakness. It’s a kind of wisdom. It’s a way of celebrating and deciding what matters most right now, even if it means setting aside things that also matter—just not right now. There’s a cultural pressure. The quiet—but constant—messages that more is better. That success looks like expansion. That if I say no, I’m missing out. _Falling behind. Thinking small._ I’ve felt that pressure. I’ve internalized it. And I’ve seen how easily it can pull me away from my own intuition. But there is something deeply grounding in making tradeoffs with intention. In not just reacting to what’s urgent, but returning to what’s essential. In being honest with myself about what season I’m in, what I can hold, and what I need to put down, for now. **It reminds me of pruning. **Cutting back not because something is dead, but because I want something else to grow. Tradeoffs can feel harsh in the moment. But over time, they create the space for depth. _For clarity. For flow._ These days, I try to make tradeoffs from a place of alignment rather than fear. When I’m afraid, I say yes too often. I chase too many things. I try to prove too much. But when I’m grounded, I can feel what’s mine to do—and what isn’t. And I can make those choices more gently. Sometimes, I still resist. **I still fall into the temptation of doing more.** Saying yes to everything can feel good—until it doesn’t. Until I find myself tired, scattered, or unsure of what I’m really working toward. _That’s usually when I remember to pause._ To step back. To ask a quiet question that has become a kind of compass: what matters most right now? That question doesn’t give me certainty. But it helps me listen. It helps me notice what I’m holding onto, and what I might be ready to release. I still believe I can do anything. But now I know that doing anything means choosing. **It means being okay with not doing everything.** It means trusting that every time I let go of something, I am making space for something else to emerge. And that is how I learned to anything.** ** --- ### How to Learn Published: 2025-04-09 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/learn/ A few minutes after I finished giving a talk on AI trends last week, as the audience began to disperse and the noise in the room started to fade, a young man approached me. He was quiet, maybe a little nervous, and had waited until the crowd had thinned before stepping forward. He was the only university student in the room—surrounded by professionals, founders, and technologists twice his age—but he had clearly been paying close attention. He asked me, simply, _“How do I learn AI?”_ There was something innocent in his voice. Not the kind of question meant to impress, but the kind that carries the weight of genuine curiosity. **The kind of question I might have asked when I was his age. **_The kind I don’t hear very often anymore._ I asked him what he had been doing so far. He told me about a few online courses he had taken, some YouTube videos he liked, and a handful of small projects he had already started building. He was clearly excited—eager to show me what he was working on on his phone, proud of what he had created, even if it wasn’t polished. _His enthusiasm was infectious._ And it stirred something in me that I hadn’t felt in a long time. **When was the last time I was that excited to learn?** I used to love learning. I learned to walk by watching others around me. I learned to speak by listening to the sounds that surrounded me. I learned to read and count and write not because I had to, but because it was all new, and I was ready. I was open. I was unafraid. I was constantly observing, mimicking, trying. I failed all the time, but I didn’t even notice or label it as failures or mistakes. That’s just what learning looked like. **The first twenty years of my life were dedicated to learning.** That was the purpose of life. Every environment I was in—from school to home to the playground—was designed around the idea that I didn’t know, and that not knowing was okay. _In fact, it was expected._ I miss that. Because the next twenty years, for me, were mostly about working. And sure, there was learning in that too—learning how to navigate teams, how to lead, how to manage complexity, how to solve problems. But it was a different kind of learning. It was linear. It was goal-oriented. **It was focused on output, on performance, on mastery.** The kind of learning that fits neatly into a spreadsheet or a resume. Through working, I learned how to get things done efficiently, effectively, and reliably. But that kind of learning rarely felt playful. _It didn’t feel free. _There was always a deadline, always a deliverable, always someone expecting something from me. **Somewhere along the way, I also developed the belief that I should already know.** That being new at something was a sign of failure. That asking questions revealed weakness. That unless I was good at something, it probably wasn’t worth doing. _But that’s the lie._ The truth is that learning, by definition, begins with not knowing. And there’s a certain grace in that. A humility. A quiet strength in being able to say: this is new to me. I don’t know how to do it yet. And that’s okay._ That’s the whole point._ The challenge, though, is that as adults we become attached to who we think we are. I’ve noticed this in myself. I start to say things like “I’m a founder,” or “I’m an investor,” or “I’m a writer.” And each of those statements, while useful in certain contexts, begins to define the boundaries of what I allow myself to explore. If I’m a founder, then I should know how to build businesses. If I’m a writer, then I should be exceptional at expressing myself. There’s less room for surprise._ Less room for play._ Back to the student who approached me after my talk. He began showing me a few of the projects he had built using AI—small tools, clever experiments, things he had thrown together using open-source models and APIs. Then he asked me, _“Do you think any of these could make money?”_ I stopped him. Not because it was a bad question. But because it wasn’t the right one for that moment. _“Why does it need to make money?”_ I asked. He looked at me, unsure how to respond. _“I guess… I thought that’s what I was supposed to do.”_ There was a pause between us. I could see him thinking. I could also see him wondering if he had said something wrong. I filled the silence by reminding him of his original question. He had asked me how to _learn_ AI. Not how to monetize it. Not how to build a company. Not how to become a success story. I told him to keep building. To keep experimenting. To keep launching new projects—every single week, if he could. Not because one of them might work. But because** the act of doing is the real learning**. Not the videos. Not the podcasts. Not the reading. Not the articles or courses or conversations. His face lit up. There was a visible shift in his posture. I could feel his excitement begin to return, maybe even deepen. “So,” he asked, “if I just keep trying ideas, one of them will eventually work?” “No,” I said, again challenging him, without hesitation. “That’s not the point.” The purpose isn’t to get one of your ideas to work. The purpose is to keep learning. To keep pulling the thread of your own curiosity, without needing to know where it leads. And maybe that’s the hardest part. As adults, **we become so oriented around outcomes.** We want results. We want validation. We want our time to feel productive, our effort to be justified. But learning doesn’t work that way. Not the kind of learning that expands us. Not the kind that lights us up. That kind of learning can’t be scheduled or measured Play is a word I’ve been coming back to more often lately. Children learn through play not because it’s a strategy, but because it’s an instinct. It’s how they make sense of the world. And when I think back on the moments when I’ve learned the most in recent years, they haven’t been when I was trying to learn. They’ve been when I was trying something new just for the sake of it. When I allowed myself to experiment._ To explore. To play._ **Learning, I’m starting to remember, is not something to achieve.** It’s something to return to. Something to remember. A part of myself I once knew well and, somewhere along the way, misplaced. The student didn’t need a roadmap. He needed a reminder. And without meaning to, he gave one back to me. And that is how I learned to learn. --- ### How to Write Published: 2025-04-06 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/write/ It started, as many things do, with a question from a friend. One I’ve been asked before, and never answered well. "How do you write so much?" For a long time, I would say what many say: _just start_. It was an easy answer. A quick way to move past the question. But recently, someone challenged me and I started to wonder if that advice has ever really helped anyone. It’s like telling someone who’s never cooked before to just make dinner. Technically true. But not really useful. So I sat down. I let the question sit with me. And I began to think about how writing has shown up in my own life. **Writing has been one of the most meaningful parts of my adult life.** Not because I set out to become a writer, but because I wanted to find a way to express myself. And for me, writing became the most natural form of expression. For others, it may be music, dance, sport, art, cooking or a myriad of other activities. For me, it’s writing. Over the years, it has taken many shapes. Blog posts, books, newsletters. But also private notes I have never shared. Simple text messages to people I care about. Journal entries that no one else will read. Each of them, in their own way, is a form of writing. **Writing doesn’t have to mean publishing.** _It doesn’t have to mean performing._ It doesn’t even have to mean being read. It can be a quiet act. A way to make sense of what’s going on inside. A way to turn a vague feeling into something that can be seen or understood. I understand why writing can feel hard, especially for adults. In school, we learned how to write in order to get a grade. We wrote for a teacher, followed a structure, and moved on. We didn’t learn how to write for ourselves. We didn’t learn how to write in a way that was connected to our identity. And we certainly didn’t learn how to write for a wider audience, or how to build the confidence that comes with doing so. As adults, writing begins to show up again, but in different ways. In texts, emails, reports, presentations. On social media, in bios, in captions. **The stakes feel higher. The audience is wider. The expectations are louder. **There’s a real fear of being judged. Of being misunderstood. Of being remembered for the wrong thing. The pressure to be perfect can be overwhelming. If it’s not good, don’t share it. If it’s not perfect, don’t start. _And so, many people don’t._ I used to think that writing was the hard part. But over time, I’ve come to see that writing is not the hard part.** Thinking is the hard part.** When I sit down to write and feel stuck, it’s usually because I haven’t done the work to think something through. Or, more honestly, I haven’t allowed myself to feel what I need to feel. When I’m clear about what I believe, when I know what I want to say, when I’ve taken the time to sit with an idea or a feeling—then the writing flows effortlessly. The writing takes care of itself. _We all think differently._ For some people, clarity comes through conversation, through engaging with others. For others, it comes through solitude, through quiet reflection. For me, **it comes in the empty spaces**. When I’m in the shower. Driving with no destination. Walking without my phone. Cooking a meal. Cleaning the apartment. These are the times when I notice ideas surfacing from within me. Not because I’m doing nothing, but because I’m tuning into myself These spaces are often dismissed as unproductive. But they are full of insight. When the noise fades, what’s left is a chance to hear something that’s already there. _Something waiting to be heard._ Writing hasn’t changed my life. **Writing has helped me change my life.** It has helped me see and understand myself more clearly. Hear myself more honestly. Trust myself more deeply. It didn’t happen all at once. But over time, writing has become a way for me to stay close to what matters._ A way to remember who I am._ So when I’m asked how to write, I no longer say:_ just start_. Now I say: _make space_. Make space to think. To feel. To listen. That’s where writing begins. Because the words are already within. They just need a way out. And that is how I learned to write. --- ### How to Make Friends Published: 2025-03-29 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/makefriends/ Two WhatsApp messages came in last night, both unprompted, from friends of friends who are moving to Lisbon and asked me an innocent question, "how do I make friends there?" The question stumped me. Not because I don't know what to say, but because it can't be said over a few sentences in a text message. Making friends is not a logistical, practical item, like say where to find healthy vegetarian food, or how much health insurance costs, or which yoga studio should I try. **It is a deep question that requires first going inwards before going outwards.** As I sat there on my couch at night, I put my phone aside and began to reflect. In the past few weeks, I have been traveling and connected either in-person or over the phone, with close friends across different chapters in my life and continents in the world. From Sydney and Lisbon, to San Francisco, New York and Toronto, to London and Singapore, I look back at my recent interactions with friends with fondness and gratitude. **The process of making friends as an adult begins with deciding to make friends.**_ That decision has tremendous consequences and implications._ This decision requires sacrifice. To treat friendship not as a luxury for when time permits, but as essential as sleep, as food, as exercise. It means sometimes choosing a coffee with a potential friend over an extra hour of work. It means showing up to gatherings and events, when exhaustion begs me to stay home. It means vulnerability when all my adult instincts push toward self-protection. **The structure of adult life is inherently isolating.** We no longer have the ready-made social pools of classrooms and dormitories. The casual daily interactions that spark connection have been further eroded by remote work culture—no more impromptu lunches with colleagues or conversations waiting for the elevator. I felt this acutely when I first started working remotely five years ago. The freedom was intoxicating, but something vital was missing. The spontaneous human moments that punctuated office days disappeared. My world narrowed to scheduled video calls and carefully crafted text and voice messages. What I've learned through setting up a home, and by proxy, a life, in New York, Lisbon and Sydney, is that adults must create the conditions for friendship that once happened naturally. This is not a passive process—it's architectural. _I have needed to build the structures that foster connection rather than waiting for them to appear._ Adult friendships haven't happened in the margins of life for me—they happen only when I carve out space at the center. **Friendship occupies territory that nothing else can fill. **Not family, not romantic partnership, not professional relationships. Sitting across from a friend in a café in Sydney, I found myself sharing thoughts I hadn't even admitted to myself. There was nothing at stake—no family dynamics to maintain, no relationship stability to consider, no professional reputation to protect. _Just the clean air of connection for its own sake._ I've observed that family relationships come with tribal expectations—patterns established decades ago that can be beautiful but also limiting. Romantic partnerships carry the weight of shared life management. Professional connections must always honor certain boundaries. But friendship—true friendship—**creates space for exploration without consequence**. For authenticity without calculation. _For growth without an agenda._ After fifteen years as a CEO, I understand the difference profoundly. Professional friendships, while meaningful, exist within constraints. They're contextual by nature. True friendship transcends context—it follows no organizational chart, honors no hierarchy, serves no purpose beyond itself. This isn't to diminish other connections. Rather, it's to recognize that friendship fills gaps that nothing else can. Gaps that, left unfilled, leave us incomplete. **Making friends as an adult follows a consistent equation: initial effort + consistent investment = compound returns.** The first stages require the most energy. Every interaction feels deliberate, sometimes awkward. Every invitation carries the risk of rejection. Every conversation requires presence when it would be easier to retreat to the comfort of established connections online. I remember feeling exhausted after my first few weeks of friendship-building in Lisbon. The constant introducing myself. The stretching to remember names and details. The showing up to events where I knew no one._ It felt like pushing a boulder uphill._ But something shifted around month three. Invitations began to flow both ways. Conversations developed continuity. Inside jokes emerged. The boulder that once required my constant straining began to roll with its own momentum. **This is the secret that few discuss: friendship has a tipping point.** Invest enough consistent effort upfront, and eventually, the relationship begins to generate its own energy. The challenge is that most adults give up before reaching this inflection. Looking at those Whatsapp messages again, I realize there's no simple answer to give. _No three-step process. No list of meetup groups or apps or venues._ Making friends as an adult isn't about finding the right locations or activities. I**t's about becoming the right kind of person**—one who has decided that connection matters enough to rearrange life around it. One who is willing to make the initial investments of effort. One who understands that meaningful relationships don't just happen to adults—they are built, deliberately and patiently. The research confirms what experience has taught me: nothing contributes more to wellbeing than genuine connection. Not career success. Not financial security. Not even physical health. We are, at our core, social creatures whose nervous systems regulate best in the presence of trusted others. I look back at my phone now, ready to craft a response to these two people who asked me how to make friends. I see that in the time I spent staring out over my balcony and reflecting on what to say, I had received a few new messages—someone from Lisbon checking in, someone from Sydney extending an invitation, someone from Toronto continuing a conversation from days ago. _This is the momentum of friendship at work._ And that is how I learned to make friends. --- ### How to Five Years Published: 2025-03-22 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/fiveyears/ This past week marked five years since that collective pause. The world stopped, held its breath, and in that stillness, something had shifted within me. Looking back now, the contrast in my life feels stark. My New York City life moved at a relentless pace. My days were filled with meetings, evenings with networking, weekends with recovery._ Just to do it all again._ Breathing in subway air and ambition in equal measure. _Running, always running._ Toward what? It wasn't really clear to me. **My identity felt solid then.** Entrepreneur. My business card said it, my introduction at parties confirmed it, my schedule demanded it. It was comfortable in its discomfort. Known in its exhaustion. _Then everything stopped._ In the quiet that followed, realizations emerged within me. Not immediately, but gradually, like plants slowly breaking through an old concrete patio. Thoughts that couldn't be heard in the noise before. What existed beyond the life I had constructed? The identity I had so carefully built might not be the only possible one for me. The first changes I made were practical. Location. Daily habits._ A move across an ocean, that wasn't meant to be permanent._ Now my life unfolds between Lisbon and Sydney. Between ancient cobblestones and oceanside beaches. Applying lots of sunscreen has become my daily ritual, replacing the morning rush for the subway. **The shift in my surroundings has brought a shift in my perspective.** My conversations now happen in accented English, with many non native English speakers as friends, whose journeys to this moment took paths entirely different from mine. Their stories and viewpoints reshape my understanding of life in ways impossible to predict. Foreign accents that once registered to me only as different now carry nuance, history, identity. My professional identity has transformed too. From entrepreneur to now investor and author. From creating a single business to supporting many. From telling one story to telling many. Less doing, more reflecting. Less building, more connecting. But the deeper shifts happened beneath my surface. I learned to hold my ideas, identities, and attachments more lightly. I discovered that letting go creates space for something new to emerge.** I found that curiosity leads to places certainty never could.** Perhaps the pandemic offered me a rare permission slip. Permission to question everything. Permission to release what no longer fit. Permission to begin again without explanation or justification. **In the space between what was and what could be, possibility took root within me.** The lesson from the past five years isn't about my specific choices—Lisbon or Sydney, investing or writing. The lesson is about curiosity itself. About approaching change not as a threat but as an invitation. _About moving toward uncertainty rather than clinging to the familiar._ Looking back now, gratitude surfaces within me. For the circumstances that created space for my change. For the people who appeared at exactly the right moment, offering perspectives I couldn't have sought out intentionally. For the courage to follow my curiosity even when my destination wasn't clear. Five years. So much change in my life, and yet it feels like just the beginning to me now. The next five years will no doubt bring more change._ More growth. More letting go. More discovering._ That's the unexpected gift from these past five years. Not the specific changes themselves, but my capacity to welcome change as it comes. To greet the unknown not as a threat but as teacher. And that is how I learned to Five Years. --- ### How to North Pole Published: 2025-03-16 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/northpole/ All I could see was white, for hours on end. This was while on a recent cross-continental flight, over 16 hours, that took a route across the top of the world, crossing the North Pole. As it was daytime, and I had a window seat, I couldn't help but stare effortlessly out of the window. A white blanket of snow covered the earth as far as the eye could see. Occasionally, jagged ridges of ice caught the sunlight, like shattered diamonds against the endless whiteness. While the plane was traveling at a high speed, everything seemed to slow down at that moment though. A peacefulness washed over me—not the forced calm of a meditation practice, but something more spontaneous and genuine that rose from witnessing something so untouched. I realized I was staring at a part of the world rarely seen by anyone. _It was completely uninhabited—by humans, animals, or vegetation._ **It was empty but full at the same time.** Emptiness often suggests absence, yet staring down at the vast white expanse, I discovered a different kind of emptiness—one full of presence, not absence. I pressed my forehead against the cold window, watching ice formations that had existed long before human eyes gazed upon them. The landscape wasn't waiting for anyone's arrival. It simply _was_—perfect in its self-contained existence. **Without concern for anyone else.** Somewhere between cloud and ice, I recognized something of myself in that landscape. A flicker of _wonder_ came alive in me, followed by an unexpected desire to carry its profound peacefulness back into my cluttered life. **How often I had mistaken my own quiet spaces for emptiness**. The digital world has trained me to equate activity with value. My attention fractures across dozens of apps, hundreds of websites and messages. The complexity compounds in my digital world until my mind resembles an overstuffed storage unit—everything is there but nothing is found. Yet thirty-five thousand feet above the earth, that snow-covered expanse made a compelling argument for having less, not more. Time behaves differently over the North Pole. _The usual markers disappear. _Just the curve of the earth wearing its white cap, indifferent to the human constructs of hours and minutes. I checked the time and was surprised to find that two hours had passed. There's a certain peace in touching, even briefly, something that operates outside my usual frantic rhythm. I also felt small against that immense whiteness. _Properly small._ **The humbling vastness reminded me of my place in the world**—not diminishing my importance but contextualizing it. A relief washed over me—the pressure of being the center of my universe momentarily lifted. It was a strange but welcomed feeling: becoming smaller made me feel _more_. From thirty-five thousand feet, patterns emerge that remain invisible at ground level. Wind had sculpted the snow into ripples that only revealed their natural and perfect geometry from this height. I thought about how perspective transforms my understanding—how stepping back from my life helps reveal patterns I can’t see when pressed up against my daily existence. As I continued staring out the airplane window, I began to wonder about what might lie beneath this immaculate surface, as there is more depth that meets the eye. Similarly, the parts of myself I rarely acknowledge—these are my personal North Poles. Regions unmarked on my mental maps. Regions I fly over but seldom explore. **My deepest creativity lies in these untouched regions.** **My most authentic self exists in this interior space that lies beneath the surface.** As the plane continued its arc across the sky, I pressed my palm against the window one last time, feeling the cold seep through the glass. To recognize that the rarely seen parts of the world, like the rarely acknowledged parts of myself, aren't empty at all but full of meaning. _All I have to do is pause and look._ And that is how I learned to North Pole. --- ### How to Bali Published: 2025-03-09 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/bali/ Spending the past week in Bali, and like most places visited on vacation, it didn’t take long to notice the obvious—the palm trees, the beaches, the warmth in the air. But what stayed with me wasn’t the scenery. It was something quieter, something that didn’t call attention to itself. One afternoon, while walking through a small village, I stopped in the middle of a busy street. I hadn’t meant to, but something caught my eye. The gates to a traditional Balinese home had been left open, revealing an intricately carved temple standing inside. It was beautiful, but what struck me wasn’t the temple itself. It was its placement—right there at the front, effortlessly integrated into everyday life. Not hidden away in a quiet room, not reserved for special occasions. Just there. It was striking, this natural coexistence of spirituality within the ordinary. Growing up in the West, spirituality often felt compartmentalized—something reserved for specific days, special ceremonies, or particular places of worship. Here in Bali, it is constant and present, quietly part of every day living. The scooter narrowly missed me as I stood there, staring at the temple, the driver offering a gentle smile rather than the expected frustration. No horn, no shouting, just a slight adjustment of course before continuing on. This happens daily on Bali's roads—a beautiful chaos that somehow functions with unexpected grace. Narrow streets built for one direction somehow accommodate two. Sidewalks appear and disappear without warning. Traffic signals exist mostly as suggestions. By all conventional wisdom, this should create constant tension, yet the opposite occurs. In Delhi, drivers would lean heavily on their horns. In London, there would be structured outrage. In New York, colorful language would fill the air. But here, the chaos breathes with its own peculiar calm. The traffic moves like water finding its path, each vehicle sensing the others without rigid rules dictating every movement. There's an unspoken agreement to make space, to yield when yielding makes sense, to flow rather than force. Bali exists in contradictions that somehow aren't contradictory at all. Ancient stone temples stand beside sleek cafés serving flat whites. Traditional ceremonies with elaborate offerings occur next to digital nomads typing on MacBooks. A ceremony might temporarily close a main road, and everyone simply adjusts without complaint. Time stretches and contracts depending on what the moment requires, rather than adhering to strict schedules. The concept of "either" feels foreign here. Instead, there is "both"—a capacity to hold seemingly opposite things with equal regard. Every morning, small offerings appear everywhere—tiny palm-leaf baskets filled with flowers, rice, and incense. They rest on sidewalks, at entryways, on dashboards, at intersections. By afternoon, many are swept away or stepped over, yet the next day they appear again. The offerings aren't precious in the sense of needing to be preserved. Their value lies in the daily practice, the consistency of attention, rather than the permanence of the object itself. This steady rhythm of small, intentional acts creates a different relationship with time. Each day contains these moments of pause and recognition. The mind isn't constantly pulled toward some future outcome or achievement. Instead, there is a gentle anchoring in the present—not through elaborate methods or dedicated retreats, but through these tiny consistent acknowledgments woven into ordinary activities. One evening, watching the sun set at the beach, it occurred to me that what feels most striking about Bali isn't any single aspect but rather the ease with which apparent opposites coexist. Work doesn't struggle against rest; they flow into each other. Technology doesn't battle tradition; they complement one another. Spirituality doesn't compete with practicality; they inform each other. The sacred doesn't need protection from the mundane; they are understood as parts of the same whole. There's no need for rigid boundaries between categories of experience. The mind that created such distinctions can also allow them to dissolve. Back home, my life often feels sectioned off into discrete areas that rarely touch. Investing stays in its lane. Health and relationships occupy designated times. Deeper questions about meaning or purpose get their occasional moment, usually when something disrupts the normal patterns. This compartmentalization isn't inherently wrong. Structure creates clarity, efficiency, focus. Yet something is lost in this careful separation—a certain richness that comes from allowing different aspects of life to inform and transform each other. Perhaps harmony doesn't require sameness or careful sorting. Perhaps it emerges naturally when we stop insisting that different elements of our experience must remain distinct and separate. My last night in Bali, I found myself again in traffic, this time as a passenger watching the dance of vehicles negotiating a roundabout with no signals or rules beyond an unspoken understanding. Motorbikes, cars, pedestrians, even a few chickens—all somehow finding their way through without collision. No single path was identical, yet all were flowing toward their destinations. It seemed, in that moment, a perfect metaphor. The harmony wasn't created by forcing everything to follow identical paths but rather by allowing each to find its own way while remaining aware of the whole. The contradictions were never really contradictions at all—just different expressions of the same life, moving in its own perfect, imperfect way. And that is how I learned to Bali. --- ### How to Surprise Myself Published: 2025-03-01 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/surprise/ I recently asked ChatGPT to tell me three things about myself that I didn’t know. It was a passing thought, more experiment than expectation. I wondered what it would say. If it would come back with something vague, something obvious, something easy to dismiss. Instead, it told me this: **_You’re a bridge between worlds._**_ You navigate different cultures, industries, and perspectives—blending your Indian heritage with your North American experiences, moving between tech and publishing, balancing strategic thinking with deep personal introspection. _ **_You have a pattern of building ecosystems, not just projects._**_ Whether it’s your company, your books, or your interest in social enterprises, you don’t just create one-off things—you create systems that sustain themselves and grow. _ **_You thrive on reinvention._**_ You don’t settle into a static identity. Whether it’s shifting industries, rethinking investments, or evolving your approach to relationships, you’re always in motion, refining and reimagining. _ I sat with those words for a moment. There was nothing in them I hadn’t known. And yet, something about seeing them laid out so plainly made me pause. These weren’t just observations. They were patterns. They were truths. And they didn’t come from a person. They came from a machine. A machine that has never met me, never watched me think, never heard the sound of my voice. But a machine that has read what I’ve written, seen what I’ve asked, and followed the trails of my curiosity. It was unsettling, in a way. **Not because it felt wrong, but because it felt right. ** So I asked a follow-up question: "What are your five biggest pieces of life advice for me?" I expected something generic. But it gave me this: **_Protect your time like it’s your most valuable asset—because it is._**_ If something feels like an obligation rather than a choice, question whether it belongs in your life. _ **_Lean into your instincts—they’ve rarely led you wrong._**_ You have a strong sense of where things are going. Keep refining your instincts, trust them more, and act with conviction when they tell you something. _ **_Master the balance between control and surrender._**_ Not everything can be optimized or planned. Some of the most important things—love, creativity, breakthroughs—flourish when you allow space for the unknown. _ **_Double down on depth, not breadth, in relationships._**_ Rather than stretching yourself thin socially, go all-in on the relationships that truly matter. _ **_Play the long game—always._**_ Whether in business, investing, or life, prioritize what will still matter 10, 20, or 50 years from now. _ Again, nothing shocking. If a friend had said these things to me, I would have nodded and moved on. But something about the source made them land differently. AI doesn’t have an agenda. It doesn’t flatter. It doesn’t try to make me feel good or tell me what I want to hear. It just reflects. It takes everything I have fed into it—my questions, my thoughts, my uncertainties—and distills them into something I hadn’t yet put into words myself. And that’s what unsettled me the most. Not that AI understood me, but that I had unknowingly revealed so much of myself. It made me wonder how much of myself do I leave behind in the things I pay attention to? I’ve always thought of self-knowledge as something I build. Through experience. Through reflection. Through paying attention. **But what if self-knowledge isn’t something I construct, but something I uncover?** What if it’s already there—written into my habits, my instincts, the way I move through the world—waiting to be seen? AI didn’t tell me anything new. But it held up a mirror. And in that reflection, I recognized myself in a way I hadn’t before. It made me think about the way others see me. The way a close friend might articulate something about me that I haven’t realized. The way a passing comment can land so deeply it lingers for days. The way certain words resonate in a way I can’t quite explain. Maybe the things we don’t yet know about ourselves are already out in the open—hidden not in the depths of self-reflection, but in the patterns of our lives. Maybe the real work isn’t about creating an identity, but about uncovering the one that has been quietly shaping itself all along. And maybe self-awareness isn’t something to chase. Maybe it’s something that has been revealing itself to me all this time. And that is how I learned to surprise myself. --- ### How to Cliffnic Published: 2025-02-22 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/cliffnic/ I recently had a picnic on the edge of a cliff. Getting there required a drive along a dusty, unpaved road, winding further away from anything familiar. The car kicked up a trail of dust, the valley below slowly revealing itself through breaks in the trees. Upon arrival, the first order of business wasn’t unpacking food or finding a scenic spot to sit. Instead, it was putting on a harness, tightening a helmet strap, and signing a liability waiver. A small but symbolic act—**releasing control for the unknown**, agreeing to participate in whatever might unfold. A fear of open-air heights has lingered for as long as I can remember for me. Over the years, exposure therapy has taken many forms—skydiving, cliff jumping, zip-lining—each one an attempt to outmatch fear with action. Yet, standing at the edge of this cliff, the same familiar pulse of anxiety surfaced in my stomach. A quiet but persistent discomfort. **My mind already constructing escape routes**, calculating distance, anticipating outcomes that weren’t real._ It’s strange how the body can feel perfectly safe while the mind insists otherwise._ **The invitation for us was simple: sit down, breathe, and enjoy a meal. **A blanket was laid out, a picnic basket opened, small vegetarian and gluten-free bites placed between us. Everything about the moment was ordinary, except for the steep drop inches away. _My body remained grounded, but my mind flew. _ At first, the experience was quite unsettling. My edges of awareness sharpened. Every shift in weight felt exaggerated. My thoughts wandered to worst-case scenarios, mapping out every possible misstep. **My mind, resistant to stillness, pulled in all directions. **It was a reminder of how easily fear creates its own reality, even when my body is entirely safe. Then, something changed. Not suddenly, but gradually. The weight of silence began to press into the moment. The valley stretched endlessly below, unmoving. _The air settled. _Breath, once shallow and rapid, deepened. _Shoulders softened. Body temperature cooled. _There was no dramatic realization or forced effort—just the slow release of tension, as if my mind had finally grown tired of resisting. The presence of nature became more noticeable. The way the sky opened without boundary. The way the wind moved with its own rhythm. The way the rock beneath provided silent, unwavering support. **It felt like an invitation for me to stop holding on so tightly. ** The vastness of the space no longer felt threatening. Instead of being on the edge of something dangerous, it felt like being in the center of something still. The cliffs, the valley, the sky—they weren’t waiting to be conquered. They just existed. _And so did this moment._ Memories of past height-defying experiences surfaced—not in the usual way, as a point of comparison, but as a contrast in intention. Those experiences were about overcoming fear through force, rushing toward discomfort as a means of proving something. This moment, by contrast, wasn’t about conquering anything. It was about being with what was there. Not resisting the fear, not pushing it away, but letting it exist without letting it lead. My mind still tried to resist. For a while, there was a battle—an instinct to pull away, to hold onto tension, to prepare for a fall that wasn’t coming. But as my body settled, my mind slowly followed. Sitting there, a quiet clarity emerged: **reality is perfect as it is. ** It will continue to shift and evolve, in its own nature and time. Nothing needs to be forced into change. My mind often operates as if things must be fixed or improved before they can be accepted, but sometimes, acceptance is the very thing that allows change to unfold. The lesson was subtle but undeniable—life is always moving, but not everything requires intervention. It made me think of other moments, other times when resistance has made things harder. How often my instinct is to push against what is uncomfortable, to try to mold reality into something easier to hold. But **reality doesn’t need to be gripped—it only asks to be witnessed. ** Nature knows this well—the wind moves without resistance, the valley stretches without effort, the rock remains still without grasping. Everything follows its own rhythm, unbothered by how it is perceived. Eventually, the picnic ended. The same path was taken back, the same car ride returned, the same dirt road stretched ahead. But something felt different. Perhaps nothing had changed at all. _Or perhaps everything had._ And that is how I learned to cliffnic. --- ### How to Love Published: 2025-02-15 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/love/ Walking through the streets this week, love was impossible to miss. Red roses stacked high at every corner store, the scent sweet and overwhelming. Heart-shaped balloons swaying outside cafés. Restaurant tables set for two, candlelight flickering in the window. The clink of wine glasses, the soft sounds of intimate conversation, the careful expressions of romance. It’s the same every year. And yet, something about the overwhelming presence of it all always makes me pause. Not because I don’t believe in love, but because the version of love being celebrated feels so… specific. The kind that fits neatly into a dinner reservation, a bouquet of flowers, an exchange of words and gestures that say,** I love you, and you love me back.** I think about the times I’ve said “I love you” in a relationship. What I was really saying was: _“I love the way you make me feel.”_ _“I love that you see me, that you choose me.”_ _“I love what we have built together, the life we share.”_ Nothing about that is wrong. **But it is transactional, whether I want to admit it or not. **There is a lot of “me” in this. There is an exchange happening—love, given and received, measured in gestures, presence, and care. It’s easy to forget that love doesn’t have to be this way. **That love can exist without being returned.** I think about my grandmother. I have loved her my entire life, but it wasn’t a love that needed validation. It wasn’t about what she gave me, what she said, or how she made me feel. It just was. There’s something freeing about that kind of love—love that doesn’t need to be acknowledged to exist. _It isn’t about being seen. It isn’t about being chosen. It isn’t about filling a space within myself._ **It’s the kind of love that expects nothing.** There are other loves like this. Love for a childhood friend I haven’t spoken to in years, but who still holds a place in my heart. Love for a city I no longer live in, but that still feels like mine. Love for the ocean, steady and unchanging, even though it has never once loved me back. **These forms of love are quieter. **They don’t come with grand gestures or celebration days. They aren’t the ones that get written into movies or turned into marketing campaigns. But they are, in many ways, the purest. Most things I love still give me something in return—comfort, security, a sense of belonging. But I wonder, how many things do I love purely for their existence? **Love, in its truest form, is given, not traded.** It is free of attachment, desire, or expectation. It asks for nothing. And maybe, that is what makes it special. This week, love has been everywhere. But the love I’ve been thinking about most is the love that doesn’t need to be returned. Some love is seen. Some love is returned. And some love, the purest love, simply exists. And that is how I learned to love. --- ### How to Mirror Published: 2025-02-08 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/mirror/ I was running late for dinner. Traffic had been a mess. Parking took forever. Now I stood outside the restaurant, watching my friends through the window. The warmth of conversation and laughter spilled into the evening air, but I was still carrying the tension of failing to get to dinner on time. **My first instinct was to blame the city.** The roads were congested, the parking situation was impossible, and I had done my best. I pushed open the door, still thinking about everything outside of me that was the reason I was late. But as I stepped inside the restaurant, something shifted. The glass door caught my reflection for just a moment—just long enough for a quiet thought to land. _Was traffic really the reason I was late?_ If I was honest, I had left my apartment later than I could have. I had lingered unnecessarily, checked my phone one last time, let the minutes slip away in small, avoidable ways. _It wasn’t just the traffic._ There had been a moment—maybe several—where I could have chosen differently. The window had given me something external to point to. But the mirror from the glass door had offered me something else. _A chance to look inside, versus outside._ **When something doesn’t go as I want, where does my attention go?** Do I scan the world outside for reasons, explanations, and excuses? _Or do I look within?_ The difference is like looking through a window versus a mirror. Through the window, I see everything beyond my control. A partner who doesn’t meet an expectation. A colleague whose habits frustrate me. A society that feels rigid in all the ways I wish it were flexible. The window gives me a view of all the forces acting upon me, and in doing so, it offers an easy and convenient answer: This is why things are the way they are. _This is why I feel the way I do._ It is comforting in its simplicity. **But it also makes me a spectator in my own life.** The mirror, on the other hand, is more demanding. It doesn’t offer easy explanations. Instead, it asks: What part of this do I have control over? Not in a way that is self-critical or blaming, but in a way that returns my power to me. What can I learn? What can I change? It’s tempting to stay at the window. **But the mirror is where change happens.** The window view is seductive in its simplicity, but exhausting in its consequences. The more I look outward for reasons, the more powerless I feel. **There is always something to blame, but never anything to change.** The mirror, though, offers something different. It isn’t just clarity—it’s energy. Looking in the mirror isn’t comfortable. It requires a particular kind of courage to see myself clearly, to acknowledge my part in the patterns that frustrate me. But it carries the gift of energy. When I shift my gaze from the window to the mirror, something transforms. Complaints become questions. “They should” becomes “I could.” **Powerlessness gives way to possibility.** This shift ripples outward. Teams respond differently when I own my part in challenges. Relationships deepen when I stop assigning blame and start getting curious about my patterns. The mirror offers no comfort, but it offers something better: a way forward. Each day presents this choice anew. Each moment of friction, each disappointment, each challenge invites me to choose: window or mirror? The easy view or the true one? The story of circumstance or the story of growth? I’m learning to choose the mirror. And that is how I learned to mirror. --- ### How to Bamboo Published: 2025-02-02 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/bamboo/ I wasn’t searching for it but felt it found me. What initially caught my attention was _Nine Perfect Strangers_, the Apple TV series starring Nicole Kidman. The weekend yoga and mindfulness retreat I just finished took place where the show was filmed. In the show, nine strangers arrive at a luxurious wellness retreat, hand over their phones, and are told they cannot leave. Nicole Kidman plays a new age guru and spiritual healer who comes off as more mysterious than mystical. Eventually, it’s revealed that their morning smoothies are laced with psychedelics. What begins as a utopia wellness experience shifts into a dystopian psychological experiment led by a power-hungry figure. I rarely watch TV, but something about the series hooked me. Maybe it was the familiarity of having been on countless wellness retreats myself—and the curiosity of how something could appear serene on the surface while something entirely different unfolded beneath it. _At the end, the guests figure out what’s going on, team up and escape._ When a friend sent me the website for this retreat centre, I recognized the setting immediately from the show–and thought it would be fun to see it for myself. Thankfully, we were allowed to leave. _And no magic smoothies were involved._ The weekend was a nice mix of meditation, yoga, breathwork, and meals prepared according to Ayurvedic principles. The food was light, easy to digest, and yet somehow, despite eating a ridiculous amount, I never felt too full. But what **captivated me the most wasn’t the stillness inside—it was the bamboo outside.** Walking along the trails, I found myself in the middle of a grove, surrounded by towering bamboo stalks—twenty, maybe thirty meters tall. They were impossibly thin. I could wrap my thumb and finger around one, which seemed absurd considering their height. They were strong and dense—I could barely make them budge. Then the wind picked up. Suddenly, the stalks started rubbing against each other, emitting deep, eerie creaks. It wasn’t the gentle rustling of trees. It sounded haunted. Like a horror movie where the walls whisper just before something terrible happens. I stood there, listening, watching, appreciating. And then it came to me—what makes bamboo special. **It bends, it doesn’t break.** This simple quality makes it stronger than trees. When storms hit, oak trees resist. Sometimes, they snap. Bamboo just moves with the wind and stands back up. In my fifteen years as the CEO of a tech company, I have been forced to adapt in ways I could have never predicted. Market shifts, customer demands, technological upheavals—every plan I ever made needed to be revised, reworked, or scrapped entirely. I used to think success came from strength, from holding my ground, from standing firm in what I believed. But in reality, **the moments that defined my career were the ones where I was able to bend.** I used to think success was about standing firm. But the biggest breakthroughs came when I let go of rigidity. Negotiating a deal? _Bend._ Managing an unexpected crisis? _Bend._ Leading a team through uncertainty? _Bend._ I’ve come to realize that to survive in a fast-moving world, it’s not about being unshakable. It’s about being adaptable. Bending isn’t just a business strategy. I see it in my body. When I first started a yoga practice, I wanted to push myself into perfect poses. But real **flexibility isn’t about forcing—it’s about allowing**. When I resist, I tighten. When I soften, I expand. It’s the same in relationships. **To bend is to listen, to adapt, to make space for the other person.** But there’s a limit. If I bend too much—if I ignore my own needs, overextend, or compromise on what matters—I don’t just bend, I lose myself. One more thing about bamboo: **before shooting up, it spends years growing underground. **The explosive growth only happens after the roots have quietly spread deep enough to support it. I’ve experienced this countless times. _The quiet years._ The ones where the work felt invisible, where I wondered if anything was happening at all. Like building a meditation practice over a decade of daily work. But** just because something isn’t visible doesn’t mean it’s not growing.** The bamboo grove at the retreat centre became the source of inspiration for me as I look back at my time on the set of _Nine Perfect Strangers_. Standing there, staring up at the bunches of bamboo stalks towering over me, The wind continued to howl through, the stalks creaking ominously, the whole thing looking as if it might collapse. But it won’t. Life will throw storms. Some resist and snap. Others uproot and run. But bamboo? It bends and stays standing. And that’s how I learned to bend, not break. **_2034: How AI Changed Humanity Forever_** is my newest book and now available on **_[Amazon](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D8VB32NJ?utm_source=howtolive.beehiiv.com&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=how-to-2034&_bhlid=1172657a84fb3fcb24d7d11c0e8a36a825ad62dd)_** on Kindle, paperback, hardcover or audiobook. You can also listen to it narrated by me on **_[Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/show/1ys66SPOlNq07WOBTWJNL1?utm_source=howtolive.beehiiv.com&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=how-to-2034&_bhlid=4a26f6e1f283d27b20e827b987cd07ae39d05a32)_**. --- ### How to 70 Published: 2025-01-26 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/70/ A close family member turned 70 recently. The night before his milestone birthday, we sat down for a small, intimate dinner—just a few of us gathered for a calm prelude to the big group celebration planned for the next day. It was the kind of evening where time slows down, and the conversations naturally become intentional. The restaurant was loud, and it was hard to hear each other. For him, it’s sometimes harder to hear in general, so I had to be very pointed and specific with my questions. I didn’t mind. If anything, it made me more thoughtful and intentional in how I asked. Finding a moment of quiet, I leaned in and asked him: _“In your 70 years, what’s the one piece of advice you’d want to give to someone else?”_ I knew this was a big question—an impossible one, really. How do you distill seven decades of life into a single piece of advice? But I also knew he’d be giving a speech at his celebration the next day, so maybe this would help him reflect on what he might want to share with a larger audience. He didn’t hesitate. His answer was simple, true, and, unfortunately, often forgotten: **_“Don’t sweat the small stuff in life.”_** I paused. I smiled. I let out a long, quiet sigh. At that moment, _his words felt like a wave of calm to me_. I felt my shoulders drop, my jaw unclench, and the tension I didn’t even realize I’d been holding start to dissolve. His advice was like dropping a dot of food coloring into a glass of water—it spread instantly, coloring everything with its truth. We started talking about how much of our mental and emotional energy we spend on things that simply don’t matter. Take something as trivial as choosing a restaurant. We spend so much time deciding where to go, then agonizing over what to order, and later wondering if we made the right choice. We let our entire mood depend on how good the food is, how attentive the service feels, or how the ambiance matches our expectations. All of that energy—spent on something we likely won’t even remember a week from now. And that’s just one example. When we zoomed out to look at the broader picture of life, we both acknowledged **how many daily stressors, arguments, and moments of overthinking turn out to be inconsequential.** So, why do we let the small stuff weigh us down? Maybe it’s because, in the moment, everything feels important. It’s easy to let a bad meeting or a wrong turn on the way to dinner snowball into something bigger. But instead, what if we see it for what it is—a passing inconvenience. As we talked, I realized how much I admired his clarity at 70. It wasn’t just advice—it was a philosophy, one that had likely taken decades of experience, reflection, and perspective to fully understand. By the time I’m 70, I hope I have this understanding deeply ingrained in me too. I hope I’ve learned to let go of what doesn’t matter, to harness my life energy toward what really does, and to live in a way that brings joy to myself and those around me. And that is how I learned to 70. **_2034: How AI Changed Humanity Forever_** is my newest book and now available on **_[Amazon](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D8VB32NJ?utm_source=howtolive.beehiiv.com&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=how-to-2034&_bhlid=1172657a84fb3fcb24d7d11c0e8a36a825ad62dd)_** on Kindle, paperback, hardcover or audiobook. You can also listen to it narrated by me on **_[Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/show/1ys66SPOlNq07WOBTWJNL1?utm_source=howtolive.beehiiv.com&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=how-to-2034&_bhlid=4a26f6e1f283d27b20e827b987cd07ae39d05a32)_**. --- ### How to Monopoly Published: 2025-01-19 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/monopoly/ The first time I played the game, I was seven. The game wasn’t new—its box corners were worn, the lid barely clinging on, a hand-me-down from my cousin. But it felt like a treasure to me. Little did I know then that this game would become more than just a pastime—it would become a mirror, reflecting lessons on competition, relationships, and the art of knowing when something is complete. Recently, while in Melbourne for the Australian Open, I stumbled across Monopoly Dreams, a physical tribute and museum of sorts dedicated to one of the most popular games of all time. As I wandered through its halls, surrounded by oversized dice and glowing property cards, my eyes widened in a way they hadn’t in years. Suddenly, I was back in that world—the wheeling, dealing, scheming world of my childhood. **I didn’t just love Monopoly as a kid—I lived for it. ** I forced my sister, cousins, and friends to play endlessly. I wasn’t playing for fun; I was playing to win. I studied patterns, perfected strategies, and approached every game with surgical precision as well as a ten-year-old could. Secure the blue or orange properties first. Negotiate deals as quickly as possible. Always keep cash on hand. My property empire always rose, and I always won. And I loved winning—until, one day, my streak came at a cost. My younger sister, tired of endless defeat, declared a one-person rebellion. She made it her mission to convince everyone we played with that the game wasn’t fun anymore because I always won. And she succeeded. Slowly but surely, nobody wanted to play with me anymore. Just like that,_ my Monopoly career ended._ Standing in Monopoly Dreams nearly thirty years later, surrounded by pieces of a game that once defined my childhood, I was flooded with nostalgia. But **what surprised me wasn’t the intensity of the memory; it was the absence of desire.** I didn’t want to play again. I didn’t want to gather friends for a rematch or feel the thrill of victory. I simply smiled, remembering the joy the game brought me, and **felt no need to drag my past forward into my present.** It is rare to feel so deeply about something and not want more of it. So many things in life we cling to, expecting them to evolve with us or remain relevant forever. **Childhood passions, relationships, milestones—they often carry an unspoken expectation that they should follow us,** as if their absence in the present is somehow a loss. But with Monopoly, I felt none of that. It was a chapter that had done its work, a story that didn’t need to continue. _The game taught me lessons I carry to this day._ Strategy, negotiation, the balance of risk and reward—it all began on that worn-out board. It shaped how I think, how I make decisions, how I navigate the complexities of winning and losing. But like a book whose ending you already know, it doesn’t need to be revisited to be appreciated. Monopoly exists as a perfectly preserved memory, complete in itself, untouched by the passage of time. Walking out of Monopoly Dreams, **I realized that not every part of my past is meant to travel with me**. Some things are beautiful precisely because they stay where they belong—in the past. They enriched me, they shaped me, and then they stepped aside, making room for what’s next. The dice have been rolled, the properties bought and sold, and the game, in its own way, is gloriously complete. And in that completion,** I’ve found a different kind of victory—not the thrill of winning, but the quiet satisfaction of knowing when to let go.** And that is how I learned to Monopoly. **_2034: How AI Changed Humanity Forever_** is my newest book and now available on **_[Amazon](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D8VB32NJ?utm_source=howtolive.beehiiv.com&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=how-to-2034&_bhlid=1172657a84fb3fcb24d7d11c0e8a36a825ad62dd)_** on Kindle, paperback, hardcover or audiobook. You can also listen to it narrated by me on **_[Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/show/1ys66SPOlNq07WOBTWJNL1?utm_source=howtolive.beehiiv.com&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=how-to-2034&_bhlid=4a26f6e1f283d27b20e827b987cd07ae39d05a32)_**. --- ### How to Australian Open Published: 2025-01-12 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/australianopen/ Sitting in the stands at the Australian Open, I watched a tennis rally that seemed to stretch time. Nearly one minute passed as the players exchanged shot after shot, each return more precise and more powerful than the last. The crowd leaned forward, collectively holding its breath, each swing of the racket pulling us further into the tension. When it finally ended, the tennis ball grazing just beyond the baseline, the applause erupted with the kind of energy only a live sports moment like that can summon. What struck me, though, was that looking at the player’s facial expressions, it wasn’t immediately clear to me who had won the point. Both wore the same expression—a blend of satisfaction and exhaustion. **They shared a quiet understanding that the rally itself, not the outcome, was the real achievement.**_ Another real life reminder for me that the journey matters more than the destination._ That moment brought me back to my own days on the court. I played tennis for nearly a decade in childhood, a few times a week with consistency. One of my clearest memories is of playing with Peter, a childhood friend. Peter was better than me—not so much better that he’d grow bored, but just enough to keep each other engaged. I could beat him only about a third of the time, but only after working harder than I thought possible. Our matches would become a valuable life lesson for me that continues to give. Playing against Peter taught me that **growth often comes from being challenged by someone better, stronger, or smarter**. His skill pushed me to improve, to try hard, and to sharpen my own abilities. That lesson has stayed with me, far beyond tennis. If I find myself in a room where I’m the most skilled or knowledgeable, it’s a signal to seek out new challenges. _Growth doesn’t happen in comfort._ It happens in the long rallies—where effort, not ease, defines the moment. Despite my years of playing tennis, I’ve never felt the need to pick up a racket again as an adult. Even watching Djokovic at the Australian Open, one of the greatest players of our time, didn’t stir in me any desire to return to the court. Instead, I feel a quiet peace. Tennis had its spotlight in my life, and I’ve let it go. **There’s something freeing about releasing a part of my past, not out of frustration or loss, but from a place of satisfaction.**_ I did it. I loved it._ And I’ve moved on because I feel complete. Each year, **I set a one-word intention to help guide the year and this year, my one word is inspire. **While it’s still early into the new year, this intention is already shaping me. Inspire isn’t just about seeking out what moves me; it’s also about recognizing what doesn’t. Watching the Australian Open, I wondered if this experience would inspire me to visit Wimbledon or the French Open while I’m in Europe later this year. I’ve already seen the US Open, so attending all four Grand Slam events could have been a fun challenge. But as I sat there today, watching the game unfold, I realized it didn’t inspire me. And that, too, is part of my intention. _Knowing what no longer inspires me is just as valuable as discovering what does. _ That long rally I witnessed today at the Australian Open wasn’t a feat of sport; it was a metaphor for my life. It reminded me that life’s greatest moments and meaning are often found in the process, the effort, and the endurance—not in the outcome._ The rally is the reward._ And that is how I learned to Australian Open. **_2034: How AI Changed Humanity Forever_** is my newest book and now available on **_[Amazon](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D8VB32NJ?utm_source=howtolive.beehiiv.com&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=how-to-2034&_bhlid=1172657a84fb3fcb24d7d11c0e8a36a825ad62dd)_** on Kindle, paperback, hardcover or audiobook. You can also listen to it narrated by me on **_[Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/show/1ys66SPOlNq07WOBTWJNL1?utm_source=howtolive.beehiiv.com&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=how-to-2034&_bhlid=4a26f6e1f283d27b20e827b987cd07ae39d05a32)_**. --- ### How to Experiment Published: 2025-01-05 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/experimentation/ Experimentation has been the lifeblood of my philosophy as an adult. Like a scientist in their laboratory, I've transformed my life into a continuous series of thoughtful explorations. Unlike goals and plans that have specific outcomes and expectations in mind, experimentation offers a different path—one without rigid expectations. It is the ultimate expression of the age-old spiritual teaching found in many scriptures:** focus on the journey over the destination. **Experimentation has become my way of putting this teaching into action. _I wasn't always this way._ For years, **I approached life like an equation to be solved, setting rigid goals and becoming frustrated when variables wouldn't cooperate.** After taking a traditional approach to life and feeling unsatisfied with how I felt, despite often achieving what I had set out to do, I decided to change my approach to be less attached to outcomes. At the start of each year, I like to set intentions. The first task is to pick a one-word theme to guide my choices throughout the year. This is my North Star, helping me make decisions, big and small. Last year, my one-word theme was Flow, which taught me to release control and trust the natural rhythm of life. This year, it is Inspire. The one-word intention is purposefully broad and abstract, allowing space for it to unfold and manifest however it chooses to as the year progresses. If you have not yet picked a word as your theme for 2025, I encourage you to do so. Now. Next are choosing a set of priorities—usually three to five areas of life that I wish to focus my energy on. These are fairly obvious categories, such as health, relationship, career, family, learning, writing, giving, and more. What's less obvious though are the relative prioritization of them and the implicit trade-offs needed to really call them priorities. And next comes choosing my experiments. Last year, I had two experiments: **Unscheduled and Unplugged.** _Unscheduled_ was an experiment to bring to life my intention of Flow by relying less on calendaring and planning things in advance. After decades of being ruled by my calendar and commitments, adopting an unscheduled mindset gave me permission to be more spontaneous, to tune into how I was feeling and what I was needing. I loved it, and now it has become a natural part of my rhythm in life. _Unplugged_ was an experiment to see how many days I could disconnect from my phone completely—no email, no WhatsApp, no social media, no news. I ended up getting a second phone to support the experiment, which had only basic utilities such as Uber and Google Maps that I realized I needed for daily life. I tracked this experiment and had 63 days in 2024 without connection to the world. It was much higher than I would have guessed, and I appreciated each day that I unplugged from technology to connect more deeply. As I brainstormed in my journal this morning about experiments for 2025, several ideas emerged, each aligned with my one-word intention of Inspire. In the realm of health, I'm curious about tracking days of fitness activity across strength, flexibility, and endurance, as well as documenting the changes I notice with regular red light therapy with my new home panels. For professional growth, I'm considering challenging myself to avoid checking the stock market before noon, after noticing how market fluctuations influenced my daily mood last year. I'm also excited about expanding my AI toolset beyond ChatGPT, which I currently use 30 to 40 times daily, to discover new tools that I can incorporate into my daily lifestyle. I continue to love writing and appreciate all of the encouragement I receive from those around me about my books and my blogs. I am curious to see how many books I write and publish this year. What's important to me with experimentation is avoiding specific goals or targets. That creates pressure and dramatically shifts the energy with which I approach the activity. **The joy of experimentation lies in not knowing—or frankly caring about—the result, instead finding delight in the process itself.** The other powerful benefit of framing activities as experiments is their defined timeframe. An experiment has a clear beginning and end. When I commit to exploring something for a specific period, it becomes more approachable than making a lifetime commitment. Through years of living this way, I've discovered that **experimentation isn't just a method for personal growth—it's a mindset that transforms challenges into adventures** and uncertainties into opportunities for discovery. Each experiment has shaped my understanding of myself and the world around me. This is the true art of experimentation: finding wisdom in the willing exploration of life's possibilities. And that is how I learned to experiment. **_2034: How AI Changed Humanity Forever_** is my newest book and now available on **_[Amazon](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D8VB32NJ?utm_source=howtolive.beehiiv.com&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=how-to-2034&_bhlid=1172657a84fb3fcb24d7d11c0e8a36a825ad62dd)_** on Kindle, paperback, hardcover or audiobook. You can also listen to it narrated by me on **_[Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/show/1ys66SPOlNq07WOBTWJNL1?utm_source=howtolive.beehiiv.com&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=how-to-2034&_bhlid=4a26f6e1f283d27b20e827b987cd07ae39d05a32)_**. --- ### How to 2025 Published: 2024-12-31 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/2025/ I start each year with a simple ritual that has really shaped my journey: **selecting a single word to serve as my guiding intention for the year ahead.** This one word intention acts as a North Star, gently steering my choices and actions without the rigidity of specific goals or resolutions. Unlike objectives, a one word intention is fluid and adaptable, allowing for growth and re-alignment as the year unfolds. The process of discovering this one word intention involves meaningful reflection. I meditate, journal, or spend time in nature to tune into what feels most significant for the year ahead. Often, the right word resonates on an emotional level—a spark of excitement, a sense of alignment, or a quiet knowing that this is what I need. **Last year, my one-word intention was Flow.** In previous years, my one word intention has been Discovery, Fearless, Trust, Space, Heart and Open to share a few. These words are intentionally abstract and expansive, inviting me to explore their meaning across different aspects of my life. Yesterday, as I was journaling on how Flow showed up for me this year, I was in awe with how many instances it shaped the course of the year, and as a result, the course of my life. From spontaneous travel, to new and meaningful connections, to discovering hidden hobbies and interests, Flow gave me the space to be curious about what might just happen. It also represented a shift for me from often forcing a specific outcome or result from a situation. Learning to flow and not force really was a gamechanger for how I felt. With this refined skill in hand, I saw myself develop greater acceptance versus tolerance for unexpected or undesired events. I am so grateful that I had Flow as an intention by my side to guide my past year. **My one word intention for 2025 is Inspire.** It is giving myself permission and space to be attracted to the projects, places and people that most inspire me. It is a prompt for me to dig deeper within myself to connect with what makes me feel inspired. And to not be shy to continue to share more of my journey with others. _Once I’ve chosen my one word intention, I like to share it with close friends and family._ This not only reinforces my commitment but also invites their encouragement and support. Sharing this intention often deepens my connections and can inspire others to also set their own one word intention for the year ahead. _What is your one word intention to inspire 2025? _ Below are a few one word intentions friends have used in past years to help inspire yours. Take time to reflect, connect with your inner world, and allow the right word to find you. Acceptance Adventure Authentic Awareness Balance Bold Build Challenge Commitment Compassion Confidence Connection Control Courage Create Discovery Energy Explore Fearless Flow Focus Freedom Fun Giving Grace Gratitude Grounded Growth Harmony Heart Humility Integrity Joy Learn Light Open Play Positive Presence Relax Respect Self Love Serve Simplify Space Surrender Trust Zest _2034: How AI Changed Humanity Forever_ is available today globally on **_[Amazon](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D8VB32NJ?utm_source=howtolive.beehiiv.com&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=how-to-2034&_bhlid=1172657a84fb3fcb24d7d11c0e8a36a825ad62dd)_** on Kindle, paperback, hardcover or audiobook. You can also listen to 2034 narrated by me on **_[Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/show/1ys66SPOlNq07WOBTWJNL1?utm_source=howtolive.beehiiv.com&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=how-to-2034&_bhlid=4a26f6e1f283d27b20e827b987cd07ae39d05a32)_**. --- ### How to 2024 Published: 2024-12-29 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/year2024/ The waiter had just taken our order. The conversation with friends over dinner had settled into that familiar, easy rhythm you get with close friends. I glanced around the table and asked innocently,_ “What was your biggest moment of 2024?”_ Smiles bubbled up almost instantly. People leaned in, animated and eager to share. One friend recalled a career leap they hadn’t planned for. Another shared the obvious —becoming a parent. Someone else brought up a spontaneous weekend trip their partner surprised them with. **These were stories of celebration, achievements and experiences that stood out.** Then I followed with, _“What was your most challenging moment of 2024?”_ The energy shifted. More pauses this time. A few long sips of drinks. I intentionally did not start, as a way to acknowledge the discomfort that some likely felt. Then slowly but surely, the responses started to come. Honest, vulnerable, a little rough around the edges. Someone opened up about burnout. Another mentioned losing someone they loved. A breakup. A health scare with a parent. **These were stories of the kind of moments we don’t always rush to revisit but shape us in meaningful ways.** By the time our food had arrived, there were hugs, high fives, and that unspoken feeling of being in it together. It struck me how much lighter the room felt once everyone had shared. Like the weight of those hard moments wasn’t something to carry alone anymore. **This time of year always feels like a harvest for me. **This is the final stretch —a time to gather what the year has grown. I become curious to uncover how I have been delighted or disappointed this year, how I have grown and how I have changed. Unlike delight or disappointment, growth and change rarely feels obvious while they are happening. It is only when taking a moment to look back do I begin to notice the changes in myself, then I can begin to integrate them more fully and carry them with me as I move forward through life. _Travel was painted all over my 2024_. I travelled to fifteen countries. But when I reflect about the places I’ve gone, the stamps in my passport aren’t what come to mind. It’s the moments – the small ones, the unexpected ones – shared with friends and family. Scrolling through photos on my phone, which I rarely do but hope to do more often, transports me back to these moments instantly. I love it. _Investing became another big theme for my 2024. _I gave myself permission at the start to learn about the public markets this year. I’ve never been that interested in the stock market, but I felt it was time for me to experiment and see what I would learn. I learned about my own tolerance for risk and volatility. I learned about the world through a financial lens. I learned firsthand how difficult it is to beat the index. And I learned that I enjoy the process of learning something new. _Health was a rollercoaster, with many ups and downs._ I had stretches where I felt great – waking up early, moving every day, feeling strong. And then, there were weeks when I would struggle with symptoms for an undiagnosed issue. The mental energy I spent trying to care for my physical health felt disproportionate at times. There’s still work to do here. But I’m learning to meet myself where I am, instead of where I think I should be. _Relationships evolved as well. _2024 started with a deep dive into family systems therapy – something I hadn’t explored before. It helped me mature and evolve how I connect and integrate with my parents and sister in ways I didn’t expect – and am highly appreciative of. I spent more time outside Europe than in it this year, which meant less time with my Lisbon and London crew. There were many moments I felt the absence of the familiarity of friends who I have grown closer to over the past few years living in Portugal. But there were also new friendships and experiences that wouldn’t have developed if I’d stayed in one place. **As I gather the harvest of 2024, I feel grateful – for the joy I shared, the growth I witnessed, and the hardships **that asked me to pay attention and make changes. Now is an important time to make peace with the past, so that we do not unnecessarily drag unfulfilled desires and lingering disappointments into the future and can start 2025 with a blank slate, aligned and connected with what we value and need most at this moment. Sharing with others close to me how my 2024 shaped me, and hearing about how their year has shaped them, has become a wonderful practice of closure and connection to finish the year. And that is how I learned to 2024. _2034: How AI Changed Humanity Forever_ is available today globally on **_[Amazon](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D8VB32NJ?utm_source=howtolive.beehiiv.com&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=how-to-2034&_bhlid=1172657a84fb3fcb24d7d11c0e8a36a825ad62dd)_** on Kindle, paperback, hardcover or audiobook. You can also listen to 2034 narrated by me on **_[Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/show/1ys66SPOlNq07WOBTWJNL1?utm_source=howtolive.beehiiv.com&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=how-to-2034&_bhlid=4a26f6e1f283d27b20e827b987cd07ae39d05a32)_**. --- ### How to Harvest Published: 2024-12-22 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/harvest/ This is a sacred time of the year for me, holding more meaning than even my birthday. There's something about the end of the year that creates **a natural invitation to pause, to reflect and to harvest.** To take stock of what was, what was not, and to make space for what might be. The rush of daily life softens into something gentler. Like driving on an open highway – when I'm going too fast, all the signs blur together. **It's only when I slow down that I can actually read what they're trying to tell me.** _The same thing happens in my inner world._ When I allow myself to slow down and take space, I start seeing signs that have probably been there all along. Signs pointing toward needed changes, toward growth, toward truth. _To harvest starts with slowing down._ Giving myself permission to do less, talk less, be less, and go less. And from this place of less, I often find more. More clarity. More acceptance. And more peace. To make peace with the year is the first step before I can even begin to think about my next year. **When I don't fully acknowledge and accept my past, my future becomes tainted.** I end up dragging unresolved feelings and disappointments into my future plans, trying to compensate or make up for what I may not feel great about. I then start the new year with a feeling of being in ‘debt’ and having to ‘catch-up’. _It’s a terribly uninspiring starting point._ This is why making peace with my past has become such an important harvesting ritual for me. _Here are six reflection prompts I encourage you to write, reflect and share with someone close to you, to help harvest your past year._ _1. My highlights of 2024…_ _2. My most difficult moments of 2024…_ _3. What I learned about myself in 2024…_ _4. How my identity evolved and changed in 2024…_ _5. Who I am most grateful for in 2024…_ _6. What my heart most desires now at the end of 2024…_ Reality is full of the wisdom that I need to hear. This is a time for inner harvest. The fields are ripe for picking and this end of year ritual is my invitation to make the space to see what this year’s crop had for me. And that is how I learned to harvest. _2034: How AI Changed Humanity Forever_ is available today globally on **_[Amazon](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D8VB32NJ?utm_source=howtolive.beehiiv.com&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=how-to-2034&_bhlid=1172657a84fb3fcb24d7d11c0e8a36a825ad62dd)_** on Kindle, paperback, hardcover or audiobook. You can also listen to 2034 narrated by me on **_[Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/show/1ys66SPOlNq07WOBTWJNL1?utm_source=howtolive.beehiiv.com&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=how-to-2034&_bhlid=4a26f6e1f283d27b20e827b987cd07ae39d05a32)_**. --- ### How to Unplan Published: 2024-12-15 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/unplan/ I used to live a life ruled by plans. As a CEO for 15 years, I thought planning was my superpower—strategy decks, quarterly targets, financial forecasts, calendars crammed with back-to-back meetings. My personal life wasn’t much different. Living in New York for 10 years, I got used to planning everything: yoga classes booked weeks ahead, dinner reservations meticulously timed, dates squeezed in. I had mastered the art of control—or so I believed. Three years ago, I moved to Portugal. At first, I tried to carry this same hyper-planned approach with me. I scheduled my days the way a New Yorker would, expecting precision and efficiency. _But Portugal doesn’t work like that. _**My plans didn’t just fall apart—they were ignored entirely. **Appointments shifted without warning, restaurants closed early or opened late, and time seemed to flow at its own unhurried pace. At first, I fought against it. I was critical of the inefficiency, irritated that things didn’t work on my timeline. But slowly, **I realized it wasn’t the culture that needed to change—it was me. ** As I started to let go, I noticed something unexpected: the stress and anxiety of forcing my plans disappeared. Instead, I began to experience the delight of the unplanned—the spontaneity, the freedom, the surprise. Moments like these planted a seed of doubt in my obsession with planning. For so long, **planning felt like security, like the scaffolding holding my life together. **But as I started to let go of those rigid plans, I realized they weren’t security at all—_they were shackles. _I had been clinging to the illusion of control, mistaking busyness for meaning, and I began to wonder what would happen if I planned less. The world doesn’t make it easy to live life unplanned though. Society glorifies planning and rewards it. Book a flight early, and you’ll pay less. Make a reservation, and you’ll avoid disappointment. Productivity apps promise to organize every second of your day. Planning feels responsible, even virtuous. But more and more, I’ve come to see that planning isn’t about control—it’s about trying to deny the nature of reality. **Reality knows that I’m not in control.** _Plans fail. Flights get delayed. Things fall apart. _I’ve been stuck in airports for hours or had flights canceled entirely, and I can’t recall the last time I felt anger or frustration in those moments. Instead, I’ve come to accept them as part of life’s flow. The energy I used to spend resisting what was happening now goes toward responding to it. Living an unplanned life isn’t the same as living chaotically. It takes a deliberate trust—trust in myself, in the process, and in life itself. It’s a skill I’m still learning. This year, my one-word intention has been Flow, and it’s shaped me. Flow has helped me to let go of expectations and respond to life as it happens. It’s not about passivity; it’s about presence. **Letting go of plans also builds resilience.** There’s no denying that the unknown is intimidating, but it’s also exhilarating. Each time I’m faced with an unexpected turn, I grow a little stronger. I’ve come to trust that I’ll handle whatever comes my way. And the more I embrace this trust, the more confident I feel. It’s a feedback loop: resilience builds confidence, confidence makes uncertainty less daunting, and that makes planning less necessary. Looking back, my years in New York conditioned me to plan for everything. My years in Portugal have shown me the beauty of planning for nothing. Neither is inherently better—it’s just that one way no longer serves me. **When I think about the moments that have brought me the most joy, none of them were planned.** They were the spontaneous turns, the unanticipated encounters, the surprises that life delivered when I left space for them. The unplanned life isn’t perfect—it’s messy, unpredictable, and at times unnerving. But it’s also alive, rich with possibility, and full of surprises I could never orchestrate. Letting go of planning has been my way of saying yes to life, exactly as it is. And in doing so, I’ve found more freedom, more joy, and more trust in the process than I ever thought possible. And that is how I learned to unplan. --- ### How to Friend Published: 2024-12-08 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/friend2024/ _“What brings you to town?”_ was the question I continued to hear over the past month. _“To see you!”_ I’d say enthusiastically every time, and their reactions always caught me off guard. Some laughed, others paused, surprised, as if **visiting friends wasn’t reason enough.** I just wrapped up a whirlwind tour across the globe over the past four weeks—Singapore, Canada, Chile, Portugal, and the UK. At every stop, everyone assumed I had some professional reason for visiting. _It felt good to say it out loud._ This trip wasn’t about work. It wasn’t about sightseeing or ticking off countries. It was about reconnecting—with people I care about, with the places that feel like home, and, in many ways, with myself. As an expat moving between cities throughout the year, friendships have become a conscious effort. I’ve found myself gravitating toward a few hub cities—places I’ve lived, loved, or traveled to often enough that they feel like an extension of me. These cities are more than just familiar places I know where to eat, how to get around and how much things are meant to cost. They’re touchpoints to my past and present. Spending even a few days in one of these places doesn’t just recharge me—**it reminds me of who I am in the company of people who know me best.** It’s said that life is a journey of self-discovery, and while that can take a lifetime, I’ve learned that **putting myself in different environments can speed up the process.** Meditation and journaling are helpful for quiet reflection, but there’s a different kind of clarity that comes from being with others. Friends bring out different sides of me, sometimes ones I’ve forgotten or neglected. Their perspectives can act as mirrors, reflecting back parts of myself that I can’t always see. I’ve long believed that _“we are the company we keep.”_ Research supports this, showing that we are the average of the five people we spend the most amount of time with. This is reflected in our health, our spending and saving habits, our travel, our hobbies and more. Looking back, the company I kept as a child was mostly circumstantial—neighbors, classmates, the kids I sat beside in school because their last names were right before or after mine alphabetically. These relationships shaped my early years,_ even if I didn’t realize it at the time._ By university, friendships started forming around shared interests—classes, conferences, the things we cared about deeply as young adults. Later, in my 20s, my friendships reflected the phase of life I was in. Fresh out of school and building a company, I spent most of my time with other tech entrepreneurs. We were navigating similar challenges and found solidarity in each other’s energy, struggle and ambition. When mindfulness became a cornerstone of my life, my circle naturally shifted to include meditators and yogis. We supported each other through shared practices and personal growth. Later, as I transitioned from being a business operator to a business owner, I sought out people who had successfully made that shift, learning from their experiences as a financial investor. Now, with an increasing focus on health and longevity, I’m surrounded by friends who are just as curious about optimizing their well-being. Together, we try new routines, experiment with therapies, and share our data and discoveries. But some friendships endure regardless of the stage of life I’m in. These constants remind me that while life changes, certain relationships remain foundational. They’ve been there through my evolving interests, shifting geographies, and personal growth, and they continue to feel as vital as ever. As I’ve grown older,** friendship has become less about circumstance and more about choice. ** Now, I think carefully about the kind of person I want to become and the qualities I want to nurture in myself. Then, I seek out people who embody those traits. Sometimes they’re already within my circles, and all it takes is intention to deepen the connection. Other times, it means stepping outside my comfort zone to meet new people who inspire me. When I think about the role of friends in my life, a few things stand out. They help me feel connected, less alone. **They offer support at moments I didn’t realize I needed it. **And they remind me that living well isn’t just about physical health or career success—it’s about the quality of our relationships. Studies show that strong friendships are one of the most significant predictors of longevity and well-being._ That feels deeply true to me._ Friendships are distinct from family, partners, or colleagues. They hold a unique place in the tribe of relationships that shape a life. And as I’ve learned, **they require intentionality**. _It’s not enough to rely on chance or history to keep them alive._ This past month, enduring flights and jetlag, traveling to see the people who matter to me wasn’t just about staying connected—it’s about honoring the relationships that make me who I am. And every time I show up for them, I realize I’m also showing up for myself. And that is how I learned to friend. --- ### How to Less Published: 2024-12-01 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/less2024/ The other day while sitting at a cafe, I found myself staring at a laptop on the table next to mine while the person had stepped away for a moment. I couldn’t help it. The person’s color coordinated calendar was up and so was their very long to-do list. Meetings to attend, projects to finalize, friends to catch up with, errands that had been postponed. It looked exhausting, and likely felt exhausting. And reminded me of my time while running a company and as a result, running myself mad with a maniacal focus on always trying to cram more in. **“More is more” was the mantra that had driven me for years.** As I started to question this philosophy, I began to experiment with a different mantra: “less is more”. Acting on it meant something very uncomfortable: making trade-offs. Life, at its core, is about making trade-offs. It’s about choosing one thing over another, not because one is inherently good and the other bad, but because in choosing, **I give weight to what matters most. **Without trade-offs, I’m not really making decisions; I’m just moving through the motions, saying yes to everything, and hoping it will all somehow work out. But it doesn’t work out. At least not well. It’s easy to say yes to everything, to try to be everything to everyone. The harder thing, the thing that feels unnatural, is to say, _“this is more important than that.” _ In a professional environment, I’ve seen this truth play out repeatedly. Over the years, I’ve come to believe that when someone feels overworked, it’s not because there’s too much work. It’s because no one—either the person or their organization—has had the courage to make the necessary trade-offs. No one has said, _“this project matters more than that one,”_ or even better, _“we don’t need to do this at all.” _ When I think about my own approach to business, **I’ve leaned toward setting priorities over setting goals.** Goals, while helpful in some contexts, can be limiting because they’re specific and static. They tend to define success in rigid terms, ignoring the fluidity of reality. Priorities, on the other hand, are dynamic. They aren’t about what I want to achieve but about the trade-offs I’m willing to make. They force me to ask: “What am I willing to let go of in order to focus on what truly matters?” This shift has been liberating. When I focus on my priorities, I can accept the outcomes, whatever they may be. I don’t cling to the false comfort of goals that feel incomplete or unmet. Instead, I remind myself that I’ve chosen to invest my time and energy where it counts most, and I’ve made peace with whatever outcome results from that investment. Of course, trade-offs aren’t just about work. They show up in every corner of life. To be in a romantic relationship with one person often means giving up the possibility of exploring romantic relationships with someone else. It’s the trade-off that creates the foundation for commitment. Even in friendships, the choices are constant. To hang out with this friend might mean not spending time with another. To show up for one person’s party may mean missing someone else’s. There’s nothing wrong with these decisions—they’re simply the reality of how time and relationships work. Travel is another example that comes to mind. To vacation in one place is to not go somewhere else. Even within a single destination, there are trade-offs. I might choose to see one landmark and skip another, or decide to relax on the beach instead of exploring the city. Every decision, no matter how small, comes with its own set of sacrifices. **What makes trade-offs so challenging is that they force me to confront something deeply human: the need to please, to be liked, to avoid disappointment**. Saying no can feel like failure or rejection, even when it’s necessary. There’s an inherent discomfort in prioritization because it requires honesty. It asks me to admit that I can’t do it all, that I can’t be everything to everyone, and that trying to do so often leaves me with nothing that feels real or meaningful. **I’ve come to see that making trade-offs is the only way to live with intention.** It’s not about limitations; it’s about clarity. It’s about recognizing that my time, energy, and attention are finite. Trade-offs I make aren’t about what I lose but about what I gain. They aren’t about saying no but about committing fully to my yeses. And when I live that way—when I prioritize with intention and let go of the rest—I find a sense of freedom that no goal could ever give me. And that is how I learned to Less. --- ### How to Zip Line Published: 2024-11-24 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/zip/ There’s something magical about being tucked away in the mountains of Chile, surrounded by friends both old & new. We were there for a wedding celebration—a group of thirty people, brought together for a week. With barely any cellular reception or WiFi, the usual distractions faded away. We were present in the truest sense, and the sense of connection was refreshing given the fast paced life we all live. One morning, our hosts handed out a sign-up sheet for activities: hiking, white-water rafting, horseback riding, or zip lining. My eyes stopped at zip lining, and a memory from nearly ten years ago surfaced. I was in Costa Rica then, standing on a zip-lining platform for the first time, heart pounding, legs trembling. But I still remember the thrill of that leap, the way it felt to fight a fear of heights and soar inside and out. That day had been about leaning into adventure. _I felt called to do it again._ As we hiked up to the first platform, the forest came alive around us. The trees seemed endless. The air smelled crisp and earthy, and the sounds of rustling leaves and distant birds were all around. But as we approached the first line, my stomach churned. My palms were sweaty, and every glance down at the ground below made the distance seem even greater. Yet **being surrounded by friends was grounding.** Their laughter cut through my nerves, their encouragement softened the edges of my fear. We were in this together, the energy building as each person prepared to leap. When my turn came, I stepped forward, was clipped in, and took a deep breath. The guide smiled and said, “_Lean back, trust the line._” With one final inhale, I pushed off. It was over in seconds, but it left a mark—a mix of exhilaration and disbelief. I’d done it. _Again. _ The second line came easier, the fear loosening its grip. By the third, I was grinning. A few lines later, I was volunteering to go first, laughing as I jumped into the void. Each time, I felt a feeling of sadness when the line ended, like waking up from a dream I didn’t want to end. What struck me most wasn’t just the thrill of the zip line. It was the way the experience awakened something childlike in me—a joy that felt pure and unburdened. **It reminded me of summer camp, of days spent outdoors with friends, trying new things, and simply being in the moment.** There’s something about pushing through fear that makes the fun on the other side feel so much sweeter. _And then there was the four-year-old in our group. _She stepped up to the platform with a calm confidence that took my breath away. After her first line, she didn’t just want to go—she wanted to go first. Watching her was humbling. She didn’t carry the weight of fear that we adults do. It reminded me of when I started my first company at 20, bold enough to jump into the unknown simply because I didn’t know any better. **That kind of untested bravery can be a gift.** What made the day unforgettable wasn’t just my own transformation, it was seeing everyone else overcome their fears, cheering them on, and feeling their excitement as if it were my own. I thought about the difference between joy and enjoyment I had once heard. Joy is what you feel in your own heart—private, personal. Enjoyment is when joy is shared with others. It amplifies everything. It’s what made this day more than just a series of zip lines. It was a shared connection and experience between all of us. _Similar to sport, music, food and even work. _ I can see how my zip lining experience mirrors life. It’s an adventure that requires trust, courage, and the willingness to step into the unknown. It’s scary and thrilling and beautiful all at once. And the best moments aren’t just about what I experience—they’re about who I share them with. Even though the journey is fleeting, the connections we make along the way are what stay with us. And that is how I learned to zip line. --- ### How to Cycle Published: 2024-11-17 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/cycle/ I can still picture my first bike. It was red, with black handles and training wheels that made a distinct clatter against the pavement. I was six, and the idea of riding without those training wheels felt as impossible as flying. My dad was crouched beside me, steadying the seat. His hand felt solid, reassuring, like an anchor I wasn’t ready to lose. When he finally let go, I remember the magic of those first few seconds. The wind tickled my face; the world seemed to blur. But then I fell, and everything came crashing back to earth—literally. My knees scraped against the gravel, stinging with fresh cuts, and I burst into tears. It wasn’t just the fall that hurt. It was the heartbreak of how quickly the magic disappeared. Still, I got back on the bike. Not because I was brave, but because my dad encouraged me to be curious. _What if the next ride lasted longer? What if I could feel that way again?_ The questions were enough to overcome the fear of falling. **There’s a rhythm to cycling, a flow that mirrors life itself. ** Pedal, coast, pedal, coast. Every push forward is deliberate, fueled by effort and determination. And then there’s the coasting, those fleeting moments when everything feels effortless, as though the world is carrying me forward. That’s how hope works. It’s fragile, fleeting, and sometimes illogical, but it’s the spark that keeps me moving forward, even after a setback. **Hope is the fuel for life’s journey. ** Sometimes it’s the dream of something better, something brighter, something new. Other times, it’s the hope of avoiding something worse. But hope isn’t tied to reality—it’s tied to possibility. And because of that, it’s powerful. It’s also vulnerable. The most fragile hopes, the ones closest to my heart, often stay unspoken. I hold them quietly, protectively, because saying them out loud feels scary. _I might lose them._ **I’ve learned the hard way that hope often turns into attachment. **There was a project I was leading years ago, one that my team and I poured months of effort into. I wasn’t just working on it—I was building a story in my mind about how it would turn out. I could see the recognition we’d receive, the pride we’d feel,_ the validation I was chasing. _ That story became so real to me, so vivid, that it felt like a certainty. But when reality unfolded, it didn’t match the story I had crafted in my mind. The disappointment was overwhelming. It wasn’t just the failure of the project—it was the collapse of the story I had clung to so tightly. That’s the thing about attachment. It’s not physical; it’s emotional.** It’s the tethering of my identity, my worth, to an outcome that only exists in my mind. **And when reality doesn’t align with that outcome—as it so often doesn’t—the disappointment can feel crushing. Reality, in its quiet, indifferent way, just is. It doesn’t apologize for being what it is, and it doesn’t try to align with the fantasies I create. But disappointment isn’t the end of the cycle. Sitting with it is painful, but also illuminating. I’ve found that when I take the time to reflect on my disappointment, I can begin to see what was at its core. _What was I really hoping for? Recognition? Security? A sense of accomplishment?_ When I understand the “why” behind my disappointment, it starts to lose its grip. And once it loosens, hope begins to creep back in. _Slowly, quietly, I find myself pedaling forward again._ **Curiosity has been my greatest ally in breaking the cycle of hope, attachment, and disappointment.** It reminds me that life is rarely about a single outcome. Instead of anchoring myself to one possibility, I try to stay open to the range of what might unfold. I think back to that first bike ride—falling wasn’t the end._ It was part of the process._ And each time I got back on, I discovered something new, even if it wasn’t what I wanted. Reality will always have the final say, and it rarely matches the stories I tell myself. But that doesn’t make the journey any less valuable.** Life isn’t about the destination**. It’s about the rhythm, the movement, the small victories of simply continuing. Even when I fall, even when the magic doesn’t last, I can get back on the bike of life. _And maybe that’s enough._ And that’s how I learned to cycle. --- ### How to Miracle Published: 2024-11-10 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/miracle/ My four year old nephew adores planes. He loves to talk about taking a plane. He loves asking about when he’s going on a plane next. He loves to ask if visitors came on a plane. He proudly announces to his parents often that his uncle, me, is probably sitting on a plane right now. **It’s not just him that loves plans.** _I do too. _ While waiting to board a recent flight, I found myself staring out the window at the gate. The sun was shining brightly off the jumbo jet, that had a majestic presence despite resting on what looked like such delicate feet. I began to notice the airport ground crew, some in a rush, some not so much. There were people loading cargo bags, others driving trucks with what looked like food containers, and even more people that it wasn’t clear to me what they were doing. I glanced and saw the airline agents checking people in, one by one. My fellow passengers, all different ages, ethnicities, and stages of life. For just a moment, I imagined all of the different places they have all come from, and are all going to after we land. Then it hit me. **The coordination required to make happen what I was about to experience was unreal. ** The pilots. The flight crew. The ground crew. The food. The cleaners. The airport control tower. The airline. The airport security. Border control. And so many other. Within a mere few hours, so many people had to be involved for this moment to happen. And it’s not just my sole experience of taking one flight. There are thousands of such flights, each with hundreds of people, across tens of thousands of airports, all being coordinated simultaneously with no one person or entity in charge. _Every single day._ This is not even accounting for the engineering that has gone into figuring out how to lift a piece of metal, with hundreds of humans, into the sky and safely move it across an ocean to a different part of the world. And then put it back onto the ground. It felt like a miracle. **It is a miracle when I take just a moment to think about it. **The opportunity for something, anything, to go off plan is tremendous and yet, nine times out of ten, ninety percent of everything goes to plan. And when that one time out of ten something inconvenient happens, we more than often lose our patience or peace, with little aknowledgement for what did go to plan. Now apply this to so many other experiences in our day-to-day lives. Taking a train or bus to work. How many people were involved in the engineering, the building of the stations, the management, cleanliness and safety of the entire process? And when the train takes an extra two minutes than anticipated to arrive, we feel a bout of disapproval and disappointment. Or take buying groceries at the supermarket. How annoyed do we get because the avocados for sale are not ripe enough, the tomatoes not soft enough, or the lineup to pay too long? Forgetting the fact that produce has been grown and transported over months from hundreds of locations around the world to give us the variety, selection and convenience we desire within ten minutes of our home. **We are experiencing miracles day in and day out.** And it completely changes my experience of them when I take just a moment to recognize reality for what it is. Yes, there are disappointments that naturally arise. It’s part of the human experience. But there can also be appreciation and gratitude for what we get to experience as humans. It is absolutely incredible. _It fills my heart with gratitude and my mind with awe. _ Miracles need not be the rare, once-in-a-lifetime moments or acts reserved for a divine life force. **The best miracles are the ones I experience every single day**, when I truly open my eyes and see. I suspect that’s something my nephew knows how to do naturally and why he loves planes so much. And that is how I learned to Miracle. --- ### How to Diwali Published: 2024-11-03 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/diwali24/ _“When my candle is used to help light yours, mine doesn’t get any less dim but rather there is now more brightness in our world”._ Light is a symbol of celebration, and Diwali for me has become a celebration that I look forward to and cherish the most each year. _Which begs the question, what am I celebrating exactly?_ I grew up celebrating the Indian new year with family and friends, steeped in cultural traditions, often intertwined with colorful religious ceremonies that have become rituals I look forward to each year. As I grew older and grew out of my childhood home, and then relocated to New York and then Lisbon, it has been telling to reflect on which childhood traditions I would retain and which ones I would shed. The annual festival of lights has for me become **a celebration of what is versus what is not**. Oftentimes in religious traditions, from any faith, the focus can easily become on _asking_ for something we don’t have. This is the norm that I grew up with and so did those around me. Be it birthdays, calendar new year, Christmas, or Diwali, amongst siblings, cousins and friends, we’d excitedly gossip about what we asked for. Maybe six or seven years ago, as I began to feel more connected with my own spirituality, I started to notice a rejection of this idea of using celebratory moments to ask for something. **I began to flip the script in my heart**, and now use these moments to share appreciation instead. Everytime I bring my palms into a prayer in front of my heart, I find someone or something to appreciate within my heart. Celebration is not much fun when experienced alone, and is much more joyful, energizing and meaningful when shared with others. The sharing of appreciation and gratitude with others is one of the highest forms of connection I have experienced. Connection to myself, connection with others and connection to a greater life force. When I take even a moment to reflect on what I appreciate, the list is endless. Hearing what others appreciate spurs me to discover even more that I appreciate. _It’s an infinite loop of continuous appreciation!_ Now when I wish family and friends a _Happy Diwali_, what I am really saying is _I appreciate you._ And when I receive greetings from others, I hear _I appreciate you._ All of this warms my heart. The candles, sparklers, fireworks and every imaginable form of light is simply a symbol of that appreciation. **The spread of lightness helps put any darkness we feel or fear into perspective.** It is not about eradicating darkness, as often the darkness helps us understand the lightness. It is more about putting any darkness we have in our lives into perspective. The light is a reminder that we are not alone, and the greetings from others are reminders that we are seen. Some of my most cherished memories from childhood center around Diwali celebrations and now I better understand why these moments, more than others, continue to sit so deeply in my heart. These are the moments when my heart has felt the most connected to those around me, thanks to the spread of appreciation. And that is how I learned to Diwali. --- ### How to Hold Published: 2024-10-27 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/hold/ _“The longer you hold the pose, the more it reveals your weaknesses.”_ These words hit me harder than expected during a recent yoga class. The instructor held us in an extended pose—one that tested every ounce of my patience and strength. As I stood there, thighs burning, arms trembling, my mind wandered: _How much longer? Should I just drop it?_ But I stayed. I could feel parts of my body I hadn’t given attention to before, now glaringly obvious. Had I let go at the first sign of discomfort,_ I would have missed that information._ When we finally let go, her words stayed with me: _“The longer you hold a pose, the more it reveals your weaknesses.”_ **It’s easy to flee discomfort—not just in yoga, but in life. ** The temptation shows up everywhere. In conversations, where glancing at my phone feels like an escape. In work, when I shift to trivial tasks rather than face the hard ones. In relationships, when it feels easier to withdraw than to communicate. In the discomfort I feel is important information. **Staying present through the discomfort is where my growth begins.** Holding doesn’t mean passively tolerating something I don’t like. It’s not about gritting teeth and bearing pain mindlessly. It’s a conscious practice of staying with what I find difficult and finding out how to breathe while in it, versus holding my breath waiting for it to pass. Like standing still on a windy bridge, knowing it will pass but choosing to be with every gust. This isn’t about punishment—it’s about noticing. Noticing where I tighten, where I want to run, and where I need support. Holding is a practice in self-awareness. It extends beyond the physical into the emotional. There was a moment the other night, sitting at lunch with a new friend, when silence stretched between us. I felt that itch to pull out my phone, or to change the topic. I caught myself just in time and chose to hold instead. It was uncomfortable—those long, silent moments. But then, out of nowhere, my friend opened up about something personal, something they wouldn’t have shared if I hadn’t stayed present. If I had distracted myself, I would have missed it. **Holding space in connection isn’t about fixing silence; it’s about trusting that something valuable might emerge if I stay long enough.** When a task feels overwhelming, my first instinct is to busy myself with smaller, more manageable to-dos—anything to avoid the hard thing. But the problem never really goes away. I’ve learned that the real breakthroughs when I’m working come only when I resist the urge to flee. The biggest challenge, though, is holding space in relationships. It’s tempting to shut down when emotions run high or when the other person isn’t giving me what I need. In those times, holding on has taught me the most. **Holding isn’t about forcing myself to endure indefinitely.** It’s about recognizing when discomfort is pointing toward growth. Like a bridge, holding asks us to be steady in the midst of what flows beneath. Sometimes that flow is doubt or fear; other times, it’s boredom or frustration. But if I stay—just long enough—I can discover strength I didn’t know I had. There’s wisdom in the moments between ease and quitting.** Weaknesses aren’t failures**—they’re invitations for me to build resilience. Every time I hold, whether it’s in a yoga class, a conversation, or a moment of emotional vulnerability, I teach myself how to endure discomfort without fleeing. Strength isn’t about avoiding the hard stuff; it’s about meeting it with presence and curiosity. So the next time life feels overwhelming—whether it’s a difficult pose, a tedious task, or a challenging conversation—I’ll remind myself to breathe, to stay, and to hold. **Growth happens in the hold.** And when I finally release, I’ll do so with a deeper understanding of myself and the quiet satisfaction of knowing I stayed long enough to discover what I was meant to learn. And that is how I learned how to hold. --- ### How to Full Moon Published: 2024-10-20 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/full/ I had a long conversation with a close friend recently. She was calling from Europe, and I’m in Australia. Despite the oceans apart, we both had been experiencing heightened emotions this past week. There was something comforting about being halfway across the world from someone, yet feeling the same, at the same time. She reminded me,_ ‘It’s the full moon. It has a way of pulling everything up to the surface.’_ I’ve heard that before—the idea that the moon’s gravitational pull affects the water within us, much like it does the ocean tides. There are days where emotions well up without clear reason, as if a storm is building inside. I used to resist those feelings, thinking I needed to be composed all the time. But with age, **I’ve learned that emotions come in waves**. They ebb and flow, _whether I like it or not._ Staying by the ocean these days has taught me a lot about the power of waves. On days when the sea is flat, the air feels stale, and there’s nothing to do but sit on the shore and wait. No surfing, no playing. There’s beauty in the quiet, but eventually, the stillness grows tiresome. Then the waves return—sometimes gentle, sometimes wild—and it feels like life resumes. Those ups and downs are what make the ocean alive, and in a way, they keep us alive too. I’ve seen this play out in other places in my life as well. Take the stock market, for example. I got into active investing a few years back, thinking I could ride a smooth upward trend if I played my cards right. I was wrong. Stocks don’t just go up—they drop, they climb again, they correct, they surprise. **Movement is necessary.** A market that only rises is bound to break, and it’s in the fluctuations that opportunity emerges. If everything went up, there would be no sellers, leaving no opportunity to buy. The ups and downs are necessary, _despite sometimes feeling stressful._ Relationships, too, follow a similar rhythm. I’ve experienced connections where everything seemed easy at first—until conflict arose, and I panicked, thinking it meant something was wrong. Over time, I’ve realized that those moments of tension are natural, even necessary. It’s through misunderstandings and miscommunications that deeper conversations happen. **Some of the closest connections I have today grew stronger only after going through some tough times.** As the connection develops into something richer and more honest, I feel gratitude for the ups and downs that I had previously experienced. Meditating for over a decade now, I used to crave stability, determined to create a life free from the ups and downs. I remember one meditation session early on, sitting cross-legged, hoping for peace but instead finding a mess. My mind wouldn’t stop racing, and I kept thinking, ‘_Shouldn’t I be better at this by now?’_ But then, somewhere amidst the chaos, it hit me—this is the practice. Just sitting with it all, **without needing to fix or force it**. That realization felt like taking a deep breath after holding it in for too long. I realized that my mind, a reflection often of my world, does go up and down, here and there, and will feel more often than not all over. And the goal is not to quiet my mind or stop my thoughts. Rather it’s to witness my reality as it is, and lovingly accept the ups and downs with a smile. **A steady, unchanging life would feel stagnant.** It’s the ups that make us grateful, and the downs that teach us resilience. Just like an ECG monitor that measures a heartbeat, life has to have ups and downs. When the line goes flat, it’s over. But as long as it’s moving, there’s life. The full moon may pull emotions out of me that I can’t always explain, but I’m learning to stop trying to control the waves. Instead, I’m hoping to ride them. **Some days I catch a perfect wave, other days I wipe out spectacularly**—but that’s part of my journey. The other night, I stood by the ocean under the full moon. The waves lapped gently at the shore, and the moon’s reflection shimmered across the surface like a silver thread. In that moment, I felt it—the rhythm, the ebb and flow, the quiet truth that everything passes. Some waves you ride, others take you down, but they all belong._ They’re all part of the same ocean._ And that is how I learned to full moon. --- ### How to Renovate Published: 2024-10-13 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/renovate/ My mom called me yesterday, complaining about a home renovation project they are knee-deep in. Her frustration was clear—nothing was turning out quite the way she imagined. A few days earlier, a new friend I met here in Sydney was venting about the same thing—delays, surprises, and the creeping sense of dread that their home wouldn’t be finished any time soon. And last week, I listened to a voice note from a friend in Lisbon who was describing their own home renovation nightmare. No matter where I turn, whether it’s in Sydney, Lisbon, or back home in Toronto, everyone has the same story. No matter the country, currency, or culture, home renovations seem to be a universal source of frustration, stress and anxiety. I’ve never heard someone say their renovation went perfectly—on time, under budget, stress-free, with everything turning out exactly as expected. It got me thinking, **_why the consistent surprise about being surprised?_** It is predictable how unpredictable renovations will be, but yet everyone acts like it is the biggest surprise ever. _I think it comes down to control. _ It’s not just about the budget overruns—many parts of our lives go over budget, and we don’t react as strongly. We might overspend on vacations, go a bit too far with holiday shopping, or indulge in an unexpected splurge on a night out. **Yet these instances don’t hit us with the same emotional weight. ** It’s also not purely about the delays. We face delays all the time—whether it’s a flight running late, a traffic jam, or waiting longer than expected for a delivery. We shrug those off more easily. _So why is it that when it comes to renovations, our emotions spike?_ _A home is personal. _It’s a place of safety, a reflection of who we are, and where we retreat to recharge. And when something disrupts that space—something as visible as a paint color not being quite right or a bathroom tile slightly off-center—it feels like we’ve lost control over something deeply intimate. Objectively, the shade of white on the wall being a touch lighter or darker, or a wire being exposed where it shouldn’t be, doesn’t actually matter. In the grand scheme of life—where we’re seeking connection, doing meaningful work, loving those around us, and finding inspiration in the world—these small details of how our homes look or how long they take to complete are so clearly unimportant. Yet, we make them matter. _A lot. _ We get emotionally attached to them because they represent something more significant: **the feeling that we’re losing control over something that feels sacred to us.** There’s an easy, surface-level response to this problem: “_plan better_.” Allocate more time and money, expect the unexpected, and manage expectations accordingly. But that advice misses the mark because the issue isn’t about planning; it’s about emotions. “_Plan better_” doesn’t address the deeper emotional need we have for control, especially over something as personal as our homes. It’s a primal instinct to seek safety and security in the spaces we inhabit. But here’s the thing: control is an illusion. **It’s something we convince ourselves we have, and we hold onto it because it makes us feel safe. **We like to believe that if we plan well enough, work hard enough, and organize everything perfectly, we can control the outcome. But life doesn’t work that way, and renovations are just one example of this truth playing out. The solution isn’t to tighten our grip. Instead, it is to look for security somewhere else. _Within ourselves._ When I take a step back, pause, and breathe, I realize that my real sense of safety in life doesn’t come from controlling my environment or my circumstances. **It comes from trusting myself.** It comes from knowing that no matter what happens—whether it’s a delayed renovation, a relationship challenge, or a career setback—I’ll be okay. I often need to remind myself of this when I get caught up in a moment or a situation. This sense of inner stability is something no external situation can mess with. When we look for safety outside of ourselves, in the perfect shade of white paint or the exact alignment of bathroom tiles, we set ourselves up for disappointment. But when we cultivate safety within—through self-trust, self-compassion, and resilience—we can weather any storm, whether it’s a home renovation gone wrong or something far more significant. The antidote to the feeling of a loss of control is finding peace within ourselves, knowing that no matter how chaotic things get on the outside, I’ll be just fine on the inside. This perhaps is the real renovation worth undertaking. And that is how I learned how to renovate. --- ### How to Shower Published: 2024-10-06 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/shower/ _‘I’ll shower on it and get back to you.’_ These words have been etched to memory for me, for well over a decade now, as they were mentioned to me during a business lunch long ago. I think the words have stuck with me as they were a surprise to hear, yet at the same time, so truthful and relatable. **Many insights and breakthroughs have come to me while in the shower. **Regardless of the domain of life, be it business, health, or relationships, I am often pleasantly surprised to find answers to problems after ‘showering’ on them. _Oftentimes, answers to problems I wasn’t even aware of that I had._ In a way, showering feels like a form of mindfulness, where my attention is not being pulled away from any external stimuli or distractions from screens, or even people. It is me alone, with my thoughts. The physical repetitive routine of showering is quite mindless in fact, requiring very little mental effort. This is why my mind can focus on more interesting or important topics, without the pressure of trying to be productive. I continue to feel a sense of awe and wonder of how the answers I am often looking for outside of me, be it from friends, therapists, books, or teachers, are more often than not already sitting within me. All I need to do is to listen for them. And that’s often the most difficult part. Learning to listen to myself. _Which requires overcoming three obstacles. _ **The first obstacle to listening to myself is getting distracted by the noise outside of me. ** With the availability of endless content, be it from professional social media personalities, self proclaimed self help gurus, life coaches, researchers turned YouTubers, and more sources, it can feel easy to forget that we know ourselves best and know what we need. Thinking that the perfect answer is out there, and all that I have to do is find it, is like searching for a needle in a haystack. It’s pointless and can be painful. **The second obstacle to listening to myself are the many voices in my head. ** They are often the voices of my parents, my partner, my sibling, my friends, or my colleagues. Trying to solve my problems through the sole lens of what those around me will think, believe, support, or accept, is a common problem I know many struggle with, as I know I have at times as well. It takes a belief in oneself to back oneself. To accept that not everyone around me may agree with my choices. And that’s okay. It’s difficult at first but becomes easier over time. **The third obstacle to listening to myself is a fear of failure. ** What if I’m wrong? Then who will I have to blame? At least if I followed some generalized best practice from a researcher, or listened to a family member, if it doesn’t work, I can point my finger out the window. And although I may still have a problem, I at least don’t have a bigger problem of feeling like I was wrong. The reality is that if I listen to myself, I will be wrong at times. The same goes if I listen to some person with credentials or some person I have a relationship with. No one, not anyone, can know or control my life. Not even me. **Learning not only to make mistakes, but to own the mistakes I make**, is the prep work I have to do to be truly open to listening to myself. Only then, after I’ve tuned out the external noises, the internal voices and the fear of failure, can I truly start to _‘shower’_ on my problems and connect with my deeper wisdom. And that is how I learned to shower. --- ### How to Left Side Published: 2024-09-29 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/side/ I went to turn on the car, and then realized I was sitting in the passenger seat. It took me a second to remember that down under, they drive on the other side of the road, and their cars sides are flipped. Having recently arrived in Sydney, I rented a car as I wanted to more easily explore this beautiful city where I plan to winter this year. Taking my first left turn out of the garage, **I noticed myself perched forward on the car seat,** extra vigilant of both the left and right sides of the road. _‘Left side, left side, left side’_ I kept chanting to myself quietly, driving for once far below the posted speed limit, carefully staying within the lines and turning even more carefully. My heart beating a bit faster, my palms a bit sweaty and my eyes open a bit wider, I was nervous and a bit **more anxious than I had expected or prepared for. ** On my second day, I considered taking an Uber instead to save myself the discomfort, even though it was only a 10 minute drive away. As I was about to request the ride in the app, I caught a glimpse of the rental car keys lying on the table and decided I needed to get comfortable driving on the left, and the only way was to face the fear. _It wasn’t so bad the second time around. _ And on the drive back to where I was staying, I found myself actually enjoying it. I turned the music on and found myself smiling for the first time behind the wheel. Within days, what I had feared had become a chance for growth and a source of needed confidence on the road. As I reflected one morning in my journal, I began to appreciate just how adaptable we are. Oftentimes, like I had experienced, **our minds get in the way.** I know my mind is trying to protect me and keep me safe, yet at the same time, my instinct to challenge myself, do what makes me uncomfortable and experience something new is the reason for most of the best adventures in life. **Feeling fear can be a signal that it’s time to lean in,** _versus lean away. _ In business, relationships, health and more, I have often felt fear and when looking back, I have never regretted not facing that fear. It isn’t easy, but totally worth it. What makes it a bit easier is to believe in myself. Without the self-belief that I can do something I feel fear about, I don’t stand a chance. With the self-belief, I am now tapping into an inner resource and spring of energy that propels me forward. _Forward into my future_. And that is how I learned to Left Side. --- ### How to Inside Out Published: 2024-09-22 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/out/ Often children stories we think are helpful for children, but watching Inside Out recently was a reminder of **how much more relevant the children stories can be for adults**, as we have more life experiences to relate and apply to. In the Inside Out movie, which one day I imagine my future kids will refer to as a classic, different characters inside a young girl’s mind each represent a different emotion. _Meet Joy._ Cheerful and always positive, she is clearly the emotion “in charge” in this young girl’s mind, setting the tone and everyone else followed. _Meet Sadness_. A bright blue blob that initially comes across as a downer, always expressing some negativity. _Meet Disgust._ A bright green cool looking character with slick hair, who often resists what is new or different. _Meet Fear._ A scrawny skinny character with big glasses, always hiding and forever scared. Of everything and everyone. And finally, _meet Anger._ A short but plump bright red character always ready to yell and scream at the slightest discomfort . Initially, I resonated with Joy, as she was the one keeping the rest of the emotions in check and maintaining a positive mood. And I found myself getting frustrated with the other characters. However, seeing the respective emotions work together as a team and the interplay between them began to sit in as more real and less imaginary. **Each emotion serves their own purpose**. And I could relate to each emotion. Sadness for example, initially annoying however overtime I could see how this emotion was the root of empathy and feeling for others, and that in turn created the opportunity for connection. Or take anger. While at the surface feels counterproductive and mindfulness teachings encourage us to not feel this emotion in particular as intensely, sometimes this emotion is what becomes the catalyst for change. _And rapid change. _ Many of these emotions, other than joy, often feel unpleasant and are easy to avoid. However, avoiding them is a fool’s game as the **emotions only grow when left unattended**, and by the time we have no choice but to face them or express them, we have no clue what the initial trigger was to begin with. Children experience and express a range of emotions frequently. Adults also experience the same range of emotions but do not express them very frequently. Children don’t know better than to allow them to show, but as we grow older, we get conditioned to hide them. **Emotions are core to who we are, and shape our experience of life. **It’s been a journey for me to become more comfortable with my emotions, and through therapy, journaling, reflection and meditation, I feel I have some of the tools to continue to work with and through them. At times my mind becomes an emotion-making machine, an endless stream of thoughts and feelings that floods my day. Those are the signs that I need to take a moment to pause, and check-in to see what’s going on, inside. It is so easy to look and point outside as the reason, or cause, of what I am feeling inside. However if the same shared external cause, be it the weather, politics, the stock market, a sports team, triggers different emotions in different people, then it is clear that the feeling has more to do with what’s going on the inside versus the outside. And that is how I learned to Inside Out. --- ### How to LEGO Published: 2024-09-15 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/lego/ The bright green base was no bigger than the size of my hand. The pieces were sprawled out on the floor, and we each took turns, quietly laying them brick by brick on top of one another. My mind started to wander, no longer present with the mindless activity of laying LEGO bricks in a straight, uniform, multi-colored vertical tower. Until I saw him lay a piece that was half on the base, and half off the base. He layed another one on top of this piece that now overhung the rest of the otherwise perfectly straight vertical tower. I stopped laying pieces and continued to pass him pieces, encouraging him to see where he would place them next. In not too much time, the vertical tower was now growing horizontally, in all directions. It started to take the shape of a giant ship that was narrow at the bottom, where it meets the water, and wider at the top, where it meets the sky. As I watched him quietly break the artificial boundaries of laying pieces in straight and organized shapes, it was **a mirror for me on how much I had fallen into the artificial boundaries of day-to-day life**. This LEGO activity quickly became a silent nudge and guiding hand for me to think beyond the artificial boundaries that my mind has become comfortable, and at times numb, playing within. There is no one way to LEGO. It’s a collection of brightly colored plastic bricks, with endless combinations of constructions possible. Similarly, **there is no one way to life.** It’s a collection of uniquely beautiful experiences, moments, connections and learnings made possible through curiosity and desire. The new LEGO kits these days come with instruction manuals, and despite them turning into objectively more interesting and intricate sculptures and scenes, the process leaves no space for creativity or judgment. There is only one way to assemble it, and it involves blindly following the instructions to a tee with absolutely no margin for error. Life just isn’t like this though. We may think and at times search for the instruction manual, hoping that if we just follow someone else’s steps, that we’ll get to where we’re hoping to get to, but in reality, **there is only one path for each of us, and it is unique to us.** The LEGO structure my three and a half year old nephew and I built together is one-of-a-kind, and can never be replicated. Nor does it need to. The next time we sit down together to build LEGO, we get to dream up something completely different. This is what makes life so interesting. The endless possibilities and limitless potential in every moment to create, discover and learn. And thanks to my nephew, I was reminded to think beyond the artificial boundaries of my mind. And that is how I learned to LEGO. --- ### How to Adventure Published: 2024-09-08 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/adventure/ It was three years ago this past week that I had moved spontaneously to Portugal, without much thought, without knowing anyone and without a plan. I guess my plan was simple: **go on an adventure. ** Part of taking an adventure that I love is the adrenaline rush and thrill of not knowing what will happen. Not knowing how I will react and respond to what comes my way. **And not having a particular agenda** or purpose, other than to be curious and open to see what might unfold. So much of life at times can feel meticulously planned, carefully architected and plotted to try and get the best possible outcome. However when reflecting back on my life, **the best outcomes have been when I haven’t planned**, haven’t researched and haven’t set specific goals. Having fewer expectations has been a recipe for feeling pleasantly surprised, and as a result, highly satisfied. _And this has been the primary lesson of my three years as an expat in Lisbon._ I had no plan or desire even to make a lot of new friends. At this stage in my life, I felt satisfied and full from the wonderful friendships I enjoy. However little did I know that I’d discover a completely new set of friends, with a similar expat open-minded approach to adventure, and who also identify as global citizens. I really cherish these new friendships I’ve built over the past three years, probably because I had no expectations. I had no plan or desire to learn a new language. Within a year, I was conversational in Portuguese, and more interestingly, my dusty French improved and I found motivation to improve my Hindi. Being in a different culture helped me rediscover a passion for languages. I had no plan or desire to invest in real estate. However landing in Portugal, at the time I did, felt like the right place at the right time. I quickly learned a new industry, built a professional network and made some solid investments. More importantly, I’ve taken an interest now in real estate in other countries when I had never imagined myself getting into the asset class. I had no plan or desire to focus on my physical health. Keeping the forever young and invincible mindset, living previously in cities like New York and Toronto where physical health takes a back seat to financial health, I had never consistently worked out. Or paid attention to my protein intake. And now I spend at least a few hours per day looking after my physical health, in a variety of ways that I find interesting and effective. The list goes on. All of the many ways my life has changed during the past three years. **Portugal hasn’t changed my life. Choosing to go on an adventure is what changed my life. ** Going on an adventure has meant saying yes to the unknown, and going into it fully open, ready to embrace what’s come up on the inside and outside, _while staying curious. _ What an adventure looks like for you will be different than what it looks like for me. And what I’ve learned is that it’s less about what the specific adventure is and more about how one approaches it. _The same goes for the adventure called life. _ And that is how I learned to adventure. --- ### How to Swiss Alps Published: 2024-09-01 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/alps/ The destination was a Michelin star restaurant that stood quietly alone near the top of the Swiss Alps, but I had no idea that’s where we were going until I got there. To celebrate a recent birthday, I was away with a few close friends for a weekend in the Alps. Normally a winter spot, it was decided by the others to give it a try during the summer. _Fewer crowds, beautiful vistas, lower prices and a quiet and peaceful atmosphere._ **It was also decided that the details of the weekend would be kept a surprise from me.** And that we’d all be mostly phone-free for it. That morning, our journey started with a local train near the hotel, which was already at about 1,000 meters above sea level. With everything in German, I had no idea where we actually were and where we were going. And no phone to pull up Google Maps to track the blue dot, that would often give me so much comfort in knowing. I had nothing to do but to admire the gorgeous views from the local commuter train._ It was breathtaking._ Now at nearly 1,800 meters, we waited in a short line and bought one-way tickets for a gondola ride. It took us from the train station even higher into the mountains. I was quickly reminded that a fear of heights I thought was part of my past was clearly present for me. **I smiled and gracefully took in the entire experience, sights and frights.** As we disembarked the gondola quickly, otherwise we’d end up going back down, I realized we were now at 2,600 meters. The air crisp and clean, the 360 degree views of the Alps standing majestically tall and the valleys shining bright green with tiny villages appearing far in the distance in between, inspired a silent awe as our small group had no words. Then we started a hike, along a fairly horizontal trail that walked alongside one of the mountain edges. After not too long, we crossed paths with a group of elderly people, smiling and laughing, looking and sounding ever more youthful than us. A little further along, we saw a few women rock climbing the face of the mountain and a few men down below cheering them on. And then saw a couple having a picnic on a patch of grass. It was a completely other world that existed far into the sky. We finally got to the restaurant, about an hour later. It was nestled alone into one of the mountain tops and sat down at our table. There was only one problem: I was no longer hungry. Having no idea where we were going, and not realizing the peak experience of the day was yet to come at the restaurant, I thoroughly enjoyed the train, the gondola and the hike, and savored every moment. It was all deliciously satisfying for my spirit. **Not knowing where we were going forced me to enjoy the journey, as there was no destination.** Had I known there was somewhere to get to, I would not have been as present and curious along the way there. So often in my day-to-day life, I have blinders on and forget to enjoy the way to wherever I am going. My focus on not only getting a specific outcome, but also as efficiently as I can, drains the journey of any value as it is a means to an end. As I sat there at the restaurant, with fancy looking food sitting on my plate that I was not that interested in, I felt this calm energy throughout my entire body. The joy of not knowing, of discovering more of the world, and as a result, more of myself, that was made possible thanks to not having a goal. The weekend away, with its surprises and silent beauty, was a reminder for me to slow down and to let go of the need to control every detail. **Life’s most memorable moments often come when I least expect them,**_ so why am I trying so hard to create them? _ The next time I’m rushing towards an arbitrary goal that my mind gets stuck on, I’ll try to remember this moment in the Alps. I’ll take a deep breath and remind myself that sometimes the most productive thing to do is to pause, look at the view, and enjoy it. And that is how I learned to Swiss Alps. --- ### How to Map Published: 2024-08-25 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/map/ “Over 100 countries”, he said when I had asked him how many places he had visited in his lifetime. _He didn’t even appear that old._ This was last month, while I was in London for a close friend’s wedding. I was strolling the streets near the popular Borough Market, south of the Thames river, on a sunny weekend morning. I was walking alone, without my phone in hand, having left my hotel with the intention to get lost and with the curiosity to see what I might discover. A beautiful old school map caught my attention in the window of a tiny little shop. Without thinking, I walked right in and began touching the paper. It was soft, almost felt-like, and pleasant for my fingertips. I then noticed that it was a map of the world, _drawn in 1797_. This was a time before air travel. Before satellite systems. Before electricity. Before cars. _Before Google Maps. _ I began to marvel for a brief moment at the ingenuity and intelligence previous generations, centuries ago, demonstrated. I can hardly remember my own phone number or figure out how to turn off some annoying feature on my iPhone without first asking chatGPT for step-by-step instructions. And I studied Software Engineering at a good school, and ran a technology business for fifteen years. Yet over two hundred years ago, someone was drawing by hand a map of the entire world, likely by studying hundreds of versions drawn by people before. “Where are you from?” My train of thought was interrupted by what I assumed was the owner of the map store I was silently standing in. “Canada, although originally my family is from India,” I told him with a smile. He turned and walked over to the other side of the tiny shop, flipping through beautifully designed decorative envelopes and pulled one out enthusiastically. He walked back to me and quietly opened the large envelope, took out a folded piece of paper and began to open it slowly. It was a map of India from the early 1800s. **I had never seen one before.** This was India under British rule. This was India before partition that created borders with Pakistan and Bangladesh. This wasn’t the India I had grown up learning about and visiting often. _I was curious. _ As we started to chat some more, and the many cities and countries I have lived in started to come out, new maps were shown to me. Each one captured my curiosity, **showing me something I didn’t know about a place I thought I knew. ** “It’s a different way to look at things,” he remarked, not realizing that I received his casual comment not literally but metaphorically. **So** **much of my experience of life is based on my perspective of life.** And so much of my perspective is shaped by the culture, community and conditioning that I choose. These influences, like the old hand drawn map I was holding in my hand, show me something that I didn’t know. And they are full of biases, _and that’s totally fine. _ It’s less about trying to find an unbiased or objective viewpoint, as that may not exist, but rather to understand the biases and subjective nature of everything that I encounter. This thought may have been deeply concerning for me even a decade ago, as the culture I had learned in school taught me that there must always be a single right answer to every question. I have since learned that’s not fully true. Learning about the map store owner’s passion for maps that had taken him to over one hundred countries in search of the most rare and interesting maps, only to be redesigned by him in his unique style, I can’t help but think of the different lenses in which we view the same thing. For example, if I find a cookie disgusting and you find it delicious, which one is it? Is the cookie disgusting or delicious? It depends on who’s asking. _There is no single answer._ There may be a popular answer, but it is a subjective question that deserves a subjective answer. I have long appreciated the wisdom **‘pay attention to what you pay attention to’, **meaning everything is less as it seems and more as I seem it to be. My intention is to choose my influences and biases, versus trying to eradicate them. All the while being open to discovering something new about something I may perceive to be old, like what a map of India looks like. Looking now at a map of New York City from 1859 in my hand, I could spot immediately the street I had lived on and the one where I had an office. But they seemed a lot further from one another in proportion than I remembered from just a few years ago. Drawing a map without the technology and tools we have today was clearly a subjective exercise back then. _And I suspect everyone was fine with that. _ I then saw a map of New York City from the early 1900s. Here the proportions started to look more inline as I had experienced them to be. _An evolution of still a subjective exercise._ Learning to tolerate different perspectives, like different maps of the same place drawn at different times, requires **a deeper understanding and belief in the inherent subjectivity that exists everywhere.** It is this understanding that is the root of the tree that allows a society to flourish and grow strong together. Everyone is not going to think and believe the same things and waiting or wanting them to is a recipe for frustration. **We all have our own subjective perspectives, influenced by the unique circumstances and conditions that we find ourselves in**. Be it place, time, or people. They are all unique, and shape us in unique ways. The same goes for me as an individual. What I thought, said or did a decade ago will be different than how I am now. _And dare I say how I will be in the future. _ After all, the universal truth that I was reminded of looking at different maps of the same place is that everything changes. I may not be in control of how, or when, or even in which ways, but I can accept that everything changes. For me, maps are now a symbol of change. And that is how I learned to map. --- ### How to Heat Published: 2024-08-18 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/heat/ “Do you like the heat?” I shot him an angry look unknowingly, as I was changing into my bathing suit at the beach. He was renting me a standup paddleboard at the beach and it was a blistering hot day already, despite it being only ten in the morning. “Yes…but not this much,” I responded and the conversation didn’t continue very far. The heat was getting to me, and** I was already starting to lose some of my cool.** This now being my third summer in Portugal, I should be used to the drill, but I’m not. Every summer there seems to be one week where the temperature turns particularly unbearable. It’s the kind of relentless, unforgiving sticky heat that turns daily life into a low-key endurance test. I tried everything I could to stay cool, inside and out. First, I thought being on the water might do the trick. It didn’t. The bright white paddleboard was reflecting back the Portuguese sun back onto my body, making it feel even hotter. Next, I thought being in the water must be the solution. A normally frigid Atlantic ocean dip did not feel cold enough that day for me. And seconds after stepping out of the ocean onto the beach, the contrast from cold to heat felt brutal. Once I got home, I took a long cold shower to wash off the sand and to attempt to cool down. Again, despite the shower tap being turned all the way to the left on cold, the water felt warm. Then I had the brilliant idea to use my new infrared red light panels. They are about five feet tall and mounted on the wall in one of my guest bedrooms. Putting on my noise canceling headphones and red light goggles, I stood bare in front of them, trying to heat my body on the inside to feel cool on the outside. Within seconds I began to sweat more than normal, and after a fifteen minute session, I noticed my body excessively warm for the next hour. _That was a failed experiment._ I started to feel hungry. I first tried a cold smoothie with ice and a fresh salad with avocado, cucumber, tomatoes, and other cooling ingredients._ That didn’t work._ Then I reversed the experiment and had warm foods. Some leftover tomato soup. A herbal tea. Similar to the red light, _I felt worse. _ All the while, the air conditioner in my apartment was cranked up to the max. And at that exact moment, there was a power outage. All of the lights, electronics and appliances were off in the blink of an eye. It’s at that moment I realized I did not have even a fan in my place. **It was at that moment I hit a wall.** I sat down quietly on my couch. With the feeling of defeat energetically throughout my body. I had no choice but to throw in the towel. _‘I give up’_, I said silently to myself. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. _And another. And another._ **In an unexpected moment of silence, inside and out, I felt a shift in my energy.** I had surrendered. I had stopped resisting. I had ended my crusade to control. I had finally accepted my reality as it was and was no longer trying to change it. For the first time that day, I felt cool. An innocent smile appeared on my face._ I no longer felt like I was going to die from the heat. _ I realized the idea of the heat was more bothersome for me than the heat itself. And then I started to reflect on **how many areas of my life I react to the idea of something versus the thing itself.** _In relationship. In business. In health. _ The mind is such a powerful tool and it has the ability to generate ideas. Beautiful, creative and expansive ideas. And at the same time, fearful, destructive and unpleasant ideas. My entire day I had been reacting to the idea of suffering in my mind versus any sensation of suffering in my body. The struggle I had been feeling is what made things worse.** There was a peace in letting go, in not trying to bend everything to my perceived liking and desire.** So often in my daily life I get caught up in trying to fix, control or resist what I perceive as uncomfortable or unwanted. It turns out that what is feared is not that bad and that I am a whole lot more resilient and capable than I realize. _‘Rain or shine, I’ll be fine’_ is a mantra I wrote to myself in my journal later that day, as a way to remind myself that regardless of what happens in my environment, figurative or literal, I will be fine. That confidence, inner knowing and self belief is the real power of the mind that I’m curious to continue to unlock in my daily life. There I was, sipping warm tea, sitting on my balcony in the sun, embracing the sweat rolling down my face with a smile, and letting the sun do its thing while I did mine. Sometimes the secret isn’t trying to change the world around me—it’s changing how I see it. And that is how I learned to heat. --- ### How to Olympics Published: 2024-08-11 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/olympics/ I was in Paris for the Olympics recently, and the city felt like it had come alive in a way I’d never experienced before. There’s always a certain magic to Paris—but this time, it felt different. The city wasn’t just alive; it was buzzing, vibrating with the energy of thousands of athletes, spectators, and dreamers all in one place. I spent my days moving between venues, as these Olympics were spread out geographically in the different corners of the city. Each sport was its own universe, with its own energy, and each one left me with **a lesson that felt both personal and universal**. Badminton was the first event I attended. It is much more than just a game of speed and precision. I watched a match where the players were locked in a fierce rally—powerful smashes followed by lightning-fast returns, the birdie was a blur in motion. And then, in a moment of pure finesse, one player hit a delicate drop shot, the birdie barely clearing the net before falling to the ground like a feather. The crowd gasped, and then burst into applause. _“It’s not just about power. It’s about knowing when to be gentle, when to let things fall into place,”_ the spectator next to me whispered. It made me reflect about **how often in life I rely on force**—pushing harder, working longer hours, trying to control outcomes—when sometimes, what’s really needed is a softer touch. _A pause_. A moment to let things unfold naturally. That drop shot was a perfect reminder that life isn’t just about how hard I hit, but about knowing when to let go and let the moment carry me. Swimming was next, and the energy in the arena was electric. I watched as one race unfolded in a way that was almost poetic—a swimmer who started strong, building momentum with each stroke, carving through the water like a knife through butter. But then, in the final lap, something shifted. Another swimmer began to catch up, their strokes gaining speed and power, while the leader seemed to fall behind, their rhythm breaking ever so slightly. The finish was close—too close to call without the help of the replay. As the times flashed on the screen, the arena erupted in cheers. The swimmer who was leading for most of the race had lost by a mere fraction of a second. _It was heartbreaking to see._ It made me reflect about **how often I can lose momentum in life because I start overthinking**, doubting myself, or getting caught up in the fear of failure. Confidence is a delicate thing—it can carry me forward like a wave, but it can also be easily disrupted by a single moment of hesitation. Watching that race, I realized that maintaining momentum isn’t just about riding the highs; it’s about trusting myself even when the finish line is still out of sight. Athletics brought a different kind of reflection. The stadium was the same one used for the opening ceremony. It was massive, with a sea of spectators filling every seat. I watched as runners, jumpers, and throwers gave everything they had, their bodies pushed to the limit, their faces full of determination. And then, during a medal ceremony, a Canadian athlete stood on the podium, gold medal around her neck, the Canadian anthem playing in the background. I felt a rush of pride that surprised me. Even though I no longer live in Canada, seeing that maple leaf flag rise and hearing the familiar anthem play brought me back home instantly. There coincidentally was a young woman draped in a Canadian flag next to me. _“It’s like a piece of home is here with us,”_ she said, beaming. In that moment, I realized that **no matter where I go, a part of me is always tied to where I came from**. Portugal may be where I mostly live now, but home is home. The Olympics, with all their international spirit, had somehow brought me back to my roots, reminding me to appreciate the values and experiences that had shaped me. But beyond the medals and the records, what really stayed with me was the way the athletes treated each other. There was one moment after a particularly grueling 400m race where the winner, instead of celebrating, turned back to help a fellow competitor who had collapsed at the finish line. He knelt beside him, offered a hand, and pulled him to his feet. The crowd, which had been roaring just moments before, fell into a respectful silence. It was a silent gesture that spoke loudly. **Competition doesn’t have to mean rivalry**. It can be a journey with mutual respect for the effort and dedication that everyone brought. I thought about how beautiful it would be if we had more mutual respect for each other in other domains between competitors, such as politics, business or_ even while sitting in traffic._ We often view others as rivals, people to beat, rather than as fellow travelers on a similar path. As the days in Paris went by, I found myself not cheering for Canada, but **cheering for every athlete who stepped onto the field, the court, or into the pool.** It wasn’t about nationality or even about who won the most medals. It was about celebrating their effort to strive for something greater, and admiring how they found meaning in the pursuit of excellence. _The Olympics had inspired me._ It wasn’t a sports competition between countries; for me it became a reminder of what it means to be alive—to strive, to compete, to respect each other, and to appreciate the beauty in both victory and defeat. And that is how I learned to Olympics. --- ### How to Pasta Published: 2024-08-04 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/pasta/ “Thank you for your request but the restaurant has the day off today”. I smiled and laughed gently out loud. After the failed attempt to book a restaurant, I decided to just walk into town to find a spot for a late lunch. To my surprise - _nothing was open_. Here I was, in the midst of the Italian summer, during peak tourist season and everything was closed. _I was surprised. _ Across Southern Europe, **the culture to prioritize the passion for summer over profits** comes through loud and clear. Much of the continent shuts down for business in August when everyone takes extended summer holidays. In most parts of the world, I’m used to a culture where the priority is to maximize profits. Businesses would be open no matter what, and they’d find people to work. It all works somehow though in Europe, even if it appears less optimal to me given my North American upbringing. That evening, we ended up at a local Italian woman’s tiny third floor one bedroom apartment for dinner. **We would be cooking dinner. ** It was a cooking class, in someone’s home. On the menu was two types of pasta, bruschetta and my favourite, tiramisu. As we began cooking, we began chatting and learned more about her story. By the look of her, we wouldn’t have guessed that she had grandchildren. We were cooking in the same home she was born in. The once family home spread across three floors had been in her family for generations, and now had been split into no less than six apartments. Her sister lived next door. Her nephew is on the floor beneath. _And so on. _ **I was struck by the simplicity and warmth of the experience.** The aroma of fresh basil, tomatoes, and garlic filled the small kitchen, mingling with laughter and stories of the past. It was a reminder for me that sometimes, the best moments are the simplest ones, grounded in tradition and shared with others. As we kneaded the dough and stirred the fresh pasta sauce, I couldn't help but think about the slow pace of life here. It's a stark contrast to the hustle and bustle I’m used to. In that small kitchen,** I found a profound appreciation for the art of taking one's time. ** Making pasta from scratch takes patience and strength. Our pasta wasn't just a meal though; it felt like a ritual, a celebration of heritage and community. Our host told us about how she would make pasta with her grandmother, learning the secrets passed down through generations. It wasn't just about cooking for her; it was about connection—connecting with the past, with loved ones, and with oneself. In North America, where efficiency often trumps all else, this leisurely approach felt almost rebellious. But here, it is a way of life. It made me realize **how much I miss out on my rush to get things done. **_Ironically, I am often in a rush for the fear of missing out. But when rushing, I end up missing. _ When the meal was finally ready, we sat down together at a small table overlooking the charming village below. The food was incredible, but **what stood out even more to me was the sense of fulfillment we all felt.** We had created something beautiful together, with our own hands, and it tasted of more than just tomatoes and garlic. It tasted of history, love, and patience. That night, as we walked back to our hotel, I felt a deep sense of gratitude. Not just for the delicious food or the wonderful company, but for the reminders I had received. Sometimes, **it’s important to slow down**, to savor each moment, and to understand that the process is just as important as the result. _If not more important. _ In a world that often feels like it's moving fast, there's a quiet joy in embracing a slower pace, in finding meaning in the mundane, and in recognizing that sometimes, **the best things in life are the simplest.** And that is how I learned to pasta. --- ### How to French Published: 2024-07-28 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/french/ “Are you done with your phone?” It was the first thing the waiter at a casual deli said to me as I had sat down for breakfast. _It caught me off guard._ My location was at a cliff side touristic town in the South of France, overlooking the beautiful blue sea on a hot sunny day. Whereas I had woken up feeling full of energy and excited to explore, connect and relax for the day ahead, my mood had shifted after hearing those six words from a stranger. _“Are you done with your phone?”_ **I started to notice my energy drop.** My excitement fade. I became more self conscious and felt less comfortable. Perhaps even a little less safe, _emotionally_. Then the person I was with reflected back to me how quickly my energy shifted and checked in with me. That helped me snap out of it. _Almost instantly._ I began to wonder how such an innocent, harmless, irrelevant question could impact me so easily. **As someone who likes to feel in control, that moment made me realize how little control I actually have. **_I didn’t like it. _ Instead of passing a judgment that the waiter was rude, or drawing on a stereotype about the French, I instead started to become curious about why the waiter acted in a certain way. Realizing pretty quickly that I didn’t have enough context or information about the waiter to build a story that would justify in my mind his action, I had to be satisfied with the only thing I could come up with. **“There must be a reason that has absolutely nothing to do with me”. ** Maybe he woke up on the wrong side of the bed that morning. Maybe he had some difficult circumstances he was working through in his home life. Maybe he was raised or conditioned to believe that it was normal to act this way. The point is that I don’t know exactly why, and don’t need to, but know that there is a reason. And that reason likely has nothing to do with me. I had been taking the interaction personally when in fact it wasn’t. One of my spiritual teachers, Anthony De Mello, says in his writings, _“what others think of you says more about them then it does about you”._ While I have read this line many times, and understood this intellectually, this experience helped me _feel it. _ **I am not as important as I think I am. **And definitely not as important to other people who are not in my daily life. The problem becomes when I conflate the world with my world. When my perspective of the world becomes so small, so tiny actually, that everything becomes about me and my experience of the world. In reflecting on this out loud over breakfast, my energy shifted and I began to feel compassion for the waiter. **I went from feeling agitation to feeling compassion**, without anything or anyone outside of me having to change one bit. Compassion requires me to see something from multiple perspectives. Not only the perspective that is convenient to me. Not only the perspective that is beneficial to me. Not only the perspective that is aligned with my values and beliefs. When I stop at simply passing judgment that “_that is good_”, “_this is bad_” or “_I don’t like this_”, then I am being intellectually lazy. Instead of passing judgment and moving on, if instead I pause for a moment and become curious to understand the why behind the action that I may like or dislike, my initial judgment turns into compassion for the person or circumstance in question. **Understanding is more important than agreement. ** Conflict occurs, be it in the world, my world or in my mind, trying to get to agreement. However it is unlikely that I will ever agree with everything and everyone I come across. And every time I disagree with something, it is a form of conflict. **Be it expressed or repressed, there is still some friction I am experiencing energetically with my environment. **And over a lifetime of friction with my environment, the toll adds up. However, understanding is something that is in my control. It is on me to choose to be curious and open to understanding this thing or person in my current environment or experience of life that I may not agree with. With this newfound appreciation that behind every action or choice I witness or experience, there is a reason behind it. I feel an ease and calm, and can glide through life with a bit more grace and a bit less friction. And that is how I learned to glide. --- ### How to Time Published: 2024-07-21 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/timee/ “Is your time yours?” has become my opening question when meeting new people. **It makes people pause.** It's not an easy question to answer off the cuff. Unlike the normal “how are you?”, “what do you do?”, “where are you vacationing this summer?”, or even “what’s inspiring you these days?” questions that often are asked, asking someone if their time is theirs is a mind bender. Yet at the same time, very revealing. **Four words that magically cause one to lift themselves out of their own day-to-day busyness and patterns, and force themselves to see their own reality as it is.**_ Instantly._ I’ve seen people’s expressions change immediately, most often faces get filled with confusion. A mild deer-in-the-headlights moment for some, as they’ve just stumbled accidentally across something that’s really important. I know the feeling as I have experienced it many times. It is a feeling of realizing I have lost my way, without knowing that I was lost to begin with. Furthermore, I thought I was on my way and these four words made me realize I am not. _Somewhere along the way, the relationship with time changed, and it seems not for the better._ I imagine one hundred years ago, those who had greater education, greater economic means, regardless of how it was obtained, by one's own merit, or passed down from others, or even through immoral activities, were the ones who felt that their time was theirs. They would spend it on travel, on leisure, on entertainment, and on loved ones. Fast forward to a modern society, those who ‘have it all’ also seem to no longer have their time. It is constantly rented out, be it to work commitments, social communities, health routines, or scrolling through feeds. One of my favorite books in the past few years is called _Four Thousand Weeks_. The author, Oliver Burkeman, challenged me to rethink my relationship with time. Instead of seeing time as a commodity or resource that I’m trying to abstract the most amount of value from, by doing more, and constantly trying to be productive, I have been inspired by thinking of time as something different. _Completely different._ The perspective encouraged me **to see time not as something to be controlled or managed, but as something to be experienced. **This shift in mindset has been transformative for me. It’s like transitioning from trying to trap water in my hands to simply allowing myself to swim in it. When I used to think about time, it was always in the context of scarcity. _There was never enough of it. _Days filled with back-to-back meetings, endless to-do lists, and the nagging guilt of things left undone. I was perpetually chasing after a sense of accomplishment that seemed to evaporate as quickly as it materialized. _It was exhausting._ But what if, instead of constantly trying to maximize every minute, I allowed myself to be present in the moment? What if I shifted my focus from doing more to being more? One practice that has helped me immensely is mindfulness. It's not just another thing for me to do, but a genuine practice that I incorporate into my daily life. Whether it's through meditation, a quiet walk in nature, or simply paying attention to my breath, mindfulness has allowed me to reclaim my time by being fully present in the now. **I also began to prioritize what truly matters to me.** It's easy to get caught up in the hustle and bustle, but taking even a minute to step back and ask myself how I want to spend my time has been liberating. I've learned to say no to things and people that don't feel aligned, and yes to those that do. **It’s about quality over quantity.** Spending an hour deeply engaged in a meaningful conversation with a friend can be far more fulfilling than a whole day of superficial interactions. I used to host hundred person parties often in Lisbon, and now I am realizing having dinner with one or two people is far more interesting to me. Investing time in activities that nourish my soul has become a priority. One of the most profound realizations I've had is that time is not something that can be owned or possessed. It's a gift, and **how I choose to spend it defines my life.** It's not about having control over it, but rather about dancing with it, embracing the ebb and flow of experiences. The irony is that by letting go of the need to control my time, I’ve actually found a greater sense of freedom and control. Time feels more abundant because I’m no longer trying to squeeze every last drop out of it. It's about finding harmony between doing and being, between ambition and contentment. In asking others, “Is your time yours?”, I hope to spark a needed moment of introspection. To encourage those around me to pause and reflect on their own relationship with time. Because in the end,** how we spend our time is how we live our lives**. And I want to live mine fully, deeply, and authentically. And that is how I learned to time. --- ### How to Lion King Published: 2024-07-14 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/lion/ The scene comes maybe two thirds into the story. Simba, the young cub,_ is not so young anymore_. He has left the kingdom and is living with Timone and Pumba in the jungle, wandering aimlessly in the jungle and enjoying the freedom from the trauma of what happened back in the day when his father, Mufasa, had died. The unexpected run-in with Nala, his childhood friend who, like him, is no longer a child, causes him to question if he is still on the right path in life. She strongly encourages him to come back to the kingdom, which is falling apart with his uncle Scar now in charge, and take his rightful place as heir to the throne. His immediate impulse is to reject the idea. He no longer identifies with his original destiny.** Yet something deep inside him is torn and not fully at peace. ** Rafiki, who can be best described as a mythical figure there to help guide things along when the are not on track, appears at the exact moment when Simba was ready to give up. Rafiki provokes Simba and Simba responds angrily, but honestly, by saying _“I don’t know who I am”_. The truth about how he has been feeling comes out, finally. Simba is directed by Rafiki to look into a nearby body of water and sees his reflection. Or what he believes to be his reflection at first, and then sees his father. And begins to hear his father speaking to him. Confused, yet curious, he continues to stare intensely at this visualization and begins to find answers to his question. He sees his father. He sees his mother. He sees all of the animals in the kingdom. He sees the landscapes. He sees the starry sky. He sees it all. And realizes that all of it is part of who he is._ All of it has shaped who he is._ And then it becomes clear to him that he must return and take his place as king, and help restore the kingdom for the betterment of all. As I sat there, in a London theater watching human actors play the role of animals dressed in elaborate costumes, I quietly took in this momentous scene that is the turning point of the whole story. It triggered a thought in me, or rather a question, about my own identity and purpose. I had been in London this past week, for the first time this year, after traveling the world and taking a six month sabbatical. The familiarity of the city spoke to me, yet at the same time, didn’t. **That’s the beautiful thing about landmarks. As they don’t change, they allow me to see how I have changed.** Like the main character in the musical I was enjoying, I too realized how my identity has been shaped by the many people, places and projects that have occupied my life. My parents. My sister and her family. My friends. My businesses. My teams. My clients. My cities. My homes. My adventures. **Even if I do not have all of it at this moment within my grip, I do within my spirit.** It doesn’t take more than a split second to recall memories of specific emotions and experiences that I appreciate, that I regret, and that I cherish. In those moments when I feel provoked to answer the question _‘who am I?’_, I turn inwards to remember the people, places and projects that I have journeyed with and through, and start to feel grounded and clear once again in my identity. As the final scenes unfolded in the musical, I found myself reflecting on Simba’s journey back to the Pride Lands. **It’s a journey of reclaiming one’s identity and purpose, confronting deep-seated fears, and embracing responsibility, no matter how uncomfortable. ** _I often face similar crossroads in my life. _Moments where I must choose between the path of least resistance and the one that demands courage and self-awareness. Simba’s transformation wasn’t just about returning to a place; it was about accepting who he truly was and the role he was destined to play. This resonates deeply with my own experience. When I decided to take my sabbatical, it was more than just a break from the routine. It was an opportunity to reflect on my own path, to question if I was still aligned with my true self. Traveling through different countries, cultures and communities, I was often faced with the unfamiliar, much like Simba in the jungle. Yet, in every new experience, **there was a thread that connected back to my core identity, reminding me of who I am and what is important to me.** Sitting in that theater, I realized that much like Simba, I also have a ‘Scar’ in my life, represented as challenges that question my sense of self-worth and direction. The key has been in recognizing these scars not as deterrents but as catalysts for my own growth. They test my resilience and push me towards self-discovery and a feeling of empowerment. Rafiki’s wisdom in the story echoes the mentors and guides in my own life who help me see what I may be unable to see. As the final curtain fell and the audience erupted in applause, I felt a profound sense of clarity. _And relief._ For me, The Lion King isn’t just a story about a lion reclaiming his throne. It’s an inspirational tale about the journey of finding my place in the world, amidst chaos, doubt and uncertainty. It reminded me that no matter where I go or what I face, my true identity is a culmination of all my experiences, connections, and choices. It’s about embracing my past, living in the present, and being open to the future. And that is how I learned how to Lion King. --- ### How to Be Annoyed Published: 2024-07-07 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/annoyed/ Six months ago, I was overwhelmed by a constant sense of annoyance living in Portugal. Every little thing seemed to get under my skin The traffic was a nightmare. Every trip felt like an obstacle course of gridlocks and erratic drivers, that made no sense whatsoever. _Randomness is the only description I can give._ Trying to make a simple bank transfer internationally was a task on its own. Mistake after mistake meant that the funds never could get to the desired destination. And my local bank seemed to block any and all online purchases for no apparent reason. Online deliveries never arrived on time and I noticed myself _becoming more sarcastic, playing a guessing game in my head. _What was supposed to be a two-day delivery often turned into a week-long wait. And not so often I would find out weeks later that it was returned because of some innocent issue, without any notification. Tradesmen were unreliable, often missing appointments or doing subpar work that required to be redone…at least twice. **_My confidence in others to get stuff done well was hitting close to rock bottom._** The mold and poor construction quality in my rental properties became the final straw. It felt like everything was crumbling around me, both literally and figuratively. Delays and surprises became part of my daily routine, adding daily to my growing annoyance. **My annoyance had reached an unsustainable level.** My mind was constantly agitated, and my emotional state was on edge._ I was constantly feeling triggered by the slightest of surprise or inconvenience_ Desperate for a break, I boarded a plane on a day’s notice to London. From there, I traveled to Paris, then Toronto, and finally settled in Sydney. I spent most of the first part of this year on a sabbatical by the beach, far from the chaos that had consumed my mind in Portugal. Last week, I returned to Portugal to begin my next chapter. _It felt as if time had stood still. _ **Everything looked the same.** The familiar faces at the local grocery store, my favorite cafe, and the building security office greeted me just as they had before. The plants and furniture in my apartment were arranged exactly as I had left them, despite many family and friends having stayed in my place while I had been away. Yet, something was different._ I had changed._ **What used to annoy me now seemed trivial.** The traffic, delayed deliveries, and unreliable tradesmen hadn’t changed. The challenges with banking and credit card issues are still here._ But my perspective has shifted. _Taking a break and stepping away from what I believe was the source of my annoyance helped give me a new perspective. The other day, I went to a small local bakery that I had always avoided because of the long wait times. This time, I decided to give it a try. Standing in line, I watched the baker expertly shape each loaf, his hands moving with a rhythm that came from years of practice. As I finally reached the counter, the warm, fresh bread handed to me felt like a gift. **The long wait no longer seemed like an annoyance but a part of the experience**, adding value to the delicious bread I was about to enjoy. Another time, I found myself stuck in traffic on my way to meet a friend. Instead of seething with frustration, I turned on my favorite playlist and let the music wash over me. I rolled down the windows, taking in the warm breeze and the vibrant city life around me. **What used to be a source of annoyance had become an unexpected moment of peace and fun.** I also remembered the handyman who had once missed three appointments in a row. This time, when he arrived late again, instead of feeling annoyed, I greeted him with a smile and a cup of coffee. We ended up chatting about his life and I got to practice my Portuguese again. It was a small interaction, but one that connected me with a greater sense of empathy. Visiting a local market that I used to find chaotic and overwhelming, I now saw it through new eyes. The hustle and bustle, the lively banter between vendors and customers, the colorful array of fresh produce—all of it felt vibrant and full of life. I took the time to engage with the vendors, asking about their products and learning their stories. **What was once a stressful environment had transformed into a rich, sensory experience.** I have begun to appreciate the little things I had taken for granted—the warmth of the sun, the friendly smiles of strangers, the views of the waves. Time away had allowed me to reset and reflect. I realized that my frustration wasn’t because of Portugal. _It was because of my mindset._ **Expectations and frustrations had clouded my experience and perception.** Now, I hope to approach life in Portugal & beyond with more patience and acceptance. I aim to embrace perceived imperfections and find joy in the little moments. What once annoyed me now serves as an opportunity to practice patience and gratitude. **Real change starts from within.** The external world doesn’t have to change for me to feel differently. My perspective and mindset is what truly matters. By changing my perspective, I changed my experience. And that is how I learned to be annoyed. --- ### How to Portrait Mode Published: 2024-06-30 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/portrait/ Walking the streets of Lisbon recently, a family of tourists asked me to take their photo in front of one of the many city lookout points. “Can you take it in portrait mode?” the dad added as he handed me their phone. I took their photos and they were very appreciative. What I found ironic though was that by being in portrait mode, the beautiful city landscape became blurry. **What was now in focus was the family.** This is representative of how I often move through daily life. In portrait mode. The focus is always, almost exclusively, on me. In the face of some thing, some person, some place, or some activity, the first question that I ask myself is _‘what am I going to get from this?’._ **The lens from which I evaluate whether something is worthwhile or not is based on the value that I may derive or abstract from it.** This way of thinking keeps my mental and emotional energy focused on me, often to the exclusion of the environment in which I’m operating. I am looking out for…me. And if there is any capacity left, then maybe those close to me or those that I feel responsible for. If instead I asked the question _‘what am I ready to give to this?’_, my energy completely shifts. The focus is not on me, but rather on some thing, some place, some person, or some activity, outside of me. **The moment I begin to think beyond myself, I am now connected to something bigger than me. I start to feel smaller, in the best possible way, as my problems also start to feel smaller. ** It is a reason I believe being in nature is so therapeutic and peaceful. Staring out at the ocean, looking at tall mountains or over vast fields and forests, the horizon and landscape becomes so wide, beyond my eyes can see, that it feels endless._ It is endless._ When I start to pay attention to what’s happening around me, I naturally start to calibrate my experience in relation to some reality that I am now taking in. Otherwise, I will calibrate my experience in relation to some fantasy that I have built in my mind. The process of asking _‘what’s in it for me’_ is the process of building up expectations in my mind. And as my father would always tell my sister and I growing up, expectations and disappointment are linked together. The Gita, the spiritual text from yoga philosophy, teaches us to be attached to the effort and not the outcome. _In other words, the cliche journey versus destination._ Flipping the unconscious question of _‘what’s in it for me?’_ on its head to _‘what am I ready to give?’_ is the practice of me learning to focus on the effort I put in, versus the results I receive. For example, when I started to meditate, I never asked myself what am I going to get from it. I did ask myself _‘what am I ready to give to it’_, and the answer was to commit a few minutes each day. And ten years later, that has continued. Another example, taking a new job. If the lens is purely _‘what am I going to get from it?’_, I don’t think one will actually feel very satisfied as there is always going to be some feeling of disappointment, which then turns into discouragement and leads to a lack of effort. If instead the focus is on _‘what am I going to give to it?’_, that turns into effort, and that effort will take care of the results itself. Or another example, starting or continuing a relationship, be it with a friend or romantic interest. If both people are focused on _‘what am I getting from this?’_, the connection won’t go very far, for either person. Rather when the focus is on _‘what can I give this person?’_, and to do it without expectation, the connection will feel rewarding and satisfying for both people.** It is satisfying to give and it is satisfying to receive. **Regardless of which role one is in at a given moment, it will be satisfying, provided the giving is without expectations. And this is a key point. **When the mindset shifts from getting to giving, it must be without added expectations. **Giving with expectations of getting is not giving. It is another form of getting, in a roundabout way. This understanding inspires me to turn off portrait mode and move through life in relation to my reality, _versus to the exclusion of it._ And that is how I learned to (un)portrait mode. --- ### How to Cry Published: 2024-06-23 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/cry/ One minute he would be in tears and the next he would be laughing and playing with his toy cars. I didn’t get how he rebounds so quickly. No one else I know does it like he does. In the past few weeks, I’ve gotten to spend a lot of time with my three year old nephew, while in Canada with my family. He is one of my favorite people, and I am_ amazed by how entertaining everything is to him_. The way he wants to show me everything, from his latest toy red car, to the food that is currently in his mouth, or to the empty Amazon envelope he found and is fascinated by. **Not only was everything fascinating - but every emotion was heightened. **He could break out into a burst of laughter or tears in a small instance. From falling off his chair at the dinner table, to stubbing his toe on the kitchen island, to getting his finger stuck in the bedroom door he was slamming, to simply just because. _The tears would come when things bothered him physically, emotionally, and maybe even spiritually_. He would very quickly express and release whatever emotion was triggered._ And then recover so quickly_ It got me thinking about how I can release and express emotions more. As adults, we rarely cry as a way to release and express emotion. We have become attune to the societal norms of _always having to be ‘good’ or ‘great’_. How often do you just respond “Im good” to the question “how are you “, instead of taking a moment to think and be genuine in your answer Society has trained us to **_associate crying and sudden outbursts of emotion with weakness._**_ _ This belief that crying is a sign of weakness is reinforced by social norms, social media, and many other facets of adult life. Suppressing our emotions is **not a sign of strength, it is a sign of weakness. It is convenient. ** The truth is that we as adults do experience emotions just as heightened as my 3 year old nephew, _but we train ourselves not to express them_. The reality is that we are highly emotional beings - but at some stage in the 6-10 age bracket, we decide (or society teaches us) that we should not longer give those emotions space or make them visible. It takes courage to first acknowledge that _to be human is to experience emotion_. It takes more courage to allow ourselves to express emotion in its entirety and regularly. Suppressing emotion and sadness not only means that we aren’t fully expressing ourselves, but that we are not _releasing our feelings and allowing for the growth to happen._ Mother nature shows this to us frequently. Even though I often wish for sunshine all year round (which is why I visited Australia earlier this year), I know that without the rain the heat gets exhausting, and nature becomes withered and no longer lush. _Nature in all its beauty, can't existing without the rain _ Similarly, if we suppress our ‘rain’, we become out of balance and increasingly numb to emotion. **Emotions & feeling is core to what makes us human. ** _Like rain, I have discovered that crying is required in life._ I have gone through periods where I cry everyday, and others when I don't cry for weeks at a time. I have felt a block around crying for the last few months, and_ I can feel the cumulative effects from the lack of tears_ Crying gives me access to the full beauty and experience of life, and it is what leads to growth. When I don’t let myself cry often, I am in a desert. Most things die in a desert. _When I cry, I know I have felt something. When I cry, I know I have I am alive_ And that is how I learned to cry. --- ### How to Family Published: 2024-06-16 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/family/ A seed was humbly planted at the start of the year and what grew from it _surpassed any expectations_ I may have had. Fifty family members, traveling from all around the world, together for an extended weekend to **reunite across generations and geographies.** We rented a venue and were together, under one roof, for the four day reunion. T Shirts were made with a family emblem, that was hand drawn and designed by one of the younger family members, inaugurated at this gathering. A videographer was hired for the entire weekend, not knowing what exactly he would be capturing, but knowing it would be worthy of capturing. A chef was hired to cook on-site for the group, _including the no less than_ twelve family members who had dietary allergies that needed to be catered for. Baby photos were printed of all fifty family members participating in the reunion. Hanging on the wall, the black and white prints were numbered and we were asked to guess who’s who. I expected the older relatives, especially those who I’ve heard say for years _‘I was there when you were born’ _would be able to guess every photo. I was wrong. They struggled with a few, including a moment of comedy when a father didn’t recognize his own daughter’s baby photo. A time capsule became a joint project. Photos were printed, from before I was born to ones of the reunion. Craft paper and felt tip pens were handed out and everyone wrote cards and letters, to their future selves and our family in the future. _It was decided we would open the time capsule ten years from now in 2034._ The highlight was skits. Prompts were written down by hand on scraps of paper, thrown into a bag, and groups of five to six people picked a prompt and were given a few minutes to develop and then act out a scene. **They were so bad that we could not stop laughing.** It occurred to me while watching my family members act out in made up scenes in front of an audience of fifty, so casually and calmly, that **we all really did feel secure and safe in this space**. It can be vulnerable, to speak let alone act, in front of a group this large. _Everyone did it with a smile and it seemed like, without breaking a sweat._ In the in-between moments, the family opted for playing cards, sitting and chatting, and of course, eating. The dining area seemed always full of people, with snacks in between meals and the food running out everytime. The chef had no idea how my family uses food as a **source of connection, entertainment and activity.** Throughout the weekend, I found myself in 1-1 conversations with family members I don’t get to see or interact with regularly. With the familiarity of family, we would go deep really fast and I got to tap into people’s experiences on a variety of topics. Be it investing in the stock market, raising kids, charity work and more. **I appreciated the bank of knowledge available to me unfiltered and unfettered.** It has always been a real asset that I have come to rely on regularly. For the last evening, we all dressed up. The toddlers in cute frocks and bowties, the women in dresses and the men in shirts and blazers. The sun started to shine through the clouds just as we stepped onto the terrace to take family photos. It took nearly one hour to capture the combinations of family, based on relation, location, generation and more. _And of course, everyone became an overnight director, which was fun to watch and maybe less fun for our photographer._ Later that evening, gag awards were given out, highlighting the memorable moments and inside jokes that made the reunion so special and fun. Followed by a full-on dance party, with everyone participating, regardless of age or ability. It was a magical moment to experience, in an environment that feels so safe and one where we all feel special. On the last morning, we gathered blurry eyed after a late night, for one final group picture. As everyone said bye, I became teary eyed as I felt how special this experience was for me. **This group of people have shaped me, in ways I’m both aware of and will never be aware of.** I am who I am, how I am, for better or worse, thanks to this family that I grew up in. As we grow older, people move around the world, it becomes harder to feel connected to each other. It was grounding to feel connected to my roots, in such a loving and caring way. I feel so grateful for my family and these experiences remind me of how special this connection is in my life. And that is how I learned to family. --- ### How to Finance Published: 2024-06-09 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/finance/ Over a tea with a longtime friend last week, it occurred to me that she had no idea about how to think about her own finances from a planning, savings and investing perspective. “Didn’t you learn this growing up?” I interrupted her and asked her. “No!” was her immediate response, starting to acknowledge now into her forties the missed opportunities because of her lack of financial literacy. It is not something she learned at home or at school. Despite being intelligent, ambitious and motivated in life, which has shown up in her career, family and health, this has been a blindspot for her. I also realized that despite us knowing each other for decades and seeing each other move through different life phases, we had never actually talked about this topic. And if her friends, family and teachers didn’t raise it, where was she supposed to learn how to finance? To contrast that experience, a few weeks ago I was invited to a retreat in Southern Europe alongside a range of entrepreneurs and investors. I hit it off with one of the other participants, as we were sharing our respective upbringings and how we learned, and didn’t learn, about how to finance. In her case, she grew up being encouraged to learn how to invest. Coming from a business family, her parents, grandparents and great grandparents were all in business and from the age of six she remembers being included in a monthly “meeting” where the finances of the family were discussed. A substantial portion of her allowance money each month was placed in an investment account and she was given the freedom to choose her own stocks. And more importantly, encouraged to track them. As a teenager, she invested in companies like Disney and Apple, because she liked and used their products. As an adult, she started to develop her own values around the environment and encouraged her siblings to not invest in any oil companies. As she continued to share with me her upbringing, I was inspired by the foresight of her family to bring her up in this way. I come from a business family as well. My parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins all are doing some form of business. Regardless if they are successful or satisfied, they are all in business, and as a result, I have learned a thing or two about finance despite never having studied it formally. It took me more than a decade as an adult to develop my own approach and philosophy about how to finance, borrowing from them what I admired and leaving behind what I did not agree with. And as I’ve stepped into my own approach and framework, I have discovered how personal something about dollars and cents truly is. **Finance is a personal and subjective set of choices. ** Despite the endless amount of advice and knowledge available to any of us, finance is really a representation of one’s values. And to know how to finance requires to know one self. _How comfortable am I with risk?_ _What are my expectations of reward?_ _How comfortable am I with volatility?_ _What financial traumas did my family experience that have unconsciously influenced me?_ _Who do I look to for input that I actually trust and listen to?_ **Learning how to finance really for me has been a journey of learning about myself. **And that is really what I am continually seeking. To get closer to my true self and understand my true nature. And the domain of finance is an excellent arena for me to uncover more of me. And that is how I learned to finance. --- ### How to LA Published: 2024-06-02 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/la/ I have twenty years of experience driving and have driven in at least twenty countries and many more cities. However, driving in LA recently made me feel like I was new to the roads. The cars, all size XL, and even bigger trucks, rushed by me on the freeway like the wind, leaving my car shaking gently from side to side. The maze of freeways, intersecting and crossing over each other, like spaghetti tangled up together, made me realize how different driving is here. At one point, I felt like I was driving up a roller coaster slope, and as my gaze took in the sights from the top of the highway, to my surprise, my belly began to feel queasy and my legs began to shake lightly, as my fear of heights got triggered. _While in a car on a highway._ Driving in LA was reflective of a culture that’s in a hurry…to sit in traffic. A hurry-up-to-wait comical scene, replayed countless times for the locals, on a daily basis. I could feel the energy that everyone was in a rush to get somewhere, and get there now. **It didn’t feel great and made me wonder why the hurry**, all the time. It also helped me appreciate the more relaxed pace of daily living I have been enjoying in Sydney and Lisbon for most of this year. I take for granted and even sometimes complain in Portugal how everything and everyone can seem so slow at times. _Yet after being on the highways of LA for a mere hour, I was craving for things to slow down._ At one point, I pulled up in a parking lot to take a break and went into a store. As I stepped out of the car, I heard yelling about ten feet from me. There was a man speaking loudly while wobbling in the street, alone, clearly suffering from some illness or challenge. A panhandler then approached me from the other side. And as I took in this neighborhood, I realized I did not feel safe. **I can’t remember the last time I felt unsafe in my surroundings. **A privilege that I have long enjoyed and I realized in that moment, I often take it for granted. When in a space that I do not feel safe in or feel rushed in, my mind is no longer free and my body is no longer relaxed. My sympathetic nervous system, also known as the fight-or-flight response system, is fully activated, releasing cortisol, the stress hormone, to prepare my body to defend itself against perceived or imaginary threats. A decade of consistent mindfulness practice has helped me tune into the sensations and changes my mind and body experience in near real-time. At that moment, I noticed that my breath began to shorten and became shallow. My shoulders tensed up. My jaw clenched. My body temperature rose. And my eyes opened wider as I took in all of my surroundings. And at that moment - I knew **I needed some comfort**, and I knew exactly where I would find it. _An authentic Mexican restaurant. _ As I walked in, the smells, sounds and sights took me back to childhood. As a family growing up, my sister and I would love to go to Mexican restaurants with our parents and we would often cook the cuisine at home. The familiar flavors and spices provided a warm hug when I needed it, and allowed me to relax. **There are so many ways to find comfort,** be it people, places or in my case that day in LA, the food. While this recent trip made me realize that I didn’t love being in LA, I did appreciate how my short experience there helped me appreciate what I already have, but often fail, or forget, to recognize. **A reminder that I can find meaning and value in every experience I have. **I just have to look for it. And that is how I learned to LA. --- ### How to Pigeon Published: 2024-05-26 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/pigeon/ This is not a reflection about pigeon, a common and comforting yoga pose. It is about a bird. More specifically, the dead pigeon I saw lying on my apartment balcony in Lisbon a few days ago. I have long had a fear of birds and have a particular dislike of pigeons. It is not something I have explored in depth to understand why, however I know from years of walking the pigeon filled streets of New York City and squares of European capitals that my fear is triggered at a subconscious level. _And this recent morning forced me to face my fear._ My morning routine is often calm and peaceful. I wake up, brush my teeth, make some herbal tea, take in some inspiration from the view of the city and river from my apartment, before sitting down to meditate. As I looked out at the view, I noticed something on my balcony. At first, I thought there was a gray glove on the balcony. I was confused and curious. As I walked up to the glass window for a closer look, my body jumped back suddenly, before my mind could cognitively process what I saw. Staring at the dead pigeon lying on my balcony, from the safety of standing on the inside of the glass door, the dread and anxiety I was experiencing continued to increase. **Any sense of tranquility I had felt was long gone now.** My heart rate was elevated. I was instantly aware of the immediate changes in my body sensations. **My mind began to quickly brainstorm on possible ways to deal with the situation** without having to personally deal with it. _Do I call my cleaner? Do I call a friend? Do I ask building security kindly to help me out?_ My mind was also quick to dismiss all of these ideas. Then I was reminded of a conversation I had yesterday with a friend by the beach. He was reminding with me that we can find meaning in everything if we look close enough, and that he often sees challenges as the universe is testing him. **The universe has often tested me.** Those moments of feeling challenged are the moments I have grown the most. _And gained the most. _ In an era where knowledge is available in abundance, it is clear to me that knowledge alone is not enough. It is the application of knowledge through experience and the integration of knowledge from experience that leads to wisdom. This is why so much of my life has been driven by a desire to experiment, my recipe of choice for combining knowledge with experience. Confidence is helpful and I think can only be built through experience. I saw this particular challenge in front of me as not only a test from the universe, but also an opportunity for me to gain a new experience, and continue to build the confidence to do things I don’t want to do. In the face of the many challenges the universe gives me, be it physical, emotional, intellectual, relational, I always have a choice. The choice is to face it or hide from it. And assuming I chose to face it, I then can choose to integrate the experience, by taking a moment to reflect on what I learned about myself through it. This dead pigeon lying on my balcony was a challenge and a choice. **My legs were now shaking** as I took a cardboard box and slowly opened the balcony sliding door. I walked up to it and then unconsciously jumped back. I was experiencing genuine fear, in a clearly physical way. I walked back into the safety of my apartment and took a few deep breaths to calm down. In a moment of meta awareness, I noticed my mind was making stories and then I was reacting to those stories, so strongly that my body was shaking from it. _I needed to stop my mind from making stories._ I put in my earbuds and played a recent voice message I received overnight from a friend. Hearing a familiar voice naturally put me in a state of calm, and my mind now had something else to focus on. I then confidently walked back outside with the cardboard box, looked away to not give my mind too close of a look and did what I had dreaded doing. I did it My mind was calm, yet my body was still shaking. I went downstairs to throw out the box and was waiting to see my body relax. _It didn’t._ Noticing this, I sat down quietly on the floor in my apartment, closed my eyes and began to do some deep breathing exercises. After a few minutes, I opened my eyes and noticed my body had now relaxed. I stood up and walked back towards the balcony. I noticed a few small red marks on the outdoor carpet on my balcony. A smile appeared on my face. These marks would serve as a subtle reminder for me that in the face of the many tests the universe will present to me, I have a choice and I can choose to face what I fear. And that is how I learned to pigeon. --- ### How to Art Published: 2024-05-19 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/art/ Sitting for dinner, at a beachside resort in the South of Spain overlooking the Mediterranean, I was with a group of entrepreneurs last week. The conversation started about business, moved to technology and went to geopolitics. After our main course was cleared, everyone’s bellies and minds feeling full, I leaned back in my seat and felt my body begin to relax. For a moment, I zoned out and stopped paying attention to the conversation, _which at that point in the evening I started to find boring._ **I had the random thought that it had been a while since I danced. **Freestyle dance has become a regular part of my life. A form of expression that I have come to cherish fondly. While in Sydney for the better part of this year, I managed to go to an Ecstatic Dance event or 5 Rhythms class weekly. _I missed it. _ “What’s your favorite form of creative expression?”, I interrupted the conversation and asked the group. There was a long pause. I shared that for me, it is writing. **It comes effortlessly and naturally to me. **It transports me into a different realm, where I lose touch with time, my surroundings, and immediately fall into a flow state. Dance would be probably the next form of expression when I feel most in flow. The group started to share, one-by-one, each with a gentle childlike smile on their faces. Screenwriting. Singing. Playing various instruments. Painting inanimate objects. Acting and improvisation. Cooking._ The variety felt endless. _ No one needed more than a second to answer. **Everyone knew immediately how they enjoyed most expressing themselves creatively. ** I then asked everyone when was the last time they practiced their favorite form of creative expression. Everyone went quiet. The answer was clear: no one could remember. It's funny how we are encouraged to pursue all different types of art & creativity in our childhood. Yet in adulthood, it is rarely spoken about or seen as a priority. To make it important would involve being encouraged to do it, without the expectation of being good at it. **Oftentimes, we are conditioned to believe that it is only worth doing something if we are committed to becoming the best at it.** Oftentimes, this involves comparison and in a culture influenced by social media, the comparisons are endless. It’s a shame to not try something because we are fearful of not being good at it. _It is an even bigger shame to not be able to enjoy something while being terrible at it. _ **Joy does not need to be so tightly associated with achievement and acquisition.** Joy is a spontaneous feeling that arises naturally from being present with the experience of doing something. So much of the joy of artistic expression has to do with the process, and not the outcome The age-old teaching, seen everywhere in spiritual, religious, and mindfulness texts, reminds us to focus on enjoying the journey versus becoming attached to a specific destination. Art is the application of this teaching. **Art is the practice of enjoying the process. ** It’s a shame to not make space for what we enjoy doing, on a regular basis. Life is about making trade-offs, and the trade-offs we make shape our day-to-day experience of life. Connecting to the desire to express that is often buried under the to-do lists, the expectations we perceive from those around us and the ambition to achieve is ultimately the source of fuel needed to make the trade-offs to make space for art on a regular basis. Letting go of any expectations to be good at our chosen forms of art is the freedom we so desperately need to feel on a regular basis. Expression through art is something we discover at some point in our journey through life and doesn’t need to end in childhood. It is a gift that continues to give, well into adulthood. And that is how I learned to art. --- ### How to Root Published: 2024-05-12 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/root/ The root of the word mother is **matr**. **Matr** is the root of several important and related concepts. **Material** is the source from which other things are made of. **Matter** gives shape to the material world in which we live in. **Matrix** is where things develop or originate from. When I take a moment to pause and reflect on the root of the creation in my life, _I begin to discover mother everywhere._ My breakfast is often granola with fruits. The apples and pears were grown on a farm somewhere. The farmer is a mother to my breakfast. The fruits were transported from the farm to my local grocery store. The people involved in packaging, transporting and unpacking the fruits are all mothers to my breakfast. Many people helped create the roads, trucks and buildings that were needed to get the fruit from the farm to me. They are all mothers to my breakfast. Yesterday I spoke with a close friend. We connect over many shared interests. Many people were involved in helping inspire each of those interests in us. They are all mothers to our friendship. **We have shared many experiences together, including travel, yoga and volunteer work.** Many more people were involved in creating the space for each of those experiences to happen, each of them mothers to our friendship. My friend and I have only a small role to play in the friendship that we enjoy when I reflect about how many mothers had a role to play. **And finally, where do my ideas come from?** Are they even mine? They may appear in my mind but after I take a moment to pause and reflect, I again discover the many people and circumstances that led to the creation of these ideas that surface in my mind. Every idea is grown from a seed that was planted thanks to some other person or experience. _Every idea in my mind has a mother_. Or several. **My mind is like a gardener that cultivates the soil so that even a few of the seeds that have been planted by the many mothers may sprout.** As I become aware of the infinite sources of creation that have influenced the food that I taste, the company that I enjoy and the ideas that I cultivate, my understanding grows that I alone cannot take credit for any of it. A level of humility arises which manifests as gratitude in my heart towards all of the mothers who have and continue to contribute to my life. And that is how I learned to root. --- ### How to 15 Hours Published: 2024-05-05 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/15hours/ After spending the last few months enjoying the Australian summer, and avoiding the North American winter, it was time for me to pack up my life again into my carry-on suitcase to visit family & chase the sunshine. The long haul flight from Australia to North America was 15 hours. **15 hours had never felt so long.** Although I’ve taken hundreds of flights in my lifetime already, these long haul flights are of a unique breed and bring up different experiences. They are uncomfortable with limited leg room, awkward sleeping positions, lackluster food, and ending with the inevitable dreaded back pain and jet lag. A key message from Viktor Frankl’s book, _Man’s Search For Meaning_, feels especially helpful on a 15 hour flight. His observation is that **when one has a purpose that they feel connected to, something to look forward to, then they can endure suboptimal conditions.** This was my experience exactly on this recent flight. I knew on the other end of this long flight was my three year old nephew, who I was missing dearly and had not gotten to see in four months. **That purpose was so important to me and special that I didn’t mind the discomfort** of sitting on a 15 hour flight with recirculated air, unappetizing food, poor sleep, at times feeling cold and at times feeling hot, not being able to stretch my legs, and more. While sitting there on board, I often imagined my nephew, playing with him, talking with him, tickling him and that was enough for me to forget about the discomforts my body was experiencing temporarily. **Connecting with this purpose of my trip changed how I physically & mentally prepared **and how I showed up on the 15 hour flight. First, **I didn’t feel the need to rush**. I noticed myself preparing for the longer trip by getting to the airport earlier and being more mentally calm. This meant that everything didn’t need to be timed to perfection, and I could enjoy the airport experience. In the past, I might have gotten easily annoyed by other travelers with less experience moving through airport security, I noticed myself having empathy for those around me. Going through security can be a stressful experience with the bright lights, people shouting at you seemingly random rules and the fact everyone around you seems equally confused and rushed. Flying over the ocean meant no wifi, _thankfully_. I’ve reflected a lot recently about the value of disconnecting. Often if I suggest to people to go offline for even twelve hours, let alone twenty four hours, the push back is strong and immediate. I know that it is often the perceived expectations of others that prevent one from going offline. Yet, here I was, watching a plane full of **a few hundred people who all went offline without a fuss for a 15 hour stretch**. _Proof that it is in fact possible. _ I also gave myself permission to relax. On a 15 hour flight, there is ample space to watch movies, read books, write and meditate. **All activities I thoroughly enjoy and wish to make more space for in my daily life**, which I am able to easily do on a long flight. I also oddly enjoyed the airplane food. Where before I would complain about the food quality, now I feel grateful to have something to eat while thirty thousand feet in the sky. I took the time to appreciate the amount of people & things involved in bringing me this meal while I was flying in the sky, and it changed the experience. The meal I was eating had to deal with transportation, air pressure, temperature changes, and conditions that do not resemble a fine dining restaurant, I can’t expect much. **A lesson for life is that low expectations can be helpful to reduce disappointment. ** Whenever I am noticing discomfort or an unpleasant situation, **asking myself why I am here in the first place, connecting with the underlying purpose, can be helpful in shifting my perspective** and attaching to the big, versus the small. And this is how I learned to 15 hours. --- ### How to Fiji Published: 2024-04-28 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/fiji/ Imagine watching a boat speed away, leaving you behind, alone, on a tiny little island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. This was my experience not too long ago **during a spontaneous trip to Fiji**. I had been itching to get on a plane, and seeking a bit of adventure. It had been nearly six weeks that I had been back in Sydney at that point. _The longest time period in years I had gone without getting on a plane. _ I was checking the weather forecast daily, unsure where to go. On that Monday morning, after my morning meditation, I started journaling and felt the impulse to decide on a vacation destination and to not overthink it. Fiji came up without any research other than the fact that it was a place I had not yet adventured to and that the reality TV show Survivor was sometimes filmed there. It was decided. **To make it more interesting, I decided to do the trip without my phone. ** The next day, once I landed in main land Fiji after a four hour flight from Sydney, I was whisked away on an hour long boat trip to the island I found a hotel to stay at last minute. I knew I was in for an adventure as I watched hundreds of lush green islands popping up from the ocean, varying heights, all without much if any signs of human civilization. The next morning, I woke up to a cloudy sky. I walked from my room to the hotel reception, and asked the staff what I should do for the day. The two locals behind the counter were young, and looked at one another, smiled gently and then turned to me. “We have an adventure planned for you today sir!” they said enthusiastically. “How does a picnic sound?” **I was curious and said yes**. They asked me to be ready after breakfast by the dock. Once I got on the boat, there was a picnic basket and a lawn chair sitting there already. They told me they’d be taking me to a nearby island for a day trip. _I didn’t think much of it. _ As we sped through the calm turquoise blue water, they pointed out to me the island where the movie Castaway, with Tom Hanks, was filmed. “Cool”, I thought. _Again, I didn’t think much of it. _ Soon after, we started to approach a tiny island that was mostly wild vegetation with a small sandy beach. They unloaded the picnic basket and setup a lawn chair for me. **Then they left. ** I soon realized that there was no one else on this island. Once the boat was gone, I realized there was no one else in sight, in any direction, as I looked out over the horizon. I felt a pulse of anxiety in my chest. I was alone. In the middle of the Ocean. Without a phone. Without any supplies beyond lunch. Without any contact with anyone. _No one I knew knew that I was here._ **The theoretical ‘if you were stranded on an island’ didn’t feel so theoretical in that moment.** It was, and probably will be, the closest I’ll ever come to this feeling. So I leaned into it, as I know instinctively that my growth lies beyond the edge of my comfort zone. I sat. I swam. I strolled. Then, realizing that I was all alone on this tiny island, with no boats in sight and no people anywhere in sight, _I took off all of my clothes._ It was a spontaneous impulse that I followed. I then again sat, swam and strolled. This time naked, it felt different. I felt exposed. Despite knowing that no one could see me, it took a bit for me to feel comfortable. And then I sat on the sand, looking out over the ocean, taking in this unique moment. A smile appeared on my face. It was not my usual adult smile though. **It was a childish grin.** There I was, enjoying the big blue ocean, without any one and without any thing. Nothing else and no one else mattered in that moment. I felt a wave of gratitude wash over me, as I realized all that had to happen for this moment to exist. Tears began to roll down my cheeks. Then all of a sudden, a tropical rainstorm came out of nowhere. Hail started hitting my bare skin. I had no where to go, nothing to protect me, so I just sat there. **I have never felt so raw before. ** There I was, lying alone on a sandy beach, in the middle of the Pacific, with a rainstorm washing my body. I felt so big in that moment, the strength of my body, the courage in my mind, and the confidence to experiment. **Yet at the same time, I felt so small. **The vastness of the ocean, the vulnerability of being alone, and being fully exposed to nature. **I had nothing and I felt like I was nothing. **As the rain continued to pour on my body, my sense of self started to dissolve into the sand. It was beautiful, and terrifying at the same time. _It felt like an energetic rebirth._ A few hours later, a boat appeared to bring me back to reality. As I rode back, I reflected on my adventure. I realized I was giving myself permission to let go of what no longer served me, and approach life more with a childlike sense of curiosity and wonder for what could be. This is the energy I hope to continue to bring into my daily life, without having to fly to the middle of no where with no one else around, to realize this. And that is how I learned to Fiji. --- ### How to Tiramisu Published: 2024-04-21 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/tiramisu/ “One tiramisu. Four spoons please”. These words were said out loud no less than six times over the course of a few days recently. I had taken a spontaneous trip to Melbourne, where I met my cousin who was studying at University there, his older sister who flew in on a few days' notice from Delhi, and a longtime friend from Lisbon who coincidentally was in town to renew her Australian passport. **I had no expectations for the trip and it turned out to be one of my highlights of the year. ** It felt like a group of friends together in university, with no other purpose than to be together. Over the course of five days, we spent most moments together. The laughter, the smiles, the lightness, filled my heart. Our unexpected bond became tiramisu. What started as a joke turned into a common purpose: to find the best tiramisu in Melbourne. So after nearly every meal, we would find an Italian restaurant and share a tiramisu, alongside a heavy dose of commentary. A few days into the trip, we spontaneously ended up at a comedy festival and saw an Indian comic perform. Half of his bit was about how he had competed in the tiramisu world cup. It was an uncanny coincidence and we took it as a sign to continue our hunt. The next day we were at a Thai place that had a tiramisu on the menu. We had no choice but to try it. It was awful. _But that didn’t matter._ The shared experience was what again, continued to bond us. **I was surprised I did not get bored of the crew. **I am not used to seeing the same people repeatedly. Most of the people I like, I may connect with once a week or once a month, hopefully in person or otherwise through exchanging podcast-style voice notes. Yet here I was, in the company of the same people for most of my days, and like tiramisu, wanting more and more of it. Every moment together may have been too much. However my cousin’s jet lag from India meant that she was waking up a solid four to five hours after me. Despite us sharing the same Airbnb, I used that morning time to cook myself breakfast, meditate and journal, hit the gym and sauna daily, and stroll around the city on my own, without feeling any guilt for not spending every moment together. I’ve observed that on group vacations, be it with family, friends or romantic, **there is often an unspoken expectation, either on ourselves or on the other, to always be together and to be doing everything together.** Those few hours to be with myself, consistently each day, gave me the energy and grounding for me to be authentically myself when we were together, consistently each day. My last few reflections have been about social media and phone addiction, as I had been feeling uninspired as of late by how I saw people, including those around me, and sometimes myself, use technology. I was reinspired after this trip, as I saw all of us so present and so disconnected from technology while we were together. **We really prioritized one another, and it showed **in the subtleties of the inside jokes that never ended, the care for filling up the other person’s water, the calling out details in the restaurant that no one else saw. It’s one thing to move through life with presence and awareness, which I continually try to do. It’s a different experience altogether when the people around me also choose to live with presence, as they add to the depth of my experience by pointing out details that I did not observe and showing up for me in ways I did not realize I needed. **Our ages ranged two decades yet somehow we were able to connect.** _I found that inspiring and rare._ To share experiences and memories, consistently through an extended period, with people at significantly different life stages and with different life experiences than me, was important to me. I’d like to invite more diversity of this variety into my life, on a regular basis. The people I interact with regularly are usually within a few years of my age. There was a richness of my intrigue to understand and empathize with others who see their world differently than I see mine. **I’ve been on some group trips where everything is planned. **Restaurants booked. Show tickets reserved. Transportation planned. Sometimes there may have even been spreadsheets involved. This experience was the opposite. Our attitude was _‘let’s see how we feel’_. And by having no plans, it allowed for the space for us to co-create our experience. Everyone’s ideas and desires were welcomed. Sometimes it was getting yet another coffee. Oftentimes it was continuing our hunt for the best tiramisu in Melbourne._ Or once in a while, it was allowing one of us to go home and take a nap._ My cousin who was visiting from India is more artistic and creative than me. One morning, after she finally woke up, she suggested going to a Leonardo Da Vinci art exhibit that was on and she had seen an ad for. It is not something I would have naturally chosen to do, however in the spirit of going with the flow, I said yes. Her younger nineteen year old brother definitely did not want to go but also said yes. Fast forward a few hours later, she was done and ready to leave the exhibit, whereas her brother and I were so inspired and curious that we kept wanting to stay and explore more of the exhibit. It was such a pleasant unexpected experience for us, one that was only made possible because we did not have a plan and we were all open enough to say yes to something that was outside our comfort zone. **It taught me a lot about compromise and adjustment, in the most subtle ways. **Not having a specific plan, and not being attached to a specific plan, was the key that unlocked spontaneous and unexpected adventure. Otherwise there we would have felt pressure to _‘do the plan’_, versus to _‘be together’_. Being together was more important than if it was sitting in a restaurant, walking along the river, going to an art show, watching a comedy show, chatting through a movie, or cooking at home. I’m often reminded when I get too focused on planning the future of the understanding that in many ways, **the act of planning is an attempt to control the future.** It is a desire to know what’s going to happen, when it’s going to happen, how it’s going to happen. And of course, I have no control over the future. I only have control over how I choose to show up, at each moment. Although we did make a plan to go to the world cup for tiramisu later this year in Italy, ideally as judges. And that is how I learned to tiramisu. --- ### How to Social Media Published: 2024-04-14 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/media/ “I go to yoga so I can post that I went to yoga”. “Really?”, I asked, a bit stunned but mostly curious. “Yeah. It’s great. I buy a cute outfit, post in the morning that I’m about to go to a class, and then after class, I get to post again, this time a bit sweaty and my hair disheveled”, shared my 19-year old cousin. She was passing through Sydney on vacation and we were sitting in an infrared sauna._ She didn’t have her phone in her hand, for once._ “So let me ask you. If you were not going to post on social media that you were going to yoga, would you have still gone to yoga?”, I asked. “Oh, definitely not. You see, getting to talk about it motivates me to actually exercise. And then I get all of this encouragement from my friends, telling me I look cute, and liking my posts. It’s really helping me”. **I genuinely believed her that if it wasn’t for social media, she would not be exercising. **Although we both practice yoga, we clearly do it for completely different reasons. _And maybe that’s okay._ It was the most unexpected conversation I’ve had with a fellow yogi. I’m nearly twenty years into being in and around social media, longer than my cousin has been alive. Yet she was the one teaching me something new. It prompted me to reflect about the different modes in how social media is used in modern society. **First mode: consumption only.** With five billion people now in the world using social media apps each month. Consumption is the default mode that most people are in. “Do you use social media?” “Oh yeah, I don’t post anything though” is the normal response, often with some hidden pride mixed in that they don’t feel the need to share. I believe this is the worst possible thing one can do for their mental health. To only consume, be it in moderation or excess, whether it is for the mind or the body, can quickly lead to a place of imbalance. The research is plain and simple around the dopamine and drug-like addictive qualities that continuous consumption of anything leads to. **Second mode: consumption + creation.** My unresearched estimate is that this is probably ten percent of the social media population, so about five hundred million people. This mode involves active consumption of social feeds, mixed with regular and consistent creation, i.e. posting. Posting on social media can be a form of expression, which is healthy for one’s emotional and mental state. To be able to express oneself publicly is a symptom of feeling secure in one’s identity and resilient enough to step outside of the house not knowing if you’ll be met with sunshine or thunderstorms. My medium of expression currently is publishing a blog every week and writing books, and I appreciate first-hand the therapeutic benefits of sharing myself with others in these forms. Although social media posting does not always allow for the depth of expression I crave personally, for others it is sufficient and I think helpful. Like my 19-year old cousin sharing her yoga journey and feeling seen and supported as a result. It obviously does invite comments and criticism as well from one’s extended social media network and the public. I have received my fair share of ‘feedback’ on my blogs and books, and I take it in with a smile, recognizing that what someone thinks of me says more about them then it does about me. It’s all contributed to my growth by helping me become more resilient. **Third mode: creation only.** Less than one percent of the social media population is in this mode, I suspect. That’s about fifty million people in the world. Usually public figures, celebrities, professional athletes, politicians and such. This mode, as it sounds, is only to create, i.e. post, without consumption. Building on the benefits of the second mode mentioned earlier, this mode enables expression without the mental health ‘tax’ of consumption. Initially, I was drawn to this mode and the past few years, I have used social media in this mode. What I have found though were many drawbacks and unintended consequences. First of all, over time this becomes more promotional and ego driven versus expression driven. Second, and more importantly, without the consumption, it becomes imbalanced and there becomes less empathy and curiosity about others’ experiences. I started to naturally turn to other modes of communication to feel connected with others as a result. More private, one-to-one modalities, be it in person, through exchanging voice notes asynchronously, phone calls or sitting in a sauna together. **Fourth mode: no social media.** I haven’t posted anything on social media in the past 100 days, which has been a new unintentional experiment. Previously, I would post regularly, be it a topic related to that week’s blog post, a picture from a gathering I may have hosted or something mindfulness related. During this period of being fully away from social media, the world has continued and so has my world. I have not noticed many changes except less mental noise and burden of thinking about what to post next. And if anything, I feel more in touch with people I am most interested in being in touch with, as I am intentionally reaching out to them, or them to me, through private channels. I know for some, like my 19 year old cousin, it may feel unimaginable to disconnect from social media, however I encourage you to try it. Be it for a day, or even a weekend. And to be clear, I have a number of friends who claim to be in this fourth mode, but in reality they have replaced a social media addiction with a Slack, email, stock market or sports score addiction, checking them just as frequently in those moments to fill time or kill time. _It’s the same dopamine addiction at play, just experienced through an app with a different logo._ With my cousin, I started to share with her the above framework and saw her surprise when I shared that I don’t consume any content on social feeds and stopped posting recently. “What would happen if you didn’t use social media for one day?” I asked, not so innocently. “I’ll never know actually, cause I don’t plan to try it!”, she responded cheekily, knowing full well where I was gently trying to nudge her. And that is how I learned to social media. --- ### How to Second Phone Published: 2024-04-07 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/second/ I noticed when someone took one out. I was also noticed when I took mine out. This was back in 2007, when Apple had first introduced the iPhone. **More than a phone, it was a status symbol. ** Apple was one of the first device manufacturers that did not allow telecom operators to subsidize phones, meaning that for the first time, consumers had to pay the full price to get the device. It was at the same time I launched my tech business, focused on mobile apps. I was lucky to have a front row seat for the start of the smartphone revolution and saw up close just how smartphones have taken over our time, our attention and our presence. When I look around me, be it while at a restaurant and seeing a family of four with four bright screens glowing in their faces, or at the gym, in a coffee shop, even at the beach, our reliance on our phones feels unreal, _yet very real._ **I believe that while back in the day it was a status symbol to own a smartphone, in the future, it may be a status symbol to not._ _**_Or at least to not be constantly glued to one._ For the past few years, I’ve had the thought in the back of my mind about how I might explore the implications of not having a phone. At the start of this year, an experiment finally came to me. I got a second phone and was curious to see what might happen if I started to regularly detach from my primary device, which I am far more attached to than I care to admit. **On my second phone, I only have a few apps. Uber, Spotify and Google Maps. **No Whatsapp. No Gmail. No social media. No content. Only the essential utilities required to get me from point A to point B. It costs me $40/month for a data plan, so about $500/year. Although it may sound like a lot, it’s the equivalent of a few therapy sessions and might just have more benefit. _I thought it was worth the cost._ The experiment started earlier this year with me taking only my second phone when I would go to the gym or yoga. I left my primary device at home. It evolved to me taking only my second phone when going out to dinner. Then I challenged myself to use it instead of my primary device on a Saturday. And then over an entire weekend. Like any experiment, I was curious to see what I might learn. **I observed immediate changes while using only my second phone.** First, I did not realize how strong my impulse had been to check my phone regularly. I was using it to fill time and kill time, _all the time_. My second phone had nothing interesting on it, so I would take it out, forgetting that it wasn’t my primary device, and then seconds later put it back in my pocket. Next, I noticed **after going about three to four hours with only my second phone, my mental state was calmer.** This was expected I guess. I’ve been meditating consistently for years now and noticed a similar post-meditation calmness after a few hours of not having my primary device. There started to appear ‘empty spaces’, in the moments when I was in between things or places or people. In those empty spaces, which previously I would fill with doing something productive or useless on my phone, I now started to see my mind churn through thoughts. There was space for passive thoughts, an important process for my brain to process and integrate the information it receives throughout the day. **I started to become more curious about other people.** While in line at a coffee shop, I struck up a conversation with the woman next to me. Sitting in an Uber, I became curious about the driver and his life story. Waiting for my lunch to arrive at the restaurant, I enjoyed a few minutes of chit chat with the waiter. I couldn’t remember the last time I had paid so much attention to the people I was sharing a physical space with._ It was energizing._ Similarly, I have started to notice the finer details in my environment. I noticed a trash can overflowing on the sidewalk and wondered why. I noticed a new building under construction, that I must have walked by a dozen times that week alone but never saw. I noticed the direction of the wind hitting my hair and the heat of the sun on my face._ It started to feel like I was living with the lights on, whereas before they were off._ These first few experiences using only a second phone inspired me to challenge myself to **go fifty days this year using only my second phone.** _I’m already at twenty five days._ Different cultures have their own rituals to inspire a regular routine of connection to something greater than ourselves, and in the process, temporarily letting go of day-to-day distractions. In sharing my experiment with friends as of late, I’ve realized that my second phone experiment is a modern day interpretation of these ancient practices. I would have never thought, back in 2007 when I was so energized by the allure of a smartphone, that years later I would be as energized by the allure of detaching from one. _A reminder that everything changes._ And that is how I learned to second phone. --- ### How to Friend Published: 2024-03-31 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/h2friend/ I didn’t realize he had been holding it for so long. It must have been difficult for him, and I was completely unaware of it this entire time. “In our years of friendship, it was the only moment I felt annoyed and frustrated with you”. A long pause ensued and I felt anxious. Then, a gentle smile appeared on my face. The fact he could share how he actually felt with me was a good sign. **A sign that he trusted me, felt secure enough in our friendship to share and that he was invested in my growth.** _I continued to listen to him with curiosity, to understand where he was going with this. _ “You pushed me on something I wasn’t ready to look at then, but looking back, it was what I needed to hear. That seed that you planted six months ago has grown. And grown very nicely. So thank you”. A friend was referring to a conversation from last summer that I honestly did not recall. But he did. Apparently very well. I had challenged him on an area of his life he was struggling with, and offered some feedback that was difficult for him to receive at the time. **It came from a genuine place. ** That was a change for me. At other times in the past, when sharing feedback with colleagues, family and romantic partners, it often would be tainted with some insecurity or fear I had been feeling about the situation. I think that’s the beautiful thing about friendship, when compared to other close relationships in my life. There is a level of closeness yet detachment with friendships, in that our lives are not entangled and integrated in a way that family, colleagues and romantic partners are. **Thanks to this level of detachment from outcomes we can be truly open and honest**. The stakes are just not as high as the other relationships in my life. Put differently, I can take more risks when connecting with friends, such as choosing to ask for and offer feedback, and in doing so, ironically the closeness increases as there is a level of vulnerability that binds. **Being truly vulnerable is risky.** And friendships have proven to be a valuable playground for me to take those risks. The rewards have been strong, deep and meaningful friendships that seem to transcend time, geography and life stages. Sharing feedback, like real feedback, that’s constructive, helpful and objective, is one of the greatest gifts one can give. And an even greater gift one can receive. “You’ve watched me up close over the past few years. What am I not seeing?”, the same friend asked me, again wanting some feedback. _I was inspired by his openness and willingness to ask for help to grow._ It is uncomfortable to ask for feedback. However growth often lies beyond the bounds of comfort where we like to hangout. Learning to ask friends for feedback is something I’m still working on and hope to get better at. _I can see it’s uncomfortable for the other person to be asked to give me feedback, a sign that it’s rare and something we both are learning how to do._ What I am learning is that it is helpful to gift wrap the feedback with love, and as mentioned earlier, keep myself honest to not taint my perspective with my own fears and insecurities. My parents and sister have never been shy to share their feedback for me. However, it isn’t always the easiest to receive, as the history of our relationships are far more complicated than any of us like to admit, and the stakes will remain high for the rest of our lives together. My business community also is not shy to share feedback when asked, be it clients, team members, investors, competitors or advisors, however again, they all have a vested interest in seeing me make decisions that are aligned as much as possible with their world view. **All of this has led me to looking to close friends as a source of valuable, and hopefully objective feedback. ** “I respect you a lot my friend, for being willing to share how you feel, which I imagine isn’t easy when unpleasant, and for being willing to ask for feedback, which I also imagine isn’t easy to receive as it’s highly personal” I shared with my friend near the end of our recent conversation. **Friendship is a unique opportunity to grow, learn and experience life and ourselves in a way other relationships don’t as easily offer. ** And that is how I learned to friend. --- ### How to Anxious Published: 2024-03-24 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/anxious/ The day had started slow, or at least slow relative to what my norm had been. Morning meditation, breathwork, journaling, light stretching, a morning walk, simple home cooked eggs for breakfast in my apartment hotel, hit the gym, a protein shake and then answered some text messages and voice notes. It was now noon and despite having a full morning, I had this feeling of _‘okay, now what?’_ and unsure what to _do_ next. I had done all of the self-care stuff I had wanted to do. At that moment, **I felt no impulse to _do _anything specific.** A lot of my existence has involved _doing_ energy and I felt no desire to be in that energy now. I previously enjoyed that energy, and know that I would again enjoy it in the future. However right then and there, there was no part of me that wanted to _do._ **That’s when I realized that I was on a sabbatical. ** I had been _doing_ for the past fifteen years professionally, before which I had still been _doing_ through student leadership activities during grade school, high school and university for another fifteen years. Thirty years of _doing_ energy. And now I was experiencing for the first time a _being _energy. It was now four weeks into my spontaneous world tour adventure. From Lisbon to London to Paris to Toronto and now Sydney, and the following week to India. **My mind was now only catching up to the fact that my spirit was taking a break. **_A real break._ Part of this break had unexpectedly involved letting go of more than I realized. In choosing to go on this adventure without a plan, I packed light, only in a carry-on. I was learning again to live without much stuff, something I had done many years ago but had lost touch with in recent years. **_Less is more_ was the attitude I had to choose.** I left my apartment in Lisbon, which had represented the feeling of home for me. It was the first place that I lived in that I owned, and I really felt ownership of the space. I took over one year to decorate and furnish it, including setting up all of the smart home automations and making nearly everything voice activated. Technicians were still going in and out of my apartment in Lisbon while I was sitting in Sydney, having no idea when I’d return to enjoy it all. **_Home is inside_ was the attitude I had to choose.** My active social community and friend groups in Lisbon, Toronto, New York and London felt even further away now. Time zones from Sydney meant more asynchronous communication and one-way voice notes turned into personal podcasts. _The connections I felt to my community remained strong however changed._ Instead of knowing and sharing the ins and outs of daily living, and the frequency of contact reduced, the conversations went much deeper. **_I can enjoy my own company_ was the attitude I had to choose.** All of the professional activities, business and projects that I had so closely identified with over the past and where I exhausted a lot of my _doing_ energy were no longer present in my day-to-day life. I had been winding down some of the new projects I had been exploring in the past year in Portugal and giving myself space to _be _without the constraints of having to be responsible to, or for, others professionally. **_I am more than I do_ was the attitude I had to choose.** In stepping out of my comfort zone and the life I had known, unknowingly, I caught myself in a moment of anxiety later that afternoon. More questions than answers arose inside, as I was starting to feel the discomfort of not knowing and no longer identifying with the stuff, the place, the people and the work. **I felt scared. I started to question myself.**_ I started to feel lost._ Within moments of feeling the anxiety, in a way I had not ever felt before, I turned inwards. That only made it feel worse. As I became more aware of the anxious feelings in my stomach, in my chest, in my fingertips. **The feeling of anxiety was growing quickly.** I then turned outwards. And began to share voice notes with a few close friends, going into a monologue sharing my innermost thoughts, fears and insecurities. One friend called me as I was recording a voice note to him. _“I saw on Whatsapp that you were recording a message to me, so I thought I’d call to say hi”_. We would go on to speak for an hour about what I had been feeling. Later that evening, another friend called me from Lisbon at 1am Sydney time. I was awake, still swimming in my anxiety, and we would go on to speak for two hours. **In those moments, I felt seen, heard and supported. ** The act of sharing with others lessened the weight of the anxiety I had been feeling. _I did not feel I was alone anymore._ Having friends who truly listened without an ounce of judgment, without giving any advice and without showing any desire to fix my feelings, helped me feel calm and that maybe my feelings didn’t need to be fixed right then and there. Having expressed myself, I went to sleep and slept soundly. I woke up the next morning, the sun shining bright outside and a clear blue sky, feeling like a changed man. In my morning meditation, breathwork and journaling routine, I did not find any anxiety within myself anymore. _I was surprised._ **Absolutely nothing in my external world and situation had changed.** I was still on sabbatical, in Sydney, without much stuff, without a place that felt like home, without the friends I had known nearby and without any professional projects. _Yet how I felt about my situation had completely changed._ The process of questioning my choices and coming to the same conclusion, that I would continue on this adventure of traveling the world without a destination or end in mind, allowed me to rebuild my conviction and confidence after I had momentarily lost touch with it. **The strong feelings of anxiety I had felt the previous day were part of an important learning process.** Had I reacted to the feelings by jumping on a plane back to Lisbon, which I easily could have done but surprisingly didn’t even think of, I would have deprived myself of the growth and resilience that comes from moving through an uncomfortable and deeply strong emotion. I now understand that the next time I feel a rush of anxiety appear, which will certainly happen, I can lean on others, I can take my time and that I will move through it eventually. I am less scared to feel anxiety. I need not be scared of the emotion and I need not avoid situations, people or experiences that may prompt it. I can look out and face life with a smile in my heart and open mind, knowing that I will be okay, regardless of what happens or does not happen. And that is how I learned to anxious. --- ### How to Curious Published: 2024-03-17 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/curious/ The sun had not yet risen and my eyes were blurry, it was still early in the morning. As I was about to open the door to walk out of my apartment in Lisbon, I glanced back at the apartment. Something inside me knew that I would not be seeing the apartment for some time. **I felt both nervous and excited.** Nervous as I was intentionally stepping into the unknown. I had decided the previous day to book a one way ticket to London for that morning, without any clue as to where all I would be going and for how long. I also felt excited as I felt this would be the start of an adventure,_ something I had been craving._ Once in London, I enjoyed the Christmas decor that covered the streets and surprisingly found myself taking pictures of the retail displays. **A new curiosity was emerging within me, one that I had not felt for some time.** I had been to London enough times in the year that the invitations for Christmas catch ups had started to roll-in. It was wonderful to see many friends, 1-1, over coffees, lunches and dinners. Equally wonderful to see the city full of Christmas cheer and take in the music, the lights, the decor inside all of these spaces. _The mood felt uplifting._ _“How long are you here for?”_ people would ask. _“I don’t know”_ was my response to pretty much every question I was asked about ‘my plan’. I was reminded that **these three words, ‘I don’t know’, are some of the most powerful words I can say to myself.** In meditation, they represent a beginner’s mindset and invite an openness to life. I had spent most of my past year with an expert’s mind, feeling the pressure ‘to know’ everything and everyone. _This was a welcomed break._ By my second night in London, I found myself casually browsing property listings on my phone, a sign I was feeling inspired by the city. The next morning, I went to see a half dozen apartments, to again explore my curiosity. Maybe I’ll set up a second base in London next year, to complement my Lisbon base, I thought to myself. After a weekend full of Christmas catch ups, I felt inspired to continue the holiday theme and took the train to Paris. I had never taken that train before, **it was again me giving myself permission to explore my curiosity.** The city, decorated with Christmas lights, was magical, romantic and inspiring. On the first night, staying not far from the Eiffel Tower, I thought it might be interesting to climb it. I bought the ticket and started my way up. And within a few stories of walking the grilled staircase, a fear of heights that I had thought I had overcome resurfaced. I paused and checked in with how I was feeling. _My curiosity had disappeared and fear took its place. _In a moment of humility, I walked down instead of up, bought another ticket to ride the elevator up and eventually made it to the top. On the second day in Paris, I was curious to begin speaking French again, a language I learned growing up but had lost a connection with. Although initially Portuguese would come out at my attempts to order a croissant and herbal tea, eventually my brain made the switch and French began to flow naturally. _Speaking the language brought me back to grade school and felt nostalgic of my earlier days._ Then I decided to fly to the US for a strategic planning offsite with the CEO of my business, as it was a quiet time and he could take a few days with me. At the airport in Paris, I bought some noise canceling headphones for the long flight ahead, also sensing I may be taking several long flights over the coming while during this adventure. The flight got delayed by one hour. And then another hour. And then again for another hour. Each time, I took it as a queue to leave the gate and with only my carry-on in hand, roam the airport browsing the shops and picking up a bite to eat here or there. And then the flight was canceled. What was most telling was I had no reaction. **In previous times, I surely would have felt some agitation, anger or disappointment.** This time, nothing. When I realized the non-reaction to the canceled flight, a smile appeared on my face. I went to an airport hotel, messaged the CEO to share that it probably didn’t make sense for me to still come and we decided to cancel our offsite as quickly as we had scheduled it. **With no plan, I resisted the urge to make one. **I was curious to see how I’d feel in the morning, and equally curious to see how uncomfortable I might feel not knowing. I turned on Netflix, something I hadn’t done in months, ordered a pizza and enjoyed a quiet evening in my hotel room. The next morning I woke up and began to journal. I was writing, writing and writing, and I started to miss my family. The next day was my dad’s birthday and Christmas Eve. _The thought came up to surprise them in Toronto._ A rush of excitement flooded my chest and stomach. I booked a one way ticket to Toronto that left in two hours and made my way back to the airport. As I opened the door to my parent’s home in Toronto, I could hear the TV was on. I quietly took off my shoes and put my carry-on to one side. My mom heard someone come in and came to the entrance. A huge smile came on her face, one of the most genuine smiles I had seen all week. Her surprise reaction lasted about three seconds though. As she gave me a hug, she muttered _“I had a feeling this morning that you might surprise us”_.** It’s as if she knew before I did. **My dad then walked by and gave me a passing hello, as if it was a non-event. We then joked that if I really wanted to surprise them, then not coming would have been the surprise. My sister showed up the next day with her family, including my three year old nephew. I still remember his reaction when he saw me– he was genuinely surprised. _At least someone one, I thought to myself._ After a few days of time with the family, it was the day after Christmas and I was sitting with my sister over breakfast. _“Where are you going next?”_ she asked curiously. _“I don’t know”_, I muttered, again the most powerful words I could use at that moment in my adventure. Wanting to help, she began to ask me questions about what I was craving and in one word, _“sunshine”_. Being the little sister she is to me, she then challenged me to go to the further possible place to find sunshine: Australia. I stared at her as she said it and again, noticed a mix of excitement and nervousness in my chest and stomach. **A sign to lean into this spontaneous idea.** A few hours later, I was on a very long flight to Australia, with again no idea of what would happen next. All I knew was that I was curious to find out and the only way to explore my curiosity was to be open to discovering what life had in store for me. And that is how I learned to curious. --- ### How to Bondi Published: 2024-03-10 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/bondi/ I walked in and felt intimidated. The music was pumping. The air conditioner was on full blast. The energy was intense. I stood there, like a lost child, without parents or friends around, unsure what to do. This was at a gym in Bondi Beach, in Sydney, Australia. I ended up back in Australia a few weeks ago, after spending time in India on an Ayurvedic retreat and in Delhi. Going to a gym at Bondi is like going to compete at the Olympics. It’s not for beginners. I got the sense that going to the gym is the most important thing that most people did that day. It showed on their faces. Like walking the halls in a corporate office in New York City or London, I could see everyone’s focus and determination to succeed. I have never really prioritized fitness as an adult. There were always other priorities I deemed more important. Hanging out here at Bondi, I decided to experiment and try something new. **And like anything new,** **it is initially intimidating as it is unknown and unfamiliar**. However, being immersed in a fitness obsessed culture is as inspiring as it is intimidating. I quickly found myself going to the gym every day, and often adding on a yoga class for good measure. The protein shakes, creatine powder and supplements have started to pile up as well. The mornings at Bondi are even more inspiring than the gyms though. The sun rises around six thirty AM, and it’s peak rush hour down at the beach. Literally thousands of people are swimming in the ocean, doing workouts on the sand, running along the promenade or lifting weights on the grass.** It feels like I stepped into a Disneyland of sorts for workout and health obsessed people. ** It took me a few tries to find my yoga studio, as almost every studio offers only hot yoga. Normal temperature yoga isn’t intense or interesting enough I guess. At the one studio I found that does not offer hot yoga, when I shared my appreciation with the studio owner, he responded with “oh, we just opened six months ago and at the time, we didn’t have the money to install heaters”. I gently nudged him to not install them._ Time will tell._ Even more of a scene are the Bondi Icebergs. **Built on the cliffside of the ocean, it is by far the best view of any sauna, gym, cafe and pool, perhaps in the world. **With an affordable entry fee of only ten dollars per day, the place is packed. The salt water pool sits on top of the ocean, with nearly every wave splashing ocean water into the pool as people do laps. To join the swimming club requires committing to a minimum level of swims per week. To join the gym requires paying upfront for the year. The sauna is the highlight of the Icebergs though. A relatively small sauna, it’s constantly full of people and what’s most interesting are the conversations. There is even a blog about what was overheard in the sauna. The commentary is endless and comical to watch, one day my friend and I joined in. It felt like entering a secret world, with a timed limit on how long I can spend there, given the heat of the sauna. Bondi is a reflection of culture and the influence it can have. **What is normal or abnormal is no longer objective and becomes highly relative.** Initially, I had judgments, many of them. I felt like a researcher, quietly observing this foreign species who inhabit Bondi Beach. Within a few weeks though, I had put down my magnifying glass and began to live the Bondi Beach lifestyle. _What I once found abnormal now feels normal._ **It has been a reminder for me to stay open minded.** It is only through being curious about what I don’t yet know that I can learn and grow. Otherwise I am stuck in my little world, which may feel safer but is probably far less interesting. And that is how I learned to Bondi. --- ### How to Retreat Published: 2024-03-03 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/retreat/ For the first six years of my entrepreneurial career, I did not take a break or vacation. Working six to seven days a week, I was all-in, all the time. Despite me being in my twenties and feeling invincible, I was in reality not. The first vacation I took turned out to be the best thing I could do for my struggling business. Initially, I was scared that things would fall apart and we’d have set backs. In reality, taking the time away allowed me to see more clearly one of the most important insights as a leader: **I’m not as important as I think I am.** The process of stepping back from my day-to-day allowed me to see the business more objectively, including what was working and_ what was not working_. It was only by stepping away could I stop fooling myself into thinking something was working just fine only to find out that the moment I looked away, it fell down. As a leader, **my job was not to do everything myself, but to make everything work without myself having to be involved**. The regular retreats became a measuring stick for me on how good of a job I was doing as a leader. _A necessary part of the process._ I would go on to take at least one week away from the business, each quarter, for the next ten years. And time away meant to fully disconnect and unplug._ It became a constant reminder that I’m not as important as I think I am._ Taking time away to retreat away from my daily life on a regular basis has helped me in countless ways personally. I once asked a meditation teacher about her routine. She explained it back to me in such a simple way that has stuck with me to this day. “On a daily basis, I sit alone for ten to twenty minutes, and that’s the equivalent to taking out the trash. If I don’t take out the trash after a few days, the place starts to get a bit stinky”. _I’ve learned that it’s best to take out the trash every day._ “On a weekly basis, I will do a longer meditation or a group meditation, which is the equivalent to tidying up the apartment or house”._ This keeps the place looking clean and avoids things from building up._ On a quarterly basis, I go on a retreat of some sorts. Be it a structured and guided retreat or a self-retreat. This is the equivalent of a deep scrubbing of the place”. _Keeping up with the daily and weekly cleaning, I can get the more difficult to reach places during retreat._ This is what retreats are for. Cleaning out the corners of my mind, that have been quietly accumulating dust. When I come back from retreat, I feel fresh and ready to give more of myself to my life and my world. “We liked it better now that you live in New York”, my mom had commented to me once while I was visiting them in Toronto, not long after I had moved away. Previously when we were living in the same city, although I would see my parents pretty much every weekend, our time together became routine, unfocused and distracted. The proximity of a twenty minute drive away meant I took seeing them for granted, and I believe they did as well. Once I was living in a different city, when I would come home to visit, despite it being far less frequent, **the attention and quality of our time together was significantly different and better** than before. _The scarcity of interaction made it more valuable._ Now I primarily see my parents when we are all traveling, as I’ve noticed that the quality of their attention is even greater once they are removed from their natural setting. A forced retreat of sorts. At home, although we may be spending time together, they are in their natural rhythm and flow of errands, chores and to-do lists. While physically away, they mentally also step away from their daily lives and can focus their energy and presence on me. My recent trip to Delhi was timed for when my parents were also visiting India. We had dinner one night, just the three of us, at a restaurant and I enjoyed a higher quality of attention than I usually get from them over a meal. The conversation went deeper and wasn’t stuck in the mundane of our daily lives. **Taking a step out of my normal place and pace helps me to detach from all of the unconscious associations and patterns in my mind**, making more space to discover new associations and patterns consciously. Adding a dose of nature to a retreat takes it to the next level. The beautiful thing about being in nature, be it hiking a mountain, enjoying a view of the ocean, or seeing an open landscape, is that it is expansive. In the process of looking outwards at something so large, I start to feel small. In that process of feeling small, my worries and anxieties also start to feel small. **Nature helps put my life into perspective.** I can’t get that perspective while in it. I have to momentarily step outside of it. Nature is also calm. Trees, water, grass, rocks and more all are quiet, still and at peace. It is often said that **the world is a mirror**. When I stand in nature and see it at peace, I am looking at a mirror and am reminded that I am at peace as well. And this is how I learned to retreat. --- ### How to Delhi Published: 2024-02-25 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/delhi/ It was the biggest risk I had taken in a while. Showing up in Delhi, as a single man in his late thirties, a city filled with many of my relatives, takes a lot of courage and bravery. I’d heard of tales growing up from family friends who would visit relatives in India…and come home married. _I got lucky, and avoided this…this time. _ It was not an easy choice to make, as my family was surprised, even a little offended. I get it, as I would feel the same if the situation was reversed. **A sign of maturity in my own independence and confidence in making my own choices,** even if unpopular, I decided to stay in hotels while spending a few weeks in Delhi recently. _Everyone expected me to stay with them. _ It was the right choice for me though, in that I was able to workout daily, enjoy amazing vegetarian breakfast buffets, have control over my schedule, be more independent in my comings and goings, and most importantly, breathe filtered air. Like everything in life, it was a trade-off. The benefit of closeness I feel when staying with family versus the benefit of feeling comfortable and independent. A sense of relief washed over me as for the first time ever, I visited Delhi without getting sick. As a child, it was often food poisoning that would get me every time I would visit. As an adult, it would be respiratory related illnesses, as the pollution in Delhi would get the better of me. Despite being Indian, my immune system is clearly Canadian, and doesn’t stand a chance. A sign of changing times, and a few years of dedicated attention to improving my immune system, this time was different though. Both of my parents were born and raised in Delhi. **They immigrated to Canada when my mother was eight months pregnant with me. **Every time I visit, I start to imagine what my life might have been like had they chosen not to immigrate. _Wildly different._ With a population of thirty million, bigger than all of Australia, Delhi can be a busy, loud and chaotic place. Yet despite this, I felt a sense of calm, quiet and peace on this trip — a reminder that the world around me is often a reflection of what’s going inside of me. My uncle and aunt opened a youth hostel for fifty young kids in a remote area a few hours outside of Delhi, and I got to participate in the opening. It was a beautiful moment to see all of our family come together in an act of charity. This visit to Delhi was particularly religious, as I found myself visiting a number of temples, some world famous on the tourist checklists, and others, long standing ones, with deep connections within my family history. I would walk into these temples feeling connected to my spiritual side, and walk out of them feeling connected to my capitalist side.** I could not help but take notes on the business of religion in India**. It’s beautiful. It involves a fair value exchange. A recurring revenue model. Relatively fixed costs with crazy high margins. The religion of god and the religion of money seemed to be one in the same in these venues. My last visit to India was five years ago, for a family wedding of course. I observed a country that is booming. The energy has changed — there is a sense that India is going places now. Honestly, in every previous trip, a younger cousin would pull me aside and ask me for advice on how they could move to Canada or the US. Getting out was on the mind of every ambitious young person. _Not anymore. _ With the cost of living so inexpensive, and the quality of life for the middle class and above so comfortable with unlimited help, I can see why people are happy and satisfied there. _The tables have turned. _ In under five years, the country has rolled out a national digital ID system that links all government services, benefits, biometrics, banking, and more. 1.3 billion people have enrolled. “Developed” nations in Europe and North America have nothing like this. _It would probably take five years of committees to discuss it. _ **Mobile payments are so prolific that I didn’t use any cash.** From paying for food, to buying vegetables from a street vendor, to paying a rickshaw driver, to sending money to a friend, all that’s needed is to scan a QR code and to pay instantly. I would text a picture of the QR code from the vendor to my cousin to have her pay for me, as I don’t have an Indian bank account. Fast delivery services will **deliver anything you need to your doorstep within eight minutes**. Yes, eight minutes. Imagine the diversity of inventory of a giant Walmart superstore, all available in minutes at your fingertip. One morning while my cousin was getting ready for work, she wanted to blow dry her hair. She ordered a hair dryer and it showed up eight minutes later. One evening, another cousin wanted a bag of potato chips. Eight minutes later, it showed up. _Move over Amazon._ These are just a few examples that shifted my perceptions of India after spending just a few weeks in Delhi. **My parents happened to also be in Delhi at the same time as me**, and one day the three of us went to Old Delhi, also known as the original or historic city center, where my parents grew up. Initially, I had a lot of judgment. Walking behind my parents, I put on my mask and sunglasses because of the dust. My white pants got dirty in seconds after stepping out of the car. I could barely walk the streets full of cow dung. I was watching my pockets carefully because of how many people were brushing up against me. At one point, I was now in front of my parents and turned back to check on them. **Their faces were glowing with excitement. **They started sharing their personal stories about each street corner. Suddenly all of my judgment dropped as I was now experiencing this place through their lens, instead of mine. _And it was beautiful. _ Looking back, I’m grateful for my parents, who made the effort to bring my sister and I there every few years growing up. Despite at the time it being a relatively big expense to fly a family of four to Delhi from Ottawa, they did it. _And often. _ It not only helped me feel comfortable in one of the world’s largest cities, where my parents happened to have grown up, but also connected to my extended family. I have a big Indian family, with over one hundred relatives in my parents immediate family network. About half of them live across Delhi, and seeing them every few years since I was a child has allowed for a connection that transcends geographies, generations and time. **There is an unconditionality to how I get to connect with family** that I really have come to value. Many foreigners visit India and Delhi, and have a wonderful experience. For me though, the experience is different. I don’t feel like a tourist. And I don’t feel like a local. _Yet I feel like I belong._ Thanks to the constant visits, endless family homes, and nothing else for me to do there but to be curious, I get to have an insider's view of what it’s like to Delhi. And that is how I learned to Delhi. --- ### How to Yoga Published: 2024-02-18 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/yoga/ In the West, so much of what we culturally encourage is forceful. **Power and strength are equated with quantity and force.** I’ve been steeped in Western yoga culture for ten years now, and have done over one thousand classes in at least a dozen countries. The _‘no pain, no gain’_ mantra has dominated my experience of yoga, with the emphasis often on challenging ourselves, and our bodies, to reach new heights. If it doesn’t feel challenging, then there must not be any benefit, has been my conditioning. At my recent Ayurvedic retreat in India, I appreciated how simple and gentle the yoga practice was. Designed to support the Ayurvedic treatments, the yoga practice was the supporting actor, not the main actor. Despite this, the effect of the yoga practice was powerful. The before and after change I feel from simple guided exercises was dramatic._ A reminder of the power of subtle changes. _ Learning to practice yoga in such a peaceful, gentle, restorative and calm manner, while feeling strong, powerful, flexible and able in my body, opened my eyes to why these practices have stood the test of time over thousands of years. While I’m truly inspired by yoga philosophy, and the depth of knowledge it has to offer beyond the physical practice, my reflection here is focused on the physical practice of yoga. _Yoga is accessible to everyone_. **It is not about being flexible in the body; rather about being flexible in the mind.** Yoga is not a performative, competitive sport, like it may seem if one looks at Instagram, or yoga studios in New York or Los Angeles. In these places, everyday activities like getting dressed in the morning, making breakfast, making it to the office, are also seen as performative and competitive sports. I remember bumping into one of my yoga teachers in New York City on the street many years ago and asking him why I hadn’t seen him teach lately. “I stopped teaching” was his response._ I was shocked. _ He went on to explain to me that he realized that yoga is such a personalized practice that it did not make sense to him anymore to teach or learn it in a group setting. Everyone’s body is different and needs something different each day. **Yoga is a personalized practice, meant to serve the body.** _Not the other way around._ I used to try to get my body to do whatever the instructor asked me to do, or more honestly, what the person on the mat next to mine was able to do. Over the years, as I have felt more connected to my body, and willing to listen to it, versus trying to direct and control it, my yoga practice has evolved to give my body the poses it is asking for. If my shoulders are tight, I’ll do shoulder stretches. If my neck is sore on one side, I’ll hold a pose for an extended amount of time just on that side. If my legs are stiff, I’ll do some lunges. If my lower back is feeling sensitive, I’ll do abdominal exercises. **The word yoga translates to union.** My experience of yoga is that it can be used to help connect me with my own body, in a way that my body needs. Otherwise being able to do complex, and sometimes dangerous Instagram-worthy yoga poses, and compete with the other students in class, is really about serving my ego. It doesn’t make my body feel good, it actually makes my body feel scared. It does make my mind feel good though. _Yoga poses are for the body, not for the mind._ And that is how I learned to yoga. --- ### How to Identity Published: 2024-02-11 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/identify/ As I sat there in silence, quietly eating my meal and staring at all of these old people, I began to wonder about identity. _Who were all of these people and what were their stories?_ This was ten days into my seventeen day detox at an Ayurveda prison hospital in the South of India last month. I had been curious to explore the ancient Indian medicine practice and found the perfect place to surrender to doctors and a strict detox protocol practiced for thousands of years. The detox was more than for my body though. I turned off my phone and unplugged from my world fully for seventeen days. The time, environment and people led me to introspect on ideas and topics I hadn’t before— including how we identity. We hold on to our identity so tightly– like a security blanket. **Any threat to our identity is a threat to us, often triggering a response.** **We identify by how we dress,** I know I certainly do. Here, at the prison hospital, that was not an option. _We were all given white pyjamas to wear, everyday. _It was my first time in life actually wearing a uniform consistently. I liked it. **We identify based on our home and all of our stuff inside. **So much time, energy and resources are invested in creating and cultivating a home that feels like it fits who we are, how we are and how we want to live. _At the prison hospital, it was not an option to identify based on my home or my stuff._ **We identify with what we do. **I had for many years. Here, I am not working– so I have temporarily let go of that part of my identity. Others though continue to work– emails, calls, etc. _Why I wondered?_ If they can afford to come to a place like this and take a few weeks away, that means they are established enough professionally that they are probably not dependent on their income to survive. But maybe they are dependent on work, an important part of our identity. **We identify based on where we are from**. In meeting the others, the first question posed was “where are you from?”. “Complicated” is how I start my response. “Originally from Canada. Spent most of my adulthood in New York. I have been living in Lisbon, Portugal the past few years. Oh, and my family is originally from Delhi”. _That last part I realized was necessary for all of the Europeans who were trying to make sense of meeting an Indian man in India, but who spoke without an Indian accent._ We identify with our family and loved ones. In speaking with some of the older women, they loved to gush about their kids and grandkids, telling me their names, where they live, and their stories with so much pride. While I also identify with my family, being fully offline and disconnected had meant not sharing this experience with them, despite I know they are very curious, especially my younger sister, who was disappointed when I told her that my disconnection would not involve sending her updates, which she was secretly hoping I would have made an exception for her. In deconstructing the dimensions of identity, I started to recognize that my way of being there was a way of momentarily deidentifying with everything, everywhere and everyone that I normally do. **What’s left of me when I remove everything? Who am I, without my clothes, my home, my work, my location and my family?** It’s an interesting and important reflection, one that allows me to connect more deeply with my essence and energy. As I finished my lunch, I got up with a smile on my face and felt a strong feeling of satisfaction, feeling more connected with myself after having removed many of the layers that often cover who I am. I also had the thought that maybe next time for fun, I’ll also change my name to really see how I feel without even that. --- ### How to Ayurveda Published: 2024-02-04 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/ayurveda/ I had been feeling called to go yet they had no availability. Every few days, I sent them an email asking if anyone had canceled, and if a spot opened up, to let me know. They kindly acknowledged my email each time, and went on to remind me that people pay deposits months and years in advance, and rarely cancel their bookings. Despite this, I continued to feel deep inside an urge to go. And soon. Then all of a sudden, the faithful email arrived. A spot had just opened up, due to an unexpected cancellation. I responded yes immediately, and said to myself I’ll figure out the logistics later. I was sitting in an apartment hotel in Sydney, Australia, when I had already been researching Ayurvedic health retreats in India. During my yoga teacher training, which I did five years ago in New York City of all places, we had an entire weekend on Ayurveda._ I was immediately fascinated by it._ Ayurveda, often referred to as the "Science of Life," is an ancient Indian holistic approach to health and wellness that dates back over 5,000 years, making it one of the world's oldest medical systems. The wisdom of Ayurveda was initially passed down through oral tradition, with sages conveying the principles and practices to their disciples. The knowledge was eventually compiled and recorded in the Vedas, the ancient sacred texts of India. Ayurveda's foundational texts were written between 1500 BCE and 500 AD. Ayurveda’s influence is not confined to India; it has also shaped the development of other traditional forms of medicine, such as Traditional Chinese Medicine. Ayurveda is based on the premise that the universe is composed of five basic elements: space, air, fire, water, and earth. These elements combine to form the three doshas, or life forces, within the human body: Vata (space and air), Pitta (fire and water), and Kapha (water and earth). _Not dosa, the South Indian version of a crepe, but dosha._ Ayurveda suggests that health and wellness depend on a delicate balance between these doshas, and imbalance leads to disease. To be in balance in Ayurveda is not to have an equal amount of all three doshas (Vata, Pitta and Kapha). It is rather to be in alignment with one’s original birth constitution– we are each born with one or two dominant doshas. Ayurveda is personalized medicine. It recognizes that each of us are unique and what my body needs may be different from what your body needs. _I love the philosophy._ Even more fascinating is that the method of diagnosis involves reading a person’s pulse, looking at the color of their eyes, the state of their skin and their tongue. There’s no fancy equipment or modern technology required. I’ve spent thousands of dollars on medical testing in the past year alone. 5,000 years ago, they had simpler ways of diagnosing patients. I’ve visited a handful of Ayurvedic doctors in the past five years and am amazed every time at how accurately they are able to diagnose whatever I’ve got going on at that time– physically and mentally, by looking at my eyes, tongue, pulse and skin. Within Ayurveda, there is a detox protocol called Panchakarma. I was made aware of it by a German friend, Martin, 54 years old but would look like he’s 34 except for his head full of white hair. Martin and I were on a shamanic retreat together in the South of Portugal a year and a half ago. Over lunch one day, he was sharing with me about Panchakarma and how he and his wife go each year in India._ I was intrigued._ Fast forward to a few weeks ago, something inside me said ‘this is the time for me to do this’. In the past year, I’ve prioritized my physical health and have noticed positive results. Feeling energized, I have been craving something more intensive and immersive. I’ve done countless meditation and yoga retreats over the years. _I needed something different._ Kerala is a Southern state in India, with the best air quality and known as quite spiritual. The cuisine, language, dress, culture, religion and customs are different from the North, where my family is originally from and where I have visited often. Kerala is the birthplace of Ayurveda. My friend Martin had recommended an ayurvedic hospital that he really likes. His word was good enough for me to go by and this specific hospital is who I continued to email every few days, looking for an opening. Once the spot was confirmed, I booked my flight from Sydney to Kerala. I would go on to spend 17 days in an Ayurveda hospital, doing the Panchakarma treatment which involved a thorough detox and cleanse– physical, mental, emotional and spiritual. It was an intense experience– and one that I will likely do again in the coming years. Coming out of it, I feel a mental clarity, a physical lightness, an emotional ease and a deeper spiritual connection. It’s only been a few days, however it feels like I continue to notice new gifts each day from the experience. During my time there, I drafted my next book, inspired by my experience. If you are interested in learning more, email me and I’ll happily share with you an early look. --- ### How to Feel Satisfied Published: 2024-01-28 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/satisfied/ Earlier this month while on extended holidays in Australia, being in the worst possible time zone relative to my businesses, family and friends, actually opened up a new sensation that I am still making sense of. It was one of satisfaction. _It felt foreign and disorientating._ **My natural and immediate impulse was to fill the moment with something useful or useless**. I resisted that urge and instead stayed in this space of not feeling pulled to do anything. It did not feel like nothing. It definitely felt like something. However, the something was not one I was used to feeling. I am used to feeling useful or useless, and comfortable with both although much prefer the former to the latter. It made me realize that I am always either striving or sleeping. And so is everyone around me. Striving energy is my chase to fulfill some desire. Be it the desire to build strength and muscle, the desire to grow my bank account, the desire to one day start a family, the desire to learn a new skill or language, and more. All of these desires motivate a striving energy in me. **Striving energy often involves some level of disatisfaction with my reality**. Sleeping energy is both literal and figurative. Literal at night when I’m actually sleep and figurative during the day, in those moments when I’m checked out. For some, it could be blindly scrolling Instagram, binge watching Netflix, eating beyond feeling satiated, or any other type of escapist or numbing behavior. **Sleeping energy often numbs my sensitivity to reality**. This feeling of satisfaction, where my mind did not go to the to-do list (there is always a to-do list) and it also did not turn to any form of escapist pattern, has inspired me. I am learning that the feeling of satisfaction is not sitting on the other side of my to-do list. I’m breaking free of the ‘_once this, then that_’ thinking that had guided much of my adult life. **My to-do list continues to be long**. Actually, having time with myself and with fewer distractions leads me to add things to my to do list. When interacting with friends, new and old, I see how many of our conversations are dominated by the striving energy. At least the people I hang out with seem to be biased towards this energy. I’m sure there are others who are swimming with people in an ocean of sleeping energy. Every topic, be it about health, money, relationships, politics, world affairs, etc., is about getting, creating, building, fixing or getting something more, better or different than the current reality. Striving, searching, seeking. How many of my daily choices, from waking up early to go to the gym, to making nutritious and healthy food choices, to choosing the company I keep, to reading a book, and more, are deep-down influenced by some desire to influence or shape my reality. **Satisfaction can only exist with an acceptance of reality though, as it is**. And so much of the striving energy and sleeping energy involves a non-acceptance of reality. Acceptance is different from apathy. I got caught for a few years, early in my exploration of meditation and Buddhist philosophy, in the tension between acceptance and apathy. Non-attachment is often taught in theory but not in practice. At least not in a modern, relatable manner. It took me years to learn that it is about acceptance of the results and outcomes, while still making the effort. Not making the effort would be apathy. **Satisfaction doesn’t come from acceptance of any reality though**. It comes from the acceptance that I gave something to reality, tried something with reality, and learned something from reality. Satisfaction is not about achieving something but knowing that I tried. That’s what I was feeling earlier this month, in that moment sitting in my apartment hotel in Sydney, looking at the sun shining brightly outside and not feeling any pressure to do anything useful or pull to do anything useless. I felt this deep satisfaction from knowing that I have tried, and from that place, have loosened my grip on the striving or sleeping energy that otherwise fills my day. I do not need to feel satisfied all of the time. I know that I rarely will, however when I do, it feels appropriate to recognize and even celebrate the feeling. And that is how I learned to feel satisfied. --- ### How to Focus Published: 2024-01-21 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/2focus/ I was trading voice notes with a friend recently, and they were becoming lengthier and lengthier with each turn. Almost like a competitive sport, hitting the ball back harder by going deeper in our reflections and shares with one another. We were exploring and sharing our respective intentions for the year ahead. We quickly progressed beyond the surface level ‘_what_’ and dug into the juicier ‘_why_’. It’s vulnerable to share what’s important to me. **It’s even more vulnerable to share why it’s important to me, at this moment in my life**. Once I take the time to dig into why something is important to me, there is a resonance and connection to it that makes it feel real and even urgent. It becomes less of a ‘_this is a good thing to do’ _and a_ ‘this is really important to me, and I’m clear on why_’. For example, I’ve decided to prioritize my physical health this year. A simple intention and probably one that the vast majority of the population have also set in the past few weeks for themselves. However it becomes more interesting when I dig into why and I realize how personal such a commonplace intention can be. My why is from a place of fear. Today, I am healthy and feel great. Sleep, exercise and nutrition are all in balance and feel stable. However I understand intellectually that as I continue to age, my body and brain will continue to deteriorate. And ahead of the decline beginning, or perhaps it’s already begun and I have not yet felt it, I want to give my body the highest possible starting point to decline from. I was on a date the other day and the woman said to me, “_I feel like you’re going to live to one hundred years old_”, to which I didn’t bat an eye at and confidently responded “_probably_”. Living well for a long time is not the natural course of life though. The natural course is to decline. Looking at my parents, who I feel have not aged particularly well, I’m reminded that **I want to be proactive and preventative with my health**. Again, my why is driven by a fear of my eventual decline. And fear can be a really effective motivator. One that brings about intense focus. The fear only became clear to me through reflection though. **Reflection is the most powerful tool I have found to focus.** Reflection can take many forms. For me, it is most often through journaling, meditating and conversing one-on-one with close friends. Through open and vulnerable reflection, I find clarity. Clarity of how I feel about something, some place, or some one, and from that clarity can make decisions that are more grounded in my present reality. For example, last year my investment portfolio did not do as well as it could have, should have, would have, had I had greater clarity on what was important to me in this dimension of life. The market went up 24% and my portfolio did not. Over the past few weeks, I have taken some space to reflect and audit my decisions over the past year and can see clearly now why I made whichever choices I did. Which ones turned out to be positive and which ones were negative. **I now understand my choices and have made peace with reality, versus beating myself up about it**. Just having the experiences without taking a moment to reflect on them will likely lead me to repeating the same experiences blindly. _The experiences I have don’t turn into lessons and learnings I need unless I reflect about them_. **Focus is often thought of as a way to improve productivity**. And we live in a productivity-obsessed culture. I know at least I’ve been obsessed with productivity my entire adult life. Productivity though isn’t about getting more done or working more efficiently, or working longer hours (on whatever the intention is, be it professional, health, financial, etc.). **Productivity is about getting the right things done, well**. And to get the right things done, it starts with being able to focus on the right things. I have had many examples professionally where I was working very efficiently towards the wrong thing. It’s counter-productive, as it gets me faster to the place I don’t want to be. Reflection helps me focus on the right things. How to focus is often talked about. _How to reflect is rarely talked about and I believe is the key to focus._ Back to the voice notes with my friend, I reflected out loud to him that it doesn’t really matter what intentions we set. It is our ability to reflect on them regularly which is what turns our intention into reality. And that is how I learned to focus. --- ### How to Australia Published: 2024-01-14 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/australia/ As the sun shined sharply on my body, while I was lying on the sand, I heard a voice directed towards me. I looked up and saw a beautiful woman asking me how the water was. We got talking and she was curious to hear about the spontaneous nature of my visit down under. It began with a breakfast table conversation with my sister the day after Christmas, in Toronto. I shared that I had an itch to go somewhere warm and jokingly she remarked _‘you could fly to the other side of the world for fun’._ Something sparked within me and it was an immediate yes. **That feeling when you know deep in your gut something feels right.** It is less about the thinking, analysing, planning and contemplating that I am so used to, and fairly proficient at now thanks to a lifetime of practice. **The energy of feeling through an idea is different.** It becomes less of a math calculation, with variables and more of a flavour of a meal. Taste is generally subjective. Something that I find tasty the person next to me may not. Feeling through ideas is similar. And I found the idea of flying spontaneously across the world very tasty. A few hours later, I was at the airport getting ready for a twenty four hour travel journey into the future. I landed in Brisbane, and had nothing booked or planned. I went up to the car rental counter, and it wasn’t until I sat in the passenger seat and noticed the steering wheel was missing that I remembered an important fact I clearly had forgotten. ‘_This is going to be an interesting experiment_’ I thought as I switched seats in the car and got acquainted with driving on the wrong side of the road. After a few days at the beach in the blazing hot Australian summer sun, I found my way to Sydney to do a bucket list item: **celebrate New Years Eve at the Sydney Harbour Bridge**. I learned that it is basically the world’s largest new year’s party, and felt the energy. The entire city shuts down for the day, with people camping the night before to get the best views over the harbour. It took far more hustle and grit than I had anticipated to get myself to a decent viewpoint for the midnight fireworks, with the checkpoints, ticket checks, line-ups and overflowing crowds everywhere. _The game was fun to play and brought out the competitive side in me._ **Celebrating the turn of the year alone was surprisingly comforting.** A common signal of how comfortable one is with their own company is to sit in meditation for days, or more simply to go to a restaurant or the movies alone. My version of this was to go to the world’s largest party alone. I was the only person I could see who was there alone. That brought a smile to my face. Thanks to me sharing through this blog that I was in Sydney, a few local friends reached out. I admittedly had completely forgotten that I had friends in Sydney, and it was a welcomed surprise to see familiar faces unexpectedly in the first few days of a new year. **It feels nice to be surprised once in a while.** So much of life can feel premeditated and planned, especially social encounters. One friend, from Toronto, had moved to Sydney during the pandemic for a job and had been living the expat life here for the past year and a half. Him and I have hung out everyday, swapping notes on the respective expat cultures we’ve each lived in across the world. **The frequency of contact with a familiar and trusted friend has felt comforting**. It’s been nice to have the space to connect deeply with someone. He has followed my writing and journey for the past decade, and has been intentional about curating suggestions for me to experience Sydney in a way that has felt very aligned– which I feel very grateful for. Eating at the restaurants the locals frequent, writing my next book sitting in a coffee shop, going on a few dates, getting more than a few mosquito bites each evening, hitting the gym and taking a dip daily in the ocean, have all made me feel like I’ve experienced Australia well. **I’ve enjoyed being temporarily in a different time zone than my world.** It has opened up hours during the daytime when I have good energy and no digital distractions. When the rest of my world is sound asleep, I’m bustling with energy and can treat my physical and mental health as the top priority, with my professional responsibilities as my second priority. In the morning, I deal with my North American responsibilities and connections, and in the evening, I deal with my European ones. In the middle, when there is inspiring daylight and warmth, I get to deal with myself. **My one word intention this year is Flow**, and despite it only being a few weeks into the year, I definitely feel like the intention has been guiding me and making it easier to make choices. My apartment hotel is a perfect example. At first, I booked it for two nights. And then on the morning of the checkout date, I extended it for two more nights. And that has become a routine now, I just extended it for the fifth time. It is representative of tuning into what feels right for me at this moment. And I notice how counter-culture this is. When meeting a variety of people, the common questions of ‘_how long are you here for_’, ‘_where are you visiting next_’, etc. to which my response is a simple and humble ‘_I have no idea_’. This response reveals more about the other person than it does about me. The other’s reaction is immediate and extreme. On one end, people’s response is ‘_I love that!_’ with a giant smile, and they lean in. On the other end, the response is one of silence and they lean back. _My little experiment is either inspiring or triggering._ Being in flow, I find myself more present and surprisingly less interested in taking any pictures. Despite being surrounded by natural beauty and having fun experiences the past few weeks, I could count on one hand how many pictures I’ve taken. I believe it is a sign I’m connecting more deeply with my present moment Hanging out in a literal corner of the world for a few weeks, **I have noticed that being physically further away from the noise and chatter of the world I’m used to has helped me feel more at peace and calm**. This has prompted me to feel more reflective and I find I am journaling more, meditating more, working out more and walking more. All of these activities lead to the same result: a closer connection to myself. And that is what I shared with the woman on the beach. How in a roundabout way, I flew across the world to hangout with myself. The environment, the friends, new and old, the food and the activities have all been mirrors to show me more about myself. Mission accomplished, I’m now ready to leave Australia and continue this exploration, of both my inner and outer world. And that is how I learned to Australia. --- ### How to Inspire 2024 Published: 2024-01-07 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/inspire/ This past week, I’ve been spontaneously enjoying summer in Australia. Soaking in the sun, going for beach walks and hikes, having my daily avo toast, and admiring the calmness, both inside and out. It is an empowering feeling to be able to on a moment’s notice follow an impulse or feeling that is inspiring me. I was enjoying the holidays with my family in Toronto and one morning decided without much thought to fly across the world. A few hours later, I was on a plane. I am testing out my one word intention for this year: **Flow. ** Like taking a car for a test drive to see how it rides, or trying on a t-shirt to see how it fits, for the last week or so I’ve been experimenting with Flow as a primary character in the play that is my daily life. I’m learning that to flow requires me to be connected with my environment, and also my self. To listen and pay attention to all of the information and tune into what inspires me. Inspiration is my currency that makes me feel rich, or poor. When I’m feeling inspired, I feel rich. When I’m not feeling as inspired, I feel poor. The topic of inspiration really brings me to my relationship with a new year. It is a beautiful moment right now in the cycle of a year to find ways to inspire the year. As if the year ahead were another person, I’ve been actively trying to inspire it. **It starts with making peace with the past.** That means finding closure, however I do, with the past year. It’s like ending a relationship cleanly or finishing a job, so that I have the space to start a new one. _I want to be fully committed to 2024 and not hung up on 2023._ **The most important step is to then set a direction for the relationship.** Like leading a team, be it in business, sports or whatever the context, people need a direction to work towards. My one word intention practice represents that direction for 2024 and I. **Next I think about where to focus our energy.** Where the one word intention describes the ‘how’ we are going to dance together, this is to describe the ‘what’ we will focus on. Not in concrete goals, but general buckets. Like setting a budget, how much resource goes into sales & marketing, engineering or administration? For us, this involves making conscious trade-offs of where we intend to invest our energy. **I like to create an experiment each year.** In my book, How to Live, I talk mainly about the many experiments I have conducted on life over the past years. Some years they are more extreme than others, however all share the common thread of not knowing. An experiment by definition means that I don’t know what will happen but I am curious to find out. _The experiment also brings a playfulness to my relationship with 2024. It is how I flirt with the year, by challenging myself outside my comfort zone._ For example, here are some experiments I have done with past years: Minimalism: resetting my relationship with stuff by choosing to not buy stuff Technology: deleting email from my phone Navigation: trying to not use Google Maps while driving around Lisbon Connection: sending hand-written cards and notes to friends throughout the year Nutrition: going vegan (specifically no cheese, which I love) and going gluten-free **This year for the first time I made a list of my tribe.** I do subscribe to the belief that ‘we are the company we keep’, and this inspires me to be intentional about surrounding myself with people that I admire, respect, love, care for and want to be more like. _These are the people 2024 and I will spend more time with._ **Everything in life is either accidental or intentional.** I feel very fortunate to have a wonderful life and I believe a lot of it is thanks to choosing to be intentional about how to live. And intentions are different from planning or goal setting. Where goals are expectations, which can lead to disappointment, intentions set the direction of travel and are inviting to a diverse range of possible outcomes. And I think this is part of the answer to happiness. To be **comfortable with a range of possibilities, versus to be attached to a specific one.** If 2024 were a person I’m in a relationship with for the next twelve months, I hope to have inspired it in a way that’s aligned with how I want to live. And that is how I learned to inspire 2024. --- ### How to 2024 Published: 2024-01-01 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/2024/ Happy New Year from down under. I am currently on a spontaneous world tour of sorts, and earlier today welcomed 2024 by watching fireworks over the Sydney Harbour Bridge in Australia. If you asked me one week ago where I’d be celebrating the year that was and welcoming in the new year, I would not have been able to tell you. Being half way across the world would have been the last place I would have guessed. _Yet here I am._ **At the start of each new calendar year, I pick a one word intention to help guide my choices for the upcoming twelve months.** This year is particularly special for me as it is the tenth year of me practicing this tradition. This past year, my one word intention was Build. As I was reflecting on the year with a close friend last week, she commented to me “_well, you nailed it_”! The theme of Build was ever present in the last twelve months of my life. From building my health and physical strength, to building businesses, to building new relationships and friendships, to building a fresh identity as an author, to building the feeling of home in my new apartment, to building a sense of familiarity across the many European cities I frequented, to building greater confidence in important areas of life, to building my language skills, and the list goes on. In the past week as I have taken inventory in my journal of how the theme of Build showed up, it was at every turn and corner. **It shaped the year and gave it a constant despite the moments of feeling up and down**. I give a lot of credit to a remarkable year to this one word intention that guided so much for me. I share these examples to highlight just how powerful a one word intention can be. It serves as a North Star and gives some direction to how I move through life. It is not a description of the 'what', 'who,' or 'where', but more importantly, the 'how'. Specific goals (e.g. financial, career, health, etc.) can become limiting, narrowing my focus so much that life begins to feel deprived of all that can be beautiful and unknown. _An abstract intention feels inviting in the face of the unknown_. **There are many ‘forks in the road’, be it little tiny ones or big heavy ones**. Ten years now into this practice, I have trained myself to lean on my one word intention to help guide my choices. Sharing the one word intention with those around me further cements it, for me. It is an act of vulnerability to share a part of myself with others, with the hope that they’ll remind me when I feel lost, support me when I need it and celebrate me when it feels right. Below is a list of one word intentions that friends have set and shared with me over the past few years. I hope it helps inspire your one word intention for the year ahead. In the spirit of sharing, **I invite you to share your one word intention with me. Be it by email, Whatsapp or social media**. And then I’ll happily share mine with you as well. It is how I ended up halfway across the world spontaneously. And that is how I learned to 2024. Acceptance Action Authentic Awareness Balance Bold Build Change Commitment Compassion Confidence Connection Control Courage Create Discovery Energy Explore Fearless Focus Freedom Fun Giving Grace Gratitude Grounded Growth Harmony Heart Humility Integrity Joy Learn Lightness Love Open Ownership Partnership Play Positive Presence Relax Respect Self Love Serve Simplify Space Surrender Truth Trust Union --- ### How to Close 2023 Published: 2023-12-21 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/close/ Those who have worked with me know that I am very good at starting new projects. I blame my parents. My father is an idea machine. I admire his curiosity and how he sees the world as a sea of possibilities. Never shy to see what is not yet seen. My mother is, after me, the most stubborn person I know. Her perseverance and determination to learn, create, grow and prosper is admirable. I’m the combination of both of these traits, which fortunately and unfortunately creates a dynamic where I have the ability to see possibility and the determination to go after it. That can often get me in trouble though. _Some call it the ‘shiny object syndrome’._ In 2023, I started a lot of new projects. And this is the time of the year to reflect and make peace with the year that was, and that wasn’t, for me. **Making peace with the year is a deeply personal and introspective process for me.** It begins with acknowledging the experiences, both good and bad, that have shaped the year, and as a result, shaped me. I like to reflect on what I've learned about myself, the world, and the people around me. I consider the new skills or knowledge I've gained and the moments when I felt truly inspired. It's also important for me to reflect on the moments of joy and laughter, as well as the times of struggle and tears. This helps me appreciate the full spectrum of human experience that the year brought me. Finally, I try to let go of unfulfilled desires or dreams. **It’s important to let go of what was not, to make space for what might become.** It’s lazy for me to drag into the new year unfulfilled goals from the previous year, thinking “this is the year”. But then I’m starting the new year in a place of debt, and having to play ‘catch-up’. It’s not very inspiring to feel behind at the start of a new chapter. This is why bringing peace to the year that was and wasn’t is more important than setting intentions and goals for the next year. To support my process, this year I answered the below journaling prompts. And this is how I learned to close 2023. _What did I learn about myself?_ _What new skills or knowledge did I gain?_ _When did I feel inspired?_ _When did I feel discouraged?_ _When did I feel scared?_ _What was surprising for me?_ _What was most difficult for me?_ _What sparked joy for me?_ _When did I feel most myself?_ _When did I feel least myself?_ _What am I most grateful for?_ _Who am I appreciative of?_ _Who do I feel resentment or unease with?_ _What do I regret?_ _How did my view of the world evolve?_ _How did my identity evolve?_ _What have you let go of this year?_ _What does my heart desire now?_ --- ### How to Motivate Published: 2023-12-16 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/motivate/ One recent morning, I felt energetically heavy and unable to drag myself out of bed. It was a rare occurrence, one I do not have much experience with dealing with. As I reluctantly sat down on my dining room table and started journaling, I realized that I did not feel inspired to move through my day and week. In the whirlwind of activities like hosting events during Web Summit, taking some time off to disconnect, and launching my book, I'd hit a post-high slump. **There was a missing ingredient that I did not know how to operate without: motivation.** The external goals I have wanted to achieve this year have mostly been achieved. And the ones that have not, I’ve let go of any expectations of. This leaves me feeling like I’m floating, without the anchor or grounding I now realized I get from having achievable projects to work towards. In this state of floating, I caught myself being passive. Figuratively twiddling my thumbs and _waiting for something to happen._ After a week or so of floating due to the lack of external motivators, I began to look elsewhere for motivation: inside. **I soon found it and realized that it is the greatest source of inspiration I have and what has actually driven me my entire life.** As an entrepreneur for over two decades now, I have often been frustrated when I notice that the people around me don’t seem to be as motivated as I am. It’s an unfair expectation however an expectation that I still naturally have. In business, I have more to win or lose than those around me. The carrot is big, juicy and sweet. The stick is also big, firm and painful. These are external though. The internal motivators for business have been about expressing, creating, building, learning and growing. _These have played a far bigger role in influencing my actions than money._ I know this because when I invest in the stock market or in other people’s companies, it is difficult to feel motivated. Yes, there is a potential external reward however there’s very little deep down inside of me that feels alive. I find that I just don’t care enough to put my energy, excitement and enthusiasm into it. At times, I have felt more motivated to exercise and improve my physical strength and fitness. At other times, I have felt less motivated. _Why?_ There are a multitude of excuses for other priorities in life that are ‘more important’. I don’t buy it though, I think there’s something deeper. Exercising to simply look good or feel good also isn’t enough. Exercising because I intellectually know that it’s good for me, both in the short term and long term, also doesn’t seem to be enough. The moments I have prioritized exercise are when I find joy and excitement from the activity itself. It is really about the journey, not the destination. Even when the journey involves sweat, hard work, and tension, when I’m into it, I like it, enjoy it and do it. **Having deadlines is rarely a motivator for me.** And as I’ve learned in being one who has set deadlines for years for others, it rarely brings out the best work in others as well. It may get the job done well enough, and oftentimes, that is all that is required, in which case deadlines help get something ‘good enough’ done ‘on time’. However, for true excellence and creativity, deadlines don’t work that well. _What does?_ Again, similar to exercise, enjoying the process. For example, I have really enjoyed deepening my writing practice and skills this year. I genuinely look forward to taking out my Remarkable ink tablet and scribbling away, or opening up a blank Google Doc and typing away. The best writing I have done this year has been when I don’t have a fixed limit of how much time I’ll spend writing, and don’t even have a fixed focus on what I’m trying to write about. _It feels meditative and soothing for my mind and soul to spill whatever is inside out._ On a recent first date, I had scheduled an hour in my afternoon to meet a woman for tea in the park. As we started connecting and chatting, I found myself increasingly curious about her and began to lose track of time. The tea in the park turned into a walk, which turned into dinner. _It was beautiful._ **What was most beautiful about it was noticing myself go with the flow.** I was more spontaneous than my schedule generally allows me to, and it was an important reminder to let the present moment guide my choices from time-to-time. So often, **I am guided by the choices I made for myself in a previous moment.** This requires me to be connected to myself and in tune with how I’m feeling and what I’m feeling. It is easy to numb that connection and be distracted by scrolling feeds, binge streaming and real-time messaging. _In these numbing activities, I am transported into someone else’s world and out of mine._ On a recent family vacation in Jamaica with my parents and sister’s family, a highlight for me was connecting with my nephew, who’s nearly three years old now. Each evening, loud music would play in the resort and he would take my hand and guide me to the stage that would be used to host performances later. With his innocent smile, he would begin to sway slowly from side-to-side, waiting to see if I would join him in the gentle dance. As I took his bait, his arms would begin to rock and so did mine. Then his little feet would begin to move, as would mine. And once it was clear that we were full on having a dance party, alone, standing on the stage in the middle of the resort, he would begin to smile and laugh. The purest laugh I’ve ever heard, as it was from a place of pure joy. Without any concern for the spectators that were quietly watching from afar or for his growing hunger, **he continued to follow his inner impulse** to dance with his uncle. _Yet another example of being guided by the present moment._ Staying connected with my inner energy, creativity and mood requires practice. And for me, those practices include meditation, journaling and dancing. While in a meditative mood, I begin to notice the strong thought patterns flowing through my mind, without judgment and over time, with acceptance. **The acceptance I practice in the moments when I’m meditating transfer to the moments when I am not meditating.** Journaling, whether it be publicly on this blog, or privately in my notebook, gives me the space to explore and go deeper into what’s really going on inside. So much of my daily choices are influenced by how I am feeling. **Taking the time to acknowledge them by writing them down has proven to be my most powerful practice.** And dancing puts me in contact with my emotions in a completely different way than meditation and journaling. It allows me to feel my feelings in my body. Rather than observe or reflect on them, to feel them is to experience them in a completely different way. **I come into contact with their intensity, and can often be surprised by what I learn.** As I have learned how to move past my post-high slump, I'm reminded by a simple truth: my motivation comes from a place deep inside me, much like the roots of a tree. These roots, hidden but essential, give me the strength to grow and reach towards my dreams and desires. It's a comforting thought, knowing that the source of my motivation is always within me, steady and strong, even as the world around me continues to change and challenge me. And that is how I learned to motivate. --- ### How to Bend Time Published: 2023-12-09 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/bend-time/ A new yoga studio opened outside the doorsteps of my apartment building in Lisbon recently. It’s been fun to re-incorporate a regular yoga practice, which I have not done for a few years since leaving New York. The familiarity of a studio, a consistent schedule, the convenience of location, all are factors that help me build momentum with the practice. **There’s just one problem: I am always late.** Despite the studio being a mere twenty meters from my building’s doorstep, I am always the last student to lay a mat on the floor and get seated. To make myself feel better, I have been reminding myself that I’m a _‘time bender’_ versus a _‘time keeper’_, which is a personality trait about myself that I accept. _More on this down below._ **This personality trait to bend time is a double edged sword though.** A few nights ago, I was speaking at an AI event and showed up one minute before I was called on stage. _I sympathize with the added stress that I inadvertently caused the event organizers._ Getting to the airport is a game of chicken that I play with the universe. **I am what we call a JITT** (just-in-time-traveler) and as a result, have an interesting mix of anxiety and adrenaline each time I call an Uber to take me to the airport. Last week, I awoke to the sound of the doorbell. My physical trainer had showed up and I overslept. One look at my bed hair, he blurted ‘good morning!’ with a smile and laugh. There is the other edge though. **I can get a surprisingly, if not superhuman, amount of things done.** And it’s not about just working harder, but very much about working smarter. Productivity is often misunderstood as efficiency, however it is really efficiency + effectiveness. Effectiveness means working on the right things. **Efficiency means working in an optimal way.** Productivity means working on the right things in an optimal way. Time bending allows me to be very productive. It forces me to be optimal. **I often get asked about how I get so much done.** My perception of time has something to do with it. I fundamentally believe that time is flexible, and not fixed. I don’t of course mean the physics of time, but rather my experience of time. Like how sometimes the longest flight can fly by and the shortest flight can take forever. The flight time is the flight time. It is my experience of it that is different. And my experience of it is often influenced by other factors in my life. **My experience of time is a reflection of my state of mind.** **My state of mind is a reflection of the state of my life.** _Or rather how I feel about my life._ For example, the moments when I feel I’m behind, that my to-do list is growing at a faster rate than I can cross things off, that the incoming messages in my inbox seem to never end and my schedule feels overflowing, my state of mind feels in one word: busy. In these moments, time flies by and I become impatient with the world around me and the littlest of things like traffic or a grocery store lineup irritate me because I feel time slipping away. Too much to do, not enough time. And then there are other moments when I feel a bit of boredom appear. Nothing really important is calling my attention, I’m well rested and fed, and my state of mind in one word is: relaxed. In these moments, time never ends and goes by very very slowly. I’m sitting on my couch, twiddling my thumbs, waiting for something to happen. Too much time, not sure what to do. I started to look into how time is perceived and came across some research of the psychology of time. **There are two kinds of people: timekeepers and time benders.** Timekeepers are those who always keep an eye on the clock. They're the friends who are always on time, and often anxious to be early. They have a built-in clock in their head, always ticking, keeping them in line with the schedule. I admire how they manage this, almost like they're in a rhythm with time, always in step. Then there are time benders. Me. We're a different breed. For us, time seems to change shape depending on what we're doing. If we're really into a task, we forget time completely, getting lost in what we're doing or who we’re with. The moment of anxiety happens after-the-fact, versus before. Time benders can more easily lose track of time when we're really focused. We're not great with routine things because we get bored. But give us something interesting, especially when there's a deadline, and we can do wonders. It's like we suddenly become friends with time, using every second in the most productive way. **It's clear that my relationship with time is a playful one.** One that I can not take too seriously. One that I can laugh and smile at. And one that I can always learn from. I find there is a sort of magic to the rush I feel throughout my day. Being a time bender isn't about squeezing every second out of the day; it's about finding the sweet spot between doing and living. And living is about feeling. Whether I’m lost in something exciting, or bored out of my mind, this flow of experiencing time differently is what keeps life interesting. And that is how I learned to bend time. --- ### How to Popcorn Published: 2023-11-30 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/popcorn/ My hands were salty, as I had just finished another bag. Feeling stimulated, I knew it would be temporary. Feeling stuffed, I still wanted more though. It was past midnight and an intense salt craving led me to binge on popcorn, yet again. The next morning, I woke up with a ‘salt headache’, as I have coined this distinct sensation, which is not that uncommon for me. The relief is to eat some fruit usually to balance out the sodium. Not feeling great, I wondered why I did this to my body yet again. I identify as a disciplined person yet in these moments, I cave to my cravings. I wanted to learn how to control what previously felt uncontrollable to me. It was in a therapy session that we dove into a subject that I had not yet thought about but is the invisible hand guiding so much of my life: impulse. **I’ve become curious to explore the nature of impulse and its role in my life.** It has opened up a new dimension of self-awareness, one that influences every aspect of my existence, from my professional decisions to my daily social interactions, and my routines and dietary choices, including popcorn impulses. Impulse, as I've come to understand, is more than a mere fleeting thought or a spontaneous desire. **It feels like an involuntary pulse of energy, an internal force that seeks expression in my external world.** This pulse of energy can manifest in numerous ways – the sudden craving for a salty snack, the urge to pick up a piece of garbage off the ground, or the need to stand and stretch after sitting for an extended period. It's a subtle force that compels me to surround myself with people, to host gatherings, or conversely, to retreat into solitude and pour my thoughts and feelings onto the pages of my journal. In reflecting upon these impulses, I've noticed moments when I consciously restrain them, applying a filter of rationality, social etiquette, or long-term goals. The often referenced ‘delayed gratification’ involves controlling impulse. For example, this past weekend I did not engage in Black Friday or Cyber Monday shopping. Despite me being in London for a few days, and having walked into Reiss (my favorite clothing store) somewhat unconsciously, I used my discipline to walk right out without buying anything. I resisted the temptation to check what was on sale on Amazon’s homepage as well. As I explore the topic more though, it becomes clear that **if my impulses are overly constrained, they tend to find other avenues for expression.** They can bubble up and manifest in various forms – binge-eating, excessive consumption of media, hyper-focus on exercise, or even an uncontrolled outpouring of emotions. These are not mere actions; they are the physical manifestations of inner energies that have been suppressed and are now demanding release. Nutrition is probably the best place I’ve seen myself overconstraining impulse, which turns out to be unhealthy. Like restricting my diet so much, and at some moment when my barriers are down, I will binge uncontrollably. **A constrained impulse finds a way to express itself, sooner or later.** It's a fascinating duality: the controlled versus the uncontrolled, the constrained versus the unconstrained. The essence of an impulse, however, is deeper than these binary categories. **It is not about classifying them as positive or negative, good or bad**, nor is it about suppressing or indulging them indiscriminately. The true challenge and opportunity I’m learning lies in learning how to contain these impulses – to recognize them, understand their origins and significance, and then choose how to respond to them. This process is not about constriction; it's about mindful acknowledgment and deliberate action. **Containment of my impulse allows me the chance to choose what to do with it.** In business and investing, I’ve been a victim to uncontained impulse. Making a snap decision that I later questioned and couldn’t find the reason behind it. Be it buying a stock based on a random data point or article, or starting a new business without taking a moment to think about it, or exploring a new market or product because it is new and shiny to me. This is why I’m fascinated by the idea of learning how to contain the impulse versus constrain it. This newfound understanding reveals where real freedom resides. **It's in the conscious choice of how to express an impulse.** When I decide how and when to act on these pulses of energy, I am no longer at their whims. There's a profound sense of power and agency in this – a feeling of being in control, not in a domineering way, but in a manner that allows for thoughtful and intentional expression of my inner desires and energies. Understanding impulses is teaching me about the delicate art of self-awareness and conscious decision-making. It’s an exploration of self-mastery, where each impulse is a chance to understand myself better and to make choices that align with what I truly want. **Self-control and discipline is not the answer**. It is more nuanced than that. It is about awareness, acknowledgement, and conscious choice. I have a long way to go on this path to understanding how to co-exist with my many impulses, in a healthy way. It’s about making conscious what has previously been unconscious. My decade of committed mindfulness practices have helped me refine the skills of awareness and paying attention to the subtleties of life. It is incredible what I begin to notice when I simply pay attention. In the meantime, when the salt craving hits me late into the evening, I will take a moment to try and contain the impulse before letting it run wild and free. And that is how I am learning to popcorn. --- ### How to Disconnect Published: 2023-11-24 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/disconnect2/ _‘I don’t know that I ever have’._ _‘Before phones were invented’._ ‘Before I was born’, These were the responses I had received from an innocent question. I had conducted such a simple experiment on myself, easy for most to do with some planning and support, **yet no one around me had done it.** Or even thought about it. The question I had asked my friends, which includes my recent experiment, was ‘_when was the last time you turned off your phone for 48 hours?_’. **Technology sits in every corner of my life**, and taking a step back from it can feel unnatural. As someone deeply entrenched in the tech industry, as an entrepreneur, leader, investor and enthusiast, technology is a key part of my identity. The idea of disconnecting from technology can feel like disconnecting from myself. However it is completely the opposite. **This past weekend, I turned off my phone for 48 hours continuously.** I took myself on vacation, alone, to Comporta, an upscale beach town a few hours south of Lisbon along the coastline of Portugal. On my drive down, I called my family and a few friends, and each conversation ended with ‘_oh, and I won’t be reachable for the next two days_’. It is not the first time by any means I’ve done this, so my disclaimer was not met with any resistance. Those closest to me know this is not uncommon. _And now the rest of the my world knows._ _As clearly most of you have never done this, let me describe the scene._ It felt like stepping into a 50s movie, one where the familiar glow of the screen was absent and I was fully present. This simple act of disconnecting created a space for observation of a different variety, allowing me to engage with the world and with myself in a way I normally don’t. **The first realization was the sheer weight of dependency I had developed on my phone**. Like a reflex, I found myself reaching for a device that was not on me. This phantom checking was a stark reminder of how many micro moments involve my phone, during my morning or evening routine alone. As the hours passed, a subtle but noticeable change began to take place. Time, which always seems to slip away in my regular life, started to expand. _Minutes felt longer_. This warping of time was not just a perception but a reflection of how much the pace of my living is influenced by my phone. And of course, it is not the physical object of a phone itself that is setting the pace. It is the information, the people, the inbox, the to-do list, and more that the phone puts in my hand and in my face, frequently throughout each waking moment. I’m surprised we haven’t yet invented a way to use our phones while we sleep. _It’s probably coming._ The irony of my situation was not lost on me. Here I was, an advocate of technology, and recently of AI, finding profound peace in its full absence. I began to notice the duality of technology - its ability to connect us across continents, yet its equal power to distance us from the very people next to us. **One of the most enriching aspects of this digital detox was the spontaneous conversations I had** with other hotel guests and staff where I was staying. These interactions, free from the distraction of a phone, were authentic and engaging. I observed myself more curious about the guests. I began to practice my Portuguese with the staff, taking the extra few minutes to ask them questions about themselves beyond the transactional interaction of what I needed at that moment. They reminded me of the fundamental human need for connection, something that ironically gets lost in digital realms. Each morning, as I sat down for breakfast, **a sense of sadness washed over me.** My eyes met scenes of couples, families, young and old, all absorbed in their devices. In a setting that was meant to be a retreat in nature, a break from the everyday hustle, it seemed like a lost opportunity. Absolutely everyone else at the hotel, from the five year old boy to the eighty year old grandparent, was on their phone. Here were people who had worked hard to earn a moment of peace, only to spend it in the company of their digital screens. This experience has led me to a resolution - to incorporate mini disconnection breaks into my regular routine. The constant influx of information in my life often puts me in a state of reactive triage, always processing, never quite reflecting. This break from technology allowed me to step out of this cycle, offering a chance for deeper connection. The mental relaxation that followed was refreshing. The cognitive load of processing emails, texts, and messages was far more taxing than I had realized. By stepping away, even for a short while, I gave my mind the much-needed break it needed. This pause in the constant mental sorting and responding left me with a sense of order and calm inside. **This experiment of turning off my phone for 48 hours reminded me of the value of taking a pause.** _And it really is simple to do._ It showed me that in the quiet moments, away from the relentless ping of messages, lies the opportunity for genuine connection with the world around me and inside of me. I hope that when I ask friends in the future the same question, their answers are ‘_just last week’_. And that is how I learned to disconnect. --- ### How to Host Published: 2023-11-17 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/host/ My home felt eerily quiet, a foreign sound that felt unfamiliar as of late. For much of the previous week, the furniture had been moved aside. The carpets rolled up and stored. Speakers had stood tall on stands. The kitchen overflowed with food and drinks. And the bedrooms were filled with visiting friends. Not anymore though. The burst of excitement from a week full of parties, friends and events at my home has now faded. A few hundred people came through my home, as I hosted gatherings each night, on top of the thousands of people who came to the off-site events I hosted around Lisbon this past week. Hosting gatherings at the surface appears to be an outward facing activity, however I have learned that it is as much an inwards facing journey. **Hosting is a metaphor for how to move through life.** Hosting parties, for me, is about creating a space for connection and shared experience. It's an opportunity to bring together diverse individuals and watch the magic that unfolds from their interactions. I find joy in the spontaneity, the laughter, the deep conversations that often emerge. But it's more than just an event. Opening the doors of my home to guests feels like sharing a piece of me. It's a vulnerable act, allowing others to step into my personal space, where every item and corner tells a story about who I am. **This vulnerability is not unlike the moments in life when I choose to share my innermost thoughts and feelings with someone.** Both require a leap of faith, trusting that in showing my true self, I'll be met with warmth and acceptance. The act of inviting people into my home is an act of vulnerability, of opening up my personal space and extending an olive branch. It's a way of saying, _"Here I am, in my element. I welcome you to be a part of it."_ It is more than just a social occasion or a celebration; it's a chance to forge new connections and deepen existing ones. Each guest brings their own stories, perspectives, and energies, creating a unique moment that will never be replicated. **These are microcosms of life itself, where diverse paths intersect**, if only for a moment, this time in my living room. It's fascinating to observe how these interactions unfold, often leaving me with new insights and a richer understanding of the world around me, without leaving my home. The laughter, the shared stories, the clinking of glasses – all of it weaves together to create a feeling of connectedness that's both rare and precious. Hosting, like life, often requires asking for help. **It's a humbling experience to admit that I can't do everything alone**, whether that means getting help in preparing food, setting up the space, or cleaning up afterwards. This act of reaching out mirrors the many times in life when I've needed a helping hand. It's a reminder that interdependence is not a weakness but a fundamental aspect of being human. Everyone has strengths and weaknesses, and it's in acknowledging and embracing this fact that I find not only the help I need but also opportunities to strengthen bonds with others. Setting boundaries is a crucial part of both hosting and living. Just as I ask guests to remove their shoes or let them know when the party's over, **life too demands that I set limits and uphold my values**. _Initially, this can be uncomfortable_. The worry about what others might think or how they might react can be frightening. But with time, I've learned that staying true to my beliefs and desires is key to maintaining my sense of self. Boundaries aren't just about saying 'no'; they're about respecting my own needs and ensuring that my space – both physical and emotional – is treated with care. There's a unique energy that comes with hosting events in my own space. Unlike the often draining experience of navigating a room full of strangers at a networking event, having people over is invigorating. In my home, I am in my element, surrounded by familiar comforts and faces. This familiarity removes the cognitive load that comes with meeting new people in unfamiliar settings. **In life, when I am true to myself and in environments where I feel at ease, my energy levels are naturally higher**, allowing me to engage more fully with those around me. After the last guest has left and the quiet returns, I take time to rest and rebalance. This downtime is essential, a period for reflection and recentering. It allows me to process the experiences, conversations, and emotions that the gathering brought. This practice of taking a step back after a busy period mirrors the ebb and flow of life itself. It's in these moments of solitude and calm that I find the space to recharge, to gather my thoughts, and to prepare for whatever comes next. **This balance between activity and rest, engagement and solitude, keeps life both sustainable and fulfilling.** With each event I host, I find the process becoming easier, more fluid. Experience has made hosting people easier for me. I grew up watching my parents host, and the training I had, unknowingly, has helped give me the confidence to host often on my own. Like any skill, living – and hosting – becomes more **effortless with practice and experience**. As I feel the effortless nature of the activity, I can focus my energy instead of the joyful interactions and memorable moments. I feel gratitude for the energy that many people brought into my life this past week, and for all of the people that supported the intention to bring people together. Hosting really is a microcosm of life - unpredictable, enriching, and full of opportunities for connection. And that is how I learned how to host. --- ### How to Diwali Published: 2023-11-10 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/diwali/ I quietly tip-toed through the living room while trying not to wake my parents, who I could hear snoring loudly, or my sister, who was sleeping deeply. I sat down gently in front of the makeshift altar we had set up the evening before, to check if the candle was still burning. It was. My focus then shifted towards the savory and sweet snacks sitting on the floor. My eyes widened first, followed by my mouth as I indulged without restraint. _With both hands._ A few hours later, when my mom woke up and came to say good morning, she could see the crumbs painted on my cheeks and the look of guilt on my face. She smiled. My sister then made an appearance and started to complain about how her favorite treats were no longer there. She had been saving them, not for me, but for the morning after. This was the scene from my childhood, the day after Diwali. **Diwali, often referred to as the Festival of Lights and the New Year celebration in the Indian calendar, is still a significant celebration in my life.** Not so much for its religious association, but for the nostalgia it brings. It takes me back to my childhood, to the joyous gatherings with family and friends, the delicious Indian food, and the vibrant colors of the festivities. And of course, the sweet taste of the morning after. **Diwali is a celebration of togetherness and of community**. Growing up each year, our house was full of family and friends. It included those who both celebrated Diwali and those who had never heard of it before. That’s why it is no surprise that last night, I hosted my own Diwali celebration in Lisbon, with my close and new friends here. **Diwali symbolically represents the triumph of light over darkness**. It's a time to reflect on the past year, to let go of any negativity, and to welcome in positivity and light. What others can take from Diwali, regardless of their cultural or religious background, is the universal message of hope and resilience. It's a reminder that even in the darkest times, there is always a light at the end of the tunnel. **During the course of this past year, I have found myself in periods of darkness.** Regardless of the reason, those moments were painful and when I reflect back on how I transitioned from darkness to light, there were a few key ingredients that were constant. The first was space. Be it a trip away for a few days, time to reflect with my journal, therapist or close friends, or just giving space to whatever I was feeling or experiencing. _With space, light started to appear._ The second was connection. Be it with people around me, people familiar to me, or even with a purpose or meaning greater than myself. _With connection, I get reminded of what I have forgotten but needed to know._ The third was compassion. Be it by having a good cry to release the emotion, taking inspiration from someone else’s story or doing something nice for myself even when I didn’t feel I deserved it. _With compassion, love reappeared. Always._ **In the embrace of Diwali, there's a silent acknowledgment of life's fleeting nature.** Each candle, with its brief but bright burn, is a gentle reminder that while moments are temporary, their beauty doesn't have to be. Another reminder of the fleeting beauty around us is the use of fireworks or sparklers to paint the dark sky with lights. It's a celebration that reminds me of the art of cherishing the present, illuminating the ordinary, and finding the extraordinary in everyday life. Diwali is a festival that doesn't just light up the world but also ignites a spark within, a reminder to carry a bit of this positivity forward, long after the last lamp has flickered out. And the morning after, when the guests have departed and the sun has risen to shine light on everything, there’s a peaceful sort of clarity I feel. The memory of the celebration lingers, a reminder to choose hope over despair and light over darkness. And this is how I learned how to Diwali. --- ### How to Friend Published: 2023-11-03 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/friends/ For a moment, time had stopped. I had gone back to the future. I sat there silently, as it all felt unreal to me. Then, I slid gently from the firm couch to the soft carpet in my living room. A spontaneous smile bursted on my face, as I realized it was not only the furniture that was moving from firm to soft. While I don’t remember the conversation that evening amongst my friends, I remember how it felt. The accents were familiar, not foreign. The smiles were genuine, not forced. The laughs were comforting, not awkward. The stories were easy and impersonal, not sensitive or serious. A few once very close friends from twenty years ago were at my place in Lisbon for dinner. They were passing through and remembered that I now live in Portugal. **But I hadn’t seen or even spoken with them in years**—we had grown apart as adults, as happens. _Yet together_, it felt like we were back in our university days in Canada and nothing had changed. **But everything in my life has changed since then**. I became an adult. I became a business person. I became an expat. I became a meditator and yogi. I became an author. _Yet together_, none of that mattered. Despite not having been in each other’s lives, our connection has nothing to do with what I had become. **But every new person I connect with in my adult life seems to only pay attention to what I have become**. As a result, I then pay attention to what I have become. _Yet together_, I was reminded of how safe and secure I feel in the company of familiar faces—ones that I know will not judge me regardless of what I say, do or don’t do. **As an adult, making new friends, like real friends, is not easy**. The structures that come from being in school, or working a job early in one’s career, are no longer around to provide a well of new connections. Our busy and over scheduled lives make it difficult to have the space to be spontaneous and serendipitous when meeting new people. When I do make that space though, and keep an open energy, I learn that the **new connections are always there**, _sometimes right in front of me._ A few weeks ago, I was at a weekend retreat for health tech entrepreneurs and investors in the north of Portugal. On the last day, I heard someone laughing loudly in the background and remember feeling annoyed. I turned around to see who it was and the next thing I know, I’m in the group conversation. Leaving my judgment behind, I began to engage with the group and noticed a sibling-like chemistry emerge between the loud voice and me. I ended up giving her a ride to one of the afternoon events and we bonded instantly. At the seated dinner that night, we were coincidentally placed next to one another. “_It was meant to be_”, we joked. Together, we both became the loud voices annoying others that evening. The next morning, I gave her a preview copy of my book, as I said goodbye. She texted me that night to share that she had read the entire book (it’s an easy read) and loved it. What I appreciated the most about my new friend was that we had no idea what each other’s professional identities were (and still don’t) or our stories. **The connection is based on how we were, more than who we are.** I recently hosted a spontaneous Halloween party at my place. Over twenty people showed up, all dressed up, on just a few days notice. (_I continue to be amazed at how available everyone in the expat community is. It’s refreshing to not have to schedule and plan seeing friends weeks in advance— like I used to in New York_). One of my friends pulled me aside and said “_you were right_”, smiling at me. She reminded me that we had first met one year ago to the day, and I had told her “you’re moving to Portugal, you just don’t know it yet”. She and her partner had just signed a lease for an apartment in Lisbon. “_Took you long enough!_” was my response, and we gave each other a warm hug. She could live anywhere. She chose Lisbon because community and friends are important to her right now in life. It is for me as well. **Over the past year, I have become a longevity nerd**. Experimenting with various bio hacking techniques, including taking cold showers, a fist full of supplements day and night, IV drips with multivitamins pumped directly into my veins and minus 120 degrees Celsius cryotherapy treatments. _My at-home red light panels just arrived._ However I have come to learn that **the ultimate longevity hack is to have close friends.** Close friendships, where I feel safe and secure to be myself, and can share a level of intimacy and vulnerability with, do more for my physical well being than any of the dozens of treatments or pills I take. **There is a tension I have felt over the years between old friends and new friends**. _Where to spend my time and energy?_ Old friends represent my past, while new friends represent my future. However I’m learning that this binary way to look at this part of my life isn’t reflective of reality. The old connections that have seen me across many chapters in life have a special place in my heart. The new connections may at times feel more relevant and connected to my present life, location and interests. There is a reason people are in my life, and my _back to the future_ moment that night, sitting in the comfort of my home surrounded by long-time friends, was a helpful reminder of this. As I have changed my country, my career, and my lifestyle, **it is not my friends that have changed** **but how I relate to them.** Unlike many things in life though, friends are something I am happy to continue to collect more of. And this is how I learned how to friend. --- ### How to Haircut Published: 2023-10-28 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/haircut/ I was surprised he didn’t recognize me and even more surprised with his honesty. As I sat down in his chair, he continued to stare at me intensely and repeated, “nope, I don’t remember you”. That rarely happens to me these days. _It was a new feeling, and slightly unpleasant._ Determined to see if he would remember me, I brought out stories that are uniquely mine, like how I live in Portugal. _Again, he did not remember._ The scene was Wayne’s barber shop in central London. It has been a place I had frequented earlier in the year. **Wayne seemed particularly upbeat and in a happy mood that day.** Without the distraction of my phone, my attention moved to him. Instead of trying to see if he remembered me, my attention shifted to learn more about him. “How long have you been cutting hair, Wayne?”, I asked. “How old are you Kunal?”, he responded back. _We both knew where this was going._ Once I shared with him my age, he responded back with the expected “longer than you’ve been alive my friend”. As I sat there, silently watching him shorten, trim and clean up the hair on my head, the wheels inside my head began turning round and round. Bundled into this one fact that he’d been cutting hair longer than I’d been alive, I knew there were many lessons about life for me to learn from Wayne. For example… **My attention span has been getting noticeably shorter**. I’m finding it more difficult these days to sit and watch an entire movie. Definitely not in silence. Definitely not alone. Definitely not without my phone. _And here was Wayne, in the same profession, for over 40 years. When asked when he will retire, his response was a jolly “I genuinely love coming into work everyday, I wake up in the morning and look forward to it”._ **My businesses have at times struggled** with winning and keeping clients, having to compete in rapidly changing technology industries where every few years required me to reinvent the product or service. _And here was Wayne, with the original recurring revenue model, telling me about his clients who have been with him for 20 years. I’ve rarely heard of a technology company keeping a client for 20 years, let alone many clients._ My interests are most often related to ‘personal interests’, that is people or things that have some direct influence on my life. And here was Wayne, having many ‘impersonal interests’ that have no bearing on his life. He talked about his hometown, his three-week vacation, his opinion on politics and other seemingly random things. **My desire for speed and efficiency** in life and business can often lead to suboptimal outcomes. ‘Progress over perfection’ has been my mantra. _And here was Wayne, his attention to detail, his focus, his patience clear in sight. He was fully present, not rushing, not distracted. He was in his element, doing what he did for the love of it, not for the sake of finishing it and moving on._ **My life is full of connections** that at times can feel superficial or transactional. Each week, dozens and sometimes hundreds of people reach out to me asking for something of me. I have to filter everything and in the process, filter myself. _And here was Wayne, building a connection with me that went beyond superficial niceties. The infamous ‘therapist chair’ that is often the barbershop. The stability, presence and genuineness of how he shows up for whomever sits in his chair is inspiring._ **I began to further appreciate the value of authentic human connection**. The world today in theory is more connected than ever, yet ironically at times feels more disconnected than ever. Listening to and watching Wayne, I realized that while technology continues to introduce change seemingly everywhere, the core of what made businesses and relationships last was the same: _consistency and genuine care._ **It's easy for me to get caught up in the race for success and forget about the simple joy of doing something well.** Wayne showed me that it's often the simplest things that bring the most satisfaction. As I stood up from Wayne's chair, I felt lighter, not just because of the weight of the hair that had been cut, but due to gaining some additional clarity on _how to live._ Curious to see if he’ll remember me next time, **I handed him a copy of my newly published book, How to Live.** He received it with so much joy and enthusiasm that I felt warm and fuzzy inside. “Maybe the next edition will have a chapter about you Wayne”, were my parting words to him as I walked out, with a smile on my face and a skip in my step. And that is how I learned to haircut. --- ### How to Surf Published: 2023-10-20 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/surf/ The drive to Nazare, in the north of Portugal, had been filled with anticipation. With each mile, images of towering waves filled my mind, replaying scenes from the famed "_100 foot wave_" documentary. Nazare is not just another beach. It is the stage for the **largest surf waves in the world**, the place where surfers from every corner rushed to at a moment's notice, hungry to face the ocean's challenge. Parking along the cliff, my heart raced as I prepared to witness these waves. Yet, as my eyes met the horizon, they found a different picture. The vast ocean, known for its roaring waves, lay silent and undisturbed, as flat as a sheet of glass. The world seemed to stand still, waiting for a breath, a sign, anything. **Disappointment washed over me.** My excitement of witnessing the power and chaos of nature was met with nothing but calmness. As I stood there, the calmness on the outside began to infiltrate me on the inside. The gentle swish of the waves, the soft chirping of distant birds, and the warm sun on my face created a serene tableau. _The world is a mirror_. It’s what someone once said to me that has stuck with me. **The still ocean before me mirrored my own recent days**. Where a few weeks ago I experienced turbulent emotions and racing thoughts, I no longer did at that moment. There's a rhythm to life. Much like the ocean, there are moments of fury and moments of peace. Embracing the calm, I took in the vastness, the serenity, and the quiet whispers of nature. **Nazare had offered me a different gift that day, a lesson in finding beauty in stillness**, in the quiet moments between the storms. And as I walked along the shore, the gentle lull of the ocean sang a lullaby, echoing the calm within. Watching the surferless ocean, I was reminded of my first solo vacation. It was at the age of thirty and I spontaneously went to Costa Rica for a week. After checking myself into a yoga hotel, i.e. a hotel with an all-you-can-yoga studio attached to it and vegetarian meals provided, my roommate encouraged me to join him for a surfing lesson. _I had no intention of going to surf however I said yes._ **I remember being so focused on standing up on the board that I kept falling**. And each fall hurt, a reminder to not try so hard. It was only when I relaxed and let the waves guide me that I was able to stand. This taught me a valuable lesson about going with the flow, both in surfing and in life. Standing at the cliff in Nazare last weekend, enjoying the warm soft breeze on my face, I closed my eyes for a moment. I naturally began to meditate, standing still, and was reminded of when I was first learning to meditate ten years ago. I was told to imagine my mind as a still lake, but all I could see were waves of thoughts. It was only when I stopped trying to control the waves and just observed them that I found a sense of calm. Then what came to mind as I continued my beach walk in Nazare was a moment when I was leading my business through a challenging period. We had just lost a major client unexpectedly that represented a disproportionate share of revenue. _I felt blindsided._ **The more I tried to control the situation, the more chaotic it seemed to become**. I was unnecessarily worrying about other clients, in unhelpful ways to my team, and taking the feedback from the one client who was no longer a client personally. It was only when I took a step back and reflected on the situation that I realized the chaos was not in the business, but in my mind. As I started to calm my mind, I was able to see the situation more clearly, and respond to the situation instead of reacting based on my impulses. My mind is big and beautiful, like the ocean. My thoughts are still and turbulent, like the waves. I get to surf the thoughts of my mind whenever I choose to. I can sit still for a moment, sit back and quietly observe. Where I drove to Nazare that day hoping to see what was going on outside of me, I ended up getting to see what was going on inside of me. And this was far more relevant and valuable. And that is how I learned how to surf. --- ### How to Trek Published: 2023-10-13 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/trek/ The cold water started to enter my boots and then it moved up. It was moving slow enough that I could feel the goosebumps forming on my skin as the cold water began to wrap around my legs. I could sense the flight-or-flight response system in my brain firing, asking ‘_is this safe?_’. It was safe, so I thought. The next thing I knew I was unexpectedly fully submerged under water. My reaction surprised me. I had slipped. Sitting there with my butt on the hard rocks, I began to laugh. The fall broke the tension I had been feeling in my mind. The tension in my mind that had been growing since the moment I was handed boots, pants, a lifejacket and a helmet. That was back on land, as I was being instructed on how to dress. All of the preparation, precaution and warnings had gotten me nervous. My mind got lost in wandering and wondering what might happen. And in doing so, **I was no longer paying attention to what was happening and distracted with what might happen.** This moment was the beginning of a day-long river trekking activity in the North of Portugal last weekend, where I ‘hiked’ up a river. 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Here was something I had never heard of and had done before. In response, my mind was flooded with worry, almost instinctively. _How many other moments am I faced with something new that I instinctively worry about just because it is new?_ I imagine it is a survival instinct, part of evolutionary biology and helps me stay alive. However this attitude of responding with ‘I’m not sure because I don’t know about it’ limits my living. It constrains the opportunities and the experiences that I can access. **The more I say ‘yes’ to what I don’t know, the more I build the confidence to say ‘yes’ to what I don’t know.** The reverse is also true. The more I say ‘no’ to what I don’t know, the more comfortable I’ll be to say ‘no’ to what I don’t know. The second challenge I had to overcome was my body. Actually, the challenge with my body was yet again a challenge with my mind. In response to not having done this activity before and worrying that it was going to be physically challenging, my mind began to worry during the activity that my body couldn’t do it. It was like if my mind was the parent and my body was the child, the parent was telling the child it couldn’t do something that the child could actually do and might even like. However if the child blindly listened to the parent, it would not even try. My body loved the experience. It was challenging, in a good way. The endorphins running through me afterwards felt electric, I felt alive. I felt energized. **I felt I wanted to do it again.** This is the difference between knowledge and experience. My mind swims in the sea of knowledge. Both actual knowledge and fictitious knowledge. It will study what is and imagine what might be. My body swims in the sea of experience. It only exists in this present moment, and engages with life through its senses and many parts. The knowledge of my mind mixed with the experience of my body created this wisdom that I can do things I don’t know how to do or know much about. And it is this wisdom that shapes my choices on how I move through life. And this is how I learned how to trek through life. 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It was a bit surreal, standing amidst the pioneers of the field: author and clinician Gabor Mate with his Canadian charm, David Sinclair, a twenty-year Harvard researcher changing the field, and Bryan Johnson, who has claimed to reverse age himself from forty-six to twenty-six. Longevity has been an interest of mine for a long time now. **About seven years ago, I started biohacking.** Much like the initial days of a promising startup, I was filled with a mix of excitement and caution. The mission was simple yet daunting: _to understand and optimize my health._ It began with a spreadsheet. I tracked everything - from the tranquility of my meditation sessions to the frenetic pace of my daily step count. My 2015 spreadsheet became a mirror, reflecting not just tangible metrics like weight and sleep but also the ebb and flow of my mental clarity, food intake, socializing and general emotional regulation. I then began correlating data with variables like weather, day of the week, location and the number of meetings I had. It felt groundbreaking. However, as is often the case with my passions that flare brightly, I risk getting all consumed. My engineer's mind loved building the system, sometimes even more than in understanding the insights it provided. Making tweaks to my routines became a game. _How would my step count shift if I changed my diet when I was traveling? What happened to my sleep if I meditated in the evening instead of the morning?_ The quest for answers turned into an obsession, and the joy of discovery was slowly overshadowed by the weight of constantly being watched. A realization struck a few years into my biohacking obsession. The tools I had embraced to enrich my life were, ironically, taking away from life. I then began distancing myself from the relentless data and spreadsheets, **seeking instead a balanced data-free approach to health.** As I stood amidst the intellectual giants at the conferences, I was reminded of the delicate interplay between passion and obsession, and the importance of ensuring that my pursuit of longevity doesn't overshadow my joy of living. When I moved to Portugal over two years ago, my inner biohacker was reawakened. In my new surroundings, I revisited my previous endeavors, but with a renewed fervor. Monthly blood tests became my norm, where I probed into over one hundred health markers. Sleep studies, gut health, nutrition, toxicity levels, skin and eye health — _even tracking hair loss._ If there was a metric, a number, or a graph I could find, I had it. My thirst for knowledge turned into an avalanche of data, stored meticulously in Google Drive folders. One could say that I had created a digital labyrinth, and I was its tireless architect. My relentless pursuit didn't just bewilder me, but even the medical professionals I started working with. The look on their faces was unmistakable as they tried to filter through my exhaustive reports. The turning point was a candid conversation, where concerned **doctors gently pointed out my spiraling obsession.** They were right. It was déjà vu, reminding me of the earlier crossroads I'd faced. Taking their words to heart, I once again decided to scale back, opting for a more balanced, holistic approach to health. Ironically, as I began detaching from the deluge of data, a newfound peace settled in. My health, mental, emotional, energetic and physical, felt reinvigorated. It was as if **by letting go of the constant need to measure, I was truly starting to live.** The journey had come full circle, underscoring the timeless lesson that sometimes, less truly is more. The realm of science and research is experiencing leaps and bounds, demystifying the intricacies of the human body and the enigma of aging. It feels like an exhilarating time to be alive, standing at the cusp of revolutionary discoveries. As with every boon, however, there comes a caveat. The more I delve into the world of biohacking and the wider scientific community, the clearer it becomes: _intentionality is key._ Just as a painter knows that the brush is but a medium to bring their vision to life, I realized that these advances, these tools, are just that – _instruments_. Their power lies not in their inherent capability, but in how judiciously they are used. This revelation became even more poignant for me at the conferences. A recurrent theme emerged from the voices of thought leaders and visionaries: the tantalizing prospect that humans might be on the brink of outliving death. Or at least staving off premature death from preventable disease. The very pursuit to defy death, to extend one's years, seemed to obscure the essence of truly living. I recall Bryan Johnson, his attire emblazoned with the bold words “don’t die.” As he enthusiastically laid out his regimented routine and lifestyle, an alternative caption for his shirt began to form in my mind: “don’t live.” The irony wasn't unfamiliar to me. On multiple occasions, **I'd plunged headfirst into the deep end of health obsession.** I meticulously tracked, measured, and analyzed, letting this pursuit eclipse the myriad other facets of existence. Time and again, introspection led me back to the understanding that health isn't the purpose but the means. It's what enables me to live. There's a timeless proverb that elegantly captures this duality: _“A healthy person has one thousand worries; an unhealthy person has only one.”_ In my most obsessive phases of health-tracking, **I became a healthy person with one thousand worries.** Much of my anxiety was a creation of my own psyche, an intricate dance of my mind convincing my body of issues that weren't really there. And this is how I learned how to not live. --- ### How to Live Published: 2023-09-29 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/live/ The journey of introspection has not been an easy one for me. I understand why now so many people choose to stay unaware. _Ignorance may just be bliss._ My journey of introspection became a journey of transformation, a journey of growth, and a journey of becoming through experimentation. What truly matters are the lessons learned along the way. My curiosity to experiment with life began ten years ago, at a moment in life when I felt I ‘had it all’, but did not feel satisfied, content and happy, like I had expected to. To be willing to experiment with life meant accepting that I did not know how to live. Or rather I no longer wanted to buy the beliefs I had been sold my entire life until that point. Ten years ago when I opened a door within myself, curious to see what was inside, I noticed a shift, deep within myself. My journey of introspection has been one of learning how to live, from a place of **living with the lights on versus with the lights off.** There have been times of struggle, times of doubt, and times of despair. There have also been times of joy, times of discovery, and times of profound understanding. And it is in these moments, these fleeting moments of clarity and understanding, **that I found my true self and my own way on how to live.** “I don’t know” are the most powerful words that I have said to myself. These words are an invitation for me to **be open, to be curious, to be playful.** As I journeyed inwards, I began to understand that life is not a series of random events but a play of interconnected moments, each scene scripted into the fabric of my existence. _Some are joyful, some are sad, and some are magical._ And each scene, no matter how insignificant it may seem, has its place, its purpose, its meaning. It is this understanding, this acceptance of life's inherent uncertainties, that brings about a profound sense of peace for me today. **I am not in control of life.** **I am only in control of how I choose to move through life.** Living in Europe now, I have become more accustomed to hearing, listening and watching football from time-to-time. As I am not really interested in the sport, I see the game as a metaphor for how to live. There are those that choose to sit at home, on the couch, and watch the game. This is exciting because they get to see someone else live their dream. _It is sad for the same reason._ There are those who are fortunate enough to watch the game be played live in a stadium. This is exciting because they get to feel the energy, hear the sounds, experience the moment up-close. _It can be inspiring and motivating, if they do something with the fire that’s been lit within._ And then there are those who are foolish enough to lace up, boot up and get on the field to play the game. They have to work tirelessly, learn how to rely on and trust others, be disappointed and be defeated more often than not, and rarely score a goal. _Win or lose, they have the satisfaction of knowing they tried._ This choice, **to be on the field versus in the stands or sitting at home**, is a core ingredient to my philosophy of how to live. _It is what motivates me and moves me._ In the quiet corners of my mind, I often contemplate **the profound influence of the company I keep**, the thoughts I entertain, and the environment I inhabit. It's a thought that lingers, like the subtle fragrance of a forgotten perfume, permeating the essence of my existence. I've come to realize that the friends I choose, the colleagues I engage with, and the surroundings I immerse myself in have a significant role in shaping my perspectives and attitudes. It's a delicate dance of influence and adaptation, a constant interplay of external forces molding my internal world. **There's a certain power in consciously choosing positive influences and environments.** It's akin to planting a seed in fertile soil, nurturing it with care, and watching it blossom into a beautiful flower. It's about fostering growth and positivity within myself, a process that demands mindfulness and intentionality. The same principle applies to what I allow into my mind and body. The books I read, the music I listen to, the food I consume - _they all leave an imprint on my being._ **My journey, like most others, has been often fraught with challenges and uncertainties.** There's a certain irony in the human condition to resist transformative experiences or changes, especially when they hold the potential for growth. **I am here to grow.** As I navigate through the labyrinth of life, I often find myself grappling with internal conflicts. It's a struggle to reconcile with the various facets of life, a battle waged within the confines of my mind. Yet, it's through this struggle that I discover my strength, my resilience, my values. Throughout this journey, I've experienced moments of revelation, instances of deep understanding that have altered my life. These moments, these climaxes in the narrative of my life, have ushered in a profound shift in my understanding of how to live. They've enlightened me, enriched me, and ultimately led me towards a deeper understanding of myself and **how I choose to engage with the world.** As I reflect on my journey of introspection, I find myself arriving at a place of acceptance and understanding. I don’t know how long I will stay at this place, as I know everything is impermanent, however while I am here, I feel inspired to share how I have learned how to live so far. --- ### How to Be Lazy Published: 2023-09-23 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/lazy/ Growing up as a kid, my sister and I watched a lot of Tom & Jerry cartoons. _On repeat._ Tom, the cat, was a perfect example of misguided effort. The elaborate traps, the complex plans, the over-thinking and over-planning, all to catch one mouse. Jerry, the mouse, on the other hand was the embodiment of efficiency and cleverness. A simple hold in the wall, a wedge of cheese stolen here or there, life always seemed good for him. Jerry was lazy. _I am lazy._ People around me often ask me how I get so much done. Until now, I would brush off the question. My truth may be unexpected though: I am actually very lazy. **I am the laziest person I know.** And my laziness is the fuel for me to learn how to be efficient and effective. **Productivity is not about doing more**. It is about doing more of the right things. And being motivated to figure out what the right things are, and how to do them most efficiently, comes from a deep laziness I feel. Laziness is often viewed negatively, akin to a stain on one’s character or way of living. Laziness has endured a PR crisis for centuries. It’s been the scapegoat, much like that one coworker who spends more time making coffee than doing actual work. _My experience has been different._ This isn't to say that I spend my days lounging around, doing nothing. Far from it. Rather, my laziness has helped me learn to prioritize, to identify what and who is worth my time and energy. **Identifying as an entrepreneur also helps foster my laziness.** In entrepreneurship, I have built comfort with risk and tolerance for the unknown. Despite what my teams might believe, I don’t aim for perfection, as I have learned (the hard way) it’s not worth aiming for. _Progress over perfection._ This character trait of laziness and accepting less than perfection has shown up in so many parts of my life. Take for instance the seemingly simple task of assembling furniture. I am no carpenter, and my attempts at piecing together even the most basic IKEA furniture have often resulted in wobbly chairs and tables, and a mysterious surplus of screws. _And I am totally fine with it._ Since March 2020, I’ve been cutting my own hair and stopped going to a barber. Initially due to circumstance, now I continue to cut my own hair, sometimes not well at all as I am in a rush, another symptom of laziness. However I know that my hair will grow back. However it looks like it is temporary. _I am not aiming for perfection._ I studied Software Engineering at the University of Waterloo. I understood early on that I had no intention of becoming a software developer, and that was clear to me. I would probably hire them, I thought to myself at the time (which turned out to be true). **This clarity allowed me to focus on what I valued most: my time.** Upon receiving an assignment, I would first look at the marking scheme. I quickly realized that the vast majority of the marks were for identifying the logic and flow of an algorithm and a mere ten percent was for being able to compile the code and getting the nitty gritty syntax right. My strategy was simple: I would solve the problem in what’s referred to as ‘pseudo code’, which are plain English instructions for the flow of an algorithm, versus actually programming it in a specific non-English language. It would take me thirty minutes to come up with the pseudo code and I’d submit it as is, without writing a single line of actual code. Other students also took thirty minutes or so to come up with the pseudo code, however would then go on to spend three to six hours trying to write the code and get it to compile, for a mere extra ten percent. Another example of me being lazy. And it worked, _every single time._ In today's lightning-speed world, where everyone's burning both ends of the candle, laziness is seen as a pothole on the freeway to success. But a change in perspective reveals it as a GPS guiding to smarter routes, bypassing the traffic of redundant tasks. In my own life, I've found that when I allow myself to be lazy, to take a step back and reflect, I am able to work more efficiently. I am able to identify what tasks are truly important and which ones are merely busywork. Bill Gates once said something about choosing a lazy person for a tough job. Why? _They'd find the easiest way to do it._ **Delegation is another fancy term**. Strip it down, and it's just handing off tasks. Like giving away last season's impulse purchases, it's about releasing the old to make space for the new. Laziness also requires a degree of humility. Humility makes it easier for me to ask for help. It helps me not overly identify with having to do everything myself. **Learning to not find my self worth from doing everything myself is a precursor to my laziness**. I imagine for many well educated people in a modern society that encourages independence, leaning on others can challenge one’s sense of identity. The irony is that when I try less, I do more as I learn to lean on other people, processes and practices that make life easier and simpler. Laziness is not avoiding work. It's dodging unnecessary work. Laziness is not an absence of motivation, it is an insatiable quest for efficiency. Laziness is not a lack of will but a will to do less and achieve more. Laziness is about swimming with the current rather than against it. Laziness is about making the tools and technology work for me. As a leader and manager of teams, my laziness extends to the people around me. I am constantly looking for ways that my teams can avoid unnecessary work and be more efficient and effective. In this age of back-to-back meetings and never-ending to-do lists, maybe it's time for everyone to channel the inner Jerry, or Kunal. To search for strategies that are efficient, effortless, and smart. To take shortcuts that aren’t just shorter, but also smarter. I've learned how to work smarter, not harder. I've learned to value my time and energy. Most importantly, I've learned to embrace my laziness, to celebrate it not as a vice but as a virtue. And that is how I learned to be lazy. --- ### How to Fail Published: 2023-09-16 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/fail/ The sun was slowly taking its first steps into the morning sky. I could feel the cool moisture around my feet as I glided across the quiet waves. I sighed, feeling satisfied that I made it to the sea. It had been a few weeks, I missed her. _She had been calling me_. Steading myself on a fragile bridge between the sea and sky, I felt like **time stopped for me**. The world was holding its breath, the silence everywhere was palatable. The warm salty breeze embraced me, danced with me and pushed me. I began to glide effortlessly, on top of the mirror-like sea. Every stroke, distorting the reflection, only temporarily. _It felt like I was dancing on water_. In the golden haze of the morning, I no longer felt myself or by myself, but a **part of something far greater**, a fragment of a story that spanned beyond me. This is the world of paddleboarding. Standup paddleboarding, SUP for short, is an activity that has become **my personal metaphor for life's journey**. The pace of life, much like the pace of SUP, is designed to be unhurried and reflective. _I often forget that_. SUP reminds me. It invites me to dive deeper into moments of contemplation. The world around me and inside of me, with its ceaseless hustle and bustle, often drowns out my inner voice. However, out there dancing on the water, the only music playing is that of my deep inner thoughts. **The world beneath the water's surface can be a mirror to my inner world.** It's a realm of tranquility and chaos, of light and darkness, of life and death. It's a world that is constantly changing, yet remains the same in its essence. It's a world that is beautiful in its complexity, in its unpredictability, in its resilience. It's a world that reminds me of my impermanence, my insignificance. Yet, also of my potential, my capacity to adapt, to evolve and to overcome adversity. **The journey of paddleboarding, much like the journey of life, is fraught with challenges.** There are days when the waters are calm and the journey feels smooth. There are days when the waters are rough and the journey feels tumultuous. Regardless, _the journey continues_. Each wave, each gust, each stroke, is an invitation to move forward. I have nowhere to go when I’m on the paddleboard, like life. I literally go out and come back to the exact same spot I left. _Finding joy in the journey is my only option_. There is an unpredictability that feels exciting on the paddleboard, however one that I often fear in life. _Learning to embrace the unknown is my only option._ Ten years ago, in the heart of Vancouver, I found myself on a paddleboard for the first time. It was etched into my memory, not for the thrill of the experience, but for the fear and uncertainty that gripped me. A fear of falling, of failing, and of the potential embarrassment. It was an experience marked by fear, a stark contrast to the ease and confidence with which I navigate the sea, and life, today. **The transformation from fear to mastery did not occur overnight.** It was a journey, a process that required time, practice, and perseverance. A testament to the power of courage in the face of my fear. The fear of falling, or failing, has been replaced with the knowledge that I will rise again, stronger and more resilient. The fear of failing, or failing, has been replaced with the understanding that failure is but a stepping stone to success. The pursuit calls for balance and focus, a steady hand, and an even steadier mind. Paddleboarding is a test of will and skill, an interplay of forces both within and beyond my control. Consider the wind, an unseen yet palpable force, a power that can either propel me forward or push me back. In life, there are moments when I feel an energetic wind pushing me forward, a ‘yes’ from the universe to everything I ask. At other moments, the energetic wind is pushing up against me, a ‘hold on’ from the universe. A prompt to question the choices I have made. When on the sea, I cannot paddle against the wind. Despite how motivated or strong I feel. _The smartest thing to do is to adapt my reality, rather than fight it._ **Standing up, suspended between the sky and the sea, I gain a new perspective.** I see things I couldn’t see when I was in the water - the fish darting below, the anchors holding boats steady, even the occasional piece of litter floating aimlessly. To truly understand, to truly see, I must take rise above it all to gain a full or fresh perspective. The sea, much like life, is a vast expanse of possibilities and challenges. Just as the sea is not defined by its waves, _my life is not defined by its struggles_. It is defined by how I respond to them, how I navigate through them, and how I rise above them. Most of all, I am reminded of a simple yet profound truth - I am not a mere spectator in the grand theater of life; I am the dancer, the explorer, the adventurer. _I am the author of my story._ Each time I stand on my paddleboard, a solitary silhouette against the nascent light, I realize that **embracing falling and failing has been my most beautiful conquest.** Each ripple in the water echoes a lesson learned, a fear conquered. I no longer dread the unknown paths, the unpredicted storms; I welcome them with open arms, for they shape my journey, molding me into a resilient voyager in the sea of existence. In the gentle sway and the tumultuous waves, I found not just a sport but a philosophy, a sacred dance between surrender and control, fear and freedom. Every time I set out into the embrace of the sea, I am reminded to be patient with myself, to celebrate the falls, the stumbles, the uncertain steps, _because they are the verses in my poetic journey through life._ I pledge to keep dancing, to keep falling and failing gloriously, to keep rising with a spirit untamed and a heart unafraid. In this beautiful struggle, I have discovered not just how to fall and fail, but the secret to living fully, richly, and with joy. And that is how I learned to fail. --- ### How to Grandson Published: 2023-09-07 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/grandson/ As I woke up early one morning this past week to journal, she naturally came to mind. I began to reflect about memories, the ones that are etched in the deepest corners of my heart. Earlier this week it was my grandmother’s birthday. She passed away when I was fifteen, I still remember the moment we got the call. It was a moment that marked a profound shift in my life, a moment that still echoes in the silence of my thoughts. **Without my grandmother, I would not exist.** She had ten children, nine sons and one daughter. Her last child was my father. If she had thrown in the towel or decided she was done, I would not exist. I can’t help but feel immense gratitude for her. It's a gratitude that transcends words, a gratitude that is as vast as the universe itself. _My universe._ Her values and beliefs have been ingrained in me and all of those around me growing up. We can’t have an extended family gathering without her coming up, as a memory or as part of a joke. She is spoken of as a long lost friend who is dearly missed. She is a presence that lingers, a presence that is felt in the laughter, the tears and the stories that we share. I have this distinct memory of when my grandmother came to visit Canada from India when I was a child. Despite her and I not being able to communicate in the same language, she did not know English, I did not know Hindi at the time. _There was a language of love that connected and bonded us_. It was a language that transcended words, a language that was felt in the warmth of her hugs, the sparkle in her eyes, the rhythm of her heartbeat. As she had many children and grandchildren spread across a few cities in Canada, she would do a tour, like the rockstar that she was. Feeling attached to her, she left my hometown of Ottawa for Montreal one morning and I threw a tantrum. I convinced my parents to let me take a bus, alone at the age of ten, to go visit her. It was a journey that was fueled by love, not fear, a journey that was a testament to the bond that we shared. Over the past few years, as I've been exploring my own spirituality, I've found myself more often in the company of friends who are on their own spiritual journey as well. We share our experiences, insights, and struggles. One aspect of this journey that seems to be appearing more frequently is a focus on acknowledging and healing generational traumas. It's a concept that, I must admit, I've found uncomfortable in conversation whenever it comes up. It's not that I deny the existence of such traumas, but rather, it has felt like a lack of grounding in the reality that without previous generations, _this one would simply not exist_. **Ancestral worship is something that has been a part of most ancient cultures.** Through ceremony, song, stories and more, ancestors have been rightfully put on a pedestal and seen as god-like. That is how I saw my grandmother growing up, and still do. She was, and remains, a figure of strength, wisdom, and love in my life. In a modern era, it is rare to talk about ancestors and the influence they have had. And to focus on the positive, versus the negative. **It's as if ancestors have been forgotten**, with all their flaws and virtues. I remember growing up there were photos of all of my grandparents on the walls of my house. Their faces, frozen in time, were a constant reminder of where I came from, of the lineage that I was a part of. I don’t have any photos of my grandparents in my home currently. _Maybe it’s time to change that._ **Being a grandson is not just about remembering my grandmother**, it's about embodying her spirit, her resilience, her love. It's about understanding that even though she is no longer physically present, she lives on in me, in my thoughts, in my actions, in my dreams and now, in my words. **Being a grandson is not just about carrying a family name or inheriting physical traits**. It's about understanding the legacy that has been passed down to me, the values and traditions, the stories and the wisdom. It's about honoring that legacy, adding to it, and passing it on to the next generation. **Being a grandson is not just about sharing a bloodline,** it's about sharing a legacy. It's about carrying forward the values, the beliefs, the stories that have been passed down. It's about honoring the sacrifices, the struggles, the triumphs of those who came before me. It's about understanding that I am a part of something bigger, something that transcends time and space. **Being a grandson is not just about carrying forward a legacy**, it's about creating one. It's about living a life that is true to who I am, a life that is guided by love, compassion, and kindness. It's about understanding that the greatest tribute that I can pay to my grandmother is to live a life that is worthy of the love and sacrifices that she made for me. I find myself wanting to understand my grandparents better, to appreciate their struggles and their triumphs, to honor their memory. In doing so, **I think I can also better understand myself**. Perhaps that's what being a grandson is all about. And that is how I learned to grandson. --- ### How to Italy Published: 2023-09-01 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/italy/ “Let’s go to Italy today”, I said to the friend I was on vacation with earlier last month in the South of France. Without any preparation, we left our hotel in Monaco, stepped into our rental car and started to make our way. My phone was on airplane mode. A self-imposed experiment to travel without the crutch of modern technology, to experience the world as it was before the advent of smartphones. I was curious to navigate the winding roads of France and Italy, relying solely on instincts and the occasional road sign. I had no idea where we were driving though. As we followed the windy streets, navigating around street closures, one-way streets, roundabouts, and more, we unknowingly found ourselves in a beachside town called Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat. Having said we were going to Italy, we had a choice to make. _Do we explore this town or continue on the mission?_ It felt like the universe had made the choice for us. Immediately in front of us, a car pulled out and a parking spot appeared. We took it. As we strolled the beautiful marina, watching the boats sail by, the sound of birds everywhere, the sun shining brightly, we enjoyed one of the most beautiful sights of the coastline and mountains. It felt magical. Upon getting back into the car, still determined to make it to Italy, we continued driving East, trusting that we’d hit the border at some point. That point was a mere ten minutes later. The street signs morphed into Italian, and we couldn't help but laugh at the absurdity of our spontaneous road trip. I parked the car next to a dumpster, a makeshift parking spot in the middle of a hot summer day. The Italian seaside was a tableau from a bygone era. Sunbathers lounged on the rocks, their bodies glistening under the sun, while others dove into the azure sea. There was a palpable sense of connection, not just with each other, but with the sun, the water, the very essence of life. No one was on their phone. An inspiring site. Feeling my hunger grow, I suggested we find food. It felt like a hunt, a quest for sustenance in a foreign land. Being vegetarian added an extra layer of challenge to the mission. As we continued to walk, we came across a beach resort, built on the rocks. The restaurant looked promising, feeling hopeful this might be open, I walked up to the front desk and asked for a table. “We’re fully booked”, the receptionist said firmly. After my failed attempt to negotiate a table, I admitted defeat to my friend and we continued walking along the coast. _My hunger was growing._ Undeterred, we spotted a building perched high on the cliffs. The climb was arduous, the summer sun relentless, but we persevered. The restaurant at the top appeared closed, its doors locked, chairs upturned. _In these types of moments, I have a choice._ The information presented to me is incomplete. **To make the choice, I have to connect to something deeper within me or bigger than me.** I need more information. If I feel hopeful and optimistic, I’ll take the risk and explore further. It can feel like I am trying to will the universe in my favor. If I feel fearful and pessimistic, I’ll conclude that once again, the universe is against me and shy away from the unknown. When I look back at the most meaningful moments in my life, many were a result of me taking the risk with incomplete information. I’ve learned that it’s less important for me to get what I want. As the reality is that I don’t really know what I want, if I am honest. It’s more important for me to know that I tried. That I made the effort. **Once I know that I’ve made the effort, I am happy to accept whatever the outcome is of that effort.** I can trust that the outcome I receive is the outcome I need. Standing in front of the closed restaurant, baking under the midday sun, I heard the sound of kids playing. They were playing in a pool. Curious, I followed the sound and around the corner, saw a staircase. By this point, my friend had taken a break and decided to let me explore my curiosity on my own. With no one in sight, I climbed the stairs and voila, a full outdoor restaurant and pool was sitting right there. The sounds of kids playing in the pool were now mixed with the sounds of Italian adults enjoying lunch on a hot summer day. I went back down to get my friend, and we enjoyed the perfect spontaneous lunch, overlooking the sea, in Italy. The feeling of hunger made the caprese salad with fresh burrata, the simple pasta with homemade tomato sauce, the perfectly marinated olives and of course, the espresso-drenched tiramisu, that much more delicious. As we climbed back down the cliff after a long lazy lunch, we again came across the crowds of Italians sunbathing on the rocks and jumping into the sea. _Another choice._ I turned to my friend. No words were needed. We proceeded to take off our clothes and jump into the sea. It was so hot outside and being used to the refreshingly cool Atlantic ocean in the beaches in Portugal, I thought to myself, ‘this water is not cold enough’. As I climbed out, I noticed a stream of blood on my left shin. Clearly, my inexperience swimming in the rockside coast of Italy was showing. Not feeling any pain, the surface scrapes on my skin looked far worse than it was. We walked back towards the car, feeling sticky from saltwater, blood coating my left leg, feeling highly satisfied with having done Italy well. Back in Monaco, having dinner with a few more friends who lived there for the summer, we were at a trendy seaside restaurant, also built on the rocks. As the sunset painted the sky with hues of orange and pink, I felt a profound sense of contentment. This was a perfect day, not because of the places I visited or the food I ate, but because of the experiences I had, the memories I created, and the presence I felt through all of it. At some point later in the evening, I heard something unexpected: fireworks. We got up from our table and walked towards the edge of the rocks. The sky was being painted with not one but two firework shows. The rest of the restaurant gathered around us as we all stood there, in silence, soaking it in. As I stood there, I realized that this perfect day I had was a reminder about the journey, not the destination. So much of my daily life is filled with striving for a specific outcome. In contrast, I woke up that morning having no idea or expectation for what would happen. Throughout the day, I embraced the uncertainties, the detours, the unexpected surprises. I was open to new experiences and found joy in the simplest of moments. A perfect day in Italy, I realized, was not about not about the sights and sounds, but the introspection and self-discovery. It was not about the external, but the internal. It was a day of simple pleasures, of quiet reflection, of realizations. It was a day of being, not doing. It was, in every sense of the word, a perfect day. And that is how I learned to Italy. --- ### How to Birthday Published: 2023-08-27 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/birthday/ Unexpected guests crashed my recent birthday party. All of the guests were dressed in white and started to crowd around the back of the boat. _Someone gasped._ The boat was already at capacity. I was told several times to not have more than one hundred people on board. _I had exactly one hundred people on board._ Silence started to spread through the crowd as everyone jaw-droppingly watched what was happening. The unexpected guests approached the boat. At first, only two approached from the back. Then another pair approached from the right. Then another pair from the left. Dolphins were swimming everywhere around us. The gasps and screams were of excitement. Many had only heard tales of dolphins swimming in the Lisbon river. The tales had now become the truth. **It was the perfect magic moment to mark the celebration of another year of my life gone by.** Earlier that day, as I rolled out of bed, I grabbed my journal and began to reflect on the past year gone by. Initially, the list of what I did, did not do, where I went, where I did not go and such came out onto the page. As I kept writing though, what started to show up was how I changed. Rather how the past year of life changed me. Today, I feel more **confident** in life. It is evident with business and investing, with romantic relationships, with physical health and appearance, with Portuguese language and more. _For example, this past year has been a health journey for me as I unboxed my physical health with the aid of testing and treatments to uncover and resolve several issues. What a gift._ Today, I feel more **conservative** in life. I have become more aware of the risks and implications of the choices I make, paying more attention to the ‘other side’ of the coin. _For example, for my real estate business in Portugal, I was looking at buying a building a few months ago to launch a new co-living concept in Lisbon. Everything looked great initially and I was excited. In diligence though, yellow flags started to appear and my excitement faded. I pulled out of the deal. The reasons to not do the deal became clearer with time._ Today, I feel more **selective** in life. Practicing more discernment with how I spend my time, who I spend my time with and learning how to say ‘yes’ by saying ‘no’. _For example, when I first moved to Portugal a few years ago, I was a ‘yes’ person, which helped me quickly establish a local community of both expats and Portuguese. I now find myself saying ‘no’ more than ‘yes’ to new social invitations, as I feel more settled._ Today, I feel more **relaxed** in life. Learning how to go with the flow, comfortable with things not going the way I expect and not feeling agitated. I am learning to not take things personally when they truly are not. _For example, recently while at the beach for a stand-up paddleboard outing, I walked back to my car to see that it had not only been ticketed but clamped. My illegal parking job was particularly spectacular that day, so much so it attracted the attention of the authorities. I noticed my non-reaction at the site of my car ticketed, booted and wrapped in caution tape. I patiently waited for them to come take my money and set my car free once again._ Today, I feel more **clear** in life. Specifically understanding the conditions under which clarity arises for me. Generally by giving myself space, not trying to force an answer and to learn to wait. _For example, when deciding to host my birthday on a boat this year, I decided relatively last minute as I was waiting to see if my excitement would build. My analytical side knew when my birthday was of course, my emotional side took a bit longer though to get excited and only then did I send out the invitations._ Today, I feel more **impatient** in life. I notice I have difficulty sitting still. I have a hard time watching a two hour movie. I believe it is because there are so many people and activities that I find more interesting than to sit and watch. _For example, I have yet to see Barbie and Openheimer. I hope to soon, but also am not going to hold my breath as there is so much else that I hope to do soon as well._ Today, I feel more **lazy** in life. My life has become much easier in the past year. I have people around me to help manage and take care of the things in life that I find boring and uninteresting. _For example, a friend is currently staying with me at my apartment in Lisbon and had a last minute wardrobe malfunction before the birthday party. I could not figure out the express wash setting on my washer and ended up drying instead of washing the clothes that badly and urgently needed to be washed. It was embarrassingly obvious that I don’t use my own washing machine._ Today, I feel more **FOMO** in life. The list of places I want to visit is growing, not shrinking. The people I am curious to connect with. The businesses I want to start. The problems I want to solve in the world. _For example, this past summer I enjoyed vacation time in Greece, Italy, France and Spain. As I shared tales of my travels with local friends, I would hear about all of these other places to visit across Southern Europe that I now want to see._ Today, I feel more **desire** in life. Specifically to connect with the people that I love most. _For example, the morning of my birthday, I took a solo stroll by the beach and found tears rolling down my cheeks as I realized how much I missed my young nephew who’s growing up quickly and the rest of my family._ As I reflect on how life has changed me over the past year, I do so unconditionally. To do so unconditionally means to not label any of these changes as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. That is the most important part of life. **It matters less about how I change and more about how I feel about the change.** _“Awareness releases reality to change you”_, a quote from Anthony De Mello, one of my spiritual teachers that I have long followed and been guided by. My awareness of my own reality is how I continue to change. Life continues to change me. I don’t need to control or direct the change. I can learn to allow it to happen. And that is how I learned to Birthday. — **_[Watch a highlight reel from my Birthday on a Boat on Instagram here.](https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cwca8GYMxv1/?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==)_** --- ### How to Dance Published: 2023-08-20 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/dance1/ As the sun was setting softly, I stood there barefoot on the grass alone in the crowd with my eyes closed as the live music filled me. I was moving gently from side-to-side, enjoying the music and feeling its rhythm pulse through my body. Then her arm knocked into mine. I turned and I could not see her face as her curly hair was covering it as she moved in her light green dress around me. She was dancing in a flow state, twirling in circles with no concern for anyone around her, unknowingly making contact with me. As her arm glided down mine, her hand took hold of mine. **It was an invitation to dance with her, in the most elegant and spontaneous way possible.** _This was a few weeks ago._ I was on a retreat in Ibiza Spain, the North side of the island, where the more spiritual and nature minded visitors go, not the South side of the island, where the more party and night club focused visitors go. It was the opening night of the week-long retreat, and we joined a community garden party with live music, food stalls, local artisans and more. **It was a great way to connect with the local culture on the island, specifically the many hippie types that have made the island home.** Despite Ibiza being part of Spain, very little about the island felt Spanish. At least not the way I’m accustomed to think of Spain from visiting places like Barcelona, Madrid and Valencia. Ibiza has over the years, especially the North part of the island, become a spiritual refuge for seekers, nomads, yogis and artists looking for nature-inspired community and good vibes all-year-round. Upon first walking in, despite so many new faces and people to mingle with, I was curious to soak it all in. I took a solo stroll around the garden, to become more familiar with what was going on, sat down on a bench and began to people-watch. ### The night was perhaps the ideal representation of what Ibiza had become. Everyone was barefoot, no alcohol or meat on site, kids running around, old people walking slowly, yet mostly beautifully dressed women and men in their 30s and 40s looking content with life. Smiling, laughing, playing and hugging. _Lots of hugging._ No one was on their phone texting or Instagramming, a rare occurrence in modern times. Feeling hungry, I stood up, found one of the retreat organizers who handed us food tickets, making me feel like a kid at Disneyland, with a free pass to go on whatever ride I wanted. _And like Disneyland, the food stalls had lines._ Unlike modern businesses, the stalls functioned very inefficiently. I realized it must be by design, a reflection of the slow pace and the reason people choose island life. To slow down. I had something to learn. After making some new friends in line, sharing sushi rolls, gyozas, acai bowls and more delicious treats, I found myself back sitting and in deep conversation with other retreat members who I was just getting to know. As I slowly tuned out of my conversation with the group, **I started to tune into the live music coming from the other side.** I couldn’t see the performers but could hear them. The tunes sounded familiar, there was an Indian kirtan vibe and I found my head slowly nodding along and my feet gently tapping along. Without thinking, I stood up and announced my departure to the music area to the group, and excitedly walked over. The crowd was electric, with everyone on their feet dancing. The open air live concert under the starlit sky, in a fairly compact space, felt magical. _The vibe was calling me._ I started to move on the spot, slowly and cautiously, not trying to attract any attention, and while slowly getting comfortable in the space. I was standing with my eyes closed when this woman brushed up next to me and invited me to dance. **Without making any eye contact and without exchanging any words, I began to move my feet and together we began to take more space on the floor.** It started with holding one hand, and then I was holding both of her hands. The music was fast, leading to rapid movements and changes in position, however our bodies always stayed in physical contact somewhere. At one point, I got a glimpse of her eyes. She was in a gentle focused state, deep in her feminine energy. **She was also clearly a dancer.** She knew exactly how to freestyle with a complete stranger. _How to move with me. How to make me move. How to be moved by me._ Her intensity was growing as the music got faster and we were becoming more comfortable moving with one another. When at first I was turning and twirling her gently, at one point, I pulled her close to me, our faces nearly touching and our torsos completely in contact. After a synchronized deep breath, I pushed her back but held onto one of her hands tightly, and proceeded to twirl her. Something I had learned in the salsa classes I started taking recently. A gentle smile appeared on her face. At that moment, **I was secretly grateful that I knew how to dance and was confident enough to do so spontaneously.** _This was not always the case for me._ It was about five years ago that with the encouragement of a close friend when I was living in New York I discovered ecstatic dance and 5rhythms, both a freeform style of dance where participants are invited to dance however they choose, without judgment. It became my jam, a form of moving meditation, therapy and expression. After hundreds of ecstatic sessions, dozens of workshops and a handful of multi-day dance retreats in the past year alone in Portugal, I now feel comfortable to dance. I had no idea that I would love to dance. **I only discovered my love of dance by doing it.** I think that’s like many things in life. On the surface, I can easily come up with plenty of excuses to not try something that’s new to me. I can convince myself that I don’t know how to do it, which is what I had done with dance for most of my life. _The fear of judgment from others created plenty of self-judgment._ ### The way I learned to dance was by doing it, whereas before I had been trying to think it. I can think my way through many things in life. I’m particularly skilled at it. However the skill of thinking in this circumstance is not an asset but a liability. It held me back from enjoying this particular activity and learning about how to use it to express myself for most of my life. The experience dancing that night in Ibiza with a complete stranger was exactly that: an opportunity to express myself. _Without words. I like words. Now I was learning to express myself without them._ That night, as the music ended, applause erupted and I looked up to see a circle of spectators had formed around us, many clapping, not only for the musicians but for the performance that the two of us had just put on spontaneously. I looked at the woman, we exchanged a short but warm smile, she squeezed my hand tightly and turned away from me. I did not see her again that night. The biggest lesson of dance is also the biggest lesson of life. To be detached from the outcome, while being fully engaged in the process. And that is how I learned to dance. --- ### How to Get A Red Phone Published: 2023-08-04 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/red/ As I walked into my friend’s Airbnb in London, where I was staying, he looked up from his computer and said to me, _‘I just texted you, impeccable timing’_, to which I responded with _‘I’ll never see that message’._ About a few hours earlier, I had been walking in a park in East London with a new friend I had been introduced to, and after I said bye to her, there I was standing on the edge of the street calling a taxi on my phone. ### The next thing I know I am no longer holding my phone. It had been snatched, clearly by a professional, who was on a bike and rode past me with laser precision to take the phone out of my hands. **As I stared at my empty hands, it took me a split second to acknowledge what had just happened.** I looked up and saw the biker a good fifty meters away, speeding away. I had no chance to catch-up to him. A few weeks earlier, a friend had told me something eerily similar had happened to her in London. At that moment, I thought of her and if it were not for knowing something like this does happen, I may have been flustered or confused. Instead, after acknowledging what had just happened, I moved to a place of acceptance. _This was my new reality._ Someone who saw what had happened approached me to check-in to see if I was okay. I was safe and had no physical harm done, a reminder of what actually matters. I asked him where I could get a taxi and he directed me to the high street. While hailing a taxi, the good old fashioned way, I began to reflect about what this experience had to offer me. The first thought that came up was empathy. This is something that happens to many people, and now **I would be able to better understand their experience**. I recalled that even when my friend told me a few weeks ago that this had happened to her, I had an ounce of silent judgment, _‘you were being careless’_. No judgment anymore, as I could relate. ### The next was that this experience is a test of my mindfulness practice. I meditate. I talk about detachment. I preach that less can be more. And in this moment, I noticed myself without any anxiety or anger, and instead only acceptance. _The practice is working, keep going, I said to myself._ I was curious about whether my digital identity would be stolen or my banking details would be compromised. As I was using my phone when it was snatched, **the screen was unlocked**, which means a conniving thief could access pretty much everything. I wondered if I would be inspired by a new business idea around personal cyber security and safety. _Turns out, my identity and banking info was safe and I did not have any issues, only inconveniences._ After going through this list of what this experience would have to teach me, I naturally acknowledged that it would make for interesting material for my next blog post. Now in the taxi, a long forty minute ride back into Central London where I was staying, I began to have a conversation with the driver. That itself was new, as normally I would be buried in my phone, listening to voice messages, responding to text messages and the likes. Without the distraction of my phone, **I was fully present and engaged with this other human being in the taxi.** I asked him if he had ever had his phone stolen. He said no, however went on to share with me **how many creative ways people try to avoid paying taxi fares.** I had no idea. For example, apparently people will take him down one way streets, which there are plenty of around London, jump out and run in the opposite direction. _He has no chance to chase them._ Even better, he shared with me a story of one guy who jumped out, and he successfully chased and got to, and when he confronted the guy to pay him, the guy said he had no money. He took the guy’s wallet, found a twenty pound note and took it. The fare had been fifteen pounds. The guy had the audacity to ask for change. _We had a good laugh as he recalled this story._ ### My empathy was growing quickly, as thanks to this experience, I was connecting with and understanding more about reality. Back to my friend’s Airbnb, after I remarked that I would never see his message, he looked up from his laptop with a confused look on his face. _My phone was just stolen, _I said calmly. Looking shocked, he stood up and came close to me. _Are you okay?_ _Totally fine. I’m safe. Let’s take a walk to the Apple store._ As we set out, he shared with me his own experiences of losing his phone or having it stolen. Again, my empathy was growing. We walked into the Apple store, smiling and laughing, and I approached the store attendant. _I need a new phone_. _Okay, do you know which one you would like?_ He asked. _Yes, the same one I just had. My phone got stolen, so I need a replacement._ _Are you sure? _He asked with a puzzled look on his face. _Am I sure what? _I asked, shooting him back an equally puzzled look. _It’s just that I have never seen anyone who had their phone just stolen come in here smiling and laughing. People are always in tears and angry._ **Another validation that the mindfulness practice was working**, I remarked quietly to myself. Also appreciation for the privilege that I enjoy where buying a replacement phone is a non stressful financial decision for me. My friend and I started to debate the color I should get. I initially went for the light blue one, as it was soft and calming. Then I picked up the dark purple, the same color I had had for the past year. _He approved both of them as suitable options._ Then I picked up the bright red phone, almost unconsciously, as I was curious to see his reaction. My friend’s face lit up, _‘that’s bold, I like it’_, **his expression had made the decision for me.** As we walked out of the store, with my new phone in hand, I began to remark to my friend about how interesting these past few hours have been, and how much I **appreciate the richness of life for giving me these opportunities to learn, grow and connect**. This is how I learned to get a red phone. --- ### How to Exhale Published: 2023-07-30 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/exhale/ Last weekend, I hosted a long weekend retreat with some of my closest friends in Portugal, that I appropriately titled Exhale. It was the second edition, last summer, my first summer since moving to Portugal, was the first edition of Exhale. It was inspired by a desire I had been feeling to connect more deeply with my new friends, in my new chosen home, in a way that invited relaxation and rest. I’ve done countless retreats over the past ten years. I’m headed on a retreat later today actually. What I appreciate most about retreats are the structure and chance to be led and guided. ### So much of my daily life is self-guided, as an entrepreneur. What I sometimes struggle with retreats is that I often feel like I need a vacation after the retreat, given the intensity of the experience, be it physically, emotionally or mentally. _Exhale was designed to be different._ A chance to be intentional about who I would invite and how we would connect, yet with lots of space to flow and see what spontaneously would sprout. As a starting point, I kept **the guest list a surprise**. No one knew who else was invited. Second, I kept **the location a surprise**. People knew the dates to keep free and were given a google maps link the morning of the retreat of where to go. The anticipation leading up to Exhale was energizing for everyone, with their curiosity building each week as we got closer. And without the details, _it was easier for everyone to let go of expectations and come open to experience whatever would unfold._ The destination was a private villa tucked away from the bustling city life of Lisbon, a place chosen for its serenity and peaceful ambiance in the countryside of Portugal. Offering plenty of space for our group and a beautiful pool to refresh ourselves in the summer heat, it was the perfect setting for a heartwarming retreat. As the sun descended each evening, the sky turned into a twinkling canvas adorned with the most stars I had ever witnessed. Living in an era dominated by technology, it is too easy to forget the essence of human connection. Thus, a **collective intention was made to detach from devices** during the retreat. Some friends simply forgot where they placed their phones, while others opted to switch them to airplane mode so they could capture the experience through pictures. The conscious disconnection from my digital world helped me to be more present and explore a deeper connection with **the people I value the most in my life in Portugal right now**. We prepared meals together. With everyone contributing, the kitchen turned into a lively hub of activity. Chopping, sautéing, and stirring ingredients transformed into acts of collective creativity, and each finished dish was a testament to our shared effort. Recognizing the innate wisdom and unique experiences every individual holds, Exhale included a series of mini-workshops. Each friend was invited to share their knowledge, teach a skill or introduce us to something new. **There was a strong theme of health** that emerged in everyone’s workshops this year. From ice baths, to movement, to meditation, to trauma release, to arts and crafts, and more, we touched on physical, mental and emotional health in subtle and gentle ways. My workshop brought in a playful twist to the retreat. While everyone was distracted, I casually walked in, armed with twelve water guns, one for each of us. What followed was a multi-hour water fight, as we chased each other around the villa, and more often than not, I found myself being thrown into the pool. This unscripted, playful activity stirred a sense of light-heartedness and joy among us, _making it one of the most memorable parts of the retreat for me._ Human connection, a concept so simple, yet so profound, became the central theme of Exhale. It mattered less about where we were, what we ate or what we did, but rather who we were with and how we were with each other. We experienced a spectrum of emotions—there were laughs, there were tears. We had light-hearted conversations, and we delved deep into dialogue late at night. These experiences served as a reminder of the multifaceted ways to connect with each other. As we were nearing the end of the retreat, everyone was occupying more and more space in my heart. As I sat there, everyone smiling at each other, a spontaneous question arose for me. I interrupted the flow of conversation and shared my question: ### _What is your biggest desire in life right now? What do you really want for yourself?_ Each of us took turns to stand in front of the group and share our answers. Sharing something so personal in front of friends opened a hidden door to our hearts. It is easy to laugh and play with friends._ I wanted more_. How could I say that I really knew someone without knowing their heart’s true desire? Listening to everyone's share, one by one, was a deeply moving experience for me. With each revelation, I was reminded of **the power of sharing and the profound effect it can have on our relationships**. The energy in the room was palpable—goosebumps were a common occurrence. As were tears. The shares were filled with emotion, a sign of how strongly many of us cared for our deepest desire. **Exhale was a powerful, meaningful, and deeply enriching experience.** The bonds of friendship that were strengthened, the wisdom that was shared, and the memories that were created—it all made the retreat a highlight of my year. The magic of human connection, the essence of shared experiences, and the value of vulnerability were lessons that are etched deep into my heart. This is how I learned to Exhale. --- ### How to Go To The Moon Published: 2023-07-22 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/moon/ It was a dark night, with a cool summer breeze wrapping me gently as I stood on top of a mountain looking into the sky. In the company of close friends, I felt comforted by an inner warmth, as we smiled and laughed, standing together under **one of the darkest skies in all of Europe**. _‘Come here’_, the guide Fred said to me softly, gesturing me to move towards where he was standing. I walked over. _‘Look here and tell me what you see’._ I bent over slightly and put my right eye up to the eyepiece of the telescope. **I could see the moon. **I could see the craters on the moon. I could see the texture of the surface of the moon. I could see the Earth shine, the dark part of the moon not easily visible to the naked eye. Feeling a rush of energy, I took a step back from the telescope, stood tall and looked at the moon in the dark sky. _It was shiny but small._ Then I took a step back towards the telescope to have a closer look, again. I couldn’t believe it. The details. The colour. The size. The glow. The magnificence of this moment. Then, an innocent thought spontaneously appeared. _Will I go to the moon in my lifetime?_ ### Seeing the moon up close last night for the first time was special. I felt special. I felt inspired. The conversation with my close friends continued to be about the moon, literally. The conversation with myself though was about my moon, figuratively. Earlier in the day, a few of us were in discussion about why we don’t follow our dreams. I shared with the group something I had read in the introduction of Paulo Cohelo’s _The Alchemist, _over ten years ago, and vaguely remembered as four reasons I don't pursue my dream. _The first is that I am scared of failure and don’t believe I can actually do it._ _The second is that I am told that I cannot do it and won’t succeed._ _The third is that I’m afraid of leaving my loved ones behind as I go on my journey._ _And the fourth is that I’m fearful of being successful and what it means._ **I share these four reasons in first-person, as I have experienced all of them at different moments in my life.** And probably will continue to experience them, which inspires me to learn how to recognize the fear and work through it. On the fear of failure, this has shown up often over the past decade in my romantic life. A fear of rejection has held me back from expressing my desire to connect with a woman I may find interesting. On being told I won’t succeed, this shows up often in business. When attempting to innovate, which involves doing something that has not been done before, I have received a lot of ‘no’ from my teams, my clients and my investors over the years. On the fear of leaving loved ones behind, this shows up often with having to make trade-offs of how I invest my time. Choosing to not only live in Portugal but to prioritize my social connections on this side of the pond versus North America has not always felt easy. And on being afraid of success, deep down I have felt this the most during the recent past. In certain parts of my life, I have played small and convinced myself to not really go for it. And I realize now it has been from this place of fear of the implications of chasing my new dreams. **In all of the reasons shared why I might not pursue my dreams, the alternative is to hide in my fear.** _It sounds cowardly because it is._ It is also safe. And if I stay hidden in my fear for too long, then I convince myself that I am satisfied with where I am and start to believe that this is it for me here on Hotel Earth. ### Seeing the moon up close last night sparked something inside of me. **It was a reminder to shoot for the moon. **_Permission to dream._ Many dreams and desires have been filling my mind since that moment I felt the spark inside, including ones that have been hiding behind the protection that fear often provides. ### I don’t know if I will ever make it to my moon, however **I want to know that I tried.** This is what my experience here is all about. The journey to discover and explore myself and this beautiful universe filled with mystery and possibility. --- ### How to Be On Time Published: 2023-07-15 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/time/ It was a morning that started off like none other for me. I woke up naturally with a smile on my face. My bedroom is pitch black, thanks to blackout blinds, and without any clocks or natural light, I have no concept of time. _This is intentional._ That morning, as my eyes opened, I softly said out loud to my voice assistant, _‘hey Google, what time is it?’_. The voice responded _‘ten thirty-six AM’._ ### In what felt like a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a second, I calmly observed to myself how I already missed four meetings that morning. And then I became curious, still lying there in bed in my pitch dark bedroom, how this could have happened. I wondered, _has this ever happened before?_ I could not think of a single example of when I had slept in this late. Then I slowly got out of bed, went into my bright sun-filled living room with a sweeping view overlooking Lisbon, and picked up my phone. Without even checking text messages, Whatsapp, email or the missed calls I had, I said to my other voice assistant, _‘hey Siri, call Ricardo’_. The ringing stopped as Ricardo answered the call, not with a _‘good morning’_ or _‘hi Kunal’_, but with a shameless **_‘are you alive?’_**. _Yes_, I respond. _You slept in_, he says to me with full confidence. _Yes_, I respond. _Ok, don’t worry, I’ve rearranged your schedule. How long until you can make it to the office?_ _I’ll be there in 20 minutes._ _Okay, see you soon._ And like that, I proceeded with my day. It was only then that I realized what had happened. My body, having just returned from New York the day before, had adjusted to New York time. There was a delay, as in New York I was waking up at three thirty AM, which was normal for Lisbon time. ### Timing is everything. And often underappreciated. I shared recently a reflection about how I have accepted my pattern of being late to everything. This continues to be the case, at a micro level. **At a macro level, the big stuff, I have learned a lot about how to be on time.** When I am in flow with time, choices become easy. When I am attempting to force time, everything feels difficult. My journey as an entrepreneur and investor has been a clear example of learning about timing. I've had my fair share of trying to force outcomes - like squeezing out a product launch within an unrealistic deadline or trying to secure funding in an unfavorable economic climate. These were mostly uphill battles, like swimming against the current. And never worked out well, as I was trying to force something. On the other hand, **flowing is more akin to floating down the river of time.** Like when I moved to Portugal spontaneously on three days notice. I didn't force it; instead, I allowed myself to be carried by the tide. When I reflect back on my journey here, it seemed as if the universe was conspiring to make it happen. _I was on time._ Last night, I was at a group dinner and met a charming couple who have been splitting their time between Puerto Rico and Lisbon. When I asked one of them how he ended up in Puerto Rico, he shared that after living in New York for a few years, he had moved permanently onto his boat and during one of the tropical seasonal storms, he got shipwrecked in Puerto Rico. Fast forward six years, he has set up a beautiful life, several businesses and a loving relationship. When I asked his partner how they met, she shared that they met in Puerto Rico however they were both from the same neighborhood in Los Angeles, had been at the same events and weddings, even at the same high school briefly, yet had never crossed paths. _Until they did._ **Another reminder for me of how timing is everything.** Back to business, I started my first tech company in the mobile apps space, before the iPhone existed. Shortly after starting the company, while graduating from university, Apple launched the iPhone. Some of the first mobile apps on the iPhone, for the likes of TIME magazine, CNN, Bloomberg, and more, were built, hosted and run by my company. **We were 21 years old and had absolutely no idea what we were doing. **Neither did anyone else in the space for that matter. The technology at the time was difficult, _very difficult_. Yet it did not feel like we were forcing anything, despite running into continuous execution issues. _The business flowed, as we were on time._ ### To recognize when I am too early, on time or too late on the big stuff requires me to sit in an observer state. have to get out of the daily routine and grind, step back and gain perspective. Perspective that is informed by a breadth of information. I need to know what’s going on around me and within me, to assess timing. **It often does require a leap of faith**, _and that is the hardest part._ If I wait for all of the information to become clear, be it about a business opportunity, a romantic interest, a health routine or a travel destination, I am probably too late. As I have grown older and experienced first-hand being early, on time and late, I've developed a different rhythm, a generally slower beat that often puts me on a different timeline than those around me. Living in Portugal has taught me to surrender to the flow of time and to embrace the unpredictability of each day. It has taught me that life isn't just about business meetings and ticking off items on a to-do list. It's also about spontaneous dinner dates, long walks along the beach, and savoring a three hour lunch in the middle of the day. It's about how I feel in the present moment, irrespective of the ticking clock. Although I often poke fun at the Southern European culture of being late to everything, there is a deeper wisdom here that I am slowly learning. **How to flow and not force. **The relative lack of reliability compared to the North American machine I have grown up with on the simple daily living has helped me learn to relax and pay attention to what actually matters in life. As a result, I am less agitated when the handyman doesn’t show up, when the real estate viewing gets canceled after I’ve showed up, or the restaurant closes early for a private event right as our main course was served. A few days in New York last week reminded me of how I was and showed me how I am changing. Now, I choose to flow with the rhythm of my day, and, in doing so, allow myself to fully engage in each moment, rather than constantly thinking about the next. I will continue to be late on the small stuff in life, and be tolerant of when others are as well. It is the big stuff that I’m most interested in being on time for. --- ### How to Be Late Published: 2023-07-07 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/late/ It was yet another one of my full days in London. It didn’t help that the night before was a late one. It included dinner with friends and a night out salsa dancing, to test out the new skills I have been slowly acquiring over the past month. It was my idea. _And I learned quickly I’m not as good as I thought, yet._ That morning, I woke up to the sound of my alarm, a rare occurrence given I stopped using an alarm to wake up nearly ten years ago. **A sign of age, maturity or perhaps both**, my body now consistently wakes up between six and seven each morning, and my schedule has enough flexibility in the early morning that I don’t need to worry about being late. That morning was different though. I was hosting a breakfast roundtable event for investors in the AI industry, and knew I couldn’t be late. _Yet I was still late._ Living in Portugal for two years now, I didn’t realize how accustomed I’ve gotten to Portuguese time. **I am always been late. To everything.** Late is a relative concept though. Living in Portugal, where everyone else is also late in absolute terms, no one is late in relative terms. If I am ten minutes late to something, it is considered early as others will be later than me. That morning I showed up to the event venue to be greeted by a sunset of the guests I was hosting. I failed to remember that in London, to be on time usually meant being early. _Even though I was early, I was late._ The roundtable was fantastic and we finished on time. I didn’t want to start a domino of lateness for others that is all too familiar to me. But **I inadvertently started the domino for myself.** I began chatting with a close friend who attended, and lost track of time. Quickly, I called a taxi to my next appointment and messaged them on the way to say I’d be ten minutes late. _It was a lie, I knew I’d be at least twenty minutes late._ My next appointment was a visit to one of London’s first longevity clinics. A **new experience and recent interest for me**, I had vitamins and supplements injected into my veins via an ivy drip, sat in a hyperbolic oxygen chamber for an hour, among other treatments. As I sat there quietly with vitamins being pumped into me slowly, the founder of the clinic came by for a quick hello, which turned into an hour long interview where he patiently entertained my questions about the business, science, education and regulation of longevity. I could see his staff nudge him every ten minutes or so about the meetings that I was making him late for. Clearly, **I’m generous with my skill of being late** and like to share it with others who come into my presence. A friend who I have been excited to catch-up with was due to come see me there for lunch. As I went from treatment to treatment, my text stream with him grew increasingly annoying I suspect for him. It started with a _“meet me at 2pm”_, followed by a _“hmm, better to plan for 230pm”_, then _“I think by 245pm I’ll be done”_, to _“see you soon, on my way”_, sent of course after 245pm. We enjoyed a delicious Mediterranean inspired meal, and even more stimulating conversation. Having recently been injected with a heavy dose of supplements and oxygen, the ideas were flowing quickly. **We were talking at 1.5x speed.** At one point, I looked at my phone to check the time, and realized my flight was due to leave from Heathrow airport in exactly 2 hours. _This was going to be close._ Pre-pandemic, I used to fly a lot and when people would ask me what type of traveler I was, my response was one word. “JIT”. I’d get a strange stare. “_Just in time”_. I like to show up just in time, not a minute sooner. And to this day, of the maybe one thousand plus flights I’ve taken (hence why I need to invest in longevity treatments to counter the effects on my body of so much flying around), I have only ever missed two flights, both quite early into my career as a professional JIT. **This time was going to be close though.** As I hugged my friend goodbye and left the half eaten hummus, halloumi and pita behind for him to finish, I thought to myself: _maybe I should invest in getting a watch. Maybe_. I stepped into the cab, said to the driver, “_I’ll pay for your speeding tickets, go!_”, and pulled out my phone. I was late for two calls I had scheduled for the same time. I messaged one of them to say “_I’m on a call, will call you soon_”, and called the other person. Once the calls were done, seeing the traffic and wondering if I was going to make my flight, which was an 8 hour flight to Toronto, the last one of the day, I thought: _‘This would be a very good time for my flight to be delayed_’. Then I quietly remarked to myself **how rare it must be for anyone to desperately hope for a delayed flight**. I wonder how many times in the modern history of flight a passenger has wished for a delayed flight. _Probably not very many._ After the hour long cab to Heathrow, I rushed inside the terminal and when trying to go through security, my boarding pass wouldn’t scan. I assumed it was an issue with my phone, and swiftly went to the airline desk. The person at the counter was coy and acting out of character. She said to me quietly, “the flight isn’t going”. “What do you mean? Is it delayed”. “It’s a Technical”. After she realized that I needed more than three or four word answers, she explained that a Technical was airline language for there being a technical issue with the plane and it not being able to take off. At this point, the plane was already boarding. She told me to wait at the counter. I pulled out my phone and began looking for alternate flights. Nothing. So I did the next best thing and began answering the many emails and text and voice messages that had been pilling up. About thirty minutes later, she approached me to share the flight has been cancelled and that I’d be rebooked the next day. I said “_okay, thank you for letting me know_”. And went back into my phone, as I was focused on clearing my inbox and list of messages. Then I looked up as I realized that I had no reaction to this otherwise unexpected development.** I did not feel an ounce of frustration, disappointment, anger or concern.** My mind shifted towards the 200 other passengers, and realizing they are probably not going to be very happy. And within seconds, I saw the stream of angry people walk my way towards the counter. I thought, ‘_oh boy, here we go…_’ **The complaints started to roll in.** The frustrations increasing. It felt people needed to vent and express themselves and chose to do it in unpleasant ways. At one point, I stepped into a mob of sorts that was forming and interrupted the rising anger and said “_hey guys, it’s a Technical, which means something is wrong with the plane. That means it is better that we are not on that plane in the air, and instead are here on the ground. Trust me, this is way better for all of us and your loved ones_”. The mob went quiet. People began to nod their head in quiet embarrassment. And slowly disperse. Someone put their hand on my shoulder as he walked by, a gentle way of saying thank you. Another woman came up to me and said “_you’re right, thank you for the perspective”._ Like time, how one feels is also relative. **When I am anchored on my expectations, I will often feel dissapointment. When I am anchored on my reality, I will often feel grateful.** Back into my phone, I answered all my emails, texts and voice messages for the first time in weeks. _The dopamine was running high._ Then I had the spontaneous thought to see if a woman I recently was setup with was available to have dinner with me. Our first date was literally the day before, it was a lunch which I was of course late for. Over lunch, I had asked her if she liked to plan or flow, she said while she plans her work life, she likes to go with the flow in her personal life. I thought this might be a good test to see how _go with the flow_ she actually is. **The adrenaline was pumping now**, as were the vitamins and supplements, as I wondered what her response might be. In the meantime, I made my way to the airport hotel at Heathrow, and called a close friend in Mexico City who I had been meaning to connect with for literally months. Every few weeks after reading one of my weekly blog reflections, he texts me and I tell him I’ll call him soon. _And then struggle to make time to do so._ After the call, I was pleasantly surprised to see a response from the woman I had messaged and **she said yes to seeing me again**. She gave me a location and I got into what would be a long taxi ride back into the city. On the taxi, I called another close friend living in Denver, who I’ve been trading voice messages with for months and he was pleasantly surprised to hear my voice live. _A rare occurrence he remarked, which I acknowledged._ Once I got to the location, she called me asking me where I was. After an entertaining exchange, I realized I was in the wrong place. **Yet again, I was late.** Upon seeing her, I decided to own my lateness in life and attempt to explain to her why. _She was entertained and happily watched me struggle._ Among many theories that I shared with her, the one I was the most hopeful of was inspired by a BBC documentary I once saw that introduced the idea of time keepers and time benders. **Time keepers**, the vast majority of the population, like to keep time. **Time benders**, the rest of us, are continuously and unconsciously trying to shape time. And in my case, continuously fail at shaping it. The food was delicious, far better than airplane food, and again, I noticed how feelings of gratitude surfaced inside for me as I anchored against reality. The date was lovely as well and I’m sure we’ll see each other again. _She seems open to tolerate my lateness._ As I rode in the taxi back to the hotel at Heathrow that night, I reflected on **what a beautiful and adventurous day I had**. The flight cancellation alone created the space for me to clear my phone, connect with longtime friends, enjoy delicious food and have a spontaneous date. ### My entire day was full of interesting people, food, vitamins and long taxi rides, however more relevant, it was also full of feelings of gratitude, excitement and curiosity. I noticed how being late has made life more interesting for me, as each time feels like a mini-experiment. I have no idea what it is going to bring me. **There is a gift in my lateness.** **I no longer mind being late everywhere I go. **I may have finally accepted it, and that others around me may not. It’s part of my package. It’s part of my reality. _And now with this reflection, part of my brand_. **Life is not about trying to be right. **It is about learning to live in harmony with my reality. _To know it, accept it and thrive in it._ I hope for more days like the one I had in London this week, where I can comfortably be late and completely own it. --- ### How to Be Canadian Published: 2023-06-30 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/canadian/ Red and white flags, stickers and balloons filled my apartment, with over a hundred people also dressed in red and white. ### I hosted my first ever Canada Day party yesterday. It just so happened to be in Portugal. It was yet another bright and sunny day in beautiful Lisbon when I woke up and all I could hear were the sounds of birds chirping. The hustle and bustle of the city was gone, as it was now a weekend. I sat quietly on my balcony, ahead of the chaos that was about to happen in my space, and took in the sun. Summer is here. It nudged a journey of nostalgia, making me walk down memory lane, retracing the steps of my Canadian upbringing. My personal identity has been defined by the Canadian values of diversity, respect, and compassion. My sister and I loved to make hearty pancakes and drench them in maple syrup. I grew up obsessed with ice hockey. Watching, not playing. And of course, I only realised once I had moved to New York that I put “eh” at the end of every other sentence. The Canadian spirit encompasses a warm embrace for everyone, regardless of their origin or identity, and that's exactly what shaped my outlook. Canada’s population recently hit 40 million. It has grown from 30 million during the course of my lifetime, evidence of the openness that Canada has to the world. In the cocoon of a Canadian upbringing, dignity and rights were acknowledged and respected far more than I have witnessed in other cultures. These quintessential Canadian values turned into life lessons that stayed with me. They didn't just fill up the textbooks of my school curriculum, but they also filled my heart, carving my character and conscience. No matter how far I travelled, the essence of being Canadian has stayed with me. It was the secret ingredient that defined me, like the unmistakable hint of Canadian maple syrup in a world full of diverse flavours. Fast forward to now, as the setting sun paints the skies of Portugal, I am nestled amidst a mix of cultures, languages, and traditions. Each day here unravels a different story, a new learning, and an opportunity to explore the unknown. Yet, among the myriad hues of world culture, the unmistakable red and white of the Canadian spirit remains unfaded within me. The Canadian spirit is a strong, silent current that runs through my actions and decisions. Being Canadian doesn't come with a badge to flaunt or a trophy to showcase. It is the quiet pride that echoes in my principles and the values that I stand for. In my experiences across different cultures, I realise that being Canadian is like the invisible ink that silently weaves through the fabric of my life and of the world. It's the thread that binds my identity, the lens through which I view the world, and the heartbeat that echoes in my interactions. It's a part of me, a silent companion that accompanies me wherever I go. A confession seems appropriate now. There's an underappreciation that lingers in the back of my mind. The privilege of being Canadian, of being raised amidst the nation's deep-rooted values, I take for granted. It was only after stepping out of Canadian territory, getting soaked in various cultures, and interacting with hundreds of expatriates in Southern Europe, that the real essence of being Canadian sunk in. Living amidst the cultural potpourri of Southern Europe, I realised that the identity I was carrying was a precious one. Each conversation with my expatriate friends illuminated how the values absorbed from the place of upbringing significantly influence an individual. It dawned on me that being Canadian wasn't just about where I was born or where I lived; it was about how those values, traditions, and experiences had moulded me. The values that I absorbed growing up were not just Canadian values, they were universal values of kindness, respect, and acceptance. And that's when it hit me - being Canadian wasn't just about owning a passport or living within its geographical boundaries. It was about embodying these values, about letting them guide my journey, and about carrying the spirit of Canada within me, wherever I go. Being Canadian is a feeling, a silent commitment to universal values, and a quiet pride that needs no validation. It's a spirit that lives on, regardless of the geographical coordinates, lighting the way and guiding the steps on the path of life. In the end, being Canadian isn't about where I am. It's about who I am. --- ### How to Compound Published: 2023-06-25 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/compounding/ As an investor, I've always been aware of the power of compounding in the financial world. However, it wasn't until recently that I began to notice the same principle at work in so many other aspects of my life. Just like investments, the law of compounding effects can be seen in relationships, experiences, skills, and even personal growth. It's a simple yet profound realization that committing to something long-term can yield benefits that aren't immediately apparent at the surface. Take my frequent trips to London, for instance. This year, I've found myself returning to the city every few weeks. I have just now begun to notice the compounding effects of these visits. With each trip, I am meeting more interesting people and discovering new opportunities. Reflecting further on this, I realized that I've visited London nearly ten times this year already. I could have easily chosen to visit ten different European cities instead, spreading my time thinly across new and interesting places. But by focusing on one city, I've been able to deepen my connections and build familiarity there, which is now opening doors to me that I didn't know existed. This is the power of compounding at work. Two years ago, I moved to Lisbon and found myself saying 'yes' to almost everything. I was eager to explore, to meet new people, and to immerse myself in the culture. Looking back, I sometimes miss the openness and curiosity of those early days. But as I've settled into life here, I've become much more selective, more of a 'no' person. Now, I invest my time and energy in deepening connections with my existing friends, rather than constantly seeking new connections. This shift has brought its own compounding benefits. I feel more grounded, supported, and cared for by my close friends. It's a different kind of richness, one that comes from depth rather than breadth. The same principle applies to how I consume information. Choosing to read a book, which allows me to explore a single topic in depth, has more lasting benefits than scrolling through a feed of fleeting ideas. The deeper understanding I gain from reading a book that can be applied in my life and shared with others, adds more value than the superficial knowledge gained from skimming through a feed. My professional journey also reflects the power of compounding at work. I served as the CEO of my tech business for 15 years. Over that period, I built credibility, influence, and experience that gave me a tremendous amount of confidence. This wouldn't have been possible if I had hopped from one business or industry to another. Many smart people choose to stay in the same organization or role for an extended period, even if there's a higher paying opportunity next door. They understand the compounding benefits of credibility, influence, and trust that come with time that they would not immediately receive next door. Recently, I started learning salsa dancing. It was a spontaneous decision, prompted by a friend's last-minute invitation. I found the challenge just right - not too easy, not too hard - and it sparked a desire to get good at it. Now, I'm taking weekly classes and seeing significant progress. If I had chosen to try a different dance style each week, I wouldn't have experienced this level of growth, would have gotten frustrated and would have stopped. Perhaps the most valuable area where I've seen the benefits of compounding is my health. Last week, when my flight was delayed by two hours, I found myself calmly using the time to clear my inbox, feeling gratitude for the unexpected free time. Looking around, I saw frustration and anger on other passengers' faces. At that moment, I truly felt the benefits of a decade of meditation at work. Over the past year, as I have dug deeper into my physical health, I have been laying the foundation for building strength, endurance and resilience for the decade ahead. I intend to continue to improve my physical health, day by day. The power of compounding is not only a financial concept. It's a principle that applies to every aspect of my life. It requires staying invested, which is sometimes difficult. When something shinier or more appealing walks by, it could be easy to jump. Whether it's building relationships, acquiring skills, or personal growth, the benefits of long-term commitment and consistency are profound. They may not be immediately visible, but over time, they compound to create significant value and richness that are not available to me in any other way. When I choose depth over breadth, I am now open to receiving the benefits of compounding. In my frequent trips to London, I've seen how repeated visits have opened doors and introduced me to people I wouldn't have met otherwise. In Lisbon, my decision to invest in existing friendships has given me a sense of grounding and support that is priceless. My choice to read books over scrolling feeds has enriched my understanding and application of ideas. My long tenure as a CEO has given me credibility and influence that wouldn't have been possible with job-hopping. My commitment to learning salsa has led to noticeable progress, and enjoyment. And my decade-long practice of meditation has given me a sense of calm and gratitude that is invaluable. The power of compounding in life is a testament to the value of consistency, patience, and long-term commitment. It's about understanding that the most significant benefits often come from deep, sustained engagement rather than surface-level exploration. It's about recognizing that the most meaningful growth often happens incrementally, over time. In a modern era filled with stimuli and that is encouraging of hoping, jumping and surfing from here to there constantly, I believe now more than ever is it important to intentionally commit to the compounding life. --- ### How to Find My Heart Published: 2023-06-16 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/shape/ This past week, I danced. A lot. I was in London participating in a 5Rythms dance retreat for 5 days, where we danced for five to six hours a day. The dance is completely free form, and the floor quickly became a canvas to express whatever my body wanted to at that moment. I enjoyed very much the privilege of being anonymous, as I did not know any of the fellow hundred dancers who were on retreat with me. Had I been in an environment where I knew more people, or was known by many people, it may have influenced how my body moved. Here, my body felt completely free. Free of expectation. Free of judgment. Free of any desire to perform. Each day consisted of two long dances, during which there was no verbal communication. With the music filling the room and our feet wandering freely across the room, each of us quickly came into our own private inner space, as if there was no one watching. Ahead of each dance, the teacher shared a prompt to help guide our inner journey. One of the prompts stuck with me. He asked, ‘what is the shape of your heart?’. The more I became curious about the shape of my heart, figuratively of course, the more I felt a lack of clarity. So many shapes, sizes and colors came up instantly. First, I imagined the shape of a long diamond, with a glass texture and pleasant blue light radiating from it. It had sharp edges and points everywhere. Then, the image of a dark purple cube arose, but with some of the corners missing and it looked a little worn out. Then, a bright orange sun shaped figure, like the sun, that was too hot to touch or come near. And so it went on for a few hours. A continuous stream of images of the shape of my heart. Then, it hit me. The shape of my heart is not static, it continues to change. It is not a fixed object, despite me trying to define it with characteristics like shape, size and color, it is an energy that is living and adapting to the stimulus and environment it is faced with. During the next dance, the teacher chimed in on the mic with another prompt, ‘who has shaped your heart?’. I instantly thought about my mom, and then my dad. How they taught me to love, to feel, to be, not through words but through their example. How they continue to teach me. I thought about my younger sister, and pictured the two of us at different ages, and how we would shape each other. Then friends, teachers, and people around me growing up. Into adulthood, there was a big part of my heart shaped by my first love. And then by my second love. And the many loves since then. The moments of immense joy. The heartbreaks. All of it shaped my heart. My dreams, hopes and desires. The ones I had early on in life, and how both getting some of them, and not others, have shaped my heart. It is not intuitive to become curious about the shape of my heart. I was just on the phone with my mom and asked her the question. After she confirmed I meant her figurative and not literally heart, she paused. And then shared that she imagined a white ball, glowing brightly, that was soft yet strong. I asked her what it meant and she reflected out loud that the color white had a universal quality to it, the shape meant there is no front or back, and the soft yet strong texture is how it can interact with others yet overcome pain. We went on to have a beautiful conversation about how our literal heart is the first sign of life the moment we are born. I asked her if she remembered hearing my heartbeat for the first time, as I joked that I didn’t. The phone went silent. I could hear her tears. My heart has been with me my entire life. I recently wrote a reflection about the most important relationship in my life being the one I have with myself. It’s fitting that one week later, I am continuing to explore what that means for me, or specifically what part of me I am desiring to be most connected to. At times, I have felt fear and a desire to protect my heart. To not let anyone in. To not let anyone shape it. However I am reminded that my heart is essential to my life. Without it, I have no life. Literal or figurative. I feel immense gratitude for all of the people, experiences and moments that have shaped my heart. And for the many more that I hope will continue to shape it in the future, in beautiful, unexpected and surprising ways. --- ### How to Look Inside Published: 2023-06-09 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/relationship/ Recently, a dear friend, who I was complaining to about some things that have been on my mind as of late, reminded me that I have an abundant treasury of answers to most of my questions. It is sitting inside myself. This reminder was intriguing yet slightly unsettling, considering my comfort and conditioning to seek wisdom and solutions from external sources. It brought about an unusual pause in my routine - a pause that allowed me to take a deep, cleansing breath and embark on an inward journey of exploration. **The realization that I understand myself more deeply than anyone else has been both liberating and empowering.** I have often heard, and now more than ever believe, that the most profound relationship in life is the one with oneself. _This is a concept that continues to resonate deeply within me._ Drawing an analogy with a romantic relationship, imagine the strain that would be inflicted upon the partnership if one were to continuously seek counsel from individuals outside of the relationship. Such dependence on external viewpoints could cause an erosion of trust, a diminution of intimacy, and a weakening of the connection that binds two people together. I've come to see that the relationship I share with myself is just as delicate and deserving of care, if not more so. **When I persistently look outside for answers, I inadvertently distance myself from myself.** This can lead to feelings of self-abandonment, an odd occurrence given the fact that I have the most comprehensive understanding of myself compared to anyone else. In my ongoing journey of self-discovery and introspection, a specific mindfulness technique has emerged as a steadfast companion. This is the practice of _'morning pages,'_ a journaling technique pioneered and popularized by the writer Julia Cameron. The beauty of this method lies in its simplicity and effectiveness. It entails waking up each morning and, before the day's activities begin to clamor for attention, taking a few blank pages and commencing a session of uninterrupted writing. The session lasts for about twenty or thirty minutes, and during this time, my pen remains in continuous motion, capturing the flow of thoughts from my mind directly to paper, without my ‘editor’ inside filtering and shaping every word. _This technique has allowed me to delve deeper into the recesses of my consciousness._ The advantage of an intimate relationship, whether it be with a friend, a romantic partner, or myself, is _the ability to glean an unfiltered perspective._ This raw, uncensored viewpoint often proves invaluable in informing my choices and decisions. It serves as an internal compass guiding me through the maze of life's challenges and opportunities. In a recent conversation with a new friend, the dynamic nature of values and beliefs was broached. It provoked an intellectual debate that, while invigorating, also offered some valuable insights. One such insight was the understanding that my life, like everyone else’s, is a sculpted piece of art. It takes form from the multitude of choices I make, which are in turn influenced by my beliefs and my deeply ingrained values. This interconnected chain forms the backbone of my existence, lending structure and meaning to my life. My relationship with myself acts as a connecting bridge to these values and beliefs. It reminds me of my core principles and the ideals I hold dear. Every time I embark on an introspective journey, I am reminded of what matters most to me, and this gives me a clarity of vision. It helps me to prioritize my goals and identify what truly merits my time and attention. I am privileged to have an array of resources at my disposal. From friends with diverse life experiences to authors I admire, from thought leaders who inspire me to professionals dedicated to unraveling the complexities of the human psyche - there's no dearth of external sources of wisdom. However, amidst this overwhelming variety, I sometimes forget to tap into the most crucial resource - myself. **Maintaining an ongoing connection with myself is like nurturing any other relationship. It demands time, attention, and patience.** There are times when I've taken this relationship for granted, times when I've been negligent, but then there are also moments when I've held this relationship in the highest regard, acknowledging its sanctity. **I cannot emphasize enough the importance of the relationship I have with myself.** It serves as my anchor, providing stability and strength. It provides a solid foundation upon which I can construct the edifice of my life with confidence and peace of mind, free from the gnawing uncertainties of self-doubt and confusion. _In times of turmoil and indecision, it is my inner self that offers clarity_. It reassures me about my capabilities, highlights my priorities, and boosts my confidence. This understanding of my own psyche serves as a pillar of support, making the journey of life smoother and more manageable. **Every time I confront confusion, which given the unpredictability of life could be as early as later today, or perhaps tomorrow, or the day after, I know where to turn.** --- ### How to Feel Alive Published: 2023-06-02 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/alive/ In the grand lexicon of human life, ‘currency’ is a term that most often conjures up images of money or material wealth. However, as I deepen my understanding of the concept, I am coming to realize that there exists a different kind of currency, something far more personal and profound. This unique currency, my personal currency, holds more sway over my actions and choices than anything else. And it is how I feel alive. I see this personal currency as the embodiment of my core values. It is what I cherish, it is the commodity with which I engage in the give-and-take of life. It's not just about possessing it, but about believing in its worth, both as something I can offer and as something I can receive. For me, my personal currency is inspiration. Inspiration is something I continually seek and cherish. It motivates my choices and destinations. Take, for instance, my spontaneous move to Portugal two years ago; the change of place, the discomfort of not knowing a single person and the challenge of starting again in many ways all inspired me. I've learned that my surroundings deeply influence my sense of inspiration. The bonds I hold closest are with those who inspire me, each in their unique way. Some inspire me through the generosity of their spirit, others through their encouragement, and still others by being true to who they are, thereby unconsciously modeling qualities that I aspire to. Recently, in a conversation with my mother, I divulged how inspiration fuels me. When she asked if she had ever inspired me, I could instantly cite two instances. Her dedication and stubbornness inspire me to stay committed to my choices. When I consider tasks that linger unchecked on my to-do list, unread emails that have piled up over weeks, or even the stretches that I avoid despite knowing they're beneficial, I realize the common thread - none of these inspire me. They feel burdensome rather than motivating. I find no personal currency to trade in these scenarios. A recent chat with a close friend led us to explore this concept of personal currency. As I unveiled my own, I saw him reflecting on his unique currency. He identified his as connection. He thrives on a sense of connection with the people around him, his environment, and his work. It resonated deeply with me - connection indeed seemed to be his personal currency. I perceive my father's currency to be curiosity. We watched a documentary recently, and I found his engagement with the film as captivating as the documentary itself. He loves delving into people's stories, asking questions, and contemplating new ideas. Curiosity seems to be his life's fuel. My mother, I believe, trades in the currency of learning. Her endless inquiries about smartphone apps, file management, or just random topics she stumbles upon online all point to her innate desire for knowledge. Learning, it seems, is her driving force. Creativity, I feel, is the currency for my brother-in-law. His joy and sense of fulfillment in expressing creativity, whether behind the lens, in front of a screen, with a paintbrush or in the kitchen, is palpable and inspiring. For my sister, fairness is her currency. She thrives on justice, equity, and balance, for herself and, more importantly, for others. Her disquiet at perceived unfairness is palpable, and unlike my attempts to rationalize, she can't just let it be. Her fervor amplifies in the face of fairness or the lack thereof. My personal currency of inspiration serves as my compass, guiding me through major and minor life decisions. It helps me understand my attraction to certain places, people, and ideas and my aversion to others. When I am trading in my currency, I feel most alive, most authentic, and most aligned with my intrinsic nature and energy. Its value surpasses that of money for me. It is, after all, my personal currency in life. --- ### How to Disconnect Published: 2023-05-26 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/disconnect/ As I sat on a rustic wooden table at a small coastal retreat in Portugal, the rhythm of the crashing waves almost becoming a soundtrack to the intense conversations, I found myself reflecting on a topic that had been quietly eating away at me_ - our relationship with technology._ The evening was spent with fellow entrepreneurs, people who had successfully navigated the tumultuous waters of the tech industry and who now found themselves on the frontlines of the very digital age we helped create. As plates of food came and went, conversation moved from the predictable territories of business and innovation to a topic that was quietly unsettling - tech addiction. With a quiet tone of curiosity, I tossed a simple question into the group, asking them to think about **the longest continuous period they had recently gone without using the internet or looking at their phone**. The sounds of laughter and easy chatter faded away as the weight of the question settled over the table. Heads bowed, as faces took on expressions of serious thought. That humility, the sudden reflection on our own habits, was palpable. The responses began to filter in - a chorus of_ 'less than a day._' When I asked if they had actually gone an entire 24 hours continuously without screens or internet, the responses were a resounding 'no.' And when the conversation drifted towards a more specific question I asked about the last time they went to bed without looking at their phone, _there was a stunned silence._ As we bravely stared down at our tech dependencies, it was clear that for all the concern we had for their children and their screen time, adults struggled with the same issues. Some were quick to rationalise, arguing that they maintained healthy relationships with their devices. But there was a point I wanted to make, one that was less about shame and more about awareness of the side effects of tech addiction. _In my life, I've found myself living in two distinct modes._ **The first I call primary mode.** It is a state of hyper-alertness, a reactive mode where my mind is constantly scanning, processing, and triaging the world around me. This mode is not a choice; it's a survival instinct and one likely as a result of human evolution. In the digital world, this mode often translates to scanning my phone or laptop for new information, missed calls, unanswered messages, or emails. Whether I check my device every hour, or every half an hour, this reactive mode is triggered. The simple act of picking up my phone disconnects me momentarily from whatever else I was doing, jolting me into this state of alertness. **The other is what I call secondary mode.** It is one of proactivity. This is the mode in which I am most strategic, most insightful, most creative, and most myself. It's in this state that I can problem-solve, ideate, and innovate. It's where I find my inspiration. Activities like yoga, long walks, showers, countryside drives, or simply cooking a meal or writing in a state of relaxed mindfulness, trigger this secondary mode. I've come to recognize these moments as those that yield the most value in life, both for myself and for others. Reflecting on my waking hours, I've noticed an encouraging shift towards secondary mode. However, what concerns me is that as a society, we may be slipping deeper into the primary, reactive mode. Constantly reacting to stimuli, rarely taking the time to be proactive about our own lives. And while I used to take pleasure in blaming big tech platforms, I now feel it is on each of us to take ownership and responsibility for our own experience of life. What I am beginning to realize is that the constant barrage of information I am faced with everyday - whether wanted or unwanted - is not just an external factor I have to deal with. It has a profound impact on how I experience my days, my relationships, and ultimately, my life. While I navigate my way through this digital era, I have learned that it's crucial to take moments to disconnect and enter into my secondary, proactive mode. These are the moments where I can truly engage with my surroundings, come up with innovative ideas, and above all, understand myself a little better. As I shared these thoughts with the group, the silence was a testament to the resonance of this truth. Perhaps it was the crashing waves, the rustic wooden table, or just the collective reflection of a group of entrepreneurs, but that evening we all left with a resolution to disconnect to connect. To consciously choose to be in our secondary mode a bit more, and our primary mode a bit less. --- ### How to Balance Published: 2023-05-19 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/balanced/ I had a difficult moment recently. In these moments, I often turn to my journal to begin to process the emotions within. After hours of writing to myself on the topic over the course of a few days, I noticed a dramatic shift in how I felt. **It was only once I saw the sum of the parts**, versus getting overly concerned about one specific part, that I began to feel more grounded, connected and calm again. _Balancing life I have realised is similar to managing a balanced stock portfolio._ It requires a broad long-term perspective, looking at the variety of fibres that make up my life, rather than focusing too intently on any single thread. It is especially important to maintain this perspective in moments of confusion or disappointment, when it is all too easy for me to become absorbed with one particular aspect of life. Each element in this intricate life portfolio serves a distinct purpose, often unique from the others. Yet, they are not entirely independent, much like stocks in a portfolio, they interact, influence each other, and contribute to the overall health of the portfolio. **Consider health.** It's multifaceted—physical, mental, and emotional—and each facet plays a significant role in the overall portfolio. When my health is thriving, it enhances the other parts of my life portfolio; energy surges, strength amplifies, and confidence blooms. However, when my health wanes, it becomes a drag, impacting growth in other areas, casting a shadow of doubt over the entirety of the portfolio. **Relationships**—family, close friends, community—can also enrich the life portfolio. They fulfil a deep-rooted desire I have for connection, which fuels me, infuses me with energy, and strengthens others parts. However, there's a potential risk of becoming overly invested or distracted by specific connections, which then turns into a liability. **Business** is another significant part of my life portfolio. It provides me with a sense of purpose and play, a channel for creative expression, and a chance to savour the sweet taste of achievement. However, it can also be the source of stress, sleep deprivation, and much frustration. **Spiritual practices**, mindfulness, and introspection act as a sort of life insurance. They provide me with support in times of need, offer inspiration, and assist in finding clarity. Yet, when over-invested in these practices, they become a source of stress, creating a pressure to maintain a routine even when it doesn't feel necessary. _There are different strategies for managing a portfolio, well studied and proven._ **Growth requires concentration.** In my twenties, when my focus was on professional growth, I concentrated my time and energy primarily on business. It was a calculated risk, similar to an investment portfolio focused on growth where concentration is essential. It worked, and the returns have been meaningful. **Preservation requires diversification.** The goal of my life portfolio has shifted more towards preservation, in several parts, which diversification is the strategy for. My time and energy is more diversified now than it has ever been. While this puts a ceiling on the growth I may realise in any one part, it allows me to preserve many parts that have become important to me. _Taking risks is as essential to life as it is to investments._ A life void of risks is akin to a stagnant portfolio—destined for a slow decline due to inflation. Embracing risks begins with openness and curiosity about the realms of possibilities for me. Just as I seek advice for managing my investment portfolio, I also turn to others for insights about life. But at the end of the day, the decisions have to be mine. I've had moments of blindly following advice, whether from bankers or parents, and felt a disconnect from the outcomes. _It is vital to feel ownership of these decisions, of how I invest in my life._ **Uncertainty is a constant companion in life, just as in investments.** Any belief that I can predict the future is an illusion. The greatest risk, perhaps, is the belief that I know what lies ahead, as it blinds me to the realm of possibilities and risks. Looking at daily fluctuations in my portfolio can induce anxiety and nervousness. But when I consider the long-term trend, there's a sense of comfort and ease. It's a valuable lesson for life. During challenging times when one part of my life portfolio takes a hit, it's crucial not to zoom in too closely or to extrapolate that one setback across the entire portfolio. **Being aware of the environment and being open to adapt is essential.** Life doesn't happen in a bubble, and I can't live well in a self-created fantasy. Being attuned to the world around me, being willing to learn, to adapt, and to make changes, is just as important in life as it is in managing an investment portfolio. As time goes on, I get new information, and it is on me to make choices based on what I now know. A portfolio is a complex and interconnected system. Understanding that each part of my portfolio serves a unique purpose, yet that all parts need to work well together, is the key to a balanced life. --- ### How to Die Published: 2023-05-12 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/living/ Recently, I found myself drawn to reflect on the theme of death, and its influence on how I live. Life is a magnificent tapestry woven with experiences and interactions, and it has a hidden influence from death, the inevitable end to the journey. Contrary to what one might expect, I realized that the fear of death, this universal dread that trails us like a shadow, is not actually what it seems. It is instead a _hidden fear of living_. _This insight has begun to reshape my understanding of how to live._ **My daily life is filled with meticulous care and calculated decisions.** I’m careful while crossing the street, vigilant when I am behind the steering wheel of my car. I find myself assessing the risks involved in potential investments, gauging potential gains and losses, unconsciously like a background computer process. I can hesitate at times before opening myself to friends or potential romantic partners, building walls to protect my vulnerability. I obsess over my diet, ensuring I’m fueling my body with the right nutrients. I watch my words, aiming to strike the perfect balance of honesty and political correctness. These actions, seemingly disparate, are united by a common thread - the fear of death. But it’s not merely the dread of physical demise. It's the fear of reputational death, the death of relationships, the death of emotions, and the death of ego. **Each careful step, every cautious word, is an attempt to avoid these metaphorical deaths.** Yet, as I began to reflect, I recognized an underlying paradox. _In trying to avoid death, I am, in a way, avoiding life itself._ Every day, I am bound by an invisible chain, shackled by the fear of death, resulting in a life cautiously lived, a life constrained. **When I delve into thoughts about death, I feel a profound sense of urgency bubbling within me**, reminding me of the temporary nature of my existence. It’s a stark realization of the fragility of my life, a poignant reminder of its impermanence. However, acknowledging the inevitability of death does not imply embracing it prematurely. Far from it. While I would never consciously accelerate death, I now understand that I can, and should, choose to more fully embrace living. I have come to realize that life is not meant to be merely a series of safe choices and guarded interactions. It's meant to be lived fully and fearlessly, embracing all the risks and rewards that come along with it. I strive to learn how to live more freely, unburdened by the fear of the metaphorical deaths that have held me back. I aim to breathe deeply, taste new experiences, and explore unfamiliar territories. I'm learning to express myself more candidly, to be more honest in my interactions. **I'm learning to be more vulnerable, to open myself to the possibility of continued deep and meaningful connections.** In my quest for health, I'm evolving to understand that wellbeing extends beyond physicality. It's about nourishing the mind, the soul, as well as the body. It's about embracing life in its entirety, from the rush of adrenaline to the tranquility of meditation, from the joy of accomplishment to the sting of failure. Most importantly, I'm learning to let go of my fear of death, to embrace it as a part of life. It's a perspective shift, understanding that death is not the antithesis of life, but its culmination. _It's not a full stop, but a poignant pause, a serene sunset at the end of a vibrant day._ In essence, the fear of death is indeed a fear of living. I'm learning to unshackle myself from this fear. I'm learning to live fully, deeply, passionately. --- ### How to Dream Published: 2023-05-07 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/dream/ I have had my fair share of disappointments in life. And I know that that will continue. Why? Because I choose to continue to dream. Dreams, the whispers of my soul, have fueled my journey of relentless passion, a rollercoaster of emotions, and endless learning. My pursuit of dreams has always been about chasing after what sets my heart on fire, even if it means exposing myself to the likely risk of disappointment. There have been moments in my life when I unconsciously prioritized safety and security. A stable routine, a controlled lifestyle, consistent places and people, and avoiding risks provided the illusion of having everything figured out. I spent my days fulfilling my responsibilities and my evenings doing the familiar, enjoying the warmth of my comfort zone. Inevitably though, the weight of feelings of dissatisfaction grow heavier, and the potential for something more becomes impossible to ignore. Deep down, I know I am capable of so much more, and the restlessness inside becomes too loud to silence. Taking the leap and following my heart meant leaving the safety of my comfort zone behind. These decisions change everything about my life. Like starting a company out of school, way before it was cool to even consider something like this. Or recently, moving to Portugal on a whim without knowing a single person or doing any research in advance. The risks I continue to take help create the most memorable and meaningful moments in my life, and they teach me that playing it safe is no way to live. The journey of dreaming is not easy though. There have been moments when my dreams seemed impossible to reach, when disappointments felt insurmountable. In these moments, I had to dig deep within myself and find the strength to keep moving forward. I learned that disappointment is an inevitable part of the process, and without it is no growth. As I continue to chase my dreams, I realize that focusing solely on an end outcome leaves me feeling perpetually dissatisfied. Always striving for the next milestone, never taking the time to appreciate how far I have come. I started to shift my mindset and celebrate along the way, by sharing with those around me more. The journey, the growth I experience, the relationships I build, and the wisdom I gain become just as important as achieving my dreams. Surrounding myself with people who believe in and encourage my dreams is vital. They lift my spirits during tough times and remind me of what is possible. I find solace in friends who share my passion and who inspire me. Disappointments are a given when I dream. Be it in business, relationships, or hobbies, dreaming is not dreaming if everything is known. That is called planning, not dreaming. Dreaming involves the space for the unknown, which can be both terrifying and thrilling. It's interesting to consider that animals, plants, and trees likely don't dream. They exist, grow, and thrive without the need for aspirations or goals. Some might even say that not dreaming is akin to being a vegetable. Even AI, as advanced as it is becoming, probably doesn't dream either. As humans, we are unique in our ability to dream, to imagine a better future, and to create a path towards it. Our dreams and aspirations are what set us apart and give us the power to shape our world in extraordinary ways. My journey, with all its challenges and disappointments, has taught me that dreaming is a gift. It's a privilege to strive for the stars and to learn from the stumbles along the way. The difference between playing to not lose and playing to win lies in the willingness to embrace dreams, to accept disappointment, and to keep moving forward, no matter what. By choosing to play to win, I've transformed my life into a daring adventure filled with purpose, passion, and growth. As I continue to chase my dreams and embrace the disappointments that come along the way, I am constantly reminded of the power of dreaming. Our dreams have the potential to change not only our own lives but also the lives of those around us and the world at large. By daring to dream, we open ourselves up to greater possibilities and the chance to leave a lasting impact. --- ### How to Be Grateful Published: 2023-04-30 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/delicate/ My eyes closed, sitting quietly in a meditative position surrounded by people, listening to the soft gentle music playing, I realized how entitled I had been feeling towards the people I would have least expected: my parents. It was six weeks ago, while at an ecstatic dance retreat in rural Portugal, that my relationship and attitude towards my parents shifted in a profound way. I had waited this long to share my reflection on it, as I was curious to see if it would stick. And it has. With years of therapy and mindfulness practices, it is often highlighted how my childhood experiences and traumas have shaped me as an adult. There are no doubt qualities and traits that I do not appreciate or like about myself, and it becomes easy to point the finger at my parents. Over time, a sense of entitlement had built up. The sense of entitlement that I now realize that had been growing towards my parents disappeared in that moment six weeks ago and remains nowhere to be found. The insight that triggered this powerful shift in state was realizing that I only exist because of them. They literally and figuratively created me. And their parents them. With this understanding, I was brought to tears immediately and remain flooded with gratitude for them today. I do not need them to be perfect anymore. I have recognized two powerful states of mind that can significantly impact my perspective on life: gratitude and entitlement. These states are like opposites and they shape my experiences, emotions, and responses in whatever context I am in. It is evident to me that both gratitude and entitlement are states of being, not static positions. I can move from one state to the other. Recognizing the signs of each state helps me to make conscious choices of how I wish to be. To cultivate gratitude, as a habit and skill, some daily practices help anchor me, including journaling, meditation, and expressing gratitude to others. Sharing my feelings of gratitude towards others also has the added benefit of strengthening my relationships. Starting my day with gratitude sets a positive tone and helps me maintain a grounded mindset throughout the day, limiting any tendency to float into a state of entitlement. As gratitude is nurtured, it creates a barrier against the sense of entitlement, preventing it from taking root and growing. Gratitude allows me to appreciate the present moment and the abundance that already exists, while entitlement focuses on what is lacking or what I believe I deserve. Entitlement often leads to disappointment and frustration, as it hinges on a self belief that I deserve something different or better than what is in front of me. When I notice feelings of disappointment, that might be a sign of entitlement creeping in. By actively searching for the positive aspects of a situation, I can counteract the negative emotions associated with entitlement and foster a more balanced and positive outlook. Some examples of this shift from entitlement to gratitude: At work, one may often feel overlooked for a promotion or under appreciated for their effort. This happens a lot. Approaching the situation from a place of gratitude for the opportunity, people, learning, and growth will signal a positive energy and enthusiasm that will be noticed, whereas from a place of entitlement will generate an us vs them attitude which can easily become counterproductive. Among friends, one may feel envious of a close friend's success and accomplishments, thinking that they deserve the same. Recognizing this sense of entitlement, practicing gratitude for the friendship and the inspiration it provides can be a positive catalyst for change and a source of motivation. Whereas a sense of entitlement will surely lead to a feeling of discouragement. Experiencing the shift between a state of entitlement to a state of gratitude continues to be transformative for me. The beauty of this shift of attitude towards my parents is that my parents had nothing to do with it. They did not change one bit. What changed was my perspective. It is a delicate dance, within myself, to observe how I naturally feel and at times, take the lead to move into a different state, one that is positive and productive for who and what it is that I value and love. --- ### How to Feel Privileged Published: 2023-04-23 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/passport/ In the past week, dozens of friends have reached out to me as I have been helping them apply for a Golden Visa in Portugal, to get a path to citizenship in Europe. The highly popular investment program is about to close forever. The experience has opened my eyes to the privilege of a passport. Growing up in Canada, the son of Indian immigrants, I had no idea just how valuable my Canadian passport was. It wasn't until my parents shared their story that I realized how different my life could have been. They immigrated to Canada just one month before I was born, which means I could have easily held an Indian passport instead of a Canadian one. That seemingly inconsequential detail has, in many ways, shaped my life. Now living in Portugal, I find myself surrounded by a diverse mix of nationalities. As my friendships deepen, I've begun to understand the struggles that many individuals face due to the limitations of their passports. I've seen firsthand how these struggles can impact both personal and professional lives. One such friend is from Russia, having left her home country long ago. Sadly, she's unable to renew her passport and is stuck, unable to travel. Another friend of mine, who had worked in Iran for a while, is now worried about entering the United States because of a few undesirable passport stamps. My own cousin, born in India just a week after me, faces constant challenges when attempting to secure visas for international travel. As for me, I've had the fortune of traveling to over 30 countries without so much as a second thought. My Canadian passport has granted me the freedom to explore the world, learn about new cultures, and expand my horizons. It's also played a significant role in the success of my business, which currently serves 300 clients in 30 countries. Without the ease of travel provided by my passport, I might have struggled to grow my company and achieve the same level of success. It's an uncomfortable truth that the world has globalized in terms of trade, information, and business, but it has not done so in terms of mobility. During the pandemic, we witnessed countries prioritizing the rights and safety of their citizens over others. This situation served as a stark reminder that citizenship still matters, and that passport privilege is very much alive and well. My own experiences have made me acutely aware of the impact of geopolitical issues on international travel. I've never done business in Russia, and I don't currently feel the need to. However, looking ahead a decade or two, I may very well want to conduct business in China, as it's predicted to become the world's largest economy. Yet, should Canada and China find themselves at a political impasse, I might be unable to travel there. It's important to recognize that while I've benefited greatly from my passport, it's something that I didn't earn. I was simply born into a fortunate situation. As I continue to enjoy the benefits of seemingly borderless travel due to my Canadian passport, I would like to believe that I can raise awareness of this issue that others face and advocate for change. Unfortunately, this is ‘above my pay grade’, as they say, and I am not confident that despite our globalization efforts, things will get better. Over the past five years, we have seen highly developed nations begin to close their borders and introduce more nationalistic policies. With greater disparities, be it a result of technological evolution, rising wealth gaps and more, I suspect we will continue to see more closed and nationalistic policies. Fast forward one or two generations, thinking ahead to my unborn children and maybe grandchildren, what is the passport privilege that they will have? I meet so many non Europeans living in Portugal that I am extremely jealous of, as they have a European passport through some deceased relative they have never met and barely know about. It amazes me that countries will prioritize descendents who may not even live in the place above people who are there and contributing to the local economy. I am incredibly grateful for the opportunities that my Canadian passport has afforded me. I recognize that I've been granted a level of freedom and mobility that many people can only dream of. We really do not know what the future will look like and the greatest teaching I have internalized through a decade of mindfulness and spiritual practice is that ‘everything changes’. I feel grateful to my parents for having the vision to plan ahead for my future. --- ### How to Twin Published: 2023-04-13 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/nature/ I recently took a vacation with my sister to Greece. It was the first time that only the two of us vacationed together as adults. For her, it was a needed break from being a young mother, the Canadian winter, and her latest artistic projects. For me, it was an opportunity to explore more of Southern Europe, reconnect with my sister, and take time to reflect. **The two of us grew up like twins.** We nearly share the same birthday, with my sister arriving into the world one day and one year after me. Countless pictures of us as babies and kids show us playing together nearly all the time. While close friends often comment that we may look alike and share common mannerisms, and even vocabulary, our personalities are unique and different. Spending nearly one week together in close proximity, sharing the same spaces, experiences, and moments, our _similarities and differences_ became very clear to both of us. **We travel in similar ways.** The hotels we find comforting, the restaurants we find appealing, and the activities we find interesting. I have to believe this is a result of how we were nurtured. Growing up together, growing up close, we generally like and appreciate similar things. **We operate in different ways.** Where my sister is very good with details, I often zoom out and like to look at the bigger picture. The number of times the two of us would be standing next to one another, looking at the exact same art, architecture, building, or landscape, and she would point out some exquisite detail that I would fail to even notice, was telling. No matter how hard I tried, I could not notice the details that she naturally would highlight. My sister is not the tidiest person. And while the past two years she used the excuse of having a young child, we all knew what she was not willing to admit. Sharing a hotel room with her made it abundantly clear how different the two of us are with respect to tidiness. I am naturally organized, almost unconsciously putting things in their place. _My sister, not as much._ **I share these simple examples to highlight the role of nature.** Although we were both nurtured in the exact same way, by the same parents, the same school, in the same home, in the same city and culture, we turned out completely different in many respects. In light of this, it starts to make it easier to accept myself. To not take blame for the qualities that I may not appreciate or that I struggle with at times. And also not to take full credit for the qualities that I sometimes feel proud of myself for and that I know serve me well. From this place of not feeling shame for the lows and not feeling as much pride for the highs, I start to feel more grounded. "It is not all of my doing". I was literally born this way. Having my sister to reflect back to me what it is about me that is likely nature versus nurture is illuminating. The grip is loosened on trying to change what is clearly my nature. And appreciation grows for what is clearly nurture. I once was taught a unique meditation practice that involves a long stare at myself in the mirror. Not to check myself out, or fix my hair, but to stare into my own eyes, continuously, without pause except to blink. It is difficult to do this past 30 seconds, let alone 30 minutes. **The reason it is difficult is that it forces me to be seen, by myself, which is vulnerable.** I cannot hide how I feel. Who I am. How I am. _I am forced to see it all._ Spending one week with my sister was similar to the mirror meditation. I was both the subject and the observer. And what I observed was the difference between nurture and nature. Or said differently, what I have influence and control over, and what I cannot control. --- ### How to Accept Published: 2023-04-06 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/perfect/ Over many years, I became numb to how yoga teachers in New York often start a class. The words that became all too common were,_ “this is a difficult time”._ Within a few years, I started to wonder if this was a _‘boy who cried wolf’_ situation, where every moment seemed to be difficult. While there are no doubt difficult moments, every moment cannot in fact be difficult. However, perhaps every moment felt difficult, which peaks my curiosity to understand why. I imagine that 20 years ago or 200 years ago, my parents or ancestors also felt that it was also a difficult moment. _I cannot imagine that it was all sunshine and rainbows for them, all the time, yet for us now, it is not._ **This leads me to believe that it has always felt like a difficult moment, and might always feel like it is a difficult moment.** When I pause to reflect on this, _it can feel very relieving_. I no longer have to try so hard. I can stop trying to change the world. I can stop trying to change those around me. I can stop trying to change myself. **Change comes in two varieties, I have learned.** One variety is effortful, and the other is effortless. It is like trying to bend a thin branch of a tree. If I bend it a little, it will have room to give. If I bend it too much, it will break. The world will keep changing. Those around me will keep changing. I will keep changing. However, I do not need to force any of it. It is in my nature to change. **I do not believe that we are on some path to a perfect world.** _I believe we are already there._ There are no doubt inequities, injustices, and insecurities. Today they are of a specific variety, tomorrow they will be of a different variety. For years, I had been telling myself a story that things will be better at some future moment. I was the boy who cried wolf. Always telling myself, _‘just need to get through this’_, or _‘once this is done, then things will be better’_. This applied in business, in health, in relationships, in how I perceived the world around me. I realize now that I had been _only fooling myself_ with this all too familiar story, that this is an especially difficult moment that I find myself in. **It is a question of the relative versus the absolute.** In absolute terms, it may feel difficult. However, relative to what I am capable of, or relative to the capacity I have, or relative to my nature, this might actually be the norm. **This moment feels more difficult than what?** Then the past moments? Well not really, as I have already acknowledged that previous moments felt difficult at the time. **This moment feels more difficult than what I expect?** There I have it. This moment feels difficult relative to what I expect. And if I feel it is always a difficult moment, it is clear that I need to change my expectations. Much easier to change my expectations than to try and change reality. Trying to change reality is like bending the tree branch with too much effort. I do not believe that it can always be a difficult moment. And it is _unhealthy to always tell myself a story that things will be better in the future_. _What if they will not? What if this is as good as it gets?_ **With this understanding that this is as good as it gets, I start to pay attention to what is real. **I stop focusing on some fantasy created in my mind. When I am connected to reality, I begin to accept it. When I accept reality, as it is and not as I wish it to be, my heart is flooded with gratitude. _A gentle smile appears naturally on my face._ This is how I try to deal with difficulty. --- ### How to Create Space Published: 2023-04-01 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/space/ Over the past few months, I have found myself traveling to London often, seeking a break from my Lisbon life. Craving a change, more excitement, and a chance to shake things up, I felt the need to step out of my comfort zone. Though I had spent the past six months traveling often within Portugal, I had the feeling that I needed something different. London, with its big city energy, terrible weather compared to Lisbon, and relentless pace, was the change that **fed and energized me in ways that I needed**. However, it was not until last week that I began to truly miss Lisbon and the lifestyle it affords me. I realized I had to take some space from my daily life to appreciate it fully. _While deeply immersed in it, I had started to not appreciate it._ **This experience prompted me to reflect further on the value of taking space in various aspects of life.** The other night, I found myself at a lovely dinner with a Portuguese family at an Italian vegan restaurant. The couple, long-married with four school-aged children and thriving careers, had an intriguing dynamic. They joked that their relationship has worked and stayed strong for so long because one of them has been traveling a few times per month for business, for the past 20 years, _allowing them space to grow closer and appreciate one another more._ **Taking space in relationships can lead to a greater understanding of each other's individuality and aspirations.** It fosters a sense of trust and independence, ultimately nurturing a healthier connection between two people. It is as if the space created allows each person to breathe and stretch, providing the room needed to flourish. I am reminded of how my personal trainer continues to emphasize _the importance of taking space between workouts_, an initially counterintuitive idea to me. However, the science behind muscle strengthening reveals that space is indeed a crucial ingredient. Muscles require time to recover and rebuild, and it is during these periods of rest that they grow stronger. **The same principle applies to my mind; creating space helps me rejuvenate and refocus my energy.** For most people, incorporating space during the workday, whether through coffee breaks, meal breaks, or the daily commute, actually enhances productivity. The mind needs space to process information and make sense of it. Without space, avoidable mistakes are made, and creativity becomes stifled. As an entrepreneur, I have learned that giving space to my team members leads to more creativity and innovation. They feel empowered to explore new ideas, experiment, and discover better solutions when not constrained by micromanagement or constant oversight. I have often found that my best business insights have come when I am on vacation, disconnected from the day-to-day and taking space from my regular routines. My mind is finally free to wander and explore new ideas, unencumbered by the constraints of daily responsibilities. **Meditation serves as a tool to create space daily for me.** It allows me to pause and observe my thoughts, feelings, and connect with what is inspiring to me. Regular meditation practice has helped me cultivate a greater sense of self-awareness and empathy, enabling me to approach my relationships and work with more clarity and understanding. The more I appreciate the value of space, the more I understand its necessity in moving through life. There is a momentum in my world that pushes me to fill every available moment with something, _which I am learning to counter._ **Nature is an excellent reminder of the power of space. **The vastness of the sky, the silence of the trees, and the stillness of a mountain all remind me that space is an integral part of our existence. **Giving space to my friends and loved ones** allows them to grow as individuals, fostering a more profound connection when we come back together. It is in these moments of solitude that I can truly appreciate the value of my relationships and the unique qualities each person brings to my life. **Space also extends to my physical surroundings.** When my apartment is cluttered, I feel stifled and stuck. Taking time to organize my environment leads to increased focus, productivity, and a sense of calm for me. **The value of space can be found in the practice of listening.** In conversations, leaving space for others to share their thoughts and feelings without interruption or judgment fosters deeper understanding and empathy. It is in these moments of silence that I can truly hear what others are saying. _Space permeates every aspect of my life, if I allow it to._ It can feel risky to give space to people, places, and projects. As a result, I can end up clinging to and constraining what it is I care about most deeply, fearing the unknown. I have come to understand that it is even riskier not to give space to what I hold most dear. By providing space, I can truly appreciate what I have, allowing it to grow and flourish in ways I may not have ever imagined. --- ### How to Be Kind Published: 2023-03-25 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/kindness/ Last week, I had a remarkable experience that left me feeling deeply moved and inspired. I was in London, and on a whim, decided to have dinner alone at a busy restaurant on a Friday evening, without my phone in hand. As I sat down, I took in my surroundings, enjoying the bustling energy of the place. I was content to be alone and observe the people around me, but then the couple sitting next to me struck up a conversation. We soon started to share food and laughter, and I was touched by how kind, fun, and grounded they were. They made me feel like I was part of their world, and I felt grateful for their warmth. The fact that I was alone and had only the surrounding people to observe allowed me to notice things and people in ways I normally do not. It was a reminder of the beauty and connection that can be found in unexpected places. I finished my meal before they did, and I got up to pay. When speaking with the waitress, I asked her to charge me for the table next to me and not tell them until the end, after I would have left. The waitress was surprised and assumed I wanted to pay for the table on the other side of me, where four young ladies were having dinner. But I said no, the couple is who I wanted to be charged for. The waitress was touched by the action and we added a dessert with a candle for the couple. As I walked out of the restaurant, I felt a wave of energy flow through me. Then I started to feel emotional and tear up. My heart had been touched by the simple reminder of how the simplest of actions can touch so many people. The impact of unexpected kindness can be difficult to describe, and is best to be experienced. It can be felt on an energetic and spiritual level. It felt like a deep sense of alignment with the universe, a recognition that we are all connected and part of something greater than ourselves. When we act from a place of kindness, we tap into that connection and feel a sense of purpose, and the joy often accompanied with it. That evening, the feeling of kindness was a physical sensation for me. It started as a warmth in my chest, spreading throughout my body, and then radiating outwards. It was like a flow of electric energy that connected me to the people and the world around me. It was a feeling of openness, and the vulnerability associated with it. All of my problems disappeared at that moment. Kindness is transformative. It has the power to shift the energy of a room, transform a stranger into a friend, and create a ripple effect that extends far beyond the immediate moment. When I am kind to others, I am planting seeds of goodness that have the power to grow and spread throughout the world. Kindness is not just about doing something nice for someone else. It is also an act of self-care and self-love. When I am kind to others, I am also kind to myself. It allows me to tap into a deeper sense of compassion and empathy, reminding me that we are all human and all in need of connection. The impact of unexpected kindness can be profound, not just on the receiver, but on the giver as well. It reminds me of our shared humanity and our capacity for goodness. It allows me to see the world through a different lens, one that is open and expansive, and filled with possibility. As I reflect on my experience at the restaurant in London, I am struck by the power of its simplicity. It is easy to get caught up in the hustle and bustle of daily life, to become disconnected from myself and from those around me. These acts of kindness remind me that we are all here on Hotel Earth together. In a world that can often feel overwhelming and isolating, acts of unexpected kindness can offer a needed glimmer of hope. --- ### How to Step Down Published: 2023-02-26 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/control/ I recently announced a new CEO for my technology business and that I have moved into a board role. For the business, this is an important milestone to no longer be founder-led and founder-run. A clear vote of confidence in our team and our clients. As a significant shareholder in the business, I am fully confident this is the right move. **For me, it marks a profound shift in my professional identity.** Since founding the business 15 years ago, in my early 20s, I have been known to my external world as a CEO. _This is no longer the case._ Like most professionals, I have been building my career with a high level of enthusiasm, excitement and energy, and naturally have **identified closely with what I do**. For the vast majority of my adult life, when meeting someone new, regardless if it was at a business gathering, a party, or even on a date, the first or second question I would be asked was _'what do you do?'._ If my identity were visualised as a pie chart every few years, when I started the business 15 years ago, the pie would probably have only one big slice. My business was my identity, which is often the case for entrepreneurs starting out. Over time, the pie has grown, and new slices have been added. My interests and passions have evolved and diversified. Other slices include being an uncle, a mindfulness teacher, a mental health advocate, and now an expat living in Portugal. **To let go of what I have known so well and identified with so closely and intimately, over so many years, required me to further develop other slices of my identity._ _**_I did not realise this along the way, however I can see it clearly now looking back._ _My relationship is changing now towards something that I care about deeply._ The connection and bond that has been developed over a 15 year relationship is more emotional than intellectual, which I feel is beautiful. And I am learning how to care for it without being directly involved or interacting with it on a daily, or hourly, basis. **Where I was in a position of authority, responsible for making decisions on its behalf, big or small, I am now in a position of influence.** It is not better or worse, simply different. I continue to have opinions and perspectives, often well grounded in highly relevant experience, and a large financial investment (or risk, depending on how I look at it). However, what I think is just that. _It is what I think._ It is not always going to be what it does. While I do not have kids (at least not yet), I imagine **parents go through a journey** with many parallels. Initially, they are fully responsible for making decisions on behalf of the other, with full authority. And over time, their role evolves from one of authority to one of influence. I can believe it is not easy, as it involves matters of the heart and the head. To not be in control of something you care deeply about, have identified so closely with and have invested and sacrificed so much for. I imagine **there are parallels with health** as well. Over the past year in particular I have invested a lot of energy in better understanding my physical health. Lots of tests, spreadsheets, consultations and treatments. Taking a step back, I am realising that despite my desire to feel in control, I am not in a position of authority and rather in a position of influence. The choices I make have an influence however I cannot force specific outcomes how I please. **Personal friendships & relationships** are often described as involving three entities. Me. The other. And the relationship or connection that we share. While I am mostly in control of myself and have no control of the other, when it comes to the third entity, the relationship itself, we are both in a position of influence, not authority. As you can see, I am curious to observe where in my life I have authority versus influence, and to what degree. I am learning that I have far more influence and for less authority. And that is not good or bad._ It is reality._ And my journey is to understand how to continue to live in tune and in harmony with reality. **I am grateful to all of the people who were part of my 15 year journey as CEO of my business, including our team, our clients, our investors, and our many supporters. **_You have all shaped and influenced me in countless ways._ _Thank you._ I am genuinely excited to see what I started continue to grow, and will continue to influence how it does that. 15 years from now, I will look back at this moment as when my relationship evolved from one of authority to one of influence, and be grateful that it happened with awareness and intention. --- ### How to Enjoy Published: 2023-02-05 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/pleasure/ I recently got new bed sheets. The morning after sleeping on them for the first time, I lay in bed, awake, curious about their impact on me. The first thought that raced through my mind was, _'did I sleep better with these new bed sheets?'_. I then started to wonder how I would be able to tell. Would my Oura ring pick up the difference in my sleep data? Might my energy level in the morning be noticeably different? I quickly concluded that there are far too many variables related to my sleep for me to isolate the impact of bed sheets. Tired of thinking, I observed how comfortable the sheets felt on my body. I was really enjoying the sensations on my skin of these new sheets. I had a desire to stay in bed longer, even if I was awake. Then a frightening thought arose. What if these sheets were worse for my sleep, even though I seemed to enjoy them? **Can I still enjoy something that may not be the most beneficial for me?** If for a moment, I assumed that I could in fact measure whether the bed sheets helped or hurt my sleep quality, and it turned out that they in fact hurt my sleep, however I enjoyed the experience, would I keep using them? _This reflection is not about bed sheets._ It is about the **unconscious tension between the desire for productivity and the desire for pleasure**. Rarely do the two pursuits come together as a package deal. It is usually one at the expense of the other. For example, in my younger years, I would eat limitless amounts of pizza, chips, popcorn and candy. The pursuit of pleasure at the expense of what would have been productive for my physical health. Now, in this domain it has flipped completely, for me. My sister often remarks how I like to eat cardboard, as I choose foods that are first and foremost healthy for my body, sometimes at the expense of how they might taste relative to their alternatives. Another common example is the professional teenage sport of Instagramming, TikToking, Youtubing and Netflixing. Kids prioritise these sports because they are as pleasurable as highly illegal substances (which research has proven), while also causing highly unproductive mental health issues (which research has also proven). These are obvious examples. The more subtle areas of daily living are what I am more curious to bring attention to. **The more I look, the more I see the invisible influence of a deeper value system of productivity or pleasure at play, influencing my choices.** The choice of walking from my apartment to a restaurant, I could take the shorter but noisier path, or the slightly longer, but quieter and more peaceful path. The choice of seeing one friend versus another. One may have a perspective to help me in business, versus the other may simply make me laugh, at their expense or even mine. The choice between going to the gym for a workout, or a hike in the forest with friends. One may be a more productive experience for my body. The other may be a more pleasurable experience for my soul. There is an endless list of examples I could share. The point is that there are always trade-offs being made. The question is how am I making these trade-offs? There is a conditioning that I am noticing to generally prioritise the pursuit of productivity over the pursuit of pleasure, for me at least. This is probably not a surprise. Having grown up in an immigrant household, where survival was the most important thing in the early years of my life. Having been raised and educated in a North American, Western and highly competitive culture, where self-worth and identity is tied very much to accomplishment and achievement. Having started a business at 21, at a time well before it was cool for young people to start companies, and struggling to survive for many years early on. All of these experiences in my highly formative years, be it through intentional training or accidental trauma, put me on a path to pursue productivity at the cost of pleasure. **And I am grateful for it, as it has now afforded me many pleasures.** It is also not a surprise that now, living in Southern Europe, where I observe a greater balance between these two pursuits than what I am conditioned to know, that I am for the first time questioning this topic. Living in Portugal, a relatively unproductive economy compared to its Western European neighbours, and surrounded by foreigners who have chosen to make this beautiful place home, like me, I am surrounded by people who are showing me how to choose the pursuit of pleasure more often than I am conditioned to. **Learning to make this transition is something that is a work in progress for me.** I am reminded about my conditioning every time I try to move too fast in a place where the default is different. _I believe in myself to make this shift, and will continue to be patient with myself._ My advice to a young person starting in higher education, or business, or in the workforce, though would be to still pursue productivity at the expense of pleasure for some time, until one feels satisfied and ready to pivot to the pursuit of pleasure. It is far more pleasurable after many highly productive years, and helps minimise the risk of taking a pleasure-filled life for granted. And ultimately, the most lasting and enduring pleasure that I can experience is not anything for my senses but the pleasure of gratitude, which comes from my heart. And my heart told me this morning that I am grateful for the bed sheets. --- ### How to Anchor Published: 2023-01-28 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/anchors/ I recently bought an investment property, here in Portugal, and was feeling pretty good about the deal until the day before I was to sign. I had underestimated the closing costs, mainly taxes, which were in fact material. My reaction was telling of how anchored I was to my original expectation. I felt anger. I felt it was unfair. I felt self-doubt. From this place of feeling all of these emotions, I began to seriously contemplate not signing the deal. For a moment, I lost perspective of the bigger picture. I was more focused on seeing my original expectation, anchored firmly into the ground, versus evaluating if this deal was still a good investment given the new information of unbudgeted costs. The once fixed anchor now began to float. Once I gave myself the space to digest my emotions, I came to again see the bigger picture and could now see clearly it was a great investment. I signed the deal. I am not one to like rules, unless I am the one setting them of course. Even then, I am not quite sure I even like rules that I set for myself, I don't know if anyone does actually. There is one rule though that after this experience of almost not signing a great deal because of my anchored expectations that I developed for myself. It has started to help bridge my fantasy with my reality. My mind is capable of imagining the ideal scenario, for practically everything. It assumes the ideal conditions and circumstances by default, even though reality most often has other plans that my mind fails to account for. The observer part of me notices how most things take longer than I expect, cost more than I budget for, and at times, have to be redone. The experiencer me often reacts to these surprises with a set of emotions that range from mildly unpleasant to feeling triggered. Knowing this pattern of expecting A, and often getting something slightly different, like an A+, A-, or B+, and noticing my automatic reaction to this delta between my fantasy and my reality, I came up with a simple rule to help me. **The 25% rule.** The 25% rule is a reminder for me that things will take 25% longer than I expect, cost 25% more than I expect, and 25% of the time, need to be redone. These reminders are starting to help build more tolerance in my reality, which is often slightly different than my fantasy. If I anchor my expectation to a specific number, or date, then I will measure success against that anchor. If the result is slightly off, I don’t feel good, either about those involved or myself. The 25% rule also takes the edge off of my perfectionist tendencies. In the past little while since being inspired by this rule, I have found it helpful to flow with surprises in all parts of my life. From business and investments, to how long it takes for a food delivery order to arrive, to my own productivity or efficiency in a day. The 25% buffer that I am slowly adding to many parts of my life is helping me relax into reality. With this 25% rule, the previously fixed anchor is now a floating anchor. It has the freedom to move, within reason. A floating anchor might sound like an oxymoron, in that it does not exist in reality. That may be true, however the fixed anchor also does not exist in reality. It is something that I made up in my mind to begin with, so why not choose for it to be floating in the first place. --- ### How to Be Confident Published: 2023-01-15 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/confidence/ I grew up learning to feel confident only once there was a reason to. The typical ‘once this, then that’ conditioning. Once I graduate from school, then I can feel confident in my education. Once I get some work experience, then I can feel confident in my skills. Once I hire people to work with me, then I can feel confident in my business working. Once I lose weight or shake off a cold, then I can feel confident in my health. For others, it might be different milestones such as once getting a promotion, once buying a house, once entering a relationship, once a chosen political party gets elected, once the weather, and so on. This type of conditional confidence on external events or people has been my norm. I have been fortunate enough that the external events and people in my life have been a consistent source of confidence for me in life. I am now realizing though that to depend on events external as my primary source of confidence is a high-risk proposition. Although I have a part to play in influencing these external events, I do not have complete control. The reality is that much is out of my hands. Confidence is fuel for the journey through life. Without it, I cannot go very far. My curiosity now turns to how to build additional sources of this fuel, in a more reliable and sustainable way, then to depend solely on external events that are mostly out of my influence. For example, if I were to lose any of, or all of, family, friends, health, looks, occupation, money, or home, how might I feel? The question now becomes how to build my confidence from the inside, verses from the outside. To know that regardless of what external events happen, I will be okay. I am okay. This requires me to believe in myself, even if my entire world is telling me the opposite. Difficult moments in life build resilience. They show me through direct experience that I can be okay, even if it does not feel that way while going through it. And the next time I am faced with an unpleasant surprise or difficult moment, I am subconsciously reminded that the last time I felt this emotion or sensation, even though it was prompted by a completely different circumstance, there is a familiarity to it and deep down I know I am okay, just like last time. In these moments of difficulty, I tell myself that I have my own back. I am here for myself. For example, if I feel rejected by someone, be it a romantic interest, a friend, a potential client, or even for a bank loan, I do not reject myself. This is difficult. To not reject myself in the face of feeling rejected from the outside. Once I get invested emotionally in something or someone, then I begin to identify with it, her or him. And when reality does not pan out how I had imagined, I will not only feel disappointed in this discrete event but will often extrapolate it to have more meaning and weight than it actually has. It is in these moments, when I remember, that I tell myself that I have my back. To not reject myself in the face of feeling rejected from the outside world. To believe in myself, even when there may be little evidence to do so. This is unconditional confidence. It is available to me, without any limits, only from one source. That source is not outside, but deep down inside, and one that I am learning how to access regularly. --- ### How to Be Inspired Published: 2023-01-08 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/inspiring/ Over the past few decades, I have had the privilege of meeting many highly-accomplished people that I find inspiring. However this past week, I got to spend time with the most inspiring person I have ever met in my life. **He walks through the world without any fear.** He climbs mountains, not trying to get anywhere but for the sheer joy of the challenge. He truly is focused on the journey, not the destination. **He is unconcerned with how he looks.** If he has bed hair, bad breath, stains on his clothes, holes in his pants or his shirt is sticking out of the bottom of his sweater, none of it matters to him. **He really does not care about what others will think about him.** If he is in a crowded public space or in his quiet bedroom, he speaks at the same tone and uses the same vocabulary. **He truly loves everyone he comes across unconditionally.** For him, life is not a series of transactions, it is a series of experiences. He will smile at strangers without pause and without hesitation. **He also knows how to express his needs and wants very clearly**, and does not stop until he feels that he has been heard. In this way, he is at peace and does not store any resentment. **He is a little shy at first when seeing someone new**. He will quietly examine the person to see if it is safe for him to engage. And then engage without holding anything back. **He is infinitely curious about the world outside of him.** In each new space he enters, he likes to inspect every corner, every button, every object and every person. **He is always open to hearing what you have to say**, and will always tell you what he thinks. There is no guessing about where you stand, he will make it clear. **He is completely present in the moment**, never dwelling about the past, and he seems totally uninterested in planning the future. He is completely absorbed with whomever or whatever is in this present moment. _The most inspiring person to me is my 2 year old nephew, who came to visit me in Portugal this past week_. Within minutes, I began to collect the many life lessons he has to teach me about how to be. I hope to be more like him when I grow up. --- ### How to 2023 Published: 2023-01-02 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/build/ For nearly a decade, I have had a New Year ritual to pick one single word as my intention for the year ahead. The word represents a theme to help guide my choices. It serves as a North Star and gives some direction to how I move through life. It is not a description of the 'what', 'who,' or 'where', but more importantly, the 'how' I intend to approach life. For example, a few of my previous one word intentions have included Fearless, Trust, Freedom, Heart, Space and Discovery. As you can see, they are each purposely vague, giving me the flexibility to choose in each future moment how to apply it. Whereas I find specific goals can become limiting, narrowing my focus so much that life begins to feel deprived of all that can be beautiful and unknown, an abstract intention feels can be inviting in the face of the unknown. This past year, my one word intention was Open. Today, I will share examples of how this intention guided me to demonstrate the power of having an abstract theme for the year. And of course, I will share my one word intention for the year ahead, followed by a list I have kept over the years of the one word intentions that friends have used, to help inspire your one word intention. As I reflect back on how Open shaped my year, its influence is evident in every corner of my life. I was… **Open to a new continent, country, city & culture.** I really embraced my new life in Lisbon, including learning Portuguese, making local friends, choosing to accept and adapt to new systems and processes, and rarely complaining as most foreigners do about how different reality can be here. **Open to building a new tribe,** as I did not know anyone when I first landed in Lisbon. Over one hundred people, that I know personally now who live here, were invited to my recent holiday party. The diversity of people I now have in my tribe is inspiring to me, spanning different life stages, ethnicities, professions, and more. **Open to learning a lot more about my health**, both physical and emotional. I did more therapy this past year than ever before, which helped open up unexplored areas within me. I also geeked out on data collection on my body, with countless tests, spreadsheets and specialists. **Open to exploring a new romantic relationship** which was something I now realise I had not been as open to previously. This relationship was a beautiful one that involved a wide range of emotions, and included me also being open to it being for a season versus a lifetime. **Open to a more spontaneous and less scheduled** way to move. I experienced the natural flow of still getting a lot done without the rigidity of having to schedule and plan every minute of my day. The Southern European schedule is far more enjoyable for me than the North American schedule that I have far too much experience with. **Open to delegation** to a degree that despite decades of leadership and management experience now, I had never done before. Overcoming my own insecurities to learn how to let go of control, so that my business could continue to flourish and that my team could continue to grow without me as involved. **Open to investing in real estate**, which I had never imagined doing. I actually for years have resisted getting involved and supporting my parents with their real estate investments, proudly announcing often that 'I am a tech guy' and that real estate is boring to me. Now I have a growing interest and position in this asset class. **Open to allowing reality to charge me.** My identity has shifted more this year than ever before. How I see myself and how the world engages with me has changed, as a result of being open. Most importantly, the shift in my identity has felt natural and not forced. My biggest lesson this year was to learn how to be open to change. Now, if you asked me one year ago today what I had forecasted or predicted for the year of Open, I would not have been able to tell you very much. That is the purpose of setting an abstract intention with one word. For the year ahead, my one word intention is Build. It came to me during my silent retreat a few days ago and it feels right. I feel a spark of energy and a curiosity to see how it will guide me this year. Finally, here is a list of one word intentions that friends have set and shared with me over the past few years. I hope it helps inspire your one word intention for the year ahead. Acceptance Action Authentic Awareness Balance Bold Breathe Care Change Commitment Communication Compassion Confidence Connection Control Courage Create Discipline Equilibrium Explore Faith Fearless Fit Focus Form Fortitude Freedom Fun Generosity Giving Grace Gratitude Grounded Growth Harmony Heart Humility Integrity Joy Learn Lightness Love Mastery Open Ownership Partnership Play Positive Presence Relationships Relax Respect Responsibility Self Love Serve Sincerity Simplify Surrender Thoughtful Truth Trust Understanding Union --- ### How to Disconnect Published: 2022-12-28 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/snowed/ Last week, I got ‘snowed in’, in beautiful Portugal. Technically, there was no snow in Portugal however the dumping of snow in Canada and the Eastern US led to me cancelling a planned short visit to see my family over the Christmas weekend. The days leading up to the holiday were celebration-filled here in Lisbon. I hosted a large holiday party, exchanged with my closest friends, listened to Christmas themed-songs on repeat and even watched a few of the classics, like Home Alone, with limitless popcorn. Needless to say, I felt satisfied with the ceremonial celebrations & traditions at this time of the year. The unexpected cancelled trip meant that I had 4 days without a single commitment in my calendar. I cannot recall when I last had this. Recognising how rare this was, I used it as an opportunity to experiment. My experiment was to go into a silent retreat, in my own home, by myself, for 4 days. The setup was the following. I physically disconnected the wifi router in my apartment. I turned off my phone and my computer. I unplugged the TV, all of the smart speakers and all of the clocks, including reprogramming the time displayed on the kitchen microwave and oven. I had enough groceries to last me the duration of this experiment, knowing that I would not be eating out or ordering in. I picked out only one book that I would read, and set up my journals from the past year in a nice stack, with the intention to read every word I wrote to myself this past year. With no external distractions, no sense of time, no consumption of information other than what I had carefully selected and planned, I was ready to disconnect from my outside world, albeit temporarily. I have long believed that only 10% of the noise within me is provoked by sources external to me, and that 90% of the noise I experience is from within. It is only once I remove the external 10% can I start to notice the internal 90%, which is where the real work lies. This monk-like discipline is not as difficult as it may seem, as knowing it was only for a few days, I did not think too much about it in advance. It was truly spontaneous. The understanding that something is temporary often provides the courage to try something new. My days felt long. The 4 days felt like 4 weeks. Limiting myself to the simple activities of meditation, reading, writing, eating, walking and sleeping, at times I felt bored. It is precisely this feeling of boredom that I needed to get more intimate with though. Learning to get comfortable with myself, without any distractions to help me escape myself, I had no choice but to see, feel and be with whatever arose within me. It felt at times like a mirror was constantly with me, gently encouraging me to see what I otherwise may not regularly see. I wrote recently about our current culture of abundance, in our material world but also our mental states. The unconscious belief that more is more. More stuff. More people More information. More experiences. I see now that my impulse to grasp for more is a form of escapism from facing reality. The pursuit of more is a denial of reality and what is here and now. The pursuit of ‘the different’ is similar in this respect. Although I struggled at first, I learned to combat this impulse to grasp for more. It helped transport me to a place of greater acceptance. And acceptance is a key to unlocking a happy and satisfying life. From a place of deeper acceptance, of all that is and is not for me, I noticed a spontaneous feeling of gratitude emerge from my heart. I began to naturally acknowledge all of the people, who knowingly or unknowingly have contributed to my reality. It is one thing to practise gratitude as an intentional practice, which I journal on nearly daily. It is another to observe it spring up naturally. The former starts from the mind, the latter from the heart. Yesterday as I emerged from my experiment, I noticed an inner peace, a mental clarity and a heart-felt connection to others that was not previously as present for me. While on a video call with my mom post-experiment, she spontaneously commented that I looked younger. I think the signs of stress had started to wash away from my face, even though I also decided to not shower for the 4 days, as I did not see the need to. I feel happier, and probably look happier as well. From a scientific standpoint, I now realise this experiment reduced the production of dopamine by removing all external stimuli, and increased the production of serotonin, by cultivating feelings of acceptance and gratitude. It also shifted my nervous system from a sympathetic (fight-or-flight) state to a parasympathetic (rest-and-digest) state. Now I better understand why I feel happier. The most powerful part of this experiment for me was that it was unaided. I did not take any pills or drink anything, other than my herbal teas. I did not use any external therapist or teacher. I did not travel to escape my home. I actually did not spend any money. In our current culture of self-development and in the pursuit of self-growth and spiritual connection, we can start to believe that we need something or someone external to us to find the peace or clarity within us that we seek. I believe the conditioning to look out is what gets in the way to look in. This dependency can become a disease, whereas independence can be the cure. The unaided nature of this self-retreat builds a self-confidence that is one of the greatest gifts that I can give, and receive. The gift to believe in myself. --- ### How to Appreciate Scarcity Published: 2022-12-18 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/scarcity/ There is a scene from the movie The Iron Lady, the story of British Prime Minister Magaret Thatcher, that has stuck with me now for over a decade. Thatcher, now in her old age and retired from public life, walks into her doctor's office. The doctor innocently asks her, _'how do you feel?'_. She turns to look out of the window, and begins her brief, but powerful and memorable, monologue... _Watch your thoughts for they become words_ _Watch your words for they become actions_ _Watch your actions for they become habits_ _Watch your habits for they become your character_ _And watch your character for it becomes your destiny_ _What we think, we become_ _And I think I feel fine_ I love the reminder hidden in this poetic monologue to pay attention to what I think. This is why mindfulness practices really have spoken to me over the past decade. Not necessarily as a tool to calm down and relax, but rather as a tool to become more aware of my thinking._ My thinking becomes my life and my experience of it._ **We currently live in a culture of abundance.** Capitalism encourages abundant consumption, especially at this time of the year. Corporate life has become increasingly abundant in privileges and perks for the professional class. Even mindfulness circles and self-help books promote an abundance mindset. **Abundance is abundant.** This is clear everywhere around me, and even within me. When I observe for a moment my daily lifestyle, an abundance mindset guides my choices, without a doubt. Earlier this week, during my morning journaling, an experiment idea arose. I often find these intellectually pleasurable, and allow myself to explore these in my mind freely, without constraint. **The experiment is to adopt a scarcity mindset in 2023.** The purpose of this experiment is to see what I might learn and what might change inside of me, by challenging the current norm of abundance. The construct of the scarcity experiment would be to artificially constrain my choices. _For example, what if in 2023, I decided that I could…_ _Take only 1 trip all year?_ _Watch Netflix only 3 times all year?_ _Read only 3 books all year?_ _Invest in only 5 stocks all year?_ _Have only 10 people at my birthday?_ _Eat at a restaurant only 10 times all year?_ _Order Uber eats or Amazon only 5 times all year?_ _Eat popcorn only 3 times all year?_ _You get the point._ The intention is to add constraints that challenge my unconscious choices and habits. Once I get over my immediate anxious dismissal of this experiment idea, and ask myself what might change, I begin to uncover a few things. First, I would have to be a lot more discerning and selective with how I spend my time, money & attention. To do this, I would need to really know myself, and what it is that I truly desire or need. Inspiring in thought, scary in practice. **I would better appreciate the need to make trade-offs.** And equally important, learn the skill of how to make trade-offs. Instead of my current default of, _'I want it all'_. This default is a way to avoid having to be honest with myself about what it is that I really desire or need. **I would learn a lot about acceptance.** I would learn how to let go of feelings of FOMO (the Fear of Missing Out), and embrace JOMO (the Joy of Missing Out). And most of all, I think **I would be happier with the choices I was making**, because there would be a lot more intention up front, a lot more presence during, and a lot more gratitude afterwards. _Intention, presence and gratitude are helpful ingredients for happiness, and they all can be grown from scarcity._ Now despite its many potential benefits, _I do not believe that I will actually do this scarcity experiment_, with hard and fast rules that are self-imposed. **I am inspired though to sprinkle some scarcity into more of my life in 2023**, despite the initial discomfort and resistance that I feel. _That is usually a sign that there is some growth ahead waiting for me._ --- ### How to Make Peace Published: 2022-12-11 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/peace/ The first step in setting intentions for a new year for me has nothing to do with the new year, and everything to do with the past year. Learning to make peace with my recent year is the first, and most important, step during my new year rituals. It is also the most difficult. To make peace with my past is not easy. It is easier to choose to not accept what happened, or what did not happen, or to ignore how I feel about it. The problem that I have found is that when I do not acknowledge or accept my past year, my intentions for the next year become tainted. I unintentionally drag my past into my future, and set intentions that are trying to compensate, or usually overcompensate, for the past. Fast forward a few months into a new year, I am now doing something yet cannot remember why I am even doing it. To make peace requires me to slow down. When driving on an open highway really fast, I cannot read the signs along the road. It is only once I slow down that I can read the signs that are right there for me. These signs usually direct me towards needed and important change. Reality is full of the wisdom that I need to hear. This is a time for inner harvest. The fields are ripe for picking and this end of year ritual to make peace is my invitation to see what this year’s crop has for me. During this time of inner harvest, I am forced to see my truth and cannot hide from it. The truth is not good and it is not bad, it is what it is. Any discomfort that I may feel in the face of the truth is a reflection of how I feel about the truth. Reflection has become a powerful tool to help guide me, as I can learn from my own experience and remember what I might have forgotten. Here are 11 of my reflection prompts that I use to make peace with the past year… What did I learn about myself? What new skills or knowledge did I gain? When did I feel inspired? When did I feel discouraged? What was most difficult for me? What sparked joy for me? When did I feel most myself? When did I feel least myself? Who am I appreciative of? How did my identity evolve? What does my heart desire? I hope these reflection prompts serve you as you make peace with your past year. --- ### How To Relax Published: 2022-11-13 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/relax/ I noticed recently how throughout a single day, my emotional state can vary from feeling relaxed, calm or happy, to feeling stressed, frustrated or anxious. **There are moments when I am engaged with "relaxing" activities**, like sitting in meditation, swimming in the sea, cooking a meal, getting a massage, or hiking with friends in the nearby mountains. **There are other moments when I am engaged with "not relaxing" activities**, such as driving on the narrow streets of Lisbon, clearing my inbox, monitoring the stock market or working out with my trainer. If I wanted to feel more relaxed, more often, _my default thesis was that I need to make more time and space for relaxing activities_, while reducing or eliminating the "not relaxing" activities. _It all felt very box-y to me._ At this moment I am doing something “relaxing”, so I am relaxed, and at this next moment, I am doing something “not relaxing”, so I am not relaxed. There is also a limit to how many massages, beach walks and friends I can see in a day or week. After a while, I imagine it might start to feel monotonous. Although in theory I could be doing "relaxing" activities the majority of my time, _I would not feel satisfied._ **I was not convinced that simply doing more “relaxing” activities is the solution to the problem of _how to relax_.** My new thesis was how to bring a _relaxed_ quality to all of the activities I am engaged with, including the ones I had previously labeled as “not relaxing”. _For example, driving in the narrow streets of Lisbon._ With this intention to feel relaxed while driving, I started to make some changes. First, I realized that I was not always comfortable in my car. Instead of being lazy about it like before, I now adjusted the seat settings to my liking, changed the temperature more often, played pleasurable music and always kept a few water bottles handy. Next, I slowed down. Once I stopped trying to beat Google Maps by shaving off one or two minutes during a 20 minute drive, I started to feel a lot more relaxed. Additionally, I noticed that when I looked up in advance where I would park instead of anxiously thinking about parking during the entire drive, I also felt more relaxed. **Like this, I have started to rewire my conditioning and habits to redesign everyday activities to feel more relaxed.** It is still a work in progress, however I feel really encouraged and no longer feel the _box-y_ nature of moving through my days. What has also helped is to no longer label activities as “relaxing” or “not relaxing” in my mind. I was pre-deciding how I would feel, and reacting to that in advance. My one-word intention for this year is **open**, and for me, that means being more open to feeling however I might feel. _When I show up with openness, I have fewer expectations, and as a result, fewer disappointments._ I now no longer feel the need to get massages regularly, and no longer feel a nervous tension of having to prioritize one type of activity over another. I am learning how to feel relaxed with the wide range of activities and during the many different moments that I get to experience, every single day. --- ### Threads Of Connection Published: 2022-10-16 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/threads/ During a recent gathering I hosted at my place, with a mix of new and old friends, someone asked me how I knew everyone here. As I began to answer the question, I began to notice how diverse the threads of connection can be. Having lived in Portugal for one year now, I have collected a wide and diverse range of connections that I thoroughly enjoy and appreciate. My Lisbon-based community is relatively large, continually growing and refreshingly diverse. **The benefits of having such a diverse community are countless.** I am constantly exposed to different cultures, different tastes, different accents, different fashion, different upbringings and much more. _I find it interesting and energizing._ I have not felt the need to travel very much, despite local travel being so affordable and easy in continental Europe. With friends from all corners of the world, be it from Australia, South Africa, Brazil, Russia, China, Ukraine, Germany, Mexico, Romania, Lebanon, France and countless other countries, I get to experience the world without even getting on a plane. _The gathering I had recently hosted had people from at least 20 different countries._ And as new connections deepen and vulnerability increases, I begin to learn about different values. How people relate to money, politics, religion, sex, equality, equity, globalization, capitalism and more. It is one thing to read about this in a book, it is a completely different thing to talk with someone in real life about their experiences. This diversity in values provides me with not only the intellectual stimulation that I often seek, but more importantly, **cultivates the qualities of openness and tolerance that help me feel even more connected** to community. A few years ago, I was in London visiting a close friend who had moved there for her masters program and stayed. We were out to brunch with her closest friends, and at one point, I interrupted the group conversation and innocently asked, _‘how many of you have British friends?_’. After an awkward pause, only one person reported that they had one British friend. During that conversation, I began to reflect about how most major cities have three distinct populations that despite sharing the same physical space, rarely intersect in any meaningful way. **You have locals** or natives, who were born and brought up in the place, and moreover identify strongly with it. **You have foreigners**, expats or immigrants, who primarily identify with some other place but have moved to this place and have made the conscious choice to call it home. **And you have visitors** or tourists, people who are passing through the place, be it for a few days or a few months, be it for play or work. At the recent gathering I hosted, there was a balanced mix of all three of these populations. This is very rare. A fair number of local Portuguese, who would often light up when finding another local who they could converse with in Portuguese. A diverse group of foreigners, motivated to build new connections in their new home. And a sprinkling of visitors, who were connected to someone who I had invited and appreciated the chance to connect to the city through people who live here. **Very few of my friends know what I do**, and even those that do don’t seem very interested in knowing more. I also am rarely interested in understanding what my friends do. Living in Southern Europe now, I can see clearly how North American it is to connect with new people through the lens of what they do. It is only since living now in a new continent, country and culture that I have come to appreciate and experience first-hand the different threads of connection that can help two people bind. It is refreshing to be able to have a three hour dinner with someone relatively new, and the topic of what we do is nowhere to be found. It is also telling that with some of my closest friends, who I see or speak with at least once a week, what we do never comes up. **When I am connected with myself, beyond what I do, I begin to connect with others beyond what they do.** I have learned that this is the key to unlock a larger, more diverse community. The unconscious thought pattern that often arises otherwise is that if I do not understand what you do, _I may not understand you_. Or if I do not like what you do,_ I may not like you_. It becomes a very narrow lens by which to see myself, and to see you. **The most important thread of connections in my life are the ones about how I connect with myself.** There are moments when I feel lost, ungrounded and unsettled. In those moments, it is extremely difficult to connect with others. And in the moments when I feel solid and clear in my relationship with myself, it becomes effortless to invite diversity in the threads of connection with others. And this ultimately leads to a fulfilling and deep sense of community, that in turn further fuels me on my journey through life. --- ### The Empire Of Worry Published: 2022-10-09 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/empire/ We all seem to live in our own little, for some large, empires of worry. To simplify, I will say that there are two types of worry. Those that are helpful, and can serve as a type of fuel to move in a direction that is desirable. And those that are unhelpful, and act as a brake that adds friction, making it more difficult to move, in any direction. A helpful worry can be one that keeps us alive. The worry that naturally arises when trying to cross a busy street safely, or during an unexpected bout of turbulence on a plane, is expected and useful. Another example of a helpful worry is about maintaining food, shelter, or more directly, a means of survival. If one is worried about keeping their job, they are best to choose to work a little, or for some a lot, harder, and do what they can to secure their means of income. These are easy to understand and obvious to most. Similarly, unhelpful worries that have very little to do with reality are also easy to understand and obvious to most. The less obvious are worries that start as being helpful, and through the momentum that often accompanies the art of worrying, become unhelpful. While there may be many examples that we have collectively experienced in the past few years, let me share a personal example of this. Earlier this year, I became curious to better understand my physical health. Living in Portugal, I discovered the privilege of a public-private health care system, which means that I can get anything I want tested, on demand, without asking for permission. Intellectually curious as I am, I started to test everything I could think of. It started with extensive monthly blood work, and snowballed from there to include hormones, allergies, gut health, hair loss, sleep, body composition, genetics, and much more. In my first blood work, with over 100 data points being collected, working with one of my many nutritionists, we discovered a rarely tested heart disease marker with a value that was four times than the expected range. Within a few days, I saw a cardiologist who was also concerned, and asked me to take a specific B vitamin supplement and to test if it is genetic, which it turns out it is. The next blood work, one month later, showed the marker was now only two times higher than expected, and another month later, was now in range, thanks to the supplement. The helpful worry to explore what I was discovering, allowed us to diagnose and treat a potentially high risk health condition, within only a few months. While my health journey started as a helpful worry, it quickly snowballed into an unhelpful worry. ‘If you look, you will find’, is what my therapist said to me one afternoon while I was complaining about my health. I was looking very hard, for the first time in my life, and I was finding a lot. It got to the point where I had convinced myself that I was unhealthy. The emotional weight, disappointment and discouragement that often accompanies unhelpful worries became temporarily debilitating for me. Where a helpful worry becomes energizing, like fuel, an unhelpful worry becomes a brake on life. When I feel lost, stuck and stopped, it is an indicator that I am living in my empire of unhelpful worry. What got me moving again was a change in my physical space. I had a pre-planned trip, the location or activity had no significant impact, as after only a few days away from my empire of worry, I quickly realized that I was healthy and in fact, very healthy. Gaining perspective, regardless if it is from stepping outside of my empire, from a trusted family member or friend reflecting back to me, or with the support of a therapist or inspiring book, is often the solution to rid myself of an unhelpful worry. This reflection is not about my health. It is about the slippery slope between a helpful worry and unhelpful worry, and the benefit of constant perspective to stay grounded in and connected to reality. Like all empires, when we start to see them for what they are, they often lose their power and begin to dissolve. The empire of unhelpful worry is no different. --- ### One Year In Published: 2022-08-28 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/oneyear/ It was one year ago today that I moved to Portugal and it has been an incredible first year in this new continent, country and culture. **When I first arrived one year ago, I felt nervous.** I decided to move to Portugal spontaneously on 3 days' notice, and arrived not knowing a single person here. My first few weeks were rough, as I had no friends, no connection to the local culture and discovered many hard truths about this new place I decided to call home. **When I reflect on my life today, one year later, I feel grateful. **Every few days, I notice myself in tears as I realize how much I appreciate the life I have today. The richness of friends and community I have here is unbelievable. What was once foreign has now become familiar to me, as I move through my days with ease and without much friction. I continue to feel inspired on a daily basis by the activities, people, places and so much more. In my journal this morning, I began to reflect about what worked for me. I moved to a foreign place spontaneously and love my life here. What did I learn? It would be easy for me to reflect on the beauty of Portugal, and what about the country makes it a desirable destination for me, however in my heart, I feel that any place can be a desirable destination. For each highlight there is a lowlight, in every place. _I do believe that anywhere can be magical and inspiring for me, if I choose to make it so._ **Openness** During one of my first few days here, I did a walking tour of Lisbon. The guide spoke about how the cobblestone streets are dangerous if you walk too fast, which I interpreted as a metaphor for the ethos of Portugal. The streets are a literal reminder to slow down. Most things in Portugal move slowly, by design. It is not a defect, it is intentional. The way Portugal and Europe operate is different from what I am used to from having lived in North America my entire life. Having the benefit of seeing many expats also move to Portugal, I can see clearly the difference between those who, like me, have a bright smile on their faces and those that have frowns. What makes this difference is the ability to adapt to a new environment, versus the expectation for the environment to adapt to me. **Momentum** Over the summer, I find myself going swimming in the ocean almost every day. And I have learned first-hand how it is much easier to swim with the current versus against it. The same goes with bigger choices in life. Picking a country, career, industry, neighborhood, sport or even book that is aligned with the macro momentum and forces is just easier. The infrastructure, support, encouragement, community and resources are abundant when many are going in that direction. **Beginner** I can now go to a restaurant, a gas station or grocery store and communicate fluently enough in Portuguese without having to rely on any English, and it is thanks to other people helping me practice along the way. When I know that I am a beginner, my expectations are in check. I do not expect to be really good at something I do not know how to do yet. There is a gentleness that I show myself, and in turn, others show me compassion because they see that I am a beginner. Be it learning a language, a new skill, starting a new job or school year, there is an extra helping hand that shows up when one fully embraces the identity of a beginner. **Commitment** When I first arrived, I met many digital nomads and upon seeing how uncommitted they were, I told myself _‘I hope I never sound like that’_. Within weeks of arriving, I had a local phone number, rented an apartment, bought a car, set up bank accounts and credit cards, registered for insurance and more. It was clear I had arrived and was living here, not just visiting. The reason I have built such a strong community of friends here is partly because people could see early that I am committed to Portugal, and as a result, I am worth committing to. Once one emotionally commits to something, then everything flows more effortlessly without friction and doubt that often gets in the way. **Trade-offs** I maintain two phone numbers and two Whatsapp accounts. My Portuguese Whatsapp is on the first screen of my phone, and my North American Whatsapp is on the last screen of my phone. This example is representative of my willingness to make trade-offs. Time and attention is limited. There are constraints to how I spend my time. A conscious trade-off I made when moving to Portugal was to prioritize my integration into a new environment over growing my North American connections. This is seen by the fact that I check my North American Whatsapp less frequently, and am far more responsive on my Portuguese Whatsapp. I have severely limited my travel outside of Portugal over the past year and as a result, am around and more available to my new connections, which is needed at the start to build a foundation. I share these reflections from the perspective of moving to a new country, however they apply just as well to moving into a new industry or professional career, moving into a new neighborhood or friends group, or moving into a new phase of life or relationship. **These moments of big change on the outside are invitations for big change on the inside.** The qualities of being open to adapt, swimming with the current, identifying as a beginner, emotionally committing and a willingness to make trade-offs are the keys to success in building a life that is constantly changing and inspiring for me. I could spend all of my energy trying to rearrange the outside world to my liking, and get frustrated as it will be ineffective. Or I could focus on rearranging my inside world, and find that I am in flow with the outside world and it is now to my liking. If you told me one year ago that my morning today would involve celery juice, practicing Portuguese and going for a swim in the ocean, I would have laughed at you. I cannot even try to imagine what my morning one year from today might look like… --- ### A Beautiful Day Published: 2022-07-24 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/beautiful/ Earlier this week, I was complaining to my therapist about how I wanted more spontaneity in my life. **I remarked how I felt over planned and over scheduled as of late.** My mind is quite skilled at visualizing a possible future, trying to optimize for how my scarce time will be used and trying to determine what I will want in the future. **Planning is a way to feel some control over my future.** It feels safe but is a false sense of comfort, as I know cognitively that my future is unknown, _even to me._ I slept in yesterday, _a rare occurrence for me_. I don’t know that I have ever planned to sleep in. It is more common for me to plan to meditate, journal, exercise and take care of my body in an active way in the morning. Despite all of my mindfulness practices being good for me, I felt so great after having slept in that the feeling felt unfamiliar to me for that time of the day. I usually feel a bit groggy and tired by mid morning._ I welcomed the spontaneity of sleeping in._ As I was making breakfast for myself, I listened to voice memos friends had left for me the previous day. **I prefer the richness of voice memos to stale text messages**, as in hearing someone’s voice, I can hear their emotional state, how the tone of their voice fluctuates for emphasis and the background noises from their immediate environment._ It is an invitation to step into their world for just a few minutes._ **The message one friend left me made me laugh out loud, several times.** It was a short message and I felt myself desiring more. I instinctively called her without knowing what I would say. She answered with _‘is everything ok?’_, a common response when someone calls without warning these days. I shared my appreciation for her message. She asked me what I was doing, I told her I was making breakfast and invited her to join me. Surprisingly, she said _‘yes’_, and given she lives down the street, a few minutes later was here. We enjoyed breakfast sitting on my balcony, overlooking the ocean, while we watched another beautiful summer day in Portugal unfold. _I noticed how when I woke up this morning, I had no idea that this is what my morning would look like._ Once she left, I jumped into the shower and heard the doorbell ring. I thought it was odd as there are normally no deliveries on a Saturday. I saw in the security monitor for my building who it was, and buzzed him into the building. As fast as I could, I dried off and dressed myself, and then opened the door to my apartment to greet my friend. After we exchanged a hug, he commented _‘it’s quiet today here, where is everyone?’_. To which I responded, _‘they will all be here…next Saturday’_. I have been hosting gatherings that involve a morning hike in the nearby mountains followed by lunch at my apartment. About 30 friends typically show up. My friend has mistaken the date and showed up a week early, _to his surprise and mine._ We sat down, once again on my balcony, and ate some grapes and caught up properly. _I appreciated the intimacy of being able to connect in this way, unexpectedly, and to not be distracted by hosting a large group of friends._ Our conversation was cut short though, as I told him _we_ had to go somewhere. He played along and tagged along with my plans. I had plans to surprise a friend and his partner, who had recently moved nearby into a new house. We drove over, rang the doorbell and surprised them. They were not expecting us at all. A few other friends had joined in and we all had an impromptu housewarming celebration together. **The couple’s place was a complete mess.** They had just moved in a few days prior, boxes everywhere and stuff from the previous owner still around. The couple shared they were not planning to invite us over until they had unpacked and settled in. I remarked how this was a common pattern that I definitely am a victim to. _An expectation that everything needs to be clean, tidy and presentable to my outside world_. A desire to give the appearance of perfection, for fear of not being accepted or of being judged. _The experience was a gentle reminder that we can all be accepted for who we are, and how we are, in every moment, without judgment and without expectation that we need to be manicured and curated in a certain way._ We then had lunch at a nearby restaurant, and went to the beach, all of which was a lot of fun on a sunny and hot afternoon. Then my phone rang, a different friend calling, which I answered instinctively with _‘is everything okay?’_. We both laughed He shared that he was biking in the nearby mountains and asked if I wanted to have dinner. I said yes, and without any idea of what time it was, I asked him to come to my place. **As I walked back to my apartment, I realized I had no food. **When I woke up in the morning, I had planned to get groceries however with the many unexpected visitors, that did not happen. Unconcerned, I told myself, _‘we’ll figure something out_’. _Another reminder for me that I did not need to over plan every detail of every moment._ I jumped into the shower, and similar to earlier in the day, the doorbell rang. The impromptu dinner was wonderful. This was a friend that although I had connected with several times, it had always been in a group environment, and the intimacy of only the two of us, paired with the comfort and privacy of my own home, invited a depth to the conversation and a vulnerability that I thoroughly enjoyed. **The day reminded me about the beauty that exists in surrendering control.** I am never really in control but often have a strong desire to feel that I might be and to believe that I know what will happen. _It feels comfortable to know and uncomfortable to not know._ Spontaneity felt so good and upon deeper reflection, I realized that it involved having no expectations. _And having no expectations is a recipe for joy._ Spontaneity is also the antidote to overthinking. For me, the recipe for spontaneity includes a quality of openness to invite in the unknown. A quality of acceptance with the reality that I may not be the most productive or efficient. And a quality of humility to acknowledge that I will not be in control. **The equation of spontaneity equals appreciation**. And appreciation is an immensely powerful feeling that helps me move through my days with grace. I went to sleep last night with a smile on my face, as I reflected on the day. Feeling gratitude and appreciation for the many spontaneous moments that unfolded with friends. I then began to wonder what I might complain to my therapist about next week. --- ### Swimming In The Sea Published: 2022-07-17 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/swimming/ This past week, I was away for a yoga retreat in the south of Italy._ It sounds dreamy, and it certainly was._ Near the end of the week, I found myself waking up earlier than the sun for the first time this summer. Feeling inspired to watch the sun rise, after I finished my morning meditation, I began my slow stroll towards the sea. About thirty minutes later, I came across a beach that I did not know existed. There were only a handful of people, quietly sitting on the cool sand and watching the sun rise over the horizon. As I felt the sand under my feet, I imagined going for a dip in the sea. Except I did not have my swimming shorts, or a towel, and did not know if it was warm, or even safe, as no one else was in the water. My desire to go into the water was clear. The resistance from my mind was also clear. **The tension between the two felt all too familiar.** _I imagined myself in the water._ And noticed a smile appear on my face and a rush of energy over my body._ It felt right._ _I then imagined myself not going in the water._ I pictured myself walking away from the beach, towards where I was staying. _I felt regret._ I imagined my mind beginning its inquisition of **why I did not have the courage to pursue what it is that I desired.** I imagined the washing machine of my mind starting to spin through the many moments from my past where I did not have the courage to do what it is that I desired. I imagined my mind taking this innocent idea of taking a dip in the sea and blowing it up into a crisis about how fear is driving my life. _It was then I knew that I no longer had a choice._ **I could not leave that beach without going into the sea.** It was not about going for a sunrise swim. It was about reminding myself to pursue my desires with confidence, even if I noticed some fear or resistance from my mind. I proceeded to then take off my clothes and run into the sea with a smile across my face. The water was warmer than I expected, the beach was shallower than I expected and I enjoyed it far more than I expected. **A gentle reminder that my mind does not actually know reality, despite its insistence that it does.** Floating quietly in the sea while watching the sun rise, a feeling of freedom arose from within. The freedom that comes with fulfilling a desire. **At that moment, I was desireless. **The desire that I previously had was now fulfilled and I could float in this space of not feeling any desire._ It was liberating._ I stayed in the water for a long time, in this state of desirelessness. Long enough for the tide to begin to change. Long enough to see wrinkles on my fingers and toes. Long enough to see the beach starting to get crowded. Long enough to feel the air above the water getting warmer. **Then I noticed a desire show up**. It was a desire to stay in this state of desirelessness for as long as possible. I had now lost contact with the moment, as I was no longer in it but observing myself in it._ It did not feel the same._ It is like taking a picture. Of anything or anyone. The act of taking the picture takes you out of the moment, as you cannot capture it while in it. Once I was no longer present, I started my exit from the sea and returned to the sand. Laughing quietly at myself for desiring desirelessness, I turned back to look at the sun rising over the horizon. I felt appreciation for this experience of desirelessness, which was completely unconscious while in it, as the becoming aware of it took me away from it. I understand that it is a cycle. It begins with a desire sprouting in my mind, and the ones that grow taller and stronger are the ones I will try to pursue, and if they are fulfilled, I will experience a blissful state of desirelessness however be totally unaware of it, until of course another desire appears and I again begin the cycle. **Desires will come and go.** I need not avoid having desires in the first place. I need not fear trying to fulfill my desires. Flowing with waves of desires arising and disappearing is how I will continue to swim through life. --- ### Third Place Thinking Published: 2022-06-05 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/third/ When I take a moment to pause and observe the stimuli behind my choices, I realize that I am often reactive. **Every choice, action or word is part of a chain of cause and effect.**_ I appear to be more the effect than the cause in my life, and that feels disconcerting to say out loud._ For example, I have been on a physical health kick this year, and continue to go strong nearly six months in. I can see now how my choices of what to eat, when to eat, how much to eat, and even how to eat, are all reactions to either a desire, an insight, a feeling, _or even a fear._ Another obvious example, work. **If I pause for a moment to observe myself working, I start to see how the majority of my day is spent being reactive.** A reaction to an email, a Slack message, a deliverable that is due, or overdue, an arbitrary financial target that I set, a client demand, a team member’s concern, a competitor’s new product, and so forth. _Where did this unconscious habit to always be in a reactive mode originate from?_ Like most well ingrained habits, I can only assume it originated during childhood, and specifically from parents. Watching my baby nephew, I can see the tension between his natural bias to react to his own bodily desires and needs, and his trained bias to react to the demands and encouragement from his parents. From grade school through to university, this conditioning to be reactive was further reinforced. **Between assignments, tests and report cards, I was constantly told what to do.** I learned that if I followed, I would be rewarded with praise. If I didn’t, I would receive disapproval. _This former observation is from direct experience, the latter from second-hand research, of course_. It can feel depressing to acknowledge the reality that I am often in a reactive state. **It is easier to be reactive.** I do not have to make any bigger choices or take bigger risks. I can put my head down, and almost blindly trust that if I simply deal with all of the causes thrown my way to the best of my ability, be it from work, family, the weather, etc., no one will be disappointed with me. _While this may be a fine strategy for survival in life, it fails as a strategy to feel satisfied in life._ **To not get in trouble is not the purpose of life.** For example, I often have told my team _‘I don’t pay you to respond to emails and sit in meetings all day’_. It is part of the job but not the job. Just responding to emails and having meetings, while it might feel productive, it does not get the actual job done. The actual job is much bigger, and much more important. (_And if I have to tell you what the actual job is, then you are best to find somewhere else to work!)_ In mindfulness practices, which I have gone deep into over nearly the past decade, as both a student and a teacher, **the common guidance is to learn how to respond instead of react. **The teaching being that in the face of an external or internal event, instead of unconsciously reacting, when one can find the tiny space between cause and effect, one can make a choice of how to react, also known as a response. Upon further reflection, I feel that to learn how to respond versus react, while an admirable and helpful habit that has served me very well, it still is _a mere coping mechanism and does not address the root issue._ **To be comfortable with being reactive to life, is to play victim to life.** It is to believe that things are happening to me. It is not under my control. I take make the step to believe that the only thing under my control is how I choose to react, or respond, to this life that is happening to me. _However, that does not feel satisfactory to me anymore._ **Third place thinking is to not realize that I am constantly reactive.** It is to strive to survive life by not getting in trouble. **Second place thinking is to choose to respond with intentionality**, versus to react unconsciously. It is to strive to better cope with my tendency to be reactive. **First place thinking is to pause, so that I can ask myself what I actually think.** It is to be truly proactive, not reactive. It is to strive to feel satisfied in life. It is scary to do this. First place thinking requires me to be vulnerable, as I now have an opinion that I do not know if it will be accepted or not. It requires me to build conviction behind my own thinking, and have the humility to change my position as I learn more. It requires me to take ownership of the consequences of my choices, as I no longer have the convenient excuse of playing victim to life. _And there is an emotional toll when my choices have a direct impact on the lives of others._ **To move from third place thinking to first place thinking requires crossing a bridge from being reactive to being proactive.** It is a bridge to a more intentional, aligned and satisfying life. It often requires doing less, as being proactive takes a greater investment of mental, emotional, and even sometimes physical, energy. It often involves disappointing others around me, at least initially, as my choices may be misunderstood until the results speak for themselves. It requires a deeper connection to myself, which is a source of insight to know what I think, like a well that I continue to dig. It requires me to build a vision for my life with conviction, one that I feel wholly connected to, and hopefully inspired by. _Third place thinking is safe._ _Second place thinking feels slightly better._ _First place thinking feels scary, as it is by definition not safe._ **There is a good chance that I will not be successful.** However, there is also a good chance that I will feel satisfied. And this is true first place thinking. First place, not as evaluated by my environment, but as evaluated by me. --- ### Annoying Parents Published: 2022-05-01 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/parents/ The love of a parent towards a child is said to be unconditional. **It could also be said that the love of a parent towards a child is annoying.** It was not until my parents became grandparents that my understanding of the unconditional love that a parent gives a child became clear, and less annoying. My sister and brother-in-law graciously took the monkey off my back by having a baby last year, fulfilling my parent’s desire to be grandparents. My nephew is my favourite person in the world, evidenced by the joy I feel every time I look at my phone and see his face as my wallpaper. My parents appear to have transformed into different people since my nephew showed up into our world. Over the past year, my sister and I have remarked often to each other in private how much they appear to have changed. We hear sounds from our parent’s mouths we never knew existed. We see genuine joy and laughter, again somewhat unfamiliar to our eyes. _Who are these people, that are our supposed parents?_ The love we see my parents give their grandson is so noticeable that it has even sparked a hint of envy within me. **Until I realized that I too receive the same unconditional love.** The love and affection that I feel towards my nephew, that I observe my parents give him, is the same type of love that I have received my entire life from my parents. It touches my heart to know that I am loved in this way. That I have been, that I am today and that I will be in the future. Unconditionally. It is no longer an intellectual belief but an emotional understanding for me. As an introspective and reflective person, I have given my parents a harder time than they deserve. In my journal, in my blog posts, and in the company of my therapist and friends. Often bringing attention to the aspects of who or how I am that I dislike, and associating them with my parents._ It is easier for me to place blame outwards than to take ownership inwards._ My parents have been visiting me in Portugal for the past two weeks, and staying with me. Although I had left home at the age of 18 for school and had not lived with them for a long time, I did return home for the first year of the pandemic recently and lived with them as an adult for the first time. _If you have read my blog for some time, you will know that it was not always easy for me._ _My parents are my parents._ I used to think that they had to change, to be less annoying to me. And they are changing, but not how I expect._ They are changing, in their own ways, in their own time and at their own pace._ **Having connected with the unconditional love they have for me has made my parents less annoying.** It is remarkable. And it is because I better understand them, now that I have seen their love through the eyes of my nephew. Just how my one-year-old nephew is receiving love from every direction, without really understanding or even acknowledging it, I too have been receiving love my entire life, without really understanding or properly acknowledging it. **I now understand that when my parents say or do things that I find annoying, their underlying intention is one of love.** I have always believed that intellectually, but it has not always felt like love to receive it. I am learning to tune into the depth of our relationship beyond our interactions at the surface. _“If you think you are enlightened, go live with your family for a week”_, is the popular quote to challenge any belief that we can meditate or medicate away the strong emotions that are sitting within us, often triggered by those closest to us. **The past few weeks, living with my parents, have been more pleasant for me than I had expected.** I am less annoyed by them, not because they changed, but because I feel more connected to the unconditional love they have for me. --- ### Drive My Car Published: 2022-04-17 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/drive/ I recently went on a first date with someone, and after dinner I offered to drive her home. As we approached my car, which was quietly parked on the cobblestone streets of Lisbon, I turned to her and without saying a word, handed her the key to my car. She stared at me with a hint of suspicion. When I said _‘would you like to drive?’_, her suspicion changed to surprise. After taking a brief moment to process this unexpected offer, she said _‘I would love to, thank you’_ and smiled. She then got in the driver’s seat, and I got into the passenger seat of my car, _for the first time_. As much as I was interested about how she might have been feeling, I became equally interested in how I was feeling at that moment. _I felt calm and curious._ **I have observed in life that the benefits of practicing trust often outweigh the risks of feeling disappointed.** Since moving to Portugal last year, a foreign country to me at the time, as I did not know a single person the day I landed here, every day I am still faced with opportunities to learn how to trust in what I do not yet know. In business, I have had to learn how to become comfortable practicing trust regularly. People on my team, with clients and investors, and the many service providers that support the business. In all of these situations and more, I have to trust. **The act of trust requires the unknown as a key ingredient.** If I try to know everything, or even as much as I possibly can, in advance, I am no longer practicing trust. I am then planning. The trust I am reflecting on here is when I do not have the benefit of knowing everything that I desire to know about the particular person or situation. **It is of course much safer to move through life not practicing trust.** To be constantly checking over my shoulder, to be cautious of not being taken advantage of, to avoid disappointment and hurt. I can minimize the downside by assuming that very few, and very little, that I am unfamiliar with, is deserving of my trust. _I am then also minimizing the upside of what I can receive from life._ **In my experience, when I have leaned more in to trust, of other people, of situations, and of the universe, I do end up with more disappointments.** I also end up with many more pleasant experiences than I would have ever imagined. The benefit of practicing trust is that the balance tips more towards getting pleasantly surprised, in really meaningful and material ways, than in getting disappointed, often in minor and tolerable ways. **The practice of trust does require a practice of tolerance.** To be able to tolerate setbacks, disappointments and unwanted outcomes. It is in these moments where I can choose to be a victim, tell myself ‘never again’ and become closed to the world. Or I can recognize that the emotion of feeling disappointed is unpleasant, but temporary. And not be scared of being disappointed, again. In observing my one year old nephew, I can see that he has no choice but to practice trust. From the moment he was born, he has been indiscriminately placing his trust in everyone, and everything, around him. This leads me to wonder if we begin life with a greater ability to practice trust, and somewhere along our journey, we begin to practice trust less. Likely out of protection, perhaps from a traumatic experience, we become scared. If when faced with someone new or something unfamiliar, my starting position is to assume that I might be taken advantage of, then I have placed a limit on what might come to me. When I trust others, it shows. There is an energetic quality of trust that is magnetic. It is difficult to describe in words, however my experience gives me conviction that it exists. **Trust has a quality of generosity to it.** When I practice trust, I give. When I practice trust, I also receive. The more I give, the more I get. Be it from another person, a particular situation, or the universe at large. **Trust is a currency that is helpful to move through life with.** It is something of value that is traded, not in a transactional manner but in a deeper manner. It enables me to have access to more people, more opportunities and most of all, more of myself. **The greatest gift I can give myself is trust.** In a constantly clouded mind, often filled with thoughts of fear, insecurity, doubt and uncertainty, trust is an appropriate counterbalance to invite in thoughts of confidence, belief, faith and curiosity. The most important relationship in my lifetime is the relationship I have with myself. The practice of trust clearly begins here. --- ### The Most Valuable Real Estate Published: 2022-04-10 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/realestate/ There is a piece of real estate that I have discovered to be the most valuable in the world. This most valuable place is more often than not heavily occupied. It at times will feel like a subway train during rush hour, or like a popular tourist attraction on a sunny weekend. Crowded. Noisy. Even a bit chaotic. Unlike most other places of unique and clear value, where there is a price to enter or some other friction involved to experience it, this most valuable place is open for all to come and go freely. No entry ticket required. No questions asked. This place is so valuable that people come and set up encampments, and overstay their welcome. What may have started as an innocent intention to come for a short visit often quickly evolves into a more permanent stay. As if this most valuable place is not full enough, there is a desire for more. More people. More activities. More ideas. It can feel overwhelming to step inside this place given all that goes on inside. While other valuable places are heavily guarded and the contents protected, this most valuable place has no doors, is never closed and is open for anyone to come and go as they please, and to take whatever they please. Although this most valuable place is mine, I rarely feel in control of it. This most valuable place that I speak of is not a physical space. It is more valuable than any physical place that I could own or occupy. The most valuable real estate in my world is the space inside my mind. If I pause for a moment to inquire about who and what occupies this most valuable space, I see so much that surprises me. Yet I need not be surprised, as the more I pay attention to the furniture of my mind, the more I begin to understand that my mind is a mirror of my life. The information I consume, the company that I keep, the choices that I make, are all reflected in my mind. The most valuable real estate in my world is not something I can control by choosing who to invite in and who to ask to leave. This most valuable space is influenced by the choices I make in everyday living. The choices I make are influenced by what I value. This understanding inspires me to live with more intention, as this most valuable space in my world is reserved for who and what I value. The reason it is the most valuable real estate in my world is because it shows me what I value. And to know myself is to understand what it is that I value. --- ### The Best Choice Published: 2022-04-02 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/better/ I have a friend who cannot watch a movie without first looking at the reviews. She cannot pick a restaurant without first checking the ratings. She cannot take only one picture of something or someone. She must take several, to then select the best one. This desire to pick the best available option, be it a movie, a restaurant, a picture, or anything else in life, is also a fear of making a poor choice. _I notice the same desire (fear) within me._ **Since moving to Portugal and settling down here, I have had to make so many choices. **Where to live, what car to drive, where to buy groceries, which Portuguese teachers to study with, even which new friends to spend time with. This desire to make the best choice, or rather the fear of making a poor choice, feels deeply embedded in my thought pattern. It is unconscious. When faced with anything new, _I expect myself to make the best choice_._ Always._ If I know that I have tried to find the best, then I will feel satisfied with myself for putting a good effort forward. I imagine the reason **I want the best is that I assume that I will be happy** with it. _How could I not be?_ I have been conditioned to believe that the best is the best. This is why celebrity endorsements, influencer recommendations or references from friends or family are often accepted without much friction. If it is good enough for someone that I trust or admire, then it must be good enough for me. _Right?_ **This search for the best assumes that we are all the same. **The definition of the best assumes an objective, consistent and standardised criteria by which to evaluate any thing, any place or even, any person. The result of this attempted standardisation to find the best is, ironically, the lowest common denominator. The best is often determined by looking only at what can be easily and consistently measured, and that the majority might relate to. **As unique individuals, none of us is the majority, we are each a minority of 1.** From the colours that please our eyes, to the tastes that excite our senses, to the thoughts and dreams that we spend so much time with inside, we are all unique. **The search for the best choice out there is highly impersonal and fails to capture any of our own individuality.** The other week, I spontaneously went to the movie theater and picked a movie to watch on the spot, without looking at any reviews. I thoroughly enjoyed the movie. When I went home that night, I looked it up and saw that the reviews and ratings were horrible. _My immediate reaction was to doubt my own judgement_, wondering if I had made a mistake, or wasted my time. Then I caught myself and checked in. And yes, I did enjoy the movie and would recommend it, even though the majority of people who saw it did not. In that moment, I began to feel more empowered in my choices and more connected to myself. Instead of asking, ‘_what is the best option out there?_’, a different question might be to ask _‘what is the better option, for me?’_. The desire for the best is to find an objective, and impersonal, choice. The desire for the better is to find a subjective, and personal, choice. ‘_What is better for me_’ is a much more relevant question than ‘_what is the best option out there_’. It is also a much more difficult question. It requires me to take ownership of making the decision, versus delegating it. It requires me to take ownership of the outcome of my choices. _If I do not like it, it is far easier to blame the mass public for getting it wrong, versus myself._ **It requires me to know myself, and what’s important to me as it relates to this choice.** What might be better for me might not be better for you. This is where the discomfort arises. In making choices that those around us may not agree with or even understand. For example, in finding a place to live, someone might value location and convenience, someone else might value price and flexibility, someone else might value light and space. There is no single best choice for where all of these people might live. There will be a different choice, that’s better for each of them. What might be the best out there may not be affordable for me. What might be the best out there may not be convenient for me. **What might be the best out there may not even interest me.** To choose the best out there feels safe. **To choose what is better for me feels satisfying.** I cannot choose what is better for me though without first connecting with myself. I need to know what I value. And that continues to be a lifelong journey, to know myself. --- ### The Limitations I Avoid Published: 2022-03-13 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/limits/ In my early twenties, I felt that time was unlimited for me. Like most teenagers entering adulthood, I felt like I could do anything, and everything. The energy and enthusiasm that I felt fuelled me to make choices with the courage and conviction often required to turn any idea into a reality. _And it worked._ What I lacked in life experience I made up for with effort, throwing time, as it were an unlimited resource at my disposal, towards whatever I was determined to achieve. I felt there was an abundance of time available to me. **In my early thirties, I began to internalize that time is limited.** The passing away of loved ones, seeing people I knew begin to experience health issues, and starting to observe my own energy and enthusiasm in the face of new challenges change, deep down I began to feel that time is not abundant, but scarce. This recognition that time is limited triggered a strong desire for me to do even more in life. As a response to time being limited, a fire was lit within me to cram _‘it all’_ into my short life. _The belief that time is scarce fuelled me._ **My mind naturally started to engineer my life to be able to do more.** My attention began to focus on the many inefficiencies in my life. The desire to be efficient, to be productive, to always be doing something, and in the most optimal manner, became what I valued. _And it worked._ As long as I was doing something useful and valuable, for either me or for others, I could feel satisfied that I was making the most of my limited time. **Except I did not feel satisfied.** Even after mastering the science of doing more in less, and achieving a lot along the way, I did not feel the type of satisfaction I expected. The satisfaction I felt is that I know how to do things. _The satisfaction that I longed to feel is that I know how to do the right things for me._ **What I am now learning is that not only is my time limited, but that there are also limitations to my time.** _There are limitations to what I can do with my time._ There are limitations to how many books I can read. Limitations to how many places I can visit. Limitations to how many people I can connect with. Limitations to how many hobbies I can explore. _The limitations are endless._ **There is a great discomfort for me to acknowledge these limitations. **My conditioning has been to believe there are no limitations to my time, and that I can do anything, and everything. It is more comfortable to try to do _‘it all’_, and even though I know deep down I likely will not, at least I know that I tried, and that gives me comfort. However, to truly believe that there are limitations to my time requires me to make trade-offs. If I am doing this, I am not doing that. If I am here, I am not there. If I am with this person, I am not with that person. _It is in making these trade-offs that I feel the discomfort._ To decide how to use my time is to know what I really want. I find this to be the most difficult question to answer. It is easier to throw time and effort at it, and avoid answering the question. **To decide how to use my time is to know myself.** And I suspect this is the ultimate satisfaction that I desire. --- ### Debt v Deficit Published: 2022-03-06 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/deficit/ Growing up as a kid, I was always the first to wake up in the house. My parents and sister would be fast asleep, often snoring, and I would quietly tip-toe my way down the stairs, open the front door and pick up the newspaper that was patiently waiting for me outside. I would then sit down on the carpet in our family room and begin to read the paper, flipping through every page, reading every headline, pausing to look at every picture and stopping to read whichever stories caught my attention. I remember the first time I read about a deficit. While I was quick to learn the concept of debt, the concept of deficit took me some time to fully comprehend. **And now I understand how dangerous it is to confuse the two.** Debt and deficit are most commonly referred to in economic terms. Debt is to borrow money, the way a government borrows money to help pay for additional spending during a pandemic, or how a family borrows money to help pay for a house, or how a student borrows money to help pay for tuition costs. Deficit is a form of continuous debt, and happens when a government is continually spending more than it is earning, or when a family is spending more money to live than they are bringing in regularly, or when a student who despite earning money from a part-time job, still spends more to live than they earn. A deficit is structural. On a long-term basis, a system with a deficit will come to a breaking point, as it is not sustainable. _If the inputs are continually less than the outputs, the picture will not be pretty at some point._ My reflection is not on the economy of our collective or individual finances, but the economy of our individual lives, beyond money. **The concepts of debt and deficit have relevance to our physical, mental and emotional beings.** **Physical** I experience physical debt when I have an injury. For example, a few years ago my knee got injured and I had mobility challenges for several months. After time for my knee to heal, I had mostly paid off this physical debt. _A physical deficit is different._ I am currently experiencing a physical deficit as it relates to my posture. 15 years of working behind a screen has led to tense shoulders, tight hips and back aches. **I cannot pay off this deficit by getting a massage**, working with a physical therapist or ‘fixing’ my posture while working. _Any deficit is structural, so I have to make deeper level ‘structural’ adjustments to solve it._ **Mental** I experience mental debt in moments of high stress, pressure or anxiety, often tied to a milestone, be it in business, earlier in school or when faced with something new like learning Portuguese. The only solution is to put the work in and ‘get through it’. **It will feel effortful and I do it knowing it is temporary.** _A mental deficit is different._ The moments when I have felt continuously ‘busy’, when my mind has had trouble relaxing, when I notice the desire to always be doing something productive or to be efficient, these are all moments of mental deficit. I feel like I am always running metaphorically, somewhere. _Addictions, be it to substances or activities, can also be examples of a mental deficit._ **The risk is that I fool myself into thinking that I just need to ‘get through this’**, and exert the type of effort that I face a mental debt with. The issue is that, unlike mental debt that is temporary, a mental deficit is structural and persists. In our modern society, I observe a high degree of mental deficit almost everywhere I look. When I innocently ask someone ‘how are you’ and the response is consistently ‘really busy’, _it is a sign of a deficit._ **As a deficit is structural, simply putting more effort is not going to solve it.** It requires a change in priorities, commitments, lifestyle or routine. _To work smarter, not harder._ **Emotional** I experience emotional debt when faced with a sudden or unexpected event, like the passing of a loved one, the end of a romantic relationship or feeling homesick after moving to a new place. **Time is the cure to pay off emotional debt. **To expect myself to be okay immediately is to deny the emotion, which will lead to suppression and a host of other issues. To dwell on it indefinitely is also not helpful. A reasonable amount of time, and a few good cries, are often helpful. _Emotional deficit is different._ It is when I feel drained, fatigued or tired, not physically but energetically or emotionally. Social media scrolling, excessive news media consumption, a toxic friend or family member, are all examples of when an emotional deficit manifests. **Time is a curse when faced with an emotional deficit.** Time gives the deficit more space to continue. The solution is cutting off time towards the source of the emotional deficit. Easier said than done, however the only path. Debt often requires a one-time surge of attention while a deficit feeds off of attention. _This is why it is dangerous to confuse the two._ **Debt is often intentional and deliberate.** I believe it is a good choice to make when I feel I have the capacity and resources to manage it. **Deficit is often accidental and creeps up on me.** To address it requires first for me to acknowledge it, and then to make deeper structural changes. It has taken me a few decades of life experience, from that moment as a child when I first read about debt and deficit, to understand better how to tell the difference, in all parts of life. --- ### How I Feel Published: 2022-02-13 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/feelings/ A few months ago, feeling major FOMO, I started to invest in crypto. **Like anything new that caught my attention, I went in deep.** From embarrassingly not knowing anything about cryptocurrency last fall, I found myself reading books, listening to podcasts and asking friends questions daily on the topic. Once I had my accounts, wallets and funds organized, I started investing, and soon, I was trading, _daily_. A few weeks ago, I had some friends over for dinner and one mentioned something about crypto. _At that moment, I realized I had not logged into a single account to trade or even check my balances in at least one week._ I was quick to admit to myself that I had clearly lost interest in this recent hobby. At times, I will feel more motivated and at other times, less motivated, in relation to an interest, a place or even, a person. **There is an expectation that my motivation and interest in some thing, some one or some place, remains constant. **Like a straight line that is trending slightly up, my interest should be increasing over time. When I look around in my life, I realize I have that _expectation all over._ The growth for my business should be a straight line, up and to the right. The stocks in my portfolio, the quality of my sleep, the strength of my relationships, the weather and more. _I sort of expect everything to always get better, stronger and more interesting._ **Life feels less like a straight line though, and more like a wave that goes up and down.** I believe this expectation for everything to be straight is a limitation of the mind. Linear patterns are easier to understand and process. The mind also likes to feel in control and craves consistency._ It is easier to predict a line and quite scary to imagine a wave._ **I am developing the belief that our emotions are in the driver's seat, not our minds.** It is easy to believe that we are logical beings who sometimes experience emotion. Life is showing me that we are emotional beings, who use logic to explain the emotion. _Emotion is inefficient._ _Emotion is inconvenient._ _Emotion is difficult to control._ _Emotion is impossible to predict._ _Emotion is highly impermanent._ Why do we crave permanence? We live in a world of impermanence, and are ourselves highly impermanent. While drowning in this sea of impermanence, perhaps the allure of permanence is the lifeboat that we so desperately want. **My motivations and interests will change.** _And I want to be more okay with that._ For example, I was recently very interested in crypto. Then, I found myself less interested. That does not mean that I am ‘done’ with it and won’t ever be interested again. I will very likely be interested in it again. _I just may not know when._ **I find that it takes an incredible amount of mental resource and emotional energy to try and sustain a consistent motivation and interest level in some thing, some one or some place.** I suspect it is because the underlying motivation and interest goes up and down, like a wave, while I fool those around me, and myself, into thinking that it’s a straight line. For example, last week, _I did not write a blog post_. I surprisingly received several messages from people asking if I was okay, as I have been consistently publishing every week, for years now. _So what happened?_ I sat down to write, and even had a few juicy topics that I was going to explore, however as I checked in with myself emotionally, I noticed that I just was not feeling it. I no doubt could have forced myself to write, which I will admit that I have done in the past, however this time I chose to listen to how I felt. If I had forced it, I likely would not have been as connected to the writing, and definitely not as satisfied. I have been keeping a fairly active blog for 7 years now. I cannot think of too many interests, maybe other than meditation, that I have continued for this long and still do with a smile on my face.** To sustain an interest over the long-term, it has to feel effortless.** Another example. I have been a vegetarian for most of my life. However in the past decade, I have oscillated between vegetarian and vegan more times than I care to admit. _Why?_ Well, clearly I like cheese way too much despite some part of me wanting to be vegan. The desire I have for cheese is clearly stronger than any desire to be vegan. It’s that simple, however I have yet to fully accept it, fooling myself every few months that _‘now it’s time’_. I imagine the same is true for many unfulfilled desires. If one has a desire to lose weight but still finds themselves eating junk, then clearly the desire to eat junk is stronger than the desire to lose weight. And that might be okay._ The same can likely be said for technology addictions, career progressions, and more._ _Look at any unfulfilled desire and an opposing fulfilled desire is to be found nearby._ One that feels so good, that’s why we do it. **When I take a long-term perspective and have conviction or belief about some thing, some one or some place, then I become more flexible and adaptable along the way.** And therein lies the key. This flexibility is what allows me to continue to move forward despite the twists and turns that my feelings will throw at me. _Any rigidity I have is a rejection of my feelings._ And in rejecting my feelings, I reject my long-term desire, lose interest and then feel discouraged. _Then, I no longer feel like doing it, so I do not do it._ **My one word theme last year was space.** It taught me the value in giving myself space to be with my feelings. Instead of trying to force some pre-developed idea I had, I learned how to ease into and flow more harmoniously with how I was feeling. **My one word theme this year is open**, and it feels like a continuation of space. It is becoming a reminder for me to be open to how I might feel about some thing, some one or some place. My feelings are highly impermanent, learning how to listen to them yet not get overly concerned with them is how I keep the flexibility that allows me to stay encouraged and excited along the way. _I feel like eating some cheese now, and then I will check my crypto portfolio._ --- ### My Inefficient Life Published: 2022-01-30 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/inefficient/ Moving to a new continent, country and culture has shown me how inefficient my new lifestyle is, and more importantly, how I feel about it. There is a conflict with my desire for the new, and my conditioning to expect efficiency in every part of life. **The new for me comes in learning to live in a new place.** From where to buy food, connecting with new friends, navigating a new system, there is so much that I am faced with daily that is new to me. I find it interesting, yet highly inefficient. _The same might be the case for one who is starting a new job, moving into a new home, entering in a new relationship, and more._ **My conditioning though is to expect efficiency everywhere.** From the society and system that I am a participant of, from the people I interact and engage with, and most of all, from my own abilities to move through it all, I expect it all to be highly efficient and optimized. All the time. _This is where the conflict arises._ My limited resources of time, money and energy are clear examples of this conflict. **Time**. I continue to get lost moving around Portugal, as the one way streets mean that I do not come back the same way I go, and the one lane streets often invite frequent small delays that Google Maps is not designed to pick up. Every time I go to a restaurant, I am reminded of how used to a rushed culture I am, as the relaxed culture here always takes longer than I expect, every time. _In these examples, and in many more, I am surprised with the inefficient use of my time._ **Money**. From buying cheese and olives that I later discover I do not actually enjoy, to surprise charges from my bank, electricity or cell phone providers, it is difficult to accurately budget or plan, as I do not really understand the true cost of my lifestyle. _In these examples, and many more, I am surprised with the inefficient use of my money._ **Energy**. When making new friends, exploring new events, going on dates, trying new classes, and wandering into new places, I can sometimes feel exhausted or unsatisfied. To curate optimal daily interactions when everything is new feels impossible. _In these examples, and many more, I am surprised with the inefficient use of my energy._ Despite observing the countless examples of where my time, money and energy have not been used with an efficiency that I am used to, or that I expect, I feel at peace with it all. This is a new feeling for me, as in a previous chapter when living in New York, where the efficiency of my time, money and energy was highly optimized, I rarely felt at peace with how my resources were being spent. I felt there was always more possible. **The key to unlock this shift has been to learn to tolerate inefficiency in life.** As my tolerance for inefficiency continues to increase, a byproduct of living in Portugal, my level of satisfaction and peace in life also increases. _Tolerance for the society and system of which I am a participant of._ _Tolerance for the people that are present in my everyday lifestyle._ _Tolerance for myself, and my own expectations of my abilities._ It becomes a little easier to tolerate something or someone that I know is temporary. And as everything is temporary, including me, I can learn to tolerate it all. Embracing the inefficiencies in my life is how I continue to move through my days with a smaller frown, and a bigger smile. --- ### I Know Published: 2022-01-23 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/iknow/ It may often feel like you must have it all together and figured out in life. That you must know exactly where you are going, how to get there, and to be on your way. Feelings of anxiety, fear, frustration, inferiority or insecurity often stem from this expectation you may have to know. Here’s the thing,** I know that you do not know**. The question is, **do you know that you do not know?** The greatest thing to know is that one does not know. Once one becomes aware and comfortable with this reality, one becomes less fearful in life. _A few reflections to help inspire this important quality of not knowing…_ Once one joins a new company or takes a new role They begin to act like they know, when in fact they do not And it is obvious to everyone but themselves _Best to accept what is already visible for everyone else to see_ Once one understands that doing something new to them might be difficult They stop expecting themselves to know the new immediately And their demands become realistic for once _Patience is a great gift in support of growth_ Once one becomes open to the idea that maybe they do not know They feel a weight has been lifted from their shoulders And now move through life with greater lightness and ease _An expert’s mind is closed, where a beginner’s mind is open_ Once one admits to themselves that they do not know They become resourceful and learn how to ask for help And get the benefits of the knowledge and mistakes of others _Teamwork is more satisfying than solo accomplishment_ Once one no longer feels a need to prove something They become secure in where they are and in who they are And from that place begin to prove a lot _Pretending is unkind and painful to the self_ Once one becomes comfortable with not knowing They stop expecting everyone else around them to know And find that their relationships and outlook improves _Learn to accept reality as it is, not as you wish it to be_ --- ### What I Want Published: 2022-01-16 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/expectations/ Recently, I have started to work with a personal trainer, for the first time in my life. I will admit that I have never consistently worked out or gone to the gym. There have always been other activities that I have believed to be more valuable or interesting. However as my body ages, I have noticed more injuries, aches and pains, enough to have convinced me to invest in strength training. My expectations going into it were simple. **Get stronger, as efficiently as possible.** I found a trainer here in Portugal, but she does not speak English well and the workouts at the beginning were very easy. I began to question early on if I should find a better trainer, as I would witness her struggle to explain exercises in English, which she did very inefficiently, and at the end of a session, my body did not feel any stronger. However, I found myself continuing to do the sessions. I did not think too much about it, and trusted my instinct to stick with it, _despite feeling disappointed early on_. **She does not speak English well and often switches to Portuguese.** As a result, this is the most consistent exposure to Portuguese I have had since moving here months ago and I am picking up the language faster. I like it. **I work from home and could easily forget to leave my home. **We meet at 730am on the beach, and watch the sunrise over the ocean as we workout. It is inspiring. Physical training is new to me and because she does not push me beyond my comfort zone, I am not scared. **I also do not feel judged by her,** based on what I can and cannot yet do. I had no idea that this is what I actually needed from a trainer, to help me build confidence and consistency. And most of all, we laugh together, every single session. It is so much fun. If my expectation was to get stronger as efficiently as possible, I had better get a different trainer. And had I, I probably would have gotten discouraged, injured or fatigued, and then stopped. Dropping my expectations is what has created a truly enjoyable experience, one that I genuinely look forward to (despite the workouts now being much more challenging). **I do not actually know what I want.** And there is a freedom to say that out loud. See, life becomes transactional when I place an expectation on everything or everyone. I then only do things that I feel are worth it. The problem is that I fool myself into thinking that I know what I want in the first place. The truth is that I do not, and can only uncover it once I am with it. As a human being, it is only once in a state of _‘being with’_ the work, the environment, the place, the person, the activity or even the emotion, that I can know how I feel about it. When I try to think my way through what I want, I often miss the mark._ This is evidenced by feelings of dissatisfaction after getting something that I thought I wanted._ It takes a dose of humility to go into something with the understanding that I do not know what I want from it, and a bigger dose of courage to be comfortable with not knowing. With humility and courage, I become open to the serendipity, the spontaneity and the surprises reality has to offer me. **The most memorable moments of my life, the experiences that have most inspired and shaped me and the people who have most influenced me have been when my expectations were few. **This is when I am most open to being changed by reality. _Conversely, the moments I have experienced the most stress, anxiety, anger, frustration and disappointment have been when my expectations were many._ Any activity, exchange or investment of time, attention or money will produce an outcome. When I have predefined what that outcome needs to be, I am closed. When I have not, I am more open to the outcome that is most grounded in reality, _versus my fantasy._ And learning to be with reality is the only path I have known to move through life with a little more ease, and a little less friction. --- ### Making Mistakes Published: 2022-01-09 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/mistakes/ There is a fear I have of making mistakes. I was not born with it though, I inherited it somewhere along my way through life. I know this when I look at my baby nephew, who is about to celebrate his first birthday, and see that he does have the same fear that I do. **He is crawling.** He is so unaware though of how to get somewhere that _he often gets stuck_, in many unimaginable and cute ways. Yet that does not stop him from trying to go somewhere. In contrast, I cannot walk or drive anywhere without first looking at Google Maps, for fear of getting lost, making a wrong turn or not taking the most efficient route. _I would like to get lost once in a while, to see what I might discover._ **He is feeding himself.** Or at least he believes that he is feeding himself, as the majority of _his food ends up on him, instead of in him_. It is very cute to watch, fills us with so much joy, and I feel that he is having fun as well. However, it is highly impractical, and that is why when I eat, I make sure that all of my food makes it into my mouth. If even a crumb ends up on my face or shirt, I remove it within seconds._ I would like to eat like him once in a while, it looks like so much more fun._ **He is talking. **Well, he believes that he is talking, but to us, he is only _making random sounds that we do not understand_. Yet this does not stop him from continuing to try to talk, mostly to himself, and sometimes to his parents and grandparents. Since moving to Portugal, I have been slowly learning the language yet my lack of confidence does stop me from making sounds. _I would like to make more sounds with my mouth, that are Portuguese like, even if they are not always right._ I begin to wonder how I became fearful of making mistakes. **School is one source.** With graded assignments, tests and exams, report cards, peer pressure, getting into a good college or university, it is a pressure cooker like environment that tells me to not make mistakes. **Home is another source.** If adults are scared of making mistakes, then it is expected that as a child, I would learn and observe this fear from my parents growing up. **Culture also contributes.** Be it news, social media, friends, extended family, religion, laws and more, the fabric of society tells me to stick within the lines, or else. _It is no surprise then that as I grow older, I have become more scared._ **There is a point in life when my fear of making mistakes peaks.** Up until this point, my fears continue to increase. After this point, my fears begin to decrease. It is a point when I become aware of the growth I have gained not from my successes, but from my mistakes. It is a point when I see that my fear is conditioning and ungrounded, when I feel secure and know that I will be just fine when I make mistakes. It is a point when I know in my heart that I am accepted and loved by those around me, unconditionally, and not based on what I do or who I become. I have made many mistakes in business, in love, in health, in friendship and in society. I know that I will make many more mistakes. _I also know that you will too._ Making mistakes is inevitable. It is like the rain. It is guaranteed, it is messy at times, however it is expected, needed, tolerated and accepted. **When I was in grade school, English as a subject was always challenging for me.** While I did well academically in math, science, and even French, my lowest grade each year was English class, and by a large margin. My interest in reading for fun developed later in life, and as a result, my vocabulary and spelling had been weak relative to my highly educated peers in North America. It still is actually but technological advances like spell check, auto correct and search enable me to fill in the gaps effortlessly. Since I moved to Portugal, I have observed that English is a second language for most of the people that I interact with. Be it the Portuguese, Brazilians, French, Spanish, Germans, Russians or Eastern Europeans, the majority of people in my day-to-day ‘in-person’ life learned English later in life. Where most of my life I judged myself and believed that I was not good enough at English, I feel no judgement of the English skills of those around me. I admire their courage for not letting their accents, grammar or vocabulary get in the way of trying. I admire my nephew who unapologetically crawls into corners he cannot get out of, baths himself in his meals or makes sounds that no one but him understands. There is a fearlessness in trying something that we do not know how to do, or believe that we are not good at. _This has helped me realize that the biggest block to making mistakes is me._ **The ultimate freedom in life is the freedom to make mistakes.** Without this freedom, I am not free. I am not dependent on anyone around me to change for me. I was born with the freedom to make mistakes. I feel more open and curious, similar to how I once was as a child. --- ### The Most Important Decision Published: 2022-01-02 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/decision/ It is fairly easy to figure out where I want to go in life. Figuring out the direction for my life is clearly quite pleasurable for my mind, otherwise I would not think about it as much as I do. **What I find more difficult though, and more important, is to figure out how to get there. **_I have learned that the most important decision is not where to go, but how to get there._ Along my journey, I will have to make many choices, some big, but most small. These choices are often made without complete information. If I wait until there is complete certainty with no unknowns, then I am not really making a choice. It has already been made for me. The choices that move my life forward are those where I am not completely certain of the outcome. _The question then is how to make these choices?_ **At the start of each year, I set an intention to help guide these choices.** My intention is like a magic wand that I will wave at any problem that comes my way, and it gives me instant clarity. It is a bright star in the distance, guiding me and giving me direction. Most of all, it is a trusted friend who is with me at all moments. _The moments when I feel lost and confused, I turn to you._ _The moments when I feel agitated, angry and anxious, I turn to you._ _The moments when I feel energized and inspired, I know it is because of you._ The practice to set an intention each year is a simple one: it is one word. This year, my intention is **Open**. Last year, it was Space. In previous years, it has been Heart, Trust, Fearless, Freedom, Energy and Discovery. The beauty of an intention that is captured in one word is that it is simple and subjective. It is abstract by design, as it invites creativity for how it might manifest. It is also deeply personal, as the same word might have a completely different meaning for someone else. Compared to a goal, which makes me feel closed, as I stop seeing anything or anyone not directly aligned with it, an intention makes me feel open. Open to possibility and change. It is this quality of openness that keeps it alive, relevant and interesting all year long. _This is the eight year of me setting a one word intention, evidence that it works, as there are not many things that I did eight years ago that I still do today._ To set my one word intention each year, I will sit and meditate on it, take a walk in nature or journal. I reflect about what it is that is most important in my life right now. What it is that my heart truly desires. Many thoughts will arise, and eventually a theme will begin to emerge. I know I have found my word when I feel a spark of energy and excitement inside. It is the emotional, not intellectual, connection to the intention that makes it meaningful for me. Once I have picked my word, I share it, as I am doing right now. This is really important, as it helps me further commit to it, ask for support and encouragement, and inspire others to also choose to live with greater intentionality. Here are just a few of the one word intentions that friends have shared with me over the past few years. May these help inspire your one word intention for the year ahead. Abundance Acceptance Action Authentic Awareness Balance Bold Breathe Care Change Commitment Communication Compassion Confidence Connection Control Courage Create Discipline Equilibrium Explore Faith Fearless Fit Focus Form Fortitude Freedom Fun Generosity Giving Grace Gratitude Grounded Growth Harmony Heart Humility Integrity Joy Learn Lightness Love Mastery Open Ownership Partnership Play Positive Presence Relationships Relax Respect Responsibility Self Love Serve Sincerity Simplify Space Surrender Thoughtful Truth Trust Understanding Union Win Youthful --- ### 21 Questions To Make Peace With 2021 Published: 2021-12-26 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/21questions/ It is now time to make peace with the past year. _First, a poem about why this practice of inner peace making is so powerful, followed by 21 reflective questions to help make peace with the past._ **The choice to make peace with my past** To start a new year with a clean slate, and not a to-do list To not drag into the new year all of my unfulfilled desires, only some of them To not carry all of my unprocessed emotions and unhealed wounds forward To acknowledge the people, opportunities, experiences and myself, for all that is good To find closure on what I have been resisting to accept about the world, and myself To remember the moments that I laughed so much that it hurt To remember the moments that I cried so much that it hurt To appreciate the pleasant surprises that brought the most beautiful smile to my face To give space to the moments I felt disappointed and discouraged To recognize that most of the fears I carried this year were unnecessary To relive the moments that I most felt alive, aligned and authentic To go beyond the noise and responsibilities, and tune into what my heart has to tell me To rediscover what it is about life that I now feel inspired by and attracted to To invite in new possibility, and to be called to, not frightened by, change To understand that the best parts of my life are not planned 21 questions to help make peace with 2021 _You might choose to answer these out loud with a close friend or family member, or you might choose to answer them privately in a journal. Take some time in the coming days to become curious about the year that was in your life._ What did I learn about the world? What did I learn about those around me? What did I learn about myself? What new skills or knowledge did I gain? When did I feel inspired? When did I feel discouraged? When did I feel fearless? When did I feel scared? What was most difficult for me? What sparked joy for me? When did I feel most myself? When did I feel least myself? Who am I appreciative of? Whom have I been upset with, and why? What am I most proud of? What am I least proud of? How is my identity evolving? What am I most looking forward to? What do I desire most for the world? What does my heart desire? What are the values that are guiding me right now? --- ### A Past Love Published: 2021-12-12 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/newyorklove/ Last week I found myself back in New York, for the first time since leaving abruptly in March 2020. Since then, I have spent many hours shedding my New York identity, cutting loose the threads that had kept me tied there for over a decade, and experiencing the range of emotions associated with a sudden, unplanned and unwanted change. This is why I knew that going back, even though only for one week, would be telling. **I was scared about going back.** Scared for my heart. Scared that I might fall back in love with a place that I had fallen for so many times. Scared that I may question my move to Portugal. Scared that seeds of doubt would be planted about the choices I have been making. _Like most things that I feel scared of, it turns out that I did not need to be scared of my heart falling for an old love._ **From the moment the taxi crossed the bridge into the city, I wanted to leave the city.** The feeling was immediate and I felt it with all of my body. Coming from a very comfortable few months of getting settled in sunny Portugal, the contrast to New York felt jarring. It was cold, dark, windy, dirty, loud, smelly and not easy on the eyes. _A sensory overload in the most unpleasant way that I could ask for._ I was not in tune and did not feel connected with the energy of New York. And that surprised me. To make sense of these feelings, I built a narrative in my mind about how the pandemic must have really changed New York. I feel different, so I point the finger at the place, person or thing outside of me. _It is ‘their’ fault._ Then I realized after a week of running around the city, meeting many new and some familiar people and eating at places I long frequented, _New York has not changed as much as I might want to believe it has._ **What has changed is me.** What prompted me to reflect about my reaction to visiting with an old love was the fact that for over a decade, and an important decade in my life, I felt very much in tune with and connected energetically to New York. Last week, when I saw people walking hurriedly down the street and the expressions of stress and seriousness on every single face, I could see myself everywhere. I used to look, feel and act exactly in this way. Everywhere I turned and looked was a mirror, showing me how I once was. What I was feeling was not about being disconnected from New York. **It was about being disconnected from a previous version of myself.** Landmarks are a beautiful reminder about how I am evolving, developing and growing. They provide me with a reference point, not to judge how they have changed, but to become aware of how I have changed. **Over the years, I have become more open to reality changing me.** It takes a letting go of what I once believed, who I once was and where I once lived, to be with my own reality of what I now believe, who I now am and where I now am. It is easy for me to intellectually be in love with what I once was in love with. It was good to me, for which I will always be grateful. It is a bit harder though for me to listen to my heart, and to hear what it has to tell me. It does like to surprise me from time to time. --- ### Just For Today Published: 2021-11-28 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/today/ My sister and her family, including her 10-month old son, are currently visiting me in Portugal. It has been a lot of fun to spend quality time together, and show them my new chosen home. My nephew is a lot of fun to play with at this age, and I find everything about him cute. When he smiles, cries, laughs, burps and farts, it is all cute to me right now. This morning while on a walk with my sister by the ocean, she innocently asked me how I feel about sharing my space, and sharing my life in this moment, with all of them. **It was her subtle way of acknowledging that living together can be a lot.** Living with a baby is a lot, as it is also a new experience for me, one that has involved a lot of adjustment of the routines and lifestyle that I am used to. Living with my nephew’s mom can also be a lot, even though it is not as new of an experience for me, I am reminded that she too can be a handful. Despite it all practically being a lot, it has not felt like a lot to me. _And I believe it is because I know that it is temporary._ **When I know that something is temporary, my tolerance for it appears to increase.** _When my tolerance for something feels unbearable, it is likely a sign that I think it is more permanent than it actually is._ For example, our collective tolerance for COVID precautions 18 months ago was quite amazing, and unimaginable. There is no way that we could have architected the changes that society implemented, _however we did it._ Now later into the pandemic, when we were asked to continue similar precautions, our tolerance started to decrease, as we started to think that these might be more permanent than what we had originally believed. The same people, the same circumstance, the same threat, the same precautions, however our response was different. **We no longer believed the situation to be temporary, and struggled to tolerate it.** Another example that comes to mind is from my yoga teacher training, which I had done a few years ago in New York. In the training, I noticed how much the instructors emphasized the use of yoga blocks in so many poses. The benefits are countless, including much better support, a chance to work on the muscles the pose was designed for, and of course, reduce the risk of injury. **However, until I had done my teacher training, I had developed the belief that yoga blocks were like training wheels on a bicycle, only used by beginners**, and that a sign that I was progressing in my practice was that I did not need to rely on them. It of course surprised me to learn that the most advanced yogis use blocks more, not less, than I was. When I asked my instructor how to navigate this common misperception that most students would have, she shared with me that the three most powerful words to use as a teacher, a leader, a parent or even as a friend are _‘just for today’_. As a teacher, _‘just for today, I’d like everyone to use blocks for this next pose...’_. As a leader, _‘just for today, let’s start our meeting by sharing…’_. As a parent, _‘just for today, I’d like you to put your phone away for...’_. As a friend, _‘just for today, can you…’_. **I got it immediately and continue to be amazed at how effective it is.** It works because when I think something is temporary, the stakes feel lower, I feel like I am not being asked to commit to something indefinitely, and I am now more open and tolerant to give something a try. For example, when I am at a restaurant, I am more open to trying new dishes and cuisines, whereas at home, I cook the same old dishes that I already know. **The more I believe that something is permanent, the more I am fearful of it.** The less I believe that something is permanent, the less fearful and more tolerant I am of it. _I can breathe a sigh of relief, as I know that nothing is permanent in life._ Everything changes. _Absolutely everything changes._ Either the thing, situation or person will change, or how I feel about the thing, situation or person, will change. If I have a desire to live life with less friction and more ease, tolerance is a key ingredient. If I have a desire to increase my tolerance for the thing, situation or person in front of me, I have to remember that it is temporary. With this understanding, I can tolerate a lot more than I realize, including a baby waking up and crying in the middle of the night four times, which was my experience last night. _It is just for today._ --- ### One-Sided Coin Published: 2021-11-20 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/oneside/ This morning while eating breakfast and staring out my window, all I saw were clouds and light rain. I immediately felt my energy and excitement for my day ahead a little lower as a result. Then I looked down at my plate and realized that all of the delicious fruit I was enjoying was made possible only because it had rained at some point, somewhere. Without the rain, my plate would be empty and I would be hungry. **To see, want or expect only what I desire is to collect one-sided coins.** _One-sided coins do not exist, which means that I am only fooling myself if I am searching for them._ Yesterday, a friend shared with me how her entire family was currently sick, as one of the kids brought home a cold from school. While it is unpleasant and unfortunate, it is also very pleasant and very fortunate to be able to send the kids to school to begin with. I am sure any parent of young children has learned to appreciate the two-sides of school over the past year and a half. _White does not exist without black._ _Lightness does not exist without darkness._ _Right does not exist without wrong._ _Up does not exist without down._ _Sound does not exist without silence._ _Gain does not exist without loss._ Two sides, sometimes opposite, do not exist without one another. To be different yet dependent. **This understanding is one of the most central teachings to living.** _It is also the one I most often forget._ In business, I will make great hires and terrible hires. I will win some deals and lose other deals. I will launch products that are widely adopted and ones that are narrowly adopted. In the early days of starting my business, without much experience and plenty of optimism, I found myself in a position, not once but twice, when I ran out of money and was unable to make payroll. At the time, it felt difficult, traumatic, challenging and scary. Looking back at it now, I am filled with gratitude for it as it taught me so much. My business is solid financially now, and has been for years, and can weather any storm. It is only because of the experience of one side that I have been able to build the conviction and confidence to be on the other side. In my twenties, I would drink alcohol socially. In my twenties, I was also quite social. As a result, during my twenties, I found myself drinking alcohol, mostly in moderation, on a highly frequent basis. So frequent that into my late twenties, my body began to develop an allergic reaction of sorts to alcohol. Instant headaches and stomach aches appeared just as frequently as drinking did. One morning I woke up and decided that my body and I were done feeling this way. I chose to live sober, forever, and have appreciated the decision ever since. To live sober in a modern world, with a globetrotting lifestyle, growing business in the advertising technology industry and active social life requires a level of conviction and confidence that has come effortlessly to me for years now. I have to believe it is only because I have experienced one side that I can live so comfortably on the other side. **When I forget that everything in my life, and in my world, has two sides, I become driven by fear.** Fear of being with the less desirable and less wanted side. The cost of forgetting that the other side exists is that I try to optimize for only one side. I am trying to collect one-sided coins that do not exist. When an undesirable or unwanted event happens in my life, or in my world, I try to remember that this is just the other side. _The other side exists, it is okay and even expected._ When I am feeling overly concerned, extra anxious or very worried, I try to ask myself, ‘_wait, am I only looking at one side?_’. **To understand that a coin has two sides creates a tolerance in me for the other side.** To understand that a coin’s two sides will be different, yet that they are dependent on each other to exist, creates a tolerance in me for the other side being different. Tolerance for the other side, which is different from the desirable side, cultivates the skill of acceptance, for which I cannot expect to live in peace without. --- ### Stream Of Change Published: 2021-11-13 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/stream/ I often feel that change is happening to me. Like I am caught in a stream of constant change, expected to adapt, adjust and acclimatize, often without any warning or preparation. **Resiliency is the new currency for survival in this modern world. **The pace of change has only accelerated, with no signs of slowing down. My ability to flow with this stream of change is constantly being tested. At times, I can flow easily. At other times, I struggle greatly. _Change feels hard. Change feels scary. Change feels unsafe._ Even if what lies ahead will be objectively better than what lies here, my survival instinct, which has been hard-coded into my evolutionary biology, tells me to resist change. _Everything changes._ **My body and mind are changing.** As my body ages, it is changing. Its weight, size, shape, colour, are all different from what they once were. Earlier this year, I got laser eye surgery and now I see further and clearer than I knew was possible. As I understand the patterns of my mind better, I have noticed an ability to better respond in moments of anxiety, stress and uncertainty. _I am grateful for the changes that my body and mind continue to experience._ **My business is changing.** Often when meeting new people socially, I am asked about what my business does, to which my default answer is _‘I am not sure’_. It is my way of deflecting the question, as what my business does will change, and unless you are a potential client, it really does not matter. Change is the reason that a decade later, my business continues to be fast growing and highly profitable. _There is no other recipe for success in business and career but to embrace change._ **My relationships are changing**. Moving recently to a new country and continent, watching my sister focus on her growing family, and exploring new interests and hobbies, the people in my day-to-day life are different from before. It is as if every person that I come into contact with is a character in the story of my life. Some are more colourful and impactful than others. Some stick around for many chapters, while others only for brief moments of a single chapter. _I welcome the flow of people in, and out, of my life with a smile._ When in a stream, the best choice I can make is to flow in the direction of the stream. To resist it would be quite effortful, and also unsuccessful. **I am not in a stream of change.** **I am the stream of change.** _To believe that I am caught in a stream of change is an illusion._ Change is like my breath. To breathe is a natural and involuntary process which the organs of my body will automatically do. To breathe does not require any effort on my part, nor could I put effort to control it either for any prolonged period of time. Similarly, change is an involuntary process that I naturally do and experience.** I cannot force or control change, despite my wanting to at times.** What I can do though is bring awareness to this understanding that I am the stream of change. And with greater awareness, I become more open to the flow of my life. _When I resist change, I resist myself._ _When I embrace change, I embrace myself._ I am the stream of change in my life. Time to enjoy the ride. --- ### Dealing With Desire Published: 2021-11-07 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/dealing/ I have noticed that I always seem to desire something. Waking up early and walking by the water yesterday, I noticed a desire to catch a glimpse of the sun rising and colouring the sky. Sitting down to meditate this morning, I noticed a desire to try and calm my wandering mind, and manage my anxious thoughts. Participating at an in-person conference last weekend, I noticed a desire to connect with people that I might find interesting or inspiring. Meeting with a client last week, I noticed a desire to better understand their problems so that I might be able to help solve them. While recently speaking with a woman that I found attractive, I noticed a desire to explore a romantic connection. _That desire was not mutual._ Regardless of the context, I am becoming more aware of how each moment, each interaction, each word even, has a trace of desire in it. **There appears to be countless desires filling my life, each fighting to be fulfilled.** _I begin to wonder will this stream of desires continue to flow indefinitely, or will this stream ever stop, or even take a pause?_ **For a long time, I naively believed that once my current desires were fulfilled, I would feel happier, or that my life would be better.** I now understand that there will always be new desires to replace my current ones. That is the nature of desire. _Desire exists in abundance._ There is clearly no scarcity of desire in my life. **There is also a difference between my life being objectively better than it was before, which for the most part it is, and me feeling that my life is better.** It is rare for me to compare my life to how it once was. It is more likely for me to set an anchor into some desired future, and compare that to my present reality. And if I am fortunate enough for that desired future to manifest, I set another anchor into a new desired future. I have found myself stuck in these cycles, sometimes for years on end, believing that once this, then that. **Once these desires are fulfilled, then I will be safe, secure and satisfied.** There is a feeling of satisfaction and peace that I do feel once a desire has been fulfilled. _I describe it as bliss._ It is extremely short lived, often lasting mere seconds, if not nanoseconds, as a new desire takes its place almost immediately. However in that brief moment of bliss, I am desireless. **If this feeling of bliss is really to be desireless, then why have desire in the first place?** Let me begin in a state of desirelessness, as a shortcut._ Is the continuous striving, achieving and resetting into the future even required?_ With this thinking, I quickly fall into the hole of apathy. In this hole, I ask myself often, _‘what’s the point?’_, as I see clearly that even when my desires are fulfilled, or forgotten, they will simply be replaced by new ones. I might even blame my external environment, be it society, culture, advertising and consumerism, for breeding desire in my mind. However, I am then playing robot, easily manipulated and controlled, _and not taking any ownership of my experience of life._ **To take ownership of my life is to see that there is a path that I am on.** I have assumed that there is only one way, however now I see that there is a fork in the road at every turn, one that I never before saw. I can continue to turn left, as I always have, which would be to continue to believe that once my desires are fulfilled, that I will feel different or better. If I stay on this path, I will keep turning left, eventually go in a circle and end up feeling exactly how I once did. _Sound familiar?_ I could stop and sit down on the path. I do not feel inspired or motivated to be continuously controlled by desires. However, I will quickly get bored if I do this, and see that life has passed me by while I stayed still. **Or I could turn right, to take a new path.** This path is to see my desires for what they are, simply desires that will either be fulfilled or forgotten, and have very little to do with my happiness in life. This path takes me to a different place. In this place, I choose to pursue my desires not to make my life better, but for the pure joy, curiosity, satisfaction and experience that they each have to offer. In this place, I choose to relate to each desire as an opportunity for learning, for discovery, for growth. In this place, I choose to remove the expectations that I have long placed on desires to give me something more or better in life. And in this place, I now feel a degree of detachment and a level of lightness that inspires me to dig deeper. I begin to only pursue the desires that I truly feel in my heart. This is how I deal with desire. --- ### Facing The Unknown Published: 2021-10-17 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/facing/ Yesterday I nearly missed a long international flight. I had arrived at the airport with plenty of time ahead of my flight. Feeling relaxed, I enjoyed some breakfast, sent a few voice notes to friends and even had time to read. Once I felt that it was time for me to head towards the gate, I was surprised to find out that I had to go through passport control. This particular morning, there were a few hundred people waiting in the foreign passport control line. **The immediate thought that rushed to my mind was that there was no way that I would make this flight.** I took a deep breath, stayed calm and then began to look around. I noticed another passport area for EU citizens with automated machines and no line up. I recognized the symbol for electronic passports, which I had a faint memory of working many years ago for me somewhere in Asia. _So I thought, maybe it’s worth a try._ I walked over to one of the machines, pulled out my passport and inserted it into the slot. A few moments later, a red X showed up on the screen. _It did not work._ I paused, looked around and saw another set of machines to my right. I walked over and decided to try it again. This machine was a little slower. I patiently waited for it to process and to my delight, a green check mark appeared on the screen and the gate opened. _It worked._ As I walked through the gate, I glanced back at the international passport control line that had barely moved, and felt a rush of gratitude that I did not have to wait in that line anymore. I continued walking to the gate, confident now that I would make the flight, and started to reflect on what just happened. While my first reaction to the situation was fear, and to assume that I would of course miss my flight, a sense of belief helped me navigate this unknown situation. For me to take the time to look around and spot the automated passport control machines, I first had to believe that there was still a possibility that I could make the flight. For me to walk over and try the automated machine, even though the signs clearly indicated they were for EU citizens (which I am not), I had to believe that it might work. For me to try a second machine, even after the first one did not work, I had to again believe that it still might work. A different response would have been for me to cave into my fear. To react to my insecurities and doubts, and to believe that I was doomed. **In every situation I am faced with, especially those with the unknown, I can choose to respond with fear or belief.** It can be with business, health, relationships, travel, school or really anything. **To respond with fear will feel more safe.** My mind is great at imagining possibilities that are scary, figuring out what the worst case scenario is, and then reacting to that. In reality though, the fears of my mind rarely come true, so why react to what is not true? **To respond with belief requires me to place my trust in something, or someone.** It could simply be to trust myself to ‘figure it out’. It could be to trust those around me to support, help and love me, regardless of what happens or does not happen. It could also be to trust some force or energy bigger than me that I feel connected with. Belief does require me to trust without having complete information. _This is what makes belief difficult._ It is easier to trust someone or something, if I know what is going to happen, or how it is going to happen. Like the trust I place in the pilot of the airplane, or the trust I place in a bank keeping my money, or the trust I place that when I turn on a light switch, electricity will be available. In these situations, there is nothing to really believe in. I know with almost complete certainty what will happen. **The belief that I am reflecting on requires sometimes taking a leap of faith.** It requires me to tap into a deeper knowing within myself, even though I might be swimming in fears triggered by this unknown or unwanted circumstance and situation. My experience yesterday was a reminder to face the unknown with belief over fear. Where fear keeps me stuck, belief can help me go places. --- ### Fear Of The Unknown Published: 2021-10-03 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/unknown/ Yesterday I found myself playing tourist in an ancient castle deep in the hills of Portugal. It was a summer home for a wealthy family centuries ago, imagined by a single person and built over twenty years. _Art, music, literature, dance and culture are all windows we get to step into someone else’s mind. _Walking through the grounds felt like walking through the mind of the person who once owned this castle and originally designed it. **This particular mind was a playground full of bold, creative and unique ideas. **From secret tunnels and passageways, to hidden symbols in every direction, to man-made caves and lakes, to thousands of imported trees and plants from every corner of the world,_ it was easy for me to get lost in this maze of his mind._ At one moment, I found myself standing in the balcony of a tiny tall tower overlooking this circus of conflicting design decisions, and feeling in awe of the boldness of his creativity and the fact that he manifested his ideas. Everything I was looking at, walking through, and hearing about, was developed and decided by one mind. **The grounds that I saw yesterday were truly inspiring to me.** Not because of the architecture, the buildings, the nature or the views. It was that to imagine all of this, he had to be extremely comfortable with exploring the unknown. Having been reminded of the realm of possibilities that exist, I feel excited to explore further the depths of my own imagination, and how to act on it. _I feel less constrained._ **With time and age, the brightness of the candle that is my imagination seems to have dimmed.** With my innocence and naivety continuing to fade in the face of life experience, it seems I need new sources of inspiration to help keep my light bright. After walking through someone’s mind, as I did yesterday, I noticed my candle shining more brightly. If I think too much about doing something, chances are that I will not do it. _There are often more reasons to not do something than there are reasons to do something._ The question about how to lead my life also arises. My life has been conditioned by my mind. The driver’s seat is more often than not occupied by my mind, with my heart sitting in the back seat. However the moments when my heart takes control of the wheel are the moments when I am most human, most vulnerable and feel most alive. **Life would be quite boring if all I did was follow a formula.** _First this, then that, then that. _Yes, it might feel safe and might in actuality be more safe. There is a part of me hard wired for survival, it is coded into my genes over millions of years for a reason. That part of me finds comfort in control. There is another part of me though that craves curiosity, and following my bold ideas requires me to become even more comfortable with the unknown. Near the castle is a scenic clifftop that overlooks the Atlantic ocean. It was once known as the _‘edge of the world’_, as it is the most Western point in all of Europe. Looking out, I imagined back to a time when people believed that the world was flat and did not know that there was another side of the ocean. Yet, despite not knowing what was _‘out there’_, courageous Portuguese explorers built boats and sailed into the unknown, without any navigation system, and ended up discovering South America, India, China and countless more parts of the world. **Had they chosen to stay where they were, and do what felt safe and known, they would not have discovered the world beyond the world that they knew.** Back in the grounds, the tour I was on was about to enter a cave. The tour guide lit a tiny candle to lead us down the dark path. _I wanted to experience this cave alone, to experiment with my limits._ I instinctively let everyone else in the group go ahead of me, counted to ten, and then slowly walked into the cave. Within seconds, I was questioning my instinct to stay back, as it was pitch black. I could not even see my hand when I raised it inches from my face and sounds seemed to be coming from every direction. **Continuing to walk, about one minute later, a moment of panic arose in the darkness.** My mind began to run, my legs began to shake and my breath became shallow and fast. Aware of the reaction I was having, I was about to reach into my pocket to take out my phone and turn on its flashlight. _Something from within stopped me from doing that though. _I took a deep breath and decided to let my curiosity drive me over fear. My breadth began to normalize, my legs stopped shaking and my mind became present. Minutes later, a sliver of light appeared far ahead, and I let out a deep sigh. **Along my journey through life, there are many moments when fear arises, usually associated with some unknown.** In those moments, I can choose to turn on my flashlight, I can turn back, I can ask for help, or I can continue down the path into the darkness, curious to discover what might be ahead. There is no right answer for every situation, and that is the fun of the unknown. I get to decide each time what to do when faced with it. --- ### 100 days Published: 2021-09-26 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/100-days/ There are 100 days left in this calendar year. Where last year felt like the longest year of my life, this year has felt relatively short. The thought of there being only 100 days left creates a sense of urgency for me, which naturally creates the conditions for me to wonder about what might be most important right now. At the start of each calendar year, I take time to reflect deeply on who I am becoming and how I am choosing to live. These reflections naturally give birth to many intentions. Some intentions have more clarity and conviction behind them, and others are better described as mere ideas. Fast forward about nine months, many of my intentions and ideas have either been fulfilled or forgotten. I feel satisfied with those that have been fulfilled, and at peace with those that I have forgotten about, as it turns out that they were not that important to me anyways. If they were, they would have been fulfilled by now. If my life is a reflection of my mind, and its inner workings, then I better pay attention to where my mind is going, as that is where my life is going. **My mind is like water.** It will naturally flow where there is the least amount of resistance. If you drop a bucket of water on top of a hill, the water will flow in all directions. _When flowing everywhere, it feels like I am going nowhere._ Alternatively, when water is directed in a single direction, it becomes powerful. It moves fast enough to create energy. Its momentum takes in everything along its path._ It is going places._ Going here and there takes resources, and there is a finite amount of resources available to me. The resources I speak of are called energy, enthusiasm and excitement. Given the choice between spreading and sharing these resources among many or few, I am best to choose few. This is how I can create impact, for me and for others. **With 100 days left in the calendar year, now is the time for me to pick two or three priorities to focus on.** _And to let go of trying to do too much more than this._ It is the time to give myself the space to focus on only these two or three priorities, and to not feel the pressure, from myself or from those around me, to have to focus on anything else. It is the time for me to commit fully to these two or three priorities, and to not make any excuses as to why I chose not to actually focus on them. Business advice that I long ago received and still remember is to describe my strategy and priorities in timelines of three years or three months. Three years provides a long-term direction and vision from which to align decisions. Three months gives enough time to make real progress, and forces me to reassess the situation based on what has been learned. Anything in between three years and three months introduces the risk of me losing connection with reality,_ which is always changing._ _My two or three priorities are best to include some diversity_, to be truly reflective of my life. There may be one related to a business, professional or work domain. One related to a relationship, community or service domain. Or one in a health domain, be it mental, physical, emotional or spiritual. By this point into reading my reflection, your mind has likely surfaced one or two of your priorities. _This is a reflection of what it is that is really important to you right now._ You might be wondering what mine are. I am not sharing mine intentionally, as it does not matter what I, or even you, choose to focus on. **What matters is that each of us make an intentional choice of what to focus on, and as a result, what not to focus on.** This ‘100 days’ reflection exercise encourages me to have a bit more intentionality in life. To pick only two or three things, not seventeen, to focus on is not easy and the upfront reflection is where the value in this exercise is found. With greater intentionality, the qualities of gratitude, grounding, ownership and responsibility are all strengthened within me. These are the same qualities that help me move through life with a little more ease, and a little less friction. _What are the two to three priorities that you will focus on in the last 100 days of this year?_ --- ### The Future of Work Published: 2021-09-18 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/future/ A few weeks ago, I booked a one-way ticket and _[moved to Portugal](https://www.bykunal.com/post/moving)_. The first question I most often have been asked is, _’why Portugal?’_. To which my response is something along the lines of, _‘it’s Portugal’_. After exchanging smiles and a brief laugh, the second question I am most often asked is _‘what about your work?’_. Living in a different country, continent and culture over the past few weeks has both **inspired me and challenged me** in unexpected ways. In the face of change, I believe it is important to let go of what was, to make space for what might be. **The pandemic has been an unplanned and unexpected phenomenon that has changed how we work.** It has forced the letting go of so much, and that space has been filled with new unimagined ways of work. **Packing up and moving spontaneously to another continent and country has also been an unplanned and unexpected phenomenon in my own world of work.** _So what has changed for me?_ _Meetings_. I have accelerated the shift towards an asynchronous culture, meaning not having to fill my days with meetings. In the past few months, I have consistently spent less than 2 hours per week with internal meetings. How? One word: Loom. _Delegation_. I have become more aware of how much more I can delegate to others, and also stop doing altogether. There is much that I realize others are better at than me at. And much more that does not need to be done in the first place. _Ownership_. I have been impressed with how people around me have stepped up and have taken greater ownership for different parts of the business. Without the crutch of asking me, people are making more decisions independently. I love it. _Flow_. I have enjoyed being in a different time zone than the centre of gravity of my business. It has opened up several hours in my day, every day, to get into flow state and do deep, important, thoughtful work without interruption. _Value_. The most valuable thing that I can do is to work “on my business”, versus “in my business”. I have dreamed of this for over a decade, and now for the first time, feel that it is happening. A lot of positive factors have contributed to this, and moving tipped the balance in this long desired direction for me. **Without a doubt, there have also been challenges.** I have gotten time zones mixed up more than once and missed client calls. I have found myself often working late into the evening, and feeling groggy and frustrated the next morning. Last week, I had lost internet connection unexpectedly, while working from an apartment by the ocean in a remote town, which upended an entire day of client activity. _I have noticed the boundaries of when work starts and ends in a day have become even blurrier for me._ **Sudden unexpected change is revealing of who I am, and how I am.** _Adaptability._ _Resilience._ _Openness._ These are some of the qualities that I have been tested on during the pandemic, and during my recent move. So have the people I work closely with everyday. **These same qualities are also needed to succeed in life and work.** I hope to continue to cultivate them by challenging me and those around me. Adaptability, resilience and openness all help me continue to flow with the future of work, _not against it_. --- ### Why I Moved Halfway Across The World Published: 2021-09-05 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/moving/ Ten days ago, I booked a one-way ticket to a new country and continent. Seven days ago, I packed a suitcase and left Canada. Yesterday, I found the city I plan to make my new home. About one month ago, I wrote about _“**One Way Ticket**”_, as a practice and a philosophy in life. It reflects both a physical movement to a new place, and also a mindset to commit emotionally to wherever, whatever and whomever. It is a choice to not look back, to not test the waters, to not carry any regret. _There is only one way, which is to move forward._ **Choosing where to move to was not an easy decision for me. **The weeks leading up to it, I found myself drowning in the optionality I had. Like when researching an online purchase or a restaurant in a new city, I found myself going down the rabbit hole of the internet, reading travel blogs, expat stories and asking friends for ideas. _The information was endless. Anywhere was possible._ I felt overwhelmed and after about ten days of feeling frustrated with my confusion, I noticed just how big of a distraction this decision was. I was dreaming about it, and could not concentrate on much else. I had put the rest of my life on pause. I can see now that I was experiencing fear. Fear of making the ‘wrong decision’. Fear of regret. _In response to how I was feeling, I had a moment of resignation to the process._ I gave myself some space from the task at hand, and decided to not think about it or talk about it for at least a few days. And assumed after this break, I would either still want to move or would abandon the idea altogether. **This momentary mental break was the best thing I could have done.** It is counter-intuitive, when faced with a problem, to stop trying to solve the problem and to take a break from it. I have experienced this time and time again though. The clarity surfaces once I turn away. _There must be something deeper within me, or bigger than me, that is a source of this clarity._ I woke up on day three into the mental break and started to write in my journal. It might have been the longest continuous writing session I have experienced in recent memory. I found myself writing for over ninety minutes, without pause. First processing everything else in my mind, I finally got to the elephant in my mind. _Where to move to?_ A question appeared in my writing that I do not ask myself often enough but wish that I did: **What is important to me, right now?** It was not _‘what is expected of me?’_, ‘_what is convenient and easy?_’ or ‘_what is safe and low risk?_’. It was: What do I desire in my life right now?. What would make my heart sing? Within seconds of being prompted about my heart’s desire, it spoke with a clarity that I had been longing for. Five desires came out immediately: _1) To live by the water._ I have always lived in cities and wanted to live by the ocean for once. _2) To have beautiful weather all year long._ I grew up in Canada. _3) To be around nice people._ A place that brings out the kindness of humanity, where I could speak to a stranger in the street and strike up a conversation with ease. _4) To be in a place with a relaxed vibe._ This means where the people do not primarily identify with what they do. _5) To be within a direct flight of family._ To be able to continue to witness my baby nephew discover the world with an innocence that inspires me. After writing all of this down, a smile appeared on my face. **My heart began to sing.** All fear disappeared, as I stopped thinking about why not to move. _I now knew why to move._ There were about a dozen countries, all over the world, that I had been researching and considering before this clarity appeared. **Now there was only one country that I felt inspired by.** I intentionally did not research or plan much from that moment on. The adventure of not knowing and not planning continues to be attractive for me. I plan plenty for my business already, I think this is why I get a thrill of not knowing personally very much. **The One-Way Ticket mindset breeds openness within me.** It is an invitation to discover who and how I am, by simply showing up in a new place, literally and figuratively, and trusting that I am capable of figuring it out. **Since moving to Portugal** one week ago, I have uncovered all of the logical reasons why this move makes sense in my life. _First, the country._ It is on the west coast of Europe, where I can enjoy sunsets over the Atlantic ocean every day. It is the second safest country in the world. Everyone speaks English, unlike nearby countries. They receive 300 days of sunshine per year. It has the lowest cost of living in all of Western Europe. There are as many Portuguese outside of the country as inside, meaning flight connectivity across the world is unparalleled. They have the second highest vaccination rate in the world and new covid cases are now in decline, unlike anywhere else. _Second, my business._ 40% of my business’s revenue comes from Europe and the U.K.. I have strong leadership now in place in the U.S. market that I trust will do a better job than me growing in the largest market, which allows me to focus on finding more growth in Europe. I have people working with me all over the world, and clients that I work with all over the world. Being in a different time zone will strengthen our global culture and increase our effectiveness at collaborating asynchronously. I can give you even more reasons why it’s great for my business that I am here. **The truth is though that I did not think about any of the above ahead of booking my one-way ticket. **I was ready for a change, asked my heart what it wanted and made the decision based on lifestyle. In any decision that we make in life, there will generally be more reasons to not do something, than reasons to do something. I could have easily listed for you all of the reasons that I should not move to Portugal, but I will not. What matters more in life than what my mind is fearful of is what my heart desires. --- ### Two Sides Of A Coin Published: 2021-08-21 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/coins/ It is easy for me to see only one side of a coin. To see the other side would require the effort to pick up the coin in my hand and turn it around. **One-sided coins are everywhere around me.** From news media to social media, every story, idea and thought is usually a one-sided coin. _One-sided coins are also everywhere inside of me._ **The work coin is often one sided.** If I were to survey one thousand people about their beliefs and desires related to work, I imagine many of their responses might include wanting to be paid more, work fewer hours, have greater flexibility, more generous benefits, perhaps a new manager, and so forth. This is one side of the coin. _How can work make my life better?_ The other side of the coin is to ask: _how will I make my life better, outside of work?_ How am I enriching my life with the people that I spend time with? How am I broadening my perspectives about the world around me? How am I deepening my understanding of myself? How am I building bridges to new places that light me up? All of these help me feel more alive, more connected, more inspired and more myself. When I am committed to continually becoming better outside of work, I will naturally become better at work. Now I am looking at both sides of my work coin. **The same is true with my family coin and my friends coin.** It is relatively easy and common to feel frustrated with family, be it a parent, a partner or a child. I may have a desire or expectation for them to do something for me, or show up a certain way for me, or behave in a specific way for me. Expectations will lead to disappointments. When disappointed, I feel agitated. This is one side of the coin. _What do others have to do for me?_ The other side of the coin is to ask: _what am I doing for others?_ How am I showing up for my family and friends? What initiative am I taking, and effort am I bringing, to these relationships? How am I discovering what they might need from me? In any situation when I feel that I am owed something by someone, that I have paid my dues or that it is my turn to receive, I am going to feel disappointed. If I instead ask myself _what do I owe to this situation?_, I am now looking at both sides of my family coin or friends coin. **My body is a coin forever with me.** On a daily basis, I will notice and quietly remark to myself some soreness or tenderness I feel with some part of my body. Today, it is a tight shoulder. Yesterday, it was a sore neck. The day before it was dry eyes. And so on. This is one side of the coin. _What is uncomfortable for me about my body?_ The other side of the coin would be to ask: _what is my body uncomfortable with about me?_ How am I taking care of my body? Am I regularly exercising and moving my body, or am I regularly sitting my body on the couch so that I can watch TV? Am I nourishing my body with nutrient rich foods, or am I constantly feeding it junk for my own pleasure? My body is asking me to take care of it, so that it can continue to be strong, healthy and be able to move through life with me. To ask my body what it needs is to look at both sides of my body coin. **My mind is the most important coin in my life.** I will observe at times my mind experiencing stress, anxiety and tension. Really unpleasant experiences for my mind, and as a result, for me. It can feel like I am not in control. Feelings of helplessness, hopelessness and discouragement will arise. This is one side of the coin. _Why is my mind not stable and calm?_ The other side of the coin is to ask: _how am I taking care of my mind?_ Am I giving it the space to just be? Am I giving it a break from having to constantly consume and process information from screens, big and small? Am I feeding it nourishing and wholesome conversations, or toxic content? Am I taking time to process and digest what comes up, or am I suppressing and pushing everything down? My mind needs space. It needs patience. It needs a break. It also needs inspiration, motivation and encouragement. When I pay attention to what it is that my mind needs, I am now looking at both sides of my mind coin. _What I give to my work is what my work will give to me._ _What I give to my family and friends is what my relationships will give to me._ _What I give to my body is what my body will give to me._ _What I give to my mind is what my mind will give back to me._ **There is an art to how I give to my work, my family, my friends, my body and my mind.** It must be without attachment or expectation to receive anything in return. Otherwise it would be transactional thinking, which is not how this works. I choose to give, with a deeper trust, belief and knowing, that only once I let go of expectation, will I be fulfilled and joyful in life. What I give to life, and how I give to life, is what I get from life. This is what it means to pick up the coin, turn it around and to look at the other side. --- ### Work In Progress Published: 2021-08-15 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/progress/ Yesterday while on a walk through the downtown core of a city, my attention was drawn to all of the scaffolding, cranes, trucks and construction happening everywhere that I looked. My initial judgment was about how much of an eyesore the construction was, and how much better the streets and buildings will look once the construction is completed. Memories of New York City surfaced in my mind, specifically the neverending sights and sounds of construction on every street. I remember that the building next to my apartment had scaffolding that I naively believed would disappear one day. I was wrong, as years later, I disappeared from the city before the scaffolding did. As I continued to reflect on the endless construction in cities yesterday on my walk, I realized that it will never end. There will always be something to build, fix, repair and renovate. _The construction is a metaphor for life._ Everything, and everyone, is a work in progress. **I am a work in progress.** I will often forget that and expect to have it all figured out. Be it business, health, relationships, and even spirituality. Our culture, including the structure of schools, the desires and fears of parents, the need for job security, and the use of social media, do not leave a lot of space to be a work in progress. Our culture expects us to be a functioning, contributing, productive, knowledgeable, skilled, talented, healthy, caring and present human being. When I remember that I am not all of those things, but only a work in progress, I become more tolerant, more understanding, more loving and more compassionate towards myself. Only once I see myself as a work in progress do I begin to see that those around me are also a work in progress. When I remember that other people are also a work in progress like me, I become more tolerant, more understanding, more loving and more compassionate towards others. It can be easy to be fooled into thinking that ‘once this is done, then I’ll be good’. Once I achieve yet another business milestone, or change my body in a desirable way, or incorporate a new habit into my lifestyle, then I will feel done. My reality has been that there will always be some desire, some need, or some want, that I will be working to fulfill. Today it is this, tomorrow it is that, and the day after it will be something else. The fact that I am a continual work in progress, and will always be, is what gives life to my life. **If I felt that I was figuratively done in life, I would be literally done with life.** There is a space between feeling done and feeling never done. _This space is what I now call being a work in progress._ With this understanding and mindset, I can move through life feeling more hopeful, encouraged and inspired. The lesson is to limit the moments when I feel discouraged and hopeless, which will arise from feeling or fearing that I will never ever be done. **This space of work in progress is where the magic and beauty of life occurs.** Staying in this space is the difficult part and maintaining a bigger picture perspective can help. When I reflect about the world around me, and the influences on me, be it government, education, healthcare, economy, transportation, culture, and more, I must remind myself that it is all a work in progress. **The moment that I expect everything, or everyone, to be in a state of perfection, I will be disappointed. **If I find myself complaining about other people, or systems, or structures, I have to remind myself that it is all a work in progress. This helps take the edge off in those moments when I feel frustrated or agitated. And when I cannot remember that I, you and they, are all a work in progress, I am best to take a deep breath. To relax my jaw, drop my shoulders, and feel my feet on the ground. This helps me feel a bit more grounded, a bit more centered, and a lot more present, _when I need it most._ _I am a work in progress._ _You are a work in progress._ _The world that we share is a work in progress._ **Knowing this lifts and inspires me. **Not because I believe for a moment that the future will be better than the present. It is because in seeing us all as a work in progress, I have just accepted reality as it is, not as I wish it to be. _And this is the key to happiness. _To see me, you and all of it, as it is, and nothing else. Now when I walk past any form of construction, I will use it as a reminder that like the building in front of me, I too am a work in progress. --- ### One-Way Ticket Published: 2021-08-07 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/ticket/ A little while ago, I booked a one-way ticket, packed a suitcase and left. I did not know if I was going for a week, a month, a year, or a lifetime. Once I landed, I started to feel out this new place. Not knowing how long I might be there for, I noticed an openness and curiosity for what I might discover during this experiment. The experience was energizing for me. Within days, I found myself making new friends, getting invited into people’s homes, enjoying delicious meals with company, finding yoga classes and teachers I connected with, meditation groups, kirtans, nature trails and hikes, and much much more. It was my version of Disneyland, with so much that I have learned to love in life around me instantly. On top of this, I chose to have fun with my team by keeping my new location a secret. We made a game out of it to see who could figure out where in the world I was first. Admittedly, I covered my digital tracks well and did not make it easy for them. 4 weeks in is when someone finally figured it out. The real experiment behind this game though was to test our Work From Anywhere philosophy, and for me to lead by example. I continued to run a global business, without skipping a beat, from my undisclosed location. Clients of course loved hearing about this experiment, it made for a great icebreaker at the start of my many Zoom calls. And very recently, I booked another one-way ticket, packed my suitcase and left again. My adventure continues. The one-way ticket practice is one that I now realize I have had with me my entire life. From my parents immigrating to Canada when my mom was eight months pregnant on a one-way ticket, to leaving home for university, to as an adult going to New York on a one-way ticket and last year leaving New York on what became a one-way ticket to Toronto. This practice continues, and likely always will. The philosophy of One-Way Ticket is more important and interesting to me though. One-Way Ticket represents a commitment and investment to whatever it is that I am engaged with. It is an “all-in” mindset, where I am choosing to emotionally be present. There is no looking back, no comparison to the past, no safety net of hitting undo or rewind. By letting go of what was, I make the space for what might be. There is so much in life that asks for a One-Way Ticket mindset. Starting and running a business is a One-Way Ticket. Committing the resources of the business to a specific direction, entering partnerships with strategic clients or choosing to hire someone are all forms of a One-Way Ticket. Building a meditation practice, starting a new role professionally, choosing to learn a language, playing a sport and more all work best when approached with the One-Way Ticket mindset. These examples, and much much more in life, all work better when one jumps into the deep end versus only dipping a toe in the water. It is natural to feel fear about ‘what if I do not like it?’, which is the reason I do not commit to something mentally and emotionally. The easier said than done antidote to this fear is to make another decision, in response to the original decision, if it turns out that it no longer works. Put differently, a One-Way Ticket is followed by another One-Way Ticket. There is no scarcity of opportunities, experiences, people and places to apply a One-Way Ticket mindset to. There is an abundance of One-Way Tickets available to me, always. Knowing this is what allows me to be fully committed to whatever it is that I am doing at this moment. When I reflect on my most recent adventure, in my version of Disneyland, I realize now that if I had seen it simply as a trip, then I would not have invested emotionally to the degree that I did. As a result, I would not have had close to the experience that I did. How much I receive from an experience, opportunity, person or place is proportional to how much I give of myself to it. The question changes from ‘what do I want?’ to ‘what I am willing to give?’. This is the One-Way Ticket mindset that I continue to be inspired by to move through life with. --- ### The Pursuit Of Life Published: 2021-07-25 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/exhale-6ldwk/ I often joke with friends that this radio station has only one channel, and that channel is called ‘deep’. What I relish most is deep conversation and connection. There is not much space or tolerance for the superficial. Yesterday while on a long hike with a close friend, the conversation quickly drifted deeper and deeper. Behind every topic we touched on, the underlying question that arose was ‘why’. _This became a question about motivation and what it is that we are actually pursuing in life._ The answer to this question, about what my life has been a pursuit of, has continued to change. When I reflect on my life in chapters, each chapter has been defined by a primary motivation that I had been in pursuit of. While at the time I was unaware of what part of me was pulling the strings and calling the shots, I can see it more clearly now. **The pursuit of pleasure** The desire for pleasure is the default setting for humans. The factory settings when we enter earth. From the time we are born, we are looking to constantly satisfy the desire for pleasure, and avoid displeasure at almost all costs. Pleasure is experienced through my senses, including my mind or ego, which is possibly the most important sense to satisfy. All of the achieving and doing in my life can be very pleasurable for my mind. The release of dopamine in my brain feels good when I am eating, buying, scrolling, traveling and winning. After years of pursuing pleasure, I hit a tipping point maybe seven or eight years ago, where I had had enough. My thirst had been satiated, yet I did not feel any different inside, despite having all that my body and mind had desired and expected of life. This was the moment that pleasure was no longer the primary pursuit in my life. **The pursuit of peace** Feeling exhausted with pursuing pleasure, for my body and mind, I turned inwards as I believed there was something else. A state of contentment, happiness and satisfaction is what I had desired. In one word, peace is what I wanted. I had wrongly assumed that doing, going, having and experiencing was the path to fulfill this desire. What I discovered was a different path, the inner journey. With the help of meditation, reflection, yoga and learning, I began to find doses of peace in my life. They were not outside, but inside. After years of dedicated practice, a genuine curiosity and giving myself the space to explore my inner world, I learned where peace resides for me, how to access it and how to cultivate it in my life. While I most definitely am not in a state of inner peace continuously, I understand where it is and am confident in my ability to find it. Maybe three to four years ago, feeling uninterested in pursuing pleasure, feeling comfortable with the pursuit of peace, I started to notice another shift in my primary desire of life. **The pursuit of purpose** While peace resides within me, purpose involves a connection with something outside of me. Be it a person, a community, a cause or an idea, purpose extends beyond me. Unlike pleasure which is about what I can get from my outer world, purpose is about what I can give to my outer world. My pursuit of purpose is why I began to teach meditation. It is why I started my blog to share my reflections on life. It is why I joined the board at CAMH (Canada’s largest mental health research hospital), began to fundraise for a variety of social causes, mentored entrepreneurs more actively and dialed up my philanthropic activities. These endeavours, and more, continue to accelerate in my life and occupy an increasing amount of mindshare, which I will remain committed to on a long-term basis. The nature of my relationships with my parents, my newborn nephew, and close friends in my life also now incorporate a dose of purpose. I find myself asking more and more, _how can I give more of myself?_ While on the hike yesterday with my friend, he innocently asked me what my next motivation in life might be. While on a meditation break during the hike, my mind began to reflect on this question. First, there was the pursuit of pleasure. Then, the pursuit of peace. And most recently, the pursuit of purpose. _I do believe another shift is happening within me right now._ **The pursuit of passion is starting to become the primary motivation in my current chapter of life.** I am paying more attention to what makes my heart sing, what feels effortless, how my body feels and where my mind wanders naturally. There is so much in my business, in my community, and in the world that I feel passionate about right now. With greater awareness of what part of me is influencing my choices at any given moment, I not only better understand myself in my world, but can also begin to better align my world with my inner desires. This is how I can cultivate a sense of satisfaction, which may be the ultimate pursuit of life. --- ### Difficult Decisions Made Effortless Published: 2021-07-17 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/decisions/ I recently decided to get a car and found the process to make a decision surprisingly difficult. At first, I justified my indecision and confusion with the facts that I have never bought one before, and honestly have never been that interested in them beyond their utility. However, as I take a moment to meditate on the mental turbulence that I experienced during this process, I cannot help but dig beneath the surface to better understand why this decision was so difficult for me. What I can see more clearly now was that this one decision highlighted a series of deeper decisions that I had to become clear about first. **The first is to get my mind around what this decision will say about me**. The reality is that being interested or concerned with what others will think of me is hardwired into my biology. Humans have evolved over millennia to make choices that allow us to stay part of the tribe, for safety and survival, and to believe for a moment that I can erase this programming would be naive. **Next is how this decision will reflect my identity. **There is a gap between how I identify today and how I imagine I might identify in the future. I am not certain if this decision is meant to reflect my present identity, or to be used as a bridge of sorts to help me identify differently. **Then comes the question of affordability. **At the surface, it appears as an objective lens however it is highly subjective and based on my mindset. A scarcity mindset would be to keep my needs within my means, and try to keep me grounded in my present realities. An abundance mindset would be to assume that my means will grow into my perceived needs. Needs broadly defined of course, encompassing practical and emotional. **The fear of regret also comes up.** The mindset trap of believing that my choices are permanent adds a heaviness to the process that paralyzes me. When I remember that everything changes, and that nothing is permanent, I feel lighter and clearer. **Most challenging to navigate are the 12 inches between my head and my heart.** There is what I think makes sense, and then what I feel is right. Each of my head and heart will tell me different things. The idea of allowing one to lead over the other is scary. _This reflection is not about how to choose a car._ I share my journey with this specific decision to highlight the deeper influences at play with practically any decision. Be it where to live, where to work, how to dress, who to date, what to eat, and more. There is a deeper layer of decisions beneath the surface where my truth lies. _To live in abundance or scarcity?_ _To lead with my heart or head?_ _To ground in my present or reach for my future?_ _To believe in permanence or impermanence?_ _To reflect who I am or who I intend to become?_ Once these decisions are made, all of the other decisions I come across become effortless and easy. These decisions are where the inner transformation begins. And only once I am clear on the inside does the outside begin to align itself with me. --- ### Fear Is My Friend Published: 2021-07-11 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/friend/ Fear generally has a negative association with it. Our culture encourages me to become fearless, to conquer fear and to not talk about fear. **When I pause for a moment to reflect on fear in my life, I see its influence everywhere. **There are very few, if any, aspects of my life that I can find where fear does not play a part. Evolutionary biology has to be considered here. For tens of thousands of years, fear has helped my ancestors survive. If the objective of humanity has been survival, then it makes complete sense to fear anything, or anyone, that will hurt chances of survival. Those that did not have fear did not survive and as a result, did not pass down their genes for future generations. **The genetics within me are coded and coated in fear. **To believe even for a moment that I can rid myself of fear, knowing it has been hardwired into my being, would be like trying to remove the bones from my body. **When I take a closer look, I can see clearly how fear shows up in small and large doses practically everywhere.** For example, this morning I sat in meditation outdoors. At some point, I heard an unfamiliar sound. A mix of curiosity and fear caused me to naturally open my eyes, pause my meditation, and assess the situation. Last night, I was spending time with a friend and uncharacteristically checked my phone while he was speaking. A small dose of fear within me did not want to be late for the dinner I had next. Yesterday morning, while picking avocados at the grocery store, I took an unusually long time selecting the perfect ones. There was a part of me that was fearful of picking ones that were too ripe, or ones that would take too long to become ripe. This past week, I hired someone to join our team, who I am thrilled about. We expedited the interview process within 4 days, as there was a fear of missing out. The candidate already had offers from other companies. Last week, I found myself working a 15 hour day, which I had not done in ages. I was fearful of not being able to complete all of the work that I had intended to do, for the people that depended on me. _There is a layer of fear that influences practically every choice that I make._ The specific fears will continue to change, as nothing is permanent in life. Like the seasons that come and go, individual fears will continue to evolve. _This is what makes life interesting._ Instead of hiding from fear, suppressing fear or feeling guilt or shame about fear, I am learning to embrace fear. **This helps me build a positive relationship with fear.** To dance with fear is to sometimes lead, and to sometimes follow. **Most of all, fear serves me.** It helps me make choices that are better, wiser and more aligned with what’s important to me. Fear keeps me honest and accountable, in a way that is deeply personal. _Fear is my friend. I cannot imagine navigating life without it._ --- ### The Chemistry Of Connection Published: 2021-07-04 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/chemistry/ An often unspoken belief is that we are logical beings, who sometimes experience emotions. Our culture is one currently that prioritizes logical, left-brain, analytical, organized, systematic thinking. This is what is promoted, recognized, celebrated and rewarded. When one experiences subtle emotions, it is common to suppress them. When one experiences strong emotions, it is common to label them negatively as meltdowns or outbursts. **I have come to believe that we are not logical beings, but rather emotional beings who use logic to try to explain our emotions.** The choices we make, be it what to eat, what to wear, where to live, where to work, who to connect with, and more, are based primarily on how we feel, or believe we might feel. And as we are all unique, our emotions are unique and influenced by our genetics, our upbringing, our community, our teachers, our friends and so much more. This makes it very difficult to connect with each other from having only limited information such as where we work, where we live or what our interests are. During the pandemic, I have found it difficult to build new connections. While I have found ways to stay connected with the people already in my life, it has been challenging to build new meaningful relationships, be it in business or personally. **To connect with others in physical proximity has become a unique experience for the better part of a year.** Being told how to connect, and not connect, for so long has felt suffocating. I have still followed the guidelines and precautions, out of respect for our collective well being and safety, however I am just now becoming more aware of what’s changed as I start to connect with others in real life. What I notice most is how much body language has to offer, both about myself and about others. I can’t help but think about how I have been missing all of this valuable information for over one year now, while trying to navigate friendships, relationships and partnerships online. **The subtle information that body language has to offer is what I find most revealing.** When paying attention, I can see the involuntary and unconscious queues that my body is constantly offering up. When I feel nervous, excited, scared, confident or joyful, my body will say it all before I make even a single sound. And the same is true for others around me. Some connections, like the ones I have with the many people I have hired all over the world in the past year and have never met in person, I need to learn how to substitute the information that I might receive and offer from body language through other means. Though in business, it is easier to ask direct questions and give clear answers through words, as there is an understanding that it’s not personal, and that the information being exchanged is not meant to be a reflection of the person but rather of the professional relationship. It is expected that expectations be clearly communicated by all people involved. Other connections, like exploring romantic relationships, are difficult to find substitutes for. In discussing the topic with other single friends, what is clear is that the chemistry of romantic connection almost requires physical proximity. In any connection, the feeling of touch, whether a handshake or a hug, is yet another way that information is shared. As I have recently restarted hugging people, I realize how much I miss the feeling of sharing and receiving. **The most powerful of course is eye contact.** I have forgotten how to make eye contact with another pair of human eyes, for a prolonged period of time, in real life. After countless hours of making eye contact with a video of someone on a screen, and avoiding eye contact unconsciously while physically distancing in public for over a year, the feeling of comfort and discomfort with eye contact is real for me right now. Before, connection in business and personal relationships heavily favoured physical proximity. Technology to facilitate online connections may have existed before but the adoption has been greatly accelerated over the past year. Now that in person connection has restarted in many places, I am curious about how the chemistry of connection will change for all of us. **Trust is an important ingredient in any connection, and learning to establish trust without the aid of body language, physical touch or eye contact is an important skill. **I have found that vulnerability and authenticity are helpful, and natural, in this regard. This next little while is an opportunity for greater intentionality for how we connect and who we connect with, and a gentle reminder to not take the emotional experience of connection for granted again. --- ### Comfort With Clutter Published: 2021-06-27 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/clutter/ There is a difference between learning how to tolerate something, or someone, and learning how to accept something, or someone. For example, I now realize that I have been tolerating the endless pandemic lockdowns in Canada over the past year. The level of fatigue I have felt as of late is evidence that my capacity to continue tolerating this has been depleted. On the other hand, I have accepted the benefits, and challenges, of having a work from home culture with my business. I do not see us opening offices again, and expect to remain fully distributed on a long-term basis. I have fully embraced it and am continually searching for ways to strengthen it. **On the topic of tolerating versus accepting, I cannot help but reflect on my relationship with my parents.** Last night, while enjoying a backyard patio home cooked Mexican dinner, I began to reflect with them about the past fifteen months of mostly living together. While there is a lot that I can share, what stands out to me the most is how my relationship with my parents has evolved, even matured, from a place of continuous tolerance to now frequent acceptance. When I shared with my parents that this past year together has taught me how to accept them, as opposed to tolerating them, my mom remarked _‘but we have not really changed’._ **This was exactly my point.** My parents have continued to be their loving, and annoying, selves without changing to my liking. _However, the way I feel towards them has changed._ For example, I am a fairly (okay, very) neat and tidy person. It comes naturally to me I suppose. I organize people, ideas and projects for a living, and have done so for decades. **My parents on the other hand are not.** They love their endless stuff and constant clutter. Where I feel uneasy and uncomfortable with clutter, they feel at peace and comforted by it. I don’t get it. Over the past year, the number of times that I have quietly and secretly rearranged their office, cleaned the kitchen counters and cabinets, and tidied up the family room, is beyond embarrassing to admit at this point. What boggles my mind though is that my parents have yet to notice. Not once have they commented. I am convinced that they do not see the clutter. It is the only way they can operate within it. That would also explain why they do not notice when it has been temporarily tidied. Now within days, usually hours actually, of them entering a newly tidied space, it becomes filled with clutter. Like a silent tornado touched down._ It is truly remarkable._ The first few times I noticed this happen, I felt frustrated. Now, a smile appears on my face as I realize that trying to change their ways leaves only me frustrated. **My parents find comfort with their clutter.** I do not get their clutter, but I do not need to. I do not see them anymore as separate from their clutter, it is part of their identity. I do not see their clutter as something that needs to change or tolerated, it is something that can be accepted. Over the past year living with my parents, I have learned how to accept them, without any desire for them to be different than they are at this moment. There is the reality of the situation or the person in front of me, and then there is how I choose, consciously or not, to feel about this reality. The latter is when I feel most empowered to make my own choices, without any expectation that the reality of the situation or person be any different than it is. _This is how I am learning to glide through life with a little less friction, and a little more ease._ --- ### A Currency More Valuable Than Money Published: 2021-06-20 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/currency/ The term currency is used most often to describe money, however there is a far more valuable, and more personal, relationship that I am developing with the term. What I am discovering is that, unlike the currency used to trade money, I have my own currency in life, unique to me, as do you, also unique. This currency carries more influence than money on what I do, and also what I avoid. My currency in life is what I find value in. I trade with it. And to be able to trade with it, I believe that I both have it to give, and that it exists out there, for me to receive. **My currency in life is inspiration.** _Inspiration is what I love to receive, and actively seek out._ For example, when I moved to New York, I was drawn to the city as it inspired me in a special way. Wherever I move to next, I know it will be a place that inspires me. I have come to learn that it is important to me that I feel inspired by my physical space. The people that I feel the closest to also inspire me, in their own unique ways. Some inspire me by sharing themselves with me. Others inspire me by encouraging me to do what I clearly want to do. And others inspire me by simply being themselves, unconsciously modelling qualities and traits that I wish to cultivate in myself. I shared with my mom that inspiration is what makes me tick, and she innocently asked if she has inspired me in any way. I shared two examples immediately. First, her work ethic and desire to be productive has definitely inspired me to similarly work hard. Second, while mostly living at home over the past year, I have also been inspired at times about what not to do. When I think about the many items that have overstayed their welcome on my to do list, or the emails that I have not responded to in weeks, or the stretches that I know are good for my tight shoulders but avoid, I see clearly that I am not inspired by any of these. They feel effortful to me. I do not have any currency to trade in here. I saw a close friend recently, and we got talking about this idea of having a currency to trade in throughout life. As I shared more about my currency, I sensed his mind starting to reflect about what his currency might be, similar to your current experience as you read my writing right now. **He shared that his currency is connection.** He is most alive when he feels connected to the people in his presence, connected to the place that he is living in and connected to the work that he is currently responsible for. I told him that I could not agree more that connection is his currency in life. **For my father, I believe his currency is curiosity.** Earlier, we watched a documentary about how the planet has changed during the pandemic. Watching my father watch the documentary was as interesting for me as the documentary itself. He loved every moment of it. He is constantly curious about other people’s stories, is always asking me questions and often exploring new ideas out loud. He loves to be curious. **For my mother, I believe her currency is learning.** She is always asking me questions about how to use different apps on her phone and how to better manage files and photos on her laptop. She is always browsing the internet, reading about random topics and often sharing with us what she discovers and is learning about. She is fueled by learning. **For my brother-in-law, I believe his curiosity is creativity.** Whether behind the camera, in front of the screen, with a paintbrush, or even in the kitchen, I can see that he is happiest when he has the space and freedom to express his creativity. It inspires me to see how creative he can be. I can never guess what he is going to create next. **For my sister, I believe her currency is fairness. **She is at peace when there is justice, equity and balance. Be it for her, or more importantly, for others. She is also disheartened when there is a lack of fairness that she witnesses, or even experiences, unfortunately. Where I may try to make sense of it with an intellectual response, she does not let it go. Her passion only grows when there is, or is not, fairness. **And for my newborn nephew**, I suspect I have yet to discover his currency, however if I had to guess, it would be joy. The other day, I went to see him wake up and the joy on his face upon seeing a familiar face was truly priceless. His smile, sounds and energy said it all. I have also witnessed when he is not experiencing joy, as he is not shy to let his parents know, immediately and loudly. **My currency in life is a north star.** It is a compass to help me navigate through the big and small decisions in life. It helps me understand why I am drawn to certain places, people and ideas, and why I avoid others. When I am trading in my currency, I am most alive, most myself and most in alignment with my natural state and energy._ It is more valuable to me than money._ --- ### The Bridge From Intelligence To Intellect Published: 2021-06-13 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/intellect/ This is a question of knowing versus thinking. The pursuit of intelligence is a pursuit of learning. Growing up, I absorbed so much knowledge, so many customs and even more beliefs from my environment. This is the intelligence that I carry today and continue to grow. This path is one paved with books and filled with engaging conversations. It is an attempt to turn the unknown into the known. **Intelligence requires the skills of observation, absorption and association.** To observe what is being shared, what is happening and what is not happening. To absorb information from the countless sources available to me. To draw associations between patterns, and to recall and remember information when relevant. I find that there is a ceiling to intelligence though, and a limit to its usefulness. Intelligence is my ability to absorb knowledge from books, teachers, experiences and those around me. My work is to know how to use this knowledge when relevant and valuable to me, or to others. The issue I am finding is that my intelligence is limited by what is already known, by someone. **Intellect requires the skill of thinking, and is a completely different matter altogether than intelligence.** _The bridge from intelligence to intellect is one that I am trying to cross._ Intellect requires the ability to think for myself. The courage to question what is presented to me. The independence of identity. The security to know that I am okay. The feeling of being grounded to something, so that I feel safe to explore the unknown. The ability to draw my own conclusions and to build my own beliefs. Intellect is when I carve my own path, and resist the temptation to follow the path that is known and trusted. Intellect is a skill that resides within me, and within each of us. And it is a skill worthy of cultivating and nurturing. _Perhaps one day mastering._ I think in my writing I have found one example of this crossing. Writing has become a space for me to explore and express what it is that I am beginning to discover about my world, and my relationship to it. Each year, I set a one word intention to help guide my choices. This year, that word is space. I can see now how space is required to cultivate intellect, as I need the space to think. _Not only do I need space, so do others around me._ During meditation, I become aware of so much. When I choose to sit with it all, versus ignore it or run from it, I become curious. With some space between myself and my thoughts, I begin to inquire within. I cannot ask anyone to answer my questions, as they can only offer me knowledge. I have to spend the time to answer my own questions. The bridge from intelligence to intellect is one that starts with creating the space for me to think, followed by the courage to inquire. It is the understanding that there is no right answer, single path or destination for me to get to._ I have nowhere to go, I am always on my way._ --- ### A Bird In The Hand Published: 2021-05-22 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/bird/ There is a desire that I often feel to let go of the bird in my hand, in the hope that there will be two in the bush waiting for me. _Behind this is the desire for more._ The bias to try and quantify as much as possible in life has abstracted the human experience to be bits and bytes. The goal of the human experience seemingly is to be happy. However, I am not sure that happiness can be measured. Scientists will claim to measure happiness. Upon a closer look though, these are mostly measures of the lack of unhappiness. The lack of food, security, safety, income, education, and so forth, are _clear measures of unhappiness._ If you have the time, patience and interest to read this reflection, chances are that your basic needs are currently being met. You have shelter, safety and stability. You have food, family and friends. You do not have the indicators of unhappiness, however may still feel unhappy at times. _I know that I do._ **The lack of unhappiness does not mean happiness.** To go from the lack of unhappiness to happiness, there is still a bridge for me to cross. This bridge is called choice. _Happiness is a choice_. I have to make it. To choose what exists for me. To choose my reality. Reality does not care if I choose it or not. It will continue to do its thing. When I try to change reality, I get frustrated. When I feel frustrated, it is from an unwillingness to accept my reality in this moment. I am trying to force some idea that I have, versus flowing with what is. Reality at times feels great, and at other times, feels terrible. The most common source of unhappiness is a lack of the basic needs, like food, safety, shelter, health, and so forth. I am grateful that,_ like you,_ my basic needs are met. The second most common source of unhappiness is not accepting reality._ I am a work in progress here._ **The third most common source of unhappiness is comparison.** Comparison brings into my awareness an alternate reality that does not exist for me. It may be what I perceive to be someone else’s reality. It may also be what I desire or imagine as an alternate reality for me. In all cases though, it is a reality that is different from my present. I then start to believe that this is better. _I am now experiencing unhappiness._ With comparison, I am deprived of truly understanding all that this alternate reality entails. I can only see the tip of the iceberg, what appears to be big, better or beautiful. I fail to see it in its entirety, with all of its pleasant, _and unpleasant_, givings. **I do have a desire for more.** _I cannot hide from this._ This desire is likely from the conditioning and programming of my society and culture, and also likely hard coded in me through evolution. Thousands of years ago, I imagine that more meant survival. It was a strategy that made sense a long time ago, and one that I have to learn how to live with today. There are different paths to fulfill this desire for more. One path is for me to live in a state of near continuous dissatisfaction with reality. To see constantly what is not. _I have tried this a lot in my life, and have not enjoyed it very much._ Another path is for me to start by appreciating what is. To hold onto the bird in my hand. To celebrate, recognize and acknowledge my present reality, as it is, _without an ounce of desire for it to be any different. Easier said than done._ With appreciation, feelings of gratitude fill my heart. I begin to realize all of the circumstances and choices that have led to what is. The people, the actions, the decisions. It is as if the universe has conspired to create this moment, _just for me._ In a state of gratitude, I have difficulty even remembering why it was that moments ago I was in a state of unhappiness. It seems to me, through my experience, that gratitude is a vaccine to unhappiness. _One that I need a daily dose of._ Appreciation for the bird in my hand triggers endless gratitude. I am now grounded in my present reality and then become curious to discover what might be. **If all the goodness in my present reality is possible, then surely more goodness is also possible.** The irony in this understanding is that it leads me to more. However, _I won’t ever know that I have more_. I am too occupied with appreciating my reality. I am with this present moment, unconcerned and uninterested in any alternate one from the past or the possible future. With appreciation for reality, gratitude for the journey thus far, and curiosity for what might be, I notice that I now have a bird in one hand, and that my other hand is open. --- ### My Post Pandemic Bucket List Published: 2021-05-15 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/bucket/ When I allow myself the pleasure of imagining a post pandemic bucket list, the initial thoughts that flood my mind are the obvious and expected ones. Giving friends a hug, looking people in the eyes, feeling the energy of a room full of people and traveling to new or inspiring places. This all now feels within reach and a smile shows up on my face as I imagine crossing each of these off my post pandemic bucket list this year. When I ask myself what might my life look like after the initial rush and excitement of these experiences, deeper questions arise, ones that I do not have clear answers to. Many decisions, big and small, will be made over the next few months that will influence the direction of my life over the next few years. Unlike the previous year or so, where it felt as though decisions were made for me, the next little while will feel quite different. **Where to live** Many of us in our 20s and 30s have temporarily moved back home. I know this is not permanent, and so do my parents. That may be why we have all chosen to enjoy each other’s company so much more as of late, and be more loving, accepting and tolerating of one another. We all sense that our time together, in this way, is coming to an end soon. Many others changed cities, either to be more rural and less urban, or to simply experiment with being in a different place. I can only imagine the number of dinner table conversations happening right now about where the family wants to live post pandemic. To choose where to live next is ultimately a question of values. The deciding factor for me is feeling inspired by where I am, within my economic realities. Inspiration comes from the people in my close proximity, the culture and community, the type of lifestyle available and the physical space that I am in. A post pandemic migration for many of us will begin to happen, to where I do not yet know though. **The company to keep** My social networks have been redrawn over the past year. The pandemic has been long enough for new friendships to form, long enough for old friendships to fade, and spacious enough for looser connections to become tighter. I can see now that a lot of previous connections were born out of circumstance. Like the people in high school that I would spend so much time with but now can barely remember their names or recognize their faces, this pandemic has been long enough for my social connections to change. Who I feel close to, the frequency in which I connect and the depth of connection I enjoy have all changed faster in the past year than in a typical year. This past year has given me a lot of information about the types of connections that I value and need most in my life at this moment. In recent conversations with friends, what I hear reflected back to me the most is a desire to have fewer, deeper connections post pandemic. It feels like along our journey, we collect a lot of friends, and this pandemic is a cleanse and reset of sorts. We now each will be more intentional about the company that we keep. **How to work** Businesses are making different choices about the return to the office, in professional white collar industries. At one end of the spectrum are businesses that expect a near full-time return to a physical office space. At the other end of the spectrum are businesses, like mine, that have made a Work From Anywhere decision and have no plans to have any physical office spaces. And then there is something in between, what is referred to as a hybrid model, with a few days per week in the office and a few days at home. How much flexibility will be tolerated in the hybrid model is unknown. A reckoning may be coming, as people who have saved money over the past year, and have gotten to experience living with less, now have more choices. The risk is high for a misalignment between the type of work lifestyle businesses expect and what people are imagining for themselves and their families. In particular, many larger businesses may face higher turnover rates this year. Big tech, unicorns and high growth businesses who have made their employees net worth and social worth skyrocket in the past year are now at risk of losing them. Their currency is worth more and they have more options. I have been hearing from a number of friends and clients sharing with me that they are now ready for their next chapter. They are tired and looking for a change. **The pandemic fatigue I feel is at an all time high these days.** I remain optimistic about the possibilities of a future that looks different than not only the past, but also the present. And I remain incredibly grateful to all of the professionals in so many industries that I had previously not appreciated. They have kept us safe, nourished and healthy. _Change is motivated either by a desire to run away from where we are, or by a desire to run to something that we are inspired by._ Ahead of the many decisions that I suspect will be made over the coming months, I hope for them to be motivated by running to something that is attractive to me, versus running away from something that I am tired of. This is a moment when I feel inspired to zoom out even further, and reflect more deeply about the type of life that I imagine for myself. I hope to be intentional, thoughtful and deliberate about my post pandemic bucket list. A lot of the past year has felt accidental. The pandemic has asked us to be adaptable. This has been easier for some, and difficult for others, but we have largely adapted well enough to get through this as a collective. Now, each of us is going to ask the people, places and businesses in our respective worlds to adapt to our post pandemic bucket list. It is filled with deeper desires and more meaningful and thoughtful intentions for a post pandemic life. --- ### Nothing Is Permanent Published: 2021-04-24 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/permanent/ This morning while on a walk with my father, I asked him innocently_ ‘how are you similar to your parents?’_. He paused at first, and then shared characteristics, qualities and beliefs that were very much his parents, my grandparents, and that he has identified with, and carried with him, throughout his life. I then asked him _‘how are you different from your parents?’_. His pause was longer this time. After deeper reflection on this second question, he shared choices that he has made in life that his parents did not make, and beliefs that he developed that did not come from his parents. This line of questioning from me was initially motivated to highlight for my father how because he is both similar yet different than his parents, I too am both similar yet different than my parents. And that will include me making different choices, at times, then they would or did. _He understood what I was getting at._ What followed was a long moment of silence, where words did not need to be exchanged, as we both absorbed this insight. It was then that a deeper meaning to this insight surfaced for me. If his parents are a representation of the past, then he is a representation of the present, and I am a representation of the future. The present is similar in some ways, yet different in other ways, to the past. The present is not an exact copy of what was, yet still connected to the past in some ways, but not all ways. The future will be similar in some ways yet different in other ways, to the present. The future will not be an exact copy of what currently is, yet will be still connected to the present in some ways, but not all ways. **The future will not be like the past.** The human condition is to assume that the future will be like the past. Not because the past is better or worse, but because it is known. The human condition is to take comfort in the known, regardless of what it is filled with. The human condition is to feel discomfort with uncertainty, even if the uncertainty might bring a better future than the present. **The extrapolation of the past into the future happens so effortlessly for me that it is unconscious.** When I pause for a moment and invite curiosity and awareness about how my mind unconsciously drags the past into the future, the evidence is abundant. When I had a knee injury a few years ago, I felt agitated, concerned and distracted by it. I assumed that I would always have a knee injury. _I believed that it was permanent, and that scared me._ When choosing stocks to buy, I automatically gravitate towards stocks that have been rising and avoid stocks that have been declining. I assume that if they have been going up, they of course will continue to go up, and vice versa._ I assume that the past is a predictor of the future._ When I build a revenue forecast for my business, it is relatively easy and convenient to create formulas in a spreadsheet. I assume that the business will continue on the same trajectory as it has. There is little space in my mind for the possibility that the future might be drastically different than the past._ I assume it will only be marginally different, of course only in ways that are to my liking._ When I interact with the people who are in my life regularly, be it family and friends, or clients and colleagues, I assume they are as they were, and treat them accordingly. _Again, there is little space in my mind to see them as any different than I have previously._ When I am faced with the lack of mobility due to current pandemic precautions, I feel frustrated because I assume that they are permanent. _It feels like Groundhog Day at times, with the same story on repeat each day._ In all of these cases, I have extrapolated the past into the future. However when I look a little more closely, I begin to uncover pockets of space within the perceived permanence, or blind beliefs, to play and explore. I start to see how I am adaptable, beyond my own awareness. The reality is that everything changes._ Absolutely everything._ Change is uncomfortable, even when that change brings desired, positive and wanted benefits. It is for this reason that the default programming of my mind is to assume that things will be as they are, or as they were. **The agitation, stress or anxiety that I feel in my mind is when I become attached to something that will change.** When I assume that the challenge or obstacle in front of me is permanent, I begin to react to the idea that it is permanent. I have now lost any connection to my present reality and I am living in some fictional future that I fear. When I assume that the future will be like the past, and when it turns out not to be, I am disappointed, discouraged or disheartened. I expect reality to be different than how it is, and now that I see it is not as I expect, I struggle to accept it. If I look closely at whatever, or whoever, I believe is a source of agitation present in my life, and take a moment to see how it will change, I no longer feel agitated by it. I cannot be agitated by anything, or anyone, once I truly understand that it is not permanent. **I can then begin to accept reality as it is, not as I desire it to be, as I understand that this reality will change.** I may not know when or how, however I do not need to. I trust my inner wisdom, a deeper knowing, that nothing is permanent. It is in this wisdom that I learn to find peace in the present. My life exists only in the present, the past is gone and the future is a fabrication of my mind._ Nothing is permanent._ --- ### The Bridge Of Belief Published: 2021-04-17 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/belief/ To live in harmony with my beliefs is not easy. It is much easier to conform to someone else’s beliefs. As then I am accepted, will receive praise and feel that I am worthy. However, deep down, once I make the purpose of my life to conform to someone else’s beliefs, then I have lost myself. _I am no longer living._ To know what it is that I uniquely believe does not come automatically. It is much simpler to figure out what I should believe. These are advertised, marketed, promoted and taught to me. I will make excuses, delegate these choices to others and convince myself that **I do not have permission to have my own beliefs**. I assume that I have no choice but to align with the beliefs of those around me. Be it society, culture, religion, teachers, parents, friends, managers and more. Like a sponge, I soak them all in. To figure out what it is that I believe is not easy. It takes space to see that I do have permission to have my own beliefs. It then takes courage to explore what it is that I now believe to be true, with an understanding that it may not align with what I was raised to believe. It finally takes strength to actually try to live in harmony with my beliefs. _This is where the real work begins._ **The why behind my belief is more important than the belief itself.** As therein lies my underlying intention and what it is that is actually influencing my life. Might it be a fear of pain?_ I believe that if I do not exercise regularly, my physical body will deteriorate and be in pain one day._ Might it be a desired feeling?_ I believe that if I meditate regularly, I will feel more grounded and calm throughout my day._ Might it be transactional? _I believe that if I work harder, I will make more money._ Might it be a love of life?_ I believe in wearing a mask to reduce the spread of a deadly virus that will kill other people._ **My unmet desires and unfulfilled dreams are often shaping my beliefs.** The desire to feel good enough, worthy and to belong. The dream to have a certain experience of life. It is fascinating to explore the why behind my beliefs. I am often surprised. The agitation in my mind, the illnesses and injuries in my body, I wonder how much of it arises from me living in disharmony with my beliefs? I believe that the pandemic should be done by now. It is not and will not be soon. This triggers agitation in my mind. **The difference between my beliefs and reality is where all of my suffering lies.** Does this mean that I should limit or avoid having beliefs, to limit or avoid my suffering? No. To be human is to carry beliefs. I understand that along my journey through life, I will feel agitated, frustrated, tired and chewed up by reality at times. Reality is not always going to be aligned perfectly with my beliefs. And reality will always win. Thus, it is best for me to learn to **develop beliefs that are in alignment with reality**. This assumes that I understand reality to begin with. That I feel a connection with reality. That I am living in a state of awareness of reality, as opposed to a state of ignorance. There is simply no other option. I cannot learn about reality from someone else writing about it or speaking about it. They might describe to me their experience of reality, however, the best that I will do if I depend on others is to learn how to imagine reality. My imagination is powerful, however, imagining reality is different than being with reality. **In each moment, I can choose to connect with reality or to disconnect from reality.** Watching movies continuously, scrolling endlessly through social feeds, excessively drinking and binging on food are all examples of choices to disconnect from reality. They are doorways into a different reality, be it someone else’s or a fictional one. In doses, it can be helpful to connect with another’s reality. It builds empathy for me, can be a source of inspiration, shows me what is possible and creates the space for me to gain a perspective that I otherwise would not have. However to live continuously in someone else’s reality, or to constantly try to escape from my own reality, leads to a state of disharmony, and ultimately, disease. No matter how painful it may be to live with my own reality, I choose it over someone else’s. **Each day, I try to cross two bridges.** One is a bridge that takes me from a place of ignorance to a place of awareness. Awareness of reality, by choosing to pay attention to my experience of life and to not be distracted by other’s experiences of life. The other is a bridge that takes me from a place of carrying blind beliefs to a place where I feel empowered and free to uncover beliefs unique to me, ones that are grounded in my desires and dreams. To live in harmony with my beliefs, and for those beliefs to be in alignment with reality, is to be in harmony with myself. _I then can glide through life with a little less friction, and a little more ease._ --- ### Chasing Clouds Published: 2021-04-11 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/clouds/ To try to know is like chasing clouds. I cannot actually do it for very long, as everything changes. I have a desire to know. It feels safe. Even if it is a false sense of safety, the thought that I know, or that someone knows, feels safe to me. **To not know is far more common though, yet so uncomfortable.** I used to associate not knowing as being undesirable. If I know, _I am good_. If I do not know,_ I am not so good._ **To not know is the most honest, humble and human that I can be.** To live in tune with reality is to understand that not only do I not know, but others do not know either. Parents, teachers, leaders and more may have the best intentions, however will not always know. **I am learning to give myself permission to not know**. In doing so, I also create the space for others to not know. There are countless examples where not knowing is in fact reality. The pandemic has shown me how much we as a collective do not know. The direction of the pandemic is still not known, despite what we may hear. I know this can feel frustrating, however it is reality. Reality does not discriminate to only offer what is desirable and hide what is undesirable._ Reality offers it all._ I would prefer that politicians, public health leaders, medical practitioners and scientists say that they do not know more often, versus to fool themselves, and me, into thinking that they do know. It needs to be okay to not know, for all of us. _Clearly it is not._ For example, in job interviews, I would rather a candidate admit they do not know something rather than fool themselves, but not me. It demonstrates humility and honesty, which are admirable qualities, _especially in the context of a job interview._ **It has taken me the better part of a decade in business to learn that I do not actually need to know everything. **I wrongly assumed that my clients, my team, my investors and more all expect me to know everything about my business, all the time. The reality is that I cannot. They do expect me though to solve problems, find opportunities and provide direction, all of which I can do, without expecting myself to know it all, all the time. Last weekend, I decided to go 100% screenless for 100 hours. No phone, no laptop, no TV. I also cut out the news, was highly selective with what I read and what I ate. This self retreat helped create the space for me to check in with myself and to see what it is that I know. Rather than evaluate myself, my life and the world, I chose a different reflection prompt for this retreat: “_What have I learned about myself, those around me and the world, in the past few months?”._ Speak with an expert and you hear someone who may show conviction, but is closed to hear alternatives and new ideas. Every thought leads back to the same original idea. For example, I host regular AMA (Ask Me Anything) sessions with the dozens of students working with me, and I recently became aware of how often my answers to their questions end with “and meditate”. Regardless of the topic, I have a fixed and firm belief on something, and as an expert. Contrast this to keeping a beginner’s mind. It is simply when I approach life as a beginner, not an expert. I become curious to discover something new, open to different perspectives and ready to experience the joy of wonder. To know is to carry an expert’s mind, and as a result, to be closed to reality. To not know is to carry a beginner’s mind, and as a result, to be open to what reality can teach me. **The past is not a good predictor of the possibilities for the future. **It is an indicator perhaps of one possibility, however the past does not tell me the range of available possibilities for the future. It may be convenient for me to extrapolate the past into the future, be it for my business, the stock market or even my own habits, however I am only fooling myself. “It was” does not mean that “it will”. For example, ‘it was raining yesterday, so that means it will be raining tomorrow’, does not hold true. **To let go of my desire to know can feel scary.** However, after some time, I learn how to be a little more present with this moment, as I truly do not know what the future holds. When I say, even to myself, that ‘I know’, I am really saying that ‘I think’, that ‘I believe’ or that ‘I feel’. Thinking. Believing. Feeling. These are not only more accurate but more important, and more human. The word ‘knowing’ brings to mind images of a dictionary. Boring and dusty. The words ‘thinking’, ‘believing’ and ‘feeling’ inspire movement, curiosity and discovery. Thinking, believing and feeling also create the space for someone else to think, believe or feel something different than me. Even if it is about the exact same thing. This is how I learn about the value of understanding over agreement. To admit that I do not know opens the door to develop greater empathy and compassion for others. Most of all, I do not know myself. I will spend an entire lifetime trying to know myself, however will never truly know,_ as I keep changing._ To know myself is like chasing clouds. The best approach is to pick a set that are present for me right now, and give them all of my attention without distraction, knowing that I do not know where they will go, how long they will be visible to me and which ones will come into my awareness next. --- ### The Seed Of Growth Published: 2021-04-04 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/growth/ Everything changes. I know this to be a fact of life. However there is often a strong resistance to change. Both within myself, and most definitely outside of myself. Growth does not happen without change. Change does not happen without loss. I have to be willing to experience the loss of what was, to make space for what might be. Loss is a part of my experience of life, and not often talked about. **Loss is the seed of growth.** There is a story that has been sold and believed. Call it the American dream that you can have it all, or the Disney fairytale that everything can be perfect. The story is that life is built like layers of a cake overtime. Every time there is an accomplishment or an acquisition, it is added to the equation of life. More additions equals a better life. _I do not believe this story to be reality._ Loss is very much part of the equation of life, as without it, there can be no growth. The idea that I can hold onto everything that I have known and acquired, and continue to add to it without loss, does not resonate with me anymore. **My sister recently had a baby.** It has been a beautiful experience and a wonderful addition to our family. However, with the baby’s arrival has also been the experience of loss. The baby’s parents have experienced the loss of sleep, freedom and the lifestyle they once knew. There has been a loss in the depth of connection I feel with my sister, someone I am very close to. For example, she no longer has the time, or rather attention span, to read my weekly reflections, which we used to discuss at length. **Leaving New York one year ago to return home to Canada** during this time, and living with my parents, has given me so much. I have gained valuable and precious time with my parents, as an adult, that I did not expect to have. I have learned more about each of them, and about myself through them, than I would have ever imagined knowing. However, with this experience has come the loss of privacy, personal space, autonomy and freedom that I have been so used to over the years. **During lockdowns and work from home** over the past year, I have experienced the loss of so much that I have known and loved. Frequent physical human interactions, the mobility and flexibility to be anywhere, and more. With this loss though, I have experienced a gain in my appreciation for physical interactions, a curiosity for nature unlike ever before and more space to pursue interests like writing and social impact. **In business, I experience the loss of clients and team members** from time-to-time. It is for some reason rarely discussed within business circles, however it is a reality of business, as it is a reality of life. The business media, market analysts and more focus mostly on the additions, rarely on the loss. This conditions me to believe that only I experience loss, no one else. With the loss though comes the space to add new clients and new team members, which leads to renewed energy and focus. This is where growth begins. Despite there being an association that loss is undesirable, accidental and unwanted, my intention now is not to avoid the experience of loss. Where there is loss, there is also gain. _I sometimes have to just look for it._ **When the experience of loss feels painful, it is a sign that I am clinging and attached to what was.** The more that I can learn to let go of holding so tightly onto what was, and learn to do it with a smile and not a frown, the more open I become to welcome in what might be. Instead of avoiding loss, which would be like trying to avoid the rain forever, I can choose to be comfortable with the experience of loss. Loss can be intentional. Loss can be grounded in a deeper understanding that it is part of the human experience. _Loss can be embraced._ Loss will show up at my doorstep. That is a certainty. It always has, and it always will. My intention is to learn how to welcome it into my life, as it will be always followed by growth. Loss is the seed of growth. It is where the journey begins to discover something new in our lives. --- ### How To Fulfil A Desire Published: 2021-03-28 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/desire/ 12 weeks into the 12 months of this year, I took a moment to pause, and reflect about what I have learned so far. I read some of my journal entries near the start of the year, and revisited what I had said not too long ago about what would be important to me. I have done this exercise often, and have often felt discouraged when I read what I wrote. It is because **I realize that my reality does not always measure up to my dreams and desires**. My conditioning is to either place blame on some external circumstance or people, or to give myself a pep talk that I can try harder, and work smarter, to make it happen. “Try again” is the message that I am used to hearing, from others and myself, when something that is important to me does not happen. However, this sounds a lot like the definition of insanity. When I keep doing the same thing, while expecting a different result. It just will not happen. These past few months I decided, as an experiment, to try something different, in the hopes of a different result. It would be to make intentional trade-offs, _in other words, to practice “less is more”._ I identified 3 areas I would prioritize, and only 3, and thought about them each literally every single day. I did not have to write them down._ They were written all over my mind._ **The first was to be present with my newborn nephew.** As the first baby in our immediate family, I knew that this moment would be a big deal and that he would be a big deal for all of us. He is. And since the day he was born eight weeks ago, I have gotten to spend a few hours, almost each day, with him. It has been such a joyful experience, despite how much he cries or smells, he can do no wrong in my eyes. There were many opportunities for my attention to get diverted to other activities and people, however I continued to prioritize being present with him. Not for days or weeks, but for months, which has been very important to me. **The next was to hire for a number of leadership positions in my business.** Although I have hired hundreds of people in the past decade and have some experience here, I knew that these roles would be particularly difficult as I was looking for very specific backgrounds and skills. It took a lot more interviews and a lot more time than I had expected, however I did hire for all of the roles I set out to fill. What I learned to do is how to ask for help from others, and looking back, I can see clearly now how I would not have been successful without the support of others. _I also feel great about the people that I now get a chance to work with and learn from._ **The third was to spinout and launch a new business.** This was done two weeks ago and I am really proud of the team and excited for the start of another chapter in the journey. It was a particularly big project to spin out a business, and the scope continued to increase week by week. There were many moments when I doubted the strategy, specifically if the effort was worth the squeeze and the timeline. This project required me to continuously recommit to it every week, as the work continued to grow. And it is not something that could have happened off the side of my desk, it required my full dedication and commitment. **While these three examples were quite effortful, in that they required a lot of time and attention, they genuinely felt effortless.** And I believe this was because I was clear with myself the entire time that they were important to me, and had no doubt about it. When I reflect deeper and ask myself, was it good fortune, lucky circumstance or simply hard work and dedication that enabled me to focus on what I said I wanted to focus on, I realized that it was not. Well, maybe these all played a small role, however the main actor here was a willingness to make trade-offs. I listed some of my recent accomplishments above, however I did not list for you all that I did not accomplish. That list is much longer, and includes areas such as physical health, writing ambitions, reading interests, romantic pursuits, volunteering, winter activities and much, much more. I bought 10+ books in the past 10 weeks and have barely touched them. I was inspired to go snowshoeing, cross-country skiing and skating this winter, and settled for walking regularly (while on phone calls of course). I did not write a single word for my book draft that I spent hundreds of hours on last year and told myself I would publish in the first quarter of this year. I can go on. **I share the list of some of what I did not accomplish with a smile though, not a frown.** I may just be more proud of what I did not accomplish, than what I did accomplish, as it signals that I actually did make trade-offs. **A trade-off is an expression of intent.** Intention is at the root of anything that I desire in life. A trade-off can either be accidental or intentional. An accidental trade-off is when I look back in the rear view mirror, and realize that I am here now because I took a turn back there. _When I ask myself why, I have no idea._ It could be because the others in front of me also turned, or that I was distracted by the noise, or that I was listening to someone else and not myself. Regardless, I am somewhere where I did not intend to be. An intentional trade-off is a proactive decision, in advance. It is not a “one and done” decision that I make, but rather a daily practice. I am tested daily by opportunities, alarms and ideas that ask me to make different trade-offs. In those moments, my resolve and conviction comes through the strongest. This is what I am starting to learn this year. To fulfill a desire, I have to be willing to make intentional trade-offs, on a continuous basis. And most of all, how to feel great about it. --- ### The Great Experiment Published: 2021-03-21 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/experiment/ It is said that there are two ways to learn. The first way is intellectually. Like a philosopher, this approach to learning is limited to only ideas. Some ideas will appear more true than others, however they are all ideas in the end. Reading this reflection is an intellectual approach to learning. The second way is experientially. Like a scientist, this approach to learning involves our senses and first-hand lived experiences, also known as ‘research’. It is only through experiencing an idea that we can discover what is real for us. **Over the past year, work from home has not been an idea but an experience.** All of us in knowledge-based professions have been scientists, running the greatest experiment ever imaginable with respect to how we work. At a scale that’s unimaginable: almost every single knowledge worker in the world. And simultaneously. The size of the global workforce is estimated to be about 3 billion people. Research published last year showed that about 40% of the US workforce are working from home due to pandemic precautions. Rough back-of-the-napkin math would suggest that nearly 1 billion people participated in this WFH experiment over the past year. Unlike most experiments, where all other variables are expected to be constant and one variable is changed to see the overall effect, the great WFH experiment was conducted in an environment with many other variables changing. This of course makes it much more difficult to draw conclusions. As I reflect on what I have learned from the past year of observing myself and others in this WFH experiment, a few themes emerge. **Resilience.** Had we learned at the onset of the pandemic that we would be asked to work from home for at least 12 months continuously, there would have been strong resistance. In many ways, I am glad that it unfolded in chapters, a few months at a time, as it provided the space to accept this new reality. **Trust.** Without the benefit of literally seeing the people who I work for and with, it became very clear to me where I have trust in others, and also where I do not. It has been a growth opportunity for me to learn how to earn, build and maintain trust in relationships without the past norm of physical presence. **Freedom.** On occasion, the freedom to choose when to work, be it late into the night, early morning or on the weekend, can feel quite nice. On repeat, this freedom can turn into a prison, where one is always working. The freedom is really a freedom to choose, and it requires making an intentional choice of when to work, and when not to work. **Boundaries.** This WFH experiment has required a new skill, one that I had not explicitly learned until now. Without the boundaries from the change in physical spaces, I have had to learn how to set my own boundaries. It can feel uncomfortable to ask for what I need from those I work with, and even more so from those I live with. **Space.** There was a lot of noise in my day-to-day lifestyle that has been cut out in the past year. I am sure it has been replaced by other noises that I am not aware of yet, however I have noticed that with shorter and fewer meetings, disappearing commutes, and business travel and conferences paused, there is more space that I appreciate. **Focus.** There is another skill that can go underestimated. The ability to focus oneself without the external support of others. Social media, Slack notifications and email all take us away from being able to do our best work. Some have adapted well to being able to find focus, others have not and have found it challenging. I do believe that WFH is not for everyone, and not for every work culture. It is for me though and for my teams. I understand that we did not have a choice over the past year, however do believe that over the next year, many will begin to have choices, even if the options feel different than what we once were. The biggest choice we can make is to be intentional about how we think about the future of work. The future will not look like the past. What I have learned from this great WFH experiment is that when I am open to change versus resistant to it, and grounded in reality versus feeling disappointed by it, I show up with an energy and enthusiasm that becomes fuel for the journey. Life is but a journey after all. The truth is that I have nowhere to go, I will always be on my way, (even while working from home). --- ### The Great Teacher Published: 2021-03-13 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/teacher/ One year ago today, I shared a reflection titled _‘Fear in the face of a pandemic’_, not knowing what would happen in the world, or in my world. The reflection was not to highlight the possible fears associated with a health pandemic. It was to **bring attention to the fears associated with change**. I clearly sensed that mass change was upon us and that getting ready for it might be helpful. One line that I continue to reference repeatedly has been, _“once we let go of what was, then only can we make space for what might be”_. Letting go can be difficult, however it was made less difficult in the past year as it was forced upon us. The difficult part has become how to respond in the face of change. In the past few weeks, while interviewing job candidates for my business, connecting with old friends or exploring the world of online dating, one question I continue to find myself curious about is this: **what have you learned about yourself in the past year?** In the past year, I have uncovered surprising and unexpected discoveries about myself. The world had to turn upside down first for me to turn my mind upside down and begin to look at my life differently than I may have before. **One year ago, I was happily living in the concrete jungle of New York City.** It was a place that I felt comfortable in, as everything about it was familiar to me. The streets, the lights, the subway, the smells, the sounds and more. However, now thinking of it feels like a foreign world, one that I am unable to easily connect with. I have found a new home and that is to be with nature. Over the past year, I believe that I spent more with nature than the previous decade combined. The grounding, joy and familiarity that I feel while walking alongside a river, watching a sunset or hiking in the woods is uplifting for my spirit. I feel calm and clear. _I feel at home._ **I have become a writer**, with over 50,000 words published in my weekly reflections for the past 52 weeks. My interest in writing has been slowly built over the years, however up until one year ago, I had made excuses for not doing it. I focused more on the reasons not to write than the reasons to write. When you start something, you never really know where it will take you. That’s the benefit of when I choose to be open. I get to discover something new, about myself, _including how little I know about myself_. **My identity has evolved.** There are many words that I identify with today that I did not as strongly with one year ago. Writer. Meditation teacher. Business owner. Nature seeker. Canadian. Son. And recently, uncle. Despite most of these being true for a long time, I did not necessarily identify with them on a daily basis and they were not reflected in my choices and lifestyle. They now all are. And some will disappear and new ones will appear in the year ahead, I am ready. **I have learned how to be more effective and efficient with my time. **The number, frequency and duration of meetings has been greatly reduced. The power of a five minute adhoc phone call has been found again, as I know that everyone is available and accessible. With fewer physical distractions and movements, how I flow through my day has shown me that _less can be more_. I have cut out a lot of the noise and have learned how to focus better on what matters most to me. The practice of less is more has enabled more space for me to explore new passions and interests, which I feel grateful for. **Resilience is a mindset**. It is a choice in the face of change. I can choose to respond with rigidity or resiliency. To be rigid is to be fixed in my views, stuck in my ways and cling to what I have known. To be resilient is to be curious about possibilities, open to new ideas and wonder what might be. In the face of unfulfilled desires, be it business objectives or romantic interests, to show up with resiliency is to say “not yet” instead of “no”, “not likely” or “never”. I chose resilience over rigidity more in the past year than probably the past decade, as it feels better to be in flow with reality than to try to force upon reality some idea that I have. In the past year, we experienced the truth that big accidents do happen. Things that are not planned, expected or desired. No one asked for the pandemic and all of its side effects that will linger for years to come. _However it is here and we have been in it._ **Most things are either accidental or intentional at the start.** The question is not why or how it came to be, but what I will now do about it. In the face of what might be accidental, there is a bridge that I can cross. That bridge is the choice to be intentional with how I show up, what I focus on and ultimately, how I feel. What I have learned in the past year about myself is that when I let go of what once was, I not only make the space for what might be but also make the choice to be intentional about just what might be possible. --- ### The Desire For Perfection Published: 2021-03-07 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/perfection/ I have a confession. I am an aspiring perfectionist. I may always have been, and might always be. **I have long struggled with a deep desire for perfection.** I am not going to try to convince myself, or you, that perfection does not exist. I know perfection is a fabrication of my mind, however emotionally a desire still exists for it. Or for something that the idea of perfection might be a proxy for. As I now build the courage to reflect about my reality, I find myself curious to better understand why. Perhaps with a greater understanding, I may learn to make peace with this long standing imperfection, to desire perfection. My desire for perfection may be from a **place of fear.** _Am I scared of feeling not good enough?_ If so, then it makes sense to strive for perfection, as I leave little space for feeling not good enough. Fear is a powerful, if not the most powerful, source of motivation for humans and animals. _Why might I be scared of feeling not good enough?_ Well, I believe that it is one of the most emotionally unpleasant feelings one can experience. To avoid this unpleasant feeling, I do everything I can to avoid it. Unlike popular belief, we are not logical beings who sometimes experience emotions. Rather, we are emotional beings, who use logic to explain our emotions. The solution here is clearly not for me to continually strive for perfection. It is for me to learn how to be comfortable with the feelings that arise when I feel not perfect. To get intimate and closer to my emotions. **To learn to heal, versus hide.** My desire for perfection may be from a **place of identity**. The desire for recognition and acknowledgement. Taken to the extreme, a desire to be famous and known by others and seen in a positive light. The fear of judgement and criticism from others, _or even myself_. Taken to the extreme, all of my choices are to avoid attention. I then over time, avoid making choices altogether. Social media has created more space for a dynamic that has long existed in communities and tribes. It is when one falls victim to living their life through the eyes of how it will be seen by others, versus what their heart truly desires. To be driven by how I am seen by others, or even myself, is a never ending battle. The solution here is to uncover and connect with my authentic self, and allow me to shine through. The key here is to do this **regardless of how I might be perceived or received by others**,_ including myself_. Once I know myself, and accept myself, I can trust that I will be accepted by those around me. My desire for perfection may be from a **place of possibility**. A sense of optimism, a curiosity for what might be possible. **Upon seeing what does not yet exist, I feel flooded with inspiration to uncover what might be**. To ask _“why not?”_. Well, there is only one way to find out. I am motivated to take action. Possibility becomes a source of fuel along the journey to try and live a better life. This is an admirable quality, to be driven to achieve perfection because I believe it might just be possible. However, it comes with a cost. To be driven continuously can be a recipe for feeling burnt out, tired and taken to the extreme, discouraged. It also comes with the risk of being discouraging to those around you, by always focusing on what could be better and failing to recognize and acknowledge the good that is. The solution here is to start with accepting what is, versus skipping straight to action of what might be. From a place of acceptance, I can **understand what is working and what is not working**. My actions are now grounded in reality. My desire for perfection is like absolutely everything in life. **It is always changing and yet, it is in complete balance in every moment.** On one hand, this desire comes with the risk of feeling dissatisfied continuously. On the other hand, this desire brings the benefits from the new, the more and the better. My desire for perfection is not good, nor is it bad. It is what it is, and a part of how I move through life. In the face of feelings of dissatisfaction or discontentment, I now understand why. In the face of a full life filled with optimism and experiences, I also now understand why. With this understanding, I can begin to flow with a little more ease and a little less friction (and frustration). I now appreciate how my desire for perfection continues to shape me, and my experience of life._ It no longer needs to be a struggle._ --- ### The Search For Balance Published: 2021-02-27 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/balanced1/ I gave up a long time ago being interested in finding balance in my life. Not because I had found it, but because I did not believe that I could find it. And it was easier on my ego to convince myself that I never wanted it in the first place, than to search for it and fail to find it. So I worked. And continued to work. And worked some more, just for good measure. In case there was any tiny bit of balance lurking in the shadows of my busy life, I continued to work to make sure it did not have any room to grow. **The rare times that I was not working, it was so that I could recover and go back to working.** In a really sad way, rest and relaxation had a productive purpose. It was so that I could get back to working. Like stretching before a race (_I did not have any interest to literally run in circles_) or hitting the driving range before an 18-hole course (_I most definitely did not have the time to golf_), rest was preparation for work. When I would be asked about balance, my response was something along the lines of “forget living a balanced life, it is unimportant and uninteresting. I am more focused on living an optimal life”. **A balanced life sounded daunting to me. An optimal life sounded inspiring.** I also learned that a balanced life was nowhere within my reach, as it asked of me ‘to be’ and not always ‘to do’. I have only been trained ‘to do’. The rewards and recognition systems around me have told me my entire life that ‘I am because I do’, not that ‘I am because I am’. An optimal life though was within my reach, as it asked of me ‘to do’. Its currency is to trade in doing. I had, and still have, an extra large capacity to do, as I have been trained my entire life for this. School. Extra curricular activities. Business. _Even mindfulness practices at times._ **I am proud to report that an optimal life is possible, and I feel that I have experienced it at several moments along my journey.** **I am also humbled to report that having it all does not feel the way that I would have expected it to.** Really, it does not. Many of the ideas and promises that I chose to believe for so many years turned out to not be true for me. This truth does not speak in words or concepts, _despite me using them to try to explain it to you_. It speaks only through experience. The only way that I can connect to this truth is by experiencing it firsthand for myself. If it was only at an intellectual level, _like your experience reading my reflection right now_, it would not be sufficient. This truth continues to speak to me, again and again, like a radio without an off switch. It continues to tell me that **a balanced or better life is not conditional on getting somewhere, finding someone or having something.** I was speaking with a large group of students recently on the topic of balance. I started by asking everyone to share with me what balances means to them. What I mostly received were academic responses of things being equal, like two sides of a scale with equal weights. One response I received though was different. “Just the right amount”. This spoke to me, as it is how I have related to balance in recent years. **Just the right amount. **It involves the act of asking what does this moment, situation, activity or person need of me? And then giving it just the right amount, for it and for me. Not more, not less. _Just the right amount._ It requires me to be present with this moment, not stuck in a previous one or anticipating a future one. To be strictly with this moment. To be aware of what is needed. To be connected and grounded to the reality of this moment. It is in my nature to be in balance. That is what I have now learned. The moment that I strive for balance, I am out of balance. **To be in balance is truly an unconscious experience.**_ I cannot do anything to find it._ My search for balance is over. I have found it. --- ### The Sound Of Silence Published: 2021-02-20 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/silence/ When I was twelve years old, I had to give one of the first speeches that I can remember giving. **It was my first introduction to public speaking in school and I was terrified. **I still feel nervous actually with public speaking, regardless of small or large the audience may be. In my seventh grade class, that frightful day when I knew that I would have to speak in front of my entire class, I decided to be clever about it. We were given the freedom to speak about the topic of our choosing. _I chose to speak about silence._ I cannot remember everything I said but I do remember that my speech started with something along the lines of, _“Today I will speak about the topic of silence, and I will start with a demonstration…”_. The kids burst out in laughter, however I did not. I stood there, in silence, at the front of my entire class for what seemed like hours. Fast forward a few decades, and my relationship with the topic of silence has matured. Yesterday, I took a walk by a frozen river while a fresh coat of snow fell gently to the ground. At one moment, **I paused and heard something I had not heard for a while.** It was the sound of utter and complete silence. No people walking. No cars driving. No birds chirping. No water flowing. No wind blowing._ I stood there, quietly, in awe of the power of the sound of silence._ Much of nature is silent. When it snows, no matter how much, _I hear silence_. When the sun shines brightly, _I hear silence_. When the wind blows, without any trees or obstacles in its way, _I hear silence_. When I was a child, the sound of silence from a parent or teacher terrified me. It meant that they were upset. As I have become older, I have learned to appreciate the power of silence. While in conversation with someone, silence gives even more importance to what is being shared. It invites the listener to absorb fully the meaning behind the words, versus only trying to keep up. **My day is filled with empty spaces.** These are the moments when I am walking, cooking, eating, cleaning, showering, meditating, walking, driving and more. They are all invitations for me to experience silence. **There is a depth to silence that is beyond the sound of words or music for me.** The sound of silence helps me connect more deeply with this present moment, as I have to pause the superficial activities that my body or mind may have been engaged with just moments before. **The sound of silence helps me connect to something larger than myself.** I naturally begin to zoom out from my tiny and temporary existence, and start to gain a different perspective on life and our world. **The sound of silence encourages me to become curious.** While on a quiet walk outside without any distractions, I start to notice the details, the changes and even the magic of nature and my surroundings that I was previously ignorant of. **The sound of silence supports my entry into a flow state. **I do my best work, create my best writing, develop my best ideas, in silence. Simply put, I am my best self with the sound of silence. **The sound of silence is where many of the solutions to my problems are found.** It is actually where I most often first acknowledge that problems exist, a needed step before I can begin to solve them. Silence is like opening a door to a different world. Every time I step through the door of silence, I am living with the lights on. I can now see everything a little more clearly. _Silence is sight. _**That is the power of silence.** Over the past year, the streets and skies have become quieter. The movements and interactions have lightened. The intensity of running from here to there has diminished. The pandemic has been an invitation for me to tune more regularly into the sound of silence. While the digital distractions may have gotten louder, I have discovered that the digital world has an off switch. It is one that I am comfortable to use regularly. _In the presence of silence, I have two options._ To choose to listen to it, and all that is has to say to me. Or to ignore it, _perhaps because I know what it has to say to me._ **The truth is that silence is not very silent.** If I listen closely, there is much for me to hear. _I now encourage you to take a few moments, right now, to tune into the sound of silence._ _Your mind may object, and try to convince you that you have more important things to do. However, I believe that the most important thing you can do right now is to listen to what the sound of silence may have to say to you._ --- ### My Life Is A Canvas Published: 2021-02-13 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/canvas/ I have been reminded recently that _my life is a canvas, and I am the artist_. My life is a canvas And I am the artist My canvas is an invitation _The most beautiful one I will ever receive_ There are no lines to fill It is not a colouring book My canvas is blank _And I am free_ I do forget that I am the artist And can feel more like the paint Being moved and sloshed around by others _I am the painter and not the paint_ Abundance is everywhere The colours are endless So many combinations _Each one unique_ It is messy The paint is everywhere It knows no bounds _I accept this reality_ Tools are helpful Brushes give variety A stand gives support _And water cleanses_ It sometimes feels difficult Taking breaks is needed As in the empty spaces _I regain perspective_ I create not for an audience Not even for myself It is about the effort _Not the fruits of my labour_ Perfection is my enemy A fabrication of my mind It stops me in my tracks _I have to move past it_ It is a journey It does not happen overnight There is no destination _So I learn how to enjoy it_ At times I become blind With ignorance and illusion Unable to see clearly _That I am the artist and my life is the art_ The richness of my art Comes not from its size But from its depth _And its many layers_ Inspiration can be helpful Be it from inside or out And when I feel most inspired _I also become inspiring_ When I share my art I allow myself to be seen When I become curious about others _I begin to see_ Time is my friend She gives me encouragement With her I feel more confident _I am as I am_ I understand the reality That I have only one I am the artist _And this life is my one canvas_ --- ### The Impermanence Of This Moment Published: 2021-02-06 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/impermanence/ A few days ago, I held my newborn nephew for the first time and I noticed how my attention was immediately captivated, unlike ever before. Despite him being asleep in my arms Breathing ever so softly that he was hardly audible Completely immobile and stationary He continued to capture and draw in all of my attention. Despite my years of meditation And weeks of retreats on end This moment was unlike no other As my attention continued to rest on his face, effortlessly. Despite the cuteness of what was in my arms An inner wisdom spoke to me One deeper than intellect or emotion That he will never be like this ever again. _The impermanence of this moment is what focuses my attention, effortlessly._ His tiny nose, ears, fingers and toes The difficulty he has to open his eyes and his sensitivity to light The innocence of each gentle movement, as if in slow motion The softness of his skin, that feels unlike any surface I have ever touched before. It will all change Some of it sooner Some of it later It will all change. In this moment I feel no resistance to change I feel no fear or anxiety about change I feel only pure acceptance of change. I can now sit peacefully and quietly With the understanding that this moment, and everything about it Is impermanent My attention is here, effortlessly. Everything changes First, I can choose to become aware of this Second, I can choose to understand this Third, I can choose to accept this, without condition. This moment is impermanent There is beauty and sadness in this Once I accept this My attention is here, effortlessly. --- ### The Kitchen Of My Mind Published: 2021-01-30 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/kitchen/ Survive or thrive? Reflect for a second about which one of these two words resonates the most in this moment. If it is to survive, that’s understandable. There is a lot happening in the outside world, and possibly in the inside world. I have experienced more moments than I care to remember of feeling stuck in survival mode. It is not only unpleasant but I have felt helpless and hopeless. In those moments, it is convenient for me to blame circumstances that are outside of my control or other people. While it may be true or justified, it does not help me to feel different. _I am still stuck._ **Mindset is the bridge for me to move from surviving to thriving.** And one that I have to continue to cross, as it’s a two way bridge. Mindset is really all I have to work with in those moments when I feel not in control of my life. To move from surviving to thriving starts with setting the intention to do so, as it does not happen on its own for most of us. **When I began my meditation journey, I wanted a clear mind.** I believed that a clear mind meant a mind clear of thoughts. However, after years of practicing a diverse menu of mindfulness practices, I did not experience my mind to be clear of thoughts. Quite the opposite actually. I became more aware of just how many thoughts flooded my mind. The thoughts were not only plenty, they also continued to change, making it difficult to keep tabs on them. **What I have now realized is that a clear mind means that I can see more clearly the thoughts in my mind.** It is not about clearing my mind of thoughts but rather seeing clearly the thoughts that are there. _To see clearly means to understand._ A clear mind asks me to bring the courage and strength required to see, like actually see, the thoughts in my mind. And here is the thing: not all of these thoughts are wonderful to look at. As I become aware more of the thoughts in my mind, I begin to see both desirable and undesirable thoughts. _Awareness does not discriminate._ This is where the inner journey begins. When I step into the kitchen of my mind. Once I am aware of my thinking, which includes the thoughts, emotions, feelings, ideas, fears, anxieties, insecurities, hopes, desires and sensations,** I now have ingredients to work with.** Some of these ingredients are best consumed fresh, like a piece of fruit. If I wait too long, then it is no longer delicious and can be dangerous. Some of these ingredients should be cooked, like garlic or onion. To consume these raw can really sting, however their properties change when given some heat. Some of these ingredients need to be mixed in with other ingredients, like salt. On its own makes no sense, however combined with something else is better. And some of these ingredients need time, like a stew whose flavours become richer days later. To give it the space to be, without trying to force, change or hurry it, gives the benefits that only time can offer. A mindset to survive is to sit in a restaurant with no menu, and wait to be served. I have no choice, no agency and no influence on what dish I will be served and how it will be prepared. The only choice I have is to accept what is given to me, or to be disappointed with what is given to me. **It still does not change the dish that is sitting in front of me.** A mindset to thrive is to walk into the kitchen at the restaurant, to take stock of the ingredients available and to decide what I will cook. It is to take control of how the dish will be prepared, which ingredients will be included and more importantly, **which ingredients will not be included today.** All of the thoughts that flow through my mind have different properties and purposes. When I cross the bridge from surviving to thriving, I enter into the kitchen of my mind. I become a chef, one who is constantly cooking up unique recipes with the ingredients that I have to work with. Like any good chef, I do not identify with any of the ingredients in front of me. They are what they are. I get to choose how, and if, to use them. --- ### My Desire For Predictability Published: 2021-01-23 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/predictability/ There is a comfort that I feel in the predictable, and a discomfort that I feel with the unpredictable. This leads me to actively seek out, and constantly search for predictability in every direction, while simultaneously avoiding unpredictability. When I reflect on my desire for predictability, it is not of what we share in our collective experience, like time, physics, weather or COVID. It is the predictability of what I perceive to be my unique experience of life. **When something unexpected happens to me, one that I did not prepare for, that I was not expecting or that I did not anticipate, I do not feel good.** I feel agitated, anxious or scared. I have felt this way many times, including when a client did not continue to do business with me, when a romantic relationship did not continue or when I felt knee pain after a yoga practice. I sometimes take it personally, as I feel that it is my fault. I was not ready, I was not prepared or I was not good enough. I could have, should have, and would have, knowing what I know now. I sometimes then feel resentment and regret._ Why did this happen?_ I might even feel angry. _Why did this happen to me?_ The truth is that my journey through life is unpredictable. The question is whether I am willing to see and accept the beauty in this truth. **Unpredictability is what gives life to my life.** It is what enables me to feel alive. Without the unpredictable, the unexpected, and the unknown, I would have no motivation to do anything. If I could predict with complete accuracy the outcomes of my actions (or yours), I would spend all of my time analyzing my predictions, not for accuracy, but for desirability. I would be like a kid in the world’s largest toy store, who after walking every aisle, inspecting every possible toy, reading every package, studying every review and asking every question, would spend an entire lifetime in the store without ever playing with a single toy. If I already know how I would feel, I would never accept what was in front of me and believe that there is something better for me that I just have not found yet. If I could predict my stock market investments, my new product launches, the depth of connection with every new friend or the taste of every meal, I would become so closed that I might as well be put in jail. **The desire for predictability is a desire to be put into jail.** In the face of complete predictability, _I become paralyzed._ In the face of complete unpredictability,_ I also become paralyzed._ **The safer thing to do in the face of unpredictability is to wait and see.** Maybe it is preprogrammed into my evolutionary DNA (a convenient answer to many of life’s unanswered questions that gives me comfort, as it is no longer personal to me). For tens of thousands of years, prior to human beings enjoying our current position of privilege at the top of the food chain, it would have been safer in the face of a potential threat to hide and wait for it to subside. Those that did wait and see survived, those that jumped out to face the unpredictability did not survive. **Unpredictability can feel threatening to what I know, to what I want and to what I am ready for.** Perhaps it is tied to childhood experiences, like most beliefs. When unpredictable events happened to me, they likely caused undesirable emotions. It does not matter what the events were, and I have no idea anyways, but what matters is how I would have felt in those unpredictable moments. _Not great._ Over time, I have built a desire to avoid those feelings. This leads me in part to avoid whatever it is that may be unpredictable, for the fear of experiencing those undesirable emotions. **It is not the actual event or situation that I am scared of, it is the emotional feelings and body sensations that they may cause that I am scared of.** **The threats from the unpredictability in life that I face are mostly mental and emotional **_(the one big current exception is of course COVID, which is primarily a physical threat)_. My evolutionary biology has a strong survival response system to physical threats. It increases my heart rate, pumps blood into my muscles, puffs up my chest, focuses my attention and prepares me for a fight or flight response. That same survival response system gets activated in the face of mental and emotional threats, _as it is the only one I was given when I came into this world._ **There is another survival response system to the threat of unpredictability.** It is what I call awareness. The skill of awareness enables me to learn how to be with the unpleasant emotions and sensations that I might be experiencing. To digest them or release them, so that they no longer overpower or overwhelm me. Awareness is an inner process. I use the term process deliberately, as **a process represents something that is predictable and repeatable.** Meditation, yoga, journaling, breathing and similar exercises all help me cultivate the skill of awareness. They help me build a survival response system that is better suited for the mental and emotional threats from unpredictability that I will continue to encounter on my journey through life. **My best defense against unpredictability is not to avoid it but to develop a process that allows me to respond to it when it appears. **_As the only predictable thing in my life is that my life will be unpredictable._ --- ### I Do Therefore I Am Published: 2021-01-16 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/therefore/ This belief that I do therefore I am has guided me for most of my life. My identity has been and still is strongly associated with what I have done in the past, what I am presently doing and what I am capable of doing in the future. I do therefore I am. From a young age, I can only imagine that as I began to show some initiative, it was recognized and rewarded by those around me. It is probably easier to raise a child that is able to do his own homework, make his own breakfast & lunch, clean up after himself and be generally independent. That was me. That is still me. I unknowingly learned at a young age that I do therefore I am. **Through middle school and high school, I identified most with what I did.** The activities, like student government. I did not identify with the friends that I had, as I had many, and still do. I did not identify with the movies, sports, music or video games of the time, as I was uninterested in all of it. I identified most with what I did. I took initiative and got good grades. **This momentum of doing lifted me through university.** I continued to show initiative and started student groups, ran conferences and organized people. I do therefore I am. While family and friends recognized me at an early age, schools and institutions began to recognize me through grade school. The awards each year began to pile up and became an expectation. The scholarships also began to add up. **In the early years of starting my business, the media began to recognize me.** Countless cover stories appeared in the newspaper portraying a kid out of school, son of immigrants, at a time before it was cool for young people to start companies. It must have been a relatively uneventful period in history, as the stories were just that, stories. **As my business started to grow, the industry recognition began.** The fastest, youngest, best this, that and the other. Like any substance use disorder or addiction, after some time, I became numb to it all. The recognition that I have received from a young age through to adulthood from parents, teachers, media and industry causes me to pause and wonder if it all has been helpful or hurtful. The answer is both. **There is no such thing as a one-sided coin.** The recognition helps with visibility, to attract resources like talent and capital, to help manifest my vision. The recognition also hurts when I am distracted by it, when I choose to identify with it, or worse of all, when I actually believe it. I do therefore I am. **I see now that the reason that I believe this is because that is the culture and society in which I have grown up in.** We all have. **Recognition releases dopamine**, the pleasure hormone, in my brain. Be it from receiving an industry award, making some arbitrary top list or having my photo in the newspaper. It’s all the same and it all feels good. However like all dopamine triggers, it is temporary and short-lived. It is also addictive. **Appreciation on the other hand releases serotonin**, the happiness hormone, in my brain. Be it from sharing appreciation with others or receiving it, it also feels good, but in a different way than dopamine. Serotonin is long lasting and the benefits are felt in more places in my brain. It is the feeling I get when watching the sun set over the ocean or the quiet satisfaction from doing something that I find challenging. It is the feeling I get after writing each week. **Appreciation is most valuable when it is with people or passions that I feel most connected to**. I appreciate the quiet mornings I can enjoy in meditation. I appreciate the family and friends that I can laugh with. I appreciate the intellectual stimulation from solving a complex business problem for my clients or with my team. This understanding inspires me to make choices that prioritize serotonin over dopamine. When I scan my to do list, I can put the word serotonin or dopamine next to each one. It is clear what on that list will give me a temporary boost versus what will give me a long lasting satisfaction. Last summer, as I was clearing out our office space to give it back to the landlord, I found a box of all the awards that I had received over the past decade. There were dozens of newspaper clippings, trophies, plaques and more. The things that would make any parent proud. Despite moving offices several times over the past decade, this box of awards, filled with dust, seemed to follow me. I had a nostalgic moment and chose to indulge myself. I picked up one of the awards and tried to visualize who I was, where I was and how I was when it was given to me. I then realized that I no longer connected to or associated with that person or that moment. I then gently put the awards back into the box and quietly placed the box next to all of the other boxes and bags that were to be thrown out. **That was the moment I realized that I am no longer what I do.** “I do therefore I am” is like an embedded system in a computer. It is deep and at the core of everything. It will take time and support for me to build a new embedded system, to replace this older one. I am as I am. This is what I am now starting to believe. --- ### Notice What You Notice Published: 2021-01-10 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/notice/ Association is a powerful, yet involuntary, process that happens in my brain and yours. When I hear the word “red," the images of a fire, a sports car, lipstick and an apple immediately rush to the front of my brain. _What do fire, a sports car, lipstick and an apple have to do with one another?_ Very little, except that they are all associated with the colour red in my brain. The associations in my brain with colours and objects are fairly benign and mostly harmless. _Other associations may not be as harmless though._ In my early years roaming this planet, as my brain was rapidly developing, many foundational associations were made. **Some intentional, most circumstantial.** As a child, I absorbed like a sponge everything that I could from my environment. This included my sister, my friends, my teachers, my culture and most of all, my parents. Parents are the first meaningful relationships that I developed as a child. It is a relationship that I depended on literally to survive. _I would have been helpless without the care of my parents when I first entered this world._ Naturally, their influence on me cannot be understated. **At a time in my life when my brain was developing and discovering how to be in the world, I turned to my parents for more insight and information than they likely realized. **Last year, when I unexpectedly got the chance to live with my parents during the pandemic, I began to understand and see a lot of the associations of my brain reflected back to me._ It was like living with mirrors everywhere, showing me just how much I had been shaped by them._ As I got older, the associations I formed in my brain were primarily influenced by the education I received. Through grade school, secondary school and into university, I was heavily influenced by the teachers and textbooks. **It is also a time in life when I began to form associations with other people of my own choosing, not only based on circumstance** growing up under my parents roof. Friends began to influence me, and me them, in ways that none of us were likely aware of._ It’s like we were trading values and beliefs with each other, as if they were baseball cards that we were collecting._ As I began to build my career, in particular in a knowledge based role and industry, I began to form associations with my business, including my team, my clients, my investors and more. I began to identify with what I did, and was influenced by the leaders, formal and informal, around me. My taste in media began to become more refined. I started to feel more conviction in my beliefs.** I began to associate with other people based on these beliefs, likely to the unconscious exclusion of others with different beliefs.** Regardless of where I have been on my journey through life, I have always been influenced by the associations that I have collected along the way. There is a quality of impermanence that is a core ingredient of reality. Everything changes, and when I recognize this, then **I begin to see how my associations change over time and how my associations change me over time.** The moments of struggle for me have been when I mistakenly believe my associations to be solid and fixed, like concrete. _Unmoveable, unmoldable, unchangeable. _It is in these moments that I stopped living and was ignorant to reality. I must continue to ask myself, am I causing harm to others? To myself? If I am, then I must look deeper to understand which associations are leading me to take these actions, say these words or have these thoughts. _Notice What You Notice_ is an intentional act to bring awareness to the associations that are present for me. It is an acknowledgement that they are not permanent and will continue to change. That includes the people that I associate with, the ideas that I associate with and most of all, the beliefs that I associate with. It is an understanding that my associations have shaped and influenced my choices through life and will continue to. As I have begun to notice what I notice, I have seen my curiosity for understanding why I believe what I do grow. I have also seen my openness to new possibilities grow. And most of all, I can better see and understand myself. **From this place of self-awareness, I feel more alive than I have ever before.** _Notice What You Notice._ --- ### Like A Snowflake Published: 2021-01-02 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/snowflake/ You and me, we are both like a snowflake. Unique and beautiful in our own way, yet also here temporarily. As my understanding of the reality of impermanence continues to strengthen, my desire to be intentional in the choices that I make also continues to strengthen. The growing desire to be intentional leads me to ask a big question at the start of a new year: _what direction will I go?_ Imagine walking into a forest, where no one has travelled before. In the face of this, there are two reactions: to feel scared or to feel excited. If you feel scared, then you can stop reading this reflection as it is not yet relevant for you. If you feel excited to pave your own path, then continue reading. **While on my own path, there are some big decisions and many small decisions that inform where I go.** With no clear markers along the way, I ask myself where I believe I should go. Not what others expect of me, but what I expect of me. There are naturally obstacles along my journey. Moments when it is dark and cloudy, and when I feel lost._ I need help to navigate the unknown and the uncertainty._ What I have started to learn is that when the countless choices that I must make on my path are aligned with a guiding direction, then I actually go somewhere. _When they are not, I remain lost._ **For the past several years on this day, I have set a one word intention to be that direction for the year ahead. **It is a north star or compass, one that helps me navigate the choices I make, large and small. Last year, my intention was heart. For me, it was specifically an intention to explore leading life more with my heart versus my mind. When I reflect on the year that was, I am eternally grateful for this intention as it helped me make choices that took me on paths that I otherwise would not have traveled. In previous years, my one word intentions have been trust, fearless, freedom, energy and discovery. All deeply personal and relevant to me, in my own unique way, at the time when I chose them. **This year, my intention is space.** It has a very specific meaning for me at this moment. It is learning to give more space to ideas, people and situations, and most of all, it is learning to give myself more space to understand, process and navigate. I could not be more excited to explore this intention in the year ahead. The ritual to set a one word intention at the start of each year is different from setting goals or resolutions. What I have learned from past experience is that when I set goals, I become closed in my thinking and discriminate against new ideas, opportunities and experiences that are not directly aligned with my goals. On the other hand, when I set a one word intention, I become open. Open to new possibilities, as I feel empowered to choose along the way how this intention might manifest. The one word is meant to be abstract and non specific to any one context or circumstance. This is the quality that invites creativity and openness. In reading this reflection, by now you might already know your one word intention for the year ahead. I encourage you to share your one word intention with those close to you (and I would also love to hear it). Sharing my intention with others is a way for me to further commit to it, to receive encouragement and support, and possibly inspire others to come up with their own one word intention. If you are looking for inspiration, below is a list of one word intentions that friends have shared with me in the past few years. Pay attention to how you feel emotionally as you read through them. You know you have found your one word intention when you feel lifted, inspired and energized by it. **Like a snowflake, my time here is what it is.** This inspires me to be intentional about each and every moment I get to be here. I hope you choose to be as well. Acceptance Action Authentic Awareness Balance Bold Breathe Care Change Commitment Communication Compassion Confidence Connection Control Courage Create Discipline Equilibrium Explore Faith Fearless Fit Focus Form Fortitude Freedom Fun Generosity Giving Grace Gratitude Grounded Growth Harmony Heart Humility Integrity Joy Learn Lightness Love Mastery Open Ownership Partnership Play Positive Presence Relationships Relax Respect Responsibility Self Love Serve Sincerity Simplify Space Surrender Thoughtful Truth Trust Understanding Union Win --- ### Make Peace With The Past Published: 2020-12-20 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/peace1/ This is a sacred time of the year for me, more important and powerful than even my birthday. There is something powerful when our collective is experiencing something together, whether it is a concert or covid precautions, we are all in a similar mindset and mood. At this time, we all become a little more introspective, our interactions become a little quieter and the pace of everything slows down. **Picture yourself driving on an open highway really fast. **When driving this fast, you cannot read the signs along the road. It is only once you slow down can you read the signs that are right there for you. Similarly, in this time when the world around us slows down, we feel more comfortable to slow down. And within that slowing down, we start to see signs on our journey that we otherwise may not see._ These signs usually direct us towards needed and important change._ To bring about change, the environment matters. Compare a large corporation to a nimble startup. The environment of one is more inviting to change than the other. It is not the people, but the environment. At the start of a new year, our collective environment is more open to change as a result of us each being more open to individual change. When someone shares an intention for change, we meet their intention with encouragement. We also have our own intentions for change that we hope others will meet with encouragement. The first step in setting intentions for a new year for me has nothing to do with the new year, and everything to do with the past year. Learning to make peace with my recent past is the first, and most important, step in my end of year ritual. It is also the most difficult. Naturally, there are disappointments about unfilled desires that I feel when reflecting on the past year. The practice of gratitude is one way to take the edge off any unpleasant emotions that I might feel during this reflection. Crying, as a way to process the emotions, is another way. _Both have a way to cut through the noise and bring my attention to what it is that I appreciate._ To make peace with my recent past is not an easy task. It is easier to choose to not accept what happened, or what did not happen, and to ignore how I feel about it. The problem that I have found is that when I do not acknowledge and accept my past year, my intentions for the next year are tainted. What happens is that I drag my past into my future, and set intentions that are trying to compensate, or usually overcompensate, for past choices that I am dissatisfied with. **Fast forward a few months, I am now doing something with so much conviction yet cannot remember or connect to why I am even doing it.** For example, imagine if my meditation practice was falling behind and inconsistent as of late. To compensate, I might set the intention to meditate for 3 hours a day in the new year. And a month into meditating for 3 hours a day, I have no idea why I am still doing it and feel frustrated that I do not have the space in my day for other people and priorities that I value. _I go back to not meditating consistently._ Another example is to imagine that I have not kept in touch with close friends. I feel dissatisfied with myself, and build up the conviction to always stay in touch with everyone. I now spend 5 hours a day calling and messaging friends, and after about 5 days of this, I am burnt out and exhausted._ I go back to not feeling inspired to stay in touch with anyone._ This is why I try to make peace with my past in this time, as a preventative measure for what I know I might otherwise do, is so important. To bring closure to the year is like landing plans that are flying around me. _All I want to do right now is land the planes. And avoid taking flight in new ones._ These planes might be my inbox, my to-do list, open conversations, my physical or digital space. This ritual of landing planes naturally leads to these last few working days of the year feeling extra intense, however what they do is help create the mental space for what comes next. Once I have made peace with my past and landed most of the planes flying around, now I can begin to retreat from the world outside of me. While in previous years, I would take a trip to somewhere remote, this year I will be doing a self-retreat. Current covid precautions are an extra encouragement for us each to do this. During the last week of the year, I will be screen-free. That means no phone, no laptop, no TV. By limiting the external stimuli for my mind, my focus naturally drifts inwards. **All of these steps create the conditions for me to hangout with myself, without distraction.** In this space of deep inner reflection, I am forced to see the truth and cannot hide from it. The truth is not good and it is not bad, it is what it is. Any discomfort that I feel in the face of the truth is a reflection that I am wanting some different version of the truth and not the real truth, as it is. Reality reflects the truth. And reality always wins. This is an important time for me to get up close and personal with it. **Reality is full of the wisdom that I need to hear. **This is a time for inner harvest. The fields are ripe for picking and this end of year ritual is my invitation to see what this year’s crop has for me. The preparation for the harvest is clear: to make peace with my past. Only then can I pay attention to what is right there, in plain sight within me. --- ### The Inefficient Human Published: 2020-12-13 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/machine/ Machines are predictable, usually reliable and very consistent. Humans are not. **Despite our best efforts, we are not machines.** We live in a society and culture that celebrates, recognizes and rewards machine-like behaviour though. To try and be something we are not is unnatural. It is not natural for a human to act like a machine, yet we try to do it everyday. The way we might try to domesticate a dog or cat, we try to domesticate ourselves, our children, our parents, our friends, our coworkers and as much of our society as we can. If you act in a way that is not to my liking, then I will punish you with the power of my word, with my actions or by withholding my attention, respect or even love for you. _I make all of this conditional on you acting and behaving in a way that is to my liking and expectation._ I am not a machine, despite having relatively strong discipline and work ethic, and having learned skills that enable me to be highly effective, efficient and focused. It is sad that the more machine-like I am, the more that I am rewarded and recognized in our present society. There is a fundamental problem with our desire for ourselves and for each other to be more machine-like and less human-like. **We are not designed to be as efficient as machines are.** Machines have an energy source called electricity, which is highly efficient, widely available and considered a commodity. Humans also have sources of energy, however they are nowhere close to as efficient. **Sleep.** Could you imagine if your phone, laptop or TV needed to sleep for eight hours a day? You may not value it as much as you do. **Food.** Think about the amount of collective resources we invest in growing, farming, harvesting, processing, transporting, stocking, shelving, buying, preparing, storing, cleaning, and of course, eating. That meal that you scarfed down in ten minutes yesterday involved hundreds of hours and thousands of people, all playing a small role. Your iPhone battery now looks pretty efficient in comparison. **Learning.** Humans spend the better part of fifteen years in a formal education system. As bright as we think we might be as a species, it takes over fifteen years for us to learn the skills to be useful and have a chance in society. And we are not even doing that great of a job educating our children. Compare that to the minutes it takes to download information from one machine to the next. I could go on. **The point is this: we are not machines. **And our attempts to act like one, are just that, acting. _Some of us are better actors than others, but in the end, it is just acting._ When you feel exhausted after your Zoom filled work day and work week, know that it is your body telling you that it is tired of acting. Last year, while I was still living in New York, a friend brought me to a talk with a panel of Broadway actors and the topic was biohacking. They were sharing their tips and tricks to cope with the demands of being on stage daily. I was surprised to learn, through their stories, how intense it is to be on stage. The rehearsals, two performances a night, the expectations to be absolutely perfect and the pressure of knowing that there is always someone younger, stronger, more talented than you, ready to step in to replace you the moment that you miss your line just once. Many shared that to be successful on stage, you need to mentally and emotionally embody your character’s persona. So much so that you start to believe that you are that character and lose sight of who you really are. The few that made time to hangout with family and friends shared that it was not always clear to them if they were in character or being themselves. **The lines get blurry once you are acting so much.** The digitization of our lives has been accelerated this year, without a doubt. What might have taken five to ten years, and been done with a bit more thought, planning and consideration, is now our present reality. At the workplace. In the classroom. Around the boardroom. And more. Unsure how to be in this new reality, we all have become actors overnight, on display through those tiny cameras and hidden microphones that are embedded in almost every machine around us. We are constantly being watched and listened to, and I have to believe this is subtly and perhaps unconsciously influencing how we are. Our environment has nudged us to be a bit more performative in every interaction, and given the thousands of micro interactions we might have in any given week, we all are now full time actors. **What is worse is when we expect those around us to also be performative, and we reward or punish them accordingly.** The moment someone acts in a way that is not to our liking, or we notice an inconsistency with our expectations, we let them know directly or indirectly._ It might be through words, actions or the lack thereof._ The role that many of us are trying to perform now is one of a machine. One that is productive, efficient, effective, consistent, predictable, and of course, void of emotion. One that does as expected and does not deviate from the script. One that can be controlled, and in turn, understands how to control others. **The simple awareness that we are not in fact machines is how we step off the stage and step into who we truly are. **We do experience emotions, like joy, pleasure, fatigue, pain, suffering and more. To be aware of and accept our own emotions cultivates self-compassion. The only way to become aware of our emotions is to learn to notice them as they arise, be patient to sit with them when they are there and quietly watch them go away in their own time. _Mindfulness and reflective practices help me do this._ From a place of self-compassion, we can begin to radiate kindness and understanding of others, and of their emotions. To be human is to have emotions. It is part of our design, whether we agree with it or not, it is our reality. Given it is our reality, it is in our best interest to accept it, understand it and enjoy the benefits of it. Once we see ourselves as humans, not machines, then we begin to treat others as humans, and not as machines. _And while humans might be inefficient machines, machines are ineffective humans._ **I choose to be more human-like and less machine-like. **I feel immense gratitude for the experience of being human, with all of its ups and downs. It is who we truly are. --- ### The Search For Truth Published: 2020-12-06 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/search/ How do I know if something is true? **Well, I first have to believe it.** Can I think that something is true without believing in it? For example, let’s imagine that it is snowing right now. How might I choose to believe that it is not? Well I could stay inside, close my blinds, not check the weather or talk about it with anyone else. Basically be in a state of ignorance. However, the moment that I become aware, for example if I go outside and see fluffy white snowflakes land gently on my skin, then I can no longer believe that it is not snowing. What is true for me is because I believe it to be true. Without my belief, it is not true. However, everything that I believe is not necessarily true. **This is where I can get in trouble.** I believe that the stock market will go up. I believe that I cannot get covid. I believe that climate change will continue to have detrimental impacts on our environment. I believe that my products are better than those of my competitors. I believe that the results of the US election are not clear. I believe that we are in a mental health crisis. I believe that all humans are fundamentally good at our core. These are a collection of beliefs, some that are true, some that are not. Yet my mind can make them all true for me, in my life, in this moment, if I choose to believe them. It all happens in my mind. Outside forces, people and my environment no doubt influence me however my mind is ultimately in the driver’s seat. _It decides what I believe to be true, even though it may not be._ My journey through life is a search for the truth. **A search for the truth that requires a strong relationship with my mind**, as otherwise I am victim to the whims of what my mind may decide to believe or not believe. This journey is also one of experimentation. It begins with awareness of what it is that I believe, and then is followed by a curiosity to try and uncover whether my belief is true or not. _There are a few ways to uncover if my belief is true or not._ **The best way is to experiment for myself. **This gives me first-hand evidence and experience, and the opportunity to learn. To learn is to grow. For example, I believe that I can cook thai food, that I can be comfortable in a challenging yoga pose and that my clients will value my new product. The best way for me to uncover if my beliefs are the truth is to action them. I put the effort forward, without attachment to what may come of it, as my mindset is one of curiosity. _“Is this true?”._ **Another way is for me to wait and give space to the belief.** For example, I believe that a covid vaccine will be effective and that the majority of people will take it. All I can do is wait to see if this belief will become true._ There is not much else for me to do at this moment._ **Yet another way is to survey and tap into the knowledge or experience of other people known to me.** For example, I believe that it could be a lot of fun to go snowshoeing in the winter but have not done so as an adult, only as a child. I could ask friends who have, to uncover if this belief has been true for them. I still would not know though if this is true for me until I actually do it. _More importantly, I would not realize the benefits of this belief until I actually do it._ **There is another way, which is unhelpful and harmful.** It is when I get lazy. When I believe something to be true simply because it appears as though others mostly do. Just because others believe it to be true does not make it true. The mystical “they” that is often spoken of and referenced. _“They say that…”_. _“They believe that if you…”_. This is a dangerous method to uncover if a belief is true, as it becomes easy to fall victim to living under a veil of ignorance. We can look to online bullying, cancel culture, political extremism and terrorist groups to find examples where group-think can lead to a misguided conviction behind a belief, which then leads to harmful and detrimental choices and actions. One way to mitigate the risk of blindly following a commonly held belief, that may or may not be true, is to take a moment to pause, and to ask myself, _“do I believe this to be true?”_. Not what the media tells me. Not what social feeds tell me or even what friends tell me. What do I actually believe? The answer may be that I do believe it to be true, which is fine. It may be that I do not believe it to be true, which should also be fine. Or the answer may be that “I don’t know”. And these might just be the three most powerful words that I can say to myself. “I don’t know” is where my search for the truth begins. **Philosophy was originally defined as “the love of wisdom”.** I believe that wisdom is the ideal mixture of two ingredients: knowledge and experience. Knowledge alone (without practice) is but an intellectual game or exercise and does not result in wisdom. Experience alone (without awareness or attention) does not expose the deeper benefits. Knowledge and experience together cultivates wisdom. And if philosophy is to love wisdom, then it is to love knowledge (learning) and experience (growth). **Physics originates from philosophy.** _I find this fascinating._ Science was born from philosophy, as a process to prove wisdom. Like this, we are all philosophers, developing beliefs from our own knowledge and experience, and we are all scientists, when we see everything as an experiment designed to help us uncover the truth. --- ### How To Turn On A Light Bulb Published: 2020-11-29 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/light/ I woke up one week ago today with no electricity and no water in the place I was staying. When I first got out of bed and walked into the living room, I sensed that something was different. The clock on the oven was no longer flashing and the living room felt a little cooler than previous mornings had. _However my conscious mind had yet to connect the dots all the while my gut was telling me something I could not hear._ When I turned on the kitchen tap to fill up a glass with water, I was surprised to not see anything come out of the faucet. I closed it and tried again, a common strategy used to troubleshoot technology failures. _It still did not work._ I then went to turn the light on and after it did not work, the light bulb of my mind turned on. In a faction of a second, my mind connected the fact that the oven clock was no longer flashing, that the electric heater was likely not working and that the light switch did nothing. The day before, I had arrived at this new space. I was in the middle of nowhere. A little town between Toronto and Ottawa, with an official population of 500 people and a visible population of not more than 5 people. This fact added to the drama that morning, as I was not in a familiar space and did not know anyone nearby. **Furthermore, cell phone reception was sparse, and without electricity, I was internetless.** _Calmly, I sat down to meditate._ **That morning, I learned the power of habit. **The conditioning over six years of every morning, waking up, drinking water and sitting down to meditate, was so deeply ingrained in me that I unconsciously carried on as everything was normal without any concern, despite the many reasons to have concern. As I brought my attention to my body and my breath in meditation practice, the light bulb of my mind began to brighten. I realized that I was in the middle of nowhere, without electricity, water or the ability to communicate. Anxious thoughts flooded my mind, naturally. I continued to sit quietly and watch them, without reacting or giving into the fear. After a few long minutes, the flood of anxiety had ceased and there I was, still sitting, quietly and patiently. Looking back, I could have simply packed my few belongings, got into my car and left town. _That thought was nowhere to be found though that morning._ What did arise was a curiosity about how I might survive without electricity, water and the internet for the week ahead. **Then, light bulbs turned on all over my mind.** The food I had bought the day before that was stored in the fridge would go bad. I would put it all in my car, as it was cold outside, and use my car as a fridge. The availability of drinking water might be an issue. I would drink the almond milk I have, the two water bottles in the car and if desperate, drive to a store to buy water. The room would eventually become cold without the electric heater working. I would cover up the windows to limit any draft, preserve the heat that remained and layer up. The power supply I had would need to be conserved. I would use the remaining battery in my laptop to keep my phone charged. The Zoom calls scheduled for the week ahead were no longer a possibility. I would drive somewhere with cell reception, to send cancellations for all of my meetings. The shower would no longer be an option. I still am not sure why I shower everyday in lockdown anyways, but this would be an experiment to see what happens. The time I would have would be invested in writing and reading. Given it gets dark early these days, I would look for a candle somewhere. **I was beginning to feel confident that I could do this.** Then I felt excited. Really excited by the challenge that was ahead of me and the unknown if it was possible. I believed it to be possible, however did not know for sure and was about to find out. In that moment, I committed to my plan and chose to see this as an experiment. I would live for the next week without electricity, water and the internet. **Meditation has taught me how to relate to my thoughts.** Yes, I saw anxious thoughts appear at first and then with time, disappear. That created the space for new thoughts, ones that inspire and excite me. The light bulb of my mind is brightest when it has space. **Meditation has also taught me that everything changes.** Later that afternoon, the electricity came on. I felt genuinely disappointed. A few hours later, the water started to work again. I felt even more disappointed. I was excited for the adventure I had built up in my mind and now was bored with the comforts that electricity and water provided. _That night, as I journaled about my day, the light bulb of my mind continued to shine bright as I started to plan for another adventure..._ --- ### Imagination Is More Important Than Knowledge Published: 2020-11-22 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/imagination/ I recently heard an Einstein quote that imagination is more important than knowledge, and I cannot get it out of my mind. It is a thought that has touched my soul, one that gives me permission to create and feels like freedom. My mind feels heard and seen. See, once I become an expert on something and acquire too much knowledge and experience about it, I become closed. Closed is the opposite of how I wish to be, which is open. For example, I consider myself an expert in the digital advertising industry, with certain meditation techniques and at cooking popcorn on a stove. **Too much knowledge can become a liability though, not an asset.** It makes it difficult, if not impossible, to see clearly what I might have not yet discovered or uncovered. I am now starting to better understand the Buddhist teaching that encourages us to approach everything in life with a beginner’s mind. _The expert’s mind is closed, where the beginner’s mind is open._ **This thought, that imagination is more important than knowledge, can feel uncomfortable and quite foreign.** Our conditioning and programming is such that we have learned for our entire lives that knowledge is power. I believe that it is, however I suspect that imagination may be even more powerful, and useful. We have built systems like schools, manuals and traditions, all designed to teach and share knowledge.** Our systems and structures to teach imagination feel quite lacking in comparison.** As a child, the more knowledge that you can prove that you have memorized in school, the more recognition and rewards you will receive. As an adult, the more knowledge that you can demonstrate in the workplace, the more opportunities that you will receive. For example, in my own business when I interview candidates, I am evaluating them primarily about their knowledge of specific areas but not really about their capacity and capability to imagine. **In this moment of Year Zero, where we have been given the space and opportunity to reimagine the future of humanity, we absolutely need to encourage more imagination.** Knowledge describes what we have known, where imagination invites a possibility that is deeply inspiring for me. **I believe that our minds are designed to imagine, first and foremost. **This is what our minds are doing all day and night, awake and especially while asleep. It is quite effortless for my mind to imagine, where it is quite effortful for my mind to understand and remember knowledge. Now imagination, like awareness, does not discriminate. I can imagine a beautiful idea, a desirable future state, a goal to achieve or even people who are special to me._ These are all pleasant and can be quite joyful for my mind to imagine._ I can also imagine what it is that I am most scared of. Maybe it is societal, like the impacts of the pandemic and the many what ifs. Maybe it is about loved ones. Maybe it is about work. _There is an endless list of horrible ideas that my mind is also capable of imagining._ What I do admire about knowledge though is that it is connected to the truth, where imagination is not yet and may never be. The truth is a grounding force that helps me stay rooted in what is real. This is a useful function of knowledge. **Every moment, my mind is imagining something.** It may be a past experience, conversation or moment. It may be a possible future, one that I fear or one that I desire. Whatever it is, with this understanding of the power of my mind to imagine, I can do three things. **The first is to make more space for imagination.** Nothing that is around me would have been possible if someone did not first imagine it. A lot that is great in my life started with my imagination. Meditation, journaling and walking in nature alone all help me make more space for imagination. **The next is to not avoid the knowledge trap. **If I rely too much on what I have known to be true, or what others have known to be true, then I deprive my mind of the opportunity to do what it does best, which is to imagine. **And finally, to inspire my imagination in a direction that is wholesome, positive and aspirational.** My mind has the capacity to imagine horrible ideas and beautiful ones. Let me choose to nudge my mind in a direction that inspires me versus in a direction that scares me. To imagine is to dream. Which means that I am always dreaming, awake or asleep. _So I might as well make it a sweet dream versus a nightmare._ Imagine a world where we place as much, or possibly more, value on imagination than we do on knowledge. **That is a world that sounds inspiring to me.** --- ### The Boy Lost In The Woods Published: 2020-11-14 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/woods/ A little boy went for a walk. Lost in thought, he ended up deep into the woods. The peaceful surrounding was an invitation for him to continue walking, without concern for where he was going. The sounds of the birds chirping meant he was not alone. The breeze was a guiding hand, softly showing him the way. The path previously traveled by others had ended, yet he continued walking, unaware and unbothered. The sun began to set, and before long it was dark. The boy tripped on a fallen branch and that is when he took a momentary pause from thinking. He realized that he was lost and his heart sank. There was no one in sight, no breeze guiding him and no birds keeping him company. The darkness outside gave birth to unpleasant thoughts inside. He was scared and although was physically stationary, he was mentally running fast, nowhere. Exhausted and frightened, he began to cry. He continued to cry, almost as if he was secretly hoping it would help him forget that he was lost in the woods, at night. He was alone and felt it inside. After some time, the tears stopped. There were no more left inside. All that was left inside, in that moment of vulnerability, were his thoughts. His scary thoughts. Thoughts about what might happen to him, alone in the woods, at night. Almost ready to give up, he raised his head to look around. He did not see all that it was that scared him. He realized that all that he was scared of was only in his mind, not in the woods. In that moment, perhaps for the first time in his life, he saw his thoughts. Upon seeing his thoughts, he was no longer bound by them. His mind had been like a cave with bats flying around wildly and in that moment of seeing, a light shone brightly causing these bats to scatter. The scary thoughts were no longer in sight. This light helped him see. What felt like hours passed in mere seconds. He saw that the past and the future did not exist anywhere but in his mind. Upon seeing his mind, all thoughts of the past and future scattered. All that was left was the present moment. He saw that he had to experience hardship and despair to see clearly. He tells himself to remember this the next time that he feels down, as there will be a next time. He saw the universal truth that everything changes. His environment, relationships and beliefs have all changed and he can only assume they will continue to change. He saw his own suffering, caused not by others, but by his attitude towards reality. He wishes for others to be relieved from their suffering through understanding it. He saw that his world is a mirror, reflecting back to him whatever he is in that moment. When he smiles, his world shines brightly. When he worries, his world becomes a sea of worry. In that moment of wisdom, he rubs his eyes and looks around. He is lying down, in bed. He had dreamt about being lost in the woods. He feels light, free and at peace, unable to remember why. Despite his trying, he cannot recall what it was that he dreamt of. However he feels the effects of it and knows it was a powerful journey somewhere. He vows to carry this feeling with him and brighten his world with it. The boy had been lost. He was stuck in the darkness of his mind. Upon taking a moment to see his own thoughts, he was no longer his thoughts. He found his light, which helped him see reality. He then felt at peace. He had to get lost for him to find his light. And once he saw the light, he became the light. --- ### Hide And Seek Published: 2020-11-08 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/hideandseek/ As a young kid, I always enjoyed playing hide and seek. Partly because I was half decent at it, and partly because it was a game that I could express my creativity with. **My strategy was unlike the other kids that I would play with.** Where most would simply find the furthest or most obscure place to hide and stay, stand, lie or crouch quietly waiting to not be found,_ I did the opposite._ I would make sure that I was in earshot of the seeker, the kid who was responsible for searching for the rest of us, and pay attention to their movements. My strategy involved changing my hiding location quietly and continuously._ It was as if I was seeking the seeker. _This strategy worked particularly well, as it was of course unexpected. The seeker would not think to search places he or she had already searched. Inevitably though, where the strategy consistently failed was that it was also unexpected for the other kids who were in the game. Some of them, who had already been found, would get confused when they would see me moving and innocently begin talking to me and asking me questions. _My cover would then be blown and the seeker would find me._ Similar to the playing hide and seek, in the game of life, I am seeking solutions to many problems. All of the issues, challenges, obstacles and discomforts that I feel are problems that I am seeking solutions for. These could be personal problems, business problems or more recently, societal problems. I am the seeker and the solutions are the other kids who are hiding from me. _My role is to find them._ One of the questions I have often received as an entrepreneur is, _“how does it feel to work for yourself?”_, to which I respond, _“I don’t know”_. **I don’t know what it feels like to work for myself, because I genuinely feel that I work for everyone around me. **I work for and feel accountable to my team, my clients, my shareholders, my industry and more. The hundreds of people that I feel responsible to means that their problems, at least as it relates to my business or industry, in part become my problems. This year has brought to the surface many societal problems that have existed for sometime and introduced new ones. _In short, there is no shortage of problems for any of us._ Now in the face of a problem without an obvious solution, I sometimes find myself taking the traditional approach to the game of hide and seek. As the one seeking, I begin to look in all of the usual places for a solution. As a kid would search all over the house for the other kids, as an adult, I am searching all over my mind, sorting through my thoughts and possibly the thoughts of others, looking for a solution. _This takes time and can be exhausting._ Upon realizing that the solution cannot be easily found, I begin to change my approach. **Instead of seeking and searching, and instead of giving up, I decide to wait. **Patience becomes a virtue as inevitably, the solution shows itself. Similar to how as a kid playing hide and seek I would constantly change my location but be eventually found, what I have learned is that the solution will be eventually found. _Not always from me seeking it though, but by it showing itself._ Everything changes, I just don’t know how, when or even sometimes, why. However there is nothing that is permanent in life. My work is to learn how to be with the change. How to welcome it, not to be upset with it or resent it for not showing up how or when I expect it to. **With space, everything changes, including the problems that I face and the problems that I see.** The many problems that the pandemic introduced earlier this Spring are examples of where I found myself not seeking solutions but rather giving space for them to appear. What to do with our offices? Although we left our spaces in early March, it was not until two months later that it became clear that we would not be going back. **We then decided to commit to Work From Anywhere on a long-term basis.** That solution was not visible to me in March but it was in May, _once I gave it space._ In January, our business plan was to invest in and launch several new product lines this year. In March, we hit pause on these plans and it was only a few months later that we decided to double-down on our existing product lines, for our existing clients, as their needs had changed. _Again, the solution became clear with space._ I left New York and flew back to Canada with only a carry-on suitcase in March. In the weeks to follow, I felt confused as to what to do with my apartment in New York, which was not cheap to keep. _Again with space, the solution became clear a little while later and I decided to not go back._ When deciding if I want to hire a specific candidate to join my team, how to manage a client negotiation or decide product priorities, giving myself space from the decisions at hand has proven to be highly effective as a strategy to find a solution. I would describe it as creating the space to deliberately not think about it. It is a form of restraint from the impulse to try and solve everything immediately. The Empty Spaces is another term, which I wrote about recently, to describe this act of making space. It is in these moments of not actively trying to solve a problem that the solution to the problem becomes clear. **Yoga philosophy describes this as the process of accessing our inner wisdom, which is beyond intellect or knowledge. **It is a part of ourselves where deep knowing and insight resides. _Again, it is beyond our mind and thoughts._ The path to access this part of myself is counterintuitive at first. To try to cultivate wisdom would be the equivalent of the seeker who is searching for solutions in the obvious places. I can only search in the places that I know exist. The work for me here instead is to create the space so that what is already there, deep within myself, can come to the surface and enter into my consciousness. **I have developed the belief that the solution is usually hiding within me.** What’s left is for it to rise into my awareness, which can only happen if there is space for it to do so. --- ### Who Is Really In Control Published: 2020-11-01 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/really/ Pay attention to what you pay attention to. This is the best advice that I could give a young person today, or even an old person for that matter. **Some believe in free will. **That I am fully in control of every choice that I make. That I am an independent being who alone is responsible for my experience of life. If I experience success, it is my doing. If I experience pain and misery, it is again my doing. _I am empowered fully to live the life that I will choose to live._ **Some believe in destiny.** I am not in control of my life and there is a bigger plan for me. Everything happens for a reason. I simply may not know what that reason is but trust that it is there and that it is right. My job in life is to follow the path that is shown to me. _There is a greater universal power that is really in control of my experience of life._ I share these two beliefs as they are at different ends of a spectrum. It is to prompt a reflection for you, about where on a spectrum between free will and destiny you currently are. _It may also be the case that you are unsure, like me._ What I do believe though is that I am the product of my environment. **I am the company that I keep.** And that my environment just might have a greater influence on my experience of life than any control through free will or of any surrender into destiny. When I pause for a moment to reflect on all of the people that I know, that I care for and that I feel a connection to, the list is long. Parents, siblings, relatives, friends, coworkers, peers, teachers and more. The list is endless it seems and I can’t help but think about how much I’ve been influenced and inspired by all of them. _Knowingly and more likely, unknowingly._ When I pause a little longer to reflect on the many people that I know of but do not know directly or personally, the list again is long. I think about the leaders in society, politics and business. Artists, athletes, authors, celebrities and entertainers. The people who work at grocery stores, hospitals, restaurants and coffee shops. _These people all undoubtedly have an influence on me, be it by sharing an inspiring idea online or a warm smile at the counter._ And when I pause just a little longer to reflect a little deeper, I realize that the work of so many people has influenced my experience of life. The warmth that I feel in this moment is from the invention of electricity by someone. The comfortable clothes on my body were manufactured by someone. The chair and desk was built by someone. The building was designed by someone. The internet, car, cell phone and more. _The work of others has a tremendous influence on my experience of life._ With this understanding that other people, including those that I know, those that I know of and those that I will never know, are all responsible for my experience of life, **a desire arises to be more intentional about the company that I keep.** The people that I interact with. The physical spaces that I spend time in. The digital spaces where my attention goes. The type of media, conversations and activities that I engage with. All of these people and choices quite possibly have a greater influence on my experience of life than any free will I try to excerpt or any belief in destiny that I have. --- ### The Bridge From Here To There Published: 2020-10-25 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/bridge/ All of the frustration, anxiety and nervous tension that I feel is when I want reality to be different from what it is. **Reality is here and my expectations are over there.** In between lies all of the undesirable emotions that sometimes makes it difficult for me to sleep at night, to be present in conversation or to feel relaxed and calm. A teacher once said to me, _“Learn to see reality as it is, not as you wish it to be”_. This advice is a continuous work in progress for me. Thankfully I have plenty of opportunities to practice it daily. When I look at myself in the mirror in the morning, hoping that I had a little more hair. When I take a stroll outside in the evening, hoping that it would be a little warmer. When I check my investment portfolio, hoping that it would be a little higher. It can feel that in every moment, and in every direction, there are opportunities for me to hope that reality is just a little different than what it is. Much of the meditation practice and yoga philosophy that I have studied encourages an equanimity, a detachment, a surrender to what is. Modern mindfulness is often marketed as making peace with the present. The ideas that_ “we have not where to go, we are already here”_, or that _“everything is always in balance”_ both draw me in and repel me away. While poetic and beautiful to reflect on while journaling, while taking a walk in nature or while reading at night, there has often been an inner conflict between these ideas and the ideas of progress, growth and evolution for me. **This inner conflict has been my biggest struggle intellectually over the past many years as a yogi and business leader.** After much reflection, mixed in with life experiences, I have finally started to make some sense of this for me, if only temporarily, as everything changes. **Acceptance is not apathy.** _Apathy is to resign to reality._ It is to blindly accept things as they are, in a way that can justify injustice, hardship, loss and suffering as part of reality. To give up. To not care. To be indifferent. This is what a practice of apathy looks like. _Acceptance on the other hand is different._ Acceptance requires a deep understanding of what is or has happened, to ultimately understand why. I may not agree with it but I can choose to understand it. Once I understand, then only can I accept. In this light, acceptance requires a sensitivity to reality. The prerequisites are an openness and a curiosity to what is, even if I do not like what is. The first and foremost example of this for me is to be open and curious about my own thoughts, emotional state and mental conditioning. The practice of meditation is an invitation for me to get cosy with my mind, to observe and listen, without judgement, without a desire to control and without unintentionally suppressing or dismissing what arises. **Acceptance is the bridge from awareness to action.** Acceptance requires awareness. Awareness is a skill that can be nurtured and strengthened. Ultimately I have a desire to take action and the benefits are clear to me when that action is grounded in an acceptance of reality, versus not. When I become aware of an opportunity or an obstacle, if I choose to accept it first, which is to choose to really understand it, then the action that I take will be grounded in reality. It will feel a little more effortless and most importantly, be a lot more effective. For example, in our working world there is a conditioning to want to improve productivity, which is often blindly measured as working more hours. My curiosity on productivity has been different. It has been to focus on how to increase effectiveness. With greater effectiveness, we work less, not more, and create more for each other and for ourselves. _This path requires a deeper understanding of the reality of how we work._ I believe that reflection in business, relationships, habits and more is really valuable and under appreciated today. **With reflection comes a greater understanding, from which comes an acceptance of reality. **From this grounding in reality, the actions that we take will be far more effective. If we really wish to see change in our world or the world, we owe it to ourselves and to each other to take the time to really understand and accept first, and then act. Reaching out to a friend that we miss, pursuing a career growth opportunity that we are excited by or adapting our lifestyles to reflect the current needs of our collective society are all opportunities to be grounded in reality first, and then act. **Acceptance is the bridge from awareness to action.** Without it, I am standing on one side of the river bank, wondering why I’m not on the other side. --- ### The Art of Gratitude Published: 2020-10-11 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/gratitude/ Gratitude is a deeply personal experience. It is not only a state or feeling that I get to experience privately, it is also entirely up to me how I choose to express it. **Growing up, I was taught and encouraged to be polite and kind to others.** Saying thank you while interacting with others. I do not know whether this was an expression of gratitude or more likely a form of good manners. Social conditioning that enables me to function more effectively within society with other people._ It sounds now like being nice to others may be the strategic thing to do._ **Going through this year of pandemic, I have expressed words of gratitude to front-line essential service workers through many of my blog reflections.** They continue to put themselves in higher health risk situations, so that I can have groceries, utilities and other services. However my expression of gratitude towards them may not be grounded. Upon reflection, I suspect that most are not choosing to make sacrifices for the greater good or some patriotic pride but rather that their life circumstances are such that they have no choice. They take higher risk roles, ones that I would not do myself, to be able to survive financially. _So it does not really add up to me anymore when I thank them for their sacrifices._ **Also this year, there have been countless displays of gratitude for the sake of displaying gratitude by large corporations.** The TV advertisements, billboards and social media ads from every bank, car brand, retailer and more. Every time I saw a large corporation spending money to thank those in less than ideal circumstances, I couldn’t help but think that the money would have been better spent helping those people directly. A different expression of gratitude could be for large corporations to reallocate their advertising budgets to buy PPE, to increase wages or to invest in organizations providing health care, education and childcare services. _To be clear, my small business, which provides advertising technology, has benefited from large corporations advertising their gratitude this year and would be impacted if they actually followed my advice._ **A reflection on gratitude is also a reflection on values.** What I feel gratitude towards is what I also value. If my gratitude is towards my car, house, clothes, status and money, that is what I likely value. If my gratitude is towards the connections to people that I enjoy, it is those connections that I likely value. A few years ago, I kept a gratitude journal. Every morning, I wrote one sentence in it for nearly one year about something or someone that I felt gratitude towards. I really enjoyed the practice of reflecting daily however now realize that it was really a practice of appreciation. I cannot force gratitude. I cannot practice gratitude. I can practice appreciation. And while appreciation is valuable, I feel it is different from gratitude. **I believe that much of my experience of gratitude is unconscious.** Gratitude is more accidental than intentional. _It is a byproduct of presence, awareness and perspective._ Presence to be with this moment, not only with my body but with my mind and heart. Awareness to pay attention to what is happening in this moment. Perspective to understand the significance of this moment. The experience of presence, awareness and perspective together is rare and when it happens, it is absolutely magical. Be it enjoying a meal with my parents and loving them for the imperfect human beings that they are. Having a conversation with my sister and feeling the deep soulful connection that we share. Talking with my team and realizing that all of them have chosen to tolerate me, when I know that they could work anywhere they wanted to. While in meditation or yoga practice, remembering that because of my teachers, and my teacher’s teachers, I am having this experience. In all of these experiences, I feel as though I have temporarily zoomed out and now have a bird’s eye view of myself in this moment. From that place, gratitude unconsciously arises within myself. I cannot describe the feeling in words, except to share that I feel it. I cannot force it or prompt it. It surfaces naturally, as a byproduct of being present with this moment, cultivating the skill of awareness and having the perspective of its significance. Once I learn to really see this moment, and all of its beauty, I feel a rush of emotion that I call gratitude. This is an experience of gratitude in its most raw form, untainted, unfiltered and unprompted, that I know keeps me grounded, healthy and most of all, connected. --- ### The Richness Of Reality Published: 2020-10-04 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/reality/ Reality is full of richness and all that it takes to see it is to open my eyes. Easier said than done. **Reality for me exists only in this moment.** To see reality is to be with this moment. To connect with this moment. To have a relationship with this moment. My dreams these past few nights have been more vivid, adventurous and exciting than what I am used to. While these dreams may be part of my experience of life, they are not part of my present moment. **My mind takes a lot of comfort in attempting to plan my future.** Where will I go hiking next weekend? What direction will I take my business? Who might I choose to hire to join my team? What friends do I feel a desire to be closer with? However useful my thoughts and intentions for my future may be, they are again not part of my present moment. **My heart feels joy when reminiscing about past memories. **The lifestyle I led and the communities I connected with in New York. The many activities and pastimes B.C. (Before Coronavirus) that filled my schedule. The raw excitement I more often felt in my younger years. While enjoyable to reflect, again these memories are not part of my present moment. **Last weekend while on a walk in the forest, I was fortunate to get a glimpse of the richness of reality. **I saw a leaf fall from the branch of a tree. It looked as if it was dancing its way to the ground. For that leaf, that moment might just have been the climax of its existence and one that I was fortunate enough to witness. The gravity of that moment, from the perspective of the leaf, is clear._ Reality for the leaf is full of richness._ A few days ago, a close friend of mine shared a picture of their new born baby. For her, this moment is beautiful. Her journey through life has begun. She is not thinking about the state of the world, what her future career prospects are or how she is received and perceived by others. In this moment, she is connected to the needs of her body. _Reality for her is full of richness._ **To connect with the richness of reality requires for me to connect with myself.** I believe it begins with connecting with my body. How does my body feel? Do I love my body, as it is, in this present moment? The truth is that I rarely do. I am usually hoping, wishing and desiring for the reality of my body to be different from what it is. If my body could write me a letter, what would it ask for? It would ask for rest, nourishment and movement. I can give it that. To connect with my present moment is to learn how to listen to the richness of information that my body has for me, versus ignore it. Next is to connect with my mental state, in this moment. This is a layer of reality where my thoughts, feelings and emotions exist. If I am driving down a highway fast, I cannot really see the signs alongside the road. Similarly, if my mind is racing, there is a richness of information that I will not receive. It is only once I slow down that I can see. This is why meditation, journaling and yoga are such powerful tools in my day to day life. They help me slow down, not so that I simply feel better or different, but so that I can better connect with the richness of reality. Once I have slowed down, what do I see? In some moments, my mind feels grounded, calm and clear. And in other moments, my mind feels busy, scattered and anxious. My mind will grip to ideas that inspire me and the fears that frighten me. Now here is the most beautiful thing about reality. **Reality does not want me to try and change it. **That is the risk once I begin to see reality, is that I may try to change it. Reality does not actually care about what I think or how I feel about it. Reality is too occupied with being itself, as it is. Reality wants me to simply become aware of it. Like a child playing in the park. All she wants is for her parents to watch her. She does not want her parents to tell her how to play, she simply wants to be seen by her parents, as she is. Similarly, reality simply wants me to become aware of it. **The only choice in the face of reality is to learn how to see it without any judgement or any desire for it to be different than what it is.** Easier said than done. I trust that the act of observation is sufficient to cultivate awareness, from which change happens naturally. Reality is full of richness, if I only choose to see it. Once I see it and once I accept it, only then can I live in harmony with it. Once I am in harmony with reality, I am in harmony with life, as my only way to experience life is through this present moment with all of its richness. --- ### When Life Feels Effortless Published: 2020-09-27 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/effortless/ There is a magical space where life feels effortless to me and where I feel most alive. It is a flow state. In this state, I am in flow with myself and possibly with something greater than myself. Flow state is when there is an optimal balance between the skills that I possess and the challenge in the task at hand. **Too much skill or knowledge, and not enough challenge, then I get bored.** For example, cooking meals I have already cooked hundreds of times, or managing certain clients and repeated business issues, or reading about topics that I am already familiar with. In these moments, life feels effortful, despite the ease that these activities represent. **Too much challenge and not enough skill or knowledge, then I feel anxious.** For example, when I tried to learn Mandarin, or was in a relationship with a specific person, or tried to navigate a more complex business challenge. In these moments, life again feels effortful, despite any desire I may have to grow in these situations. **Growth cannot be forced through effort.** Like the exhaust that comes out of a car, growth is a byproduct for me when I am in flow state. In these moments of flow, I am challenged within my reach and because I can see that it is in my reach, I reach for it and through that action, grow. In business life, I have the opportunity to support others in finding flow state for themselves. If I have asked someone to do something that is too easy for them, then they are not growing. If the work is too challenging, then they are unlikely to do it well. Everything I ask of others may not be in this harmonious space of skills and challenge, however at least some will be. And I can try. In home life, this is why household errands and chores are often annoying. It is not the activity itself of cleaning dishes, tidying a room or doing the laundry that is annoying. It is that they are relatively easy and I do not get to grow. As a result, they feel effortful despite being routine, simple and easy. Earlier this year, many took to baking and gardening all of a sudden. It was because these activities represented an opportunity to be in a flow state, where skill and challenge are in balance. **This is about an optimal lifestyle. **One where I show up motivated, engaged and interested. Being intentional with what I do, how I do it, and why I do it, gives me the opportunity to feel and experience a deeper satisfaction with my life. **The satisfaction that I seek in life rarely comes from achieving, reaching or arriving.** One of my teachers says “you have nowhere to go, you are always on your way”. This is to say that the journey is not only more important than the destination, but that there is no destination. The journey is all that I have. When I can believe, understand and connect with this truth, only then can I start to pay attention to the quality of my journey versus obsess about a fictional destination. Finding a balance between my skills in this moment, and the challenges that I choose, is when I feel most alive, and also when I have the most to offer others. When I was new to meditation many years ago, I found myself reading constantly on the topic and curious about what many teachers had to share. I do not find the same enthusiasm to read about meditation now, yet find myself enthusiastic about leading practice and sharing my passion with others. _This is why it has felt effortless to continue teaching meditation on Zoom, so consistently, since the Spring._ I started writing my book in the Spring and transparently, have gone through stretches where I am writing almost daily for weeks, and then stretches where I do not even think about my book for weeks. Yet I continue to write a reflection for my blog, without fail, every single week. This experience tells me that writing a book is something that, right now at least, I find challenging relative to my skill level as a writer. On the other hand, posting to social media feels not challenging enough for my skill level, that’s why I do not do it often. Writing a weekly reflection is right in my sweet spot and something that I feel immense satisfaction from. Writing for me is about the journey, as it does not matter to me if this is read by one person or one million people. _Case in point, a few months ago I stopped looking at the analytics for my blog, yet continue to write regularly. It feels effortless, joyful and fulfilling to me._ The insight for me is simple. When I feel bored or anxious, it is likely due to an imbalance between my skill level and the challenge level. **When I get to engage with life in a way where my skills are matched with the challenge presented, life feels effortless.** Although, now I need to go do the laundry. --- ### Walk The Tightrope Published: 2020-09-20 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/tightrope/ Life feels like walking a tightrope. While I want to get to the other side, I have no choice but to focus on taking one step at a time. The moment that I take my attention away from where I am, I fall and am no longer living. It can feel scary, if I begin to think about the many ‘what ifs’. At the start of the pandemic, I wrote about the two types of fear in life. Those that keep us living and those that keep us from living. While walking the tightrope of life, the fear of falling keeps me focused on the rope, not the other side. _This is how I can continue to live._ **Expectations take my attention away from the rope.** Expectations introduce a fear, anxiety and tension that causes me to lose my focus and ability to with the present moment, and all of its beauty and wonder. At the start of the pandemic, in the face of the unknown, my expectations on life, and on the world, quickly changed. For example, what I expected of my business lowered. I reforecasted down our revenue and financial plan for the year, aligned with our client’s reduced expectations for their businesses. Then into the Spring, when I realized that my business was not only outperforming our reduced forecast but also our original pre pandemic plan, I felt a sense of relief, ease and confidence that I had not earlier. From a place of ease and without expectations, over the summer I started to make changes and choices for my business that have led to even stronger performance and a culture that I am proud to be a part of. My focus had been on simply walking the tightrope, without trying to get anywhere. _Then, everything started to change, as it always does._ **A few weeks ago, I began to notice a light layer of anxiety, tension and worry re-enter my daily presence.** My empty spaces, those moments when I first wake up or am taking a walk outside, are not so empty and free as they once were a few months ago. My sleep is not as uninterrupted and restful as it had been. Even my digestion is not as consistent, despite no changes in what I consume. All of these signs tell me that I have fallen from the tightrope and took my attention away from the present. I was on a hike yesterday and while reflecting on how I have been feeling over the past few weeks, the signs that have shown up my physical body, I could pinpoint all of this unpleasant change to the moment I began to set expectations again, for my business, my commitments, my lifestyle, my community and my life. While I remain excited about the endless possibilities in this Year Zero moment of reset, the expectations have become a distraction. I have lost my balance and have fallen off the tightrope. The beauty is that the simple awareness that I have fallen is sufficient for me to be back on the path. It is effortless and automatic._ The act of seeing, reflecting and noticing where I am lifts me back on to the rope._ **Walking through life is a balancing act no doubt. **A balance with having a direction to guide my choices, so that they are aligned and consistent with my intentions, and with staying present with what is in front of me. In the face of big expectations on life, I risk feeling paralyzed and not being able to see the next step to take that is right in front of me._ Or worse, focus only on the destination and fail to appreciate the journey along the way._ This is the tightrope of life. To move forward, verses to stand still. To believe that I know what the next step is, even if I don’t know all of the steps. And to not be intimidated by or obsessed with some expectation for a future that has been fabricated in my mind. I can only walk through life one step at a time. --- ### The Someday Experiment Published: 2020-09-13 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/someday/ [ { "type": "highlight", "id": "12d4a2fd-753f-48f4-8e77-379002a500fd", "shape": "underline", "isFront": false, "isAnimationEnabled": false, "animation": "draw", "duration": 0.5, "direction": "right", "color": { "type": "THEME\_COLOR" }, "thickness": { "unit": "em", "value": 0.1 }, "linecap": "square" } ] Each week has seven days in it, and none of them are called “someday”. Think of the many mental lists that we create, “someday, I will…”. The sad truth is that “someday” may never come for most of us. And if it does for the lucky few, then it may be at a time later in life when our physical, mental and emotional resources are not what they once were. I have been inspired to experiment with how to make space for “someday”, today. **Earlier this year, I asked my team at Polar to take every other Friday off. **While I called them “Wellness Days”, it was really the start of an experiment to see what would happen to our business, to our clients and to our team productivity if we worked less, not more. The results were inspiring enough for me to launch what I now call The Someday Experiment. **The Someday Experiment is a move to a four day work week.** Monday to Thursday is our new work week and _Friday has been renamed to Someday_. Our team can choose to invest their Somedays however they wish. I am encouraging everyone to be intentional with their time and to focus on connecting with what it is that they feel passionate about. For some, it will be spent running errands, building something in their home or investing more time with their kids. For others, it will be learning new skills, diving into a hobby or investing in a side project. And for others, it may be volunteering, mentoring or caring for those in greater need. In my case, it’s writing a book (or two). **This is not simply a 3 day weekend.** It is not an extra day off, but rather the space to be intentional. I am also creating the opportunity for my team to share with each other how they are investing their Somedays, and what they are learning. We are not reducing compensation and we are not asking for longer hours during the four working days in the week. In fact, we are acknowledging that Someday has in-kind value, in the form of time, that we are giving back to people as part of their recognition, in addition to their current compensation. Polar is a business I founded over a decade ago. We are profitable, growing quickly and have hundreds of clients in dozens of countries. I am not sure if I would have had the conviction or confidence to attempt this experiment earlier in my entrepreneurial journey._ I hope that other leaders and entrepreneurs can take some inspiration from my experiment._ There are several assumptions that I have going into The Someday Experiment. **_1) Trust:_** that my team feels the trust that I place in them so much that they are inspired to take even greater ownership and responsibility for our business, and the commitments that we make to our clients and to one another. **_2) Productivity:_** there is a tendency for work to fill time. Productivity is not how much we work but what we work on and how we do it. Constraints help create the conditions for more focus and I believe that working less days will lead to greater effectiveness and efficiency. **_3) Mental Health:_** with more space to connect with what it is we care most about, I believe that the lingering anxiety, mental stress and distractions that we feel may feel will reduce. We will feel even more refreshed and energized to tackle the growth opportunities for our business. This experiment is more involved than simply reducing the work week from five days to four days. There is a rewiring of how we work that is happening, which started earlier this year in March when the pandemic hit. The Someday Experiment encourages management to be better with prioritization, to ensure that we are investing in the most important clients, projects and products. It encourages everyone to spot inefficiencies sooner rather than later. Overall, it encourages us to be a stronger business. If there was ever a time to run an experiment like this, it is now. The world is going through a collective reset, what I refer to as “Year Zero”. This is a time to make different choices, choices that have the possibility to positively shape our future. I started to imagine The Someday Experiment two years ago. We are now ready for it. The world is now ready for it. Recent _research_ by Angus-Reid showed that the majority of Canadians support a four day work week. We will continue to see _more companies_ adopt similar approaches in the years to come. **The Globe and Mail wrote about our experiment a few days ago, _here is a copy of the story_.** Henry Ford is credited with popularizing the 5 day work week in the 1920s. The norm used to be a 6 day work week. 100 years later, I believe we can collectively move towards a 4 day work week for better productivity, balance and satisfaction in life. **Kunal Gupta** CEO, **_Polar_** **Read more about our culture** **See our open roles** --- ### The Deceptive Shadow Published: 2020-09-06 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/shadow/ A few days ago, a full moon shined brightly in the sky. Here’s the thing.** The moon is always full.** The moon is always in the sky. And the moon is always shining brightly. It is just that I don’t always see the moon that way. The way it always is. Call it intellect, knowledge, experience or wisdom, there is something within me that understands and believes that the moon is always full, even though it is rarely visible that way to me. **The moon is a metaphor for life.** Call it intellect, knowledge, experience or wisdom, there is something within me that understands and believes that my life is always full, even though it is rarely visible that way to me. I could list for you all of the reasons that my life is full, and all of the reasons that my life sometimes does not feel so full. It would not matter though, as it would not be the truth. _The truth is that my life is always full even if I do not always see it that way or feel that way._ **To see the moon as it is, it helps to close my eyes.** My eyes can play tricks on me and they have limitations on what they can see. My eyes cannot see the moon in the middle of the day, even though it is there in the sky. My eyes also cannot see past the shadow of the earth that the sun places on the moon most nights. It is earth’s own shadow that ironically gets in the way of the people on earth from being able to see the fullness of the moon. It is my own shadow that ironically gets in the way of me being able to see the fullness of my life at times. The appearance of any darkness in my life is often the result of a shadow casted from my mind. Fears, insecurities, attachments, desires and gripping thoughts are what create this shadow. **This shadow makes it difficult for me to trust the beauty in my life.** There are countless examples of how I have placed my trust in what I know but cannot see. I deposit money into a bank account and trust that it is there, even though I cannot see it. My team is working from anywhere now, and even though I cannot see them in an office, I trust that they are working. I bite into a piece of fruit knowing that I will not get poisoned. There is so much that I know but cannot see. Similarly, there are likely countless more opportunities for me to continue to place my trust in what I know but cannot always see. Most of all, that like the moon, my life is always full. Even if my own shadow makes it difficult for me to see it as such from time to time. --- ### To Dance With The Unknown Published: 2020-08-30 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/dance/ Try to imagine The Unknown for a moment. It is difficult to do. I imagine myself standing here, and that The Unknown is over there. It is within sight, maybe 20 meters or so away from me. It is a dark and shapeless form that is not familiar to me. If I look more closely though, I see that there are many versions of The Unknown ahead of me. Some closer, some further. Some smaller, some larger. When I zoom out, I see that The Unknown is in every direction that I look. **There are a few options for how I show up in the face of The Unknown.** First, I can choose to run away, in the opposite direction. If The Unknown is in front of me, I can turn around and run the other way. The Unknown can be scary and intimidating. True to its name, it is “not known” to me. If I do not know, then how can I trust it. When The Unknown manifests as a threat, like the few that trigger my flight or fight response system, it may make sense to run. COVID is an example of The Unknown that I choose to run away from by staying physically distant from others, wearing a mask in public spaces and being alert. This feels like the right relationship, for the safety of others and myself. _The truth is though that the situations where it makes sense to run away from The Unknown are few and far between._ **Another option is to choose to stay where I am, standing still, in the face of The Unknown.** I wait for The Unknown to become a little less unknown, and a little more known, before choosing. It is like an early morning mist which makes it difficult to see what’s ahead, so I wait. I stay stationary until I feel safe to move. This response is to be paralyzed by The Unknown. It is when I over analyze, over complicate and over think how to be with The Unknown. The Unknown, by definition, has incomplete information and asks of me to make choices without the comfort of knowing. Earlier this summer, I was speaking with a group of university students. The innocent question came, which it often does in mentorship settings, “how did you start a business out of school?”. My honest and candid response is “I did not think about it”. Had I thought more about starting a business, I would have found the many reasons to not start a business and would have not done so. There are always more reasons to not do something, especially if it is new and different, than to do it. To wait for the mist in my mind to clear may take a lifetime, or worse, may never actually happen. **Another option in the face of The Unknown is to learn to walk towards it, and then into it.** To walk towards The Unknown is to not only acknowledge that it exists but to recognize that there is some attraction, some benefit, some curiosity, some hope, maybe even some excitement. Unlike the options to run away or stand still, to walk slowly, cautiously and carefully towards it is to begin to embrace The Unknown. Several years ago, I received an email from a friend inviting a few of us to join her for an improv course. Prior to reading this email, I had never thought about improv. My mind was quick to dismiss the idea, the equivalent of me running away from The Unknown. I then realized how fast I was to dismiss something new and different, that I said to myself that I would at least think about it. This was the equivalent of standing still in the face of The Unknown. Once I realized how fearful I was towards the idea of improv, I realized I had only one choice: to do it. However the idea of doing it with a group of friends terrified me even more, so I said “no thank you” to the invitation from my friend, and secretly signed up for a different course on my own. This is what it means to walk towards The Unknown, albeit slowly and cautiously. In other words, it was a conditional embrace of The Unknown. **The only other option, outside of running away, standing still or walking into it, is to learn how to dance with The Unknown.** This is to truly embrace The Unknown, with a smile on my face. A sign that I feel secure, safe and grounded, while also inspired, free and open. Eliminating expectations, except on myself, to be open to being surprised and delighted. Confident that I will be able to handle whatever The Unknown throws my way, hopefully with some grace and gratitude. A few years ago, I did an experiment to challenge my relationship with The Unknown. I asked a friend to pick a place for me to go alone, for the holidays, and to not tell me where. She could pick literally anywhere in the world and I would have no control or knowledge about what to expect. It was most definitely an adventure into The Unknown. I would go on to spend three and a half weeks on my own, opening envelopes every few days telling me where to go and what to do, in a place I had never visited before far away. This was to dance with The Unknown. I had no choice but to be open, to be present and to be willing to roll with whatever I would uncover and discover on this journey. **Life is a dance with The Unknown.** Despite any belief to want to know, it is actually the last thing we want. If we knew everything that we believe we want to know about our world, about our future, about ourselves, we would lose all of our enthusiasm, excitement and energy in life. The Unknown is what makes life interesting and desirable. To dance with The Unknown is to be a little more open and a little less fearful, with a hint of curiosity and a dash of play. We do not know, and that is the point. --- ### The Human Condition Published: 2020-08-23 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/human/ A few days ago, I was sitting with my parents in our backyard. We were enjoying another home cooked delicious meal, on a calm summer evening together. At one point, our conversation quieted, as it more commonly does nowadays, given the hundreds of meals that we have shared over the past few months alone. Our conversations have also been getting deeper. Possibly a byproduct of fatigue from the state of the world, or perhaps we have become more open to one another. After a long quiet, my mother remarked that she wished she had a smaller garden. My dad and I looked at her, a little confused because my mom has worked tirelessly since the start of the Spring, as she does every Spring. She clearly takes so much pride in her work, it is inspiring to watch. Planting, digging, seeding, watering, and more, with her “other children”. At night, she often watches YouTube videos to learn more about gardening techniques and when it is too hot to be outside, she reads books on caring for plants. Needless to say, she has long been obsessed with gardening. She went on to share that her large garden is a lot of work. She feels tired because of it. She has had foot pain in the past few weeks, which has prompted her to reflect on her relationship with her garden. 25 years ago, at the childhood home where I grew up in Ottawa, we had a large yard but a small garden. My mom began reminiscing on how joyous it would be to have a smaller, not large, garden, like we had 25 years ago. Back then, with a small garden, she would see the large gardens our neighbours all had, and hope one day to also have a large garden. **This is the human condition.** To believe that the grass is greener on the other side. To want what others have, believing that it is better than what we have. To feel dissatisfied with our current reality, and hope or expect a brighter, stronger and happier future. A few weeks ago, my business reached a significant revenue milestone. It is a milestone that I have had my eye on for the past 3 to 4 years. I felt motivated, as much as curious, to see if it was even possible. I was never quite sure how we might reach it, and that’s the fun part. At times when I would obsess about it, I felt anxious and experienced doubt. There have been many moments in the past few years, in the face of fresh challenges in business, that I stopped believing that this milestone was possible. When I could no longer see the path, I did what I only knew how to do. Take the next step that was in front of me. And step-by-step, almost unknowingly and without expectation, we reached a place that I had only imagined about, and had recently forgotten about. A quiet satisfaction filled me, as I gave myself a few moments to acknowledge what we had achieved and what it meant. I shared a few words with my team, primarily an expression of gratitude for what we had done together. I did not mention the milestone to anyone else. Not my clients, board, investors or the media. I felt no desire to. I then began to wonder why something I had made such a big deal about in my mind, for so many years, was now all of a sudden unimportant to me. Within 18 hours of me recognizing what we had achieved, my mind began to wander and automatically started to imagine the next milestone for the business. A few years of hard work was celebrated in my mind for 18 hours, and then it was on to the next mountain to climb. **This is the human condition.** The human condition is to want what we do not have. Once I have this, do this, get this, then life will be better. The human condition is to believe that “once this, then that”. Despite knowing the folly in this farce, I still fall into this line of thinking more often than I care to admit. Core to the human condition is also the power of intention. Our intentions do manifest in some shape or form, sooner or later. Be it a result of a greater force, our collective consciousness, luck or whatever you may choose to believe in, it feels to me that our intentions are heard. _Intentions are a double-edged sword though. Intentions have implications._ My mom wanted a large garden, now years later, she has a large garden that also comes with a large amount of work that she is not physically fit for anymore. My business reached a growth milestone I had only imagined for years, yet upon reaching that place, I felt little satisfaction relative to the attention I had placed on it for so long. Many societal intentions have also manifested, each with their own implications. The stock markets continue to rise, however they seem to be divorced from the economy. The market gains are not shared amongst the people who have worked the hardest. The suburbanization of our cities, over the past many decades, has afforded many with cars and roads, yet we complain about traffic. The urbanization of our cities in recent years has led to developers building condos and housing in city centres, to attract young people, who cannot afford the spaces designed for them. The advancements of technology and automation was so that we could work less, however we seem to want to work at any hour of the day and every day of the week now. The desire to have access to the world at our fingertips has resulted in companies tracking every search, predicting every share, and bating every click, irrespective of our privacy. **Intentions have implications. **This insight helps me place a little less expectation on the future being better than the present, and to start to connect with the beauty that exists in this moment. I hope to be a little less surprised when I experience the implications of my intentions and see that life is not better or worse, it is simply changed or different. There is a minimum dose of hope and desire that is healthy to have. It provides me with fuel for the journey, helps me focus my energy and gives me direction. There must also be a limit to the anticipation and expectations that I place on the future though. Too much, and it leads me to be blind to the present moment. **The present moment is deserving of my presence and attention.** Once I choose to be present with this moment, I begin to connect more deeply with the abundance that exists and can only feel grateful and grounded. This may ultimately be the human condition to cultivate. --- ### Lost At Sea Published: 2020-08-02 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/lost/ I feel lost in the current movement on racial equity. It has triggered a deeper reflection on the influence of culture and society on my own identity. I am not Black. I am not white. The colour of my skin may not be white, however I grew up with many of the privileges that many white people have. I am Indian, however I do not identify as fully Indian, as others who may look like me do. Most of my friends are not Indian. I do not enjoy Bollywood movies and could not name more than a handful of actors if I had to. While I enjoy Indian food, I have become a picky eater, as my mom regularly points out. My interest in Indian holidays, like Diwali and Holi, is more about nostalgia and cherished childhood memories, than it is about any cultural or religious meaning. My parents immigrated to Canada months before I was born. They have without a doubt done all of the right things to expose my sister and I to our Indian culture. **We grew up Indian in a non-Indian society.** We took Hindi language lessons on Saturday mornings for years, despite our reluctance as kids. Our family friends were mostly other Indian families with kids our age. I have countless memories of regular gatherings, every weekend. My uncle designed the Hindu temple in Ottawa, the city where I grew up. It was, and still is, a beautiful structure that for a young child can only be described as large and intimidating. We would go there every month or so, and be exposed to a community of people who looked like us. At each life milestone, be it moving into a new house, my parents opening a new business, or the passing of a grandparent, we would host a puja ceremony at home, led by a Hindu priest, in the company of family, friends and Indian food. My parents were active in the Indian community, hosting and organizing events for hundreds of people, a few times per year, at least. Like I said, my parents did all of the right things to give my sister and I a childhood that was rich in Indian culture. It may have been even more authentic to tradition than if they were still in India. The Indian culture, as practiced by my parents who left India in the 80s, feels frozen in time here in Canada. The distance from home had also inspired a dedication and commitment from my parents that remains admirable to me today. **While home life was rich in culture, my school life growing up was not.** I went to the largest public high school in Ottawa, and in a school of 1,600 students, there were maybe 4 Indian students that I can remember. My sister and I went to different high schools. If she had gone to the same school as me, there might have been 5 Indian students that I remember. _Her high school was similarly not very diverse in race._ In high school, it is probably no surprise to hear that I was quite involved with student government. Each year I was elected, including as co-president in my final year. Back then, I was a shy kid. I might still be. While I was good with academics and usually knew the answer to the questions that teachers would ask in class, I rarely raised my hand to answer as I was scared to speak. I did not date in high school, despite many girls catching my attention. One year we were tasked with a public speaking assignment. I was so intimidated by that three minute speech that we had to deliver, that I cleverly chose to speak on the topic of silence. My speech involved a very long, and awkward, demonstration of my topic. Winning student elections each year felt like a miracle, especially as a kid who was scared to speak. I may have been smart, but at 15 or 16 years old, what wins elections is not intelligence but popularity. I guess that may still be the case for adults in some places. I can now see that my popularity came in part from my race. Race has played a bigger role than I have realized. The fact that I was often the only non white student putting myself forward for leadership roles increased my chances. A form of reverse discrimination gave me access. Despite being a student leader, having influence and some authority, the activities that we ran for students were ones rich in white culture. For example, we hosted four high school dances a year. If I was not responsible for organizing them, I definitely would not have attended any. I felt extremely uncomfortable and did not ever have a good time. We hosted monthly barbecues. Despite being a vegetarian, I would cook hundreds of burgers, smell terrible and lose my appetite for the rest of the day. I played rugby for a year and a half, until I almost broke my nose. Despite being fast, my skinnier physique was no match for the larger rugby players, who were all white. I did not have the awareness, role models, encouragement or strength to build an inclusive student society that celebrated all races and cultures. Instead I propagated, likely poorly, the existing student societal norms that tried to appeal to the masses, at the expense of the minorities. **In contrast, my experience in university was different.** My roommates were Asian. I dated a woman who is white. The company that I kept was truly a rainbow of races. My friends included people who identified as Black, Indian, Asian, middle eastern and white. My friends knew about Diwali, I celebrated Ramadan, Chinese New Year and Christmas with them. In university, I had the space to choose my friends. We connected on our shared interests, not our shared race. In my case, I started a student entrepreneurship conference in my first year at university, which went on to become a national organization that did inspiring work for a decade. The team was the most diverse that I have ever been a member of to this day. Diversity happened as a byproduct though, there was a bigger common purpose that attracted all of us to work together. My understanding of different races and cultures did not come from teachers, the media, or even my parents. It came from friends. There is only so much understanding that can come from reading books, listening to podcasts and scrolling through Instagram. It is only once we connect directly with people who are different than us can we start to build a depth of understanding, empathy and compassion for our diverse society. Diversity means to see race and culture. If we do not see race, we cannot celebrate it, learn from it, and be inspired from it. Every race, culture and religion has its own customs, beliefs and practices. There is an intentionality behind all of this, that I find fascinating. None of it is accidental. My experience in high school is an example of the society that we have largely lived in. There has been a sea of sameness that legacy and convenience perpetuated long past its expiry date. My experience in university is an example of the society that I hope we continue to build together. One where we connect not based on race but on a shared higher and common purpose. One where diversity happens as a byproduct, not for achievement or status. When I place my attention on the richness in the racial and cultural diversity that exists all around me, I feel less lost or even concerned about my own identity. I know that I will continue to be shaped by the beauty that exists in every race. I no longer feel lost at sea and have found my way. --- ### The Richness Of Race Published: 2020-07-26 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/richness/ Last year, I was on a first date with a woman in New York, and one of the first questions she asked me was what my name meant. I gave the answer that my parents have given me decades ago. _“It was the name of a King, a long time ago, in India”_, to which she responded with, _“Okay, but what does Kunal actually mean?”_. **I was embarrassed.** I did not actually know. Despite how educated, talented and intelligent I had believed that I was, I had never taken the few seconds it would take to look this up. Maybe I was unaware, or maybe I was uninterested. In that moment, after pausing awkwardly as I realized I did not know something that I presumably should have and could have, I said _“I don’t actually know”_. She was clearly surprised. I'm not sure if it was because I did not know or that I admitted that I did not know. Regardless, at some point she momentarily got up to use the restroom. I whipped out my phone and looked it up. Right there, at the top of the search results page, I discovered for the first time in my life what my name meant. Kunal means one who sees beauty. In this time of increased attention on race, to say that _“I don’t see race”_ would be to deprive myself of the beauty and richness that comes from being able to see race. True to my name, I believe that there is beauty in being able to see race, and understanding the richness in the cultures that are shaped thanks to race. **My appreciation of the richness of different races and cultures did not really grow until I started to travel the world.** I realize now how privileged I have been. My first world travels without my parents were as a student leader in my early 20s, an opportunity by design only given to a select few from a pool of thousands. I was asked to attend global student leadership summits in Malaysia and Egypt. Through coop, I got to work in the U.K. one summer. I also got to study in Hong Kong on exchange one semester, an experience that now few may get in the decades to come unfortunately. As the CEO of my business, I am responsible for attracting clients and found myself in my mid 20s on planes around the world. From Japan to Spain to Germany, I traveled to dozens of countries each year that I would otherwise have not even thought about visiting. We now have clients in over 30 countries. And when in many of these new places, I made time to play tourist. Last year, visiting South Africa for the first time, I was inspired by seeing Nelson Mandela’s prison cell. No matter how many times I watch Morgan Freeman play Nelson Mandela on the big screen, or how many times I read stories about the apartheid, it was only until physically being in these historic spaces that it set in for me the gravity of what had happened. Once I learned how to take breaks and time away from working, and as my interest in yoga and meditation grew, I have found myself in different places with different cultures. My first yoga retreat was in Mexico. I did not know that it was in Spanish, _a language that I do not know_, until the retreat had started. The next year, I found myself spontaneously in Costa Rica in a small town without paved roads on the coast of the Pacific Ocean. My accidental roommate was a firefighter from Toronto who was there to surf. While I was there to yoga, he encouraged me to join him and I ended up going surfing every day. Taking a 5 hour bus ride back to San Jose to fly out of Costa Rica was by far the bumpiest drive of my life. It not only gave me empathy for the living conditions others experience but also helped me appreciate what I had back home. A pleasant feeling of nostalgia comes up for me as I reflect on the experiences I have had with races and cultures different from mine. The richness of race, beyond my own, has continued to shape me in profound ways. I'm learning that it takes an openness and curiosity to connect with people who are different from me. It is rarely convenient nowadays and the opportunities to do so as I grow older become few and far between. I do not know how we will continue to be exposed to different races and cultures in a post-pandemic era where many young people may not be able to afford to travel as often as before, the cost of transportation and accommodations will no doubt skyrocket for everyone and the health and safety risks are of course increased. **Books, Instagram posts, Netflix documentaries and podcasts can only go so far.** While they may help give us an intellectual understanding of different races and cultures, it is not until we have a direct experience, a direct connection with someone who is different from us, that we can start to feel some of what they feel, and deepen our understanding. Much of the beauty in the experiences that I have been privileged to have is thanks to the richness of races and cultures that are different from mine. This is the inspiration for me to continue to be open, to explore, to invest and to connect with others. --- ### The Empty Spaces Published: 2020-07-19 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/empty/ When I first wake up in the morning and am still lying in bed. While brushing my teeth. While standing in the shower. While sitting in meditation. While eating breakfast. While walking in the neighborhood. While cooking dinner. While doing the dishes. When I am lying in bed at night about to fall asleep. **These innocent and harmless moments are what I call the empty spaces.** In these empty spaces, my mind is filled with thoughts about what I feel anxious about and what I feel inspired about. It is an unconscious process, one that I cannot control and do not wish to control. It is in these empty spaces that I am an observer, not a director. I become a follower, not a leader. These empty spaces are not so empty though. They are filled with information, possibly the most valuable information and definitely the most relevant information that I have access to. The thoughts that naturally fill these empty spaces are an indication of where I may feel out of balance and what I may not be at peace with. An example of what often fills these empty spaces is the infamous to-do list. Some mornings, I wake up with my mind racing about all that is that I desire to do that morning, let alone that day. This morning, my empty spaces were filled with thoughts about finishing and publishing this reflection. Yesterday morning, it was about moving out of our Toronto office space for good and helping my dad with a few computer requests. The to-do list is an obvious source of thoughts that fill my empty spaces. My mind is not at peace, as it cycles through what has to be done, for fear that I may forget. Beyond the to-do list though, sometimes when I have trouble falling asleep at night, my body is tired however my mind remains active. Proof that I am more than my body. My mind grips onto thoughts about something that may have happened that day that I feel disappointed with. It makes sense for thoughts of disappointment to enter my empty spaces, as I have not yet come to a place of acceptance. Once I do learn to accept whatever happened, or didn't happen, then these thoughts leave my empty spaces. **Ideas that inspire and lift me also have a way to fill my empty spaces.** I remain inspired by the idea that we are in a Year Zero moment, and have been given the space to make different choices and hit the reset button in so many facets of life and society. This idea has become a passion, spurring thousands of thoughts that find a way to come into my empty spaces when I may be journaling, showering or walking. What I am learning though is that it matters less what fills these empty spaces, as it continues to change, as everything always does. What matters more is what I do with the information that comes into my awareness. To become aware of these empty spaces itself is a meditation. To bring awareness to the thoughts flowing and floating through my mind is the meditation. If I tried to quiet, control or even calm these thoughts that fill my empty spaces, then I would be depriving myself of such valuable information. **This information is highly actionable.** Once I am aware of what I feel out of balance about, what I am not at peace with, or even what I feel deeply inspired by, I will start to make different choices. These choices will change my life in ways that make sense for me, in this moment. Like a kid riding a bike, a teenager playing basketball or someone playing golf, one can get good at most activities with practice. Mindfulness practices help build the skills for me to learn how to listen to these empty spaces. How to pay attention to the thoughts that unconsciously fill my mind, and the invaluable information that arises continuously throughout my day. There is another path. Instead of paying attention to these empty spaces, I could instead choose escapism to try and ignore them. Netflix, Instagram, alcohol, drugs, excessive eating and constant consumption are ways to suppress the information that is filling these empty spaces. In doing so, I lose out on the power of awareness and all of its benefits. A few weeks ago, I took a self-declared Wellness Week, which I have also asked everyone on my team to do this summer. During my Wellness Week, I turned off my phone completely and went screen-free for seven days. I also did not read the news or consume any media. I kept my reading of books limited to a few personal favourites, that I have already read countless times before. **In a sense, this week was an experiment to create even more empty spaces.** I created the conditions that encouraged me to become more intimate with the information sitting in my empty spaces. My primary purpose for this time was to learn to sit in these empty spaces and soak it all in. _The experience was unique, meditative and profound._ I found myself feeling inspired with new ideas for our world, for my business and the many projects I continue to invest in. I also noticed insecurities and anxieties arise, about themes in my life that I had not paid much attention to previously but could now see how they ripple into many facets of my life. _It takes strength to sit with the discomfort that can arise in the empty spaces._ Having moments to sit in my empty spaces, be it shorter, like staring into the distance for a few minutes, or longer, like going screen-free for a week, have become important to me. The most productive thing that I can often do is to pause, and pay attention to the valuable information sitting in my empty spaces. I trust that from this awareness of my inner wisdom, I begin to experience changes and different choices, naturally. These begin to influence me in ways that are more aligned with what it is that I need most at this moment. This is the value in paying attention to my empty spaces. --- ### Like A Sponge Published: 2020-07-12 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/sponge/ For most of my life, I blindly absorbed values from teachers. These teachers included family, friends, culture, society, education, workplaces, media, role models and more. The younger I was, the more porous I was and ready to absorb whatever was around me. The company that we keep, the content that we consume, the contemplations that we explore, all shape our values. Our values shape our choices. Our choices shape our experience of life. We are rarely given the space, or rather rarely encouraged to create the space, to choose our values and beliefs. They are handed to us, often unconsciously. Living at home with my parents over the past few months now, watching them in close captivity, I continue to make sense of so much now, about myself, that I have long been curious about. My work ethic has been reflected back to me by my mom so clearly. She is gardening, painting, tidying and learning constantly. Behind this is a desire to always be doing something, a desire to be productive. She cannot sit still and I have yet to inspire her to meditate with me. Now I know that this desire to always be productive, which I value, and at times have even resented that I value, is something that I have absorbed from her. My interest to imagine what does not yet exist has been reflected back to me by my dad ever so clearly. Dinner conversations are filled with an endless stream of new ideas from him. I grew up watching my dad share his ideas enthusiastically with others, and now am privileged enough to be the first to hear many of his ideas. Now I understand why I am continually sharing new ideas with my teams, and also how they may feel. Creativity and imagination is something that I value and that I have absorbed from my father. _It can be a powerful, sometimes dangerous, combination to feel the space to imagine new possibilities and to feel the confidence to execute them._ Understanding that my values shape who I am, I have a responsibility to myself to be intentional about the values that I absorb and keep. This is the path of freedom. The freedom to choose. Like an invisible hand, my values help me navigate life. They are often subtle, operating beneath my consciousness and quietly pulling the strings it feels. When I first started to meditate, I became curious about myself in a way that I had not known previously. I became introspective, from which, changes began to flow. How I saw the world and showed up in the world began to change in ways I was becoming conscious of. These changes stemmed from taking a moment to pause and to inquire about the values that had been guiding me through life thus far. In this inquiry, one at a time, I picked up each value or belief, looked at it closely, and asked myself if I still believed it to be true. I wanted to really know, from deep inside myself, what I believed and to not be afraid to challenge a belief simply because I had once believed it or have only known to believe it. If the answer was yes, then I would put it back in its place, with a smile on my face. If the answer was no, I would place it aside, and no longer let it take me for a ride. If the answer was ‘I don’t know’, I would not lament, but experiment. These experiments involved sometimes taking the opposite extreme of a value. For example, I used to believe that ‘more is more’ when it came to consumerism. I experimented then with ‘less is more and adopted an extreme minimalist approach. This experiment, one of many, helped me understand what I now believe to be true. This inquiry of my values has not stopped to this day and will continue through my entire journey. I have also discovered that my values change. The purpose of my values are to serve and shape me, each in their own way. Some values are life long, like kindness and compassion. Others are for specific chapters in my life, like graduating university with a solid education, getting experience working for someone or establishing financial security. All of these were once important for me but are no longer today. And that is okay. The real inquiry is to examine the values that I have absorbed unknowingly from the circles and communities that I identify with. It can become easy for my preferences to become prejudices, where I risk discriminating unknowingly based on what I have absorbed. If left unchecked, what was once an idea can become cemented as a strong value, even if unconscious. For example, I thought that I should only do a yoga teacher training program once I was more skilled and confident with a yoga practice. It was not until the first day of my yoga teacher training course, five years after I had been practicing consistently, that I realized I could have, should have, would have done the course in my first year. It is one thing to live life according to a set of values and beliefs that one blindly absorbs, without conscious choice. It is another thing to live life according to blindly absorbed values that have been reinforced to the point of extremism. For example, imagine a child recruited by a terrorist organization. The child, usually a boy, has been brainwashed based on a set of values and beliefs. The boy now carries a gun, shoots people, or even worse, takes his own life, in the name of a belief system that he did not even choose. Upon exploring this example, I may feel sympathy for the boy. However that feeling may actually be better described as empathy. There is a part of that boy’s journey that I have been victim to. The terrorist organization might be called capitalism, racism or elitism. The brainwashing power of strong belief systems are often systematic and remarkably effective. It is especially disheartening when harmful beliefs spread rapidly online, which social media enables so effortlessly. Social media is also remarkably effective at reinforcing my existing beliefs, even if they are ones that I do not truly believe. The hill to climb, to lift myself out of a narrow ditch, becomes even harder. I may not be able to prevent others from sharing their beliefs, founded or unfounded, however I can choose what to absorb and what not to absorb. I can also bring attention to what I share with others, and ask myself why is it that I feel inspired to share. Is it to widen a perspective, confirm a bias or perhaps even seek validation. While it may feel safe and easy to absorb the beliefs that appear to be the mainstream, I should not always do so. If everyone believes that they should jump off a bridge, drive with their eyes closed or eat furniture, these are values I would not absorb blindly. A sponge does not discriminate and soaks up clean and dirty water. Similarly, we soak up all of the values from our environment. This is why we must make an intentional and conscious choice about what it is that we truly value. How many of us have taken the time and space to reflect deeply on what we value and believe to be true? Based on what we see unfolding in society and the choices many are making, I would conclude not enough of us have. Each time that I interact and engage with someone whose perspective is different than mine, I can recognize that they are coming from a different place. A different set of values and beliefs. If I am to blame or block that person, then I am depriving myself of the opportunity to learn and grow. I cannot choose a value or belief that I am not aware of. This moment has raised into our awareness a wide diversity of beliefs and values. It is helping us to ring out the values that we have absorbed, and to make the space to choose our values. Some of which may be the same and some no doubt will be different. Year Zero has given us the space to reflect about ourselves and become more intimate with what it is that we truly value and believe. Knowing this will shape the choices we make, and this will shape the world that we all get to continue to live in, together. --- ### A New Declaration Published: 2020-07-04 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/declaration/ While I may live in a time when most countries are no longer subject to the rule of law imposed by other countries, I also live at a time when the mainstream belief has been that independence for the individual is desirable and worth striving for. To be financially independent. To be independent at work. To have independent thought. To be independent has meant to be free, and to be free has meant to have choice. The fight for independence, be it for a country or for a teenager, appears to be deeply ingrained in most of us. It may be a genetic predisposition coded into each of our beings. However in the pursuit of individual independence, we have run away from one another, and perhaps even run away from ourselves. Our pursuit of individual independence may have gone too far. **There is actually so much, and so many, that I depend on in this very moment.** This house that I am living in, someone had to design it, build it, and maintain it. I have been dependent on all of them. This laptop that I am using to write and share my reflection, someone had to design, develop, manufacture, ship, package and test it. I have been dependent on all of them. The meal that I just ate, the ingredients had to be grown, nurtured, picked, processed, packaged, transported, stocked and sold. I have been dependent on all of the people involved. **Upon further reflection, I can see that I have always been highly dependent on others.** My parents. For not only bringing me into this world, but also for raising me, providing for me and caring for me. My friends and family. For support, companionship, lightness, perspective and growth. Most of all, for continuing to tolerate me, and all that it entails. My teachers. For showing up, especially in those moments when I was clearly not interested or engaged. They have taught me so much, and continue to. On you. For reading or listening to my reflections, and for sometimes reflecting back to me what you hear, feel or think. My team. For doing what is asked of them, even at times when they may not agree. I have been away from work for the past week, screenless, phoneless, and have depended on them even moreso. My clients. For continuing to do business with me, sharing feedback and ideas with my team and for paying their bills, so that I can pay mine. The media. For helping keep me informed, inspired or entertained, on demand whenever I feel the desire to consume. Strangers. For practicing physical distancing and helping minimize the spread of a deadly virus that disproportionately affects certain populations over others. **Within myself, there is also much that I am quietly dependent on.** I depend on the many organs in my body. My heart that pumps blood throughout my body. My lungs that enable me to breadth. My kidneys and liver that filter the fluids and toxins that circulate in my body. I depend on my muscles, joints, tissues and bones, to help me move from here to there and to give me structure and support for my organs. I depend on my senses. Sight, smell, sound, taste and touch all allow me the privilege of experiencing the material world, and also keep me safe. I depend on my mind. To process information, generate thoughts, connect with emotions and much more. **It may be time for a new declaration.** There are other forms of dependence than are more deserving of our attention and pursuit than individual independence. **Inner-dependence** is more important than independence. So much of my experience of life is subject to my inner mental and emotional states. Thoughts, feelings, emotions, dreams, desires, values, beliefs and more all arise from or solidify in my inner states. I could spend all of my time and energy trying to rearrange the world outside of me. Try to change people, expect better outcomes at work, want a slightly different body, buy more stuff and so forth, and it would not make the slightest lasting difference if I did not realize how dependent I am on my inner states for happiness, joy, peace and satisfaction. **Intra-dependence** is more important than independence. All of the happiness research clearly states that the quality and depth of our connections with others matters more than anything else. If I become the company that I keep, then the communities that I participate in and belong to will shape me more than anything. It is where I find models for what is acceptable, moral and ethical. It is where I find my identity. To be intra-dependent on friends and family is quite possibly the best thing that I can do for the protection and strength of my mental health and emotional wellbeing. **Inter-dependence** is more important than independence. There are so many systems, structures and societies that without I would not function. Where independence breeds individualism, inter-dependence breeds cohesion, consistency and certainty. I cannot imagine a society where every individual was truly independent, making their own choices with little regard or respect for others. There are a shared set of values and cultural norms, not to mention a rule of law, that we all agree to mostly operate by. This is why we are all inter-dependent on one another in a functioning society. In an age of pandemic, we must now learn how to rebuild communities, without the benefits of large gatherings. We must now learn how to rebuild understanding, without exposure to new people in public spaces. We must now learn how to rebuild connections, without close physical proximity. Humankind has survived many wars, plagues, pandemics, recessions, and periods of political unrest. We have done so by prioritizing inter-dependence, intra-dependence and inner-dependence, not individual independence. This understanding that I am highly dependent, as opposed to highly independent, cultivates a strong feeling of gratitude within my heart. _I hope that a subtle flavour of gratitude can coat every word, interaction and privilege that I enjoy in life._ As a result of the pandemic, we have been taken to a Year Zero moment. Before Coronavirus (B.C.), there was a misguided belief that individual independence was our goal. After Coronavirus (A.C.), there is a growing recognition, at least within myself, that dependence is precious, desired and ultimately the true nature of our reality. --- ### The Fourth Crisis Published: 2020-06-28 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/fourth/ We live in an ocean of crises, each one building on the last, creating a bigger impact changing the world that once was. It took 3 months for the first one million and 8 days for the next million. This is not about new users for some hot social media app, but infections from the health crisis. The global waves continue and are growing in size, at a time when we are running faster into the ocean. The first crisis. In the fall, government relief cheques, delayed mortgage payments, eviction bans and savings accounts will dry up for hundreds of millions of people. The economic crisis may have left tens of millions unemployed in its first wave but its second wave may have an even bigger hit. The second crisis. The social crisis has started with a wave of attention on the anti-Black discrimination that exists in our systems. However, discrimination exists everywhere we look. Expect continuous waves of protest and shaming of our systems that privilege the few, over the many. The third crisis. A fourth crisis is beginning to emerge. It is a result of the cumulative intensity from the health crisis, the economic crisis and the social crisis. It is a result of taking a moment to pause and reflect on how much change has hit us, in such a short period of time. It is a result of searching for sources of inspiration for a safe and sound path forward. **The fourth crisis is one of trust.** Trust is the result of a firm belief in the reliability, truth or strength of someone or something. Trust is a glue that holds our life together. When I open my laptop, I trust that the internet will work. When I set up a meeting with a client, I trust that they will show up. When I turn the stove off, I trust that it is off. When I fill up gas in a car, I trust that gas coming out of the pump. When I put money into my bank account, I trust that it will still be there the next day. To navigate the intensity of change that we are faced with now, individually and collectively, we are required to place our trust in someone or something. This could be a belief, an institution, a leader, a teacher or even an idea. While our B.C. (Before Coronavirus) economic, government, education, healthcare and justice systems continue to do the best that they can do to serve us, many were simply not designed to thrive, or even survive, in the face of the intensity of change in front of us. Furthermore, we can’t help but question if these systems are the solutions we need or were they complicit in creating many of the problems. _How might we prevent this fourth crisis, one of trust, from hitting us harder than the already big crises rocking our world?_ **Trust in government. **The top five countries with the most number of Coronavirus cases are the US, Brazil, Russia, India and the UK. They collectively make up the majority of all global cases. All five of these countries have common leadership in government who have put their populations on an unnecessarily fatal path. If we do not trust the people who lead our governments, we need to change them or change the influence that they have. **Trust in global institutions.** The United Nations was founded 75 years ago after WWII. Its primary purpose, rarely said, was to prevent WWIII. It has done that, despite many smaller wars still impacting millions. Most battles today are civil, in that they are within the confines of a country for which the U.N. was not designed to solve. More support, not less, for current and new global health and economic institutions is what is needed. **Trust in leadership.** Our organizations and corporations, be it healthcare, education, justice or business, are the rescue boats that can save us as we drift in this ocean of crises. They have an ability to impact our day-to-day safety, security and stability. The qualities that build trust in leadership include integrity, initiative, consistency, transparency, accountability and most of all, action. **Trust in each other. **As many of us step out of lockdown and step into a changed world, we are placing an incredible amount of trust in one another. Similar to how when I drive a car, I trust that you will stay in your lane and that you will stop at a red light, I now trust that you will wear a mask, respect my right to physical distance and limit the spread of a highly infectious virus. **Trust in our community.** Family and friends, some in lockdown who we get to see nearly every moment of every day, and some who we see only through the screen, have continued to be there for us, and us for them. The intensity of change facing the world has led to many of us feeling anxious, confused, fearful or depressed. This is why trust in our community of family and friends is the antidote to help keep us emotionally healthy and well. **Trust in ourselves.** The ocean of crises has been a wake-up call, not only for the world but for our world. The space afforded during lockdown, to many of us who are not on the front lines in essential services, is a rare and possibly once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Now is the moment to reflect on what it is that we truly value and believe in. Placing trust in our government, global institutions, leadership, each other and our community may be the relatively easier part of navigating this fourth crisis. Learning how to place trust in ourselves, in our values and beliefs, especially when they are different from what we think may be accepted or encouraged, is the difficult part. Trust is built over time but accelerated in moments of need. --- ### The Unexpected Failure Of Facebook Published: 2020-06-25 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/failure/ Just when we thought Facebook might have been turning a corner, it is clear now that this is one dog that does not want to learn new tricks. While 2.8 billion people have an obsession with Facebook’s products, I have a different obsession with Facebook. As a business leader in the digital media industry, one has to pay attention to Facebook and frankly can draw inspiration from their ad products, which we have at Polar. However my obsession with Facebook runs much deeper. At the start of the pandemic, I picked up Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search For Meaning. He says, “Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked.” In this quote lies the struggle at the root of Facebook’s problems. Zuckerberg is continually struggling to explain that the means justify the mission. In his case, a mission of connecting the world and giving everyone a voice. The irony is that what Facebook has done remarkably well is to connect their world, including staff, clients, shareholders and governments, in a constant hum of anti-Facebook feelings. The hum has gotten louder. The world is full of problems right now and we need resource rich organizations to invest in solving them, not creating more of them. Facebook is rich in financial resource, human resource, computing resource and most importantly, data resource. What the world is asking of Facebook is not to connect us. It is not to build addictive, I mean engaging, products. It is not to deliver advertiser ROI. The world is asking Facebook to be a model platform, a force for good, to set a higher standard and to inspire us with what is possible with technology and talent. Instead what we are witnessing is the failure of Facebook, one that even Zuckerberg with access to the world’s data, did not expect. This is not a financial failure. It is not a product failure. It is not a client failure. It is a moral failure. Big businesses normally fail where there is a failure of their products to continue to meet the demands of their clients. IBM would be an obvious big tech example. When was the last time your business bought something for IBM? Blackberry would be another one. They were just removed from the stock market index for not having enough value and trading volume. Closer to our industry, print newspapers, who came into digital two decades ago but only now are getting behind a business model that values their content fairly. Facebook is not a failure because of any product shortcomings. Their product appears to work just fine. I guess when you sell an addictive product, and get your customers hooked, you are set. What is the difference between the big tobacco companies of the twentieth century and the big tech companies of the 21st century? Both industries offer products that are highly addictive. Both industries have power and influence to keep government regulators at bay. Both industries have incredible profit margins. And both industries offer products that may cause harm. If you smoke, your risk of lung cancer is 23 times higher than if you do not smoke. Smoking increases the risk of at least 15 different types of cancer. Teens who use social media excessively have 71% increase in suicide risk factors than those that don’t. Those who visit social platforms frequently are three times more likely to feel socially isolated from those that do not. Like big tobacco, Facebook too has had a clear moral failure. Facebook staff have recently staged walkouts and publicly shamed leadership because of their decisions. The issue from staff is not about pay, working conditions, manager expectations, harassment or other issues that are typical labour concerns. If there was a Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs for staff, Facebook has delivered the basics for their staff remarkably well. There are higher expectations on the business now though. Staff expect the business to act in a moral and ethical manner. Facebook advertisers, like REI, North Face, Upwork and Patagonia, have all pulled ad spend from the platform as part of a Stop Hate For Profit campaign. Expect hundreds of advertisers to follow in the coming week. What we see here is that the advertisers are not pulling spend because of product failures, like brand safety, lack of transparent measurement or data violations, all previous product failures that Facebook has taken some actions on. They are pulling spend because of Facebook’s moral failure. The ask to be a moral institution is a tall order, one that I'm afraid Mark and Sheryl may not be cut out for. Zuck may be great at building addictive, I mean engaging, products and Sheryl may be the best of them all at selling advertising to 10 million businesses, but building an institution that can act as a role model for the world and connect with a higher purpose in society is a different act altogether. Where Zuck and Sheryl lead in the domains they are qualified and skilled to lead in, they desperately lag in this new domain, a higher domain. I even feel some empathy for the position that they are in, being asked to do something they clearly do not know how to do. Now I am sure that we will see Facebook make changes in the coming months, however the fear I have is that these changes are not for the right reasons. They are to appease staff, win back client trust and keep regulators at bay, not because Facebook fundamentally believes that they are the right things to do. Growing up, my father would often say to my sister and I, “what is good is not always right, and what is right is not always good”. Facebook has a history of doing what is good, often at the expense of what is right. This is the unexpected failure of Facebook. _Relevant References: _**[Stop Hate For Profit](https://www.stophateforprofit.org/)**_, _**[CNBC](https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/22/patagonia-joins-growing-list-of-companies-boycotting-facebook-ads.html)**_, _**[AdExchanger](https://www.adexchanger.com/platforms/advertisers-are-boycotting-facebook-will-it-last/#more-136851)**_._ --- ### 100 Days Of Clarity Published: 2020-06-21 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/100days/ I feel in a lighter mood this weekend, as we mark one hundred days in lockdown since the pandemic first began. Perhaps it is because one hundred days ago, I could not have imagined how I would be, or rather who I would be, today. The health crisis, economic crisis and social crisis remain very much alive and present in our world, impacting hundreds of millions in unfortunate and undesirable ways. These tidal waves hitting our world are enormous and will require an appropriately enormous response from each of us. This is why I feel a desire to rest up and fuel up now, mentally and emotionally, to be ready to bring the best of what I can be to our world over the next one hundred days. To rest up and fuel up begins with a simple reflection. _What have I learned about myself in the past one hundred days?_ **Clarity** Crisis leads to clarity. In an ocean of crises, a lot has become clearer for me. When I take a moment to step back and reflect, I can see now that how I have showed up and responded to life in the past one hundred days is a clear reflection of my values and beliefs. **Identity** When the world hit the pause button, one that we did not even know existed, I had no choice but to look in the mirror and see myself, with fewer labels and distractions of my previous lifestyle. My identity has evolved, or at least my awareness and understanding of it has. I identify as a leader, as a writer, as a son and most of all, as an active participant in this world, that it itself is in the process of rediscovering its own identity. **Change** For years in meditation practice, an essential teaching that I have leaned on to help me navigate times of confusion, uncertainty and stress has been that “Everything Changes”. Now I have witnessed what happens to me when “Everything Changes At The Same Time”. In the face of sudden and drastic change, how I responded was to lean into it versus to shy away from it. I appreciate that my instinct has been to be hopeful, instead of fearful, that we do not return to normal. **Connection** Without much information and little foresight, I chose to leave New York in early March, to be at home in Toronto with my parents. Although I identify and connect with being someone that lives in New York, with the independence and convenience that comes with the city, I identify and connect more so with being a son and the comfort of being close to loved ones. **Acceptance** “If you think you are enlightened, then go live with your parents for a week” is the famous quote that is referenced in mindfulness circles. Living with my parents has been a wonderful lesson in acceptance. I feel truly grateful for how my connection with my parents has matured, evolved and grown in the past one hundred days. This morning I wrote a letter to my dad, for Father’s Day, and shared how much I appreciate his presence in my life. I continue to learn about myself by observing him, up close as of late. He is a mirror for me. **Presence** While the thought of going into retreat mode at the beginning of the pandemic piqued my curiosity, like the many meditation and yoga retreats that I've enjoyed over the years, I chose instead to be present with the world and with all of its chaos, confusion and suffering. To withdraw from the world at the start of the pandemic would have been to withdraw from myself. **Discrimination** I have started to become more aware of how unconscious and subtle discrimination exists everywhere. Were it not for the protests that have entered our headlines and streets, I would not have paused to reflect on this. Although I have not personally felt that I have been a victim of discrimination, I understand that my experience is unique. I somehow slipped through the cracks in the system that discriminates against so many. **Leadership** A TV personality in Canada, who was behind a three decade long public service campaign promoting physical activity, shared this past week that the reason he started it was to fight racism. He had been hired as a sports broadcaster over 30 years ago, only to be fired the same day, when an executive said “we already have one Black host, we do not need another”. The broadcaster’s leadership issued a public apology to him this week. They took responsibility for something that their predecessors did and acknowledged that racism continues to exist in sports media today. I was encouraged by their humble and thoughtful response, which could have easily gone in many other directions. **Security** When governments began rolling out economic relief packages to help the newly unemployed, and thus increasing deficits and debt levels, I found myself immediately in agreement. I want my hard-earned tax dollars from the past decade, and likely over the next decade, to help people in need. I now see that I want to live in a world where everyone has the financial security to look after their basic needs. **Capitalism** The business headlines in the past few weeks in Canada have included a very public critique of the largest grocery chains.They had temporarily increased staff pay by a mere $2/hour at the start of the pandemic, referring to their staff as heroes. They recently removed the pay increases, despite generating record profits in the billions. How one feels in light of this news makes it very clear how one feels about the level of corporate greed that our capitalistic culture has cultivated. It is shameful. **Balance** This is a marathon and not a sprint. A new appreciation for what balance looks like in my life has grown during this time. I can see clearly that before I had a fairly one-dimensional attitude, optimizing a single aspect of my life, at the expense of other aspects. In the past one hundred days, I have learned how to shift towards a multi-dimensional attitude, choosing to optimize for several aspects of life instead of only one. **Writing** Although I have kept a blog for the past few years and often wrote opinion pieces for the digital advertising industry on behalf of my business, over the past one hundred days I have discovered a new depth of my passion for writing. Thank you to all of you who have shared your comments on my reflections, which I will continue to share each week. I have also included below a list of the reflections from the past one hundred days, with a favourite line from each. **Teaching** I am grateful to the many friends who have given me the encouragement to teach meditation. The weekday live meditations with friends continue, each day at 9:30am EST (which you are more than welcome to join, sign-up at _[findfocus.live](http://findfocus.live/)_). There have been over 1,200 individual meditations and 25,000 cumulative minutes of practice together. I have also been inspired to start writing a book about the applications of mindfulness principles in everyday moments. **Awareness** The past one hundred days have given me awareness about what I truly value and believe to be true. This is a Year Zero moment, not only for the world, but for each of us individually. We have been given the space to make different choices. I believe this process starts with connecting more deeply with ourselves. _What have you learned about yourself in the past one hundred days? I invite you to email me (k@bykunal.com) and share a few words or sentences with me. I would love to hear from you._ **_[Fear In The Face Of A Global Pandemic](https://www.bykunal.com/post/pandemic)_** _“To take action right now is a response to fear. To not take action is also a response to fear.” _(March 15, 2020) **_[Hope For The Future Of Humanity](https://www.bykunal.com/post/humanity)_** _“In the face of crisis, there is clarity. Choices that we previously feared are now easy.” _(March 22, 2020) **_[Making Difficult Decisions](https://www.bykunal.com/post/decisions)_**_ “The sometimes useful, sometimes inconvenient ability we have to project and predict how we may feel after a decision hinders our ability to make the decision.” _(March 29, 2020) **_[The Two Valleys](https://www.bykunal.com/post/valley)_** _“Once I became aware of my own suffering, everything changed.” _(April 5, 2020) **_[The Desire To Be Productive](https://www.bykunal.com/post/productive)_** _“It literally feels good to be productive and no surprise, it becomes addictive. It has for me.” _(April 12, 2020) **_[The Many Layers Of Our Identity](https://www.bykunal.com/post/layers)_** _“We are more than what we do, where we are, how we appear and how we play.”_ (April 19, 2020) **_[The Art Of Crying](https://www.bykunal.com/post/crying)_** _“I cried yesterday. The day before that. A few days before that. And I cried last week.” _(April 26, 2020) **_[The Search For Unconditional Balance](https://www.bykunal.com/post/balance)_** _“Balance is not an intellectual concept. Balance is a feeling. I can’t think balanced. I can only feel balanced.” _(May 3, 1. **_[Less Is More](https://www.bykunal.com/post/lessismore)_** _“This is a philosophy that cuts through the noise of my mind and brings me to a place of peace. I feel less stress and pressure to have more, do more or be more.” _(May 10, 2020) **_[Our Future Is Limited Only By Our Imagination](https://www.bykunal.com/post/imagine)_** _“Our imagination may just be the most powerful tool we have to create a better life for ourselves and a better world for the future of humanity.” _(May 17, 2020) **_[Unconscious Expression](https://www.bykunal.com/post/expression)_** _“The idea that I am not responsible for how I am received by others. I love this idea.” _(May 24, 2020) **_[A Desire For Change](https://www.bykunal.com/post/change)_** _“While not all lethal, the social inequalities are plenty and all around.” _(May 31, 2020) **_[The Destruction Of Discrimination](https://www.bykunal.com/post/discrimination)_** _“Teachers can be our bridge from discrimination to discernment.” _(June 7, 2020) **_[Slipping Through The Cracks](https://www.bykunal.com/post/cracks)_** _“All things considered, if I had not slipped through the cracks, there is a good chance that my life would not be as great as it is today.” _(June 14, 2020) --- ### Slipping Through The Cracks Published: 2020-06-14 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/cracks/ I feel as if I have somehow slipped through the cracks. _I am not Black, however I am also not White._ _I am not an immigrant, however my parents are._ _I do not identify based on the colour of my skin, however I know many rightfully do._ _I have not been economically disadvantaged, however I know others who look like me have._ _I do not feel that I have been discriminated against, however I know that I am in the privileged minority, of the visible minorities, who feel this way._ _I am not at a higher risk of being over-policed, however I now see that so many, too many, others are._ As I become more aware about the subtle, and not-so-subtle, countless acts of intentional discrimination against Black people around the world, Indigenous people in Canada and visible minorities from any backgrounds that are foreign to the incumbent populations in every nation, I feel disheartened and upset, and at the same time shame and guilt. So many have not had the same equitable access to justice, education and economic opportunity that I have had, for no fault or doing of their own. This reality continues to weigh heavy on me. **I have been one of the lucky few, who somehow slipped through the cracks of a society and a system designed to discriminate against so many.** My parents immigrated from New Delhi to Montreal a month before I was born. It also happened to be a week before the Air India Flight 182 bombing, where 329 people aboard lost their lives, still the worst act of terror in Canadian history. Every summer, my parents remember that event somberly, as the three of us could have easily been on that flight. Worst of all, my younger sister would not be in this world if that had been our unfortunate fate. Growing up, we were fortunate to have the freedom to visit relatives in India often and as I got older, I found myself stopping in India every other year, while on global business trips to the Middle East, South East Asia or Australia. The greatest gift from these short visits continues to be the connections that I enjoy with my cousins. We are all about to jump on a global family Zoom call today. Every time that I visit India, including this past fall, I have to walk poverty lined streets, scratch countless mosquito bites, jump at sounds of stray dogs barking at night and avoid breathing in too much of the densely polluted air. I could have easily grown up here and be still living here, is where my thoughts often go. I cannot help but begin to imagine what life would have been like for me if my parents had decided to stay in India instead of come to Canada. I would not have slipped through the cracks. Much of my life would have been different. I likely would not have received access to the quality of post-secondary education that I did here in Canada. The Indian college system is far more competitive, and knowing what I know now about my academic capabilities and interests, I clearly would not have gotten into a top school, like I did in Canada. I would not have been able to start a business at 21 years old. While improving, the Indian business culture would not have accepted a young CEO over a decade ago. “Where is your father?” would have been the question I would be asked by potential clients, not open to taking me seriously. While in North America, I had signed major global clients within 9 months of graduating school, which cemented a stable foundation for the business to grow and flourish. Ironically, I may not have discovered my passion for meditation and yoga, as contrary to popular belief in the mindfulness communities that I am deeply invested in here in North America, everyone in India is not a yogi. In my extended family of over one hundred relatives, I can count on one hand the number of people who identify with or practice yoga. I also would not be writing this reflection from the place of relative privilege that I have today. Almost everything that I identify with today would likely not be the case, had I been raised in India, despite being born to the same parents, at the same moment in time. **In this moment, I similarly cannot help but begin to imagine what life would have been like for me if I had not slipped through the cracks of a society and system that discriminates often based on the basis of race.** I might be living in a predominately poor neighbourhood due to racial segregation policies. For example, in the 70s in Chicago, public policies created by the city government were designed to keep Black away from prosperous neighborhoods, and as a result, away from good schools and good jobs. It is a symptom of fear that continues to result in active discrimination towards people of colour. I would likely be in a public school with a challenging teacher-to-student ratio. In poorer US school districts, there are 29 students to 1 teacher, versus the national average of 16 to 1. I might have lost interest in education at an early age, without the attention from teachers and the inspiration from older students. Would I even have finished high school? In Wisconsin, only 67% of Blacks students graduate high school compared to 93% of White students. In Canada, only 44% of Indigenous students on-reserve graduate high school, compared to 88% of all other Canadian students. If I had not slipped through the cracks, there would be a higher chance that I would be working in an essential business, in the middle of a global health pandemic, and putting my safety, and those whom I live with, at greater risk. 38% of people in essential business are Black compared with 27% who are White. Black workers are 50% more likely to work in healthcare than White workers. If I were living in a rougher neighborhood, I might have been exposed more to the less inspiring realities in society. I might have had friends with single parents or friends who lived in unsafe homes subject to domestic violence, drug abuse or alcohol addiction. What type of environment might I have had, and how would that have shaped how I saw my place in the world? If I had not slipped through the cracks, I might have witnessed relatives being over-policed, based on the colour of our skin or the neighborhoods that we could afford to live in. I might have seen the inside of a jail cell, or known many people who have. How might that have influenced my trust of government, law enforcement and the justice system? Black people make up 12% of the general US population but 33% of the population in jails. If Black and Hispanic people were incarcerated at the same rates of White people, the US jail population would decrease by 40%. In Canada, Indigenous people make up only 4% of the population but 23% of the jail population. If I did graduate high school, my college or university experience would likely not have been the same. Would I have been encouraged to go to a great school and be considered for merit based scholarships and awards? Would admission officers unconsciously discriminate against me based on my name or my address? Enrollment in the top 500 US colleges is 75% White. While nearly 72% of White students finish a degree within 6 years, it is only 46% for Black students. If I had not slipped through the cracks, and still by some miracle graduated post-secondary education with a decent degree, what opportunities would be available to me? Would I even have thought about starting a business at 21 years old? I might have not known many entrepreneurs, or had as many inspiring role models and support around me. Would investors fund me? 75% of technology startup investments go to White founders. Only 2% of Venture Capital partners are Black. In the workplace, would I be promoted based on my skill and potential, at the same rate as my non Black colleagues? Would I be paid a competitive and fair wage? Would I be effective in a sales or client facing role, where the mantra of “people do business with people, not with businesses” still holds true. **All things considered, if I had not slipped through the cracks, there is a good chance that my life would not be as great as it is today.** The cracks in society are few and far between, available to the lucky few like me. For most, the system does not let them slip through the cracks to avoid the discrimination that occurs in education, housing, justice and the economy. What this moment is asking from all of us is to cultivate greater empathy for the lives that may be different than ours. Empathy starts with listening, not talking. Listening to stories. _Stories are more powerful and deserving of our attention than numbers._ _Stories influence and change the unconscious conditioning that we may have._ _Stories lift our blinders, so that we can learn to see reality as it is, not as we might wish to believe it is._ **This is a Year Zero moment.** It is an opportunity to make different choices, to create a different system. One that is equitable for all people, regardless of race. One where I do not have to somehow slip through the cracks to live a good life. This is what this moment asks of each of us. --- ### The Destruction Of Discrimination Published: 2020-06-07 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/discrimination/ In the recent months, we have referred to the novel Coronavirus as a villain of sorts, one that is conscious and diabolically plotting the destruction of human life. This villain’s form is a virus, that infects one human body at a time, while turning its latest victim into a host enabling it to spread more efficiently and grow exponentially. This villain has shown resilience in the face of medical treatments and vaccines previously known to humans. World domination appears to be its mission, invading humans in every continent, country and city. We have superheroes who are brave enough to fight this villain. Front-line health care workers, most government leaders and physical distancing practices. We hope that there are more superheroes coming soon, including efficient and effective contact tracing and the development of a vaccine. At the hands of this villain, there has no doubt been destruction of our economy, of our lifestyles and most of our short term plans, including graduation celebrations and summer vacations. The destruction has been greater for some over others though. Many have seen the destruction of their income, or worse, the premature death of loved ones. **Discrimination is another villain that has been destroying our society.** Unlike the Coronavirus, this villain is not novel and has been present for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Similar to the Coronavirus though, it is not visible to the naked eye but clearly seen through the path of destruction that it leaves behind. We may not always know where it is but can see where it has been. Discrimination is a complex villain that attacks in many ways. Discrimination based on race, gender or religion are well known and increasingly visible to many. There is also discrimination based on age, appearance and ability, which may be less visible but still destructive. Discrimination also needs a human host to spread, like the Coronavirus. It is an infection that we catch from other people. It is through the influence of parents, teachers, religion, leaders, corporations, marketers and more that we become infected with discrimination. We are not born with the ability or understanding of how to discriminate. It is an undesirable skill, one that we have learned and one that we, unfortunately, teach others. This villain has a form that we are well aware of. This form is what we read often about in the headlines and in this moment, countless stories from recent months and years are heard more loudly. It has clearly infected the systems that educate, fund and govern our society. This villain has a more viscous and destructive form though. Unconscious discrimination is a form travels beneath our awareness. Unconscious discrimination has become systemic in each of us. We are all infected. Unconscious discrimination exists in the subtlest of forms, that more often than not, evade our consciousness. The judgments that we place on others with incomplete or incorrect information. **There are countless opportunities for me to practice unconscious discrimination.** _When I choose where I sit on public transit._ _When I scan through resumes of candidates._ _When I swipe through profiles on a dating app._ _When I choose who to donate to._ _When I vote for a political candidate._ _When I scroll through a feed._ In simple terms, discrimination has come to mean when someone is treated unfairly or differently based on their race, gender, religion, age, appearance, abilities or other factors. Discrimination, especially in an unconscious form, is an undesirable skill. Discernment, on the other hand, is a desirable skill. In simple terms, it is the ability to judge well. It involves paying attention to the finer details of something before placing judgement. In the examples above, my evolution is to bring conscious discernment to the situations where I otherwise could bring unconscious discrimination. I do not remember taking a course in grade school about discrimination, reading a book about how discrimination infects society and how it infects me, or hearing business leaders speak about discrimination in their organizations. **Teachers can be our bridge from discrimination to discernment.** We can choose to see everyone as a teacher. The school, the workplace, the church and the stage may be the formal places where we see teachers. The home, the social feed, the garden and the meditation are the informal places, each with their own teachers, that likely have even more influence on us. To apply the skill of discernment to picking a piece of fruit or buying a piece of furniture is relatively easy. To apply the skill of discernment as it relates to the treatment of other human beings is not as easy. It requires empathy. The destruction from discrimination has led to a response of sympathy from many of us. “I see your pain and suffering”, as a doctor would say to a patient or a lawyer to a client. The destruction of discrimination requires a response of empathy from all of us. “I feel your pain and suffering”, as a good friend would say. Discrimination is so widespread that it has infected each of us. This moment has become a spotlight, through peaceful protest, to bring attention to this humbling truth. The irony in my reflection of comparing the Coronavirus to discrimination, both villains and both infections, is that the latter may be the more dangerous one. Discrimination has not only infected our systems and each of us, but it has also infected the Coronavirus. The Coronavirus has disproportionately discriminated against certain populations, more so than others. In each moment, we must ask ourselves if we are helping the virus of discrimination spread. In this moment, we are being asked to help bring destruction to discrimination. --- ### The Truth About Productivity Published: 2020-06-04 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/productivity/ We have an obsession with productivity, not only as a measure of our collective progress as a society, industry or business, but also as a measure of self-worth for the individual professional. **There is a difference between working a lot and being productive.** We may be working a lot, especially in this time, that does not mean that we are being productive. I do not buy the countless claims of productivity increases that employers, employees and the media are claiming in this time of work from home. I never thought we were that productive to begin with or that we cared to be. I believe we have been after something else. There is science to explain our obsession with productivity. Every time that we finish a task, be it as simple as responding to emails or clearing unread messages on Slack, or as complex as troubleshooting a client issue or developing a multi-month project plan, our brain releases a hormone called dopamine. Dopamine feels pleasurable. Similarly, scrolling through an Instagram feed, drinking alcohol or eating fried foods also releases dopamine in our brains, which feel equally pleasurable. I do not believe that we have a desire for productivity as much as we have a desire for pleasure. Pleasure feels good. Modern culture has us believe that we are logical beings who sometimes experience emotions. That is why, for example, you rarely hear of leaders in business talk about one of the rawest expressions of emotion known to humans, to cry. I cry, all the time, and _[wrote about it recently](http://bykunal.com/post/crying)_. I believe that we are emotional beings first, who sometimes use logic to try and explain or justify our emotions. To feel is to be human. Lately, we have been very human, in that we have had a lot to feel about. We feel for the people impacted directly by the health pandemic, including health care professionals on the front lines and essential service professionals keeping us connected, fed and safe. We feel fed up with the social inequalities, many so deep-rooted and long-standing that they have become ingrained within our systems. _We also feel good when we believe that we have been productive and feel bad when we believe that we have not been productive._ In many industries, we have glamourized over-work, the way fashion magazines and advertisers have popularized one specific image of beauty in the minds of the masses. If I felt productive today, then it was a good day at work. If I felt distracted, scattered or inefficient today, then it was a bad day at work. \*\* More Is Not More\*\* In the industries that I am directly involved with, like digital media and mental health, more effort does not equal more value for the clients or users that we serve. More products, more features, more customers, more press or more team members does not always mean more business. It is linear thinking to believe in business that “more is more”. Businesses are far more complex to lead and manage. For example, we have seen how large multinational corporations have acted on this humbling truth. Many have been quick to consolidate, divest and reduce their product lines and geographic footprints. In my business, I have clients now in 40 countries but in reality, most of our revenue comes from clients in 8 countries. At the start of the year, I had ideas to invest in several new product lines however now have decided to put the weight of my team behind one product and make it the best that we can for our clients. While it may be intellectually pleasurable to create new things, the most productive thing that we can do is to focus. **Constraints cultivate focus.** Focus leads to effectiveness. To be effective is to be productive. \*\* How We Work\*\* What I first experienced at the start of the pandemic was that more work led to more burnout, more fatigue, more impatience and more confusion. More is clearly not more for how we work. I see the symptoms of fatigue and burnout everywhere I look. It is time to evolve what it means to be productive as more than pleasure, and that starts with how we work. Less can be more. In the past month, I have experimented with this idea when it comes to collaboration in a distributed setup. Here are four ideas that I have tested and now chosen to keep in our culture. **1. 30 minute meetings** by default instead of 60 minutes. The constraint of time encourages focus. **2. No internal meetings after 1pm.** An intentional effort to create more space for uninterrupted time to be productive. **3. Less Slack.** We set a mandate to reduce Slack usage by 50%, and so far have cut it by 30% by simply asking everyone to be more intentional with it. **4. Bi-weekly is the new weekly.** Moving my 1-1s and other team meetings to every 2 weeks is fine and gives everyone more space (including me). The above changes alone have given me and my team a lot more space to actually be productive and produce better work, by working fewer, better hours. **A Marathon, Not A Sprint** In the first few months of lockdown, I found myself working at irregular times. My days would start around 7am and continue sometimes into the evening (I am single and do not have kids or a partner). I felt exhausted working this much, and all through a screen without the benefits of IRL (in real life) interactions. With our current lack of structure, there are fewer separations for when the work day starts or ends, and even when the work week begins or finishes. Furthermore, there is an added complexity, which has always existed, called time zones. Running a global business means that I have clients and teams available to me at literally any hours of the day._ I took advantage of that at the start of lockdown and quickly saw how it took advantage of me._ About one month ago, in a moment of burnout, I realized that this is a marathon and not a sprint anymore. This insight inspired me to make 3 specific changes to how I work: **1. Start time.** Each weekday morning, I lead a 20-min live meditation on Zoom for friends, clients and my team at 930am (you are welcome to join us, _[findfocus.live](http://findfocus.live/)_). I now begin my workday at 10am after the group meditation. This has given me the space each morning to reflect more deeply about important business ideas and issues that are on my mind, invest more in practices that support my wellbeing (writing, meditation, yoga), and read the newspaper (which I have come to really enjoy). **2. End time.** I am an active volunteer with several organizations and entrepreneurs in the mental health space and now intentionally schedule my phone calls (not Zoom calls) for 4pm or 5pm. This has helped create a forcing function for me to unplug from work through screens for the rest of my evening. **3. Technology.** I do not have notifications, email or Slack on my phone. I never did but now more than ever, given that we do not go anywhere, we do not need to be connected to work through our phones. If something urgent happens, I trust that someone will call me. While these practices sound simple, they have required a healthy dose of discipline for me to stick to and I am grateful for them. The constraint of time has helped me be more focused, effective and strategic with how I work and what I choose to invest time with. The Space To Be Well To think of vacation may be difficult during this time however taking time away from the day-to-day has always been helpful, if not one of the most productive things that I can do for both my business and myself. Making space for our mental and emotional wellbeing is important but not always intuitive. Last month, I asked my team to take a few Wellness Days. On a Wellness Day, they were asked to disconnect fully from email/Slack, to not do any work and more importantly, to invest the time intentionally to support their mental and emotional wellbeing. The next day, everyone shared with me what they did, however I was more interested in how they shared it, as a sign of how they felt. Everyone’s energy and enthusiasm for life was lifted. People were inspired again. **Over the next few months, I have asked everyone on my team to take a Wellness Day every two weeks, in addition to taking one full Wellness Week.** I am encouraging dedicated space for mental and emotional wellbeing not because it leads to more productivity, loyalty and focus (which it does). I am doing it because it is the right thing to do. _In the end, that is what leadership asks of each of us._ One of the central teachings in meditation is to “see reality as it is, not as you wish it to be”. What this time has highlighted for me about reality is that we need space to be well, less can be more, now is a great time to reset how we work and most importantly, being productive does not mean working a lot. While filled with pleasurable dopamine hits, working a lot leads to only one thing: fatigue. I do not want that for my team, for myself, or for any of you. --- ### A Desire For Change Published: 2020-05-31 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/change/ I feel sadness about the disturbing events unfolding in the US. The murder of a presumably innocent young person by a police officer, and the immediate civic unrest that has erupted in cities across the nation. More is unfortunately likely to come in the days and weeks to follow. I also feel disappointed, as I naively thought that we were further along in our evolution as a caring and compassionate society. Now the heartwarming responses that we have seen from many during the pandemic remain a source of hope for me, however these recent events make it clear how much more we collectively still need to grow and develop. _Our journey continues._ While not all lethal, the social inequalities are plenty and all around. I felt prompted by this week’s events to reflect on some of the social inequalities present in my field of awareness. **The coronavirus** has disproportionately impacted racial minorities and lower income populations. These members of our society are more likely to live in close quarters where the virus can more easily spread. If that was not enough, they are also more likely to be in essential service roles, where they are more likely to be exposed to the virus from others. Furthermore, in the months to come, it will be clear how those in less developed and privileged countries will be further impacted by the virus in ways that we, in wealthier nations, are not able to even imagine. **Income inequality**, while nothing new, has been made more clear in the midst of the pandemic. The impacts of an economic recession are not felt equally by everyone across the spectrum of rich and poor. Those with fat bank accounts and investments may see the value of their financial portfolios fall, however their present moment experience is limited to numbers on a screen changing. Compare this with those who have lost their only source of income and bear the brunt of the impacts of a recession. It is not their fault that governments ordered lockdowns and that consumers do not want to spend, and likely will not want to for a long time to come. These members of our society do not know how they will pay rent or buy groceries in a few months after the government relief cheques dry up. **Women** have not been given the same career advancement and economic growth opportunities that men have enjoyed for a long time. While there are countless initiatives to support the movement and significant progress that has been made in recent years, it still feels to me that this is taking a long time. Unlike the other social inequalities that I am reflecting on, this one we all agree on and I do feel that we are headed in the right direction. This is the reason that I have hope for these members of our society, but still a growing impatience. **Climate change** invisibly impacts some members of our society more than others, despite the climate changing as a result of our collective choices. Densely populated cities continue to use efficient, but carbon heavy, sources of fuel to get people moving that results in significantly more people dying from air pollution each year than the coronavirus will kill this year. Both respiratory illnesses, both lethal, one is far more pervasive and the curve is not flattening but growing exponentially. Populations near shore lines have to deal with rising sea levels. The increasing temperature of the planet means that some geographies are more susceptible to heat waves and uncontrollable fires. In the face of the social inequalities that climate change has led to, _“we are in this together”_ takes on an equally important meaning as it continues to in the pandemic. **The mental health and addictions** crisis continues to accelerate. The pandemic and months of lockdown have made it clear to everyone that mental health is health. We have all experienced first hand, or born witness to those close to us experiencing feelings of anxiety, stress and fear. Death by suicide rates have historically increased after recessionary times. However, rates are not evenly spread across income, education, age, location and racial groups. Some members of our society are more susceptible to death by suicide than others. I bring up death by suicide as but one example of what happens when we fail to support and strengthen mental health. I believe that the social inequalities that I have shared reflections about here are in fact symptoms, not causes, of a different issue. **Death by suicide** may be a symptom of losing hope and a lack of support, but these in themselves are symptoms of a different issue. **Climate change** may be a symptom of our dependency on coal and oil, however this dependency is a symptom of a different issue. **Income inequality** may be a symptom of our capitalistic structures, taxation loopholes and access to education, however these are each a symptom of a different issue. **Women** inequalities in the workplace may be evidenced by a lack of pay and promotion for women alongside men, however these are symptoms of a different issue. **Lower income** populations are at a higher risk of exposure to the virus due to the types of jobs they have, which is again a symptom of a different issue. And the murder of a young man by a police officer is the result of a number of issues, including prejudice, fear and arrogance, which themselves are all symptoms of a different issue. **_This different issue that I reference repeatedly here is one of values._** Our values inform our beliefs, which influence our choices. Our choices impact the friends that we keep, the schools that we hope to attend, the careers that we desire to pursue and the information that we consume. And the friends, schools, careers and information we choose shape how we see the world and how we show up in the world. And this is what directly influences the many social inequalities that I am reflecting on here. I grew up in Ottawa, Canada’s capital city, and was fortunate to learn about civics in grade school. I had the opportunity to represent my student class in school government at the age of 11 and continued to be involved each year, which led to me being co-president of my high school when I was 17. I went to the largest high school in Ottawa, a population of 1,600 students, that happened to be in a lower income neighborhood with tremendous ethnic diversity. In my leadership roles, I was lucky to be exposed daily to all segments of our student population. There were only a handful of Indians in my school, that I remember at least. Growing up, I identified more as a Canadian than an Indian. Even though my childhood was rich in Indian culture, which I continue to appreciate and have so many fond memories of, I grew up not seeing myself as any different than the other kids who were of different races or had less or more money than my family. Upon reflection, I can now see that I was blind to the social inequalities that exist. It is only now as an adult, having lived in different places and traveled to most places, that I can start to understand the grave social inequalities that have and continue to exist. In the many roles that we each may identify with, be it a teacher, parent, employer, government, religious leader, friend, relative or neighbour, we have an opportunity to bring intention to the values that we want to offer each other. The values that we inherit from one another influence who we are for each other. Every time we engage on social media, speak with a family member, connect with a friend or collaborate with a coworker, we exchange our values. _This exchange is more unconscious than conscious and in each exchange, we give one another a little bit of ourselves._ We have given each other the inequalities that I have reflected about here, through the exchange of our values and the inheritance of our values from the choices of previous generations. We are all members of the same society. While we get to enjoy its fruits, we must remember that we also have a responsibility to look after one another. **Now I believe that we are in Year Zero.** There was life BC (Before Coronavirus) and there will be life AC (After Coronavirus). In between, this present moment, we have been given the space to inquire within and to question these values that we have exchanged and inherited. We can ask ourselves deeper questions, such as _“what do I now believe to be true?”_. It may be the same as what was but it does not have to be. _It takes intellect to question others._ _It takes courage to question values._ _It takes humility to be open to change._ _It takes strength to be willing to change._ _It takes leadership to initiate that change._ The social inequalities that we are witnessing, from up close like the front line healthcare professionals and essential service workers, who are putting their physical and mental health at risk for us, and from far, like the murder of a young person by a law enforcement official due to racial divides, has led to a strong desire for change. This change can start with asking ourselves about what we now value. --- ### How I Use Zoom: 17 Productivity Tips Published: 2020-05-27 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/zoom/ In the past few months, I’ve used Zoom for pretty much everything, including daily meditations, client meetings, team stand-ups, dance parties, improv, family gatherings, dates, birthday parties, yoga, kirtans, webinars, conferences and more. All of this adds up to over 500 hours on Zoom in the past 10 weeks alone. While I have experienced major Zoom fatigue at times, there are intentional practices that have helped me stay productive and present. As we say in improv, “you build the house one brick at a time”, which here means that every little change, regardless of small it may seem, contributes to the overall experience you have. _Here are a few ways that I use Zoom:_ - Hide self-view is a must, can focus better if I am not staring at myself - Rename myself to a clean screen name, “Kunal” keeps it personal and private, relevant for conferences and bigger gatherings - Gallery view is a must, need to see everyone, so much information on who’s paying attention and when I may be losing people - Mute myself on large calls, above 5 people, and use the ‘Spacebar’ shortcut to Mute/Unmute - Video on by default, especially in a business context, effective way to establish trust - Look at the camera from time to time, versus only the screen, helps establish connection - Private chat messages are the most effective way to get someone’s attention in real-time - Keyboard shortcuts are worth learning, command+shift+s for screen-share - Emojis are fun to add to my screen name, command+control+spacebar on Mac - Google Calendar browser extension is great, makes it fast to add Zoom to new meetings - Google Calendar integration with Zoom is also great, makes it easy to find meeting links - Desktop over phone for sure, quality and perception suffers when joining from the phone - Notifications off on all my devices by default, it so obvious on Zoom now when someone is distracted by a notification or ping on their screen or phone - Virtual backgrounds can be fun and are a much better conversation starter in business meetings than pandemic chatter - Audio only calls with friends, where we have video on for a few minutes to see each other, and then both go video off for the rest of our call - Share sound versus screen from time-to-time lightens up the mood - Beauty filter, yes, also called “touch up my appearance” The best way to learn how to do some of the above is to literally Google it, e.g. “how to hide self-view on Zoom”, and you will be able to find simple instructions. As I shared with my mom at the start of lockdown, “have patience, with practice and time, you will learn to be comfortable with Zoom”. Practice and presence has helped me feel in more control when using technology. And for better or worse, video calls are here to stay for a long time and it is worth the investment of your time to learn how to be good at doing them. --- ### Unconscious Expression Published: 2020-05-24 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/expression/ Each moment is an unconscious expression of who I am. Each day when I walk in my parents neighbourhood, I get to witness the unconscious expression of nature and learn from it. The bright red, yellow and purple tulips have bloomed and are completely unaware of their own beauty. The trees stand strong yet still, grounded with their sprawling roots, some visible, most invisible. The birds sing, each to their own tune, without any concern for how they sound. Every time that I step outside of the home, every time that I look outside the window, every time that I open my ears to the sounds of the suburbs, I get to witness the unconscious expressions from one of life’s greatest teachers, nature. A common feeling is a desire to always be productive, or rather a desire to feel that I am always productive. I call this conscious expression. It is no doubt a conditioning that I have inherited from the culture that I grew up in and that I continue to find myself in today. The desire to always feel productive is a disease for the mind, in that it can put the mind in a state of dis-ease. It can be difficult to express honestly, vulnerably and accurately if I am concerned with the production over the process. On the other hand, unconscious expression is more concerned with process than production. A sense of satisfaction may accompany the doing however I am at peace without it. For example, I committed to myself to create the space to write everyday for the past week. It has been wonderful. Writing can be a source of inspiration, clarity and energy for me, and something that I do not to impress, influence or inspire, but merely to express. The paper is my canvas, the ink my paint and the pen my brush. It matters less to me what you think about me or my writing, and more that I express myself accurately and fully, how I am, in this moment. A friend reflected with me recently that once she realized that she was not responsible for how her expression is received by others, she felt a weight lifted off of her shoulders. I love this reflection. The idea that I am not responsible for how I am received by others. I will instead allow my expression, in all of my doing and being, to be me. To allow my expression the space to be unconscious. If I am trying to be received in a specific way, I risk becoming overly conscious and can lose myself. This reminds me of an important teaching from the Gita, the book and source of yoga philosophy, that says _“it is better to do your duty poorly than to do someone else’s well”._ My parents renovated their kitchen last year. As I continue to navigate where everything can be found, I get to see their personalities so beautifully reflected in the design of this space in our home. They love kitchen stuff and to my amazement, there are drawers within the drawers to store all of the kitchen stuff that they have. They like to freeze food, and as such, the freezer is as large as the fridge and often more full. There are no glass cabinets, as they have no need to display fancy glassware or bowls. Although the fridge is massive, there is not a single shelf that could fit a wine bottle, as they do not drink. There is only recycling and compost, no trash. **The reason that I love to spend time in the kitchen and admire it so much is not for its function or form, but because it is such an accurate reflection of who and how parents are.** The garden beds wrapped around our home are a clear expression of my mom’s passion for flowers, plants and produce. They, like my mom, are not really well organized but instead appear like a collage of randomness. However, every time that I walk in our backyard and open my eyes to really look at the garden, I smile as I see my mom’s personality so authentically reflected back to me. I know that she could hire gardeners and professional landscapers, however I hope that she never does. The end result with hired help may look better, cleaner, neater, tidier, fuller and brighter, however in doing so, she would miss the entire purpose of gardening. **For my mom, gardening is not about any final result.** It is the activity, the daily struggle and joy, despite her arthritis and other body aches, that she gets to experience. We have started to talk about visiting my sister and brother-in-law in Ottawa sometime this summer, to which my mom’s response is _“but I can’t leave my many children behind”_. She is referring to flowers and plants in her garden. If you ask me what my parents do, I cannot tell you with any specificity except to share that they often claim to be “very busy”. Doing what, I am still quite not sure but that is besides the point. Their respective desks do appear very busy. My father’s desk in particular looks like it may have looked in the 90s, with papers sprawled everywhere, you cannot barely see the beautiful wood desk under the piles of papers. On a few occasions, I have covertly organized them on the shelves and cleared the desk space. Within days, the papers are spread back everywhere, without any discussion or comment. This weekend, I have started to quietly remove the excessive stands, tables and chairs from both of my parents' offices, where papers naturally accumulate however I doubt it will make any difference. On the other hand, my desk is paperless and spotless. At first glance, you would not believe that I spend hours each day at it. What I have now realized is that each of our respective desks is but an expression of who we each are, how we like to work and the conditions that we each thrive in. **There is no one way.** There is a humility to know that to express and observe expression implies that I have the space to do so. I am fortunate. Fortunate to not have concern with food, shelter or safety on a day-to-day basis. _Through no doing of my own, but of so many others around me, I can enjoy the freedom to explore the many shades of expression that continue to come into my awareness._ Everything that we do is ultimately an expression of ourselves. Every space, every action, every word, every thought, is but a mere expression of our identity. When I remember that the purpose of my doing, whatever it may be, such as guiding a meditation, running a business, taking a walk outside, speaking with a friend or cooking a meal, is to express myself, then I feel less pressure. The doing begins to feel effortless. However, when I get confused about the purpose of my doing and assign to it an expectation of the achievement of a specific outcome, then the doing feels heavy and effortful. **True expression may just be an act of the heart over the mind.** My one word intention for this year is heart, which means I dedicated the year to explore the many expressions of my heart. To create the space for expression has involved learning to listen to the sound of my heart and simultaneously turn down the volume of my mind. _Each moment I am an unconscious expression_ _Not as I may have been_ _Not as I might desire to be perceived_ _Not as I hope to be_ _But as I am now_ **_There is a freedom that I now feel with unconscious expression._** --- ### Our Future Is Limited Only By Our Imagination Published: 2020-05-17 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/imagine/ The state of lockdown that we are in would have been completely unimaginable and absurd to talk about, even 100 days ago. If you were to describe lockdown to me 100 days ago, you may say something along the lines of: _“we will take all of the planes out of the sky, stop the trains and busses, keep everyone in their homes, close all of the schools, close every bar and restaurant, close every office, cancel every sports game, postpone the Olympics, cancel every concert and conference, and ask people to wear a mask when leaving their home.”_ **I would not understand you.** I would not believe you. I might show some concern for the world. I would show more concern for your mental and emotional well-being, for having these thoughts. What the past two months of lockdown have shown me is that a reality beyond our imagination is completely possible. As our conversations now focus on unwinding the lockdown, a bigger question needs to be asked about the type of future that we want to create. **Our future is limited only by our imagination.** **This is Year Zero.** There was life Before Coronavirus (B.C.) and there will be life After Coronavirus (A.C.). We have been given the space, an opportunity even, to make different choices for the future of humanity. Some fear that we do not return to normal. I hope that we do not return to normal. _We can do better for each other and it starts with our imagination._ In the book Sapiens, the author challenges our framing of the purpose of history. He says that the purpose of history is not to predict the future but to free ourselves from the past and to imagine alternative destinies. I love this. I can find countless observations from my own life, like the current lockdown, that were unimaginable to me before yet became part of my reality and story. This again shows me that my journey through life, like the future of humanity, is limited only by imagination. My Unimaginable Realities In many mindfulness courses, a common journaling or reflection prompt offered is _“what would you tell your 8 year old self”_. It is an opportunity to bring into awareness what we now know but could not have imagined previously. **New York** is a city that captured my attention, from when I was a child, as pictured above. I remember my first solo trip to New York. I was 22 years old, a few weeks before graduating university, and had flown down for a publishing conference as I was trying to start my business. It was exciting yet intimidating. I do not think I spoke to a single person at the conference. If you told me then that 10 years later, I would live in New York, and enjoy the lifestyle of a New Yorker, I would not have believed you. **Advertising** is an industry I knew nothing about and now I get to run a global business that works with hundreds of publishers and agencies in dozens of countries. I speak, write and reflect often about the future of advertising and continue to learn so much from the industry. The important role that trusted news, especially in this time, offers society and democracy. The understanding that without effective marketing, the best product, policy or perspective will not be accessible or available to those that may benefit from it. The continuous reminder and countless examples of the potential and power of human creativity. **Yoga** is a practice, like most Indians born and brought up in the West, that I would have never imagined myself interested in. The first yoga class I did was a decade ago and I remember dismissing it immediately. It was foreign, uncomfortable and painful. This is why last fall, late one night after I had taught my first yoga class, I found myself in tears. I realized in that moment just how much I had grown in a practice that was once so uninteresting to me. **Divide And Conquer** At times during lockdown, I have felt guilt about reflecting on my life and dreaming about our collective future in the midst of tremendous suffering in the world from a global health pandemic, a deep economic recession and growing mental health crisis. I have found inspiration with the idea that we are all on the same team. **Team humanity.** Health care professionals, essential businesses, governments and more are focused on the immediate term needs that we have - which we are so appreciative of and grateful for. Education professionals, banks, industry leaders, public transit and more are focused on the short-to-medium term needs that we will have - not an easy task to navigate the unknown. And some need to be thinking and talking about the longer-term needs that we may have - to help inform a better and more resilient future. We each have a role to play, based on our strengths, skills and interests. _This may be a more inviting interpretation of our present day mantra, “We Are In This Together”._ \*\* Everything Changes\*\* Impermanence helps inspire our imagination. If things were static and fixed, we would slowly stop imagining new possibilities. Thankfully, everything does change. Find me one thing that does not appear to change and I will show you how it does change. Either the thing changes or our relationship to the thing changes. **Impermanence is an invitation for us to imagine.** Our imagination may just be the most powerful tool we have to create a better life for ourselves and a better world for the future of humanity. What we are experiencing now in lockdown was unimaginable to us only a few months ago. Life After Coronavirus is likely unimaginable to us at this moment. This is why we describe life in the terms of what was. _However, it is only once we let go of what was, that we can make space for what can be._ I invite you to bring the child-like qualities of curiosity and openness to the new possibilities that will continue to emerge for each of us, and for all of us, in the months and years ahead. Our future is limited only by our imagination. --- ### Less Is More Published: 2020-05-10 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/less/ The most epic spring cleaning of my lifetime, and yours, is now in motion. Our spaces, lifestyles and beliefs are evolving as a result of the constraints the health pandemic and resulting economic crisis has introduced to everyone. **This is Year Zero.** _Our culture Before Coronavirus (B.C.) was to encourage more and our culture After Coronavirus (A.C.) is to encourage less._ Evidence of our evolution from ‘More Is More’ to ‘Less Is More’ is in every direction I look, outwards and inwards. With awareness of this evolution, we learn to be intentional and can approach the changes ahead with a bit more acceptance and openness. **What Is Essential** Many years ago, I used to buy almost anything and what now feels like everything. My consumption patterns were liberal and I did not think much before making a purchase. That changed for me about five years ago, when I started to become more introspective in life. Feeling unsatisfied with constantly consuming, I questioned my prior belief system that ‘More Is More’ when it came to stuff and experimented with a different belief system, one of minimalism. With only essential businesses allowed to be open now in lockdown, the economy has come crashing down like we have never witnessed before. Unemployment is already at the highest since 1930. The GDP for all countries, a measure Before Coronavirus of the size of the economy, has already contracted at a rate never documented before. Massive government stimulus packages have been pumped into the system, only to provide momentary relief measured in months, not quarters. It is clear that our high consumption patterns Before Coronavirus were never needed, despite our culture, media and beliefs. Many are now asking the questions that I had asked myself five years ago. The economic structures and systems that we have followed for the past century were anchored on a belief system that ‘More Is More’ and are not as relevant After Coronavirus. _We now have to build new economic systems that support a new belief, that ‘Less Is More’._ **Focus In Business** A few weeks ago, I turned my attention to explore new ways to support my team, knowing that there are plenty of competing external sources of distraction right now in everyone’s lives. I wanted to reduce internal distractions to create more space for focused uninterrupted work. At a time when teams have become distributed, you would expect leaders to encourage more communication and collaboration. We did the opposite. We set an explicit intention to reduce our adoption of Slack. Overnight, we reduced the volume of messages on Slack by 30% and I think we will get to a 50% reduction soon. We set a guideline to have no internal meetings after 1pm and encouraged a 30 minute time limit on all meetings, internal and external. I have noticed that I feel more productive and focused during the day, and can see many examples that people on my team are getting better work done faster. And more importantly, feel better. Although we have over 100 clients in 20 countries, 80% of our revenue comes from 20% of our clients and from only a handful of countries. We have long made the decision that we would rather be very important to a few clients instead of interesting to a lot of clients. In this time of economic uncertainty, this strategy has proven effective. Although a few smaller clients have had to leave us, most of our larger clients have leaned in with us and many have grown their activity, and revenue, with us in the past few weeks. They need us and we need them. _The past few months have reinforced for me that ‘Less Is More’, especially in business._ **Purposeful Experiences** In the months Before Coronavirus, I took pride that 2020 would be the first year, in over a decade since I took my business global, that I would not have frequent flyer status with Air Canada. Over the past year, I had lost the willingness to jump onto a plane, which I’ve done almost every week for the past decade, and had a desire to ground myself. Now we are all grounded and will remain grounded for a long time. As governments begin to cautiously ease lockdown restrictions, it is clear to me that the experiences that we once knew and loved will no longer exist in the same form. Transit will have to be redesigned, with even greater public funding and higher passenger fares, to support fewer commuters. Gatherings of all kinds, from professional sports or music festivals, to parents watching a kids soccer game or friends going on a hike, will be forever changed. Over the next few years, most of the experiences that we have come to identify with will feel stressful as we navigate this transition from Before Coronavirus to After Coronavirus. The bar will be now much higher for the experiences that we will choose to engage with. The financial costs, health risks and time involved will lead to greater discernment and judgement before saying yes to something. We will ask ourselves, ‘is this really worth it?’, and realize that the answer will be no more than it will be yes. We have also seen the positive impact that ‘Less Is More’ can have on our climate, which may be the next global crisis that humanity will need to navigate skillfully. _We will now look for more meaning in our experiences and will find that ‘Less is More’._ **Screen Fatigue** In the first few weeks of lockdown, I found myself happily jumping on to and setting up Zoom calls with team members, clients, friends, family and even strangers. That has changed as Zoom fatigue has set in for me. I do not need to read the research to know that staring at screens, small, medium or large, drain my energy. I have now become more discerning about who I connect with, how often and for how long. I can see that my parents are growing tired of the screen too. The frequency of nightly movies has reduced, as they choose sleep and rest instead. It has become more difficult to watch entertainment that was clearly produced Before Coronavirus, as it feels disconnected from our new reality. If anything, watching Netflix has become an endless source of triggers. Close physical interactions. Large groups. Travel to new places. It is all a painful reminder of what was and not a window into what can be, which is partly what I expect from entertainment. Staying informed with the world through print newspapers has given me a sense of satisfaction that the digital feeds simply do not. When I read the paper each day, from front to back, I feel complete. Unlike websites filled with click-bait that needlessly encourages more content, more comments and more perspectives, the constraints of a newspaper mixed with a serendipity of indiscriminate discovery have given me more through a lens of less. Audio is another medium that I feel inspired to now rediscover. Connecting with friends over audio has been a richer experience for me, as I can more clearly hear someone’s tone and get to imagine their environment. My creativity comes more alive. Last night on the phone, a friend commented that my Canadian accent is more clear now, likely because she was able to tune in more clearly to my voice, with less distraction from the screen. Audio is also a more accessible medium that does not discriminate based on my experience with technology, how my home looks or the strength of my wifi signal. _With digital consumption and real connection, ‘Less Is More’ is what I am learning._ **Connection Strength** This pandemic has enabled me to reconnect with my global social network in a special way. For the past 8 weeks, I have continued to host daily live meditations, through which I get to connect with friends and family from all over the world. It’s common for me, each morning now, to say hi and meditate with people from dozens of cities across different time zones. There is no longer a discrimination that once occurred in the connections that I once invested in. Meditation and yoga classes, birthday parties, improv workshops and dance parties now include friends from around the world, whereas before they were limited by physical location. The constraints of the lockdown have made everyone more accessible to me, if only in my mind. It does take more effort and intention to connect with people in a physically distanced world. There are no longer large gatherings, previously found at studios, grocery stores, the subway, events, conferences and walking down the street, where I would once bump into people that I know. The number of acquaintances that I have is beginning to reduce and the depth of the friendships is beginning to strengthen. Frequency of contact is not a proxy for strength. Neither is the size of the gathering. The most meaningful online events I have participated in during lockdown have been smaller, not larger, in size. _Fewer and deeper connections have reminded me that ‘Less Is More’._ **A Final Reflection** Less Is More is a philosophy that cuts through the noise of my mind and brings me to a place of peace. I feel less stress and pressure to have more, do more or be more. It helps me glide through life with a little less friction and a little more ease. Less Is More is like a breadth of fresh air, one that I happily accept with open arms and continue to invite into my life. --- ### The Search For Unconditional Balance Published: 2020-05-03 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/balance/ This is a stressful time and despite a menu of mindfulness practices that I have continued to work with, I continue to become more aware each day of the tax and toll on my body and mind. The search for balance during a time of unrest, unease and uncertainty may seem counterintuitive. I have definitely made the feeling of personal balance conditional on the resolution of the issues facing our world. However it has become clearer now that the health pandemic and economic crisis will take years, not months, to come to a new balance. **Let the search for unconditional balance begin.** Perhaps, only once we each find balance within ourselves, will we learn how to restore a new balance for each other and for the future of humanity. **I Feel Nervous** My reflections on balance begin at a physiological level. Both Western science and Eastern philosophies explain our nervous system to be our internal command centre of operations, corporate head office or central processing unit, to use a few analogies. Our central nervous system includes our brain and spinal cord. Our peripheral nervous system includes our motor functions and sensory organs. Within our motor functions, they are either voluntary or involuntary. Within our involuntary motor functions are two systems that you may have heard of: our sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. **The sympathetic nervous system**, also referred to as the ‘fight or flight’ or stress response system, controls the body’s response to a threat. When activated, the body’s heart rate increases, cortisol (the stress hormone) is produced, adrenaline increases, muscles contract, pupils dilate and digestion slows. _This is the feeling of stress and a state I have undoubtedly felt more dominant over the past several weeks._ The stresses of modern life Before Coronavirus (B.C.) were bad for most. Now we have the added stresses of staying safe in a health pandemic and navigating the impacts of an economic crisis. These have all led to our sympathetic nervous system being activated far more than our body is used to. _This dramatically increases the long-term health risks of non-Coronavirus illnesses for all of us and hinders our present moment experience._ **The parasympathetic nervous system**, on the other hand, is referred to as the ‘rest and digest’ response system and controls the body’s ability to rest. When activated, the body is calm, heart rate slows, muscles relax, pupils constrict, saliva and digestion increases. When reading late at night, on a quiet walk outside, sitting in meditation, moving my body in several yoga asanas or even while writing this reflection, I feel calm and relaxed. _These activities can help activate my parasympathetic nervous system. _The search for unconditional balance for me includes a search to learn how to activate my parasympathetic nervous system more often now. **A Philosophy** Yoga has come to mean exercise for most and is seen alongside any other type of fitness. During my yoga teacher training last year, it was illuminating to discover the depth of yoga, through the study of yoga philosophy. Yoga has less to do with the body and more to do with the mind. _It is a practice to support the search for balance._ The physical postures we have come to associate with a yoga practice, also referred to as ‘asanas’, are really only a preparatory exercise so that one can sit in meditation uninterrupted for a longer period of time, to go deeper within. _To practice yoga postures without a meditation practice is the equivalent of cutting, chopping and cooking a meal and choosing not to eat it._ Western medicine largely sees every human body as the same. This one-size-fits-all is seen from nutrition to fitness. The underlying assumption is that we are all similar, and as such, our bodies need similar solutions to stay healthy. Similar illnesses and diseases are treated with similar treatments. **A sister science of yoga is Ayurveda.** Although I have only begun to scratch the surface here, the philosophy is one that I resonate with deeply. The science looks at each individual as unique, with a constitution of qualities that is unique to the individual. These qualities are called ‘doshas’, of which there are three: Vata, Pitta and Kapha. We each have our own unique mixture of these three qualities. We are born with a certain constitution, influenced by that of our parents. There is normally a dominant quality and supporting quality. Now contrary to my initial assumption, to be in balance in Ayurveda does not mean an equal constitution of these three qualities. This part I find fascinating as it challenges my bias into believing that balance means equality. Ayurveda tells us that to be in balance is to be aligned with our own original constitution. This celebrates our individuality and recognizes that we are all different, and as such, will need different treatments._ I love this._ Our society and my education had led me to think of balance as a scale, with equal weights on both sides. Yoga philosophy, and Ayurveda in particular, has introduced me to a different perspective of balance, one that I appreciate and need. The search for unconditional balance for me includes the discovery and recognition of my unique and original nature. **The Layers** Another illuminating discovery for me in yoga philosophy is a framework to describe our subtle bodies, referred to as the ‘Koshas’. The Koshas are the layers that surround our true self. If you imagine your true self as a bright light bulb, then think of the Koshas as the lampshades that cover your aura. I’ll explain each of the layers briefly, including some of the symptoms of when there may be an imbalance and common practices to bring balance to each layer, from a yogic perspective. _Layer 1: Physical Body_ This one is easy to understand, and includes all of our senses (sight, sound, touch, taste, smell). Symptoms of an imbalance here may include tiredness, physical pain, hunger or fatigue. Balance of this layer can be restored with nourishing food, restful sleep, active exercise and for me, more time away from screens. _Layer 2: Energy Body_ The energetic life force inside and outside of our body is often experienced through the flow of breadth. Symptoms of an imbalance here may include feeling anxious, restless or negative. Balance of this layer can be restored with breathing exercises and intentional movement-based practices, of which yoga asanas and mindful walking are what I gravitate towards these days. _Layer 3: Mental Body_ This is where we experience our thoughts, feelings, emotions, fantasies, desires and so forth. All of our beliefs are in our mental body. Symptoms of an imbalance here may include stress, excessive mind wandering, dullness or laziness in the mind, trouble sleeping or even panic attacks. Balance of this layer can be restored with meditation, chanting, prayer, reading and other spiritual practices. I continue to host daily live meditations each weekday, you are welcome to join our global connected community of friends. _Layer 4: Wisdom Body_ This is where “knowing” and our experiences with art, creativity, dancing and intuition are found. This is not about thinking or intellectualized wisdom, but felt wisdom. Symptoms of an imbalance may include feeling lost or confused, creativity blocks or tenseness in the body. Balance of this layer can be restored with creative practices, including reflection and my favourite, journaling. _Layer 5: Bliss Body_ This is the most difficult to understand, as it is extremely subtle, and requires balance in the above four layers to begin to experience. It is still not our true self but connected to it by a thread. In the path of yoga, it is a deep feeling of love, happiness and joy. It is not felt or understood intellectually but through our true inner self. It is the experience of oneness and connectedness. This a framework that recognizes that we are more than our physical body and helps me diagnose where an imbalance is happening. It is only once I am aware of which layer is in need of balance that I can give it the appropriate treatment. As each of the layers of my subtle body come into and stay in balance, my true self shines through more brightly and warmly. The search for unconditional balance for me starts with a more acute awareness of where imbalances may be occurring within myself. **Unconditional Balance** This topic of balance has clearly been on my mind lately and came up in conversation with a friend the other day. I asked, _“how do you think about balance?”_. It was a big question, to which my friend reflected back to me that within my question lies the answer. Balance is not an intellectual concept. Balance is a feeling. I can’t “think balanced”. I can “feel balanced”. I have not felt in balance during this time in lockdown and have made my perception of being ‘balanced’ conditional on the pandemic, recession and all the associated uncertainties as being clear and resolved. **The search for unconditional balance has begun for me and I hope for you as well. **As I shared above, perhaps only once we each find balance within ourselves, will we learn how to restore a new balance for each other and for the future of humanity. --- ### The Many Layers Of Our Identity Published: 2020-04-26 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/layers/ Zoom fatigue has now set in and as a result, I have started to read print newspapers again. The trade-off for less screen time is one that I will take any day. My sister makes the same trade-off and shared with me this weekend that she often reads the obituaries. Print media offers a serendipity that digital and social media feeds simply do not. Intrigued, I thought I would do the same. If a global health pandemic, where people are losing their lives and loved ones every day, is not a strong enough reminder of my own fragile existence, reading obituaries are. We observed how obituaries are written. What is often included can be grouped into five themes: profession (titles and companies), family (names and relations), location (where they grew up and grew old), activities (pastimes and passions) and social causes (the people they chose to help). These are some of the many layers of our identity. **Year Zero** I believe that we are in a transition from B.C. (Before Coronavirus) to A.C. (After Coronavirus) and that this is Year Zero. This idea has inspired much reflection and conversation for me during the pandemic. All of the societal structures and systems that we have known B.C. will be different A.C.. Government, health care, long-term homes, education, travel & tourism, hospitality, retail, food, sports & entertainment, transit, urban communities and more. We have been given the space to make different choices. These choices have the potential to put humanity on a different path. Some fear that we may not return to normal. I hope that we do not return to normal. For most, normal B.C. was not that great. I believe that we can do better as a species for each other, and for ourselves. **It is Year Zero for us together and for each of us individually.** How we identify will be different A.C. and with awareness of this personal evolution underway, we can be intentional about the changes we wish to see in ourselves. _We have to let go of what was, to make space for what can be._ Identity is deeply personal, if not the most personal aspect of our existence. Identity invisibly impacts the many layers of our lifestyle. The layers of our lifestyle are now being stripped away through the loss of loved ones, routines and freedoms. This forcing function will cause each of us to reflect more deeply now about who we are and what we value. **This is new territory**. Societal norms B.C. encouraged us to conform and blindly believe. The new norm in physical isolation has offered us space. Space for inquiry. This inquiry can be made less intimidating with the understanding that we are not alone. _We are all in our own Year Zero._ **What We Do** Having lived in New York for the past few years, I see that American culture is to identify strongly with what we do. At a business conference, at a party or on even a date, the first question that I am asked is about what I do. I am proud of what I do, however I have a strong aversion to associating my identity with my profession. The risk with this cultural norm is that “if I do not like what you do, I do not like you”, or “if I do not understand what you do, then I do not understand you”. When I first moved to New York, to build community, I hosted regular dinners at my apartment with people that I was interested in connecting with. The guidelines were simple: no work talk and no technology. The calendar invites had the other guests hidden and the reminder emails had everyone in BCC. Friends had no idea who they would be sharing their evening with. What I experienced is that without the option to share what we do, the conversations penetrated multiple layers of our identity and we landed at a deep place of connection instantaneously. This approach accelerated the depth of connections in the communities that I am fortunate to have participated in. I have learned that we are more than what we do. **Where We Are** While it may be American to identify with what we do, it is Canadian or British to identify with where we live. This is how we often break-the-ice when connecting with someone new. It is only once that I left New York for lockdown, and returned to my parents home in Toronto, that I realized how much of New York has been wrapped up in my identity. The activities, people and spaces had become so familiar and so comfortable for me. Yoga classes, meditation communities, sober silent dance parties, the lineups at Trader Joe’s, the symphony of horns, laughs and cries on the streets, the scents of mainly garbage, the diversity in every direction. _All of this had become an extension of my lifestyle and as a result, my identity._ Now, in my parent’s spacious space, I have slowly spread out into each room of the house to accommodate my many interests and I enjoy walks in the quiet neighborhood filled with birds, trees and squirrels. _I have learned that we are more than where we are._ **How We Appear** Forced physical distancing and the closure of non-essential services has upended many industries, including fashion, retail, beauty and fitness. It is telling that what we may have believed to be essential, like the purchase of new clothing and fashion accessories, the frequency of haircuts and beauty treatments, or obsession with fitness classes, are all in fact non-essential. Within a matter of weeks, we have shed the many layers of appearance that we have come to know over a matter of years. Our identity is finally starting to shine through the layers of how we dress, groom and look. We have begun to reveal a more authentic, discover a more affordable and bring a more amazing version of ourselves to each other, and more importantly, to ourselves. _I have learned that we are more than how we appear._ **How We Play** A friend recently shared that he no longer feels FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) as his Instagram feed is no longer filled with friends going to amazing places or having unique experiences. There is a comforting leveling that has happened, where it is difficult to feel superior or inferior in relation to others. Our identities B.C. had been influenced by the lifestyles that others portrayed, especially on social media. Now that we all are living with similar constraints and under similar circumstances, our experiences are becoming less unique and more similar. This makes it harder to identify with the activities that we engage with. The medium has become the message. I may use Zoom to teach meditation, run a global business, chant kirtan and play improv games. A friend may use Zoom to learn baking, dance ecstatically, go on dates and compete in chess games. _It is all blending to feel the same._ Over the past holiday break, which feels like years ago although it was only months ago, I took a trip for a few weeks and decided to not tell anyone where I went or what I did. To this day, the trip remains a secret and will be forever. It was an experiment to see if I would make different choices on this trip knowing that I would never have to build a narrative to share with others. I did. _I have learned that we are more than how we play._ **A New Beginning** In lockdown, there are less distractions from the activities, people and lifestyles that we previously lived B.C.. Now with the lockdown measured in months versus weeks, we are becoming numb to the media headlines and social feeds. **Fatigue has set in and this is wonderful.** Now we will begin to see through the many layers of how we used to identify. The soil of our true identity has become fertile again. Seeds that were once planted and unable to grow now have room. New seeds are also being planted that will shape who we become A.C.. It is Year Zero and we each have the space to make different choices, inspired by what we uncover within ourselves about ourselves. **Awareness goes hand in hand with acceptance.** As I become more aware about the many layers of my identity, I can choose to accept myself. And to accept is different than to tolerate. To tolerate is to see an ideal and then to see that reality as not that ideal. To accept is to not see reality any different from what is. It is only once I accept that I can take action from a grounded place, aligned with what I value and with who I truly am. The obituaries that I read decades from now will be different, as we are more than what we do, where we are, how we appear and how we play. --- ### The Art Of Crying Published: 2020-04-19 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/crying/ I cried yesterday. The day before that. A few days before that. And I cried last week. Since the pandemic started, I have cried every few days. Before Coronavirus, believe it or not, I cried almost every day. The tears are often from a place of sadness, empathy or joy. This week, I was interviewed for a podcast and asked about my mindfulness practices. I listed off several, including crying. The hosts were intrigued and continued to interrogate me further about it. I shared that the way yoga is the language of my body and meditation is the language of my mind, crying is the language of my emotions. **Our culture has trained us to associate crying with weakness. I feel otherwise.** This belief that crying is a sign of weakness is often reinforced by public leaders, professional athletes, school teachers, business people, heroes in movies and more. Our societal norm to suppress emotions is not a sign of strength, it is a sign of weakness. It is convenient to believe that we are logical beings who sometimes experience emotions. The truth is that we are in fact emotional beings who try to use logic to justify our emotions. It takes courage to first acknowledge that to be human is to experience emotion. It takes more courage to allow ourselves to express emotion regularly. Imagine lush trees, clean cut grass, spring flowers, birds chirping and all of the beauty that nature has to offer. Now compare our instinctive reaction to rain versus sun. Our conditioning is to see rain as undesirable and sunshine as desirable. However without rain, the full beauty of nature does not exist, and what would be left is only desert. Rain is required for anything to grow and that includes all of the food that feeds humans. Like rain, I have discovered that crying is required in life. Crying gives me access to the full beauty and experience of life, and it is what leads to growth. Before I had started to let myself cry often, I was in a desert._ Most things die in a desert._ In my capacity as a leader, I feel responsible for others. In the business that I lead, the communities that I participate in and for the family and friends around me, there are many people that I have the good fortune to interact with, find inspiration from and likely influence. I have to know how to take care of myself, before I can even think about taking care of others. Crying is how I can start to work with my emotions. This enables me to show up clear, grounded and calm for others. This is even more true in a business and professional context. Earlier this year, I was fortunate to attend an event titled _One Last Talk_, where a few brave speakers deliver a prepared talk, as if it was their final talk. It is a brilliant concept and offers a safe space for people to express their deepest vulnerabilities. As you can imagine, it is an emotional evening, as people share stories about themselves that have never been shared before. The host that evening often got emotional and I was disappointed that instead of acknowledging how touched they were, they continued to apologize for crying. Imagine a culture where we feel pride, not shame, when we tear up publicly. When I eat, which I have been doing more often these days living at home with my parents, I need to digest my food which leads to regular bowel movements. Anything different would be considered unhealthy and likely cause for concern. **To cry is to digest and process emotions. It is healthy to cry. **Movies and books have an ability to draw me in and can capture my undivided attention. When I relate to the characters, I begin to feel their wins and losses. It is then that I start to empathize with them and often tears will start to flow. A few months ago, I found myself watching Alladin on a flight and was in tears throughout. While a good movie can bring many of us to tears relatively easily, this is especially true on an airplane and there are physiological reasons why. The higher altitude and cabin pressure reduces oxygen levels, which leads to dehydration, causing difficulty in regulating emotions. This is why babies and kids cry (even louder it seems) on planes. There are different depths of feeling for others that I have observed and experienced. Sympathy is to see someone’s suffering, like a doctor might. Empathy is to feel someone’s suffering, like a close friend might. Compassion is to feel someone’s suffering such that it compels an action. That action might be as simple as a thought, an expression with words or more. Compassion requires empathy and empathy requires feeling. When I cry, I know I have felt something. Research has shown that women cry on average twice as often as men. Scientists say this is because men have larger tear ducts, creating a higher threshold before eyes swell up to the point of tears overflowing, and that women have different hormones that make their bodies produce more tears. While this all may be true, I believe that in general, women empathise with others more often than men do and that our social conditioning does not encourage men to cry. _As men, we can practice greater empathy. And all of us can learn to hold space for others to cry._ **My sister is my best friend.** Several years ago, she had a major concussion that changed her life forever, and ours. Her journey has become a source of inspiration. As an artist, her work is impressive and her latest project is a graphic memoir called Brave. It is a story of empathy told through the lens of living life with a concussion. In the early years of her concussion, we lived together and she would cry often. I did not feel comfortable with her crying and would encourage her not to cry. _“Don’t cry, there’s no need to”_ were my words to her back then. My words would now be _“cry, cry it all out, that’s the bravest thing that you can do”_. An activity that we do over and over again is what I call a practice. It may be a meditation practice, a cooking practice, a Netflix practice, an Instagram practice, or in this case, a crying practice. As we grow in a practice, we need more tools, not less. For example, I had believed that I was good at yoga if I did not yoga blocks. However, during my yoga teacher training last year, I learned that advanced yoga students use blocks, straps and bolsters all the time. **Crying itself is a “yoga block” in navigating the emotional experience that is life. **There are several tools that I use to support my crying practice. I call these _positive crying triggers_. These include reflections of my sister’s journey, specific memories from childhood, certain yoga poses like pigeon, kirtan music and mantra, pretty much any rags to riches story, spontaneous and random displays of kindness, unexpected generosity and more. For example, I started to tear up a few days ago during one of the daily live meditations that I host for friends. The topic was appreciation and the reflection about the people that I feel appreciation towards was profound and intense for me in that moment. The debt of gratitude that I feel for our healthcare heroes in this time is so strong. When I think about it, see a newspaper ad about it or hear people recognize them, I start to cry. This display of kindness, from both our healthcare heroes and from those who publicly acknowledge them, is so beautiful and deserving of tears from all of us. **In this time, there is immense suffering in the world.** Suffering from a health pandemic, where people are losing their lives every day. Suffering from an economic crisis, where people are losing their jobs and businesses every day. Suffering from a social crisis, where people who are already the most vulnerable in society are getting pushed to the brink of survival. Suffering from a mental health crisis, where we are experiencing heightened emotions of anxiety, concern and stress. **In this time, it is expected for us to feel. And to cry is to feel. **My hope is that each of us start to cry more. _It is only once we take care of ourselves that we can start to take care of others._ --- ### The Desire To Be Productive Published: 2020-04-12 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/productive/ A few days ago, as I rushed to prepare a morning smoothie for breakfast, my dad turned to me in the kitchen and innocently commented, _‘you look like you are in a rush’_. Without hesitation and without looking his way, I blurted out _‘yes, I have to go meditate now and I am hungry’_. It was only once I walked upstairs to my sister’s bedroom, which I’ve commandeered as my second office thanks to a slightly more reliable wifi connection, and sat down on her chair that I caught up to the irony of my response a few minutes earlier. As I shared with my meditation group that morning, I believed that rushing to meditation and yoga classes was a _‘New York moment’_ of sorts, unique to the hustle and bustle of that environment, and one that I have experienced far too many times to admit. **I now have learned that rushing to slow down has less to do with New York and more to do with me.** This weekend I hit the pause button on my virtual New York lifestyle that I have continued to live from my parent’s home in Toronto, and for the first time in four weeks, chose _‘to be’_ over _‘to do’_. The weekend continues to unfold and I am uncovering the unfortunate truth that running continuously takes a toll. _On my body, my mind and on my emotions._ As I embark on an introspective journey to make sense of my desire to be productive at all times, a set of practices, a _'mental health toolkit'_ if you will, has surfaced and I share it below with the hope that it inspires you to take care of yourself, especially in this period when we are all a little more vulnerable. A meditation teacher once shared, _“you have nowhere to go, you are always on your way”_. This teaching serves me well to help loosen the tight grip of my mind that has a continuous desire to be productive. I have become curious to uncover where this conditioning of my mind has come from. **Perhaps the conditioning of my mind is from the machine of the markets.** As an entrepreneur for over a decade now, I have been rewarded for the productivity of my business. What is a business? As Sapiens author Yuval Noah Harari explains elegantly, a business is a construct that involves a collection of people who form agreements. Agreements to work with one another, to work collectively to solve problems that another collection of people have and to be compensated for that work. Productivity leads to profits and profits lead to happiness. _Just kidding. While the former may be true, we know that the latter is not._ **Perhaps the conditioning is hereditary and passed on through genetics.** My mom, who despite her age and arthritis, is an Energizer Bunny who bounces around between cooking in the kitchen, learning from YouTube videos, painting a myriad of landscapes, working in the garden, annoying my father with endless commentary, talking with my sister on the phone or her latest feat, connecting her phone to her printer. I had strong doubts that this was possible and was glad to be proven wrong. _I witnessed first hand this week that where this is a will, there is a way._ **Perhaps it is not unique to me and a condition of the brain.** Yesterday, I spoke with my brother-in-law on the phone and he shared enthusiastically about his productive morning. I could hear the lightness and energy in his voice, and I felt lifted by his productivity. When we complete a task, be it doing the dishes, taking a walk, writing a blog post or even to sit in meditation, our brain releases the famous dopamine hormone that leads to a pleasurable sensation. The experience of consuming alcohol, drugs, Netflix or Instagram also releases dopamine in our brain. It literally feels good to be productive and no surprise, it becomes addictive. _It has for me._ Our culture has led us to believe that being productive is a good thing, for both you and the collective. Productivity leads to progress for all of humanity and is required. The question I have is if it is required at all moments and to highlight that there is a cost to always being productive. On a walk this week in my parent’s neighborhood, which is unbelievably quiet and peaceful, I took my phone out and started calling friends. After three different attempts that were met with pre-recorded voicemail greetings, I put my phone back in my pocket and lifted my head up. I heard the sound of the wind dancing with the trees. I saw the brightness of the sun illuminate every inch of the neighborhood without discrimination. I watched two squirrels playing and chasing one another, with no regard for physical distancing. And then I felt a smile, of a different variety, appear on my face. This one was not triggered from a dopamine release in my brain. It was inspired by a deep connection with reality, with nature and with the present moment. **The desire to be productive can be superseded with another desire.** The desire to connect more deeply with this present moment, with all of its peace and suffering. _To connect begins with a pause, so that I can see, hear and observe reality as it is, not as I wish it to be or think it should be._ The natural trajectory of my lifestyle, including the current virtual environment, business responsibilities and the communities I participate in, does not always lend itself to these moments of pause organically. It is for this reason that I have started to be intentional and seed moments of pause, like many parents may be hiding easter eggs for their children right now. Here are a few recent practices in seeding moments of pause. My teacher Julie often qualifies her offerings with, “take it or leave it, it is entirely up to you what to do with this”: - _Airplane mode:_ in the evening, I put my phone on airplane mode and wait until after my morning routine (meditation, yoga, journal, shower, food) to turn it off. The 8-12 hours of continuous disconnection each day helps my mind take a pause from consuming. - _Mobile apps:_ I do not have email or Slack on my phone anymore, have never kept any notifications on and do not use social media either. Given that I am not out and about physically anymore, I do not need to use my phone the same way I once did. - _Meal time:_ in week one of lockdown, I could be found eating quietly at my desk in my room while typing or Zooming away. Now, I treat each meal as an opportunity to pause. In my case, it is a chance to connect with my parents and with my food. - _Meditation:_ this reflection would not be complete without me highlighting the importance of meditation for my mental health. In addition to my own self practice, I continue to lead a live meditation each weekday at 930am EST for friends. _Come join us!_ As I learn how to pause, which is a skill in itself, my awareness begins to expand in new ways. It is clear that feelings of anxiety have heightened for all of us at this moment. Please know that to feel anxious is absolutely normal right now. I would be worried if people in my life told me they did not feel anything right now. This is why it is more important than ever for each of us to be intentional about caring for our own mental health. This is particularly true for health care professionals and essential service workers, who we remain indebted to for being productive on the front-lines, for all of us. **Health is not limited to physical or financial. Mental health is health.** As I reflect on my desire to be productive, what I have discovered is that to pause is one of the most productive actions I can take. --- ### Making Difficult Decisions Published: 2020-04-05 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/making/ Everything is a decision. What I do as an entrepreneur and business leader is to make decisions. How to invest. What to prioritize. Where to go. What I do to live is also to make decisions. With whom I spend my time. Where to focus my energy. How I choose to feel. Some decisions feel more difficult than others. The past few weeks have been filled with many difficult decisions for each of us and for our world. _The next few weeks will be filled with countless more difficult decisions._ I have started to reflect on what makes a decision difficult. **My hope is that we can all be a little better equipped to navigate through what is likely to come for each of us and for all of us.** **The Shine Has Worn Off** The decision to self isolate on a moment’s notice may not have been easy for most but necessary. Now a few weeks into this new reality, I found myself this past week trading stories with friends about how the shine has worn off for each of us. The novelty and newness of a change in environment, a change in routine and a change in the people we are with, or not with, has passed. _The _self-isolation_ honeymoon is now over for many of us._ Over the past 15 years, whenever I would come home to see my parents, it would be for a short time after a long time. An outpouring of kindness, focused attention and a jovial energy is what I had become accustomed to. Three weeks into my homestay, we have evolved from me visiting home to now living at home. What this means in practical terms is that the _“it’s so nice to see you”_ and _“I’m so glad that you chose to come home”_ has evolved to _“what are you cooking for dinner”_ and _“when are you cleaning this and fixing that”_. Every new day together at home is an opportunity for me to explore the depths of our relationship and recalibrate our connection as adults. Prior conditioning had me believe that for peace to be had, we must agree on everything. What I have now started to discover is that peace can exist when we choose to understand each other. **_The difficult decision is to choose to understand, even if we do not agree._** **To Retreat Or Not To Retreat** Over the past few weeks, I have pondered pivoting this physical retreat into a mental retreat as well. One where I spend more time with practices like meditation, yoga, journaling and kirtan. I could dive into the 100+ list of books I have on my list to read or begin to work on writing a book. _Maybe two._ I have had many experiences in isolation and disconnecting from technology. It has become a common practice for me on weeknights, weekends and on vacations over the past decade. I find it easy to put my devices away, disconnect from the endless external stimuli and go inwards to work on the internal stimuli. _It feels familiar._ In the face of a global health pandemic, an economic crisis and a tsunami of social crises unfolding, I find myself drawn to step into the world versus to step away from the world. The past few weeks have felt even more active than my typical New York lifestyle, as I start to discover how to best be of service and of use to the world in this time of need. Leading daily live meditations, volunteering and fundraising for several causes, calling friends every day and continuing to share reflections like this one are where I have started. **_The difficult decision is to leave behind the familiar and to step into the unknown._** **The Wake Of A Decision** A close friend shared this past week his fiance and him made the difficult decision to postpone their wedding celebration. He had mentioned a few weeks ago that they had started to reflect on whether or not to continue planning. Although I stayed quiet at the time, I knew that their wedding would not go on as they had planned. Intellectually, it was clear to me. What was less clear to me a few weeks ago and is now evident after we spoke yesterday, was that I had underestimated how the emotional weight of a decision impacts the decision itself. The sometimes useful, sometimes inconvenient ability we have to project and predict how we may feel after a decision hinders our ability to make the decision. The wake of the decision is what can make the decision difficult. **_The difficult decision involves facing undesirable implications of the decision._** **Influence Without Authority** The Olympics are not only a major sporting event, they are a major, if not the largest, advertising event globally. This is why advertisers and broadcasters have been anxiously standing on the sidelines, more than curious, to see what the decision was going to be about the Olympics. I wrote an industry column titled _Advertising In The Age Of Coronavirus_ one month ago predicting that the Olympics would be postponed. It was clear to me given what was beginning to unfold globally, as nations awakened to the global pandemic. GWI Research surveyed 10,000 people in dozens of countries a few weeks ago. Only 5% of people globally believed that the Olympics should go on as planned, and in Japan, that number was only 7%. Despite it being overwhelmingly clear to many of us that the Olympics would not go on this year, for some reason, the Prime Minister of Japan continued to say that they would go on, as did the IOC. While the decision to host and organize the Olympics was perhaps easy, the decision to postpone the games was difficult for those at the helm. Canada then announced that we were not going to the Olympics. And Australia soon followed. And only then did Japan and the IOC have the conviction to make the decision that was so obvious. Where Canada is not an Olympics heavyweight like the US, Germany, U.K or France may be, we are also not a lightweight like Albania, Nauru or Somalia. This is why it is easier for Canada, over say the U.S. or Japan, to pull out of the Olympics, and for it to still have an impact. We cannot imagine the Olympics without countries like Canada and Australia. When the stakes are high, leaders with the authority can freeze exactly when we expect them to do the opposite. This is when those without authority but with enough influence need to make a difficult decision. That can be part of the process for the collective to make difficult decisions together. **_The difficult decision can be made by those without authority but with influence._** **The Lack Of Choice** Upon learning that both India and South Africa had made the decision to lock down their entire populations for 21 days, I was pleasantly surprised. I did not expect these countries to make the decisions that the countries I live in have not yet made. India and South Africa are far more vulnerable to the impacts of a health pandemic than countries like the U.S., U.K., and Canada. India and South Africa also have far more to lose economically than Western countries. The impact of pausing the economy will be disproportionately felt by the majority in these countries, many of whom have already been living on the brink of survival. This did not stop them. At the same time, countries like Russia and Brazil have not made the decisions that they need to make, in line with India and South Africa. The wait-and-see attitude by government leaders is literally going to kill their own people. It is disheartening and disappointing. It is humbling to think that being unprepared for a challenge can be the fuel to act with more conviction in the face of that same challenge. There is no other choice for countries like India, South Africa and many more but to take bold action immediately in the face of this health pandemic. **_The difficult decision can be made more easily when you know you have no other choice._** **The Price Is Right** In the game show The Price Is Right, contestants win prizes when they bid closest to the value of the prize without going over. I do not understand why governments are playing a game of The Price Is Right with the economy right now. In the second week of March, the Canadian government announced $1 billion in additional funding for provincial health care systems and $10 billion in federal loans for small businesses. The next week, an additional $27 billion package was announced as income support. A few days later, $50 billion in tax deferrals. The following week, the income support package grew to $105 billion and tax deferrals to $85 billion. The Canadian government is not alone in this snowflake-to-snowball approach to economic stimulus packages. What I believe makes it difficult for leaders here is that there is little history to rely upon and no playbook for how to navigate through this amount of economic uncertainty. I know that these are ‘unprecedented times’ however citing that these are ‘unprecedented times’ does little for the present moment but to provide a justification or excuse for the decisions, or lack thereof. Leadership requires the ability to navigate and steer the ship in stormy and turbulent waters. The captain should underestimate how ready the ship and crew are to face the storm and overestimate the magnitude of the storm. This is the playbook to navigate uncertainty. **_The difficult decision is to underestimate oneself, not overestimate, in the face of uncertainty._** **Pay Attention To What You Pay Attention To** I have come to believe that we are not capable of making a bad decision. In the moment we make a decision, we make the best decision that we can, based on the information available to us in that moment and based on the experiences that we have been influenced by. In hindsight, we may reflect on a decision and judge it to be good or bad. There are many times that I’ve reflected on past decisions and say to myself, ‘knowing what I know now, I would have made a different decision’. However, in that moment when I made those decisions, I made what I believed to be a good decision. With this understanding, we have to pay attention to what we pay attention to. What we consume influences how we see the world, and shapes our beliefs, which ultimately guide our decisions. **_The difficult decision is influenced and inspired by our conditioning and beliefs._** **Finding Compassion** Now that the self-isolation honeymoon is over and we enter week four of this new lifestyle and routine, it is important that we all continue to make the decision to physically distance. As a family member recently shared with me, ‘there is nothing to feel proud of by not following rules and thus introducing even more risk to one another’. The warriors in this pandemic are the front-line health care professionals and their families. They continue to lead the battle to keep us safe and we are indebted with gratitude for their tireless hard work, commitment and compassion. Here are a few lines from songwriter Paul Williams that capture beautifully why we continue to self-isolate, despite any desires that may tempt us to do otherwise. _When you go out and see the empty streets, the empty stadiums, the empty train platforms, don’t say to yourself, “It looks like the end of the world.”_ _What you’re seeing is love in action._ _What you’re seeing, in that negative space, is how much we do care for each other, for our grandparents, for our immuno-compromised brothers and sisters, for people we will never meet._ _People will lose jobs over this. Some will lose their businesses. And some will lose their lives. All the more reason to take a moment, when you’re out on your walk, or on your way to the shop, or just watching the news, to look into the emptiness and marvel at all of that love._ _Let it fill you and sustain you._ _This isn’t the end of the world. It is the most remarkable act of global solidarity we may ever witness in our lifetimes._ Framing why we do what we do changes how we feel about what we do. I love the framing that our choice to continue to self-isolate is ‘love in action’. I can get behind that. **_The difficult decision can be a great source of inspiration._** **The Key** Decisions are not always difficult. The difficulties that we may experience ourselves and observe in others are a reflection of the fears, anxieties and insecurities associated with what we have known to believe. Some are founded, most are unfounded. Once we learn to see reality as it is, in this moment, and not as we had once wished it to be, we can let go of the fear that has clouded our ability to connect with what we now believe to be true. **_The difficult decision is to listen to and trust our heart._** --- ### The Two Valleys Published: 2020-03-29 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/valley/ The past two weeks have been a tale of two valleys for me. Both valleys began with falling, deep into darkness, and both involved lifting up, to new heights that were outside my previous realm of possibilities. Although the journey has not been easy, I trust that it continues to be a necessary one for me to experience. The reality that we have all been handed overnight has felt jarring. _Everything has changed as life has asked us to change quickly and in ways we would have never imagined._ Working from home, if we are fortunate to still have work. Engaging and entertaining children the entire day, every day. Spending all of our time with the same people, in very close quarters. **It is natural to feel unprepared for this new reality that we did not ask for.** In Man’s Search For Meaning, a story of the author’s experience in WWII concentration camps, Viktor Frankl shares, _“It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life”._ The two valleys that I have started to experience are part of a journey of transformation and perhaps evolution. From asking “what do I want from life?” to ask instead “what does life want from me?”. **The First Valley** What feels like lifetimes ago was a mere two weeks ago, when I fell deep into the first valley. I was still in New York City and on a warm early Spring evening, went to a friend’s play reading in midtown. We all greeted one another with waves, smiles and the occasional namaste instead of the handshakes and hugs that we were accustomed to. Several dozen of us, sitting next to one another on plastic chairs, crammed into a small studio space. What felt like a normal “New York experience” at the time now appears like a mortal sin reflecting back on it. After the play reading, my friend and I shared a bite at a nearby restaurant. _That was the last meal I had at a restaurant and will be for a while to come._ We talked, laughed and cried together as we told stories about our everyday lives, shared past memories and future hopes. As we parted ways after dinner, we accidentally gave each other an innocent hug. And were immediately in shock, as we realized we had done something that we were not supposed to do anymore. _That was the last time I hugged a friend, and will be for a while to come._ Once back in my apartment, sitting on my comfortable couch, I checked my phone for the latest Coronavirus news. New York City declared a state of emergency. I stopped reading and stared blankly ahead, as if someone was sitting there, as my mind began to process the implications. **I only had to read a few more sentences on my phone to confirm the decision that my heart had already made.** I had to leave New York and come back home to Canada to weather this storm. At the time, little did I realize how fierce this storm was going to be. _In this moment, it continues to torment and destroy the new ‘ground zero’ of this global health pandemic._ The next few days, back with my parents in Canada, I started to fall deep into darkness as I struggled to make sense of all the sudden and simultaneous changes in my life. My physical space was changed. The routines and communities that I had become accustomed to disappeared overnight and I now was left to redesign my lifestyle. The connections were rewired instantly. My laptop became the only window into my business. My parent’s television was now the only window into the world. And my phone was the window to connect with friends. Feelings of fear, anxiety and stress passed over me, day and night. Sleeping more than a few hours continuously was an impossible task. As the time I spent in meditation increased, I became even more aware of how I had been feeling. _Awareness did not discriminate._ Once I became aware of my own suffering, everything changed. First, I stopped identifying with it. The fact that I was experiencing anxiety in these moments did not mean that I was now an anxious person. **Next, I accepted that reality was different now.** Once I had let go of what was, I could then make space for what could be. That is when I began to reframe my relationship to this moment. I had a choice and decided to see the goodness now present in my life. More quality time with my parents. More clarity and less distractions on how to direct the business. More space to meditate and practice yoga. More intentional effort to connect with friends. With acceptance, I started to regain a familiarity, one that I didn’t realize how much I valued. This is how I lifted myself out of the first valley, to a new height filled with possibilities that previously I was blind to. I finally began to sleep through the night again. _And then everything changed._ **The Second Valley** After a few days of productive work and a few moments of lightness, I fell into the second valley. The darkness became clear to me late one night, when I woke up at 2 a.m., with thoughts of concern and feelings of helplessness racing through my mind and body. That night, I had no option but to get up, stay up and sit with racing thoughts and feelings. That is when I recognized that even though I was okay with this new reality, and those around and close to me were okay, the world was not okay in this moment. _And my consciousness was not okay with that._ The weight of the health crisis, that continues to spiral out of control with the impending economic crisis looming, continues to feel heavy. Later that day, we would see the financial markets have the single largest drop since the 1930s and the economic crisis became official. As I shared in my reflection last week, a third crisis has now been born, a social crisis. _“While no one is immune to the impacts of the health crisis and the financial crisis, there are segments of our society that are particularly vulnerable. They always have been, however we will become more acutely aware in the coming months of just how much more susceptible some are. The homeless population, those incarcerated, the aging and elderly, gig workers and the entire service industry are only a few of the segments that will experience more suffering than most. The disappointing truth is that these segments collectively make up the most. Furthermore, our health care system, our educational institutions, our earth’s climate and our ecological environment are all under extreme stress, which in turn places stress on every segment in society, rich or poor.“_ At the depth of the second valley, **I connected with the sobering truth that I am in the minority, not the majority**. I was born and raised in first world countries. I am living in a spacious and comfortable home with my loving parents. We have access to all of the resources we need to sustain ourselves for a long time and have countless financial, social and mental safety nets. Few have the good fortune that I have and I cannot take credit for any of it. My relatively good standing in a moment of global crisis is not from my doing. It is a result of the collective actions by so many other people. Those known to me, like my parents and their parents, and those unknown to me, like the teachers, scientists, doctors, labourers, bureaucrats, architects, engineers, lawyers and so many more. _It is as if all of humanity conspired together, knowingly or unknowingly, so that I could have the comforts, securities and fortunes that I have._ **This understanding fills my heart with even more gratitude for humanity and fills my mind with the strength to be of greater service.** This is how I start to lift myself out of the second valley and move from feeling hopeless and helpless to feeling hopeful and purposeful. Passing through the second valley has helped me see a wider realm of possibilities, for myself and for the future of humanity, from new heights that I didn't know existed. My days and nights are now getting filled with thoughts, conversations and actions, using whatever skills, capabilities and resources that I have, to be of service for humanity. **The Journey** The first valley is a journey to accept and adjust to a new lifestyle. Work from home. Home school kids. Close quarters with many people. While it is important to make sense and peace with these sudden changes, I ask that we _do it quickly and not obsess over it or get stuck in it._ **This is not a crisis of learning how to fill time or kill time while in lock down.** There is a global health pandemic that has triggered an economic crisis, which has triggered a social crisis. We will each awaken to the severity of these crises in our own way, in our own time. Looking outside my window, everything may look calm, peaceful and quiet. I may understand intellectually that people in far away countries are dying by the minute right now. I may hear of outbreaks in cities that I once visited. I am now hearing of friends who have lost their jobs and of the first positive cases showing up in the health care organizations that I support. Soon, people I know will begin to test positive for this virus and even more people that I know will be victims of the economic tsunami. The second valley involves connecting with the global human suffering from these waves of crises. To climb out of the second valley is to redirect our capabilities and resources outwards versus inwards. There is a third and fourth and fifth valley ahead, that I have yet to experience. However unpleasant and distressing these valleys may be for me personally, they are part of the journey of transformation and evolution. _I accept these valleys with open arms._ My heart continues to go out to the front-line health care professionals who are fighting this war, often under equipped, to keep us safe. _They have no choice but to put themselves and their families at risk, for our safety and well being._ If you are reading this reflection, chances are that, like me, you are in a place of privilege. **Know that you had very little to do with that. ** What life is asking of me, and of you, is to find ways to be of service. Now. --- ### Hope For The Future Of Humanity Published: 2020-03-22 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/humanity/ _The skies, seas and streets are empty. As familiar sounds fade away, a new sound has appeared. **The sound of silence.**_ On more than one occasion over the past week, my body tossed and turned in the middle of the night as my mind struggled to make sense of all the sudden change. The sound of silence is loud inside. Very loud. _I am exhausted now. Mentally. Emotionally. Physically._ One week ago, I shared a reflection about my relationship with fear in the face of a global pandemic. I wrote about how action and inaction in the face of a global health crisis are both responses to fear, just different fears. That there are two types of fear in life; those that keep us living and those that keep us from living. And how awareness practices like meditation help me feel grounded and calm in the face of extreme uncertainty. After one of the many restless nights this past week, I spent time the next morning in an extended meditation and observed how my state changed dramatically. Where for the previous day I had been filled with anxiety, I was now fueled with inspiration. While the gravity of reality had only continued to heighten, what had changed was my perspective. Thanks to a moment of insight, I understood that my stress experience is part of my process to come to a place of positivity. However unpleasant, allowing myself the space to feel these emotions had helped me digest them. Only then could I let go of what was, to make space for what could be. _Experiencing fear was part of my journey to hope._ **What once felt extraordinary now feels ordinary in the face of an _ocean filled with crisis_.** **The first wave in this ocean is the global health crisis.** We are forever indebted to the front-line professionals, who have shown up fully to defend the well being of our species. They are in this moment putting themselves, and their families, at risk to protect us. The respect we have for war veterans and military service members extends to health care professionals. _They are battling an invisible and foreign enemy who is rapidly attacking humans everywhere._ **This has triggered a second wave.** The global financial crisis that we got a preview of this past week. Given the extreme uncertainty, the financial markets have been volatile and will continue to feel violent. The rapid announcement of major economic stimulus packages by most governments and central banks this week did little in the face of this second wave. The architecture of our existing economic structures depends on consumer spending, the ability for people to move effortlessly between borders and that humans stay alive. The global health crisis is an earthquake to these foundational pieces of our economy. _This earthquake is increasing in magnitude, not decreasing, right now._ **A third wave is beginning to surface.** A global social crisis. While no one is immune to the impacts of the first wave and the second wave, there are segments of our society that are particularly vulnerable. They always have been, however we will become more acutely aware in the coming months of just how much more susceptible some are. The homeless population, those incarcerated, the aging and elderly, gig workers and the entire service industry are only a few of the segments that will experience more suffering than most. The disappointing truth is that these segments collectively make up the most. Furthermore, our health care system, our educational institutions, our earth’s climate and our ecological environment are all under extreme stress, which in turn places stress on every segment in society, rich or poor. While this rapidly approaching social crisis will be surfaced due to the first and second waves, it is really a reflection of flawed choices in the evolution of our civilization over the past few centuries. _In the face of crisis, there is clarity._ Choices that we previously feared are now easy. There is a worldwide experiment currently underway for universal basic income. It is the same governments that were previously stuck in endless debate and discussion that are leading this experiment to support our structures. At a time when humans are having trouble breathing, the earth is breathing just fine. It has been painful to watch our institutions try to take meaningful steps towards the climate crisis in the past ten years but in the past ten days, these same institutions have ordered everyone to stay indoors and limit mobility. Pollution levels have now decreased dramatically. Rigid and regulated professions are showing they too can adapt in the face of a crisis. Italy fast-tracked 10,000 medical students through graduation so that they could serve those in need immediately and offload the pressure on more experienced doctors. Consumer technology platforms often attacked (including by me) for disrupting, dividing and destabilizing our society are on the digital front lines educating the public about actions to take in the face of the global health crisis. Facebook has stepped up. Zoom has enabled classrooms for free. Spotify has also played its part, among many others. I was pleasantly surprised to see Uber encourage riders to not take rides. _In the face of a crisis, it is not growth at all costs._ The previous trajectory for working professionals was more time in the office and on the commute, all at the expense of time at home. These same people now have the permission, that they did not know they needed, to spend quality time with their families. The richness of our connections, in both physical and digital spaces, has skyrocketed overnight. A friend shared with me this morning that her friends are more accessible now via video calls than ever before and that she is having many more quality conversations with the people in her life. When I listen to politicians speak, I can no longer tell who is a conservative and who is a liberal. They all sound the same to me. They are all on the same team. _Team humanity._ \*\* I feel more hopeful for the future of humanity now than ever before.\*\* We are experiencing a unique moment in the evolution of our species. A transition from B.C. (Before Coronavirus) to A.C. (After Coronavirus). _This is year zero._ We have picked up all of the pieces of the puzzle. We have been forced to unexpectedly hit the pause button. We will soon have an incredibly rare opportunity to be intentional and deliberate about how we put the pieces of the puzzle back together. _We have already started to build a different A.C. puzzle._ **The waves of the crises have only just begun.** The compassionate actions that our governments, institutions, corporations and more have taken in only the past week is encouragement for me to feel hopeful that we have the capacity and conviction to make different choices. A.C. can and will be different than B.C., for the benefit of humanity. In this moment, focus married with faith is a powerful combination. Having faith in the future of humanity, guided by our collective consciousness to do better and supported by the universe, allows us to focus on the actions that we can take right now. While we may not have a grand plan for how humanity will evolve from B.C. to A.C., we can have focus and faith. It is for these reasons and more that I will sleep a little more soundly at night and wake up each morning filled with hope for the future of humanity. _We are all in this together._ --- ### Fear In The Face Of A Global Pandemic Published: 2020-03-15 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/pandemic/ I decided to leave New York and come back home to Canada during this time of uncertainty. I love New York for so many reasons, however I also love my parents, the Canadian health care system and in my heart, felt drawn to be in a more familiar place right now. My choice to retreat back home was in response to the fear and anxiety that I have been feeling over the past week. Yesterday while meditating, I became aware of just how stressed and anxious I have been feeling and it is far more than I would have imagined. Despite having the benefits of a long-term meditation practice and a plethora of powerful mindfulness tools at my disposal, my response to the global pandemic we are all witnessing is to feel scared. On a walk this morning in the slightly cool and brisk winter air, I reflected on the heightened state of fear that we are all feeling. _All of us._ Many of us have taken bold, deliberate and intentional action to better prepare for the uncertainty and reduce the risks to society. Going into lock down mode involves working from home, keeping kids home from school, shifting gatherings from in-person to virtual, not going to the gym, yoga or restaurants, stocking up on the necessities and planning for a very different and unique day-to-day lifestyle. _This is one response to the fear that many of us feel._ At the same time, in the face of the same global pandemic, many of us have chosen a different response. To carry on with as much normalcy as possible, and to hope to continue living with minimal lifestyle adjustments. This is also a response to fear. Fear of change to what we know and control. Fear of disruption to what we have become comfortable with. In the face of the unknown, we naturally cling to what we understand. _We only understand though what has been, and do not understand what might be._ **To take action right now is a response to fear. To not take action is also a response to fear.** The fears that we are responding to are just different fears. A friend shared with me several years ago that we experience two types of fear in our journey through life. **Fear that keeps us living and fear that keeps us from living.** In the face of a global pandemic, with a large range and diversity of opinions, perspectives and insights coming from all directions, it becomes even more challenging to distinguish between the fear that keeps us living and the fear that keeps us from living. To give into the wildfire of fear that is quickly being sparked through the many media and digital channels that we consume can be dangerous as it is not always grounded in truth and reality. At the same time, to block out the fear, to blame institutions and to blind ourselves to the facts is to be in a state of ignorance. _Ignorance is not bliss._ A dose of fear is healthy and important, especially in this moment. Fear can serve a practical purpose to keep us, our communities and our world healthier and safer. Everything in moderation though, fear should not be limitless. Like my body that can only intake so much food or my mind that can only handle so much meditation, there is a limit to the fear. Once I acknowledge that fear is part of my reality, I can focus on how much and how to manage it. I can make the choice to feed my fear by mindlessly consuming, scrolling and spreading content blindly on unregulated social media platforms. Or I can make the choice to manage my fear by exclusively reading trusted news sources and making even more time for awareness practices like meditation, yoga, journaling and reflection that help me feel grounded and even calm in the face of uncertainty. The latter choice enables me to show up in a way that is aligned with my identity, values and beliefs for those around me. When I reflect on the source of my fear, I can trace it to the unknown. In the face of the unknown, my natural conditioning is to retreat and wait for more to be known. Then I can act from a place of knowledge with conviction. It is not always prudent though to wait for more to be known. It is difficult to make choices in the face of the unknown. It is even more difficult to make choices and change them once more becomes known. _This is called humility._ To choose to live in the face of uncertainty without giving in to fear requires an awareness that there is a new normal that is not yet clear. I believe that a new world order is being born and that we are not going back to how life was. Like 9/11, there are fundamental changes to our institutions and to our culture that we will see in a post-pandemic era. Furthermore, we get to shape this new world order. _It starts with letting go of what was to make space for what can be._ **There is one fatal flaw in the human condition though.** I believe that we can overcome it as we usher in a new world order. The flaw that I speak of is our inability to think beyond ourselves, as our default state. The individualistic programming our culture has ingrained so remarkably well into us over the past few centuries has led to major social and structural issues, including income inequality, climate change and a mental health crisis. To think beyond the self means to expand the sense of self to include others. It starts naturally with our family and friends. This is realistic and reasonable for all of us to experience. Our sense of self needs to then extend to include the people on the front lines of a health pandemic, like doctors, nurses, first responders, and also those keeping our transportation, electricity, water and internet infrastructure running. Then, our sense of self needs to expand to include the broader communities we live in and ultimately the global village that we are all part of. The global health pandemic we are witnessing has so far impacted people who we do not know in far away countries. It is now starting to impact people we know of, who are in public life like politicians, celebrities and athletes. Soon, it will impact people that we directly know in our close communities. This is how a pandemic goes from being an intellectual concept that we read about to an embodied reality that we feel in our heart. This global pandemic is proof that we are all connected. We all are on our own journey in life and will come to a place of action, a place of compassion and a place of an expanded view of self in our own way, in our own time. I do not know when this will happen for you. It is happening for me right now. As Viktor Frankl shared in Man’s Search for Meaning, _“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”_ I do not have control over the global pandemic or the public response to the global pandemic. I do have control over the actions that I take. And not taking action itself is a choice. \*\* A final reflection on fear.\*\* I have come to believe that **behind all fear is love.** Love in the face of a global pandemic is effortless action. It comes from the heart, not the mind. In my heart, I feel the connection that we all share and a moral responsibility to take bold action. _Not from a place of fear, but from a place of love._ --- ### Why Workplace Mental Health, Why Now Published: 2020-02-04 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/workplace/ Most of us spend more time with work than any other part of our life. In a given week, although only 30%-40% of waking hours are spent _physically at work_, most of us spend 60%-70% of waking hours _mentally with work_. Only 32% of employees today feel that their organization’s leadership is taking action to address workplace mental health. CAMH recently published a 28-page playbook for business leaders that outlines a 5 step framework on how any organization can take action to address workplace mental health. **_[Here is a link to download the playbook](http://bit.ly/31v8559)_**. I believe we will look back at this period in history as the moment when we changed our relationship with workplace mental health. Everything changes and the tipping point we are crossing is taking mental health from a stigmatized disease we pretend does not exist towards a part of everyday life that impacts every single member of our team. 1 in 5 people experience mental illness and 5 in 5 people have mental health. If your team has ten people, at least two of them are impacted directly by a mental illness, most of your team will have family or friends directly impacted and all of your team has mental health. Over the past few years, we have taken deliberate actions to strengthen mental health at Polar, a global technology business that I run. Here are three specific examples: **1. Flexibility:** we trust our team to make choices as to how, when and where they want to work. We provide a tremendous amount of flexibility in what time people want to work, if they want to work from home and how much vacation they would like to take. **2. Technology**: we have been really intentional on how we use (vs abuse) technology. This includes tech-free meetings (no phones or laptops), mandating that people disconnect completely from email and Slack while taking vacation and not asking anyone to be online during evenings and weekends. **3. Mindfulness:** we take a mindful moment at the start of team meetings, board calls and client workshops, making available group meditations regularly and running workshops for those interested to learn more. The benefits to our culture, our clients and our company are clear to me however I don’t prioritize mental health because it’s a positive ROI (which it is), but because** it’s the right thing to do**. This is why we will continue to invest in programs and practices that support mental health in the workplace. By the age of 40, half of us have had a mental illness. 20% of employees have voluntarily left roles for mental health reasons. The numbers increase to 50% for millennials and 75% for Gen Z. 70% of all disability costs are due to mental illness. Nearly 4,000 Canadians die by suicide each year – an average of almost 11 suicides a day. After accidents, suicide is the second leading cause of death for people aged 15 to 34. CAMH (the Center for Addiction and Mental Health) is one of the world’s leading mental health hospitals and research centres. I joined their board three years ago and have been inspired by the people, stories and ideas I have come across. There is a lot of work to do and it feels like we are just getting started. **_[Download the workplace mental health playbook today](http://bit.ly/31v8559)_** and share it with your team, manager or leaders to start a conversation about what this looks like for your organization. **[And here is a framework](https://www.bykunal.com/mentalhealth)**_ that explains how I think about mental health in general._ --- ### How To Be Happy Published: 2020-01-05 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/happy/ **Our society and culture has trained us to believe that life is conditional. _Once this, then that._**_ _ This training to be dissatisfied with life in the present moment is actually what makes the machine of the markets work remarkably well. It is why we continue to consume and create, for hope of a better life in the future. _Once this, then that._ The dissatisfaction that we may feel with our status, our body, our career, our relationships, our institutions and more dominates our thoughts. Constantly. Setting goals defines specific conditions for our happiness and further perpetuates our culture of dissatisfaction with reality. _Once this, then that. _ The prevalent belief that we have adopted is that life can be better, only if we had something more or something different. And that we must change ourselves or the world must change, for us to be happy. _Once this, then that._ **Did it ever occur to us that we may already be happy?** And not because of the things, lifestyles, experiences or achievements in our lives. Those are all sources of temporary pleasure and thrill. We may already be happy because it is in our nature to be so. But we have been conditioned to believe otherwise. There is a way to break-free of this conditioning of _once this, then that._ _We have a choice, between two options._ **First, we can do what society and culture wants us to do.** To put our energy into rearranging our respective worlds. This means trying to put things, people and situations in place with how we believe they should all be. All of the ideas that we have formed in our minds over the years, if not decades, for how things should be now dominate our thinking. _This is good and that is bad. This is right and that is wrong. This is better than that._ We exhaust all of our energy trying to control the outside world, which we have very little control over to begin with. We are all trying to create different worlds simultaneously aligned with different beliefs, when there is only one true reality that we all share. This leads to a lot of friction. _With this first choice, we have once again made our happiness conditional. _ Our fear is that if we choose to be satisfied and accept reality as it is, what will happen to our motivation and ambition? Will we simply watch Netflix, scroll through Instagram and eat pizza all day? The simple answer is no, as it is not in our nature to be satisfied with that reality. We may experience it but will not be satisfied with it and will then begin to unconsciously change it. **There is a second choice.** And that is to choose how we show up. What is the quality or energy that each of us wish to show up with, in every situation, challenging or otherwise. This choice for how we each show up is like carrying an umbrella by our side in the rain. When it is raining, we can choose to complain about the reality of the situation and try to control the rain (which we can’t actually do, that’s the first choice above where we spend our energy trying to rearrange the world to our liking). Or we can choose to pull out our umbrella and carry on without any concern, agitation, anxiety, frustration, worry or stress. _Because we have our umbrella, and we trust that it will keep us mostly dry in the rain, we are fine and comfortable when it rains._ There will be unwanted, undesirable and unpleasant moments along our journey. Instead of obsessing over minimizing or eliminating them (which is difficult, if not impossible), we can focus instead on being prepared for them. Have the confidence in ourselves that we can deal with anything that comes our way. And eventually, we won’t even see these moments as unwanted, undesirable or unpleasant. We will see them simply as part of reality. **This is how we can learn to live life with a little less friction and a little more ease.** And flow in harmony with reality. Where everlasting and boundless happiness exists, unconditionally. --- ### My One Word Intention For 2020 Published: 2020-01-02 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/intention/ **For the past six years, a New Year's ritual I’ve practiced has been to select one word as my intention or theme for the year ahead. This guides how I intend to show up and has replaced specific goals and outcomes that I used to define for myself.** **My intention for this year is heart.** For me, it means learning to listen to and lead more from my heart. I’ve focused a lot on building an understanding of and relationship with my mind over the past many years, and feel good and settled about this. Now I am curious to explore what it looks and feels like for me to lead my life more from my heart. In previous years, my intentions have been trust, fearless, freedom, energy and discover. What I have learned is that this one word intention acts as a compass of sorts, or a North Star. It helps guide my decisions, small and large. And in moments when I feel challenged, uncertain or fearful, I turn to it like I would an umbrella in the rain. It gives me some space to carry on with less agitation, anxiety or stress. Setting and sharing an intention for the year with those close to me has been a meaningful way to connect at a deeper level. _Over the past year, here are a sampling of intentions friends have set for themselves, which I’m sharing here with you to possibly help inspire yours._ Acceptance Action Authentic Awareness Balance Bold Breathe Care Change Commitment Communication Compassion Confidence Connection Control Courage Create Discipline Equilibrium Explore Faith Fearless Fit Focus Form Fortitude Freedom Fun Generosity Giving Grace Gratitude Grounded Growth Harmony Heart Humility Integrity Joy Learn Lightness Love Mastery Open Ownership Partnership Play Positive Presence Relationships Relax Respect Responsibility Self Love Serve Sincerity Simplify Surrender Thoughtful Truth Trust Understanding Union Win I suspect by now you’ve connected with one word as your intention for the year. If not, don’t worry and give yourself some space. _It’ll become clear soon enough. _ Once I’ve set my intention, I find it helpful to share it with those close to me, make it visible in my physical or digital space and to write some reflections on what this means for me in a journal.** This reflects my commitment to my intention. ** The only choice that I believe that we can make in life is how to show up, especially in the face of challenges that we may encounter along our journey. This one word intention can be an incredible source of inspiration, as it comes from the only place where our truth resides, inside ourselves. --- ### Meditation: How To Get Started Published: 2019-12-16 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/meditation/ _“Meditation is not for me, I’m not able to calm my mind”_ is a common response from those resistant to meditation. My response back is, _“do you really think you’re the only one with a mind that is overflowing with thoughts?”_. **Meditation is not about stopping thoughts or controlling the mind.** When I first started meditating several years ago, I believed that it would help relax my mind. Similar to how my body feels relaxed after a massage, meditation should be like taking my mind to a spa. The disappointing reality is that my mind rarely felt like it was at a spa, it was always thinking. After about 500 days of meditating each morning, I realized that meditation is a process to strengthen my mind, the same way I go to the gym to strengthen my body. Meditation, as a form of strength training for the mind, builds important skills. Here is some of what I’ve learned about the practice of meditation and how to get started. **1. Awareness** The first skill that meditation builds is awareness. If thoughts were like water in a river, to control thoughts would be like placing rocks in the river to stop the flow. It would be wasted effort, as the water would still find a way to flow. Like the water, thoughts are always flowing. Meditation is not about trying to control the stream. It is instead about learning to lift oneself out of the water, sit on the river bank and watch the stream go by without getting caught in it. **Learn to become aware of your thoughts. **Having an object of focus is helpful. Most guided meditations use the breadth, body, verbalization or visualization. It does not matter what the object of focus is, these are all tools to practice awareness. **2. Acceptance** The second skill that meditation builds is acceptance. I like to think of my mind as a puppy, sitting by my side. When my mind begins to wander, it is the puppy that’s running around. Sometimes slowly, often quickly. This visualization helps me detach from the thought stream and accept that my puppy (mind) will wander. It is in its nature. To expect anything different from it would not be realistic. **Learn to accept your thoughts. **Once we start to become aware of our thoughts, it is a common tendency to then start to judge our thoughts. Or judge ourselves for having thoughts. We naturally begin to inspect the contents of the thoughts, dissecting each ingredient to understand them. Learn to let go of judgement and accept whatever you become aware of. **3. Alertness** The third skill that meditation builds is alertness. The biggest threat during meditation is sleepiness, of the body and the mind. What I have learned that helps prevent this is a straight spine. I like to think of a tall, inspirational building like the Empire State Building, the CN Tower or the Eiffel Tower. **Learn to be alert in meditation**. A few practical suggestions: _1. Sit in a dignified position._ Head straight, shoulders relaxed, jaw unclenched and a strong back. Meditation is a commitment to yourself, practice it with dignity. _2. Keep your hips higher than your knees._ If sitting on the ground, use a pillow or cushion under your seat to help elevate hips slightly. Without this, you begin to look less like the Eiffel Tower and more like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. _3. Avoid any back support._ If seated on a chair, sit slightly forward. Without back support, it is physically impossible to fall asleep. Do not lie down (that is called sleeping). These practices will give you a solid physical foundation for the mind to be alert. **Build a personal practice** Like my rib cage that holds the vital organs of my body and my spine that keeps me upright, my personal practice holds me up and supports me through the journey of life. Over the past four years, my personal practice has evolved and can be described in three parts. First is the daily practice, every morning for 20-30 minutes. This is like taking out the kitchen trash. If you don’t do it after a few days, things start to get smelly and stinky. So best to take out the mental trash each day. Note: morning meditation is different than evening meditation. Both beneficial, but serve different purposes. So experiment with both. Next is the weekly practice, which is a longer meditation or sitting with a group of people. This is like tidying up the apt and putting everything in its place. Thanks to the foundation of a daily practice, on a weekly basis I am able to deal with stuff that may be accumulating or piling up, and put it in its place. On a monthly basis, I am taking a few days for retreat. It is either structured or unstructured time and I am disconnected from normal day-to-day responsibilities (both professionally like the business or personally like running errands). This is giving the place a deep scrubbing. A strong personal practice will have many layers that all build on and support one another. **A few helping hands** Meditation is not easy. I’m grateful to have leaned on several resources to support me along the way. Understanding meditation from an intellectual perspective is useful early on. **_Classes:_** there are many meditation studios in every major city now, which help make group meditation more accessible. I would recommend to attend at least one per month. I have started to build a guide (for New York), available at _[findsilence.today](http://findsilence.today/)_. _More cities coming soon._ **_Books:_** always have a meditation or spiritual book on the go. There are so many available, they all share similar lessons. In my early days, I read: The Buddha Walks Into a Bar (Lodro Rinzler), Search Inside Yourself (Chade-Meng Tan), Buddha (Deepak Chopra), 10% Happier (Dan Harris), The Internet to the inner-net (Gopi Kallayil) and Meditation (Eknath Easwaran). **_Netflix:_** there are several documentaries available that can help peak your curiosity. A few that I watched at the start of my journey were: Happy, 10 Questions with the Dalai Lama and I AM. **_Apps:_** use a guided meditation app to help build consistency in your practice. They help make something new feel effortless, as all you have to do is hit play. Do not worry about which app, start with Headspace, Calm or Insight Timer. If it does not work for you, try another one. If it still does not work for you, ask yourself if you are really committed to explore meditation (you may not be, which is okay). **_Community:_** the most important resource for me has been having friends around me that I can share my experiences with, ask questions to and learn from. Surrounding yourself with like-valued people who are also curious and committed to exploring meditation is helpful. Meditation is a tool for introspection but it does not mean that you have to do it alone. **How to know if it is working** Meditation is not about how you feel while practicing. Meditation allows you to practice the skills of awareness, acceptance and alertness, so that you can guide through life with a little more ease, a little less effort and a lot more peace. When you notice the rest of your day feeling slightly different, that is the encouragement to continue strength training. --- ### 3 Life Enhancing Skills From Yoga Teacher Training Published: 2019-10-02 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/training/ **When I started a 200 hour yoga teacher training program, I had no idea at the time just how influential this experience was going to be for me.** I have been practicing yoga for the past five years fairly consistently and have thought for many years about doing a training, but held myself back as I had the misguided belief that I had to be an advanced yogi capable of doing every pose with ease. It was a spontaneous decision to start the training that I made less than a week before the program started, inspired by a relative who had passed away that triggered a sense of urgency in my life. Now I still cannot do a handstand or wheel, and struggle to do a headstand without the support of the wall or a teacher. Yoga teacher training had less to do with my physical abilities and more to do with my attitude. Like me, most of my fellow yogis went into the program not to become yoga teachers but rather and simply, to learn about the practice. It is really is a preparation for life and could be renamed from teacher training to life training. Here are 3 ways that the yoga training has influenced my life over the past year. \*\* 1. Yoga training has changed the way that I sit, stand and walk\*\* After practicing yoga with the same teachers and at the same studios for several years, I noticed that my mind would easily wander during class. My yoga mat became my office, where I could go to sort through things, organize my life, and feel ready to re-enter my world. Yoga training has changed all of this. We spent a few hours on each yoga pose. Yes, imagine dissecting, learning, teaching, practicing each of downward dog, warrior 2 or tree pose for a few hours. I quickly learned what is happening to each part of my body, in each pose. And there is a lot more than meets the eye. Learning about the specific alignment and adjustments of body parts during each pose brought a whole new level of depth to my practice. So much so that I wish I had done the training five years ago when I had first started practicing yoga. Now that I have an understanding of each muscle in my body during each pose, my attention does not wander anymore. I am far more mindful now of lifting my knee cap in triangle pose, pressing firmly into the floor or blocks in a forward fold, externally rotating my upper arms in downward dog, pressing into my toes in upward facing dog, and I could go on. Yoga anatomy blew my mind. I have been fortunate to be healthy in life thus far and not face any serious medical injuries or emergencies. I had not previously been exposed to anatomy and largely thought of my body as a black box. Yoga training changed that. Learning about the differences between my sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, the regions of my spine and how they are meant (and not meant) to move, and about individual muscles - my relationship with my body has changed forever. The level of awareness of my body in everyday situations, be it walking to the office, sitting on the subway, in a meeting room, while brushing my teeth or cooking in the kitchen, I now sit, stand and walk differently. \*\* 1. Yoga training has made me more effective in business\*\* My admiration for yoga teachers skyrocketed after we were asked to start practice teaching. It felt like we forgot how to speak English once each of us stood up in front of the class to instruct. Although I am no stranger to public speaking, I learned quickly that instructing a yoga class with movement, unpredictability and a sequence is a completely different game. Clarity is critical, as people are trusting me to guide their movements safely. Brevity is paramount, to keep the class flowing and students engaged. This challenge stimulated me. Now what I was most surprised about was how transferable these skills were to my business. How I showed up in business, with clients and my team, changed. My emails became shorter. My instructions more direct. I paid more attention to what people were saying. It took me a while to attribute this shift that I had been experiencing professionally to my yoga training. For example, in training we learned how to give demos. Here is how I could instruct tree pose: - Shift your weight into your right foot - With the help of your left hand, place your left foot on the inside of your right thigh - Avoid placing your left foot on your right knee, place it above or below your right knee - Bring your hands to your hips and level your hips - Tuck your tailbone and lengthen your spine - Engage your core, gather your ribs and broaden your chest - Energetically point both of your hip points forward - Lift and engage your right knee cap, lower your right hamstring - Bring your hands into a prayer in front of your chest - Raise your arms to the sky and focus on your hips for stability - Continue to press into your inner right leg for greater balance - Externally rotate your upper arms so that your triceps face forward - Lower your shoulder blades down your back and unclench your jaw - Focus your gaze forward and relax your facial muscles - Breathe If a student was new to yoga or tree pose, the above instruction is incredibly intimidating (although mostly accurate and complete). Here is a different way to instruct the same pose: - Shift your weight into your right foot and place your left foot above or below your right knee - Bring your hands to your hips - Bring your hands into a prayer in front of your chest and gather your hips together - Raise your arms to the sky and continue to focus on your hips for stability We were taught to focus on “the one thing” we want the students to learn instead of reciting a textbook of instructions that cover every possible piece of information about the pose. (The one thing in the second example is clearly a focus on the hips). I remember my next day in the office, I wrote an email to a client explaining the value of our product and listing seven benefits. I paused and then asked myself, “what’s the one thing that I really would like to communicate?” and re-wrote the email to focus on 1 benefit instead. My sales presentations, blog posts, product strategy, 1-1 feedback and general prioritization all began to anchor on “one thing” instead of a list of 17 things. As a yoga teacher or business leader, being clear, direct and focused is what those around me expect from me. \*\* 1. Yoga philosophy is a handbook on living well\*\* Yoga in the West has been popularized as a physical workout alongside other fitness routines. Most yoga studios, teachers and students focus exclusively on the physical practice. The reality is that yoga is much more than a physical practice and the poses are a tiny part of the teaching. The purpose of yoga poses is to prepare the body to be able to sit in meditation for an extended period of time. Why? So that we can go deeper within without being distracted by physical discomforts in our body. I’ll repeat. The primary reason yoga poses were developed was to prepare the body to sit in meditation. To have a physical yoga practice without a meditation practice is equivalent to taking cooking classes, but never cooking a meal; or practicing a sport, without ever playing the game; or learning to drive, without ever getting behind the wheel. Yoga philosophy is my jam and I really loved learning more about ayurveda (Indian medicine from 5,000 years ago), the Bhagavad Gita (the ancient yoga text full of knowledge and teaching), Pranayama (breathing practices), Bhakti (the yoga of devotion and service) and the Koshas (the many layers to our existence) among other aspects of the practice. Yoga is full of frameworks, teachings and theories that continue to help me make sense of my relationship with myself, others and the world at large. I have drawn a lot of inspiration on how to life live with a little more ease and a little less friction. \*\* And, one more thing\*\* Practicing at several studios in New York over the years, I often heard teacher training programs being advertised and would think quietly to myself “who in their right mind would do a teacher training in New York? I’m going to do it in Thailand or Bali”. And of course, I ended up doing a teacher training in New York. The most influential part of this experience, more than the above three points, was the community that I built. I am so glad I chose to do it in New York, where I now live, as I have a yoga crew that continues to support, teach and encourage me along my journey. This includes the many teachers and friends that I feel so much gratitude towards for guiding me, especially over the past year. **[Yogamaya](https://yogamayanewyork.com/)**_ is where I did my training._ --- ### The 2 Minute Daily Meditation Published: 2019-09-02 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/minute/ For friends who are new to meditation, struggle to find the time, have fallen out of practice or are not feeling the many guided apps, I recommend starting with a 2 minute daily meditation. You most definitely have 2 minutes and it might just be one of the best investments you can make for your own mental health and wellness, each day. This is best to practice first thing in the morning (bonus points for doing it before looking at your phone). You can do it sitting or standing (avoid lying down, that’s called sleeping). You can do it with your eyes open or closed, does not matter. Set a timer on your phone for 2 minutes, to avoid getting distracted wondering when time is up (“hey Siri/Alexa/Google, set timer for 2 minutes”). Choose your own adventure. Stay in silence. Each day, pick one of the following three options for your meditation: **_A) Space_**: bring your attention to the physical space you are in right now -Feel the floor under your feet and the chair/sofa/bed under your seat -Notice the temperature in the room and observe the air touching your skin -Listen to the sounds in your environment -Notice the light coming through your open or closed eyes **_B) Body_**: observe your body in this present moment -Feel the weight of your legs and arms -Notice your head and any sensations on your face -Unclench your jaw and relax your shoulders -Do a light body scan, from the top of your head to the tips of your toes **_C) Breath_**: focus your attention on the sensation of breathing -Select either your nostrils, throat, chest or stomach -Quietly observe each inhale and each exhale -Your mind will wander, which is completely natural -Once it does, gently bring it back to the sensation of breathing This simple 2 minute daily meditation is an accessible and useful for everyone. Set a daily reminder on your phone initially to help build your consistency. Bonus points if you do it with others. If you have kids, this is a beautiful skill to share with them. If you have a partner, this is an amazing way to ground yourselves, together. Many friends I have shared the 2 minute daily meditation with share with me that they do it now multiple times a day. That’s a sign that it is really working, when you naturally are attracted to it. --- ### How A Garden Shovel Changed My Life Published: 2019-08-16 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/garden/ “Change your thinking, change your life”, a yoga teacher once shared with me. This seed that was planted has blossomed into something beautiful in my life. There is a lot of dirt that seems to collect over time. And my Garden Shovel is a tool that helps me sift through that dirt. More often than not, I discover treasure. The treasure is not gold, but something far more valuable. The truth. My truth. Although my truth is not always great to look at, I feel great once I see it. In an instant, everything makes sense. This dirt that my Garden Shovel helps me sift through is fear, attachment, insecurity, judgement. Judgement from others? Maybe. Judgement from myself? Definitely. I am the hardest on myself and I get in my own way more often than not. This can make it difficult to see what is real and what might be possible. In the opening of Paulo Cohelo’s The Alchemist, he shares four obstacles that can get in the way of realizing our dreams: - Doubt: we are told by others that what we want is not possible. - Love: we are afraid to abandon those around us to pursue our dreams. - Fear: we are afraid to make an effort and possibly fail. - Success: we do not feel worthy to achieve our dreams. I have experienced each of the above in my life and I’m sure will have more opportunities to experience each of them again and again. My Garden Shovel helps me see the obstacle and that clarity is the treasure that I value. The treasure that my Garden Shovel helps me uncover can also be called wisdom. Wisdom is a bit of knowledge mixed with a lot of experience. Wisdom cannot be gained by reading a book, listening to a podcast, engaging in conversation or from this blog post. It can only be gained through experience. I gain experience with every day, every step and every breath. This treasure that I describe as my truth is the wisdom that can only be found from within. It may be sitting there but I have to do the work to find it. And that means clearing the dirt, for which I need tools. My Garden Shovel helps me become aware of decisions that I have already made but am not able to see or ready to act on. Decisions related to my business, including really difficult ones like if I should hire someone or even let someone go. Decisions related to my relationships, like how I may feel or in other cases, may not feel. Decisions related to my lifestyle and priorities, like where I want to invest my time, resources and energy. I believe that there are processes that are continuously making decisions for me, based on the knowledge, experiences and inputs that are available. Where exactly are these decisions being made? I am not sure. I could call it spirit, energy, god, light, universe. It does not matter what I call it, so for today I will use the term consciousness. To find this treasure I speak of requires that I place my trust and connect with something greater than my body and mind though. And my Garden Shovel is one tool that helps me connect with consciousness to clear the dirt. On the other hand, there are some tools that invite more dirt. Alcohol, caffeine, sugar, Netflix, Instagram and the like can take me to a place of ignorance, which is why I have chosen to not have any of them in my lifestyle. To see my truth is the equivalent of sitting in my apartment with the lights on. Every time I use my Garden Shovel, the light turns on and I realize that I had been sitting here in the dark. I am fortunate to have many sources of inspiration around me. Teachers. Friends. Books. And while I do try to listen to others, seek out new ideas and be open to different perspectives that may help inspire me, what I have found is that the strongest sources of inspiration for me are the treasures that I can discover from within. There is a connection and conviction to these treasures that transcends intellect. There is an indescribable quality to my own truth that makes it the most powerful source of inspiration in my life. If I was a doctor, I would give prescriptions for Garden Shovels. If you are reading this post, take it as your prescription. Take one dose of your Garden Shovel, 3 times a week, for 4 weeks. And then see for yourself how you feel. If you find it helpful, continue with it, otherwise stop it. The Bhagavad Gita is an ancient Indian text and source of yoga philosophy. One of the verses that continues to guide me reads, “do your duty, but do not concern yourself with the results”. This describes a state of mind. Take action and make an effort, but do not be attached or even interested in the outcome of your actions. What is my Garden Shovel? I have many, including meditation, yoga and morning pages. These tools have served me well as I continue to put the work in to try to cultivate a beautiful garden, which is my life. We all need tools to help us build a life filled with beauty, meaning and purpose. Find your own Garden Shovel and give it a try without any expectations of results. And see how your thinking might just begin to change a little bit. --- ### How Myers-Briggs Helped Me With Acceptance Published: 2019-08-02 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/acceptance/ Mindfulness is a tool that helps me cultivate awareness from within but it is not the only tool I use. Another one that I have found to be powerful has been reading personality assessments. A meditation teacher once shared with me, “you do not have to listen or agree with all of your thoughts, with practice you learn to observe them”. I understand that personality assessments are not perfect and putting people into boxes is not fair. And I am fine with that. I use it as a signal, not as the Bible or the law. I was pleasantly surprised after taking the five minute 16personalities quiz, based on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), and reading the ten page assessment of the type that I tested as. So I did it again. And again. The assessment felt shockingly accurate and comforting in a strange way. Reading about the many quirks and tendencies that the type I tested as experiences, I immediately began to accept myself more versus continuing to try and change myself. For example, the personality type I tested as likes to design frameworks as a way to understand concepts. The type goes through a process to deconstruct something into pieces and then puts it back together. This is exactly how I process information. To the point, that if I did not come up with a framework myself, I can have a difficult time understanding the idea. Next, I asked others on my team to also take the quiz and share with me how they tested. And I encouraged them to read my assessment. Reading about how people on my team approach the world different than me was mind opening. I know at an intellectual level that we are all unique but I have to say that my empathy deepened once I took the time to read the personality types and could relate it back to real life examples I observe in the people I spend dozens of hours each week with. And how different they are than me. For example, the type I tested as does seek recognition from others. Naturally as I don’t expect recognition, I unconsciously assume others also don’t seek it. Wrong. After reading other personality types from people on my team, I realized that I may not be giving people what they need from me. Awareness of how my tendencies are unique from others has helped me begin to consciously show up differently as a leader. I also asked past romantic partners what personality type they tested as. A delightful surprise, they all tested the same as each other. And reading the assessment led to a stream of insights and aha moments flowing through my mind. So many unanswered questions and confusing moments cleared up. In the assessment, I could see described specific personality traits that I struggled to understand as they were so different than me. Now I recognize that to be a lack of understanding on my part, not that there was something wrong with them for thinking differently than me. For example, the personality type I test as is quite structured and organized. Past romantic partners have tested as the opposite. That is likely part of the attraction however my lack of understanding of this difference led to me interpreting their choices in an unfair manner. I asked my parents to fill it out and for fun, my sister and I tried to guess how they would test as. And we were completely wrong. Now either they did not fill it out accurately or more likely, the way each of us view our parents is significantly different than how they view themselves. If you have not taken the test, _[16personalities.com](https://www.16personalities.com/free-personality-test)_ is a quick five minute free online quiz with detailed descriptions of all types. Take the quiz. Read the assessment of the type you test as. And then encourage those close to you (partner, family, friends, team) to do the same. Read each other’s assessments. You may be curious about how I tested. INTJ, labeled as _[The Architect](https://www.16personalities.com/intj-personality)_. A friend recently shared with me how Myers-Briggs came to be. It dates back to World War II. Katharine Cook Briggs was intrigued when she met her daughter’s future husband, Clarence Myers, for the first time. He had a different way of seeing the world and that triggered a 20 year research project to understand personality types. Katharine and her daughter, Isabel Briggs Myers, believed that if people better understood each other, they could work better together and there would be less conflict. This vision is one I connect with, as a business leader and mindfulness practitioner. It is centered on awareness. Awareness of the self and of others. As I often say, awareness does not discriminate, which means that I will become as aware of the beauty and the dirt. When it comes to personality assessments, this practice has helped shine a light on traits that are both desirable and less desirable. With greater awareness comes greater acceptance, and this is why I have become passionate about using this personality indicator to strengthen acceptance of myself and those around me. --- ### Breaking The Link Between Pain And Suffering Published: 2019-06-21 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/exhale-n9scb/ The rising sun brightened up the terminal as I strolled slowly through LaGuardia airport this morning. As I caught a glimpse of a fellow traveler who looked, well, like a New Yorker might at 6am in an airport, tears suddenly began to roll down my face. Before the events of the past week, I might have been like that grumpy New Yorker, rushing around the airport, trying to get somewhere fast. Instead, there I was, walking like a turtle, unbothered by the pain my body was feeling and smiling like it was my first time ever in an airport. The beauty in that moment brought me to tears. See, earlier this week, I had re-injured my lower back. The original injury was from maybe six years ago, and I had re-injured it a few times since then but not in the past three years. It was serious, or “advanced”, as the physiotherapist I saw a few days ago commented. My body is currently shaped like the leaning tower of Pisa. It is slanted but changes direction throughout the day, the way a sunflower chases the sun. The muscles around my spine are compensating for weakness and unconsciously searching for any relief. The week was the most physically challenging my body has faced in years. Walking was painful. Standing straight was not an option. And forget about even trying to tie my shoes. Once my body had been horizontal for a few hours or the night, trying to get out of bed was the riskiest part of each day. Probably riskier than starting a business, eating street food in Asia or taking the subway late at night. It would take a few attempts and I might as well have been jumping out of a plane. The feeling was the same. I had no idea what was about to happen and if I would be able to stand after. Even writing this message to you, while sitting on the plane, I find myself constantly shifting every few minutes in my seat, as no one position feels quite right. Yes, a lower back injury can be intense. Back to this morning. As I watched the sun begin to illuminate the airport terminal, it also began to shine a light on my experience this week. I had the experience of severe physical pain without any accompanying mental pain. What a foreign feeling. I have not experienced a single ounce of mental agitation, stress, anxiety, tension, anger, frustration or worry. As I reflect on this experience, this is what has surprised me the most. My body was in severe pain and my lifestyle was flipped upside down, yet my mind stayed at peace and now feels even more calm. I accepted my new reality in a heartbeat. I guess I had no choice but to accept it. How was this possible? I’ve definitely experienced mental agitation from previous lower back injuries that were far less painful than this one. I can only assume that my mindfulness practice is at work. It must have helped create the conditions for my mind to be at ease despite my body’s pain. To be clear, acceptance did not mean apathy. Quite the opposite. I chose to work from home, reschedule a number of meetings, go for daily acupuncture or physiotherapist visits, purchased heat pads, took pain killers, changed my diet to further reduce any inflammatory foods and napped often on the hard floor. All of this action arose from a sense of responsibility for my body, not from a place of fear for my body. Last night, while speaking with my mom on the phone, she asked me how I felt. I shared with her that the way I feel about my back injury is how I might choose to feel about the weather. “Oh look, it’s raining outside”. Aware yet detached. The practice really starts with learning to see reality as it is. Once I can see reality, I can accept it. Once I can accept it, I can take action. I also understand that everything changes, and the pain I notice in my body will also change. And it has. My body feels much better now. What brought me to tears this morning was a deep feeling of gratitude that I could actually walk. Simple movement brought me so much joy, after I had experienced just a few days of lack of movement. The tears shined a light on a few of the simple fortunes in my life that I take for granted. A teacher once shared that “in life, pain is inevitable but suffering is optional.'' The experience in the past week has helped me understand what it means to observe pain yet not suffer. What’s fascinating now is that I’ve actually fallen in love with the pain. It has taught me so much. I feel grounded in the awareness of the fragility of my body. I feel grateful to be able to walk, something I take for granted. I feel more present in each moment, as when my mind wanders while moving, I put my body at greater risk of injury during this sensitive time. I feel empathy towards those who cannot move their bodies as freely. I feel compassion towards others who may be suffering from pain. I feel more connected with reality. I feel clear. I feel at peace. And finally, I feel thankful for this injury, it’s the best thing that happened all week. --- ### The Root Of All Creation Published: 2019-05-11 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/mother/ The root of the word mother is **matr**. **Matr** is the root of several important and related concepts. **Mater**ial is the source from which other things are made of. **Matter** gives shape to the material world in which we live in. **Matr**ix is where things develop or originate from. When I take a moment to pause and reflect on the root of the creation in my life, I begin to discover mother everywhere. My breakfast is often granola with fruits. The apples and pears were grown on a farm somewhere. The farmer is a mother to my breakfast. The fruits were transported from the farm to my local grocery store. The people involved in packaging, transporting and unpacking the fruits are all mothers to my breakfast. Many people helped create the roads, trucks and buildings that were needed to get the fruit from the farm to me. They are all mothers to my breakfast. Yesterday I spoke with a close friend. We connect over many shared interests. Many people were involved in helping inspire each of those interests in us. They are all mothers to our friendship. We have shared many experiences together, including travel, yoga and volunteer work. Many more people were involved in creating the space for each of those experiences to happen, each of them mothers to our friendship. My friend and I have only a small role to play in the friendship that we enjoy when I reflect about how many mothers had a role to play. And finally, where do my ideas come from? Are they even mine? They may appear in my mind but after I take a moment to pause and reflect, I again discover the many people and circumstances that led to the creation of these ideas that surface in my mind. Every idea is grown from a seed that was planted thanks to some other person or experience. Every idea in my mind has a mother. Or several. My mind is like a gardener that cultivates the soil so that even a few of the seeds that have been planted by the many mothers may sprout. As I become aware of the infinite sources of creation that have influenced the food that I taste, the company that I enjoy and the ideas that I cultivate, my understanding grows that I alone cannot take credit for any of it. A level of humility arises which manifests as gratitude in my heart towards all of the mothers who have and continue to contribute to my life. Thank you. --- ### Why Jet Lag Is A Disease Of The Mind Published: 2019-03-21 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/jetlag/ After a recent three week world tour that took me to Australia, Singapore, the Middle East and South Africa, someone on my team asked me “how do you deal with jet lag”, to which I responded off the cuff with “jet lag is a disease of the mind”. It’s telling of how I actually feel about jet lag and in the past few days, I’ve been reflecting on my relationship to it. What I have uncovered is that jet lag is a choice. If I suffer from it, it is because I have chosen to. If I am unaffected by it, it is also because I have chosen to. I do not think avoiding jet lag is a matter of luck or chance. In the past decade, I’ve taken an estimated 600+ flights, a good number of them across time zones. What I’ve learned is that with greater awareness of my body and mind, managing jet lag naturally becomes less of an art and more of a science. It starts with having confidence, faith and belief that I will be fine (and am fine). The moment fear or negative thoughts towards jet lag enter my mind, I’ve already lost. _I genuinely believe that jet lag is a disease of the mind, hence this short essay to share my conviction in this belief._ There are a few practical guidelines I can share on how I choose to avoid jet lag. One to two days before I am about to leave for an international trip, I begin to anticipate where I will be and what time it is there. This light mental conditioning is to get myself prepared, almost at a subconscious level. By infecting my mind with neutral thoughts of where I will be, I am also preventing myself from grabbing onto anxious thoughts tied to the change in time zone. I make responsible choices for my body, being selective of what I put into it. No alcohol. No caffeine. Nothing with added sugar. All of these stimulants or depressants are unnatural and mess with the body (and mind). A few natural supplements can be useful, specifically vitamin D (which I’ll take every morning wherever I am) and melatonin (a natural sleep aid that I’ll take when it’s time for me to sleep while traveling). A few words on melatonin. Often referred to as the “sleep hormone”, it is produced naturally by a tiny part near the middle of your brain. If your brain was a house with many rooms in it, the process of falling asleep is the equivalent to the light switch in each room being turned off. So when you feel “half asleep” or “half awake”, there is truth to the statement as some of your brain regions are asleep or awake. Melatonin is the hormone that turns off the light in each relevant part of your brain to allow us to sleep. It is produced naturally but what interferes with its production is blue light. Where does blue light come from? Screens. The light emitted from your smartphone, laptop or television gets in the way of the natural production of melatonin. And that is likely a big reason why you may find it difficult to sleep. As a general bedtime routine, it’s advised to completely avoid screens for 1-2 hours before you intend to fall asleep. _Note that while melatonin supplements work for most of the population, you should do your own research or consult with someone you trust before blindly taking them._ While on a flight, I am intentional of when I choose to look at the inflight entertainment system or work on my laptop, fully aware that if I’m planning to snooze soon, then it’s best to avoid screens for the 1-2 hours leading up to my inflight bedtime. Another natural sleep aid for me is reading. Especially if it is boring. I will subject myself to reading something uninteresting on a flight if I am getting ready to bedtime and it works beautifully. Food is equally important. Again, I am not consuming anything with added sugar which is not natural and messes with my body (and mind). I will deliberately eat a heavier or larger meal (including buying something overpriced but healthy at the airport before boarding) if I know that I intend to sleep. The reverse is also true, if I intend to stay awake, I will deliberately eat less. Once I’ve arrived in my new place, I eat based on where I am without fail. It does not matter if I am hungry or not, putting food into my body accelerates the adjustment of my body clock (and also avoiding putting food into my body when it is not mealtime). A common issue with changing time zones is how my mind will react when I inevitably will wake up earlier than expected on my first night or two in the new place. How I respond internally in those initial moments when I realize it’s 3 a.m. and I’m wide awake are crucial. Choosing to accept reality as it is, not as a I wish it to be, is what allows me to see it positively. _‘I have a few hours now to meditate, journal, yoga and prepare for my work day’._ I find those few hours before everyone wakes up are precious, quiet and peaceful, on the outside. Initially they were not very peaceful on the inside but I have learned that as soon as I accept that I’m awake, my mind is at peace. Finally, meditation, breathing and general mindfulness techniques really serve me while flying and once I’ve arrived. They help me regulate my mind, become aware of any strong thought patterns or emotions and acknowledge my reality in that moment. A few years ago, I realized for the first time that I am not my body. If I am the driver, my body is the vehicle. I have a responsibility to care for it and depend greatly on it to experience life. This level of abstraction and detachment has helped me to be more objective about how I treat my body and be more intentional with it. My choice to not suffer from jet lag is reflected in my actions that ultimately influence my body. In the end, my body and I on this journey together and it’s in our best interest for me to be kind, compassionate and caring to it. --- ### Nelson Mandela: Struggles Are A Source Of Strength Published: 2019-03-02 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/mandela/ Standing inside Nelson Mandela’s former prison cell in section B of the maximum security prison on Robben Island, I felt inspired by hope. Robben Island, located off the coast of Cape Town, is the Alcatraz of South Africa. They kept two types of prisoners here: the criminals convicted of the crimes you would expect, and political prisoners. Mandela was a political prisoner for 27 years, the first 18 of which were spent on Robben Island in this tiny cell. He spent the remaining 9 years in two other prisons on the mainland, until his release in 1990. When I saw his former cell, the first thought that surfaced was “how did he fit lying down?” He was a tall man, and there is no way that he could have lied down comfortably and fully extended on the ground. This cell was maybe 6 square meters, and he not only spent 18 years there but it was this prison cell where he developed his perspectives on freedom and kept faith that he would one day be free. The conditions of the prison were not grand by any means. I was fortunate that my tour today was being given by a former political prisoner who was imprisoned on Robben Island from 1977-1982. He was arrested as a teenager, and during his high school years was an active voice against apartheid. Hearing about life in prison through his eyes and experience made it feel all the more real. Mandela successfully inspired a nation to come together and avoided civil war in the 90’s. He shared: “As I walked out the door toward the gate that would lead to my freedom, I knew if I didn't leave my bitterness and hatred behind, I'd still be in prison.” During a walking tour of Cape Town yesterday, I visited the historic place where Mandela made his first speech as a free man. There were apparently over 100,000 people who waited all day to hear his words. The crowds made it difficult for him to actually get to the stage. He was scheduled to speak at 2pm that day and was not able to appear until 9pm that night. Among his many messages to the people was the instruction to vote in the election that would end the apartheid. Mandela embodied hope and it was his struggles that gave him the strength to help free the nation. When I reflect on the struggles I’ve experienced in business, relationships and health (both physical and mental), I am reminded that these very struggles have been a source of strength for my life. And my attitude towards struggle begins to change and be one of gratitude. --- ### Why I Don’t Fly Business Class Published: 2019-02-16 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/businessclass/ Earlier today, as I said goodbye to my new friends with hugs at the airport terminal in Hong Kong, I was reminded of why I don’t like to fly business class anymore. One of my new friends was off to Bangladesh, the other to Malaysia and I was in transit to Australia. After three men spent 15 hours on a flight squished together in economy class, I would have expected there to be maybe some resentment from not sharing the arm rest enough, relief to be off the plane and other minor annoyances. Instead, we were laughing and smiling with one another. Let me rewind 15 hours... Settled into my seat, we were in the air and above the clouds. I was enjoying a movie and noticed the man next to me was fidgeting often. I sensed that his body movements were maybe a window into agitation he was feeling in his mind. I took note to check in with him later. A few hours later, I noticed he was sitting slightly forward on his seat, with his spine straight and arms at ease. He was meditating. I often meditate on flights, be it for 5 minutes or 50 minutes, however have rarely seen a flight mate also do it. I was intrigued. A bit later I asked the inevitable question, “how’s your meditation practice going?”. Coming from me, this question is opening a can of worms, as those who know me know that if I’m not in meditation, I am usually talking about meditation. It’s a topic that I find I cannot stop talking about. Fast forward a few hours, I am holding my first mindfulness workshop at 37,000 feet in the air with the two men sitting with me. Explaining the concepts behind meditation first, we then shared a longer practice together followed by a journaling exercise (Morning Pages). Our conversation went deep very fast, and we found ourselves in a discussion about spirituality, religion and lifestyle choices. One of my new friends shared that his marriage had recently fallen apart, and he has found meditation to be a useful tool to navigate an uncertain time. So many priorities to juggle, including his two kids, thriving career, exploring his passion for music, staying physically active and a desire to build a regular meditation practice. His intention for this year is balance. My other new friend is younger, about to graduate from university and enter the working world. He shared about his relationship and desires with money, clearly aware of the trade offs involved. His girlfriend of a few years is from a different culture which he made a few interesting observations of. His intention for this year is freedom. The depth of human connection I experienced in the most unlikely of places was a special moment for me. There was a beauty that I witnessed in the fact that we were all strangers to one another, in some way we felt more comfortable being vulnerable, authentic and real. Instead of watching endless movies, reading an interesting book or takings naps, connecting with new friends made me feel as though I wanted this 15 hour flight to be just a bit longer. I’ve taken many flights, long and short and know that I will take many more. _I love sitting in economy class._ It’s a humbling experience that keeps me grounded. And after today, a reminder of the chance for unexpected yet wonderful connections. Previously, when I did fly business class, I noticed that no one looked happy and most looked very serious. I rarely got to met anyone or had an interesting conversation. After today, I am reminded how my experience changes once I place my attention on others instead of myself. I think this is what it means to be a mindful traveler. Staying aware, open and curious. I also felt inspired by the stories I got to hear from my new friends. I enjoyed sharing a mindfulness practice together and feel grateful for the chance to plant a few seeds that I suspect may sprout over time. --- ### How I Start My Meetings Now Published: 2019-02-03 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/start/ I like, I wish, I wonder **I like** how transferable the skills I’m learning are to the rest of my life. **I wish** I had taken this many years ago. **I wonder** what it will feel like to actually teach strangers. This is how I feel about the year-long yoga teacher training program that I’m in. My statements above are an example of a simple design thinking tool called **Like Wish Wonder** (that I’ve become obsessed with recently). It is a simple practice that I use at the start of meetings (with my management team, clients and my board). Each person answers the questions “I like…”, “I wish…” and “I wonder…” with a short headline-style statement. I acknowledge what was shared by saying “thank you for sharing” and do not respond to anything or ask any further questions. Here is another example. This week, I had a board meeting and that caused me to reflect on how I feel about my board. **I like** that I connect with and respect each of my board members as people. **I wish** we were able to meet as a group in-person versus only over the phone. **I wonder** how else each of them might be able to contribute to my business. What I love about Like Wish Wonder is that it is a super efficient way to get a pulsecheck of the group, it engages each person individually and creates the space for each person to share how they feel. It is far more effective than “how are you” and quickly surfaces the diversity in the group. As no one will respond or ask me probing questions, I find that what I share is more personal, vulnerable and transparent. I do not fear having to defend what I am about to say. And this creates a feeling of trust amongst within the gathering. Here is one final example. I recently decided to start using Instagram. Not as a consumer, but as a research tool for our advertising products at Polar and as a producer of content on mindfulness. How do I feel about Instagram? **I like** how easy it was to buy advertising with just a few clicks from my phone. **I wish** it was not designed to steal and waste people’s most valuable resource. **I wonder** how using it might influence my perception of myself over time. --- ### Understanding My Needs In Life Published: 2019-02-02 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/needs/ _While on holiday in a tropical paradise recently, memories of both my consumerist and minimalist days haunted me._ I could stay, eat and travel on either ends of the spectrum there, without having to give it much thought, as the length of the spectrum was very short. The relative difference in costs to live like a king or backpacker is tiny. I contemplated a deceptively simple question, “what are my needs in life?”, and after much thought, came up with an updated and simplified hierarchy of needs: **Level 1: Physical** All of the needs of our body, including food, sleep, physical safety, comfort and exercise to name a few. _Motivation is a desire for pleasure._ **Level 2: Psychological ** Our mind, including thoughts, feelings and emotions, ideas, connection to others, sense of achievement, fears and anxieties. _Motivation is a desire for happiness._ **Level 3: Purpose** The final need is to be connected to something bigger than ourselves. It may be caring for a child, expressing unconditional love, a spiritual or religious belief or as simple as picking up a piece of trash on the sidewalk. _Motivation is a desire for meaning._ Pleasure is different than happiness. Happiness is different than meaning. This simple framework helps bring awareness to my motivations in life so that I can hopefully bring great balance and fulfillment to each of my needs. An obsession with a single need at the neglect of the others would be unhealthy (which I’ve done many times, I’m sure you have as well). Taking care of my lower-level needs so I can focus more energy on higher-level needs is how I justified living like a prince at times during my recent holiday in paradise. I feel it’s important though when investing in lower level needs to see them as a means to something more important versus as the end in themselves. I’m confident that the above framework is not perfect, which is fine, as perfection is not one of my needs anyway. --- ### My Journey Into The Unknown Published: 2019-01-02 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/journey/ **I handed over my passport to the airline agent and she asked where I was going. “I don’t know” was my short response. An awkward pause. She looked at me, I looked at her, smiling. She realized I was serious.** Over the recent holidays, I ran an experiment in learning to let go of control. I asked a friend to pick a place for me to go and not tell me. Inspired by a secret and spontaneous holiday my sister and I had planned for our parents a few years ago, I received a packet of envelopes from my friend on a mid-December evening, with the first one telling me to go to the airport immediately. I proceeded to take one flight after another, and found myself on the other side of the world. Every day or two that followed for the next three and a half weeks, I opened an envelope that told me where to go, where I’d be staying and suggestions for what I may want to do. The experience was truly a journey into the unknown. Although initially uncomfortable (given how much I naturally like to feel in control), within a week I adjusted and enjoyed not knowing what was around the corner. It was a lesson in learning to trust. Trust my friend. Trust myself. And trust the universe. Exploring this new environment that I suddenly found myself in taught me a lot about myself. It was as much a journey on the outside as on the inside (that’s why I don’t feel the need to share specifically where I was sent). For the past several years, I have been setting and sharing a one-word intention with those close to me. Fearless was my intention last year and this journey into the unknown was a satisfying finish for the year. Trust is my intention for 2019, naturally. Trust in myself, first and foremost. Trust in those around me and trust in the universe. The one-word intention has served me well over the years. Acting like a North Star, I use it as a tool to help me make small and not so small decisions. Whenever I feel at a fork in the road with different paths, I simply checkin with my intention and the decision becomes obvious. Friends have started to share with me their one-word intentions for this year. It’s a beautiful way to connect with others and to support one another. Here are a few intentions to help inspire yours…. Acceptance Authentic Awareness Connection Courage Discovery Energy Fearless Freedom Focus Growth Love Passion Play Presence Wisdom By now, you have likely connected with your intention for the year. Journal on what you feel it means to you now. Share it with someone that you trust. And find a fun way to keep it top of mind. We do not know what our journey will have in store for us, despite any desires to control everything. Knowing this, having a compass of sorts to help navigate the unknown is helpful. --- ### A Dance With Capitalism Published: 2019-01-01 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/balancism/ “If you don’t like the culture around you, you have to choose to not buy it”. These are the words of Morrie, from Tuesdays with Morrie, simple yet empowering. For me, they are a reminder, even permission, to make different choices. And choices that are more aligned with my own beliefs, versus the beliefs that I may have inherited from society. One of the mainstream beliefs that I have begun to question is that of capitalism. Specifically, the belief in capitalism that “more is more”, with the sole focus being money. There is a beauty in the simplicity of this belief. A single dimension to focus on, an easy numerical measurement that is widely understood and adopted by most. I wonder how much of our love for this belief is actually our love for simplicity. Perhaps a limitation of our minds has resulted in a one dimensional belief system, not because it is better, but because we can understand it easily. Capitalistic structures, like the stock market, the corporation and the tax system, all concern themselves with making, measuring and spending money. Money is important for Financial Security. Unfortunately, a large portion of the population currently faces financial insecurity, with more entering this state as result of the pandemic. Money is absolutely needed, without it, one will have great difficulty living well. Food. Safety. Shelter. Money can also provide Financial Freedom. This is where money is used to go beyond our basic needs, and is used for our desires. A nice home, nice car, nice clothes, fancy foods, experiences and entertainment. These desires can bring pleasure and comforts. Money can provide the opportunity for Financial Impact, when one chooses to invest funds to help solve a particular problem, not for themselves, but for others. Making a donation to a charity is an example of this. We are moving away from this though, as the average person gives a very small share of their income today, and giving rates pre-pandemic have been in decline for years. Money can also provide a sense of Financial Identity, and this may just be the source of greed and corruption often found in capitalism. To identify with how much money that I have, or that I have earned. This appears to be a never-ending battle with infinity. Money can be like air. There's practically no limit to how much air exists, however having more air beyond a certain point does not really do anything for me. I have a limited capacity in my lungs for how much air I can take in, at any one moment. There is a minimum amount of air that I need to live, but there is a limit to how much air I can take in, despite a near infinite supply available. It would appear that for a squirrel, yes a squirrel, success in life is food. It spends all day, going from here to there, searching for food. It spends its entire life running and looking for food. Capitalism is no different. Under a capitalistic belief system, we are all squirrels running around, looking for food all day, even though we can only eat so many nuts in a day. **Introducing Balancism** There is another way, and it asks us to not buy the culture that we find ourselves in. It asks us to open our eyes and to see reality as it is, as it truly is. And it asks us to transcend any limitations or laziness of our minds to see and only identify with a single dimension in life. While Capitalism is a one-dimensional approach to life, Balancism is a multi-dimensional approach to life. Balancism asks us to bring a balance between three dimensions: money, time and space. Money means Financial Security, Financial Freedom and Financial Impact, however stops short of Financial Identity. Time means having the time in one's lifestyle to invest in connections. Connections to people and passions, outside of work. It could be quality time with family and friends, learning skills or exploring new interests. Countless happiness research studies prove that the biggest influence of happiness is not money, but the quality of the connections that we keep with others. To cultivate quality connections takes quality time, not leftover time after the dishes are done at the end of the night. Space means mental space. We are more than our body. Our material experience in life is via our senses, however there are perhaps even more important experiences that we have in life, which are non-material and non-physical. These are our thoughts, emotions and feelings. They are always with us and I believe have an equally important influence on our experience in life. Peace of mind might be as valuable, if not more valuable, than money after a certain point. To be at peace, intellectually and emotionally, with the world, with how I show up to the world, with the choices that I make, with what has and has not happened. Our mind is the most valuable real estate that exists in our world. Who or what is occupying that real estate? How much of that real estate is occupied by our work? **A Different Culture** Capitalism prioritizes one dimension, money, at the expense of time and space. In a culture dominated by capitalism, one is working nearly all of the time, physically or mentally. Time to explore, connect and learn is scarce. Space to feel at peace, to reflect and to be present is nonexistent. The purpose of life, observed through a snapshot of this moment, is work. Balancism looks to optimize for multiple dimensions. Balancism could be described as part capitalism (money), part socialism (time) and part buddhism (space). Value is placed in money, time and space. Balancism believes that a full life is full of pleasure, people and peace. This is a philosophy that has guided me well over the recent years and one that I continue to learn, experiment and grow with. It is a philosophy that I intend to manifest in the culture within the organizations I am responsible for leading or supporting. --- ### Podcast: Finding Mindfulness In Business And Life Published: 2018-12-02 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/podcastwells/ Dr. Greg Wells interviewed me for his podcast and he uncovered what sparked my interest in mindfulness practices, the transformation that has happened in my life since then, how I approach business differently and most important of all, how my day-to-day lifestyle has evolved. [Listen on iTunes](https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/16-kunal-gupta-on-finding-mindfulness-in-workplace/id1434948381?i=1000426028912&mt=2) [Listen on Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/episode/1FF3n0jUnAs7PUGN54DtvW) [Original link here for other listening options](https://anchor.fm/dr-greg-wells/episodes/16--Kunal-Gupta-on-Finding-Mindfulness-in-the-Workplace-and-in-Life-e28bp9/a-a5cb0c) --- ### Why I Switched To A Dumb Phone Published: 2018-12-02 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/phone/ **This is a guest post by my friend, Jen. We both enjoy running experiments that push the edges of our “comfort zone”. Jen had the courage to do something I’ve only dreamed about doing: _she traded in her smartphone for a dumb phone._ Here is what she learned.** It was one year ago that I switched to a dumb phone. Remember those? That’s right, a brick-like contraption with push buttons, a pixelated screen, and you guessed it – T9. And just to get any questions out of your mind – no, there’s no Snake. But there _is _FM radio – and it’s not streaming. Free unlimited radio. Remember the days? So why did I do this? I get that question a lot. So by popular request, I’m writing this article about it. I’d tried to kick my internet addiction in a number of ways. Hey, can you blame me for wanting to curb my screen time? These shiny devices they called iPhones and Androids come with built-in “use me” addictive features. It’s just so easy to move your thumb over to the next coloured square and open the next app. It’s like a slot machine. Each time you go on, you get random timing (will you have any updates? Or none) of a random reward level (e.g. did your crush send you a Facebook message?). Apple has actually said that on the next release of the iPhone they are going to add some features that help reduce smartphone addiction. So there I was, checking away. I tried deleting the apps. They came back. I tried using blockers. Easy to disable. I cancelled my data plan. And added it back. And in moments of social anxiety, it was all too easy to find a public wifi network and just…scroll. Keep in mind that I don’t have any other addictions (well, maybe chocolate sometimes!). But the internet is just this pervasive thing with unlimited info. For someone who loves learning like me, it can be an endless rabbit hole. On one of these learning blitzes (ever find yourself on a random Wikipedia page and wonder/forget how you got there?), I happened upon some articles about how a lot of tech CEOs and executives had started switching to dumb phones. I’d also been reading at the time that willpower was finite, and used up throughout the day – so if you said no to chocolate 20 times in the morning and afternoon, it might be harder to say no again in the evening. I thought I’d rather use my finite willpower on resisting chocolate, rather than resisting moving my thumb one millimeter in a way that the device was designed to make me do. I think this research may have since been debunked, but either way. I decided I’d give a dumb phone a try. I went to my local discount mall, and was greeted with more options than I could have imagined. Who knew that dumb phones had so many features? I wanted a flip phone for posterity’s sake, but somehow they all had email! Can you imagine checking and writing email with T9? I started going around asking for phones _without _email, to the shock and amazement of the shopkeepers. Finally, like a fountain appearing out of the desert, I happened upon a Nokia that had FM radio, dual SIM card capacity (!), the ability to insert a microSD card and store 32GBs of MP3s. And it was only $30. Sold! My first few days with the phone were a bit tricky. Among the hurdles, the most difficult one was probably that sending texts took way longer than before. However this had the unintended positive consequence of leading me to call more. I’ve been rocking the dumb phone for about a year now, and I love it! I don’t know if humans were built to take in tons of incoming information all throughout the day. For me, that’s too stressful. My therapist has been very supportive of the idea – he calls it a health phone. At social events, I’m very present – I have no choice to be since there’s no source of endless info in my pocket to check and use to avoid awkwardness. I just check my email, social media and such on breaks at work (e.g. at lunch), or stay for a bit after work to check it. Also, I feel a lot less overwhelmed on an ongoing basis. Plus, the battery life is incredible! The Nokia had 5 days battery life. And when once I left it in a field for 2 weeks, someone found it and it was still on and functional (despite there being rain). I’m now trying the Doro PhoneEasy 520X, which was made for seniors. Cons: low battery life. Pros: 2.3 megapixel camera, daily reminders, and very loud! The most common question I get asked (aside from “WHY?”) is “What about Google Maps?”. Well, to answer that, I like to write down my route in advance of departing from my office. I have a paper agenda. And when I book things, I write in the address, major intersection, and directions if I need them. And if I get lost, I just ask someone. And if they don’t know…well likely that funny little buzzing thing in their pocket (their smartphone, silly!) does – and they’re more than happy to take it out and help a smartphone-less wonder like me. I should also mention that I don’t have internet at my house. But perhaps that’s a subject for another blog post… --- ### Is Mindfulness For The 1%? Published: 2018-11-03 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/exhale-rard5/ My journey into mindfulness began about several years ago and it was at a time in life where I was fortunate to have satisfied the basic needs in life, like shelter, food, security and community yet did not feel satisfied with life. It was triggered by a curiosity to discover and understand the self. A sense there was more to the experience of life than what I was aware of on the surface. A mindfulness practice has blossomed in a few ways for me. Physical awareness has been primarily through a yoga practice, which has brought me closer to my own body. I respect it far more than I once did and am mindful of what I put in it. Emotional and mental awareness has strengthened thanks to a consistent meditation practice. Learning to become aware of my thoughts and feelings and accept them helps me respond in situations where I once would react (and usually, the response is to consciously do nothing). Inner wisdom and clarity has been developed with a reflection practice. Morning pages (free writing) is a wonderful journaling technique and regular retreats help me zoom out. Spiritual connection has been inspired by reading many texts combined with a deep introspection practice on how my own experience. I describe it like opening a door to a previously hidden room inside myself, and once that door is open, it’s impossible to close it. **A desire for self-actualization** Borrowing the well known framework, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, a few years into my mindfulness practice I had developed inadvertently a desire for self-actualization, the highest level need we have. Intellectually this made sense. One could only focus on actualizing the self once the basic needs were taken care of. If mindfulness was a tool to self actualization then it would would imply that mindfulness is primarily for the 1% (i.e. only 1% of the population, those with resources of time, money and social status, should be concerned with it). In encouraging friends and family to adopt mindfulness practices, the common objection I hear is _‘I don’t have the time right now’._ My experience has shown me that mindfulness is not about satisfying a higher level need on a linear hierarchy. The practice shows up for me in many everyday moments. Like when I wake up in the morning, and feel discomforts and pain in my body. Or when I’m stuck in a long security line-up at the airport and begin to feel anxious about possibly missing my flight (and the domino effect that would have on my scheduled meetings and activities). Or while I’m on a date and begin to feel more self-conscious than I normally would be. Or when it’s the end of the quarter and we haven’t achieved every single objective we set for the business. Mindfulness builds a skill that has helped me live life with more ease, comfort (mental and emotional), control and compassion. **A skill building exercise for everyone** While I discovered mindfulness from a place of privilege, with the good fortune of having resources like time and money to explore a practice, I believe that the skills a mindfulness practice builds are far more valuable for those who unfortunately are struggling with lower level needs like shelter, food, safety and community. I recently started volunteering with a social justice organization that brings mindfulness practices into underserved and marginalized communities. Recently, I had the opportunity to spend time with some of their teachers and clients from these communities. What I learned from their experience is that mindfulness builds confidence, dignity and strength, which gives people the courage to ask for help when dealing with addictions, the courage to leave an abusive house (be it physical or emotional) and most importantly, find hope and reduce the risk of falling into a downward spiral. Mindfulness is not a coping mechanism for accepting a bad hand that’s been dealt to those in challenging circumstances. It is a skill building exercise that gives people additional tools to help lift themselves out of the holes they have fallen into and build a better life for themselves. \*\* Expanding the view of self\*\* A spiritual practice has helped me begin to expand my view of self beyond my direct physical, mental or emotional experience and feel a greater connection with other beings. This is why I’ve become passionate to help others. It is not to feel better about myself but to take care of an expanded self. --- ### 3 Steps For Writing Blog Posts Effortlessly Published: 2018-11-02 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/blog/ Writing blog posts was once an effortful process for me but thanks to a 3 step process I’ve developed and refined, it has become effortless. In the past two years I’ve shared over 50 posts and have used this blog as a public journal, sharing from my own experience and reflecting often. Earlier today, I published a new post on meditation and will use that as an example of the 3 step process that has helped make writing effortless for me. The requirement before starting to write is to have a specific topic that you feel passionate about and connected to. Here are the 3 steps: **_1. Brain dump._** - Take a blank sheet of paper and a pen (important to do this by hand). - Write the topic in the centre. - Now brainstorm all of the related points, ideas and questions you have to share on the topic. - Quantity over quality. Put absolutely everything you can think of down. - This step is quick. If it takes longer than 5 minutes, you are thinking too much. - Take a short break. - Then read everything you wrote. - Start to build a narrative and flow for the points you wish to make. - Number the points in order. I usually end up with 5-10 points. Here is a picture of the brain dump for the post I wrote today: **_2. Draft Post._** - Next, open a blank file (I use Google Docs) on your laptop. - Place the sheet of paper _on top of the screen_ so you cannot see it (you can also reduce the brightness of your laptop so the screen is black or simply close your eyes). Here is a picture of my laptop setup: - Now picture yourself in conversation with 1 person, a close friend who is a good listener. - Start typing, in order of the points you have your sheet, as if you were explaining it to them. - Do not use the delete/backspace button on your keyboard. - You can restart new sentences as many times as you need to. - Do no worry about spelling, grammar or making sense. Your goal is to capture the conversation you would have on this topic you are passionate about. _[Here is a link to the Google Doc ](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QNnNdfBsU1OEsPs6FBPCESDzLvRuKQObxPJpsClXs6Y/edit)_where you can see my draft post. It’s not pretty. It does not flow, has no attention to spelling or structure and often points are repeated. This is not a surprise given I did not see the screen once while composing the draft. **_3. Edit and Publish_** - Now you can look at the screen. - Starting at the top, look at each point or paragraph and rewrite it. - You’ll most likely cut down the length significantly. - This is where you wordsmith each sentence, pay attention to spelling, grammar and structure. - Take a break. - Now reread the entire post, making changes and updates to help the flow. - It helps to read it out loud as you’re doing this final read through. - Add images. - Now come up with the headline for the post. - Optional: send the post to a friend to proofread. - Now you can publish it (and feel a sense of accomplishment!). \*\* Get started\*\* To share your knowledge and perspectives with the world can be an incredible gift and impact others in ways that you are not aware of. If you have ever thought about writing, I encourage you to just do it. And if it happens to be on the topics of mindful leadership, technology culture or awareness & introspection, I’d love to have you contribute to this blog as a guest writer! --- ### Words For My Whiteboard Published: 2018-10-09 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/whiteboard/ _A short poem I wrote the other day that I wanted to share..._ You provide a safe space to express ideas And listen to all of it unconditionally Without judgement You see facial expressions of all varieties And accept them all Without trying to change them You uncover insights that are hidden inside And give a surface for them to shine Without taking any credit You are always there, rain or shine And stay true to who you are Without any wavering You are a constant reminder of impermanence And erase everything Without shame or guilt You are a trusted friend And a dependable one Without fail Thank you. --- ### Why New York Is The Most Mindful Place On Earth Published: 2018-10-02 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/newyork/ Wait, what? Yes, that’s right. I believe New York is the most mindful place on earth. I’ve been commuting between Toronto and New York for the past ten years and at the start of this year, officially made the move down here and have loved every moment. The city has further inspired my mindfulness practice in so many ways. **From off-the-grid to on-the-grid** Monasteries, retreat centers, hermitages and other places designed for intentional mindfulness practice are often situated in remote areas surrounded by nature. They provide a structure that allows one to go off-the-grid. I’ve been fortunate to have the means and time to visit many such places over the years and have enjoyed these supportive environments. I have found that it is easy (as much as going inside oneself can be referred to easy) to meditate on top of a mountain or in a quiet cave (which I have not yet done). _Try learning to meditate in the middle of Times Square, while riding the subway or in line at Starbucks._ New York, with its endless hustle, dynamic energy and accelerating speed, represents a different type of nature, one that is very human. We created it and instead of escaping it, can learn to live mindfully within it. I’ve been fortunate to have the opportunity to face real life in a busy city, which is a “forced mindfulness”. When lost in thought while walking down the street, the cabbie honking without end, the pedestrian at the corner yelling into their phone and the fruit vendor trying to catch my attention, all immediately bring my mind to the present moment. It’s very difficult to sustain mind wandering for more than a few seconds in New York. While on retreat, I can be lost in mind wandering for hours and it’s an effortful practice to bring my mind to the present. However being on-the-grid of Manhattan, my attention is grounded in the here and now, effortlessly. **Meet my mindful friends** The density of people in New York means that it’s easier to find your tribe. At least that’s been my experience. One evening earlier in the spring, I hosted a small gathering of like-valued people who share an interest in mindfulness, technology and entrepreneurship, at my apartment. As the evening came to a close, I started to smile inside as I realized that I did not know a single one of these new friends even two months prior. And here we are, sharing a meal and a deep conversation. Interested in exploring mindfulness communities, with the help of a researcher I found on Upwork, we built a spreadsheet of the many group meditations available in New York. _We stopped the list at 100._ That is right, we found over 100 different opportunities to meditate with other people, in real life, on at least a weekly basis. From free to luxury, from downtown to uptown, from religious to secular, every type of practice has a group in New York that practices together regularly. I have been on a mindfulness tour of the city, visiting many spaces (15 or so thus far), finding new communities and making new friends. _[Here is a ](http://findfocus.today/meditation-newyork/)[guide](http://findsilence.today)_ to meditation in New York I have been building to help others navigate and connect. The absolute number of people interested in, committed to and practicing mindfulness in New York has to be the largest in the world of any city. Yes, there may also be the largest number of people practicing mindless activities as well, but they are not the ones I am inviting over to my apt to meditate with me. **Infinite choice** The city’s population density, concentration of financial wealth and cultural diversity all lead to infinite choice. If you’re into pizza (which I am), there’s an endless selection of varieties and price points. If you like deserts (I don’t), just name it and you can find it in the city. The choices for entertainment range from comedy, improv, musicals, plays and more. Transportation options are countless, you can walk, take the subway, rent a Citibike, hail a cab, call for a Lyft, arrange a black car or even take a helicopter. Yoga studios are plentiful, with any practice from ashtanga, vinyasa, heated, humming, ariel, and more available near you. You get the idea. Infinite choice has helped me build two skills that are core to my mindfulness practice (and to yours). **Awareness.** With so many choices, I am learning to be more discerning. What to eat tonight. Which yoga class to attend. What show to see with a friend. The feedback loop is fast. I quickly become aware of how choices impact my physical, mental or emotional state. **Acceptance**. In the face of choice, learning how to accept a decision and not fall into a cycle of regret, optimization or wondering ‘what if’ because of second nature. I get to practice acceptance far more frequently in a city with so much choice. And in fact, acceptance itself is a choice. _These are some of _the _many ways that New York has further inspired my mindfulness practice. I hope that some of this has inspired you (even just a little) to consider how your environment is supporting you versus feeling a need to escape it._ --- ### A Beginner's Mind Published: 2018-10-02 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/beginner/ **After returning to the yoga studio after the first weekend of yoga teacher training, I soon realized that my experience with the physical practice of yoga would forever be changed.** It was a Monday morning, with all of us students feeling slightly sleepy and blurry eyed still. The teacher shared a spiritual theme, detachment, to help set the tone for class. A specific story from The Gita (a spiritual text from India) was referenced and the suggestion was offered to practice detachment on the mat to prepare us off the mat. What caught my attention immediately was the clarity of instruction. Although I’ve taken 100s of classes over the years, this was the first class where I actually heard each word (or almost each word) from the teacher. Normally my mind is focused on the actual pose or more realistically, wandering to some past or future setting. The class started with a puttering (aka warm-up) sequence that included stretching our arms to the sky, a forward fold, moving in cat-cow, a downward dog, a lunge and a few more partial or full poses. Then, moving through a surya namaskar (sun salutation) sequence, I noticed my attention focused on every single word (catching any irregularity from what I began to anticipate the instruction would be). _Each instruction was far more intentional than I had ever given teachers credit for._ During the first weekend of yoga teacher training, we had 6 hours of anatomy lessons. These were enriching and exposed me to new knowledge that I now appreciate greatly. Applying this new found knowledge in class, I began to examine which muscles were in expansion or contraction, extension or flexion, rotation or not, in each pose. I began to wonder about the intention for each pose, with a slightly more informed guess as to the muscles that were meant to be the focus. Having anatomy knowledge at the forefront of my mind led to a profoundly different (and more interesting) practice that helped ground my mind in the present. I also began to let go of expectations (that were clearly self-created) to do a pose in a certain way. I’ve had some minor knee pain for some time now and where before I would still find myself in say a revolved lunge twist with my back leg straight, now more aware of my body and confident in my practice, I found myself resting my back knee on the ground without any shame or guilt. In a yoga class setting, I am in close proximity to other students, which I often find distracting and intimidating. In this class though, I found myself less conscious and less concerned with others around me. As a result, my focus shifted towards what was happening on my mat versus in the room. I may only be one weekend into training but I feel that anyone practicing yoga consistently would benefit from a basic understanding of the intention of each pose. It has been a while since I’ve been to a beginner’s class, that’s next on my list, but I suspect my opinion will remain the same: **if you are passionate about yoga, you owe it to yourself to take time to gain knowledge about the practice.** --- ### Final Boarding Pass: A Reflection On Life’s Timeline Published: 2018-09-23 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/boarding/ _This is a reflection on how a reminder of death can inspire urgency to live life now versus later._ This week, my parents have been visiting me in New York. It’s their first visit since I’ve moved here and it has been nice to have them around. We have enjoyed nice meals together at fun restaurants around the city, they have completely taken over my apartment (and fixed all of these things I didn't even know needed fixing) and have already started planning their next visit down. And then today, the energy for all of us took a 180 turn. We have relatives who live nearby in Staten Island and a few days ago, my uncle was moved into hospice care. He's 85 years old and has lived a life rich in meaning and purpose. A real pioneer in the family, he moved from India to the US 50 years ago, with absolutely nothing. Building a life that fairy tales are made of, his generosity and kindness has been felt by our family and across their entire community. Today we went to go see him and it was the closest to death I’ve ever been. My uncle is resting in a small room on the lower level of their home. It’s quiet and small, without many objects. A small flower vase, a couch and a few chairs. The sliding door to the backyard is open. We hear the birds chirping, feel the cool fall air through the screen door and see the sun shining brightly on all of us. It feels like a waiting room, between this world and some other, and inspired a short poem for me… --- _With your boarding pass in hand_ _You made it through security_ _And are now waiting at the gate_ _This is your final flight_ _It will be time to board soon_ _We will miss you_ _Bon voyage_ --- This flight my uncle is about to take does not have first class, business class or economy class. He will take without any material belongings. A humbling thought on what’s important in life. Although I’ve meditated, journaled, read about and discussed the topic of death at length many times over the past few years, today was different. Feeling, touching and hearing death up close, both through my uncle and my relatives, took a concept I have only understood intellectually and made it real. Seeing my parents (who are spring chickens compared to my uncle, in age) express their emotions deepened my understanding of immortality. This evening, I noticed a slight shift inside of me. An urgency about life. I’ve experienced many timelines in life. Projects back when I was in school, a calendar quarter in business or any week, day or hour. Timelines create a sense of urgency that in turn forces clarity and focus. It becomes easy for me to decide what’s in and out. This evening I signed up to do a yoga teacher training course (that starts next weekend). It's a big commitment, 200 hours spread out over the next 9 months. I had decided long ago that I would at some point do the training, always thinking "later". Later was conditional. Conditional on me making more time. Conditional on feeling more confident in my own practice first. Today was a reminder for me that life does not wait. If something is important to me, that is enough reason to make it an unconditional priority. To do it now versus some later. As you are reading this, I imagine one thing that’s important to you has probably already surfaced in your mind. And if not, take a moment to reflect right now on it. I have a timeline on life. We all do. --- ### Why Acceptance Is Unconscious Published: 2018-09-16 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/unconscious/ Over the past few years, I’ve had the chance to travel with my parents, which I know is rare as an adult. We’ve enjoyed vacations in Australia, India, Italy, the UK and recently, spent a week together in New York and Miami. Whenever I’d return from one of these trips, I would joke with my friends that _traveling with your parents is a wonderful opportunity to practice acceptance._ After this most recent trip, I realized I had been fooling myself all this while. I was not practicing acceptance. I was practicing **tolerance**. Tolerance is a conscious and deliberate action. I see someone or something different than what I expect or imagine and then make the conscious choice to be _okay_ with it. Lifestyle choices my parents might make about eating less nutrition food, buying stuff that was clearly not needed or spending more time on their phones than one should are some examples of what I was tolerating, perhaps poorly at times. It requires willpower and discipline to tolerate someone or something. My experience has been that the simple thought pattern of _‘I see you as different than I what I expect and I am choosing to be okay with it’_ can drain mental and emotional energy. There are other symptoms as well. Suppressing emotions, feelings and thoughts inside and bundling them up over time starts to leak out in the form of anxiety, stress, frustration or even anger. I can forget about empathy when I am tolerating someone or something. My judgement blinds me and I get closed. I am not able to see, understand or feel for anything or anyone other than myself in that moment. Tolerance in its nature makes it impossible to be authentic. I am building many tiny facades around me. Now tolerance does help me function in society and is often needed in normal day-to-day interactions. Like taking the subway, standing in-line to order lunch or someone asking for directions on the street. _My message is not to stop tolerating, but to start accepting._ After this most recent trip with my parents, I felt different. I did not feel the symptoms of tolerating that I once did. I felt empathetic and authentic with them, and we were all vulnerable with each other. And that’s when I realized I had started to accept them. Over dinner on our last night together, I shared with my parents that _‘I think I’ve learned to accept you’_, to which my dad responded with a smile, _‘so you feel we’ve become more acceptable people’_. I responded with _‘no, you haven’t changed, you both are yourselves, I have changed’_. **Reality is all right.** If something appears to me to be not all right, then it is me who can change. Acceptance paves the way for a deeper connection to the people and experiences around me. I am able to find meaning in what is, versus focusing on what is not. How do I go about practicing acceptance? I cannot. The moment I try to consciously accept someone or something, I am no longer accepting and am instead tolerating. The process to learn acceptance starts with focusing on awareness of what I may be tolerating, and becoming curious about it. It is unpleasant to study what I am tolerating and when faced with a situation I don’t like, the tendency could be to run away from it or distract myself with something else. To be fearless is to look at it closely and understand what’s actually happening. What am I fearful of? What am I attached to? As I keep digging, I then start to change. Acceptance is a symptom of a deeper exercise to understand myself. Awareness automatically results in unconscious change. Fears begin to crumble. Attachments begin to loosen. And an openness to the world begins to grow inside of me. --- ### Changing My Perspectives Published: 2018-09-11 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/rockport/ The sun was shining brightly in a clear blue sky and the birds were gliding calmly in the wind. We found a flat surface on the rugged red boulders to sit. Looking out into the ocean from the cliff, we could see as far as the horizon. And then I realized how _limited my perspective actually was._ As part of a monthly retreat ritual this year, where I take time to reflect and reconnect with myself, I was fortunate to spend the weekend at a friend’s summer home in Rockport, Massachusetts. Rockport is a small, ocean-side town that was established in the colonial era. It is a town stuck in time and that’s where in lies its beauty, in addition to being neighbors with the Atlantic Ocean. While sitting quietly, with a few new friends, we admired the views of the ocean from a popular lookout point. Although all we could see was the ocean in all its beauty and glory, the curvature of the earth prevented us from seeing very far out. Curious as to how far out we could actually see, a friend (thanks Google) shared that at sea level, one can see approx. 13 miles out. That’s not very far at all. And at the tallest human-made point on earth, the top of the Burj Khalifa tower in Dubai, one can see a mere 64 miles out. Barely anything. From having my attention buried in a smartphone or a laptop to now looking out at the ocean from the rocks of Rockport, I realized that my perspective was widening. And as I start to zoom out and my perspective changes, new ideas enter my thought stream and my experience of life begins to shift. **Paintings by Jonathan** Walking in downtown Rockport, drawn by bright colors in a nearby windowsill, I found myself wandering into a small studio. Quietly browsing (in real life, not on my phone) the art on display, my initial perception was that the paintings were nice but nothing caught my eye that was unique or worth writing home about. Just as I was about to exit the studio, I heard some laughter and turned around to see a young man, clothes covered in paint splotches, with a smile as big as the moon and eyes wide open, animated in conversation with fellow browsers. He caught my attention, I went towards him to say hello. His name is Jonathan. I was intrigued by his clear passion for life and asked Jonathan about what inspired his work. He shared that after he lost his father, he had moved from Boston to Rockport and soon after learned how to paint. He now paints to bring joy and cheer into the lives of cancer patients and their families. He hosts classes at many hospitals in Boston, invites patients and their families to Rockport for art retreats and continues to use color to bring lightness into some of life’s darkest moments. It was only once I widened my perspective and tuned in that I came to discover that Jonathan’s paintings are unique and his story is definitely worth writing home about. **A New Yorker who works in tech** In the town of Rockport, I quickly learned that everyone calls it in early at night and the real action happens in the morning, as people rise naturally, in near perfect coordination with the sun. On the first morning, I met my friend’s father, John, who had been out for a walk with Lester, the family dog. After Lester and I exchanged a few pleasantries, John and I got talking and I had shared that I work in tech and live in New York. Over the course of the day, I got to share a few meals with the family to get to know everyone a bit better, all while enjoying some peaceful time reading and reflecting by the ocean. The next morning, I was up a little earlier and saw John sitting quietly in the sunroom, soaking in the morning, reading a magazine. Now, like Lester, I suspect that John was starting to feel more comfortable with me around. Unprompted, he shared with me that his perspective of people who live in New York and of people who work in tech has changed, thanks to my visit. He shared that meeting someone like me who was visibly present with the people in the house, made strong eye contact, was not distracted on his phone, chose to actively listen and would not stop talking about mindfulness, was not what he had been accustomed to from the people he knows who live in New York or who work in tech. While generalizations may be convenient, they are rarely accurate. Thanks to John tuning in and being open, his perspective was widened and impression changed. **Courage in the quarry** Rockport back in the day was filled with quarries built to mine granite. Granite that was used for the Empire State Building, the Brooklyn Bridge and likely in many of the homes around the town. The quarries were large, thousands of feet deep into the ground. They would be used to mine to the point where spring water would begin to surface. While the quarries were active, pumps would help control the water. Business was booming until it wasn’t. The abandoned quarries filled with spring water that one could drink from, as it was as clear as a cloudless sky. Yesterday we went for a swim in the local quarry. A unique experience. As I began to walk into the quarry, I could feel just how cold the water was. Doubt arose in my mind. Did I really want to do this? I did. And thoroughly enjoyed the experience. After drying off in the bright sun, I was grateful for that ounce of courage that was required when doubt appeared about getting in. I started to reflect on the many moments in business when I need that same courage. This experience of stepping into the cold water gave me the perspective that although doubts may appear along the path, I do not need to be afraid to pursue decisions with courage and trust that it will be fine on the other side. **Natural lookout moments** Taking time to pause, zoom out and widen my perspective has become a ritual for me, as it was previously not natural to pause and lookout. The end of a day, week, month, season or year can be beautiful moments for this. This year, I have been taking a long weekend each month on self retreat, where I will disconnect from technology, spend time with nature, read something inspirational, reflect in my journal and be mostly on my own (or occasionally enjoy the company of others, like this past weekend). These moments help me pause mentally, breathe in some fresh air, look out over the horizon into the ocean and see my perspectives start to change. --- ### The Paradox Of Social Media Published: 2018-09-02 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/socialmedia/ **This is a guest post by my friend, Adrian Choo. Adrian and I first met a few years ago while taking a course at Singularity University in California and immediately connected on shared values and interests on introspection. It’s been a pleasure to travel alongside Adrian as he and I both explore our own spiritual journeys, pointing out to each other new discoveries along the way.** I have been shitting on social media for about three years. On New Years Eve of 2015, I deleted my Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter accounts. At the time, I rationalized this decision to myself and others that it was part of a new quest to live without digital distraction and to level up on my mindfulness practice. Looking back now, this was only a _half_ truth. Unconsciously, I was also doing it to protect my ego. I had just quit my job a few months before that and found myself in an identity crisis. I was hit with status anxiety every time I was asked what I do for work. I no longer had the security of a job title or membership under a professional tribe to impress others. I wasn’t particularly keen on flaunting my new status as an unemployed hippie and I didn’t have the courage to admit that I really didn’t know what I was searching for. Like many people, I primarily used social media to construct my persona, or social mask. Psychiatrist Carl Jung described the persona as “a kind of mask, designed on the one hand to make a definite impression upon others, and on the other to conceal the true nature of the individual”. Although it served me well throughout my early adult life, I over-identified with this persona and became excessively concerned about how others perceived me. So to avoid judgement, I hit the ‘delete’ button. After committing career suicide and getting rid of my digital persona, I started experiencing what some psychologists describe as an ego-death. Parts of me were noticeably deadened. This was especially salient when I would walk through a busy public area. I felt invisible like a wandering ghost. In a much less cinematic way, I felt like Neo having stepped outside of the matrix and then re-entering feeling like a foreigner in the simulation. Being in societal limbo was a mix of contradictory states. I found it incredibly liberating to not have to maintain or add to a rigid persona. At the same time, it was disorienting to wander without a clear destination. As I loosened the grip on my former identity, I could tell how much I wanted to quickly find a new replacement. At times, I fantasized of being the ‘monk who sold his Ferrari’ except I didn’t go into complete monastic living nor did I own a Ferrari. For over a year, I was chasing transcendence on the spiritual treadmill. I had a heavy diet of reading and meditation and became a workshop junkie. I fooled myself into thinking that I was ‘above it all’. Then I slowly realized that I had simply traded my former ambitions for status and wealth with new egoic ambitions for enlightenment and nirvana. They both stemmed from an inner feeling of _not enough_. When I exited the arenas of social media, capitalism, and status games, I was also beginning to exit the arena of being human. I started to deny myself the permission to feel certain aspects of the human experience. For example, I judged others for their ambitiousness, impulsivity, and ignorance simply because I demonized these traits in myself. In short, I was pathologizing my ego. Our egos help us navigate life. It is a feature, not a bug. At times, our egos may indeed be the enemy because it can distract us from our deeper callings and even lead us into games we never signed up for. But this is an example where we need to learn how to love our enemies because they can also teach us about our _true_ selves. It is clear to me now that life is more meaningful when I participate in the arena rather than judging from the stands. It helps to leave the inner and outer critics in the nosebleeds while I continue to play. “ SECURITY IS MOSTLY A SUPERSTITION. IT DOES NOT EXIST IN NATURE, NOR DO THE CHILDREN OF MEN AS A WHOLE EXPERIENCE IT. AVOIDING DANGER IS NO SAFER IN THE LONG RUN THAN OUTRIGHT EXPOSURE. LIFE IS EITHER A DARING ADVENTURE, OR NOTHING.” — HELEN KELLER Recently, I decided to start a podcast and to re-engage with social media. I want to share honest conversations about our first world problems and how we can help each other navigate the messy human experience. It has become somewhat fashionable to blame social media and technology for our social problems. There is no need to throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater. Our relationship with and intentionality behind these tools are what determines their human cost. Paradoxically, I’m being called to using the same tools that originally fed my crisis of meaning to help others work through theirs. If you want to join me in the arena, let’s connect through social. _[Twitter](https://twitter.com/adrichoo) | [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/adrichoo) | [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/adrichoo/) | [Podcast](http://www.soulspacepodcast.com/)_ --- ### The Ingredients Of Wisdom Published: 2018-08-13 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/wisdom/ _While in the countryside in rural Quebec for a close friend’s wedding, I was reminded about the ingredients of wisdom._ --- The afternoon started with a bright and sunny sky. The chatter of old and new friends seeing one another, while enjoying a BBQ outdoors, served as a distraction as clouds started to fill the sky, quietly getting darker. To test if we were paying attention, the heavy clouds started to sprinkle lightly. Drops turned into showers. And within seconds, there was no more brightness outside. The torrential downpour spared no one. Everyone and everything was drenched. As we rushed inside, the mood began to shift. Would it rain all evening? Would it rain all weekend? What about the outdoor wedding ceremony the next day? And all the activities planned? Fear started to appear, almost as if this rain would be permanent. And then the rain stopped. _A reminder that everything changes._ The clouds were now parting in the sky, the sun starting to shine again. A curious friend was the first to step back outside. And then another joined. And another. Everyone was outside now, standing quietly in awe, gazing into the sky. Red. Orange. Yellow. Green. Purple. Blue. Each colour, vivid, unique and visible clearly. Yet also blended, unable to see where one started and the other began. A natural phenomenon was being witnessed. The result of two ingredients: sun and rain. --- Wisdom is a similar natural phenomenon, from my experience. Cultivating inner wisdom for me has been the result of two similar ingredients: knowledge and experience. Sun can be a provider of heat, life and brightness, without discrimination to all that seek it. Knowledge is no different, providing to all those curious to learn. Rain is a different type of provider. It can be dark, stormy, cloudy, wet and messy. Experience is no different, it can often be challenging along the way. When I started my business ten years ago, feeling bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, I was quick to seek knowledge from other entrepreneurs. One of whom became our first investor. His words were _“you are going to run out of money, but you have to experience that yourself to really understand. My early investors told me that I would run out of money, I didn’t believe it yet I did. That’s how I learned and how you will have to learn as well.”_. We did run out of money in our first year. And again in our second year. Even though I had all of the knowledge, it was not until I experienced this that I truly understood. And since then, we have not ever run out of money (nor will we). What I’ve learned countless times is that knowledge I receive from a teacher, parent or friend is useful only to direct curiosity. No one can give me wisdom. Wisdom is not possible without experience, which requires action. And like rain, sometimes experience is messy. It’s part of the process to cultivate inner wisdom. --- The combination of the sun (knowledge) and rain (experience) gives birth to a natural phenomenon that is grounding. The mind takes a break from anticipating the future or reflecting on the past. The heart is not wishing for it to be anything different than what it is. Acceptance comes easy, as it is nature. Outer or inner, it does not matter. --- ### Why Everything Should Not Be Shared Published: 2018-08-02 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/skydiving/ I jumped out of a plane a few years ago and chose not to tell anyone, as an experiment. What I learned was that when I share my experiences in real-time, I lose touch with ‘the why’ I chose it. ‘The why’ quickly becomes for ego, to gain admiration. And then I've lost my freedom, as unconsciously I do things that will be praised from others, forgetting what I value. It is a twisted feedback loop, where I may have an experience, and I'll wait to see how others judge my experience. Based on others’ judgement, I'll form my own opinion of my own experience. Completely twisted and in reverse. For example, let’s say I post a photo of a recent experience on Instagram (I don’t actually use social media, but roll with me on this). Based on how many likes the photo gets, I'll subconsciously form an opinion and let my feeling of that experience be influenced. The extreme would be removing a post that does not get enough likes (which I recently learned kids are doing these days). I've now chosen an experience to gain praise from others with an attempt to boost my ego. And like a drug, I've now lost my freedom and am hooked to the admiration of others. An actual example, I took email off my phone 7 years ago. And didn't tell anyone for 4 years. Initially, I wanted it to be my own little secret, there was a thrill in being coy about a counter-tech-culture move I had made. And I also didn't want to deal with the judgement from others who may be insecure about this practice for themselves, or have to put energy towards convincing someone else that what I was experimenting with was ok. And then I forgot that I hadn't told anyone and it become second nature, a part of my lifestyle. And when a few years ago I decided to share this mindful tech practice, it was from a place of trying to help others (and not to show off). A few years ago, I went skydiving. It was a deeply personal and emotional experience for me, as I've had a lifelong fear of heights. Over the course of one year, I worked deliberately and diligently to get closer to this fear of heights, and had gone zip lining, cliff jumping, CN Tower edge walking, and finally skydiving. It was such a thrill and amazing experience. I am so thankful I did it. And even more thankful I resisted the urge and instinct to tell my whole world about it immediately after. I needed to sit with the experience, the thrill, the achievement, with myself for a solid week. To process what I had done, my journey over the past year leading to this personal achievement and get in touch with how I truly felt about it. It was such a precious experience for me that I did not want to taint it with biases and judgements from others. I did not want to have to justify it to my mom. I did not want to risk tainting a natural high by hearing praise from friends. Because the next time I did something, instead of experiencing the emotions and feelings of the activity itself, I would be anticipating the reactions from those around me. And there I've lost my freedom to choose how to feel about my own experience. Taking time to sit with my experiences has allowed me to connect with “the why” more deeply, which in turn builds confidence, courage and conviction for the next time. So it is like that, I encourage you to wait even 24 hours or 1 week before sharing a personal experience that you value with others. Be it a delicious meal, an amazing yoga class, a beautiful sunset or jumping out of a plane. You owe it to yourself to soak in the experience, unfiltered, untainted, raw and fresh, and connect with what it truly meant to you. --- ### We Can Do Anything But Not Everything Published: 2018-08-02 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/focus/ **Focus** is a new company value for Polar (the business I lead). Here is a copy of a memo that we shared with our team explaining _how to find focus_. --- While we believe that _we can do anything_, we have learned that we _cannot do everything_. It has been an important lesson for us over our ten year journey together so far. To focus is to choose what we will do and what we will not do. Choosing to focus is one thing but staying focused is another thing. And this is what we are most interested in strengthening in our culture. This memo is organized around a few beliefs and offers tools to help you practice focus. --- **Less is more** Culture has conditioned us to believe that _more is more,_ however we have come to the understanding that _less is more._ It may sound counter-intuitive at first. A few examples: Our high-value-partner strategy is the reason we doubled core revenue last year. We decided to not focus on new deals and focus on growing core partners. It worked beautifully. Earlier this year, we described our platform as having many solutions. People (internally and externally) got confused, and now we have simplified it into two business lines. People have appreciated the simplicity. On a personal level, I’ve adopted a minimalist lifestyle in the past few years, which I have found to be more meaningful than a previous consumerist lifestyle that I once led. “Top 3” is a focus practice we have been experimenting with for the past 6 months: - All of our priorities, objectives and plans have been explained in 3 bullets. - All of my own personal intentions for the year are grouped into 3s. - Every morning for the past six months, I’ve written down my top 3 actions for that day. - A few things we have learned as a result of the “top 3” practice this year: - More thought up-front and asking the hard question, “what is most important?”. And when we don’t know, it triggers deeper conversation or reflection. - The difference between “top 3” and “any 3”. At times, we would pick “any 3”, but once we became aware, there was more rigour on challenging ourselves to make sure it’s “top 3”. My behaviour throughout the day can noticeably change. For example, if I have a 30 minute window, I will look at my daily top 3 list instead of naturally looking at email/Slack. Here are the signs to watch for, to know if you have really internalized “top 3”! - Your answers to questions a friend, partner, or child asks you are structured with 3 points. - Your meals, workouts, journal entries, cleaning or other routines are structured in 3s. - You remember at the end of the day what your top 3 intentions were for that day. We invite you to find you own ways to practice _less is more._ Top 3 has been one useful tool. You may develop your own. Our hope for you is that at the end of this year, you can point to visible examples of something that has shifted in your life thanks to adopting a _less is more_ belief to help find greater focus. **Distraction is the enemy** The flood of information hitting us has flourished at a faster pace than our brain’s development to manage it. This gap is why we can lose control of our attention and become unfocused. In the past few years, I have become obsessed personally with reducing distractions. I started with a focus on learning how to better manage external distractions. After I felt I had a good handle on those, I started to focus on internal distractions. That is why I have taken to mindfulness practices. They help me manage the flood of internal distractions. Let’s start with understanding common sources of distraction: - **Technology**: our current culture is designed to keep you addicted. Smartphones, social media, notifications, email and Slack are all designed to steal our attention (by giving us dopamine hits which “feel good” and leave us wanting more). - **Environment**: people and loud noises interrupting our flow are obvious distractions. Clutter in our physical spaces leads to clutter in our minds. And object association (e.g. bed = sleep, patio = relax, couch = rest) influences our energy and intention in a space. - **State**: our physical, mental and emotional states are common sources of distraction that make it difficult to be focused. Common states may include: - Physical: sleep, hunger, pain, lethargy - Mental: stress, fight/flight, anxiety - Emotional: anger, fear, worry There are few moments that we are not distracted. To bring awareness to how many times in a day you are distracted by technology alone, reflect on: - How many times a day do you “pick-up” your phone in a day? - How many times do you check email/Slack in a work hour? - How many notifications do you receive on your laptop, phone or watch per hour? **Multitasking is a myth.** When we believe you are multitasking, we are actually switch tasking. Multitasking is when we are doing multiple tasks related to the same objective. Like cooking or driving. Many micro tasks that are effortless as they are all aligned. Switch tasking is when we are switching between unrelated tasks, like checking email while in a meeting, eating while watching something, checking Slack while working on a task or looking at notifications. _Switch tasking is the slowest and most inefficient way to work._ Please stop doing it on our dime! **Use it or lose it** Focus is a skill. And like any skill, it has to be learned, practiced and trained for it to be useful to us. We have to use it otherwise we will lose it. This is why focus cannot be discussed only in a work context. If we believe in the value of focus and are truly committed to it, then it has to be practiced in our personal lives as much as our professional lives. This is the only way we can make it a skill. I used to think of focus as a light switch. ‘_Okay, now I’m going to focus on X’_ and think that some “focus switch” would get switched on inside. While that may have given me a temporary boost in focus, it was always short-lived and I would find my attention wander easily. Focus is a skill that has to be both trained and practiced, with: - **Awareness and curiosity.** Awareness of when we feel focused and unfocused, and then becoming curious to understand why. - **Flow by design**. When in a flow state, _focus is effortless_. Creating the conditions to flow is the effortful process. That means paying attention to our physical space, our body, our mental and emotional states, and being deliberate about them. - **Fun vs Force**. It’s fun to flow and fun to focus. When we feel we are doing something meaningful, focus comes with ease versus force. Focus is a skill to be practiced, over and over again. That is the only path to get strong at it. And then it will start to serve us and become part of how we show up in every walk of life. Ownership. Growth. And now, Focus. These are our core values that we will continue to practice to help strengthen our culture. --- ### Why Are You Here Published: 2018-07-16 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/whywork/ Many years ago, I became curious as to why people work for my organization and started to ask people a deceptively simple question, “_why are you here?”_. Expecting to be enlightened, instead I received blank stares and non-responses. Disappointed at first, I started to sympathize with my team realizing that this is a difficult question to answer. As a leader, I felt a responsibility to help my team, help me, understand what they value and why. Over a few months, I passively thought about how to answer this question. And started to poll a few people, inside and outside my organization, to help uncover the possible reasons anyone would work for any organization. With contributions from thoughtful friends, I developed a framework to answer this important question:_ why are you here_. \*\* The Framework\*\* These are the five possible values that inform why anyone works at any organization: - **Mission & Purpose**: I value the problems that my organization is trying to solve, believe them to be meaningful and feel inspired to play a role in helping advance our mission. - **Growth & Development**: I value the opportunity to learn new skills and gain new experiences professionally, with less concern for the specific domain we are working in. - **People & Community**: I value the culture and environment greatly. Building meaningful connections with others, both inside and outside the organization, is important to me. - **Recognition & Compensation**: I value being rewarded financially or being recognized, privately or publicly, for my contributions to the organization. - **Wellness & Balance**: I value feeling supported and encouraged to practice work-life balance, have flexibility in my schedule or location or not feeling stressed on a day-to-day basis. After building this framework, I shared it with my team and then asked the question, _“why are you here?”_. People found it easy to answer this difficult and also to explain what these values meant to them. The responses were enlightening for me, bringing new awareness and greater curiosity to really understanding what my team values and why. \*\* What I have learned\*\* We have systematized this into our culture. Every six months, people are asked to share with me why they are here. Here is what I’ve learned so far: - **Diversity**: everyone is not here for the same reasons. This is a leadership challenge, as it signals a commitment to support and recognize diversity in values. When I first started my business, I believed everyone was here for the same reasons I was, and would take a ‘peanut-butter’ approach (i.e. spreading things evenly). If it’s community, let’s host regular team socials. If it’s growth, let’s bring in subject matter experts. If it’s compensation, let’s give everyone options. What I have learned (and have the data to prove now) is that people value different things and this requires that as a leader, I personalize my approach to incent, motivate and reward people for it to be effective. - **Impermanence:** after four rounds of asking people what they value, I have learned that people’s values change. And this should be no surprise since as people, we are continually changing. This once again is a leadership challenge, to not only recognize the diversity in values but also the impermanent nature of values. In each round (six months apart), at least two thirds of the team changes at least one value (we ask them to select their top 3 from the list of 5). - **Awareness:** early on, most people shared one value (from their top three) that was a surprise to me. This awareness is crucial as a leader, and helped me understand that I should not assume that I know what people value. Inviting people to share often what they value has led to rich and meaningful conversations that I know are appreciated. \*\* How we use the framework\*\* Every six months (as part of our semi-annual review process), I ask every team member to complete this simple one-page template. I am asking them to rank their top 3 (of the list of 5) values, their level of satisfaction, to explain in one-sentence why it’s important to them and what their expectations are. I share the aggregate results and my analysis with the team after each round. This level of transparency builds trust that I am listening. _[Here is the template](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fqEpZL9SrcDTbJUMftCXUymjnC_wEFCW4_wZ64_u55w/edit?usp=sharing)_ if you are interested in adopting this with your team (many of my friends in leadership roles have adopted it successfully since I first published it). Additionally, when recruiting new people to our team, I will ask them to share with me what their top 3 values are and why. This supports meaningful conversations and allows me to evaluate whether I believe we can deliver on their expectations. _I’m grateful to Jay Vidyarthi, Lou Pino and Afraj Gill for being involved in the process to develop this framework, and to my team at Polar for adopting this framework with full openness to help me understand what they value and why._ --- ### The Future Of Work: The 4-Day Work Week Published: 2018-07-09 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/work/ On a recent flight from London to New York, I chatted up a fellow flight mate sitting a few rows away. He was friendly, had a huge smile on his face and was full of wisdom. He was curious about my life and me about his. He is 11 years old, about to turn 12. And as I returned to my seat, I felt a strong sense of urgency to write this essay. It has been under construction in my mind for over a year, and like an artist who feels they are never quite done, I have been waiting to share. However my new 11-year old friend inspired me, to help inspire a better future for him. **A thought-experiment** One year ago, I began asking people close to me what they would do with an extra day in the week. A magical eight day, that no one else knew of. People’s faces started to immediately glow. Eyes began to shine, a gentle smile showed excitement and facial expressions showed a subtle child-like curiosity. The question was not difficult. Practicing dance. Learning a new language. Cleaning the house. Spending more time with nature. Reading a book. Writing a book. Starting a business. Volunteering in the community. And like this, the answers kept flowing, each clearly filled with personal meaning and joy. And then I asked the unexpected question: _what is that worth to you?_ People paused, unsure how to answer. This question was more difficult than the last. There may have been silence on the outside; however I imagine there was anything but silence on the inside. The initial thought must have been about which dimension of worth to evaluate on. Monetary? Time? The initial glimmer on their faces started to dim, as the reality of making trade-offs started to sink in. Many feel _stuck_ with the decisions and commitments in their life already and the demands on their time or money. Unsure where to find space. I broke the silence and offered a simple suggestion: _why not shorten the workweek and adjust your salary?_ **The reality of work** A large share of people in professional fields can be characterized as overworked and overpaid. Overworked as evidenced by often feeling stressed or burned out, addicted to being connected 24/7 and rarely feeling the space to truly breathe and relax. Overpaid as evidenced by lifestyle choices (contrary to consumeristic beliefs, ‘more is not always more’). At the same time, we have another large group in society that are unemployed and underemployed. Simply put, not everyone has the opportunity to work and earn a fair living in our society. And many feel their skills are not utilized and potential not realized. The original computer was not the piece of technology that you may be reading this on. The original computer was a person whose job it was to compute data, manually. The threat of automation in every industry is real. Over the coming decades, we will experience major disruption in the workforce and those jobs are not coming back. So we have (a) people that are working too much, (b) people that are not working enough and (c) an expected reduction in the jobs available. Many who are working or trying to work are feeling unsatisfied. The current path is to do the same thing we have been doing, but faster, hoping we will feel better. I believe we are in quicksand right now and feeling symptoms of insanity (doing the same thing and expecting a different result). We can do better. One of my favourite books is Tuesdays With Morrie, with this one line having stuck with me, _‘you have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesn’t work, don’t buy it’._ I don’t buy our current work culture and believe there can be a different future for both people and organizations. **Enter the _Dream Program_** The Dream Program is a vision for the future of work, where you are encouraged to invest in yourself and the life you want to build in this moment. It is a reversal of _‘once this, then that’ _thinking that pervades modern society. Under the Dream Program, your organization offers you the option to reduce your work time and you offer to adjust your salary. _To help you visualize the Dream Program as I explain it, make the assumption you work 15% less and adjust your salary by a similar amount._ Now I sympathize with the reality that a salary adjustment may not be an option for everyone. Many people would not be able to afford it given their circumstances. The Dream Program would not be applicable for people in these positions. However, many people can afford it and it’s a larger group that you think. Well-popularized research has shown that once we are earning at least $75,000, increases in levels of happiness are marginal relative to increases in salary. I believe the Dream Program can be considered for anyone earning above $75,000 a year. An immediate challenge in taking a salary adjustment would be that your cost of housing will not be adjusted. Dense cities like New York, Toronto, San Francisco, London and Sydney continue to experience a rising cost of living. Some lifestyle adjustments would have to be considered, so one has to ask, _what is that eight day of the week worth to me?_ Another challenge is how the work gets done in less time (when it may feel like there isn’t enough time already). I see this as an opportunity to be more efficient with our time. Time is our most valued resource and thanks to digital distraction, we have found countless ways to waste it. The digital wellness movement will soon enter the workplace as the collective consciousness of our modern working world begins to question how tools like Slack and Facebook impact our ability to focus at work. As the time available for work becomes more scarce, I believe we will naturally become more efficient. My meetings would get shorter, fewer emails and Slack messages would be written and I would ask myself more often _‘what’s really important?’_. Improving efficiency is one side of the coin. The other is increasing capacity. As an employer, if my team approached me and said ‘_we will work 15% less, take a salary adjustment and feel happier, more satisfied and grateful’_, my response would be _‘yes, let’s do it, and I commit to hiring more people with the additional budget to create more capacity’._ Now the impact on society from a small organization like mine adopting the Dream Program would be to inspire others. The true impact will come when large organizations like a Google, Pepsi, Procter & Gamble, AT&T or Citibank adopt the Dream Program. Imagine if all large organizations committed to create 15% more jobs. The ripple effect on society would help solve many unemployment issues. And to help solve underemployment, I think big organizations would realize that the skills they need may not be as readily available and begin to invest in training and development to increase capabilities. And capability building is what we really need in society for the long-term, given the threat of automation. **How to measure work** We currently measure work based on time and economic value, not societal value. For example, a data scientist working for Facebook who spends their day figuring out how to get you more addicted to your phone is paid three to four times what a grade school teacher who is helping your child develop critical skills that will serve them for life. When life hands you lemons, you learn to make lemonade. As such, the Dream Program’s structure is based primarily on time as the measure of work. A few assumptions: - 365 days in a year - 260 weekdays (52 weeks x 5 days) - 10 statutory holidays (on average, varies based on where you live) - 15 vacation days (my American friends are jealous, European friends are upset) - 235 workdays (not including vacation, which we’ll address later) We will use 235 days as the baseline and make all of the assumptions from this starting point for how many days you will work less and the resulting salary adjustment you would need to take. **How to structure the Dream Program** There are several structures for the Dream Program to consider, but first I want to thank the many friends who have indulged in intellectual debate and discussion with me over the past year and contributed to this vision for a better future of work. **The 4-day workweek** I was in Amsterdam last weekend and the Netherlands have already successfully built a norm around shorter workweeks. Many Scandinavian countries have as well. Recent data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development shows that happy team members working shorter workweeks are far more productive than team members who are stressed working overtime. Working Monday to Thursday becomes our new norm. After ten years of work experience, I feel that Friday is a fairly useless day in most organizations. People on my team do not want to meet with me, for fear of getting more work. Clients rarely see me, and if they do, people are usually checked out and ready for the weekend. And finally, I subscribe to the decision fatigue theory (that we have the capacity to make a limited number of decisions in any one time period), which means that the decisions I make at the end of a long week are probably not my best ones (and this is true regardless if you are a CEO, developer, marketer or accountant). There are practical considerations that would have to be planned for to make a 4-day workweek a reality. Your industry. Your customers’ expectations. Business travel. Industry events. However I am confident that these can all be solved for with a bit of thought and deliberation. _Note: Friday would be a non-workday only in weeks that do not have a statutory holiday already (as those are already 4-day work weeks!). If we assume 10 weeks with a statutory holiday in a year, then we are talking about 42 non-working Fridays._ Additionally, we can factor in efficiency gains. Let us assume that the baseline efficiency is a 7/10 on an arbitrary scale (I am probably being generous). And let’s assume that the 4-day work week brings us up to an 7.5/10 (for the days that we are working). - 235 workdays or 165 weighted efficient workdays (baseline) - 42 non-working Fridays (not the statutory holiday weeks) - 193 workdays or 145 weighted efficient workdays (4-day work week Dream Program) - 18% reduction in working time or 12% reduction in weighted efficient workdays I believe the salary adjustment required to support a 4-day work week would be 12%. _Would you do it if offered?_ **Buy-back time option** Another version of the Dream Program is to offer the option to buy-back time. Provide a range from 0 days (for those that did not want to participate) to a max of 50 days. And ask team members to commit in advance (semi-annually or quarterly) the days they intend to buy-back. The cost for each day bought can be the salary divided by the baseline number of work days. - $75,000 salary - 235 work days - $300 per day (salary per workday reduced by ~6% to account for efficiency gains) - $200 net cost per day bought (net of taxes, assuming a 33% effective tax rate) The difference between this and the 4-day workweek model is that there would not be consistency in when people are working or not working. The benefit of this model is that there will be team members available five days a week to carry on the operations. The challenge will be that in small teams with specialized skills or roles, projects may get really slowed down, as people will depend on each other to get a project done. **The sabbatical** Academia and some large organizations offer the option to take a paid sabbatical, only once you have put your time in. A version of this under the Dream Program would be to offer the option for an unpaid sabbatical. For example, offer for those interested to take one unpaid month (continuous and disconnected, of course). That is the equivalent to an 8% salary adjustment. Having one continuous month opens up opportunities for new experiences in life at a time when they can be impactful and meaningful. For example, while I was in Madrid last on self-retreat for a few days, I fell for the city and had the thought that _one day, _I’d love to come live there for one month, learn Spanish, latin dance and immerse myself in the culture. Last summer, I took a nine-day holiday in Australia ahead of a business trip in Sydney. It was an unstructured self-retreat. I rented a car and drove the coast, staying in random places and meeting other travelers (many of whom were on the road for months). This summer, my cousin and his family (wife and two kids) decided to go live in France for two months. The experience will be an enriching one for his kids. I suspect many of my friends would choose to go on an extended meditation retreat, do their yoga teacher training, take up an immersion course or work on a volunteer project. _Is an 8% salary adjustment worth the opportunity to explore and experience something you find meaningful and worthwhile?_ **Unpaid vacation time** Building on the unpaid sabbatical concept, what if vacation time was unpaid and unlimited. The on-demand economy is already there. An Uber driver or Upwork freelancer who chooses not to work today is not paid today. This may be a preview of what will happen in other industries. One way to structure unpaid vacation time would be to decide what the baseline vacation days are that are included in the salary and give people the option to take additional vacation time (similar to the buy-back model). Another way to structure this would be to assume 0 vacation days to start with. This would mean first increasing salaries. If standard is 3 weeks of vacation, then salaries would increase by 5.8%. And then provide the option to take unpaid vacation time at a daily rate. - $75,000 base salary - $79,000 adjusted salary (assuming no paid vacation) - 235 work days - $336 cost per vacation day - 30 vacation days (assumption) - $69,000 actual salary (assuming 30 unpaid vacation days) This model is similar to the buy-back structure, I think providing clarity on how a vacation program changes is needed in any model for the Dream Program. **A combination of the above** There are also interesting combinations that are possible using the models outlined above. For example, first increase salaries to reflect no paid vacation. Then move to a 4 day workweek, with a 12% salary reduction. Then provide the option to buy-back between 0 and 20 days a year at $X/day or the option for a one-month unpaid sabbatical at $Y/month. Based on the industry, organization size, culture, financial situation and customer demands, the Dream Program should be custom-crafted for the specific needs you have. If you like the idea but are unsure of which tactics make the most sense for your culture, I would suggest sharing this essay with a few people in your organization. Ask them what they think. Consider designing a pilot program. If you are not in a position of authority or leadership to make such a decision but want your organization’s leaders to be inspired by this, send me their email address and I will share with them this essay directly (without mentioning your name). If they do not respond, I will follow-up with them. And if they do respond, I’ll share with you what they say. **Resetting our priorities** The culture I grew up with led me to believe that I should prioritize my profession first, my relationships second and myself third. And I had previously lived following this sequence. What I experienced was that by the time I got to myself, I didn’t have any time, energy or money left. When I was not working, my time would be filled with commitments to other people. And then things changed. As I started to become more introspective a few years ago (and used tools like meditation, yoga, reading and journaling to learn more about myself), I noticed that feeling happy, content and at peace was sitting inside of me. The priorities were reset. Once I prioritize myself, I feel grounded and connected with my truth. After that, while I spend time with those close to me, I show up with an energy and presence that is authentic. I start to naturally feel supported, as others feel my passion and spark. And feeling encouraged, I then can focus on my profession, with greater confidence, conviction and clarity. This is how I have learned to avoid burnout and experience greater fulfillment, connection and meaning from my work and relationships. The Dream Program is designed to be that helpful hand, encouraging you to invest in yourself. Be it physically, mentally, emotionally, creatively or however else. So that you can show up with greater energy and enthusiasm for those people close to you, feel supported by them and take on your life’s work with full enthusiasm. **A vision for a different future** People generally are happy, calm, relaxed or energized on a Monday morning and feel depleted, tired, angry or fatigued on a Friday afternoon. We know from our own experience that taking time to rest allows us to show up as our best selves at work. Life is not a linear path and needs flexibility. If one is caring for an aging parent or child with specific needs, dealing with a mental health challenge (which 1 in 4 people do every year) or is curious to explore a place, culture, topic or skill, the Dream Program offers some guilt-free options to do so. The benefits for organizations are clear. The trust built by showing _we care about you_ will be seen through higher quality of work and stronger commitment. Focus and efficiency will improve from within the heart of the organization. Flexibility will attract greater diversity in the workplace. Team members will have the mental space to solve real problems and develop new insights. Over the next few years (while this remains a novelty), it will also be seen as a differentiator in a competitive market. But most importantly, as a leader, it is an opportunity to reflect the values of the organization in a practical, tangible manner. There are risks and reasons the Dream Program may not work. That comes with the territory of being an innovative organization. It is not only about what you work on but also how you work. As a leader, if I can help those around me live their dreams, that’s plenty meaning and purpose for me. I look forward to Friday, so that I can start writing my book. --- ### Morning Pages: A Self-Therapy Practice Published: 2018-07-02 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/pages/ A few years ago, I had the chance to spend a full day with Julia Cameron, author of _The Artist’s Way_, someone I’ve admired at a distance for several years. It was a special, memorable and insightful day. I got into a conversation with Julia about how she developed Morning Pages, a writing process that I’ve practiced at least 500 times now in the past many years. I first learned about in her well-known book, The Artist’s Way, published in 1992. She shared her story of wanting to become a Hollywood writer at the time and failing at it. She moved to Mexico and unsure what to do next with her career, she just started to write every morning when waking up to avoid boredom. And writing every morning freely began to change her life. _Morning pages changed my life as well._ And it continues to every day. _The process is simple:_ - Commit to writing (by hand) at least 2 full pages (ideally 3) in one sitting in the morning. - Do not let the pen or pencil STOP, continuous writing is a must. If you do not know what to write, write “I do not know what to write” continuously until it changes. - Do not read a single thing you write, throw it out (or recycle it) immediately. When I first started writing Morning Pages, I noticed that many of my deepest fears, anxieties, insecurities and attachments would dominate the pages. I kept going though and eventually it changed. After shedding many of my self-critical and self-doubting thoughts, clarity started to surface. I then realized the power of Morning Pages as a process to make sense of my reality. **_My inner critic._** Core to this process is learning to bypass my inner critic, who is constantly editing and censoring my thoughts, words and actions. For example, as I compose this blog post, my inner critic is hard at work. It is useful to help me function in society effectively, as a filter of sorts for when I communicate with others. However the critic also gets in the way of understanding myself and my reality. Writing continuously without pause and knowing that no one, not even my critic, is going to read the pages, the critic takes a backseat and doesn’t feel the need to be involved. _I am free._ **_Purposefully unfocused._** Julia explained to us that unlike journaling where there is a topic to focus on, Morning Pages are unfocused. My experience is that they are very unfocused. I’ll start writing a few lines about a dream I had last night, then a few lines on the soreness in my hamstrings, then on what someone said to me yesterday, then about a key project at work, and so on. There is absolutely no structure or flow at the surface. It may sound useless at first however having the space to flow is where the magic begins. **_It is self-therapy_.** While writing continuously and freely, without judgement, I will start to get into a flow state after a few pages where a stream of consciousness starts to pour onto the pages. I express thought patterns that I am not even conscious of. Clarity, inspiration and a synchronization of sorts of my life starts to form. I am able to unblock and release the mind. What’s amazing is that all of answers to my problems are already sitting inside of me, I just need help to access them. _The ability to tap into my inner wisdom is truly special._ **_It is for everyone. _**This is not a creative writing process. It is a process to unblock and free my mind (which helps with both creativity and life). Morning Pages often help me become aware of business decisions I’ve already made inside but have not realized. When I find myself feeling agitated mentally (not if, but when), I will start writing. Doesn’t matter if I’m in the subway, at my desk or in the lobby of a client’s office. **_Write by hand. _**Someone had asked Julia about writing by hand versus typing on the computer. _‘When we write by hand, we connect with ourselves’_, was her response. Writing is slower than typing and that’s why it works. When typing, we miss the opportunity to connect with what we’re writing (I think cyberbullying is perfect evidence of this), as we move too fast. If you have read to this point in my post, you have been inspired to at least give it a try. Take a few pieces of blank paper, a pen and start writing. Do not pause to think. Keep writing. Do not stop until you have filled up the pages. Do not read what you wrote, throw them out once done. Do it again tomorrow. And the day after. And the day after that. _You just may start to see your life change in ways you did not expect, as I did._ --- ### Mindful Consumerism: My First 100 Days Living In New York Published: 2018-06-11 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/america/ In the past few years, I’ve adopted a minimalist lifestyle. Moving to America, specifically New York, arguably the capital of the world for consumerism, has been an enriching experience for me. At the start of this year, I officially moved here and although I’ve spent the equivalent of 3+ years over the past 10 years visiting the city for business, living here I’ve become aware of unique qualities that I suspect most take for granted. Mindful consumerism Moving to New York, I was quickly exposed to consumerism in a very high dose. Initially confused with how to engage (my apartment was empty for a few weeks, with only an inflatable mattress to sleep on), one morning in late January while meditating, I decided that I would use this as an opportunity to learn. I would experiment with mindful consumerism. Instead of developing aversion, I decided that I would be a conscious consumer, skillfully experimenting with new products and services that caught my attention. And doing so with a level of awareness, feeling of detachment and sense of curiosity about what I could learn. The experiments These experiments, all of which I either experienced first-hand or observed up close, anchored on one of many themes: a preview of the future, the on-demand economy, an obsession to optimize for convenience or customer experience as a business differentiator. _The hunt for shelter_ 1. The number of apartments I saw, within a span of 4 days. Thanks to _[StreetEasy](https://streeteasy.com/)_, my expert-at-everything-apartment-related friend _[Carla](https://www.apartmenttherapy.com/tour-nyc-walk-up-full-of-clever-diy-projects-257374)_ and pre-deciding which areas I was open to (Chelsea, Flatiron or Union Square), the experience was expedient, easy and actually fun. After seeing the place I ultimately chose (in Chelsea), within 24 hours the lease was signed, within a further 12 hours the funds for the deposit were wired and within another 24 hours, I had the keys and officially had the place. I was impressed with how fast things move here. _The small walk-up apartment has a “virtual doorman” service. Delivery people simply ring the doorman, are connected to a call centre (hooked into a security camera) and they can remotely unlock the main door to allow delivery people to place packages inside the building._ _Self-serve internet anyone?_ In Canada, you would have to call Bell or Rogers, schedule an appointment 1-2 weeks in advance, likely work from home that day and hope that it worked on the first try. In New York, I called _Spectrum_, they told me to visit their location down the block from my place. The entire setup process was self-serve. They gave me the internet router and box, told me to plug it in myself and that was that. _And I was surprised to learn that month-to-month service is the norm here (unlike Canada where you’d be forced to sign a year-long commitment before even getting the service setup)._ My initial intention was to sign-up for _[NYC Mesh](https://nycmesh.net/)_, a community-owned peer-to-peer free and open internet option that is growing in the city (but not yet available where my apartment is). Hopefully later this year I’ll cancel Spectrum and use NYC Mesh. After moving in, my landlord mentioned that I needed to transfer the electricity to my name and pay _[ConEdison](http://coned.com/)_ directly. I was able to turn on my account, set up billing and transfer it under my name _on my phone, within 90 seconds_. Impressive. _Tales from the shelves_ I’m fortunate to live very close to both a Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s. And I’ve learned that as most New Yorkers do not have cars (and some don’t even know how to drive, a sign you are a true native), carrying your groceries home should not be underestimated. I learned this the hard way (a few times) after having to take frequent sidewalk breaks carrying all those paper bags a mere 100 meters. Anyways, they have solved for this. Both Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s offer same-day delivery (for $5) for your groceries. _I have not yet tried online grocery delivery or the many meal kits, however have many friends that enjoy the plethora of subsidized meals (courtesy of Silicon Valley investors)._ The Container Store takes this dilemma of buying too much stuff that you can’t carry to the next level. When walking in, you have the option to pick up a _price gun_ of sorts and you walk around the store, simply pointing and clicking on the items you wish to buy. And at the register, give them the price gun, pay them and they deliver all your items to you. _Finding lunch in a pinch_ Our office is in Flatiron and for the first few months, I found myself waiting in long line-ups for lunch, or skipping lunch because my schedule did not accommodate waiting in line-ups. Well, I soon discovered that pretty much every one of my favorite lunch spots allows me to order the meal ahead of time and simply pick it up (without talking to a single person). My current favorites: _[DigInn](https://www.diginn.com/)_, _[LevelUp](https://www.thelevelup.com/)_ and _[&pizza](https://andpizza.com/)_. _[Seamless](https://www.seamless.com/)_ is a also beauty. Quick and efficient meal delivery, at your fingertips. I do not use it often but did for a dinner I hosted a few weeks ago and plan to use it again. _[Mealpal](https://mealpal.com/)_ is a subscription meal service, where you pre-purchase 10-20 meals for the month (at a steep discount on the normal price), and each day pick the meal you want (from over 1,000 options, all of the normal lunch spots). The value is getting diversity and a good price. I liked it in theory but found in practice that my schedule (travel, client meetings) did not have enough consistency (I could not use all the meals I purchased in my first month). _Cardboard castles_ I know, it’s been around for a while now, but I only started using Amazon Prime this year and I remain impressed. I consume a ridiculous amount of seeds and nuts (which my mom refers to as bird food), all of which now gets delivered to me. Thank you Amazon. _Although the number of folded Amazon cardboard boxes on the sidewalks of Manhattan is concerning and makes me question if I will continue to use Amazon or not._ _When Silicon Valley takes you to the movies_ _[Moviepass](https://www.moviepass.com/)_ is a subscription movie service that you pay $10/month for the ability to see as many movies you want in theatres. _There is a high chance the service will go out of business soon (thanks Silicon Valley investors for the fun while it lasted)._ I really do not know why I signed up for it, but I did. The app has not worked consistently (once I ended up paying for movie that I thought I was signed up for) and I found I ended up going to watch movies I would normally not want to go see, because I had access to it. In the spirit of experimenting, I did it. And learned that I need to be aware of how these services influence decisions on where I invest my time. _Anyways, I cancelled the service today._ _Finding a double dopamine hit_ Exercise and a good deal. I’ve been practicing yoga consistently for a few years now and it’s been an important part of my lifestyle. My two favorite studios in New York are _[Laughing Lotus](http://nyc.laughinglotus.com/)_ and _[Yogamaya](https://yogamayanewyork.com/)_. I also happen to live very close to both now (that may have influenced my choice in apartment location). _[Classpass](https://classpass.com/)_ is a subscription service where you pre-buy credits each month that you use to take classes. Well, my two studios are on Classpass and I’ve found that I spend about 50% less on classes now. As a consumer, it’s great. As a business owner (if I say owned a yoga studio), it’s not so great. _If you do sign-up, use my link __ (we both get $40, thanks again to Silicon Valley investors for subsidizing our fitness efforts)._ _How to hail and pay for a cab in New York_ Uber, Lyft and other services make the payment process so convenient, I will use them for that perk alone. However I do find myself still taking yellow cabs, thanks to the ease to catch one. _[Curb](https://gocurb.com/mobileapp/)_ and _[Arro](https://www.ridearro.com/)_ are two apps that allow you to pay for yellow cabs from your phone. I tried to set both of them up, but had two issues. They would not accept my Canadian phone number and they do charge an additional transaction fee (I could not justify it outside of the experiment). _Ask me in a few months if I’ve figured out how to easily hail and pay for a cab._ _How meditation helped me buy a comforter_ The most difficult purchase for me was finding a comforter. Why? The choice and selection was overwhelming and paralyzing for me (as I was not used to buying “stuff”). I went into Bed Bath & Beyond on three occasions and left empty-handed. One late-January morning, after I woke up feeling cold from the night before, I decided that this would be the day I come home with a comforter. Determined, when seeing the selection available at the store, instead of thinking, I basically meditated while feeling the different options. _Choosing to tune out my thoughts and tune in to how I felt inside._ And the decision became very easy, and served as a reminder that my thoughts can get in the way of what may already be clear to me. _Furnishing my apartment from my phone_ After spending a few weeks in a furniture-less apartment (where many friends enjoyed a home cooked meal with me...sitting on the floor), I decided that I wanted to test the limits of mobile commerce and committed to ordering all of my furniture from my phone (without seeing any of it _in real life)._ Thanks primarily to _[Gilt](https://www.gilt.com/)_ (and a few other sites, and expert advice from Carla and Kanika), I now have a couch, bed frame, coffee table, writing desk, chair, rug, whiteboard (yes, I know), bookshelf and counter stools. I was very close to finding someone on _[Handy](https://www.handy.com/)_ to come assemble my furniture, but could not justify it mentally for the experiment. And the satisfaction of self-assembly was worth it. _Mattress in a box_ The amount of advertising happening by mattress startups makes you question how often everyone else buys a mattress, because you know you don’t that often. Well, I apparently do. I’ve now bought 4 mattresses in the past 5 months living in New York. This is one over-drawn experiment that is still in progress (unfortunately). It started with an inflatable mattress (which of the 4 mattresses I’ve bought is the most comfortable and reliable for my sleep needs, and great for guests). And after a few weeks, I bought a _[Casper](https://casper.com/)_. While it was fun to setup (it comes rolled up in a box), the sleep was not as great for me (too soft). That was returned (at no cost, except to the environment). Then I purchased a _[Helix](https://helixsleep.com/)_. They are known for custom-built mattresses to meet your needs. I was curious, and went to their showroom for my “fitting”. I was suspicious but went with it. And it turned out to be far too soft as well. That was returned yesterday. _Part of my experiment was also evaluating the customer experience while trying to return one of these online purchases. It was pretty good._ The fourth (and hopefully final) purchase was defaulting to the traditional brick-and-mortar store _[Mattress Firm](http://www.mattressfirm.com/)_. Desperate for sales (the place was empty), I feel I could name my price. And I did just that. The mattress arrived yesterday and ask me in 30 days if it’s still here. _My advice for you: don’t ask me for advice on how to buy a mattress, ask someone else._ _Home insurance made easy_ I put off getting renter’s insurance for a few months (don’t tell my landlord, actually they know because I received an email every week on it). Those that know me know that discipline generally comes easy and I am not one to procrastinate. However the thought of trying to navigate setting up insurance was daunting, so I put it off. And then someone on my team told me about _[Lemonade](https://www.lemonade.com/)_. I signed up for insurance within 2 minutes online and it was done. And very affordable. _When I see services like these, I worry for the traditional industry as they are about to be massively disrupted._ _Dry cleaning at your fingertips_ Typical dry cleaners are open during business hours, when typical professionals who wear dress shirts or suits are working. _[FlyCleaners](http://flycleaners.com/?stay=1)_ is a service that has reimagined dry cleaning by offering to pick-up and drop-off with very specific 1 hour time windows (up until midnight). I used it, purposefully changed the time windows constantly (curious to see when it would break) and it worked fine and was very accurate. _Now I have gone back to the traditional dry cleaning approach, given there is a place down the street from my apartment (and it’s a fraction of the cost of FlyCleaners)._ _Co-working armageddon_ Move over WeWork, the plethora of co-working spaces in New York is a maze on its own to navigate. We are currently working out of _[Grind](http://grind.work/)_ in Flatiron and like the space (for now). We are starting to see specialized co-working spaces. _[The Assemblage](https://www.theassemblage.com/index.php)_ is one that is worth highlighting. It’s an entire building (now three locations actually) that is designed to attract people and groups working on for-purpose initiatives and ventures, with a strong dose of mindfulness, spirituality and collective consciousness designed into the physical space. Meals (vegan, of course) are provided, alongside yoga classes, meditation spaces, community events, world-recognized speakers and local community led workshops. Pretty impressive. _The minor catch is that it’s not accessible financially and a significant premium over the alternatives._ _The one service I may just try next_ A new breed of entrepreneurs have become passionate about giving you plants for your place...on a subscription model. Yep, you pay a monthly fee and get plants delivered to your place, every month. A preview _[here](https://www.wellandgood.com/good-home/flower-plant-subscription-services-boxes-deliveries/slide/4/)_. 3 insights from my experiment If you’ve read this far, congratulations. I hope you bring a dose of awareness, detachment and curiosity to your next purchases. While many of you may have been exposed to some of these already, imagine (if you can) what it would be like to get exposed to all of them _for the first time_ within _100 days_. That’s what my experiment was all about (and is now complete). Here are 3 takeaways from my experiment: - _User experience as a differentiator:_ it became very obvious after exposing myself to so many consumer services in a shortened time period which companies have thought long and hard about the user experience and which ones have not. - _A preview of the future:_ stepping into this head-on, I feel like I’ve gotten a preview of the future and will continue to do so living here. If you are in a role that requires you to imagine, influence and inspire the future of anything, being surrounded by others is helpful. - _Gratitude for what we have:_ as I went into this experience with a level of detachment, I became more aware of what is already present in my life. It helped me cultivate a greater sense of gratitude for everything that is (versus obsessing on what is not or what may be). I continue to enjoy my own transformation from ‘more is more’ to ‘less is more’, and choosing to live in New York has been a deliberate effort to understand what it means to be a conscious consumer. It is possible and I’m thankful for the opportunity to practice, experimental and learn. --- ### Advancing Social Justice With Mindfulness Published: 2018-06-02 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/tita/ _Like the moment when one discovers that the world is not flat, I had a moment that has forever changed how I see a practice that I hold so dearly and close to me._ The moment was earlier this year, and I was sitting in a chair at a conference, listening attentively to a speaker on stage share her life’s work. The speaker was Tita Angangco and her story was one of impacting social justice using mindfulness. Tita is a breathing, talking, walking, smiling and laughing role model for mindful leadership. Listening to her share the harsh realities that many in society endure and how mindfulness practices are being developed and offered as an act of service, I realized that I’ve only seen one side of this coin that I’ve held onto so tightly in my hand over the past several years. My passion for mindfulness was sparked several years ago from a curiosity to understand myself and the world around me. I’ve been fortunate, like many of my friends, to have the resources (time, safety, connections and financial) to devote energy towards introspection. Many are not so lucky. Fundamental needs of safety, security, connection, and for some, food and shelter, are where all energy is devoted. Reflecting, I realized that my experience with mindfulness has been only from a place of privilege and luxury. Not from a place without. This is why I’m inspired by the work that an organization that Tita has helped create, [The Centre for Mindfulness Studies](https://www.mindfulnessstudies.com/about/). A social justice organization that brings mindfulness practices to underserved, underrepresented and marginalized populations in the greater Toronto area is a novel idea that Tita and others have made a reality. Acting outside of the traditional health care system, their innovative approach to teach the teachers and brings resources that build mental resilience where it may be needed most is working. Tita is the spark that caught my attention and the organization’s approach to serve the community using mindfulness is why I’m committed to helping them (and want you to as well). --- ### Mental Health Is Having Its Moment And It’s Time To Pay Attention Published: 2018-04-02 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/mental/ I believe we will look back at this period in history as the moment when we changed our relationship with mental health. Everything changes and the tipping point we are about to cross will take mental health issues from an obscure disease we turn a blind eye towards to part of everyday life, impacting every single member of our society. Last year, I joined the foundation board for _[CAMH](http://www.camh.ca/)_, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, and would like to share with you more about why I’ve been inspired to invest more of my time and energy towards what I believe firmly will the biggest issue facing us in the decades to come. \*\* Why now\*\* In the past 30-40 years, our advances as a society in research, science and medicine have reduced premature deaths, improved quality of life for those with physical illness and increased our general awareness and understanding about what is good (and not so good) for our bodies. The progress with diagnoses, prevention and cure of most physical health issues has been a remarkable display our human intelligence and passion to solve problems. In the next 20 years, the biggest health issue that will face our population will not be physical, but mental. If you have children or plan to have kids, it will be the biggest health issue they will face in their lifetime. If you have baby boomer parents like I do, their mental health and physical health issues will be on par with one another. We are all impacted by mental health issues, directly or indirectly. Be it a lived experience, a family member, friend or co-worker, someone you know is dealing with a mental health issue right now (whether they are even aware of it). This is the moment the responsibility of mental health shifts from researchers and clinicians to all members of society. \*\* The issue is real\*\* What do we mean by mental health? Some examples include depression, anxiety disorders, schizophrenia and substance abuse. Issues will vary from mild to severe. Unlike having a cavity, a bone fracture or even cancerous cells, it is not as easy to diagnose mental health issues yet. Though based on the available definitions and data, we begin to get a picture. In any given year, 1 in 5 Canadians experiences a mental health or addiction problem. Think about 5 people you care about. One of them is likely dealing with a mental health issue today. _Source: National Institute of Mental Health_ Nearly 4,000 Canadians die by suicide each year – an average of almost 11 suicides a day. After accidents, suicide is the second leading cause of death for people aged 15 to 34. Based on this trend, suicide may easily become the leading cause of death for young people soon. According to The National Survey on Drug Use and Health, in 2015 alone, 9.8 million adults 18 or older thought seriously about trying to kill themselves in the past 12 months, including 2.7 million who made suicide plans and 1.4 million who made a nonfatal suicide attempt. These numbers represent 4.0 percent of adults in 2015 who had serious thoughts of suicide, 1.1 percent who made suicide plans, and 0.6 percent who attempted suicide in the past year. The stigma is still getting in the way. 39% of Ontario workers indicate that they would not tell their managers if they were experiencing a mental health problem. The economic burden of mental illness in Canada is estimated at $51 billion per year. Most of these data points are sourced from CAMH and although many are specific to Canada, we can assume that most developed countries would be in the same ballpark. \*\* Several forces collide\*\* For those of us not directly in the medical system, it feels as though the rise in mental health issues came out of nowhere. I think there are a few forces that have collided that are leading to mental health having a moment right now. First, the stigma is lifting slowly and we are becoming aware. This is thanks to public and private sector led campaigns, advocates sharing their personal lived experiences, employers starting to recognize their role and technology helping us share more easily. Next, with more affluence and income, we buy bigger houses, more expensive cars and nicer clothes. The obsession with economic growth (at rates higher than population growth) means we are all buying more (on average), often with money we do not have. With more stuff, we can become attached to it or fearful of losing it. Also, those of us unemployed are feeling the stress of rising costs of everything from rent to groceries. Those of us underemployed are stressed about unsatisfied careers and unmet desires. Those of us not yet in the workforce are uncertain if there will be any jobs available. And beyond personal economic factors, our expectations and desires of life seem to have lost grounding. We expect more of ourselves and those around us. And these expectations can lead to greater disappointment that we may not be equipped to handle. **Technology: friend or foe** As a technology entrepreneur for the past ten years, I am the first to question whether the way we've adopted technology in our society could be contributing to the accelerated rise in mental health issues we are facing. If used well, technology can be an enabler for better access to information, better connections with communities and a platform to express emotions and creativity. If abused, technology quickly becomes the master and we become the slaves, unaware of who is in control. It’s no coincidence that the rise in social media adoption over the past decade is consistent with the growth pattern of mental health issues, especially amongst young people. In fact, a _[study released last year](https://www.rsph.org.uk/uploads/assets/uploaded/62be270a-a55f-4719-ad668c2ec7a74c2a.pdf)_ by the _[Royal Society for Public Health](https://www.rsph.org.uk/about-us/news/instagram-ranked-worst-for-young-people-s-mental-health.html)_ in the UK found that Instagram, followed by Snapchat and Facebook, are the worst social platforms for teenager’s mental health, with respondents citing an increase in feelings of depression, anxiety, isolation, loneliness, FOMO and inadequacy when using these platforms. Smoking was very cool in the 70s, and was featured in advertisements, TV shows and pop culture, and then once we became aware of the links between smoking and health in the 90s, it all changed. What smoking is to our physical health, I believe social media is to our mental health. And once we become aware of this, we may choose to take back control. \*\* Introducing CAMH\*\* _[CAMH](http://www.camh.ca/)_ (Centre for Addiction and Mental Health) is Canada's largest mental health organization and since getting involved in the past few months, I think of the organization as serving three distinct mandates that support each other. Locally, in the Greater Toronto Area and South Western Ontario region, CAMH is a hospital (with 500 beds) dedicated exclusively for mental health patients. Focus is critical for anything and by having a critical mass of patients with similar issues, the hospital attracts great talent. Nationally, CAMH is an advocacy partner providing education and training for practitioners, and input to government on policy. For example, CAMH has been an active voice with the Canadian government during their current process to legalize marijuana. And globally, CAMH is a research institute. With a research team of over 300 people focused on mental health, it is one of the largest in the world. The vision to connect the theory from research labs to the realities on the hospital floors accelerates everything. My starting point with CAMH has been as a member of the foundation Board, and I continue to be impressed by the passion, commitment and dedication of everyone I’ve met towards the organization’s vision of transforming lives. \*\* The next step\*\* The moment is happening before us and our relationship with mental health is changing for the better. The progress we have made is impressive but largely confined to research labs, hospital beds and doctor offices. The vision I have is where mental health is respected in the classroom, at the dining room table and in the workplace. And to do this, many of us have a role to play in helping build an ecosystem of leaders, change makers and entrepreneurs not only focused on this space but working closely together in a supportive, collaborative and effective manner. --- ### How The Falls Reminded Me About My Identity Published: 2018-04-02 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/falls/ Last weekend on retreat, being with nature reminded me of the strength and beauty that comes from being aware of my own identity and being true to that. First, what do I mean by retreat? Retreat for me this year is taking a few days, each month, off-the-grid. Spending time with myself, my thoughts and being present. No responsibilities, no plans, no structure. A chance to disconnect on the outside to reconnect on the inside. Last weekend, I took a close friend with me on retreat. We planned to be spontaneous. Yes, the irony is clear but the need to plan unplanned time has become a reality for both of our modern lifestyles. Having unstructured time, even for _just a few days_, is the complete opposite of my normal day-to-day lifestyle where everything is planned, purposeful or productive. It is for this exact reason that I find that going to the other extreme is useful (at least once in a while!). We got into a car on Friday morning in Toronto, without any idea of where we were going, what we would do, where we would stay or what would happen. We drove south, without really discussing or deciding, perhaps unconsciously hoping for some warmer weather. While crossing the Canada-US border, we learned just how revolutionary it was what we were intending to do. _“What do you mean you don’t know where you are going and where you are staying? You can see how this looks questionable, right?”_, asked the border officers. We were called in for further questioning and could not help but laugh at ourselves after being fully honest with the officers. We explored cities and towns we had never cared to pay attention, even though they were in our backyard. We quickly discovered that it did not matter where we went. Taking time to be with ourselves and our thoughts was such a rich and fulfilling experience that the outside environment or activities became less important. We were able to draw inspiration from many people, places and paths we observed, simply by being curious. One such place was Niagara Falls. Specifically, the “American side” of the Falls. See, growing up in Canada, we had visited the Canadian side of the Falls countless times before but never had once been curious, until now, to see the other side of something we felt we knew well. While walking alongside the Falls, I found myself naturally comparing the American side to the Canadian side. Then I closed my eyes. And fell into a sound meditation of sorts, experiencing the Falls with only my ears. Standing close to the Falls, all I heard was a loud thunder and roar. Strong and continuous, without end it seemed. And then an insight rose. It did not matter which side of the Falls I was standing on. The Falls is concerned simply with being itself. So focused on being itself, it is unencumbered by anything else. It keeps doing its thing, loud and proud, irrespective of what I may am doing, where I may be standing and what I may be thinking. It is not bothered by any of it. It may be sunny or rainy. There may be many tourists or very few. It just continues to flow. It is also not trying to please anyone or change itself for anyone else. It changes at its leisure, in its own way. At a deeper level, what made this a beautiful experience for me was observing the Falls being grounded in its own identity. And that is where the true beauty from nature lies. Whenever I am with nature, be it in the ocean or in the mountains, I am reminded of what it means to be true to myself. When we know ourselves, and can be fearless in being true to who we are, all of our beauty shines through. That then inspires those around us to be true to themselves as well. And like that, we all walk around, grounded in our own identity, true to who we are, and appreciating the true beauty in others. --- ### Climbing Out Of Debt Published: 2018-03-11 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/exhale-p6hsh/ Recently, while in Australia on business, I took a self-retreat for a few days, and learned how to climb out of debt. Mental debt that is. _First, what is a self-retreat? _For me, it means creating an environment where I can eliminate distractions to help focus my attention inwards. Disconnecting fully from my day-to-day. No work, no email, no Slack, no phone calls, no text messages, no social media (which I don’t use anyways) and no news media either. Just me and myself. While in Australia, I rented a car (and was _fearless_ in driving on the left side of the road in Sydney!) and ended up in Blue Mountains, a few hours west of the city. Using Google Maps (the only use of my phone), I randomly ended up at Wentworth Falls. I got out of my car, and started walking. The walk turned into a climb, with many ups and downs, following a hiking trail until I came upon a lookout point that had one of the most stunning views of a valley I’ve ever seen. The lush greenery was endless (remember, it’s summer down under right now), with hills and large rock formations adding depth to a landscape that left me inspired by nature’s beauty. Once I finally soaked it all in, I found myself standing there, peacefully observing the physical space and then naturally began observing my own state of mind, _by checking in_. While in a meditate state, _checking in_ means observing my mental or emotional state, as if I was another person, one that I can see fully inside. Now to my surprise, the stillness and quiet of the physical space had the opposite effect on my inner space. My mind was quickly filled with thoughts. Not thoughts of where I was, not thoughts of what I was observing outside of me. But thoughts of what I felt I should have been doing. _In other words, my to-do list._ As I became aware of what was going on inside of me, a strong feeling came up. I started to feel that I was in debt. Mentally. Before I could let myself be present mentally and emotionally with where I was physically, I felt I had to first _pay off_ what was outstanding. Finish what I had previously committed I would do. A ‘_once this, then that’ _type of feeling. When we think of debt as a term, we associate it immediately with a financial state, and think of a mortgage, loan, credit card or bank account. Now, how does debt translate to our mental state? Mental debt is a build up of stuff I feel I should be doing, before I can relax. This may be an obvious symptom of the culture we live in today. I think mental debt is self-imposed. I create it. It is perhaps useful, as a source of motivation to get stuff done, but only to a certain point. Mental debt can quickly outgrow its usefulness as it can limit my ability to experience the present moment. Back to my retreat, that feeling of being in debt mentally is what I observed near the start of the trip. At the end of the retreat in Australia, only a few days later, I reflected again on my mental and emotional state, and am glad to report that I was no longer in debt. Not because I cleared everything. _I actually didn’t do anything on my to-do list._ Instead I invested time in myself. Practicing, meditating, reading, writing and reflecting. Basically, building up credit in my account. I felt that my account had been balanced. And along the way, I learned that there are many ways to climb out of the mental debt that I will carry from time-to-time. --- ### How New York Breeds Innovation Published: 2018-03-02 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/innovation/ _New York breeds innovation at every turn, which I have not seen anywhere else in the world. And unlike Silicon Valley, it’s not all about apps or AI, in New York it’s about real life._ At the start of this year, I officially moved here and although I’ve spent the equivalent of 3+ years over the past 10 years visiting the city for business, living here I’ve become aware of unique qualities that I suspect most take for granted. **A market for everyone** If someone has a new business idea, New York is where they will come launch it. Thanks to a high density of diverse people from around the world, you can find a market for almost anything. Pick your cuisine, pick your fashion, pick your fun. You’ll find it here. And if you’re selling to other businesses (versus direct-to-consumer), then you’ve got big industry here. Finance, retail, fashion, education, healthcare, media and advertising. New York is a microcosm of the world, with the diversity of consumers and global industry present in one place (which places like Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, Boston, Montreal, Paris, Dubai, Mumbai, Rio, Tokyo and Beijing do not have). The closest may be London, Toronto, Sydney or Hong Kong, however they all really see their geographical areas as their markets. New York sees the world as its market. **New York’s innovation lifecycle** I’m going to pick on the [specialty doughnut craze](https://www.thrillist.com/eat/new-york/the-best-donut-shops-in-nyc). I walk past these places with curiosity, on a daily basis. Although I have yet to step inside one, they have taught me a lot about how innovation is bred in New York. You see, I don’t believe specialty donuts are a standalone business. They really are a _feature_ for existing businesses (like coffee shops or bakeries). So how do they exist as standalone businesses? Thanks to the density of people willing to try something new (as a way to kill time and money) and the non-stop influx of tourists (ready to spend without guilt), many of these features are artificially propped up. And I’ve come to learn that’s a good thing, as it breeds innovation for the other business owners walking by who see the line-ups, and take inspiration and incorporate those features into their businesses over time. And behold, you will now see specialty doughnuts in coffee shops and bakeries (from what I’m told). Here is a visual I created showing **New York’s innovation lifecycle**. _To recap:_ - Entrepreneurial people have brilliant ideas for something new. - A new business is launched, lots of risk but even more energy and passion. - The local media starts talking about it, mainly because it’s new. - Other entrepreneurs launch their own take of the idea, usually with a twist. - Tourists start to pour money into the latest craze, thanks to FOMO. - Established entrepreneurs get inspired and incorporate it into their businesses. - The original entrepreneurs go out of business (or get bored), and try something new. To be clear, I think it’s healthy for the original entrepreneurs to move on to the next idea, as that’s what keeps the innovation lifecycle going for the entire city. Everyone has their part to play, including the media, tourists and established incumbent businesses. **New York is not that intense** I’ve been encouraging many of my entrepreneurial friends to invest some time in New York (and you’re welcome to crash at my place, many have taken me up on the offer already). The initial reaction I often hear is that “New York is too intense”. Well, New York is only as intense as you choose to make it. As a visitor, be it a business traveler or tourist, yes, New York is usually an intense experience. The reason is a direct reflection of the attitude one has a visitor. From the speciality donut store, to a new dream machine pop-up experience, to the latest broadway show, napping pods or a flash sample sale, new, interesting and unique business ideas are everywhere. And as a visitor, one has limited time and mixed with the intention to see, eat and shop as much as possible (FOMO), there you have a formula for an intense experience. What I’ve learned as a local is that you don’t experience FOMO, the way a visitor might. You learn to accept that you do not need to experience every new trend the moment is shows up, and choose to prioritize seeing friends, investing time on activities you are committed to and self-care. Take some time to visit New York, with an open mind and schedule, and see if this place inspires you, the way it has for me. --- ### A Data Exercise To Discover How I Invest My Time Published: 2018-02-03 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/2017time/ 230 days worked, 1,327 hours in meetings, 1,602,783 steps, 17,894 minutes on my phone screen, 2,585 hours in bed and 456 hours practicing awareness through meditation, yoga, journaling and reading. That is how I invested most of 2017. **Pick what’s important to you and become aware of it.** That’s not a quote from anyone famous, but rather something I believe strongly in. For me, it’s time. More specifically, where I invest my time. Time is my most valued resource, more so than money. It is easy to track money, but tracking time has become more valuable for me now. I believe that **awareness is the key to everything** and without the awareness of how I’m investing my most valued resource (time), I have no idea if I’m making decisions that align with my values and intentions on a day-to-day basis. This is my third year sharing how I invested my time in the previous year. One year ago, I shared _[how I invested 2,504 hours in work](https://medium.com/find-focus/how-i-invested-2-504-hours-67d4bf3a2272)_ in 2016 and two years ago, I shared _[my lesson in understanding where I spend my time](https://medium.com/find-focus/a-lesson-in-understanding-where-i-spend-my-time-87fd5218be1f)_ covering high-level insights in 2015. My analysis on 2017 is more comprehensive than ever before, looking at **both personal and professional time investments and habits tracked**, combining data from several sources. This analysis covers where I physically was (location), how many hours I invest in meetings (and the type), how many steps I take (sliced and diced from different views), how long I spend on my phone screen, tons of sleep-related insights, how much time I took off and my consistency with practices (including meditation and yoga). _Note: this can be a DIY exercise if you’re really determined to sort through and merge multiple data sources manually. I am planning to build an easier process for 2018 and will share it once ready._ **51% of my days invested outside of Toronto** Not a real surprise, however useful for me to self-audit where I am physically. In 2017, the majority of my days were outside of Toronto. New York, London and Sydney are the other cities our business has offices, and I did invest decently in these places. I think what’s more telling though is where I spent my “workdays”. **56% of them outside Toronto.** There were 230 of them in 2017. That’s 365 days in the year, minus weekends and minus time away (more on how I invested my time away, while not working, below). I’m glad to see I invested almost as much time in Toronto as New York while working, as I had sent the soft intention at the start of the year to be more in New York than before. _And in 2018, I’ll easily cross 50% for workdays in New York._ The source of this location data is a spreadsheet I update from time-to-time by referencing my calendar (manually). **5.6 hours per workday invested in meetings** **1,327 hours of my time in 2017 was invested in meetings.** That’s 61% externally (with partners primarily) and 39% internally (with people on my team). Total meeting time decreased from a high of 399 hours in Q1 down to 327 in Q4 (with an average of 300 in Q2 and Q3). And surprisingly, I took the fewest days off in Q2 (more on that below). The above data was derived from our team accessing the Google Calendar API to pull all of the meeting invites on our calendars, categorizing them to see who else was on the invites to classify internal versus external. _Note: team stand-ups and internal social gatherings and events were excluded from the internal meetings time._ **Overall, I invested 5.6 hours a day in meetings.** My initial reaction was that it felt low, as I often feel I’m in meetings continuously throughout the day (and enjoy it, I’m not complaining whatsoever!). However the time is based on calendar events, so does not account for the odd 15 or 30 minutes between meetings, the time it takes me to travel to/from meetings, etc. In 2017, we made a deliberate strategy decision in the business to really lean in and invest time with our core partners. It was a successful strategy, in that our revenue from core partners grew 100% in 2017 and that is a result of us investing more time. 63% of my external meeting hours were invested in our core partners with 37% of my time invested with our non-core partners. This is a helpful self-audit tool. _And yes, I have the above data for every person on my team._ We discuss it up on a monthly basis as a team, and it guides conversations about how people are investing their time. **30 days invested away from the business in 2017** I took 30 days away from the business in 2017. Time away is weekdays **where I am not working and 100% disconnected from the business** (that means no Slack, no email, no meetings, no phone calls). This was less than 2016, where I had 45 days away. While taking time away, it is critical for me to disconnect from the day-to-day noise and stimuli that becomes a distraction for me from **developing deeper insights and perspectives on the business**. Here is a post I shared two years ago on _[what I learned by disconnecting](https://medium.com/find-focus/connecting-by-disconnecting-while-away-eed4645df9b0)_. When away, I may not necessarily be traveling (although I normally am). Over the recent year-end holiday break, I actually spent two weeks, disconnected, with my parents, enjoying a “home retreat”. I find when taking time away, **it is easier for me to work “on the business”** versus “in the business”. There are many times in the past year where I feel I added more value to the business by taking time to gain perspective and really think about the direction we take. _My strategy for time away in 2018 is a little different, ask me personally or stay tuned for my 2018 recap post one year from now to hear how it went!_ The source of this data is the same spreadsheet where I update from time-to-time my location, referencing my calendar. **5,500 steps per day, fewer than I thought** On average, I took 5,527 steps. **This was fewer than I would have guessed** (hence the importance of looking at data). The source of this data was the Apple Health app on my phone. Now my phone is not always with me (as those who know me know that I’m not always glued to my phone...and I have data below to prove that!), so my actual average is likely 10% higher. When I was in London (9% of the year), I took on average **64% more steps than my average days in Toronto**. And when in New York (31% of the year), I took on average 45% more steps than when in Toronto. That is considerable, and representative of how I often feel at the end of a day in one of those cities (exhausted) after running around between partner offices all day. **I did not anticipate the seasonality of my steps.** January and December had considerably fewer steps on average than the rest of the year. May and July were the best months. I guess weather does impact my willingness to stay active throughout the day _Fun fact: my daily step count average for January 2018 month-to-date is 7,217. Most of this month has been invested in New York._ **49 minutes invested per day on my phone screen** On average, I invested **49 minutes per day looking at my phone screen**. And I checked my phone 38 times per day. This was tracked using an app called Moment, which is _[the one app you have to download](https://medium.com/@findfocus/the-one-app-you-have-to-download-now-761ae5cad521)_. According to Moment, the average user spends 3 hours and 57 minutes per day looking at their screen and picks up their phone 52 times everyday. **Although I feel that 49 minutes is high, I understand that it’s far below the average.** Looking at my phone screen time per month, it was in early June I set the intention to dramatically reduce my phone screen time (as an experiment) and it worked. I got down to 26 minutes and that was proof enough to me that I could do it. Now I “let go” of the experiment at the end of June but it took 3 months before the habit go undone. And after the high in Sept., based on the data, I clearly unconsciously started to reduce my usage again (this time it was not deliberate, I did not look at the data for the second half of 2017 until a few weeks ago). **What I have learned from this is that I really can control how much time I invest on my phone screen.** The ratio of screen minutes to pickups varied greatly. When I was in Australia, each screen session lasted on average 2.0 minutes compared to 1.1 minutes when I was in Canada, although the daily average of pickups was the same. No surprise that my daily average while in the US (primarily New York) was 2x higher than the overall average, as I find myself often running around the city from meeting-to-meeting getting lots and looking at Google Maps. **Proof that I generally disconnect on weekends**, my average screen time on weekdays was 53 minutes (Wed. being the highest at 64 minutes) where it was only 40 minutes on weekends (Saturday being the lowest at 38 minutes). The average times per day I glanced at my screen varied greatly by time of the year. **Overall the average pickups per day was 38**, although for the first 9 months of the year, my average was 31 (August being the lowest with an average of 20 per day) and over the last 3 months of the year my average was 57. Almost twice as high, as I clearly was more liberal with my frequency of screen pickups. **7 hours, 5 minutes is the average time I invested in sleep each night** The source of my sleep-related data is from an app called SleepCycle, _[a previously more detailed analysis can be found here](https://medium.com/find-focus/tracking-my-sleep-made-me-smarter-in-11-ways-232e7ce9829c)_. For this most recent year’s analysis, I cross-referenced my sleep data with my location data. The median time I woke up each day was 6:14 AM (and average was 6:28 AM). **On weekdays, I woke up on average at 5:53 AM and on weekends at 7:58 AM.** I think what’s telling is how consistent I am throughout the week (as you can see, I let myself sleep in by about 20 minutes until 6:09 AM on Friday mornings). **The median time I went to bed was 11:07 PM** and the average time was 11:20 PM. As you can see, it varied with Tuesday and Saturday evenings being my latest and Monday evenings being my earliest, although the time I went to bed was consistently within a 1 hour time bracket. On average, **I was in bed for 7 hours and 5 minutes per night**. It varied widely between work nights (Sunday through Thursday) versus weekend nights (Friday and Saturday). Friday evenings I clearly got a well-deserved night’s rest. Although not a surprise, **the time I spent in bed was far less while I was traveling in New York and London versus Toronto**. And most of my time in Australia and in Other places was on vacation or retreat, so it’s expected I would be spending more time in bed. _I am curious how this will change this year, as I now have a place in New York and fully expect my average time in bed to increase here._ **Practicing awareness for at least 75 minutes per day** Meditation, yoga, journaling and reading are all forms of “practice” for me. **What am I practicing specifically? Awareness.** These tools help me stay grounded, calm and balanced. What I have now come to learn about practice is that it’s less about how I feel while practicing and more about building the capacity and skills, on a continuous basis, to learn to become more aware. And that ability to become aware shows up in other parts of my day constantly. I practice awareness a lot. 75 minutes per day on average. That’s 75 minutes every single day (or 456 hours in 2017). _Note: I only tracked these practices if I invested at least 30 minutes in each per day. How did I track my practices? Using the sleep notes feature of SleepCycle. I turned it into my own habit tracker, in that each night before I set my alarm on the app, I customized a checklist and then was able to analyze that data on my own._ On average, I meditated 82% of days (for at least 30 minutes, I actually meditate daily without question), which feels about right for me. I practiced yoga only 33% of days, which was a surprise, I thought it was higher (and have set the intention to practice on 50% of days in 2018). Journaling was 42% and I think that can get to 50% fairly easily this year. And my reading practice I am the most satisfied with, as I had set the deliberate intention to increase the number of days I read for fun and that did increase throughout the year from 44% to 68% (the average being 51%). _In case you’re curious what I read, I’ll share a more detailed post later this year on the topic, the only hint I’ll give you is that it’s not business books._ As you can see from the above graph, my consistency in practice varied widely throughout the year. Lots of ups and downs which signals to me that I clearly feel drawn to use different tools at different times. I feel grateful to have a variety of tools available to me to practice. This data reinforces for me that the specific tool used (e.g. meditation vs reading) matters less and the consistency of practice to cultivate a greater sense of awareness is what matters more. **Pick what’s important to you and become aware of it.** For me, awareness has become the answer to everything. The data I surfaced for my investments in 2017 have definitely influenced my intentions and practices for the year ahead. Now I don’t live and die by the data on my own habits, behaviours and time investments. I use it as a soft feedback loop to check is my reality consistent with what my expectations are. This awareness is subtly influencing hundreds of micro decisions on a continual basis which ultimately shape my day-to-day experience in life. _Put differently, becoming more aware of my own reality gives me the choice of how to invest going forward, and why wouldn’t I want the power to choose?_ Finally, if you have not already _[set a one-word intention for 2018](https://medium.com/swlh/my-new-year-ritual-a-one-word-intention-db074d64b10b)_, I encourage you to do so soon (it’s not too late). _If you are not sure, pick **awareness** and see how it shows up for you this year._ --- ### Time For A Digital Spring Cleaning Published: 2017-02-07 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/cleaning/ You know that great feeling you get after you tidy up a physical space, like your room, kitchen, condo, car or desk? I want to help you get that feeling again, but this time from tidying up your digital space. _I’ve outlined 3 challenges in this post to help you do just that._ We understand the value of keeping the many physical spaces we are in clean (well most of us do). Now as we spend an increasing amount of time in a digital space, the same value exists in learning to declutter and clean. Out of sight, out of mind. Having a clean digital space means less potential distractions and more time to focus our attention on what we choose. And we feel better. **Where to start cleaning digital space** The dominant digital space we get distracted by is our phone, which is evident when you observe people in any public (or private) space. Cleaning up starts here. I’ve adopted a minimalist approach with my phone and feel grateful for it: Recently while hanging out with a friend, he got a glimpse of my phone and commented how his approach was quite different: he had literally hundreds of apps. So I challenged him to immediately _delete as many as he could._ He then, within minutes, proceeded to delete over half of his apps, and enjoyed that great feeling one gets after cleaning. Over the past week, I’ve challenged others (including my parents) to do the same, and in every case, no one hesitated and immediately de-cluttered. And enjoyed doing it. **CHALLENGE #1: REMOVE AS MANY APPS AS YOU CAN FROM YOUR PHONE,** TO CLEAN UP YOUR DIGITAL SPACE, WHICH WILL HELP YOU FEEL MORE FOCUSED, CLEAN AND CALM. As part of this challenge, you may come across an app that you use rarely, I encourage you to still remove it still as when you need it, _you can just download it again._ **What’s your number?** There is an easy way to check how many apps you have on your phone. For iOS users, open the _Settings_ app, navigate to _General_, then _About_ and you’ll see the number next to _Applications_. For Android users, [click here](https://www.google.com/settings/dashboard%20) to see the number in your Google settings. **POST A QUICK COMMENT AT THE END ON THIS BLOG POST WITH YOUR NUMBER**, YOU MAY BE A SOURCE OF INSPIRATION FOR OTHERS! _Note: on iOS, the number does not include the pre-downloaded Apple apps (like Mail, Maps, iTunes, App Store, etc.), it counts only the user-downloaded apps._ **The one app you should still download** To support my awareness of how often I check and use my phone, I’ve been using an app called Moment on my iPhone (Android users, checkout Checky or BreakFree), that tracks how many minutes per day I spend on my phone and how many times I “picked up” my phone. Here is my usage from the past week and my stats for the year: I spend almost 7 hours per week on my phone, which at first seemed like a lot to me, but then I saw that _the average user spends 3 hours and 42 minutes per day_. **CHALLENGE #2: GIVE THE APP A TRY, EVEN FOR JUST 1 WEEK**, AND LET GREATER AWARENESS SPARK YOUR JOURNEY TO A MORE PEACEFUL, CALM AND FOCUSED DAY-TO-DAY LIFESTYLE. **From app king to app killer** If you’ve known me for more than a few years, you can see the irony here. 9 years ago when I started my business (then called _Polar Mobile),_ the adoption of mobile apps was non-existent. Apple had just launched the iPhone, BlackBerry was still a big deal, Android did not exist, nor did iPads. And we launched a business offering a software platform for media publishers to have mobile apps. Over 5 years, our software was used to build, launch and host over 1,200 mobile apps for 400 media brands around the world, including TIME magazine, Sports Illustrated, Globe and Mail, Maclean’s, Toronto Star, Wired, Vogue, CBS Sports, Food Network and many more. That momentum led to us in 2013 to launch a new platform supporting content based advertising for these same media companies, which has done quite well (we shed the mobile apps platform a few years ago). **And now I’m encouraging you to remove as many apps as you can. The more you remove, the better and more focused you’ll feel.** **Moving to an app-less world** The app industry has gone through a major evolution in the past decade. The first era involved operating system fragmentation, with iOS, Android, Windows, BlackBerry, Symbian and others available, that needed to be supported individually as each had a proprietary development language. Then came a wave of web-based applications, available through mobile browsers (like Chrome, Safari, Firefox), as web development technologies improved and a somewhat comparable user experience was available. And now we’re in a platforms era, where users spend most of their time in a few platform-based apps that dominate our usage (like Facebook, Kik, YouTube, Google Maps), and different applications are now available within these platforms. In the near future, **you will not have to download very many apps at all on your phone.** We are getting close to this app-less world. Here is some data that shows the most used mobile apps in the US (from last year). You’ll see they are most what I refer to as platform-based apps. **How to one up yourself** Done removing apps on your phone and want more? **CHALLENGE #3: STOP USING EMAIL ON YOUR PHONE**. I STOPPED USING EMAIL ON MY PHONE 6 YEARS AGO NOW AND HAVE NOT LOOKED BACK ONCE. --- ### The One App You Have To Download Published: 2017-02-07 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/moment/ You’re addicted…to your phone. You know it, I know it and so does everyone around you. And you may justify it to yourself by saying _well, so is everyone else._ But deep down you don’t buy it. I’ve developed a strong belief that with greater awareness, everything else becomes easier. Once we are more aware, our human instinct to take action kicks in. It happens at a subconscious level, without deliberately thinking about it. **_It is time to become aware of our phone usage_** Enter a new wave of apps designed to help us become aware of just how much we use our phones. I recently downloaded [Moment](https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/moment-screen-time-tracker/id771541926?mt=8) on my iPhone (Android users, checkout [Checky](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.calm.checky&hl=en) or [BreakFree](http://www.breakfree-app.com/)). The app runs in the background (using very little, if any, battery) and tracks how many minutes per day you spent on your phone and how many times you “picked up” your phone. Here is my usage from the past week: And yes, it is probably far lower than most but that’s thanks to a lot of hard work over the past few years learning to use technology responsibly versus getting used by technology. I’ve taken email off my phone, disconnect regularly while away and use Slack versus being used by Slack. All of this keeps me focused. **_How often do you check your phone?_** It’s more than you think. And that is getting in the way of your ability to concentrate on a singular activity for a long stretch of time. The endless notifications, emails, social media updates and messages are like mini pickpockets continually stealing attention from you. **Challenge: give the app a try, even for just 1 week, and let greater awareness spark your journey to a more peaceful, calm and focused day-to-day lifestyle.** And thanks to my friend Jay Vidyarthi for _[making me aware](https://medium.com/@jayvidyarthi/5-nye-resolutions-to-curb-your-tech-addiction-bc29ca760afe#.4kxkmvuu9)_ of this wonderful app to keep us all aware. --- ### 4 Journaling Techniques I Practice Published: 2017-02-07 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/journalism/ Journaling has proven to be an effective grounding and problem-solving practice for me, with 4 specific techniques I turn to time and time again. I don’t have any data on the benefits of journaling but my experience alone has been convincing enough for me to continue this practice and have the desire to share it with you. My practice has developed over the past 2 years and my biggest advice, if you’re interested, is to just give it a try. It is natural to intellectualize and analyse in your mind whether you think something is for you or not, however give yourself the benefit of having some experience and then decide based on your experience. You may surprise yourself (which is what happened to me)… **Reflection technique** When I’m taking time away, maybe by the ocean, on a hike, in nature or just on my own somewhere, I’ll take out my travel-size vacation journal and capture reflections when I am feeling most introspective. It’s like I’m writing a story about my life, one that no one except myself will ever read. It’s mostly non-fiction, and involves tons of thoughtful insights, meaningful analysis and short pep talks. I’ll date the entries and also read what I wrote previously. It’s by me, for me, and you’ll never see it. Both reading and writing in this journal is meaningful for me. It’s become a source of inspiration and what makes it that much more meaningful is knowing that it’s all come from inside of me (versus a book). **Washing Machine technique** What do a washing machine and our mind have in common? Once you put something it in, they both spin it around again, and again, and again, until they are stopped. I’ve learned how to stop the washing machine in my mind and it’s really simple: I make lists. I have not looked for the science on this yet but my experience has taught me that once I write something in my mind down, my mind relaxes (once again, writing it down by hand versus on a laptop or phone). I’ll start making lists of whatever is in my mind, and will fill up pages of small notebooks, writing unstructured lists of 40, 50, 60 “things” at a time. This technique takes a whole 3 minutes, not very much time at all. A lot of association is going on, where one item may trigger another item, which may trigger another item, and so on. Most of them have to do with my work but not all. And after those few minutes of writing it all out, my mind feels at ease. If in the evening before going to bed or first thing in the morning after waking up, I find my mind “spinning”, this technique has proven to be very useful. The most important thing about this technique is that I never read the lists. This is not a to-do list technique (as that may add additional weight to the mind). It’s a stop the washing machine in my mind technique and it works! **Freewriting technique** I first came across freewriting as a journaling technique just over one year ago, thanks to reading a book called The Artist’s Way, by Julia Cameron. It’s been the most impactful technique for me out of all 4 that I’m sharing with you and the one I recommend the most. You see, we have an editor in our mind, and everything we say, write or think passes through this editor. It’s constantly at work, editing everything and as a result, getting in the way of our thoughts. Freewriting is a technique to practice bypassing the editor momentarily and learning tap into a stream of consciousness and our true thoughts. The technique is really simple: - Commit to writing (by hand) at least 2 full pages (ideally 3) in one sitting - Do not let the pen or pencil STOP, continuous writing is a must, if you do not know what to write, write “I do not know what to write, I do not know what to write” - Do not read a single thing you wrote, throw it out (or recycle it) immediately What happens with this technique is I feel truly liberated to express anything and everything, without fear of judgement, not even from myself. The combination of a longer sitting (maybe 20–30 minutes of writing), not stopping the pen to think (bypassing the editor) and knowing that you’re not writing for an audience (not even yourself), unlocks a creative energy in me that I am not able to access easily otherwise. And the best part is that I almost always find clarity about any problem, business or personal, I may be dealing with at that time. It’s amazing as I’m reminded time and time again that the answers are sitting inside, I just need to learn how to access them. **Gratitude technique** Every morning after I meditate, I’ll make a super short entry in my gratitude journal about one specific thought, feeling, characteristic or intention I feel in that moment. Whatever comes up. The structure is simple: (1) date and (2) one sentence describing whatever came up. That’s it, it’s super short and takes a whole 17 seconds to do. It’s such a short time investment there can be no excuses for not doing it. And it’s been two years now so this has become habit. As I travel a lot, I make sure to the small travel-sized book with me. The most rewarding part of this technique is that every few months, I will flip through the pages and read what I wrote. Since it’s short, it does not take very much time at all and is meaningful, as it all came from me. And writing it down by hand versus typing it adds to the experience, as I see my own handwriting which reinforces that all of this came from me. --- ### 3 Ways I Got Started With Meditation Published: 2017-02-07 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/startmeditation/ So you want to meditate? I got started with meditation courtesy of Netflix, a few good books and my phone. Curiosity, knowledge and experience were the key ingredients for me at the beginning. When I first [took an interest in meditation](https://medium.com/find-focus/meditation-what-ive-learned-along-the-journey-a3144dbaa78e#.x1jpbz2kl) two and half years ago, it was not through practice. I started as an intellectual exercise, with my curiosity peaked and knowledge gained thanks to a few good resources. Then I gained some experience which changed everything. Here is how I got started with meditation… **1. Learning to be curious with Netflix.** Meditation has been an exploration of my mind, and what I’ve learned is that being curious about myself is the fuel that keeps the exploration going. That curiosity for me initially was cultivated through watching a few documentaries on Netflix, that at the time, got me thinking and asking questions that I had not before asked myself. **Happy:** Happy is a must-watch documentary, it challenges our Western capitalism inspired beliefs with qualitative and quantitative evidence and takes us outside of the bubble we live in. 2011, 1hr 15min. [View on Netflix](https://www.netflix.com/title/70243161) **10 Questions with the Dalai Lama:** A simple documentary of the film maker’s travels to learn more about the Dalai Lama and the history of the struggles that have affected many. 2006, 1h 26min. [View on Netflix](https://www.netflix.com/title/70072635). **I AM:** Tom Shadyac (director of Bruce Almighty, Ace Ventura and the Nutty Professor) opens up through a journey to answer what’s wrong with our world and how can we make it better. 2011, 1hr 20min. [Learn more](http://www.iamthedoc.com/). _None of these documentaries are about meditation._ They helped inspire me to be more curious, which was a key ingredient that helped me get started with meditation. **2. Gaining knowledge and getting started with meditation with a few good books.** The good news is there is no shortage of books available that talk about meditation and mindfulness practices. Here is what I recommend. **The Buddha Walks Into a Bar**: a modern and simple explanation of how to apply various mindfulness practices in our everyday life, with anecdotes and examples that are easy to relate to. The second book _The Buddha Walks Into the Office_ I found equally relatable. By Lodro Rinzler, [learn more](http://www.shambhala.com/the-buddha-walks-into-a-bar.html). **Search Inside Yourself:** from Google’s _jolly good fellow,_ this book from an engineer’s perspective is another practical guide on how to incorporate simple exercises and practices in your everyday life. By Chade-Meng Tan, [learn more](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8fcqrNO7so). **Buddha:** if you’ve ever been curious about the Buddha’s story from 2,500 years ago, this novel brings it to life in a way that’s engaging, interesting and fun By Deepak Chopra, [learn more](https://www.amazon.com/Buddha-Story-Enlightenment-Deepak-Chopra/dp/1441826572). **10% Happier:** I will admit I have not read this book yet but feel I have, based on the excerpts I have read and the various contexts I’ve seen it referenced in. The author talks about his own journey in dealing with stress. By Dan Harris, [learn more](http://www.10percenthappier.com/) (about the book and the app). **The Internet to the inner-net:** from a Google business leader explaining his experiences and practices to look inside, sharing practical examples of how everyday business life can be influenced. By Gopi Kallayil, [learn more](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9lPlor59ZY). **Meditation**: this was the first book I picked up (randomly found it on a family member’s bookshelf) and is a rare find. It broke down meditation into a simple path that was both inspiring and encouraging, especially in my early days. By Eknath Easwaran, [learn more](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/370997.Meditation). **3. Getting experience from apps.** I’ve taken [email off my phone](https://medium.com/find-focus/why-i-took-email-off-my-phone-31edb8a365f9#.cvm5l4rz7), [disconnect while away](https://medium.com/find-focus/connecting-by-disconnecting-while-away-eed4645df9b0#.79vxh2px0) and recently discovered an app that tracks [how long I spend on my phone](https://medium.com/@findfocus/the-one-app-you-have-to-download-now-761ae5cad521#.bywibby1w). You would think that I don’t like my phone very much based on all of this! Truth be told, technology is a useful tool when used responsibly. There are a number of apps available to help you get started with meditation that breaks it down and make it super simple. **[Headspace](https://www.headspace.com/)** is what I started using 2.5 years ago, and used it every day for six months. It helped me build consistency in my practice. It is a series of guided meditations, starting with just 10 minutes a day. And they build on each other, one day at a time. What I found most compelling about using a guided meditation app at the start was the ease of waking up in the morning, sitting down to meditate and just hitting play on the app. Nothing else required. The 10 minutes went by really fast and then turned into 20 minutes a day. Although I don’t regularly use Headspace anymore (as I’ve developed my own practice and techniques inspired by many different sources), it remains my #1 recommendation to anyone interested in starting. A few other apps that I’ve tried include Calm, Omvana, Sattva and Meditation Timer. --- ### What An Iceberg Taught Me About Humility Published: 2017-02-07 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/iceberg/ I recently found myself in Iceland for a few days, on a spontaneous last-minute adventure while en route to Europe for business. The country is stunning, it feels truly untouched by humans. It was an opportunity for me to [disconnect from technology](https://medium.com/find-focus/connecting-by-disconnecting-while-away-eed4645df9b0#.79vxh2px0) and reconnect with nature. Visiting the glaciers was awesome. As a quick aside, the glaciers are actually melting, which was made that much more real for me up close. The specific ones I visited are melting a rate of 300 meters per year and have created a giant lagoon that did not exist 30 years ago. Now if you subscribe to _the belief that there is goodness in everything_, thanks to climate change, I was fortunate to do a glacier lagoon tour, which was a beautiful experience. While on the tour in a tiny motor boat, I was surrounded by hundreds of icebergs, which sparked a real curiosity for me. Icebergs are simply a portion of a glacier that has fallen off and is floating in the sea, melting away slowly. I saw icebergs of all shapes and sizes. The smaller ones were the size of a basketball (I even picked one up out of the lagoon) while the larger ones looked like small buildings standing on the water. **A lot more beneath the surface** Driving right next to an iceberg, you can see how **90% of its volume is beneath the surface**. The depth and breadth underneath the surface is not easily seen until you are right next to one (_I can now see why the Titanic crashed into an iceberg without notice)._ I learned that the age of an iceberg can be seen by counting its layers that are each different colours. The darker blue layers are older (more densely packed ice with less oxygen), while the lighter layers are more recently formed. My curiosity growing, I found myself trying to convince the tour guide to let me jump onto one of the larger icebergs. After giving him my best pitch, he responded without pause, in a serious Icelandic tone, _“No, I’ve seen too many of them flip”_. Hold on, I said. What do you mean ‘flip’? He explained to me that based on the temperature of the water or the sea, different parts of the iceberg will melt at different rates. And then the iceberg may appear as if it’s floating above the sea, as it melts unevenly at the edges and starts to _rise_. And sometimes when the top gets too heavy and too big, then it flips, without warning, in a violent and dangerous manner. So if an iceberg gets too big above the surface, it is in its own nature to self-correct and restore its balance, such that 90% of its volume remains beneath the surface. After the tour, I went on my way and felt inspired from learning more about icebergs and the science behind them. And [while journaling](https://medium.com/find-focus/my-guide-to-journaling-4-techniques-i-practice-regularly-25d67217524c) later that day, I realized that **_icebergs can be a metaphor for humility in my life._** _To be like an iceberg is to practice humility in all walks of life._ A reminder to stay beneath the surface and not let pride overtake, distract or disorient me. Otherwise a flip may occur. **Experiencing humility in a modern world** I’ve felt a special connection with icebergs for 10 years now. When we started our business, our first company logo was an iceberg, meant to symbolize more beneath the surface. Even though we were right out of school and it was a time when very few young people started businesses, our skills, passion and energy provided a depth to us that was not evident at the surface. Just like an iceberg. About 15 months into our business full-time, we ran out of cash, and missed payroll for the first (and only) time in our history. With a team of 14 people, it was a stressful experience. I was overconfident about collecting receivables from big customers (who I now know are slow to pay!). _That was a flipping-of-the-iceberg moment for me._ Reflecting back, I feel grateful for that experience, as it taught me a valuable lesson and has given me the conviction to always run a healthy business (which is profitable now), with no chance of running out of cash! Running a business in digital media is a continuous lesson in humility. It is an industry that changes rapidly, is very competitive and faces macro economic forces out of my direct control or influence (kind of like the weather). As an entrepreneur who puts a lot of energy into my business,_ I sometimes find myself feeling entitled to things going my way._But if a competitor launches a shiny new feature, or if a customer decides they are taking their business elsewhere, or if a new deal takes just a little longer than expected to sign, I am reminded to be like an iceberg and practice humility. Last month, I got onto a stronger yoga kick than normal, taking classes or practicing on my own daily. Although it felt really good at the time, while on a hike during my Iceland adventure, I had a _flipping-of-the-iceberg_ moment when my left knee started to experience pain. I realized I may have overdone it over the past few weeks. **Taking the practice of humility forward** My connection with humility is weak when I may be feeling lost, confused, FOMO (fear of missing out) or generally ungrateful. I know that in these moments, remembering to be like an iceberg will change how I feel. Humility for me is knowing who I am, accepting myself and reality as it is. It is knowing what I stand for and being comfortable in my own skin. It is not lowering myself or thinking of myself as worth less in any way and it is not seeking the admiration of others. It is remembering to stay beneath the surface and that if the top gets too big, everything may flip without warning. **I feel humility is a state, of mind, of being, of presence.** _It is not something to be achieved, but something to be cultivated._ And remembering to be like an iceberg is how I intend to continue to do so. --- ### Learning To Be Fearless Published: 2017-02-07 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/fearless/ I took a long weekend for a random, last-minute getaway to the Hudson Valley. It is absolutely beautiful and it was also a chance for me to [connect by disconnecting](https://medium.com/find-focus/connecting-by-disconnecting-while-away-eed4645df9b0#.a55hsk53b). During a day hike at Bonticou Crag, I came across my first rock scramble. What is a rock scramble? Well, it’s a way up a mountain that involves scrambling up rocks, using your hands! This particular rock scramble is 150 feet up, which is high enough to make you wonder if it’s a good idea or not to climb. What I was reminded of was that there is no one way. There is no right or correct path. The “rocks” are scrambled randomly and it is on you to find your own way. That is your journey. Every single person who has gone this journey has taken their own path, no two paths the same. It is useless to even try to describe the path to someone, as they will end up taking their own (or worse, put themselves at risk by blindly following your path versus creating their own). At many times during the journey (up the rock scramble), I was convinced it was not safe and I should return down. I was talking myself “down” versus “up”. Consistently. And agreeing with myself that it’s okay to not climb it because I was feeling scared. I found myself wishing someone else was with me. Or that anyone random was also doing it. That would make me feel safe and feel that it’s okay to try. I was looking outside for a leader when the whole while, the leader was sitting inside of me. When I looked way up at the top, at the steep rocks, I could only help but be filled with feelings of fear, anxiety and doubt. The path was not clear at first, or even later actually. I found myself confused and uncertain when trying to plan too far ahead. **_Focused on being Fearless_** I was most at ease and felt safe and comfortable when I focused on “the next step”. Setting small, incremental goals as my focus. Bringing my attention to what was immediately in front of me, versus trying to plan out the entire journey. Staying focused on [“single tasking” (versus multi-tasking)](https://medium.com/find-focus/why-you-need-to-stop-multitasking-8d4ada6eb47#.zaysnn25b) was paramount. What I experienced during those moments when I brought my attention to the next step, were feelings of momentum, energy, enthusiasm, excitement and a sense of fearlessness. I saw progress along the path, even though I was not sure how in the world I was going to make it to the top. I discovered new paths up the mountain that I could not see before when trying to plan the entire trip in my head. My perspective changed (literally) as a made my way up the mountain, and new paths opened up that I could not see before. And focusing only on the next step, I ended up at the top of the mountain without even realizing it. We often have a vision of where we want to go but will get intimidated by not knowing how to get there. And because the path to achieve the vision may not be clear from the start, we often don’t even try. Being fearless is taking that first step, and the next step, and the next step, even though the full path may not be clear. Being fearless is to trust that if you continue to take the next step, one step at a time you’ll get closer to realizing your vision. --- ### What I've Learned About Meditation Published: 2017-02-07 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/meditationlessons/ Curious about meditation but haven’t yet committed? I’ve committed to a daily meditation practice for the past 2 years and have noticed everything around me change, for the better. Although I continue to build my own practice, I have learned a lot along the way through much hard work and experience. **Learning to watch the stream flow** A common myth is that meditation is about making your mind blank and stopping all thoughts. Our mind is always flowing with thought, after thought, after thought. And at times with thoughts about thoughts! It feels like there is no end, which can make the thought (ha!) of not having any thoughts feel like an insurmountable mountain not worth even trying to climb. The good news is that meditation is not about “not thinking”. Think of the thoughts in our mind like the flow of water in a river. Forcefully trying to stop the flow of water (i.e. to “stop thinking”) would be like placing a really big rock in the river. And then another rock, and another until you have a barricade of rocks to slow down the flow of water. That barricade will only be temporary though, as the built up pressure from the flow of water being blocked will push over the rocks placed in its way, and the water will flow again. Our thoughts are the same way, they are always flowing. Learning to meditate is not about trying to block the stream of water, instead it is about learning to lift yourself out of the stream, sit on the river bank and watch the stream go by without getting caught up with it. **A positive and priceless ROI** The endless benefits of a consistent meditation practice keep my commitment and passion strong for this in my life, which I feel grateful for. A bit of what I’ve experienced… **Getting fit** Just like my body needs exercise, so does my mind. And meditation is exercise for my mind. It feels challenging at times, but I still do it with the understanding that I am getting stronger and sharper thanks to the exercise. This is why I refer to meditation as a “practice”, just like you may practice a sport, a dance, an instrument or any other skill. During meditation (i.e. exercise for my mind), there are various techniques I practice. In all of them, I learn to hold my attention on something specific over extended periods of time (e.g. 10 minutes). It may be my breath, a visual object (real or imaginary), a verbal saying (inside or outside voice) or anything else. It does not actually matter to me what is being used as the object of concentration during practice, as I know I’m getting fit every moment thanks to it. **Increasing focus** The ability to concentrate on a singular activity for a long stretch of time is quickly becoming a valued skill in our super distracted culture. The endless notifications, emails, social media updates and messages are like mini pickpockets continually stealing our attention from us. My meditation practice has been the foundational source of strength and conviction to combat these mini pickpockets. That’s why I’ve taken email off my phone (post), disconnect while away (post) and use Slack versus being used by Slack (post). All of this keeps me focused. **Saving time** Let’s say someone says something to me that upsets me, and I react, with feelings of anger and anxiety that arise inside. Previously, I’d hold on to and be distracted by carrying these emotions for say 8 hours before calming down. Now I’ll hold onto them for maybe 6 hours thanks to my practice. Those are 2 extra hours I’ve gotten back for my peace of mind! And with continued practice, those 8 hours will become 4 hours and then 2 hours, and then 20 minutes and then 2 minutes and maybe even 2 seconds. Thanks to a consistent practice, I have experienced a greater sense of calm and more patience at times when it matters most. **Taking the first steps** When I first took an interest in meditation two and half years ago, it was not through practice. I started by watching a few documentaries and reading books. At an intellectual level, I found it stimulating and my curiosity was peaked. However it was not until I started to practice (a few months later) that I really understood at an experiential level what this is all about. If you’re reading this part of my post, congratulations, this means you’re able to stay focused and are now a candidate for meditation. --- ### 7 Ways I Use Slack Without Losing My Mind Published: 2017-02-07 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/slack/ We were an early adopter of Slack at Polar. We started to use it 2 years ago and the adoption within our 40-person team has been so strong, we now have **no internal email **at the company. Imagine that? When I share my passion for Slack as our internal collaboration platform with peers and friends in the industry, it’s rarely met with the same excitement. The most common objection I hear is feelings of being overwhelmed by the firehose of information. I can understand how left to its own, Slack can be overwhelming as it exposes far more information at a pace of communication that is not seen within a professional environment. Here is a memo I recently wrote for my team on how I use Slack and still feel good about it. **How I manage Slack (versus getting managed by Slack)** While adopting Slack has solved for the email overload issue most companies face, another issue can get introduced: Slack overload. It is easy to get overwhelmed and feel anxious with our use of Slack, especially because we use it **a lot.** We have a culture of awareness at Polar, making a strong effort to help make everyone aware of absolutely everything. An equally strong effort is needed to balance the amount of information we make available. Every conversation someone has with a customer (partner), prospect, press or busdev partner is captured and brief meeting notes are shared in Slack, available to the entire team. Every support ticket received from a partner, every project that is being worked on, every Jira ticket change, our outstanding accounts receivables, they are all shared within Slack. We have even built a Slack bot called Newsbot that filters relevant industry news into a single feed into Slack (so no more industry email newsletters for our team). So how does one keep up and thrive in this environment? Slack at Polar is a microcosm of the internet. And now 2 years into this, I’ve adopted a few practices along the way that support me greatly and keep me a strong believer in Slack (over email) as an internal collaboration and communication tool. Here is a look inside how I use Slack at Polar. **1. Notifications are evil** They really are. I’m going to pen a separate post soon on my passionate hate for notifications, but in summary, if you have notifications (for Slack, email or anything), it’s not your fault. They are designed into the user experience by these products that have an economic model that hinges on stealing your attention. Slack, Facebook, Gmail, Snapchat and others have all commercialized stealing your attention. If you stopped checking these sites, apps and services, they would make less money. **My advice is to be fearless and try it for a day. Turn off your Slack notifications for 1 day and see what happens.** Feeling fearless? Turn them off now. _(And I’m going to be unapologetic about pointing this out to our team now, as I’ve noticed that I get distracted by your notifications on your laptop while you are presenting something to me)._ **2. Mobile use: none-to-little** Although I have the Slack app on my phone, I do not use it. The rare occasions when I have to look something up while running around New York, I’ll reference the app. Those are few and far between, I feel grateful to not have the habit of checking Slack on my phone. This is related to why I took email off on my phone (and if you have not at least tried this practice yet, give it a try!). **3. Turn off email notifications** Similar to notifications, these are not needed. To be fair, I turned this off before even giving it a try, but we use Slack to get away and reduce the burden of internal email, having more email makes no sense to me. If I’m going to take the time to read an email about all the internal Slack activity, I may as well just open Slack and read it there, that way I can click on relevant links and provide replies (or emojis) right then and there. Btw, how is “send me email notifications once every 15 minutes” even an option from Slack? That’s terrible! **4. Star messages as my to-do list** Often I will read a message, acknowledge it in my head that I need to do something about it (respond, or tell someone else, or read a link) but do not feel ready to take that action right away. What I do is _star the message_ (by hovering over the time stamp, a star icon appears that you simply click on). The starred messages become my to-do list or backlog. And once or twice a week, I’ll take some time to work through things on this list (which is always a fun feeling to “uncheck the star”, the equivalent of crossing things off on a list). All of my starred messages are available by clicking the star icon in the top right-hand corner of the app. Here is a snapshot of what the starred messages backlog looks like in the top right corner of the app (it has 17 messages). **5. Star channels** Staring channels prioritizes them on my sidebar, which influences where my attention goes. I’ve stared 7 channels, 4 of them public, 3 of them private, and they probably represent 80% of my Slack usage. These are the channels I will look at daily and prioritize. Having them at the top helps keep me focused and bring my attention to what’s needed. All of the other channels are below the starred list, and I do use them but do not feel the need to go into them constantly! Even if something is bolded as unread, I don’t have to go into it right away. Convinced? To star a channel, open it, go near the top to the channel name and click the star icon that appears once you hover over the channel name. Here is my sidebar: **6. Mute channels** This is really simple, yet powerful. I mute channels that have more activity but the chance of it being directly related to me is low. The high-volume and high-activity channels are muted. The channels where I am the de facto leader or actively drive from a day-to-day perspective are generally unmuted. The channels that I’m a contributor to but may not be necessarily leading are muted. If someone @kunal my name or even mentions my name ‘kunal’ in a muted channel, the channel name will still get highlighted in my sidebar, so don’t worry, I’m seeing messages you direct at me. You can see in the previous screenshot I have a combination of muted and unmuted channels (note: even some channels that I’ve ‘starred’ I still have muted, because I know I will go into them on a frequent basis and don’t need to be notified). Convinced you want to mute more channels? It’s really simple. Type ‘/mute’ in the message bar of that channel (public or private), and it’s not muted. And to unmute, type ‘/unmute’. **7. Only open the Slack app when I need it** This is a recent experiment that I’m really enjoying (maybe because it’s new?). My default behaviour now is to keep the Slack app on my Macbook closed, and only open it when I need it. It’s hard initially to change your behaviour here, but well worth the effort. Pro tip: close the Slack app when you’re in a meeting, especially if you’re calling into a meeting remotely (from one of our global offices or if you’re working from home). You will be far more focused and attentive, which everyone else will appreciate. **Bonus tip: keyboard shortcut to find a channel** To quickly go into a channel, I use the keyboard shortcut ‘⌘’ + ‘K’ (‘⌘’ + ‘T’ also works) which brings up the channel finder where you can type in the channel. This is very helpful! **In close** Make Slack work for you versus feeling you work for Slack. Some of my advice you may or may not agree with, that does not matter. My key message is to make Slack your own. Take the initiative to learn how you work best and stay focused. It will not automatically help you focus, quite the opposite. These tools are designed to steal your attention. I’d love to hear your suggestions and feedback on how you make Slack work for you (versus feeling that you’re working for Slack) at Polar. Kunal SHARE --- ### Willpower: A Finite Resource Not To Underestimate Published: 2017-02-07 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/willofpower/ Willpower is a finite resource, and every action we take will either deplete it, replenish it or have a neutral impact on it. Understanding and learning how to use this finite resource effectively is something I’ve recently become curious about and with the help of a research and experiment driven book (Willpower by Roy Baumeister), I have become more aware of how willpower impacts everything. **Making decisions requires willpower** I make decisions continually throughout the day, whether those decisions impact one person (myself) or many people (my team, my friends, my community), understanding that I may make a different decision about the same topic based on my willpower at that moment is fascinating. A lot of research has been done about decision fatigue. Making decisions requires willpower, because we have limited willpower, we can make a limited number of decisions. And once we’ve exhausted our willpower, we’ve exhausted our ability to make decisions. Food and sleep are the main ways to replenish willpower. The body gets glucose through the food we consume and our glucose levels fluctuate highly throughout the day. Before a meal our glucose levels are likely the lowest, which means they are also the worst times to make any decisions. Making important decisions should be done when we have the willpower to do so, and decisions should be avoided in all other circumstances. **Change requires willpower** At the start of the quarter or year, I often take a step back to reflect and get energized about life. As a result, I will set many intentions for the upcoming time period. What I often forget though is the reality that any change takes extra willpower. For example, let’s say I set an intention to a) meditate every morning, b) engage in regular physical exercise, c) cook often and d) read every night before going to bed. If I attempt to introduce all four of these new activities at the same time, it’s unlikely I’ll be successful initially and I’ll feel like a failure, despite best efforts to focus my willpower on all of these activities. An alternative approach is to focus on introducing only one major change at a time, and letting go of everything else. This could be getting into the habit of meditating every morning at first, and not worrying about if I’m exercising, cooking or reading. Initially, building the practice to meditate daily will deplete willpower (which is fine), however maybe after a few months of practice, it will have a neutral impact (or even a replenishing effect). And that’s when it’s time to introduce the next major habit change, like exercising regularly. Focus on one major habit or lifestyle change at a time, until it no longer feels like work. **Habits conserve willpower** Building habits reduces the amount of willpower we need to perform the very activities we are trying to make habitual. For example, for years I did not floss my teeth consistently and literally every night I made a decision on if I was going to or not. And then I decided to commit to flossing every night, not because I felt it was better for me (even though it is), but because I didn’t want to have to make that decision every night (which likely consumes more willpower than the act of flossing itself). Our Personal Best Practices are all of the little decisions we make, like choosing what to wear in the morning, what to eat for breakfast, how to get to work, where to sit on the train, and so on. All of these somewhat mundane, repetitive and (what I feel to be) lower value decisions can be made either consciously (willpower depletion) or unconsciously (neutral impact on willpower). We can use habits as a way to conserve willpower, allowing us to use that finite resource for what we value the most (versus the least). **Learn to effort box** Between running a company, traveling every week, investing time to meditate, yoga and journal, hanging out with family and friends, and writing this blog, learning to effort box is valuable for me. To effort box is a practice where I predetermine how much effort (willpower) a specific activity is worth before engaging in it, and maintaining awareness throughout to check if I’m within that threshold. Think of effort as a combination of time and context. Time is an objective measure in minutes or hours (easy to estimate) but context is a subjective measure of “does this makes sense to do right now”. Context is important as that the same activity will take a different amount of effort based on when I choose to do it. Writing a blog post on a relaxed Sunday morning will take me one hour, whereas attempting to write the same blog post on a Thursday evening could easily take me three hours (as my willpower is depleted). Within this practice is the belief that done is better than perfect, and that if I have to choose two of working smart, hard and long, choosing to work smart and hard is better for me than hard and long or smart and long. **When simple feels complex** When a car is running low on fuel, the little gas tank icon lights up to make us aware. Similarly, there are many indicators when our willpower is depleted. The biggest one is when simple feel complex. For example, if routine decisions like writing an email to a partner, responding to a question from someone on my team on Slack or choosing a restaurant for dinner that night feels difficult, confusing or takes a lot longer than it should, that’s a sign that my willpower is depleted and I’m running low on fuel. Other symptoms of willpower depletion (based on the research and my own experience) include being more easily irritated, reacting unconsciously, impulse decisions or a general feeling of frustration. When we become aware that our willpower may be depleted, the best thing for us to do is to not make any decisions and find the nearest fuel stop (by way of eating or sleeping). Our future self will look back and be very grateful we chose to take care of ourselves. **Cut out the noise** The seemingly simple actions of checking your phone, filtering notifications in real-time, opening your inbox, going through Slack, browsing Facebook or swiping through Snapchat all consume an incredible amount of willpower. And that’s why you likely feel drained after spending a few minutes indulging in the noise. Thousands of micro-decisions are being made a daily basis for one person, trying to filter out what’s relevant and important at any moment, and this habit pattern to be always connected, always checking and always concerned is depleting our willpower. If you’ve been reading my blog, you’ll know that I took email off my phone 5 years ago, disconnect while I’m away, use Slack without losing my mind, avoid multitasking and use a screen tracking app to help make me aware of how much time I spend on my phone (which is not very much at all). After spending time learning about the research behind willpower, I have even more conviction on the necessity to cut out the noise, so that I may continue to use the finite amount of willpower I have effectively. --- ### Time Audit: How I Invested 2,504 Hours Published: 2017-02-07 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/timeaudit/ **In 2016, I invested 2,504 hours in work, **which is 29% of the available 8,760 total hours we all have in one year. And approx. 237 days, or 65%, of the available 365 days I did some work. _TIME IS MY MOST VALUED RESOURCE, MORE SO THAN MONEY. IT IS EASY TO TRACK MONEY, BUT TRACKING TIME HAS BECOME MORE VALUABLE FOR ME NOW. I BELIEVE THAT AWARENESS [IS THE KEY TO EVERYTHING](https://medium.com/find-focus/why-awareness-is-the-answer-to-everything-70ed2fea6812#.ys079gaws) AND WITHOUT THE AWARENESS OF HOW I’M INVESTING MY MOST VALUED RESOURCE (TIME), I HAVE NO IDEA IF I’M MAKING DECISIONS THAT ALIGN WITH MY VALUES AND INTENTIONS ON A DAY-TO-DAY BASIS._ At the start of 2016, I did my first [time audit](https://medium.com/find-focus/a-lesson-in-understanding-where-i-spend-my-time-87fd5218be1f#.nfx9rujzy) (for Q4 2015) and it was an eye-opening exercise. I realized I was not aware of the realities of where I was investing my work time and fooling myself. This experience motivated me to track my work time all throughout 2016, which I did by making an entry at the end of each week in a [simple spreadsheet](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/10fCNIBhS6m3IumfGwox5_mXnud3NnRRolBCUJcpPQk4/edit?usp=sharing) pulling data from my calendar. **58.2 hours per week is on average how much I invested in work.** Here is a histogram (that looks like a New York skyline, where I also invested a lot of time, more on that below) of how many hours I invested per week throughout 52 weeks in 2016. I invested a total of 2,504 hours in work last year. Taking out weeks I invested away from work (i.e. time off on vacation, etc.), that turns into an average of 58.2 hours per week. I normally did some work on one day during the weekend (i.e. either one of Saturday or Sunday), so if I worked an average of 5.5 days per week, that is **10.6 hours per day.** _Reminder: the sample size for this data set is the entire year. I was consistent in tracking my investment for all 52 weeks._ **_48% of my days are invested on-the-road._** Only 52% of my time was invested in Toronto, although this surprised me as I thought it was even less. Perhaps being on the road constantly changed my perception of how much I was away, in that those days feel longer and stretched out where days in our Toronto office may go by faster. The “other” category is primarily London (where we have an office) and a few days in Silicon Valley. **_57% invested in meetings with no single category more than 22%._** Quick legend of what is included in each of the above categories: - **Sales Meetings** is time invested with prospective customers - **Partner Meetings** is time invested with current customers (who we refer to as “partners” internally at Polar) - **Internal Meetings** is time invested with my team - **Planning Activities **is time invested on my laptop, working in presentations, documents, spreadsheets or Slack on activities related to the organization and strategy - **GTM Activities** is time invested in all go-to-market activities such as presentations, demo and meeting prep, press activities and various marketing programs - **Corp Activities** is time invested in building the corporation, including recruitment, business development and time with our Board Here is the breakdown by category, by week. I invested a lot in other people. Makes sense given the leadership role that I play both in our industry and with our team. I enjoy it and get a lot of energy from it. 61% of my time was invested in market-facing activities, which also makes sense given my strengths and where I think I can contribute the most to our organization. I’m proud that my total time invested in internal meetings was 21.5%, this is down considerably from 33% in Q4 2015 from my first time audit. We [set the intention to reduce internal meetings](https://medium.com/find-focus/why-i-m-killing-meetings-at-polar-da0e29715ee2#.odn1pu9ai) at Polar in 2016 and our collective team data shows [we were successful](http://polar.me/blog/dumped-extraneous-internal-meetings-heres-looked/) in doing so. **_9 weeks invested “on the business” in 2016._** As an entrepreneur and leader, **when I invest time away from work, it really means that I am investing time to work “on the business” versus “in the business”**. When time away, it could be on vacation, courses or adventures ([always disconnected, of course](https://medium.com/find-focus/connecting-by-disconnecting-while-away-eed4645df9b0#.79vxh2px0)), my thoughts will float towards my vision for the market and business, our strategy to continue to grow and assessing how our values are guiding our behaviours and actions. Also, it provides a chance to re-energize, re-focus, re-balance and reset for myself. In 2016, I invested the equivalent of 215 business days (43 weeks) “in the business” and 45 business days (9 weeks) “on the business”. And the 45 days were spread out somewhat evenly throughout the year which I was proud of. _Note that the 45 business days away included statutory holidays (given our global offices in Canada, US, UK and Australia, I found that I did not stick to statutory holidays for any one country consistently)._ **9 weeks away sounds like a lot, and it is. **I invested in taking time away more than anyone else on my team last year. And I doubt anyone came even close to me. [Taking time away (and disconnecting)](https://medium.com/find-focus/connecting-by-disconnecting-while-away-eed4645df9b0#.79vxh2px0) has become so important for me and I value the investment greatly. We have a flexible time away and vacation guideline at Polar, and leading by example is a key ingredient to cultivating the culture we are trying to build at our company. **_Your turn._** I continue to track my time investment (and have changed up the categories for 2017) and encourage you to [do your own as well](https://medium.com/find-focus/a-lesson-in-understanding-where-i-spend-my-time-87fd5218be1f#.nfx9rujzy). Here is a [simple spreadsheet template](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/10fCNIBhS6m3IumfGwox5_mXnud3NnRRolBCUJcpPQk4/edit?usp=sharing) (make a copy of it) that you can use yourself. _Note: There are many apps available that can help do this automatically but I prefer the “traditional approach” of doing it manually as it reinforces the theme of awareness, which is the point of this in the first place._ In addition to tracking how I invest my time at work, I also track my phone usage (thanks to an app I’ve become obsessed with) and my sleep and habits. --- ### Look Into The Eyes Of A Butterfly Published: 2017-02-07 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/butterfly/ _Last weekend I was on a hike with a friend just north of the city and although I was immersed in nature, which was peaceful and quiet, my inner nature was anything but calm. My mind was racing with thoughts of the past week and flooded with anticipation of the weeks ahead._ We sat down by a small lake to take in the calming environment when a butterfly came and sat down on my hand. I was still and so was she. I brought my hand up close to my face for a closer look at this visitor and noticed it’s big beautiful black round eyes. I had never seen the eyes of a butterfly, never even had the thought cross my mind before. LOOKING INTO THE EYES OF A BUTTERFLY IS A METAPHOR FOR STILLNESS FOR ME. Cultivating stillness in our physical, mental and emotional presence these days may feel challenging. When was the last moment you felt still? With your body, mind and emotions? **Cultivating Stillness** In a state of stillness, physically, mentally and emotionally, I continue to become more aware and connect with my own reality. Both my own inner reality and the reality outside of me. I learn to become aware of the beauty that exists in what is already there and can’t help but feel grateful. Grateful for the people, experiences and knowledge that I get to enjoy in life. The world may seem like a scary place these days but taking a moment to be still, I feel that there is a lot that is right. WITH STILLNESS, I START TO EXPERIENCE THE WISDOM THAT MY OWN INNER TEACHER AND GUIDE HAS TO OFFER ME AND STOP LOOKING OUTSIDE FOR ANSWERS, VALIDATION, BEAUTY, CONTENTMENT AND CLARITY. Strengthening the capability and capacity for stillness through practice is thanks to the many tools I’ve come to rely on. These days, my tools include [meditation](https://medium.com/find-focus/meditation-what-ive-learned-along-the-journey-a3144dbaa78e#.yrd3zkt1z), yoga, [journaling](https://medium.com/find-focus/my-guide-to-journaling-4-techniques-i-practice-regularly-25d67217524c) and reading. For others it may be walking, running, hiking, or swimming. THE SPECIFIC TOOLS MATTER LESS, WHAT MATTERS MORE FROM MY EXPERIENCE IS THE CONTINUITY OF PRACTICE. Whenever you may be feeling stressed, overwhelmed, anxious or confused, choose to take a moment to _look into the eyes of a butterfly_. And with this feeling of stillness, you may feel more grounded, stable and strong. [With greater clarity](https://medium.com/find-focus/connecting-by-disconnecting-while-away-eed4645df9b0#.79vxh2px0), you can now reset and choose where you place your focus as you set your intentions for the moments that lay ahead. --- ### How Elevators Help Anchor Me Published: 2017-01-01 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/elevators/ I’ve been practicing for a few years now. What do I mean by practice? Activities that help me feel grounded, calm and centered, like meditation, yoga, journaling and reading. For you, it may be running, swimming, cooking, cleaning or something else. The specific activity you practice matters less, it’s more about the state of mind you find yourself in while practicing. My experience with practice is that it is generally scheduled, planned or on my mental to-do list. And while I’m consistent with practice, I have felt a stark difference in my state of mind while I’m practicing and while I’m not. This observation sparked me thinking about what a more integrated practice could look like, to realize the benefits of feeling calm and focused throughout the day, not only when I scheduled it. **Enter awareness anchors** The solution I came up with is something I’m calling an awareness anchor. It is identifying something that I encounter in my daily lifestyle that I can use as a signal and reminder to check in with myself. It serves as an anchor to direct my awareness in the present moment. Elevators are what I started with. This means that whenever I find myself waiting for an elevator, riding an elevator or leaving an elevator, I’m using these moments to check in with myself. Checking in could mean paying attention to the sensation of breathing, a light body scan or asking myself how am I feeling right now. My natural behaviour while waiting, riding and leaving an elevator has changed thanks to this practice. I am not on my phone getting distracted anymore. I am not thinking about the last meeting or conversation I had. I am not anticipating the next conversation I will have or planning the many things I have to do. I am trying to just be present, with myself in these brief moments. Using an awareness anchor several times throughout my day has become like a fuel stop along the journey. Rather than feeling rushed mentally all the time and waiting until the end of the day to refuel, this has become a more sustainable way to integrate a mindful practice throughout the day. And taking just a few moments to check in with myself while transitioning from one activity to the next, I find myself able to focus and concentrate better, and at times gain new insights I may otherwise have not have had. **Pick one!** If this practice sounds at all interesting to you, give it a try! And notice what changes. To inspire you to identify your own awareness anchor, here are some additional examples that people on my team, family and friends who have adopted this practice have shared with me: - **Water:** pouring or drinking. - **Birds:** sight, sound and images - **Coffee:** every sip or the act of preparing it - **Space:** the transition from an indoors to outdoors and vice-versa - **Doors:** the act of opening and closing a door - **Transit:** riding the subway, taking a taxi or entering/leaving a train The practice of checking in with yourself throughout the day is simple, practical and can be helpful. If you find it valuable after giving it a try, share with me what your awareness anchor is! --- ### Why Awareness Does Not Discriminate Published: 2017-01-01 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/awareness/ I have been practicing awareness using several mindfulness tools (including meditation, yoga, and journaling) consistently for three years now and what I’ve learned along my journey is that awareness does not discriminate. As I strengthen my capacity for awareness, I have realized that I become more aware of the good AND the bad. The pleasant AND the unpleasant. The wanted AND the unwanted. For example, if I’m doing a body scan, I will not only become aware of the parts of my body that are feeling relaxed and strong, but also of the parts that are feeling tense and weak. **The Awareness – Acceptance Connection** Although many of the resources I’ve benefited from focus on strengthening awareness through various tools, techniques and processes, what I have found has been missing for me (and maybe you) is the understanding that with an increase in awareness, I need an increase in acceptance. When I am not able to accept what I have become aware of in the moment, I find myself feeling worse about my current reality. For example, here is an observation that you may have experienced. Today, we are more aware of the world around us than ever before. Every act of terrorism, natural disaster, gun violence and so on. This is thanks to social media, smartphones and the attention economy that generates an almost infinite amount of content. A byproduct of this increased awareness may be a feeling that the world is becoming a dark, scary and deadly place. However this could not be further from the truth. The data tells us that there are fewer fatalities and fewer acts of violence than ever before. Our world is actually becoming safer. We may understand this at an academic level, yet our lived experience day to day makes us feel otherwise. We have not matched the increase in awareness we now have with an increase in acceptance. **Awareness and Personal Vice** Let me give you another example: dealing with a personal vice. I don’t have many vices in my life right now, however one that I am struggling with is pizza. It may sound trivial but it illustrates the point well. I spend a lot of time in New York, where truly amazing pizza is readily available, and I’m eating out often. This combination is a perfect storm where I find myself eating pizza three, to four and sometimes five times a week. Now the challenge is that I am aware of my consumption habits but have not yet accepted them. It is this disconnect between awareness and acceptance that can cause tension and anxiety. Now I know the way I feel about it will change, I will either choose to eat less pizza (unlikely) or choose to finally accept the reality of this very serious situation! **Practicing Awareness as Part of Your Business** In business, there are many opportunities to practice acceptance alongside awareness. We use Slack heavily at Polar (so much so that no one sends anyone any emails, imagine having no internal emails). Everything is shared and we bias towards public channels. In a team of 30 people, we have 160 channels. Every partner we work has a channel, where we post meeting notes, automated reports and questions. Every product feature we build has a channel, where we collaborate, solve issues and support each other well. Every conversation I have with someone external is captured with a short post, so everyone knows what I know. All of this to say, we consciously have raised awareness for our team. This practice of sharing everything has also taught me that awareness does not discriminate. We not only share good news, but also bad news. Believe it or not, sometimes there are issues with the product, or partners are upset or even choose to work with a competitor, or we lose a deal we’ve been pitching. And all of this is shared. Without our team’s ability to accept what we are consciously making them aware of, you can imagine how easy it would be for people to fixate only on the negative and start to needlessly worry or feel anxious. Transparency leads to trust and I trust my team to be able to accept what they become aware of, good or bad. I have understood that acceptance and awareness need to go hand-in-hand. Another term used for acceptance is equanimity. Which is about choosing how to feel in the moment. When I become aware of something new, I can delegate (blame) some external force for how I feel. Or I can choose to accept that it will change (or the way I feel about it will change). Or I can choose to take ownership and responsibility for it, and lead the change from a place of acceptance, calm, peace and focus. --- ### Unsubscribe Me Please Published: 2016-02-07 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/unsubscribe/ I recently took a few days off in Copenhagen (disconnected, of course) and absolutely loved the experience! It was my first time to a Scandinavian country and I was struck by how calm, peaceful, relaxed and joyful everyone was. Out for dinner one night, I noticed something unique: people were actually talking with each other versus looking down at their phones. It was a beautiful site and as someone who lives between New York, Toronto and London, the cultural difference was clear. Checking for email is a common reason why many have become addicted to the small screen and find themselves constantly distracted, unable to focus and challenged to concentrate. A few years ago, I started a simple practice to remove all junk and email not directly sent to me in an automated way from my inbox, and I’m sure it has saved me thousands of hours. **The practice is simple: setting up an email filter that automatically removes any email with the word “unsubscribe” in it. **If you don’t know how, I have detailed instructions below, including why I care about this. **I dislike the way we use email** This is why I took email off my phone (5 years ago). The first email ever sent was by Ray Tomlinson, a programmer, in 1971 to connect information from one computer to another computer (both of which were right beside each other). Email is from the stone ages, or at least the way we use it (which has not evolved that much over the past 40 years). Email was not designed to facilitate efficient and effective communication at the scale we now operate, with billions of people connected on tens of billions of devices. At Polar, we have cut out all internal email. That’s right, no one at my company sends an email to me or to one another. All of our communication and collaboration happens on Slack. **Spam costs me real money** A few stats to that quantify the impact: $20 Billion annually is the cost to businesses in decreased productivity in the US alone due to spam and unwanted emails, based on estimates from Radicati Research Group.$1,934 is the average loss per employee annually because of spam, according to Nucleus Research estimates.58 billion junk emails will be sent every day within four years from now and the costs will rise to $198 billion annually globally, with some researchers estimating that the costs may be as high as $257 billion based on the growth of spam.43% of adults in the US report that more than half of their emails are spam related, according to Blue Kangaroo research. This is why I’ve taken responsibility of this issue at an individual level, and you should to. **Taking back control in 7steps** The practice that I follow to take back control of my focus, via better control of my inbox, is simple. Creating an email filter that will automatically move any incoming emails that have the word “unsubscribe” in them to a separate folder. Here is a simple 7 step guide to doing this in Gmail: _1. Open Gmail. Click the ‘gear’ icon in the top right hand corner, and **click on Settings.**_ _2. Click on **Filters and Blocked Addresses.**_ _3. Click on **Create a new filter.**_ _4. Type **“unsubscribe”** in the Has the words field and click **“Create filter with this search”.**_ _5. Check **“Apply the label”** and then **“New label…”.**_ _6. Type **“Remove”** and click **Create.**_ _7. Click **Create filter**._ And you’re done! You will see a folder in your inbox called Remove where any email that is spam or unwanted will likely go. My best practice to quickly scan this folder every one or two weeks (at most), and I am reminded every time how grateful I feel to not have to stare at all of these messages throughout my waking, productive and focused hours.Now you too are unsubscribed. --- ### Why You Need To Stop Multitasking Published: 2016-02-07 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/multitasking/ When we think we are multitasking, we are really “switch tasking”. And switch tasking has a real negative impact on our productivity, effectiveness, safety and perhaps most importantly, happiness. Having greater awareness of the impact of switch tasking has influenced the thousands of micro-decisions I make throughout my day that ultimately impact how I feel. **How multitasking and switch tasking are different** Multitasking is when we are doing **multiple tasks aligned to the same outcome**. Driving a car involves checking the rearview mirror, watching the odometer, looking at the side mirrors, checking blind spots, oh and watching the road ahead of you through the windshield. Cooking a meal in similar, in that the stove may be on, while you are chopping vegetables, wiping the counter and following a recipe. Switch tasking is when our attention is on **different tasks that are not directly related** to the same outcome. Going from working on a project, to reading something on Slack, to eavesdropping on the conversation next to you, to eating lunch, to checking Facebook, to answering an email and back to the project is switch tasking. Our brain can handle multitasking. _Our brain does not do so well switch tasking _and there is a real cost to switch tasking. **Never achieving a flow state** Switch tasking gets in the way of achieving a flow state for the mind. This is when we are able to really focus and do our best work. As knowledge workers in the 21st century, our contributions rely on our ability to use our mind effectively to solve problems. And a flow state not only makes solving problems easier but also much more enjoyable. _WE ENJOY WORK IN A STATE OF FLOW BECAUSE IT NO LONGER FEELS LIKE WORK._ Research shows that it takes [25 minutes](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/05/opinion/sunday/a-focus-on-distraction.html?_r=0) to return to a task that we get distracted from. And yes, there are _many_ distractions in our day, including email, Slack, notifications, social media, people physically walking up to you, nearby chatter, bio breaks, food and snacks, and of course, meetings. I absolutely love [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAKgKb00WNI) from a product marketing manager at Google who speaks about managing time. Really nails it that with focus, we can be effective, productive and happy. Developing creative insight happens best for me when my mind is able to daydream and wander. Which also means my mind is not reacting to technology or trying to do too many things at once. This is why I make it a habit to disconnect from technology while taking time away. **Missing out on life** I am often in New York, running around Manhattan between meetings and can always tell when other pedestrians in front of me are distracted, simply by the way they walk! WHEN WE ARE DISTRACTED FROM TRYING TO SWITCH TASK, WE START TO MISS OUT ON LIFE AROUND US. A study from the [Western Washington University](http://courses.umass.edu/psyc241/unicycleclownHyman2010.pdf) had a clown riding a unicycle around campus who 75% of students nearby did not notice while talking on their phones. _Inattentional blindness_ is what the researchers called this, highlighting that when distracted our brains do not register what is happening around us. Oh, and we also tend to eat more when trying to switch task, which research published in the [American Journal of Clinical Nutrition](http://news.health.com/2013/03/29/cutting-out-mealtime-distractions-may-help-manage-weight/) uncovered. **It slows us down** Contrary to popular belief, switch tasking does not save us time. It costs us more time. Here is an exercise to try if you don’t believe me (you’ll need a timer, maybe use your smartphone). 3 tasks. First, time yourself saying out loud the first 15 numbers (1, 2, 3,…until 15). Next, time yourself saying the first 15 letters of the alphabet (A, B, C,…until O). Now, time yourself saying the first number followed by the first letter (1-A), then the next number and next letter (2-B), and so forth, until you get to the end (15-O). How long did it take to count the first 15 numbers? 3 seconds or so. The first 15 letters of the alphabet? Likely another 3 seconds. And how long did it take to count the first number followed by the first letter, until the end? Maybe between 12–18 seconds. IN DOING THIS EXERCISE DOZENS OF TIMES WITH OTHERS, I’VE SEEN IT TAKES 2.5X LONGER WHEN SWITCH TASKING THAN TO DO EACH TASK INDIVIDUALLY AND ADD THE TIME UP! **Where we go from here** What I am sharing here are simple insights based on my own experience and from some research, I have done on the topic. I would love to run experiments to surface data, including measuring my heart rate (proxy indicator for stress?) throughout the day as I am switching tasks, using the camera in my MacBook to measure the level of distraction from my eyes moving all over the screen or understanding how the frequency of my brain waves may change based on tasks (or the switching between tasks). Now in writing this post on the impacts of switch tasking on our day-to-day lives, I also started to wonder on a deeper question. Why do we feel the need to multitask? More to come in a future post on this. And in case you’re wondering, I wrote this post in about 40 minutes and did not switch task once and am thankful for that! --- ### Why I Took Email Off My Phone Published: 2016-02-07 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/email/ I took email off my phone 5 years ago and it’s been one of the best business decisions I’ve ever made. _And yes, the irony is clear to me given I run a technology company._ It’s a practice I’ve come to take for granted however recent encounters with friends have inspired this memo, to my future self, in case I ever find myself addicted to my phone because of email… Hey Kunal, if you’re reading this, it’s because you’re burnt out, feel like you’re always working, have trouble sleeping, are less connected with yourself and are constantly distracted. Every time, everywhere. The solution is simple: take email off your phone (again). And here’s a reminder as to why it’s been so effective for you in the past. **Email sucks** First of all, email sucks. The first email ever sent was by Ray Tomlinson, a programmer, in 1971 to connect information from one computer to another computer (both of which were right beside each other). Given your mom refers to your iPhone 5 as _ancient technology_, email must then be from the _stone ages_. The way we use this stone age era technology has not evolved much over 40 years. Email was not designed to facilitate efficient and effective communication at the scale we now operate, with billions of people connected on tens of billions of devices. Do you remember how you cut out internal email at Polar one year ago? No one sends emails within your company anymore, thanks to full adoption of Slack (you also killed internal meetings). Now Slack’s success is not only due to their technology being fast, easy to use and really strong on mobile. There’s a societal trend and social phenomenon for feeds. Everything is a feed, and thanks to Slack, that consumer behaviour has made its way into the work environment. **When it stops feeling like work** With email on your phone, you are likely reacting constantly to the needs of other people. And it frankly will feel like work. You’re pretty good at it, and capable, but it will take a real toll on your energy and spirit. And it’s not the individual actions, it’s the cumulative effect which will lead to you feeling like you’re always working. You’re operating in a global economy, a competitive industry and are running a growth-oriented company. The responsibility you feel may be high but not unmanageable. You are naturally going to be thinking about work, during evenings, weekends and while taking time away. You may be always working, but it doesn’t have to feel like work. When you stop reacting, you can start to be proactive. You’re creating, ideating, imagining what may be possible. And coming up with solutions to problems from a few hours ago, a few days ago or a few weeks ago. Joining dots that otherwise may not have been connected together. The right side of your brain (creativity) starts to flourish and gets a crack at solving problems that the left side of your brain (analytical) couldn’t solve during the workday. WITH EMAIL ON YOUR PHONE, YOU’RE SUPPRESSING YOUR CREATIVITY AND USING THE YOUR ANALYTICAL SKILLS ON OVER DRIVE. See, it’s less about how many hours you spend working, and more about how you choose to spend those hours. From your time audit exercise, you’ve got a tool to get the buckets right, now it’s about how you choose to spend each bucket. Let’s not forget: the reason you started a company and continue to lead one today is to have the opportunity to create. It is a form of expression for you in life. And creating doesn’t feel like work, for anyone. Whether you’re creating a delicious meal, creating art or creating a company, it all feels the same as it’s inspired from within (versus being injected into you through an email app on your phone). **You’re a leader** And part of your responsibility is to set a positive example for those around you. It sets a terrible example if you’re constantly disrupting the personal lives of your team and your customers, by sending them emails which they’ll (unfortunately) feel obliged to read and respond to, 24/7. The cost of burnout of even a single team member is really high. They become unproductive, less efficient, need more time away to recover and are an energy drain on those around them. Letting that email wait until the next morning is a smart financial decision versus suffering from the high cost of burning people out (including yourself). You may try to make the argument that working constantly gives the perception to your team and customers that you’re super-committed. However anyone with experience in business, who’s learned about balance the hard way, knows that always reacting to emails and working evenings and weekends is not sustainable and leads to burnout. And no one wants that. Don’t trick yourself into thinking that “I’ll rest once these emails are answered”, as the stream of incoming requests never stops. And here’s the thing no one ever told you: the more email you write, the more you’ll receive. It’s a recursive loop, that you continue to feed. _REMEMBER: YOU DO YOUR BEST WORK WHEN YOU’RE PROACTIVE AND CREATIVE. AND SO DOES EVERYONE AROUND YOU, SO ENCOURAGE THEM TO STOP REACTING AS WELL._ **The world does not stop** You have successfully taken email off your phone for the past 5 years. And didn’t tell anyone on your team about it until one year ago. No one noticed or complained once. The business has not slowed over the past 5 years. Like any entrepreneurial journey, you’ve had your fair share of bumps along the way, however imagine how many more bumps you’d have if you were constantly reacting and addicted to working 24/7, versus having time to disconnect from the day-to-day, thinking bigger picture and being creative. This is why you disconnect while taking time away. Thinking bigger picture and being creative is not only your job as a leader, but an expectation you have of everyone on your team. For their own career, for their role within the company and for the customers and business. You don’t have all the answers, as expect your team to come each day to work with solutions. This means they as well need to take email off their phone, so they can stop reacting and spend more time creating (in their head). _The only exception to having email on your phone that you’ve made is while on business trips, because you have a habit of being late (sometimes) for client meetings and need to give them a heads up. It hasn’t affected your mental well being though, as you’ve trained yourself over the years to not check email on your phone._ **A sound sleep** You sleep better when you have a few hours to wind-down all the activity from the day. The process of falling asleep involves the production of melatonin within our brain, which is a natural process that gets hijacked when we’re exposed to artificial lights (i.e. screens). The result of being addicted to your phone at night is it will take longer to fall asleep. Consuming information at unwanted times will get your mind racing. You’d much rather read an interesting book or have a conversation with a friend in the evening, and let that influence your subconscious, then reading work emails late at night. The most dangerous aspect of having email on your phone is it gets in the way of your mental peace. See, receiving information and not having the time, space or tools to act on it, is a lose-lose situation. And the mind may start doing that washing machine thing again, where it takes a thought (especially one of stress, anxiety or worry) and cycles it, again and again and again. **A beautiful morning** Your mornings would get hijacked by reacting to what happened the night before, if the first thing or second thing you did was check email. Thanks to not having email on your phone, your morning routine has become a source of energy and excitement for your day ahead. Being consistent with your daily meditation, journaling, yoga and reading practices are what help you feel grounded and calm. They help you start your day off in a good place, positive and upbeat. The reverse would be true if you were consuming and consuming, without giving yourself time and space to process everything already inside. **Push versus pull** Email, like a bag of chips, is addictive. Even with the most discipline, you will break. Having email on your phone is the equivalent to walking around with an open bag of chips with you. All the time. It doesn’t sound very healthy, does it? The anticipation of someone sending you a message leads to checking obsessively, even when there’s nothing there. Imagine walking outside your house, going to the mailbox and checking for snail mail…every 20 minutes. You’d feel pretty ridiculous, wouldn’t you? Email is designed as a push channel, and by taking email off your phone, you can take back control and turn it into a pull channel. This is how you keep things in balance and stay focused (remember: multitasking is a myth). **Not convinced to take email off your phone yet?** Then be fearless and try it for a day. A 24-hour period. And don’t tell anyone you’re experimenting. Just delete that mail app from your phone (turning off notifications or push updates doesn’t count). And experience for yourself if anyone notices, how you feel at night and how you wake up the next morning. I know you’ll listen Kunal, as this is a tried-and-tested practice over a 5 year period. Welcome (back) to feeling peaceful, calm and focused, Your current-day self. --- ### 11 Insights From Tracking My Sleep Published: 2016-02-07 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/sleep/ 192 nights of my sleep were tracked earlier this year and I was surprised with what I learned. We spend 30% of our lifetime asleep, and last year I became curious to learn more about sleep (and went on to read 5 books on it). As an experiment, I decided to track my sleep, not to change it, but to become more aware of how I sleep and how my habits potentially impact my sleep. **The experiment** Between January and August 2016, I tracked 192 nights of my sleep using an app called Sleep Cycle. Included in the app is a feature called “sleep notes”, which allows you to take customized notes on daily basis. The app gave me an export of all my sleep data (including sleep notes) in a CSV format, which I took a few hours to organize (and learned a number of new spreadsheet functions) recently. _Note: there are many sleep tracking apps available in the app stores, all of them claim to track “sleep quality”. At the start of my experiment, I used 3 sleep tracking apps and while they all tracked what time I went to bed, how long I spent in bed and what time I woke up accurately (as you’d expect), they all had very different ratings for my sleep quality. That led me to not trust the sleep quality data and discard the sleep quality data completely for this experiment._ Every month at our [company](http://www.polar.me/), we host [Lightning Talks](http://polar.me/blog/lightning-talks-polar/), which are an opportunity for anyone on the team to give a short presentation sharing what they have learned, be it related or not to the business. The data below is from my first Lightning Talk sharing my experiment with tracking my sleep. **1. I sleep more than I think I do** 7 hours and 27 minutes is the average time I slept per night over the 192 nights of my sleep being tracked. And that’s longer than I would have thought. You’ll see from the data that on weeknights, my average sleep time is closer to 7 hours (very consistently) but on weekends, it is closer to 8 hours and 30 minutes. **2. I go to bed later than I think I do** 10:50 PM is the average time I go to bed each night, and while I often like to believe I go to bed closer to 10 PM, the data showed me otherwise. Friday evenings are a “late night” for me (11:11 PM on average) and Monday through Wednesday nights being “early” (10:30 PM on average). Not too much variability overall though. **3. Waking up early is something I really do value** 6:19 AM is the average time I wake up, which is not that big of a surprise. I “sleep in” on Friday and Saturday mornings (7:35 AM and 7:22 AM respectively) and wake up earliest on Mondays (5:32 AM). Waking up early has become a ritual for me, and something I really do enjoy, value and cherish. It gives me an opportunity to meditate, practice yoga, and journal, all of which help center and ground me ahead of an active day. **4. Using screens at night happens more often than I think** 61% of the nights tracked I had used a screen at night, and although that’s probably lower than society’s average, it’s way higher than I thought it would be! There is plenty of research about the connection between screen use at night (be it TV, laptops or smartphones) and it’s impact on sleep quality (and the interference with melatonin production in the brain, a chemical that is needed to trigger the start of the “going to sleep” process). Although I did not measure sleep quality, nights I used a screen I did go to sleep 13 minutes later than average. [I do not have email on my phone](https://medium.com/find-focus/why-i-took-email-off-my-phone-31edb8a365f9#.cvm5l4rz7), barely browse the web, do not regularly watch TV and do not personally use social media, so screen use at night does not happen that easily. I believe my screen use would have been a combination of working into the evening, going to the movies, texting with friends or randomly watching Netflix. _In case you’re wondering how I tracked this (and the points to follow), I kept “sleep notes” within the Sleep Cycle app, so each night before going to bed and starting the sleep app, I had a checklist of sorts to capture a few predetermined habits I wanted to track. And then when I extracted the data, I was able to see what habits I had practiced during the day and correlate that with my sleep data._ **5. Reading at night is great for my sleep** 52% of the nights I read before going to sleep. Reading at night was not a regular habit for me before this experiment and an intention I had set, knowing I would be tracking my behaviour likely encouraged me to do this more consistently (and I’m pleased that I read half of the nights, it is more than I thought I did). I slept 9 minutes longer and went to bed 14 minutes earlier on nights I read. Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday nights had a lower frequency of me reading, likely because those are often my travel days (I live in Toronto but am normally in New York Tuesday through Thursday). And Saturday I often would be at my parents place or out with friends. In all of these instances, I probably did not have a book with me. And I do not read books on screens, I choose real-life books (usually from the library). **6. I consistently eat more on Sundays** I asked myself each night if I felt I had “more food” or “less food” during the day. This may seem subjective, but any inaccuracy would be consistent as it was always me asking and me answering the same question (over 192 nights). I was not surprised that 60% of the days I ate more, but was surprised to see that it often happened on Sundays (my mom can take credit for that). Days I ate more I ended up sleeping 9 minutes longer and went to be 6 minutes sooner. Thursdays I ate less, likely because I often travel on Thursday nights and probably end up having a light dinner (or no dinner). **7. Eating less during the day means I sleep less** Conversely, days I ate less food, I slept less and went to bed later. I am not sure if that is because I needed less sleep or because I was occupied with other activities those days so much that both food and sleep were reduced as a byproduct. Eating less food does not mean only having an apple (as the simplicity of the image may lead you to believe), I probably still had 3 meals but was more mindful of the quantity of food I consumed. **8. Caffeine is truly optional for me** I do not regularly drink caffeine and when I do, it’s tea. 36% of the days tracked I had tea, which was actually more than I expected. Days I have tea are concentrated on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday (also the days I am on the road and often in New York). I did sleep less on average days I had caffeine and went to be slightly earlier, however once again, as I did not track the quality of my sleep, it is difficult to tell the relationship. About two months ago (before looking at this data and after I had stopped tracking my habits and sleep), I decided to experiment with cutting out tea altogether. It was a spur of the moment decision one morning and I was curious to _see what would happen._ No surprise, nothing happened. And I am completely fine with no caffeine. I no longer have tea, even on my travel days. **9. I sleep more when stressed** Now we are getting into the most interesting part for me. Similar to the food question, I asked myself each day if I felt “more calm” or “less calm”. Less calm means I felt stressed at some point during the day. Could be a small dose or large dose of stress, doesn’t matter. If I felt any type of stress during the day, I marked it less calm. I felt stressed only 13% of days, which was fewer than I remember, which says to me that we may remember days we feel stress more than days with a lack of stress. I slept 18 minutes longer and went to be 28 minutes sooner on days I felt stressed. Feeling burned out and tired likely go hand-in-hand with feeling stressed, and showed up in my sleep data. Mondays are when I have a day full of [internal team meetings](https://medium.com/find-focus/why-i-m-killing-meetings-at-polar-da0e29715ee2#.odn1pu9ai) (so my team can take partial credit for when I feel stressed on those days), Wednesdays I am often in New York and Sundays I am usually with my family. **10. I am generally a calm person** 87% of the days tracked I felt calm, i.e. not stressed. I’ll share credit for this with all of you who interact with me on a regular basis and my personal practices, which include meditation, yoga, journaling and reading. **11. I value sleep now a lot more than I used to** I used to have a negative relationship with sleep, seeing it as something optional and feeling that it was a trade-off I was willing to make for other experiences in life. I’ve done a 180 turn on that feeling now and have a positive relationship with sleep. That does not mean I sleep all the time (my average time in bed is 7 hours and 27 minutes), it means that I value, respect and understand the importance of sleep. And as such, now pay attention to all of the other habits and routines in my life that may be impacting my sleep. This experiment has been valuable as a self-awareness tool, surprising me with new insights that were contrary to my previously held assumptions and beliefs. --- ### My Adventure In Couch Surfing Published: 2016-02-07 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/couchsurfing/ [Couchsurfing](http://www.couchsurfing.com/) is an online community that was recommended to me by a few friends. Initially, the concept sounded both intriguing but creepy. Complete strangers are agreeing to stay with each other while traveling to foreign places, with no exchange of money or fees in return. The concept is novel and unique for sure. It began in 2004 as a side project by a few people who were looking for a place to stay while on a trip to Iceland. It’s now grown into a global community of over 14 million couchsurfers who open their home and share their lives with one another. After I setup my profile on CS (what couchsurfers refer to the community as) and started to message with a few people about my upcoming trip to Lisbon a few days away, I quickly discovered that CS had very little to do with finding a place to crash while on the road and much more to do about connecting with new and interesting people while traveling. We all say “I love to travel”, but what do we really mean? I think we often refer to the experience of discovering a different part of the world, seeing architecture and sights, tasting different foods, taking in culture and also just the act of being away from our normal day-to-day. With CS, the “love of travel” extends beyond all of this and includes people who are traveling for the joy of connecting with other people, in potentially meaningful ways. And that was my experience as well. **The First Night** My first CS host was a kind and generous 25-year-old European woman who has lived all over the continent, choosing to not make any specific place home. She met me at the local metro station, we walked by the waterfront and sat down for dinner. Conversation flowed naturally, and I quickly discovered that she was a gentle and open person, with a lifetime of experiences at a relatively young age. Back at her apartment, her roommate was away for the weekend and she was gracious enough to offer her roommate’s bed (which I was not expecting!). Later that evening, we hung out on her balcony, overlooking the city, seeing people playing soccer (football as they call it) and sharing life stories and getting to know each other. After a peaceful night’s rest, the next morning we [shared a meditation](https://medium.com/find-focus/meditation-what-ive-learned-along-the-journey-a3144dbaa78e#.yrd3zkt1z) (which she appreciated as it had been a while for her) and a discussion about how we respectively manage stress in life which turned into a journaling session ([free writing was the specific technique](https://medium.com/find-focus/my-guide-to-journaling-4-techniques-i-practice-regularly-25d67217524c) I introduced her to). She took me around Lisbon, enjoying beautiful views of the entire city, and I got to hear what Portugal meant to her beyond buildings and structures. She works in media broadcasting and is developing a documentary on the side, which I was interviewed me for as well. **Connecting With A True Local** While messaging several people on CS ahead of my visit, I connected with another host who seemed like a really cool guy. Although he couldn’t host me, as he’s been busy studying for law exams, we decided that we’d still meet up for a coffee while I was there. We met in a popular cafe in the heart of the city. Full of locals, the place was buzzing. He was explaining to me that the Pope had just been in town, the Lisbon football team was playing in the championship game that evening (which they won) and also that evening was the Eurovision Song Contest (which Portugal won for the first time in history). Needless to say, the city was alive and I would not have discovered all of this simply being a tourist. I learned that he has been part of the CS community for over 8 years now and hosted over 200 guests, and is planning an extended adventure across Europe this year, and plans to connect with the CS community along the way. He had been inspired to go see the world, by meeting so many people from around the world over the years. And he’s the same as me. The diversity of stories, experiences and backgrounds he’s been exposed to is incredible. **Taking Flight** And finally, my third CS connection was with a 28-year old local who hosted me for my second night in Lisbon. What piqued my curiosity about him was that he’s been training to be a commercial pilot. Stepping into his house, I could see just how passionate he was about his work. We immediately went into talking about how technology has changed how pilots train, talking about flight simulators, virtual reality, artificial intelligence and fancy gadgets (including this 720 degrees chair that moves literally in all directions). So the next morning, we decided to go up for a flight. We went to the local flying club where he had been trained, rented a plane for a few hours and went up. It was a tiny 2-seater plan, by far the smallest plane I’ve ever been in in my life (and I’ve been in a lot of planes). Seeing the amount of multitasking that goes on to get a plane off the ground was exciting, and as we climbed, the city faded away in the background and the clear skies and sea dominated the view. I even took control of the “wheel” (stick) to fly the plane myself (another first). We connected how the cockpit of a plan was the best office in the world. Seeing his passion and excitement for what he was doing first-hand was a source of inspiration. **Trust Flows In Two Directions** As you can tell, the CS experience is about much more than finding a place to stay. It’s about connecting, and when you let someone into your physical space, you end up sharing meals, stories and experiences. The immediate bond that is formed is something I underestimated. It’s a two-way relationship of trust. A host is inviting a complete stranger not only into their home but into their life, and the couchsurfer is usually in a foreign place without really knowing anyone and no back-up plans. One of my hosts commented how within 12 hours of hanging out, it felt as though we had known each other for ten years and sometimes even with friends in your life for years, we don’t get past the surface and feel comfortable really letting them in. Learning to place trust in a complete stranger and be trusted in return is an experience I feel grateful for. **Gaining Perspective** This couch surfing experience was part of a bigger experiment that I’m doing this year (which I’ll be sharing more on soon), to build greater empathy and understanding of the various communities I’m a part of. Learning to live thanks to the generosity and kindness of strangers was wonderful, and seeing first hand the life of others encourages us to start think beyond ourselves. Beyond our own desires, challenges and comforts. The different perspective also helps us realize what we likely take for granted in our lives and feel grateful for what we do have. --- ### 4 Ways I Stay Focused While Working Published: 2016-02-07 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/focused/ Earlier this year, I started an AMA (Ask Me Anything) initiative with my team that has been really enjoyable for me and valuable for them. During the Town Hall I run at our quarterly team Summits (where our global team comes to Toronto for one week), I give everyone post-its and markers, and ask them to ask me anything, which I answer a few every week via Slack. I also have a Google Form set up where people can submit anonymous questions at any time. A few of the recent questions had a similar answer: How do you stay focused at work? What ritual and habits help you stay productive? How do you find time to be strategic on a day-to-day basis? In a modern era where we are more connected than ever (read: more distracted than ever), I have become passionate about finding focus and calm on a day-to-day, moment-to-moment basis. Here are 4 ways, all connected, that I stay focused while working: **1. Take responsibility** It’s easy to feel that we are not in control of our day, week or month, and that we are constantly reacting to others around us. The moment we place blame external to us on others is the moment we give up control and stop trying. Taking back control by being proactive, thoughtful and by just taking a moment to think is empowering and the first step to feeling focused at work for me. You may be thinking “oh, it’s easy for you to control what you do, you’re the boss”, but it’s not. I’ve gone through many cycles where I had given up responsibility and control of what I focused on to everyone around me, be it my team, the market, our partners or even competitors. And in those cycles, you realize all you are doing is reacting and not showing up with your best self. The first step is to take responsibility and stop blaming others. **2. Find your practices** What gives you energy? What grounds you? We all have our own practices (habits, rituals or comforts) that we can remember to lean on. It may be cooking a delicious meal, hanging out with friends, watching a good movie, reading a book, learning something new or heading to the gym. For me, it’s meditation, yoga, journaling and reading. I really do enjoy these practices while taking time away and feel energized thanks to it. However your practices don’t need to be reserved for time away, they can and should be incorporated into your everyday lifestyle. On a daily basis, I’m engaging with 2–4 of my own practices which helps me stay grounded. **3. Moments of insight** Many of the insights, breakthroughs, “aha!” moments or new ideas happen for me in those little moments of time and space between meetings, while waiting for the elevator, on the subway, in a taxi, walking to work, eating a meal or traveling through an airport. Choosing to use those moments to reflect, versus habitually getting consumed by my phone has been a game-changer. It also gives me a chance to breathe, and rest, to regain my focus before jumping into whatever is next in my day. Remember, multitasking is a myth, you may be surprised with how refreshed you’ll feel by taking a moment to think passively versus filling those little moments with those little doses of dopamine you get from glancing at that little screen in your pocket or purse. **4. Remove distractions** I took email off my phone 5 years ago. Now, removing distractions for me has been about learning how to use email and Slack effectively while I’m on my laptop, versus feeling used by them. Unlearning our habits to constantly check email or Slack is challenging but absolutely required. Keeping email and Slack closed by default while working has really helped and I continue to experiment with other ways to have fewer distractions on my laptop. Being fearless about staying focused while working Taking the next step with one of the above suggestions is how I recommend getting started down this path to help cultivate greater focus, calm and peace while working. Good luck! --- ### Why I'm Killing Meetings At Polar Published: 2016-02-07 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/meetings/ I’ve made it my mission to kill the time we spend during meetings at Polar. At the start of 2016, I did an audit of where I spend my time ([view the full audit here](https://medium.com/@findfocus/a-lesson-in-understanding-where-i-spend-my-time-87fd5218be1f#.r6oz3lb2v)) and was surprised to learn that 33% of it was spent in internal meetings at Polar. AFTER FURTHER THOUGHT AND REFLECTION, A DEEPER THEME SURFACED: MAKING VERSUS MEETING. The reason I started a company and why people join our small team is to have an opportunity to make. And meetings can get in the way of that. I decided to drastically reduce how much time I spend in meetings, which means reducing _how much time everyone spends in meetings at Polar_. Since we deemed Tuesdays and Thursdays as internal meeting free days at Polar, and introduced other guidelines, the amount of time I spend in internal meetings is now 20% (which I’m satisfied with…for now). Here is a memo I sent to my team at the start of the year. **Memo: Making time to make** January 4, 2016 To: Polar team At the end of last year, I did a time audit using my calendar and the results were surprising. 33% of my productive time was spent in internal meetings. All the while, I thought I had internal meetings under control (and I know 33% is likely less than my peers). Given that I was not meeting with myself, it also meant that I was taking up your time as well! As much as I like all of you, I plan to spend a whole lot less time in meetings and am encouraging you to do the same. To be clear, I am not suggesting that we stop talking to one another. What I am suggesting is that we become more aware and be fearless to re-think how a big chunk of our time is used (at least for me). **Collaboration and communication are critical** to our success, especially a small team like ours that is geographically distributed. First, watch [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAKgKb00WNI) (it’s 100 seconds)… **Makers versus Managers** We are a small team (40 people) with each person counted on with tremendous responsibility (hundreds of customers globally and growing). All of us are makers. Maybe at big corporations or in the government there exist full-time managers that are not making as part of their role, however that is not the case here. **Everyone here is expected to be making.** Making is so important to how we create value for our customers. From prospecting clients, to running a sales process, to developing a press program, to managing our books and bills, to writing product requirements, to software developement and testing, to releasing and managing technology infrastructure, all of us are making. That is a big reason each of us (myself included) have chosen to work at a _smaller organization_. **Making is fun!** **Stealing someone’s chair** When you have an internal meeting, it’s the equivalent to stealing someone’s chair. What happens when you steal someone’s chair? They are not able to work. An internal meeting has the same effect. Especially one that is not valuable. David Grady has a hilarious [TED video](https://www.ted.com/talks/david_grady_how_to_save_the_world_or_at_least_yourself_from_bad_meetings?language=en) that is under 7 minutes, that I enjoyed on this topic. **The myth of multitasking** “But I am a really good at multitasking”. Yeah right. I’ve written about [why we need to stop multitasking](https://medium.com/@findfocus/why-you-need-to-stop-multitasking-8d4ada6eb47#.97cr2myxf), because we are actually switch tasking which is costly. **Multitasking:** when we are doing multiple tasks aligned to the same outcome. Driving a car involves checking the rearview mirror, watching the odometer, looking at the side mirrors, checking blind spots, oh and looking ahead of you through the windshield. Cooking a meal in similar, in that the stove may be on, while you are chopping something, and wiping the counter. **Switch tasking:** when we bring our attention to different tasks that are not directly related to the same outcome. Going from writing code, to reading something on Slack, to eavesdropping on the conversation next to you, to checking Facebook, to answering an email and back to writing code is switch tasking. THE BRAIN KNOWS HOW TO MULTITASK. IT DOES NOT KNOW HOW TO SWITCH TASK. Research shows that it takes [25 minutes](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/05/opinion/sunday/a-focus-on-distraction.html?_r=0) to return to a task that we get distracted from. And yes, there are _many_ distractions in our work day, including email, Slack, notifications, social media, people physically walking up to you, nearby chatter, bio breaks, food and snacks, and of course, internal meetings. **Simple guidelines for meetings at Polar** Now internal meetings are an important part of how we work together. Here are some super simple guidelines on how to keep them valuable for everyone: **Limit size to 8 people. **This is already 20% of the company! Any larger and it’s clear that the information should be shared on Slack or a smaller group is what’s actually required. _Exception: Polar Summits, Polar Spotlights and Polar Talks._ **Limit time to 60 minutes. **This is already 10–15% of someone’s productive hours! Research shows our attention spans fade after 60 minutes and are pretty much gone completely after 90 minutes. If you cannot get something done in 60 minutes, there is probably something else wrong. (I’d really love to suggest 30 minutes but let’s start here…) **Eliminate technology distractions.** This one we are pretty good at _but not 100%._ Myself included. It starts with us being fearless to call one another out when we are distracted during a meeting. Put away your laptops and turn off your cell phone notifications. Out of sight, out of mind. (And yes, we are going to make sure all of our Toronto meeting rooms have working old school clocks!)For our international team members, I know it can be distracting given the whole meeting is conducted on your laptop (using join.me), my advice is to “maximize” (the little green button) in the join.me window so that you are less distracted from notifications and other programs. (I know sometimes I might get boring, and it may be tempting to ignore me and quickly check your email…but don’t do that, it’s not nice or productive for either of us) **Video matters. **Research [shows](http://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/why-you-should-probably-use-videoconferencing-more-than-you-do-infographic.html) that video conferencing improves teamwork, productivity and decision making over audio conferencing. Given we have Polar team members located now in New York, London, Glasgow and Sydney, it is really important to make the effort to conduct **all **internal meetings with remote team members using video. Join.me is not perfect but it works, so keep using it. And for those of you in Toronto but not physically in the office, you should still be video conferencing for internal meetings. And ask yourself at the end of the meeting, _was that meeting necessary?_ Would the same outcome have been achieved if the information was communicated over Slack? **Introducing meeting free T-days** **Tuesdays and Thursdays will be free of internal meetings at Polar**. Globally. Effective immediately. For this to work, we all have to commit to it. This is an experiment, I ask that you all commit to this with me. This is the start of our plan to help **make more time to make** at Polar. I want to acknowledge the importance of communication and collaboration at Polar, and I know that we are not _as bad_ as many other companies are with meeting overload. However, I think we can be better here and this what showing leadership is all about. Kunal --- ### Being fearless about staying focused while working Published: 2016-02-07 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/focus1/ I’ve developed the belief that with greater awareness, everything else becomes easier. Once we become aware, our human instinct is to take action in such a direction that solves for challenges or seizes opportunities. It happens at a subconscious level, without deliberately thinking about it. It helps to disconnect from technology to allow ourselves the space and freedom to become aware ([that’s why I took email off my phone](https://medium.com/find-focus/why-i-took-email-off-my-phone-31edb8a365f9#.eizg5xtma)). For example, when you become aware that someone around you needs help, it could be as trivial as someone who’s unknowingly dropped something, you (without thinking) take action. Or if you’re with a friend who’s struggling with an issue, you naturally start to try and help them solve the problem with them. Or once you become aware that you’re hungry, you automatically start to plan out your next meal. FOCUS ON AWARENESS, AND EVERYTHING ELSE WILL BE FINE. Without awareness, it is difficult to navigate a world that is constantly changing. This is why I have been deliberate in cultivating a culture of awareness at Polar. Here is a memo I wrote recently for new team members joining Polar, explaining (in one place) how our awareness culture works. **Market awareness** Let’s start with awareness of our market. In our case, this consists of the digital media, publishing and advertising industry. We built a Slack bot, called Newsbot, that curates a personalized feed of industry news for our team. Instead of subscribing to dozens of newsletters and forwarding links around, Newsbot handles everything. We’ve identified about 40 trade publications from our industry, selected over 100 keywords that are relevant to us, and our Newsbot algorithm is scanning these sites for these keywords, to curate a personalized feed. It’s a daily must-read feed now for most of the team. It has become a single source of information for what’s happening in our industry. I love it. **Customer awareness** Next up is awareness of our partners (customers) and prospects. Every conversation anyone on the team has with an external party, be it a partner (customer), prospect, reporter, or analyst, is summarized and captured in a concise Slack post. We have a way to organize these by the company we’re speaking with, the relationship with Polar and how to structure the actual update itself. The belief is that any conversation we have is now available to everyone in the company. Everything I know, you should know. This increases context and provides greater awareness, in an efficient manner and on a consistent basis. Although not all of you interact directly with our partners on a regular basis (at least not yet), everything we ultimately do is to serve our partners. So you need to know what’s happening. We do encourage you to join and listen in on partner and prospect calls. I often do take people with me from our Toronto office to New York for business trips, where we run around the city (sometimes literally!) meeting partners and prospects. **Strategy awareness** With 4 offices across 3 time zones, our small 40 person team is quite spread out around the world. Not to mention the fact a few of us (myself included) are consistently on the road (in the sky?). To keep all of us on the same page about the strategy and direction for the business, we have invested in a quarterly team-wide internal conference, called the Polar Summit, which happens in the first month of each calendar quarter! We fly everyone into one location from our global offices for a week, and focus inwards on what’s happening with the business, our partners, our products and each other. This has become a great opportunity to connect with one another, strengthen relationships and spread awareness. Having fun together is a key ingredient to a successful Summit. This past Summit we had an afternoon picnic at the beach, earlier this year we did an improv workshop together and also went curling! The Summit is a natural opportunity to step back, lift our heads out of the sand and align on priorities. We’re quite transparent with the good and bad in the business, I will share an honest SWOT assessment of the business and we’ll do a full walk-through of the company’s financials (revenue, expenses, cash, everything). **Day-to-day awareness** On a more regular day-to-day basis, we host a team-wide stand-up twice a week, every Monday and Friday. It’s 15 minutes, it’s called the Spotlight, and 3–4 people get to spread awareness for a specific project or partner that’s relevant to the entire team. New features are shown, new partner launches are showcased and completed milestones are celebrated. It also brings us together and after much effort, we’ve figured out how to get a decent A/V setup so that we can see everyone’s smiling faces from all over the world and connect. We’ll have lunch together in the Toronto office, where the bulk of our team is, after the Monday Spotlight. This has become a nice way to start the week, together. We’ll also host Polar Talks about once per month, with external or internal speakers, to talk about the industry and deep-dive on specific topics. We also host Lightning Talks every 6 weeks, which is an opportunity to increase technical awareness. Developers, product managers and QA team members will share short talks on new technologies, tools or approaches they are experimenting with. **Self-awareness** Feedback is a gift. We have built a few tools to make it easy to receive feedback at Polar. We have a semi-annual review process (we purposely removed the word “performance”, as it’s not aligned with our way of thinking). The review process begins with a self-review, each of us answering 3 simple questions. Thereafter, your leader (we refrain from using the term “manager” here at Polar) will answer 3 questions as well, after reading your self-review, but with a twist. They will speak with other key leaders in the organization, including myself, to gather additional feedback for you. This way, you get a collective voice from the organization’s leadership which you will hopefully find valuable. In addition to this, we have built a simple tool to enable you to ask for peer feedback, either anonymously or transparently. You choose who you’d like feedback from, you can use the template questions or develop your own and only you see the feedback from your peers. You can do this whenever you’d like as well; it is not tied to the semi-annual review process above. And finally, we are experimenting with a growth plan tool, to help facilitate a bigger conversation about your longer-term professional aspirations. This is intentionally separate from the review process, because it allows you to ask for support and feedback from a variety of people (inside and outside the team), and also share your growth plan more widely. If you care about your own career growth, so do I. And I want to know about it, so I can help find opportunities to support your growth. **Ask Me Anything awareness** The most recent initiative I’ve kicked off is [#AMA](https://manage.wix.com/dashboard/bb1ae37d-f133-4e9b-81fe-290b51bb0740/blog/posts/search/.hash.ama), ask me anything. I collect the questions anonymously (which helps everyone feel more comfortable asking truly whatever they want) and post answers on our Slack general channel every few days. So far I’ve received over 40 questions and have a good backlog to work from. I will answer every single question. The questions I’ve received vary widely, which is what makes it interesting and fun for me! Such as “why aren’t we more aggressive attacking our competitors?”, to “how do you make compensation decisions?”, to “what does Brexit mean for our company?”, to “how many pairs of red running shoes do you go through in a year?”. **In close** In my experience, awareness takes care of everything else. The change you wish to see in yourself and in your outer world begins automatically once you become aware. Earlier this year, I shared how I’ve been [auditing my time](https://medium.com/find-focus/a-lesson-in-understanding-where-i-spend-my-time-87fd5218be1f#.qamq88kih) and how this new found awareness of something as simple as where I spend my time has influenced my day-to-day choices at work in a meaningful way. In a modern world where we are so connected with technology, we may still be disconnected from our work, our peers and ourselves if our attention is not focused. What I’ve shared here are some of the many initiatives we’ve introduced at Polar to support awareness. I am sure that these will continually evolve and change. I ask for your help in continuing to build a culture of awareness at Polar. Thanks, Kunal --- ### Why Awareness Is The Answer To Everything Published: 2016-02-07 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/answer/ I’ve developed the belief that with greater awareness, everything else becomes easier. Once we become aware, our human instinct is to take action in such a direction that solves for challenges or seizes opportunities. It happens at a subconscious level, without deliberately thinking about it. It helps to disconnect from technology to allow ourselves the space and freedom to become aware ([that’s why I took email off my phone](https://medium.com/find-focus/why-i-took-email-off-my-phone-31edb8a365f9#.eizg5xtma)). For example, when you become aware that someone around you needs help, it could be as trivial as someone who’s unknowingly dropped something, you (without thinking) take action. Or if you’re with a friend who’s struggling with an issue, you naturally start to try and help them solve the problem with them. Or once you become aware that you’re hungry, you automatically start to plan out your next meal. FOCUS ON AWARENESS, AND EVERYTHING ELSE WILL BE FINE. Without awareness, it is difficult to navigate a world that is constantly changing. This is why I have been deliberate in cultivating a culture of awareness at Polar. Here is a memo I wrote recently for new team members joining Polar, explaining (in one place) how our awareness culture works. **Market awareness** Let’s start with awareness of our market. In our case, this consists of the digital media, publishing and advertising industry. We built a Slack bot, called Newsbot, that curates a personalized feed of industry news for our team. Instead of subscribing to dozens of newsletters and forwarding links around, Newsbot handles everything. We’ve identified about 40 trade publications from our industry, selected over 100 keywords that are relevant to us, and our Newsbot algorithm is scanning these sites for these keywords, to curate a personalized feed. It’s a daily must-read feed now for most of the team. It has become a single source of information for what’s happening in our industry. I love it. **Customer awareness** Next up is awareness of our partners (customers) and prospects. Every conversation anyone on the team has with an external party, be it a partner (customer), prospect, reporter, or analyst, is summarized and captured in a concise Slack post. We have a way to organize these by the company we’re speaking with, the relationship with Polar and how to structure the actual update itself. The belief is that any conversation we have is now available to everyone in the company. Everything I know, you should know. This increases context and provides greater awareness, in an efficient manner and on a consistent basis. Although not all of you interact directly with our partners on a regular basis (at least not yet), everything we ultimately do is to serve our partners. So you need to know what’s happening. We do encourage you to join and listen in on partner and prospect calls. I often do take people with me from our Toronto office to New York for business trips, where we run around the city (sometimes literally!) meeting partners and prospects. **Strategy awareness** With 4 offices across 3 time zones, our small 40 person team is quite spread out around the world. Not to mention the fact a few of us (myself included) are consistently on the road (in the sky?). To keep all of us on the same page about the strategy and direction for the business, we have invested in a quarterly team-wide internal conference, called the Polar Summit, which happens in the first month of each calendar quarter! We fly everyone into one location from our global offices for a week, and focus inwards on what’s happening with the business, our partners, our products and each other. This has become a great opportunity to connect with one another, strengthen relationships and spread awareness. Having fun together is a key ingredient to a successful Summit. This past Summit we had an afternoon picnic at the beach, earlier this year we did an improv workshop together and also went curling! The Summit is a natural opportunity to step back, lift our heads out of the sand and align on priorities. We’re quite transparent with the good and bad in the business, I will share an honest SWOT assessment of the business and we’ll do a full walk-through of the company’s financials (revenue, expenses, cash, everything). **Day-to-day awareness** On a more regular day-to-day basis, we host a team-wide stand-up twice a week, every Monday and Friday. It’s 15 minutes, it’s called the Spotlight, and 3–4 people get to spread awareness for a specific project or partner that’s relevant to the entire team. New features are shown, new partner launches are showcased and completed milestones are celebrated. It also brings us together and after much effort, we’ve figured out how to get a decent A/V setup so that we can see everyone’s smiling faces from all over the world and connect. We’ll have lunch together in the Toronto office, where the bulk of our team is, after the Monday Spotlight. This has become a nice way to start the week, together. We’ll also host Polar Talks about once per month, with external or internal speakers, to talk about the industry and deep-dive on specific topics. We also host Lightning Talks every 6 weeks, which is an opportunity to increase technical awareness. Developers, product managers and QA team members will share short talks on new technologies, tools or approaches they are experimenting with. **Self-awareness** Feedback is a gift. We have built a few tools to make it easy to receive feedback at Polar. We have a semi-annual review process (we purposely removed the word “performance”, as it’s not aligned with our way of thinking). The review process begins with a self-review, each of us answering 3 simple questions. Thereafter, your leader (we refrain from using the term “manager” here at Polar) will answer 3 questions as well, after reading your self-review, but with a twist. They will speak with other key leaders in the organization, including myself, to gather additional feedback for you. This way, you get a collective voice from the organization’s leadership which you will hopefully find valuable. In addition to this, we have built a simple tool to enable you to ask for peer feedback, either anonymously or transparently. You choose who you’d like feedback from, you can use the template questions or develop your own and only you see the feedback from your peers. You can do this whenever you’d like as well; it is not tied to the semi-annual review process above. And finally, we are experimenting with a growth plan tool, to help facilitate a bigger conversation about your longer-term professional aspirations. This is intentionally separate from the review process, because it allows you to ask for support and feedback from a variety of people (inside and outside the team), and also share your growth plan more widely. If you care about your own career growth, so do I. And I want to know about it, so I can help find opportunities to support your growth. **Ask Me Anything awareness** The most recent initiative I’ve kicked off is [#AMA](https://manage.wix.com/dashboard/bb1ae37d-f133-4e9b-81fe-290b51bb0740/blog/posts/search/.hash.ama), ask me anything. I collect the questions anonymously (which helps everyone feel more comfortable asking truly whatever they want) and post answers on our Slack general channel every few days. So far I’ve received over 40 questions and have a good backlog to work from. I will answer every single question. The questions I’ve received vary widely, which is what makes it interesting and fun for me! Such as “why aren’t we more aggressive attacking our competitors?”, to “how do you make compensation decisions?”, to “what does Brexit mean for our company?”, to “how many pairs of red running shoes do you go through in a year?”. **In close** In my experience, awareness takes care of everything else. The change you wish to see in yourself and in your outer world begins automatically once you become aware. Earlier this year, I shared how I’ve been [auditing my time](https://medium.com/find-focus/a-lesson-in-understanding-where-i-spend-my-time-87fd5218be1f#.qamq88kih) and how this new found awareness of something as simple as where I spend my time has influenced my day-to-day choices at work in a meaningful way. In a modern world where we are so connected with technology, we may still be disconnected from our work, our peers and ourselves if our attention is not focused. What I’ve shared here are some of the many initiatives we’ve introduced at Polar to support awareness. I am sure that these will continually evolve and change. I ask for your help in continuing to build a culture of awareness at Polar. Thanks, Kunal --- ### Connecting By Disconnecting Published: 2016-02-02 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/connecting/ Connection has been such a powerful theme in my life; it is something that I have often abused and taken for granted. We think we are more _connected _than ever these days, however, I feel the complete opposite. Connections with people, places, experiences, knowledge, nature and most importantly, myself, have become such an important enabler for me to feel grounded, inspired and focused. Taking time away regularly allows me to connect, but it starts with disconnecting. Disconnecting from my day-to-day lifestyle, routine, and habits starts with choosing to unplug completely from work. Learning what I have learned through this practice, my business cannot afford for me to not disconnect while away (spoiler alert: it is not as scary as it sounds, it is good for you, and those around you will thank you for doing it). **I am not as important as I think I am** A few years ago, after coming back from probably the first vacation where I disconnected completely, a distinct and unpleasant feeling arose: disappointment. There were not as many emails, fires, issues and questions as I had expected from me disconnecting. Then a humbling thought passed my mind: _I am not as important as I think I am_. The world can go on, and the business does go on, without me. In a technology business with large global customers and ambitious growth expectations, issues will come up. That is a reality. Now while away, I have found that team members will step up and show leadership in unexpected ways. Seeing people grow in this way is rewarding for me and I know they appreciate the trust felt by me choosing to disconnect while away. **I can stop fooling myself** It is easy to fool myself into thinking that everything is working just fine when I am involved in the day-to-day on a permanent basis. When I disconnect, I find out quickly what is working and more importantly, _what is not working_. And that allows me to focus on solving for the real issues and bottlenecks in the business that I may otherwise not be aware of. Learning how decisions are _not made_ while I am away has been the most interesting part of this practice. For example, I will find out that what I consider to be small decisions that may be related to customer issues, new product features, budget requests or marketing campaigns were not made because I was not involved. These are opportunities to clarify expectations with team members and empower others to keep things moving. We are all better thanks to that. **Cultivating creative insight** Creative insights are awesome. They are those “_eureka_!” moments that I often crave but rarely enjoy while connected to work. The thing about developing creative insights is that they cannot be forced — they come up when they come up, in spontaneous and unpredictable moments. There is no email, Facebook message, blog post or YouTube video that is the source of creative insight. It is completely from within, which is such an empowering feeling. Disconnecting from day-to-day work helps cultivate a state of mind that lends itself to spitting out bigger creative insights about my business. It is about giving my _thinking_ brain a break and letting my _artist_ brain flourish. I find my thoughts are often directed towards my business, but in a far more strategic (and valuable) manner. The creative insights naturally arise, as deep down there is a part of me that is aware of the problems that I wish to think about. **Lighting a match in the wind** If I were to be connected by checking email, getting pinged on social media, reading the all-too-negative news headlines or reacting to those constant _dings_ around me while away, I would be interrupting the process of real problem solving that goes on in my mind. It would be like trying to _light a match in the open wind_. Challenging, difficult and frustrating. If I am a product of my environment, then it must be true for not only my physical environment but also my digital environment. Everything I consume while being digitally connected will influence me, even if it is meaningless and trivial. And clogging up my mind with the digital trash gets in the way of making space to connect to what I value more. **Stop throwing boomerangs** Disconnecting from email requires turning on my _Out of Office (OOO)_ reply. The real reason I turn on the OOO reply is not to notify the (few) people who may email me, but to give myself the peace of mind that I am not leaving anyone hanging. Here is the funny thing I have learned about email: they are like hundreds of tiny boomerangs. The more of them I throw (write), the more of them I catch (receive). The fewer I throw, the fewer I catch. This goes even when I may not be away. At a conference, customer events or planning sessions with the team, I am throwing and receiving fewer boomerangs. **Taking time to grow** Time away does not have to mean sitting on a beach. Time away is much bigger. It is about taking time to grow, learn, relax and connect, outside my normal way of life. For example, in the past year I took time away to enjoy Costa Rica and explore Croatia, but also took time away for a meditation course and a program at Singularity University, among other experiences. I plan to continue to take time away and encourage those around me to do the same. It is an opportunity to cultivate a connection, be it to people, knowledge or experiences. Cultivating that ability to connect in meaningful ways is critical in a modern _always on_ society for me. I believe the practice of disconnecting translates into deeper connections for me with my team, my customers and my community. Taking time away has also become a way for me to connect with my _vision_ for the business, the world I live in and most importantly, myself. Making it a consistent practice to disconnect while taking time away has been a wonderful gift to myself, one that I plan to continue to give. --- ### My First Time Audit Published: 2016-01-01 URL: https://kunal.live/unlearning/audit/ Over the winter break, amidst much reflection on the year that was and getting ready for the year that may, the question arose: where am I spending my time? Determined to come up with a clear answer, I decided to audit my time. **How I used to audit my time** One of my early advisors once shared with me his best practice on this topic. Start by taking a piece of paper and make a vertical line down the middle. On the right-hand side of that line, first list the areas you want to be spending your time on. Then on the left, the areas you are actually spending your time on. And finally, draw horizontal lines to connect words on the left-side that match on the right-side. What we naturally will see from this exercise is that there are areas on the right (things we want to be spending our time on) that don’t appear on the left. And there are areas on the left (where we actually spend our time) that do not appear on the right. This simple self awareness practice has helped me a lot over the years. **A new data-informed exercise** Data was at the center of this exercise. Data is what allows us to question our biases and preconceived notions. Enter my calendar. It knows more about my time than I do. And here’s the beauty of the calendar: it does not lie and fall prey to any of my biases. My calendar is used to schedule everything, and my days (probably like yours) are divided up into 30 or 60 minute chunks. Here is a typical week for my calendar: Thinking about how to categorize my time, I identified six buckets: - Internal (Internal meetings) - Sales (Prospect meetings, sales outreach) - Marketing (Events, research, press calls) - Acct Mgmt (Customer meetings) - Desk time (Email, Slack, planning, document review) - Other (Board, HR interviews, partnership meetings) Then using my calendar, I went back over Q4, week-by-week, and recorded an estimate of the # of hours per category per week in a simple spreadsheet. The resulting table looked like this: Also included was the city I was in that week and the weeks I had time away (personal, vacation, etc.) had no time recorded. Travel time (flights, taxis), breaks, social plans or lunches were not included. The focus was on recording productive hours. **What I learned** Here is visually where I spent my time over the past quarter: I was surprised with the analysis. Even though I consider myself to be fairly self-aware, this exercise was humbling. 33% of my time was spent in internal meetings, far more than I would have guessed. This was a trigger for the experiment we are running at Polar, called making time to make, where we have introduced internal meeting guidelines that also include 2 days per week with no internal meetings. Desk time is something I underestimated, and even though it’s all grouped as one chunk of time, this is a mix bag of so many different activities. It caused me to ask myself, ‘how do I prioritize my desk time?’. Desk time represented approx. 72 productive hours of my time in Q4. **The power of intention** As a further experiment, I am setting a clear intention for where I would like to spend my time in Q1. The intention is ambitious given it involves changes, but I do believe that there is power in being clear on our intention and that subconsciously will influence day-to-day actions. **Do it yourself** In case you are wondering, this time audit took less than 1 hour to complete and if you are interested in doing this yourself, here is my template that you are free to copy. If you have someone who helps manage your calendar, even better, delegate this to him or her. **Final thought** The purpose behind this exercise is to increase my awareness. In our always connected, globally competitive business culture, leaders now more than ever need to be aware and mindful of ourselves. I think it starts with our time, and where we choose to spend it. --- ## Unprompted (AI Dispatches) ### Two-Hour Interns For fifteen years I ran a company where the average Published: 2026-06-07 URL: https://kunal.live/unprompted/two-hour-interns/ For fifteen years I ran a company where the average tenure was over seven years. That mattered to me, in an industry where people usually change jobs every two or three. We had built something people wanted to stay inside of, and that felt like the real product, more than anything we ever shipped to clients.I used to think about the math of turnover constantly back then. Six to twelve months for a new hire to build enough context to actually contribute, then maybe twelve to eighteen months of solid output, and then, often, they were gone, lured by a bigger title somewhere else. Good for the employee, who usually got a raise and more responsibility by leaving. Brutal for the employer, who had to absorb the cost of recruiting and onboarding and the slow drag of pulling the new person up the curve. Our culture made the math work in our favour most of the time, and I took that for granted.Then I started building with AI, and the math broke entirely.My agents quit every two hours. Sometimes faster. A context window expires mid-task and the agent I've spent ninety minutes briefing on the architecture of my codebase, the conventions, the three things we tried yesterday that didn't work, the file we are absolutely not supposed to touch, is simply gone, and the next one shows up with no memory of any of it. I have to start the onboarding from scratch. Re-explain the project, re-paste the relevant files, re-warn about the sharp edges we already discovered together the day before. It is the most extreme version of employee churn I have ever experienced.The old math was six months to ramp, eighteen months of contribution, then attrition. The new math is six minutes to ramp, two hours of contribution, then attrition, and the intervals collapsed but the structure didn't, which means every agent still needs context and every agent still needs its work checked. The overhead just got compressed into the same day, over and over, and the cost is paid in cognitive load on me. I am the institutional memory now, the onboarding doc, the senior engineer who's been here long enough to know why we did it that way, and I have to perform that role thirty times before lunch.There is an old rule I used to live by as a manager, which is that you wouldn't hire a twenty-year-old student for two days, even if you were paid to, because the price isn't the point, the overhead is. The math doesn't work.I am doing it every single day now.The Claude Code subscription divided across twenty working days is roughly twelve dollars, and Codex is similar, which means that for the price of a takeaway lunch I can summon an army of two-hour interns who are confident and fast and will tell me with absolute certainty that they have identified and resolved the issue, which is its own particular flavor of intern energy, the kind where the work has been done but not actually verified, and then their shift ends and a new one shows up, equally confident.The thing that is slowly dawning on me, though, is that I have seen this problem before, and I just didn't recognize it.For years while running my company, I poured enormous energy into giving my team context. Weekly town halls, a weekly email after every client trip with everything I had seen, quarterly offsites where we flew in our biggest clients to spend two days embedded with the team. None of it benefited me directly. All of it was an attempt to push context outward so that people could make better decisions without me in the room.After about ten years, I quietly stopped doing most of it, not because it didn't matter but because I had realized something uncomfortable. Most people didn't want the context, and they couldn't reasonably be expected to hold the whole business in their head the way I did. They wanted clear instructions. When I switched from broadcasting context to giving very specific direction, output went up and I wasted less of my own energy on the things that weren't sticking anyway.I think I am relearning that lesson now with agents, in a different shape but with the same underlying truth. We are pouring enormous engineering effort into harnesses and context engines and skill files and persistent memory, all of it aimed at turning agents into something closer to senior employees who carry the project around with them. But maybe the better move is to stop trying to make a two-hour intern think like a senior architect, and start designing tasks that a two-hour intern can actually finish.Here is what I am starting to think about.The skill that is becoming most valuable in this phase is one I undervalued for years as a CEO, which is the ability to decompose, to take something complicated and break it into pieces small enough that a fresh intern, with two hours of context and no institutional memory, can finish one of them. That is a real craft, part product manager and part senior engineer and part the kind of taste that knows what to leave out.I am also thinking about the problem nobody seems to be solving yet, which is how agents interact with each other, because I can brief one agent, and I can brief two, but when I want the agent that wrote the backend to coordinate with the agent that is writing the frontend, the cognitive load is still on me. I end up being the bus between them, and I am a terrible bus, slow and distractible and prone to dropping things.And I keep coming back to the asymmetry between assigning work and reviewing it. Assigning is intoxicating, because I can spin up five tasks in five minutes, but reviewing is excruciating, because it is the least fun part of the job and the most consequential, and my output is bottlenecked not by what I can ask for but by what I can actually verify. The bottleneck has moved from production to judgment, and I am underinvesting in judgment.The technology will get better. Context windows will grow, memory will improve, and some of what I am describing here will sound quaint in twelve months. But I don't think the management problem goes away. I think it just changes shape, and the question of how a single human orchestrates dozens of fast, confident, forgetful two hour interns is going to be one of the defining management challenges of this decade, and almost nobody is talking about it as a management problem yet.What I keep wondering is whether the people who will be best at this aren't the ones with the most technical skill, but the ones who already know what it feels like to manage a team that is always turning over. The agency owners. The restaurant managers. The construction foremen. The people who learned, the hard way, how to extract good work from someone who started yesterday and might quit next month.Maybe they have been training for this their whole lives, and they don't know it yet.And maybe the rest of us are about to find out that we were signing up to be managers without realizing it. The writer who just wanted to write a book, the founder who just wanted to ship a product, the analyst who just wanted to automate a workflow, all of them now running tiny organizations of forgetful collaborators, learning on the fly what it means to delegate and review and hold the thread when nobody else can. Building with AI was supposed to be the thing that freed us from management. It turns out it was the thing that made every one of us a manager. --- ### The Rocket Ship Problem We have rocket ships. We're using them to commute. Published: 2026-05-10 URL: https://kunal.live/unprompted/the-rocket-ship-problem/ Friends were over for games night last week, and somewhere between dinner and the cards coming out, the conversation drifted to AI. It always drifts to AI these days. Someone was telling a story about how a colleague used ChatGPT to draft a performance review, and someone else was talking about how their partner had built a meal planner over the weekend. The usual rotation of small wins and small frustrations. I love these conversations. They're the closest thing I get to a real-time read on how people are actually using these tools, beyond what shows up on my X feed.Halfway through, I noticed a feeling I wasn't expecting. Disappointment. Not in my friends, who are smart and curious and genuinely making their lives better with these tools. Disappointment in the shape of the conversation itself. We were three years into the ChatGPT era, sitting in our apartment in Lisbon, and everything we were excited about was a slightly better version of something humans already knew how to do.Write code. Design a website. Analyze a spreadsheet. Draft an email. Plan a meal. Run a workout. Talk through something with a therapist-shaped chatbot. All useful. All faster, cheaper, more personalized than before. And all, when I really sat with it, not new.I want to be honest about something before I go further. I'm guilty of the same pattern.In the last few months, I've been using AI to build a to-do list app. A small digital publication. A health tracker that fits the way I actually want to track my health. A tool to help me manage my stock portfolio in a way none of the off-the-shelf platforms quite do. Each one has been genuinely fun to build. Each one solves a small problem in my life that I'd been carrying around for years. I'm not complaining about any of it.But none of these things are new inventions. They're customizations. To-do lists existed in 1985. Health trackers exist. Portfolio managers exist. What I'm doing is taking categories of software that already exist and tailoring them to my taste, which is a real and valuable thing, but it isn't the future I thought we were building toward.The wall between technical and non-technical has come down. I've been writing about that for over a year. What I'm noticing now is that most of us, having walked through the gap, are using our new freedom to rebuild the rooms we already had, just with the furniture arranged how we like it.There's a reason for this, and it's not a mystery. LLMs are trained on the accumulated written output of our species. They are extraordinarily good at producing more of what humans have already produced. Of course they're good at code, and email, and meal plans. We've been doing those things for decades. The training data is rich, the patterns are clear, the outputs are reliable.What the models cannot easily do, and what we as users have not pushed them toward, is help us make things that humans don't yet know how to make. Not "things I as an individual couldn't build before." Things our species hasn't figured out yet. There's an enormous difference between those two, and I think we're collectively conflating them.I want to say something sharper, because the soft version of this isn't landing for me anymore.The AI conversation has been hijacked by the wrong people. Scroll any feed and you'll see the same parade. The prompt engineers selling courses on how to write better prompts. The UGC factories cranking out AI avatars to read scripts to camera. The startup founders raising at billion-dollar valuations to build the seventeenth ChatGPT wrapper for legal contracts. The influencers running threads on "10 prompts that will change your life," which always turn out to be ways to write a slightly better LinkedIn post. This is the discourse. This is what most people think AI is for. And it's making us collectively dumber about what the technology actually is.I'll go further. Most consumer AI software being built right now is a distraction. Not because it's harmful, but because it's absorbing the talent, capital, and cultural attention that should be going somewhere else. Every smart builder spending a year on an AI-powered note-taking app is a smart builder not spending that year on something that might actually move the species forward. We have a generational tool, and we're pointing it at our inboxes.The work that matters is happening in places almost nobody on tech Twitter is talking about. Materials science. New molecules, new alloys, new structural designs that no human would have thought to try. Drug discovery. Compounds that come out of latent space rather than out of a chemist's intuition. Protein folding. Decades of stuck progress cracked open in eighteen months. Climate modeling. Patterns in atmospheric data that human researchers would never have isolated. Pure math. Conjectures that have resisted proof for a century being approached from angles no human mathematician proposed.This is what AI is actually for. Not faster email. Not personalized to-do lists. Not avatars reading scripts. The tool's deepest capability is finding patterns and possibilities that exist outside the range of human intuition, and we are squandering that capability on consumer software that mimics what we already had.I include myself in this. The four projects I mentioned earlier? They're symptoms of exactly the disease I'm describing. I have access to the most powerful reasoning tool ever built, and I've been using it to optimize my morning routine. The contradiction isn't lost on me. It's why I'm writing this.I've been sitting with a question for the last few weeks, and I haven't been able to put it down. Is what I'm building a worthy use of this moment? Not the moment in my life. The moment in history. The window where being early to AI-assisted creation gives a single person more leverage than they've ever had. Spending that window on a better to-do list is a choice I've been making, and when I look at it directly, I don't love what I see.The question I keep returning to in my own work is no longer "what could I make easier with AI?" It's "what could I attempt that I would never have attempted before, because the answer isn't anywhere in the training data?" Those feel like completely different questions to me. They lead to completely different work. And one of them is the question I actually want to be living inside.I don't fully know what that work looks like for me yet. I have hunches. I'm interested in what AI can find in financial markets that no human investor has noticed, not by mimicking good investors but by reading the data sideways. I'm interested in what it can suggest about how to organize a day, a week, a life, that doesn't just optimize existing structures but proposes ones we haven't tried. I'm interested in what it can do with health, where the patterns are too high-dimensional for any individual doctor to hold in their head. I'm interested in the territory where the tool has to reach.What I'm not interested in anymore, and what I'm done pretending is interesting, is the to-do list. The note-taking app. The personalized version of the thing that already worked. I'm retiring those projects. Not because they were bad, but because they were too easy a use of something this rare.After our friends left that night and my partner and I were cleaning up, I told her what I'd been turning over during dinner. We're using rocket ships to commute. She laughed and asked what I'd build instead, if I were trying to use the rocket ship as a rocket ship. I didn't have a complete answer.But I know I'm done commuting. --- ### Icy Roads For 15 years, the only thing I had more of than ambition was friction Published: 2026-05-05 URL: https://kunal.live/unprompted/icy-roads/ The roads in Ottawa freeze hard by mid-November. By January, they're a kind of glass you have to learn to read. Every intersection becomes a small test of whether you remember what your driving instructor told you when you were sixteen. Don't slam the brakes. Don't oversteer. Feel the car through the wheel. If you grew up there, you learned that the road is always talking to you, and your job is to listen.I've been thinking about those winters lately, sitting at my desk in Lisbon at 4am with a dozen AI agents running in parallel.For fifteen years I built a company, and the only thing I had more of than ambition was friction. Prospects said no because we were selling something they hadn't budgeted for. People said no when I tried to recruit them. The team said it's not possible when I asked them to build something new. Investors said no, often, and politely, and sometimes not so politely. Every direction I pushed, the world pushed back. That was the texture of every single day for a decade and a half.I overcame it the way most founders do, through stubbornness, conviction, and a slightly unreasonable belief in the thing I was building. It worked. It took longer than I thought it would, and cost more than I thought it would, but it worked. Five years ago I stepped back from the CEO role, and the friction lifted, and for the first time in my adult life I was not negotiating with the world from morning to night.Then I started building again. This time, alone, with AI.And I have no friction.My AI agents say yes to everything. Every idea I have is, a great idea. Every market I consider entering, I should enter. Every feature I dream up at midnight, I should build by morning. I now run multiple plans simultaneously on Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and Replit, and on most days I have a dozen agents going in parallel, each one cheerfully executing whatever I bark into my microphone. Nobody pushes back. Nobody tells me the timeline is unrealistic, the market is too crowded, or this isn't the problem worth solving right now. Nobody says I don't think this is a good idea, Kunal. Everybody just builds.I've been working 80-hour weeks, in part due to this lack of friction. The agents work overnight while I sleep. I come back to features I half-remember asking for, in directories I don't fully recognize, solving problems I'm no longer sure are mine. I built a thing yesterday that I'm not sure why I built. I added a feature to an app that wasn't broken because the agent confidently informed me it was a great addition.By the end of most days I am not satisfied. I am frustrated. Floating, actually, is the word that keeps coming to me. Floating in too many directions at once.This is the thing I lamented for fifteen years. If only people would see my vision and say yes. If only the friction would lift. Now the friction has lifted, and I am lost in a way I never was when everyone was saying no.Building a company in the old way, the pre-AI way, was driving in sand. Heavy. Slow. Every meter of forward motion required disproportionate energy. The friction was exhausting, but it was honest. The road told you exactly where you stood. Sand doesn't lie about resistance.Vibe coding, on those rare moments when it works beautifully, is like driving on ice. Fast. Effortless. The car responds to the lightest touch, and suddenly you're moving at speeds that would be impossible in any other condition. But ice has its own discipline. You can't slam the brakes. You can't oversteer. The slightest overcorrection sends you spinning. Ice asks for a kind of relaxed precision, a feel for the road that takes years to develop.What I'm in right now isn't ice. It's a road with no surface at all. No resistance, no grip, no feedback. The car goes wherever I point it, instantly, without consequence. Which sounds great until you realize you've forgotten what direction you were going.The friction in the old world wasn't just an obstacle. It was information. Every no told me something. The prospect saying no was telling me my product wasn't ready, or my pitch was off, or the timing was wrong. The engineer saying it's not possible was telling me I needed to scope smaller, or wait six months for the technology to catch up. I hated all those no's at the time. But each one was a filter, narrowing the infinite space of what I might do down to the much smaller space of what I should do.Now nothing filters. The agents will build whatever I describe, in whatever direction I point. Every idea is technically buildable, which means every idea is, in some sense, equally valid. Equally valid is a kind of nightmare for a person who used to navigate by friction.There's a thing my driving instructor told me when I was sixteen. The worst drivers in winter aren't the ones who are scared. They're the ones who feel invincible because the car is responding so well. They mistake the absence of resistance for the absence of danger. They speed up because nothing is stopping them. And then they hit the moment when the road asks something of them, and they don't know how to answer.I think the past year of vibe coding has been, in some ways, my speeding-up phase. Nothing is stopping me, so I keep going. More tools, more agents, more features, more verticals. The token counter climbs. The 4am sessions accumulate. And underneath all of it is a question I'm only beginning to articulate: what is the new form of friction supposed to be?If friction was information, and the world isn't providing it anymore, then someone has to. And the only candidate I can see is me.Here's what I'm starting to think about. The most important skill of the next phase of building isn't prompt engineering, or tool selection, or knowing which model is best at which task. It's the skill of providing your own friction. Of saying no to yourself in a world where nothing else will. Of knowing when an idea is good, and when it's just a 4am idea wearing a good idea's costume.I don't have that skill yet. Or rather, I have it, but I built it for a different road. I learned to navigate by friction, by reading the resistance the world offered, by pushing into the no's until they became yeses. That skill served me well for fifteen years. It is not the skill this new road requires.The new skill is something more like taste, or judgment, or what my partner calls just knowing what you actually want. It's the ability to look at an agent that just confidently announced this is a great direction and say, no, actually, it isn't, and walk away, even though everything is pointing toward yes.I'm starting to wonder if a lot of people in this next phase of AI building are going to crash for the same reason. Not because the tools failed, or the models hallucinated, or the technology wasn't ready. Because the road got smooth, and we mistook smoothness for safety, and we didn't realize that the friction we'd spent our lives complaining about was actually the thing teaching us how to drive.I'm not sure how to develop the new skill. I think it has something to do with slowing down, even when nothing is asking me to. With introducing artificial constraints that the world will no longer provide for free. With having more conversations with people who will tell me I'm wrong, because the agents won't.Most days I don't manage any of this. I just keep building, and the agents keep agreeing, and the road keeps disappearing under my wheels.But every once in a while I think about a sixteen-year-old in a parking lot in Ottawa, learning to feel the car through the wheel, learning that the road is always talking, and the only question is whether you're listening.I'm not sure what the road I'm on is saying yet.I think it might be telling me to stop. --- ### My Window Is Now A Mirror There was always someone or something between me and the thing I wanted to build Published: 2026-04-19 URL: https://kunal.live/unprompted/my-window-is-now-a-mirror/ For twenty-five years I had a window to point at. Now it's a mirror.Last week I hit the usage limit on Claude Code for the third time in a single day. Not the monthly limit, the daily one. I switched to Cursor. Maxed out. Switched to Codex. Already burning through the ceiling there too. At some point in the last six months, I've been cycling through AI tools like a gambler who's been cut off at one table and walks to the next. My wife has watched this build for months, the late nights bleeding into early mornings, the laptop open before coffee, the conversations where I'm physically present but mentally still inside whatever I was building an hour ago. She doesn't say much about it anymore. The pattern speaks for itself.For fifteen years as CEO of a technology company, and ten years in student leadership before that, there was always someone or something between me and the thing I wanted to build. Engineers who would tell me the thing I wanted would take six months. Clients who moved at their own pace. Investors with their own timelines. The friction was the terrain, and in a way I never appreciated at the time, it performed a function I didn't know I needed. It gave me something to point at. The team is still ramping up. The client hasn't responded. The funding round isn't closed. A window I could look through and say: that's why this isn't done yet. If the bottleneck is out there, then the bottleneck isn't me.Every excuse I relied on for a quarter century has evaporated in what feels like a single season. I need a team? Agents run overnight without complaining. I need money? The tools cost a fraction of a single junior developer. I need knowledge I don't have? I can learn anything in an afternoon with a model that never gets tired of my questions. Market research, a logo, a database schema, all of it is a conversation away. There's no one left to blame, no friction to absorb the impatience, and what I'm discovering is that me, without the convenient structure of external limitations, is a person who doesn't know when to stop.The strange thing is that I have enough. Enough professional satisfaction, enough financial security. This isn't the hunger of someone with something to prove. I did that for fifteen years and wrote a book about why the summit was empty. This is the curiosity of someone who spent most of his career imagining things he couldn't make, and who now can make almost anything he imagines. The creative impulse finally has no gatekeeper, and it turns out the creative impulse without a gatekeeper is a flood. Every problem I notice becomes a potential project. The gap between what if and let me try has collapsed to nearly zero, and the result isn't the liberation I expected. It's a kind of overwhelm I have no practice managing.A friend of mine, another builder here in Lisbon, told me something over dinner last month that I haven't been able to shake. He said he'd realized that for years he thought his problem was access, that if he could just get the right tools and resources, he'd finally build what he saw in his head. Now he has all of that. And the thing he's confronting is that the vision was always slightly ahead of his ability to execute it, and the external friction was masking that gap. Take away the friction, and the gap is just you. I recognized that immediately. The mirror again.There's a version of this realization that's terrifying, the moment you understand that the excuses were load-bearing walls, and without them the whole structure of how you understood yourself starts to shift. For twenty-five years, being a leader meant navigating constraints. Remove the constraints, and what's left of the identity? But there's another version I keep circling back to in the quieter moments, usually after my wife has gently reminded me that the laptop can close. Maybe the mirror isn't showing me a bottleneck. Maybe it's showing me something I haven't had to look at before because there was always a window in the way. The real shape of my own creativity, my own limits, my own relationship with the difference between building because I can and building because it matters.The skill I suspect matters more than any prompting technique or tool selection is the one I've never had to develop: patience with myself as the only variable. Knowing which of the eleven projects deserves this week, and being at peace with the ten that don't. Knowing that maxing out every AI plan every day is not a sign of productivity. It might be a sign of someone who hasn't yet learned to sit with the mirror.I spent fifteen years wishing the window would disappear. Now it has, and the view is only me, and I'm still learning what to do with that. --- ### Why does vibe coding make me lonely? I think I finally solved the authentication flow Published: 2026-04-19 URL: https://kunal.live/unprompted/why-does-vibe-coding-make-me-lonely/ I've been vibe coding every single day for over a year. Across every tool I can get my hands on: Lovable, Replit, Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, and a handful of others whose names have already blurred together.I've used about a billion tokens. Thousands of dollars a month in credits. I know that's not a normal number. Most people hear it and assume I'm either exaggerating or addicted. The truth is probably closer to the second one.Most mornings I wake up around 4am while our apartment in Lisbon is still dark and my wife is still asleep. I make ginger tea without turning on the lights, the counter familiar enough by now to navigate by feel, and sit down at my desk where the monitor is still glowing from the AI agents I left running overnight. Sometimes I come back to a codebase that's been quietly improved while I slept. More often, I come back to a codebase that's been quietly rearranged in ways I didn't ask for. There's a particular kind of suspense in it, like checking on a house party I left unsupervised.By 8am there's usually a kind of electricity running through me. A feature that finally clicked, a bug that surrendered after hours of back and forth, an interface starting to resemble the thing that had been living only in my head. That's when I walk to the bedroom, sit on the edge of our bed, and talk too fast about whatever just happened. I think I finally solved the authentication flow. My wife nods, half asleep, says that's great, babe, understanding none of the specifics but all of the energy behind them. It's become our rhythm, these mornings.Before all of this, I ran a tech company for fifteen years. Scaled it across thirty countries, raised capital, managed engineering teams, sold to Fortune 500 clients. I called myself the Chief Everything Officer because I did everything except the one thing the company actually made. I couldn't write a line of code. For a decade and a half, the building was always someone else's job. I sat on the other side of a wall that separated the people who could imagine things from the people who could make them, and I accepted that wall as permanent.Then the wall came down.The feeling of building with AI is extraordinary, and I don't want to understate it. I can go from an idea to a working prototype in hours, standing up features that would have taken my old engineering team months to scope and ship. That first 95% takes maybe 5% of the total effort. It's intoxicating. The first time I looked at something on my screen and thought, I made that, the feeling was real and powerful and I understand completely why people are falling in love with this.But then the remaining 5% begins. And it is a completely different experience.Earlier this year, I built a photo sharing app for our wedding. It took a few days. Friends and family uploaded hundreds of photos, thousands of people viewed the site, and my wife and I had this beautiful collection of our celebration. The thing worked. So I expanded it into a full product, something anyone could use. That's when the whole thing cracked open. Other people couldn't figure out where to click. Uploads broke on certain devices. Edge cases multiplied with every new user. I'd deploy agents to fix the bugs, and the agents would create new bugs. The context window would run out mid-conversation and I'd start over from scratch, re-explaining the entire project to an agent with no memory of the last four hours. The app that had worked beautifully for our wedding was barely functional for anyone who wasn't me.Weeks of this, and not just on the photo app. The same cycle across every project, every tool, every 4am session. Finally a day came where I sat on the edge of our bed for our normal 8am rhythm and I had nothing to report. No feature that clicked. No bug that surrendered. My wife could tell before I said anything.I give up.She asked what was wrong. And the honest answer was that it wasn't one thing. Not one bug, not one failed build. Something that had been quietly accumulating for weeks, maybe months. The feeling of pouring myself into something that kept almost working, almost ready, almost good enough to share with others. Almost is a brutal place to live.The hardest part of vibe coding is not the technical complexity. It's the loneliness. There is no standup in the morning where you can say I'm stuck. There is no Slack channel pinging with someone who noticed the same issue. For fifteen years I had engineers, product managers, a whole organization whose job it was to carry the weight together, and I didn't appreciate it at the time. I think you never do. Now there's just me, and the quiet hum of a machine that doesn't know what time it is.Everyone is talking about the first 95%. The miracle. The speed. The empowerment. And they should, because it is a miracle. What I hear almost nobody talking about is the last 5%, and what it actually costs to get there. Not in tokens. Not in subscription fees. In the quiet, grinding, lonely hours where you're the only person who knows the thing is broken, and the only person who can decide whether to keep going or walk away. I wish someone had told me. So I'm telling you.The judgment to know when something is worth the grind of the last 5%, and when it's better to take what I learned and build the next thing. That judgment is irreducibly human. No agent is going to develop it for me, and the only way I've found to sharpen it is by getting it wrong repeatedly.The gap between prototype and production will shrink. The agents will get smarter about not breaking things they just fixed. Context windows will grow. Some of what I've described here will feel quaint a year from now. But the hope, the frustration, the addiction of almost, the question of when to keep going and when to walk away. Those are human problems, and they'll outlast every model update.I've been championing the idea that anyone can build. I'm writing a book about it. I'm currently building a platform around it. And I believe the core of that idea more than ever, because I've lived it this past year in ways I couldn't have imagined even two years ago.And while everyone is, rightly, celebrating the prototype. What happens after is largely ignored. The questioning of whether this thing you poured yourself into is worth finishing or whether you should just start over. That silence is the gap I'm trying to fill. Because if you're in it right now, you should know: it's not just you.Whether the hope outlasts the exhaustion, I genuinely don't know.Ask me again tomorrow.If you know someone who's been chasing the same bugs, send this their way. They might need to know they're not alone. --- ### My Wife Thinks I'm Addicted to AI The video game I didn't know I was playing Published: 2026-04-07 URL: https://kunal.live/unprompted/my-wife-thinks-i-m-addicted-to-ai/ I was the kid who never played video games. My friends would disappear into consoles for entire weekends and I'd sit on the couch watching, bored and a little judgmental. Staring at a screen for hours, building nothing real. I tried a few times, was terrible at most of them, and decided games weren't for me. That became part of my identity for decades.Now I'm 40 years old, running three AI coding agents simultaneously across two monitors, and I haven't moved from my chair in four hours.A few weeks ago my wife and I were making dinner. I told her I was in a good mood. She didn't look up from what she was chopping.It's not because of me. It's not because of the weather. It's because you're addicted to vibe coding.My first instinct was to push back. Addicted felt too strong. Addictions are destructive. This was productive, creative, useful. She just looked at me. She was right, of course. She usually is about the things I'm slowest to admit.For fifteen years as a CEO, I context-switched every thirty minutes. Meeting to meeting, decision to decision, fire to fire. I have ADHD, and the constant switching trained my attention span down to something that could barely hold a single thought for the length of a conversation. My wife and I would start a film and twenty minutes in I'd be on my phone. Books that used to take days started taking weeks. I stopped finishing most of them.Vibe coding broke that pattern. Three hours pass and I don't check my phone, don't open a browser tab, don't drift. For someone who hasn't sustained attention on anything for that long in fifteen years, that fact alone is worth sitting with.There's a reason it works on my brain when nothing else has. The challenge level never holds still. One moment I'm describing a feature in plain language and watching it appear on screen, and the feeling is generous, almost effortless. Then an agent rewrites a component I didn't ask it to touch. Two agents start editing the same file and neither one knows the other exists. The model I ask for help cheerfully tells me everything looks fine while the screen is full of red. I'll realize I've been leaning forward in my chair for forty minutes, jaw tight, shoulders up around my ears, bargaining with a machine. Then something clicks, the feature works, and my whole body releases. Easy, hard, easy, hard, impossible, breakthrough. My brain never gets the chance to wander because the ground keeps moving.Gamers know this feeling. Game designers call it the flow channel, that narrow band between frustration and boredom where you're stretched just past your ability but not so far that you quit. The entire gaming industry is built on engineering that state. Vibe coding does it by accident.But in games, the rewards are virtual. In vibe coding, the rewards are real and they compound. When I showed my wife the photo sharing page I'd built for our wedding, she went quiet for a second, then started scrolling through it slowly. You made this? That landed somewhere no level-up screen has ever reached. And when a context window expires and I lose four hours of shared understanding with an agent, the frustration is just as real. The thing I'm building either works for actual people or it doesn't.Here's the case I keep making to myself, and I think I actually believe it. Every other addiction I can name narrows your life. Less money, less health, less time, less presence with the people next to you. This one keeps producing things. Tools that work. Problems I've solved for people who needed them solved. Skills I didn't have a year ago. A version of myself that can take an idea and make it real, which after fifteen years on the wrong side of the wall is not a small thing. If the output is genuinely useful, is the compulsion still a problem?My wife would say yes. She'd say I disappear into it, that I lose hours I meant to spend elsewhere, that the pull of one more agent run at 4am has a texture she recognizes even if I won't name it. And she's watching from close enough to see what I can't.There are 3.4 billion gamers on the planet. Nearly half of humanity. It took four decades to get there, and all that time the loop was attached to virtual outcomes that reset when you turn off the console. Vibe coding is the same loop attached to real things. The nurse building a patient tracking system for her ward. The teacher building an attendance tool that works the way her classroom actually does. The restaurant owner automating her scheduling because she's the only one who understands the problem.Every Friday my AI studio team does a show-and-tell, and I watch it happen in real time. Someone shows a tool they built that week, eyes bright, talking too fast, exactly the way I talk to my wife at 8am when something finally works. The pull has them too. It's not just me. This thing is spreading in a way that nobody is tracking because it doesn't look like adoption metrics or revenue growth. It looks like people who can't stop building.The variable nobody is modeling is the addictiveness of building itself. Not the capability curve, not the cost of tokens, not the labor displacement forecasts. The pull. The thing that keeps someone at their desk not because they have to be there but because they can't leave. Gaming proved that half the planet will show up for a well-designed loop. What happens when that loop is attached to solving real problems, and the only barrier to entry is a browser?I genuinely don't know whether I'm building something or being consumed by it. My wife is keeping score. I suspect she'll tell me before I figure it out myself. --- ### Do Your Homework A warning from someone who's been building with AI every day for a year Published: 2026-03-21 URL: https://kunal.live/unprompted/do-your-homework/ Almost every single one was about the wrong thing. The questions kept coming, dozens of them, and I could feel the pattern before I could name it. How do you get your app to production quality? How do you handle distribution? What's the best way to monetize a vibe coded product? Is it even possible to build something reliable enough to sell? Reasonable questions, the kind any serious builder eventually needs to answer, but they're also the questions you ask at the end of a very long road, and everyone in that room was standing at the beginning.A Sunday morning in a coworking space in Lisbon, nearly a hundred people in the room, and I was supposed to talk for five minutes. A quick overview of what I've been building, what I've learned, some observations from the past year of vibe coding every single day. Five minutes came and went, and then ten, and then fifteen, because the questions wouldn't stop. I mentioned, almost as an aside, that I've been consuming roughly a billion tokens a week across every tool I can get my hands on, Lovable, Cursor, Replit, Claude Code, Codex, and a handful of others whose names have already blurred together. The room changed. People sat up. Hands went up before I finished my sentence. What had been a polite audience listening to a short talk became something closer to an intervention, dozens of people who had been sitting with their own frustrations suddenly realizing someone in the room might have answers.There was a person near the front who was clearly frustrated with the whole endeavor. They'd been building something, trying to turn it into a product, hitting the wall that every vibe coder hits when they move from prototype to production. The bugs that multiply. The features that almost work. The gap between what the AI delivers and what a paying customer would accept. They wanted to know how to close that gap, and the honest answer was that they were asking the question three stages too early.I ran a software company for fifteen years and studied software engineering. I understand what production-level software needs, the infrastructure, the testing, the reliability, the thousand invisible decisions that separate a prototype from a product people trust. And what was striking to me in that room was the assumption that AI had collapsed all of that into a few prompts. That you could describe your dream in plain language and have it arrive, production-ready, on the other side.That's not how any of this works. Not yet. Maybe not ever, at least not the way people imagine.What I told the room, and what turned the five-minute demo into a fifteen-minute conversation, was something that felt almost too simple to say out loud. There's a progression to this, and most people are trying to skip to the end.The way I think about it now, after a year of building every single day, is that there are three phases. The first is building for practice. Throwaway things. Apps and tools and experiments that you will never open again. The purpose isn't the output, it's the learning. Understanding what the tools can do, how the back and forth with an AI actually works, where the models are strong and where they hallucinate with extraordinary confidence. I have hundreds of these, scattered across platforms, most of them abandoned within hours of creation. They were never meant to last. They were meant to teach me something, and they did.The second phase is building for yourself. A personal productivity tool, a workflow automation, a scheduling assistant, something that you yourself need and will actually use. Not theoretically use. Use tomorrow morning. Use next week. Use next month. This is where most people discover how hard building actually is, because the standard is no longer "does it work once," it's "will I reach for this again." I've built dozens of tools for myself that I used for a single day and then abandoned, because the experience wasn't good enough. A button in the wrong place. A flow that required three clicks when it should require one. The kind of friction that's invisible when you're building and unbearable when you're using. That friction is the curriculum. Working through it, iterating on the small annoyances, staying with something long enough to make it genuinely useful to yourself, that's where the real skill develops.The third phase is building for others. Products to sell, tools to share, things that need to be stable and reliable and worth someone's money or attention. Distribution, monetization, go-to-market, all the questions that room was asking. Production-level software has always been hard, and AI hasn't changed that. It's changed who can attempt it. It hasn't changed what it demands.The thing I keep circling back to is why most people try to jump straight to phase three. And I think the answer is something that has very little to do with technology.There was a moment during the Q&A where I challenged someone directly. They were frustrated with the gap between their prototype and a sellable product. I said, build something you yourself will use every day for thirty days. Not for someone else. For you. Wake up tomorrow and use it. Use it again the next day. If you're still using it after a month, come back and talk to me about monetization. The look on their face suggested this was not the advice they were hoping for.Because it sounds like homework. And adults, particularly adults in our thirties, forties, and fifties, have forgotten how to do homework.We've spent our professional lives optimizing for results. For ROI. For the most efficient path between effort and outcome. In the world we were trained for, doing something without a clear return on investment feels wasteful, almost irresponsible. The idea of building something you'll never look at again, on purpose, as practice, runs against every instinct that Western capitalist culture has spent decades installing in us. Everything must produce. Everything must count. Everything must be monetizable.If I said this to a twenty-year-old, they'd get it immediately. They're still fluent in the language of learning for its own sake. It's called practice. It's called training. It's the thing you do before the thing you do matters. Somewhere between twenty and forty, we lose that fluency. We start believing that effort without visible output is wasted effort. And then we sit in a room at an AI event and ask how to monetize an app we haven't even built for ourselves yet.Professional athletes still practice. That's the part that gets me. LeBron James, in his twenty-second NBA season, still practices. Every single day. Not because he doesn't know how to play basketball, but because the practice is what keeps the game sharp. Before he was in the NBA, he was in high school, playing games that didn't count for anything except his own development. Before that, he was in a driveway. The progression from driveway to practice court to professional arena is so obvious in sports that we don't even question it. Nobody watches a kid shooting hoops and asks about their distribution strategy.But with AI building, which is genuinely new, which none of us have been doing for more than a couple of years, we somehow expect to skip the driveway and the practice court entirely. We want to walk onto the professional court because the tools feel professional. The interface is so good that it tricks us into thinking we should be producing professional output. The AI doesn't care that it's your first week. It will confidently attempt whatever you ask. And that confidence is contagious in a dangerous way, because it makes you believe that the gap between you and a shipped product is smaller than it actually is.I've been thinking about what the next twelve months look like for people entering this space, and I keep coming back to the idea that the biggest barrier isn't technical. It's cultural. It's the deeply internalized belief that learning without producing is a luxury we can't afford. That building something we'll never show anyone is a waste of time. That the only valid reason to sit down and create is if the creation has a market.The people I know who are getting genuinely good at this, the ones whose work is starting to feel solid and intentional and useful, are the ones who gave themselves permission to be bad at it for a while. Who built throwaway things without guilt. Who spent weeks on a personal tool that only they would ever see, not because they were building a product, but because they were building a skill. The skill is the product. Everything else comes after.I spent a year doing my homework. A billion tokens a week, hundreds of abandoned projects, thousands of hours of the particular frustration that comes from watching an AI agent confidently declare a bug fixed while the app is visibly on fire. There was just a person learning, slowly and expensively and often at 4am, how to build things that actually work.The room at that event wanted the shortcut. I understand the impulse. But the shortcut doesn't exist, not because the tools aren't powerful enough, but because the person using them needs time to develop judgment that no model can provide. When to push forward and when to start over. What good enough actually looks like. Which features matter and which ones are noise. That judgment is what separates a prototype from a product, and it's built the same way every durable skill has always been built.One throwaway project at a time. One tool you use yourself until you can't stand the rough edges. One month of daily use before you ask anyone else to care.Build something tomorrow. Something small, something useless, something you will never show another person. See if you can tolerate how that feels. The discomfort of making something that doesn't count. If you can sit with that, you're closer to ready than everyone in that room asking about distribution and monetization.The tools have been ready for a while now. The homework is yours. --- ## Undo (Investor Reflections)