Don't try to be like me!

Don’t try to be like me. You don’t have to be like me. You may like a few things about me. But that should not make you be like me. You may obviously try and learn that one cool thing from me. But always remember, you are different. You are not me and So you are not limited by my boundaries.

Last 2-3 week were very intense professionally. We were selected in the top 20 teams in the world by g20 tech sprint. We were working for the final submission which is due today (31st of Aug 2020). But I am not here to talk about that. I am going to talk about the two closely resembling conversations I had last week. One of them was between me and my brother and other between me and one of my friends.

My brother was telling me how I manage to remain focused for a long period. It is not entirely true. But there to some extent I agree. Life is really complicated, You never know what it has planned. Planning for a long period is nothing if you are not able to adapt to the challenges. I frequently find myself changing approach although the end goal remains more or less the same. But we are not talking about this either. 1 to 1 comparison is always pointless. Different people have different abilities, different skill sets, different priorities and so on. all this contributes to the overall personalities.

Comparisons are not always bad if you know with whom are you comparing yourself and also why are you comparing yourself against that guy. By answering the why part you make sure that you are aligned with your goals. For example, I do a bit of running but saying that I can’t compare myself with Eliud Kipchoge or a Usain Bolt, since I am not a professional athlete. Running the fastest marathon is cool but it is never in my priority list. I can obviously compare myself with the best software developer around and try to improve myself. By comparison, I mean the comparison in a positive note. This is very systematic, very structured. I know what I am trying to find out by doing the comparison. It is important to some extent but not essential (in my case least).

You may have come across the term priority list in this article many times. Let me define it for you now. It is a list of things which you want to do in your life before you die. So many things depend on hope, so we take the average life span as granted. If you can foresee your death, have some serious, irrecoverable disease, then be realistic. Now you question yourself what is the most important thing you want to do before you die given that you have x number of years to live and you repeat the process before you end up with a few things you want to do in your life. It can be one big purpose or many smaller ones. By now you have gotten your big purpose of life, the one or two or some x number of things you want to live for. Now you need plan how do you achieve that. Your plan can be broken down to smaller iterations. Each and every task in your plan go to a list and this list is sorted by the importance or due date of the task (whichever is more relevant to you). This list is the priority list. You always need to keep the list up to date. The topmost item in your list is always the most important task for you at the moment.

This article is really small to explain the entire concept priority list. Ask me if you need help with this. I will try to write one article with examples and all later. Until then you can give a crack at creating a priority list. But most importantly, remember you are different, independent and you don’t need to try hard to be like others. Be you and enjoy being you. Stay safe.