Priorities

The Time: About eight months ago
The Place: The H.O. of an Indian industrial goods major
The Occasion: The hundredth iteration of a 2×2 depicting Market Attractiveness vs. Competitive Advantage for the various markets our client served.
The Story: Two-by-two was a dreaded word those days. The team had spent many a sleepless night on reams and piles of data spanning multiple Excel sheets. All in order to place dozens of multi-coloured bubbles on an atavistic matrix of four boxes. Yes, I am talking about a consultant’s bread and butter- the 2×2 matrix.

In one of my several resentful moments that night, a thought struck me: if bags of cement deserved laborious 2×2 charts then so did more important things in life. More important things in life. Hmm…interesting. Yes, I would devise a 2×2 for the important things in life, a matrix for priorities. Sketches were made and storyboards carved out in long car rides back home and in some stolen moments at work. I managed to churn out some slides too. However, I was soon buried under an avalanche of presentations and meetings and then it was time to quit and pack and move. This matrix remained embedded in a hard disk somewhere. Till now.

I just managed to disinter this cool idea and with a few finishing touches, ladies and gentleman, je vous présente, ‘The Priority Matrix’, in Consultantspeak.

The Priority Matrix is meant to capture the different degrees to which you can satisfy the spectrum of priorities in your life. Every bubble represents a priority and its position on the Matrix tells you a lot more. It offers insight into your psyche as well as bank balance. Where do your top priorities lie? How successful have you been in meeting these – your needs as well as your wants? Is it time to bring in some personal and professional changes? Is this beginning to sound like an ad on Asian Sky Shop? Okay, let’s move on.

Obviously, different people will have varying concentrations of bubbles in different quadrants of the matrix. What does that say about you?

Obviously, the framework was developed in the context of a specific problem: my life. One look at my last few days at work is enough to determine which type I was. Keywords: night-outs and blackouts, followed by dinner at the Racecourse and drinks at Wink. In one word, a rollercoaster. Grad school promised an entirely new social machinery. An enchanted forest where sleep grew on trees and free time just flowed by you.

Sometimes, I looked around at my colleagues and an evil gnome in my head would break out into a sinister laugh: I have my ticket (and visa) to eight hours of sleep and sixteen hours of fun. Tumhaare paas kya hai?

And now, in true MTV-style, an invisible baritone voice sniggers and asks me, Can you repeat the question?

Uh-oh. Time to do the math again.

Ah well, I now have twice as many shoes as I did last year. I get my Cosmo’s regularly. My dSLR is still here and it has a litter of new lenses. Check. Check. Check.

I don’t get eight hours of sleep. I get nine. Check. Other need-priorities are far from being met.

So essentially I am still the same type. All this hullabaloo over nothing, what was the point of this post, you might ask. Well, I told you it was Consultantspeak

Sacrificing boredom

In order to live free and happily, you must sacrifice boredom. It is not always an easy sacrifice.

- Illusions, Richard Bach

–
Two months ago, I was aimlessly browsing the net when I remembered an interesting idea I had read as a teenager. Whenever you are looking for direction in life, take a book and open a random page and it will tell you what you need to know. Illusions was at hand, and my random page spewed the wisdom above.

I smiled and went back to aimless browsing.

–

After three super-charged and super-packed days in NYC, I found myself stranded at Dallas Fortworth for a night thanks to American Airlines. What do you do at an empty airport; alone, no book, no friend, no iPod, two cups of coffee and consequently, no sleep. You think.

I thought about what makes people happy.

Being with people they love. Doing what they love. Being somewhere they love.
Broad enough. I went through the list again.

Being with people they love. I had just said goodbye to A a couple of hours ago. I was headed back to an empty desolate studio apartment (fondly referred to as ‘Deep Freeze’)

Being somewhere they love. Three days in NY and I dreaded the thought of coming back to Stanford. I didn’t realize how much I missed crowds and noise and life and colours. I missed imperfection, I missed masses of real people. Mee Mumbaikar indeed.

Doing what they love. Let’s not even go there baby.

Wait a minute, isn’t the last one the only one I have some control over? Sadly not. Boredom and I have become comfortable roommates in this state of Deep Freeze. I have had a nagging feeling for a long time that I am not really happy, but it was something I was learning to live with – like frizzy hair, absent-mindedness and a boyfriend with a erm…scatological sense of humour.

And that’s when Bach’s words came back to me. It is not always an easy sacrifice.
What’s life without a little challenge? Here’s hoping that I can shake myself out of slumber.

–
Unrelated amusing anecdote

Last week I was at dinner with a friend and his girlfriend. Somehow we got down to talking about my blog.
My friend tells his girl,”You should check out her blog. I don’t really like it, but you might.”
I laughed, “You really don’t like it?”
“Yeah, I think you try to be too arty.”

Well, maybe I should have stuck to my old blog handle – iamart(sy).

Bang Bang

One of my pastimes in class is to pick up a phrase from what the professor’s saying and take it on a nice long stroll. While we amble, time moves by leaps and bounds and when I come back, I have no choice but to continue daydreaming, because the lecture does not make sense any more.

I am taking a really interesting course this quarter: Analysis and control of nonlinear systems. It’s a course that provides ample food for thought. It is both mathematical and allegorical. A large part of this course is devoted to a form of control that switches between two states, more interestingly known as bang-bang control.

My favourite line from my SoP to Stanford went something like this: In a world where equations are hardly ever linear, one certainly cannot expect lives to be. Yes, life in all its nonlinearity lends itself to some bang-bang control of a different kind.

Bang bang. Sex and violence.
In more elegant terms, love and fear.

Love and fear are the only driving forces in life. All human needs would probably fall into one of the two buckets (and just when I thought that the consultant in me had died…): food, sex, gossip, politics, art, careers, shoes, travel, sex. (Except my apoplectic abomination of pigeons. Now that is a tricky one)

Yes, when stripped of costumes and make-up, every impulse turns out to be one of the two stage veterans. If all the world’s a stage, Love and Fear are shaping the story, controlling almost all human actions.
But surely life cannot be as simple as a primitive control technique. Life, unlike thermostats, is dual not binary. Can love and fear ever exist independent of the other? They feed on one another, slaking and stoking at once. Isn’t love also the fear of loss, isn’t fear the loss of love?

However, behind this curtain of interwoven impulses, one can tell that the best decisions are the ones fueled only by love, and the safest are the ones driven by fear.

So what drives you?
And what holds you back?