There are times in my life when I wake up and wonder, how did that happen?
There are set of events/outcomes in my life for which there is no meaningful explanation even on my side as to how it all unfolded?
Obviously, I know I was following my curiosity and was just playing naturally, and it happened. Yes, the most wonderful things in life just happen like that — naturally. When you are completely aligned with your true self and when you are completely aligned with your true nature. When you are perfectly aligned with the Tao. (A philosophical version of this concept can be drawn from Tao Te Ching: nothing is being done because the doer has completely vanished into the deed.)
I have also realized — these exceptional outcomes have happened for other people in the same manner too. These are outcomes in life for which there is no meaningful explanation or a path that you can be advised to take.
Let me give an example.
Let’s say there are two students in high-school: one of the students is a top-class football player and is the captain of the school football team, while the other student presented his plan of tackling climate change crisis in front of the global leaders at the World Economic Forum.
If I ask, which one is a more impressive achievement? Almost everyone considers the second as more impressive.
You can plan for the first, but how do you plan for the second? The short straight answer is, you cannot. There are just too many variables in it for you to effectively craft a strategy to bend each variable to your side.
For the first, you need to practice the sport very hard and everything that comes with it- the training, the diet, etc. But for the second, it’s hard to imagine a path? How did this person even get there?
From this comes the lesson — exceptional outcomes can’t be planned.
So then how do you align exceptional outcomes for yourself? You follow your curiosity and if you continue to follow something you are interested in, no matter how weird it seems, magic will unfold, and you will look back after some time and say, “how did that happen?”.
Maybe this second student once saw the receding glaciers first hand, saw the damage and then got intrigued by it. She then watched all the videos understanding all about climate change, and then started an interest group in school, that interest group did a lot of work together — writing a newsletter, started advocacy and awareness camps, and one fine day their work got noticed (while they were all having fun and following their curiosity), and BOOM, they were invited to speak at the WEF. How do you plan for this? The answer is you can’t.
The only way to align the stars is to follow your curiosity. If you are interested in something, go do it, and you will have outcomes dropping out of somewhere, and you too will wonder, how did that happen.
When students and young professionals seek my counsel on how they can forge a path to an exceptional outcome, I ask them invariably to follow their curiosity. I ask them to not get lost in the race to be number one. I ask them to play and see the workings of the world unfold. I ask them to have fun. I ask them to follow their nature. I tell them this story and tell them that it’s difficult to compete with people who are following their curiosity and having fun.
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These are my rough notes, and an attempt to share my take at life and everything that makes it up. Privileged to have people around me who push me to question the world, and the systems that make it up.