Sunday, June 2, 2019

Have you created your "anti-worry" list ?


For all the bashing that social media gets for being addictive, sometimes nasty and often worthless, there are moments, infact quite a few of them, where you end up learning a perspective that can alter the way you approach your days. 

I firmly believe that when you encounter such moments of enlightenment, the first though you should do is to assimilate and share. Knowledge not shared is indeed the knowledge wasted.

This post is dedicated to one such sharing. Today, I came across this short tweet storm by Andrew Hoag. Let me re-iterate the tweets (with due credit and permissions to Andrew). 

1/ As a CEO, it is incredibly difficult to measure your own progress. Behind every summit lies another, taller peak that feels more urgent, never giving enough time to look at how far you’ve come.

2/ The buck stops with you, which gives you nearly infinite things to worry about, and can occupy all of your mental energy.


3/ A hack I have recently developed to counterbalance this is thinking about what you *no longer* have to worry about: PMF, capital, marketing, recruiting, whatever large or small! Take a moment, make a mental inventory.



4/ This “anti-worry” list is a quick measure of your progress and can help put things in perspective. Spend some of that mental energy on gratitude, and the new peaks won’t seem so tall anymore. 

To me this is such a powerful concept explained so simply in just 4 tweets. One of my earlier managers once told me: Every year of our professional and personal lives add extra bit of responsibilities.

The package called responsibilities comes bundled with an add-on called as stress. I beleive to deal with stress there are only 2 ways: embrace an easy life or find ways to hack stress out of your lives.

"Anti-Worry" list seem to be one such hack. It helps us give a perspective of what we have achieved in our days, the sense of which gets so clouded in midst of the fire-fighting that we have to deal with every day.

"Anti-Worry" list also helps us be grateful of what we have by our side. We often tend to forget that there are things worth appreciating in our work and personal lives.

Quoting this article:
Living your life with gratitude means choosing to focus your time and attention on what you appreciate. The goal is not to block out difficulties, but to approach those difficulties from a different perspective. Appreciation softens us. It soothes our turbulent minds by connecting us with the wonderfully ordinary things, great and small, that we might otherwise take for granted.

I don't know Andrew Hoag but I would like to wholeheartedly thank him for sharing such a wonderful concept to live life.








No comments: