Biggest Turning Point of my life

Today I want to talk about what I consider is the biggest turning point of my life. It happened when I was in the seventh grade. Before I talk about that turning point, I need to provide some context that led to this point and made it the biggest. Before my seventh grade, I was an average to below average student. I used to get mostly B grades and some C grades. But that was not the problem. The main problem was my self confidence and self- esteem were at rock bottom. This problem was self-created.

As a child, I did not like to talk to anyone nor did I want anyone to talk to me. I liked being in my own world. There were many people in my class who didn’t know I existed as I never talked to them or I never made my presence felt in the class. I hit a low point with my self confidence and my self esteem when I had a conversation with myself in the sixth grade when I asked myself what do I want to become when I grow up. I had heard some people talking about it where someone said he wanted to be an engineer and someone said doctor and  pilot. The answer I got from within still resonates with me more than 25 years later even today. My inner voice said I am incapable of being anything in life. I am bad at studies and I don’t talk to anyone and nobody really cares about me. On that day I felt like I hit rock bottom with my life.

While I was going thru this in my head, I entered seventh grade. In my state, seventh grade is a big deal because we have board exam for the finals. Also passing this grade gives us entry into high school which means serious stuff. With what was going on in my head, there was no way I could expect to do well in the board exam. My parents must have thought about the importance of this grade and were looking for some options that could help me.

That is when they took a decision that changed my life. My parents decided to get private tuitions for me and decided to send me to a particular teacher. The biggest turning point is not their decision to get private tuitions for me but the teacher they picked for it. My teacher was a good one and a popular one in my school but more importantly all the toppers in my class used to come there. At the beginning of the year, I was ranked 37 in a class of 60. But over the next two months, due to my teacher’s effort, I moved from 37 to 17th in the next unit test. That gave me some confidence. But what gave me a boost to my self esteem and my confidence was the toppers in my class started to recognize me and greet me. Before I know it, they started to invite me to play football and cricket. I never thought this would happen. By the end of the year, my confidence and my self esteem had taken a 360 degree turn and I started to believe that I can do well in the final board exam and I did. I scored 447 out of 600. If you were to ask me or my parents at the beginning of the year if I can score so much, both of us would have said no. This laid a solid foundation for my self confidence and I started to believe I can achieve something.

I am eternally grateful to my parents for making the decision to send me to that particular teacher for private tuitions which not only led me to improve in studies but laid a strong foundation for my self confidence and boosted my self esteem. I owe all the success in my life to that biggest turning point in my life.

Having expectations is an oxymoron

Every body has some expectations from other people. Many a time we hear people saying "I expected you to do this", "I expected you to say this" etc. But I feel having expectations is an oxymoron. Let me explain:

We only have control over ourselves. We have no control over what any other person does and says. God has given the same capabilities to see, talk and hear to everyone. So people can say what ever they want and do what ever they want. When we don't have control over the other person, having expectations is like saying I want to control what you do or say so that it is in favor of what I want. That is not possible at all. You can only hope that the other person does or says what you want but there is no guarantee.

So stop having expectations from other people.  

Windows 8

This week, after a lot of thinking whether to upgrade my desktop from Vista to Widows 7 or 8, I finally decided to go with Windows 8. So far the experience has been good. I ran into the following issues and I found the solutions on the net and I am listing the solution that worked:

When I re-installed Cisco VPN client on Windows 8, it did get installed but when I ran the client, I got the error that the Adapter is not enabled. When I went on the net, I found that many people had this issue and the following solution worked for me:

 Open Registry editor by typingregedit in Run prompt
·    Browse to the Registry Key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\\SYSTEM\\CurrentControlSet\\Services\\CVirtA
·    Select the DisplayName to modify, and remove the leading characters from the value data upto "%;" i.e.
o    For x86, change the value data from something like "@oem8.inf,%CVirtA_Desc%;Cisco Systems VPN Adapter” to "Cisco Systems VPN Adapter”
o    For x64, change the value data from something like "@oem8.inf,%CVirtA_Desc%;Cisco Systems VPN Adapter for 64-bit Windows” to "Cisco Systems VPN Adapter for 64-bit Windows”
·    Try connecting again

Another issue that I encountered was that my wireless connection was slow. I did the following and I saw a quite a bit of improvement:

- Left click the Internet Access icon in the bottom right corner(Next to sound icon), and then right click the Wireless Network you are connected to and select "View connection properties".

- In the security tab of this window, click the dropdown box for Encryption type, and select 'TKIP'.

- Press okay.

I went to speedtest.net before making the above change and my download speed was 0.56 mbps and the upload speed was 5.6 Mbps. After I made the above change, the download speed increased to 12.24 Mbps and the upload speed to 7.49 Mbps. Overall at this time, my Wireless internet appears to be fast enough. Another option If I face any issue with this is to download the Wireless drivers and reinstalling them again. I hope i don't have to do that. 

Ubuntu 12.10

I was getting bored of Windows Vista and wanted to experience another OS. I heard a lot about Ubuntu and I got the Windows installer of Ubuntu 12.10. When I downloaded the installer (wubi.exe) and double clicked on it to install, it could not because by default it will try to install the 64-bit version of Ubuntu. So I had to run the file by giving a --32bit parameter

http://askubuntu.com/questions/132745/how-to-install-ubuntu-32bit-with-wubi

After that Ubuntu got installed and I ran into another problem. The Wireless connection was not working. I tried a lot of things and none of them worked. Then I hooked up a wired connection and then installed the Broadcom wireless driver for Ubuntu by following the commands from the following link:

http://www.howopensource.com/2012/10/install-broadcom-b43-legacy-wireless-driver-in-ubuntu-12-10-12-04/

Then I went into System Settings > Software Sources > Additional Drivers >
 and selected the Broadcom Wireless Driver and clicked on Apply Changes. It activated the driver and after the system restart, it started recognizing the Wireless connections. It's been heck of a challenge to make it work and now I am enjoying Ubuntu.

The next step was to configure Cisco VPN client and do a remote desktop to my work machine. The first step is to install the client:

http://handytutorial.com/install-cisco-vpn-client-in-ubuntu-12-04/

I actually had a .pcf file from my company. So after I installed the client, I went into the Network Manager > VPN Connections > Configure VPN > click on Import button and import the PCF file. Make the appropriate changes for the username, password etc. and save the VPN connection. 

Then the next step is Remote Desktop client. Ubuntu comes with Remmina Remote Desktop client which is the best for Ubuntu based on my research on the internet. Click on Dash Home on the top left side and type Remmina and you will get the application. Click on it.  It will open the remote desktop connection to your work machine. Adjust the resolution to your choice or match it with the work computer.

I think I have everything in Ubuntu now that I normally do on a windows machine. I will try to use Ubuntu instead of using Windows and see how the experience is.This is the only way to learn something. If we try to find a windows alternative, we will never learn. I plan to upgrade to Windows 8 during christmas holidays. So I will experience Ubuntu until then.

Do you have to be abusive and arrogant to be a successful leader?

Today I was reading an article in the fortune magazine where the authors who wrote books on Sam Walton and Steve Jobs were in conversation. The moderator asked them what are some of the things that are common between their subjects. They answered that both of them were very ambitious, very ruthless in their dealings (nobody wanted to negotiate with them), rejected other's ideas that they did not like very rudely. They had the razor sharp focus on building their company and feared that their successors would ruin the company they started. They never took no for an answer from anyone.

There was another article about Jeff Bezos who is the CEO of Amazon who was declared the 2012 businessman of the year. He shared some of the qualities of Sam and Steve. He is very ambitious, talented, visionary but also very competitive and would not take no for an answer. Outside of this magazine, I had read about Bill Gates and Larry Ellison (CEO of Oracle Corporation) and they also share a lot of things with Steve and Sam. All of them were a little bit rude to others.

Looking at all the case studies above, one could conclude that in order to be as successful as all of the above, one would have to be arrogant, ruthless and abusive. I don't think so. But I am yet to come across some who is as successful as the ones above and who is not arrogant and abusive. After the death of Steve Jobs, lot of people read his biography and analyzed him deeply so that they can emulate him. I hope people take away his passion, ambition, relentless pursuit for excellence and not his arrogance and abusive behavior.

Worst Case in life

During one of my introspective sessions, I thought of something that I feel I need to share with everyone because I feel it is a powerful idea. Most of the times when we have to make a decision whether to do something or not, our heart says something but we do want to think logically and evaluate the pros and cons of doing something or not doing something. Then based on the analysis, we choose the one that we think is the best decision considering the risk involved.

During these decision making sessions, we always ask ourselves: "what is the worse that will happen if we do this or don't do this?". And we make a list of all the things that can go wrong if we choose to take this path. If we see a lot of things in this list, we refrain from doing so even though our heart wants to do it. The mind does not let us do it because it is risky. In my opinion, there is only one worse thing that can happen to us in this life and that is death. As long as you are alive, you can always do something else and achieve the same success a little late or achieve a different kind of success that we never thought of. So my friends, as long as the list does not include death, there is no worse case. Follow your heart and do what you really want to do. I am not asking you to suspend logic and thinking but when you really want to do something and by doing it if you won't die, there is no reason for you to not do it. 

Catching up with myself

It has been a long time I have taken time to write down something. Life has been very busy. I have been running around not having time for anything. My son is already 15 months old. He is a real joy to be with. It still feels so surreal that I was partly responsible in creating a human being. As normal as it may sound  to others, I feel very surreal about it. If I have to think of the most proud thing that I did in this life, it has to be the birth of my son. I don't think anything else compares to this feat. I hope I get to see every inch of him growing up. I will do my best to expose him to everthing possible so that he grows up to be a balanced and broad-minded person.

Apart from my son, my MBA studies have been keeping me busy. So far it has been a great experience. My favorite course is organizational behavior. There is so much psychology in this course that I am enjoying learning every bit of it. This course has explained certain behaviors and helped me confirm some of my understandings of why people behave in a certain way. Now I am very careful in stereotyping people and forming perceptions about people.

Work has been the same. Luckily with the new manager and the new setup, I have a lot of freedom to do what I want and so far I have been successful in getting the work done on time with high quality. There are two more releases this year and if I can deliver with high quality and also deliver some nagging performance and production issues, I can be very proud of myself. Next year is going to be a challenge as we need to make the reform platform ready. I am looking forward to this challenge.

Of late, I have watched some videos on you tube called "Classic Legends with Javed Akhtar". I learned about some of my favorite artists: Raj Kapoor, RD Burman, Majrooh Sultanpuri and I also learned about Sahir Ludhianvi who I did not know much about but he turns out to be one of the greatest poet in our film industry. All these stories are so inspiring. They have achieved so much in their life which reminds me that life is short and I should not waste time in worrying about things that don't matter much  and do what I want to do. Before I know it, I will be standing at the end of the road for this life. I really want to take a pledge to follow my heart and not worry about anything and anyone.