My defining decade
By: Saheb Motiani
Tags: Growing Up, Reflections, Life Lessons, Life

Start anywhere. It’s never too late.

I have often heard people say, I don’t know where to start, what to do. The blunt answer is, whatever the hell you want. You can write whatever you want, do whatever you want to do. No one cares unless you do. At first, this freedom of infinite choices can freeze you — like me — instead of making you feel powerful, that’s alright.

I was a stubborn topper who never read a novel, only textbooks. I didn’t feel a need for it without even trying. A misconception I believed in was that the purpose of reading was to only improve at the language. I was ignorant of the concept of reading for pleasure. In the early formative years, it’s easy to change your beliefs, yourself, anything, but it becomes harder as one grows older — this is what I have observed; I hope I don’t become a stubborn old man.

Read whatever you like, write whatever you want, start anything you desire; almost always it’s never too late.

What I did: I wrote about myself, my everyday life, start there if you feel that’s easier — presuming fictional stories and characters are not floating in your head already.



Hemingway said it well: So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say.

The root problem is most of us don’t know what we really want to do. That’s why the initial bafflement; along with that, you don’t know if it’s worth putting in the effort, you don’t know if you are good enough, and you don’t know if anything will come out of it.

There is only one way to find out. If you are not good enough, be it, but you will have to try to figure that out. Before starting you can’t know. It is not possible to know. No one can answer that for you.

Ask yourself: what’s at stake?

My innate optimism and naivety made it easy for me to get started. Perhaps failure, being at rock bottom, and ignorance helped as well. I didn’t bother considering the scale of the problem, the amount of time or effort, etc. — this has turned out to be a blessing in disguise for me on multiple occasions.

Treat your mistakes as medals

Mistakes happen when you try something new, anything; it’s inevitable and it’s good to make mistakes; it’s as real as it gets in terms of proof that you are trying.

If you’re not making any mistakes, it might mean that you are not trying to solve hard problems, or not aiming to learn something outside your comfort zone, or not wanting to master what you’re already good at.

I’m not saying repeat the same mistakes.

Reduce repeated mistakes, and make new ones. Learn to differentiate between the two and most importantly analyze your mistakes, so you can become better.

Stating the obvious, so you don’t forget: you can learn not just from your own mistakes, but others as well. You don’t need to burn your finger to learn that it hurts.

Never rush with fundamentals

Fundamentals are important. I can’t stress it enough; without mastering them, there is no way forward. It’s easy to work around them, or not give them the time they need, but don’t do that. You are making your future life difficult.

The education system I was part of valued memorization a lot. And it came easy to me. So easy that when it was time to unlearn it, I couldn’t do so. Instead of focusing on understanding the fundamentals, I memorized them. As you can imagine, that didn’t work well for me.

It took me a while, but with the help of chance, I figured it out. My mind was a mess and my past glory on which I stood tall was useless. I stopped trusting my memory, understood how my mind processes things and spent a crazy amount of time on fundamentals.

Your education is your responsibility. I’m sure teachers can’t focus on every student, and parents want their kids to reach the next grade without fundamentals. Needless to mention the stigma of staying a year back. A kid doesn’t have that kind of clarity or courage. They don’t know the importance of being true to oneself, yet. They are more worried about disappointing their parents and tainting the image perceived by their friends and classmates.

Comparing with others is a curse

Comparing is a useful tool, don’t curb your instinct, but understand when and why it can be harmful.

When you meet a new person comparison happens in your mind whether or not you want it, they have different skin, their eyes are different, etc. This isn’t bad, it’s useful to understand the differences. I have nothing to say about that.

When you improve from 40% to 50%, it’s progress, that should make you happy, but in our competitive world that is not considered as important unless you have performed better than the competition. Your rank might not have improved or might have deteriorated, making you wonder whether you have improved at all. This is ingrained in the system, that’s how the election works, that’s how the admission process works, that’s how job selection works, the point being, they are designed to care for the system and not an individual. As an individual, it’s only you who can understand when you have improved and when you haven’t. Comparing yourself with your past self is essential but comparing yourself with others is detrimental.

Don’t chase perfection, chase improvement

Baby steps. One day at a time; one breath, followed by another. Focusing too much on perfection can stop you from going on. I find it better to focus on reducing the room for improvement.

Process is more important than the end result

You got to trust the process. You got to enjoy the journey. You will get to the destination sooner or later; you will get the desired result sooner or later. But it shouldn’t matter if you don’t. As long as you believe in the process, everything else will fall into place eventually. The end result should be a side effect of a well-defined process. Desired outcomes will change, destinations will come and go, all you got is the journey, so make sure you choose the ones that give you joy.

Struggle isn’t necessary; curiosity is

Life isn’t supposed to be hard, and it’s not necessary to struggle to produce anything rare and valuable. What you need though is curiosity, endless curiosity to pursue what piques your interest. If your own curiosity drives you, life will turn into a game; all that’s left to do is play.

Anything worth achieving takes a long time

This lesson usually arrives late in life. In the early years, the goals are definite and you don’t really understand the gravity of what “long term” really means. But sooner or later you figure this out yourself, that whatever you feel is worth doing, takes a lot of effort and time, likely years. That’s when the importance of choice becomes even greater.