happiness is ...

A good friend of mine messaged me to ask me if I was fine. If I was happy. I didn’t seem happy enough. Was something wrong?

These are difficult questions to answer. Are you happy? The frank answer is I don’t know. Instinctively – yes I am happy. My home is just set up. Yesterday I sat till late on my desk and I was reading on the laptop about Amazon and its growth. I was reading random things. I paid some bills as well and I ordered stuff on Amazon. I felt happy and content that I was there doing my bit.

But work takes up a large part of my awake hours. I realize that work is a bit of a bummer. The team is just not ready and is completely wasted. I would have to work with them to push them, improve them and make them come up to mark on a whole host of things. I have to coordinate and play games with so many people to get things going. There are people in the firm who are stuck in a time warp. They refuse to learn and refuse to improve. They are just there, stuck. They don’t even want others to improve. I don’t understand how ego can come in the way of making more money for the firm as a whole. They block everything and every move.

Now that I think over it I see this organization evolve over the last 18 years. Weakness exhibited by the management 18 years ago has snowballed into a large issue and now these monsters have been dragons of epic proportions. Slowly they become even more difficult to dislodge and take the whole business down with them. Weak managers who want to control only their immediate balance sheet try not to upset the apple cart too much. These who manage one year at a time, hiding the problem get rewarded and move to the top. These are managers who do no wrong. They also do no right.

But these are ones who have built this massive organization. Possibly it was an era where you did not need to compete like crazy. You needed just to not do too much hara-kiri and stay alive. Today when you see, the old organizations in the industry are built on edifices of rust and so weak at the roots. One needs to change things and shake them up a bit for them to move and compete in this bold new world.

In all this stress, I am also trying not to take too much stress. I want to sleep at night, not get my blood to boil or increase or decrease my pressure. I want to simply live and manage. Like the same wise friend of mine explained to me 6 months ago when I said I want a boring job “no jaimit, you won’t work in a boring job. You will take a boring job and then you will attack it and make it work and change things there as well. No jaimit, people like you don’t rest”. This was told to me not only by this friend by a few more friends.

Its right I guess. We have the best of intentions but our friends know us more than anything else. This is the thing about friends. So yes – my friend did guess it right. I am the happiest. Possibly I am a grumpy old troll these days. And some other good friends who care have been telling me about it. I guess I have been on the edge. I need to just chill and relax. Make things happy around me. Make myself happy. Manage my happiness quotient.

Of course I have to push for change. Hard push, but never at the cost of screwing my own happiness. That’s a really tough thing to do. Push for change as hard as you can and then enjoy the process and the failures that it will inevitably bring you. Hah! Chalo… it’s a learning of a different order. Be happy be pushy and be content.

These are too many opposites reconciling.

Let’s talk some happy things – I have grown an ugly thick bushy burly moustache. My wife hates it. And I am enjoying it no end.  I always wanted a thick moustache with a short crop hairdo. Now that I don’t have too much hair itself, the contrast is amazing. I think I am loving my old man, grey look. Here you decide.