The Clarity Principle
My experiments with clarity began about two years back. It had been three years since I had started my business. I was still nowhere close to where I had wanted to be in terms of my personal, financial, emotional and professional lives. I had this very vague sense of being dissatisfied with what life had offered me. Out of this dissatisfaction stemmed a feeling of disappointment and a little depression too.
Growing up in a liberal household, I was never really brought up with any kind of aspirational targets. Whatever I did, wherever I went, there was really no pressure to perform to any kind of benchmark. While this freedom to experiment gave me the essential life lessons of my formative years (and also shaped my character and value system to a large extent), it also instilled in me a false notion that life was all about “let the chips fall where they have to”.
While this fatalistic mode of thinking was great when I was in my teens and early twenties (because it gave me a liberal outlook towards life and helped enhance my world view), it was not necessarily the best thing once I started my professional life. For one, professional life was all about numbers and concrete achievements. And secondly, to achieve anything in one’s professional life was a conscious process, which could not be left hostage to forces like destiny and fate.
Going back to my predicament two years back, during my existential crisis, I realized that I did not have an idea what I wanted from my life. Not knowing what I wanted from my own life, my only measurement of my self worth was in terms of my peers. And we all know that we can never really keep up with the Joneses.
So one weekend, I did a simple exercise. I took a sheet of paper and wrote down the following:
Things that I want to be when I am 65 (65 being the age when I want to retire from a professional life):
I divided it into the following categories:
1) Personal
2) Professional
3) Health
4) Spiritual/ Social Service
5) Financial
Once I did that, I started filling out these categories
1) Personal
1)Be a good father, son and a husband
2) Professional: (1) Achieve domain competency in one subject (2) have at least 2 flourishing businesses
3) Health: (1) Not have any major disease (2) be able to follow one sport religiously (3) be able to work out for an hour
4) Spiritual/ Social Service: (1) Change at least 10 lives
5) Financial: (1) Be able to maintain present standard of living after retirement (2) Be able to afford Medicare after retirement (3) Have the kids go to a good school, university and be able to bear their marriage expenses
Once I did this, I knew the general direction I had to take to take to get to these goals. For example, under Financial, if I have to maintain my present standard of living when I am retired, I better start putting a part of my salary into some kind of a pension fund. For some of the vague goals, (for example, under Personal ) I tried to bring more clarity to them. I asked myself what was being a good son? Is it simply calling my parents on parents day? Or is it about taking care of them in their old age? If yes, how much would that cost?
Once I brought more clarity to each of these goals, I put two columns next to them: Time and cost.
For example, to pay for the university fees of my daughter, I needed to save Rs30 lakhs (approximately USD 60,000) at today’s prices over a span of 21 years.
Once that got nailed down, I divided my lifespan from now ( I am 30 now) till 65 (when I want to retire) into 5 year milestones. Knowing where I wanted to be at 65, I reverse engineered milestones so that I knew where I had to be at those points in my life in order to make my goals at 65. For example, if I wanted to have changed 10 lives for the better by 65, I must have identified an NGO (not-for-profit social service organization) whose cause I am aligned with by 35. By 40, I must have put charity in my routine so that I would have changed at least 2-3 lives by the time I am 45.
I did this exercise when I was 28. Today I am 30. Having done this exercise brought phenomenal clarity to my life. This exercise did make me a better professional, a better father, a better husband a better citizen. Today, I can assuredly say that I am content with where I am and I know where I am going. Gone are the days when my self worth used to be measured by what my peers earned.
Life is a mosaic and it is upto each one of us to decide how to fill it up. Surely each one of us will pass through life’s ups and downs. But having a flight plan helps get through turbulent weather. In school, we are given an education but we are never taught the important lesson of clarity: how it can be applied to our own lives as well as our dealings with others. If only we have clarity about where we want to go, life can only be a pleasant journey.
