Thinking on your feet is one of the most essential life skills we could ever acquire. Whether it is high-stress situations such as a job interview or talking in front of a group – to more mellow settings such as a dinner conversation – thinking on our feet is certainly a trait that we should constantly nurture and improve upon. This life skill is encompassed in skills that are known as transferrable skills – being skills that will certainly pay dividends many years into the future if we invest the time and effort to improve day by day. Developing such a broad skill as thinking on your feet will take time, but the rewards will certainly be bountiful.
Category: Musings Page 3 of 5
As each year passes, every additional year that we experience becomes a smaller and smaller proportion of our entire life. Although birthdays are a cause for celebration, birthdays also serve as conscious reminders that time is indeed passing. These landmarks that populate our year – and largely our lives – should allow us to reflect and take stock of how we are growing, learning, and maturing to be better versions of ourselves.
Imagine your family buys a new car. It is pristinely new and scintillating in the bright light of day. Equipped with many new bells and whistles in which technology has improved drastically, it is much the upgrade. Because it is new, you don’t want to get it dirty. You drive it carefully. This works for a few days, but how about a few weeks, or even a few months? You’ve gotten used to it, where you are more or less at the same level of happiness before getting the new car.
As humans, we tend to be self-centered creatures. If this statement does not seem valid to us at first glance, an important question to ask is what proportion of our thoughts involve us compared to others? I would argue that it would be the vast majority of them.
“Where you are is partially defined by where you are not. When you’re somewhere, you’re not somewhere else. But when you use your phone, you’re everywhere. You keep in touch with friends. You hear what’s going on at home. You see the screen exactly as you do anywhere else.” – Derek Sivers, “Travel without a phone”
Having spent a good year listening to audiobooks, I thought it may be a good time to observe its utility for me over the past year, especially if there is a clear cut option that suits me? Note that this is purely an anecdotal standpoint, and what works for me would not work for you as everyone will have their own style and habits of reading. So here we go.
What is the point of life if it goes so fast and you don’t have enough time to reflect and learn the lessons from it? If you have so many things going on and everything is a blur, a deep-seated irony is that it feels like nothing has happened at all.
For most of us, I would believe that we have this instinctual desire to be right, and to be right all the time. Wouldn’t it be great if we always had the right thing to say at the right time? Wouldn’t it be great if one had an answer to every question possible, just like Google?