A Jolt

Sometimes, you get a huge jolt/wake up call. It can take many months of zombie like roaming through life, before you realize that things can't go on as usual. "How you spend your days is how you will spend your life." - I remember the mild shock I experienced when I read these words the first time. It made me question how I'm spending my time and made me realize how much of it is really wasted. Get a time tracking app and write down how you spent your day. After 4-5 days, a clear picture will emerge and it will both shock and disgust you. 

It's incredible how much of one's life is subject to some routine. You do the same things over and over each day, eat pretty much the same things at the same places, talk and interact with the same people, spend your free time doing the same things. Life can easily spin into a rut. Well, it is time to get back your life by handling your time of each given day better. It is time to require more of yourself, take better care of yourself and do things each day that are important for your future rather than focusing on urgent things that are less important. Set bigger, ambitious goals than settling for some mediocre ones just because they seem attainable and easy. Wake up and truly assess your state of mind, health and career. You know that you are capable of a lot more things than what you have accomplished. You know that you haven't pushed yourself hard enough, you know that you deferred and delayed your dreams by being paralyzed by irrational fear of failure. Be the best that you can be one day at a time. Do the things that matter one day at a time and keep it up. If you are angry with yourself, do things that will make you love yourself. When you do the right things, you will start to love yourself more and that's important too. "If you truly knew how strong your thoughts are, you wouldn't be having negative thoughts". Be kind to myself, would you keep a friend who would speak to you, the way you speak to yourself? You know exactly what to do, so just do it! No more excuses, no more self-doubt, no more self-sabotage. Ya Basta!

Stop Learning, Start Thinking!

So, couple days ago I was watching this 14 year old, autistic genius giving speech on TED. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uq-FOOQ1TpE&list=PLM2LA2chrd5rBhzco8EhLlebNaMIleVWn

The kid basically says that at some point, we all need to stop learning and actually start thinking/creating. We all come up with all sorts of excuses not to get started with something that is truly important for us. Waiting for all the stars to align is like waiting for Godot. After all, the true learning happens when you are out there doing rather than reading about doing over and over. Stop being afraid of failure and stop coming up with all sorts of excuses not to get started with that special project of yours. Everything you want is on the other side of fear. We live in the country that is on the cusp of a major industrial and developmental "explosion." There are so many industries and opportunities that need to be exploited. So stop resting on your laurels and stop telling yourself all those excuses not to get started with your business idea.Those who don't take risks work for those who do!  Create goals and break them down into small, manageable tasks to be tackled each day. A thousand mile journey starts with a single step.

Evening Activities Other Than Drinking

I don't know what exactly I am going to write in this post, I just felt like writing for the sake of writing. I haven't written anything in a long while, so the words and thoughts are not exactly coming with ease. I have pretty much stopped going out during the last few months, as I got really bored with the clubs and senseless drinking. After some time, the clubs lose all the allure and your friends can't drag you out anymore. And then the question becomes of what to do with all that free time in the evenings. At first, you start looking for ways to entertain yourself. I regularly check the piratebay for the latest movies in the bluray format (dvd rips are no longer acceptable in quality to me) and seen all the major works of the directors and actors that I like. I annihilated many popular tv series and out of boredom explored the French and Italian cinema classics. At any given day, my pc would be torrenting 4-5 movies of different period and genre to suit my mood and interests. And still I managed to get bored of watching movies as well. I noticed the other day that there are so few truly positive and uplifting movies out there. Ask me for the names, if you are interested.

I have always been a voracious reader. When I was a kid, my parents would place restrictions on my reading time and always encouraged me to go outside to play with other children. But all I wanted to do was to stay home and read. In the summer, my parents would exile me to a children's camp and my mom would go through the suitcase to ensure that I won't be taking any books there. I guess they wanted me to develop social skills, but I was a shy introverted kid who wanted to escape into some fantasy world. But I digress, I am catching up with my reading lists too. Besides popular fiction titles, I have read several biographies (Steve Jobs, Andre Agassi, Viktor Frankl) and attempted to vanquish some serious books such as "The God Delusion" and "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins. I am interested in vegetable farming, so I had to force myself to read two books on organic farming. (Not a pleasure reading for sure) Psychology books fascinate me and I love reading books about will power, habit formation, influence, etc. I'm also interested in healthy eating, so I have devoured books on vegan eating, paleo diets, slow carb, etc. Still, I find it ironic that there is a vast gap between knowing and actual doing. And one doesn't truly know until one really does it. I start so well and somehow fall of the train again and again. (Now you probably understand why I'm reading about will power and habits) I hope that one day soon, I will stop dithering and will make that lifestyle change for once and all.

For the past month or so, I have been learning Spanish by listening to lessons crafted by Michel Thomas. His method of teaching is truly amazing and the students will be able to construct simple sentences after 10 minutes of listening to his course. It's a very logical and gradual approach to learning a foreign language, I think that I will explore the French program under his tutelage after I am done with this Spanish course. His programs are available on the piratebay and I highly recommend them.

Last but not the least fun activity that I have engaged in, is learning to play an acoustic guitar. My guitar instructor is Justin Sandercoe. The course is completely free and Justin is a great teacher. The website address is www.justinguitar.com . After about a week or two, you would be able to play simple songs on your guitar. I hope that I will persist with the guitar, it is my conviction that a man must learn to play a musical instrument.

What's next? I'm thinking of learning salsa or some martial art. So far, the above activities are keeping me occupied.

Thoughts on being single

Last Friday, as usual I went out clubbing with bunch of my friends. First, we went to Iloft to check out a DJ from NY, but he was a disappointment and we didn’t stay there long. Brix was also weird and disappointing, and somehow we ended up going to Metro. The club was bustling and I saw these four girls sitting at a table downstairs. I knew three of those girls, all of them come from relatively well-to-do families and are quite successful in their current careers and are quite good looking. Incidentally, all of them happen to be single. The next day, I was having a conversation with a close friend who asked me of the reasons why they remained single. I came up with a short answer at the time, but I knew that it is far from being the definitive answer. So, I started thinking about this topic and also recalled numerous conversations that I have had with guys and women about this issue. I realize that the points that I will make below will not be agreeable to some or most people, but then again, I don’t purport that this short essay of mine amounts to be a serious research on the topic anyway. Rather it is a mix of personal observations and thoughts on the matter.

Many women today are well educated and as a result have successful careers. There are more women obtaining higher education than men in Mongolia, and it has been that way for over a decade now. Due to flawed government policies and overall economic conditions, many healthy young men (and women) choose to live and work abroad. According to some data that I read somewhere before, South Korea alone is now a temporary home to about 100 thousand Mongolians and most of them are men that were born in UB. Thus, it’s only natural that women outnumber men in universities and colleges. Armed with the education, they are able to find white-collar jobs that pay well and don’t need financial support that women used to require in the past. Our parents had to work in order to feed us in the 80s and 90s, but now quite a few women earn enough to take care of themselves independently. There is no urgency nor economic need for these women to tie the knot anymore.

As the number of these women is on the rise, I foresee that women will soon surpass men in pay, job status and education within the next decade or so. (I think that it’s already happening in some industries and occupations.) The traditional notion or concept that women should “marry up” will start to diminish in meaning and women will have to accept the fact that they’re facing a shrinking pool of what are traditionally considered to be marriage worthy men. Men are rapidly declining in income, education and future employment prospects compared to better educated women. Women are going to be on top (and some of them already are) and men will have to learn to deal with that.

There is a theory that in societies and communities where women outnumber men, the men turn into players. Since many men left to work in Korea or elsewhere, the number of marriageable women seems to exceed the number of marriageable men. There is a number of guys that I know that are successfully chasing multiple women and are unlikely to settle down. Many women who want to marry are confronted with the fact that there is a significant number of men out there and they are either players who juggle multiple women or men with very limited life and career options. It is quite possible that many great women are choosing to stay single than settling for men who aren’t marriageable.

At the same time, some of these new breed of women are trying to widen their scope and are revising their dating and marriage criteria. Some are dating younger men, less wealthy men or even shorter men. It’s not necessarily because those men will make good husbands or fathers, it’s just because they make them happy.

The choices that my fellow single men face are somewhat different, but that’s a topic to be written some other day.

Traffic in UB

Traffic in UB is truly maddening. I used to think that it had mainly to do with the fact that the road conditions are bad or that the roads are not wide enough or that there are too few roads that go in and out of the downtown area. But now I'm convinced that it has to do with the etiquette of our drivers or the lack thereof. What irritates me is the fact that most irresponsible drivers are recent (or not so recent) migrants from the countryside and they seem to think that they can drive any way they want, as if they're riding a horse. I observed a while ago that the rudest and most irresponsible drivers are the ones who drive the shittiest cars too. I don't want to say that all of Excel and Accent drivers are the bad ones, but there seems to be a strong correlation between the quality/price of the car and the driver's sense of etiquette. Naturally, there are some irresponsible drivers among the owners of expensive vehicles too, but I sense from empirical evidence that the percentage of bad drivers among them is much lower.
Everyday we observe the foolishness and selfishness of irresponsible drivers who can't wait an extra 10-20 seconds and create further traffic bottleneck by driving on the wrong side of the road. Or some car in front of you runs out of gas (broke down or smashed into some other car) and if I try to go around it, the drivers behind me wouldn't yield or let me in. Most of the time, I literally have to force my car into that lane to get ahead, as nobody wants to wait for 2-3 seconds! I have a strong suspicion that some people get some kind of sick pleasure from cutting or not yielding.
So, what's the solution to this problem? It might sound corny, but a song by Michael Jackson titled "A Man in the Mirror" comes to mind. It goes: "If you wanna make a world a better place, take a look at yourself and make that change." If we want to see better behaved drivers on the road, we need to lead by our own example. We need to educate these hicks that it's perfectly okay to allow other people to make left turns and if someone asks us to get in front of us, we are sensible enough to spare 4 seconds of our lives to let them in. If there's a significant number of responsible drivers, at some point the hick drivers will learn a thing or two about driving etiquette and will make all of our lives a little easier.

Minding Your Own Business

People are very nosy. They can ask you about the kind of car you drive or where you live, or where you office. What difference does it make to them? Do they want to feel inferior that they drive a worse car or live in a less prestigious area? Mind you that the truly successful people won't ask you these stupid questions. People should just mind their own business rather than envy someone else's good fortune.

Good looks

Looks are very superficial and yet they matter a lot. Men fall for good looks all the time and most likely will remain that way forever. A plain looking woman would have a very difficult time attracting a suitable partner. The looks are less important for men, but cant be completely ignored either. It's ironic that despite the heavy emphasis on the importance of the looks, the beauty of a woman rarely goes over a decade in this country. At most two decades for exceptional women.