Dang, March just flew by! My quarter officially ends on Sunday though to make it exactly 13 weeks.
Yesterday, I finished listening to South Asian Stories, w/guest Kovid Gupta. Apparently both him and the host, Sameer Desai, went to UT. Looked him up and Sameer was on Punjabawockeez lol. SO we have a few mutual friends. But Kovid (yes, aged a bit poorly name wise lol) is a Bollywood filmmaker, screenwriter, and author. Heard about his journey, and some of the lessons along the way and behind the scenes of making these TV shows and movies. He also started India Kids, a non profit looking to help very underprivileged orphans in India who are the children of female sex workers. Throughout the interview, he spoke about explicitly as well as in the subtext of only doing things that aligned with his values. Especially in a world of filmmaking when it's so easy to just say yes to any opportunity, even more so when you're just starting out and don't really have too many connections. Definitely applaud him for that. Might read one of his books at some point, let's see.
Then during lunch and on the commute back home, listened to How I Built This with Guy Raz, with guest Steve Ells, founder of Chipotle. First off, I can't figure out where Guy Raz is from. His name, face, features are ethically ambiguous which eludes my normally keen sense of placing people geographically and quietly irks me lol. Anyway, the episode was pretty good. It ran this year but was a rerun of a 2017 episode, but all the content is still relevant and insightful. He was an Art History major. For all the parents out there, this is a much bigger discussion, but if college is there to make students think independently and critically, then whatever major that accomplishes that the best for the kid is the one they can go with. Always in a rat race to go to the best Pre-K in order to go to the best elementary school in order to go to the best middle and high school and get the best grades and standardized test scores in order to go to the most 'prestigious' colleges to get the best degrees in order to get a high paying job in order to have a 'high status' in society in order to get big and fancy cars, houses, etc. in order to retire early in order to 'enjoy life and do what you want.' That whole system is so whack when you phrase it like that. I digress. He took his art history degree and went to culinary school and shortly thereafter opened up Chipotle. It was supposed to only be a one-off location with enough $ for him to open up a full-scale 5-star restaurant. Obviously, several different factors like service model, openness, location site and branding, and early reviews led his restaurant to go from a single location serving burritos into a QSR empire that's used as a standard and moniker for other QSR and related industries. Definitely a lot of great takeaways, which I noted in my Media Vault as well.
But one of the questions Raz asked was "how much of your success would you attribute to luck and how much to skill?" Now, Ells gave the standard answer of how he worked tirelessly and was fortunate to have the breaks go his way most of the time. After I finished the episode, the rest of the drive back I pondered on that dichotomy. What I concluded at, for my philosophy, is that there is no real luck or skill. There are concepts created by your rational minds trying to explain the universe. Since we can't point explicitly to something as the cause of some 'good luck,' we then just chalk it up to luck. Skill, we trick ourselves into thinking it's our rational mind as well. 'Put in 10,000 hours of training to become an expert at it.' Sure, the bodily work has to be put in. However, what drives us to take that action? Actions are the result of our thoughts and words, which are themselves the result of our subconscious. If we agree that 90% of our mind is subconscious and 'unexplained' by science, then that majority is deciding how we think, talk, feel, emote, act, learn. All those things ultimately roll up to skill b/c you acquire a skill by learning and then taking action on it, in its simplest form. Now, here is the more interesting part. The subconscious itself is dictated by a larger principle of karma. Everything that we consciously and subconsciously do falls under karma. What we did yesterday plants the imprint for something that we do today, which itself is the cause for something tomorrow. Basic cause-effect framework that karma operates under. For luck, we have the term luck b/c we can't explain it. But what if you can explain it as karma? If everything that we think, say, do, emote, feel, etc. is part of a cause-effect relationship, then everything that happens in this world, individually and collectively, happens for a reason. The reason being we have 'done' (thought, said, acted, felt, etc.) something to cause that. When the conscious mind can't comprehend what that cause is, we just say it's luck. But really, there is no luck! We have created our own 'luck' and 'skill' through our karma. Simple as that!
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