The week started with a little bit of regret over me not able to attend this year’s Mango Ride, annual cycling ride of Hyderabad Bicycling Club or Eloquence 2018, the annual division conference of Toastmasters in Hyderabad.  The first one was due to skin rashes which I was suffering since the 400 km Brevet in Dec’2017. And I couldn’t attend Eloquence for no reason whatsoever :/

The week before, my mom was requesting me to accompany her for a visit to Arunachalam. I kept postponing because I had other unimportantly important things to do. So on Monday, my mom gave an ultimatum resulting in me booking bus tickets for the travel.

The trip was for 3 days. I started writing about the travel and I realised it had already crossed 700 words. Maybe it’s worthy of a full length blogpost I guess, which I’ll be posting on Thursday under the Throwback Thursday category.

Coming back from the trip, I had a lazy Thursday.

On Friday I went for an easy run along with Gautam Pondi. Through the 12 km run, he gave me a lot of tips.

I’ll pin the two important ones here.

 

I had been procrastinating on a lot of things and the Cryptography course from Stanford University on Coursera is one of them. I finally started it with 6 hours of study so far. You can check out the syllabus here.

During the trip, Mom and I made a promise to ourselves to consume only plants, dairy and eggs(semi-vegetarian??). I also started my new journal this week. New pages kind of give me fresh enthusiasm for what’s lying ahead.

The week ended with me working on a changeover for my blog with some new ideas in the structure with this Weekly Newsletter being one of them.

That’s how my week went in a brief.

Book of the Week:

Rather, books of the week. With 4-5 new books at my disposal, I kept shuffling between them and ended up completing none. Those books were,

Finding Ultra by Rich Roll which documents his journey of Ultra Running and multiple Iron Mans

Start with Why by Simon Sinek which reiterates the fact that having a strong motive is very essential for success.

LinchPin by Seth Godin where Seth tells us how to become a Linchpin or an indispensable employee.

Other than this, I made it a morning routine for the past two weeks to read a page of The Daily Stoic everyday in the morning. It has short 1-page stoic philosophy which regularly makes me aware of what’s in control and what’s not.

Video of the Week:

Had to delete the history a couple of times but as far as I can remember two videos had sparked some motivation in me.

One is a Ted-talk by Gaurav Chaudhary, popularly known for his Hindi tech channel- Technical Guruji. His ending line was amazing “In any field, don’t think about money in your initial days. You’ll reach a stage where don’t need to think about it.”

Other is a compilation of advice from 10 great people. Kind of like a checklist we all should remember.

Tipping Points:

(for the lack of a better word, these are the points of big psychological thoughts for me)

  1. Postponing the date of travel. I had an epiphany that this life was a blessing for me and I was thinking of putting it off for a suitable time in the future(which I may or may not be lucky enough to see). True fact.
  2. I met a distant cousin of mine who’s of my age and is from one of the prestigious engineering institutes in the country. With academic excellence since childhood along with extra curricular achievements, she’s on her way to the U.S to work in one of the top global companies. No visa hassles and no money issues which most of us think about. It’s the result of all the hard work she put in.
    I promised myself to raise the standard of the things I accept for myself.

 

I’m excited for the coming week as my training for Airtel Hyderabad Marathon starts from Monday. I’m participating in the 42km category and it will be my first competitive run after almost 4 years 🙂

Do share with me your experiences or tipping points or the videos/articles you found useful. Until Next week 🙂