performing personality

I am an introvert. If I were to take a snapshot of me right now, I’d have me confused, I would be unsure, in fact, I would be sure that I was an extrovert.

I’m very shy with new people. But they wouldn’t know it, I think I’d have them fooled. Hmmm… some folk would recognize me for an introvert, but I gather most would not. I’m sometimes even shy with people I’ve known for a while.

It’s not as bad when you type and communicate over the web, IM, and email. It’s the spoken word that scares me.

There is such an immense and intense battle within, that I have to win each time, as I transform thought into spoken words. And this just for normal conversations. When I am on stage performing a skit, at a podium during a debate or in front of a crowd doing magic, it is like a war of nuclear proportions inside of me.

The more passionate I am about something the more difficult I find to get my message through. Even under normal times, I will start to stutter, start to spew out incomprehensible sentences. Such a fight and struggle just to say a few simple sane words. It’s as if that split moment starts to crumble right before me, the moment passes outside of the realm of my control. Yet, somehow I breathe and somehow I survive.

Then why is it so difficult the second time around?

I barely use the phone, I don’t like using the phone. Phone calls require talking – spoken words.

It wouldn’t be surprising if a lot of the performers out there were also extreme introverts. I’m definitely not unique in what I go through, so I wonder how people do it. I don’t create moments, I find myself in a moment and go along for the ride.

Sigh… breathe… okay.

So I found this personality test (no sign up or sign in required), which I thought was interesting not because of the gadgetry but because of the detailed nature of the questioning. It doesn’t ask you whether you’re an extrovert or an introvert, it does an assessment based on your answers. There is also a PersonalDNA Facebook application.

compassion, empathy, trust and happiness: a work-life balance

Bear with me here, these are all random unstructured thoughts.

Do you love what you do? In work or in life?

Why is it important to love the work you do? At least, why is it important for me to love the work I do? The work I do is a part of my life, it is a part of who I am. The general structure of our society dictates that we are at work at least 8 hours a day, for a lot of us it’s more than that. This means that we spend more time in a day working and getting to work then we do other things, like spending time with family and loved ones or sleeping. So is it not important that for our own well being that we love what we do? Or that we do what we love?

Does money buy happiness? If time = money, and money buys you happiness, I would argue that time (not buys but) brings you happiness. Hah, the need for money vs the need for time. I would choose time every time around. Time allows you to do (or think) a lot more than money does. Money is a lame substitute for time. And those that are attracted by the lure of money are also lame. Money does not, cannot and will not buy you peace of mind. Time is not equal to money, time is far more valuable than that.

So then, why are we not happy? At work or in life? No one can be happy all the time, so why aren’t we as happy as we should be. I think it has a lot to do with a lack of compassion, empathy and trust. Think of all the conflicts you find yourself a part of, now imagine that those involved in the conflict trusted each other more, empathized with each other and were more compassionate, what would be that state of the conflict then?

I’m sure there are more concepts apart of those three that I’m missing, but in my mind those three suffice. It’s sad because we are not conditioned to trust or empathize or be as compassionate as we should be. But then, when we are, it’s often misconstrued, people start thinking things, questioning your motives. Now think of how difficult it is for someone to empathize or be compassionate when all you are doing is questioning their motives. Meh, but don’t let that phase you.

If you’re doing something good for someone and are looking for something back in return, you might as well be dealing in money instead. I’m not saying that knowing that you helped someone is a reward in and of itself (it might be though), but I’m saying, stop looking for rewards.

Clear your mind, think of nothing. If you think about nothing, then you have nothing to worry about. In our lives these nothing moments are very short and they come in different forms. A chuckle, a laugh perhaps a gasp (there are so many more), but they don’t last long. Think about what we can do to maximize those moments, think about what we can do to maximize those moments for others!

Let moments of nothingness be your motive, let them be your reward.

Serendipity to WordPress

I converted the blog from serendipity to WordPress.

I used the S9y to WordPress Importer, although I had to modify the code a little to make the conversion go on without major errors. There was still a glitch however, the importer didn’t map a lot of the posts to the correct categories. Instead of actually fixing the code, I found it easier to just go through the posts and remap them to the correct categories. Luckily I wasn’t dealing with a whole lot of posts.

The main reason I converted is because WordPress with Akismet has much better spam blocking features. I was too lazy to look up how to make spam blocking work in s9y.

I’m going to take a little look at how plugins exactly work in WordPress. See if I can hack something together.

It’s interesting because I wouldn’t have even thought about bothering to do anything with the blog if I was working right now. Only because of the break did I bother, makes one wonder.

EDIT – I forgot to add, I totally love this wordpress theme. Courtesy of wptp. Best of all it’s valid XHTML and CSS.

Single train on a single track

“Single train on a single track”, this is loosely translated from Hindi and is something my grandfather said while describing me (when I was in India many months ago).

What I take from that is how one-dimensional I am. There’s nothing better than a dose of reality based on how you communicate and interact with new people. You realize how multi-dimensional people really are and how that holes you back into your single dimension.

This comes from a self-retrospective based on the Toronto Newunion 2007.

  • I’m only funny 81% of the time.
  • When you are around people who have the capacity to think, articulate and engage better than you do, just shut up and listen. (you might even learn something).

These are general notes from the day:

  • Get glasses or contacts that don’t make thing blurry. I’m wearing a trial pair of contacts and anything two feet away or more blurs out after a few seconds of viewing. This is annoying and headachy.
  • Make meaning, not money. change the world (or certain sub-sections)
  • speak in a way that you are heard, even by lurkers.
  • people on the internet are humans too
  • time passes quickly when you’re sitting down and doing nothing
  • we’re not chuckling with you, we’re chuckling at you
  • network through exchanging sharing ideas
  • Godfather and Beauty and the Beast are in the same category of movies
  • You can still get a real job if you studied English in school
  • You can have your cardboard at Future bakery, and eat it too
  • Plans are nice, but please assess risk as well

The India Experience

It’s feels like so long ago. I’ve already started to forget.

I would never have thought, that I would go to another country for work purposes. So when my Saudi experience unfolded to become my Indian experience, you have to understand that everything felt surreal.

But I was there, and it was real. I found myself in Mumbai. I’ve never been in Mumbai for more than two days. But whenever I’ve been there I notice this distinct smell. Yes, there is a smell. As soon as I stepped out of the airport, there it was, the smell. And even if my eyes were closed, I knew I was in Mumbai.

Let me go back to how unreal of all this was. I even recall telling the then COO of the company, “No”, when he asked someone, “Is Adnan the best person to go to India?”. Not that I was the worst, I suppose I was good enough. Did I want to go? Yes, of couse I did. The very thought of the experience was exciting. Either way, it came to pass.

Next day I was at the office, located in Bandra. The office was nice, from the inside. Not that the outside was bad (we’ll discuss incidents on the outside later on).

My second day at the office, my co-workers started to play a song for me, [Ya Ali, Maded Ali]. Translated it means, “Oh Ali, Help Us Ali”. I knew I was there for a purpose, right, I was there to train them.

In the next few weeks we covered a lot of material, from source code control (CVS) to JSPs. It was indeed an interesting experience, because now I wasn’t coding myself too much, I was dealing with people who would be doing the coding. This is a different level of being. It’s just not the same. In ways, it is more difficult and challenging.

I got used to being in India pretty quick. I was walking to work, or taking a rickshaw (or ric as they call it). I wasn’t just ‘staying’ in India, for those 4 weeks I was living in India.

The work days were tiring though. Sometimes I’d be explaining things individually to folk, and on other days we’d put ourselves in the boardroom and project my laptop onto the screen and discuss things. Then at night, I’d go back to the apartment I was staying at and everyone back in Toronto would be up and online, then I’d catch up with the Canadian email, read documents, try and phone into meetings etc. So really, it was like working around the clock.

What else did I do while I was there? For being there a whole month, I didn’t do a whole lot.

I bought a lot of books. You see, books printed in India are printed on cheaper paper, and thus cost less. I purchased around 24 books dealing with programming, technology and management. The most important of these books was Peopleware. But I’ll discuss that in further detail at a different time, on a different blog. I had to purchase a new suitcase just to be able to carry all those books back.

I also went on a one day trip to Hyderabad, to meet my grandfather and other relatives. It was quite the day, perhaps one of the most tiring day’s I’ve been through. We rented a car and hit up a lot of relatives from my dad’s and mom’s side. One after another. It was like hit and run. And they all had something or the other for me to eat or drink. And foolishly I did eat or drink. Unforunatley the next week I was feeling sick and hardly ate at all. But it was good going back to Hyderbad, even for a day. This was the first time I was there by myself. I hadn’t been there in about 7 years, so it had been a while.

Outside our office are a couple of colleges. The place where students go for studying purposes, and other purposes I’m sure. One day the internet went down, and then the electricity disappeared as well. So we stepped out of the office to get some polluted air, tea and whatnot. After much persuasion, I decided I would go ahead and do magic for totally random people. So I went up to this group of 7 guys and asked them, “Hey, you guys mind if I shows you some card magic?”, they all seemed fine with it. So I started.

You have to understand one thing. This is Mumbai, there are lots of people in Mumbai. So when I started doing magic, people started to gather around fairly quickly. People were calling over their friends from across the street. Curious folk walking by stopped and started to watch. By the time I had finished the trick, there were over 40 people gathered there. The reactions were awesome!

This girls starts saying, “Who are you?”, as if to say, who are you and what are you doing?. “Are you like David Blaine?”. I just said, “Yes, I am the David Blaine of Mumbai, and you’re going to be part of my next trick” and started to do more magic. Once again the reactions were awesome. Unfortuantely none of this was caught on any media (video or still). Once I was done, people were a bit confused, not because of the magic,, but they were wondering why I was doing all this. I think they thought that I was doing this to promote something or gather money or something. I told them “I’m just doing this for fun”. And it was fun.

I was told by my co-worker that after the crowd had dispersed there were some folk on their cell phones talking about what had just happened. People were talking about it across the street as well. When asked for the bill, they tea guy said he didn’t want any money. During the whole commotion, this guy who has a stall setup to sell things (biscuits, chocolates and the like) was climbing up on this stall to be able to see what was going on. Unreal. All I had was a deck of cards!

There was another magic incident, where we (co-workers and I) had gone bowling and then went to this restaurant. I decided to do magic for our table. Once I started, the entire restaurant (about 50 people) stopped doing what they were doing. They were all starting at our table. The waiters had gathered around our table and everyone was watching. After I finished, the waiters were all smiling. Once again, the reactions were great.

I’m going to go into my magic rant here, but every single time it’s an unbelieveable feeling. I can really say now that I’ve performed for 100s of people. And to be able to make some sort of a difference even for that one moment is amazing. It’s very humbling once I think about it, having the ability to do that.

There are other work related things that I experienced while in India that I’ll elaborate on some other day. 🙂

Well, after all was said and done, India was an awesome experience. And it only adds to the growth process I’ve gone through in the last year. I don’t feel I did an amazing job there. I think I was adequate. I think I could have been much better. But I also know that my being there helped. Which is good.