Your 1st blog post will be bad, but your 1000th will be great.
Your 1st workout will be weak, but your 1000th will be strong.
Your 1st meditation will be scattered, but your 1000th will be focused.

Put in your reps.

As we gear ourselves for the next 5 years, one thought going through my mind is the importance of playing the long game.

You have the right to work, not to the fruit
- Bhagwat Gita

The other day, I was going through some of the old files and amongst other documents, I found my engineering degree certificate. While the GPA on my certificate is something I am not too proud of but what caught my attention was our college logo and the motto of the Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee which is part of the logo itself.

Something historic happened last week. SpaceX flew a manned mission to the International Space Station (ISS). Two American astronauts were lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center in the Crew Dragon capsule atop a Falcon 9 Rocket.

“As I’ve gotten older—I would say starting in my mid-to-late 20s—I could not help but notice the effect on people of the stories they told about themselves. If you listen to people, if you just sit and listen, you’ll find that there are patterns in the way they talk about themselves.

There’s the kind of person who is always the victim in any story that they tell. Always on the receiving end of some injustice. There’s the person who’s always kind of the hero of every story they tell. There’s the smart person; they delivered the clever put down there.

There are lots of versions of this, and you’ve got to be very careful about how you tell these stories because it starts to become you. You are—in the way you craft your narrative—kind of crafting your character. And so I did at some point decide, “I am going to adopt self-consciously as my narrative, that I’m the happiest person anybody knows.” And it is amazing how happy-inducing it is.”

Author Michael Lewis[1] on the stories we tell ourselves. (from 3-2-1 by James Clear[2])

The stories you tell ourselves could have a big impact on your mental frame and hence to your reaction to any situation.

In 1996, Garry Kasparov played against IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer in a six games match and defeated the Deep blue. But a year later, Deep Blue defeated Kasparov in a rematch. It was the first time a reigning world champion was defeated by a computer under tournament conditions. It was a definitive moment that proved that finally machines were superior to humans.

Many at that time believed that computers couldn’t learn chess. But not only did it learn to play chess, but it proved that it could defeat even the best in the world. Many international players were afraid that the sport was going to be dead now because no human could beat the computers, so what’s the point of playing.