Snippet Of My Life Episode 32 – Don’t Let That Dumbbell Falls Onto Your Balls!

“You are much smaller than how I imagine you to be,” said one colleague of mine from India whom I have not met before in real life.  We were having lunch at our office canteen.  It was a bright and sunny day with the glory of the afternoon sun flooded into our dinning hall through the long row of floor to ceiling glass windows.  Caught off guard by his comment, I was unable to response.  You see, from where I work, we have tons of cross border voice conference calls.  Most of the time we recognize people by voice.  Most of the time, we visualize how the person may look purely by our imagination.

I have fallen in love with Adele’s voice.  Her song “Rolling In The Deep” lifts up my spirit whenever I hear it played on the radio.  When I watched her music video on YouTube, she was not how I imagined her to be.  Nevertheless, I adore her music and I love her voice.  I hope I have not disappointed that colleague of mine too much, by not being as physically big as how I may have subconsciously portrayed myself to be through the phone.

The other day, after yet another conference call, an Indian colleague from the same office building commented that I have a commanding voice.  Perhaps I do sound different when I am on the phone, versus when you catch me on the lift.  You see, I don’t think conference call should be long and painful.  Because too many people have spent too much time listening to the topics that are of little interest to them.  Updates and clarifications should be concise, actionable, and to the point.  Get your 10 seconds of fame and pass the mic to the next one quick.

Reward is a peculiar thing.  It motivates you to move forward.  It nullifies the pain of your daily grinds.  Your hope and anticipation builds up as you are closing in.  The moment you get your hands onto your reward, the happiness seems to last for only a split second.  And then you ask, what’s next?  It is as though the reward itself seldom matters.  What matters is the journey of getting there.

I see this in my online game.  I see this in my real life.  Suffice to say, the moment I do not see any reward in sight, I would feel restless and lost.  I have a theory.  If you are bored at work, that would likely to make you a duller person outside your office.  If you are too busy at work, that would make you a workaholic that frankly speaking, I do not know who would love you except your bosses.  Or rather, who you would love besides your work.  Striking a balance is never easy.  Consistently attaining that balance seems almost impossible.  Nonetheless, that is the ideal.

Like it or not, our society pigeonholes us into buckets of similar attributes.  We may end up having a similar set of milestones in life, doing similar things in life, and going through similar set of daily grind.  This is rather unfortunately, in my opinion.  We could be so much more unique.  The point is, there are many things in life that we should be doing them because we want to, rather than because everyone is doing them.  The journey is the same.  But the experience is different.

I enjoy meeting this buddy of mine over at the east for lunch during working days, at the airport.  One fine day after our food, we were browsing magazines at a newsstand.  One particular magazine, or rather booklet, caught his attention and he passed it to me.  It was a guide on how to exercise with the dumbbells.  How appropriate.  I have always want to get a proper guide on how to do weightlifting.  I flipped through the pages seriously considering to spend ten bucks purchasing it.  Then I stopped at one particular routine.  In the picture, a man was lying with his back on the floor and he was using his feet to do the heavy lifting.  The dumbbell was locked in between the arches of his feet as he pushed it up into midair and let it down.  We gasped.  What if the dumbbell or pieces of it, for whatever reason, fell off?

Ouch.