Being Open

My long time friend has given me some hard feedbacks today after knowing me for about 11 years. Before sharing them and my plan to improve upon them I would like to tell a bit about him, our relationship and how/why I plan to improve upon them. And hopefully, the reader will be able to understand why I feel him important enough to write about in my blog.

Sushant and I are friends from our undergrad - where we both studied Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Patna. I would admit that I have always been a very unaware, immature and lacked the social aura that several of people around me had who were easily able to make huge groups of a social circle around themselves - and Sushant was among that group. My childhood life friends are also a very go-solo type of people - not the kind of folks whom I look forward to for any life advise. Sushant was different, even in college, he used to say things are a hard cold fact. It would be very very hard to disagree with him and even if I would, it would be highly likely that I come back to his world view sooner or later. Arguments like why should we give tip to any waiter - it's our money - would fall flat whenever we discuss them later - or could be I am depressingly poor in winning arguments. Over time, my relationship with other folks in my college went sour and I felt way more in need of moral support. He was always there and would always give me tiny actionable feedback to improve my personality in a very acceptable tone. Those days we used to code together and he used to pray in the nights (even during the time of day :-) ) which used to make me feel weird about him to be so deeply involved into religion.

Nostalgically, if I remember correctly, we came on a few conclusions then like speaking after pauses, thinking before speaking, and made me overall more confident about my presence. We both would agree that he has a big role to push me on a journey towards self-improvement which lasted for a few more years after I left college. Things like understanding that I need an anchor to improve OR that I am not the most knowledgeable person OR that speaking less listening more OR that speaking after rewinding my sentence in my head OR that doing things after some thought around why we would do those, helped me a lot atleast in my confidence and reduce my goof-ups.

I retained some of those and improved my interaction with others. Needless to say, my self-esteem was very very low in my college and I had only two respites for me - my friend and coding (which is where I would keep myself mostly busy).

However, I was in discussion with Sushant yesterday and my world shook upside down again. Few startling revelations for me were that I have become very closed-minded now AND that I lack a world view or a higher level view AND that my audience can get easily distracted with verbose speech AND that I have stopped seeing others with compassion AND that I have stopped being in present AND that I have started to see every input provided to me with my lens of world view AND that I pollute raw facts before it hits me AND that I have stopped giving a thought about what my speech’s message AND that I just do things because it needs to be done.

It hit be very very strong because these are also the things which were in my mind in college and these were also the things which my girlfriend complaints me about. It made me feel like I have not moved an inch in life despite 11 years of meeting him, talking my problems out - just that I can identify my problems on my own (though after his hint). Now that I am slightly better than my past, I can understand that what he was saying is a cold hard fact - like he did in past. And I so I wanted to improve on myself.

Being open is the key - Sushant Kochar

The single biggest outcome that I took out of my feedback was to be more open and receptive of the world around me. I am not sure how difficult or expansive this feedback was, but it is my journey to discover what it means to be open. I do not want to judge Sushant - I highly disagree with how he lives his own but I just cannot avoid but agree to his views on me again.