Month: January 2026

Kapil Gupta of Siddha Performance talks about truth.

I have a tough time understanding what the truth is.

He says every situation has a truth behind it.

Truth is the only thing that works. This is logical. How can a lie work?

Many times, I am confused.

What exactly is the truth? Kapil Gupta says it is the most practical thing in the world.

My realization is to equate truth with honesty. In every situation, be honest about yourself. Stop playing games and see reality as clearly as you can. Be honest about your intentions. Do not let the ego get the better of you.

See yourself honestly and clearly. That is the best place to start. I think the mind tries to make truth some grand and spiritual thing. Keep it simple. 

Truth is honesty.

I love books and buy lots of books. I end up not reading most of them.

I started to realize that buying books is a chase for me. I am chasing the knowledge and wisdom of the books.

It feels like there is a gap or something missing in me that I want to get from the book.

Unfortunately, the book does not have the power to make me whole or fill my gaps.

The mind does not seem to have realized or internalized the truth. I continue chasing after books. 

A wonderful interview of Seth Godin, from the Sprouht channel, with insights that make me think and reflect on my choices and the direction of my life.

• “You don’t need more time. You need to decide.”
• “Intellectually and emotionally, I try to focus on the work to be done, and not to catastrophize, and not to day trade on what’s wrong, but to figure out how to have a day without complaining, unless my complaining takes the form of making something better, because I find if I make something better, the day was worth spending”
• “I start by acknowledging that I’m gonna die.”
• “So if we know we’re gonna die, and this day is here, right here for us, right now, what should we do with it?”
• “The question I try to ask myself is, what will the me of 10 years from now thank me for doing today? Something difficult, something unrewarding. But 10 years from now, I’ll be really glad that I showed up and did that.”
• “I can’t teach you anything, but maybe you’ll decide to learn it yourself.”
• “There’s no direct line you can put from the origin story to the end result, except the story we tell ourselves about the origin story. If you’re always telling yourself that you came from X and will never get to Y, then whenever things get difficult, you will fall back to that story.”
• “The problem with admitting agency is then you have to take responsibility. It’s so much easier to blame whatever culture, environment, or boss, or parent, or whatever you have for where you are.”
• “To quote Zig, to be a meaningful specific, not a wandering generality”
• “Wishes are good, goals are better.”
• “And a strategy is the hard work we do before the hard work.”
• “And the most important thing is to decide to have a strategy. The second most important thing is not letting someone else set your agenda.”
• “So if your only goal is to make a million dollars, there’s something wrong.”
• “We need to have goals around our personal life, our physical life, our community life, our spiritual life, and our professional life. And if you are out of balance, it’s gonna come back to haunt you.”
• “And when you pick your peers, you pick your future.”
• “The only way to do creative work is to be willing to say, this might not work. It’s the generous failures where someone is gonna benefit from your effort, even if you don’t, that unlocks the door for something to get even better.”
• “There’s plenty of feedback in the real world. You just gotta pick who you need to hear it from.”
• “Where are you aiming your attention? Are you letting an algorithm of a social media network decide what you’re gonna see next? When we decide we had a good day, what made it a good day? How do you queue up more of that?”
• “You get what you measure. And if you measure the wrong thing, then you’re gonna be disappointed.”
• “What is it that you want, and what are you willing to pay to get what you want, and what fuel are you using, and how will you know if you’re accomplishing what you want?”
• “What does it even mean to have useful ambitions? I don’t think most people have had a conversation with themselves about that.”
• “And the question is simple: what are you afraid of? And if you can’t answer that question, it’s ’cause you’re hiding.”
• “If you name the fear, then you gotta go do something about it.”
• “You don’t need more time. You just need to decide.”
• “Say it out loud. Just say it. Not because other people need to hear it, but they might—but because you need to say it. If you can’t say it out loud, then I’d ask what’s your fear? What are you afraid of? You gotta start by saying it to yourself, and then figure out what to do when other people push back.”

Derek Sivers has a wonderful post on parenting: 

Whatever he’s doing right now, that’s the most important thing. So I encourage him to keep doing it as long as possible. I never say, “Come on! Let’s go!”

We’ll go to the beach or forest, and make things with sticks and sand for half a day before he’s ready to switch.

Other families come to the playground for twenty or thirty minutes, but we stay there for hours.

Nobody else can play with us like this. Everyone else gets so bored.

Of course my adult mind wanders to all the other things we could be doing. But I let it go, and return to that present focus.

Reading that made me realize how far I need to go before I can be a better parent myself. The ability to be truly present with your child is something I need to cultivate. The mind always leads you astray in such moments. The moment you are in is never good enough. The mind keeps searching and wants to do something else. In a way, it is just like meditation. As the mind deviates, you have to bring it back to the present moment.  

Ego plays a huge role in our lives. It is easy to see ego in others. Harder to recognize ego in ourselves. 

When I start to judge others, I realize that the behavior that irritates or disgusts me the most is the one I also have. 

I like Shane Parrish’ quote: “Outcome over ego”. In work settings, ego runs amok too. It is harder to step back and see how your ego is preventing the outcome you want. It takes a measure of self-awareness and honesty to see that your ego is getting in the way.