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Transcript of this talk: Data Mining to Discover Your True Self
So my story started … there in a small town in Orissa. Went to a neighborhood school, took a little leap, did my engineering in my state. Took it the next big leap to do my MBA. This was out of my state. Traveled out for the first time to do my MBA then took this big leap to the corporate world to become a brand manager, head of marketing and then the grand native. At 32 I became an entrepreneur; thought I was a king of the universe but well it was not to be that way. Six months later I was there. Yeah, six months. Things went horribly wrong and I was right there. No money, no job and no idea what I wanted to do the rest of my life but that’s not the story that I’m going to talk to you about.
Actually, that’s a story that million people have spoken my stories about what happened next when I sat down one day to say what do I do with my life. Now, this is what happened I had to get a job so I had to write my resume. Now how many of you here have tried to write a resume in the last few years? Raise your hands. Wow! Now how many of you have felt confused about what you want to write in your resume? Raise your hands. They sing now. There I was, I was confused to an extent where it was debilitating. I was not just confused. I was, so this is what happened when I started writing my resume so what am I good at, what are my real achievements, what is my mission statement now, what am I genuinely passionate about. We can try to write my resume right? And I didn’t want to lie to myself. I had to tell myself the truth. What does success mean for me now? It didn’t stop. That got worse with every hour that I spent with myself sitting there what am I, where am I going from here, what is this about what the hell is all this? You know I was, I was in that moment of I would like to die. It was as bad as that and then it kind of ended with this culmination of a question saying – who am I, what’s my story? Really I mean started with the resume and there ended up with this existential question saying -who am I, what’s my story? So I, I was frozen, I was really- really frozen so Mark Twain said saying – ‘there are two most important days in your life are the day you’re born and the day you find out why’. Actually he was wrong. It is the day you’re born and the day you ask yourself why because that’s the day you start searching for your story. That’s the you start searching for your real resume. So in psychology there is a word for it by the way. It’s called Eugenic neurosis existential frustration – eugenic neurosis. So at the extreme end of it, people kill themselves actually. They do that it’s and I was borderline depressive at that stage saying oh my God I mean I’m suffering from this disease called resume, resumeness or whatever that’s called so I had to write my so – Who am I, what’s my story? And there are two choices I had I to live or kill myself but my son was on his way. My wife said she was pregnant, my son was on his way. So one of the options had to get deleted, so I had to live. Yeah, so if I had to live, I had to write my resume back to this back to the same board setting up my people saying how do I write my resume, where do I go to find the answers of the question? So I went to the world of self-help. You know seven Habits of Highly Effective People, eight principles of success, fifteen rules of happiness, thirty-five something – complete disaster! It is a, it was I recommend you never go down that road – complete disaster because it demotivates you because you see ‘oh they did it I can’t’. You know you feel smaller and smaller. Every book I read, I sank a little bit. Every book I read, I felt they could do it I couldn’t then that was journey one because I realized that you could improve well. You won’t! You know what to improve which is used to become self-aware you can answer the what once if I mean you can answer the how once you found the what, so, what do I want to improve upon? I need to know myself better.
So, that was my second journey to say I must because I must figure out what my story is, so then, I walked to the Himalayas. I said, I must find answers there probably self and someone said, ‘if you go to Rishikesh, you’ll find answers so I walked up to Rishikesh. So Vedas, Vedanta, Upanishads, Bible all that kind of stuff, which was good. It was not a disaster but it is not a solution either because it didn’t tell me how to write my resume. I wanted to write my resume and that did not give me the answer to my resume. It give me, you know the spaceship view of life, you’re sitting in the spaceship and looking at life saying, ‘ ah that’s how life looks like but the macroeconomic reality is very different from the micro economic reality. My micro economic reality was I needed to write my resume, so, there is there I met a monk who changed my life. He said, ‘well you guys do data mining right? So why are you an analyst so why don’t you go and mine your inner data and so he explained to me that ‘you are actually nice thought and 90% of you is hidden to yourself, 90% of you is these layers that is their behavioral layers which is where you operate from below that is the motivational layer which is where all psychological stuff is – where the id is the ego is the in the psyche is below that is the spiritual level meaning lies, you know. He explained to me that the surface meaning is all about thinking reasoning decision-making attention but the deeper meaning comes from emotional spaces of surprise, anger, happiness, fear, love, and acceptance. So I went to do data mining. He said, ‘You’ve got an Internet why like there’s an internet there’s an internet- so you should walk there and discover your internet. There’s so much data lying there that you do not know about.
So I had to become the experiment of my, I mean, subject of my own experiment. The only promise I had to make myself for that I have to be objective to my own data so this is what I did. I did three kinds of data clusters about myself, first one was reflections from outside. I took a tape recorder, like this I wrote down 22 questions about things like when I was happier, when I was the saddest. If you could give me a job what job would you give me? Would you also sit with me? So I interviewed 52 people, ex-girlfriends, father, mother, and teachers. I went to reverence impede and I filled it down, transcribed it fantastic patterns. I started discovering things about myself. This was reflections from outside.
Second thing I did was I started observing – what I know, what movies do I watch, what books do I read, what kind of people do I meet, what kind of food do I like to eat. And this data everywhere, so I started observing that I like to wear blue color, I liked listening to country music, I like meeting people who are of a particular kind and then I started realizing why I am do that I never, never do. Tendencies – they were behavior patterns underneath that so I started observing myself it’s called ethnography I did
Self-test and the last thing I did was the third dataset which is called creative play. This is based on Carl Jung’s work on the psyche where you have to find access to your psyche because he answers real data. The real inner data lies in your psyche so I would freak my way into my psyche, so, I would ask myself, I cleared the phone journal and I used to ask myself ridiculous questions and give myself two minutes to answer. Say, if you could write your autobiography what would be its title? Right now, write down, so imagine how difficult that question is if you could invite three people for dinner tonight from history
You who do you invite to you please? If you were stuck in a prison for the next five years and even carry five objects with yourself, what objects would you carry to keep with you there now? If there was such a room called the happiness room and if he could be there, for, for a whole lifetime what would that
Happiness room have? So, I created a battery of 800 such questions. Every day I would wake up and I would write my answer to one such question that became my creative play but in that I would not
Locate my own psyche. Why, why am I writing this? Why is this answer coming? Where is it coming from and then you start doing analysis. I had a huge data set about myself. At the end of that journey I knew about my duty fulfillment, anxiety aspirations, my ambitions, my joy comfort and that massive data set I started finding patterns and then I did cluster analysis of that data set. I put it into four clusters – one cluster was myself, my values, my attitude, my tendencies, my worldview. The second was my heart what do I like doing, what does my doodle all about? What is my skill? What’s, what’s my poetry? Third place was what gives me joy? People, places, situations gives me joy, then the last was what do I want to do with my journeys with – with – my, with my energies, what energizes me? What’s my mission now? In that cluster analysis, I wrote a 180 page resume of myself. I had, I had 180 maps of my life. My anxiety map, my happiness, my help, my aspiration map, my- my- my empathy. All of that 180 page resume I didn’t just find my resume. I actually discovered a bit of my story. So that’s your story if I held
A compass on now knew it was mine not which way is really not I’d, I was not looking at east-west I could stare at my North and in that I found my Icigai. It’s a beautiful word to the hell close to my heart. It’s a Japanese word for what do you wake up to every morning, that’s Icigai and I found my Icigai in my cluster analysis. Can meaning I know you keep searching for meaning right? What is the meaning of
Meaning? This probably is that meaning that we you know search for now talking about meaning this is a man who inspired me in some ways to go down that road – Viktor Frankl. He was stuck in a concentration camp is a fairly famous place. Please read his book ‘Man’s search for meaning’. It’ll change your life I promise you. So he was in, he was in that concentration camp and he would see the
Same torture, same torture to the inmates. This was in the Nazi camp in the Holocaust. Same torture but different responses from people, so torture being the same. He said, how is it that
Different people are responding differently to that same stimulus and then he discovered and he said it’s
Nothing through the physical well-being. People who are stronger collapsed, people who are weaker stood up and then he found in that that people who survived the torture had the story in the mind. They lived up to that story. In the context of that story that torture was manageable.
Now the thing is we will all hit our concentration camp. We will all at some point in our life, hit our concentration camp, the disease or a divorce or a loss of job you will hit your concentration camp but before that you must find your story so that you can live through that torture and that story probably lies in the internet of yours in the data that’s there stored inside. Ninety percent of you that you don’t access and so I encourage you to find your story before your next concentration camp moment. I wish you your story, thank you.
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