Sure, I'd like to change the world. Expecting that I will is plain wrong though!

All my life I have had different things that motivated me to do what I have done. But for the past few years, a constant driving force for the choices I make and the work I do has been the impact that those choices and work have on the world. Unfortunately, I have been self-deceiving myself into believing that what I am doing has or is going to have a measurable impact on the world.

For past three years I have been working on synthesising a large chunk of an even larger molecule. The way I put it to ninth graders, recently, was that I am attempting to stitch  atoms together in a very restricted manner. I am using the technology that chemists have developed over the past two hundred years to produce something in the lab that nature took millions of years to do. Sounds cool and it is.

And yet, when I finish writing my thesis I am not sure if it will be read by more than a handful chemists in its lifetime. The paper that will eventually be published in a reputed journal may be read by a few hundred chemists around the world and a small percentage of them may even cite my work.

A total of ten man-years of work, including three years of my work, and ~£1 million of tax-payers money will have what impact on the world of chemistry or on the world in general? May be nothing and may be a lot, I don’t know.

This blog is very shortly going to reach the 100,000-hits mark since it was brought back to life in June 2009. What impact my writing has had on the world? I don’t know.

“Some people will bring a small stone to the building called science and some people will bring a big one but nevertheless no one can take that stone away from you.” These words by the Nobel laureate Jean-Marie Lehn’s, may soothe my soul  and maybe some clever words like these may soothe my soul about my writing too. But I cannot deny that walking into something thinking it will make a measurable impact on the world is a little foolish.

Looking back at one’s activities one may be able to understand what is the ‘impact’ those activities have had but looking forward it is incredibly hard to do be able to predict the impact. But such is human nature that as someone venturing in to a new area of work, I find it hard to be able to convince and motivate myself to keep working hard if I can’t see the impact of that work.

I posed this as a question to someone who has been working in sustainability for the past 10 years after having switched from a successful career as an accountant. The answer I got was an obvious one but I think I needed to be told. He said, “The world is incredibly complex. One may never really be able to understand the impact of one’s work and, in this case, the only piece of advice I can give to you is something that won’t be satisfying. Learn to let go off the expectations and you will find it simpler to deal with the world and keeping doing the incredible work that you are doing.”

Knowing this is one thing, applying it to my life is another.

Related: It should be about choices not goals

Repetition is a necessity

Botton claims that in a secular world we are taught lessons once and are expected to remember them for a life time. Instead, religion understands that our minds are like sieves and they expect us to repeat important life lessons over and over again.

I feel convinced with this idea. Religious or not, people tend to make very similar mistakes in their lives over and over again. I am sure you’ve come across older people who seem to make the same common mistakes that we young people make. This phenomenon has made me wonder many times whether our ability to learn drops so sharply as we grow old that we need to make those mistakes again to remember the lesson we’ve learnt already before.

It seems that Botton’s claim holds a good explanation for this phenomenon and moreover, it also makes me think about a better way of keeping a track of life lessons. It seems to me that as an atheist and a rationalist, I would benefit from something like a self-written guide to good living. A document that I can keep tweaking as I go ahead in life but also something I can refer to on a regular basis to refresh the many important lessons that I’ve learnt.

I also believe that the key to better living is forming better habits. This ‘guide’ could be used to help form these key habits.

Bringing dogma to education

Botton’s thoughts on how university education should be restructured by learning from religion repel me. He claims that currently universities around the world treat us as rational adults who need information and data to be able to understand how to live a good life. Whereas, all major religions treat us as children. Religions believe that ‘we are only just holding it together’ and that we need help. He says that we should bring back sermon style teaching where words are meant for changing lives and not just for giving information.

This idea repels me because, in short, what he is requesting us to do is going to bring dogma to education. Universities are places where people come to learn from their own experience rather than get told what is that they should do. They face opposing ideas and must learn to be able to draw their own conclusions.

The world is a very complex place and not even the combined knowledge of all religion, philosophy and science can yet, accurately enough, set guidelines of how to live a good life. It is definitely much better to let people figure out whether they need help rather than overwhelm them with ‘help’ that Botton thinks is the right help for them.

Best of the two worlds

I am not against the notion that there are certain things that religion does well and that it may well be possible to have the best of the two worlds. Yet, I think that the best of two worlds will be different for different individuals. A one-size fits all isn’t the way forward, and Botton accepts that too.

What is surprising, though, is that I felt much more satisfied after having finished that blog post than I would normally feel for a blog post that I knew had a point to make. (I may be hinting at the fact that because I made a choice to write a blog post without a goal, it gave me more satisfaction). But given this realisation, I feel it is worth exploring this kind of writing a little more.

In Praise of Half-baked Thoughts

One of my main arguments for blogging has been that it gives space to people to share half-baked thoughts and half-formed ideas. When sharing, they get an opportunity to explore their thoughts and may be in the process they are able to ‘fully bake’ those thoughts. If not, it allows for a serendipitous discovery to happen. There may be readers who may have the other half of that brilliant idea you just shared on your blog.

Ribbonfarm, a fairly popular blog written by Venkatesh Rao, is a good example of a blog where lots of half-baked ideas are shared. He usually writes long 2000+ word blog posts and many times the blog posts are a compilation of the multiple thoughts he has about that topic. He usually has a point to make but he writes in a manner where the point he makes hardly matters. He gives his readers so many interesting half-formed ideas that even if you don’t read the whole blog post whatever time you spent reading seems worth it.

In The Pipeline, one of the most popular blogs about drug discovery written by Derek Lowe, recently completed 10 years. The success of Lowe’s blog is not just from the niche that he has created for himself in the blogging world but also because of a rare distinction that it has earned as ‘one of (the blogs with) the highest signal-to-noise ratios in the entire world of blog comments’. He considers the many comments he gets on his blog as ‘rivers of gold’ and indeed they are because his readers are ready to explore the half-baked ideas that Lowe shares with them.

In his 10th anniversary blog post, he writes, “I compose quickly, and type quickly, which helps keep blogging from becoming a chore. It really doesn’t add much time to sit down and write up something about what I’ve been reading and thinking. It helps, in fact, to clarify my thoughts – I’m sure that I retain a lot more information for having blogged about it.” Here, I think, he is hinting at being able to confidently publish ideas even if he hasn’t quite got a grasp on them. He uses writing as the medium to understand it better and try to retain what he has been thinking.

Why fear then?

I realised that sharing half-baked ideas can be intimidating. We are acutely tuned to judge ourselves before others can. And, of course, if some ideas don’t even make complete sense to us then, surely, sharing them in public can only make things worse, right?

Well, not really. Consider these two blog posts, here and here. Both the blog posts have more than the usual number of comments my blog posts get. But one is a blog post where people have only commented to appreciate the writing and the other one is where people have commented to express their thoughts on what I wrote. Of course, both kinds of blog posts make me happy and proud but the one with others thoughts gives me more satisfaction – I get new ideas to write about, I am called out on things that aren’t clear to me, I am faced with opposing views, and with all that I grow.

Hopefully, my half-baked thoughts don't look this unappealing

If half-baked thoughts can start a dialogue, sharing them becomes worth it. Of course, this is not an argument for putting forth thoughts without having put in the effort to explore the thoughts. Even if it’s an incomplete idea, it is important to make your case to your readers as clearly as possible (which I’ve done here, hopefully!).

And in the spirit of the idea of sharing incomplete ideas, I am going to leave you with these half-baked thoughts. I hope you will share what you think about it and, together, maybe we can grow.

How many of these have you given yourself?

How many times have we looked back at a relatively short period of time (weeks or months) and realized all the things we did wrong and blamed ourselves for not doing better? I’ve done it many times and every time I’ve felt either miserable or angry.

What’s the point in this reflection then? We make mistakes and we should learn from them so as to not make them again. That’s fine if it stops at that. But more often than not it does not stop at that. After mulling over the lessons learnt, we start blaming ourselves for making those mistakes. That just ruins all the effort put in to contemplation.

It’s great to have the ability to rush through all that data from the past and cherry-pick the data which shows us that we were wrong. We have made great progress because of this ability but when we take the next step of blaming ourselves for those mistakes we miss the point of the exercise.

We make mistakes and sometimes the mistakes we make were unavoidable given the circumstances. Looking back, of course, it might not seem so because we have a lot more data to answer the same question. Nevertheless, it is true many more times than we convince ourselves.

The world is complex and me saying it a million times is not going to be enough to convince your heuristic-ridden brains. To be able to deal with all the complexity our brain depends on shortcuts that it has created based on our past experiences. These heuristics, as they are called, are usually very useful but they also lead to the creation of biases. These biases lead us sometimes to underestimate the complexity of the world and blame ourselves for things we might not really be responsible.

Of course, playing the ‘world is complex’ card too many times can not only be futile but also harmful. It’s a card to be played when the exercise of finding our faults isn’t being helpful, when the self-criticism is stopping us from growing.

Related: The importance of differentiating between mistakes and failures.

I was born in 1987 in Nashik. Only a few days after I was born, my Dad got a job in Calcutta. He moved from Nashik to Calcutta at a short notice leaving me with my mum and my nani (mum’s mum).

Without dad, my mum and my nani did a lot for me. She developed a very close connection to me spending all day and night taking care of me. Then after three months, my Dad came back to take my mum and me with him to Calcutta.

Suddenly, all the joys of having a baby around disappeared. My nani felt very lonely. At the time, the only means of keeping in touch were letters and trunk calls. Of course, I couldn’t write a letter so the only communication that happened between nani and me was that when, during a very expensive and rare trunk call, she heard me make some noises. That almost always made her cry.

If I were born today, things would have been so different for the relationship that my nani would have developed with me. We would have the modern forms of communication – she could talk to me on the mobile phone even if my dad earned the same salary as then, she could see me grow up on Skype and if she really really missed me she could even take a flight to Calcutta (because they’ve become so much cheaper than those days!).

The story made me wonder about how much technology has affected us. I tried to understand hard what it must’ve been to have a relationship in that era but I am unable to. Sure, people must’ve dealt with it and got on with things. But I am more interested in the quality of the relationship of those times. We may never realise what it meant to long for someone.

I remember my mum telling me that when my Dad went to Europe in the early 80′s, he used to write her a letter a day which she usually received in bunches after a couple of weeks. Letters from India to Europe took even longer and because my dad was travelling, I am not sure how many times he actually heard back from mum. What must it have been to be my dad who had a one-sided dialogue with his newly wed wife for months?

Somehow, I am not sure that everything is better because of newer technology. We seek immediate responses and quick replies. Many have forgotten the art of letter writing. We’ve developed LOLspeak and gotten addicted to IM. Knowing people’s ‘status’ makes us happy even if you don’t know what is really going on their life.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not trying to be a Luddite. Technology has done lots to help. A frequent story that is repeated to show the power of technology is that of an Indian farmer who can now afford to make calls to the local market to figure out a better price for his crop. The grassroots have definitely been strengthened. 884 million Indians have a mobile phone today, that’s 73% of the population!

Even in my case, technology has done plenty. Skype is such a blessing. Every weekend when I talk to my parents for an hour or two, I leave the conversation feeling satisfied. It’s not just about knowing what they are doing but also seeing them and hearing them (so much is communicated through body language).

And yet, stories like the one about my nani make me think about the time without the internet, without mobile phones, without social media…