A lot of us might have lost someone, lost a job, faced suffering, faced struggles, faced depression and more last year. The first question we ask ourselves is “Why is happening to me?”. Instead, try asking “What is it trying to teach me?”. Suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning. If we don’t heal what hurt us, We’ll bleed on people who didn’t cut us. Everything in life has a purpose. There are no mistakes, no coincidences, all events are blessings given to us to learn from. Through out life, we get clues that remind us of the direction we are supposed to be headed if we stay focused, then we learn our lessons. When we learn our lessons, the pain goes away. I’m fascinated by the idea of what suffering does to people. It’s often a healing and transformative experience for people who rise above it. No matter how much it hurt us, someday we will look back and realise our struggles changed our life for the better. We will fail.We will fall.We will suffer.We will struggle.We will break. But then, We will learn.We will rise.We will heal.We will overcome.We will become better humans….

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Think of your family as a cult. When you are young, they take your pure, clean mind and brainwash it into their way of thinking, behaving & believing. We are all cult members to some degree. We all spend time in one cult after another. That’s why its call Cult-ure. We all are part of a cult in one way or another while others start their own Cult-ure and invite others to come along. The statement would still hold true if you substituted family with any number of other terms. Religion/Friends/society/social media/educational institutions. For some, the greatest task of life is undoing all the influence and the damage of the Cult-ures they grew up in. Children are not taught to think. Any child who raises questions is usually told to shut up. Kids must be taught how to think not what to think. When you leave the cult, your task is to return your mind to the pure state it was in before you joined, retaining only anything useful. You got to frame your own modeling of the world, unlearn everything you have been taught so far and reprogram your way of thinking.

Over the last few months, I have been to a couple of co-working spaces like WeWork, CoWrks, 91springboard, Innov8 Coworking™ and few startup offices. A while ago when Freshworks Inc opened up one of their floors, a few folks in the startup community I knew were of the opinion that they were spending too much money on their workspace. Girish Mathrubootham showed me and few folks around the same floor before they opened it up for their employees to work there when we were at Freshdesk for an event around the same time. I was fascinated by the amount of thinking, planning, and effort they had put into design their workspaces. Over this past weekend, I was in Hampi. Over the last few days, I have been reading up on the architecture and about the monuments built in the 14th and 15th century. I’m amazed at the level of planning that kings put into designing their palaces, temples, and cities in those days. Those structures were built not just as a show of their power and wealth but also for practical everyday use be it their palaces, temples or places of learning. As I look at the amount of planning, effort and money spent on co-working spaces and office spaces these days,…

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