A New You: Living life on the front foot… Now
This summer (2019), I did a performance titled “Salsa: The Rhythm of Passion” in front of an 300+ audience at the Chevron Auditorium at International House, Berkeley — a venue where I had sat starry-eyed as a member of the audience only a year ago. I ended with a 30-second speech telling them my ‘Why’. The audience loved it (they really did!).
I did this while interning at Symantec’s San Francisco Office, helping their Data Loss Prevention optimize their cloud resource provisioning operations. I loved my work, was the reigning table tennis champ at work, and made a great set of intern friends.
The semester before, my last at Cal, I had taken 21 units, all while finding time to be in great physical shape, read a book a week, and find time to dance as well. The semester before, I had served as a paid Reader for a machine learning class I had taken earlier. This was while working as a research assistant implementing a graph theory algorithm developed my research supervisor in the C/C++ programming language. People sought me out to seek advice and inspiration. Don’t get me wrong. There were (are) a thousand ways I still need to improve myself, but in my final year at Berkeley, I got a start. Something had changed. But what?
In cricket, there are two distinct ways to play the game as a batsman (the person who hits the ball). One, called ‘playing on the back foot’, involves waiting for the ball to come to you, and then merely blocking it. It is like treading water, a fundamentally low-energy, defensive way of playing. Then there is ‘playing on the front foot’, a diametrically opposite style of play that involves skipping out of the safety zone, and confidently attacking the ball. It is a fundamentally high energy, confident way of playing. It is also usually more risky.
In life, I believe there are also two ways you play. You can play on the back foot and let ‘life come at you’, or you can play on the front foot and ‘go to life’.
A back foot lifestyle:
- low growth
- uncomfortably comfortable
- there’s something missing, something yet to be experienced
- dry, and at times, let’s face it, just boring
A front foot lifestyle is:
- high growth
- uncomfortable at times, often tiring
- fulfilling, but there’s always an itch to grow
- intense & passionate
I believe that’s what fundamentally changed in my life. Sure, there were a 1001 symptoms, but I think the root cause was the change in outlook I described above.
So, now that the secret is out. I want you to try to look for individuals with each of the above life approaches from among the people you know. Are there those whose lifestyles appeal to you? If so, what is it about their lifestyles? How do you think they approach life?
-> Which of the above two life approaches would you live if given a choice?<-
