Life Project — A Sustainable and Scalable Approach
As a computer science professional, having the experience of working on problems that deal with a large scale, your perspective tends to shift towards seeing the bigger picture in just about everything, with a grand scheme of things. Strangely, rather quite aptly one begins to look for a solution to deal with problems in real life in a way similar as that for a project at work.
Two pivotal elements of a good design, for growth, for success of any project are it’s —
- Sustainability
- Scalability
Although it sounds very trivial, but do we really look at our “Life Project” in a similar way for it to be successful?
What gives this thought more weight is the current situation that everyone of us is faced with, a global pandemic, it’s obviously (more hopefully) a brief digression from our normal lifestyle, but this has given us a major opportunity to look at the two aforementioned pivots for a successful project.
Sustainable Lifestyle ❓
Putting things in perspective, let’s look at a few questions applicable to most of us —
- What are my eating habits?
- How do I maintain a proper mental, physical, psychological and social health?
- What are the ways I re-charge myself, my recreational habits?
- What I do to find the right balance across different aspects of my life?
- What’s my go-to thing when it comes to self-reflection?
(Just mentioning a few thing to bring the flavor of what we should be asking ourselves)
Once we have the answer to these questions, we can visualize how in different situations, particularly when we are out of our “usual comfort zone”, these things would pan out and whether or not these would even then be sustainable and/or scalable.
Can your lifestyle handle a crisis ?
Let’s take this global pandemic situation, it’s okay to feel out of place and there are probably many things that we can’t do, but that shouldn’t paralyze us an individual and in fact this is the single most important learning one can have, if your lifestyle was too extravagant or unrealistic like maybe going out everyday and that is something that you were surviving on, and now that it got taken away, you have no life left, that’s a signal that there is something fundamentally wrong with how we have been approaching our life.
Not concluding that it is a flaw, but perhaps a hint that we should check every once in a while for the “what ifs”, what if — we had a crisis [an 👾 invasion ], will we still be able to sustain most aspects of our lifestyle?
A choice — It goes a long way
“Global effort always starts at an Individual level”
Something I came across just recently was that we often wonder about the environment and think about sustainability in terms of what kind of planet are we gonna leave for our future generations? But shouldn’t the question be the other way round i.e — what kind of future generation are we gonna leave for the planet ? If we can answer that question, IMO most of the problems can be solved at the root itself.
Sustainable is still fairly intuitive but what does scalable imply in life?
Whether it has the potential for growth, to take you to the next level personally or not — that’s scalable. Given more of your time and energy, whether this element will be degrading factor in your life or an elevating one. ex — you can work for 18 hours a day every day, but that life, of sitting in front of a computer 👩💻 every day lacks both of these elements, but if done right, coupled with other fronts it can be made like one, and that’s what we should be striving for.
“Nothing shouldn’t be too powerful that if taken away from you, it leaves a hollow”
Limiting the things we are attached to gives us a way to be more flexible and welcoming to change, and adaptability is perhaps why we even exist as a species, so we must always look for ways to bring that quality out and challenge that potential.
___________ will be sustainable and scalable 🤨
Whatever you wanna do in life, just make a habit of asking this question.
No model is perfect, even in machine learning, you constantly need to train your algorithm on new data, similarly in life, our perspective which plays a very important role in decision making has to be tuned from time to time, thereby, we all must be a little more accommodating to change and embrace the what’s not perfect — and before holding onto anything too closely, evaluate whether this would be a sustainable and a scalable choice for designing our lifestyle!!
