4 Thoughtful Comments That Stayed with Me in Misfits

Kindness and warmth fill every pore of OS.me comments.

This is old news. OS.me is the kindest corner on the internet. It struck me, however, that some of the comments written in response to my posts have superb nuggets of wisdom. And not everyone reads the comments.

I wrote this article to highlight 4 comments which were written in response to my articles, that stayed with me.

What should you do when people you help take you for granted? By Anu Jain
I wrote a post titled Foibles of Human Nature – Part 2. In this post, I mused about instances where I did a good turn, only to have it taken for granted. Making me think twice about doing good deeds on some occasions.

Anu Jain brought to my attention the words of Sudha Murthy: “those who can work even in most emotionally painful situation, may join me.”

In other words, even if some people don’t acknowledge the good deeds that you do, keep doing good deeds anyway. This may be obvious to you, but it certainly was not obvious to me. It was a massive takeaway for me.
The hidden dangers of listening to movie songs. By Pratik Wadhwa
In a F.R.I.E.N.D.S episode, three of the friends had good news to share:

– Ross was up for tenure
– Rachel was up for an interview with Gucci.
– Joey finally got a seed out of his teeth.

Which of these is the biggest news? Phoebe delivered the verdict. Joey’s of course!

I too celebrated getting a metaphorical seed out of my teeth. I transformed my sad song into my happy song. That was a bigger achievement than developing an intricate and comprehensive iOS app.

Pratik Wadhwa went to the root. He said that he doesn’t listen to songs for this reason.

“This was one of the reasons I stopped listening to the songs. My mind would automatically play the sad songs in sad situations. I guess the key to happiness is to reduce the dependency on external things.”

I haven’t stopped listening to songs completely. But I am more mindful, and catch myself before a song takes complete control over my mood.
How to pursue a response when they don’t reply to your email. By Ravi Trivedi
I wrote an article about the situation where they don’t respond to your email. The normal response is to take offence, or feel sad. I argued in my thesis that there can be several good reasons why they may not respond to your email, and stoic acceptance is the best response.

Ravi Trivedi went further. If you are really eager to hear from them, he said there is but one thing to do. Persist. And persist. Keep persisting. “People also value the persistence, and will give you time, if it is just about them being busy.”, he explained.

He also gave a template that you can include in the original email:

“Ravi,

Happy weekend. Can you take 7 minutes out today and …..

Let me know by typing any of the below alphabets
A– Don’t need a Personal CRM
B – Can’t spare 7 minutes now
C – Ping me next week
D – Stop bugging me.”

Emanual Lasker said that when you find a good chess move, try to find a better one. When I thought I found a good “chess move”, Ravi Trivedi pointed me to a better one.
Is it Nature’s Way of Telling You to Let Go of Material Attachments? By Pratik Wadhwa
I asked world bridge champion Bob Hamman for an autograph on three occasions. Given my propensity to lose things, I lost two of them and saved only one. One out of three is not bad, I mused.

Pratik Wadhwa shed an angle that never struck me. “Maybe divine wants you to let go of the attachment to the material things.” While minimalism, decluttering, detachment and such has been on my mind, I never applied it to this context. Pratik showed me a new way of thinking.

I should add: Pratik wrote a series of thoughtful comments when I wrote articles for the second edition of the write choice challenge. Instead of trying to find adjectives to describe Pratik’s comments, let me say that I became a huge fan of Pratik Wadhwa’s thinking.