Leaving the corporate world made me question every metric I had been chasing.

↓

We live in a world of borrowed dreams.

Everyone wants a happy life. But can you define what happiness means to you?

We all want to be successful. But was there ever a moment where you already felt that you succeeded in life? Not at work but in life.

If you are in a corporate job, it is easy to measure if you are being successful at work or not. Yearly reviews, performance bonuses, increments, promotions all give you the feeling that you are cracking it in your job.

But what if you do not get that feedback loop through the corporate ecosystem.

We chase the success metrics defined by the society around us, whose success was in turn defined by the society around them, without giving our own dreams a chance.

It has been four months since I left the corporate ecosystem and completely lost the feedback loop.

The salary notification at the end of the month was enough to say that I did something useful the past month. No complaints from my manager - probably did great.

But when there is no income at the end of the month and no one to keep you accountable, you are unsure if everything you worked over the last month was worth anything.

But all of this comes from the definition of what work meant from a corporate structure.

We never took our time to understand what true happiness or success looks like beyond our work - in our life.

The last four months, I worked on multiple projects, multiple business ideas only for most of it to remain an open thread. I reviewed each one of those open threads last week to understand what drove me into exploring these ideas.

And two things stood out

1. So that I could fit myself into an identity - a consultant, an entrepreneur, a marketer….the list goes on
2. To productize my knowledge - I was so obsessed in building courses that I stopped asking why I put so much work towards it.

I was too quick to fall into the same old trap of measuring my success in life based on external feedback loops instead of internal feedback loops.

13 years ago, in my first job, I was paid a salary of ₹16,000 / month (~$250).

Back then when my friend asked me “How much do you think you need to live a happy life?” my answer was somewhere around ₹10 lakh rupees (~$16,400).

That number set the baseline for my financial satisfaction ever after.

Every time my income increased over the past years, my lifestyle did not increase to match that. Because in my mind, I’m at a better position than what I thought would constitute a happy life in 2014.

So instead of asking what I should be doing, I’m asking myself what is the life I want to be living.

I’m giving my writing and my health a fair chance.

I have designed a Happiness tracker that measures my effort towards these two goals and a journal that would help me reflect on my learnings across the day - both about myself and the work I do.

I reflect on four questions each day:

1. What did I learn today? A concept, a pattern, an observation about myself etc.
2. What did I feel proud about today? Small wins (Especially the small wins)
3. Was there a moment I could have been a better person? Not being judgmental but just noticing myself.
4. Any quote, anecdote or conversation worth keeping? So it could inspire my writing some day.

I will be writing more frequently on Substack moving forward and slowly phasing out this newsletter.

So give me a follow if you would want to follow along my journey.

If you want to read more bitesize content about my writings, make sure to follow me on Substack with the link above.

If you think this newsletter will be useful to someone else, feel free to forward it.

And If you were forwarded this newsletter, you can read all previous issues and also subscribe to the newsletter here. Make sure to click the confirmation email once you subscribe

I hope you enjoyed this week's version. See you next week.

Best wishes,

Nimalan.