Hi everyone. Today I would like to talk about focusing on what we have instead of what we don’t have. As an example I am going to use a sports team. The team is the San Francisco 49ers and they are an American football team in the National Football League (the NFL). Prior to last year, the niners were very successful advancing to the NFL semi-finals twice and the championship once. But at the beginning of the 2014 season, rumors started to filter out of the organization. The management and the coach were at odds with each other. The players did not like the intense coaching style. The players themselves had off the field issues like being arrested for drunk driving, domestic abuse and other incidents. Needless to say, the performance suffered. The niners ended the season with a record of 8-8 and did not make the playoffs. The coach was fired. In the off-season, many veteran players retired. Also many players left the team and joined other teams. All the football analysts said the niners would be lucky to break even and most probably they will have a losing season. The analysts focused on what the niners did not have, as reasons for the dismal prediction. But slowly, the team overcame its shortcomings and at the niners won the first game of the season by a score of 23-3. I watched the game and what I noticed was some younger players stepped up, the remaining veteran players also picked up their game a notch. I know it is early. There are 15 more games left. But my point is that they focused on who they had instead of worrying about all the people that left the team. Take Spud Webb. He was 5 feet 4 inches tall. He wanted to play basketball in the National Basketball Association (NBA). He was told, he is not tall enough. But he had great ball handling skills. He was nimble and fast and very accurate. In 1986, he won the NBA dunking contest against people who were much taller than him. Or how about an author Theo Giesel. He was told he could not use higher than a first grade vocabulary and no more than 50 different words. You may know Theo better as Dr. Seuss and the book was Green Eggs and Ham. Finally Joanne, a single mother living on welfare, using an old typewriter wrote a book that was rejected by 12 different publishers. But for her, 13th time was the charm. The author was J K Rowling and the book was Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone!!

I hope you like this post. I hope all of us can focus on what we have and make the best of it.

Hi everyone, all of us are guilty of this. We are quick to judge people based on something they did without going a little deeper into why they did it. I got this message on one of my WhatsApp groups: A little girl is holding two apples. Her mother says “Can you give me one of the apples?”. The little girl takes a bite out of one apple and then the next. The mother is unsure how to react. Just then the little girl offers one of the apples to her mother and says “here, this is the sweeter one”.

There is also a story in Ramayan. Lord Ram is wandering through the forest. A woman named Shabri is a devotee. When she finds out that Lord Ram is coming towards her, she wants to give him some berries. She collects the berries and presents them to him. But the berries are half eaten. Seeing this, Lord Ram’s brother, Laxman is angry. He says “How dare you give Lord Ram half-eaten berries?” Shabri says “I ate them to make sure they were sweet. I threw away the sour berries”.

In my day to day life, I am quick to say something to my kids before sometimes finding out what they were thinking or why they did certain things. My children tell me to not judge them. And sometimes they do have a point.

Recently at work, I was having trouble with my wireless mouse. Sometimes even if I double-clicked, it would not open documents. Sometimes, even when I did not click it, it would close documents. The cursor was all over the place. So about 2-3 weeks ago, I requested our admin to order a new mouse. I figured, it would arrive in a day or so. But as I said, 2-3 weeks went by. I thought she forgot or perhaps she felt that this was not important. I was about to go back to her and ask her why it was taking such a long time, when she walked in with a new keyboard. She said just ordering the mouse would not have helped. If we did that, then the keyboard won’t work properly. She also apologized for the delay. Similarly, I had submitted my expense report for July in early August. It was end of August and I had still not got my reimbursement check. Again I thought that perhaps our admin was behind. She was on vacation and also she was studying for her part-time course. But one morning, my boss called me and said that he had signed the expense report, but forgot to return it to me. It had been sitting on his desk for a week or so.

All I can say is that I need to learn to delay judgement. Maybe you could too!