Freedom and Responsibility – Two Variables. Four States.

As I reflect in my personal and professional spheres, these two words keep coming up and I thought I will put a simple model around this two words. To give a background, most of the TV’s in some of my friends’ home are cut as their kids are giving their exams. I keep debating with them on why are they practicing this kind of control and why don’t they give them the ‘freedom’ to be ‘responsible? They give me a cold blooded stare and tell me without blinking an eye ‘Let your turn come man’ and then we shall have this debate. Well, I have been proven wrong many a times and when my time comes I have a feeling that I will operate no differently.

I pondered over these two variables and kind of arrived at a simple model as below.

 

The assumption here is ‘Freedom’ is given to me by someone and ‘Responsibility’ is taken by me. There are equivalent derivatives of responsibility like accountability, but as the beautiful culture lens below reveal, accountability was not a word till the early eighty’s. So someone possibly discovered it for some convenience and as like many other words, this word has been marketed well and its usage possibly will exceed responsibility in the coming decades. However for the purposes of this discussion responsibility encompasses accountability. Also in the circle of life I wear the various hats of giver and taker for freedom and responsibility.

Encage

Personally, I like this state. This is a state where I am happily in a cage, knowing that there is little freedom and there is little willingness or scope to take responsibility. This is a state where I am perpetually trapped and where neither I take any steps to move along the responsibility axis nor does the environment around me take any step to move along the freedom axis. As long as I chose to be cog in the wheel, this is a peaceful state to be in. No questioning of status quo! I like this state because this is where I have accepted that I cannot do a thing and possibly remain blissful about it. I also put people into this state. A live example is as follows

Son – Appa, Can I go to play?

Me – Yes, of course. But before that please ensure the following

·         Finish your homework

·         Clean your desk

·         Practice Music

·         Drink Milk

·         Do not play near this...

·         Do not play with ....

·         ....

·         Be back before 6:00 PM

And the time will be kind of between 5:30 to 5:45 PM when the conversation happened

It really is a Hobson’s choice. Isn’t it?

Enrage

This is the state where I fight the lack of freedom. I want to take on more, prove my worth to my stakeholders in every aspect of my life but I do not just get the space to exhibit my sense of responsibility. I am like the tiger in the cage, who wants to get out desperately, but will continue to make hurried strides with the cage. I can relate to the TV example here, when the kids say they are willing to watch it in moderation with responsibility and I deny them that freedom. I think in professional life there are countless instances where I would have killed many vibrant dreams possibly without giving the space for exploration of that dream. I would have accumulated bad karma by the sheer volume of people whom I would have pushed into this state! My only defense is, well I was not mature enough to have understood this explanation at that time!

Escape

This is the state where I deceive myself completely and I kind of act as if I am unaware. I will find out all possible excuses on ‘how not’ to accomplish an objective be it personally or professionally. The sheer variety and diversity of excuses that I can come up on ‘why I will not do something’ and conveniently shift the blame on everything around me can open up a category in the ‘Nobel prize for excuses’. A simple example is ‘weight management’. I am obese and I can convince anyone in the world to agree with my view point of why I find exercise boring in a face to face meeting. (I am kind of shifting from this view point off late, but I am positive that I will go back into my erroneous zones). In a professional setup, sometimes I wonder the time I spend on explaining and preparing on why I could not meet a commitment far exceeds the time I could have invested in making the commitment happen. If you want to test this, keep a repository of excuses that people give when they fail to show up for meetings on time and you would possibly smile at the point I am making.

Empower

This is the state of where I am in complete harmony with myself. I have felt that this is the state where I am trusted, no one is watching by back and I am fully aware that ‘The buck stops with me’. I have nothing to prove to nobody except my own self. This is the state where the mix of freedom and responsibility is optimal and that allows me to bring out the best in myself. Coming back to the ‘weight management’ example, the day I do get to step on the dreaded tread mill and beat my previous pathetic record of the 5K run, I feel liberated and for that one micro second I do feel light.  The days I have stepped in and attempted to change status quo for betterment, I have felt this state. It did not matter if I change status quo or not, but took the call to change the status quo. You would have been possibly in this state when someone uttered to you ‘Take Care’.

There is a box in the middle termed ‘Mid life Crisis’ and sometimes I have felt that I am in perpetual ‘Mid life Crisis’. I have to admit that till certain stage in life, I was not aware of these two variables. In my view ‘Mid life Crisis’ sets in when I am hopelessly confused about the relative positions of these two variables in my respective spheres of life. But the question I have repeatedly asked myself is, even after I became aware of these variables and their relative positions, did I exercise the choice to move along the axis to become truly liberated?

Any such complex question has only one answer. ‘It Depends’, but to end philosophically, “Are we not the sum total of the choices we make”?

As far as the TV problem which made me to get into this mess, the Jury is still out.

So which state you typically are in?

Are there any other states that you think given these two variables ?

Which state do you put your folks in, be it professional or personal?

Time to ponder

Have Fun

Stay Tuned

The Economics of my attempt at Self Publishing

I will begin with a disclaimer. This post is not about promoting my book that I self published. I just want to share the mechanics behind it and the economic incentive or the absolute lack of it.

I and four of my friends went on a road trip to Leh and the book was kind of an amateurish photo journal. I did not know why I wrote, but that trip was something I thought I should pen down and I wanted to relieve some kind of nostalgia ,so that when I reach some stage in life and look back, I will be nothing but some total of my experiences and I had wanted to evidence that experience.

The process was something like this

 

It is really simple and at the end of it, I liked the smell of what I had in my hand.

The content creation or the manuscript was the toughest part. I woke up at 5:00 AM in the morning from July 7^th to July 31^st 2012 and wrote non-stop for an hour.  After that I established contact with the publisher and this process of getting the book out take longer than expected. For my good fortune, the hard disk in which the publisher had this manuscript had crashed and I had to re-work with the publisher. I had wanted a Diwali release, then I pushed to Christmas release, then I pushed to Pongal/Sankranti release and finally the book came out in sometime in March 2013. By that time I had resigned to the fate of just getting the damned thing out. To be frank, my initial enthusiasm had waned by the time, the book came out. I am kind of summarizing the lessons learnt at the end of this post, but I did maintain a good relation with the publisher and for an amateur, the courtesy extended by the publisher was reasonable. Also, the entire transactions happened over email exchanges, without a single phone call. Oh God, I do love these kinds of transactions.

Here comes the Maths

Cost of Publishing including 35 soft bound and 5 bound hard copies for known circles and preservation for nostalgic purposes. 4 copies of book have to go to authorities for safe keeping so that they can issue an ISBN. Books printed by me on demand come at actual cost	Rs 53786.00
Cost of getting the epub and kindle formats	Rs 31200.00
Google Adwords for two months	Rs 2000.00
Total Cost of Publishing	Rs 86986.00

Next comes the real fun. Below follows the royalty report from the publisher.

Total Units Sold	23
Total Units Paid for	21
Total Units not paid for	2 (Publisher has not received the money from online distributor)
Total Author Earnings	2235
Payment Details	To be Issued J

Here comes some background

MRP of the book	Rs 990
Discounted Price from the publisher	Rs 750
Cost to print the book (Owing to the photographs)	Rs 490
Distribution cost for the publisher	Rs 150
Author earning per book	Rs 110

Rs 990 was very expensive was the feedback I got and the author earning per book goes to Rupees 5 when sold through  online book stores. I had two orders from flipkart and no one knows how to transfer rupees 10 to me yet.

I made the ipad and kindle versions of the book and offered it for $2.99 in Amazon. I have had 3 sales till now and this is a scheme in which Amazon takes 70% of the value and some holds back around 30% of the remaining amount as withholding tax under some kind of trade agreements between India and US !!. In net, it amounts to $0.61 and Amazon is having some hard time getting that $0.61 into my account.

Well anyone, who has crossed 2^nd standard maths, can figure out the return on investment on this venture. Since I have not received any cash till now, it tends towards negative infinity which probably is not all that bad :).

How did I feel?

Well first things first. I did not expect to make any money and I do not have any disappointments there.

However, I was not without disappointments. I thought I will be able to reach at-least hundred people and I reached twenty five. The number of hundred came from my calculation of a term that I had discovered called ESN (Effective Social Networth). More about it in a later post.

As far as the quality of the book itself, I did not receive any adverse feedback. Since most of the copies were read by people close to me, I guess they chose not to hurt my efforts or feelings. I understand, respect and appreciate that.

I did receive some hand written and email feedback from people who were completely unrelated to me. They did have some nice things to say or in other words did not have anything bad to say.

In that sense, I just patted my back saying, Well ‘For a first timer, it is just about ok’. If my Appa was around, he would have been delighted and also kind of subtly given some actionable feedback. I was and am unlucky there.

My kind of summarized lessons are as follows

·        If you want to write, go ahead and just do it. Technology has empowered anyone to write. If I can get away with it, you too can and you can be more successful.

·       Do remember this. Take end to end ownership. At some part, I just gave up and wanted the book to come out. At hindsight, it could have been better with one more round of editing. In that sense hold on to the leash tightly and be very focused on the last mile. Focusing on the finishing is as important as the start.

·      The thread from start to finish has to be held together by you. During the iterations, do listen to good feedback, but do not get swayed too much by opinions. You do not want the integrity of your work to be taken away.

·       Find that peaceful hour and set the pace. Once you are in the zone, you would want to be in that zone and once you experience what happens in that zone, you probably want to continue to be in that zone. Looking back, the daily one hour early morning ritual that I had set for myself helped me realize two things. I can experience ‘flow’ states and though I do not do it often now, I can get back into flow states.

·      Failures are a way to keep you going. Empirically my first attempt at writing would be classified as a failure and I accept that , but emotionally it was a success for me.

Stay Tuned.

Have Fun.

Expect my second go at this shortly.

I am in a race against time.

Zunder