I failed not once, but many times before I finally stopped taking action simply to prove myself right. I realized it late. I was not investing my time to understand and improve. I was investing in trying to win.
I believed that experience automatically made me wiser. I assumed I would never repeat the same mistake. But I was wrong. I never corrected my ideas. I discovered that experience was not teaching me but presenting the reality.
Learning depends on whether I observe it. Looking back at my own decisions, I noticed something uncomfortable. The circumstances were changing. The people were changing.
But my thinking was often the same. I carried the same assumptions into different situations. I never took nature seriously. The nature of dreams. The nature of ideas. The nature of business. The nature of markets. The nature of human behavior.
The problem was the way I perceived reality.
Every decision began with assumptions. Those assumptions did not come from experience. They came from my own ideas about how reality worked.
When the COVID-19 wave hit our country, reality introduced me to circumstances I had never imagined. A business otherwise doing well was completely dependent on outsourced skilled labor.
The assumption that money could win any battle ended up proving wrong as most of my team left and never came back. Looking back, I no longer see it as a business failure. I see it as the failure of one of my assumptions.
I eventually realized that my mistakes did not repeat themselves. My thinking was repeating itself. For the first time, I became aware of my regret without becoming regretful.
Awareness interrupted my automatic behavior and stopped me from falling into a well of regret.
Instead of asking “Why did this happen again?”
I began asking, “What assumption was I repeating?”
That question changed everything. It shifted my attention away from the outcome and toward the process that created it. I was now studying patterns instead of merely creating business ideas.
I started correcting my assumptions before turning ideas into frameworks. The mistake itself became less important than the thinking behind it.
Perhaps that is why awareness always comes before change.
Here is when a new question appeared.
If I know what to do, why don’t I do it?
— Kartikeya
Inquiry in Silence. Yoga in Practice.
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