Life 2.0: Staying Active

I acknowledge how clichéd the title sounds. I mean who doesn’t know that being active is a good thing? But when I heard the following five words, it got my attention immediately – “Sitting is the new smoking.”

Whosoever came up with this line, understood the power of inversion.

In last seven years, I have tried four different gyms, two swimming pool memberships and started preparing for numerous marathons. Every time the initial motivation lasted only for few weeks and then life (career, family, friends, IPL) got in the way.

I am sure many of you have had the same experience. You make a plan and commit yourself to it but soon life’s randomness and uncertainties throw you off. The randomness of life, its uncertainties – I call it “the chaos monkey”.

The gym operators understand this and you would be surprised to know that they plan their capacity taking this into account. So if the gym can accommodate 50 people at a time, they would actually sign up 100 people because they know that 50% of them will just give up after some time.

I soon realized that the solution wasn’t to reduce or control the randomness of life but to come up with a system which works in spite of the uncertainty of our environment and to certain extent thrives on that uncertainty – a true anti-fragile approach. If you aren’t familiar with the concept of anti-fragility, I would strongly recommend Nassim Taleb’s book Antifragile.

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