The Zen of Business

It is one thing for people to say 'do what you like and get paid for it, so that every day at office will feel like a vacation'. It is quite another to actually find a profession that you are passionate about. Most of us spend our lives in writing software, or sending invoices - or most likely - writing software for sending invoices. In effect, we usually spend days in writing emails, making phone calls, and attending meetings. There are reasons for this. Firstly, most people do not know what they are passionate about most of the time. Ask any person, especially the one who is preparing for a job interview or for an MBA entrance exam, and pat comes the grammatically incorrect reply: "listening music". Whoever invented this phrase deserves to be in the list of Nobel laurets. This is the most you can get without giving any real information or even any real thought to the question - what do you like to do? I mean, what kind of music? -- Any kind! -- Any specific genr

It was a perfectly useless afternoon – like the one that Lin Yutang urges you to spend in a ‘perfectly useless’ manner. The chilly winter breeze of Northern India and its accomplice the dense soupy fog had made commutation redundant and I was confined to stay at home. It was then that I turned to my old bookshelf, rummaged some of the lesser accessed shelves and blew away dust from atop some of the volumes and made a nice pile on the center table. I had read some of these works partly earlier a long time ago, and the others I had kept for leisure reading. It was like meeting a handful of school friends once again after years – not at the planned alumni meeting, but while you are out shopping your week’s supplies – by sheer chance. I pulled out a mid-sized volume with a yellow cover that shows a man playing flute by the river and a few others listening to him, leisurely resting on the nearby rocks and trees. It was ‘The Importance of Living’ by Lin Yutang – a work I had discovered i