Dr.

Srikumar S Rao is a renowned subject matter expert in the field of creativity and personal
mastery. He spoke about creating a purpose in life, understanding what success means and
about mental chatter.

His take on the ‘second arrow’ concept was very helpful and inspiring. I completely agree
with his statement, “whatever situation you are in, mental chatter makes it at least one degree
worse”. I tend to be very hard on myself and introspect more than necessary. I will work to
control my self-critical mental chatter as much as possible.

The benefit of setting a goal is NOT really achieving the set goal. The learnings, growth and
failures that we face in the process of trying to reach the goal that makes it worthwhile. The
main takeaway for me from this discussion was the idea that we need to invest more in the
process and not in the outcome. While giving due importance to the set goal, I will try to
carry this with me in the years to come.

He also spoke about the importance of letting things go. There is no constructive emotion that
comes out of prolonging the negative emotion that arose in us in any given scenario. Letting
it go helps us move past it and look at it objectively and understand what went wrong.

I was not able to completely appreciate the concept of “Whatever you can observe, is NOT
you”. But, it caught my attention and appealed to my curiosity. I will try to explore further
and decipher the idea behind it.