Piecing it together

October 06, 2024

Digital world has superimposed itself in all aspect of my life. My screen time and concentration time has become inversely proportionate. High time to snap the line and look for interests in offline world.

A puzzle box lying in a library aisle caught my eye and I picked it up happily. It is good concentration exercise, meditative in its own form. Am I becoming a researcher or an innovator who is looking for a piece that fits right from dump of a1000 piece jigsaw puzzle! Soon enough I realized I need a better strategy in place otherwise it may feel like a big mammoth to solve for.

That is how I started my journey of applying data strategy concepts learnt through online medium into offline world. With recent completion of this course, every concept was fresh in mind; I am ought to piece it together in offline world now.

I had a game plan. Find corners since two sides would be straight line, followed by side pieces with one straight line, start segregating same color and pattern pieces, cluster them together, arrange and repeat this exercise to deliver your MVP. Yeah, applying some agile principles in daily life reflecting on concepts from my professional life. One might get frustrated going in sequence and might get stuck, hence I had to break monotony and start with different pattern every time I was stuck and iterate from there building smaller sections.

Here are some snippets from my dining table, utilized more for solving puzzles than eating dinner.

Every piece has its exact place just as every person in your life has its own place. If you find the right piece, it will snuggle well with its partner fitting arm in arm. It is such a satisfying feeling to witness entire process and bring it to completion.

This is love time with myself, calming my mind, rejecting thousand other thoughts and only focusing on finding exact place for each one of this thousand piece puzzle. Fully engrossed, breaking my back, had to pause; My brain started wandering and I recalled few lines from my recent read Lincoln Highway - " Wouldn't it have been wonderful, if everybody's life was like a piece in a jigsaw puzzle. Then no one person's life would ever be inconvenience to anyone else's" - Amor Towles.

And as I approach towards the end, I can see there will be no extra piece left, every piece in this universe matters. It has a purpose to fill the gaps we have, interlocking pieces, completing the puzzle of life.