Would the Real Anu Sridharan Please Stand Up

It’s funny when you try and figure out the essence of you.  What does that even mean?  I was looking through old blog posts (strange listening to your 2 year younger self talk).  I think the biggest issue is that life has shifted gears and I’m still trying to figure out what that means, but more specifically, what that means to me.

I moved to small town India August 2011.  I wanted to get away from everything and focus on one cool thing that I always wanted to do.  People asked if I was running away and at that time I said no, but now, two years later, I can say yeah. I totally was.  I guess it was obvious, given the first blog post I wrote, but you know.  We can all be in denial a bit.

March 2014: 2.5 years later and I am a different person.  I grew up running a startup in small town India.  It’s sort of like saying you were raised by hyenas I think.  That’s a strong statement but I think that’s the harsh reality of doing a startup, right after college when you know absolutely nothing, you have no real networks, and you figure everything out from scratch.  Oh yeah, in a foreign country PS.  Looking back, I can’t believe some of the stuff that has happened- knowing what I do now, I think it would be hard to do some of those things again.  Youth has its advantages. Stupidity?  Naivety?  Whatever it is, it got me through, and I am thankful for it.  I don’t know, it’s hard to process objectively.  And I’m still young so it’s sort of like the blind judging the slightly lesser (but not really significantly different) blind.

You know the weirdest thing? Trying to integrate back into the world of regular people again.  That sounds strange, but I think it’s really true.  When you live in the wild, you focus on survival.  The only rules are that there are no rules and only the strongest survive.  But when you shift gears, things are different.  It’s sort of hazy, trying to remember what it was like being back with people, hanging out with people who are not your coworkers ( just making sure we survive/thinking about cool stuff we can build/imagining a new world).  It’s not black or white either.  There were some great things back then that I loved, and I want to keep. There are some great things to look forward to now.  I guess it’s a matter of figuring out what parts I want to keep and what parts I want to ditch in this new phase.

People say that the teenage years are the ones where you experience the most growing pains.

I’d argue that if you live your life right, you should be experiencing growing pains every few years, because otherwise, doesn’t that mean you’re just stagnating forever?  Or maybe as you get older you figure out how to make it less painful and make the time periods to adjustment shorter.

Note to older, smarter self- work on THAT.