Post by Abir Mukherjee

Five Things This Year Taught Me (the Hard Way) — #3 I didn’t know that writing these would keep getting tougher. If I’m honest, after the first two, I’m a bit tired and just want to finish this one before I start overthinking it. Lesson #3: I was too serious about myself, and ambiguity was painful. I expect a lot from myself. Clear thinking. Quick decisions. Clean answers. It sounds fine. It’s also exhausting. When things didn’t resolve neatly, I assumed I was doing something wrong. I pushed harder. Took myself too seriously. Made “not sure yet” feel like a flaw. I was reading Ghalib. And something struck me differently. He didn’t avoid ambiguity. He knew himself well enough that ambiguity — personal or professional — didn’t unsettle him. He named his inner questions openly, almost ahead of time, before others even realized they were feeling the same confusion. Nothing changed overnight. I just began forcing less. Pausing more. Letting things be unclear without treating that as incompetence. The problem wasn’t ambiguity. It was my discomfort with not having an immediate answer. Taking myself a little less seriously turned out to be far more useful than trying to be better all the time. That’s it. Lesson three. Two more to go.