April 5th, 2008
It Has Been One Year Since I Made My 30 By 30 List
Welcome to Gauravonomics Diary! Subscribe to my combined feed in a feed reader or by e-mail and you'll never miss a single post. Thanks for visiting!
It has been one year since I made my 30 by 30 list –
Sometimes, I think that there’s enough in there for a book already, in my journey from that world to this. But, sometimes, I feel that I’m, in fact, standing in one place, staring at the hourglass that is my life running out of time.
So, I have decided to do more with the time I do have; the result is a list of thirty things I want to do before I’m thirty. The interesting thing about my 30 by 30 list is that every single thing on it looks impossible today. As impossible as being ‘the man I am’ would have looked to ‘the boy I was’ fifteen years ago.
In the worst case, I’ll give up on the list in a few weeks. Even if don’t, I’ll probably be able to do less than ten things on the list by the time I’m thirty. But, if I do manage to do all thirty, what a story it will be!
So, even though I know that the odds are impossible, I’m doing it anyway, because, never again in my life, will I be young enough, or foolhardy enough, to even try something as insane. And, maybe, as I try to find ways to do these thirty things, I’ll also find the answers I’m looking for, by trial and error.
So, twelve months after I made the list how many items have I ticked off?
None. Nada. Nothing. Zilch. Zero.
But I knew that when I made the list. I knew that it won’t be easy. I knew that I’ll not be able to tick off one item per month. I knew that the key was to not give up, to keep working on my goals, until the impossible became possible, until the odds tipped in my favor, until ticking them off felt as easy as thinking of them.
So, twelve months after I made the list, eighteen months before I hit thirty, I am happy to tell you that I haven’t given up on it. I have kept working on it, through a difficult year, until I hit 2008 and the tide started to turn my way.
So, twelve months after I made the list, I am happy to tell you that, out of the thirty goals that looked equally impossible then, at least five to ten look possible today.
Some of the books will happen, the column will happen, the startup will happen, the teaching/ consulting gigs will happen, even the target to ‘have assets of more than a crore’ will happen, and I still have eighteen months to figure out how to do the rest.
What’s more important, I have also found some of the answers I was looking for; my year long book-as-a-blog experiment ‘The Marketer Who Went Off Consumption’ is a result of that.
So, here’s my 30 by 30 list, once again. Even as you smile indulgently at my audacity, do wish me well.
- Publish a novel.
- Publish a best-selling management book.
- Publish an anthology of my poems.
- Publish a travelogue.
- Write a movie screenplay.
- Write a weekly column for a national newspaper.
- Host a talk show on TV.
- Put up a play at Prithvi Theatre.
- Put up an exhibition of my photography.
- Take Gauravonomics into the Technorati Top 100 list.
- Start my own web startup.
- Start my consulting practice.
- Teach at an IIM as a guest lecturer.
- Buy a house on Worli Sea Face.
- Buy a second weekend house in the mountains.
- Have assets of more than a crore.
- Run the full marathon.
- Climb to the Everest Base Camp.
- Scuba dive in the Egyptian Red Sea.
- Take a river cruise down the Amazon.
- Take a month off to backpack through Europe.
- Take a month off to drive around North America.
- Travel to at least thirty countries I haven’t visited before.
- Live in Europe for at least three months.
- Watch all the movies in the IMDb Top 250 Movies list.
- Read all the novels in the Time Magazine 100 Best English Novels list.
- Learn French and watch all of Francois Truffaut’s movies, without the subtitles.
- Learn Italian and watch all of Federico Fellini’s movies, without the subtitles.
- Learn Spanish and watch all of Pedro Almodovar’s movies, without the subtitles.
- Date Sushmita Sen.
