Human Beings: Creatures of Habit

With the effective conclusion of my school term in San Francisco two days ago after the final project presentation to my client Panasonic North America, I would have imagined myself jumping up in joy at yet another milestone and excited at the prospect of spending the little-over-one-week break not having to worry about course readings, assignments, and daily team meetings. But that was not to be as here I stand two days hence...bored, despondent, staring at the vacuum that life has suddenly turned into, and trying to up the activity levels before I return to Boston for the final term.

The past two weeks had been grueling, to say the least. The penultimate client presentation had not gone well: the client did not like anything we proposed. It was one of those very rare occasions in life where one drew a blank - an absolute and perfect blank! The entire team was demotivated and and had lost the drive to work any further. It is here that I and another team-mate started to pick the threads and attempt to move on. We decided that whatever happened, we will not go down without a fight.

What followed were intense and long hours of re-thinking the strategy, looking at the client's problem in fresh light, make sense of what the client was "not" telling us through the limited interactions we had with them. We usually met at noon, had a quick Starbucks 'lunch' with coffee at 3:30 pm, returned to work until around 9 pm or later and planned the next day's activities on the 20-minute walk towards Embarcadero on Battery Street. Bad days ended with wine in the evenings and indulgent ones with a proper lunch at Pier 39. Given the state the team was in, the weekends were no different. The effort we put in brought results as the client liked our final presentation and though we did not end up on the top of the charts, we literally blazed the trail with the biggest jump in rankings among all teams causing a few upsets along the way.

And now that the challenge is over, life seems to have paused. With no morning alarm to wake up to, sleep ought to be better but is actually worse. A lack of urgency in getting ready to leave home to make it to the daily meetings on time has made the whole process of getting ready more excruciating, not less. All of a sudden, there is lots of time but few ideas on what could be done with the sudden surplus. There seems to be no motivation for going to school and even Starbucks is not as much fun anymore. In the absence of mental stimulation, even the walk along good ol' Battery Street seems to be a waste of time.

Such is the nature of human beings - we are creatures of habit! Take our habits away and the mind is unable to comprehend what to replace those habits with. What an interesting creation of the creator we are!