Dhingra - Dear Hannah : a geeks life in self-improvement

D ear H annah

A Geeks Life in Self-Improvement

P hilip D hingra

Copyright 2014 by Philip Dhingra

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

Published by
Nuclear Elements, Inc.
Austin, Texas

Contact: philipkd.com

First Edition: August 2014 First Printing

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dhingra, Philip

Dear Hannah: A Geeks Life in Self-Improvement / Philip Dhingra. 1st ed.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-1500392246

1. Self-Help > Personal Growth > General 2. Body, Mind & Spirit > Meditation 3. Biography & Autobiography > Personal Memoirs

Printed in the United States of America

To my parents, who gave me a room of my own.

My answer is simple: I learned to harness the principle I now call concentration of power. Most people have no idea of the giant capacity we can immediately command when we focus all of our resources on mastering a single area of our lives. Controlled focus is like a laser beam that can cut through anything that seems to be stopping you. When we focus consistently on improvement in any area, we develop unique distinctions on how to make that area better.

Tony Robbins, Awaken the Giant

The power of focusing can be seen in light. Diffused light has little power or impact, but you can concentrate its energy by focusing it. With a magnifying glass, the rays of the sun can be focused to set grass or paper on fire. When light is focused even more as a laser beam, it can cut through steel. There is nothing quite as potent as a focused life, one lived on purpose.

Rick Warren, The Purpose-Driven Life

Why self-improvement? Thats the question Ive been trying to answer since middle school. For my 14th birthday, my classmate Hannah gave me Dale Carnegies How to Win Friends and Influence People, and what happened afterward blew my mind. I discovered I could control the way I socialize and, in doing so, change my world. After this early success, I developed an insatiable appetite for more books, more pop psychology, and more personal experiments.

When Hannah moved away to the East Coast, I started relaying my progress via e-mail and we agreed to keep each others letters because one day, we might want to write books of our own. Im 30 now, and while I havent stopped reading self-improvement books, in some ways I feel done. The books I read in the past three years completely changed my attitude about self-improvement. I used to spend 10 hours a week on the floor, stuck in loops of over-thinking. Now I spend an average of 10 minutes lightly analyzing some issues, and then I move on. Im no longer lost career-wise and Im no longer scared of love. Happiness is the new normal for me, and so now its time to chronicle how I got here.

Hannah stayed involved in self-improvement, but not to the extent that I did. For her, these books were part of a toolbox that included other outlets like painting and fiction writing. Her letters, if published, would likely form a novel, starting with two kids creating elaborate twig fortresses in the rocky hills of Rancho Bernardo who then grow up worlds apart. But thats a different story.

Self-improvement was the only tool in my toolbox, but Hannah never tired of hearing about my exasperated trials and errors. She always had the right turn-of-phrase or word to summarize what I was doing. Maybe having Hannah to talk to is why I felt I could leave therapy aside and opt for do-it-yourself.

To borrow an idea popularized in Malcolm Gladwells Outliers, self-improvement is my 10,000 hours. But what have I mastered, if anything? Rather than answering that question with a standard self-help book saying, like Ive learned x, you should do y, you should avoid z, etc., Im inclined to share my letters to Hannah just as they are. The following pages will hopefully show what happens when your life is dictated by one operating principle: Be better.

- Phil

Authors Note: At the bottom of each letter, I include a brief, present-day reflection on what I think of its contents, now that Im older.

High School and the Dot-com Boom

Date: October 22, 1996
Age: 14
Location: San Diego, CA

Hannah, I owe you a big thanks for Dale Carnegies How to Win Friends and Influence People. If you were here right now, you would immediately notice the difference. Theres a bounce in my step and I stand tall, despite having a giant backpack with textbooks weighing me down.

Every day, after summer school, Id walk thirty minutes to my parents office, holding your book in one hand and a yellow highlighter in the other, marking passages that struck me. This one line in particular is still glowing in my head:

You can make more friends in two weeks by being genuinely interested in others, than you can in two years by getting others interested in you.

Thats it. Thats the secret. When I think about that line, I imagine my hand on my chin, attentively listening to others. Rather than just spouting off about the Internet or whatevers on my mind, I imagine myself asking, How are you doing? and really meaning it.

And now, everythings changing.

Out of nowhere, I got accepted to RBHSs Peer Counseling program. I must have impressed the adult counselors in the interview, because even though there are about sixty kids in the program, only five freshmen got accepted. When I stood for our group photograph, and looked to the left and right of me, all I saw were crisp, blue letterman jackets and beautiful faces. I thought, Im standing next to our future prom kings and queens.

I had thought I was near the bottom of the pecking order, but something clearly changed in me over the summer. Which makes me think, that if reading one book can completely turn around a major aspect of your life, what would happen if you read ten? Couldnt you turn a shy geek into a suave stud? Couldnt you turn an average Joe into a person of great destiny?

- Phil

Active listening became really useful when it came time to build my web design consultancy. However, when I tried to apply it to my peers in school, it led to some comedic results.

Date: March 25, 1997
Age: 14
Location: San Diego, CA

Hi Hannah. Is Dale Carnegies the only self-improvement book you can recommend? I rummaged through my parents library, and all they have are biographies. I need something more specific ... something about managing people. If I dont find something soon, I think my heads going to explode.

At the start of the year, Mr. Rabel, our computer lab teacher assigned us to teams of three to enter ThinkQuest. ThinkQuest is an international web design contest with huge scholarship prizes ($25,000 per teammate for first place, plus some money for our school), and my team might have a chance of taking the big one. Ive already thrown hundreds of hours into the project, designing graphics and slinging together HTML, but sadly, my two teammates, Carlos and Paul, have nowhere near the same interest I have in winning.

I nearly broke down and cried the other day because of how frustrated I had been with Paul. At our first meeting since spring break, a slightly sunburnt Paul arrived late and actually smirked with pride at how little work he had done. As Carlos and I walked through the tasks we had completed, Paul smiled and shook his head in a smug, couldnt-give-a-crap attitude.