Imagine this scene.
It is a usual Monday Morning and your mood is right up [gesture low hand pointing to the ground] here.
You come or rather drag yourself to your workplace and a Colleague asks “Hey man… how was the weekend? Anything interesting?”
Most of us just shrug and whimper with a dull reply, “The usual”.
Happens, right?
I’m sure that you wouldn’t have shrugged if you had spent your weekend doing something which you enjoy.
Mister / Madam Toastmaster Fellow Toastmasters Distinguished Guests
Larry Page, the co-founder of Google, once said,
“You never lose a dream , it just incubates as a hobby.”
Today I would talk about Hobbies. Hobbies are activities which you “USED” to enjoy doing in your leisure time. But now you are simply “BUSY”.
Most of us do have something or the other as our hobby. Everyone likes to do something when they have nothing else to do right?
Some like to solve puzzles or crosswords, some like to sing or dance , some like to read and some like to play. Some like to do Gardening. Some like to cook.
And then there are some, who just like to eat and sleep or ‘Netflix and Chill’. And they’re , indeed, living the best life.
HASHTAG #SARCASM
Do anyone here like to share some of THEIR hobbies? Anything unique?
See, We all lead a very busy life. So we need something to unwind ourselves. To take us to back to our roots. To do things which makes us feel happier. Don’t we?
Today, I would share with you the impact of hobbies which I had on my own life.
I Like to indulge in visual arts. As in, I sometimes Draw Cartoons , Click Pictures , Spend Hours on Photoshopping them. Also I create Posters , Design Logos and so on on so forth.
5th Jan, 2012, a hindi movie “Mr. India”, was being shown on TV. I used to love that movie as a child. So I decided to create a small poster for the movie. Just as a tribute.
This shows Anil Kapoor and Sridevi through a red glass. Those who have seen the movie would get it easily. Those who haven’t , just hold on. This is a Minimal Poster where very little or just the core of the story is shown.
What happened after, is that I shared this on my blog, Facebook and Twitter and got a very positive response. This prompted me to create some more posters for some more movies and TV shows. I enjoyed making them and my friends continued with the praise. I wasn’t doing anything special . I was just passing my time by creating minimalistic tributes to the movies I had enjoyed myself. Just to feel nostalgic .
Then I created more posters . Now in non-Hindi languages as well. I’ve created close to 200 posters by now.
When the blog got popular, it finally got noticed by some movie makers and then some journalists. Then this started happening.
I got popular.
I got interviewed many times. My posters have been published in numerous newspapers and magazines. I am not saying that I am very good at it. Far from it! Just that I kept pursuing my hobbies and others liked that. It made me famous and gave me something to brag about and encouraged me to keep doing it over and over again.
My point is , who knows where your hobbies could lead you to. You are doing it just for fun . But you never know , what impact could they have on you and people around you.
Thus, I would just encourage and request you all to take some time out and do what you like, other than usual working for 8 hours a day.
Take out that old guitar which you always wanted to play but never took time out. Go join some dance classes and start flying again. Lately, there has been no Philately but who is stopping you from collecting stamps again. You like to cook? Be better at it and who knows you could land into Masterchef one day?
Even if you don’t, at least you’d have spent your time in doing something you liked and enjoyed. Isn’t that good in itself?
I would depart with the following quote from Warren Buffett, often called the world’s richest man,
“Whatever YOU like to do , make it a hobby and
whatever the WORLD likes to do , make that a business.”
Here’s a rehearsal recording of the speech:
