I had?

A recent guest post on Zen Habits caught my attention; it is a terrific experience to be in the writing field. It gives me comfort, peace and helps me to be steady in my goals. I always thought that I had to be a hard-worker to survive in the online world. When my friends  saw my strength and abilities in writing field they insisted me to write – to start a blog however, I was unsure if it’ll be a success since I was not a blog savvy nor I had had any experience. Many of my friends were in the writing field already; one of them gave me a platform to walk. I decided to start my own blog, the journey as always wasn’t easy, and it took me several months to design one of my own. The complex attributes were tough initially as to how to organize daily, weekly, bi-weekly or monthly posts, how to generate ideas –  were some of the queries swirling around my head. I had to read a lot – and the thought which helped me to pursue this dream was a quote by John O’hara he says: “becoming the reader is the essence of becoming a writer”; isn’t that a wonderful quote, well after analyzing myself I made the following table to groom in:

Read daily: Although it does get boring at times but I had to somehow develop this practice so that it may benefit me in the long run. However, just like the others I was unable to do so, to keep up the pace for reading was disturbing my mind because to read one sentence repeatedly use to irate me. For instance, I started off reading an article in the newspaper soon after the first paragraph I lost interest and track of the story and just kept reading. It was such that my mind was not grasping anything but my mouth certainly was exercising for nothingL.

            I had to reproduce another idea to overcome this obstacle and so I surfed on the internet read motivational blogs and ultimately got some ebooks downloaded. That was my homework for the month to read atleast one page of that ebook. Luckily, to my surprise there were some more interesting books recommended in the ebook which boosted my enthusiasm and with a positive attitude I marched. This is how I got rid of my downfalls. Ever since, I have not been honest with my ‘Read Daily’ routineJ; nevertheless, I ensure that at the end of each month I come up with one post. This keeps me going and I don’t even lose interest whatsoever.

The guest post on Zen Habits: “11 Creative Ways to Avoid Becoming a Workaholic” is such that you would want to read it nonstop, the material written is so true and attractive that you’ll fall in love with, plus the authenticity is 100%. Some points in this post were really rejuvenating such as:

4. “Spend time in nature”

5. “Make time for friends, family and your partner”

9.  “Constantly question your goals and life purpose”

I strongly believe in point no. 5 it is so true. Recently I have observed that being organized so much into my writing career I have given up my family life. Surely, you are to achieve goals but in a timely manner - not sacrificing your social life duhhh!. I have been so busy in my schedule that I don’t even have a good talk with my family, it’s just that if I’m doing my work and they are sitting in the same room so we discuss, otherwise I don’t see myself putting-in the effort that I should, to be with the family.

As for the point no. 4 yes! That is absolutely correct. I have experienced it, that when I’m alone in the garden my mind is swamped with loads of thoughts, ideas, new inventions.

So this goes out to all the work freaks – not waste time or be caught up in your passion that you tend to fall apart from your loved ones. Remember your loved ones are the shadow of comfort when you feel down; their support is consistent throughout your life.

Spend a day with your family with no workaholics’ provisions; your family truly deserves it this time.

Fill in vs Fill out

In today’s modern trend we do not acknowledge the importance of usage of the English terms. It has rapidly increased in recent years gone-by. How often has it been that without having the proper etiquettes of phrasal verbs one just keeps on pursuing himself in the same direction. It is important to understand the fundamental differences between such terms as it will improve your phrasal vocabulary.

I have researched on one of the phrasal verbs’ term that I will be classifying in this article. Hope you get something out of it. The motto of my research was a brief conversation I had the other day with my colleague, and this led me to conduct an extensive research; our topic was “why do the terms FILL OUT & FILL IN - not the same and if they are, why don’t we use only one of them? I was perplexed at this query - paused for a while, thought of an answer and responded but I had not achieved the satisfaction within. It was just not it, and thus, I intuited to delve into these terms as to what could be the difference, finally surfing on the internet I came across thefreedictionary.com website which cleared my confusion.

Look below and you will see a concrete difference between the two:

The encircled picture (1.a) illustrates the phrasal meaning of ‘fill in’ i.e. (to provide with information) whereas circle (1.b) elucidates ‘fill out’ as (by providing required information). Hence, we see a significant difference between these two. See the explanation below:

Fill in: represents to provide with information, e.g., you go to a bank, and request for an account opening form now the teller would ask you to fill out the form, on the contrary your obligation is to fill in the blanks – P.S. you are at liberty to provide additional information. Hence (you are providing to the bank with information).

Fill out: definitely has a slight difference it denotes to filling out only the required information (which have been asked in the form). For example; if we take the above scenario while filling out the form the task what we perform is to fill out the details only which are interrogated in the form. Therefore, we just fill it out as per the requirement.

Thus, these terms hold a contrast between - however, both are used as variant in place of another. So next time when using these terms you might need to reconsider!