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A lot of us do not want to live by the conventional route.

We want to explore and challenge ourselves.
But our fears hardly let that happen.

What if I fail in singing?
What would I tell my parents if I couldn’t earn as much as Sharma ji’s son?
What would my friends say when they know I have left my job to start up?

However, what if we used our power to think for ourselves?

What if people end up loving my music?
What if my parents would be happier seeing me happy?
What if my friends draw inspiration from my example?

We don’t know what the result will be.
But if we don’t try, we won’t ever know our own selves.

If we were given a chance to peek into our future, we’d certainly not miss it.

What if we knew that the way we live our days is setting up our foundation for our future?

This also enables us to change our past, because the present of today is the past of the future.

The best way to change the future lies in the present.

We want to build that product.
Create a community of like-minded people.
Change the way things work.

But there is a lack of time.
Or we are not sure if the idea will succeed.

What will people say if we fail?
How will we ever know the result until we do the work?

Intentions hold power only when they’re backed by actions.
Otherwise, they’re the lies we are hypnotizing ourselves with.

A year from now you will wish you had started today.

You felt intense pain.
You wanted to escape.
It really hurt.

And in all that, it was easy to blame circumstances.
Except that circumstances were not to be blamed.

If circumstances brought us pain, how is it that different people handle their pain differently?

The hurt that we felt because of the circumstances was because the hurt was always there. Circumstances only brought them to the forefront.

Circumstances don’t cause pain.
They reveal them.

This is a story across 20 years, that I still can’t believe.

27th August 2002 - I took my first ever flight in my life.
It was for the USA.

Papa had to take a Rs. 55,000 loan to pay for the one-way ticket.

I still remember the scene at the Delhi airport.
My entire family had come to see me off.
Ruchi had come too.
Everyone was crying.
I was crying too.

But I was also excited.

This is what I had always dreamt of.
To go to the US for a fine education, become a space scientist, join NASA, land on Mars.
And that dream was finally coming true.

27th August 2022 - exactly 20 years to the day I left for Michigan State, the university confirmed me as a speaker for their alumni speaker series.

I spoke at the university this April.
Shared my journey with the current students.

19 years back, when I dropped out and came back to India, if someone had come up to me and said:

“Hey - I am from the future. And I have some exciting news for you.
In about 19 years, you will have more than 8M+ people following you on something really cool called social media.
You would have written two best selling books.
You will be invited by top companies to address their employees and motivate them.
Forget all of that - this very university that you are dropping out from, will call you back to address their students.”

I would have told the person to get a CT Scan :))

But here I am.
Living this life.
Not because I am the smartest person I know or the most hard working person I know.
I am living this life because I did not give up on myself.

A lot of you would be going through something similar in your lives.
A new company, a new city, a new career, a new relationship, or a new experience.
And it may not always turn out to be what you wanted it to be.

But that's not the end.
There is never any end, until the day we all die.

Up until that day, you have yourself.
And I wish for you to find that yourself, one day :)

Focus is something we choose for our own selves. For the life that we have chosen. Our career. Focus makes us accountable.

But there is another perk of that focus: The right kind of focus leads us to stop focusing on what others are doing wrong, and start looking for where they are going right.

Owning your game does not allow you to question someone else’s.

Happiness is not about experiencing something new or something exciting.

It is continually experiencing what you already have, in different ways.
And this also means that happiness is rarely about doing more.

Instead, it is about having the time, space and wisdom to appreciate what you already have.

A lot of us do not want to live by the conventional route.

We want to explore and challenge ourselves.
But our fears hardly let that happen.

What if I fail in singing?
What would I tell my parents if I couldn’t earn as much as Sharma ji’s son?
What would my friends say when they know I have left my job to start up?

However, what if we used our power to think for ourselves?

What if people end up loving my music?
What if my parents would be happier seeing me happy?
What if my friends draw inspiration from my example?

We don’t know what the result will be.
But if we don’t try, we won’t ever know our own selves.

If we were given a chance to peek into our future, we’d certainly not miss it.

What if we knew that the way we live our days is setting up our foundation for our future?

This also enables us to change our past, because the present of today is the past of the future.

The best way to change the future lies in the present.

Your perception of the past will change as you do.

And if you can change your past, through your perception, you can undo all the chains that have tied you down so far.