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Someone was kind to you for a long time.
Now, all of a sudden they’ve become rude.

This leaves you questioning. 

How could they change? Why did they change? Did I do something wrong?

Somehow it has started affecting your self worth in that relationship. 

Here’s the truth: People don’t change. They just surface. Depending on their life circumstances or even the situations. 

When we accept people for where they are, we don’t do them a favour. We do one to ourselves. 

Maybe you figured a Product-Market fit that worked.
Maybe you wanted to try things on this side of the world.
Or perhaps you were just happy doing it.

Whatever it is, that reason is important. 

Your “why” is important.
Your root cause matters.

The reasons hyped by the media, the Twitteratti, competitors, don’t matter as much.

When you know why you became an entrepreneur in the first place, the only story that matters is the one between your two ears.

Out of our entire childhood of waiting for summer vacations, having crushes, that little pocket money and having nothing to worry about, what do we reminisce about the most?

That we were free.
That when we were authentic, life never brought in anything pathetic.
That when we lived in the now, we hardly wondered about the next “how”.

The best thing about childhood was that we didn’t have to do anything to be original.
The better thing is, we can still do it.
We can still go back to our roots and connect with our inner self.

When we taste a little success of a product we built, we want to 10X it. Or 100X. And make a lot of money from it.. 

Except, that when we aim for quick money, we lose it quicker.
Several reasons.
Our self image hasn’t adjusted to it.
We grew by luck or perhaps a great product – however, we never grew along with the process.
More than anything else, we were hardly able to reflect – a superpower that comes after failure.

Growing your business and having more money is great. It helps us make better choices. However, when we want everything right now, we end up trading the lessons of a lifetime for loss of a lifetime. The last thing we’d signed up for.

The fastest way is slow.

We don’t start hoping we’ll get there.
We make strategies. Plans. Executing them to the T.

Then comes a huge black swan effect. At the moment we were waiting for it to get over, another one came in, sweeping away all strategies.

And when all of these do not work, then comes the hope.
Hope that we will make it through this storm, like we’ve done through all of them.
Hope that there exists a light at the end of the tunnel, wherever the end is.
Hope that till we get to the end of the tunnel, we will be the light.

All our strategies didn’t account for what we are going through. Hope is the only thing we’re left with – fortunately.

Our parents are the people we disagree with the most.
We have differing opinions on the smallest life issues to making big life decisions.
And that’s okay. And a different thing.

Right now, our parents need a different thing from us: Our presence.
When they were our age, they witnessed tremendous hard work, lack of opportunities, and struggle to make ends meet. 

Life hasn’t been easy for them. But we can make it a bit easy by being there for them – making them talk about their favourite topics (our childhood, their childhood), listening to them, or simply engaging with them.

Our friends and family.
Our colleagues.
Our acquaintances on social media. 

We love to keep everyone happy.
If they aren’t happy, that’s because of us.

“I should not have said that.
I am not balancing work and family.
I am responsible for their sadness.”

Except, it’s false. 

No matter how much we “sacrifice” for someone else, happiness is always an inside job.

How do we operate when no one is watching?
What’s a complete no-no, even if it is an immediate gain for us?
Do we want others to win, or is it just a sole game in a team?

Values aren’t something that we just write and let it be there. Values are who we are, something that we would never compromise on. 

When things fall apart and values don’t, it means we are on the right track. More than anything else, we know we are practising them right when others know us through those.

Our values are our foundations. While it is lucrative to work on the building, nothing keeps the building stable if there isn’t a foundation. 

In almost every organisation, there are grapevines.
People who think how work should be done, how others are doing it, and how it serves as a platform for them to gossip.

The sad part is, sometimes it affects the people who aren’t a part of that grapevine.
It leads them into believing that their worth is determined by how cool they are to be a part of that group, and not 

Except, that’s false.

Our worth is determined by what we control, our input, that is our work.
What others think is something we can never control.

A great way to level up is to remind yourself what you can control.
Somehow, everything else you cannot control loses its importance.

Happiness is our nature as kids. If we enjoy something, we are in a state of flow doing it. If we don’t, we’ll cry our hearts out to make sure we don’t do it.

And then, we grow up. Unfortunately. And forget to make our happiness a priority.
We pursue courses that our family wants, marry someone because we’ve been told to, and end up living a life that is totally apart from how we would be happy living it.

In the pursuit of trying to make others happy and giving up our own, we realise we aren’t happy either. So, choosing our happiness is the safest option to ensure not only ours rather everyone else’s happiness.

How do we know if we are happy doing something? By asking two fundamental questions:

a. What about it makes me happy?
b. Am I truly happy doing it?

It turns out, the happiest thing we could do to our happiness is live with it forever. That’s the most difficult yet the easiest thing to sign up for.