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The world runs on instant gratification today.
The instant like, the instant comment, the instant live. 

However, this quick dopamine boost does more harm than good.

The reality is, all good things take time and effort.

True love, true relationships, true friendship, true meaning and fulfilment in work, true well being – physical, mental, emotional.

The quicker we realise good things don’t come quickly, the more we will enjoy the daily small actions towards the long journey, even if they don’t give instant rewards.

You want to pick designing after engineering.
Maybe go for a self-financed trip for six months.
Perhaps quit graduation and get a full-time job in photography.

All these are not the conventional paths.

But all these are the paths that seek your attention.

Should you take them up?
Or should you “settle-down” first and have a back-up plan?

Steve Jobs said you can’t connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect the dots looking backward. 

How will we be able to connect the dots if we do not move away from where we are now?

We picked up a book to read.
Now we don’t quite enjoy it.

However, if we leave it midway, guilt quickly jumps in.
Should we finish it up or read it fully?

The guilt works strangely.
Instead of making us decide, it makes us give up on reading altogether. 

What if we kept down the books if they took away our interest?
Or perhaps we skimmed through it?
Or read between the pages about what piqued our interest?

The best relationships with books are give and take.
We give them our time and they keep us hooked to read them.

Creating content is less about new ideas on a random day.
It’s more of a process.

Showing up each day.
Documenting what we did.
Being ourselves.

Creating content even when we don’t get the muse.
And listening to the audience about what lights them up.

If we keep on doing it consistently without worrying about it to monetise, the power of compounding will take us places even we couldn’t imagine.

But the universal caveat remains unchanged:

Creativity shows up when we do.

You got promoted.
Maybe getting married this year!
And oh, you got a pet too.
Or you got fired from a job.
Went through a tough breakup.
Perhaps the family went through a crisis.

These are extreme emotions. 

People share them all the time on social media.

And there are responses like: “I’m so happy for you”, “So glad to see you like this”, or “Extremely sorry to hear that”.

However, no one feels what we feel.
No one knows what we are going through.
No one is as happy or as sad for us as they say they are.

We have only ourselves to know what we are going through. 

We are still using some things in life.

Old words.
Old thought patterns.
Old behaviours.

Just because we have accustomed ourselves to them.
They’re a habit now.
They don’t serve any purpose.

As we form new habits, it is also important to question which are the old ones that we are leaving behind. 

A good habit to have is to discard habits that do not work.

90% of new year resolutions are broken by 15th January.

Why does that happen despite our best intentions?

The brain is always looking for shortcuts, and its default shortcut is to go back to what it is used to. 

Deep down, we haven’t conditioned it to act in a manner aligned with those goals.

So, what if we change what the brain is conditioned to?

What if we create habits because of which it is possible to achieve our resolutions?
When goals go for a toss, habits are always there to catch you safe.

All year-round :) 

We often ask ourselves a lot of questions:

Why am I doing this?
Why do I not want to do this?
What do I want to achieve by taking this path?

All are very meaningful and important questions.

However, are we allowing ourselves to get the answers? 

Or are our lives a big question mark because of never getting out of a whirlwind of questions?

Questions give different directions; answers show the path that drives actions.

MBA immediately after graduating looks like a cool choice.

We will be a B-school graduate, have a great job, and finally “settle down”.
Gaining some work experience before that is coined as wastage of time.

However, what if the work experience turns out to be fruitful for an MBA?

What if we enter an MBA not to top the class, but rather to understand how business decisions work?

What if we knew that to understand business, it pays to have work experience?

The goal of college is to understand how college can help us.
For an MBA, that might mean gaining real world experience before college. 

There are two kinds of pressures:

Performance pressure and peer pressure.

Performance pressure is the one we apply on ourselves.
That we have to deliver.
That we have to win.
That we have to achieve. 

It is the story in our head. 

Peer pressure is the one we experience due to others.
That they are doing so well.
That there is so much to learn from them.
That I too can be just as good. 

We tend to perform better when we are surrounded by performers and achievers.

That is how top athletes train themselves. 

Pressure can make a hard potato soft and a soft egg hard.
Choose your pressure!