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Falling in love with yourself includes just three things:

1. You will NOT blame yourself.
   You can point out your mistakes. You can get better. But you will never say to yourself: “You have done it wrong. All the bad stuff has happened because of you! You are a wrong person. You are inadequate. You are a loser! You will never be able to do it. You don’t blame the person you love.
2. You can live with that person even without talking to that person. The kind of people whom you meet after years, you take off right at the place where you left it. Or you don’t need to talk to them, but not forcing to talk to them. However, we cannot sit with ourselves. We are scared of our own thoughts. We don’t know how to spend time with ourselves!
3. You don’t judge yourself. That fat kid. That failure. That ugly girl. That inadequate person. The one who is not loved by anyone. Every time you judge yourself, you are damaging the relationship with your own self.
   
   No one knows you better than you.
   Yet isn’t it strange you wish others to love you yet you are your worst critic?

My firsts book Do Epic Shit hit Amazon India bestseller within hours of its launch.

That was a proud and gratitude-filled moment for me.

However, I want you to walk you through what seems like an easy hit to the bestseller list:
– I have been blogging for 16 years now.
– For the first 4 years on YouTube, I gained roughly 7,000 subscribers only.
– I have been creating content on LinkedIn for over 5 years now.
– Writing Twitter threads relentlessly since April 2020, did not miss a single week.

While it always fills me up with gratitude for all the love you shower on me, I think I owe it to you to tell that it takes almost a decade to become an overnight sensation.

I once wrote on Twitter, “Trust doesn’t get built just by meeting expectations.”

There are two parts to it:

1. Building trust
2. Meeting and exceeding expectations

Here is a three part process to it:

When you do what you are supposed to do, you will get what you are supposed to get: money in lieu of work.
When you exceed what you are supposed to do, it becomes obvious that you cannot be compensated in monetary terms each time you exceed expectations. However, as you continue doing it, you build trust. Which becomes the driver for humans above meeting their financial requirements.
As you continue building trust, you are rewarded in bigger ways than you were supposed to, because you did more than you were supposed to.
The last part does not come easy or announced or even expected.

However, if you do the bare minimum, how can you even think of maximising your life?

No one else could walk your path.
When you accept this, you turn off your blinders.
And listen to the person talking to you, instead of figuring out how to give them solutions.

Everyone knows their solutions.
What people are looking for is validation.
Validation comes from not judging what they say.
Which is the last thing we do. And the first thing we must do.

Listening to someone without judgement is the most precious gift you can give to that person.

What we fear the most is usually what we most need to do

None of us fears going along with the status quo.

What we fear the most is taking unconventional decisions and taking the steps that would make others laugh at us.

Guess what? No one broke any mountains just by doing comfortable things every single day.

Fear and discomfort are green signs to go ahead. Love for the status quo is a greener sign to abandon it.

Life isn’t about knowing everything before it happens.
It is about knowing how to react when life happens.

Life, fortunately, isn’t about predicting it based on your sun sign and following up with joy or remorse.

Life is about getting out of your home and doing uncomfortable things.
It is about doing things you are scared to do, anyway.
It is about falling, failing and figuring out; instead of figuring out before falling.

Some things do not change chronologically :)
Fortunately, life and your responses are that chronology.

When it comes to money, more information doesn’t make people more aware.
It makes them more scared.

About money, the simplest information works the best:
1. Invest in equity.
2. Invest for long-term.
3. Don’t invest in FOMO to get rich quick.

When it comes to money, less information is more. Literally.

If you are not going to respect your time, no one else will.

Wasting your time is a sign that you allow others as well to waste your time.

Being particular about your time shows others as well how you manage your time.

The way you respect or not respect your time is the way you teach others to treat your time. And you.

Regret will cause more pain than failure ever will.

Failure will give you ways to succeed.
Regret will give you compounding regret. With zero end to that downward spiral.

You will never know how your decision would turn out, until you actually make that decision.
However, if you won’t make that decision, you would always blame yourself and everyone else for the rest of your life!

Do you really want to sign up for that?

I hope not, because it is always a wonderful idea to try and fail than to not try and tell stories (while regretting silently in your mind).

You will struggle to smile and show up. Show up anyway.

It’s scary to show up on days you are scared. And scarred.
However, it is only by showing up on those days that you tell your scars that your smile is bigger than the scares they give.

Anyone can show up on a day of sunshine.
But sunshine doesn’t make you strong. Struggles do.
To show up with courage on a day when it wasn’t easy is what will make you tough!