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You will write cold emails to prospective clients.
Will join an online course to upskill yourself.
Start meditating at least 10 minutes a day.

All of these are good resolutions.
But none of those work.
Until you do the work.

It is always the actions that take all the rewards, never the commitments that are never followed by actions.

We are made not by the promises we make, rather by the promises we keep.
The world knows us not through our words, rather through our work.
Showing what you could do is far lesser than showing up and doing.

The things that will give the best results are going to be difficult.

Working out instead of sleeping in.
Sleeping on time instead of Netflix.
Writing a cold email for a job instead of waiting to be picked.

Of course, by their very nature, they are uncomfortable. The opposite is comforting.
Everyone does those. And doesn’t require any effort.

The very nature of hard things is that rare people will do those.
People don’t just get lucky. They just do the unconventional.

The car depreciates in its value by 30% immediately on getting out of showroom.
In a year, it’s down 50%.
Maintenance is another unavoidable expense

Each time someone buys a car with their hard earned money, it breaks my heart.

Most people who buy one, don’t need one.
If only we could let go of societal approval, we would be riding smoothly.
In our lives. And the hired cabs.

“Where do you see yourself 5 years from now?”

None of us know the answer of it.
We tell stories, share Googled answers, or say something the audience wants to hear.
And to those who answered this in 2015, what they saw in 2020 was certainly not what they had answered.

One of the best awareness we could have is not being aware of what happens in the future.
Uncertainty leads to unexplored possibility!

One of the most frequently asked questions to me is: “How do you manage to wake up early?”

Logic says several answers to it:

• Keep your workout gear next to your bed
• Alarm clock in another room
• Burpees on waking up, etc.

All of these work, until they don’t.

The true question to address is “How to sleep on time?”

If you’re sleeping at 11 and want to wake up at 4, the motivation will certainly stop on Day 4.

What if we get a night-time schedule, that makes it impossible to sleep late? Something like:

• Having dinner 2-3 hours prior to planned bed time
• Spending time doing activities that relax you
• Planning for the next day

It turns out, if we turn to twist the outputs without changing the inputs, the motivation won’t lasts.
The more we strive to get the inputs right, the more the outputs automatically take care of themselves.

Job interview. Client meeting. Exams.
We want the best for us.

And for the fear of not making it, we automatically get the stress for us.

Stress is a form of fear.
Fear of loss.
Loss of opportunity.
Opportunity that you got by luck.
Now you’re scared.
Of not making that luck happen again.

The truth about luck is, of course, that it just happened to occur.
The question is: Have we designed our life in a way that it occurs more often?

If we do not see results on the outside, we think we are not growing.
Not the best definition of growth.

Growth is rather an input. If your inputs are getting better with time, you are growing.

The goal is not to make the world notice your change, immediately.
The goal is to make yourself cringe at what you did 3 months back. That is the best growth!

Often when people ask me, “What is the secret sauce behind your consistent content”, I have only one answer:

Creativity is a process.

Every Tuesday, for example, is my shoot day.
It’s been over 1.5 years that I’ve built a full-time team, and I haven’t missed a single week.
Tied up schedules, birthdays, or even vacations – I simply show up and shoot.

The answer to all complex problems of life are simple. 
It is all about the relentlessness with which we show up and do the work, and put in the bricks even if the eventual building is far away.

Whenever kids in their late teens or twenties reach out to me saying they have wasted their life, my response, in some way or other, is: “You have time!”

However, at the same time I am very particular about how I use my time, in a way that gives me the maximum energy. Almost standing guard at the door of time – and using it for work or for Netflix, in my way.

Micro focus on being strict on time, with macro focus on being aware, that you have a lot of time – isn’t it the best thing about time?

Taking care of your days is important. The years would eventually take care of themselves.

I often talk about choosing the path you want to choose, so that you don’t regret later.
Because we will never have the answer to “What if?”
It may or may not be the best decision, but the only way to figure it out is by making that decision.

On the other hand, a lot of people in their 30’s reach out to me with their regrets.
I thought the same of myself, when I was 30.
I was fired from my first startup, was figuring out what to do with life, and watching “The Social Network” featuring Mark Zuckerberg’s story made me feel even more miserable.

However, as I started applying, things changed for the better.
That is when I thought, it is not about the years gone by. It is about the years still left!

It turns out, when we are young we refrain from making a decision thinking we might regret it.
When we get a bit experienced with life, regret already takes over.

That is the nature of regret – it makes us wander about our future, and accuse our past.
And the only way to get out of regret, is to make your present count.

Forming habits. Showing up for creativity with discipline. Working on your mindset and your body.

Over time, we get to a place of lesser regrets and more gratitude, for taking care of the inputs, and let the outputs unfold.

Regret is like a weed, if we don’t tend our garden of the present with the right seeds, the weed will inevitably show up.