Blog

It is almost impossible to meet 3 kinds of people:

1. People who haven’t made any mistakes.

2. People who have reached a success after failure without reflection.

3. Managers who have team’s trust by exerting control and micromanagement instead of trust.

Three things that help me achieve productivity pro max:

1. Sharing my calendar with my wife: She can add, edit, delete anything – and it gets on my calendar.

2. Taking notes like a kid: We believe productivity is a far off game of some day, however, productivity is making the best use of the place you’re right now in. This, is aided to me by my practice of taking notes.

3. Having dinner by 6:30 pm: How is this related to productivity? Because I have dinner 3 hours prior to sleeping, it helps me feel lighter and easy while going to bed. Which also means feeling way less groggy in the morning, thus, productive.

While there are several apps to make you more productive, for me, it is the old school things that help the most – including family, writing, and dinner before sunset – that make the most difference!

Why do you continue to work hard on your passion despite you can’t see any visible results?
Why do you wake up early to do it?
Why do you ignore the parties because you want to nurture your side gig?

Why do you do it, when you have exhausted all the wordly reasons to not do it?

You do it because you do not know who you would be, without it!

We continue not because we will get something.
Money. Accolades. Trust. Recognition. Success.
None of these is the reason.

We continue because we will lose ourselves if we don’t.

I created different content for different audiences, on different platforms.
While the nature and intent of the content is different, what remains the same is what I want to download.

Here is what I stand for, in every content piece I create:

Simplicity:
Anyone can make simple things complex. What I stand for, off the content, is simplicity. That’s what I strive for, even in each content piece I create.

Authenticity:
I am the same person everywhere – whether you bump into me in a mall or whether you meet me in your office.
The reason I have so much fun creating content is because I do not pretend to be someone else!

Humility:
One thing I care for, is accessibility with humility. I might not be able to respond to every DM or email I get, but whatever I do respond to, it is human. Not robotic like “apologies”. Who says apologies in reality?
I talk like I talk to real human beings. Because I do talk to real human beings.

Simplicity, authenticity, humility – my three sauces to crack the content game.

Feeling intimidated by a colleague daily? Does it mean you aren’t “cool enough” or does it simply mean they do not make you feel involved?

Trying too hard to find work you love? Does this mean you aren’t worth it or does it mean your efforts are compounding to give you 10X return?

Parents asking you for small things? Does this mean they are poking their nose or does this mean they simply want to lower their anxiety by making sure you’re safe?

All of these things make you struggle.
However, when we go to the roots of struggle, it helps you discover yourself in profound ways.

Struggle isn’t meaningless. If you are willing to do the work to find its meaning

The key to motivation is to keep tracking your progress.
Knowing it is the easy part.

Tracking your progress is the difficult part.
Because if you won’t, no one else will do that for you.

It is difficult because we don’t see mountains moving on the basis of daily efforts.
Yet if we keep putting in the daily efforts, they do move over a period of weeks, months, or years!

However, in order to reach that place, we need to be motivated. To be motivated, we need to keep tracking our progress. Even when we don’t feel like. So that when we actually don’t feel like working, our tiny steps will remind us that our work does make a difference.

Motivation comes from daily insignificant actions, that create significance over time.

It is the day you die.
It is the day you leave this planet and go up there.
it is the day you finally get to meet God.

And as you reach there, you expect to be welcomed for the comfort zone you stood by.

Instead, God hands you over a long list of all the things you could have done yet you didn’t.
All the times you procrastinated because you had fear.
All the times you binge-watched TV instead of working on your dream project.
All the times you said yes to going out and having fun, instead of going through the discomfort of discovering yourself.

What would your answer to God be?
Would you really be able to answer, because no excuses or reasons would be allowed then :)

Can we avoid this Big Question on our encounter with God, by doing something about it daily?

The world is a place filled with bad people.
People want to cheat on you.
People want to make the most out of you without caring about you.

Most of us, consciously or unconsciously, grow up with this belief system.

The truth is, the world is a place filled with very helpful people.
People innately want to be trusted. And they love to trust in return.
Only if, we get rid of our blinders, that make us inconspicuous of the goodness all around.

The biggest lie we grew up with, was that most people are bad.
The second biggest one was, that you also have to be bad in order to deal with the bad world.

The first thing, the very first thing that I do after making a mistake, is accept the fact that I am responsible for making the mistake.

Yes, someone else could have avoided the mistake. That is how most people handle their mistakes.

However, just because someone else could have, doesn’t mean I couldn’t.

The reason why we keep repeating our mistakes and not learning lessons from it are, because we think we are not responsible for those.

Seth Godin is one of the people in the content industry I look up to.
He has been writing his daily blog for over 25 years now.
And over and above being a marketer, he is one of the finest thinkers I’ve come across.

In a recent blog post, Seth mentioned about his new course on decision making.
The course got me thinking, where Seth primarily focussed on giving up your chips.

The sunk cost fallacy.
The opportunity cost.
The cost of continuing something you hate just because you spent 5 years decades ago working on it.

It is like most dentists hate being called dentists. Yet they continue that profession because their neighbours know them as dentists, they have invested in that chair, and they spent 5 years getting that degree!

He shared that example by demonstrating the green iguana lizard. The lizard is a few inches long, in its nascent stage. It is very easy to bring it home, and tame it.

With only one problem.

Within 6 months, the lizard becomes up to 5 feet long. Not the best thing to still tame it.

Most people, would drown in a guilt trip, on taking the 3 feet long lizard a month later, and dropping it back to the jungle.

That is where we need to throw down our chips.
This is where we need to let go of the green iguana.
This is where we need to know that I need to drop out of my PhD. Or I need to give up my consulting and join a startup. That I need to step down from the position of CEO of nearbuy to get all into content creation.

Just because you’ve been doing something for a long time, it is not enough a reason for you to continue doing that forever.
The opportunity cost is the cost we do not see in cash, it is nevertheless a cost.