Blog

I am someone who wakes up every day around 4:30 – 5 am.
However, it is less about what time you wake up, it is about what you do when you wake up.

Do you go through your mails first thing in the morning?
Or see how many likes you have gathered?
Or check if your friend has seen your message?

This will anyway set up your day for a failure.

As much as waking up early is a great habit, owning your first 2-3 hours for yourself is the best way to set up for success in the outside world.

The outside world is simply a reflection of the inside world.

Whenever I’m reached out by people asking me if they should go for an MBA or not, the answer, mostly, is no.

Here’s the mistake we make while considering an MBA:

• We want to do it to get a degree.
• We do not know what to do next in life.
• It will give us two years more to not face ourselves.

Here are the real reasons for which one should consider an MBA:

• It is from a top B-school
• It has a difficult selection criterion
• The career graphs of their alums are an example of what they reflect

The network you get from a top B-school challenges you to change your thinking completely, and that is the only reason you should consider an MBA.

It turns out, most often in life, we are not confused about answers, we are confused about the right questions which invariably make the answers difficult.

I once spoke about how an artist always strives to do more, they are never running away from “more” work.

There is, however, a corollary to this.

The artist wants to do more because she does less in every other area. Purposefully.

She says no to parties if she is working.
Doesn’t eat out if she is on a diet.
More than anything else, protects her time like a Mom guards her new born.

That leaves the time and the mental space to get into the depths of who she could be, instead of what the world wants her to become.

You could do more, only when you do less.

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!