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What do I look for in candidates while hiring?

Not their college? Not their work experience? Or their family background?

For me, it’s always curiosity.

Why are we doing what we’re doing?
What would this look like if it were easier?
What is this trying to teach me? 
What’s the root cause to solve for?

The curious minds fall in love with the problems instead of solutions.

They enjoy the process instead of the final product.

They know that they don’t know everything.
And that is the best thing to know.

I love working with curious minds who are obsessed with asking the right questions. 

“There is no one right answer. Only better questions.”
– Tim Ferris

A successful singer was once interviewed on a talk show.

He was bullied his entire childhood for being fat. Fast forward to today, he didn’t feel resentful towards those kids.

When asked why, he replied: “Had I still hated them still, they would have defeated me.”

The best way to live life is to live life, instead of keeping accounts of who did what.

The best way to be undefeatable is to let go of those who’ve made every attempt to defeat us. 

One of the best ways to win in life is to own our happiness.

We get a new job and start as if we are the first one to have this job.
We enter a new relationship and start as the person has had no relationships before.
We handle a new client and start proposing solutions immediately.

Whenever we start something new, we start As if we are the start.
And there was nothing before us.

And in that process we rarely stop and ask about history.
What worked, what didn’t work, why didn’t it work and what is there for us to learn.

Instead, we start with a clean slate.
And end up repeating the same history on that slate.

History exists for a reason.
For us to learn from it.
To create a better history.

All our lives, we are surrounded by voices.

What we should be doing.
What we should be thinking.
How we should be doing things.

Instead of clearing up the smoke, these voices end up creating more.

Mystic and philosopher Rumi, once said: “There is a voice that doesn’t use words. Listen.”

What that voice is trying to tell us, nobody else would be able to. Because we are the only one who is listening to that voice.

That voice is the voice with clarity. 
Only if we are willing to listen.

What’s the difference between a product company and a service company?

A service company reacts.
Reacts to the requirements of the client, to the situation, to the context.

A product company preempts.
Preempts the requirements, the situation, the context.

A service company keeps asking, “What do they think about us?”
A product company keeps asking, “How do they feel when with us?”

We meet people all the time.
Online. Offline.
New people.
People we’ve already met.

And quite often, we’re also asking the same question: “What are they thinking about us?”

What if we thought of ourselves as a product?

What if we asked ourselves: 

What emotions do we leave people with? 

How do they feel with us, instead of about us? 

What’s the experience they have with us?

When we ask this question, we think less about what people think about us and more about giving them a phenomenal experience. 

We think of ourselves as a product, as against a service.

How do we live a life of integrity?
A life of honesty?
A life where we do not have to second-guess our thoughts and actions?

Roman Stoic Philosopher Seneca said: 

“We should live our lives as if everyone could see us.”

What would we do differently if everyone could see us?
What would we stop doing altogether?
More than anything else, how would that change our life?

When we assume everyone can see us, we stop lying to the world.
And that is the first step to stop lying to ourselves. 

When we get angry, we end up doing things we don’t want to be doing.

Our actions become impulsive, words get uncontrolled, and thoughts become really fast.
None of this allows us to calm down and be thoughtful.

And we often ask ourselves:

Why does anger hurt me more than the other person? Why do I feel empty after that emotion of anger? Why am I not able to focus for long even though the situation has passed?

Gautam Buddha described anger aptly when he said: “Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else.”

When we are angry at someone else, we are the ones who get affected the most. And yet we feel that giving up anger means giving up power..

Giving up anger doesn’t mean giving up power.
Giving up anger means having power that no one can take away.

There are people who have gone on to do exceptional things.
Changed the world forever.

Leonardo da Vinci. Madame Curie. Albert Einstein. Steve Jobs.

What’s a special trait they have?
Were they child prodigies?
Or naturally gifted?

It’s because they kept telling themselves: “I don’t know a lot, I’m still learning.”

In the quest of being a student forever, they became teachers of creating an epic life.
In their ordinary curiosity for knowledge and education, they became extraordinary.

Being extraordinary is going the extra mile by remaining an ordinary student forever.

Do you sometimes feel lonely?
You feel no one understands you, feels your emotions, or knows what you’re going through.

How to go about fixing it?

When we listen to someone who’s going through the same pain,
when we let them know they aren’t invisible,
when we assure them there’s nothing wrong with their emotions,
we take the first step in moving beyond our loneliness.

When we allow someone to walk away from their loneliness, our own walks out along with it.

In the healing and hearing of others, lies our own.

An alcoholic father had two sons.

One grew up to be an alcoholic. When asked why, he responded, “I watched my father.”

The other grew up hating alcohol. When asked how he chose to be sober, he responded, “I watched my father.”

So it wasn’t about what happened to them. It wasn’t about the circumstance. It wasn’t about the situation. 

It was about what they took from it.
It was about the stories they told themselves of what they went through. 

We are the stories we tell ourselves.