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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.

Do you feel bad upon receiving feedback?

“Maybe my your boss doesn’t like me.”
“Maybe she doesn’t think highly of me.”
“Maybe I am just not good enough.” 

We discourage ourselves with all these thoughts in our head.

What if we took feedback as an opinion, instead of a fact?

What if we you learned from it instead of judging ourselves?

Because that will decide how well we grow.
The words we keep repeating to ourselves will end up becoming our truth.

Feedback isn’t about you, the doer.
It’s about the deed.
The deed, which the doer always has a chance to make better. 

Are you afraid of making decisions?
What to wear, what to eat, career choices, who to marry, whether to marry – small to the biggest decisions, are you afraid of making them?

The truth is we are afraid of making decisions because we are afraid that they might turn out to be bad decisions. 

We’re afraid of bearing the brunt of wrong decisions, overlooking the fact that even if they turn out to be wrong, we would’ve learnt a lesson.
It won’t entirely be a loss.

The biggest loss is not making a decision and staying stagnant.
If you don’t move, you would’ve already made the wrong decision.

I recall during my first job, unable to understand why things functioned in a certain way, I asked my boss, 

“How is it that some people have so much work and some hardly have any work?”

“Good people pay a far higher price for being good, than bad people pay for being bad.”

That has stayed with me forever.

If you are good with your work, you will get more work. You will get more responsibilities. There is a lot more than will be expected from you. And that is going to be hard.

Being good isn’t easy, however worth striving for.
Because being the opposite isn’t worth it.