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Words. Wisdom. Winners.
Understanding that no one understands
When something bad happens, everyone says they’re in a lot of pain.
However, this pain that you are going through, only you can truly feel it. No one else can.
Only you know what’s going on with you.
Everyone else sees the world through their own biased lens.
It is your pain. It is your journey. And it is only your understanding.
20 books that helped me more than years of college or school ever did
It was 2009 when Vivek Pahwa gifted me
The book changed me. Threw open a different way of looking at the world. Came to define “resist the obvious” for me as a life lesson. It remains my most gifted book till date.
2016: I had just laid off 80 of my colleagues for no mistake of theirs. And this book came to my rescue
“CEOs must master three essential attributes, realistic optimism, subservience to purpose, and finding order in chaos.”
When I first read
GRIT: THE POWER OF PASSION AND PERSEVERANCE by Angela Lee Duckworth
I felt like I would want my life to be such a story.
“Passion for your work is a little bit of discovery, followed by a lot of development, and then a lifetime of deepening.”
Entrepreneurship was made cool by the media. And then came
THE HARD THINGS ABOUT HARD THINGS by Ben Howoritz
“Life is struggle.” I believe that within that quote lies the most important lesson in entrepreneurship: Embrace the struggle.”
As someone who loves to ask questions, this book opened my mind to a whole new set of them
“Money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised.”
I love autobiographies
TOOLS OF THE TITANS by Tim Ferris
gave me multiple autobiographies in one.
“If you let your learning lead to knowledge, you become a fool. If you let your learning lead to action, you become wealthy.”
I have come to believe that everyone in life requires a coach
taught me how
An absolute must for leaders
“Not what happened and who’s to blame, but what are we going to do about it?”
Getting to know about Stoicism has helped me immensely in life
A GUIDE TO THE GOOD LIFE: THE ANCIENT ART OF STOIC JOY
is a great book to understand stoicism
“the easiest way for us to gain happiness is to learn how to want the things we already have.”
If I ever write a book, I know it will be on the lines of
THE SUBTLE ART OF NOT GIVING A F*CK by Mark Manson
I love its authenticity and realism
“Who you are is defined by what you’re willing to struggle for.”
For the longest time I used to suck at giving feedback.
And then I read
which changed everything for me
“The way you ask for criticism and react when you get it goes a long way toward building trust—or destroying it.”
If there is one book I would love everyone to read every year of their life, it will be
HOW WILL YOU MEASURE YOUR LIFE by Clayton Christensen
“It’s easier to hold your principles 100 percent of the time than it is to hold them 98 percent of the time.”
IMO, one of the most simple yet powerful books of our times is
“You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current results.”
This book shook me to my core and made me realize what is important to me in my life
“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”
What Nassim Nicholas Taleb did for me in his book
was explain the meaning and importance of risk, like nothing else ever had
“What matters isn’t what a person has or doesn’t have; it is what he or she is afraid of losing.”
I started following Kapil Gupta and his thoughts moved me. So I picked up his book
I was shocked at how little I knew what’s inside my head.
“Why do I get angry when I am insulted? A: Because you entertain the verity of the insult.”
IMO there isn’t a better guide to understanding startups, than
THE HIGH GROWTH HANDBOOK by Elad Gil
“In fact, the general model for successful tech companies, contrary to myth, is that they become distribution-centric rather than product-centric.”
If there is only 1 autobiography that I would recommend, it would have to be
“The single easiest way to find out how you feel about someone. Say goodbye.”
Nothing calms me down than reading Ghalib
Thank you Pankaj Bansal for gifting me
It shocks me to read how much Ghalib understood human emotions.
Back as a kid obsessed with X-Files (and in love with Scully), the book
added fuel to my imagination
I remain a student of aliens :)
“The positive thing about the skeptic is that he considers everything possible!”
The only fiction I have ever read
(and will perhaps ever read) was the only fiction I would ever need to read
This is a priceless book.
“To say “I love you” one must know first how to say the “I”.”
Any other books you would recommend, that you feel I would enjoy and learn from?
What are we addicted to?
Social media.
Junk food.
Video games
Alcohol
Drugs
Are these the biggest additions?
We are not addicted to these things. We are addicted to the feelings that the things generate.
And all addictions generate a feeling of comfort. Which makes us numb.
When we are addicted to comfort, we don’t get comfortable with failure.
Instead we get comfortable with what we have.
When we are addicted to comfort, we don’t get comfortable with risk.
Instead we get comfortable with safety
When we are addicted to comfort, we don’t get comfortable with challenges.
Instead we get comfortable with appreciation.
The biggest addiction is comfort.
Because we don’t change and challenge ourselves anymore.
Dealing with haters on social media
When we are real and vulnerable on social media, we are inevitably going to face haters.
And they might end up saying things that affect us..
Whenever that happens, here’s a question to ask ourselves: “Would we go to them for their advice when we need it?”
If we wouldn’t take their advice for anything, it certainly doesn’t make sense to take their hate seriously.
Negativity coming your way, isn’t your choice.
You taking in the negativity certainly is.
Does what you’re doing feel shameful?
A kid is told “no” 400 times a day while growing up.
So as we morph into adults, that behavior gets reflected in everything that we do. It results in “no” being our default response to everything.
This has never been done.
Are you crazy?
What’s going on in your mind that you’re thinking of doing this?
What was taught to be shameful in childhood, might not be the reality.
When we question everything that we think is shameful, we might realize most of those things aren’t.
Is it okay to fire your friends?
Our energy gets drained.
Enthusiasm lowers each time.
There is no feeling of being cared for.
These are the experiences we have with some of our friends.
However, we were not born into those relationships. We chose them.
Since we chose them, we can also choose to get out of them.
This isn’t mean or narcissistic. This is to save yourself from misery forever. When we take energy-draining people out of our lives, we stand up to appreciate ourselves. And that’s an act of self-love.
It’s okay to fire your friends.
If we don’t, we are firing our energy, our optimism.
What’s more valuable than IQ and EQ?
More than two decades back, the society revered the ones with high IQ.
Over time, it began giving higher importance to mastering our emotions, and understanding them in others. So EQ became the in-thing.
However, there is a third important thing beyond both of these: focus.
The top minds in the world today are vying for just one thing: your focus.
A tag in the Slack overflow.
An important WhatsApp notification.
A story “mention” on Instagram.
Someone tagged your on Facebook.
Beautiful ways to make you realize you are important.
While nothing is more important than your focus.
If you have the ability to sit and work on one thing at hand for 60, 30 or even 5 minutes at stretch, you have the biggest asset in this world: focus.
Our intelligence and emotional mastery is relevant, only when we have learnt the art of focusing on the subject at hand.
Focus is the new IQ.
Using the hurt to grow
How do we respond when we are hurt?
Do we blame the person who did that to us?
Or carry the baggage of that hurt forever?
Here’s a simple question to ask:
“What is this trying to tell me?”
We’d probably get nowhere getting to the root cause of hurt. However, understanding the lesson behind each hurt and failure grows us tremendously.
When hurt, ask for the lesson. Not the reason!
How do we respond after making a mistake?
We’re entering the elevator from the 10th floor.
Got to go to the 20th one.
By mistake, we press the ground floor button.
In the haste to correct that mistake, we instantly press that 20th floor button. Forgetting that the elevator will go to the ground floor first. It doesn’t care about our mistakes.
What if we remembered this while making mistakes in life?
How would our actions change when we knew there’s time to rectify the mistake?
Would we do anything different if we knew there was no need to hurry up?
Probably, we’d help ourselves from making another one.
We always have time to correct the mistake after we’ve made it.
Trying to correct it immediately is another mistake.
What if we achieve our goals?
We work really hard.
Give up on all pleasures.
Sacrifice a lot.
All in order to get to our goals.
Unfortunately, sometimes we are not able to make it.
Our dreams are shattered.
So does our hope.
And sometimes we do achieve our goals.
One day they become a reality.
And when they do, we find ourselves asking the questions:
Now what?
What’s next?
Is that all how success feels?
There are only two tragedies in life:
one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.
– Oscar Wilde
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