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Success is made up of 99% small things done on a daily basis.

You do not have to be immensely talented and gifted in order to be successful at work and in life.

All you have to optimise for is showing up and doing the work.
Every. Single. Day.

Even when it seems boring.
Even when you don’t feel like it.

The most successful people are basically successful at staying consistent.

Consistency beats talent and natural gifts.
Heck, it even beats luck.

All the work we do at wariCrew is documented and tracked on @Asana.

We have been using it for 2.5+ years now — with awesome success.

3 reasons why:

1. It keeps everyone accountable.

2. It allows us to manage projects and their various tasks and dependencies efficiently.

3. It keeps us on time — across content and courses.

It is also the system that determines the timeliness of team members, which in turn, drives 40% of their quarterly bonus through profit sharing.

How is the profit-share determined for every individual?

While the pool is common for the team (10% of net profits), the individual amounts are determined 60% by the quality of their work (which is reviewed through their monthly self-rating followed by my assessment) and 40% by the timeliness of their work.

Last year, the total profit-sharing pool was 52 lakhs.

Such tools help our team of 21 operate remotely and asynchronously.

If you died, your manager would put out a job posting in 48 hours looking for a replacement.

Your friends and family will never get that chance.

As much as your job is necessary, do not ignore the relationships where you remain irreplaceable.

There are 3 things that can help us gain confidence:

Seeking feedback from people who genuinely want us to progress.

Measuring progress because that helps us see ourselves moving forward.

Knowing ourselves.

Knowing if we are the best.
And knowing that if we are not, we will do everything in our capacity to become the best.

To get confident, we need something to be confident about.
It doesn’t need to be our strengths only. It can very well be our progress.

We are still using some things in life.

Old words.
Old thought patterns.
Old behaviours.

Just because we have accustomed ourselves to them.
They’re a habit now.
They don’t serve any purpose.

As we form new habits, it is also important to question which are the old ones that we are leaving behind.

A good habit to have is to discard habits that do not work.

90% of new year resolutions are broken by 15th January.

Why does that happen despite our best intentions?

The brain is always looking for shortcuts, and its default shortcut is to go back to what it is used to.

Deep down, we haven’t conditioned it to act in a manner aligned with those goals.

So, what if we change what the brain is conditioned to?

What if we create habits because of which it is possible to achieve our resolutions?
When goals go for a toss, habits are always there to catch you safe.

All year-round :)

We often ask ourselves a lot of questions:

Why am I doing this?
Why do I not want to do this?
What do I want to achieve by taking this path?

All are very meaningful and important questions.

However, are we allowing ourselves to get the answers?

Or are our lives a big question mark because of never getting out of a whirlwind of questions?

Questions give different directions; answers show the path that drives actions.

MBA immediately after graduating looks like a cool choice.

We will be a B-school graduate, have a great job, and finally “settle down”.
Gaining some work experience before that is coined as wastage of time.

However, what if the work experience turns out to be fruitful for an MBA?

What if we enter an MBA not to top the class, but rather to understand how business decisions work?

What if we knew that to understand business, it pays to have work experience?

The goal of college is to understand how college can help us.
For an MBA, that might mean gaining real world experience before college.

When we say we don’t know what to do, it isn’t entirely true.

We always know what to do.
We just don’t know whether what we want to do will work out or not.

That fear of failure paralyses us from anticipating even the good that might come out of it.

What if we asked ourselves: What is the worst case?
What if we imagined that worst case playing out in reality?
And when we did, what if we asked ourselves: “Will I be okay despite that?”

If we somehow get to a point where we will be okay despite the worst case scenario actually playing through, the tough decision won’t be tough anymore.

Visualising the worst case scenario doesn’t make the future worse, it just makes the present better by helping us decide.

1. When speaking to people, look into their eyes.
It makes you look attentive and unbiased.

In virtual meetings, look into the camera pinhole and not their face (will take some time getting used to).
That way, you look straight into their eyes.

2. Asking simple questions with predictable answers makes you instantly likeable.

That’s why, start a first meeting with standard questions.
“Where are you from?”
“What do you do?”
“Who all are in your family?

3. If you want people to agree with you, begin by asking for a small favour that they will say yes to.

It could be anything.
Even something as basic as “Could you please pass me that pen?”

Chances are high they will agree/say yes to what you ask after.

4. To show that you are listening, keep nodding.
It will make them express more.

Ranveer Allahbadia is a master at this.

5. Your last impression is just as important, if not more, than your first impression.

People’s memory of an experience is heavily dependent on how it ended.
Make that last impression count.