Path to future You
Do you believe you can do better? Do you have a picture of what life could be for you? Do you know who you need to be if you a want life like that? Every day is an opportunity to learn and prepare to get where you intend to go.
Are you listening?
Arguably one key attributes of a successful leader – political or otherwise is the ability of listening. Not just hearing but listening with a open mind with limited bias filters applied to our auditory function.
Do you do what you love?
This is a complex question. When did you figure what you wanted to do when you grew up? Are you doing what you are doing for the love of it or for money? or Prestige?
Being an entrepreneur and a parent
Running a business while raising kids can be challenging. There are a lot of decisions, example setting etc that one needs to focus on. In this context I always remember a lecture by Desh Deshpande at a TiE Conference in California nearly two decades back. He said “In life we all have many balls in the air that we are juggling between – ambition, career, hobbies, dreams, family…all of these balls are made of rubber except one. All the ones made of rubber will bounce back up even if you drop them once in a while. But there is one that is made of glass and you better not drop it. It is the ball of Family”. I never forgot that.
Managing Distractions
We all are distracted at work. To push complex work at hand to a later time span – a digital age procrastination. Nir Eyal wrote a whole book to help manage distractions on and in this article he underlines 4 steps that could potentially reduce distractions and points to “Bricker’s work using acceptance and commitment therapy in smoking cessation programs “
Using willpower Vs designing your environment for success
Benjamin Hardy, PhD who I have referred to a few times through this year has written a whole book ‘Willpower Doesn’t work’ – about why over reliance on will power is bound to fail. To make his point he quotes the findings of historian Will Durant – the author of The Story of Civilization – a labour of love that took him over 4 decades to complete. This is what he concluded – ‘“history was not shaped by great men, but rather by demanding situations.”
Pareto for life
There is this really quick but effective read that I found where Mark Manson the author of Everything Is F*cked: A Book About Hope wrote about how applying Pareto to your life may throw up some surprising results.
Is your phone taking over your life?
The day after Apple reveals their juicy new iPhones I thought it would be appropriate to point at the elephant in the room. The issue is real. We are all spending enormous time staring at our phone. Lot has been written on the ills of this. I spend 2-3 hours on my phone a day and get a lot of work done using my phone as an extended screen of my laptop. I have no games. But I do get a lot of notifications from apps. These distract me often. This article by Ryan Holiday on Forge addresses this issue head-on.
Productivity Hacks
From time to time shortcuts to success ideas become alluring enough. A recent study by HBR found that CEO’s work on an average 62 hours a week and attends 37 meetings. How do they manage to get work done?
We are not smart and rational
You believe you are smart, rational and always taking the best decisions the situation permits. Well, think again.
Richard Thaler, the Nobel Laureate economist thinks otherwise and Eshe Nelson says, you would do better to pay attention.
