Raw. Real. Unfiltered. Daily blogs. Often, less than 100 words
To overcome your own vices.
To not comment on someone else’s clothes.
To not mock someone in a gathering.
To look at people for who they are and not who others are.
To be really interested in people in an interaction.
To not carry someone’s no as a badge of animosity.
To be nice to yourself, because you do unto others what you do unto you.
The direct effect of your work is that it serves your customers and pays you money.
The indirect effect of your work is that it builds the brand and hence makes the investors happy.
Yet, what is the overall effect of your work?
One of my core business principles is to look at the after-effects of the work I am doing.
The work I do should make the world a better place.
This means:
– For the books I am ghostwriting, I ask myself, would I happily gift these books to my nephews and nieces?
– For anything I write, it has to come from a place of reflection and not replication of AI content.
– For the conversations I have, do they make the other person feel better? I hopefully hope so…
So many of us are too focused on the “let’s do it now” and too little on doing it with the right intent and execution.
It is easy to think about profits and valuation. I am a CA and a Sindhi, and I love money.
Yet profits and valuation stay sustained when you have built the foundation of your values right. It’s almost always incredible how the past values define the future of your work, your business.
…what would you change from your past?
People often ask this question for reflection.
What if they asked, “what would you change in the future?”
You already have the magic wand. Use it.
With gratitude being popularised ubiquitously, people are somewhere (maybe) realising the importance of saying thank you.
But saying thank you and really meaning it, along with using the first name of the person is the gracious level of gratitude.
When you cross step 1, you default to step 2.
Kind people begin directly with the gracious level.
And how is it beyond the home, the car, the properties?
All of those are good, your hard work, your toil.
But does your life include becoming a better version of you?
Were you a (good) different person today than yesterday?
Were you nice to strangers and to those who hurt you?
Were you nice to yourself?
Did you listen to others while in a conversation?
Did you have the courage to leave a gossip?
Did you have the self-love to go to bed on time daily?
True life is perhaps making your life a study material that extends beyond material riches.
Been waking up to this view for this week:
It makes me often think about true richness.
True richness to me is having the ability to wake up to this, even at your home.
When I was a kid, my uncle, aunt and cousins used to live in a government quarter, which was legit surrounded by an infinite jungle.
But as grown ups you realise these are the real wealths of life.
Of course money is important, as I always say, but that money should be put to use for making your mornings peaceful. I am blessed to be living in such a place at home as well as my parents’ home, maybe because at some level you find what you are looking for.
I truly wish more people make time to live around at least a few plants and trees, sunrise, and a terrace to walk around. To me, hanging around at these places have helped me make more material riches.
If you don’t spend your time exercising, you will spend your life waiting for the elevator.
If you don’t spend time meditating, you will have no option but to take 5 hours on a task of 15 minutes.
If you don’t spend time reading and making yourself better, life will make sure you become your own guinea pig.
Living life on reactive mode is hardly living your life.
I often want to run away from travel preparations. Even if it sometimes means minimal preparations for leaving for my hometown.
I was about to diagnose myself with anxiety yesterday, as I came back from hometown a day before and now in just 30 hours was going for a very short meditation retreat.
But then words of Marcus Aurelius came into my mind, where he says:
“Today I escaped anxiety. Or no, I discarded it, because it was within me, in my own perceptions — not outside.”
If you want to read good books, quit bad ones.
If you want to walk often, get a footwear that you can get into in 5 seconds, so that there is least resistance to start walking.
If you want to sleep on time, aim to get all your laptop/phone work done by 5 pm.
Outcomes are designed destinations, not coin-flip coincidences.
Successful people have a possibility for every “reality”.
Unsuccessful ones create an excuse for every visible possibility.
After the Diwali of last year, I travelled to Dubai with my cousins.
It was a short five-day trip, with each day packed to the brim.
We started Day 1 on high note, covering several major attractions, stopping and enjoying 6-7 places, clicking pictures, and ending the day with a visit to the Burj Khalifa.
We returned to the hotel quite late, I put up a child-like drama that I did not get any picture, especially in the Dubai mall with Burj Khalifa in the background, and slept even late.
The next morning, as I was performing suptapadangushtasana, I fainted.
And I don’t remember anything that happened after that.
When I woke up, I was lying in bed, surrounded by all of them. For the record, it was my elder bro, bhabhi (his wife), their 5yo daughter and my younger bro. There was absolute memory loss of that one hour or two or whatever had transpired between my fainting and regaining senses.
These three were rightly convinced that I was unfit for travelling that day.
So they dropped me at another cousin’s home, who had coincidentally landed in Dubai the night before, with his wife and their 11yo daughter.
We all come upstairs in their home. They showed me the guest room. And I slept like a baby. This was little after the noon.
When I woke up, it was already dark. It was around 7 pm. I had an array of messages from my cousin whose home I was staying at, that the fruits are kept in fridge (my bro knows his sister well :D), and that they were at Dubai mall, and would be back in a while.
So I took a banana and a thepla with curd that my bhabhi had kept for me, and sat in the balcony of their Burj-Khalifa facing apartment. Alone.
It turns out, I have always looked for some bit of solitude in my days. It is my fuel. It is my best friend, my way of life, my oxygen.
And here I was, that the solitude walked up to me in ways I had never expected.
Sitting in that balcony I was nothing beyond joyful and peaceful. Filled with gratitude that even when I was unwell in a foreign land, I had family to drop me to another family, who made sure I was surrounded by food I love. I even enjoyed the musical fountain show of Burj Khalifa, where they played Baby Shark :))
It turns out, you always find what you are looking for, sometimes even unconsciously and unexpectedly.
I am someone who loves solitude more than anything else.
I knew for sure I was not going to find my pockets of solitude in this trip, mostly because we were going to Dubai, not an ashram. I was okay with it. But somewhere, somehow, even in the most surreal ways, solitude found me.
The way my body found it by falling ill is obviously a reaction to too much work or travel, and too little rest. And the idea is never to promote getting to this level of exhaustion.
But no matter what you do and whatever happens to you and whatever falls apart, what you are innately looking for, even when you have not asked for, is looking for you too. Make what you can, of this info.
People do not wake up in the morning and say, “Today I am going to ruin <Insert your name> ‘s day.
Trust me, no one is conspiring against you, even if you feel so.
Which is why it is important to get out into the world with a mindset of positivity that can handle any pain that these pointless people actually throw at you.
But if you are already angry, anxious and atrocious, you have lost the battle even before it began.
Standing for the one being bullied.
Being quiet when the room is raging.
Reading a book instead of bingewatching.
Going for a walk instead of sitting on your couch.
Drinking a lot of water.
Moving on from a friend who did not say a goodbye before moving on.
Walking in a park for your mental health.
Waking up in the morning and exercising before the day takes over.
Loving your parents but not becoming like them.
Putting aside money for your future, however bleak at the moment.
Bringing joy to the table, whichever table you walk to.
It is good to do things for which you might not often fetch a medal for, because the right thing is the right thing even when no one is watching and even if no one cares.
You will not believe how this simple exercise (all the steps, in order) will give you reliability over everyone and everything else.
“Anger is like a hot coal. It burns the person holding on to it,” observed Buddha.
And it also burns the person who did not ignite it, because the person holding on to it has decided to not let it go.
Sometimes when we are angry with someone, we inflict that on everyone else. Sometimes then when we are not angry with anyone, that anger becomes our default setting.
This makes us inflict anger on everyone, regardless of what they did or did not do.
Your relationships and your mood are not that cheap, are they?
When you go to a store of H&M or Uniqlo, the checkout experience is seamless. I believe it is for at least two reasons:
In a Pantaloons or a Shoppers Stop outlet, you are asked both of these.
It almost makes me reconsider revisiting them, because you do not want to say these polite no’s over and over again. Also, once a customer has landed in our store and is reaching the end mile of making a purchase, it is wisdom to know that future sales are going to be driven by how good your product is, not by selling memberships or charging for a ₹10 paper bag, a better quality of which comes for free at H&M or Uniqlo.
To begin with, I understand that the former two have a different audience than the latter two. I am also aware of the fact that the “free” bag is built into the prices of the products at H&M and Uniqlo, which are definitely on the higher side than Pantaloons or Shoppers Stop.
Yet the customer does not care about what is the price of your product. Pantaloons or Shoppers Stop could easily increase the price of every single SKU by ₹10 and lose no customers, while they could make the bag free. Also, if the product is no good, no customer is coming to “use their membership card” even for which they might have paid for.
The customer cares about good product, hassle-free experience, and not being pushed for “further sale” after they have made bigger financial decisions already during shopping.
Making money is not an evil object. Not caring about the customer and milking them after they have already milked themselves is.
Because if you don’t read good books, the world around you is designed to make you average.
Because your mind needs training to think new things.
Because you do not want to be addicted to the screen.
Because you want to learn from other’s lives, so that you do not use your life as a guinea pig.
Because Mark Twain said that there is no difference between people who don’t read and people who can’t read.
Find anyone whose ideas you adore and you would find them not do many or all of these.