Tag: happiness

Documenting the Day, Life

Weekend lessons

Some quick lessons I learnt this week:

  1. Change is the only law of life. Don’t go by what someone said a month or six months ago. If they are positive, they’ll encourage you evolving. If they aren’t, then you don’t need to bother 🙂
  2. You will be judged, even when you have your finest intentions. The best thing you could do is still have those finest intentions because that is who you are!
  3. Being the bigger person and not taking credit for that is superpower!
  4. Just because everyone else in the team is submitting work late, don’t lower your standards and be the latecomer. Always be a day in advance. Your brand is built by what you do every day.
  5. Everyone is trying their best. Just because their best doesn’t match with your standards of worst, they need support. Not internal trolling from you.
  6. Twitter is the best way to improvise on your writing.
  7. Spending less time on WhatsApp and Instagram is the secret sauce to eternal happiness.
  8. Evening walks in the sun are therapeutic.
  9. People want the best for you, trust them! If they don’t, trust yourself!
  10. People will behave kiddish. Most don’t want to see that. So smile at them for who they are. And move on.
  11. Most of the times what we are crying for is NOT even happening! The best way to solve problems is through communication.
  12. Learning is the licence to happiness.
  13. You matter!
Career, Emotions, Family, Happiness, Knowing Yourself, Life, Success, Thoughts, Truth be told, Uncategorized

To those who have failed in CA exams…

19th January 2015.
The day I became a Chartered Accountant.
I still vividly remember the day.

We had just returned to Kota (my hometown) after an overnight train trip from Mumbai, after attending a family function there for three days. So the winter was a harsh reality from the pleasant zero winter of Mumbai to being back to Kota. Because of this train journey, I had taken a shower quite late, around 10-11 am.

The moment I came out, I saw a miss call from a fellow article at the firm I did my articleship from.

Oops, my heart started pounding.

As I called him back, he picked up the call and asked: “Kya hua?”

“Result aa gaya?” was my surprised response, to which he said yes.

My mom had gone to take shower and I was virtually alone at home. So I opened up the laptop, connected it to the slow BSNL router we had and checked the result.

452 out of 800, result: PASS. (*Top 100 scorers in India then)

Wow!

The day I will never forget!

Throughout the day I did not feel cold at all despite returning from Mumbai back to shivering winters of Kota. It was in the evening that I finally realised I should be feeling cold 🙂

My mom came out of shower and started crying a lot. A lot. She basically missed my Nanaji for whom I was a source of pride and who had passed away eleven months back. The day was something me and my parents had been waiting for, for years!

But this is the success story. That I cleared CA Final (both groups together) in the first attempt that too with very good marks.

Here is the back story: I failed in IPCC twice. As on date, given the number of failures we get to face, this doesn’t seem huge.
Back then it was. Especially for a class topper like me since childhood, who ended up with this major jolt for the first time in my life.

You know what, my Mom cried then as well, for how could such a thing happen to me? (Yes now I know that I was responsible, but I just couldn’t convince her to see that part. Maybe I didn’t want to see that either!)

But I did clear the IPCC exam eventually. One group at a time.

That is the word you need to remember my fellow CA students: eventually.

The world isn’t going to be smooth even if you clear all three stages in the first attempt with AIR 1. It’s true that social media is not going to have your pictures when you fail.
It’s true that your neighbours will probably stare at you when you’ll leave home for coaching classes.
It’s perhaps true that a friend who was not expected to clear is a CA today and you aren’t!

All this is real pain.
And it hurts, especially if you worked hard.

But there is one more thing that is real: Your grit. Your persistence. Your belief in your capability that no matter what, you will end up with the prefix CA before your name eventually.

Feel sad as hard as you want to. Clean your nose with your sweater that your friend likes who is a CA now. Look at yourself in the mirror and just be, it’s okay!

But when you are done, don’t waste a minute pondering about what was and what could be. Just focus on what you are going to do next.

Winning in life is less about numbers and more about your attitude.

For example, I’m not a cunning person and because of that I sometimes get walked over (sometimes by my hashtag friends), and that feels very bad. But then I tell myself that my systems and ethics are powerful, so I needn’t be scared. NEVER ever has been a place in my life that because of not being cunning, rather being a simple human being, I hadn’t won eventually. Things always turn out to be in the favour of the person who works hard with the rights systems and the right mindsets.

And if you are worried about number of attempts, yes I did get a bonus of 1L INR extra back in 2015-16 because of being a first attempt passout. But today, 5-6 years down the line, almost everyone is earning in the same income range. Time is a great leveller and a wonderful thing to forget.

So keep up your spirits high my fellow CA students, it is only a matter of time that you will become a member of the reputed ICAI. Till then, focus on building systems and attitudes that eventually and undoubtedly lead to success, instead of letting things happen.

PS: In case you are wondering if I used some systems while preparing for CA Final exams after failing in IPCC twice, of course I did! I won’t blabber them here because the purpose of this blog is not to show you how, the purpose is to show you what. If you need help with systems and processes while preparing for CA exams, drop me a note at ngehija454@gmail.com and I’d be happy to help you out.

PPS: It will happen, eventually!

Truth be told

Apple is a statement

I was once in a conversation where an app developer for an android phone was listening to customer concerns. The app was a skill-development learning app.

One of the customers asked for the app being released in Apple App store, as they had an iPhone, while the app was available only on the Google Play Store.

The app developer remarked, “You own the iPhone man, you don’t need this skill development app.”

This statement made me think.
The app developer was right.

Not because I’m an iPhone user for almost six years now.
Not because I have something against the Android users.

Rather because Apple is indeed a statement.

It is not just a brand, it is a brand for those who have the money to afford it AND the personality to match to it.

It’s almost you can catch a rich non-Apple user and not-so-rich Apple user by the values they stand for. Yes there are exceptions to the rule where status game kicks in, however, most of Android users and Apple users have a lifestyle that defines their choice of brand.

For example, people with super expensive Android phones are the ones that despise iPhone the most. Whereas, iPhone users earning a mediocre income have nothing against Android users, because they know what they want is what their phone has.

Why are we talking about it right now?
Well, you know if you know!

Family

Our old home

Today in the evening as I was riding on the Activa towards the park, I passed through our old home.

Just like every other day.

However, we had sold off our home in March 2020. So it wasn’t officially ours now.

Today was special, though.

A crane was demolishing the entire structure.
It was bought by our grandparents at the time of partition.
My uncles left their respective parts in 2000.
We left in 2015.
Sold in 2020.

73 years, in five lines. This is how quick life is.

Think of life this way: The girl who lives in an 8,000 sqft home with Anushka and Virat in Worli, Mumbai may have come from slums or may have come from a kingdom in her past birth.

But we all have to leave our homes. Sometimes being alive, always after death.

Nothing to feel sad or empty about, we all are there for each other – isn’t that epic?

The only home is the home humans take less time to think about 🙂

Anyway, here’s some pics from our old home.

Nothing awesome, just a few bundles of memories. Enjoy!

That’s it folks!

I went deep down the memory lane. Without a tear. Just a beautiful smile, to show that life is too small. Enjoy it while it lasts 🙂

Life

Everything will be alright

The days I workout the best, meditate the best, am working as per schedule, eating less, walking more are the days when there are challenges.

On the days things are going okay, life also gets average.

So don’t pray for more “settled” or okay days.

Wish for more strength and you will see yourself impersonating calm in every situation of life.

Try to karke dekho 🙂

Clients

Client lessons

  1. Of course growth is painful in the long term. But go ask anyone with a huge following and they’ll say 99% of the people that started with them quit in the middle because of less growth. Persistence is power.
  2. Show them the effort. What looks effortless to you should look like effort to them. Realised this truth quite late, however, thankfully realised it.
  3. If you are talking about a new project, bring the talk of commercials in the first or max second conversation. No one will value you if you don’t.
  4. You are not paid for your core competency. You are paid for your awesomeness in delivery, your accountability, your love for work, and how you give more value to the client in lieu of their money.
  5. Quote what you feel is the right amount for you, don’t lower your standards. And when that is crystallised, always give more than what you are paid for. There is a saying in Hindi: “Daata ke haath sada bhare rehte hain,” meaning, that the giver is always fulfilled.

Hope they help you, as much as they do to me.

Knowing Yourself

Don’t do it

Someone left a bike like this outside our building.

We leave our imprints wherever we go.

And it becomes a karma.

Imagine how many people are going to give opposite of blessings to such tiny aspects of what you do.

Earn blessings, not opposite of those.

Documenting the Day

LOLs by Nishtha – 21 Jan

LOL technically means Laugh Out Loud.

However, I use it as lessons of life.

So this is how we will use them whenever I want to share life lessons

  1. Protect your days. That is all you have.
  2. There is no “urgent” mail. Trust yourself.
  3. Keep your good word.
  4. Keep your good word to yourself.
  5. Read point 4 and 5 again.

That’s all.

Wish you a great time, wherever you are 🙂

Humour, People

My early morning hunt for blog posts :)

Remember how I wrote about a neighbourhood Uncle a few days back, and how he used to address me Moti?

Well, today morning we bumped into each other again, and what followed was magical! (Okay, not magical, yet surprising :D)

  • He didn’t address me like that
  • Which indeed made me talk to him for a while
  • And then he started his usual Uncle kinda talks to say: “When are you going back to Delhi (I would’ve told you if I knew the answer), “Do you have a vacancy for CA in Delhi (There are hazaar vacancies, however, this is not how life works bro); and my nephew in Ahmedabad is looking for a job (Will he really listen to a female helping him to search a job? – I’d love to help, if he is willing to be helped :D)

Chalo, the essence of this post was that now both that Uncle and me are away from our “addressing” me blatantly issues to the usual ones 🙂

Aal is well!

Knowing Yourself

My favourite one-liners

This is the collection of my musings while working, working out, figuring out life, and most of the times, showing up! Enjoy, and feel free to share 🙂

  1. Talent becomes latent when work doesn’t become hard.
  2. They don’t take care of you because they are too broken to take care of themselves.
  3. We wait for an idea of the future hoping for things to get better, not realising it is getting created here and now – with what we think and what we do.
  4. Chill bro! This too, shall pass!
  5. Never leave yourself. Because others will do that to you anyway.
  6. If you are not cunning, you should be proud of yourself.
  7. Saying no to things that aren’t important isn’t a bug you have, it’s your feature.
  8. Sometimes the best moments get created when we are NOT recording videos of them. The happiness is living in the happiness.
  9. Poking fun at others is a sign of lack of self-honour.
  10. Playing revenge on mean people is becoming a photocopy of the one you despise the most. Why would you do that?
  11. People don’t get tensed because they are tensed. They get tensed because they’re in a habit of getting tensed.
  12. Just like laptop’s fan starts shouting when a lot of load is put onto it, so does our brain starts shouting when we expose it to a lot of load. Less is more, baby!
  13. If our follow-up email to a cold prospect could land us a client, imagine how our follow-up to a cold-blooded person might make them warm! Ego is indeed the enemy!
  14. Awareness is being aware of what’s good in you and what isn’t. It doesn’t mean endorsing what’s bad in you because you are “self-aware”.
  15. Our happiness is a function of how quickly we are able to bounce back from a mood-off.
  16. We spend our lives thinking about the correct thing to do, not realising not doing is the most incorrect thing to do.
  17. If we don’t pursue momentary pain, we sign up for a permanent one.
  18. Be hard on yourself so you could be easy on others.
  19. You’re a beautiful person if you take responsibility.
  20. You are the change you’re looking for.
Life

The idea of a happy life

When I had initially come home during lockdown, I had thought I would finally be happy when I will go back to Delhi.

I had thought I will be happy when I get my freedom, but it isn’t denied to me here either.
I had thought I would have good places to shop, but life is anyway being lived in the same pyjama since eternity:)
I had thought my parents wanted to stop me here forever, but they don’t, which makes me live here happily.

Don’t know when going to Delhi will be possible like before, but I am now starting to be happy with my dysfunctional family. Especially since opportunities to work and make money are infinite with zero compromise on my daily power naps and evening walks and morning workouts and what not!!!

We wait for an idea of the future hoping for things to get better, not realising it is getting created here and now – with what we think and what we do.

Happiness, Success

The reality of social media

You must have seen people partying on the beach on Instagram.
Or making teddy bears of snow.
And making you feel like it is your life only that is at loss.

Here’s a silent truth:
Someone I know personally posted a vacay pic of theirs, with a thoughtful caption and how happy they were truly being in this flow state of life. However, I know they are going through a really, really tough time. A super tough time.

It is great that they took a break, no doubts about that.

But here is what I want you to consider:

  1. Social media = away from reality. Almost always. Rather always.
  2. People show that they are enjoying because they have FOMO – they have also seen others showing their “happy” pics and would do anything to show that they are also happy.
  3. Our real nature is happiness. When we are away from it, we would do anything to get closer or appear closer to happiness. If we get close to real happiness, awesome! If we get close to faking happiness, our hole of sadness gets deeper.

Choose the form of happiness you want to live in. And the coolest of the coolest people, who are your (real) role models, they hardly share their vacay pics online with a “success-filled” caption. Because they know that real happiness is the remaining 350 days as well, when we are not on a holiday.

Read the above line again.
For yourself.

Knowing Yourself

Whatever you do…

Whatever you do, others draw an example from.

Whatever you do, becomes the barometer for others to function.

Whatever you do, determines your state of mind.

Remember this the next time you’re going to take a step your intuition refuses to.

Family

Do your parents also say this?

I did a sin.
I opened the fridge today.

Is it really a sin?
It is, if you have to put something back and you have parents that trust you to the moon and back:)

Lol.

So my Mom saw me putting a steel dabba of halwa back into the fridge, when she remarked, if you are unable to do it, let it be, I’ll do it.

Yes Mom, I’ve lived most of my adult life away from home. Gone through heartbreaks without you being aware of it. Living in the capital of the country figuring out life. And lo and behold, I won’t have the awareness to put a dabba into the fridge. Such fun.

Anyway, yes parents are suffering and trying their best, but, sometimes you have to put a virtual gulab jamun in your mouth and stay silent.

For your sake.

And if you still want to take some action, I wrote about it in the newsletter I sent today. You can read it here.

People

Are they really sorted?

There is someone in my circle who comes across as a very sorted, chilled out person.

They are least affected by all the hype happening at work or in someone else’s life, don’t respond to extreme events, and enjoy their work the most.

Very recently, someone in the group asked them what was the biggest personal lesson of 2020.

You’ll be stunned at the response!

“I realize I am the biggest source of stress in my life.” They went on to say that in the nine months of Covid alone, they had developed more grey hair than all the past years combined together.

It made me think. I always used to think of her as a chilled out, I-don’t-give-a-damn kind of person. Maybe they are that. However, just because someone doesn’t show it, that doesn’t mean they aren’t carrying a heavy load.

For some people, the very nature of not showing is their way of dealing with their load.

Aceeptance, not judgement, opens the doors of empathy from us to them, instead of we pigeonholing them as ruthless.

Each human is suffering, and the best way to save them is acknowledge it first, instead of judging them

Emotions

Happy when sad…

If we want to talk about the pains we went through, the list is endless.
And I understand, the pains were and are very real.

If we want to talk about the high moments of our life, the list is still endless.
Of course, we did work really hard to get there.

However, these are the extreme sides of human existence. They are somewhat the result of our inability to control the end results.

So is there something that we can control?
Yes, our happiness.

Happiness doesn’t mean celebration in an unfortunate event. It however does mean that you will stay stable and calm come what may.

When we are going through that break up, we can be happy because there were a few good things that came out of that relationship.
When we’ve lost that loved one, yes it is difficult, but wherever they are right now, would they be happy seeing you, an apple of their eye, suffer like this?
When we are going through lives’ biggest setbacks, do we have any idea that our nightmare is someone else’s biggest dream come true?

Perspective is what makes the entire difference.

This doesn’t make your suffering little. But the people for whom you are suffering would love to see you happy. Be happy for them.

And always remember, your happiness isn’t a sign of you not loving them. Your happiness is a sign of you loving them despite they had to go to another journey…

Documenting the Day

Documenting NY habits

This year, I’m doing something different: creating habits instead of goals. While I do have some goals at the back of my mind, they’re all effective when we build systems around them.

So here are mine:

1. Create one IG reel + one LinkedIn post daily. And write a Twitter thread every Tuesday about lessons from the book I’m reading.

2. Sleep by 9:30 PM. Daily.

3. Have daily habits of reading and meditation, and check my chart daily at EOD.

The only person between you and your happiness and success is you, and let good habits nudge you away from the old you.

Happy New Year folks! I’d love to listen to your habits, DM me on IG/Twitter/ LinkedIn with the handle nishthagehija26.

See you then, and 2021 will be the best year of your life!

Career

One question I get asked a lot

One question that I get asked a lot is:

“How were you able to make your career switch? Did you not face any challenges? Did you fail? How did you bounce back?”

This blog, is an attempt to answer that.

Well, to give you a background, I am a Chartered Accountant by profession. Worked in the corporate for five years, and kept writing on the side because I loved it.
In 2020, I quit my job and took up writing full-time.

How was it possible?

Before how, let me address the question of why.

I used to work as an Internal Auditor. Which meant on any given day my high rating would be a function of how many errors and how huge errors I detected. It, in turn, meant that someone else had to screw up badly in order for me to perform greatly.

And I kid you not, I was great at my work.

Sometimes people were fired because of me, sometimes people were issued warning memos, and almost every single time someone else’s annual rating was adversely affected.

With all this going on, I was not very happy. If wherever you go, you are welcomed at a superficial level yet at a deeper level people wished I didn’t come or went away quickly. The money that we earn brings blessings. For me, it came at the cost of many people’s career. My career, no matter how legit, was someone else’s nightmare.

And with my love for writing, it was just nudging me daily to make that move.

So here’s how I quit my job and made a career switch:

  1. Started freelancing part time. I had already been creating my content – so initially that and a few cold emails served as a starting ground.
  2. Over a period of time and some force of luck (that always shows up when we do the good old hard work) when I got good clients + I managed to save a year’s worth of expenses, I made the move.
  3. The expenses that were saved are not used yet, thankfully, and will never be used as an emergency. But that cushion keeps you from making bad choices.

Simple. That’s it.

I did not know this would be the process, I just kept creating content without any direction of where it would go, and soon it did lead to some good places.

As far as problems that were concerned, I solved them the way I solve all my problems – by surrendering them to God. The results are never short of epic.

Try it out! And reach out to me to tell how it was 🙂

Thoughts

The usual boring stuff

Much of our lives is the usual boring stuff.

Extreme events – such as a job promotion, getting your dream client, getting that deal, your first pair of Nike’s, no matter how eventful – they’re extremely rare.

Which brings us to the boring stuff, and make the best of it.

How to make the best of it – no one can answer that for you, only you can.

But if you keep making the best of each boring day – trust me, you will have ideas to an extent of just extreme events.

Only one caveat: Keep working on your habits and the usual mundane stuff of doing the right things while watching someone else’s happening Insta feed.

Emotions

Wouldn’t agree on this one…

I read somewhere that pain is just pain. Someone else’s intensity of pain doesn’t reduce your pain.

While most people may agree, I tend to disagree.

Someone else’s intensity of pain might be different from yours. And if we are unable to acknowledge that, it makes us more selfish and less empathetic.

If we are in pain and still can acknowledge someone else is in pain, we are truly a caring human being.