Category Archives: Personal

the discipline of freedom

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We all want freedom. Freedom from rules and regulations, freedom from family, freedom from teachers, freedom from friends, freedom from everything. But what is freedom? Is it only attributed to what and how we want?

Freedom is an attribute of mind. The mind needs to have its control over all what is happening around us and that is what the freedom each of us aspires.

 
Freedom, when not controlled, is the most dangerous enemy we will have, and that is why Freedom needs discipline. When thoughts are built with discipline, that is when you experience the complete freedom.
 
The mind and brain even though are interlinked, many times the brain does not follow the instructions of the mind. The mind does not allow you to think objectively, it only sends out emotional thoughts. The brain wants you to get up and run, but your mind refuses to get up (an emotional thought of sleeping for a little more while). It gets caught up in the vicious cycle. It is tempted to do what it is doing (resting, watching TV, reading or writing). How do you overcome this?
 
About a year ago, I started my journey as an Entrepreneur. Suddenly, I had the feeling of emptiness. There were no more late night calls, no scheduled meetings or travels, no escalations and last but not the least, no being artificial self. Suddenly, I felt I had all the time in my day and my brain was not being occupied. Now, I see the morning sunrise, do not rush to have breakfast and don’t look forward to my coffee break, no lunch meetings, no gossips, no rush hour traffic and finally, not going to bed with all the energy lost, just dreading to wake up in the morning to start the cycle again.
 
Days and weeks went by, I rested and let my body accept the new changes. Life was good. I now have all day to myself to do what I want to do and what I was wanting to do. For a long time (even now at times) I kept pushing out things in my checklist – I can do it later, I can do it tomorrow etc. As days passed by, I realized that I am being lesser productive than I was earlier. On 1 Jan 2016, I made a resolution that I am going to write a blog post a day for 100 days and voila, I did it. I used to plan my writings, write during the weekends and set the timer to publish automatically each day at a set time. I was using each minute I got productively by focusing on what energizes me to push myself during the office hours. Off late, I realized that now, because my day is not packed, my mind and body were getting off guard. The commitment to get things done has slowed down (I have all the time, right?).
 
It took a while for me to get back to schedule. Now, I get up in the morning, make a list of things which need to be done for the day and the day goes on by checking off the list. Initially, I used to make a list of things which I need to get done – like respond to the email, complete the presentation, meeting with someone etc. This helped, but the lethargy still exists. Now, I have a list of things which I need to do and I started using an app called Strides on iOS. This is a fantastic app which allows you to make a checklist of your activities which you need to get done each day repetitively. Now, my checklist goes like this – Wake up at 5 AM, Read/Writing time, Meditation time, the list of things which need to be done during the day, Read/Write or Google time.  Notice the Google time. I realized that unknowingly I keep spending time on Google searching for something or the other. Now, I avoid going on unnecessary searches, rather I write down what I want to search in a paper and do it during the specific time in the day.
 
When we have all the time in our hand, we forget how valuable and brutal it is to not be productive, especially when you need to earn your living as an Entrepreneur.
 
This is the reason I renamed my blog to The Discipline of Freedom because freedom without discipline is like living without breathing.

What I learnt from my Mother

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2014 August is when my mother left us. She had been a homemaker all her life, but with her understanding of mythology, she used to share quite a few stories of her life, childhood and learnings from her mother.

Life was so beautiful when she was around. I am fortunate and blessed to be born to her. A decade ago, I started to get into life problems and all the time she used to share her experiences with me and ask me to incorporate them into my life. Being a youngster, her advice sounded old fashioned and used to argue back with her, but there definitely are quite a few points which I did want to incorporate into my life, but to practice them, took a very long time.

Be silent
Whenever there was an argument at home or when I was frustrated while driving, she used to tell me one simple thing – To remain Silent. She says silence is the best answer to the most frustrating moments. People around you will only point fingers at you always. This is because of various reasons, they might find solace in blaming you. The best thing you can do is to remain silent all the time. Silence speaks louder than words.

Be respectful
Never even think of insulting or speaking low of anyone, because this is not a good feeling and it will hurt you back internally rather than helping. So, keep it simple and speak to each one around you with respect and dignity. That will take you long in life.

Don’t keep hurt
There are times in our life when we get hurt because of someone. Don’t keep it in your heart and keep thinking of it because it will take away you mental peace and will not help you grow. If you can, speak to the person and close the misunderstanding or hurt, else, drop it. It is good for you. Just because you are hurt, nothing is going to change for you in your life. Instead, if you drop the hurt, it will give you more happiness and that happiness will help you think of the next step which will bring you more success.

When I asked her how she manages all these things, she said that whenever she felt hurt or someone said something which hurt her, she always used to chat God’s name which helped her.

Very simple philosophies and this is what everyone tells us, but after she went away, these three came back to me always and now am trying to follow them as much as I can as respect for her and better my life.

The art of building relationships

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Let us accept it, in this world everything depends on how you build your relationships. Be it with your parents, friends, spouse, children, boss, co-workers, subordinates and your buddies, every relationship needs to be nurtured and built upon.

What happens most of the times is that our expectations in each of the relationships decides how much we get out of each of the relationship. The key here is our expectation.

Recently, Matthieu Ricard, a 69 year old Buddhist Monk is hailed to be the happiest person alive by scientists who have conducted a 12 year study on his brain. The thing what Matthieu Ricard says is that one should train their brain to be benevolent. Very simple, as it sounds.

In building relationships what we tend to do is that over periods of time we unknowingly start building our expectations and with this, the sense of insecurity and instability start creeping in. When insecurity and instability start to play a bigger role, the relationship gets hit.

We need to make conscious efforts to carefully examine our relationships from time to time and look at how they are impacting our lives. If you gain happiness with one of your acquaintances, ensure you nurture the relationship. If you feel strained about the person, understand why you feel strained and see if you can mend the relationship. If you cannot, then you must reconsider.

What is important to understand and accept is that not all relationships give you the best of the feelings. So, identify those which do and build on those relationships.

Few relationships are very important, family, spouse, boss and your client. Ensure you spend time periodically asking the tough questions to yourself and build on what you have been observing.

Each time you build a new relationship, keep evaluating on your expectation.

Resilience – The way I work with it

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I read and heard about resilience quite a few times in my life. Through the journey, whenever something happened and I learned from it and incorporated the learning into my life, I looked back and thought I was getting more resilient.

Building resilience needs a lot more strength and mental ability. This is the best life skill you can ever learn.

A year and a half ago, I, unfortunately, lost my mother. I last sat with her, ate with her and spoke her wholeheartedly eight months before she passed away. I was away from home and by the time I came back, she was in bed. That was the most testing and tiring times for me. It was totally unexpected and came in as a rude shock.

Just after her death, I was hitting unexpected bumps in my other aspects of my life. Suddenly life is being jolted. Was getting hit from all facets of life. I was not able to do anything that I wanted to do. Even if I did, things were just not working for me. I was frustrated and irritated to the core. Lost all my dreams. Gave up on tomorrow and was really feeling low. This continued for the next few months. Each day was hell. I get up looking forward to the day to end, rather than to live the day.

Then after 5 months, I met someone who redefined and changed the way I think. I could identify my blind spot. Since then, everything looked different. The problems I was facing still exist, but the way I look at them have changed. Situations are the same, but the way I identify and work towards addressing them have definitely changed.

When I look back the last one year, identifying my interest areas and working towards them without looking at the results has benefitted me. I started writing a Gratitude Journal, got back to running, started to write and read again.

Today, I don’t react to situations anymore. My anger and my openness to speaking straight are mostly gone. Earlier, when someone on the road is not driving properly I used to be frustrated and would take the frustration to other things. Today, I do not do that anymore. I am silent and let the anger pass away.

If you are not happy with yourself and things are not working the way you want, the only thing you want to do is focus on what you wish to achieve ( the purpose of life) and do things which motivate you and deviate your attention from the not so good things which are happening.

Building resilience is not easy, but something which you will develop over time.

Intention

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What is your intention?

All of us make New Year resolutions, but over the period of time, they fade away and we loose the energy to accomplish them.

I found a way to work around that.

First, Identify the intention of the Goal. For example, you wish to accomplish something noteworthy which can add to your accomplishments in life. Identify as to how it will add to your Skills/Experience. Spend time on having a complete clarity of the Intention.

Second, break the Goal down into as many smaller tasks as possible.

Third, set a timeline to achieve the smaller tasks. Monitor how you are doing on the smaller tasks each day. If you feel that the size of the task is more than you can accomplish, fine-tune the task even more.

Fourth, each day read your Intention and see how closer you are getting to achieve it.

When all the tasks are completed, you not only achieve your Goal, but you would have attained your Intention.

Intentions are powerful, where as Goals are adjustable and have a risk of getting faded.
Good luck with your Intention for the New Year.

5 Steps to create your Niche.

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Creating a niche to bring out the best in yourself always is not an easy one. In today’s world, identifying skill set, nurturing the right attributes with apt understanding of domain are the key qualities to establish oneself.

 

The 10 Year Rule
To be a perfectionist in a particular field, one needs 10,000 hours of practice. Let us break this into a practical way to implement.

 

Years 1-2 of your career goes into understanding the “working world” after spending 21 years in school/college.

 

Years 2-4 go into understand what the work is.

 

Years 4-6 go into mastering what you are doing.

 

At this juncture, you need to understand what you wish to do – If you wish to add professional qualifications to strengthen subject knowledge or find work which will help you broaden understanding of the subject.

 

Years 6-8 go into building on the learnings.

 

The last two years in the decade goes into establishing yourself as the Subject Matter Expert.

 

These 10 years will help you complete 10,000 hours of practice and help you identify, create and nurture your niche.

 

If you aspire to make a meaningful impact in what you do, identifying you niche is the first step.

Finishing 2009

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The Year 2009 passed by very swiftly. There have been many learning’s for me both Personally and Professionally.

If you have been following my Twitter, you must have noticed by now that I changed my style of tweets concentrating more on Entrepreneurship, Social Entrepreneurship and Leadership. Also, I started working on Dazasya more seriously and will have the new site up and running very soon. You may follow Dazasya on Twitter and get updates purely on Social Entrepreneurship and Leadership.

Going forward, my blogs all will see a change. I will continue to write my personal thoughts, however, will also categorize to write about various aspects of Entrepreneurship on a weekly basis.

Is Recession Real?

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Well, many people asked this question and many people responded with what they thought. I am not a financial expert nor an Economist who can answer this question. But, I have been in the Industry for close to 10 Years now and have friends who have been in the Industry for longer than me and also many of my close friends have their own startup’s. This post comes with my interactions with them and also what I have been seeing in the Industry I work. 

During 2001-2003, we saw the Internet bubble burst. There were many people who sacrificed their lives, given up their line of work and moved to the IT field to make their name and fame. There were many organizations born, but eventually, most of them faded away. Let us also not forget, that organizations which had their fundamentals correct, grew up to be giants in their own fields. 

So, are we seeing the same phenomenon here today? The only similarity I see from my eyes in the two recessions is that they are man made. We have been hungry for more in a shorter span of time and this has really effected us. If this is human’s thought process, we should never forget that the nature also has its own ways of sustaining itself. This is a natural cycle and if the 2001-2003 recession helped in streamlining the speed at which we travelled in making a new world, this recession is setting expectations for us to ensure we have our fundamentals correct for a better future. 

Fortunately, most of my very good friends organizations have not been disastrously hit by this current situation and also quite a few of reputed organizations are also not hit. Organizations which have been disturbed are the one’s which missed out one or two of the key elements of ensuring the life of the organization works the way it should. 

What are the fundamentals which I am talking about? 

The fundamentals I am speaking apply to both individual and also the organization. The fundamentals which each of us should be aware of. The precautions we take to ensure we have a healthy living (not money, but health). Eat good food, have healthy habits, keep your mind calm and peaceful and ensure that you perform your responsibilities well. The same applies to even organizations. They have life too. 

I once received a forwarded email about Recession and it made a lot of sense to me. I just wanted to summarize the story here as an illustration of the concept. 

There was a poor man, who made eateries on the roadside. He worked very hard, to ensure he maintained cleanliness around the place he ran his business, he had few chairs for his customers to sit, clean drinking water and his USP was that he always ensured that he was presentable and welcomed his customers with a big smile. He did this for all the last 15 years since he started his small outlet. He was contended with his earning, and ensured that his customers left with a smile.  

This businessman had a son and ensured he provided the best of the education to him, with what he could earn. His son went on to study well and acquired a very decent and dignified job for himself.  One day, his son stopped over at their eatery and was explaining the current situation to his father. How people are loosing jobs, how banks are going bankrupt and how access to money was getting difficult day-by-day. With this, the poor father began to think. Over the period of time, he reduced his expenses. He was getting the place cleaned once in two days instead of every day. He stopped buying fresh water every time, but instead managed by mixing tap water to the water he bought. With various thoughts and tensions in his mind, his smile went away, he cared less about his presentability.

Over the period of time, his customers stopped coming and his business went gloomy. He told his son that he was absolutely correct and the economy is really very bad. Their business has come down heavily and tomorrow does not look bright. 

What is the morale of the story? It is actually not a story, but REALITY. The reality is that we are more worried and hence our productivity is reducing. What would have happened if his son never studied and helped his father? I am sure their business would be the same and their lives would have definitely been the same. At times, too much of thought also hits our overall productivity. 

Let us stop worrying about recession and concentrate on our work. Organizations should do what they need to do and individuals need to do what they need to do. I am sure, our tomorrow is more bright.

In my next post, I would share about my experiences with the industry and entrepreneur friends who are definitely working at the same pace and ensuring they get their business 🙂

First Post from Nokia E71

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I wrote a very big post earlier and it failed. The trial version of Wavelog does not allow me to save and hence had to exit the editor and come back to write.
Well, to begin with, I got a new Nokia E71. Yesterday, tried to search for blogging clients for Symbian and i found two – Scribe and Wavelog from Telewaving. After unsuccessful attempts to install Scribe (certificate error), I now installed Wavelog. This tool is really cool. It is very easy to install and use, but costs $16.50. Well, i don’t mind as long as its working. I found two hitches, there is no Support/Contact us information and the license is only for one phone. Now that i am going to use my E71 for long time, am planning to buy. But before that I have a month to try out.

I feel all features of the application should have been given and the duration of the trial could have been reduced. You cannot save and once you exit the application, you need to create your login credentials again 🙁

Going the iPod Way

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Long ago, not so long ago, when the world was just welcoming mp3 players, I was in London and felt the need to have a portable music player which I can carry along. I brought a Creative Zen 20 GB player which can play WAV and MP3 format music. On Windows operating system, when you plug it in, it opens the windows explorer where you can organize your music or you can use NOMAD. Over the next few months saw the arrival of iPod. Initially, I felt it is just expensive and just another MP3 player (even though I am a huge fan of Apple). I refused to even look at it in the stores or even read about the machine which changed the world of music.

Two incidents made me look at iPod:

1. I brought my MAC Book last year and lo! it was a bumper for me. I could not organize my music as NOMAD (which is used to organize music on Creative range of products) is not supported. I then searched and finally got an alternative to use my Creative on the MAC. Read more about this in my earlier post NOMAD for MAC.

2. Last year, I got a music player for my car and it came with the USB extension to play music players. I was able to connect my USB stick and play music, but unfortunately my creative player is not recognized. It really pained me. I searched on the web, but was not successful in finding a solution. Probably an AUX out should have helped, but never got that.

Finally, just a month back, got a iPod 120 GB classic. Well, I thought 120 GB is quite a good amount of space and only now realizing that I am sure to exhaust this space in 2009 for sure. Already have close to 2,200 songs and the most facinating part of iPod for me is the ability to organize PodCasts. I have good number of subscriptions and I am so very happy that I can carry my Podcasts without my computer now 🙂

Overall, in the last one month I have become obsessed with my iPod and looking forward for many more intersting encounters with the machine which made a huge difference in my life.

Last but not the least, have loads of movies on the go 🙂