Tag Archives: Think

Own the Road

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If you are a startup, owning the road is what makes the difference.
Creating a niche/competitive product is no longer what makes you differentiated. Everyone has something to offer. What makes the cut is, you creating a platform for yourself and/or your product.
In idea evaluation 50% weightage goes towards the differentiator. 5%goes to testing, 20% weighs towards what you are offering and 25% weighs towards you Idea itself.
So, create your platform and own it. Your client will drive your growth.

Where is our Creativity?

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Creativity is almost lost from our lives. We live in an era where everything is turning mechanical. Right from the alarm in the morning to tracking your sleep, everything is automated. Earlier, we need to set the alarm on the clock each night before we sleep (because we would have switched it off in the morning), but today, your phone can set the alarm for each day of the week at the same time or different times.
When you get up in the morning, some days you feel tired (because you might not have got a complete 8-hour sleep or you were disturbed. But, today, your phone will tell you what quality of sleep you had and how long have you slept and how many times you woke up.
What this is doing to us is killing our ability to think. Every aspect of life is taken care and in the coming decades we will also stop driving and let the automatic cars do the job.
Creativity is not a switch which you can switch on/off when you need. It is the ability to see, feel and communicate with the world around you. The next time you are doing something brings on the creativity by being present in the situation. Think differently about the same problem which you solved yesterday. Change the way you communicate and see which is the best way of communication you can build on.

Blackbox Thinking

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Every flight is equipped with a Blackbox, which records all the conversations in the Cockpit and each and every instruction given to the plane. There is no debate on how this is helpful to track how the plane has been operational.

Our brain is our blackbox and it records each and every instance of our life, making us what we are and how we behave and handle our thought process. What if we decode our brain from time to time and look at how it has been processing our experiences?

Many a times, our mind takes over our thoughts. It clubs our emotions to our feelings and gives out instructions on how we react to situations. Only few of us can actually note these reactions and understand the instructions from the brain and then take action. This comes out of practice. The practice of thinking and practice of handling instructions from brain and mind.

When it is a good news or success, we celebrate. But, when there is failure, we allow our mind to rule over and react according to what it feels. Success comes from managing this reaction. This is the reason successful people become successful. They look at their failures and downtimes, practice thinking and understand the reactions from the brain and then take action.

So, the next time you experience failure, evaluate what your feelings are and act according to what the brain says. This will give you the required result rather than a

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.

How to think? – Challenge assumptions

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In the first part of How to think, we started with Questioning. This is the first step towards improving our thinking. What’s next?

The next step to sharpen our thinking is to Challenging assumptions.

Challenging assumptions is developing our curiosity quotient. How do we practice curiosity? Start by asking Why? to things around. Why are we afraid of what we are afraid of?

Let me share my story. Long ago, I was afraid of the middle sex. When ever I saw them on the road coming towards me, my heart would pound. One day when I was with a good friend of mine, she noticed it and asked me. I told her. She asked me if I reasoned as to why I am afraid? I said no. The next week on a Saturday, she invited me to come to an NGO. I went. This was the NGO which was run by the middle sex for various social causes. She introduced me and told the gathering that I would be teaching them Fundamentals of Computers. With my inhibitions, I started to teach them. Over the next 2 months, everything changed for me. I got to know them better and I realized how wonderful and nice people they are. My fear was absolutely baseless. They loved me so much that after my sessions were over, they actually called me to come back few times.

Look around, start by asking simple questions. There are mostly no questions which have no answers. We just need to spend time with the question and we will get the answer.

If you are an Entrepreneur, ask yourself why you are solving the problem. If you work for a company ask why you are doing what you are doing.

Developing curiosity enhances your ability to challenge assumptions. When you challenge the assumptions, the way you look at dealing with things completely changes.

Asking the question right..

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All of us ask questions. Is there a right or wrong way to ask? I am sure once in your life you heard – “That’s a very good question”. How do we different the questions? Is there a logic behind asking what we want to ask.

The answer is Yes. There are patterns in which we ask questions. Few ask to know if the other person knows the subject or not; few genuinely ask; others ask to confirm if they understanding is correct and few ask for the sake of asking.

If you have taken a course on How to do presentations or teaching a class, you would have definitely covered the topic on how to manage your audience. Based on the tone and involvement of your participants, you know the genuinity of the question.

Asking the right question comes with the understanding of the subject. If the subject is new, the questioning pattern comes from inquisitiveness.

Based on my experiences, I identified 3 attributes which make it best.

– Start with the situation (Set the stage) – Before you ask a question, it makes it easier for the narrator/speaker to understand the context. So, highlight what he/she said and then start the question.

– Repeat what the other person said before you ask the question (Providing clarity) – After setting the stage, ensure you repeat the last line what you heard and then start with your question. This will help in connecting the story with the situation.

– Close the question with your understanding (if possible) – After the question is answered, close it by repeating what you have understood. This gives confidence to the speaker that their effort is valued.

How to think?

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During my +2 days, my Mathematics teacher used to write a problem on the board and turn to us and ask “How to think?”

We used to make fun of the question.

Fast forward 20 Years, here I am pondering on the same question. Over the last few years, this question has been coming back to me regularly. How to think? can be a tricky one at times.

How to think is a very genuine question we don’t usually ask ourselves. In the Indian system, we have been bought up with a tradition of not asking why, what and how? to our elders. At home, when parents tell us to do something and we ask a logic for it, we get back the answer “Our elders said so” and at school when we ask a question, we get a reply “So, you think you are intelligent eh?”. All these have deep impact on our thinking and we are continuing to follow the same in today’s world.

What we need to focus on and make effort is to change is the way we approach the questioning part. Asking questions is the way we need to think. What we need to accept is that we do not have answers to all the questions we have, and usually, the easiest way is to conclude. Instead of concluding, when we start questioning, many things open up and the complete approach to dealing with life changes.

So, the next time someone asks How to think?, the answer is Questioning.

Questioning is an art and it needs a lot of practice.

Dealing with failure. The way I did.

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Failure is the biggest fear we have and at any point of time we hate failing. But, failure is part of life and we need to accept the fact.

Everyone wants to succeed in life, but only a few prepare.

During the preparation process, we need to embrace failure. We need to accept it. But how to deal with it?

When you hit the unexpected lows, keep the focus on what the low is teaching you. It is very difficult to be practical but this is what one needs to be focused on. I have had failures and low times. At times, I try fighting to change things, but many a times, just sit down and think why this is happening. Both have not resulted in good for me. Luckily, from few sources, I understood how to look at failure a little more objectively.

The next time I encountered failure, I wrote down what failed and why I attributed it as a failure for me in the center of the page. Around the page I wrote down what are the possible situations which could have come out of the failure. Did few iterations and then finalized a list of reasons as to what I did not do right and why things did not happen the way I want them to happen. This gave me a holistic view of the failure and helped me think more objectively. I improvised the next time the same situation came.

At times, you do feel that you are right and the situations/people around are not identifying the correct result. Look at this as the area you need to work on because this is the perspective you need to deal with and we will need to address the failure, not as a failure, but as a situation where people can see what you actually wish to communicate.

What is your Strategy?

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You have an Idea and it is your Eureka! moment. You are going to change the world with your innovation and you are proud of it. The next steps you take lay the foundation to the future of your idea and changing the world.

You will need to have answers to:

– How to make your idea into reality?
– How to take it to market?
– How much money is required?
– What is the gestation time?
– When will you make money?
– If it does not work, what is the Exit?

Strategy involves Understanding, Thinking and Predicting.

Understand the present. First, look at who your competition is. If you do not have competition, Congratulations! you have taken the first step to changing the world. If you do have, identify as many competitors as you can along with their offerings and USP along with their market reach and penetration. Understanding your competition is the first step in creating a niche product offering.

Think of what your USP is going to be. For each of your competitors marketing message, have a USP of your own. This will help your consumer to easily identify you and it will give them clarity as to why they should come to you.

Predict the future, not of your idea, but your consumer. How will your consumer benefit by using your offering?

Strategy is the fundamental understanding of what your consumer needs, how are you going to provide it to him.

Invention Vs Innovation

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Invention can happen with a single person, but it takes a long time and lot of efforts for that to become an Innovation.

Charles Babbage was the first person who invented the programmable computer in the earlier 19th Century. The following years and decades transformed the whole meaning and design of the Computer.

What we are dealing with today is the transformation of the Inventions to Innovations which can reach people and make lives much better.

Innovations deal with identifying solutions to problems in simplistic manner. There might be an existing solution, but if we can better that up, it is Innovation.

Inventions happen vary rare, and even if they happen, it takes a long time for them to come into light.

What should we focus on – Invention or Innovation?

Innovation. Chain of innovations can lead to an invention.