Tag Archives: Think

Kokoro

Leave a reply

Destiny favors the prepared in Body, Mind and Spirit.

We tend to start our journey with an objective in mind. We do various analysis and design a way to accomplish the task. At times we Succeed, at times we fail. We take the learnings from both of the outcomes and go forward.

What is important is just not the action, but conviction from the heart. More than hard work and determination to accomplish something, it is the feeling in the heart which plays a bigger role. You believe you can accomplish, you can. If you do not believe and you do not listen to your heart, you cannot.

When we have an idea, the usual tendency is to ask people around and go with what they feel. In this process, we forget out feeling. Listen to your heart. Apart from being a component of your body, the heart has a feeling and this is called Kokoro. Listen to it and you can do wonders.

Kokoro for the Japanese is the feeling of the Heart.

Change

Leave a reply

Life is full of changes and the biggest fear we have is accepting it. We like it or don’t, life will change and it will make us accept it.

Change is an every day situation for Entrepreneurs and Professionals. When we resist change, it challenges us and while facing that challenge we tend to make disastrous decisions.

What is Change and how do we embrace it?

There are many definitions of change. For making change powerful, let us define it as to transform. Transformation is good and it should always happen in the positive side.

You identified a pain point and wanted to solve it. The solution starts with what is in your mind and over the period of time, with inputs from consumers and investors, you better the solutions. This is change and it is transformation to your solution.

Over a year and half ago, I lost my mother. Everything stalled for a moment. Life became boring. Loosing a parent is the worst we can face. It took me over six months to at least get over my loss. I didn’t know what to do. Over the period of time, I only told myself, if my mom is with me right now, would she like how I am dealing with things? When ever I felt a ‘No’, I changed my approach.

You are having a wonderful career and everything is going well, suddenly there are changes in the organisation – the leadership changed or you took up a new role. One should always be ready to manage/handle the change which will make you successful.

Success never comes to people who do not embrace change. It is the way of life. The more we accept it in mind and body, the more easier is becomes to deal with yourself. Many enterprises and many careers collapse only because of the inability to accept change.

So, the next time there is a change, welcome it, embrace it and take a positive stride. It is worth it.

5 things we can learn from Sankranthi

Leave a reply

Sankranthi is a very auspicious festival for people of Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka and also celebrated by all the Hindu’s across the world.

It is the first harvesting festival of the year. We celebrate the festival for 3 days (some celebrate 4 days too). Day One is Bhogi where you put up bon fire early morning. Day 2 is Sankranthi, where you celebrate with all family around and Day 3 is Kanumu, where you relax and spend time with family. According to me, here are top 5 things we can learn from the festival.

Discarding the Old – The world has progressed much more in the last 10 years than in the last 100 years. It is very important for us to keep revisiting and discarding older ideas and change our thought process from time to time.

Keep away the evil – Any kind of evil is not good. For every positive thought, there is negative thought. To be successful, having positive thoughts is very important and this comes only with practice. Successful people never think negative.

What you sow is what you reap – Habit is the most powerful thing in this world. One habit can change everything we perceive and see. Developing positive thinking and optimistic approach to problem solving, keeping negative thoughts away are all the habits which you want to sow. In farming, there are famine times, there are times when there is excess water and there are times when the farmer does not get the returns as he expected. Keeping all these things aside, he pushes to cultivate and bring out fantastic crop. Harvest good thoughts and you will only see positive returns even though you run into tough times along the way.

Togetherness – Family time is important and so as Team time. Once a while, it is very important to spend time with team members and colleagues. It builds the bonding between individuals and this increases the productivity. Spending time with family makes you feel wanted and cared for. This is what fuels us to do what we do. Spending time with family and team is very important in achieving what we pursue. So, make time for them.

New Beginnings – When you begin new task, always begin new. Learning from the mistakes is different from brooding from the past. Identify what went right and what went wrong the last time, device a strategy to incorporate learning’s from the past mistakes into the new approach. But, always start New.

#Confidence AND #Competence

Leave a reply

It is a very subtle difference between the two words. They sound almost similar and start with the same syllable.

One word describes your personality and the other describes how you operate. Confidence and Competence are the key attributes of our personality.

Confidence comes with experience and Competence comes with practice.

To be confident, one must adhere to the rules of the game and understand how to execute learnings, and to be competent, one must practice the execution.

Confidence is being self-aware; being aware of what you know and what you do not. Acceptance of the unknown and willingness to explore the uncharted path.

Competence is accepting the ability of coming together of forces which en-kindle the thought.

Confidence AND Competence will make you Impregnable, which is what will make you cogent.

Thinking Big

Leave a reply

We hear it everyday; in School, In College and at our workplace. “You need to think big if you need to be successful or get things done”. What does this exactly mean?

Thinking big is the ability to understand the situation and analytically arrive at an answer.

This is not easy. Having an understanding of a situation demands understanding the probable answers and then applying our knowledge to derive an appropriate solution.

In few scenarios we do have a lot of input. Even if we did not study the subject we talk to people, read literature and arrive at a methodology. For example, ‘Money Management’. The moment we start earning, we get lot of suggestions of how to save and invest so that we get good returns on our money. Financial institutions do a lot of advertising for us to understand. Even if we did not study Finance as a subject we develop our skills. When it comes to what we want to do in life or better at a job? We don’t get this information easily. We need to invest time to learn and apply our learnings.

In a running race, to participate in an event, you would work hard to build up the stamina and practice your body to help you run without injuring yourself. What differentiates the winner and others is the technique you have built. Developing technique is based on understanding body, its abilities and the plan we device to build it to our need. The person who comes first has ‘thought big’ and understood his/her short comings and worked on them even more than the one who comes second.

It is the same in other facets of life too. Understanding our strengths/weakness; devising a plan to better at each of them are the key ingredients of thinking big.

So the next time you are addressing something, design a plan to get the best out of you. This needs practice and the moment you start practicing you are practicing thinking big.

Perception

Leave a reply

Everyday we see news articles and posts on Social Media about a lot of things. In my feed on Facebook for instance, for every 100 posts which come up, 60% are perception based which fortunately or unfortunately are “shared” and not supported with authentic data and mostly leave a negative mark.

In today’s world what we really need in “Perception with data” and this makes a difference.

What happens to just ‘perception’ not supported by data? This creates the negative impact. This impacts our thoughts and these thoughts hamper our actual thinking ability. What happens when your thinking ability comes down is that you turn to opinion based decisions. We all know that opinionated decisions hamper not only us an individual’s but also others around and this impacts the overall society, which has an adverse effect on the Country.

Media is a very powerful tool and we should curate it for a better living.

As Dr. APJ Kalam says “Where there is righteousness in the heart, there is beauty in the character; when there is beauty in the character, there is harmony in the home; when there is harmony in the home, there is an order in the nation; when there is order in the nation, there is peace in the world”.

How to become a Visionary?

Leave a reply
 Visionaries are people who thin they want to change the world in what ever way they can. By creating their own company, by writing, by traveling, by reading, by sharing their ideas or by creating value in their own lives.


When you embark on a journey with the intention of creating value to yourself, it starts with humiliation, rejection and non-conformance.

When you want to create value to your life, you will need patience, willingness to accept what does not work, embrace it and then build over it. All these are qualities of visionaries who changed the world.

When you wish to change the world, you change yourself and automatically the world around you changes and you become the epitome of change.

Have you embarked on the journey yet?

 

5 Steps to create your Niche.

Leave a reply
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.

What do you want to be remembered for?

Leave a reply
Life gets really unfair at times. Robs you of what you deserve and what you are destined. Brings you down each second, trying to show you that what ever you do, it has the upper hand. It teaches you to cry, loose confidence and hurt yourself. This is the reality of life.
What do you at these times? Give up? The easy answer is “What ever is destined, it will happen” and this is correct. What ever is destined, will definitely happen. But, if you take a moment and question yourself, the path you have taken, the decisions you have made, all of these will give you different answers.
What did Steve Jobs do when he got fired from his own company? What did Richard Branson do when he had to sell his successfully running music business to start Virgin Airlines and when British Airways was beating him top to bottom? Did they give up? If they did, today, I will not be typing on a MacBook or think of flying in Virgin Atlantic.
Simple Question we need to ask ourself is “What do I want to be remembered for?” This is what Dr. APJ Kalam asked himself. When someone asked him this question, they were looking forward to hearing – Scientist, Statesman etc. But, Dr. Kalam was quick to respond “Teacher”.
Fortunate for him, Dr. Kalam breathed his last when he was teaching and we remember him as a true Thought Leader who had his Theatre of Action perfectly in place.
So, what do you want to be remembered for?

Which HealthCare System should India follow? 

2 Replies
India is a very interesting, unique economy in this world and there are many reasons for that. We are the country with the highest “working population”, we are a country with various traditional medical practices (which prove to work), we are a country with considerable number of people Below Poverty Line, we are a country, where in the last two decades have seen changes in our lives, livelihood, migrations and better quality of life.
With this, even the HealthCare landscape in India is changing. The model we follow is the “Out of Pocket Model”. Even though the Government has a very good spread for reaching each person in the Country, due to various factors, this does not work as expected. Private players are increasing and Technology is playing a bigger role in bridging the HealthCare needs to the common man.
Let us quickly examine the 4 HealthCare models on this Planet:
The Beveridge Model
This model is named after William Beveridge, the man who designed and developed the Britain’s NHS (National Health Services).
In this model, the complete Health Services are funded by the Government from the tax’s collected from public. The best example of complete Beveridge Model adoption is Cuba.
The Bismarck Model
This model is named after Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. This is an Insurance Model where employers and employees pay for Health Insurance through their payrolls. The Government holds a very strong control on the payout’s and hence the HealthCare costs are controlled. This is a pure “not-for-profit” model and this is the reason even though there are private Health Services, the costs do not go up.
This model is followed in Germany (where there are more than 200 funds which contribute to HealthCare services) and other European countries including Japan and Latin America.
The National Health Insurance Model
This is a combination of Beveridge and Bismarck models. This model uses private providers but funding comes from the Government’s Insurance Programs to which people contribute to. Since payments are controlled by Government, there are no denials/exploitations in the costs and services.
Best example for NHI Model is Canada.
 
The Out of Pocket Model
About 25% of countries in this world have an established HealthCare Systems are the remaining are Out of Pocket Models.
This is a straight forward model where you pay for the services utilised (Minimal/free in Government Hospitals and completely paid for in Private Hospitals).
Is it time we follow a model / combination of models / Create a Model for ourselves?