1. Are my dreams truly mine? — people give in to society’s vision of what they should be.
2. If I had all the money and time in the world, what would I be doing? — these things will nurture you.
3. Are my friends and family keeping me stuck? — most times it’s the ones closest to us that hold us back.
4. What do I regret the most? — learn the lessons or it will keep happening.
5. What is calling me but I am afraid to do? — asking someone out, taking a trip, etc.
6. When was the last time I was ecstatic? — notice what you were doing.
7. What’s holding me back from my dreams? — it’s usually a bullshit story.
8. Why is it holding me back? — another bullshit story.
9. Why don’t I believe in myself? — take a chance on yourself.
10. Am I in a loop? — like the mundane existence of most people.

-Rafael Eliassen

You are your own ceo........

Between the ages of 18 and 25 you have a certain power that will never be as powerful going forward: The Power to Screw Things Up!

Between the ages of 18 and 25 you have a certain power that will never be as powerful going forward: The Power to Screw Things Up!

Barely any mistake, failure or screw-up can permanently damage you or your life at 22-years old.

You still have the body, the mind and the time to make it all up and that is a phenomenal strength, because it allows you to explore!

Not all the investments you will make are going to be golden! Some will be piles of crap, but that’s okay!

If you spend the time you have now to grow, to become better than you were and to find out what you can about yourself and your life, you will be miles ahead of everybody else even if you do screw up along the way!

Dive right in, take a chance, do the things that scare you and take the time to give yourself your all!

---

#1. Invest in Books

Understand that every book you read holds information that someone else spent years collecting, organizing and making easy to understand.

Use that help!

Invest in your own improvement, your own mind and knowledge, because it will stay with you forever!

The biggest reason why so many people stagnate as soon as they get a job out of college is because that is the moment they stop growing and learning at the same rate they used to.

Go above and beyond and learn those things that others are unwilling to learn so that you create an arsenal of knowledge that supports you in creating the life you desire!

---

#2. Invest in a Coach/Mentor

Coaches and Mentors can see the things that you will miss.

They hold you accountable, make you see your own mistakes and help you grow in a way you could never grow alone. That is why the smartest and most successful people in the world know this and all have mentors, coaches and a circle of amazing people themselves.

Even Warren Buffet is taking financial advice from someone!

A good coach/mentor will take your mind for a loop, they will make you feel like you got slapped across the face, and by doing so will cut through all the limitations you have set yourself, giving you a clear cut path.

It’s one of the most luxurious, high-class investments you can make, especially if you start early.

---

#3. Invest in your Circle

Invest in the relationships that will help you succeed!

Find people that push you to be greater than you were and people that make you do uncomfortable, but great things.

Do not spend your time with “Feel-Good People” or those that do not even care for you. Invest in the relationships that push you to be your best!

You want to find people that are better than you at the things you want to get good at so that they pull you towards them, but also those that will not allow you to cheapen out on what you are capable of!

Find at least 5 of those people that have the same drive or that will not allow you to B.S. yourself!

Once you find these people push them in the ways you want to be pushed and they will push you back, creating an upwards spiral of growth!

---

#4. Invest in One Hobby

Go all in into something that you love and improve, grow and master that thing.

Maybe it’s playing Music, Writing, Drawing, or even becoming a Master in how to invest.

The point is that you pick one Skill that you already love and become even better at it.

This does not have to be a marketable skill! We are not going for Sales or Money here! What’s important is that YOU derive value from this hobby and love it.

We all need some ways to get our mind off of the daily stress and off of our problems, and if you have something that gives you self-worth and makes you feel phenomenal outside of what you do for a living you will have a powerful safety net when hell breaks lose!

---

#5. Invest in Getting to Know Yourself

Who are you? What do you like? What do you dislike? What are your strengths and weaknesses? What do you do well with and what do you struggle with? What makes you uncomfortable? What makes you scared? What is your mindset like? What are things you still wish to gain? Who do you wish to become?

Get to know yourself right now and become comfortable with who you are. Travel alone, meditate in peace, or take some time to answer the questions above.

When you become comfortable with who you are there will be less things that scare you. You grow a belief in yourself, which will bring you far more joy in life.

Go explore life, test some things out, do what you find uncomfortable right now and put who you are to the test. Only when you do what scares you do you clearly see who you are and only then can you truly act upon it.

Learning who you are and how to love yourself is the best, self-repaying investment you can ever make.

-Lukas Schwekendiek

Working as hard as Elon Musk?

 

Start Ups

You mean that 2 guys who might have never worked before, with no experience of making tough business decisions, with no financial experience or cash cushion, putting together a product that was never seen and entering a market that doesn’t exist, with a brand that no one cares and a business entity with no real process, but still taking on large complex problems do fail often? Yeah, what do you expect?

So many startups fail because new and risky ideas are by design failure prone.

I worked for a “startup factory” project within Microsoft — where they assembled some of the best scientists and engineers tasked with building new ideas. There was money, there was experience, there was Microsoft’s brand and distribution channels. Despite all that most ideas never succeeded.

For another company, I was managing new venture creation and it was quite hard to push new products despite having large customers for the existing product and the brand name.

New ideas fail everywhere with a high probability. If the risk of failure were not there someone else would have done that already. Startups by design take those ideas that have a slim chance of success.

It is not like IBM could not have built an operating system for microcomputers. Just that they rightly guessed it was risky and the market not big. But, it actually turned out to be a huge market due to changing economic conditions and Microsoft ruled the roost. Walmart entered ecommerce late as they believed people were not likely to buy through computers. The Internet evolved way too fast for them to react.

---

As a startup founder you are entering a lonely coast known for tsunamis. You might drown by the huge wave or might actually catch a huge amount of fish (that no one else is taking).

You are trying to put a completely new concept or a new market and assemble a group of people who might not have worked together. While they might have studied together, working together is a different ball game. There is no process to hold the discipline and no brand to lean on. The cash cushion is not big enough to withstand multiple failures and the executives might have no experience wading through tough times. There is no real HR process to manage talent and no good financial management. There is no established relationship with customers and no established channels. Product quality is often poor in the early days and customer support not as professional.

It is just a miracle that some startups even succeed. Startups that got incredibly lucky being at the right time with the right people succeeded. Most others with similar capabilities died.

And many of the startups that die should not have existed in the first place. It might be a feeble attempt by a group of people who might have met at a meetup and decided to try something for a few months. Or a lone ranger trying to build the next big thing. Or some new grads who try something before getting a good job.

For startups with founders who have experience, connections and a team, the failure rate is not as high. The failure rate is just proportional to the risk of the idea itself.

-Balaji Viswanathan

“I worked really hard and yet I failed”

This is one of the most common line I have ever heard from people.

Most people assume that one cannot achieve success despite putting in the hard work and success really depends on luck.

However the real problem is that most people cannot distinguish between manual labor and actual hard work.

Most people are stuck doing manual labor which fetches them no result.

Success on the other hand highly depends on what I call “High Impact Activities”.

A majority of people ignore these “High Impact Activities” because they are “Hard”.

Now don’t get me wrong, here hard activities does not mean they take effort, its just that they are least pleasant to do.

Hence people try avoiding these activities and focus all their energy and effort on low impact activities.

Lets take an example for both HIA and LIA:

In business context:

HIA: Cold calling customers, selling them products on the phone or reaching out to new customers, following up new leads.

LIA: Designing logo for your website, spending time to learn so called “productivity tips” from YouTube after wasting hours on designing the logo which you could have outsourced on fiver for $5.

In a student context:

HIA: Focusing on the most important yet hard topics and understanding them thoroughly.

LIA: Spending more time on easier topics, topics which you already know well.

In a newbie programmers context:

HIA: Working on a personal project which involves building something.

LIA: Reading and searching for answers on sites, deciding which code editor to use, debating on which programming language is better.

I hope this gives a clear idea of how High Impact Activities are different from Low Impact Activities.

If you compare them both, you will find that both of them take the same amount of effort to do.

However if you take a look at HIA, they are not very comfortable or pleasing to do.

Designing a logo for your business seems like a nice idea while cold calling a client sounds rough and hence people tend to deviate towards things that are of less importance just because they find pleasure doing them.

High performers on the other end know what activities would create the most impact for them and hence they are willing to do them irrespective of how un-pleasurable they are to do.

Doing hard work does not mean working like a donkey on some simple things.

Here is what hard work looks like:

1. Deciding and doing something which you know is not pleasurable but can give you the maximum results.
2. Taking risks in all walks of your life, switching careers if the current one does not pay you well.
3. Taking hard decisions, making a complete shift in the way you operate and think.
4. Taking responsibility, hiring people, or learning some new skill which can change the course of your career.
5. Being able to manage and make the most efficient use of your time.
6. Being consistent for years doing anything, be it at a business, learning new skills, or working out.
7. Doing something which you have never done before, or doing something where you are uncertain about the outcome.

These are the actual activities which can be termed as hard work.

The day you understand the difference between manual labor and real hard work is the day when your life would change completely.

-Saurav Sharma

Firstly, stop creating false beliefs in your mind

Firstly, stop creating false beliefs in your mind

Firstly, stop creating false beliefs in your mind.

There is no written rule anywhere which says that if you are a student from a tier 3 or tier 4 college means you cannot make it big in life.

The only people who fail are the ones which impose themselves with false beliefs like a being from a particular college limits you from achieving your full potential.

Why IITians are successful:

Talking about percentage, there are a lot more successful people from IITs who work at top companies.

On the contrary, the percentage of successful people from tier-3 and tier-4 colleges is very less.

However, the students from IITs and NITs are not successful because they belong to IITs or NITs but because they are extremely hard working people.

If you had prepared for JEE in the past, you would know how much work it takes to crack JEE.

If you did not crack JEE does not mean you were lazy, you might have worked hard but the truth is that the ones who cracked JEE had outworked you.

The same is likely to happen in careers as well, there is a high chance that when it comes to career opportunities these people will outwork you as well.

The earlier you accept this fact the better it would be for you.

IITs are definitely better at providing education which also makes them better engineers but that’s not the crucial factor. I have some senior friends who were at IITs and yet they are not as successful in their careers just because they stoped working as hard after a while.

If IIT was the only determining factor, then everyone at IITs would have been a huge success in their careers which is not true.

How can tier-3 tier-4 students get on par with students from IITs:

1. First and foremost, get rid of the belief that being from IITs would limit your potential it does not.
2. Outwork them, this is the best way you can get ahead of them, compensate your lack of good education with a solid amount of hard work.
3. With the internet, you have access to lectures from top universities like Harvard for free on YouTube , so with that you no longer have the excuse to say you don’t have access to good education.
4. Time is your most important asset, using it wisely can make a lot of difference in what you can achieve.

Being from a tier 3 or tier 4 college wont stop you from achieving success, but the mentality that makes you believe that tier-3 or tier-4 college has the power to decide your fate will definitely do so.

-Saurav Sharma

Completely ignore what others think of you ?

Logic Improvement in Coding

Write a journal to document your progress

Write a journal to document your progress: You do have a passbook to keep track at transactions of your money at the bank. What would happen if the bank stops keeping a track of your money and expenses? Wont that be a terrible idea? So why not keep track of where you are in life right now, what are you doing to improve and how much have you improved over a period of time ? To actually improve yourself, you do need a tracking system in place to track your progress on a daily basis. This system does not need to be complex, you just need to maintain a journal which records things you have done today to improve yourself. For example, you may write things down like “1. Reduced social media usage by 2 hours”, “2. Started learning XYZ skill, completed 1 topic” “3. Walked for 1Km ”. At the end of every week or every month, you can now do a self-review to see how much you have accomplished for the entire month. You can calculate the total hours you have put into learning a new skill, total kilo meters you walked, or total time saved for the entire month which you would otherwise have spent on social media. You can use the same journal for comparing your month-to-month progress as well. For example, in the past month if you had walked 30km then in the next month walking even 35km would be considered as a good progress.

-Saurav Sharma

Be very stingy with your time and energy

Be very stingy with your time and energy

A simple question?

Would you pay INR 500(USD 8) per month to use the social media site which you browse regularly which provides no value but instead wastes your time?

Heck no, you would rather stop using it instead of wasting your money.

So why would you want to waste your time and energy on the same site which are worth a lot more than INR500 per month ?

If the site starts charging that subscription amount you would rather quit using it.

It’s funny how we panic when we loose some money, we are very wise with our money even though we know that it can be earned.

However, our time and energy is something which can never be earned back.

Hence be very cautious before spending energy on some dumb stuff, like watching that YouTube video which provides no value.

Stop spending time on social media which brings in no value, would you have paid a monthly fee for using the same social media site?

-Saurav Sharma

Optimize your energy

Optimise your energy

Optimise your energy

Is there something which is draining your energy.

Are you engaging in some activities which are a huge drain on your physical and mental energy.

Activities like these include, engaging in hate conversations on social-media, consuming irrelevant content for hours, mindlessly browsing social media etc.

You can always analyse your day and list out the activities you did today that drained your energy but were not a good investment.

You can stop doing these and find a drastic increment in your energy levels.

On the other hand, you can also work on enhancing your energy as well.

Activities like running, working out , meeting up with friends in real life are the activities which energise you.

You may also make some tweaks to your diet for being more energetic such as including vitamin-c and a consuming a lot of water.

-Saurav Sharma

Cab Driver Makes More Money Than IT Graduates then why to study ?

To have bigger goals, you must be around good people

To have bigger goals, you must be around good people: Most of your achievements do not depend on your hard work but depend upon the people around you. If you are around mediocre people all day long, chances are that you will end up being like them. This is why families which belong to a certain class in a society always remain in the same financial circumstances for generations to come. The way in which this works is that when you be around people, you are influenced by their thoughts and actions. For example, if you are around drunkards you will thinking that drinking a lot is common and you will end up being a drunkard. When you be around chain-smokers you will find smoking to be acceptable and you will end up being a smoker as well. If you be around people who think making X amount of money, buying a car which costs Y is acceptable then you would impose that standard on yourself as well. Imagine if you be around your friends who are terribly fat, they eat potato chips, drink soda and lay down all the time. Chances are that if you hang around with them, you will end up being like them as well. On the contrary, if all of your friends are fitness addicts with a six pack, even if you are a fat guy the next time you go out with them you will feel ashamed of your body and would at least think about joining a gym. Hence always be around people who are better than you, it’s better to be along rather than being in the wrong group of people. If you have no people around you who can be ideals then read autobiographies of great people, reading them has the same influence as being around them.

-Saurav Sharma

Once rain is over, the same umbrella becomes.......

Stay humble

Stay humble: I’ve seen people fill up with pride like a hot air balloon when they achieve a teeny bit of success. They get a huge ego boost, they start considering themselves as some kind of god who knows it all and can never fail however thinking that is a recipe for disaster. Yes, you must celebrate your success but you should also realise that there are tons of successful people that are way ahead of you and have done a lot more than you did. Only then you will be able to think ahead in life. When you be humble and realise that your success is nothing as compared to others, only then you will be able to reach to the level of people who have achieved a lot more than you.

-Saurav Sharma

People Develop Their Attitude Depending on........

Karma's Role In Unemployment

Changing Yourself or Changing the World ?

 You are asking to compare two things which are incomparable.

• Changing the world is impossible.
• Changing the self is immediately possible.

Most people waste their life trying to change the world and in the process they themselves change to fit into the world.

No one can change the objective world, which always consists of good as well evil. .

• Many great saints, prophets and even Avatars of God tried to change the world, through love and spiritual knowledge but they failed.
• Many philosophers tried to change the world by giving the world new thoughts, but they too failed to change the world.
• Many kings and tyrants tried to change the world by sword and terror, but they also failed.
• Many revolutionaries tried to change the world by overthrowing the rulers and they too failed.

The objective world is never going to change.

However, it possible to change your subjective world to a great extent.

And that can be done by changing yourself.

• If you become good, the world becomes good to you.
• If you become evil, the world becomes evil to you.

Hence, be the change that you wish to see in the world.

When you make yourself good, your world becomes good to you, though the same world would continue to remain evil for other people who are themselves evil.

-Awdhesh Singh

If a cab driver makes more money than an IT professional, why should I study?

Karma's Role In Unemployment

Regrets...........