021 Life Hacks

We all have succumbed to the fear of missing out or FOMO. There are times we have to miss out on things to be able to focus on ourselves an our life. I stumbled upon the not so well known Sturgeon's Law. Sturgeon's Law gave me a simple tactic to deal with the fear or missing out (FOMO). Sturgeon's Law helps you convert the fear of missing out (FOMO) to the joy of missing out (JOMO).

In this age of constant notifications, it is easy to get distracted. You can use notifications as an excuse not to to stay distracted. What you focus on is what you see. If you focus on something which does not exist you will start imagining it. So if you focus yourself on success you will start seeing it even if it does not exist in your life. You can stay focused in a distracted environment by controlling the things you give importance to.

Life will make difficult demands of you. How will you survive and thrive? Adding a dose of SENSE will give you a strong platform to build on. Go ahead and add SENSE to your life. Five simple and time tested daily habits which will give you a head start and help you start your day strong.

Life is unfair. You will always encounter situations where you will feel that the rub of the green has gone against you and you have been dealt a bad hand and life is unfair. How does one deal with unfair situations where you are not to blame for the hole you are in. How does one flip the situation where you can deal with an unfair situation with a sense of control and confidence. We have four effective tactics to deal with unfair situations.

You meet someone for the first time, how do you establish credibility quickly. It is easy to establish credibility over a period of time when you have held up to your commitments and established that you can get things done. You are always interacting with others in a personal, social or business context but there are tactics which would help you in establishing credibility quickly.

We all want to live a great life. Hoping to live a great life is never an effective approach. We need an approach to proactively design our life. The approach to designing our life needs to be practical. Most importantly it should deliver great results i.e. helping us live a better life. Having a structured approach to design a life will take away the confusions of how to start and what to do next. We can create an approach which maximizes pleasure, minimizes pain and makes you strong to look at things you were avoiding and sweeping under the carpet.

Haters exist everywhere and will pull you down every time. Dealing with haters can get confusing as they are a drain on your time and emotional energy. You can choose one of the extremes to go all out and attack them or you could just choose to ignore them. For most of us a path in between would work the best to handle the negativity and criticism you receive. 

Seeking to predict your future? I have seven predictions for my future. You too can predict your future. The predictions have held true in the past and don’t expect them to change. Learn these rules of prediction and predict your future. Now that you can predict your future, you can work on your present to shape a great future..

Fail early. Fail fast. Fail often. Don’t be afraid of failing. Have the courage to fail. We have heard of many glib phrases around failure. Seems there is failure fetish in vogue right now. All those phrases are fine as long as you win in the end. What if you fail? What if you don't win? No one talks about situations where a failure blows you up and how does one go about dealing with it. There is nothing glamorous about failing.

Even if we don’t play sports, we are all inspired by sport. The winning athlete inspires awe and our admiration. Popular culture, society and media creates demigods of winning athletes and we all worship them. If we can worship winning athletes, then can we not learn from them. Can we not learn to live like a winning athlete? Here is the list of good things which I have observed in athletes and would like us all to make them a part of our life.

We are our actions and not our talk. Talk is cheap, action requires effort. Do you have the muscle to do the work? For you to have the muscle, you need to build it and muscle is built by consistent exercise. So, you want to be rich, successful, happy, creative. Are you putting in the consistent reps and set which will exercise the muscle to be rich, successful, happy, creative? Build a strong foundation of muscles on which a great life can be crafted is achievable.

We just can’t live without comparisons. For most of us it all started with our parents comparing us to other children. Here we are as adults and the comparisons have not stopped. We have now continued on this journey with great vigor and just can’t stop playing the comparison game. If you are a player, then it’s good to know where you stand. Smart comparisons are great and can be great tools for improving yourself. However, done the wrong way it’s an exercise in futility. We all have heard about not comparing apples to oranges. We can use the same principle of not comparing apples to oranges to make smart comparisons to empower ourselves with insights to be better.

Remember any incident as a child, being the odd person out. It was an uncomfortable place to be in. It was a place where most of us vowed never to visit again. Some of us learnt it from their first uncomfortable experience, the value of fitting in. Some of us took a few more hard knocks to start fitting in. We learnt the art of seeking validation so that we fit in and are not the odd person out. However, top performers by definition are above average and hence they don’t fit in with the average crowd. If you are or desire to be a top performer get comfortable with the idea of being different from the average and learn not to seek validation from others

We all go through periods of uncertainty and ambiguity where we just don't know what’s going to happen next. We don’t know how to tackle such situations and we spend a lot of time and energy focusing on what we should do when we don’t know. It requires a lot of intelligence and luck to be able to figure out what needs to be done in uncertain times. For someone who is not so smart, I spend time thinking what I should not do rather than figuring out what to do.

Seeking help is difficult for most of you. Either we are supremely confident about our capabilities and don’t see any reason to seek out help. Alternatively, we are lacking in confidence to be able to reach out to someone, expose ourselves and be vulnerable. We attempt to understand the process of seeking help from the perspective of both the help giver and the help receiver to identify the paradox inherent in the process of seeking help. Understanding the paradox of seeking help will make us more confident while seeking help.

Dealing with a no and rejection is routine and a hard reality of life. We are continuously pitching ideas, making suggestions and making requests and we hear a no and get rejected. We need to analyze the nature of the no. Based on the nature of rejection we can come up with strategies to handle the rejection and move forward. 

Effective problem solving is a key tool in the armory of a high-performance individual. We would like to be a great trouble shooter without encountering great troubles. As much as possible we would like to avoid problems and never embrace them. However, when faced with a problem I would like to have an effective tool kit to handle a problem rather than freezing in the face of a problem. The toolkit is simple as it directs you to stay away from problem avoiding patterns while keeping the focus on problem solving.

Learning, goal setting, exercise, nutrition, sleep etc. are the well-known and more discussed tools in the repository of a high performer. Through this post I would invite us all to discover the power of writing and how it could help you reach higher levels of performance. Writing is an undiscovered for many and little discussed topic in the area of high performance which could turbo charge your ability to deliver great results. The thought of writing is intimidating and, many would stop reading this. However, you can leverage the power of writing and understand how writing will help you write your own destiny by following some simple practices.

Who am I ? It’s been a question which has been asked since the start of our species. It is a philosophical question with complicated answers. However, I have simplified the answer for myself. It works for me. It is a simple answer to difficult questions which I can keep in my mind even in the most difficult of times. I am the player, coach and spectator. Understanding Who am I at different points of time gives me a self-identity and simple tool to help me survive in difficult times and ensures that I don't go off track during the great times.

Once you have had a chance to study your income in Becoming the CFO of your life: Personal Finance basics - Understanding your income statement (Part 1) of this series , we then take one step forward to understand our financial health need to understand how well we are doing. We look at 3 simple numbers to be able to understand how well you are doing with regards to your income.

High performers are actually doing a great job of being the CEO of their lives. However, their personal finances could need some help and hence they need to be better CFO's (Chief Financial Officer) of their lives. Let us build a comprehensive understanding of our income statement for us improve your finances. We can look at some simple concepts in your income statement which will help us becoming super effective in managing our personal finances and be an awesome CFO for yourself.

If you are ambitious enough to set a goal for yourself then 9 times out of 10 you are not going to achieve it. While we should celebrate the ambitious you, who has the courage to set up a goal, we need to understand why you are unable to achieve it. Here is a simple checklist you can run through to figure out why you are unable to achieve your goals.

Take back control! Take back control of your wallet, time and attention from the companies who are marketing to you. It could be the media and social media companies who steal your time and attention from your life towards the noise they generate. It could be the companies who play with your psychology and push a deal and get you to buy something which you did not need in the first place. Taking control of your earnings and life can be simplified by giving it an approach which is simple as ABCD'S.

Getting advice is so easy. Unsolicited advice is available for free parents, spouses, family, friends, so called well-wishers. The less you ask for it, the more you will receive. However good advice is worth its weight in gold if you ask the right person. Great counsel is really helpful. I follow one rule to classify advice givers into three categories. Once advice givers are classified into three categories, it is very easy to identify the advice givers to seek out and the advice givers to avoid.

The first rule of winning at work is understanding that you are playing a game. The game is played by a certain set of rules. You may like or dislike the rules, but you have to play the game by the rules of the game if you want to win. What does the game require from you to win at work?

Do you recognize this person? The person is completely dependent on her salary. Cannot survive for more than a month without his salary. Is living only to earn his salary. Is not happy living with living only for the purpose of earning a salary. He is free to change his employer as and when possible i.e. not enslaved to his employer. However, she is enslaved to her salary. Does the person look familiar? Very familiar? Too familiar that it sounds scary and makes you uncomfortable. Here, we were living under the illusion that slavery had long been abolished. Sounds complicated, however can we simplify it so that its less scary.

Try rewinding some conversations from last year in your mind. A colleague wanted her start up another wanted to change career paths, find a better job. A friend wanted to lose weight another wanted to eat healthy, drink less, stop smoking. The spouse who wanted to spend less, save more. Not surprised if you find that most of them have done nothing, not moved an inch forward. Most of them wanted to desperately change and mind you making change for these life issues is not rocket science. Yet 9 times out of 10, a change is neither made or if made does not sustain beyond few days of initial euphoria. Change for such simple matters need not be so complicated. Yes, there is a way to not only make a change happen but also for it to stick.

For around 75% of the people who I have seen, the simple answer is that you take the salary from your job every month and the ability to get away with doing the minimum work while looking ok in the team. Once a year, you take away a salary hike which will most certainly leave you dissatisfied and if you are lucky a promotion. For some it is their title, the power their hold in their team or set up, the ability to socialize with a select few in your team (though they may hate most of the people around them). For a very few its about the learning, growth opportunities. Here is a longer list of the more valuable things which you can take away from your job.

After being protected by our parents, instructed by teachers and ordered around in our workplaces, thinking for yourself is not easy. If you let life run itself then they you may realize that you may not even get a chance to think for yourself as the world has already thought on your behalf. Scary, that we can easily run through life without getting an opportunity to think for yourself, forget learning to think for ourselves. The world does not owe you anything not even the opportunity to think for yourself.

It breaks my heart when I see so many people unable to reach their potential and be successful because they are unable to communicate both it in social settings or in professional settings. It takes a toll on their confidence, self-image and self-belief making the compromise to living a lesser life. Most of us confuse communication with the right accent, fluency with the language and the charisma of your personality. You are either born with it or not. However, I see it differently. I see it as a set of skills which can be easily learned. For me communication is about your story, script and delivery.

To tackle a difficult situation, we need the confidence and courage to handle and resolve it. Stress, fears and anxieties take away our confidence and courage. In a state of panic, it’s difficult to solve problems. I don't try to be brave under such situation. I look at my fears from a position of weakness and have a mental tactic which tricks my mind and gives it the strength and confidence to rise above the panic to try and figure out some solution to my fears or at least give me a good coping mechanism to live with my fears without being in a state of panic. This tactic is effective and starts delivering results within a week or 10 days.

Life is crazy for many of us. For others it can get crazy at times. Life will keep throwing things at you and leave you feeling that you are dodging bullets all the time. While shit is happening. here, I am talking about designing your life. Sounds simple. Yes, it is. My approach is to focus on things which I can control while keep dodging the bullets for things I cannot control. For the things I control I just look at stuff I need to avoid as it is the easiest during stressful times. Just by avoiding things which are in my control my life feels much more in control and helps me have day which have been designed by me

Sports, art, craft, doctors, military ... we expect nothing less than mastery. We become arm chair analysts critiquing a poor performance of a master in sports, art, craft, military. In miltary if you walk in to a situation without mastery you will die, sports persons will lose the match, artists will flop, patients will die. Yet we have millions of excuses if someone expects mastery from us. We are not talented, we did not have x,z or z growing up. Who the hell could possibly expect mastery from someone as ordinary as me. What if we could flip it around and bring in elements of mastery in our life. Would life not be more fun?

We all have heard saving for a rainy day, building and emergency fund or some other variation of having some money saved for the bad times where money can reduce the pain of the bad time. Saving for a rainy day or having an emergency fund sounds weak, timid and exhibits lack of confidence. I prefer something bad ass and I call it having fuck-you money in the pocket.

Be at work or in our personal life with our friends and families we have all encountered situations where someone who promised to help you does not follow through on his or her promise. The double whammy with an unkept promise is that we get to hear of the lack of follow through at the last moment and we are stuck. Sounds familiar, feels disheartening but it stuck me that its quite easy to figure why such things happen.

If someone sold you a product with torn packaging would you buy it? Definitely not. Maybe yes, if you were getting a good deal. When you are searching for a job you are selling your services in return for a salary. Then why would you sell yourself with bad packaging. Unless of course you intend to discount yourself. Read on to learn simple tactics from someone who has conducted   1000+ interviews across decades to make great impressions with no effort which would help you differentiate from 90% of the crowd and present yourself successfully.

Time is a great equalizer. Be it the most successful or the least successful person of the world, each start off with 24 hours in their days. However, high performance situations require as tackling challenging issues and coming up in with solutions faster are quicker. Hence time is critical resource in the tool box of high-performance individuals. In the context of managing one’s time we will get advice, dime a dozen of what to do  with one’s time. I focus on what not to do with my time. I just avoid activities which take away from performance in terms of the time or the energy and focus left to tackle life goals.

Exercising daily while living a busy life or a lazy life is next to impossible. Life happens, and the best laid out plans to hit the gym daily can go a for a toss and requires insane amount of discipline to not miss a day of exercising and working out. Here is a tested but ridiculously fail-safe method of not missing a single day of exercising. In the last 757 days since I figured it out only 8 days missed out with no exercise using this hilariously simple method without requiring any self-discipline.

For those who have never invested in the share market and are not sure how to start there is a simple way to get you started within 1 hour. Like learning to cycle or swimming for the first time, the intent is to ensure that the start is easy and safe, and you are able to start investing in the share market without the worry of making mistakes and losing money. The idea is to start strong where your performance is always as good as the share market. Through this technique your performance will never be worse than the share market. All you need is an hour of time to get started and small amount of Rs 1000.

It happens to me all the time, its late in the night and I can't fall off to sleep. I figured out a simple hack which would get me snoring (yes i snore) within 30 minutes. I figured out a sleep hack which would keep me away from staring at the phone screen while struggling to go to sleep.