021 Life Hacks

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.