Harikrishna Natrajan

Harikrishna Natrajan worked for a decade in the software industry, really enjoying the field throughout his job career. A software developer with proficiency in multiple programming languages, he chose startups as his destinations and worked in a lot of applications (such as WiFi networks and Android car dashboards) before they became popular in the retail market. Thus he enjoyed being ahead of the curve. His commitment to work on open source solutions led him to explore a lot of options and get work done without being tied up by the whims of a single corporation. With his love for travel, he found freedom and leaves scarce while working in jobs. With the full support of Priya, his wife, he quit his last job in the November of 2015 and entered the world of software freelancing full time, after trying it as a side gig for 3 months. Priya soon quit her job too as the two of them planned an ambitious, life-changing year-long self-planned trip around India. Nowadays, he enjoys life with his wife, who also quit her job, and both are always on the lookout for experimenting with self-planned travels, ideas for entrepreneurship and passive income and how to get better at life. He writes about his learning experiences on this blog.

Here are Harikrishna Natrajan's blog posts.

How Priya mastered long distance bicycling

I love bicycling and have been doing it since learning it during my summer vacation between fourth standard and fifth standard. After marriage, I have been encouraging Priya (my wife) to use her bicycle frequently as well. But what she achieved over the last two weekends has left me immensely proud of her. With me, Priya rode 235km in the rainy conditions of monsoon, one of them being a 160km (or 100 mile) long ride from Pune to Thane. All this, considering that this is Priya’s first year of serious long distance bicycling, whereas it is already my 6th.

What is Priya’s secret to such supreme fitness and determination? Ideally this should have been Priya’s post to write as her own story, but this time we decided to take a different angle, by making me the observer who studied Priya’s success. Continue reading How Priya mastered long distance bicycling

Can we really re-wire our brain?

As humans, we always change over the years. Our bodies, beliefs, tastes in food and clothes, the books we read, the TV shows we watch and many others. If you were to look back at yourself 10 years ago, then you’d realise that you are a very different person now than you were then.

However, some things hardly change. It may be the fact that you have either been a morning person or a night person right from your childhood. Or that you have never liked brinjals. Or maybe you never found studying history fun. Or probably you still bite your nails. These traits have been part of you for so damn long that you never thought that you could get rid of them. In fact they are part of your identity. You may have tried really hard to consciously change these traits at one point or the other. However, doing so feels like you are continuously rapping the knuckles of your automatic self and constantly keeping your brain on a high alert to avoid automatic behaviour. That is tiring and certainly not enjoyable.

However, what if it is possible to change these traits using certain methods to re-wire your brain, such that new behaviour becomes part of you? Anthony Robbins is the leader of a method called Neuro-Linguistic Programming and he believes that you can use this kind of ‘programming’ to re-wire your brain so that it behaves exactly as you want it to, without resorting to will power to rap your knuckles.

Continue reading Can we really re-wire our brain?

Stop the excuses and start with the ordinary

Person 1: “Just look at these photos. I too wish to take photos like these. If only I could save up the money to buy a DSLR, lens and filters.”

Person 2: “Would you look at this snow-capped mountain in the Himalayas? How I wish I could trek on it. Our tropical town is no good.”

Person 3: “Just wait and see. The day I am able to gather a team of experts around me, I will start my business and earn millions. But it’s so hard to hire experts.”

We all come across people who repeat such statements every day. They insist that their reasons for not starting are genuine. Lack of resources, lack of facilities, lack of experts and what not! But the one thing that they do not lack is EXCUSES. Instead of starting with what they have, they are willing to wait for the utopian day when they have the best of resources, which they assume will automatically turn them into experts.

Let us discover why it is not a good idea to wait for the best resources and how not to fall into the trap of excusitis. Let’s get started on our dreams today!

Continue reading Stop the excuses and start with the ordinary

One simple idea to get things right

In his book The Checklist Manifesto, Boston based surgeon Dr. Atul Gawande mentions that failures occur due to the following reasons. The top three of them are:

  1. Lack of knowledge
  2. Lack of proficiency despite the knowledge
  3. Completely unforeseen circumstances.

But more than 90% of his best-selling selling book highlights the failure of the fourth kind. You may have complete knowledge about a subject, you may have gained enough fluency to be an expert and the task ahead of you is completely predictable and smooth. Yet you goof up, because you forgot a step by either not paying attention to it or because some other step distracted you. These are the mistakes that are the easiest to eliminate and yet they keep creeping up in our day-to-day work. In this post, we discuss why they occur and how to eliminate them.

Continue reading One simple idea to get things right

The one habit that enabled me to quit my job and become my own boss

Good habits are, often over a period of time, the difference between a roaring success and a crashing failure. Good habits make things possible by setting you in the right direction step by step instead of a whimsical leap of faith. But, there are often habits that once practised and reviewed, DO help you take that leap of faith! One such habit helped me quit my day job, eventually freeing up my time for working on the kind of projects that I had always wanted to work on and do things that I had always wanted to do without worrying about leaves. In this post, I help you discover what that habit is and how much it can liberate you to follow your long put-off dreams.

Continue reading The one habit that enabled me to quit my job and become my own boss

How to eat an elephant!!

There is a very popular book by Bill Hogan named, ‘How Do You Eat an Elephant? One Bite at a Time!‘. While the idea of eating an elephant sounds very weird, the metaphor is spot on. The very idea of eating an elephant can overwhelm all our senses at once. However, instead of thinking about how we will ever finish a giant pachyderm in our lifetime, we will inch closer to success, just by thinking about how to eat the next bite. This applies to all our lofty challenges that we set for ourselves. Climbing the Everest, running an ultra-marathon, generating 7 figures of revenue in your business, speaking in front of an audience of 1000, you name it. The common thing about all these goals is that the moment we think about starting on it right now, it is way too overwhelming even just to think about it. So, how do we eat an elephant? Continue reading How to eat an elephant!!

Getting makers and managers to work together

Imagine this scene from your childhood. You have just built yourself two LEGO battle tankers. You are sprawled on the floor, firing imaginary shells into the air across the two tankers. You make noise as you fire … bang… crack! Your hero tanker has taken a few hits and is weak. Your enemy tanker is just two shells away from destruction. The suspense is building and you are totally in the zone, lining up your hero tanker’s barrel at the enemy tanker for two final shots.

But your mother calls you and says that lunch is ready. She is insistent that you eat it NOW! You say, ‘Just two minutes, mommy’. But she is adamant. She has a kitchen to clean up and dishes to do before she can start her next meal prep. You have to go RIGHT NOW or she will get angry. She reasons with you that you can have lunch and resume ‘LEGO tankers’. Sure you can do that. But you have been shaken off your zone — the total isolation of focus that gets you physically, mentally and emotionally involved in what you do.

In the modern nuclear family, your mom no longer tears you away from your zone. But, you are constantly ripped away from it by meetings, phone notifications, calls and people visiting your desk. In this post, let us talk about how workplaces should be designed around the two types of professional people: those who need to interact with others to get things done, i.e. the managers, and those who need isolation to work at their best, i.e. the makers.

Continue reading Getting makers and managers to work together

How to plug the ‘wiggle spaces’ in your daily rules

We dream of achieving goals and basking in their glory. The world-class product that sells like hot cakes, the Olympic athlete body, the dream holiday and so on. But the day-to-day routine such as writing the product spec, writing 10 pages a day for a book draft, the 100 reps of an exercise, the non-sugar diet with only vegetables are quite boring.

It requires a lot of discipline to keep ourselves on track. Occasionally our minds give in to temptations. To free our conscience, our minds make up stories to fit the lapses within our goal rules. The book Switch by Dan and Chip Heath describes the stories for such contradictory behaviour as ‘wiggle spaces’. Continue reading How to plug the ‘wiggle spaces’ in your daily rules

What I am overjoyed about after a year of marriage

On the 15th of April, my wife Priya and I celebrated our first marriage anniversary. We had a wonderful time at two beach resorts on the Konkan coast, Harihareshwar and Velneshwar. We got away from the crowd, enjoyed quality time alone, but we also got to do something that we hold very dear – quarterly reviews of the things that we want to achieve together and a reflective look at a year of marriage. We realised that both of us had learnt a lot from each other and each other’s families. I realised that a lot of key points had made our marriage so successful in the one year that seemed to rush by, my best year in life by far. Continue reading What I am overjoyed about after a year of marriage

What we can learn from Indian Railways

On the 16th of April 2016, the Indian Railways completed 163 years of service. I happened to see this accolade in Thane Railway station on a banner. Thane was the destination for the first ever railway train to run in India. From a rather small scale service running 30km from Mumbai (Bombay during those days) to Thane using a steam locomotive and 4 coaches, the Indian Railways has since evolved to become the biggest, busiest and the most used railway service in the world. What can we learn from the mega success story of the Indian Railways?

Continue reading What we can learn from Indian Railways