I am meeting Rahini today after nearly a decade. We were best buddies in college, almost inseparable. But life got in the way and some how we had lost in touch. Thanks to Facebook, she somehow found me and messaged and now we are going to meet in a Cafe’ Coffee day by Besant Nagar Beach.
I’m pretty excited, I’m sure she would be too. I can’t believe that we were in the same city all the while and we never met. But thanks to Facebook 🙂 I love you FB.
Big sports events are passionate, frenetic, dramatic and super fun. Sports also reveal the character of the participants. We come to know who is persistent and fit, who has nerves of steel and can rise to the occasion. At the same time, we see who can be magnanimous and who are lousy losers. We can learn a thing or two from big players in big events. Olympics, Tour de France, Super Bowl and the Football World Cup. So many things to observe & learn. However little did I know that the qualifying rounds for big events, where some of the smallest teams compete to try to make it to the big stage can teach some rather surprising and jaw-dropping lessons.
In this post, we will see how the national football team from Barbados thought completely out of the box and managed to qualify for Caribbean Shell Cup of 1994. Continue reading How to get your way by thinking out of the box
Anee is  a dear friend from my mountaineering days. I remember seeing her sit up all night due to the altitude related insomnia, but never once missed a single day of training. She was an incredible leader for her team (Rope) and a great support to all of us. She went on to do more wonderful stuff in life, that continues to inspire me and hope it is to you too. Continue reading Traveller and Solo Back Packer – Anee Verma
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
You probably already know that building good habits is the shortcut to building success. Determination and Willpower are good traits. But they are fleeting and limited and to count on them for building a habit is like having Hope as a strategy.
Most people rely on their will power to stick to a new habit. No wonder new year resolutions don’t even last a few weeks. We have all set resolutions to get fit, study harder, spend more time with family, travel more, start a business and we clock another year without doing any of it.
How can we create and sustain change? How do we set our self up to succeed ? If will power does  not work, then what works ?
Continue reading The Four Phases of Successful Habit Building !!
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.
Do you know of a company that…
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
Have you wondered “I’ve been working for nearly a decade or more now. How is it that my Zero Balance Salary account is stuck forever at that ‘Zero Balance'”
“I started my career with a salary close to what my dad retired with, and in spite of all the generous increments and all these years of hard work I’ll probably own nothing more than what he did when he retired and to top it all I don’t even have a pension”
In his book The Checklist Manifesto
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.
