I went yesterday to “complete” with V. It was a good meeting.
Some lessons that I learnt are:-
1. There is always scope for misunderstanding.
2. Its good to complete and leave everyone complete. Misunderstandings only drain our power.
I’ll write a much longer post about my learnings from my entrepreneurial journey so far. That would be a loooong post. But for now, I just wanna update that life is cool at my end.
I have started doing some freelance work. Have my hands full. Gives me $$ (been such a long time) and life is comfortable. I finally purchased a Laptop and a Digicam and went on a holiday too.
Have done all kinds of interesting work so far, Head Hunting, Business Arbitrarge, Web Design and Development, Business Development, Online Marketing Strategy Consulting and Social Media Marketing. Not bad, I say! I am actually a “jack of all”. They say that a good thing would be to be “king of one/some” but I am fine this way. As an entrepreneur I want to be a generalist. I’ll hire the specialists. But I should know enough to understand if the specialist is bullshitting me!
Am starting a small Web Design and SMM firm. Already have a good deal of orders. Need to execute them. This time no partnership.
I have also taken on being “fun”. I am so frikin serious in life and so significant. I am getting over it, and thats one of the coolest things thats happened off late.
Another post to tell about M, N and U with whom I have moved out. M is like a mum to me. Literally treats me like her kid. She has an extraordinary commitment for me. I am unable to express either my love or my gratitude to her.
I am planning to earn a scholarship to do an MBA from Stanford. Thats my dream school. Planning to apply in Fall 2010. The best part of moving out on my own is that I have had time to introspect and create a new dimension to my future.
The past couple of weeks have been a phenomenal experience for me. For the first time in my life I confronted the question “What if I fail?”. For anyone other than me, it would be a very vague question. But for me its pretty straight forward – “Not being able to fulfill on the goals that I have listed down in my dream list”. I am a dreamer. I think big. I BELIEVE that we are here to shine, to experience everything that the world has to offer. I don’t want to live a life of wants. I want to be a creator, a creator of something from nothing, a creator of my destiny.
These 2 weeks, I have come to understand why my loved ones are so concerned about what I am doing. [Quit my job, tried my hand at many things for a while, working on a startup from which I am evidently not making any money]. Seriously, I have gotten their concern.
Until now, I was so damn sure of myself that I never even once considered “Not being able to accomplish my dreams”. I have been courageous enough to actually unabashedly share them with whoever I click with.
But these past few days, I have confronted a lot of stuff. I won’t go overboard by calling them “harsh realities”, but they definitely made me feel so miserable that I didn’t feel like eating food for days and escaping from everything that I am doing. All my responsibilities (most of them). And sleeping it out to avoid facing the truth.
Well there is no real truth, only perspectives. But the perspective that I was choosing to push under the carpet was:-
Its been 11 months since I have quit my job and I have only earned some 40K Rs so far. I have borrowed money and asked my dad to help out on multiple occasions. And even right now, I have no assured form of income.
In my perspective, I was doing great.
I got multiple job offers (one of them payed me more than 2times my previous salary), 3 people approached me to start a startup with them, I got ownership of a startup even though I didn’t have the capital to invest on the same, I almost certainly got business contracts worth a couple of crores etc etc.
You know there are times when you work hard for something with only 1 fuel, “belief”. When these kinda things fail, then you feel real low. You question yourself and your abilities. It becomes all the more tough when there are people waiting to catch hold of you and tell you how foolish you have been for not taking their advice earlier. Its this kind of a feeling that I went through and seriously considered QUITING as an entrepreneur. Taking up a job – probably one that would earn me some respect in the eyes of those who measure your success by your “Compensation Package”, probably do an MBA from an IIM and earn big bucks, clear myself of my financial liabilities and then become an entrepreneur again. This would take a few years at least.
But no baby no, I ain’t quiting. I went through the dumps. I understood how people feel when they say “Whats wrong with you”. (Its just their way of expressing, I love you, I am concerned about you) And I appreciate the fact that I realized all this.
Entrepreneurship is a game of creating wealth doing something that you are passionate about. And I am here to play this game and win it. I swear, in 5 years time, I am gonna have the skills to be able to create wealth and freedom anywhere, anytime.
Here is a video that I absolutely loved. It invoked in me the spirit to do whatever it takes to accomplish what I want. To give it the best of what I have got!
A majority of my initiatives didn’t work out. And I started living inside this conversation called – “I am a failure”. But in reality, I guess its just that I am not on track with my targets.
Life is fun. I saw this wonderful video on YouTube! It really cheered me up.
More often than not, people are not able to comprehend why I am doing what I am doing. I don’t want to explain anything to them either. I want my actions to do the talking, but off late, my actions have not spoken much and I have had to give a lot of explanations to people for my supposed “inability to make money”. This video really pepped me up. And even though I am a little spaced out right now, I am all set to kick some solid ass in the days to come.
There are so many highs and lows that I have seen this month!
The Lows,
I break my resolution to read 5 books every month.
I break my habit of waking up at 5am every month.
I stopped planning my work
I became careless about my eating habits again. There are few days when I have my breakfast. Often skip a meal.
I quit exercising
I quit yoga
I quit meditation
My house started getting untidy again
I don’t read my goals daily
I didn’t meet my financial targets
I quit painting
The Highs,
I became absolutely unstoppable towards my entrepreneurship centric projects
I made money! Finally!
I got the offer to revamp a dead organization as an entrepreneur with limited liabilities.
Impressed with my proactive attitude, the company’s founder asked me to become a director in the company instead of my previous role as an adviser. Its a big honor and privilege for me to be regarded to highly.
My coachees at Landmark love me and we are contributing to each others’ lives. Its a very enriching experience
I developed alliances with several people and companies.
I am close to building a team that will create a revolutionary book.
Well there are a lot of gaps in life right now. I would like to do everything that I want to do. And do it all together. I gotta grow massively as a human being to make everything happen together.
Today is the 3rd of June.
Today I take on being an absolutely un-stoppable person. I will not succumb to my circumstances, I’ll be their creator instead.
I will restart megaliving from tomorrow onwards and also restart simple.ology. I have to build a lot of habits before I take on my role as an entrepreneur. I have time till July 21st. And I’ll make it happen.
I also take on writing a blog entry every night. I want to document my growth through these times. I would love to read these pages sometime in the future!
Its a big privilege to be an SELP coach. You’ve got to be responsible. You’ve got to honor what you say. And all this becomes all the more enjoyable when the people whom you coach play the same game as you are playing. When I did the program, I was full of reasons for not completing my homework, coming late etc etc. But my coachees aren’t. They DO honor their word. They are absolutely unreasonable with themselves.
Everything in life becomes very easy when we do what we say we would do at the time when we said we will do it. Each of these guys and gals, are pretty much in route to reaching that stage. For instance, today, each of them (barring Madhavi who is out of station), came on time and with their homework complete. This makes life just so easy. We can invest our time in growing rather than addressing why being out-integrity keeps us from growing.
Besides, they inspire me to take on living my life just as powerfully. To plan my work and work my plan. To generate my present and future free from the constraints of the past. To get a ‘yes’ from people, no matter what the situation.
I am sure I’d come back years later and read it and smile again.
Today was a harsh day! Every single thing I tried to earn out of my hobbies – failed. Or rather I did not give my heart and soul to achieving success. I firmly believe in the fact that, we create our destinies and everything that looks ambitious initially, becomes downright practical if you focus your attention and energy into making it happen.
However, I am not that great at FOCUSing yet! In fact I have realized that “Lack of focus” is my biggest impediment to success.
May is about to come and I don’t have the resources to last it. In the midst of a heartache, I chose to pick up a job again. I’ll give my final burst to earning from my hobbies till 15th of May, and if I am still broke, I’ll pick up a job.
This journey has not ended yet, so I will not jot down everything that I have learned from it. But I do wanna acknowledge the tremendous amount of good that it has done to my psyche. Man, I am so glad that I got this chance to experience life and do all the wacky things that I have done in the past 4 months.
I have discovered several mental blocks, attitudes and fixed ways of being that stop me in life! I have also realized that getting a job and sticking to it is the easiest thing one can do in life. But thats a sure shot way to mediocrity as well. I quit my job to live a life I love, and being in the rat race is actually 1/(Living a Life I Love). But none the less! There is something called Stomach as well
Freak yar! I am not turning so negative!
I’ll fucking make my way out of this negativity business.
I declare – By May 15th I would be having 10,000 bucks in my Bank Account. Earned by me without writing any code.
Explore the basics. Eg, I should know the basics of the Internet. If I want to understand or explain something, I should be able to break it down to the basics.
Another is the habit of imagining things. I would like to be able to imagine the sketches that I am making. I would also like to be able to imagine abstract pictures of the concepts that I am studying. The way Feynman did.
Another habit is the habit of persistence. Basically a habit of deciding to do something and sticking to it till the end. It also means seeing things to completion. The sheer joy of seeing things that I once imagined as complete. Along with this habit comes the responsibility of carefully setting a target. It should be something that I am absolutely inspired to follow.
4. Doing and learning from Simpleology.This will help me build the all important habit of hitting my target.
Some of the goals that I have are :-
1. Earning 60k in the month of April. (Seems unlikely) {Now that I am at the end of April, I have absolutely failed to come anywhere near to the 60k mark. 10k is possible if I slog till 30th.}
2. Earning 1lk in the month of July. Another unlikely possibility.
3. Having real fun! all the time. Basically, right now I have the opportunity to have fun working with the inmates of a jail with Mumma. Doing cool things like giving personality development courses at Chatarpur. Well, in my life to be, its these kind of things that will excite me the most. Just what is it right now that stops me from enjoying all this? Well I guess, its the habit of not doing my things on time. If I conduct myself in such a way that I have taken care of all the things that I need to do, in the morning itself and am free to do anything I please during daytime, this problem won’t be there. 1 life baby, live it!
Some other random thoughts that are coming to my mind are :-
· What to do about my website?
·Basically I gotta build this habit of planning my day every morning, after having a steady look at my goals. And then work my plan with integrity. Yeah, working my plan . This way I’ll be able to generate enough free time to take care of the random activities that keep happening.
So what can my daily routine be like???
Review the goals
Make a list of things that I wanna do today
Distribute them in different time slots and plan the day
Work the plan the rest of the day.
Yeah this one looks much better.
Wow! looks like I screwed up the CSS of this template!
Just came back from my SELP. And I am in a wonderful frame of mind.
There is this thought that I have been mulling over for quite some time. Had I achieved everything that I wanted to achieve by this point of time in my life, would I have been living the same way as I do? The obvious answer is NO. Similarly, if I ask this question 1 year hence or 2 years or 3 years henceforth, I’ll still get NO as the answer. The answer is gonna be NO for the rest of my life, because as normal human beings we are never satisfied with our achievements.
This thought sounded very silly to me. You know, I wanna live the rest of my life in such a way, that I can answer the question and say YES! So the answer I came up with is, I’ll start doing all the things that I think I’ll do if I were absolutely accomplished. (Of course money plays a major spoilsport here, but its ok).
So, I were absolutely accomplished at this point of time in my life -
I’d be Going for Trekking and river rafting etc
I’d be Going eat out with strangers
I’d be Running a Marathon
I’d be Gazing at the stars doing nothing really
I’d be not worrying about making money and solving algorithmic puzzles for fun
I’d be studying Web APIs and building mashups
I’d be speaking regularly to my family members and girl friend
I’d be waking up with a smile and ready to take the world with me for a ride
I’d be doing my bit for the community
I’d be donating a part of my money for Charity
I’d be exercising regularly and building my 6 pack
I’d be building my own Startup and making it a big success
I’d be someone inspiring people to take on living a life of their dreams
I’d be reading some 5-10 books every month
Ok, I guess I am purposely not writing things that my current broke state can’t afford. I’ll drop the conversation in my head,
I’d be partying a hell of a lot!
I’d be salsa and all
I’d be having my Mac Book Pro and a sexy mobile phone always by my side
I’d be gifting various tours to my sister
I’d be buying a lot of good stuff for my family and friends
I’d be owning a cool sports bike
Man there is a shitload of cool things I’d be doing. Now this kind of life inspires me!
This is what I am taking on!
To hell with the constraints the circumstances are posing on me! I create my circumstances and not visa versa!
I came back recently from my looooong vacation. I went to my home town – Bhopal (MP) and also visited my Sister in Kota (Rajasthan). Man, this has been such a rocking vacation. I have never ever spent so much quality family time in the past decade. Post Landmark, my entire way of looking at life has transformed. Awesome! Truckloads of fun!
I read about 20 books in those 2 months. I will share a few things from my activities there in the days to come. Basically I wrote a few posts for my blog which I nicely forgot at home. Once I get them, I’ll post them. A few of the interesting books were – The Hitchhikers’ (complete Trilogy in 4 parts), The Rainmaker, Just For Fun and a few not so interesting ones.
But the coolest thing is that I am back and I am kicking. I have become a Coach in SELP and life is super sexy.
Here comes another bullet post. I’ll finish writing this within 7 minutes.
A whole new possibility came to my mind today when I was thinking of my Ma’am. (Mrs Kamal Baduni. My teacher from APS Dagshai who is just like a mother to me). I anyways think of her a few times every week! But this time I thought of going and staying with her. I was thinking about going home and thought it would be so wonderful if I could stay with her also!
Thinking of the same a wonderful new possibility came to my mind. How about traveling the country staying with my friends and family all the time! Sounds great doesn’t it? There are a few hitches though. 1 its not practical. Not the travel part of it but the money part of it. If I am not earning then the experience will be more painful than fun for me.
So the next imp question is – “How do I earn money while consistently being on the move?”. Well there are many ways.
I can become a blogger. This blog + my yet to be started tech blog + my handwriting analysis website can fetch me sufficient money.
Also I can conduct – Handwriting Analysis workshops and do some live analysis in malls for fun. This way I can earn money.
The next problem is Computer! I don’t have a laptop yet and I would need one. Anyways I have kept “Buying a laptop and a sexy cell phone” in this years targets. I just have to focus on buying it soon enough.
So how much money should I earn every month such that I can easily go and have fun? I guess 40k a month will be sufficient.
Buttttt… What about my entrepreneural dreams? Well, this is a tough question. I’ll need some time to work it out.
But the possibility is wonderful!
Aha.. I have taken 11 minutes already. Its gonna take me another minute to put the tags and publish. But good I am improving on writing bullet posts!
(been such a long time) and life is comfortable. I finally purchased a Laptop and a Digicam and went on a holiday too.
