Life is far from perfect. Lets make it rock!

In the past few days, I have been my powerful self. I have refused to accept that things are impossible and I am just beginning to realize what being true to your purpose is.

But if I take the holistic picture, life is still a breakdown. I am not meeting my friends or speaking to my family, regularly. I am not exercising, neither am I waking up at 5. I am not keeping my house spic and span. Not washing my clothes regularly and almost nothing is planned. I am not reading either.

Ok, so I put all these things together in my life from tomorrow onwards.

Truly converting all my ORs to ANDs.

There are a lot things that I had said I’ll do by the weekend.

• Doing 100 volumes in sales and recruiting 1 person in my team by tomorrow 3PM. I did only 66 volumes and haven’t recruited anyone yet! But I have time till 3PM
• Putting up the Startup Pains research website. (This will be done tomorrow)
• Interviewing 2 people. This again will be done by tomorrow.
• Memorizing my dialogs. Tough, but I have to memorize them by tomorrow.
• Inviting 15 people for my workday.
• Fixing the date for an HILF and a CILF. I am not enrolled to making this happen.

Freaks, its too much.

And I’ll make all of this and the ones above it happen tomorrow, and onwards.

I already have a headache imagining how seemingly tough it looks. This is when I shall grow.

—-

A few journal entries,

Did my rehearsals today. Not sure how good or bad they were. I forgot my dialogs left, right and center

Met my college buddy Siddharth Banerjee today after a long long time. He is like a family to me. It felt awesome. Got calls from Krishna and Prateek, both came as a surprise. Felt real fortunate in life!

Yet another sexy new possibility – Theater!

It was Aashish who called me up at 10 in the morning yesterday saying that their troupe is short of 1 guy for their play – “The Death of a Salesman”. He asked if I was interested, I immediately said YES. I went gave an audition and I got selected.

I had done a couple of plays in my school. I was the best actor in the Hindi play and I forgot my dialog in the English play!

I have to be truly extraordinary to make it to the rehearsals though. Been heavily out integrity in terms of work. I have at least 20 items in my to do list, stuff that I should have done by now but haven’t.

In fact, I was about to inform Aashish of my inability to participate because I had a lot of other work to be done. But when I thought for it a little more, I realized that what I was thinking was – ‘I am not good enough to manage all these things together‘. I dropped the conversation and said ‘hell, I am‘.

I have invented a sexy new possibility of replacing all the ORs of my life with ANDs. That is, I usually say, I can either do this OR do that. What I have taken on is, to do this AND that. All you need to have, to do this , is -

• Integrity (honoring your word),
• Existence Mechanism (Reminders in phone and daily/weekly/monthly planning),
• Relationships (ability to make powerful requests) and
• Powerful Communication.

Thats all it takes.

–

Wow! I had always imagined doing theater in Bangalore. That is happening!

Art is happening.

Dance is next!

A bit about my awesome Coachees at Landmark SELP

I am assisting in Landmark Education as a Self Expression and Leadership Program Coach. I am so inspired by my coachees! I have 5 coachees.

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 salute you guys.

Thanks for enriching my life with your presence.

Truckloads of Love,

Amit Singh

The most effective habit!

We are always taking actions even if it doesn’t look like.

For example if I want to earn 30,000 bucks this month. This is my goal. Then every moment I have the choice to take actions that take me towards these goals or to take actions that take me away from them. As Mark Joyner says, “There is no such things as procrastination and laziness. These words are based on an assumption there is no action involved”. But an action like lying down on the bed, dreaming about your goals is also an action. An ineffective action, but an action it is. The impact of the action is that dreaming about my goal rather than working on it is gonna bring stress in my life. The stress will reduce my energy levels and in turn my goal-fulfilling capacity.

So the most effective habit that I can ever build is – “To take actions that take me closer to my target instead of taking actions that take me farther away from them“.

A corollary is – “To take actions that increase my power rather than to take action that decrease my power“.

These two habits have been copied from Joyner’s Simpleology 101 program.

This habit in essence is “the ability to take the hard right instead of the easy wrong“. Every time I take a strengthening decision, I reach closer to my goals. Also it becomes easier for me to take a strengthening decision again. Similarly, every time I take a weakening decision, I move farther away from my goals and my ability to take a strengthening decision becomes harder.

The interesting thing is, we are making this choice all the time. At any specific point of time, we can answer the question – “Is doing whatever I am doing right now (or about to start), taking me (gonna take me) closer to my goal or farther away from my goal”. This question is valid all the time.

I gotta make this habit the no 1 habit in my life. It has to be practiced moment by moment. And I am all charged up to follow it through.

Inspired by this habit I am taking on taking strengthening decisions over the following 3 habits of mine :-

1. Watching Porn. Nothing wrong in it objectively, but I somehow have a 1 to 1 correspondence between watching porn and depression . I take on saying no, every time the urge comes.
2. Over sleeping. When the going gets tough, I get sleeping.
3. Not working my plan. I have built this good habit of planning my work. And this bad habit of not working my plan. I will start taking the strengthening decision of working my plan every time I plan it. And learning from experiences every time I fail to work it out.

Thats it.

So I have a goal of waking up at 5 AM every morning. And its already 12.50 now, so I gotta take the strengthening decision of hitting the sack fast.

This post took me 19 minutes to write. I had set a goal of completing it in 7 minutes. It does not qualify to be a bullet post. Lesson learned – “Always think of what to write before setting the target to complete the post”.