Life in Bangalore

So the 2012 Akshaya Tritiya came and went…you would need to give it to the ingenuity of the marketing talent of Indian jewellers who converted this auspicious day where they laugh all the way to the bank at the cost of the customers breaking into their bank. Reports suggest that the Jewellers were a disappointed lot this year as they could not maintain the 20% YoY growth in the Akshaya Tritiya sales owing to the high price of Gold !!! While reams and reams have been written by MBA whiz kids about “Is Gold an asset class for Investment?” ,this question is a “no-brainer” in India. “The Missus Association of India” (with support from Jewellers Association of India) have passed a resolution judging the Gold as the indisputable asset class.This resolution is not based on the “number-crunching” by the MBA Whiz kids, but solely based on the emotional intelligence of the Missus Association questioning the “husbands association” with the eternal question “What have I gained in my life afte

  Flow  refers to the   mental state   in which a person in an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity. I am enamored by the concept of “Flow” even though I have to admit my experience with Flow have been more due to the lack of it rather than the state of attaining it.                 We all must of encountered the state of flow at one point or the other. A common example is say we are playing a favorite game when we have deep concentration in the limited activity of playing the game so much so that we have a distorted sense of time that just passed. Bruce Lee, advocates the need for fluidity or the state of Flow as “Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water my friend.” Edward de Bon

Today I completed writing 100 posts in my blog. Without going into an exercise of self-aggrandizement, at the very least I feel satisfied. This sense of satisfaction is because, earlier, I had a self-doubt over my ability to generate Content frequently. Now I am convinced that I am creative enough to produce content. I feel like a retiring cricketer who says “ I never thought I would last this long”. Readers, No don’t get excited !!! I am not writing the epitaph yet… There are host of things to improve in my blog. The most important being 1)     Quality of the posts: I need to definitely improve the quality of my posts. When I read it every time I see some room for improvement 2)     Frequency of the posts: My sheer laziness results in missing the postings too often 3)     Advertisement : I need to do some more advertisement (without being invasive) to gather more traffic 4)     Networking with other bloggers 5)     Getting experts to write a guest post in my blog

Most of us have habits consciously or otherwise be it Internet surfing, Television watching, Chatting with friends, Reading books and so on. Richard Koch, in his book “The 80/20 Way” advocates that we need to identify and practice what he calls the High life time pay-off habits . These are the habits whose benefits are many times the effort it takes to do them. Some of the examples of High life time pay-off habits are: Habit:    Daily exercise Payoff:  Much better health, more attractive body, feeling great Habit:    Daily intellectual exercise Payoff:  Keep alert, increase intelligence, enjoy thinking Habit:    Doing one altruistic act a day Payoff: Makes you happy Habit:    Meditating or quiet thinking each day Payoff:  Clear mental clutter, make better decisions Habit:    Always give praise or thanks where possible Payoff:  Makes other person and you feel good Habit:    Save and invest 10 percent of income Payoff:  A future free of money worries Habit:  

One of the key learning that I got from from Leo Babauta  (  http://zenhabits.net/ )   is that we need to cultivate the habit of “Developing Habits” (in a good sense)  to accomplish anything. Most of the New Year resolutions fall through the crack as early as the second week of January because they were merely words on a paper and not an Habit. In any sphere of our life, be it Personal Health, Personal Finance or Skill development it needs to be integrated into our daily life to see the continuous improvement. So the key step is to cultivate the Habit. The only rule for forming an habit is : Think Big …but  Start Small.  Starting    is the key. You may wonder about why we need to start small…For ex., Your goal may to develop a better health through Jogging for ½ hour everyday… but if you are planning to blast yourself with 30 minutes of Jogging on Day One…Sorry …you are not going to do it. It is just going to leave you out of breath. So you want to just start with 5 minutes or a

As they say, “Don’t come to me with problems, come with  solutions”. One of the much appreciated skill for Individual in the Corporate World is the Problem Solving skill. Following are steps that I recommend towards solving problems 1)       Don’t Panic : This is easier said than done nevertheless the most important requirement. Meditate…Follow your breath movement as you inhale and exhale for at least for 2 minutes 2)       Break down the bigger problem into smaller problems :  If the problem is too big or complex, chunk into smaller problems to a proportion that can be handled 3)       Brainstorm for all the solutions: Jot down all the possible solutions.Don’t worry about the feasibility yet. This step should be continued even during the solve phase 4)       Solve each smaller problem one at a time: Based on the brainstorming, solve each of the sub-problems 5)       Integrate the solutions of smaller problem to solve the bigger problem: Finally integrate the so