Flesh your words up.

I often say big ambitious things and make commitments which I never fulfill. This scares me a lot, I’m scared of my words not matching with my action.

I try to achieve a balance between what I say and what I do. But I almost always fall short of what I promised or said I would deliver. This is probably because I don’t put enough logic and thinking when I say things. Or maybe my action just isn’t up to the mark.

Actually both of them are true. So how do I fix this ? Two ways:

1. Start saying less ambitious things.

OR

2. Make the action come upto the level of words.

The former would require me to think logically before I speak. But I like my illogical overambitious aiming-for-the-sky self. I’ll go with the other approach of trying to flesh my words up, which means doing work which does good justice to what I say.

This way I create high standards of performance against which I can compare my actual output. It is almost always much lesser than what I’d said but much bigger than what I’d have normally delivered.

This approach of fleshing our words up is something we all must learn. To live upto the promises we make and holding ourselves accountable to our own words.

Once you let your words be your boss. You transform into the ultimate version of yourself.

For eg. When I decided to write 1 blog a day, I didn’t know how I’ll do it. But I went out and made sort of announcement to everyone that I’ll write 1 blog a day. Till today I’m trying to keep up with those illogical overambitious words and we have come a far way.

Be overambitious in your what you say and then put everything in fleshing those words up.

-ChoubeySahab

We are slaves of what we know.

Whatever we are today is because of what we were taught. My parents taught me to greet every elder with “namaste” with folded arms. Fast forward to today, my hands automatically fold up to greet an elder. I don’t see most others doing it.

Others just wish elders as if they are their friends. Which is fine because that’s what was taught to them. While my parents almost coded into me to use both my hands to wish an elder.

The point I’m trying to emphasize here is that we’re coded or programmed into the way we are today, by our parents. They dictate what is our natural behavior towards people. This is because they are the ones who we learn from all our lives.

From learning a language after being born to learning how to effectively use the language to communicate. We learnt it all from them.

What we are today is simply what surroundings we’ve been in since our childhood. All our childhoods were different in different ways which makes us all so different.

There are 2 possibilities:

1. You like what your parents have made you.

2. You don’t like it much.

If it’s the former I’m happy for you and your parents. But if it’s the latter, guess what I’m happy for you again because you know that there are things in you which could be better. The fact that you know what all needs to get better makes you a self aware person.

The good thing is as you grow older, you get to control more and more of how you shape up. You can choose your surroundings (friends), inspiration and what you read/know.

If you don’t like certain things about yourself. Trust me, you’ve got ample time and capability to make it what it should be.

You can now code your systems programme. On one hand it feels really amazing but on the other it’s a major responsibility to take charge of your ownself and shape yourself into a person whom you’ll love more than anyone else in the world.

Take charge of how you shape yourself from here on and you’ll be just what you want be.

-ChoubeySahab

Trim your ego.

Yeah ego is much like hair. It grows with time, even if you don’t want it to. After a while it starts looking shabby before you chop off the extra hair and start looking good again.

But the difficulty here is that most people won’t tell you that you’ve started to look shabby and a haircut is what you need. You’ll need to figure this out yourself when you look in the mirror everyday.

Same works for your ego. Noone tells you that it’s bigger than requirement and needs to be trimmed. You’ve to look for this into your own self.

This again is not easy to do. We think very highly of ourselves. Finding flaws in ones own approach towards life and people is nothing close to easy.

This is why self awareness, which sounds simple to achieve, is something 95% of us haven’t achieved and aren’t even trying to achieve. Do you know what things make you angry and what things don’t? Has your self respect converted to your ego?

When I ask myself these, I get to know that it’s time I need to trim my ego. I didn’t do anything for it to grow but as I told you, it’s like hair.

But wait, how do you trim ego? Go straight down and apologize to people to whom you think, you were egoistic. Tell them that you acknowledge that your ego hair had grown too long and had to be trimmed. Most will understand and maybe they try to take a lesson or two from you on how they also need to cut their ego hair from time to time. It can make them realize that they look shabby and no one actually told them about it.

I want you to go look into the mirror right now and see if your ego hair has grown too long and is making you look shabby. I’m sure you need a good haircut.

-ChoubeySahab

What are Monday blues?

Ever heard of this term. If no then I’m sure you must have experienced it at some point. Monday blues refers to the slight sadness due to the start of a new workweek.

Much like how we feel good on a Friday evening about a weekend. Similarly the start of a new week gets most of us sad.

You can be in school, college or working, Monday blues will certainly haunt you. This is simply because we don’t like doing what we “have to” do and weekend offers us the freedom to do what we “want to” do.

This is interesting. The society doesn’t let us perform as per our whims but it allocates us work as per what it wants from us. It needs workers in bigger numbers than leaders. So it programs all to become workers and learn to follow rules.

Then we end up feeling sad for being programmed by the society and we feel sad for what we have to do for an entire week. Hence, the Monday blues.

In a survey, it was found that 9.5 out of 10 individuals have felt this at the start of a week.

Apparently today is Monday. Do you feel sad about it that you have to work yourself through Tuesday then Wednesday then Thursday then Friday and if you’re extra lucky then a working Saturday.

I got your back. May God give you the energy to go through all this. You’ve done it in the past, you most certainly can go through it again. Kick out the monday blues and get to work.

-ChoubeySahab

Attention economy

Your attention is the most valuable commodity in the digital age. It is something all digital Giants are fighting for.

On rough average a person stays up 18 hours a day. Out of which he is attentive for only a few hours. In today’s day and age, we utilize most of these attentive hours on our phones.

This is why our parents have problems with us remaining glued to our devices and having little concern for what’s going around. Has it ever happened to you that your mother told you to do something but you were too busy with your phone that you didn’t listen to her but still nodded your head as if you heard it all. But later when she scolds you for not doing the work despite being told, you’re left wondering when did she tell you to do this work.

I’m pretty sure this must have happened with most of you. The worst is when my mother tells me to watch the milk while it’s on the stove to boil. It’s almost certain to fall down. I don’t know why she still trusts me with all this despite knowing that the chances of me messing things up are so high.

But the main point here being that our attention has shifted from the real world to the devices you’re currently holding in our hands. This attention is limited to a few hours a day and whatever is limited carries value. So your attention is valuable.

This is the reason why you see ads in between YouTube videos, simply to get your valuable attention. It is profitable for the company to do so but for you it just breaks your attention and takes it to something entirely unrelated to what you are interested in. Like a zomato ad playing in between a astro-physics video.

This is the reason why our attention spans are falling at an alarming rate. Ads hinder our attention spans. This is profitable for internet companies but not so much for us. We have to watch ads in return for watching YouTube videos for free.

We need to realize that the fight for our valuable attention is intense among the internet companies. But they value our attention worth much less than what it is actually worth.

What you pay attention to decides what mindset you carry. It shapes your thoughts. It builds your identity.

You better start paying attention to what deserves your attention than what does not because it’s the most valuable resource you own in today’s age.

Also, if you’ve noticed, we never “give” attention instead we “pay” attention. It’s like a currency we need to learn to spend wisely.

-ChoubeySahab

Are early mornings really helpful?

Indian parents keep pushing their children to wake up early. But does it really help waking up early or is it just fancy?

I have been waking up early for quite a few days now. Which makes me somewhat qualified to answer this question.

One thing that is the most important to make your early mornings productive is to have a pre-determined task to accomplish. If you just randomly wake up early someday and start thinking what to do then you’ll almost certainly go back to sleep again without doing anything.

Okay but pre-determining a task isn’t much difficult to do. What’s difficult is actually waking up? This is because our sleep schedules are programmed in a certain way and trying to wake up early means shifting that sleep schedule. Like all things, our body resists change too. Making it difficult to wake up early.

There are different ways which work for different people in getting them up from bed early. I won’t suggest any, you can simply Google and find tons of it there.

Initially it would be difficult. But as days go by, you’ll notice yourself getting comfortable with the early mornings. You’ll notice the peace you get in that part of the day which you can’t get in any other part.

If you say that peace can be found at late nights as well. Sure it can be but your brain is already tired during the night when compared to the morning. This helps you utilize that peace better in the morning.

In my opinion, early mornings are the best time to read and write. You have a more receptive mind at this time than any other part of the day.

Give it a shot by trying to do it for 3 days on a trot and see if it works for you.

Don’t forget to sleep on time when trying to do this else this can lead to lack of sleep. Wish you luck with this early morning thing!

-ChoubeySahab

Unpaid internship. Worth it?

To answer this, let’s first look at what all an internship can offer. It can offer exposure, money and a few perks.

Whatever internship you take up, exposure is almost certainly something you’ll get. It’s the quality of exposure that differs. You get to know a lot of new things about the job and more than that you get to know what is it like to work in an office and how people conduct themselves.

Then comes the money part of it. An internship may be paid or unpaid. Here you need to take a good hard look at what other than money is the company offering. Are you getting to work in exactly the job you’d want for yourself? Can this internship help you come in contact with some quality experienced professionals from your field from whom you can learn a lot? and does the company have a big name in the industry? All these factors are to be looked into whenever an unpaid internship is offered.

If it fulfills even 2 of the 3 questions I just mentioned. I think it is worth working for this company even if it’s without pay.

Lastly, coming to the perks part of it. Which is pretty lucrative when it is a startup company. They offer you all day workspace snacks. You can play table football at office when you get bored. You can sit on a bean bag and work. All this also plays a major role in deciding on an internship. The fact that our generation values comfort over anything else, makes this an important aspect of an internship.

Concluding this, in my view, an internship has a lot more to offer than money. The stage of career when a person does internships is early in their career. So exposure should be the primary factor you look for when taking an offer. Money will come in larger amounts if you choose exposure at the internship stage.

-ChoubeySahab

Stan Lee- A true legend

“I used to be embarrassed because I was just a comic-book writer while other people were building bridges or going on to medical careers. And then I began to realize: entertainment is one of the most important things in people’s lives. Without it they might go off the deep end. I feel that if you’re able to entertain people, you’re doing a good thing.”

Those are the words by Stanley Martin Lieber (his original name), the most loved man of the youth and children across the globe.

The quote above has a lot to learn from. The society we live in today isn’t much different from the one he grew up in. Even today we have ideal professions. If today someone tells me that he/she wants to become a comic writer, I would be surprised.

The times haven’t changed much, which makes it important for us to take inspiration from the man himself. He disrupted the whole comic industry with one thing that we all possess. That is imagination.

Most of all superheroes that we admire today took birth in his imagination. Pursuing imagination as a career seems a bit absurd. But if this man would not have taken the not-so-ideal path then I only wonder who would have produced the kind of entertainment that he did.

I drive a ton of inspiration from him whenever I do something that isn’t considered normal. I tell myself that maybe it’s that unexplored path that contains the secret to my success.

Success doesn’t have a given path to follow. One may find it in unexpected places. Like Stan Lee found it in his comics. The respect and love his comics have earned him will last him centuries even after his death.

Look for where your success lies. Don’t look to be in the ideal profession. Do what you love the most and be the best at it. That’s how simple yet hard success is in reality.

-ChoubeySahab

Entitlement, exceptionalism promoted through media.

This has to do with how we all aspire to be there at the top and no one really knows and appreciates simplicity. Media covers those who are entitled and exceptional in what they do but they romanticize the concept of being up there.

Media shows the beautiful side of these people’s lives. They don’t show how away from simple their lives are. They don’t tell you how abnormally different their lives are to normal people. What seems easy to you, feels like a previlige to them. Like going out with family for shopping without people giving you (irritating) attention. All you want to do is spend some good time with family but that is a luxury for them.

Media makes us all believe that entitlement feels good. But in reality it’s nothing more than a different experience.

An experience away from normality and simplicity. I personally would think a thousand times before bartering my normal lifestyle with anything else. Though even I wish to be exceptional but I don’t want that glam life. I don’t want people hovering around me all day long to get a picture clicked.

All that takes away my simple life. You feel special for a while but after a while this lifestyle is nothing short of an burden. A clear departure from a normal person’s life.

It’s time that we all collectively stop having beautiful view of the life of those at the top. Because it’s nothing better than our lives, just different. Maybe even worse.

-ChoubeySahab

Faces behind a face.

We all have our role models. People whom we greatly admire and want to become like. But do we ever think about the fact that there were several people without the help of whom this person wouldn’t be where he is at today.

Consider Nobel prize winners. The scientists who win this prize almost always have a team working on the discovery/invention.

But it is the individual who gets awarded. It is the individual who gets to be our role model, not the whole team. It’s time we start acknowledging that a person can’t achieve much on his own without any assistance from someone else or a team.

The one thing we never take away from our role models is the importance of collective work. The ability to work with people to achieve better results.

It is one extremely important skill you should know in order to be called successful someday.

We celebrate individual successes and hence even our role models are individuals. While what needs to be admired about them all is their skill to work with a team to achieve what they have achieved now.

Don’t fall into the trap of know it all and and do it all. Find the right people to work with you on a mission. Because individuals fight small battles, if you are in for a big fight then you’ll need an army.

Remember that there are several faces behind every face that we know and admire. Just a handful of them get acknowledged. All those faces are important because without them the few faces that we look up to won’t be there.

-ChoubeySahab