If we look at our lifestyle now, we own things even a king couldn’t dream about a century ago. A nice air-conditioned house, a car to ride along smoothly , cool , classy iphones and so many other luxuries. Yet, we are still unhappy. We complain and get frustrated a lot.. about the “traffic” , “cellphone calls dropping”, “Nasty plane travel” and many other things.
We get impatient if our flight gets late… can you imagine getting from one place to another without the invention of airplanes?
We get upset when our computer does not respond within 10 seconds…. can you imagine how productive it would be without one?
We get annoyed when the elevator is too slow… can you imagine how slow (and not to mention tiring!) it would be to climb those 45 stories?
You can see where I am going with this… We are Very Lucky to be in this age rather than be in an era where there were no flights, no ATM’s ,no cellphones.. Once we take this view.. that we are lucky to be living in these times, we begin to appreciate all the advances in our technology and be grateful for them. When we take this point of view that we are lucky to enjoy these luxuries, we begin to see past our immediate frustrations and with this way of thinking, we may find that ever elusive happiness!
Tools fundamentally increase our capacity. As entrepreneurs, business owners, managers and individual contributors, we need to move past our small frustrations and ‘ideal scenarios’ while dealing with tools and technology we use in our everyday work so that we can appreciate how far we have come and see the blessings that these really are!
This light-hearted, humorous video below shows how “bad” it was just a few year ago and how people “complain” about the present technologies rather than enjoy the marvelous advances in technology.
If we examine our life, we have some areas which are not the way we want them to be. For example, we want to move ahead in our career but we are stuck at the same position, Things don’t happen the way we want them to happen. Why?, It is because we have not genuinely accepted this as a problem and have not taken full responsibility for it. We may think we took responsibility but we don’t. The good news is it is very easy to find out if we are genuinely taking responsibility and the test is rooted in action. The test is simply to notice if we are acting or reacting. The former resides in the land of ‘taking responsibility’ and the latter does not.
In reading about countless successful people, I have noticed that they move things forward to produce the situations they want.
In other words they become a “cause in the matter” i.e they cause things to happen. Once we know that we are the “cause in the matter”… opportunities that we were blind to before will start to appear, they appear because , now we are looking for them. For example, when you drive today, decide to enjoy the roads, the scenery along the way.. and for this trip stop thinking about anything. I bet even if you have been driving for a few years, in this trip you will “notice” new things that you never saw before… even though the driving route is the same, the car is the same, the destination is the same and even the components of the scenery are the same (they have always been there!)
So, how do we make things happen in our life? Here are 2 ways:
Be the “cause in the matter“: Notice that we can let things happen or we can make things happen. Decide to take responsibility and look for opportunities to make things happen.
Notice if you are a drifter or causer : Every moment of your life, you can ask yourself “Am I drifting or causing something to happen in my life”. Causing does not mean any movement. it just means anything which will help us move forward in life to achieve what we want. “Thinking” about your life and goals in life is causing too. Playing with our kids or enjoying a movie with the kids counts as causing too.
Just gazing at a beautiful scenery without any thoughts… to help rejuvenate your body and soul is causing too. if we practice this, we can notice how our days, months and years pass by. In the begining do this as a fun exercise, just notice and don’t judge and put yourself down. if we make ourselves bad, then we won’t do this again. Gradually we will change.
Go ahead, Be a causer and drifting will never happen.
P.S. Thanks to landmark Education for the distinction “Cause in the matter”.
Before proceeding .. Please consider reading this Post from Seth Godin.
We all want to succeed in Business, want to get healthier and we know how to do it… but it doesn’t happen. Business is helping a group of people (niche) better than anyone else out there ( think Apple’s iphone). Health is just a change in diet and doing some exercises. We know this , but we still can’t do it. Why? It is because deep down in our brain.. inherited from millions of years ago is our lizard brain which fights for survival. Anything which causes pain it will avoid at any cost.
By the way, we have many different brains.. I like to call them minds. but let us talk about the two major ones.. The Lizard brain and the Possiblities brain. One (Lizard brain) always takes care of survival and reproduction and the other (Possibilities brain) takes care of possibilities . Both are needed. The lizard brain will save us when we cross the street, so we are not hit by the truck. It will save us when we are walking barefoot and see a nail. Fundamentally it will save us from anything that we interpret as “painful”.
The obvious next question is: How do we interpret “painful”? There are two ways.
By instinct.
By our “Past Memories”
In one way, Instincts are also the “default” memories which come along with the package (you) when we are born. Ever seen a new born chicken running away from an eagle? Or consider when you pulled your fingers when you touched a heat source like a stove.. that is instinct. Your body by instinct knows that too much heat is dangerous. After this, now you have a memory that you cannot touch a stove. The next time you are near a stove you will “remember” the danger.
The other brain – The Possibilities brain knows deep down you are a born genius and you have the potential to do what you want to do. That is why you dream about things you want like getting rich, getting healthier etc. fundamentally it wants freedom..
So, anytime you want to make a change like for e.g. if you want to get healthier and you want to change your diet. the lizard brain interprets this as “change” and any change will cause pain which it will try to avoid. How do we get out of this? Simple… by using your “possibilities” brain and changing your interpretation of the situation. Let us take an example to better illustrate this.
Let us say there is a overweight 18 year old boy going to college. If his dad or friends says ..do exercise he “interprets” exercise as boring and painful. His dad keeps pestering him to do the exercise but he doesn’t do it. Let us say after a few months this prince meets a beautiful young princess and thinks that she likes a boy who is strong and muscular. He immediately hits the gym and it (going to the gym) suddenly does not occur as painful but in fact, joyful. What changed? The context. At first, the context was “Be healthier” which changed to “I need to impress this princess with my body”. Now the exercise occurred as joyful.
What happened here is the lizard brain interpreted this as “joy” and not as “pain”. If you see great men and women, they “failed” a lot of times, but kept going and ultimately succeeded. This is because they interpreted “change” as joyful and so failure occurred as positive for their “lizard brain” and they could continue. I agree this may not be the case in all great men and women but fundamentally they made sure that the lizard brain does not come in the way of what they want.. by resisting it by the use of willpower OR by befriending it.
One of the most effective way to overcome the lizard brain is by “befriending it”. Like any good long-term relationship.. issues will arise continuously but as long as we are committed to be friends with our lizard brain for life, it will work out. You can count on the fact that every time the lizard brain senses change, it will get perturbed. At this moment notice it and use your “possibilities” mind , create a powerful and inspiring context and let him know that this change is not painful but a joyful one.
In my life, I recently learned yoga. Everyday my body was aching and I hated getting up everyday to do this. Everyday after the yoga, my pains were more. If fact I quit for a couple of days. Then I remembered the “context” concept after reading it in the “The three laws of performance” book and hearing it in a class from “Landmark education“. I changed my context of “doing yoga for health” to “Spending one hour out of 24hrs with my spiritual teacher”. It shifted completely and my “Lizard brain” interpreted it as a good thing and I haven’t stopped one day from then and I love doing yoga now.
Special Thanks: Seth Godin in his brilliant book “Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?” talks about the Lizard Brain. For a brief Introduction to the lizard brain check this post , this video and this short e-book
Your brain would not want to read this book because your lizard brain interprets this as painful. Imagine you had lived your whole life being manipulated by a system without you knowing it. Isn’t it painful… Hey, you are aware of it now. But consider changing your “context”… The “context” is “Here is a book which will show me how to live my life with freedom”
Many times in our life, we feel stuck or helpless when we encounter a situation. We would have encountered this same situation before but when we tried to control it, we couldn’t, so we accepted that it cannot be controlled. When the situation occurs again we think we are helpless and are resigned about it. This is called “Learned Helplessness” i.e we have learnt to be helpless and we get depressed. As grim this might sound, there is a silver lining to it – Since we have learnt to be helpless we can also unlearn it and come out of it.
Martin Seligson, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of several books including “Learned Optimism” did some interesting experiments on Learned Helplessness. They took a few dogs and divided them into two separate groups. The first group was given a electric shock and if they pressed a lever the shock stopped. The second group was wired parallel to the first group. i.e when the shock was given it goes to both the groups at the same time, but for the second group their lever didn’t stop the electric shock. It stopped when the first group pressed the lever. For the second group, the shocks appeared to start and end at random and they learnt that they cannot do anything to control the shocks and learnt to be helpless.
They took the same set of dogs and this time placed them in a different setting, This time, instead of a lever, they put a low partition in front of them, so they can jump out. When they gave the shocks the second group which learnt to be helpless simply lay down passively and whined even though their escape was just in front of them.
This is the same with humans. We can be trained to be in “Learned Helplessness” mode… How do we get out of this?
There are 2 ways.
1. Recognize this mindset: Whenever you are feeling helpless, remember that this may be “Learned Helplessness”. Many times we are not aware of this at all. It all happens unconsciously. Now you know what “Learned Helplessness” is , you can recognize this in yourself when you encounter it.
2. Be Optimistic : Once you notice “learned Helplessness” in yourself, the way to come out of this is learn to be optimistic. Martin Seligson in his experiments found that in the second set of dogs, Some dogs did not become helpless, but instead managed to find a way out of the unpleasant situation despite their past experience with it. This characteristic was found to correlate highly with the human character .. optimism.
Our natural instinct is to fight change. We always want stability. Our ancestors in the jungle had to be extra cautious about any change in the surroundings and that instinct still remains in our genes and we fear change. We imagine something bad is going to happen and that is why we fear change.
In the Industrial Revolution, change was slow.. People went to the same factory and almost did the same job and their day was almost the same the whole 40 years of their working life.
If we look at the current reality in our knowledge economy , Change is happening at lightning pace in the world. If we live in this ever changing world and if we fear change. we are stressed every moment. When we are stressed, the side effects are unhappiness and health problems.. Is there a way out. Yes there is and… it is to learn to embrace change. Like any other skill this can be learnt and can become enjoyable.
There are three ways to learn to embrace change:
Accept that most of the time change cannot be anticipated and we will always live in uncertainties : If we look at it, we cannot stop the change happening in the world, so accept it. Seth Godin in his book “Survival is not enough” talks about the following article he read in the New york times. It explains why most of the time, we may not be able to anticipate change The title was “What happens when the Jaguars die”
“Jaguars, as it turns out live is Mexico. Their favorite food is rabbits. And when jaguars die(due to encroachments on their habitat by people), the rabbits multiply like , well, rabbits. And when the number of rabbits dramatically increases, the grassland turns to desert. In other words, a small change in the status of one animal ( the jaguar) can lead to millions of acres becoming a desert.
The ecosystem is very responsive. kill off one crop and entire species that depend on it become extinct–Just like the ecosystem your business operates in. A small change– say the availability of competitive pricing data to your customer base– can have implications for the way your company must run all of its operations in order to succeed”
There are very few ecosystems which are stable but the majority of them are unstable. So accept that we cannot always anticipate change and will have to accept uncertainty.
Know that we are capable of embracing change: In our workplace or in any endeavor we don’t like, change appears as bad and threatening.. but you change the context – for example, lets say you are planning to go on a vacation… suddenly Change is fun, exploring is fun. mystery is fun. This indicates, that we are capable of embracing change if we decide to embrace it.
Embrace Change: The only way, species in our planet earth survived is by evolving themselves. Seth Godin recommends to to get into the habit of making frequent small changes first, then work your way to bigger and bigger things. He calls it zooming .. Zooming is about constant change, for no particular reason, and with no particular goal.
Zooming is about stretching your limits by adapting to new ideas, opportunities, and challenges without triggering our inherent human change-avoidance reflex. Zooming is about adapting small changes over time. You can practice zooming in everyday life, Seth Godin proposes the following five simple things to try in our daily lives.
For dinner tonight, eat a food that you’ve never tasted. Then try another one tomorrow night.
On your way to work tomorrow, listen to a CD from a musical genre that you hate or that’s new to you.
Once a week, meet with someone from outside your area of expertise. Go to a trade show on a topic in which you have no interest whatsoever.
Read a magazine you’ve never read before.
Change the layout of your office.
…or just do something for the first time, as often as possible. Once you master these five steps, you are much more likely to invent five more steps and gradually you will view every change as an opportunity. Companies that zoom do the same thing.
“The doctor of the future will give no medicine, but will interest his patients in the care of the human frame, in diet, and in the cause and prevention of disease.”
– Thomas Edision
Since the flu season is setting in, We need to take good care of our health and our family’s health. Good health is an opportunity to take care of things which we want to take care of like our startup. if we are sick, things don’t happen and just come to a screeching halt.
There are several ways to fight flu., but if we understand the fundamental knowledge, it is easier to find “solutions” to prevent and fight flu. we won’t be misguided by all the advice out there.
As many of you are aware, the most fundamental thing to know is that the flu and common cold is caused by Viruses and there is no medicine for Viruses. (strange isn’t it!). These viruses continuously mutate i.e they keep changing their DNA Structure, so it is difficult to create any medicine for these types of viruses. If there is no medicine, then the question arises on how to cure it. The answer is, Our amazing human body has the capacity to create the medicine by itself to destroy the virus if we let it do its work.
When a virus enters our body, our immune cells checks its memory to see if it has destroyed this kind of virus before, if not, then it gets to work to find the right type of medicine, It keeps trying various combinations until it finds the right combination. When the body is actively working, it generates a lot of heat and this is what we commonly refer as “fever“. Once it finds the medicine, it starts killing the virus. After successfully killing the virus, it has to send the dead viruses out of the body. The body creates mucus and puts the destroyed viruses there and the mucus flows out of our body through the nose. This is what we call “Runny Nose“. Anything we do to stop this natural flow, will inhibit our body to do its job. So, for example taking cold/fever medicines will inhibit the body too. So, unless it is absolutely needed, it is not recommended to take medications. In fact, if you ask the doctor, they will say “Take cold medicine only if required”, but we ignore the “if required” part and take them anyway. “if required” means we should take it only if the pain becomes unbearable.
Here are a few ways you can help your body fight the cold or flu when you see the starting symptoms.
1. Give good Rest to your digestive system: In our everyday life, When we focus our energy on the job at hand, we can complete it faster. If we have too many distracting tasks, we don’t do any of the things properly. In the same way, when a cold or flu virus enters our body, we have to let the body concentrate all its energy on eliminating the virus. If we take heavy food, then the body is “distracted” and has to perform both the digestion process and also has to prepare the medicine. The best option is to not eat any solid foods and take only liquids.
2. Take only liquids without any added sugars: Doctors advice to take plenty of liquids. This means any liquid which is easy for digestion. Yes, this means Coffee and Tea are out. Some Juices have added sugars in them and need to be avoided as well. The best option is – Take 200 or 250 ml warm water, mix four to five spoons of honey and Squeeze half a lime and drink it. This gives the needed energy for the body, The body needs about 800 calories per day when fasting and taking the “warm honey water” about four to five times a day should be enough.
In the past three years, I had symptoms of a flu once and fought it back within a day by fasting with liquids.
A lot of us want to start a business, but we cannot leave our full-time jobs, because we need to take care of family.. mortgage.. monthly expenses etc. Is there a way out. yes there is .. and here is the good news
According to the data from the U.S. Department of labor, three-quarters of those who start new business are also employed in wage-and-salary jobs at start-up.. and some 60% of new firms begin at home.((Source: Doug Hall‘s book – Jump start your business brain )
Some of the largest companies which started as part-time and became hugely successful are..
1. Ford motor company : Henry Ford worked in Edison Illuminating Company ( now GE) under Edison, while he worked on building cars when he was not at work.
2. ebay.com : Pierre Omidyar the founder of ebay worked for about 9 months in a full time job, while he started and ran ebay.com as a part-time business
3. craigslist.org: Craig Newmark founder of craigslist.org worked full-time for about 3-4 years .. while he ran craiglist part-time
In the last 10 years, due to advances in technology the cost of infrastructure has fallen down so low, it has become easier to start a business thereby moving a dream to reality. The problem is not money anymore, For less than $1 a month, we can start a blog, for about $5 a month we can start a niche social network
So, What is stopping you.. is it an absence of an intense desire?..
“The starting point of all achievement is desire. Keep this constantly in mind.” -Napoleon Hill
To achieve anything in life. the first character to have ..is an intense desire. Take a moment.. and think of something which you achieved in your life and think back on how much desire you had to achieve it or maybe how desperate you were to achieve it. (Hint: Think of your first love.. Your first job..)
People with intense desire do not worry about the ability or the resources they need. Ability and resources can be acquired if we have the intense desire. One of the characteristics of an entrepreneur is to achieve what he wants without regards to resources. First, he says what he wants then he starts to think about the right configuration (tools. team etc) he needs to make it happen. If you look at the most successful companies like Apple, Microsoft and amazon, they all had lots of constraints. They all started with less than $10,000. With Intense Desire, we activate our inner genius. Studies show that we humans use about 5% of our brain capacity. Imagine, if we can double it and what we can achieve. Everything starts with an Intense desire to achieve what we want.
I once heard a story, which explains beautifully what “intense desire” is. Here is the story…
A disciple asked his teacher ‘Sir,How can I see God’. The teacher said ‘Come, I will show you’ and took the disciple to a lake. Both the teacher and the disciple got into the lake and suddenly the teacher pressed the student’s head into the water. After a few moments.. he released it and asked the student how he felt. The student panting for breath.. said he felt that he was about to die.. and while in the water, his one and only desire was to get a whiff of air. The Teacher said ‘Son, if you have the same amount of desire to see god..you will see him’.
This is the type of desire..we need to achieve what we want in life.. whether to start a business.. have a good career.. a good relationship.. a good life!
A new entrepreneur almost always gets an idea and thinks it is the coolest and the greatest idea. He safeguards it and when someone asks him he would say we are in “stealth” mode. He dreams of how he would be on the covers of Fortune, Fast Company and Inc when his idea clicks and takes off. The truth is no one really knows whether the idea will click or not. About 50%of venture backed firms fail.
So, how does an entrepreneur increase his chances of Success. He needs to Accept Change as normal and Be willing to Evolve. Nobody can escape change… the way I see it – Either you will confront change OR change will confront you. You choose. The best way is to accept that change happens and take advantage of it rather than be bogged down by it. Humans and a lot of other species on this planet survived and thrived by evolving themselves as the surroundings changed. Similarly, the best companies can survive, if they can adapt with the surroundings and evolve.
We would not have heard about Google, Hotmail or Paypal if they stuck to their initial Plan (Plan A). The founders quickly evolved their companies. They tried a business model and if that didn’t work, they changed it immediately and tried another. For Paypal, Plan A to Plan F didn’t work. Plan G as we know today worked marvelously and the rest is history. Google grew and could introduce so many products because it encourages a culture of experimentation and Failure. All these and other successful companies evolved by looking for opportunities caused by change in the marketplace and encouraging change and experimentation within their business.
This can happen only if the team is willing to make mistakes, Learn from it and move on. Our school system has trained us not to make mistakes and view mistakes are failures. This view might prove useful for someone working in a large corporation which has lots of restrictions to change, but for an Entrepreneur, mistakes need to be learned from, quickly, and then move on from.
In the old days, when a missile is fired, it had a fixed destination.. “Ready, Aim , Fire” . Nowadays, thanks to modern technology, a missile , can be fired and then it’s course can be corrected midway. Tom Peters has a saying that goes – “Ready, Fire! Aim”. It is the same with a business. When we start the business , the business model is different and if it does not work, we correct course as we move.
There are a lot of definitions for business. But I am interested in just the simple and fundamental way that we can define a business.
So, what is a business?. Fundamentally, business is ‘providing good help’.
Think about it. Every human being needs help. Otherwise he or she cannot survive.
Some of you may disagree.
Before you say anything, let us look around in our life. Notice the help we are receiving almost everyday. The jobs we have, the house we live in, the mail we get are all provided by someone else. As human beings, we need help.
The best way to get help is to give help. We work for someone to provide our services and they help us back by giving us money. When we need help, we typically look for the best help that we can possibly afford.
Over time the market in which we provide “help” keeps getting bigger and bigger with each new radical innovation. When cars became mass produced, people could travel long distances to get the help they needed. This changed the way people used the marketplace. If they wanted a job in another part of town, they could take it, since they had a car to drive to that part of town. If they wanted to buy something which was available in another town, they could drive and get it. When Airplanes were introduced, people could travel around the world to provide their “help” or get the “help” they needed.
In the very old days, a person with a skill could provide help to others living in the same village, for example a blacksmith could provide his service to people in his village. As the tools of transportation and communication evolved, many more people were able to use his services like those in the neighboring villages. Today, with the advent of the internet and the economy changing from an industrial to information age, a guitar maker ( in crude terms, a modern day blacksmith ) in any part of the world can sell his handmade guitars to anyone in the world. Rick Toone does this. I am sure without the Internet, he would not have a large enough audience for his “help”.
Even when we play online games or want to watch a movie, we are looking for the best game or best movie, Since we cannot personally make a game or movie, we are looking for help to be highly entertained. There are free games and free movies but ultimately they exist because both the provider and the consumer get benefited in some way. When you visit Disneyland , you want the best entertainment (help) and Disney can provide that in return for the money (help) you pay to enter.
So, as entrepreneurs, what can we do?
The bottom line is this: As long as we can provide good help, we have a high chance of succeeding as people are always looking for better help. With the world as our market, there is a high probability that we can find a large enough market that needs our help.
—-
Vijay Peduru is an entrepreneur in the bay area and is the co-founder of a bootstrapped startup. His interests are bootstrapping, leadership and spirituality.
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“The doctor of the future will give no medicine, but will interest his patients in the care of the human frame, in diet, and in the cause and prevention of disease.”
A lot of us want to start a business, but we cannot leave our full-time jobs, because we need to take care of family.. mortgage.. monthly expenses etc. Is there a way out. yes there is .. and here is the good news
A new entrepreneur almost always gets an idea and thinks it is the coolest and the greatest idea. He safeguards it and when someone asks him he would say we are in “stealth” mode. He dreams of how he would be on the covers of Fortune, Fast Company and Inc when his idea clicks and takes off. The truth is no one really knows whether the idea will click or not. About 
There are a lot of definitions for business. But I am interested in just the simple and fundamental way that we can define a business.