A Learning a Day

I’ve realized that it is nice to switch schedules once a while – i.e. work from morning to night for a week or two and then switch..

For me, morning schedule works for the more discipline oriented tasks i.e. ones that need doing. Night schedule works better for the more creative/ more thinking tasks. So, when I’m in chop chop mode, it’s morning that’s good!

Change, in essence, can be very positive if we take it as such. It gives us a new perspective.. :)

Have a nice day! :)

Interestingly points to how innovation is about taking best practices and tweaking them! :)

“In every forest, on every farm, in every orchard on earth, it’s what’s under the ground that creates what’s above the ground. That’s why placing your attention on the fruits that you have already grown is futile. You cannot change the fruits that are already hanging on the tree. You can, however, change tomorrow’s fruits. But to do so, you will have to dig below the ground and strengthen the roots.” ~ T. Harv Eker from Secrets Of The Millionaire Mind

That’s genius.

Remember: you can NOT change the fruits (the current results). But you CAN nurture the roots and, in time, you are bound to successfully produce the types of fruits/results you’re dreaming of.

Thanks Brian Johnson from Philosopher’s Notes

Thanks to Mom – I was a voracious reader when I was young. This was because Mom loved reading and the easiest way to shut me up when I was a kid was to thrust a book into my lap. So, I began with books like Robin Hood, Black Beauty when I was a kid and progressed to finish more than 400/500 Enid Blyton books – loved series like the Five find-outers, the famous five and the like. This progressed to novels with an addiction to a not-so-popular author called ‘Colin Forbes’. This was in my 9th standard/grade/Sec 3 and post this, I just stopped!

The only reading came in the form of comics like Tintin, Asterix, Archie’s etc and the trend continued with me being ‘too busy’ to read in university in my 1st year and a half. A lot changed post that though and here’s how..

1)Audio books: My mentor changed everything when he mentioned he shared his audio book hearing experiences. He said he didn’t enjoy reading as much as he did listening and I thought it would be great to give it a try. With a lot of push from him and a gift of a nice collection of audio books, I began hearing my 1st book – The Virtues of War; A novel of Alexander the Great. And boy, was I hooked.. I couldn’t stop requesting for more books and recommendations from him and soon I was hearing these books whenever I found time.

I’ve found that I’m traveling on buses atleast 30 minutes during a normal day here in NUS. All this time is potential reading time and here I was, beginning to use this time. A big learning here is the Peter Drucker insight on Managing Oneself – there are readers and listeners and you can only be of one of them. While some are comfortable reading long emails, others are better with phone calls – it’s the same with books. Some are comfortable reading, others are comfortable listening. I, for example, can never imagine getting through an e-book. A hard cover is just about bearable by now. But, I can coast through an audio.. This was probably among the better insights I had..

Learning: I was most inspired by the line ‘The difference between you now and 10 years from now are the books you read and the people you meet’

2)7 Habits of Highly Effective People: This book has really changed my life. I know there are a lot of people out there against these kind of ‘self help’ books. But, I’ve loved every book I’ve read – often getting so many take-aways that I would never have gotten otherwise. This book touched me.. It was a heavy book to get through – took me 1 month. The only other book that took me so long was ‘A Splendid exchange’ which atleast was a 17 hour audio. This one was much shorter, but extremely deep.

So, what is it about the 7 Habits that is so special? It deals with growth, and how it happens at the most basic level. The first part of the book is just about moving from dependence or the baby stage to independence, the teenage state. The 1st 3 habits are

‘Be Proactive’ : which can be summarized in ‘Make and keep commitments’ . This has been among the most difficult things to do as I was serial breaker of promises. Gradually, I’m getting better at this..

‘Begin with the end in mind’: or Visualize – which has not been too bad.

‘Put first things first’: or work according to priorities which I have always needed LOTS of improvement in. This book called for getting organized and over the past few months, this has begun to happen..

Learning: The 7 Habits book has been a bit of a bible. I can not be done reading it for a very long time. It’s philosophy revolves around the fact that we are always taught to be better personalities i.e. be better presenters, public speakers etc, but long term success can only come if we are strong characters i.e. trustworthy, honest and live life along with the basic principles

3)The journey: There have been so many other books that have captured my imagination. Right up the list is ‘A splendid exchange – a story of how trade changed the world‘ – that made me wish I had learnt history this way. ‘How to win friends and influence people‘ and ‘How to stop worrying and start living‘ by Dale Carnegie were also splendid. So were books like ‘Outliers‘ and ‘The Alchemist‘..

However, the book that next made a huge impact was ‘You don’t have to be born brilliant – how to design a wonderful life’ that is a book written by a leading Australian real estate tycoon who talks about how he designed a great life for himself by being proactive and being EXTREMELY organized. I found his example inspiring..

A lot of things begin to link in gradually. As I’ve accepted the 7 Habits philosophy, I do see the common trends mentioned in multiple books. Suddenly, more of the stuff that I hear around me is beginning to make sense. ‘Think and Grow Rich’ which I’m starting on today is just an extension of the habit of ‘Beginning with the end in mind’, which says – ‘See yourself going rich first, think about and then it will happen’.

Learning: Of all the gifts I have received over the past many years, the gift of audio books is likely to be the most impactful yet..

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I met an entrepreneur in January back home who said he and his wife made sure they read 30 minutes a day and saw 1 movie a week. I was very inspired by the example. Since then, I’ve made it a point to read 30 mins a day between Monday – Friday.. And I managed this rather unlikely discipline thanks to a system coming up in the next post – the R15..
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11 days to go..

This is tip I picked up thanks to Lifehacker featuring the article from the ‘How-To geek‘ to use outlook rules to delay the sending of every email by 3 emails.

How many times have we sent an email –

-> when we were in a bad mood and regretted it the moment we sent the send button
-> with the wrong attachment and realized it just after..
-> and then realized that we could have tailored the message better..

I’ve been doing this for the past 8 months and I’ve found it to be incredibly useful. Almost 1 out of every 3 emails I send are re-opened within the next minute for edits.

Click here for instructions on how to configure this for Outlook..

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Well Gmail has an option called “Undo” where you can “unsend” your email just after you’ve sent it :)

Thanks Nila! (In comments)

Good Morning! :)

Time to get moving then! Have a great day and week ahead! :)

As I said in my post about my last lecture, it was fitting that I took up ES2007S during my last semester. It is the best course I have taken during my 4 years at NUS.

Taking this course seemed jinxed as I had first taken it in the 1st semester of my 3rd year, attended a class and had to drop it because of excess workload, almost took it in my 1st sem this year and eventually managed to take it now to complete my ULR requirements. And thank god I persisted!

There are a lot of things I liked about the module and I will try to narrow it down to the top 3 –

1)Learning openness: A big part of my learnings during the course has been thanks to Brad – who was brilliant as a lecturer. Brilliant – not because he lectured/taught multiple concepts, but because he showed us that you have to be a good student if you want to be a good teacher. At every point, I felt like Brad was a student rather than our teacher.

Most importantly, it was great to see the openness and flexibility that was on display. One example that didn’t quite work was Dropbox. Inspired by the peer teaching on collaborative workspaces, Brad readily decided to try Dropbox out for the course. And soon, we realized that was probably not the right move thanks to the rule the lecturer plays in the initial work. It made sense for groups to use amongst themselves but not as the workspace of choice for interactions with the lecturer. It was something that didn’t work but we all learnt a lot about openness. There were a 100 other things that did, by the way, but the process with which we tried this new idea, didn’t quite succeed and then went about fixing it was a great learning.

2)Learning to take feedback: If I had to look back at my university life in general, learning to take myself less seriously has been one of the top learnings. I’ve noticed this to be common among many great men like Warren Buffett, Mark Twain etc. These are/were guys who were always laughing at themselves which made them very open to feedback.

Over the last few weeks, I observed many barriers break among classmates as we gave each other loads of improvement points. While it may not have been easy in the early stages, the environment class was one of candor and honesty and everybody knew that the intent was to help the other. I have always believed giving feedback requires a lot of care as it is easy to ‘find fault’ but takes a lot more effort to present in a way that sounds acceptable. And I think we all got better at both giving and receiving feedback and learnt from each other during the course..

3)It’s all about the people: Brad had a massive part to play in this course as it is a class room teaching course at the end of the day. And it was thanks to his openness, encouragement and flexibility that the class environment was one of a lot of fun and laughter. Leadership is about taking care of the environment and that was definitely taken care of..

Having said that, an equally important part was played by the people. And every one of my classmates were fantastic in adding to the experience. Here’s what I remember from each of them –

Clement: Clear strong points of view, lovely way of summarizing observations and learning and very good leadership and learning ability.

Diana (1): Always a quiet presence, very receptive to feedback and a smile.

Emily: Very genuine presentation style, passionate about her points of view and applying blog feedback by editing blog posts from time to time.

Glenn: Excellent team mate, very good with technology and prompt in getting work done.

Godwin: Lots of warmth, care, genuine-ity and friendship!

Goh Chern/Diana (2): Champion speaker, very honest, open and our ‘little miss sunshine’.

Jasper: Fabulous team mate, excellent design sense and a great person to get stuff done with.

Jie Ren: A heart person, very modest and dependable.

Jolene: A very passionate presenter, always smiling and open.

Joshua: An amazing actor, excellent interviewer and sales person to be.

Kian Leong: Excellent presenter, quiet yet insightful and always very clear about his points of view.

Kun Lin: Great sense of humor, very receptive to feedback and very focused.

Nicole: Very warm and friendly presence, bubbly and easily excitable!

Pei Rong: Passionate conservationist, very persistent with questions and great with work.

Weiying: My star teammate throughout, very dedicated and extremely sweet.

Zhisheng: A great story teller, warm and very straightforward.

It’s all about the people really. Thank you guys for making it special!

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Added thanks to a special request from Clement that I could not refuse.

Rohan: Ever having creative ideas, and always willing to share his point of view, so as to help others improve. A clear leader with many abilities for others to emulate. And above all, someone whom I am proud to say I know.

Did I also mention that Clement is very kind with compliments??

NUS had a lot of potentially life changing experiences. Nineo was a big one.. RealAcad was potentially massive as well.

Now, it is EXTREMELY hard to give background about RealAcad. That’s RealAcad’s biggest marketing problem. Simply put, it is a lifechanging experience.. As I like to say, RealAcad gets a group of smart youngsters (between 18 and 30 years of age), puts them in a room in Stanford or Harvard or Singapore, and at the end of a week, they form a company.

Entrepreneurship is just the excuse.. What really happens is that we’re in a fun pressure cooker situation where most importantly, we face ourselves – see ourselves as we are, whether we like it or not. And that, in itself, is a life changing experience. I’ve been fortunate to have attended a bunch of RealAcad’s and while there are too many experiences to recount – the top 3 are –

1)THAT game at Harvard: We were at a lovely ancient looking building (like all the other colonial like buildings at Harvard) and above our team room, we had a nice auditorium – as in the bottom picture.

Now, it was during one of our energizers that this idea came up for a game that involved passing a balloon (with a small weight – to make it tougher) using our heads across a hall way which was about 20 metres long and then put it up to the next floor. Somebody remarked that it was ‘impossible’. That’s how a lot of crazy things at RealAcad have happened.. Somebody says ‘impossible’ and then everyone else decides that it has got to be otherwise..

And we began our journey. The first challenge was getting good at heading this balloon as it often fell half way. In a hour’s time, we were pretty good. By this time, there were suggestions we should probably make it back and get back to work. These were duly ignored though and we ploughed on. Soon, we had the contraption you see in the picture.. And boy, did we try hard.

After 4 crazy hours that left us drenched in sweat (that was amazing given it was a rather cold rainy day in Boston), we got it across. A big part was thanks to Daniel, who was only 6 feet 7 inches tall.. And boy, we felt like we’d won the world cup..(Middle picture)

Learning: It’s amazing how much we learn from incidents like this. It seemed unrelated to the camp and entrepreneurship in itself but after these 4 hours, our team truly believed that there was nothing beyond us. Sleepless nights, crazy amounts of work were a small matter after all..

2)THAT camp at Stanford: Again, I can’t thank my stars enough that I had the time and the opportunity in university to attend multiple RealAcad camps. No camp however, was as eventful as the camp at Stanford. I had blogged about it here. It is very hard to describe it accurately as you had to be there to experience it.. :)

Simply put, it was the craziest 1 week I have spent in my life. The reason I still have very positive memories of that camp was because that was the first time I was exposed to individuals from 14 different countries(team in the top picture), who were all incredibly accomplished and yet.. I felt they were extremely encouraging and supportive of a young kid like me(all of 18 years and 4 months). Also, it was very heartening going into a pressure cooker situation and ‘surviving’..

At the end of our camp, we are gifted a t shirt from RealAcad that simply says ‘I Survived!’. I’ve had a lot of people come up to me and say – ‘Wow.. What sort of a camp is that?’. But, trust me when I say, every RealAcader would vouch for the fact that those 2 shirts best describe the emotions at the end of a RealAcad. Somehow, at the end of a RealAcad, our minds are stretched and post that, whenever I’ve been through a tough situation where I’ve had to work many nights in a row, I always go back to my experience at Stanford and say -‘If I survived that, this should be piece of cake’.. Haha

Learning: ‘A mind once stretched never comes back to original dimensions’ – Oglivy
THAT camp at Stanford saw to that alright..

3)Friends: RealAcad’s vision is to train every global leader by making the best become much better. The term ‘best’ is very hard to define.. I always see it as a group of people who really want to make a difference in this world. So, you see all kinds at RealAcad – entrepreneurs who have been so since they could remember, multi millionaire businessmen who have great desire to learn, consultants from top tier firms who are looking for a new challenge, kids like me who are just looking to absorb as much as possible from all the above.. Haha.

After that RealAcad week, the best thing that happens is the friendships. Suddenly, you have friends in atleast 7 or 8 new countries (13 in the Stanford case) and some of these friends know you better in 1 week than many would know you in a lifetime. More so, these friends are those that are aligned, supportive and believe in their dreams – just like you do. It’s a wonderful combination.

Till date, my camp mates bring me immense joy. As always, there are a few that I have gotten really close to over the years – some who are way way ahead of me in terms of years and experience, yet keep an eye out and care.

Learning: Leadership is simply caring more than the next person. At RealAcad, I’ve experienced this.. Care, lots of it!
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RealAcad means a lot to me. It’s thanks to RealAcad that I have Monday emails to send to many a friend as a way of keeping in touch. Just by these emails, RealAcad helps me stay inspired every week and reminds me that life is about love, learning, growth and laughter..

I feel alive at RealAcad.. And I can’t wait for my next one – first as a ‘working adult’ – hopefully soon! :)
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12 days to go..

United beat City in the last minute – 3rd time this season..

Chelsea lost to Tottenham..

John Terry was sent off.. and he had THAT look on his face..

|Arsenal capitulated unfortunately. Being a fan of Wenger’s philosophy, that’s unfortunate but I really hope they buy this summer|

Come on Chelsea, lose another one!

And come on Liverpool, beat ’em!

:D
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I should add I had a great game of football on saturday evening with friends as well! :)

Ha ha.. Not quite the summer of ’69.. But hey, it was one hell of a summer.

Here’s why.. Anyway, what did happen was I took

1)Taking a break: I had worked at Nineo for 2 years and in my 3rd 1st semester decided to convert my work into an industrial attachment. Now, simply put, I was a disaster in those 6 months. I am not quite sure what to blame it on – there was an obvious increase of expectations between being a student part timer and a full timer that I didn’t cope too well with, there was a lack of discipline in a lot of things I did that had never been tackled.. A whole set of things that needed fixing basically.

It was right at the end of the 5 month IA period that I had a chat with my mentors and felt that in this process of working all through, I had missed out on a few of the basic things a university student would go through. Most importantly, I had tried to jump my ‘teenage’ or rebellious phase where I could choose to do bugger all with my freedom and I felt it was best for everyone if I took a break – tried to spread my own wings and fly. This was also partly because I was part of a very caring ecosystem that went to any links to make things work out, and I felt it was time I tested out my own capabilities.. This was obviously a stage where I was gradually building more on the self confidence rather than the insecurity(slowly, at that) and I thought this was the best step. This inspiration about the teenage came from the ‘7 Habits of Highly Effective People’ book which has become a personal bible of sorts (so important that I shall blog about it! :)). Every person grows up from dependence to independence to interdependence and jumping a stage never quite helped.

So, here I was – all set to take a break from work and try my hand at student life. It started with a 40 day break at home(I had never been home that long in 3 years as I was working..) and 2 big things that happened that summer were..

Learning: Sometimes, its just important to question deeper motives and look at things from a higher level. Taking a break was a tough decision, but one of the best I have made..

2)Agnee and Bowling: As mentioned, confidence comes in building blocks. For 3 years now, I had been completely work centred and it was time for something different. The first big thing that greatly helped was my Mom’s insight into my strengths (if you ever want to know what your strengths are, I’d recommend you call your mother!). One strength she picked was event management and before I knew it, I had a chance. My high school was trying to shirk off a rather nerdy image and organize an excellent cultural competition over 2 days. My mother was in-charge of the team and they had been working hard to make it a grand success. I landed home 4 days before this program and thanks to Mom, took complete charge. I daresay it had quite an impact because things turned out very well.. This was thanks to training at RealAcad. Most importantly, my Agnee kiddos turned out to be the biggest success story as I watched them ‘grow up’ and bloom over those few days. It was an amazing experience getting my feet wet and a lot of that experience helped greatly in my foray into events at NUS with Sparkz..

The second big thing happened thanks to a friend who forced me to go to Down Under – a Bowling alley which was selecting students for the Under 21 state championship. It was an opportunity for us to bowl an extra set for the usual Rupees 100 (or 3 dollars) and we did so. It turned out that we were placed in the top 32 and after much consideration, I decided to give the finals a shot. Now, I had always been a casual bowler but given I have a passion for sports in general, I was not too bad.

What I wasn’t prepared for was the day itself. A lot of things went right.. When you aren’t amazing at a sport, a lot depends on the ‘day’ and boy, did things go well. I choked in the start in the finals though and made a come back only to lose by a point. However, with a day’s average of 160 and a new title of ‘Runner up in a Tamil Nadu state championship’ was not bad at all..

These two events were huge building blocks and I still can’t help thanking the heavens for a great summer..

Learning: Unexpected events often come our way. What matters is to be open.. And just understand that unexpected events and action also result in unexpected results..

With bowling, I had a lovely time following the tournament as I had lots of free vouchers and spent some time learning the game. I realized that approaching anything with an ability to learn always reaps rewards.. Also, some things are not meant to be. I had a chance to take it professionally but the impracticality was too big to ignore. As a learning experience though, it is not something I will forget..

3)The beginning of Sparkz and ArtVibe: In my new found zest for student life, I had decided I wanted to do something memorably and actually make a dent.

ArtVibe happened thanks to a close friend who was involved. I noticed the club looked like it was going to die.. And felt it would be a great challenge – more so, because I am as non-artsy as they can get. So, that was a new venture and a good chance to build a team and try and learn delegation because I obviously would be able to contribute only to a certain level..

Sparkz happened thanks to my existing ExpressionHappens team. We’d decided to do an event.. And we thought Sparkz would be a great idea – to choose 10 top finalists from all over NUS with talents like singing, dancing and loads of other cool stuff on show. So, we began the long approval process for the event..

Learning: We must believe we ‘can’ make a dent. They say success and self confidence is a chicken and egg situation. With more self confidence comes success and the vice versa is also true. Having said that, it’s easier to start with the self confidence than sit and wait for success..

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13 days to go..