The race is still on

No one knows exactly who came first on this earth. Excavations have proved that dinosaurs existed much before the homo-sapiens came into existence. Probably there are many more species which haven't been excavated yet, which might have been the predecessors of dinosaurs also. Jurassic park movie series has been a great showcase about the fight between dinosaurs just like how million other movies have showcased the fight between humans. The fight is always to show that one is better than the other just to achieve the desired objective. Fights shall go on because the race is still on.

The fights that I referred in the earlier part of the blog post was just not the fight that happens amongst people. It also refers to the internal fight that goes on inside us on a daily basis. The fight between the lazy and busy self in us, the fight between the visionary and missionary in us, the fight between different priorities of life, the fight between the passion and profession in our lives so on and so forth are all different shades of fights that exist in our lives. All these fights employ two sides which are vying to race one beyond the other. Every fight won moves one side ahead of the other. More the steps a particular side takes forward, the race gets extended by those many steps. People are trying to break each others records on a daily basis. There is stiff competition which is only increasing the speed of this race among individuals to prove who is better than the other. Someone will always be better at all points of time and some few will always try to beat him and become better at all points of time. Hence the race shall never end and be still on for ages to come and go.

Temporary failures appear as dead ends of life for those who fail to try again to win back what they lost. They forget to see beyond the obstacle that the race field is far and wide touching the horizon. All that we have to understand is that race is something which shall only travel with time as eternal as time is and never reach the destiny called end. Race is always on and it allows participants who are ousted out also to get back to competition and hasten the spirit.

Professionals define the profession

In today's world, with the surmounting amount of information flow from all directions people have a huge question on mind as to which profession to take up. Different opportunities present different scales of returns and the number of such opportunities is limited in case of those who aren't prepared and trained to enter the work world while for those who are pre-equipped, they are just too big in number and variety. Too many options only confuse our choices. Which profession to choose is of great question and the debate about the goodness and badness of a profession is never ending. That's where I need to jump in and tell that your profession can't define you; you will've to give a new meaning to the profession you get into.

I had heard my lecturer say in my college days that, "everyone is good, everyone is bad but only the percentage varies." Likewise profession is also something that's innovated by man. No profession is good or bad. It's the people in the profession who shall define the quality and fame of the  profession. Let's take two simple examples of Sir Richard Branson and Sachin Tendulkar. to understand the concept better. Sir Richard Branson is a true serial entrepreneur who has made people feel that entrepreneurship is the cloud nine of life. He has given his adventurous touch to the business world. In the same way, Sachin Tendulkar has displayed the true spirit of sportsmanship by taking cricket records to new heights which people might not even defeat for ages to come. He has inspired and influenced hordes of others to take up cricket as the profession just like how Sir Richard Branson has triggered plenty of youth to jump into the ocean of entrepreneurship and business.

We can find so many frauds and cheats in both the fields of cricket and business. Still people opt for such fields because of the personalities who have made those professions noble. Hence we must not have any bias towards any profession. We must think about what value we can add to the profession we are in and how we can influence lots more to take up the same profession and benefit themselves. Only then you become a true professional in your profession and a leader who sets new benchmarks and standards.

Set a new zero

Life happens in different stages. Every stage is a step to reach the next stage. While you're climbing the steps you need to climb one after the other or two after two based on your agility. However every step you take requires the same amount of energy and efforts. Climbing the first step is as equivalent as climbing the 10th step from the 9th step. Likewise in life also, to climb from one stage to the other the amount of energy and efforts required are the same. We cannot bank upon our previous achievements and work and hence become complacent or ignorant towards the amount of hard work required. We have to set a new starting point for ourselves, a new ZERO standard.

Once you set a new standard of zero for yourself, you shall forget all that you've achieved till now in life. There is no pressure of performance and you are just like a free bird who can fly as high as your heart wishes to go. The freedom of mind is more than essential to make new stories happen. There is no limit to the achievements and accomplishments that one can amass in his kitty. It's all in the game of mind. You need to tell yourself when you're at the peaks that you shall break open the gates of complacency and restrictions set upon your mind just because of the self image that you have built. A new image is awaiting to share your persona. Any new idol is formed only when we have the absolutely-no-form clay lump. A deformed idol cannot form a new idol for us. Hence we need to bring back ourselves to ground zero to re-launch ourselves.

Many might have a doubt whether we will lose out on everything and start all of a sudden newly when we reset our life at zero once again. It's not going to be that way at all. When you set your standards to be zero, your experiences don't become null. They shall back you up for sure. Your expectations out of yourself reduce because nothing much is expected out of a novice. The fun in planning for optimum utilization of resources ceases to exist with overly available resources. The loveliest part of life is not the number of times we succeed alone but the number of times we fail and bounce back to success. This can happen only if we allow ourselves to fail. Except for the beginner's luck, someone who starts or restarts at zero is bound to fail to learn the next lesson of life only to enhance the productivity multifold. Let's set a new zero in our life every time we grow old and make ourselves young once again.

Only conviction drives the vision

Commitment to work and dedication of time and efforts are the most essential requirements to reach our goals in life. Goals can range from being unrealistic dreams to rational visions. It all depends upon the individual who holds these dreams and visions in his eyes. He has the ultimate power of converting thoughts into reality. Fortunately or unfortunately, man doesn't realize the strength of this power unless he uses it once and that one time implementation requires thorough conviction. Conviction alone can drive visions into reality.

Conviction is all about sitting and doing the task at hand irrespective of whether it is interesting or not. Conviction deals with more of completion of the activity rather than the liking or the disliking of it. Starting different kinds of work is easy because there is the assistance of the initial curiosity or the beginner's luck. Sustaining is the challenging part and taking the work to completion is the toughest challenge. However, the mere decision of making up the mind for something so massive, can only be the result of taking commitment. A commitment is always kept up to because of conviction and hardwork. No matter how much time or energy it takes , one must make up his mind without even getting such distractions.

There are different ways to raise back your conviction. Have a mentor who can spot the flaw points in you without any doubts or questions. Develop the habit of reading more books because they are the sources of knowledge and wisdom. The vision towards which you're driving must be more important than the intermediate results. Only then will the conviction be able to drive us far ahead in life to accomplish all that we dream of.

Leadership is a D.E.P

To elaborate the title for those of you who couldn't interpret it, 'Leadership is a D.E.P (Daily Evaluation Process)'. To become a leader is a never ending process. Everyone is a leader to himself. The journey of becoming a better leader never ends no matter how many years of life we scale through. A leader is not the one who leads a lot of people. A leader is one who knows and does the job of leading himself or herself. Life is all about leading ourselves towards our goals. The moment the world sees us leading our lives, it surrenders to the leaders like us who have the power and clear direction to lead the globe. But, how does one evaluate himself as a leader?

Leadership is a daily evaluation process. He never gets a chance to get complacent at any point of time or can he compromise on any of his results. A leader needs to build his work day by day while developing himself so that he notices a better himself the next day than what he was the previous day. Hence I call that leadership is a daily job. Achieving excellence in whatever one does is what qualifies, as well as quantifies to be a leader. It's not about achieving perfection that defines a leader though he never gives up on striving for accomplishing perfection in every endeavour that he is a part of. For a leader, it's one day at a time and one work at a moment. A moment wasted apart from getting invested into work is a lost moment and he loses his leadership status for that moment. The more number of such moments only undermine the name and capacity of a leader. Hence every moment counts.

While we are pursuing our academics, we have the evaluation done once a month or once in 3 months or annually once. But while being a leader in real life, every day is a test or an exam. A leader needs to perform on a daily basis on a wide variety of things that he or she is involved in. There is no one to evaluate the performance except the results that his work is going to produce. It's all about self-evaluation. How well can you win your own self-evaluation will determine how well you have lead your day. Leading persistently and leading oneself correctly have to be tested on a daily basis and only then a true leader is formed. Once again, "Leadership is a D.E.P".

Practical entrepreneurship

With the advent of internet, opportunities to be your own boss sitting at home have increased multifold. Information is available just a click away and resources to build a company are easily accessible at your doorsteps by way of ordering at your fingertips. The craze of owning something has forgone a long way more than just mere desire to form a kind of psychological lock. One who doesn't have to take others orders is considered to be great. As a result of all such factors, today's youth is jumping into entrepreneurship without having any practical insight into it just out of excitement. MBA books have introduced so many complicated terms just by knowing which people believe that they can become entrepreneurs.

Today, the word 'entrepreneur' has taken up various forms for people in different fields. For working people, entrepreneurship turns into something called intrapreneurship. For people in fields other than business there's a wide variety to choose from such as social entrepreneurship, political entrepreneurship, knowledge entrepreneurship and a lot more. In any form of entrepreneurship the most important thing to be taken care of is practicality. Any work can be printed on paper and conceptualized to the best idealistic extent. The true roots of success or failure can only be witnessed when we jump into the practical field of implementation of the intended idea. I have heard so many MBA students who come to the conclusion by the time they start working that they just need to take all their textbooks, tear them apart and throw away once they are in the real world. Books were written based on the real world scenario of the past.

Having graphs of thousands of dollars scaling their way up with every passing year or charting out tables and pie-charts indicating the expected investments or the profit/loss statements do not alone suffice to build a practical B-plan. One has to get a first hand experience on field about business, about working with people, about understanding the relationship between demand and supply and many more practical aspects related to business. Without basic understanding for at least a couple of years one will only be devastated to see his/her paper plans crushing down into ashes if the practicality of implementation is sidelined. Let's get realistic friends!

The challenging philosophies

Books like that of Nicholas Nassim Taleb and Malcolm Gladwell challenge the existing philosophies. Irrational idiots and lucky fools are some of the phrases that authors of these kind use for some of the most renowned people whom we refer to as the successful souls on earth. There was the time of Newton when he discovered gravity and lot of other equations for motion and the era of Newtonian mechanics evolved and everyone accepted that it shall stand true through all ages until Albert Einstein proposed his Theory of Relativity. The new theory proved that Newtonian mechanics wasn't true in all the cases. Similar to changes in scientific philosophies is the case with the humanitarian theories.

During the early times, people believed that if a person worked hard he would become successful in life. Later came the concept that mere hard work isn't sufficient. If that is the case, then donkey must have been the most respected animal. Alas! It's not the case here. So another attribute got added to work and that was smartness. People take pride in saying, "I am not a hard working guy, I am smart worker." Likewise earlier people believed that success or failure was entirely dependent on the person alone. Whether one succeeded or failed, it all depended on the person's thoughts, attitudes, efforts and character. Nothing was of any external influence or importance here. However some people took up the career of research to dig down the reasons for success or failure. They came back with statistics that showed the influence of date of birth, places of existence, availability of resources and a lot of other factors that played a very prominent role in the visible results.

As every living being is subjected to evolution even the theories framed by humans are subjected to evolution. No theory shall get outdated. It shall only be augmented with more points to suit the updated era in accordance with the existing technology. Let's not forget the lessons of the old school just because we've the new school and the teachers of the modern age. 'Old is gold' is an age old statement which can never be abolished but can be taken as an exception in some cases. Growth and success are a result of a lot many factors which the human species is still yet to completely discover although we are aware that it's an impossible task. Let's be focused on our goals and dreams and assimilate every lesson that can take us a step forward in life.