June 2016 - We Are The Living

Can we really re-wire our brain?

As humans, we always change over the years. Our bodies, beliefs, tastes in food and clothes, the books we read, the TV shows we watch and many others. If you were to look back at yourself 10 years ago, then you’d realise that you are a very different person now than you were then.

However, some things hardly change. It may be the fact that you have either been a morning person or a night person right from your childhood. Or that you have never liked brinjals. Or maybe you never found studying history fun. Or probably you still bite your nails. These traits have been part of you for so damn long that you never thought that you could get rid of them. In fact they are part of your identity. You may have tried really hard to consciously change these traits at one point or the other. However, doing so feels like you are continuously rapping the knuckles of your automatic self and constantly keeping your brain on a high alert to avoid automatic behaviour. That is tiring and certainly not enjoyable.

However, what if it is possible to change these traits using certain methods to re-wire your brain, such that new behaviour becomes part of you? Anthony Robbins is the leader of a method called Neuro-Linguistic Programming and he believes that you can use this kind of ‘programming’ to re-wire your brain so that it behaves exactly as you want it to, without resorting to will power to rap your knuckles.

Continue reading Can we really re-wire our brain?

Would you invest in ‘Me, Inc.’?

Do you know of a company that…

Has no mission and hence no articulated mission statement?
Has no vision of where the company wants to be in 20 years?
Has no values as guidelines to help in decision making?
Has no council of advisors or board of directors?
Occasionally sets annual goals but does not review or track them, and soon forgets about them?
Has no financial plan whatsoever? Does not know its cash flow? Does not have a profit and loss statement or a balance sheet?
Does not feel accountable to its stakeholders to keep them abreast of significant changes or consult when appropriate?
Does not have an incentivisation system that promotes the right behaviour?

Continue reading Would you invest in ‘Me, Inc.’?

Stop the excuses and start with the ordinary

Person 1: “Just look at these photos. I too wish to take photos like these. If only I could save up the money to buy a DSLR, lens and filters.”

Person 2: “Would you look at this snow-capped mountain in the Himalayas? How I wish I could trek on it. Our tropical town is no good.”

Person 3: “Just wait and see. The day I am able to gather a team of experts around me, I will start my business and earn millions. But it’s so hard to hire experts.”

We all come across people who repeat such statements every day. They insist that their reasons for not starting are genuine. Lack of resources, lack of facilities, lack of experts and what not! But the one thing that they do not lack is EXCUSES. Instead of starting with what they have, they are willing to wait for the utopian day when they have the best of resources, which they assume will automatically turn them into experts.

Let us discover why it is not a good idea to wait for the best resources and how not to fall into the trap of excusitis. Let’s get started on our dreams today!

Continue reading Stop the excuses and start with the ordinary

Where is my money, honey ?

Money Thoughts:

Have you wondered “I’ve been working for nearly a decade or more now. How is it that my Zero Balance Salary account is stuck forever at that ‘Zero Balance'”

“I started my career with a salary close to what my dad retired with, and in spite of all the generous increments and all these years of hard work I’ll probably own nothing more than what he did when he retired and to top it all I don’t even have a pension”

I dont know — “It’s only 5th, how come it’s showing zero balance again”

Continue reading Where is my money, honey ?

One simple idea to get things right

In his book The Checklist Manifesto, Boston based surgeon Dr. Atul Gawande mentions that failures occur due to the following reasons. The top three of them are:

Lack of knowledge
Lack of proficiency despite the knowledge
Completely unforeseen circumstances.

But more than 90% of his best-selling selling book highlights the failure of the fourth kind. You may have complete knowledge about a subject, you may have gained enough fluency to be an expert and the task ahead of you is completely predictable and smooth. Yet you goof up, because you forgot a step by either not paying attention to it or because some other step distracted you. These are the mistakes that are the easiest to eliminate and yet they keep creeping up in our day-to-day work. In this post, we discuss why they occur and how to eliminate them.

Continue reading One simple idea to get things right

Why does the standard gauge in US have a distance of 143.5 cm or 4 ft 8 1/2 inches ?

It is not a whole number in either meters or feet…how did the engineers come up with this number.. what made this the standard in this standard gauge.

Let’s examine the reasons:

– Because that’s what it is in UK, who were the original Pioneer of the railways. Ok. But why?
– Because that was the distance of the tram in Pre- rail road era. Ok. But why?

Apparently this is the average distance between the two wheels of a horse pulled carriage of the yester years. The engineers who were developing the rail system, for lack of any reference points took this to be the standard.

And do you know why a two wheel horse pulled carriage had this really odd wheel distance?

horsedrawn-carriage — horse drawn-carriage

Continue reading Why does the standard gauge in US have a distance of 143.5 cm or 4 ft 8 1/2 inches ?