I have talked about a morning route to rouse your day here. However, finishing your day with a routine is as important as starting your day with one. As with a morning routine, a wind-down routine is an excellent way to get you from wakefulness to deep sleep. Being an long time insomniac and a light sleeper, I can say that a wind-down routine has worked very well for me. Continue reading Wind-down routine: The perfect lullaby
Harikrishna Natrajan
Harikrishna Natrajan worked for a decade in the software industry, really enjoying the field throughout his job career. A software developer with proficiency in multiple programming languages, he chose startups as his destinations and worked in a lot of applications (such as WiFi networks and Android car dashboards) before they became popular in the retail market. Thus he enjoyed being ahead of the curve. His commitment to work on open source solutions led him to explore a lot of options and get work done without being tied up by the whims of a single corporation.
With his love for travel, he found freedom and leaves scarce while working in jobs. With the full support of Priya, his wife, he quit his last job in the November of 2015 and entered the world of software freelancing full time, after trying it as a side gig for 3 months. Priya soon quit her job too as the two of them planned an ambitious, life-changing year-long self-planned trip around India.
Nowadays, he enjoys life with his wife, who also quit her job, and both are always on the lookout for experimenting with self-planned travels, ideas for entrepreneurship and passive income and how to get better at life. He writes about his learning experiences on this blog.
Here are Harikrishna Natrajan's blog posts.
The ONE thing you should do every morning
Grab any magazine, read lifestyle sections of newspapers, go through productivity blogs or read productivity books. Everyone tells you the importance of morning routines, a regular sequence of actions you do every morning to build up to peak performance. Without the rhythm of a morning routine, you may mindlessly fumble through the day.
Most morning routines (including my previous one), fall under two categories: getting physical so that your body grows energetic (jogging, workout, yoga) and getting mindful so that your mind can focus better (meditation, journaling, worship).
However, Benjamin Hardy and Bedros Keuilian hit the nail on the head by suggesting that the first thing you should do every morning is an activity which takes you a step closer to your life’s most important goals. This activity most likely changes every week or month and is the #1 activity for that period of time. Continue reading The ONE thing you should do every morning
Book summary: Ready, fire, aim by Michael Masterson
Book title: Ready, fire, aim
Author: Michael Masterson (aka Mark Ford)
ISBN-10: 0470182024
ISBN-13: 978-0470182024
Buy here
What this book is about
Ready, fire, aim is not a typo. It is a deliberate word play on the common phrase Ready, aim, fire. Written by Michael Masterson, this book describes the process of building a company right from the startup phase to an enterprise that earns millions of dollars. The title suggests that we should always start before we are fully ready to launch something and that we should never obsess to the point of perfection. By launching before the product is perfect, we are letting the market decide how to improve it rather than falling into the trap of hubris, where we falsely believe that we fully know the market.
In the book, Michael breaks down the lifetime of a company into five stages. The sections of the book focus on what to do and where you should focus during those five stages. Continue reading Book summary: Ready, fire, aim by Michael Masterson
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Travelling for a year: not as radical as it sounds
Priya (my wife) and I are on a one year trip around India. We are calling the trip India 360, in which we are trying to cover as much of the country as we can in a year. The trip is from April 2017 to May 2018. While we have been enjoying ourselves and carrying on with the trip as if it were our regular day-to-day life, the reaction that we get from people who learn about our trip varies from mild concern to absolute shock. Trust me, most people are happy with what we are doing, but then….! Continue reading Travelling for a year: not as radical as it sounds
Live rich, feel rich, today, right now!
In his book Automatic Wealth, author Michael Masterson (aka Mark Ford) keeps re-iterating the difference between having a lot of money in your bank account and living rich. I was skeptical when I first read the title of the topic. How can someone live rich without having piles of money in his/her bank account? As I read the topic further and further, it became more and more convincing. After reading the last few words from this compelling section of this must-read book, I had a big smile on my face and an invigorating thought, “YES. I can live rich TODAY and RIGHT NOW.” Continue reading Live rich, feel rich, today, right now!
Book summary: Rich dad’s guide to investing by Robert Kiyosaki
Book title: Rich dad’s guide to investing
Author: Robert Kiyosaki
ISBN-10: 1612680216
ISBN-13: 978-1612680217
Buy here
What this book is about
Robert Kiyosaki, the author of the famous book, “Rich dad, poor dad”, has written a book named “Guide to investing”, which helps you build the right attitude to help you become rich. The book starts with a young Robert going to meet his mentor, whom he calls ‘rich dad’, and rich dad’s son. They are talking about investing in a very lucrative opportunity. While Robert asks to join in, the two politely respond to him that he couldn’t do it, since the opportunity was legally only for the ‘officially rich’, i.e. a networth of $1,000,000 and above. Stung by the incident, Robert consults his one and only guide on how to grow rich – his rich dad. The book is a culmination of what rich dad taught Robert about getting rich. Continue reading Book summary: Rich dad’s guide to investing by Robert Kiyosaki
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From masterpiece to mediocrity
We have seen this quite often. We love a certain brand of chocolate dearly. Let’s call it Toffee X. Over the years, the taste of the Toffee X changes gradually until one day we feel that the chocolate is tasteless. We try to reason it as a natural change of taste associated with growing up. But no! Your friends say the same thing. Well, they have grown up too. But no! The kids in your block say that Toffee X isn’t a tasty chocolate at all. They wonder why their parents were hyping it so much!
After poking around, you find that the makers of Toffee X did indeed change the taste. To cut costs, they kept cutting back on certain ingredients. The amount of cardamom was halved, butter was replaced with margarine, the size went down by a third and they used refined sugar instead of honey. From being the market #1, they are now just also-rans. This is a typical example of a work of masterpiece degrading over time and dying a slow death due to short-sightedness and lack of commitment and cutting corners as a result. Continue reading From masterpiece to mediocrity
A simple two-sided trick to get better at discipline
Travelling by bus through the Himalayas, we noticed a man attempting to throw three empty plastic water bottles out of the bus window. We immediately told him not to do that. The man looked at us, then withdrew the bottles, thankfully not converting the beautiful landscape into a landfill. After a while, he walked to us and asked if we ever planted trees. When we said no, he launched into a virtue-loaded story about how he planted a tree on his birthday every year from when he was a certain age and on special occasions like Diwali, children’s day, etc and now that he was 57, he must have planted more than 50 trees. Priya (my wife) and I did our best to listen and keep up with his bragging.
The man’s story was good. He had focused on what he should do to increase the earth’s green cover one tree at a time. However, what about garbage and their harmful effects? What about his non-biodegradable plastic bottles meddling with the Himalayan landscape and causing a hazard for the soil, the plants and the animals?
The man had focused only on what to DO and had ignored what NOT to DO. The man would have benefited from a DOs and DON’Ts list. You often need both to enforce discipline. Continue reading A simple two-sided trick to get better at discipline
How do you react to failure?
You are driving through a busy street in a city and need to park your vehicle. You find a spot that’s perfect to parallel-park your car between two others. Finally, your tiring drive can end. But while backing your car into the spot, you graze your car’s rear into a light pole. This is the side of the car to which you are blind-sided, and can only use judgement. There are an ugly scratch and a dent. After a few more twists and turns, you finally park the car. But your parking attempt suffered a failure. You can take this failure either like a loser or as a person who looks at it as something learnt. Continue reading How do you react to failure?
Theme your days to get more done
In his website Smart Passive Income, host Pat Flynn, also the author of Will It Fly, describes how he sets a different theme to every day of the week. This helps him focus on a certain project for the day by pushing everything else to other days with respective themes. Read about it in the “Communication and Calendar” section here.
I have already discussed how I use a calendar to schedule my days. However I soon realised that a calendar has its limitations. In Pat Flynn’s podcast with Mike Vardy, they discuss how a calendar is an example of horizontal scheduling and how it leads to focus being fragmented and on particularly distractive days, how nothing gets done.
The solution is to use a concept called day-wise themes.