Power = Speed of thought to Action

Procrastination is the unhappy place where brilliance goes to die. The world is full of great ideas that never saw the light of day. So how can we stop this self-sabotage and make things happen? It is a long process but I want to give you a new way of looking at ‘just doing it’ […]

Do it today

“You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.” – Abraham Lincoln. Procrastination is an affliction that debilitates even the best of us. But Future You is not going to be very happy with Present You if you keep delegating your tasks to him / her. Procrastination is a symptom of lack of […]

The 40% rule

Ex US Navy Seal David Goggins (also known as the ‘Toughest man alive’) has a penchant for pushing himself beyond human limits every single day. His most famous story is about how he ran his first ultramarathon (100 miles) with broken bones in his foot and a kidney failure. You can read more about his […]

From Worrier to Warrior

Go from being a worrier to being a Warrior. A worrier is paralysed by fear of the unknown. A Warrior knows that the unknown is exciting, and proactively seeks it. A worrier thinks too much about the future, and is paralysed by inaction and indecision. A Warrior in the battlefield thinks only about the here […]

Professionals ship. Amateurs make excuses.

The tools don’t matter. Start creating. I spent almost a decade waiting to get everything perfect before I started putting stuff out. I had thought of creating videos, but I never seemed to have the right camera, the right lenses, the right lights. When I was producing music, I never seemed to have the right […]

Don’t watch the news

Ours is an era of information overload. A time when there is such a glut of information from all the infinity pools of our news feeds, that will we always run out of time before we run out of ‘new’. We have gone from a time when information was scarce and knowledge was power, to […]

The Law of Forced Efficiency

“There’s never enough time to do everything, but there’s always enough time to do the most important thing.” What’s your most important thing for today? What’s the one thing that you will absolutely, positively accomplish today that will significantly move your work and life forward?

Trust the soup

Trust the soup. What to do when you are in a creative endeavour and are doubting yourself? When you hit a wall and you think, “I can’t do this”, or “This will never work”, or “this idea is just not good enough”. Trust the soup. From Steven Pressfield’s ‘Do the work’: 👉 When we say […]

Single tabbing

Single-tabbing. The best way to get things done today. As I have written before, multi-tasking is multi-failing. So how to focus in a world of a hundred open Chrome tabs? 1) First step is to block time for your most important task of the day.2) Once you are in that time block, close all other […]

Conscious creation and conscious consumption

At this very moment, you are consuming instead of creating. You are scrolling through a feed. Is it a (well earned) break for entertainment / information, or are you procrastinating, running away from something that is tough / uncertain / unclear? Procrastination is a sign of pain avoidance. Pain that arises from the resistance to […]

Your to-do list is your enemy

Your to-do list is your enemy; Your calendar is your best friend. The to-do list is the demand for your time. Anything and everything that is seeking your attention goes on that list. But who is checking this demand vs the supply of your time? If your to-do list has 20 items, who is helping […]

Regret and anxiety

Regret is worrying about the past and anxiety is worrying about the future. Both are equally useless. “We suffer more in our imagination than in reality.” – Seneca. Try to minimise both of these emotions and focus on the present.

Be bored. Everyday.

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” – Blaise Pascal. Have you had a situation where you worked on a problem for a long time to no avail, and then took a walk or slept on it and the solution magically emerged? That’s the power of your […]

The first two hours

👉 In the first two hours of the work day, work on the most important priority that will move your most important goal forward. Every ping, every notification, every email is someone else asking you to work on their priority. All of that can wait during those first few hours. Once you get a solid […]

Grit = Focus + Persistence.

‘Focus’ on your long term passion that has been discovered via experiments run over many years. Have the ‘persistence’ to not give up when the going gets tough. Research has shown that the #1 predictor of long term success is Grit. Not talent, not IQ, but grit. And having grit does not mean machoism and […]

The power of deadlines

“Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” – Parkinson’s law. We are terrible at estimating how much time a new activity or project will take. Whatever time you allocate for a project, you will end up ‘generating’ busy work to fill it. ⚡ The best way to get things done? Understand […]

A day well spent

What does a day well spent look like? 1) Working really hard on a problem that really matters to you, your company and to the world, at the cost of many other lesser important problems that are vying for your attention. 2) Making progress in that problem by moving ideas, execution and the team ahead. […]

Multi-tasking = Multi failing

There’s a quote in Tamil, that loosely translates to “If it is worth doing, it is worth doing well”. The corollary to that is “Do only what is worth doing, and do that very well”. No point doing many things at once under the guise of ‘productivity’. You are only fooling yourself, because the mind […]

Don’t say “I don’t have the time”. Say “it is not a priority”.

Don’t say “I don’t have the time”. Say “it is not priority”. The most important priority will always get time. Always. When you are underwater and need air to breathe, you will not procrastinate, you will not evaluate it vs other ‘priorities’, you will not make a plan and compare a pro-con list. There will […]

Do you know your hourly rate?

👉 Do you know your hourly rate? What is one hour of your time worth? We are making trade-offs every single minute in our day, without thinking deeply about the value that we are creating or wasting. Everyone wants to be wealthy, but no one is assigning the right value to the most important variable […]