Praveen Ramesh

Want to be healthy?

Simple- eat right. And move every day.

Want to be a prolific creator?

Simple- Create consistently. And enjoy the process.

Want to manage time?

Simple- Start measuring where you spend your time. And eliminate triggers.

Want to get more out of relationships?

Simple- Be the giver.

Want to have a growth mindset?

Simple- Embrace unlearning and relearning.

The answers to all problems are always simple. Never easy. The answers are always hard to implement. But the answers in itself? Always simple!

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Questions are often seen as a scale to test your skill. It’s a chance to show how good you’re at a subject.

We’ve been trained to answer questions the right way. Rather I prided myself in knowing the answer to any question thrown at me. Nothing wrong with it at face value.

But things start when we use answering questions as a benchmark to test our intelligence.

A job interview, a podcast interview, a sales call, or an office meeting.. if we take the approach that it is a test, and there’s ONLY one right answer, we’re not actively engaging or taking an effort to move forward.

Instead, we could use questions as opportunity to learn. See more deeply. Introspect and reflect. And ensure we ease tensions, and make the other person feel heard.

Questions are prompts to change our minds and learn something. It’s not always a test to get things right.

Image courtesy

A few months back I quipped a colleague for saying he doesn’t have time to time to pursue his hobby. In fact, I for sure know he has the time. It’s not hard to squeeze in 15-20 mins to start a new habit or hobby.

What he (and in most cases all of us) don’t have are attention and energy. Both these resources are far more limited than we think. What I think we should say is

I don’t have the attention required to get this done

I might have 8 hours to get all the work done. But I probably have 4 hours a day for work that requires focused attention. Any effort beyond my ‘focussed attention’ period means I’m physically present, and mentally I’d elsewhere.

Time and attention aren’t the same things. They're barely related.

[Photo courtesy from Unsplah]

There are a few things that we cannot get enough of. And most times, it’s not even our fault.

For example

• Real food satiates us. Junk food always leaves us wanting more.
• Consuming information on social never seems to tire us. Reading something intense, and deeply researched exhausts us.

Most of the things we want more off are designed to be that way. Junk foods are made with the holy trinity of salt, sugar and fat, leaving us wanting for more.

Ever stopped after eating a single piece of cookie? Or crisps? And when was the last time you stopped after ‘just’ spending 5 minutes on a social media platform?

We can choose to get out of this loop, face reality, and experience real ‘pleasures’. Or continue to go down the spiral with that gives us a temporary hit.

It’s a choice we have to make every single day!

Picture courtesy from Unsplash

I spoke about the counterintuitive lessons I learned in 2022.

What is the #1 thing you learned this year?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXFsGMSJG9c

If I had my way, I would recommend every entrepreneur and employee to read this book. Here are 5 things I liked from Rework, a book written by the founders of Basecamp.

Lesson 1: ASAP is poison

There is very little commitment when someone says “ASAP”. You know often ASAP is used as a disguise for urgency but in reality.

“ASAP” doesn’t make us realize that what’s important for us might not necessarily be important for someone else.

It always helps to ask

• “What can I reprioritize or move around to get this ASAP work done?”
• Why do you need it in an urgent way?
• Can you stick to these deadlines while managing other stuff?

Lesson 2: Planning is guessing

Every company plans for stuff. Come December- there’s a huge recession.

Everyone had a plan for how 2020 would look. Come March, everything was out of the window.

Irrespective of how good you’re with excel, presentation planning really does not move things. You can’t make a plan better with another stronger plan.

You make a plan stronger by moving, executing and doing things, and pivoting.

Lesson 3: Inspiration is perishable

Inspiration like most things in life is available in limited quantities. I write this piece post my evening coffee, when I feel the most inspired to reflect and push this piece out.

So plan your day and peak focus activities around times when your inspiration is on a high!

Lesson 4: Don’t be a hero

• Don’t try to do all things
• Don’t be afraid to admit mistakes
• Don’t try NOT to be vulnerable

The world loves to see a person fail. So ensure you know what you don’t know, seek help, and don’t get too ahead of yourself!

Lesson 5: Pick a fight

Standing out from the market requires you to stand for something.

Entering an established market? Stand against dated practices

Competing in a red ocean market? Stand up against the biggest competitors?

Standing up for something you attrach everyone who aligns with your thought process.

Embarrassing firsts in one of the most read posts from my blog. Something that often weighs us down when we want to start doing something is the fear of looking foolish.

Have you ever noticed how people become all the more conscious when they do something for the first few times? I bet you’ve been in the shoe multiple times!

Image by Brett Jordan

Here’s my take

A huge obstacleNOT doing something new or uncomfortable is the fear of looking foolish.

• While we learn to cycle/bike we fall over and over again, until the minute we don’t.
• We are embarrassed of raising questions in meetings, until the minute we are more confident.

Failing and looking foolish is how we learn. Somehow adults have told themselves that looking foolish is a bad thing. And this stops us from exploring and trying anything that will make us look foolish. Or amateurish.

A lot of unfair advantages in life is built by looking foolish in the short term.

For example, a lot of creators who went ‘all-in’ during the lockdown appear to be prospering and make people who took a cautious approach to create seem foolish. Only the creators properly positioned can take advantage when all the hype settles down. And the ones succeeding are the ones who believed in the slow burn and looked foolish in the short term.

Scenario-1- Thinking Excercise

Close your eyes and think of the last purchase(s) you made! It could be software, a car, a piece of clothing, or the vacation you booked!

Now, how many of these purchases can we rationalize without any emotional reasoning? In other words, how many of these purchases were driven by careful analysis, and objectively led to an “Answer”

In most cases, it’s ZILCH.

Scenario-2- Personal Experience

Ok, I’ll go this time. I bought an iPhone 13 Pro. While there were other phones in the market, I justified it by telling myself that I need it to shoot videos for my Youtube Channel.

And now, I plan to buy a whole bunch of things to ‘fit’ into the ecosystem.

• Was iPhone 13 Pro the best bet for my Youtube channel? Probably not. There are economical options that could have gotten the job done at a fraction of the cost.
• Do I need all the accessories that come with it? Absolutely not. I could still get away with headphones, watch, and systems from other brands.

Here’s What I Observed About Purchasing Patterns

• We don’t value things, we value their meaning. The reason we ‘feel’ personal with certain belonging as opposed to others.
• We tend to optimize more for how things make us feel, not what they do. What will it mean for me to own a brand of phone/clothing from another brand that does the same functionality?
• If you’re a marketer (like myself), it’s more important for you to understand human psychology and motivations as opposed to science/ attribution models.

We tend to take decisions emotionally, and justify them with rationality.

I recently had an epiphany.

Often people speak about “Trust” being central to any successful relationship. Upon appropriate maginication, I realised that trust is never gained or lost by a single incident. Like everything else, building trust needs consistent efforts.

And when I mean efforts, I don’t mean pour yourself to seek validation and all that jazz. It just boils down to two things

1. You doing what you said you will do

2. And doing that over a long period of time.

Just by doing these two things, anyone can become reliable. And reliability leads to trust.

Let me explain it with a two random examples

Image Credit: Randa

Starting a YT Channel

Say you want to make it big on YT. And you’ve been putting a video a week for over 3 years. Here’s how it would look

1. The algorithms will trust you and promote your content more. Because you’ve done it for 3 years.

2. Your newer subscribers will trust you that you will continue to add value if they subscribe (because you’ve done it for 3 years)

3. You start trusting yourself, and that acts as a great intrinsic motivation lever ;)

At Work

Say you take up a big project every quarter (or month), and you keep shipping the projects with best efforts and intentions.

1. Your manager and team starts to trust you. Even though some campaigns/projects bomb, they know that you have the company’s best intention in mind.

2. They trust you with bigger projects when the opportunity arises

See the pattern? While sticking with “Being realiable” is sort of redundant and old school, it’s the simplest muscle to build.

On a fuzzy Saturday afternoon, I logged into my inactive Instagram account. Unsurprisingly, all I found was an ad in every second scroll.

Many ads were selling how I wouldn’t be “Happy” with what I had. How ugly/unhappy/lonely/obsolete I am, and how buying “a product” would make my life instantly better.

In the past, I have given in to temptation and bought a few stuff. Unsurprisingly my mental state would’’t change after the purchase.

I was always left wanting more. And wanting to make things better than they are. Just like how seeing the NEWS makes me anxious and leaves me wanting for more!

Makes me wonder, ads especially the ones that offer comparisons are distributing dissatisfaction! Isn’t it?