Praveen Ramesh

We love success stories. We want to replicate successful people. Successful practices. Successful frameworks. Everything successful.

Deliberate magnification will reveal how drastically different every success story can be. A classic case of outcome bias.

It arises when a decision is based on past events, without any regard to events that led to success. In fact, outcome bias deemphasises preceding events that led to a fruitful outcome.

Outcome bias plays down the HUGE role luck plays in every result.You know what you need to do the next time you’re in a ‘End state aspiration’.

I love writing, but I didn’t build this website.

I love speaking in front of the camera, but I don’t edit my videos.

I love training with weights, but I have a personal trainer to help me.

Everything we do uses tools, expertise and frameworks that were built by others. That begs the question

Should we be doing all things that we are doing? Can some one else do it better than us?

If you’re a writer, does it make sense to edit your own work or should you be taking help from someone who’s twice as good, charges half the price and is faster in the job?

Now replicate that to every action or work you ‘perform’.

What are you doing that only you can do well? Why are you doing the rest?

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There are three proven ways to have good ideas. At least those that have worked for me

Thinking For Someone Else

It’s so easier to come up with ideas when you’re not the one executing it. It’s much easier to paint a picture to your words and care as a consumer.

Bad Ideas

Lots of them. The harder we work for bad ideas, the better. And eventually a great idea might just slip through.

Cross Pollinating

Connect dots from completely different fields/streams. Relatively easier to contextualise what has worked somewhere else!

60 minutes. There’s a lot of ways we can view 60 minutes

60*1

30*2

15*2 + 30*1

15*4

10* 2 + 15*1 + 25*1

All of the cases, the quantity of the hour is the same. The quality isn’t.

And this sums up most of our working days. We’re doing multiple things in a single hour. 15 mins of some work. 20 minutes of another. And 10 minutes of small talk and 15 mins call, ensuring nothing effective gets done.

Here’s an experiment

Pick something and work on it for 60 minutes. Without being interrupted, checking your phone, or resisting the urge to speak to a colleague. You'll surprised on how much you get done.

A fractured hour is a mess of minutes. Crammed input equals ineffective output.

I’ve seen 3 types of creators. Doers. Perfectionists. Complainers.

Doers share their work.

Sharing your work is scary. It’s like you’re venturing into an unknown territory, making yourself susceptible to judgement. But that’s the only way a creator can grow their audience. They don’t wait for the right ‘moment’ to get started.

Perfectionists are hoarders

Perfectionists get caught in finding the ‘perfect’ version of their work. They over index on it.

If they had only stopped tinkering along the way, and taken the leap of faith.

Not publishing your work feels safe and comfortable. But it has a huge cost-your ideas never help the intended purpose (even if you’re publishing for your own comfort).

Complainers keep yapping

These are people who always “have” ideas, “want” to publish, but never get around doing it. They want “big” things from Day-1. You will see these people telling you

• How they haven’t found the perfect tool to start
• Why they feel creating isn’t for them
• Why they don’t find time to get things done
• How they’re excited about an “idea”

What do you want?

You could be any one of these. And that’s perfectly fine.

If your goal is to “Create”, do yourself a big favour by sharing your work.

If not, move on! Maybe it’s not the right time. Or you aren’t in the right frame of mind. Come back to it.

This video contains a 1-line review of every book I’ve read till June 2022.

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

The stand out for me? How much I’ve progressed in my reading and video creation journey.

Writing and clarity dance with each other.

Writing is something that I never enjoyed. I used to write to “sound” intelligent. And eventually ran out of ideas, motivation and drive. All this changed once I started to see writing as an outlet.

Feeling overwhelmed? Write

Have an idea to work on? Write

Not sure how you feel? Write

Have a brilliant idea? Write

Feeling too blah? Write till your mind is empty.

Writing has helped me put shape to thoughts. Feelings and emotions suddenly come to surface. And all this with a pen and paper that costs less than $1.

Clear writing gives poor thinking nowhere to hide.

Habits are weird. They are exciting when you start, and incredibly hard to maintain once you see some results. I’ve had my fair share observations of NOT staying put with a habit for long

• Losing weight is easy- maintaining it is difficult
• Starting a blog is easy- posting on a schedule is not
• Having 1 great appraisal is easy, having consecutive ones is hard

All of us love having one time validations. But they mean just that- validations. Not results.

Magic happens when we stay put.

A horse is standing between a haystack and a can of water confused on what it should consume.

Enough time passes and eventually the horse dies of a hunger and thirst. This analogy reflects my thinking process. Stuck & confused on picking the right choice. And ultimately giving up because of fatigue.

Here’s how I’m changing it

When stuck with choices, I force myself to act. When acting we’re forced to pick or make something a priority. And even if we go with the wrong choice, we would have learnt something.

For most people routines are boring. And I for one hate the rigidity it brings into my day. This until I quit my previous job, and was in a little break.

After some reflections, wandering I really didn’t know what to do with my time.

And slowly but steadily the freedom became draining.

I was bogged down by

1. What to do next?

2. Constant effort in choosing my next project

3. And burnt out with all the decision fatigue.

I set out to have a simple routine in the morning. Something that will just set up me for the day, and that’s not too taxing. And KA-BOOM I instantly start to feel better.

These routines have changed, have been altered, but I’ve constantly stuck to some kind of a morning and wind down routine. But then begs the question

How much routine is too much?

We never want to go overboard with our routines. Because they cause rigidity and boredom. And eventually we beat ourselves even if miss a day. I for one, don’t schedule every hour of the day.

I try to have a routine that gives me enough flexibility to try new things, yet gives me the predictability to my day.

Mornings: Wake up and just be, workout, breathing/meditation, read, meal preparation.

Evenings: Meal prep, watch something, read and sleep.

Apart from these, I have theme days.

Like Thursday’s are my shoot days, Saturdays are my socialising day, and Sunday is complete rest with no fixed agenda.