Books Review

Importance of focus in a crazy environment I stumbled across the book  ‘Psycho Cybernetics’  by Dr Maxwell Maltz. The following paragraph had me awestruck and I kept thinking about it for a long time. When you habitually personalize every slight, every overheard conversation, even things you read or hear in media, you reveal a very thin-skinned self-image with the weakest of immunities. Be bigger than such things. Have bigger fish to fry, as the saying goes. The person in hot pursuit of meaningful, rewarding goals and a calendar of important things to do has little time to obsess over trivial slights and offenses. Most dumb, insensitive remarks are dumb, insensitive remarks; they have no hidden meaning, and searching for it -- certainly being offended by it -- is an utter waste of time. Its something I do (can’t say about everybody) and it looks like the author is talking about me. The thin-skinned self image destroys the whole body function and makes it really hard to ...

How to tweek your life to use failures to succeed I am reading Scott Adam’s ‘ How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life ’. One of the most important messages in this book is ‘always use failures to reorient your life for success. Its easier said than understood. Its easy to feign understanding it and its extremely difficult to implement it in your life. I believe the author has done a great job in explaining. I would like to break it down to the following steps. When have you failed? Most important part of the whole cycle is that you fail to understand when have you failed? Life is a continuous process and it never stops. So the clear signal of failure is never there. There are symptoms and indirect evidence. However its very late to realize that the we have failed. If something is failing the first attempt is to salvage and don’t allow it to fail. People who have anticipated failure early in the work and developed parameters / benchmark...

Daily habits that can help winning the battles to ultimately win the war Photo by  Ana Juma  on  Unsplash Its been more than three decades since I gained the wisdom to take care of myself. This indeed has been a roller coaster ride and with its ups and downs. There were more ups than downs but we tend to remember the downs more than necessary. In the years I have cultivated a plan to go about my daily chores so as to ensure that my goals are met and I am happy domain. It works most of the time but sometimes I falter in these habits. The side effects show up much faster than I anticipate and I have to set the sails again. Control your mornings Photo by  Carli Jeen  on  Unsplash Self help experts have a clear cut templates for suggesting morning routines. I would tell mine and encourage you to create your own morning routine based on experiments on what works well. First and foremost ensure you have a routine. This means that y...

Scott Adams discusses building systems in detail in his book ‘How to fail at almost everything and still win big’ So what is the difference between a system and a goal. The goals are future states that we aspire mono-maniacally, while systems are our daily habits that we do to ensure that we are moving forward. As pointed out by Scott Adams, one can easily confuse or interchange these two but the  gist  is that one should build a daily routine and stick to it. While goals are important to motivate but its more important to consistently work so as to move forward. The daily routine could be built around (not limited) to the following key factors. What makes me happy? What can I do on a repeat without being frustrated? What can help me learn more skills? What can give freedom to invest more into my family relationships and possibly contribute to society? If one is able to build a system then it will be sustainable and progress is guaranteed. Also it comes with th...