Summer Camp has Begun – Maintaining the schedule without committing to another person is tough!

Instead of diving right into a new venture (although I am thinking about what to do constantly) I have set up a “summer camp” of sorts for myself for the next month.  The PLAN (and i stress plan for reasons I will explain below) is as follows:

- Conversational Hindi classes – three times a week for one hour

- Yoga classes – twice a week in the morning for one hour

- Cooking classes – 2-3 times a week for 1-1.5 hours

- Sailing classes – 2 times a week for 2-3 hours

- Bridge classes – 3 times a week for 1 hour

 

Only the Hindi and Yoga classes are actually paid for, fully scheduled classes.  Cooking “class” is with our home cook, sailing classes is regular sailing with a “tindel” on-board who does not speak a work of English and bridge classes are, as of now, non-existent (though I am spending time reading and learning online).  It has not been for a lack of trying though!

 

I am afraid that without having a set, committed, schedule with a teacher that i have paid for, it will be tough to maintain my motivation.  Having that monetary pressure plus feeling of responsibility to another person makes it more likely that I will learn.  Take bridge, for example – I started by scheduling an hour of time for myself at home.  First lesson was easy but with all the distractions I have on my computer it is easy to slip. 

 

If any of you have any other ideas of how to keep myself motivated please do let me know!

What to Do With Your Life Besides Make Money and Outperform Your Peers

Since I graduated from college and began my “corporate life” I have never taken a step back to determine what my personal goals and aspirations are.  From a professional perspective it was easy to fall into the trap of comparing myself to my peers in terms of performance and pay.  Thus, the goal became to outperform my peers both operationally and in terms of the amount of money I could make.  I never gave a thought as to why I was making money – to what end?  Nor did I really think about what exactly is it that I would enjoy to do!

 

Two years ago as I was leaving my job at Merrill I began to feel that I needed to find a better “purpose” in my life, not to find the “answer” but to figure out what I wanted vs. what society told me I wanted.   Being aware of these thoughts is tough because finding an answer is REALLY tough.  I ultimately fell back into the trap of working for money and prestige precisely because the answers are tough to find; it is easier to ignore the answers then to confront them head-on.  Tim Ferriss’s book the Four Hour Work Week really helped me open my eyes and think about the “why” and “what” by giving a structured method to think about my life goals.  At the beginning of the book he asked direct questions that helped tackle my fears and define worst-case scenarios.  This exercise ultimately freed me to think about all of the positive possibilities / outcomes as well. 

 

After defining my biggest fear – to lose my entire net-worth and the respect of my friends and family (realizing of course that losing the net-worth is much easier then losing the respect of my friends and family) – I proceeded with Tim Ferriss’s dreamscape exercise.  Basically I had to think about what my ultimate life-goals would be in the next 6 months in an ideal world (where I would not have to worry about money).  Very simple for me -

1. Spend a month in Buenos Aires
2. Learn how to cook
3. Learn Hindi properly
4. Learn Bridge
5. Get my own fully furnished apartment on rent (I'm talking a really NICE place!) in Mumbai

 

Based on this initial list I had to figure potential costing and a definite way to prove that I have achieved the goal -

1. spend a month in Buenos Aires (USD 1,500 round trip –> ~USD 6,000 total spend including rent)
2. Prepare an Indian meal for my family alone (lessons free from my cook!)
3. Speak to my cook for five minutes without stuttering or pausing to translate in my head (~INR 5,000)
4. Play bridge for an hour with my dad and his friends (~INR 5,000 for a teacher)
5. Apartment on rent (~INR 50,000 per month)

 

Now with realistic actionable goals and an understanding of the end-product (for skills learned especially) it makes it easy to break down these tasks into smaller and more actionable items.  I can also see from the above list what goals are realistic and what goals I will need more money for.  More importantly, though, I realized that I can achieve my dreams for less then I thought (if I were to spread the costs over 6 months it would be INR 100,000 per month [including a 30% buffer for extra expenses]).  Going back to my obsession with GTD, this type of thinking is helpful because now I can define specific steps to achieve my goals vs. being paralyzed by larger less general objectives. 

 

Now the key is, how do I make enough money to afford an apartment and go to Buenos Aires.  I am going to start learning my new skills next week!

I am finding it tough to make lots of money by doing minimal amounts of work

I really wish I knew a way to make a lot of money where I could do minimum amounts of work.  That would be ideal.  If anyone has any ideas, please let me know . . . . .

 

One of the great parts about David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” (GTD) productivity system is that it forced me to break my tasks down into smaller manageable, and more importantly, ACTIONABLE tasks.  Over the last two years it has really help me increase my productivity at work and home and also make me feel like I am in control of my life. 

 

The system has worked well for me in a job where my objectives were reasonably well defined and thus the expectations and tasks were also well defined.  When your objective is less defined (i.e. making a lot of money by doing minimal amounts of work!) it is tough to find clearly defined tasks to accomplish your end goal.  For instance, the obvious first way is to start researching some “concepts” on the web.  Fine.  Now identifying compelling opportunities is very tough because there are a lot of qualitative as well as quantitative measures that you can use and they change on an idea to idea basis.  So, how am I supposed to choose a way to accomplish the overarching goal when I can’t rate the different ideas because they have complex ratings mechanisms that are not even comparable to one another.  The end result is complete and utter standstill . . . . zero productivity (check out the link, how hilarious is this)!

 

Let us say for a moment, that I was able to find something worth trying.  The next step presents an even  bigger problem.  You typically have to do something you have never done before AND spend money dong it.  Now without any sort of income (since I have “left the corporate” so to speak) I can’t bring myself to spend even one cent on a business where I have not already proved the return potential – that means I’m already refining my search to the “getting something for nothing” category which I anyways believe is just not workable. 

 

What I keep hearing from successful, for budding entrepreneurs is that you don’t know what will work until you have tried it – and you have to expect a bit of failure.  You need to learn from your mistakes and TRY OUT your new ideas!  I think I'm just stalling because I’m scared to try new things.  I bet that by the end of March when the prospect of zero-income fully hits me I’ll probably start trying new things in earnest.

Overloading Your Information Diet

The marvels of modern technology allow me access to information in any place at any time. About two months ago I realized that I was spending almost 3 hours of my day reading through newspapers, blog posts and other internet news sites. I am an information junkie. I had never stopped to think about why I need all of this information and how any of it could really help me.

I operated under the assumption that the more information I consumed, the better - at somepoint, somewhere, that information could/would be useful.  After reading my new favorite book “The Four Hour Workweek” I very quickly realized how much time I was wasting.  Reading every word of every article that comes across my radar is not only unproductive but some of the most important pieces of information are easily forgotten in the process.

How do you re-evaluate your information diet?  Easy, read the tagline / headline and ask yourself some very important questions:

1. Is this piece of information going to tangibly help me today/tomorrow/this week
2. Is this piece of information something that I am actually interested in and care about

For example, I was reading every single article about the Satyam debacle in the ET everyday. As general purpose cocktail knowledge it is good to know what is going on in the world, but EVERY article is overkill. What I needed was the one article that gives the daily overview of what is happening (in fact, typically you can get this from the headlines themselves). Also, through the headlines you can then find specific articles that you can focus on . . . for example I have worked with a certain audit company in the past and would like to know what the public perception / regulatory fallout is of this debacle. Just by asking myself the above questions I was able to cut my “time spent on Satyam” to 1/8 of what it was before . . . . .