Got this as a forward and just had to store it with me.

*Written by a 90 year old*

This is something we should all read at least once a week!!!!! Make sure you read to the end!!!!!!
Written by Regina Brett, 90 years old, of the Plain Dealer, Cleveland , Ohio.

“To celebrate growing older, I once wrote the 45 lessons life taught me. It is the most requested column I’ve ever written.
My odometer rolled over to 90 in August, so here is the column once more:
1. Life isn’t fair, but it’s still good.
2. When in doubt, just take the next small step.
3. Life is too short to waste time hating anyone.
4. Your job won’t take care of you when you are sick. Your friends and parents will. Stay in touch.
5. Pay off your credit cards every month.
6. You don’t have to win every argument. Agree to disagree.
7. Cry with someone. It’s more healing than crying alone.
8. It’s OK to get angry with God. He can take it.
9. Save for retirement starting with your first paycheck.
10. When it comes to chocolate, resistance is futile.
11. Make peace with your past so it won’t screw up the present.
12. It’s OK to let your children see you cry.
13. Don’t compare your life to others. You have no idea what their journey is all about.
14. If a relationship has to be a secret, you shouldn’t be in it.
15. Everything can change in the blink of an eye. But don’t worry; God never blinks.
16. Take a deep breath It calms the mind.
17. Get rid of anything that isn’t useful, beautiful or joyful.
18. Whatever doesn’t kill you really does make you stronger.
19. It’s never too late to have a happy childhood. But the second one is up to you and no one else.
20. When it comes to going after what you love in life, don’t take no for an answer.
21. Burn the candles, use the nice sheets, wear the fancy lingerie. Don’t save it for a special occasion. Today is special.
22. Over prepare, then go with the flow.
23. Be eccentric now. Don’t wait for old age to wear purple.
24. The most important sex organ is the brain.
25. No one is in charge of your happiness but you.
26. Frame every so-called disaster with these words ‘In five years, will this matter?’
27. Always choose life.
28. Forgive everyone everything.
29. What other people think of you is none of your business.
30. Time heals almost everything. Give time time.
31. However good or bad a situation is, it will change.
32. Don’t take yourself so seriously. No one else does.
33. Believe in miracles.
34. God loves you because of who God is, not because of anything you did or didn’t do.
35. Don’t audit life. Show up and make the most of it now.
36. Growing old beats the alternative — dying young.
37. Your children get only one childhood.
38. All that truly matters in the end is that you loved.
39. Get outside every day. Miracles are waiting everywhere.
40. If we all threw our problems in a pile and saw everyone else’s, we’d grab ours back.
41. Envy is a waste of time. You already have all you need.
42. The best is yet to come…
43. No matter how you feel, get up, dress up and show up.
44. Yield.
45. Life isn’t tied with a bow, but it’s still a gift.”

Here are 16 things I wish they had taught me in school (or I just would like to have known about earlier).

1. The 80/20 rule.

This is one of the best ways to make better use of your time. The 80/20 rule – also known as The Pareto Principle – basically says that 80 percent of the value you will receive will come from 20 percent of your activities.

So a lot of what you do is probably not as useful or even necessary to do as you may think.

You can just drop – or vastly decrease the time you spend on – a whole bunch of things.

And if you do that you will have more time and energy to spend on those things that really brings your value, happiness, fulfilment and so on.

2. Parkinson’s Law.

You can do things quicker than you think. This law says that a task will expand in time and seeming complexity depending on the time you set aside for it. For instance, if you say to yourself that you’ll come up with a solution within a week then the problem will seem to grow more difficult and you’ll spend more and more time trying to come up with a solution.

So focus your time on finding solutions. Then just give yourself an hour (instead of the whole day) or the day (instead of the whole week) to solve the problem. This will force your mind to focus on solutions and action.

The result may not be exactly as perfect as if you had spent a week on the task, but as mentioned in the previous point, 80 percent of the value will come from 20 percent of the activities anyway. Or you may wind up with a better result because you haven’t overcomplicated or overpolished things. This will help you to get things done faster, to improve your ability to focus and give you more free time where you can totally focus on what’s in front of you instead of having some looming task creating stress in the back of your mind.

3. Batching.

Boring or routine tasks can create a lot of procrastination and low-level anxiety. One good way to get these things done quickly is to batch them. This means that you do them all in row. You will be able to do them quicker because there is less “start-up time” compared to if you spread them out. And when you are batching you become fully engaged in the tasks and more focused.

A batch of things to do in an hour today may look like this: Clean your desk / answer today’s emails / do the dishes / make three calls / write a grocery shopping list for tomorrow.

4. First, give value. Then, get value. Not the other way around.

This is a bit of a counter-intuitive thing. There is often an idea that someone should give us something or do something for us before we give back. The problem is just that a lot of people think that way. And so far less than possible is given either way.

If you want to increase the value you receive (money, love, kindness, opportunities etc.) you have to increase the value you give. Because over time you pretty much get what you give. It would perhaps be nice to get something for nothing. But that seldom happens.

5. Be proactive. Not reactive.

This one ties into the last point. If everyone is reactive then very little will get done. You could sit and wait and hope for someone else to do something. And that happens pretty often, but it can take a lot of time before it happens.

A more useful and beneficial way is to be proactive, to simply be the one to take the first practical action and get the ball rolling. This not only saves you a lot of waiting, but is also more pleasurable since you feel like you have the power over your life. Instead of feeling like you are run by a bunch of random outside forces.

6. Mistakes and failures are good.

When you are young you just try things and fail until you learn. As you grow a bit older, you learn from – for example – school to not make mistakes. And you try less and less things.

This may cause you to stop being proactive and to fall into a habit of being reactive, of waiting for someone else to do something. I mean, what if you actually tried something and failed? Perhaps people would laugh at you?

Perhaps they would. But when you experience that you soon realize that it is seldom the end of the world. And a lot of the time people don’t care that much. They have their own challenges and lives to worry about.

And success in life often comes from not giving up despite mistakes and failure. It comes from being persistent.

When you first learn to ride your bike you may fall over and over. Bruise a knee and cry a bit. But you get up, brush yourself off and get on the saddle again. And eventually you learn how to ride a bike. If you can just reconnect to your 5 year old self and do things that way – instead of giving up after a try/failure or two as grown-ups often do – you would probably experience a lot more interesting things, learn valuable lessons and have quite a bit more success.

7. Don’t beat yourself up.

Why do people give up after just few mistakes or failures? Well, I think one big reason is because they beat themselves up way too much. But it’s a kinda pointless habit. It only creates additional and unnecessary pain inside you and wastes your precious time. It’s best to try to drop this habit as much as you can.

8. Assume rapport.

Meeting new people is fun. But it can also induce nervousness. We all want to make a good first impression and not get stuck in an awkward conversation.

The best way to do this that I have found so far is to assume rapport. This means that you simply pretend that you are meeting one of your best friends. Then you start the interaction in that frame of mind instead of the nervous one.

This works surprisingly well. You can read more about it in How to Have Less Awkward Conversations: Assuming Rapport.

9. Use your reticular activation system to your advantage.

I learned about the organs and the inner workings of the body in class but nobody told me about the reticular activation system. And that’s a shame, because this is one of the most powerful things you can learn about. What this focus system, this R.A.S, in your mind does is to allow you to see in your surroundings what you focus your thoughts on. It pretty much always helps you to find what you are looking for.

So you really need to focus on what you want, not on what you don’t want. And keep that focus steady.

Setting goals and reviewing them frequently is one way to keep your focus on what’s important and to help you take action that will move your closer to toward where you want to go. Another way is just to use external reminders such as pieces of paper where you can, for instance, write down a few things from this post like “Give value” or “Assume rapport”. And then you can put those pieces of paper on your fridge, bathroom mirror etc.

10. Your attitude changes your reality.

We have all heard that you should keep a positive attitude or perhaps that “you need to change your attitude!”. That is a nice piece of advice I suppose, but without any more reasons to do it is very easy to just brush such suggestions off and continue using your old attitude.

But the thing that I’ve discovered the last few years is that if you change your attitude, you actually change your reality. When you for instance use a positive attitude instead of a negative one you start to see things and viewpoints that were invisible to you before. You may think to yourself “why haven’t I thought about things this way before?”.

When you change your attitude you change what you focus on. And all things in your world can now be seen in a different light.

This is of course very similar to the previous tip but I wanted to give this one some space. Because changing your attitude can create an insane change in your world. It might not look like it if you just think about it though. Pessimism might seem like realism. But that is mostly because your R.A.S is tuned into seeing all the negative things you want to see. And that makes you “right” a lot of the time. And perhaps that is what you want. On the other hand, there are more fun things than being right all the time.

If you try changing your attitude for real – instead of analysing such a concept in your mind – you’ll be surprised.

11. Gratitude is a simple way to make yourself feel happy.

Sure, I was probably told that I should be grateful. Perhaps because it was the right thing to do or just something I should do. But if someone had said that feeling grateful about things for minute or two is a great way to turn a negative mood into a happy one I would probably have practised gratitude more. It is also a good tool for keeping your attitude up and focusing on the right things. And to make other people happy. Which tends to make you even happier, since emotions are contagious.

12. Don’t compare yourself to others.

The ego wants to compare. It wants to find reasons for you to feel good about yourself (“I’ve got a new bike!”). But by doing that it also becomes very hard to not compare yourself to others who have more than you (“Oh no, Bill has bought an even nicer bike!”). And so you don’t feel so good about yourself once again. If you compare yourself to others you let the world around control how you feel about yourself. It always becomes a rollercoaster of emotions.

A more useful way is to compare yourself to yourself. To look at how far you have come, what you have accomplished and how you have grown. It may not sound like that much fun but in the long run it brings a lot more inner stillness, personal power and positive feelings.

13. 80-90% of what you fear will happen never really come into reality.

This is a big one. Most things you fear will happen never happen. They are just monsters in your own mind. And if they happen then they will most often not be as painful or bad as you expected. Worrying is most often just a waste of time.

This is of course easy to say. But if you remind yourself of how little of what you feared throughout your life that has actually happened you can start to release more and more of that worry from your thoughts.

14. Don’t take things too seriously.

It’s very easy to get wrapped up in things. But most of the things you worry about never come into reality. And what may seem like a big problem right now you may not even remember in three years.

Taking yourself, your thoughts and your emotions too seriously often just seems to lead to more unnecessary suffering. So relax a little more and lighten up a bit. It can do wonders for your mood and as an extension of that; your life.

15. Write everything down.

If your memory is anything like mine then it’s like a leaking bucket. Many of your good or great ideas may be lost forever if you don’t make a habit of writing things down. This is also a good way to keep your focus on what you want. Read more about it in Why You Should Write Things Down.

16. There are opportunities in just about every experience.

In pretty much any experience there are always things that you can learn from it and things within the experience that can help you to grow. Negative experiences, mistakes and failure can sometimes be even better than a success because it teaches you something totally new, something that another success could never teach you.

Whenever you have a “negative experience” ask yourself: where is the opportunity in this? What is good about this situation? One negative experience can – with time – help you create many very positive experiences.

What do you wish someone had told you in school or you had just learned earlier in life?

Source: http://www.positivityblog.com/index.php/2008/04/02/16-things-i-wish-they-had-taught-me-in-school/comment-page-4/

Well I am not a sadist but if you want to trouble your boy friends and annoy the crap out of them here are a few things you can do:

1. Take them shopping with you.
2. Get them to buy pink stuff
3. Make them watch chick flicks and romantic hindi movies with you

That’s all I can come up with right now… Will keep editing the post with more things.

It’s been over 7 months since I last blogged. This isn’t the first time I have said that I’ll blog regularly… But I sure will try. Also, installed the wordpress app on my BB, hope that helps me blog more. Fingers crossed!!

Wednesday, 17th Feb 2010
@private beach at the Sea Shells resort – Havelock.

The sea was calm – I mean really really calm. Not a wave; not a ripple. It was as if I was staring a pond rather than sitting at the sea shore — It was so calm and quiet. I wish my mind was that calm. The flood of thoughts.. all random, was crazy. But the sea…. it was calm.

With all my starting, the sea responded…. there were a few ripples. I looked straight ahead and saw nothing but a couple of mangrove trees. Thought I would see a dingy pass by in a bit which was probably what caused the ripples, or a crab or fish swimming, but there was none. I stared endlessly at the beauty lying ahead and enjoying every second.

The ripples appeared again!! This time, I stared at the sea, just around the shore….. that’s when I realized what was happening…. The tide was sneaking out!! It was time for high tide I have been to many places, a lot of sea shores, lived on an island for 4 years (was in Fiji) but have never ever see the sea so sneaky.

In Mumbai, high tides mean a few waves bringing the sea out — never have I seen it sneak out like this…. Wow… this was a pleasant experience.

I was reading this article on the discussion of strengths and weaknesses that happens in almost all interviews and it got me thinking. If I am asked what my weaknesses are, what would I say?

1. Chocolates
2. Procrastination (check my wardrobe / room out)
3. Lack of determination (you goota see me to believe it — i have been on a diet for about 4 yrs now and have gained 15+ kgs)
4. I do not finish the books I read
5. I am a romantic at heart

People who know me and are reading this, please comment. Let me know what your weakness(es) is and what you think mine is. Help me know me better!!

A friend of mine sent me an email which is actually a contribution by IIM B Professor Y.L.R. Moorthi. It is an amazing read; do read this.
 

testing testing testing

“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.”
- Warren Buffet

Other people’s perceptions are very important in business. First impressions are made within seconds and office gossip has the potential to damage a reputation almost beyond repair. Do you know how your colleagues perceive you?

who, me?

Have you overheard someone’s negative comments? Has your boss reprimanded you during your evaluation? Has a friend said something about your behavior? Perhaps people’s body language or tone of voice changes when you join a conversation, or maybe you just have a gut feeling.

If you want to find out how you’re perceived, ask someone you can trust and listen carefully to their comments, without taking offense.

Other people’s perceptions of you may be wrong, but rather than wasting time complaining, getting even or defending yourself, take action to change their opinion. Just keep in mind that your actions in the first few months at a new company or in a new position will set the tone for how others perceive you.

Here are eight common misperceptions, and ways you can turn negative impressions into positive ones.

take aim

1- They think you’re lazy

Take initiative
Ask for more responsibilities and go above and beyond your call of duty at work. No matter how full your schedule is, you need to be seen working harder.

Show your accomplishments
Don’t brag; use a little creativity to turn the office gossip from criticism to praise. People like to be thanked. Try saying something like, “thanks for the figures you gave me; that really helped me get my report ready for the Board of Directors.”

Watch your body language
Don’t slouch or lean against the nearest wall or desk. Keep your feet off the desk — literally and figuratively. Approach your work with energy and enthusiasm to counteract any suggestions that hard work goes against your nature.

2- They think you’re unprofessional

Master etiquette
Courtesy is contagious. When you’re respectful and polite, it makes it more difficult for people to judge you unfairly, blame you unjustly or otherwise disrespect you.

Accept criticism
Don’t be defensive when you receive feedback or when you overhear things about you that are inaccurate. Being open to comments and listening to constructive criticism is a sign of maturity and professionalism.

Filter your comments
To avoid putting your foot in your mouth, think carefully before speaking. No matter how angry you are or how sloppy someone else’s work is, hold back. Watch what you say and whom you say it to.

Look the part
Dress appropriately and speak well. Know the corporate policies and lingo. Be prepared for meetings and be sure your workspace looks organized.

3- They think you’re the office clown

Shut up
You’re there to work so stop telling jokes and trying to make people laugh. There’s plenty of time for humor over a beer after work. When your colleagues pressure you to entertain them, put the focus on someone else. “I can’t think of anything funny today. How about telling your joke, Charlie?” deflects the attention on to someone else without alienating anyone.

Laugh less
It’s great to be known as an open and fun-loving kind of guy, but there’s a limit. Leave a crowd of employees who are laughing it up, by saying you must return to work.

Tidy up
Maintain a professional-looking workspace. Take down the cartoons and limit the number of e-mail jokes you forward.
You might want to remove that lampshade from your head…

4- They think you’re a party guy

Tone it down
Don’t talk about your experiences. How late you stayed out and how much you drank is no one else’s business. Don’t consume alcohol during working hours and behave at corporate functions like the annual holiday office party. Treat after-work gatherings as networking opportunities instead of a party and you will change people’s impressions.

Get serious
No matter how valid your excuse is, don’t show up late unless you want people to speculate about your extracurricular activities. Arrive on time, and be alert and ready to be productive.

5- They think you’re a womanizer

Be discreet
Don’t boast about your sexual conquests. No matter how tempted you are, never flirt with your colleagues, your boss, your staff, or your clients.

Clean up your act
Don’t use any sexual innuendoes, don’t forward jokes of a sexual nature and, of course, don’t surf pornographic sites at work.

6- They think you’re always late

Be on time
Get up earlier and be the first one to arrive at work. Be realistic with your schedule and build in extra time. You’re setting yourself up for criticism if you routinely neglect to plan for travel time between appointments. Being late is perceived as a sign of disrespect and disorganization.

Plan ahead
Prepare and follow a to-do list, updating it regularly. To be safe, overestimate the time it takes to perform your tasks. Don’t procrastinate. Plan your timeline well and you’ll be able to hand in your projects before the deadline, no matter what unexpected problems arise.

7- They think you’re unethical

Be honest
Be careful what you propose. Don’t suggest stealing the competition’s ideas or plagiarizing someone else’s research. Be sure that any claims you make about your products are accurate and proven.

Demonstrate integrity
Follow corporate guidelines to avoid any perception that you’re abusing the company’s fringe benefits (for example, making personal long-distance calls or using the company photocopier for multiple personal copies). Know the policy on accepting gifts from customers or suppliers, and don’t get caught on the golf course when you call in sick.

Be responsible
If you make a mistake, admit it. Take ownership instead of blaming someone else or making excuses.

Make the right decisions
If you are asked to do something you feel is wrong, reflect on the long-term impact it will have on your image and professional reputation.

Be community-minded
Donate money to charity in the company’s name. Suggest doing a fundraiser at work to help a charitable organization or ask employees to bring in non-perishable goods for a local food bank.

8- They think you’re not a team player

Be friendly
Learn and use people’s names. Take the time to get to know a little about your coworkers’ business strengths and outside interests.

Be dependable
Don’t poach ideas from colleagues and always give credit when it’s due. Offer to help a colleague if you can and praise your teammates for a job well done. When upper management hears your colleagues saying how much they enjoy working with you, you’ll be seen as a natural leader.

Focus on your goals
Whether or not their perceptions are accurate, what your colleagues think and say about you can potentially make or break your career. Ask for feedback from a trusted colleague or your boss on a regular basis. You want to turn negative comments into positive ones. Many of these suggestions are interchangeable; just remember not to be defensive.

By trying to change people’s perceptions of you, you’re not necessarily admitting to any of these shortcomings; you’re simply trying to get those you work with to see you in better light. So don’t try to change your personality. Remain sincere and true to your values. And if all else fails, start fresh at a new company.