Once in a while, we get attracted to different things including cause, person or a vision. It is difficult to differentiate between lust and love at first because they both have the same passion and sentiments. With the passage of time, it becomes difficult to keep the same sentiments over an extended period of time. We all are humans and sentiments make or break us. We have to invest resources such as time, money and emotions for a better future but mostly we are unsure if this is the right use of our time. No one can predict the future accurately however it is fairly easy to assess the present.

Love increases with time and lust decreases with time

This is a good parameter to measure if it’s love or lust. If you are more excited about your product on daily basis then you are heading in the right direction and if it’s the other way around, it’s time to rethink if this is what you want to do in your life. There are rough patches in everything, but during rough patches it should bring you closer to the things you love rather than creating distances.

In tough times, you want to be with your loved one and far from lust

It’s never a good move to follow lust but love. You have to be passionate about what you do, else with the passage of time, you will get drained. If you are getting drained, you are not in due to the passion for some other reason.It’s fine as long as you know that!

TL;DR

Use Verbal/Written communication appropriately. Have a purpose for every communication and based on that choose the appropriate medium.

Thoughts :

Communication is one of the most important aspect of our everyday life. We communicate to understand, assist, or help each other.

Here is a random order, in which I think we started communication

– Hand Signals

– Drawing the hand signals

– Drawing and sending those hand signals

– Invented some sounds to replace the hand signals

– Standardized these sounds

– Converted these sounds into symbols / characters

– Improved on these characters and standardized these sounds

– Language was invented

So now we have two forms of communication

Vocal & written ( I am excluding Body language here )

For Distant people, we invented Postal Mail ( Email/Fax)  & Telephone to communicate efficiently. Both of them have different purposes to communicate. Usually, I have came across when they are not used at the right time, which causes problems. I often find hard to balance between both of them as well, since we tend to use the easiest tool at that point of time. Such as we will call and leave a voicemail, when we know that the person will not be available on desk. We will draft an email in a tone that the other person feels bad. In addition, we also might call the person and poorly communicate a deal to give our self-benefit of doubt.

All of these are wrong practices and should be avoided. I have not yet mastered this and constantly try to improve based on feedback and results. Just make sure, the purpose of communication have been achieved.

I get a lot of emails/tweets and other messages per day which are not urgent nor important, however they take away my momentum and attention. They constantly feel like something I am obliged to read or respond resulting in low productivity. PG have an excellent lecture on it. It’s like a to-do list that is created by others for you.

It’s however rude not to respond to emails. I respond to every email that is sent to me even if it was a marketing pitch as long as it is written specifically for me and not generic mass mail. 

With passage of time these emails start to clog up your email and haunt your productivity unless you just ignore them, which I do not recommend because there is always an opportunity to learn more. 

I came up with a 60 minutes sprint twice a week, which helped in achieving efficiency, which I am sharing below

• Open up the mails there not urgent nor important and could be responded in less than180 seconds.
• If you are left with some time, I would may be respond to emails that are not urgent but may be of some importance. 
• Do this while standing 
• Keep your phone away during the practice
• No music  or any other app should be open

I wont spend more than 2 hours per week on this exercise and I star/label the emails that are unanswered. I answer them whenever I get time which could be a month even 🙂

there is a major difference between letting other people do you work and delegation. Passing off your work means you are not responsible of it anymore. Delegation means that you are now more responsible for the work.

Doing things your self is easy and teaching is difficult. Delegation brings the best of your self, because whenever you are teaching you are more concerned about the quality than ever before. Want to try ? Teach some one driving 😉

During delegating, you have to write down the process and keep on iterating them based on best practices. Never ever expect or force people to do it your way. I recommend that you give them the deliverables and expectation and let them find a way to do it. If they do it better way, you have learnt some thing. If not, you share the way you do it and expected a better result. Delegation is an iterative process and not linear. You delegate, check back improve and then delegate again.

Bottom line. Delegation is teaching people how to perform better than you !

Whenever there is an opportunity, it comes with a risk. There is a time limit in which you have to take a decision to spend specific amount of resources to achieve desirable result. Flip side is your result might not be desirable or not even close to that resulting in wastage of resources and possibly other damages that could not be predicted while taking risk. In addition there are some intangible losses and gains. These include but not limited to emotional & morale loss.

There are 2 big fears

– Fear of missing out

– Fear of loosing

When the fear of missing out overcomes the fear of loosing, you become Entrepreneur.