The ‘Never Eat in the Same Restaurant Twice’ Challenge
In 2018, my goal is eat at a different restaurant everytime I eat out. This is the challenge I’m taking on.
Why? Because life needs spicing up. I’m finding opportunities to continuously step out of my comfort zone. And my family’s. My daughters have a notorious fascination for biriyani and that’s almost a standard order. Through this goal, we’d look to try different cuisines.
What did I have for dinner? Mutton Boti (gizzards made of intestines, liver and stomach) and goat blood fry. I’ve never had them before in my life. Never wanted to. Now did it to kickstart the challenge. Wish me luck.
The Best Way to Respect Advice is to Action Them. Here are Three Examples.
This blog post is dedicated to a rare set of people who respect advice given and go on to accomplish things in life. These three people I hand picked are to inspire the rest of us to actively look for ideas and suggestions and more importantly execute them.
CHETAN MAHAJAN
My first pick is Chetan Mahajan, a corporate honcho who held senior positions including CEO of HCL Learning and has since quit the rat race. He has moved to a quaint little village in the Himalayas to pursue his passion for writing. A common friend had connected the two of us. I wanted to get Chetan on my ‘First Book Podcast‘ where I interview authors. He wrote his book, ‘The Bad Boys of Bokaro‘ in while in Jail and that made for a compelling story. After recording the interview, we continued to talk when he told me that one of us future book ideas could be on his own experience quitting the corporate life for a quiet life. He even had a nice title, ‘The Rat who Refused to Race’. That’s when I mentioned in the passing that starting a community blog with a group of people like him who pursue other passions could be a good marketing strategy. He immediately went ahead with the idea and started the UnCity blog. Well, the book never saw the light of the day but the blog took a life on its own. Two weeks ago, the UnCity blog won the IndiBlogger ‘Best Indian Blogger Award’ in the humor section.
AMAR RAMESH
Amar Ramesh was a tech professional in his earlier avatar. After spending a decade in the US, he made the life-altering decision to move back to India to pursue his passion for photography full time. In the few years he has been here, he has built StudioA, one of the most creative photography and videography firms. He recently won the Fearless Award, a prestigious award considered to be the Oscars of the Wedding Photography World.
Early last year, I decided to get out of my blogging hiatus by taking up ‘The 1000 Days Content Challenge’. It’s a way to force myself to blog regularly. Amar Ramesh jumped in and decided to join the challenge too. Fast forward and while I have faltered here and there, Amar has been super consistent and continues to produce high-quality content every day.
STALIN RAJKUMAR
Stalin Rajkumar is an IT veteran with a deep interest in writing. One of his bucketlist goals is to author a book. He attended the Unconference on Book Authoring I conducted and took inspiration from the 100 Day Book Authoring Challenge to realize his dream. He is now the proud author of ‘Broad Daylight’.
The three persons I mentioned above are all highly self-driven professionals. The thing that clearly differentiates them from the rest is the ability to capture ideas, build on suggestions and finally take the ideas to fruition.
Write a Letter to Yourself in the Future.
I recently discovered this site http://www.FutureMe.org which lets you send emails to yourself in the future. We can’t talk to our past self but we can speak to our future self. An interesting way to visualize the person you want to be and describe the achievements you want the future self to accomplish. An interesting novelty worth a try. I sent three letters to myself and am conscious I need to accomplish certain important tasks before emails reach me in the future.
Making Habits Stick Using LoopHabit App
I have just started to use the LoopHabit app and I’m already beginning to love it. While we all have right intentions of following good habits and discarding bad ones, its a lot more difficult to put them into action. The trick is to do the habits long enough for them to become habitual. That’s where the LoopHabit app comes in . It helps keep track on how you are following up on each of the habits you have set to imbibe in your life. I’m already seeing it make an impact. This blog post you are reading is because of it because I have set to blog everyday. And I can’t sleep peacefully if I don’t tick that off the list. 🙂 You can download the Android app from the Google Play Store where it is rated quite highly.
100 Day Challenge to Author your Book!
Something very interesting happened recently. I asked on my Facebook wall a simple request, “If you ever wanted to author a book in your lifetime, click the ‘Like’ button.“. To my utter surprise, 261 people showed interest in authoring a book. Over 80 people have even finalized their topic of the book. It is astounding to see the kind of interest that people have in writing a book.
However, even though people have the intent and desire to author a book, it’s a lot tougher to put that into action. When I started with book authoring many years ago, I faced that problem initially and I really wished there was someone to help guide me and motivate me.
Having authored four books now (and working on my fifth), I figured it would be nice to have an event to help people achieve their dream of authoring their book. Thus was born the ‘Book Authoring Retreat‘. It’s an intense, highly focused, two day book writing workshop which is part of the 100 day plan to bring out the book. The aim of the retreat is to encourage and help the participants publish their book by March 1st, 2014. Every participant commits to ensuring that their book gets published by that deadline.
It takes place in a lush green 9 acre farm in a beautiful village. You can get more details about the event at http://Kiruba.com/authoring