The Second Chance.

I used to wish to go back in time and do things differently and be a more successful person. Sometimes I would think about ideas that came to my mind but they remained ideas while someone else worked on the very same ideas and became successful. There is a saying "hindsight is always perfect". This implies that if we knew the future we can do things differently in present and become more successful than we would be without that knowledge.  Now compare this to "foresight" which is fraught with you making wrong decisions and not doing what you should have done. We always wish for a second chance to do things, the right way. 

One would think that the only way to get your Second Chance is to Travel back in time. Wish it was as simple as sitting in a time travel machine and go back. the problem with time travel is that right now there are no means to travel back in time except in sci-fi movies. However, there does exist a way to travel ahead in time i.e. the future. To do that all we need to do is use the machine we all already have. The machine is called imagination. Past cannot be imagined, for it has already happened, but nothing stops you from imagining the future as it has happened yet. Use your power of imagination and travel to the future and see your successful self, having achieved everything that you think would make you a successful person, but right next to your successful self imagine your unsuccessful self who failed to achieve anything. Here lies the really important trick, you can envision both your successful self as well as unsuccessful self then figure out what it took to get to become either one of them. 

Okay, enough of envisioning for now, travel back to present and the whole perspective has changed with the knowledge that you can reach your successful self in future much easily than just going through the life aimlessly and dealing with it as it hits you. If you still haven't got it, then just think you are 5, 10, 15, 20 or how many years in future and are broke, broke financially, physically, emotionally. Your family life is a ruin too, and you are just contemplating how you got there and "what you would do differently to not get to where you are?". This last part is really very important. This is going to be the key to your ultimate success. Now travel back to your present and think about what you just experienced, spend some time thinking about your failed self that you just saw and make a list of things you would do differently to avoid becoming that person. Start writing the list on paper or into your computer/laptop/tablet/phone. This list, if followed, almost guarantees you to become a successful person. Here's the catch, you are now living your "Second Chance", so make sure you do what you should have done the first time around so that you can become the successful person you just visited.

To get you started I have listed below some simple things we can start following today which i feel would lead me to the successful person I saw sanding next to the failure I wanted to avoid becoming. Feel free to add your own items to list or to simply start with your very own list from scratch. Just remember this is your Second Chance so don't make the mistakes you made first time around. Let's name this as "My Life List".

• Send a note/email/message to someone daily about why you like them. Send a note a day to certain people, a week to others, and a month to others. Keep adding more, but try not to delete anyone.
• Talk to a stranger, daily. Get to know about them, remember their name and other details and try to contact again.
• Take pictures every day and sort out the ones you want to keep.
• Identify a belief, daily. Question this and try to change it for the better
• Walk/exercise for at least 30 minutes every day.
• Identify one good quality about yourself, daily. Try to improve upon it.
• Try a new recipe, once a week.
• Refrain from one bad habit for at least 30 days, keep adding one habit a day.
• Write a blog entry, daily.
• Practice on a skill, daily. For example draw something, play an instrument, play a game.
• Watch an inspirational video, daily; Can be self-improvement, educational, biographical, documentary.
• Read at least one chapter of a book, daily.
• TV fast, daily. Sop watching TV outside a specific time (less than an hour)
• Meditate, daily, for 20 to 30 minutes.
• Wake up early, daily / Sleep in time, daily.
• Write a journal, daily.
• No excuses, no lies, no complains, forever.
• Do something you are scared of, daily.
• Do something selfless, daily.
• Pray, 5 times a day. Morning, noon, afternoon, evening, night.
• Thank before eating a meal.
• Plan your day the night before, daily.
• Plan your week, the Sunday before.
• Plan your month the last day of previous month.
• Plan you year the last week of previous year.
• Smile while talking, in person, on phone.
• Smile while writing a message.

NOW is the most important time....

Every once in a while I realize that I am making a big deal of something That really isn't important. I remember a book titled "Who moved my cheese?". Although I never read that book but my interpretation would be that someone is worrying about something that should not make much difference to the overall picture. Probably the cheese wasn't moved at all and it's just us thinking someone moved it, and to make it even worse, we start worrying about who moved it, what were they thinking, and now life's not worth living.

If you really want to analyze and understand something, you need to detach from it and take a 1000 feet (or maybe a 1000 miles) view, meaning you look from a much broader perspective instead of focusing on only a part of it.

Let's use this approach to our lives. A very very simple view from a thousand miles above would be that LIFE starts when we are born and ends when we die. This overly simplistic definition applies not only to us but also to those who have come before us and to those who will follow. The shortest life span can be death at birth, and the longest, though not definite, very close to 100 years (give or take a few years). Majority, though, perish somewhere in between the two extremes. Although, science and technology have increased the general life span but the fact remains that everybody is born and dies or will die at some point, giving it clearly delineated start and end points.

Do we really want to spend whatever life span we have worrying about who moved our cheese? who cut us off on the road? who said something that we didn't like? what someone is or is not doing? what someone is wearing, eating, driving? or do we want to spend it enjoying the small moments that swoosh past us while we are trying to figure out the exact location of the cheese? The small moments are right where we are, who we are with, what we are doing, how we are dealing with others, the PRESENT. This the most important point in time one can have.

We  have no control over what has already happened or what will happen next, but we can definitely make the best use of our "present". This will help us make the future better as well as our past something to cherish about. The most important person is the one you are with right now, leave them with pleasant memories and make them feel important and special. For when you are gone they will remember you as someone special they met and would want to meet again. You have the power to make this world a good place to live in one person at a time, and it doesn't take much effort. Just be nice.

The most important thing you do is what you are doing right now, for this will represent your past and also be the foundation of your future. So stop worrying about the coordinates of your cheese and share it with people around you and do something that will make your past memorable and future something to look forward to.

Your best comes out when you are not competing with others....

I will start by taking you back almost 35 years, when I was a young schoolboy. My parents always told me that there are only four positions in the class: first, second, third and "the rest". So naturally I was all the time being pushed to try and leave "the rest" behind and and get into the first three. I did manage to do that eventually, but there was always the these other two guys around me trying their best to get or stay ahead of me. Then, there always were boys from "the rest" of the crowd threatening to break into the top three and often succeeded.

Then something happened that got me to the first position and I never looked back. That something was when I stopped competing with the others. I decided that if I have to stay on top I must achieve a certain percentage and that was as close to 100% as possible, and I stopped worrying about what anyone else was doing or achieving. It was just me trying to get to 100%. In some subjects it was possible to get to 100% while in others you could only get as far as the teacher was willing to let you go. So now I had a goal in each subject to achieve and that goal was very precise and clear. It wasn't to stay ahead of others, as that would be a moving target without any specific position to get to. I was very clear what I needed to get in order to be the best. I repeated the same when I was in the engineering school and got similar results.

What I am trying to explain here is that if you want to be the best in whatever you do, you have to forget about how the others are doing and set up your own target, and then focus just to get to that target. The end results will always be that since the target was set at a point where you would be the best so you will turn out to be the best. This is what I consider not competing with others, or in other words, competing with yourself.

I have never failed at anything!

"I have never failed at anything in my life" - nobody will take you seriously if you say this. I never thought I could say that about myself either as I thought I could fill up books with list of things I have "failed" in. So why did I choose this as the title of this article? I was reminiscing one day on my life and what I have achieved (not what I have failed at) and it suddenly struck me that I have succeeded in anything I had wanted to succeed at. The new revelation dawned on me when I started analyzing why I had succeeded at certain things and then came the realization that I have succeeded at whatever I planned to succeed in. I hope the last couple of sentences would steer your thoughts towards the fact that when you really want something strong enough and you go out there to get it, you always get it. The things where you think you have failed are, in fact, things you didn't wanted bad enough and didn't try hard enough. And if you don't try hard enough, you have, in fact not failed because you never went after success to begin with. 

 Almost any self improvement speech has this famous quote from Napoleon Hill "What the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve" and I used to think that I can think of a lot of stuff that I can never achieve, However, now that I have figured out that I have never failed at anything, I understand what Napoleon Hill wanted to convey.

 So, in order to understand yourself what I am talking about, first decide what you want, then make a plan listing what needs to be done to get it, and finally start executing the plan. There would be hurdles, set backs, seemingly impossible situations but as long as you focus on what you want, you can go around obstacles, get up and get going again or change you approach and you will get to your goal. To reinforce this mindset, just think about the successes, small and big, that you have had in your life and recall the reasons for your success and your would eventually you too will figure out that "You have never failed at anything in your life".

MIT Video - EdX: The Future of Online Education is Now

MIT Video - EdX: The Future of Online Education is Now

Windows 8, Metro UI and Visual Studio 11

Windows 8:

Windows 8 is Microsoft’s next generation Operating System that has been completely rebuilt from the ground up and is primarily aimed at touch enabled desktop / laptop and tablet devices. It still provides the ability to work using a mouse but to take full advantage of the Metro style interface, a touch device is required. Windows 8 also provides the regular desktop interface which feels and functions very similar to the familiar Windows 7 desktop.

The Metro interface is different from the regular desktop in many ways.  The main theme is that of pages (like browsers) with square and/or rectangular tile which have the ability to provide Live information pertinent to the specific app it belongs to. Apps are launched by touching/clicking the tiles and only the app active in the forefront is functional, other apps that have lost focus go into a suspend status, which is actually a snapshot view of the app from the moment it lost  focus. Switching to a suspended app resumes the app from the very same point it was suspended at and the current app goes into suspended mode. Apps are not normally permitted to function in the background and there are other very strict requirements for getting an app certified, including the ability to launch within 15 seconds, otherwise the app is kicked off. The App function in full screen modes and the other mode is the snapped mode which snaps the app to the left or right edge of the screen and this is the only way to have two apps active simultaneously. Due to very stringent design specifications for Metro apps, the Windows 8 OS performs very efficiently of various devices and the user experience does not suffer on less powered CPUs on Tablets compared to the laptops or desktops.

Metro Interface:

The Metro Interface is composed of Live and/or Dead Tiles in square or rectangular shapes. The inspiration behind this UI is the road or guidance signs in a Metro city/location. For examples signs in a subway station or an airport which provide relevant information at a glance in a precise manner. This was first introduced on Windows Phone 7+ devices and same concept has been upgraded for larger screens. Having used Windows Phone for about 5 months, I am familiar with the MUI and have developed a liking for it based on the productivity improvement. The Live Tiles provide upto date information and one can delve deeper into the information if desired. I have also used the Windows 8 Metro UI on my laptop and although it isn’t a touch screen, but even with a mouse it works very well. It takes a week or so to discover the functionality and also to get used to the paradigm shift from the GUI to MUI, but once I discovered the ins and outs, and used it for a few weeks, it becomes a much more enjoyable experience, especially when I have the same UI on my phone and hopefully on my next tablet. It does take some effort initially to continue using and learning the MUI, but that’s a very short  and shallow learning curve and very quickly one would start realizing the benefit of shifting from traditional GUI to MUI.

Visual Studio 11:

Metro Apps Development: The IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for developing Metro style Apps is Visual Studio 11 on a Windows * device. VS 11 on other versions of Windows do not have the ability to develop Metro Apps at this time. Several prebuilt templates are available to get started quickly with most of the functionalities built-in. Until now most of the developers have focused on using the templates and app using the Metro UI in a more creative way may start cropping up soon. One thing to keep in mind is that MUI is primarily a touch enabled UI and designers/developers are encouraged to keep that in mind when coming up with ideas for MUI apps. Most of the current apps being developed in Metro style are more for information consumption and not information/data manipulation. Next version of Office suite is supposed to have a MUI mode and that would provide guidance to developers/designers on developing such content development apps. The potential is there and is pretty huge so the early developers of such apps would certainly have the first market advantage. Due to the strict design and performance specifications by Microsoft, the developers do not have the freedom to go about designing apps to do whatever they want to, and that should in fact serve as a positive move towards a more stable and efficient experience.

Agile Life - A Personal Scrum - KanBan

Work in progress...

You must have heard so much talk in the business world about Project Management and various approaches to it. Most popular terms used in project management are Agile, Scrum, KanBan, Lean, and a few others. Everybody has been managing projects throughout their personal lives in one way or the other, which made me think of why not apply the same principles of project management to these as well. So I started this blog with the aim of figuring out how to accomplish this and how effective this approach would be. The more I thought and wrote about it, the more I realized that I am discovering* a whole new approach of making my life more manageable and at the same time achieving results that seemed to be always becoming ever so farther away, as more clutter (new goals) joined the apparently un-manageable list of "Things-to-do". *(I am pretty sure there are many others who would have come across this discovery before me). Lets go through the journey of discovering and applying the agile project management principles to our day to day life and hopefully get a grip on our life and achieving results we are always striving for, but seems to be just out of reach.

 The project management theme I am going to use is more leaning towards SCRUM and KanBan, both belong to the Agile category made popular by so many large corporation from almost every major industry, but used more effectively by aviation and software industries.

To get started with Agile Project Management, first step involves making a list of features required in the end product/service. In our personal lives, we can equate the feature set to goals (both are the end results we want to achieve). So here we are actually setting up goals, and the I approach I prefer is to make use of the "Wheel of Life". I wrote a blog entry some time ago about achieving success in personal life and mentioned the famous "Wheel of Life", which is basically a wheel with 8 spokes that cover various aspects of life and if all of these are well balanced, then the life becomes a smooth rolling wheel. For each spoke on the Wheel of Life, you should write down a list of goals that would result in a perfect 10 score. The trick here is to be very specific in what the goals are, not general goals like " I want to be healthy, wealthy and  wise.." . Explain what being healthy means to you in terms of ideal weight, BMI. Indicate exactly how much wealth will make you wealthy. What being wise means? does it mean getting trained on a new skill, or getting a degree in a particular field... and so on.