Cordially Yours

How Do You Define Success ? If you ask this question, you will receive various answers because the definition of 'success' will vary from person to person. While a few people may be agnostic towards questions like this, a person may say that he wants to amass wealth within 10 years. So, his view of success is to become rich. Another person may say that they want to climb the rungs of their career ladder and that their success trajectory will end only if they reach the top position in their company. The focus here is career-oriented and not money-oriented. Similarly, there can be as many definitions for the word "success" as there are human beings.  A study of the lives of highly rich may reveal that not all of them are happy. This means that money cannot get you happiness. If a rich person boasts that he is a heavy-hitter and that he keeps working for 90 or 100 hours a week, what is the use? How can he enjoy his life? He has thrown work-life balance to the wind. He do...

Should you worry about how others judge you? The answer is an emphatic "NO." The point is the moment you stop worrying about criticisms or how others, including your close relatives and friends, judge you, you are fast-tracking your success. Further, you will be coming out with optimum output because you have unloaded the burden of getting the approval nods of others.  Let us assume you have made a big decision. Of course, you might have thought about it a thousand times before making it. But others may feel that your decision is goofy. So what? There is no need to worry about what they think because if you focus on what others feel, you suffer from temporary amnesia. Thanks to such obliviousness, you forget your goal or vision of your life. So, you cannot achieve it. The moral is that instead of worrying about what others feel or how others judge, you must keep taking all the steps required to achieve your goal. Reasons why you should stop worrying about judgmental...

"Do you want to become a millionaire ?" You may say "Who doesn't want?" My next question is: "If you want to become a millionaire, are you taking the right steps towards achieving this? Have you ever done an introspection to find out if your current habits are helping you in your journey? If not, what is/are the habits should you get rid of?" Experts firmly opine that if you want to amass wealth, you should quit a particular habit. Do you want to know what this habit is? Please read on. You may say "I am working hard for 40+ hours a week but my financial status is not improving at all." This statement reveals that a particular habit is sabotaging your journey. The fact is that you are not alone. Hundreds of thousands of folks toil and toil but they do not achieve huge success . What is the reason? The reason is that these folks, like you, are not planning and preparing for their journey. They haphazardly lead their lives. There is no doubt ev...

Almost everyone including those who have embraced renunciation and those of the mundane type has goals. Since every individual is unique, the goals of people vary also. Unfortunately, not all people achieve their goals. You may wonder why the number of people who fail is much higher than those who are successful. This post may throw light upon this phenomenon and show how to achieve success .  Is having goals good or not? Having goals in life is certainly good. But will it alone get you the success you aspire for? The answer is a resounding "No." You may now ask: "Then, why the heck experts including the troglodytes and the contemporary gurus are asking us to have goals in life?" According to them, if your mind consistently focuses on your goals, you will hit upon ideas to achieve them. But the reality is completely at variance with what they opine.   Why are you not getting results despite your focus on your goals? You have great ideas. You do not fail to seize wha...

You have set your goal and have started putting forth the efforts required to achieve it. You review your efforts periodically to ensure that everything is in order. According to you, everything is moving as you have planned. You are now half-way through in your journey. Suddenly, you have a nagging feeling that there is a loss of steam or things are not moving at the pace as before. You are obviously upset. What may be the reasons? What is holding you back from achieving the success you have been longing for and cherishing in your bosom? Let us find out.  The reasons may be: 1. After reaching a certain point, you have started indulging in what is known as "self-sabotage." True, you have put in place proper systems. But there is some lacuna due to which your plans fall through. You commit avoidable mistakes and these may decelerate the pace of your journey. 2. Not listening to the advice of experts in your field may be another reason for the retardation of your...

You may have a clear vision about your life's goal . You may be putting forth your sincerest efforts to achieve the goal as well. But in the cockles of your heart, you may have a feeling that the speed of the results of your efforts is not satisfactory. Is your feeling right? If so, what should you do to accelerate your success? Let us find out. Is your feeling right? To the question if your feeling that the speed of results of your efforts is far from satisfactory is right, the answer is: Since this feeling has surreptitiously entered your mind and you are not comfortable with it, your feeling is right. Of course, overnight success is a Utopian dream and can happen only in fantasy stories. Further, several instances of overnight successes leading to disasters abound in human history. This means there should be gradual improvements. By "gradual," you need not construe that the improvement should be slow. Your journey should be reasonably paced. If the pace of the improvem...

There is a notion among people that getting rich is not everyone's cup of tea. These folks may be working hard but may be leading an ordinary life. So, they think that it is difficult to amass wealth. They cite several reasons including that one has to be born with a silver spoon, has to have education from an Ivy League Educational Institution, or similar such things. Other excuses they cite are that prices of almost all commodities and services have sky-rocketed and that their incomes have not gone up in the same proportion. Do you think that their notion is right? The answer is a huge "No" because there are scores and scores of people who have not been born in rich families, nor have they done their studies in Ivy League schools but have joined the group of top-income earners. How is this possible? This post tries to delve into this topic. Do you have a clear goal in your life? The main reason why people fail to get rich is that they do not have clarity as far as the...

The number of people with huge ambitions may perhaps be less than those who think that they are leading a contented life. Even among ambitious folks, only those who make their plans and put those plans into action are likely to succeed . Others will have to remain where they are till the end of their life because they are just day-dreamers. If you belong to the group of those with huge goals and if you have set your goal, you can try the following thought experiment to fast-track your success journey. Unfortunately, this experiment is not very popular and that is why not many pursue it. But ancient relics seem to contain details of it. Never forget the fact that ancient relics, in general, do not talk about scandalous stories. So, you can afford to be bullish on the experiment. Let us dig a little deeper into it.  What does this experiment need? The point that this experiment is related to the mind and not one that is carried out in a laboratory is worth reiteration....

Experts who have undertaken a thorough study of the ways of the most successful people point out that there is one secret that has catapulted these people to such an enviable level. If you know this secret and adopt it diligently, you can achieve success also. Let us find out more about this. It is not that the highly successful people have been achieving success after success in all their endeavors and that they have never tasted failures. In reality, they have committed mistakes and failed many a time as well. After all, they are also normal human beings. There is nothing extraordinary about them. Nor all of them are prodigies or geniuses. So, there may be several occasions during which they may have faltered. But they do not allow these setbacks to upset them or discourage them. Instead, they study their setbacks and find out the reasons that have caused them. They vow to themselves that they will never commit the same mistakes ever again. For example, an athlete who is training fo...

If you browse the Internet, you will find endless materials that emphasize on the importance of having goals and striving to achieve them. But on a number of occasions, you may have certainly wondered if you are doing a great disservice to yourself by focusing too much on achieving your goal. Precisely put, you are wasting your life by imagining about the alluring promise of an undefinable land called "future." Unfortunately, such promised lands may not exist at all, not to talk of reaching them.  In his essay entitled "The Station," Robert J. Hastings metaphorically describes that everyone of us is traveling by a mystical train called life. We will be continuing our journey with the anticipation and belief that we will be arriving at a station when the train takes the next bend. We keep imagining that the station will be beautiful and will provide a panacea that may solve all the problems of our life. We may also imagine that when we arrive at the station,...