Personal Growth

How was 2018

It has been more than a year since I posted here and it is already the end of 2018. So how was my year 2018? This is not a detailed overview of the year like others write. But more like a short blog post of what happened in the past 1 year and what I …

How do you introduce yourself

Whenever I meet people in conferences or meetups, I experiment with how I introduce myself. Every time I talk about myself and what I do, I make subtle changes and notice what reaction the other person gave. This isn’t something I did in the initial stages of my career. When I started (as a programmer) …

How to listen to podcasts and get the most out of them

I am a regular podcast listener even before the recent upsurge of numerous podcast shows that has cropped up in recent times. This year I have listened to a record number of podcast episodes. I have learned a lot from them and I have also improved the way I listen and take notes. In this …

How to give good feedback

Yesterday I talked about why criticism is important in the success of any company and how to accept feedback about your work. Today I am going to write about how to give good feedback. Giving good feedback is as important as accepting it. Present a solution instead of a complaint Even if you don’t follow …

What is the Michael Jackson Theory of Feedback

Few months back listening to one of Noah Kagan’s podcast episode, (the one where he talks about his conversation with Jonathan Coon of WikiBuy.com) he mentions something called the Michael Jackson Theory of Feedback. No, this wasn’t a theory by Michael, instead is a theory based on Michael Jackson. I am paraphrasing the explanation about …

How to Make yourself Unique at your Work

In any business organization, there are two types of sub-units or teams.

Profit Centers
Cost Centers

Profit Center

Profit Center is the team/department which gets the company money and thereby profits. They bring in the dough/bacon. One of the common example of a profit center is the sales department. Unless you have sales, you wouldn’t have customers and thereby no money.

Cost Center

Everything other than a profit center is a Cost center. Any team or department of a company to which various types of direct and indirect costs are charged are cost centers. It could be the Production or service departments in a factory, operations team, IT department, etc.

Why I decided to write an article everyday

In my November month challenge I had mentioned that I will be writing one article every day. Consistently writing one article every week is doable, but one per day is unbelievably hard. One of my friends had mentioned that doing such a challenge will reduce the quality of the posts. I totally agree with him. …

I challenged myself to talk to strangers everyday and learnt a lot about myself

It is the first of November, which means end of the October Challenge. As mentioned last month, I decided to have a conversation with a stranger every day of October. When I mentioned it to some of my friends, I received varied reactions. Some said it was interesting, some didn’t understand why I was doing it …

You can’t break the ceiling by staying in the room

Few years back, I heard a quote which made me rethink about personal growth.

You are the average of the 5 people you hangout with.

It basically means, if all your friends, colleagues, etc., are all just like you, you will always be at the same level. If they are all earning the same amount of money, having similar ideas, read the same books, etc., you will be stuck there. And by staying at the same level, you are only losing out on all the opportunities in life.

Unless you hangout with someone above your level, you won’t know how life up there is like. Unless you have spent time with a millionaire, you won’t know what their life is like. If you are already a millionaire, spend time with other billionaires.

Average

I started blogging back in 2004 on LiveJournal (it was Medium of those days, if you kids don’t know). I didn’t have any audience in mind when I wrote on my personal blog – it was literally a log of my personal thoughts. It allowed me to write about anything.

An year later I started writing about free and open source software and that was when I was writing for an audience. I was writing for others who want to learn and use open source software.