Peaks and Valleys

As I have got older, I have become increasingly circumspect that nothing is permanent.

Today you identify a winning campaign and tomorrow your very next campaign fails. This is life. When something is going very good suddenly you get hit by a curve ball.

I have realized there’s no point in fighting and thinking “why does this happen to me”.

When you put your ego aside and think how you can utilize that time to improve …..I have seen maximum success after I took the downtime to improve myself . There was a time when I came to a new city and for various reasons my career got into a jam. I took the time to learn IT networking and suddenly within a few months my career took a new trajectory.

Whenever I have seen a valley, its always an indication that I had something to learn which I was missing. The other thing that I have noticed is if I have not learnt something new from that valley then I keep falling back into it.

Some people blame their stars, some people on external things. I also used to feel like that when I was younger.

Today with age I have started feeling a little differently. Today I believe differently, I have started thinking more like what Tony Robbins says”…. its happening for me not to me”. So if its happening for me then there must be something which I need to find and till I find that I won’t be able to climb the next peak.

But its a fact that Peaks don’t last, because we have to learn to go to the next stage. If we put our ego in between and don’t learn the lessons, then we stay in the valley.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Time is not money…relationships are money

collaboration, Habits, Karma, relationships, Uncategorized

Yesterday I heard the amazing statement above, that I could not stop myself from sharing it with you.

All my life I have heard that time is money because it is one resource which cannot be replenished so you should use it very wisely.

I have worked on improving my ability to utilize my time and am continuously looking for ways to leverage my time. I stopped driving my car for health reasons, but now I feel that driving a car is not the best use of my time and I take a cab so that I can make better use of my time.

I delegate tasks to my team members so that I can work on higher value tasks.

Yesterday during the training from Ilovemarketing mastery program, I heard the coach from Strategic Coach talk about this. She explained this concept so well.

All time is not equal. The time spent in building relationships pays many times over compared to any other time spent.

As a matter of fact Richard Koch in his books also talks about this in the 80/20 rule. While I have read his books but this time the way this coach explained was so awesome that it hit me.

Being in marketing I have always prided myself for the relationships I have cultivated but I realized after this training that I could have achieved an even higher level of success if I had built even better relationships.

Most of my success in my career has been because of the people who supported me and believed in me and therefore gave us business. My own capabilities maybe limited but these relationships multiplied those so many times over

See how you can spend more time on building relationships by first giving because as Joe Polish says Life Gives to the Giver.

Till next time.

Carpe Diem!!!

The good people in Paris

Great People, Karma, travel

Yesterday I wrote about how in my opinion Good Karma has helped me in far off places like South Korea.

This time I will narrate one of the many situations which I encountered in Paris.

My family and I were visiting Paris in 2018. In Paris the best way to travel around town is using the Metro. However one of the challenges of using the metro you need to understand the inter-change because all of them are marked in French. I had been to Paris multiple times earlier when I was a very small kid along with my parents and elder brother. Since then I had the intention to take my family to Paris since I find it very beautiful.

We were staying at a relative’s house which was in a suburb of Paris.

On this day, when this incident took place, we had taken the cruise on the river Seine and after a late evening walk to Trocedero to have a look at the Eiffel Tower we were totally exhausted.

So we walked over to the metro station and identified the station where we had to do the interchange to take the metro to our stop. Once we reached the station where we had to do changeover to the other line of the metro we could not find the exit from which we would get into the station for our metro line.

It was quite late in the night, we were exhausted and there were no one to help us identify the location and we kept going round in circles. Even though Paris is relatively safe for tourists, when you are with your family in an unknown place and its kind of late in the night, you tend to get a little anxious.

The other challenge is that Google Maps at that time would get confused in identifying French locations because we were using the English interface.

While the three of us were moving around, un-noticed to us, on the station there was a person who was cleaning the platform. He saw us walking around 4-5 times around the same point with map in hand.

He came to us on his own. He didn’t know English. We didn’t know French. But he sensed our anxiety and worry.

In his own sign language the person asked our issue. We showed him the location we had to go to and metro line we had to take. He simply asked us to follow him in his sign language.

Leaving his broom in a closet, he led us through a flight of stairs and then about 5-7 minutes of walking to the point where the escalators to the other platform were located. That’s when we heaved a sigh of relief.

This gentleman pointed to the escalator. We thanked him profusely and tried to tell him in English how grateful we were, but he only understood the “Merci” , waved as if he had done nothing spectacular and walked back to go to his location to clean up the platform.

People do try to help a lot in Paris especially when they realise you are coming from India to see their country and don’t know their language.

Like I have said earlier, inspite of all the negativities the politicians and the news may make you believe the world is a pretty decent place and you will find good people in all places.

Till next time -stay positive stay enerrgised.

Carpe Diem!!!