joe polish

Sometimes opportunities come looking for you.

Karma, Networking, relationships

Being in marketing and sales I am always looking to find ways to get opportunities.  Some of the methods I  have written about  in separate posts are finding the right “elephant ” to ride so that wherever the elephant finds opportunities,  it takes us alongside.

Then I  have written multiple times about other partnership  mechanisms to help you get closer to opportunities.

Today I  will write about  what Richard Koch talks about in his wonderful book, The 80/20 for Manager- the power of loose and distributed networks .

One network is  what you build consciously by nurturing various people, by giving value in advance. This is something that Joe Polish calls his Genius Network. With these people you stay in touch, help them and they in turn help you. So when they see an opportunity they join hands with you to address the opportunity or you take their advice to get that opportunity.

Then their are networks where people know you through other people or because you have at some point worked with them. In either case they remembered you because they believed that you are good person and good in the job.

It is these kind of people who refer you for an opportunity to a friend or to a third party , without any possible gain to themselves, except the feeling of helping someone.

It’s then that opportunities come searching for you. If you have helped enough people, and you’re known for doing a good and honest job , then people love recommending you. This is what happened today with me.

Out of the blue today somebody came seeking me out to showcase our products/ services at an event they are doing and they won’t be charging me anything. We are always looking out for opportunities to showcase our solutions to a wide audience and this is a God send eventhough the time is very short.

It comes back to my basic philosophy to always help people, excuse some where the Karmic cycle plays its role.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Teach something…learn it forever

Human Brain, learning

Today, 5th September is celebrated as Teachers day in India. It is in memory of Dr. S. Radhakrishnan, who was the president of India, a scholar and above all a very respected teacher. So today I was thinking about the teachers who left a deep impression on me and made learning enjoyable.

Some of my own colleagues also sent me thank you notes today for having helped them learn. I used to hear Joe Polish, multiple times, on his podcasts of ilovemarketing.com, talking about the best way to learn something is to teach it to someone.

I used to relate to it because I personally like to get down to the basics of the technology, then conceptually figure out an analogy from a different walk fo life and teach. If my understanding is clear then I will be able to put it into different scenarios successfully. If the analogy is from an area which is dear to the person who is hearing it from you then, they will will immediately absorb the concept.

So for my colleagues who prefer to look trendy, I speak in terms of fashion brands to explain concepts. For people who are more commercial, I have to speak in terms of business. A lot of people have told me that I could become a good teacher because I teach very complex technologies, very simply.

Till now I had not realised why I am able to do it. I generally used to think that I have a unique ability to understand from first principles both – marketing and technology together, which for some reason, others are not.

When I was reading the Steven Kotler book – The Art of Impossible – I have written about this book earlier also – what struck me was the way our brain is wired to learn something. Dopamine is a key hormone which helps in learning. So when we understand something dopamine is released. When we are able to build a story or narrative around it, further dopamine is released making the memory pathways even more permanent.

I think this could be one of the reasons why all the old religious texts had stories built around them, since there were no concepts of writing more than 10000 years back in India. Students were made to recite things. The recitation would involve multiple sensory organs and hence get the brain more active and the stories would keep the narrative constant.

The more you realise the way our brain works, te more you marvel at what a machine we humans are. With more and more scientific discoveries around the operation of the brain, I am in even more awe about what is the limit to our thinking.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Three Hundred Posts

Affirmative action, Financial Independence, Habits, Marketing

I didn’t realise it but yesterday was my 300th post. What an achievement. For someone who didn’t know what to write and was always wondering why will anyone read my posts, to today watching this number made me so happy.

This journey started about 4 years back and I took my domain name around this time. Then I took the WordPress subscription to link my website to my domain.

Initially even putting up one post was an ordeal. As a matter of fact when I hit the 25 mark, I actual had a celebration post. To write my first hundred posts took me almost 3 years painful years because each time I would sit down to write on a weekend, I would think I did not have enough data and so I would go in search of data and the post would not get written.

Last year because of the lockdown due to the Covid pandemic, I got some amount of time at home and I started listening to various podcasts, one among which was I Love Marketing which is run by Joe Polish And Dean Jackson. Joe keeps talking about 2 things which I have taken to heart.

One is that – Its better to be prolific than perfect and

Two – You learn a little by hearing / reading / watching, you learn a lot more by practicing and you love the most by teaching it to others.

I have always had this penchant for wanting to share my knowledge but I didn’t think it would be of value to others so I never bothered. Then I cam across the video series on YouTube by Gary Vaynerchuk where he would put out a video everyday on wine tasting and the kind of wines he was tasting. These were short videos.

That got me on this journey to take affirmative action, to share from my practical experiences in marketing and in finance and then whatever I was reading in terms of improving our performance and health. All my articles after that have been keeping one principle in mind, you should get bite sized information in a quick read while you are standing in the line to take your coffee.

Thank you for being active readers of my blog. I hope I am able to give you even more value in the future. This writing everyday has now be one a habit and I don’t let a writer’s block come in my way. I just put down my thoughts as they flow.

Till then

Carpe Diem!!!

Gratitude – Part 2

Fear, Financial Independence, Gratitude, Happiness, Human Brain, peak Performance

if you do a split of my posts, they can get equally split between Marketing, Financial independence, Human Mind & Performance, Charity / Karma / Gratitude.

I have mentioned multiple times that when I am feeling low, I decide to go and do charity. It gives me a high of a different kind. This is something which I seriously started doing when I heard Joe Polish on his podcast ilovemarketing.com. He had other ideas also about things which you can do when you are feeling low and don’t even have the money to do charity.

While continuing reading the book The Art of Impossible by Steven Kotler, I realised that the human performance is very strongly linked to the human mind – nothing new here, but what was surprise was the scientific reason behind why gratitude or doing good for others helps improve performance.

As per the research which Steven talks about – gratitude trains the brain on looking at the positive things, for which you are thankful. The brain is otherwise seasoned to look for things which can ham us, so that it can protect us. When you are in the state of gratitude , the negative things which can harm us, get filtered out by the brain automatically. When the negative things are filtered out, there is reduced fear. Once that happens you automatically get into a good mood and you feel happy.

When we are in a good mood, we feel safe and secure. When we feel safe and secure, our mind is willing to wander and think. Due to this your creativity also gets enhanced. To get into the more technical details of how the neurobiology and neurochemistry work I would highly recommend reading his book.

Coming back to where I started this post, while I was splitting the Human Mind & Performance , from Charity / Gratitude / Karma, it seems from the research that Steven has done that actually these help improve the performance of the human mind.

So actually my blog posts then, have a skew towards the human mind and performance compared to other areas of marketing and finance. This is interesting.

While I have always had an inclination to continuously find ways to improve myself, I had never actually taken the rigorous analysis that Steven has done on improving myself.

Tell me what do you enjoy more – my posts on marketing, financial independence or human performance.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!