3 corners of a fulfilling life

Three key ingredients that make a life worth living : Dreams, Freedom and Happiness. As we get set to launch the book "Dream On" on our 3rd pillar (Dreams), we will complete the circle that we started almost 4 years back - with only one intent - to elevate lives around us....
Want to know how to streamline and balance your life? read on...

Your passion Vs Your profession

This is the question which would have haunted you at some stage of your life, or is it still haunting? Your heart wants to chase your passion and calling of life, but your mind restricts you to your profession - for the risks involved as well as lower money assurance in chasing your passion. Is there a way out? Can we make our passion our profession?

She made her little contribution...Have you?

So often, we are faced with situations in life where our contribution to change things around us seem just so little, so tiny that it seems like a waste of effort. Again, it is about how we look at it. A different perspective can change things around, and give us the motivation, desire and the energy to continue to seek change.

2015 Goals : 6 Best Practices that help you achieve more

It is the time of the year, when we have another opportunity to change the way we are going to live our life in 2015. As the saying goes, "Today is the first day for the rest of your life."

I present my report card for the goals I set out for 2014, and also what i am targeting for 2015. I also present six (6) best practices that help you achieve more of your goals, year after year.

5 Simple Questions you must answer (Video+)

After the webinar on 1st March 2014, which got people ruffled out of their comfort zones, this new video is creating ripples across the minds of hundreds of freedom seekers. 

This video will push you to THINK about answering 5 of the simplest, yet un answered questions of your life.

4 Things you may be missing to plan in your lives, at your own peril

We recently had a wonderful and interactive workshop on Financial Freedom last Sunday (12th Jan 2014). This was organised by Sartrac Global in Faridabad (NCR). During my interaction with the audience, i realised that most of us tend to miss out on these 4 vital things in our lives..and of course, we do so at our own peril.... Just if someone could point us towards these things, life can take a completely different dimension...Read on...

Mission of Life

The two most important days in your life are the day you are born, and the day you find out why.... said Mark Twain.

While all of us precisely know about one of these two important days, it is very rare for most of us to have established the second day of our lives.

The evening hugs and the morning byes

It is 5:30 pm in the evening. I am able to successfully avoid all the traffic congestion and reach my parking lot from office for a safe and comfortable parking. The car is parked. I switch off the music system, pick up my laptop and head towards my house's entrance door. I open the door and here you go... Two beautiful and adorable angels come running towards me - the elder one behind the younger one. This is one race where the younger one always beats the elder one, without any exception.

Source or Sink

There is a hero in each one of us !!

The fact is that most of us are looking for some heroes in life, someone whom we can follow, someone whom we admire, someone whom we know is making a difference out there in the world "in spite" of all the challenges and is not sitting down and out "because of" all the reasons, someone who can show us the direction. 

Are you blindly following everyone around you?

"Go with the crowd" mentality is so typical in any corporate work environment. It is also not uncommon to notice this in our personal lives. You will see people just following what people around them have been doing for many years, sometimes, not even knowing the rationale behind what they are doing and why.

There was a real experiment (scientific study) done involving 5 monkeys (10 altogether, including replacements), a cage, a banana, a ladder and an ice cold water hose. Some of you may have heard about this experiment before, but the fact that this was a real experiment amazes me every time i read this story and relate the same to the real world.

Lets create our own inspiring story

GOD made you and me with the same dedication, commitment, focus and HOPE as HE did for someone like Sir Edmund Hillary. This is also true for each and everyone around us. When HE created us, he did not create any difference, in terms of giving us the "freedom" to mold our own lives, live the life that we want to live, define our own path and to go and achieve our own goals and dreams.

We do trust GOD on this impartial commitment. Isn't it? Then, why is it that some of us are able to carve our names in the history books while some keep struggling for most part of their lives.

Get your Life Vitals right - Mission, Goals and Strategy

We have been talking about the need and importance of a mission, goal and strategy to achieve anything meaningful in many of our earlier posts. I call these 3 elements as vitals of our life. Having understood the purpose of these vitals, let us now focus on how to go about creating these vitals for our own life.

Life is a journey towards a destination

Nothing can be more true than the age old saying: "Life is a journey and not a destination". This saying is so relevant because if you have not enjoyed your journey of life, you are in for a hollow sense of achievement after you reach your destination. You will spend a major part of your life in the journey towards some of your goals and a minute fractional little in savoring the destination. Hence, it makes so much more sense to lay emphasis on the journey rather than the destination.

Well, if that is the fact, then why are we so hung up about

Top 13 Symptoms of leading a Desultory Life

I sometimes wonder how come most of us go through this journey called "life" without having any concrete plan for it. We have a clear plan for almost everything that we do at our workplace or in our personal lives, but we just seem to ignore our own life completely on this aspect. On deeper thinking, i realized 3 primary reasons for the same:

1) May be, we do not want to believe the fact that life has a clear beginning and also a definite end. While we celebrate birth, we mourn death. These are the 2 milestones in between which you must cherish every moment and make your life worth living.

2) We fear death to an extent that we do not want to talk or even think about it. It is like closing your eyes to avoid an upcoming storm. Doesn't help. Rather, get ready for the inevitable and plan for it. Plan and execute this span of life so well that you have no regrets as you lie on your death bed. Do not repent for it in the end. Life is a beautiful gift from god.

3) Worst, we have the inherent feeling that although death is inevitable, it will probably not occur to you. You may be seeing others falling around, but how can you believe that the same can happen to you. Trust me, it will happen :)

4) We just fail to see the bigger picture of life. We are so engrossed in our day to day life that we simply fail to halt, take a step back and look at the bigger picture before we proceed with the next step.

I do not know what is your reason. It could also be a mix of all the above reasons. Whatever be your reason, it is always going to be more meaningful to come down to the reality of life and the facts surrounding it. If that is the case, then let me ask you a hard hitting but a very important question. Do not ignore it. Try to answer is in a simple Yes or No.

Do you have a written plan for your life?

If you were honest, I know that most of you answered it as a "No". Some of you even tried not to answer it because you still have the feeling that you need not answer it. Life is going on anyways. Some of you also thought that though you have not written your plan, but you surely do have a plan.

But let us face it. Unless you have clearly defined (and documented) the three critical aspects of your life ie your life's Mission, Goal(s) and Strategy, you can be sufficiently assured of the fact that your life is being lead. It is being lead, not by you, but by situations, circumstances, people and everything else except you.

Well, it is so no rocket science why i say that. If you do not even know why you are existing on this planet and what is the purpose of your life, then all the actions you are doing on a day to day basis are driven by the environment and circumstances around you. Let us take a very rudimentary example. Let us say that you are on a beautiful highway driving the best car that you can think of possessing, but unfortunately you are not aware where you are headed. If that is the case, and you reach a crossroad, then how do you decide which path to take. In such cases, you would probably tend to take the path of least traffic or best road condition or anything else that attracts you. Your decision is driven by the circumstances on the road and not by the destination. This situation is exactly similar in our lives. Our life is a beautiful highway road, you are that dream car. If you do not know where you are headed, you take actions in your life depending on what you see around you rather than what you truly want to do.

Are you among those who have forgotten to define and document your life's mission and goals. You may not be sure. So let me try and help you with this.

Having seen most of the people around me in a similar state of life, i tried to figure out how their day to day behavior was different from those people who had clear goals and mission in life. I accumulated all those symptoms together and tried to list down the top few symptoms which i could commonly see across most of such unfortunate souls.

Below is a list of the symptoms that you can check for yourself. These symptoms will tell you whether you are driving your life or you are being driven by circumstances and situations. If you happen to relate to a few of these symptoms, it is high time you take some action and try to define the mission of your life. Your day to day actions would ultimately be driven by the mission in your life. Another word of caution before you scan through this list. There is nothing wrong if you happen to be displaying these symptoms. This is just to make you more aware of the reality of life so that you can take appropriate actions to correct the course before it is too late. So, here you go.

• Though you are doing well in your career, you often reach at crossroads where it is becoming more and more difficult for you to take a decision whether to aggressively go for the next step in your career option or to slow down and take care of your family, your health and your forgotten passions of life.
• You believe that the childhood time was the best time and student life was anytime better than today's. Not only you believe in this, you also express this more often than not, in your casual conversations with your friends and family members.
•  It is often difficult for you to chose the kind of role you should be performing at your workplace. You often seek advise from your "well wishers". Unfortunately, most of these "well wishers" and "free advisers" are also lost and themselves in need of direction. So, all the best with the advise that you get.
• You are earning good money. You do not know whether to spend this money lavishly and live the life "in the moment" or save money for your and your family's future needs. You tend to toggle between these two extremes periodically.
• You frequently start various personal initiatives and hobbies like joining a guitar class, exercising, cycling, walking, jogging, gym etc. only to leave them in between. Not only that, you have a very "valid" reason to leave every initiative every time - your work priorities, your kids, your spouse etc..
• You do not know how much money you want to earn in life. How much of it would be enough? How much do you need which would ultimately prove sufficient to lead a financially secure and a peaceful life.
• You occasionally want to leave the hustle bustle and din of city life and lead a peaceful, relaxed life in a relatively smaller town or village. But you do not know what will you do post retirement from job. Life is likely to be aimless after retirement.
• You are earning well but are still not truly "happy". You seem to be unable to defend your inherent happiness, which gets stolen by adverse circumstances, situations and people around you. This "loss of happiness" happens to be quite frequent.
• You do not feel that the colleagues at your workplace follow the right path in life. The irony is that you also follow the same path, as you do not see any alternatives.
• You get frustrated that age is catching up.
• You feel hollow sometimes of the so called "achievements" till date in life.
• You seem to be working extremely hard, whether it is holidays, weekends or late night. You are always overloaded with work because you are good performer. In the meanwhile, you seem to be missing on smaller beauties of life like having occasional healthy discussions with your kid on a school subject, sitting and chatting with your spouse across the breakfast table with no specific agenda, spending time with your parents, playing Ludo or Snakes and Ladders with your kids, chatting with your neighbor etc.
• You hate Mondays and you love Fridays.

Did you relate to any of these ?

If yes, then wake up and start thinking about what is that single purpose that you want to serve while you are on this planet? What makes you happy & fills you with bliss? Read good books to explore more. Establishing a mission for yourself will take time. It may take weeks, months and sometimes even years. But trust me, all time that you have in hand is futile unless you have established your life's mission.

For God sake, do not lead a desultory life. Do something significant in life.

Thomas Edison once said,

Being busy does not always mean real work. The object of all work is production or accomplishment and to either of these ends there must be forethought, system, planning, intelligence, and honest purpose, as well as perspiration. Seeming to do is not doing.

Cheers

Manoj Arora