Evaluate your progress after 10,000 hrs

I was listening to Malcom Gladwell on CNN couple of days back. Amazing guy, I love his take on simple things in life. Anyway, he was talking to Fareed Zakaria about his recent book “The Outliers“. If you don’t know what that book is about, here is a simple one-line jist until you read it sometime – “Behind every great person’s success there are two things – the time they are born and 10,000 hrs of sheer hard work”. The first factor of when you are born is pre-determined, I guess. You cannot do much about it other than make the best out of it. The second factor is interesting – 10,000 hrs of hard work. So, Gladwell in his interview said that he believed talent to be the desire to put 10,000 hrs of effort into something you want to do.

This is my take on this humdinger. Evaluate yourself after 10,000 hours. You might reach success before that or after that. In general, success is relative and cannot be accurtely quantified. However, after 10,000 hrs of work, you can start evaluating your progress. It will give you a _very_good_ overview of where you stand. Until the 10,000th hour, keep chugging. If our goal is to keep adding on quality hours to our project, when we hit 10,000, we would have accomplished lot of things. An easy way to remember this figure is – If we work 10 hrs a day on something, to reach 10,000 hrs, we need to work for little over 3 years.

Say for instance, you are writing a book. Your goal is to first finish the book and assume you finish the book in one year. The next two years you spend time marketing, publishing, doing book tours, etc. Everything is part of this grand scheme of getting your book published. At the end of the year three, if self-evaluation comes, it will give you a true insight.

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Triiibes Meet

Last Saturday, there was an Austin Triiibes Meet. It was great fun. Got together with some brilliant people for an afternoon of brainstorming with no preset agenda. It was good conversation.

Good conversation according to me is what evolves naturally without any planning. It can be ideas, philosophies, random thoughts or anything that makes you reflect, enjoy, get inspired or have fun. As Megan put it, it was a discussion of world domination over smoothies.

Project with Dell Children’s Hospital

Guys, excuses for very few blog postings in the past couple of weekes -

• Working with Dell Children’s hospital on a high impact idea that would help millions of children around me.
• Hence, I am getting things worked out for that and meeting people who can help me implement the idea.
• Finished pitching the idea to Dell Children’s this week and they LOVE it. Now, the logistics…
• Working on a new website for tViG. Learning to use wordpress (org)  for that.
• Doing these things simultaneously after my 10 hrs at Qualcomm.
• Less sleep, more tired,…but supremely excited.

That is the way it is going to be for the new couple of months. I will post frequent updates on http://saranyan.com and share my learning through this blog.

Bear with me for a couple more weeks till things are in order.

Achieving

It is easy to be an achiever. On the other hand, it is very hard to be ordinary. Every person is born to do great things. However, we constrain ourselves within false boundaries and settle for something less. We try to get a job at Google when it is easier to start a company like Google. We strive hard to keep our jobs intact by curbing our natural creativity and flair, while we are born to do otherwise. Achieving is easy. It is actually much easier than convincing ourselves that we should walk by the rules of this world.

The problem is that every one of us has been told in some point of our lives about what is “safe” to do to gain society’s respect. We take these lessons to heart rather than the lessons that come from within us. We “learn” to believe that these fake rules created by people who were scared to explore their inner selves are the rules to live by. Look at every child – he/she is an achiever. They play by their rules and they are not scared by what you think of their perception of the world.

Being an achiever is the easiest and best thing one can do for themselves. All they have to do is be themselves and do things that really make them happy. They have to let their inner child take control of the outer world. If only everybody could do that, we will have this world overflowing with happiness and tale of accomplishments.

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tViG Launched

I launched  tViG (The Vigraham Impact on the Globe) with a project proposal to help the Children’s Medical Center Foundation of Central Texas. You can read more info at http://saranyan.com/

Fun and busy times ahead as I get this potential non-profit rolling in whatever time I get outside work…

Family and Friends (Twitter and outside) have been of immense support…You guys rock!! Thanks!

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Are you ready?

Your achievements depend on the answer to this question. If you think you will be ready in five years, it will be five years. If it is two years, two years it will be. But the point is,  you never know this for sure. When that said time arrives, you might find yourself still wanting.

Believe that you are ready now, and you are! If you believe you are ready (to lead, to invent, to execute, to inspire) then you start exploring ways to do that. I honestly believe that it is the right way to spend our energies.

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For who?

Have you ever asked the question – For who?

Whom do you work for? Who are you trying to impress? Whom do you write for? Who are you trying to make happy?… so forth.

The fact is that if the answer to your question is not ‘myself’, then rethink your actions. Because, the best way to achieve something is when you do it for yourself. If you are an author, if you constantly think if people are going to like your work, you can never be yourself. Be yourself and you will create a master piece.

It is a simple rule – try it out, you will definitely see a change in the quality of your creations.

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Probability of Happiness

If your happiness depends on the outcome of your actions, you will rarely be happy.

We can never control the outcomes of our actions All we can control is the the actions itself. Our quest for happiness should end right there. I’ve seen people getting worried about something that “might” happen. The thing to remember is that the said thing that “might” happen may also “might not” happen.

For instance (hypothetical), we go to a grocery store to buy some fruit. We know that we might either get an Apple or Orange, not both. If our happiness depends on getting specifically either of these fruits, we not going to be happy 50% of the time. However, if our happiness depends solely on our action of going to grocery store in search of a fruit without caring what we get, we will be always happy.

It is interesting that despite the probability of something happening our way is almost always 50%, the probability of finding happiness is rarely 50%. It is around 10% or even less because we keep worrying about the “what if that does not happen factor”.

If you want to be happy, find it in the journey, not the outcome.

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Doing things

Do things only because if you don’t, you will lose your sleep. That’s all. No other reason.

Once you have decided to do it, ignore the world for good. Don’t fear or mind what the rest of the world is going to say about this. You are doing it for yourself. You are doing this because it feels like it is what you must be doing. It is a call from your higher self. Nobody else is going to feel the same way as you do. Hence, why are you listening to them?

Remember, the first line is VERY important.

How aware are we?

Are we living or just motoring along? How much aware are we to our surroundings? How much of that awareness tranlates to learning?

Awareness + learning = Happiness

A simple exercise will illustrate what is going on with our lives – Just for 10 minutes, walk outside in the open (your community, college, workplace, anywhere where you can see the sun and feel the wind) and observe everything. Don’t ignore anything or take it for granted. You will surprised to see how many things we take for granted on a daily basis.Simple things like growing grass, scent in the breeze, your neighbor’s kids playing, cloud patterns, etc. Once you observed these things, ask yourself, WHY? See if you can explain the reason behind these to your mom or grandmom or your kid. If you can’t, that might be because you don’t know yourself and you’ve been taking these simple things for granted in your lives.

The real secret of happiness is awareness translated to learning translated to knowledge. Once you become wise, world will make much more sense. But for that, you first have to step out of your ignorance and become aware of every wonderful thing that happens around you.

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