If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

I created this example to drive home a point and use this often in my speaking engagements. Remember, this is fictional

Think about this for a second. You had offered to give him about ten hours of your time. Let’s say you would have productively used about five hours of those ten hours - meaning you would have sort of squandered five hours and instead of that you have to pay $100 - about $20 per hour. since most of us earn more than $20 per hour, it does look reasonable. Or, may be not.

I know your mind is now screaming with logic as to why this story does not make sense. You have your reasons and you may be right. However, the point I want to make is simple - most of us are willing to squander time but safeguard money at the expense of time. Money can be earned back but time once lost can never be earned back. This is our sorry state of our relationship with time and money.

Have a good time (pun intended)

I am involved in Open Source through CIGNEX and have been blogging here for the last one year. I see some similarities in the two worlds.

Blogging has become like open source software. There are hundreds and thousands of blogs out there but only a small percentage
of them are quality blogs.

We can change that. Let me give some background and a possible solution.

Here is my point. The blog is not always FOR you. It is for your READERS. You are smart and I am sure people close to you are reaping benefits of your smartness. Through a blog, you can change that and extend the reach and SERVE more people. Recently Guy Kawasaki started his blog - Let the good times roll. For me, it is not a blog, it is higher education. Many people wonder why Guy didn’t start his blog earlier.

The smart people of the world can unite and change the blogosphere by creating and maintaining quality blogs with the highest ROII.

My latest column on CIOUpdate.com has been published today. It is a topic dear to my heart - branding for IT professionals. IT professionals can ignore branding when the going is good and still succeed. However, when the going gets tough, your brand can be your first line of defense. This is a two-part article and here is a link to the first part

Personal Branding 101 for IT professionals

Oh GOD! please save me from watching these brainless record breaking attempts.

I was reading the morning news paper in Bangalore Deccan Herald. On page 13, there was a photo of a few children brushing their teeth. Apparently the photo shows only part of the story. I believe there were close to 11,000 children assembled at Manila’s Rizal Park to break a Guinness record of “most people brushing their teeth simultaneously”

I couldn’t believe what I was reading. Upon searching, I found that AP had picked up this brainless news item. Here is the link:
Philippines Children Brush for Record

Have fun!

PS: I think media is hungry for such brainless events everywhere. I wrote about such a thing in the US late september on the topic
Man breaks record for watching TV

In 1993, my first meditation teacher explained the use of anchors. My anchor was simple - when I was delving deep into meditation, I would bring my three fingers (thumb, index and middle) together in both hands. The idea was that with practice, I would be able to accelerate my getting into meditative state by activating the anchors.

Triggers are like reminders for an appointment. Let’s say you want to get into a meeting in a positive frame of mind and you know that listening to particular kind of music or a particular song for example will get you into the positive frame of mind, that music or song becomes a trigger for you.

Anchors and triggers work. It requires discipline to setup and follow through. Again, this is something that happens in the long term. Hence the temptation would be to easily miss and ignore their power.
Here’s one way to setup an anchor

The idea is that after sometime you can activate your anchor to move into the desired state

Here’s one way to setup a trigger

People ask me the key difference between an anchor and a trigger. In my opinion, an anchor is something that you do and a trigger is something external.

Use both of them in whatever combination based on your preference and make the most of your life!

We take certain decisions for certain reason(s). Many times there is a public reason and there is a private reason for a decision. A public reason is what we say to others to justify the decision and a private reason is why we really took that decision. While we can fool someone else with a public reason, it is best not to fool ourselves with it. We need to be clear about the private reason and actually question ourselves whether it is really a “valid” reason in the first place.

In the above example, both reasons seem to get linked slightly. Look back in your own life and re-visit some of the significant decisions. There is a possibility that some of them have two reasons - one public and one private. Next time when you make a decision, check on the validate your “private” reason first. You may be surprised on what you find there.

This gem of a poem was forwarded to me by my always insightful friend Mukundan. This is not a quote but it’s a poem by Mother Theresa. I am including it here because when I read it, the poem looks like a collection of great quotes. Hope you will enjoy it.

Greetings from Bangalore, India.

I have been talking about ways to distinguish yourself if you are an IT professional. After the publication of my book “Beyond Code” and after talking to so many people outside the IT world who read the book, it is clear to me that irrespective of what your field is, there is a need to distinguish yourself.

This afternoon, Naveen took me to a fast food place for a quick lunch. First, the food was just great. Second, what I saw in that roadside fast food joint was very interesting. The name of the place was “Rural Food Station” (in Kannada language “Halli Thindi”) and on the menu was all the items that are famous in the villages of Karnataka. The place was packed.

With the hectic pace of life in Bangalore, I think it is almost impossible for people to prepare these kinds of items at home.

However, since a large part of the population was originally from the rural parts of the state, people know about these items and are still interested in eating them. “Rural Food Station” helps in taking care of this need. There are probably tens of thousands of food junctions in Bangalore and most of them serve the same kind of food. This small joint decided to distinguish and stand out from the crowd.

The payback as I could see was looking great.

During this trip to India I got a better understanding of the booming BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) industry in India. While I can talk at length about this topic, for now, I want to focus only on one aspect - the intensity with which the industry is attracting young talent and some of the consequences thereof.

Let me take an extreme example of a financial services BPO. Here’s a partial day in the life of a BPO employee

As you guessed rightly, to do this job, it does not require a lot of brain power but the pay is good. To give a comparison, a BPO employee may make anywhere from $300 to $600 per month whereas this employee’s classmate may be making only $100 - $150 per month. So, there is a huge temptation among young people to get into a BPO industry and make four times the money that one of their classmates are making out there.

My point is simple - if someone jumps into this career because of the money they get in the short-term, they will pay a huge price in the long-run. BPO is still in its early stages and the complete consequences are not known yet. A few years from now, the initial employees will be in a “stuck” state for good as they can’t do anything other than “robotic” actions in the back office. This is a classic case of getting a big salary in the short term and forgetting that the big salary comes with a huge COST in the long run.

Now that I finished my rant on the BPO industry, let’s talk about your case. Why don’t you honestly answer the question:
 “What is the COST of your salary?”

Special thanks to Satish MM of Verismo Networks for all his insights on the topic.

My apologies to all of you. My last article was posted multiple times (due to a software glitch)

I will be more careful next time.

Sorry for the inconvenience.