Month: June 2023

Stop trying to control. Surrender

Many of us go through life trying to control everything and everyone around us. Trying to bend the universe to our will.

It never works and it is exhausting at the same time sucking up all of our energies.

So what is the alternative?

Not doing anything and letting people push you around? Of course not.

The answer is to enhance the only thing you can truly control: You!

Work on your body, mind and soul. Intentionally and not by chance.

Read, play, converse with people smarter than you, exercise, write, travel, reflect, explore, support others without expecting anything back, etc.

This is how you invest in yourself.

Surrendering control and letting the flow of life guide you is an art that has to be practiced.

The first time this happens when the universe is guiding you one way and you want to go the other way, it will not feel comfortable. You will want to push back. You will want to control. This is when practicing surrender and being open to opportunities comes into play.

Really listen and get in tune with what the universe has planned for you. Don’t resist.

Surrendering and letting go is the way to winning and peace.

Life’s too short to work with B personalities

In work and also in personal life, it’s always better to find and work/be with personalities that are smarter and better than you.

Of course, there are insecurities that come with it when you are working with or managing people who are smarter than you are, but at the same time, it’s very rewarding to lift and elevate these folks.

No need to really ‘manage’ people like that, lead them instead with proper metrics to keep them accountable to results.

Conversely, there’s a cost for working with B players that is not apparent immediately at first. As an entrepreneur or a CEO, you feel like you’re saving money, but in the long-term it will come back to bite you. It’s just not worth saving money in the short-term if in the long-term it can harm you and your business.

Let go of your ego. Work with people who specialize in specific areas and are preferably at least twice as better than you in their own discipline like marketing, sales, product management, operations.

In Summary:

  • Hire and work with only A players.
  • Don’t manage A players, lead them.
  • Set very specific metrics and keep them accountable.
  • Encourage and support them to do their best work!

Working hard is overrated

In Asian cultures, especially places like India and China, if you told somebody that you were hardly working, they would look at you with disrespect. In these countries, as well as many others, people pride themselves on working hard to make a living. The harder you work, the more you are held in honor.

Bullshit.

This type of perception has kept so many amazing people doing busy work instead of meaningful work.

Think about it. How did people feel when calculators first came to mass market? Were there purists who held the notion that we must continue to calculate things the hard way with pen and paper as opposed to the new calculator technology? You bet there were.

These are the people who got left behind, became irrelevant and no one remembers them.

The pragmatist smart folks knew that using the calculator was just a shortcut they could take to accomplish amazingly Big things and leave the rudimentary calculations to the calculator. Smart work and not hard work.

Same thing is going to happen with artificial intelligence. There will be people who will shun the technology and will insist that we use human intelligence for what artificial intelligence can do. Just a false ideology without any real merit behind it.

The smart folks will take advantage of artificial intelligence and all of its flavors as it becomes available to catapult their potential to the next level.

It’s too bad that many intelligent get left behind because they focus on working hard instead of meaningful impact. That has always happened when any new technology comes to market and will definitely happen with this new phase as well.