9 AM, 12 Jan.
Blue Tokai Oshiwara (yeah, not Starbucks :))
So, week 2 is over.
It took its time to come and pass by. Like most other weeks (and months and years and all that), this was a blur as well. I don’t know when one day ended and the other began. I have the same routine – wake up, take 3 steps to my table, put on my morning track list, reply to emails, get ready, get to Starbucks, make calls, eat, sleep, repeat. And in between, find distraction on Instagram (which has become a serious addiction and I need to fix it) and daydream.
I have an idea. Each time I open Instagram, I will do 3 pushups.
Let’s see. Will keep a track.
So, in this entire madness, the only good part is that I don’t have to worry much about money (no I am not financially free but I have an ongoing business that on most days does ok; these days however it’s not doing that well as I would want it to).
The other good part is that I am mostly ok in the head, apart from the days when I have to travel. I think I am blessed.
Ok, this is becoming a blog by itself. Lemme get to the notes, reports, reflections and all that from the week gone by.
Lemme start with what I thought I would do this week. And my report on the same.
I said I would work on the startup and work on my 2025 plan.
I am glad to report that I made progress on the first one.
And nothing on the second one. However, once I publish this, I plan to spend the rest of the day planning for 2025.
So we are ok on this count.
The tracker from the week that went by.
I thought (and decided) that I would live in public and track some metrics thru the year. Here’s a screenshot from the week that went by.
While this tracking is helpful, here are my takeaways.
- I don’t have discipline when it comes to food. I need to work harder on it.
- I haven’t been able to slot workouts or exercise into my routine. From how things are, I think I can try for an evening session. My mornings are way too important for me to do anything. So lets see if I can make an action on that.
- I can’t really make any correlation between what I eat, how much I walk and my emotions. The last two have been bad. I don’t know why. And because they’ve been bad, I can see that I’ve been eating more than I typically do.
On the tracker, VG has made a public motion of no-confidence. I no longer want to argue or fight. Each time I have wagered against him, I’ve lost. But I will try my best to keep this going. If I’ve done it for 10 days, there’s no reason why I can’t do this for 364 more.
Time shall tell.
Oh, here’s an ask.
If you see me missing these updates, please remind me and force me to update this. I need to gun for consistency in each thing I do.
May be Consistency would be the word of the year for me?
Things at the top of my head
1/ I said no to an opportunity to travel to Noida.
If I had gone, I would’ve probably built some business connections. But I want C to take on the lead. And I want to not travel and focus on health.
2/ Should I offer this?
3/ I am deleting food delivery apps from my phone.
Let me see if I can live without it. The only thing I will miss is the instant delivery of groceries. But lemme try and be more planned about it. I anyway don’t care about being wasteful. I’ll report next week.
4/ Twitter threads
In my pursuit to grow my distribution, I am working with someone to help me write Twitter threads. The first one they’ve sent has come out nice. Let’s see how that grows.
Some photos from the week gone by
I am starting this new thing where I hope I get to share some of my “masterpieces”. Here are some…
You may see this link in case you are unable to spot it.
What didn’t go well?
1/ Lost a classmate
Last night I got to know that one of the 150 odd people I went to MDI has passed away. Unlike a lot of others, I am immune to it. I know that as I grow older, I need to grow up. But I am unable to make sense of loss. These are the times when I question the existence of good and the usefulness of all the things around us.
But I also know that life is beautiful and I love to live and whatever time we have, we ought to make the most of it. So that.
I hope the family finds peace.
2/ People didn’t join me
I reported last time that I am working on a startup that I am very excited about. And now it has reached a place where I am trying to build a team. All my life I have prepared for a Mahabharata and it seems to be upon me. And all the allies nad friends and alliances I forged had to come in handy at this time.
But not one of them did.
So many thoughts and lessons in there. The biggest one? I need to rethink and redo my take on my ability to be with people. I often say that I am a great scout and I can read people well. This experience is teaching me that I am anything but that.
I’ve written more about this here.
There’s more but that’s for my notes.
What went well for me? for C4E? for my village?
1/ I wrote Twitter threads every day (except one day)!
Woot!
If I can get this consistent with things in life, I will change the world.
You may see those here.
2/ Sent handwritten notes to some people on New Year
I am not sure if I covered this in last week’s update. I am too lazy to go check.
Yet to send some.
Will send today.
I like the idea of doing such things for people I love.
What did I learn / realised / discovered etc etc?
1/ At C4E, we need to get more efficient.
While we are and will remain a culture-first company, we don’t operate from a place of urgency. The principles of ‘Ready, Fire, Aim’ are not practised. And that’s not cool at all.
2/ Twitter is a goldmine when I comes to people
With all the brouhaha around Elon and his antics, I’ve made some incredible connections with Twitter. In the past week, I met Anand, Saurabh, Rohan, Amul, Advik (Advik was the highlight) and many more people. Need to amp my twitter presence. Any ideas anyone?
3/ Graeful that Astha exists.
While am in general grateful about a lot of people, this week’s highlight would be a chat with Astha on Jan 08.
4/ I published these lessons from this TED talk by Anurag Kashyap.
Each of these lessons is worth chasing.
5/ Amul taught me about branding, identity and more.
If you are a curious soul, you MUST follow Amul.
6/ I need to work hard on the AI stuff.
the world around us is changing fast and I feel I am missing the bus by staying on the sidelines. While the world is already talking about AGI and other things, I can’t even tell people a difference between AI or Intelligence!
So, need to get my act together on it.
7/ I’d love to be around a Bonnie.
Imagine the rest.
Ok, coming to what I look forward in the next week?
This assumes that I will have finished my #in2025 document by end of the day today 😀
1/ Build a business case for a project that I am undertaking.
This is the part of the startup I am building (I mentioned it last week).
2/ #dateSG document.
Where I want to list things that people must know if they want to date me. Assuming they want to. assuming I want to (with all the action happening around me). But then I have discovered that in my life, if one thing does well, other things fall in place. And if one thing gets fucked up, everything else does!
3/ The 2024 Review Letter
Again, this depends on my ability to write the 2025 letter. From the look of things, I’ll block next Sunday and work on this. Let’s see how it goes.
That’s about it!
Honestly, as I end this, I think I could’ve written lot more but I am trying to manage my time well. I’ve been on it for two hours now and I don’t want to invest more time. I’d rather do more things. May be the next week’s update is better.
Oh, here are the previous editions: Wk 01
PS: This series of posts is inspired by Thej and his weekly notes.