Importance of Choosing Platforms for a happy life:

In my last blog, I wrote about how short our life is – it is only 30,000 days. 2016, seems like started only a while ago, 90 days is almost gone. Intentional living and making each day count are keys to becoming successful and thus being happy. As success is always measured on relative terms, there is always a tendency to go for more. Human beings are driven by one of the strong emotions of being happy and satisfied in whatever they do. Happiness and satisfaction of leading a purposeful life is derived based on what we are doing currently and not what we did last year and even a month ago. A research study concluded that, money stops being a major contributor to happiness as soon as basic needs are met. So in my view choosing platforms that continue to challenge us is very important for leading a happy life than our bank balances and material possessions. We should not only aim for success but also aim for significance. In my definition – success is all about impacting one’s family and close circle of friends but significance is about impacting the broader world and society through our body of work and actions. Business, Politics, Public service, Social service are some of the platforms that can catapult one to be a significant individual. In most cases, every significant person is necessarily a successful person and reverse is not true.

So if we want to be significant and happy, choosing platforms and what we spend most of our time and energy on, is more important than anything else – be it our education, knowledge and capabilities at a given time. Knowledge and capabilities can always be acquired by a person with an intentional-living and ever improving mindset but choosing platforms needs to be timely and based on a thorough analysis of current environment and emerging future. I have always believed that, people who are in the entertainment and Sports industry are NOT more talented than a professional who is great at doing his or her craft. But successful entertainers and sports-persons tend to be more significant than a successful professional and that is due to the power of life platforms.  There was a famous Business Article on S- Curves in managing growth of a company through cycles and that is very true for individuals as well. The 3 Axis graphic below gives a powerful perspective on platforms in life.

The good and bad news is that, every platform goes through a growth cycle and after peak, it plateaus and then invariably comes down. During the growth cycle – we also go through a happiness cycle but during stagnation and the downward cycle, frustration and unhappiness set in. The reason for this unhappiness, is because of the demand from the platform is lower than the competence and capabilities that we acquired through the growth. Fundamentally Human beings are emotional creatures, which is why sense of purpose and growth direction is always important. One needs to identify well in advance when a platform is about to plateau and go down, jump into the next one to feed our emotions and happiness cycle. This is an ongoing process for companies and individuals. 

I have always believed that, everyone is capable of designing our own future, platforms and hence happiness. Happiness is always intrinsic and not extrinsic and it varies from person to person. We are all unique and let’s all lead a very happy life, continue to grow and make the world a better place…  

Life - nothing but 30,000 Days Journey and let's choose to spend each day purposefully

As the year 2015 draws to a close, it is an opportune time to review the year and plan for things looking ahead. Personally I am a great believer of strategizing and planning and constantly evolving it with the changing world. The process of planning our life is more important than the plans themselves as they are transitory in nature. Great leadership coach John Maxwell eloquently puts it about coming up with one’s life Plan  – a sentence or paragraph that defines one’s life and mission, which he says first write it with a big pencil along with an eraser as we would need to keep refining it until we die.  So Planning and reflecting have to be a daily, weekly, monthly and yearly activity – all feeding into one’s life mission. The intent of our life mission for most of us is probably the same – which is “Putting a Dent in this world” but what dent and how will vary.   

As we are all in the yearend reflective mode, let’s consider our life’s span through days instead of years. The moment, I internalized this framework, it changed my way of thinking about days and no of hours in a day..

As per the latest WHO estimates – Human beings average life’s expectancy is 82 years. Our immediate reaction is, life is very long and we have so many years ahead of us. But if we look at it in - no of days, it is just around 30,000 days and to be precise 29,930 days, if we get to live all 82 years.  Let’s divide our life into the following phases

·       Equipping Phase  (Until 21 years) =  7,665 days

·       Value adding Phase (22 – 70 Years) = 17,520 days

·       Retirement Phase  (70 -82 Years) = 4,745 days

Approximately, we spend about 7665 days in equipping ourselves by going to school, college and for most of us this is the intense learning period and after 70 years one cannot be as active as the preceding years and what’s left in between these two phases - is just 17,520 days to create our legacy and putting a dent in the world.. If we dissect this further, out of 17,520 days in value adding phase, half of the time goes in sleep, entertainment, vacation and other resting activities. So to create our own unique mark in the world – we just have less than 9000 days that too, in an ideal scenario.   

Wow, now it is completely a different frame work to think about life. It really brings a huge sense of urgency and clarity about what is most important. Steve Jobs in his famous Stanford commencement address pointed out that, when we live each day as last day of our life – trivial things, distractions and all the negative emotions that hold us back from life’s mission goes out of the window..

With the above framework in mind, let’s look at our life ahead and reflect on the following questions.

·       How many days are left in our life’s journey?

·       Are we directing our life purposefully or just getting by each day?

·       How many days we made it count in 2015 around life’s mission?

·       How can we make 2016 and coming years - the best years ever around our life’s mission and not around someone else priorities?

·       Are we emptying our skills and talents every day through best work or wasting our skills and talents in trivial things?

Let’s choose to live our life with a grand purpose and be passionate about that, knowing our days are very limited. But let’s remind ourselves, bigger the plans to put a dent, more fulfilling and exciting our life becomes and I know, no one wants to lead an unfulfilled and unexciting life but most of us slide into that trap unknowingly – good news is that from today, we can change all that for every day for rest of our lives…   

Emerging Influence of Digital Technology on Businesses:

Over the past decade, technology has played a major role in economic progress more than any other previous decade. We have been a witness to various industry leading businesses becoming obsolete with their old business models due to technological disruption. Technology has unbundled various segments from a traditional business, created whole new categories and changed the customer experience completely and this rapid change is sector agnostic from retail, Telecom, manufacturing, construction, banking, marketing and automobile. Social media industry is less than 10 years old but it is ubiquitous now and changing the way we interact with each other. Any one, who is in conventional businesses may think that, he or she is not affected by this as much as businesses in that space, but in reality it is disrupting every one. Ram Charan – the management guru in his book titled “Attackers Advantage” – said -today businesses are becoming “Mathematical Corporations” by deploying computing power to drive their business decisions. It is very important that, every business leader is cognizant of these trends and build new capabilities to make businesses relevant in this rapid change. It is all about how technology is woven into products and Business design.

Companies like Uber, Airbnb and whatsapp have created new ways of doing business in transportation, hospitality and communication industries respectively. Boundaries are being pushed. Recently in India - relatively a kid, who has not even attended the college created a front end hospitality portal, which has tied up with budget hotels throughout the country and Japanese major investing close to about 100 mill USD in the company proves the viability of the business model. Barriers are being broken in terms of experience, whom we know in the industry to start a business. All we need is an idea, which is unique and scalable. 10 years ago, no one would have thought of technology enabled front end models disrupting the traditional business with real brand and infrastructure which took years to build and scale.

In my view, with advancement in technologies – the trend is just the beginning of the beginning. As consumers, we are living in exciting items and let’s enjoy the ride but as business leaders – it is testing time with continuous disruption – watch out guys..