Hi everyone. Today I would like to talk about focusing on what we have instead of what we don’t have. As an example I am going to use a sports team. The team is the San Francisco 49ers and they are an American football team in the National Football League (the NFL). Prior to last year, the niners were very successful advancing to the NFL semi-finals twice and the championship once. But at the beginning of the 2014 season, rumors started to filter out of the organization. The management and the coach were at odds with each other. The players did not like the intense coaching style. The players themselves had off the field issues like being arrested for drunk driving, domestic abuse and other incidents. Needless to say, the performance suffered. The niners ended the season with a record of 8-8 and did not make the playoffs. The coach was fired. In the off-season, many veteran players retired. Also many players left the team and joined other teams. All the football analysts said the niners would be lucky to break even and most probably they will have a losing season. The analysts focused on what the niners did not have, as reasons for the dismal prediction. But slowly, the team overcame its shortcomings and at the niners won the first game of the season by a score of 23-3. I watched the game and what I noticed was some younger players stepped up, the remaining veteran players also picked up their game a notch. I know it is early. There are 15 more games left. But my point is that they focused on who they had instead of worrying about all the people that left the team. Take Spud Webb. He was 5 feet 4 inches tall. He wanted to play basketball in the National Basketball Association (NBA). He was told, he is not tall enough. But he had great ball handling skills. He was nimble and fast and very accurate. In 1986, he won the NBA dunking contest against people who were much taller than him. Or how about an author Theo Giesel. He was told he could not use higher than a first grade vocabulary and no more than 50 different words. You may know Theo better as Dr. Seuss and the book was Green Eggs and Ham. Finally Joanne, a single mother living on welfare, using an old typewriter wrote a book that was rejected by 12 different publishers. But for her, 13th time was the charm. The author was J K Rowling and the book was Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone!!

I hope you like this post. I hope all of us can focus on what we have and make the best of it.

Hi everyone, all of us are guilty of this. We are quick to judge people based on something they did without going a little deeper into why they did it. I got this message on one of my WhatsApp groups: A little girl is holding two apples. Her mother says “Can you give me one of the apples?”. The little girl takes a bite out of one apple and then the next. The mother is unsure how to react. Just then the little girl offers one of the apples to her mother and says “here, this is the sweeter one”.

There is also a story in Ramayan. Lord Ram is wandering through the forest. A woman named Shabri is a devotee. When she finds out that Lord Ram is coming towards her, she wants to give him some berries. She collects the berries and presents them to him. But the berries are half eaten. Seeing this, Lord Ram’s brother, Laxman is angry. He says “How dare you give Lord Ram half-eaten berries?” Shabri says “I ate them to make sure they were sweet. I threw away the sour berries”.

In my day to day life, I am quick to say something to my kids before sometimes finding out what they were thinking or why they did certain things. My children tell me to not judge them. And sometimes they do have a point.

Recently at work, I was having trouble with my wireless mouse. Sometimes even if I double-clicked, it would not open documents. Sometimes, even when I did not click it, it would close documents. The cursor was all over the place. So about 2-3 weeks ago, I requested our admin to order a new mouse. I figured, it would arrive in a day or so. But as I said, 2-3 weeks went by. I thought she forgot or perhaps she felt that this was not important. I was about to go back to her and ask her why it was taking such a long time, when she walked in with a new keyboard. She said just ordering the mouse would not have helped. If we did that, then the keyboard won’t work properly. She also apologized for the delay. Similarly, I had submitted my expense report for July in early August. It was end of August and I had still not got my reimbursement check. Again I thought that perhaps our admin was behind. She was on vacation and also she was studying for her part-time course. But one morning, my boss called me and said that he had signed the expense report, but forgot to return it to me. It had been sitting on his desk for a week or so.

All I can say is that I need to learn to delay judgement. Maybe you could too!

Hi folks. I am excited and sad at the same time. I can’t believe the challenge is over. Time flies when you are having fun. But all good things must come to an end unless as Natalie suggested, we continue. That is what I plan to do. All of sudden I am getting ideas for my blog. I think instead of singling out one daily challenge that I liked, I would say that I liked the whole challenge. To be honest, I got my WordPress account in October 2014. I read books about blogging, saw videos, but never really felt like blogging. Not sure why. But this challenge sort of gave me a reason to try my hand out at blogging. I loved it. My blogs were not long or loaded with content, but it was a start. I could not believe how easy it was. But if I think about it, there were two daily challenges I liked most. They were the feed your mind body and soul and be a tourist in your local city or town.

Hi everyone, have you ever met someone who lives near a tourist spot but never visited that spot. I have come across many people. For example, I met a couple of people in New Jersey who have never been to the statue of liberty or back in the day when I was a graduate student in West Virginia and I had visited Niagara Falls which was about a 6 hr drive but my adviser had not, I traveled a lot when I was a student. I had time but less money. Now I have money but no time. Anyway, we recently moved to a house in the same city. I had heard about this powerline trail. This trail is actually following the power lines from one part of our town to another. Our new house is close to the powerline trail and one day my family and I went on this trail. Our kids had a lot of fun. Also I live close to Philadelphia. There are many up and coming areas of Philadelphia, which used to be run down but are going through a renaissance. So that is what I would like to do: visit restaurants and places in these up and coming areas of Philadelphia.

Hi all. Today I am going to talk about fueling my mind body and soul. As I have mentioned in my previous posts, I meditate in the morning and then also read religious books. I exercise before lunchtime. I guess one thing I would like to do is eat a balanced diet. I am not very good at sticking to that principle. Especially when I go to parties or when I go to professional meetings etc. In the past eating more protein and reducing the amount of carbs has definitely helped me lose weight. I also noticed that it has an effect on my confidence, my attitude and my image. So that is one thing I am going to do to fuel my body.

Hi everyone. Today I would like to talk about decluttering. I have to confess that I am a pack rat and I tend to keep everything. But you realize how much stuff you have when you have to move. We recently moved to a new house and packing everything was a nightmare. I had so many newspaper clippings, magazines, statements etc and I was overwhelmed. This is one of the things that my wife and I fight about. She wants to throw everything away, and I want to keep everything. But I am determined to declutter. When we were moving, we had a deadline and so I tried to look at as much stuff as I could, but we just ran out of time. So ended up moving a lot of boxes and totes that still has junk in it. But now I don’t think we will move. Yes, I know, never say never. I also want to declutter mentally. I think all of us are guilty of hanging onto too many memories and old grudges etc. We have to start living in the present and plan for the future. That is my plan. Let us see how things go.

Hi folks, I guess it is our nature to make sure that we take care of our family, our work, our friends and then finally ourselves. Especially if you are a parent. It is tough to get some time for ourselves. In my routine, I do spend some time in the morning meditating for about 15-20 minutes and then about half an hour in the afternoon when I work out. But since 2007 I have been doing something just for myself and that is attending my 10th grade reunion. There are about 30-40 friends from my 10th grade class who live in the US. Every year in the fall we meet in a city where one of our friends lives and spend the weekend reminiscing about our days in 10th grade. It is a lot of fun. This year on the weekend of October 24-26, I will be in Columbus, Ohio. Looking forward to it.

Hi everyone, when I think about outsourcing, I think of the movie Multiplicity. In that movie, Michael Keaton is a stay at home dad and is overwhelmed with the day to day activities. So he goes to a scientist and clones himself multiple times. But as the movie progresses, he realizes that the clones are not his exact copy, but some of them have one of his original qualities enhanced. For example one clone is very romantic, one clone is very organized and so on. I currently don’t have business, but if I did, I would definitely outsource the administrative stuff to an assistant. Anyway, cloning has its drawbacks just like they show in Multiplicity. One of the biggest is me and my clones cannot all go out at the same time. The other is what if my wife doesn’t recognize me and has a tryst with the more romantic me? Assistant is the way to go!!

Hi folks, don’t you wish there was one tool that you could use to streamline your life? So do I. Although I think we may need more than 1. But if I were to use only 1 tool, I think it would be coming up with Standard Operating Procedures for everything I do. I currently don’t have a business, but in my professional life, I am a pharmaceutical scientist. In our industry things are very highly regulated. Also in order to be consistent across sites and people, we had SOP’s for everything. We even had a SOP on how to write SOP’s. We had to constantly train on new SOP’s about equipment and record keeping etc as well as retrain on some that were older than 2 years. But the big advantage was that all my colleagues approached every unit operation the same way, because they followed the SOP. Also, this way you can be sure that things get done in a systematic manner and continuity was maintained. The other tool that I would like to use and I think would be fun to use would be Asana. I am going to check it out.

Hi folks. To be honest, I am not very good at coming up and keeping my goals, but I am going to try. One of my first goals is to finish an e-book about things to do if you lose your job. I am almost done with the majority of wiriting. I just need to put the finishing touches. I would like to finish the bok by end of this month. By October, I want to have a framework for creating my info-product and by December, I want to finish another book. I have couple of topics that I have started, but I am in the very early stages of writing. Let us see if I can accomplish those goals.