Point A & B
Day 1
The million dollar question is where do i start?
The billion dollar answer is here & now aka Point A. Use your aspiration (even greed) to imagine what you want to become in a time period (1 year may be) aka Point B.
The DesignU process begins by taking a stock of the various elements of life right now and a desire to change it for better.
#buildselfinpublic
Me: I want to build a whole new life from now on. The idea is none of the past should matter. This is where I want to start as Point A. That is a hard proposition but will be fun to do.
I am a realist. There are only 365 days or 8760 hours in this chosen time period. Out of which 2930 goes ins rest and sleep. The other 3000 may go off in work. The rest is for everything else.
More than 3 projects (has a start and end date) and 3 routines (doesn’t have a start and end date, it goes on) is impossible in this time frame. It takes about 60 days to form a habit and 30 more days to stabilize it. That is almost 100 days. In 365 days 3 solid routines is a big deal.
we overestimate when we plan for a day and we underestimate when we plan for a decade. Being real with time as a boundary has helped me.
3 mega projects for this year would be
I have been dying to do this data project 90-60 (weight loss) for 2 years now. Every time I get impatient and never allowed my weight to touch 90 kgs. Max I allowed it to be 84 and always brought it down. The lockdown has helped immensely to see that number. I didn’t try hard this time. It just happened. Could be the stress, insomnia, remote work, junk food etc. Time to make it into my dream project 90-60. Let us get started from worst health and move towards the best.
Simple math: Every 10 days 1 kg is lost. In a year max 30 kg can be lost (tough by the by). Weight loss tapers as we get healthier over a period of time. Checkout the weight loss series for more info here. This is application time.
As a team we want to start a 100% remote business from this year beginning onwards. Thanks to Covid, we could make that happen.
For the fun of it, we want to build a million dollar business from India and just prove ourselves we can do it. A million dollars in INR is about 8 crores in 3 years. 2.5 cr per year is a doable number. Checkout the personal finance series here. Let us see if those principles work 😉 Let us start from a zero bank balance.
As a designer and a product leader, I built products for others all along. So far built around 160 digital products in the past 20 years. It was totally fun solving problems and building stuff. It is time to build our own info products by picking problem statements that excite us. Can we launch one product a month as a team? That makes it 10 products a year (we work only 10 months a year, 2 months is to wind down and do other things in life). Let us get started from zero products.
We are done I guess. 1 is in health and fitness category, 2 is in finance category and 3 is in career category.
With grace, I am blessed with loving friends and family. This has been the secret sauce that has helped all along. So not much work needed in relationships ❣️ However I suck with keeping in touch with friends and acquaintances. I get caught up in the busy world and I forget prioritising social time. This year, I want to talk to at-least one person every week. May be do a podcast out of it or something so I can share with others as well.
As a hyper-learner, I love books. I am planning to read one every week and I have not been diligent about this habit all these years. When there is so much assimilation, there must be synthesis and expression as well. Writing 300 words to express is not a bad idea.
So that is 3 routines for this year.
1 book a week (assimilation), 300 words a day (synthesis and expression) and 1 social time a week. All three in Growth category.
Every birthday (22 Sep), I do pick my projects and routines. I spend one week post birthday in planning. The above is a result of thinking for a week. It so happened that the series ended in the right time.
We will start today and conclude next Oct 2, 2021. Happiness is personal and contextual. Choose what you think is a great project for your life. Choose the person you want to be. Go for it! This has worked wonders for me. If you want to tag along with this series, do so. It is fun to do it with company. Put down your growth year plan in the comments section and we will get started 🎉
🥂to growth!
Yo! Thanks for reading. Means a lot to me as attention is the hardest currency 🙏
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