A Better New Year Resolution

No New Year Celebration is complete without a New Year Resolution but few New Year Resolutions are completed. In some sense this is an example of two typical human behaviors, one gift and one curse. We want to be better. So, we take a New Year Resolution. But we are lazy. So we fail. Year after year, millions of people resolve to be better. And they fail.

The inherent failure of your New Year Resolution is not because you are lazy. You know you might be a lot of time. But you are not lazy always. People with low self-discipline fail at their New Year Resolutions. So do people with high self-discipline. In fact, it does not matter how old you are, what your profession is or where you live. You are bound to fail at your New Year Resolution. Everyone fails. But everyone cannot be lazy all at once. This means there must be a fundamental flaw in New Year Resolutions.

In fact, there is. Let us consider a fairly common New Year Resolution, going to the gym. Simple, just go to the gym for the next 365 days. Thousands of people go to the gym everyday, you can do it too. So its Jan 1. You've taken the Gym membership and you are ready for some action. You set the alarm to 6 AM. You wake up, go to the gym, work out and come home. Great! You are on your way to having an awesome body. You keep on going. You are starting to have some body pain. Not much. You keep going. A week passes. Two weeks pass. You are feeling good. But one day you are not feeling like it. You decide to take a break. The next day there is that football game. The day after that, you are instructed to turn in some urgent work. You stop going. A week passes. Two week. Your 1 month gym membership expires. Very soon you forget you had a gym membership. Two months later one of your friend asks how your New Year Resolution is going and you can't even remember what it was.

Let me clear something upfront. You are not lazy. New Year Resolutions are hard. Because becoming better is hard. It takes sweat, work, dedication and discipline. So, when our internal motivation starts to decrease and the pains increase, we tend to switch off that alarm clock and go back to sleep.

So are we doomed? Not quite. There is a better way to take a New Year Resolution. It may not benefit you directly but eventually it will. Let us say instead of taking a Resolution to make yourself better, you resolve to make someone else better. That someone else could be anyone whom you genuinely care about. It could be your parents/ siblings/ spouse/ friend/ boyfriend/ girlfriend or a colleague. If you are a teacher, it could be a weak student. If you are a doctor, it could be a patient that needs your help. But it has to be someone about whom you really care about. Then you will take a New Year Resolution for them. At this point it is very essential that you know the person well enough to know that they will actually benefit from that resolution. Otherwise, you may end up wasting your time or worse, harming them. Once you decide upon your Resolution To Help, you may have to employ a variety of methods to make your chosen person actually complete your resolution. 

Let us say you see your friend struggling with his health. You decide to help your friend in going to the gym. Now, going to gym will remain difficult and painful for him. So you may have to use different ways to make him go to gym. You may have to motivate him, bribe him, threaten him or something else. Unless he starts going to the gym regularly on his own, you may have to keep irritating him if he does not. And even if he starts going, you cannot rest easy. You have to keep checking on him. It may be best to not let him know that you have taken a New Year Resolution to make him go to the gym. Because if he knows, he may ask you not to pester him and leave him alone. Therefore, it is all the more necessary to take a resolution about someone whom you really care about. You should know them well enough to know what is best for them, even if they don't realize it themselves.

This is better than taking resolutions about yourself because now you only have the motivation but no pain. It is very difficult not to shut down the alarm clock when you are feeling sleepy. It is your instinct for immediate relief that overpowers your long-term rational concern for a healthier life. With convincing the other person, there is only the second part. And if the person getting better is someone you care about, you will feel good about it. But not only that. This will actually make you a better person!

So, what is your Resolution to Help going to be?

Thanks to Shivaraj and Yamini for reading drafts of this post.

The Easy Way To Make Your PPTs Suck Less

I had to make a ppt for something today. I chose the old and faithful MS-Powerpoint (I'm not quite the Prezi guy). I started off the usual route of putting all the content in my mind onto the slides. I tried to follow the best practice of not putting too much content in one slide and maintaining a logical flow. Then, I chose a 'Slide Design' from the standard powerpoint menu. After that I put some font styles here and there. And Hey! I had got a ppt for myself! It was all good, except that it was boring. Boring as in "Boooooring". This must be the millionth ppt made with this design! In fact, I actually put myself to sleep after watching the slide show. There had to be another way!

So, I decided to dump the ppt and start afresh. I thought that having images as background would be a cool idea. But only high-res images would do, otherwise the slides would look pretty pathetic. A small search for high-res free stock photos lead me to this super-cool link : Stock Photos That Don't Suck

Each of those pages contain some very awesome pics. So I redesigned my ppt by searching for appropriate photos and experimenting with them. Finding the perfect photos took a decent amount of time but patience was the key in unearthing this treasure trove.

Here are the results of both the efforts. I have replaced the actual content for a much more interesting (and healthy :P ) content. Hope you enjoy/learn. Let me know your feedback. And do share your quick ppt tips in the comments below!

The Earlier Version:

Earlier Banana from Abhiroop Bhatnagar

The Later Version:

Later Banana from Abhiroop Bhatnagar

Additional Notes:
resonate.duarte.com : This is an excellent resource which tells not only about how to make effective ppts but how to have effective communications in general. Thanks to Vedant for sharing it. 

Some Start-up Related Stuff

Here is a collection of some start-up related stuff that I have come across.

Next Big What- An India-based platform for entrepreneurs

Hatch - Accelerator and Incubator based out of Chandigarh. Their website has good articles about some start-up basics. Check out their resources section to see some sample business plan templates.

Yourstory - News about Indian Start-ups

The RodinHoods - Excellent online community of entrepreneurs.

NEN - Vast collection of resources. Don't expect too much details but it covers the basics. Their associative program with Tata is called 'First Dot' focuses on student entrepreneurship.

TechCrunch - Best source of global news about tech-based start-ups

The stuff listed till here was more like 'fundas for start-up' . It mostly dwells on 'What' should be done regarding various aspects of a start-up. But it does not go into exploring reasons for why it should be done. Therefore if you wish to go deeper into understanding about a start-up, the links listed below might help you.

How to Build A Startup - A one of its kind course with a totally different approach.

Paul Graham's Essays - There are about 200 essays, some of which are well over 3000 words. If you have the patience and time to go through them, you will find many gems in there. Paul Graham is the founder of Y Combinator, world's best start-up accelerator. In these elaborate essays, he describes his views regarding various issues that start-ups face apart from other topics such as hacking.

Also, a link to the best start-up tools list I could find on the web:

Startup Tools by Steve Blank

Hope this helps :)
Would really welcome additions to this list.

Edit:
Another Start-up course suggested by Samarth Bansal : Technology Entrepreneurship course by Stanford : (http://venture-lab.org/venture)

Book Review: Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston

I could not have found a better topic for my first blog post than a book review of the book which could as well be titled 'Chronicles of Tech-Entrepreneurs'. This book will definitely feature in my list of 'Best among the Favourites'.

Founders At Work by Jessica Livingston contains interviews of start-up founders (about 30, some of which are Apple (Woz), RIM (Mike Lazardis), PayPal (Levchin) and Hotmail (Bhatia) among others. The best part about this book is that these interviews are printed verbatim, in the form of a dialogue between Jessica Livingston and the founders which has helped in capturing the emotions of the founders when they talk about their beginning days. Their fear, doubt, confusion, joy and satisfaction just flow naturally. It almost feels as if they are talking to you in person.

Being a partner at YC has given Jessica a very keen insight into the start-ups which can be clearly seen in the questions that she has put up to the founders. The focus is on the very early days and the challenges the entrepreneurs struggle against during that period. This makes the content of the book very relevant to the founders who are planning to start-up since this phase, mostly, is a crazy roller-coaster ride in terms of emotions. The questions asked to the founders seem designed to explore these very emotions. One of the questions Jessica interestingly asks each of the founder is "When did you come closest to quitting?"

But the most fascinating aspect about this book is the exploration of the combination of technology and business and how it can bring about a revolution in the way people do things. In each of these interviews, the founders talk of how they faced a problem, observed that many other people also face similar problems, developed a solution through technology and made it available to people through business. It shows that certain people just choose to be luckier than others by making their choices in such a way. For some it was a continuous tweaking of the product or business model, for others it was opening one start-up after another. Needless to say, passion, perseverance, technical abilities and business insights are frequently mentioned in this book. If you are passionate about start-ups, this book will make a perfect collection of bed-time stories for you.

Thanks to Sneha Bengani for reading drafts of this.