2015 - A truly interesting year!

Yay!! My New Year’s Eve blog!! This “may” be long because I am going to try and cover all of 2015.

So 2015 has been by far the most interesting year for me. It’s been phenomenal and absolutely absolutely interesting.

The year started off with those super creative calendars most of my friends love, and continued pretty low key until March. While work had its ups and downs, none that impacted me a whole lot. Chaos started April onwards, and since I am responsible for fixing problems, I wake up one morning, almost restless. Tell my wife I think I should go to the US, she gives me “the look” and instantly says “then you should”. News passes to Pratap, his response “Oh finally, you realise”. (Note - I never fancied travelling to the US, I still don’t) 

Tickets booked, US task list done, US was great fun and a very successful trip both professionally and personally. Met a lot of friends, travelled a lot, worked my butt off on week days (oh wait, people say I don’t have one.. ok never mind)

Fast forward – July 8^th, I am back in Bangalore. Thrilled to be back home. India check list made (I erased that check list on 30^th Dec) I came back with a number of projects/tasks. New CRM. More work. Loads of new projects and huge volume of existing business. This is when I feel! “Ah, life’s good”.

Fast forward – September – Shit hits the ceiling, client changes policies, reduces our volume of business drastically. Internal issues. Staff issues. We try to tackle the bigger issues first. Go Head on. Some very threatening issues resolved. The smaller ones ignored (or let’s say “Delegated”)

October – November – Reasonably slow in terms of work. Vacation. Meet Relatives. Meet best friend. Loads of stuff happening in terms of strategy and issues in the background. Certain stuff that threaten our existence. We remain unfazed by any of this, but it does cause a little bit of bitterness. A natural excuse to drink more often *wink*. Started Following this guy Gary Vee on Facebook and YouTube. A new set of learning begins.

December – Floods. First few days of the month, I wake up extremely restless. Because, I am not a person that can sit, watch and just pass comments about things. And that was exactly what I was doing and I hated it. Finally decide to go and help people. Most of them I reached out to helped financially or in kind, travelling to Chennai was never more exciting. Travelled around the city. Very humbling experience helping the ones in need.

This experience kind of teaches me a few very important things. Not going to list that since they are very personal to me. And this followed by meeting some important people. Friends. Dinner. Drinks. More important business decisions.

Like I said, 2015 was one of the most exciting years of my life. Have learnt (or may be not) being genuinely interested in people and helping them has its own disadvantages/pitfalls. But hey, that’s life. It’s not what we want it to be. I will continue to do what I do… I will continue to learn.

2016 looks extremely exciting because of that 2015 taught. Hopeful that, even if it 25% of what we have thought, it’s going to be a truly wonderful year. Plan to travel more. New lines of business. Very excited!

PS – The ones who really know me would find a lot of things missing. That’s because some issues and people have become irrelevant. J

Get your act together..

So, I updated this very fancy blog of mine saying “look who’s back” and I’ve been trying to come up with something ever since, what to write!? 

Loss of topics, was it? Contrary to that – As the ones that read this will know that I am extremely opinionated, which basically means. I have too many things to write about, really! Now to decipher that is a herculean task in itself!

And to make matters worse, last week was quite eventful (or uneventful... Whatever you want to call it)

So, here I am trying to come up with something random. And in-between I check on work – emails, phone calls, listening to Pitbull amidst all this. Get the picture?!

Having said that, the thing that has been lingering on my mind is “Discipline”, and I used to hate this word back in school (I used to get pulled up for random shit and they called it “Discipline Issues”)

So what about discipline? I ponder, when we grew up with certain things we did as a part of our childhood. And I am not even going to mention any of that.

As grown-ups, we have our job, both at home and at work. Most times, the things that fall into the “discipline” bucket are not often checked for sanity. Someone lays the rules, someone else delegates the “job” to someone else and then it gets done (or so we think). One fine day, things come down crumbling like a pack of cards and that’s when we realize that these are caused not because of someone’s inability to do the job but because of lack of discipline to check if everything was being done the way it should.

And every person, job, business have their discipline which is unique to them and they always need to revisit them to make sure they are in-line to their vision for themselves/their business or their family.

I still remember, In Dell, Addy One of my best friends (then CEC who I hated the most) used to have an email signature, In God, We trust. Rest, we monitor.

Oh well, I write this today because, hey – It’s Monday and I’ve had a pretty crappy day. Because, I was undisciplined. :-)