Harsimran Says

The Problem of Plenty

I recently received a message on WhatsApp that started something like this:

Here is a list of movies, by genre, without rankings. You can watch them.

Then I started scrolling down.

And I scrolled down a bit more.

And a bit more.

Okay, I will stop the scrolling now. You get the drift.

These were the categories:
War
Western
Sci-fi
Time travel
Zombies and post-apocalyptic (yes, talk about timing)
Animation
Gangster
Drama
Outside of Hollywood

Each one of these 9 categories had an average of 17 movies. That gets the total to somewhere around 150 movies.

What did I do with the list? I outrightly ignored it.

If the list had, say, 5 to 10 movies in total, then I would have still considered viewing them. But the huge number of movies in it made it just another forward by someone.

This leads to the problem of plenty wherein having more than what we need overwhelms us and leads to inaction.

It is exactly the situation we are in right now. 21 days of national lockdown seems like a long time and each one of us might be, atleast I am, ready with our list of things-to-do in these 21 days. Now here is the catch.

Having the full 24 hour to ourselves for 21 days might make us feel that there is a lot of time.
This feeling of a lot of time might lead us to believe in the indefiniteness of time.
This indefiniteness of time might make us feel that there is no end in sight.
This lack of end in sight might stop us from making a start because we can always make that start 'tomorrow'.
This postponement of our start might stop us from completing things from our to-do-list.
And before you know it, the 21 days will be long gone.

Thus, the situation of plenty, that there is plenty of time available to do things from our to-do-list, might oddly enough end up stopping us from achieving much or even starting. Ergo, the situation of plenty will soon translate to a problem of plenty.

Is your life imperfect?

I am fond of getting to know stories about people's lives covered particularly by and .cast. The former talks about people like you and me, while the latter talks about people that we may aspire to be.

I find them positive. More often that not, they seem to have a happy ending. But it is not their ending that makes me positive towards them. It is the starting.

At the start, most of the people that they cover seem to have troubled starts to their lives or undergo tough journeys. This could either be their own doing or the doing by someone or something that they have little or no influence over.

This act or doing renders a life imperfect since it pushes our life from what it could have been to what we desire it to be. This act or doing renders a life imperfect because it does not fit the normal or acceptable definition of what a perfect life ought to be.

Whether it is Ed Sheeran (), who asked people at the end of his shows if they could let him sleep on their couch at night for he didn't have a place to stay.

Or a nursemaid in Mumbai who along with her husband raised her grandson, for his parents passed away when he was just a toddler.

Or how Ratan Tata's () love relationship didn't work out and how he ended up joining as an intern in what is now known as Tata Motors ()

Regardless of the imperfections that one may face, there are some people who continue walking that journey. It doesn't matter whether you choose to continue or to quit.

In the end, everyone finds their way home. And everything is perfect when you are home.

Salary negotiation, answering when you don't know what to speak, making a strong first impression, we covered it all in this workshop.

Secret to getting rid of nervousness before a big interview?
One thing that always helps a student to be more confident is to get a good number of mock interviews so as to be familiar with how they conduct themselves and how to think on their feet. The 'good number' here is subjective. If done properly, even a single mock interview is good enough. If not done properly, even 5 may fall short.

Always a pleasure to conduct a workshop at this college. Here's wishing the participants an explosive level of good luck!

🚀

Imagine if your interview process required you to demonstrate your working ability before you got the job?

That's what this batch of teachers-to-be had to prepare for: Conducting a class and managing a group of students before they were actually recruited.

And I had such a lovely time conducting a workshop for them. Super enthusiastic and interactive group. I am sure they would go on to becone fabulous teachers. I would love to be taught by teachers like them!

Happy to be presented with this memento for my keynote address at IIM Nagpur.

Looking forward to a month of workshops and keynote addresses across corporates and educational institutes this January.

Dale Carnegie, the father of Public Speaking, once said, “You must learn to speak by speaking.”

Glad to share this feedback from one of my signature programs titled ‘Express to Impress’ wherein participants learned techniques and nuances of public speaking and got a chance to test them out on the spot.

Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal, before starting Snapdeal, launched a venture by the name of Moviebookings.com. With this, they planned to enter online movie ticketing. Barely after completing the market research, speaking with multiplex companies and registering domain name, Bookmyshow.com got funded by Network 18, the media giant. Daunted by this, the founders scrapped the idea of moviebookings.com.

Google, the internet’s undisputed ruler, launched Google Plus in 2011 on a very aggressive note. It automatically added all Gmail account holders to the network, but it did not capture the user’s attention. It offered little or no value-addition to users who were already functioning on Facebook or Twitter. With users barely spending any time on it, Google discontinued the consumer version of Google Plus on April 2, 2019.

Uber, the ride-hailing company, launched Uber Eats, its food delivery service in India in mid-2017. It is currently valued at around $400 million. Their peak number of orders has touched 6,00,000 per day. This was good, but not good enough. Uber is now in advanced stages of talks to sell Uber Eats business to Zomato.

At the outset of the new year, while it is always good to take on new targets and goals for oneself, it is equally important to look back and identify the goals that didn’t serve us well. It always helps to look back and assess if some of our goals did not shape the way that we wanted them to. Once identified, it is imperative that we revisit, or if required, even scrap them.

The above 3 examples are just a tiny drop in an ocean of such instances where corporations looked back and decided to scrap some of their goals. Here is hoping that the new year gives us the courage and wisdom to let go of goals, aspirations and habits that did not help us in our journey to fulfilment and contentment.

Only by letting go of things that do not serve us, will we truly have a happy new year.

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Expensive & Cheap,
Success and Failure,
Rich & Poor,
Good & Bad:
Everything is relative.

It takes 5 hours for a person to wake up from their sleep.

I have an idea that can help you wake up quicker.

Source of the '5 hours' fact? My phone manufacturer told me so. Well, to be more precise, the alarm feature in my phone told me so.

This feature gives me a buffer of 300 minutes, that is, 5 hours, to wake up. I can set the alarm to snooze 10 times after a gap of 30 minutes each.

As if that is not enough, I have the power to set multiple alarms.

Need to wake up quicker? Disable the Snooze option. You might miss the bus a few times, but knowing that the alarm will go off only ONCE, that you have only ONE chance to wake up on time, will help many of us save a lot of time that is wasted snoozing away every single morning.