9

Another day that treads on hopelessly through.

Sometimes it is an eye opener to look at things as they seemingly fall into place. To look at hints and answers that have been present even before questions were ever being asked. I am working mostly on the quality of features and applications that I am responsible for shipping. This is as it sounds, a meticulously nitpicky job. Little did I know that there is such a huge scope for improvement here also. The processes, the streamlines and the paths that I will take are not even outlined for me, but I have a fair idea where I am good at and what will help me decide.

Everytime a freakin' Investors and Entrepreneurs ad pops up on my gmail, I am taken back to the days of TIE and Open Coffee Clubs. It seems meaningless to do something more with a talent for writing and little else. I guess I must find a way to better utilize my own tendencies and profile stuff, or as one of my friends put it, turn all the inputs in a day to a meaningful output and then jump aboard and do more. I have at least some idea of the frame work that will go into my making of my first and most precious foray into entrepreneurship. It deals with Information and is sure to give me some experience in all that needs to be set right with my own turbulent life....

8

Ever felt a gargantuan weight push you down so hard that you have no other option but to sleep? Well...welcome to my life. After gyms and 4 continuous meeting/calls today, I crashed like a dying man's vital signs on hitting the bed. The entrepreneurial scroe so far -- Work 345 Me 0 :(

7

The lucky number brought with it, its own specter of work with add-on initiatives and Work piling up with each passing day. Now, my primary worry is that my leave doesnt get canceled.

6

Booking Tickets for home and multiple issues at work made sure that Monday Morning blues hit me hard. With a Credit card debt reaching upward of 40,000 and my online transactions blocked due to faulty password entries, the day was done and dusted from the get-go

4 & 5

The weekenders were a much needed respite from work where I did nothing save sleep, eat and watch inane stuff on TV. Also, the pinnacle of prime time programming like "Rakhi ka Swayamvar" made sure that my loyalties were not divided between the TV and my quest to make something out of myself.

3

The fun part of today was that it was a saturday and with multiple English movies releasing, my entrepreneurial instincts had their a$$ handed over to them by my fun self and that was literally the end of that. Also, the mind wandered about the feasibility of greatness when camera tripping can produce virtuoso comments. Weekend ahead and dont think this one will be particularly productive...

2

Not many updates today.

Feeling a little toady and hence spent most of my time surfing and deciding on the best implementation model. I had also subscribed to something called a trend predictor with hilarious consequences and the same trend predictor assuring me with something of a hollow eye on the future that hallucinogenic drugs are a thing of the past with no utility on an egalitarian basis...Thank you ...I didnt really know that :D

Looking at mentoropolis/mentorpolis and quite loving their chilled out views on what it is that a mentor can provide. The fact that they use time as a metric with a staff on board that can be seen as a wider cross section of all that you will see at a quality institute, I had an idea of something similar a long time back but with the profitability and the scale of the entire thing kind of bombing, I really had to retract my claws on all similar pursuits. Also spent time on compendium sites and wannabe portals like Examhub. The idealization days are finally bearing fruit with at least a vague idea forming in my head about things that I want to do...

1

July Brought with it plenty of rains and a dramatic new ticket to success. So far I had randomized myself by thinking of taking up way too many things at the get-go. That still hasnt changed much but now I realized what my follies are :

1. No domain Knowledge - A common handicap across all entrepreneurial pursuits. I guess thats what makes this field unique. You interpret and then you proceed, if everythings laid out on a table then there isnt really much of a scope for innovation.

2. Passion does indeed color everything - I was laughing and smiling when I read this off someone's status message but this is more applicable than most other things. I must figure out what it is that checks all my tick-boxes at once. I must find out what is going to keep me up at nights with a boner thinking about brand new innovations and fun new ways to innovate.

3. Partners in crime - As important as everything else is, all great innovators and entrepreneurs concur that 2 is the best way to go. I decided that 4 is a good number. But the problem and the issue is that they were all technically very strong and I was adopting their idea....not coming up with my own and owning something. This will bite me in terms of motivation and I decided sooner rather than later to go my own way, ahead full steam.

30

The Birthday is a time to celebrate. With passion literally overflowing and energy hitting the roof of a clandestinely designed 17th century monument, I finally made some strides in the entrepreneurial department. I realized that my life was becoming a charade and took a few steps to remedy just the same. I realized that :

1. Being randomized was a problem and I was just not recognizing it as 1
2. I was trying to do way too many things
3. I will still try to do way too many things but with a semblance of a plan in place
4. My Time is precious and I should treat it with respect
5. There are non work things that must demand my time and I should tend to them

There were other realizations but the main summary is that I was not looking at the World's most important product - Me. I was not encouraging the work that I had to do to look after myself in an ailing economy. I was screwing up. With this and a hatful of other realizations, I was promptly on my way to start work....Wonder why Birthdays are such great eye openers, maybe its just the sheer knowledge that time is passing you by that inspires and forces realizations down your throat. I had also realized most of my follies regarding the Entrepreneurial pursuits and will elaborate tomorrow...

29

Typically, I dont spend much time procrastinating. Today was the one notable exception to that rule. I spent the better part of an hour just wondering if I would reply to an e-mail that I was sure will get me involved in the days to come. Eventually, the good boy in me took over and I did reply to that, but it was just that kind of day. Silly coffee jokes, innumerable wishes to just conk off and sleep when the clock hit 3, 2 hour lunch was followed by most of all that. I decided to take off by the cusp of four and do some swimming to re-energize my nightly pursuits but the deal was that again the Chinese guy had woken up to my silent appeals at the most inopportune of times. So 7 pm take down and I decided that i will swim, come what may. The empty environs of the designer pool also summoned me to the salon where I had tried (and failed) to get a haircut the previous weekend. A haircut, a swim and a quick bite later, it was sleep time. And even though, the clock was winding down towards my 22nd, I decided to call it a night anyway and move on to bigger and better things this year. Happy Birthday to me and Good Night World :)

Alas, no entrepreneurial aspirations were fulfilled on my 21st. I think the coming year is the new beginning that I have been desperately seeking to pump some life into my humdrum life

28

Almost there is right. Almost there means being nowhere close after having started out with the right directions in mind. Today was a day of blinding inadequacies and even more ineffectual thinking. It all started with some dude in China finally responding to my mail sent on Friday. His demands were not that insane, just that they still involved the most avoidable part of a weekend, a trip to the office. When I did eventually drag myself out of bed after having spent the better part of an hour reading through the morning paper. Interestingly, it has its sales pitch firmly focused on scantily clad models and wardrobe malfunctions for Saturday. On Sundays it deals almost exclusively with male perversions and maid fantasies, apparently Shiney Ahuja isnt alone.

After grappling with an innovative problem for the better part of an hour I decided against using any brains and headed off straight for search. That frustrated me for another hour before I went away and had coffee to freshen me up. Apparently, empty stomachs, the same ones which are consistent with every lazy weekend mornings when the Sun's bolting down and every place seems too far compared to the serenity of the sleep at hand, aren't the best places for innovating for problems. After 4.30, my cell started being my local search engine. I did notice that Bing was delivering substantially more relevant results than google on the subject of Technical jargon. Google results seemed to go to hell even more with every subsequent addition to detail of the problem at hand. By 5, not even a trivial solution was at hand and I had decided to leave for a quick swim, something to revitalize the aging neurons that were bombarded with dosages of alcohol extremely frequently. No sooner was I ready to strip that a call alerted me to the prospect of a reunion with a long lost friend over some momo and samosas at a local lake resort. This took up even more time as we made our way to another irani chai joint before heading home and ordering in for the night. The rest of the evening was spent lazing away and making re-affirmations about how I will not drink.

Lastly, I think the entrepreneurial spirit is dying within me....

27

26 being a designated wet day, there were no posts, no entrepreneurial pursuits and in general no activity that involved me without an ample dose of Embarrassment thrown in. Anyway, more on the impromptu hugs, crawling on all 4s, snake dances, shouting and similar tenets of embarrassment later on..

Today started pretty much as yester-night ended, a heavy hangover and no memory of what happened last night. To add to the mix, an old friend of 6 years had dropped by. His schedule made it possible to grab a quick bite sometime in the morning. Hung-over and barely sane, I managed to reach the big pizza hut properly before settling down idly to have a meal for 2. Conveniently enough there was a kiddie birthday party on at the same time, turns out screeching kids aren't much of a help when you are hung over.

After that ordeal was done and dusted, I spent a sizable amount of time googling (live-ing/bing-ing/yahoo-ing) the methods to ease hang overs.Finally some lime juice and a decent sleep later, I was alive again. I chilled out some more before settling on watching American History X before meeting up with friends and watching the recently released New York. The movie sucked, the time was wasted and my hang over didnt let me get much action by way of sarcastic comments and witty spins. Never again will I touch another bottle, or a peg, I am done for at least this year and it feels good to have made a mistake. Seems like a milestone that I can look at and say "this is what experience taught me"

No Entrepreneurial ideas yet, so let me just start afresh on that, in control and in demand :)

25 June

Now this is going to be 1 short-ass post because of one simple reason.....my capability to type when Under the Influence. After 180 ml of your favorite brand of Vodka has gone in to my system, there really isnt much that I can do by way of entrepreneurial activity. Just basic courtesies on the phone and chasing away night-time pingers on IM seem to be a tough enough job. The added pressure to do something more is simply not good enough to sustain over time :)

By the way, the entire day panned out as:

Woke up at 1
Reached office at 3
Played TT till 4
Ate till 5
Participated in a Sports Quiz(Didnt finish last but did finish joint last :))
Came back and drank my head off and got off on Vodka

Ciao ppl, sleep much needed to cathc up on :)

Gnyte

Corollary to 24

fLAWed

Today started early, partly because I had early morning testing to complete and partly because I was running way behind schedule. So, when I shook myself awake at 8.15, a full half hour before designated lift off, I knew this day would pan out in exactly the same way that most others had over the years, slow and groggy to start, an hour of productivity and endless doubts on the career path of choice. The sudden realization that this pattern repeats itself a lot also doesn't help out too much with my life. The productive time at work, if isolated wouldn't even fill a diary entry. This conclusion has led to sudden and mostly certain beliefs in my subconscious :

1. Productive time is essentially a by product of non productive time. Essentially when you get tired of wasting your own time, you do something rebellious that goes against the wishes of your fun loving self, you get work done :)

2. Non productive time is a necessary but not sufficient condition for some (and I stress some) work to be done by the end of the day.

3. By corollary, incentives that link your performance to your pay are generally kidding themselves because as you might already know, our performances are linked to our unproductive time, the causality of which, itself being variable causes HR hotshots to have nightmares and a constant need for tinkering to resolve these issues.

This rather strange rendering of whichever law hovers dangerously close to infringing on Parkinson's law didn't make a lot of sense at first to me. But soon I realized how importance the voids in our day to day activities are. It's like when you look at Universal Soldier and Dolph Lundgren. He could do anything he wanted but he over heated after a while and couldn't continue. Ok...bad example, Cheetahs and their day to day activities basically involve chasing down deer/gazelle/[placeholder] and eating them. This main activity is non-descriptly divided to sub tasks, not the least of which is to keep their body temperature below the level where they start conking off, so the cheetah dudes in effect play a delicate balancing act. Which brings us to Economics and the changing theories of professors who are harping on "Optimize" rather than "maximize". Thus we should consciously work towards optimize and not maximize, so in effect not only is working too hard bad for you but so is working hard. Hardly Working does more to conjure up productivity than any of the former :) Maybe the dictionary definition of optimize will have to be tailored specifically for separate people, maybe its sleep and a recharge of batteries for some people, maybe its a sutta for most others.

If we need vacations to recharge ourselves from working too hard,

maybe mini vacations where we talk, gossip, idle and bitch
are just another way to increase your productivity pitch :)

24

24 June

24 being the auspicious number that Dada Wore after relinquishing the numero Uno of India. Most of us will associate that jersey with the tremendous downward spiral that he went through but for what its worth.....

Today started early, partly because I had early morning testing to complete and partly because I was running way behind schedule. So, when I shook myself awake at 8.15, a full half hour before designated lift off, I knew this day would pan out in exactly the same way that most others had over the years, slow and groggy to start, an hour of productivity and endless doubts on the career path of choice. The sudden realization that this pattern repeats itself a lot also doesnt help out too much with my life. The productive time at work, if isolated wouldn't even fill a diary entry. This conclusion has led to sudden and mostly certain beliefs in my subconscious :

1. Productive time is essentially a by product of non productive time. Essentially when you get tired of wasting your own time, you do something rebellious that goes against the wishes of your fun loving self, you get work done :)

2. Non productive time is a necessary but not sufficient condition for some (and I stress some) work to be done by the end of the day.

3. By corollary, incentives that link your performance to your pay are generally kidding themselves because as you might already know, our performances are linked to our unproductive time, the causality of which, itself being variable causes HR hotshots to have nightmares and a constant need for tinkering to resolve these issues.

With these things in mind I had set apart a fair chunk of my time on work 'issues'. Mostly time that I would have usually spent gossipping or going on wisdom walks that culminated in another round of passive smoking. However all my well laid plans were thrown to the wind as the Sign Off for my latest release approached. There were (as there always are) teething issues and massive show stoppers, each took its own sweet time to get resolved but at the end of a long day with frustrating boiling over, the last cuppa was spent reading the sign off mail. That made all the horsing around from morning to evening worth it. Even the clueless expression that the Ops guys wore when coupled with the incoherence of their willingness to take a shot and "debug" the problem was sticking out like a sore thumb in a Picasso Masterpiece. Finally, the problem got inflated to such an extent that we all agreed it needed a bigger platform with more standardized solution that ...ayckety yack.. Wasnt our fault that your system isn't working. And with that ever so smooth transition of blame, we were ready to sign off on another glorious chapter in our lives.

I had almost thought that the 2nd half of the day would bring some ideation to a tired, worn out but still enthusiastic mind. However the myriad issues made sure that plan never saw the light of day. My brain, as dysfunctional as it is did hit upon a rather brilliant idea last night though. Since most of my efforts are concentrated on making something truly original, I have overlooked the obvious, the fact that.....more on that in the next post. In fact both of these have the potential to become Strat.in classics.

23

23rd June

The date hardly seems to matter with all the crap thats going on at work. I slept really late last night and consequently felt a ton of weight on my chest as I tried to wake up today at 7.30....8....8.30...9.... and finally 9.43 am. The ascending times of my ascension early in the morning were not a cause for concern at work though and so I took the liberty of sleeping in, each morning thinking about breaking the cycle and each morning falling deeper and deeper into the abyss that is my life. Work by itself isn't really the smoothest of things with several unrelated, trivial and equally irritating things taking up my time in ways that I could never have imagined.

The big thing about work is that it has to get done. The 'how' is not as important as the end result but people still attach a fair amount of importance and pay a good amount of lip service to it. So, the deal is that when people are man-whoring around their departments with work that requires control and co-ordination, you tend to lose the plot. Similar things and trivial issues were taking up time at work with my work being blocked. People were seemingly as deaf to the impending situation as some rescue ships were to the Titanic's wreckage.

The dependencies that my work had were 5 minute operations, they seemed that long till I met Mr. Procedure and his friend Dr. Protocol. They introduced me to the dark planet of Zonk,

Where every other guy seems drunk
And The Elephant is grabbed by the Trunk,
With Operations left to Junk....

My own thoughts about a quick turnaround were just that, thoughts, with hardly any justification or premise, any who, Dr. Protocol was adamant about expanding every 5 minute ordeal to an SLA of 6 days nee 6 working days. Mr. Procedure was even better, he demanded re-work and a cadmium plated Powerpoint Presentation for every single breath we take.

This kept me at work till 12.30, obviously any entrepreneurial work will have to be done in my dreams.........

An Introduction

22nd June 2009

My pursuit doesnt get me anywhere near what I want to do in life,
I tried to find meaning but I ended up with strife,
Tried to make peace but ended up sharpening the knife,

My travails take me far and wide, to myriad faces and even more absurd excuses, finally bottoming out (economy-esque) in the giga tons of work that I have everyday. Its silly really, that every day I get out of bed, there isn't a single bone in my body that doesn't want to break out and find "a truly original idea" (A beautiful Mind). Yet, I can't rise above the ceiling that has been created for me and I find the walls closing in. With each and every breath, it gets even harder to breathe.

Ok..enough philosophy and more than enough of the whiny crap. I work in a big huge MNC and am paid silly cash for the work that I do. It may not be what I wanted to be when I grow up but the people are nice, the work is decent, if a bit hectic and low on challenge. I like my boss and he does actually give a damn when he says "So, how are you doing?". All this doesn't really translate into ideal Entrepreneurial material. The fire is kind of lukewarm, the conditions are conducive to meandering and the drive is well, absent :)

Find out how each day, I try to become an entrep and well do i succeed? A week from my 22nd bday, my hope is that, in addition to all the crap that I attach to my name, Failed Businessman should be 1 of them