Its time to look back on the year that has gone by. To take stock and recollect the insights gained. It has been an exciting year for me personally and professionally. Lots of ups and downs which makes it worthwhile to live. Here are 12 things i learnt and experienced personally in 2012. I will be adding the personal story behind each lesson at a later time. Here is to the New Year 2013 and we go……

1. Risk of failure is the cost to be paid to succeed. There is no guarantee for result. But still you have got to try. The cause and effect relationship between your effort and result cannot be directly calculated. It works more like the karma. Good karma brings forth good karma.
2. Passionate work is more rewarding. Anything that you do without passion doesn’t count. Better don’t do at all. All remarkable that happen in this world are done by people with passion.
3. You are expected to perform more than one role. If you are an author, now you are a publisher and an entrepreneur too. If you are a doctor, you work like a startup bootstrapping your way to building a brand. If you are a bureaucrat, you are now an activist and a Govpreneur too.
4. You are a brand. You define yourself. Personality is no longer personal. Social Media transformed it into a brand. You get positioned in a segment. You build an audience. You build a reputation. You are marketing yourself. The brand is defined and created by YOU.
5. Build your platform. Thats the way to get noticed. If you have something to say, you will soon find an audience. If you want to lead, a tribe will find you. Your platform will help you do that. Email, Blogs and Social media are channels that help you build a Platform and make your message heard to your followers and connections.
6. Its more important to ship. Deliver the minimum viable product. Ground test and iterate. Its called Agile development in IT Industry. But its applicable in any industry. Working idea with scope for improvement is a hundred times better than a perfect solution that is yet to be delivered.
7. Talk about your dreams. When you talk your passion shows. People will not acknowledge it. They may even ridicule you. But it has an impact – on yourself and others. You vision gets more clear. You determination will increase and make you succeed.
8. Balance – work, family, friends and health. In this age of information overload and reduced attention spans some areas tend to suffer. They are like the four quadrants of graph. Let your life curve touch all the axis.
9. Taking up new projects and improving old  ones is the only way to build a legacy. Try more…Fail more…Learn more…Achieve more…. Its a virtuous cycle. The more the better. The faster the better. 3 out of 4 venture backed startups fail. So double your failure rate. That’s a sure fire way to Succeed.
10. Innovation comes from transformation of ideas. Innovation is nothing but cross application of ideas to address pain points. Innovation is a problem specific rearrangement of existing knowledge. When stuck for ideas you will find it in unlikely places. So keep your minds open and explore. There’s everything to gain and nothing to lose.
11. It is the logical extension of the previous idea. Reading widely is an excellent way to stir up the mind. Infact tangential reading triggers lateral thinking. Reading provides a stream of idea triggers. Ebooks provide access to knowledge anywhere and anytime. Amazon sell 114 ebooks for every 100 books. When the world around you is reading like mad….where in the hell are You.
12. Learn something. Anything that you like. Playing a videogame. Tinkering a website. Writing code, a foreign language, keyboard fingering, install a new software/app and explore it, drive a heavy vehicle, a music instrument, a holy literature or literally anything on the internet……

Bonus Points:

• Focus on your best effort, result may be different but it will still be worth it.
• Everyone has access to the same tools. Its not the technology but the story behind it that creates an impact. A story is a particular view of a fact. A fact informs, a story impacts.
• Information is everywhere. But knowledge is still scarce. Technology has given us access to information. But curate knowledge that will be useful for you. Separate the wheat from the chaff and store it. It is your digital wealth.

What lessons you had learnt in 2012. Let me know in the comment section below……

Tags: Ideas, interesting reads, Things I learnt

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