When you can walk on water, take a boat
I was going through my bookshelf looking for something while dusting off the dirt. Frankly, I have no idea why I was looking for it. For some reason, I just stopped writing, got up from my chair and went to look for something.
I have hundreds of books, manuals, binders and printouts on the bookshelf. I felt myself pulling towards this book I read few years ago. It’s called “When you can walk on water, take a boat (Download FREE)” by John Harricharan. The title of the book is not only a beautiful metaphor about life but also something to think about.
When you can walk on water, take a boat.
It’s very much presented in a biographical story where you’ll think about “if it’s true”, “I wonder if all of this happened to John”.
This book will mean different things to different people. It can be true, it can also be a metaphor. When I first read the title of this book, I was like “Whoa, now that’s heavy duty”.
This book is not about religion, or just mindless babble on spirituality. You’ll read a story about how author goes through the process called “LIFE”. In a metaphorical way, he meets god in many shapes and forms (from Krishna to jesus to Buddha).
If spirituality is not your thing, then well and good, I will just like to talk to you about this metaphor about the book title.
Like I talked about how people goes through their life in motions. In the motions of life, even though we might be looking for shortcuts, we are doing it wrong. Life is not a go through process. Instead its a journey. And we are taking every step with out eyes closed and making it harder.
That’s what metaphor is saying “If you can walk on water, don’t waste your energy, take the damn boat”. When I first read the title, it hit me like tons of bricks. I was like “funny, how things can be so simple and we make it so damn complicated”, there’s no need to.
Personally I don’t know what this will mean to you as you are different from me. I do suggest you to take time out and read this book and it’s sequels “Morning has all night coming” and “Journey in the fields of forever”.
Covert Persuasion Or NOT!
Couple of days ago, I was chatting with someone who is studying some persuasion techniques. He was talking about matching, mirroring and “swear to god” techniques that work 
.
I told him, “You cannot persuade anyone who doesn’t want to be persuaded”.
His response was, “No, that’s the beauty of these techniques, you can persuade someone like that”.
Yup, I can see, he is enthusiastic about what he’s learning right now and everything these persuasion experts are saying to him works.
His enthusiasm right now reminded me of the time I spend learning persuasion, NLP and hypnosis. I wasn’t much different from him at that time. Ah, it’s a process everyone goes through.
Young kids (age 4–7) can be great example of the the kind of people who are hard to persuade.
Have you ever faced a kid who has puffed up his cheeks, arms closed and looks away from you when you are telling him why he’ll not get THIS toy?
So far, I’ve not seen any scenario where kids were ever persuaded. They are dead set on getting what they want, and who cares about others…
In persuasion everything comes down to one simple thing, Does the subject want to be persuaded or not?
You cannot make up mind for others. You cannot force your will on others.
In hypnosis, the subject who says “I can’t be hypnotized”, often goes into trance faster. Their refusal is token refusal, it’s like a cry for them “oh yes, pick me, pick me, I want to be hypnotized”.
Now, I can hear people who are into sales grumbling about how often they get rejection and they have to overcome these rejections with ‘persuasive techniques’. So what’s happening there?
Again, the resistance is just a token resistance. Not real at all. If you are in setting with someone trying to sell, the person is interested in one way or another. You just have to over the barriers he/she produce to your sales pitch. People these days have automatic shields against selling. Yet, they are getting sold over things they have interest in.
So how do you go about people who don’t want to be persuaded?
You don’t. There can be many reasons they don’t want to be persuaded, yet.
Notice I said, “YET”. Persuasion changes with Every situation, every person. If they are not ready yet, then you have to wait for them to be open enough to get persuaded.
Like I said earlier, You cannot make decision for others. And it’s true in every walk of life. You don’t have to “attempt” to persuade someone. You just have to be good at Listening, Articulating and Understanding their problem. And the above 3 skills take time to master.
Varun
Desire. Commit. Succeed.
Own Your Business, Don’t get Owned By it.
Yesterday evening, I spent 3 hrs in meeting with one of the sharpest marketing mind in New Delhi. We discussed content, marketing strategies and many others things that we are going to cover in my upcoming seminar on building business.
One of my foundational base is “Scientific advertising”. In this, you have to understand the nature of your product, your company, your customer base and so much more so that you can create a marketing frenzy. It goes beyond what you might think about marketing or selling.
And because I have worked with pretty darn successful companies in New Delhi. I realized they have no concept of marketing and selling. Often their marketers are doing the job of salesman (and doing a piss poor job of it) and their marketing is literally man-handled by people who should have nothing to do with marketing at all.
For Example :– One of the Marketer for this publishing company was more worried about selling the advertisement page for the magazine rather than creating a strategy which results in automatically selling those pages, building a database or may be more effective brand awareness.
And these marketers have gall to brag about how successful their last campaign was. When you ask them what are they going to do afterwards, their silence give you the answer. Sometimes I wonder what exactly they think their job as marketer is?
Ah, I digress.
The problem with institutional advertising is, it’s too time consuming, too resource hogging, too pricey and almost always gets results which cannot be substantiated. This is where most business owners get owned and swallowed by their own business.
And this is exactly where I am going to show how anyone can handle their own marketing with just a shift in mindset. If your base is “scientific advertising”, then you’ll see results of your campaign and be able to realize and make informed decisions whether you should scrap this campaign or not before it starts bleeding your account dry.
And that’s how exactly you should be doing your business.
For example :– I helped a marketer with a full page advertisement which was going on 4 national monthly magazines with re-creating the offer, changing image position and improving the overall impact of the advertisement. The results was staggering. He could not believe how much response his ad got. His office was swamped with calls and people tried to get their hands on the offer.
The best part was he knew when to scrap this campaign as it started losing steam and instantly changed the offer with new advertisement improving his results.
Now this is what I call smart marketing. I did help create the advertisement, but it’s his job to make sure he runs it and follows it afterwards. Most MBA grads spend spray shinning their diploma/degree rather than understand how to actually successful market and campaign their products.
Why You Don’t need to be Self Confident?
I’ve been working on the concept of self image for quite a few years now. One of my earliest discovery lead me to believe it’s more important to have a good self image than self confidence.
It doesn’t matter what kind of situation you are in, you can always work on your self image and improve results you are getting.
About 3 years ago, I found a book by Dr Maxwell Maltz called, “Psycho Cybernetics”. He also puts a lot of importance on the self image rather than confidence. The more I studied, the more I was convinced the power of self image.
If you look at peoples lives (or yours own life), you’ll see, you are a product of habit. If you change any habit, you change as a byproduct of that change. Everything depends on your mental image of yourself that you carry with you always.
Mental image like “I am a failure”, “I am just damn unlucky” or “Damn, I am good” or “I am better marketer than a seller”. Anything that’s your story becomes a mental image.
Your mind starts confirming the image you have in mind by changing your habits. I wonder if you noticed this phenomenon, let’s say you wanted to buy a new car with a special color and suddenly you start seeing this car a LOT more than you used to.
Why? Because your mind creates an abstraction around your sight to make you see things you want to.
Why? because it makes it easier for mind to process the details around you. Otherwise, you’ll end up remembering SOOOOOOOOOOO many things that you’ll go crazy.
So taking the above in consideration, If you think you are unlucky, you’ll start procrastinating every single time and always ending up losing. If you think you are better marketer, you’ll find yourself getting lots of ideas but not being able to close the deals. And so on.
So the process becomes
Mental Image -> Mind confirmation –> Habit change -> Live Results.
You see, the concept of self confidence never even comes up. In fact this concept is so damn flawed that the only one who teaches it are the self development teachers who teaches but does not do it. You know, like they say “Those who can’t do it becomes teacher” is pretty darn true.
Again if you are not confident about selling or may be you can remember anything you read. All you need to do is start changing the image.
I have developed a very sharp memory since my teenage years. About 4 yrs ago, I somehow developed a habit of saying “Ah damn, I just can’t remember people’s name”. And suddenly I found myself forgetting a heck a lot of people’s name. It was like my mind was confirming what I was saying. At that time I was working on the concept of self image so I didn’t have technology like that to create instant change but What I did was started working on my memory and start getting results in 8–10 days.
That’s how powerful this stuff can be. Your self image, your mind is Powerful tool that hasn’t been utilized 100%. Heck I doubt anyone can utilize his mind (may be I need to change image on this idea too).
Change your self image, change your mind, changes your habits and Life.
Varun Pratap
Desire. Commit. Succeed.
GOOOooooNNNN… That’s sound like Trouble
GOOOOoooonNNNNN… That’s the sound (rather noise) my Hard disk is making right now. At first I didn’t notice it but as the noise kept growing. And that sounds like Trouble with Capital T.
Now I am bit worried.
I am worried because I know it is happening one of the 2 reasons.
1. My Hard disk is dieing.
2. Data cable is not processing data properly.
If you have a business like mine, you’d be shit scared right now. WHY? because most of my stuff related to business is in computers. I don’t have to worry about Data back up as I do it often. But more of the passwords, settings my computer has, important email accounts and emails.
Today is Deewali, and I can’t buy a new hard disk because of the festival holiday. ARGHHH…
First is my to Do list for saving back up is
File & User settings. It’ll keep take care of basic User settings.
Next I am going to back up my Outlook Express (incidently I don’t know how, DAMN).
Third I am going to take complete back up of my Master Boot Record and C Drive. So that I can re-install all the softwares and settings in new hard disk. I am worried because this is going to be my first time trying to do this. I’ll Keep my finger crossed and pray it works in 1st attempt.
As I am taking back up, I am bit stressed.
Before all of this happened, I was working on my Live Online Marketing Seminar Next Week and My 3 Week Workshop on “Effortless writing”. It’s scary because now my focus is divided into many things including seminar and workshop, taking care of seminar attendees etc. Of course, I am worried. But even then I am planning to prepare for it mentally and physically and make my seminar and workshop a SUPER SUCCESS.
I know the distraction caused by this hard disk problem will cost me at least a day. If you are wondering how I am going to cope with it? Well I don’t know. When I focus, I focus completely to my goals. That’s always how I did it and It’s how I am going to do it.
I know, I should have listened to my Hardware friend about backups. But hey, there are always things we learn the hard way. 
Varun Pratap
Desire. Commit. Succeed.
It always hurt when you found out
It isn’t as big as you though.
LOL. I found this picture while net surfing and just couldn’t help myself posting it.
First ever genetically modified food in India?
Personally I don’t know what to think of this news about genetic enhanced food in today’s newspaper.
Horrors of all horrors, the very first food is brinjal… I can already see, kids imagining a fat round brinjal with biceps and thighs embarrassing Arnold’s running after them yelling “eat or be eaten, that’s the question” 
. lol
For some reason, the word genetically enhanced doesn’t resonate with me. I know it’s all about pest/herbicide/disease resistance, more nutrition etc. Of course the debate about global food shortage also comes up with this. But when it comes humans, take a look at the history, whenever human intervened with nature, the result haven’t been that excited.
May be I am just paranoid. I am so much about natural food, health etc. But hey with all the pollution and colored food, it’s already going towards un-natural. Chances are we are already eating enhanced food and we can’t differentiate. But for some reason, I just can’t get this image out of my head.
I have no doubt that this will be pretty much our future. Yet there are many challenges ahead for governments, especially in the areas of safety testing, regulation, international policy and food labeling.
Damn this post became a little depressing… I’ll post something better in evening.
Lakshmi – Goddess of Wealth.
I was talking with a friend from Australia just a while ago and our chat took into direction towards Law of attraction, The secret, Mental blocks about money and wealth.
I was telling him about Lakshmi – The Goddess of Wealth. How people worship Laksmi the day of Deepawali (Indian festival of light, 17th this weekend). I also told him about “Dhantares”, a festival meant for business people related to provide prosperity and well being.
I was telling him about this and he made an interesting comment.
He told me, “that’s amazing, I don’t think I heard about any kind of festivals in any other culture”.
I realized, yeah, he was right. I too haven’t heard anything like this in other cultures. Heck we have our own goddess of wealth, we can worship whenever we want.
Now what all this have to do with you, me and all of us?
It has everything to do with us. While someone in the past (one of our ancestors) created a goddess of wealth and talked about worshiping. Today we are spending time, programming ourselves and our children about how it is hard to make money.
Things like -
Money doesn’t grow on trees.
Money is root of all evil.
If you make too much money in little time, you are getting black money.
Whoa… hang on there… so much negative programming in our minds. Yikes, Talk about bad picture and programming. So what to do?
Phew, Take a deep breath and release all the bad programming from your mind. Do it 10 times and you’ll notice your shoulders got lighter.
I know it’ll take some time to get rid of these pictures, but keep deep breathing, it helps with more than just getting rid of tension, stress and bad images.
Varun Pratap
Desire. Commit. Succeed.
How to learn any language in 30 days?
My friend’s boss who is from England is having hard time learning Hindi. And my friend is not making it easy for him at all.
The biggest problem about learning languages is that you start with learning formal style of speaking. This has been my experience with Japanese. There’s huge difference between formal and in-formal way of speaking Japanese.
While learning Japanese I started out experimenting few things differently. I realized, unless I do things differently, I’d end up spending 3–4 years with 10,000 words or so of vocabulary as a requirement and yet will have hard time understanding it.
I used a technique which I always use when I am learning new topic. So I never tested in learning a language.
Something which I call Immersion.
Simply, immerse yourself completely in trying to learn the language. The basic idea behind this is to use as many methods to learn as you can. So in this case, I ended up reading/watching/listening up Japanese.
Of course as an experiment, it was big headache to handle at that time, but I refined the idea to something far better.
Tuning your ear.
One of the biggest problem you’ll face in learning a language is recognizing what is being said. So you have to someway “tune your ear” to Japanese language (in case of Richard, it’s hindi).
I did this was by watching Japanese shows, animes, and listening to audios. Now because Japanese people are speaking in these shows, it starts programming my ear to listen to Japanese sounding words. Plus I started understanding the grammatical flow of speaking Japanese.
Notice how similar this technique is to how a child learns. Children doesn’t start learning grammar or alphabets. They start tuning their ears and then follow the adults.
You can easily find Movies, shows with English subtitles that’ll help you tune your ear and help you get acquainted with the language. In Richard’s case, he should find Hindi movies with subs titles, plus while living in India, he does have daily connection with Indian people speaking Hindi.
Some people speak slow, some people really fast and some people are barely comprehensible. Your ear starts tuning to all kinds of speech pattern and voices. This helps in long run when you are learning language and bridges the gap between formal and regular speaking.
I remember before my ears tuned to the Japanese language, I couldn’t differentiate between Chinese, Japanese or Korean at all. All of them sounded same. But today, I can hear them quite distinctively.
For me, learning Japanese was a great experience. Though I wouldn’t call myself an expert in Japanese but I am good enough to go Japan and communicate with people.
Varun Pratp
Desire. Commit. Succeed.
Just a Thank You
Few weeks ago, I had to go to electoral department.
It was hot, It was sunny, it was crowded. Just the way I don’t like.
Because of my work at the office, I had to pay Rs 75 for the forms and change. Now it’s not a big deal, but these guys refused to give me change of Rs 500. They told me, you have to get the change by yourself.
I argued, begged, threatened, they never relented. Damn govt officials.
So I started asking around… Guess what with at least 70–80 people, no one had the change for 500. Do you believe it? I’d never, if it wasn’t happening to me.
So in search of a change I went out and start looking for people (now there’s no store in sight, where I can buy things and get change for myself).
After looking for it for 20 minutes, sweating, cursing like a pig, I bumped into a woman. Like a machine I blurted out, “do you have a change for 500?”.
She looked at me (and may be took pity) like a robot,she pulled out her purse and gave me the change.
WOW, I was excited, overjoyed and I was thankful for her help. So I end up saying “Thank you so much”.
Suddenly her complete posture changed, her pupils enlarged, she smiled really big and said “Your welcome”.
Of course, I felt different too… We shook hands and off we go. The whole situation changed. From a shitty day to really good one.
Why?
Because a simple heartfelt ‘thank you’ and a simple heartfelt ‘your welcome’. Before saying “thank you” we both were on automatic, going through the motions of life. Without warning, like a strike of lighting everything changed.
“Thank You So Much”, 4 words changed my whole day.
I realized, How powerful the word thank you can be. We don’t say enough heartfelt thank yous in our life. We are going through the dull motion of our lives. A monotonous “thank you” won’t probably change your day.
Thank You, I love you, Sorry are one of the few words which are far more powerful than we know. We are not using enough of our heart into our lives. How can we change that?
How about really thanking people who are in lives?
How about just stopping and start noticing how life is going around you?
Making a heartfelt change just life that.
Varun Pratap
Decide. Commit. Succeed.
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