Quote from the Blog Post

I’ve noticed that people who read a lot of blogs and a lot of books also tend to be intellectually curious, thirsty for knowledge, quicker to adopt new ideas and more likely to do important work.

I wonder which comes first, the curiosity or the success?

Another blogger found a missing element between curiosity and success “Implementation”.

My first thought was both of them are only half right.

What do you do when you are thirsty? you go and drink water…

And guess what do you do when you have a thirst for knowledge? you go and find the source to quench your thirst. That’s reading.

And this is where process stops.

Internet is such a shining example of this. With so many Keyboard warriors (Like my mentor used to call intellectual masturbators), you can see what happens for intellectually curious.

Today I somehow got lost and found myself in front of my TeeVee. Anyone who knows me, knows I avoid TeeVee like a plague. But anyways, I digress.

I almost ended up scaring the hell out of myself. On the TeeVee, we had celebs acting as a foster parent to toddlers. I mean which stupid came up with the idea on putting kids less than yr old in the hands of more stupider people (celebs tends to lose whatever braincell they receive you know) and put them on show.

Now I am struggling to decide who’s more stupid, TV directors, Celebs or the parents of the kids participating?

Sigh…

People do anything to get a chance on the TeeVee.

Crazy thing is one of the so called celeb Rakhi Savant was trying to be a foster parent to kid… Man was she being a parent or being a snooty nosed witch? I know she makes money being nosy (and noisy) but that doesn’t mean scare the shit out of kids.

If I was a parent, I would have punched the nose, kicked the shin and stomped on foot. Multiple times.

Anyone who called TV as an Idiot box was pretty damn right.

One of my mentor used to say this “The size of your TV tells me about the size of wallet and pant. The bigger the TV is, the smaller the wallet is and fatter your waist is”. Funny eh?

My thought of overall show was simple. I don’t care what people do, there’s no need to push toddlers into all this. We already have 3–4 yrs old in front of stage and trying to outshow the other 3–4 yrs old in singing, drama contest.

There’s another Ad on TV which literally says something like this “I could not live my dream but I’ll make sure I live my dream through my childs”. Scray thoughts.

The ad is about a Credit card (If I remember that right).

People are pushing their dreams onto their children. Why not let them find their own goals, dreams?

When I see people around me, I see them trying to re-live their life through their children. Of course their parents did the same to them, now it’s their chance to payback. How about breaking the chain and becoming the parent you should be?

Fortunately my parents never tried that… Thank god their foresight. I am not a parent, right now. But whenever I am going to be, I won’t be any of the above stupids I talked about.

Like in the pic, You got to teach your kids lots of things, but pushing your dreams on to kids is not one of those.

Varun Pratap

Desire. Commit. Succeed.

1) Do not use splash pages

Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at a website. They normally have a very beautiful image with words like “welcome” or “click here to enter”. In fact, they are just that — pretty vases with no real purpose. Do not let your visitors have a reason to click on the “back” button! Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page.

2) Do not use excessive banner advertisements

Even the least net savvy people have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements so you will be wasting valuable website real estate. Instead, provide more valueable content and weave relevant affiliate links into your content, and let your visitors feel that they want to buy instead of being pushed to buy.

3) Have a simple and clear navigation

You have to provide a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child will know how to use it. Stay away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered dropdown menus. If your visitors don’t know how to navigate, they will leave your site.

4) Have a clear indication of where the user is

When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you will want to make sure they know which part of the site they are in at that moment. That way, they will be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of the site easily. Don’t confuse your visitors because confusion means “abandon ship”!

5) Should have a content management system which provides RSS feeds.

RSS feeds will help you promote your website. Whenever you update your website, RSS feed let the whole world know about the updation. Its like Self-promotion on steroids. In a nutshell – you’re nuts NOT to use an RSS feed. The Internet is changing, just like everything else 

Its kind of funny when I was trying to build my business, I had lots of people (i.e. relatives, friends, parents) who told me to get a “Real Job”. I always wondered what do they mean by Real Job?

Are all those businessmen are not doing “Real Job” in their business? If they are not then you’d be not wearing than fancy shirt/trousers or whatever right now.. If they are not then you’dn’t be taking out your date on that nice fancy cozy little restaurant with the corner table right now…

Heck I think Entrepreneurs are the only People who are doing “THE REAL JOB”. Rest of the world is sleep walking or playing “house” like little girls.

From my point of view, the Real Job factors comes when we are insecure and want to ensure our future (By getting a job? it makes no sense, you can get downsized, fired or what not) . When Companies in US started downsizing and started moving their operations in India and China. There were lots of people who are left shocked, disgruntled.

They were blaming companies for being penny pincher, cheap, and countries Like India or china for taking over their jobs. I could feel the animosity in the people at that time. Now if you take all of this from a company point of view, all they want is better profit and better margin. No wonder they outsourced.

Now In this article I don’t want to dishearten you by reminding you of all those bad things… but I want you to gain more understanding of yourself as a whole.

Now, if you love your job and your boss, then you don’t necessarily have to leave your job. What I want you to remember is that “Become a foundation” in your company. If your job (experience) is something that can’t be replaced, then not only you can survive these kinds of lay offs but also flourish from them.

I rememeber, Back in 2000 when I was a programmer. In those days, Dot com bubble burst opened. The result, thousands of Indians living in US, Europe were fired from their jobs and they all were coming back to India. At that time, I personally knew 3 Top programmers who were hired by US companies and left India to pursue their jobs.

The difference? Mediocrity can be replaced anything, but excellence cannot. These guys were Top Notch. They were being paid top dollar even then.

Anyways, There’s something more important which I wanted to discuss. If you read Steve Pavlina blog post. I highly recommend His 10th point.

Taken from Steve Pavlina’s Blog : Have you noticed that employed people have an almost endless capacity to whine about problems at their companies? But they don’t really want solutions – they just want to vent and make excuses why it’s all someone else’s fault.

It’s as if getting a job somehow drains all the free will out of people and turns them into spineless cowards. If you can’t call your boss a jerk now and then without fear of getting fired, you’re no longer free. You’ve become your master’s property.

When you work around cowards all day long, don’t you think it’s going to rub off on you? Of course it will. Read Rest of The Blog post.

He makes such an excellent point. I suggest you to go read this blog post right now. I can comment on it, but I’d rather not on such a masterpiece.

Varun Pratap

You see, people in tend to think “outside the box”, they forget what was inside it. Its about the obviousness of something. People are so much stressed out that they can’t see the obvious. I’ll share some of my “Well Duh!” moments and talk about the obviousness of things.

Till then

Varun Pratap