I came across this video recently and am amazed at it’s simplicity and powerful implications. We are consumed by doing far too many things in life, thereby diluting our focus and true impact. Finding that singular mission with a corresponding drive to move ahead, is what separates the good from the great.

In a post I wrote in July last year, I put down an outline of what I my focus was to be:

“To assist individuals find career paths & professions that bring them a similar sense of satisfaction and enjoyment as I have found in the one I have selected.”

This focus still needs refinement, however, I do believe it is moving in the right direction. Since I have declared this focus and mission on my blog, I find myself helping a greater number of people find their ideal paths. Through my new venture Identifii, my mission has found impetus and has been accelerated.

I look forward to hearing your sentence!

No one wants to fail. We do whatever we can do avoid it. While doing our best to avoid failing, we miss out on our opportunity to actually grow. The sooner we learn to accept failure as a positive step forward, our world view changes.

This video does a brilliant job of communicating this thought. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Derrick Sivers.

I tend to do a lot of reading online on a daily basis. I come across many articles I enjoy and believe would be useful to a lot of individuals, specially those who read this blog. Hence, I will be posting one entry weekly with a list of the best posts I have read during that week.

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It has been 7 years since I got into the startup world. For the first 6 years, I was involved in service based businesses. I learned everything from how to choose the right partners to understanding inventory management systems. During this period, I discovered what I was good at and the things that I was not as skilled at. The most definitive takeaway from the last few years, was that scaling a service based business was something that I did not enjoy at all. Last year, I made a decision to slowly start moving towards establishing a technology based business that was built to scale.

I did a deep dive into understanding business models of the technology world in great detail, learning from mentors and friends who had been there and done them before. I began to learn to say “no” to a lot of service based business work and to start laying the foundation to finally remove myself from it completely. It has not been easy! I can now understand to a great extent, what goes through the mind of someone working a job and wanting to start their own venture. I have however, established several lines of passive income which makes my decision relatively easier.

I just completed the Founder Institute program and from the 1st of Jan 2011, am concentrating on my latest venture Identifii. This is a web service, with a vision and potential to assist fresh graduates and young professionals, make better and more informed career decisions. This stems from my personal mission in life, which is to assist individuals find professional life paths where their strengths are amplified. In the next post I will write in much greater about the business. I am really excited as I start on this new path, and eager to see where it takes me. I am fortunate enough to be working with a co-founder who exemplifies all the traits that one should look for!

If you cannot measure something, improving it becomes close to impossible. Collecting key data metrics that assist you in understanding what is working and what is not, is critical to success. Dashboards are a great way to collect all this critical data in one place, to constantly review incoming information and make real time decisions to see what is working and what is not.

Recently we launched a new project that I am working on Identifii. I will be posting a detailed article on the venture next week. To track our initial alpha users, we have been using a service called Geckoboard. It does an awesome job of aggregating all of your stats into one place and displaying them in one location.

With the dashboard, we have been able to make real time decisions regarding how users are interacting with the system, what buttons they are clicking, whether they are doing a particular action we want them to, as well as a host of other base metrics we use to focus on engagement. If you are running a web app, online store, or even a large website, I would highly recommend you set this up for yourself.

An individual I admire greatly is, Jack Dorsey. The way in which he is able to articulate his thoughts and communicate complex ideas, with such ease, is something I hope to emulate one day. For individuals who are not completely plugged into the tech scene, there is always a fascination with how twitter came about and what exactly it was built for. The interview above with its inventor will demystify that question once and for all.

The interview has a lot of great soundbites for entrepreneurs in general. Some things you will pick up during the interview are:

1. How to evaluate an idea?

2. The importance of minimum viable products and validation.

3. Team selection and the importance of the right people on the bus, in the right place.

4. The one mistake that he would never make again in any startup.

5. The one factor he believes leads to success.

I handle multiple projects, most of the time. To do this effectively, a system needs to be in place, otherwise, dates will be missed and deliverables will not ship. As such, I am always on the look out for new productivity hacks that optimize the systems I have in place. The core tool that I use is the OmniFocus suite. Very powerful, synchronizes across devices and integrates into all major programs very nicely. Putting lists together and working your way through them is probably 30% of the battle. Putting check marks in front of all those line items, is a lot harder.

I used the Pomodoro Technique for a while. I was frustrated by my inability to log activities effectively, integrate with my project management tools and a lack of an effective reporting feature. I have managed to find a really good tool, one I have enjoyed using thoroughly since then. It is called Vitamin-R and it does all the things I wanted, very effectively.

What I like about the theory around this technique of breaking your tasks up into slices and working through them without distraction, is the ability to get started. Tasks like starting a proposal, making a presentation deck or even something smaller like writing a blog post are difficult to get started on. Getting started on a large task in batches of 10 – 20 minute slices, increases your ability to reach a state of “flow” and breaks that vicious procrastination cycle.

I would recommend you start off with something like the Focus Booster App. If the technique suits you, move up to some of the paid products which give you more functionality and control. Good luck!

I tend to do a lot of reading online on a daily basis. As such, I come across many articles that I enjoy and believe would be useful to a lot of individuals, specially those who read this blog. I will hence be posting one entry weekly, with a list of the best posts I have read during the week.

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On Leadership, Teams, Success & Happiness