Productivity

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Both David Goleman's exposition of Emotional Intelligence and Chris Lowney's book on Heroic Leadership point to self-awareness as the foundation to good leadership.

Many people, however, will miss a tiny but important point. Self-awareness is important even if you don't dream of becoming a leader.

It's natural for "things" to happen to us as we go through our lives. But when these things happen to us, we feel compelled to judge or label them. A shortage of money is "bad." Lack of activity is "boring". A breakup is "depressing."

Here's an important lesson that continues to be validated by fellow entrepreneurs: "What you think is what you get." If you think you're small, you'll remain small. If you think you'll be poor forever, you will be poor forever. When we started the business, we thought we would only be getting small projects. But we applied "What you think is what you get" and started thinking and aiming for bigger clients. So far it's worked, and here's how we did it.

At first we started with the question, "When can we start getting big clients?"
But we realized that the question wasn't right. It meant doubting our wushu. Clearly, we knew that if we only put our minds to it, we would eventually get big clients.

After struggling to conquer the paper and digital clutter that was weighing down on my life, my next challenge has been how to organize my tasks such that I know how to handle them as the work-day moves on. My startup recipe was simple: have some goals in mind and then handle whatever task caught my attention at the moment.

Now that as you may have realized, is a Sure Recipe for Disaster. I ended up fighting fires everywhere and the upshot of it was frustration. I felt lost. Nothing got really done. The unbeatable foe started to look more unbeatable and stars looked more unreachable every day. Would the Couch Kamote survive the year without getting fried?