You are known by the company you keep

As I said in one of the earlier blog posts - humans are social animals. We cannot live alone. We like to have friends and live in a society. We like to spend time with our friends, play with them, work with them, chat with them and in general spend time doing things we love doing.

So when we are such social beings - it is obvious that we are tagged and labeled by the people that we spend time with. As humans we generalize and when others generalize - you get the same label and level of respect that is given to others in your company. One bad person or a person with bad reputation and the whole group gets labeled bad and when the whole group gets labeled bad - guess what - even you get labeled bad. The other weird thing about humans is that - if we show humans a white canvas with a black dot - most people notice the black dot not the white canvas. Moral of the story is - most people notice the bad thing in others before they notice the good thing - so even if most people in the group are good - one bad person gets noticed the most and the whole group gets a bad reputation.

The other strange thing about us humans is that - we do one bad thing and people remember us for that one bad thing and not for the hundred good things you might have done. You do one good thing and most people will tell 2-4 people about it - you do one bad thing and most people will tell 15-20 other people about it.

Keeping a good company has another advantage. Most people in a good group are most likely doing some good things - they are quite likely to be a good student, a good polite person, a hard working smart individual and when you keep company of good people like that - you inherently start realizing that they are doing good things - start following their example, start doing good things and automatically become a good person.

So stay in a good company, a company with good reputation and it will make you a better person and will also result in creating a good impression about you.

Time is Money

Time is money. It's hard to believe how time can be money. But think of it this way - a day has 24 hours that is 24 * 60 * 60 which is 86400 seconds. So everyday at the beginning of the day - the time puts 86400 seconds in your bank and leaves it up to you to figure out how you are going to use those seconds. At the end of the day the bank gets totally empty and another day starts with 86400 seconds in the bank. The time machine maintains one single rule - use it or lose it. It does not care what you do - but if you don't use it wisely - you just waste the seconds, lose the time and empty your bank without getting any benefit.

You might have heard a penny saved is penny earned but it is even more true about time and seconds. A second saved is a second earned. Time can be your biggest ally or your biggest enemy. Use time wisely and time is your biggest ally - waste time and time becomes your biggest enemy.

Just because you have to use time wisely does not mean that you don't relax or don't enjoy. You can and should and must enjoy life but when it it is time to enjoy and when it is time to get things done and work hard - work hard. Doing wrong thing at the wrong time is like using or more like wasting your money on something totally useless and once that second is passed - the second never comes back. The second is lost. So please be careful of time and what you are supposed to do at that time. Give higher priority to the needs than the wants. Do the right thing at the right time, do it the most efficient way, stay focused, get things done and you would have made time your ally. Once the needs are handled you can always find time to relax or enjoy or do the things you do to relax you, refresh you and replenish the brain and the body.

Maintain the focus, figure out the priorities and do the right thing at the right time, do it the most efficient way, don't waste time and you will achieve a lot in your life. Make time your friend and you will be hugely successful in life.

There is no substitute for hard work

Most humans want to be successful. It's very hard to find someone who says - I just want to be a failure. Even those who claim to be wanting to fail are actually secretly wanting to succeed - just that they never come out and say that out loud for the fear that they might fail.

Success is not easy. Gordon Gekko says in the movie Wall Street "for a lack of better word, greed is good". You have got to be greedy to be successful and the only constructive way to act on your greed is to work hard. There are only 3 kinds of people who can be successful in life:

• People who are really really smart like John McEnroe.
• People who work hard at it like Ivan Lendl.
• People who are both smart and work hard like Roger Federer.

John McEnroe was one of the most if not the most intelligent tennis player who ever played. He was not a hard working guy but he compensated for that by being smart. Ivan Lendl was not not smart but he worked very hard without getting tired and achieved huge success in tennis. But it is Roger Federer who is both smart and worked very hard and became the dominant player for a long period of time winning the most grand slam events. All of these guys were successful but when you look at who was successful and numero uno for how long, you will realize that Roger followed by Ivan followed by John was the order in which they achieved and maintained success over a period of time.

What this shows is that smart and hard working attitude is better than hard working attitude which is better than just being smart. Even if you are smart, you have to work hard to achieve and maintain success. Smart people come and go, are flashy, appear on the scene for a short period of time but then fade away. They are like the shooting stars but smart and hard working people are like the real stars.

so when I say this that there is no substitute for hard work - please don't argue or try to reason out - because guess what - you can argue and try to reason out all you want - there is no way around hard work - that's just a law of life. Accept it, embrace it, don't fight it and keep working at whatever that you want to pursue.

Follow your passion, you are smart, continue being smart and work very very hard at whatever you want to achieve. There is just no shortcut through the jungle of life. Work at it, work hard, work smart and the success will be yours.

Hope is the fuel of life

Humans are emotional animals - well so are most other animals. But what makes humans special is that our brain has evolved to be able to have multiple emotions, correlate those emotions, put them together and create a complete picture. One of those emotions is HOPE. Hope is a very powerful positive word.

Hope has a positive connotation too. Hope drives humans to get going. Hope makes us look forward to something. Hope gets us excited. Hope is the basic ingredient in motivation. Hope makes us take the positive steps in the right direction. Hope makes things possible. Hope plays a strong role in innovation. It was the hope of exploring moon that made man motivated and start working towards the moon landing. Hope of making an electric bulb motivated Edison to look for ways of creating a bulb that changed our lives forever. It was the hope of finding a better solution to web searching that resulted in Sergey Brin and Larry Page finding better web searching algorithms and found Google which changed how we interact with the web completely.

Hope also makes you look for positive things and positive outcomes in life and allows you to look beyond the failures and the immediate barriers that you see in the road.

Take hope out and there is nothing left in human life. Without hope there is nothing to look forward to. Without hope, life becomes hopeless, generates lack of motivation, and makes life dark and bleak. If you don't have hope, you don't have anything to look forward to, nothing to get excited about, nothing to motivate you, and without the excitement and motivation there is no moving forward, no progress. Going to moon was never going to be easy and if we had lost hope at the fatal Apollo 1 accident - we would have never made an attempt, Apollo 11 would have never happened. It was hope that allowed us to continue on our path for moon exploration.

So never loose hope.

Hope gets us

Excited which makes us

Love and become passionate which generates

Positive thinking.

Communication matters

This is one of those lessons that you will keep hearing from me again and again. The thing is I cannot overemphasize the importance of communication in human life. Humans by nature are social animals and one of the things that makes us social is communication.

Communication comes in various forms: Verbal or Oral, Written, Emotional and Body Language. We communicate to others using one or more of these and others also communicate to us using one or more of these. There are clues in communication all the time - the words you use, the tone you use, how strong the verbs are, how expressive the language is, how obvious the body language is, how well you show or hide your emotions etc. All of these things matter and form an integral part of our communication. Take communication out and we (the human race) are nothing.

The other important thing about communication is that communication is not just for you, communication is to communicate with others and share with others what you want to, need to and plan to share. All of the 3 above matter. You should be communicating what you need to, what you want to and what you really plan to. You mess up on one of these things and you end up communicating something quite different.

Also remember that when you say it (the words - verbally or written), they are like a bullet fired from a gun - it cannot be brought back and it takes a lot of effort to undo something than to do it the right way the first time and this is more true about the verbal communication than any other type of communication.

You will also hear from me and others that "say what you mean and mean what you say" - but you know what - the funny and sad thing is that - this is not necessarily true in real life. This sounds good in theory and behavior books - not in real life. One of the important thing about communication is that you need to be tactful. Sometimes you need to be polite, sometimes you need to pump up someone's ego and rarely you need to offend others. It is ok to offend others but when you do offend others be damn sure that you are doing it on purpose and not by accident.

Another important lesson about communication is that - you cannot control how the person in front of you is interpreting what you are saying. They are entitled to their interpretation and the onus lies on you to make sure that they understand what you mean. This is especially true about the written communication. When you write something and the other person reads it - you are not there to use the right tone, voice modulation and body language. The person is reading your words and interpreting them in his/her own mind. You don't have the luxury of providing the additional input around the words to explain what you meant.

That also brings up an interesting point - communication is for others to understand what you meant to communicate. If you say something or write something that others cannot understand or follow, the communication fails and you do not achieve the result you had planned through that communication. So be short and sweet but also make sure that you share enough background information, provide enough context, speak clearly, don't eat words, say it loud enough but not too loud, write it clearly and legibly so that others can read and make sure that the main point is communicated.

This is a long lesson and this is not the end of it - there will be more in the communication series - but you know what - I am trying to communicate to you and yes - communication matters!!!

This is for my son and me...

This blog is for my son and me. I don't really care if others read it or comment on it. I definitely plan on sharing this with my son. The main purpose behind this blog is to leave a father to son dialog while treating my son as a man. Hence the title man2man.

My son is a little young to understand the concepts and thoughts behind this blog but I am sure it won't be too long when some of these shared viewpoints will make sense to him. Now I agree with most people when they say that every person should be allowed to learn on his or her own through his or her own experiences, mistakes etc. and should not be biased based on someone else's viewpoints let alone someone from the older generation. However I also believe that it is every father's duty to talk to his son and share and pass on the knowledge from one generation to another while making it very clear that one generation's viewpoints are affected by that generation's upbringing, culture, nature and nurture. I also plan on making it clear to him that all of these suggestions should be taken with a grain of salt and he should be applying his own filter and couple these experiences with his own to come up with what suits him the best.

With the new generation becoming what I call the "i"generation, (iPhone, iPod etc.), coupled with extremely busy lives for the parents as well as the kids, the quality time being spent at the dinner table and the backyard while throwing aero-bee or baseball or biking on a trail is decreasing every day and somehow looks like the "i"nternet is becoming the medium through which we talk to our kids. It's a sorry state of affairs and this blog by no means is an excuse for that. Also this blog is not meant to be the sole communication mechanism. My purpose with this blog is to share the thoughts in a persistent manner that he can come back to in the future and use it more as reference material more than anything else.

So here it goes. That's good enough for introduction and why I am starting this blog. Hope I will be able to make it interesting and relevant for my son.