Let Shit Happen

Shit HappensShit happens. Yes it does. You will not get the job that you always wanted to. You will get reprimanded by your boss. Yes your spouse will fight with you for no reason and then blame it on you. Your colleagues will try to sabotage your career. Your pet will die. Shit will happen. But it happens for a reason. Not to make your life miserable, that is just an effect, but to prepare you for even harder challenges in life. Any problem of any field, any time or any scope comes with a lesson. Every bad experience goes away trying to teach you something. This is what the proverbial silver lining is all about. It is always up to you to rise above the problem and find a resolution and to make sure that any lesson or experience that came with the problem was absorbed and understood. Assess the problem, assess why it came, what you could have done to avoid it and what you would do to fix it. Once it is fixed, look back. What you can take from it. How it changed your life, temporarily or permanently? What you can remember so that it does not happen again and if it does you know how to tackle. Look into the finer details as all big issue are made up of smaller problems. If you are able to do all this and come out with a learning then that becomes a successful problem. A failed interview prepares for the next. A bug fix today will take you a long way. A betrayal today will improve your ability to judge people. A fight today with your spouse will be more love tomorrow. Try to make the most of the problem because the life is unfair and it will keep throwing more hurdles at you. The best you can do is dodge the ones that you can remember and try to identify the new ones. This will work. This always has and this always will.

And if all this fails stand up, dust yourself and smile because somewhere someone is having an even worse day for sure.

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Why I dont listen to Stairway to Heaven

Let me start b saying that I love “Stairway to Heaven_”. It is hard to not love it. I love it so much that I avoid listening to it. It might sound strange and I have a perfectly good explanation for that. _Stairway to Heaven is an 8 min long song which I am perfectly OK with. I don’t even dislike the fact that it starts of slow, because the gradual change in tempo is a major part of its greatness. The only issue I have is that if I listen to it, I have to listen to it 6 times (or more). I am physically incapable of listening to this song less than 6 times in one go. Why? Here it goes.

First time I listen to the song because, well, I wanted to listen to it

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Between a friend and a boss

I love my employees. Every single one of them. The relationship I share with them is more than a common employee – employer relationship. We take lunches together and talk about almost everything outside of work. We are friends. And yet there are times when I am reminded that being a boss is hard. In the previous post I had provided a section about being friendly with your colleagues (I dislike the word employees) and what should be the extent of the friendship. But like most of the aspects of human nature, things are easier said than done. When working in a small team where you get to have a lot of interaction with each of your colleague objectivity is bound to take a hit when it comes to playing the role of the boss. Your personal relationship with them sometimes stops you from reprimanding them for a mistake or confronting them for a delay. You are cautious that you don’t act too harsh in the fear that it might change their behavior towards you and they might stop considering you a friend. Though you are correct to be afraid of this but sometimes it leads to over extending yourself. These are the tough times when you are sitting with them to discuss an issue and yet you are constantly weighing your words just because you can’t be objective and that clouds your judgment. As I mentioned in the earlier post as well, the best way to avoid this is to have clarity in your own mind about what the extent of your friendship with your colleagues is going to be. From what experience I have these are a few pointers that help me in making such decisions and bring clarity.

Always remember that your professional engagement is the core of this relationship. You might have become best friends but it started with you hiring them some time in the past. At the time of hiring both the parties entered into an agreement about their duties and responsibilities. Are those duties and responsibilities still honored? Are your colleagues working up to your expectations that were set when signing the employment/appraisal/increment contract. If not it is seriously time to keep the friendship aside and take a look at it with complete objectivity.

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Lessons of the 26th year of life

I turned 26 last Thursday. I am usually not fan of big celebrations but what I do do is assess the last year and the lessons it gave. In the past these assessments were usually mental notes or notes on rough paper but this time I decided to document them properly so that I have a reference point for the next year. Obviously this idea of documenting is derived from my entrepreneurial experience. :)

Never Drink and Drive: This is shameful. I usually pride myself on the fact that I learn from the mistakes made by others and yet it took a personal experience for me to truly realize this. It happened early last year and at the risk of sounding dramatic – it was a life changer. Maybe it was just not my time to go or my parents’ good karma the only damage that came out of the experience was a totalled car. I am just happy that no one was hurt. Experiences like this are completely avoidable and I strongly ask you to learn from my lesson and never mix drinking and driving. Ever.

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Latest Pet Project : Check DND Status

I love small pet projects. This love drives me to starting a lot of small projects even though i might not complete them. I wish I get more time and am able to finalize a lot of those tiny useful utilities and fun app. I am pretty psyched by the fact that I have been able to finish a pet project after a long time. It was a small project with very little coding involved but it was fun. Hence I bring to you http://checkdndstatus.in

The only reason I decided to write this app is because I had the relevant data readily available. A simple Google search will reveal that there are already a lot of such apps/services available but I really doubt they are being updated regularly (I could be very wrong). I feel most of them are riding the big SEO wave to make money through ads. As for this I may or may not put ads on this service (only if traffic is high and server takes a heavy toll) but one thing is for sure, if I am not able to maintain or update it properly I will take it down. As a policy that we follow at Green Apple Solutions, we never release untested, unapproved or unsupported code. This has worked pretty well for us so far and I personally this this is a great policy. Anyways the service can be found here. In case you have a feedback to share just write to me.

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I just wanna be OK

You are young. You are restless. You are full of ideas. Each one of them seems better than the last and you just want to make all of them. You are hungry for much more and this hunger becomes stronger with every day. Every action is a step forward and every moment is an opportunity. you work the weekends and pull late nights. You live to brainstorm and brainstorm to survive. You are a young executive.

I am one of you. A young entrepreneur. A young guy. And I love this life. The rush of new ideas and the thrill of brainstorming. There is nothing better than a well executed idea or even an attempt and failure is just another experience. We don’t want to slow down no matter what for we fear that the momentum is critical. Working gives us a kind of a high and this is a buzz we don’t wanna lose. But what most of us do not realise that we are pushing us towards an inevitable burnout. For most of us it is short, temporary and fixable by a decent break but it can come to stay. The thirst to move forward and constantly perform sometime changes our perception and a less eventful day starts to seem as a loss. We stop counting the smaller accomplishments and only aim high. We forget that that bigger goals take time and the unit of life is a day. Today loses its value for us and this is where things go astray. Today is always the most important day of ones life. And it’s necessary that today goes great. Great should always be the aim and one should be happy with OK. For an OK today means a day well spent and that you can make tomorrow great. Your OK might be different from mine but please learn to accommodate OK.

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Being a boss is hard!

I don’t want to crib but it is. You might have been a subordinate your whole life and you might think that you know what it is like being a subordinate but the moment you become a boss, bam! - you are lost. I was employed for two years before Green Apple Solutions happened. And I was not a model employee. I questioned authority and argued against conventional wisdom. I did everything my way even if it meant I had to do it all over again taking the path my senior had initially prescribed. After some time you think that you know all the tricks in the book but the moment you get a team to handle you realize there is still so much more to know. It is especially difficult if you are a young guy like me. You are enthusiastic and lack patience. You tend to lose temper when you are lied to blatantly and most of the time it is confusing. All these feelings increase many times over if you are an entrepreneur and you have butt load of things that needs to be done. It is tough to keep a straight face when your teammates bombard you with excuses you can see right through. It is difficult to be calm when the output is not in proportion with the input that you put in. But like i say every experience comes with a lesson. It is very important for an entrepreneur to be a good team manager if he has to go forward as there is nothing more valuable than having a team that shares the same goals and ideas as you. A good team can make or break a startup. My team has grown to 25 people now and I too have learnt a few of tips in the past two years. I am sure most of them could be found in management books as clearly i am not the first one to be leading a team, but I think they would be helpful to someone who is a young entrepreneur like me and is new to managing a team.

Realize your comfort zone - There might be a lot of schools of thought in the market that tell you how friendly/professional your relationship should be with your team. You can choose whatever level of friendship you might want to but make sure that it is within your comfort zone. You should not be over/under doing. I personally feel that consistency in your behavior makes a great impact on your team. People usually consider being predictable to be boring but it is extremely helpful and comfortable if your team realizes and remembers or in the best scenario able to predict what you are going to expect from them. They will never be able to resonate with you if you keep changing your attitude towards them and this will mean inefficiency.

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Our Inspirations

As I have been bragging for a very long time we have just moved to a new office. Bigger Office. Awesome-r Office (I know). Here we have a lot more room to act out all our fantasies and whims. We have many great ideas but we are limited by the time constraints of day to day life at Green Apple Solutions. Yet no compromises have been made and every aspect of the office is (or is going to) say who we are. All the glass cabins are done and so are the designs on them. Each pane adorns someone we love ,respect and derive inspiration from. I am not a great photographer but I think these pics will say quite the story[gallery link=”file” orderby=”rand”]

 

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Hacker News Chrome Extension

I am an ardent fan of the Google Chrome browser and it is one of my “essentials” when working. I have tried a lot of times to write a chrome extension of some sorts but the project always got abandoned in the middle somewhere. This time I came around completing it for a change. It is a very small but a very useful extension. I am an avid follower of Hacker News and one peculiarity that I see in their links is that they open in the same page when clicked. This is kind of irritating for me for I do not like opening HN again in a new tab or going back to read yet another article. This is what my extension changes. On installing the extension updates the Hacker News links in such a way that they open in a new tab when clicked.

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