Author: Shivam Chhuneja

Are you overcomplicating your own life?

Imagine your phone is running quite slow all of a sudden.

You open Instagram and it takes 5 seconds for it to open, 7 seconds for Whatsapp and god forbid 8-10 seconds for Gmail app to open.

What are your first thoughts as to why this might be happening?

Virus?

Hackers?

Webcam compromised, financial details leaked? What will you do now? Will they empty all your savings that you took 5 years to accumulate?

Well, More often than not all that is required is to free up some space. Delete a few Good Morning videos from Whatsapp data and lighten up your gallery a bit, restart and your phone is good to go.

Why is it that we overcomplicate our own lives?

There is a mental model to help you overcome that, Occam’s Razor.

It says usually the simplest solution to a problem is the best one and that’s where we should start.

Old People Know the Secret to Happiness in Life

Across different cultures in the world there is a notion that old people tend to live slower, are usually happier and also savor the small positives in life.

Some say it is because they don’t spend a lot of time on Twitter or social media in general but in truth there is a deeper reason to this.

It turns out that old people have subconsciously trained their brains to be “happier”.

I was going through my index card notes and out popped an index card that mentions a study done by a Stanford Psychologist. (this is from the book Deep Work by Cal Newport)

Laura Carstensen conducted an fMRI study where she studied the brain response of young and old people towards positive and negative imagery.

For young people their Amygdylla fired up with positive as well as negative imagery however for old people it only fired up with the positive stuff.

This means that the brain of someone who is much older actively bypasses the negative stuff almost completely ignoring it automatically while increasing their acceptance of positive imagery!

But here is the kicker, have you heard of Neuro Plasticity? Well, it simply means that all of us can rewire our brains in specific ways no matter who we are and our age.

So we too can train ourselves to be more stoic in our daily lives with more practice.

How To Find A Mentor

I got a few DMs on Instagram as well as Twitter of people asking me to mentor them.

Here is something I can tell you about mentors and how I had cracked my chance to work with someone like Grant Cardone.

I had dived in value first. So rather than saying “hi, whatsup, would you be my mentor?”

I had simply searched the projects he was working on, did my research and found a solution to a problem he was in(he had mentioned it on his social media) and shared a solution with him.

I got no response, then next day I reiterated on the solution and sent another message via snapchat, this time he saw the message from that day as well as the day before.

He responded with something along the lines of “Would love for you to take care of it, connect with the head of staff at ___ email”

Now, I am not saying that you find a solution to my problems and email me but I am saying that no matter who the person they are going to value your input if it is worthy.

Hope you got it, let’s move ahead.

Remember, it is lonely at the top so the people there when find someone who wants to give instead of ask their eyes light up and they see a part of themselves in you.

They get thousands of emails and messages every day of people asking them for favours. Rarely someone gives first.

Will everyone reply? No, of course not, but it for sure will increase your chances of getting a reply.

So this weekend reach out to someone you follow but instead of simply asking for something start a conversation and see how you can be of value.

Directly ask what you need to ask. I have also seen people sending something like “hi, can I ask you a question?”, you just wasted an email, there is no chance they are going to reply to that.

In fact try this, if you simply ask them about one book that they have gifted the most(I learnt this from Tim Ferriss by the way), they are almost always bound to respond.

I recently did the same on my twitter and got responses from a couple of amazing people and also ended up sparking a quick twitter conversation with Nikhil Chinapa.(AMAZING)

Not only did he recommend me an awesome book but also gave me a couple of pointers about what to think while reading and oh also after reading I tweeted again tagging him to which he responded again to the lines of it’s a fun book and shared a few of his favorite parts from the book(one of them was my favorite too!)

With me till now?

Alright moving on,

When asking a question asking them which book changed their life is tricky, because they will have to spend 10 minutes and think which book changed their life.

But usually there is going to be more or less 1 book that they gifted other people the most. So ask for a book that they gifted the most.

The reason I ask amazing people for a book recommendation is because we all learn to think from other sources, usually through education and books.

If I can read the book that they have read, learn from the same source and apply I might actually be able to get one step closer to where they are.

That’s how you can look for mentors. Oh also make sure to watch what they do in their lives and not just what they say. (A video coming on this next weekend xD)

Doing Less Is What Helps Us Succeed

“Remember that very little is needed to make a happy life.” – Marcus Aurelius

Marcus Aurelius points the importance of a minimalistic lifestyle.

Excess of anything is harmful. Even excess of water can kill a human being.

In the age of social media, we are bombarded with an excess of information.

It often happens that people just collect information and in the act of doing so start believing that this is actually a productive act that they are doing.

But in reality, only a little information is needed to take actions.

Similarly, it often happens with teens that they have a huge so-called friend circle. 

They feel like they are making friends, making memories for life, while that is an important part of life; we all need friends and should have friends who we have a deep connection to.

However, we just need company of very few like-minded, ambitious, and goal-oriented friends, friends that help us grow in life.

In many situations very less is needed to make the most out of our lives.

So this week let’s try and remove 1 unnecessary thing from your life. It can be anything, it can literally be a hobby that you maybe do sometimes, don’t enjoy much too.

Eliminate things and watch yourself getting happier and progressing faster on the other things that you will have left.

The 0 Competition Path To Success

So, I published a 50 minute in depth YouTube video today on Grow With Shivam channel.

The aim was to go deep and talk about my journey as a YouTuber, lessons learnt, making money and everything else that a beginner will need to start on YouTube.

The average watch time is 2 minutes. Usually people run videos at 1.5x speed but when the video itself is 50 minutes long even a 1.5x speed is not going to get you done within a minute.

Average view duration is 2:05 out of 400 views in the first 3 hours

This shows us that more than 99% of the people in this world have reducing attention spans, reduced patience and do not want to learn stuff in depth.

Here in lies our opportunity.

Since maximum people are not interested to go in depth or to be patient with the process there is literally 0 competition for people like us.

0 competition for people who want to build their own category in whatever they want to do. Instead of fighting others in a pre-existing category it is better to create one of our own.

This is also a classic business strategy thing that we use and the technical term that everyone uses for this is the Blue Ocean Strategy.

There is practically 0 competition when it comes to “long form business, marketing and finance videos in English for the Indian audience”

So naturally I am going to tap into this and be one of the few creators doing this in India.

Now of course the size of my potential audience will be much smaller, maybe across India there are like 100k to 200k people interested in such content as of now.

That is just fine, more than enough people. Even if there were 1000 people who would listen to such content from start to end I would still do it because those 1000 people are my perfect audience and I have literally 0 competition to reach them.

Take the 0 competition path to success, create your own category!