The bottom line is this: either you create your own rules or you’ll be living by somebody else’s, following the carrot that’s forever dangled at you.

Here are a few of my rules for living.

• Take every lesson life gives you.
• What you make of your life is up to you.
• Don’t waste time making decisions. No Opportunity Waits.
• If you are going to be able to look back on something and laugh about it,you may as well laugh about it now.
• It’s a new day. You are alive, dangnabbit!
• Live. Then die. In that order. No exceptions.
• Play not to win the battle but to win the war.
• By the butterfly effect, you hold ALL responsibility for any event that occurs.
• The opposite of boredom is excitement. If ever you are not excited, it’s because you don’t have enough clarity.
• Being bored is worse than being shot.
• One person cannot make a difference unless someone else notices that difference.

What are your rules?

Time Management is all about how to organise your time effectively. But it’s overtaught, overdone and I feel, unneccessary. What should be taught is how to choose the right thing to be doing, not just doing many things, important and urgent. Ultimately, there is a limit as to how much you can organise and how many techniques you can go through to manage your time better. What we should learn is elimination - how to eliminate that which doesn’t serve us.

One thing I would encourage you to do is batching. Do you know where most people’s time is wasted? It’s during the moments when they’re umming and ahhing about what task to do next - it’s the time during task-switching and getting distracted between tasks.

The best way to overcome this is by batching. I mean, let’s look at laundry. The average person doesn’t do their laundry if there’s just 7 clothing items. He/she will wait till there is a considerable amount of clothes that need washing before doing it. They’ve “batched” the tasks together. Batching involves letting similar tasks accumulate and then performing then at limited times.

Let’s take a look at a personal example with email.

I used to be an email freak! For me, email was like crack! No matter how productive I am and how many times in a week I get compliments on how well I work, I was an email freak. Especially with the send/receive button on my laptop’s Outlook Express. The number of times I could hit the button in a day was in its hundreds.

For the last two months, not only did I change that, but I changed it drastically. I only check email once a day, twice at most during busy periods. Changing the way I handle email has been the single biggest turning point in getting more than 300% productivity increase - and trust me, I can work as fast as the top 10 people in the world!

Even though, when I open my email once a day, I get over 100 new emails, I only deal with those most important right away. Emails I can’t deal with will wait until a time in the month where I allocate a special power hour to clear the inbox.

By living this new email lifestyle I’ve cultivated over the last seven weeks, I’ve got a lot of emails from customers, clients and friends asking why they haven’t received replies faster like they used to.

To combat that, I’m trying something new. I’m setting up an autoresponder email that those emailing you will get right away to let them know that you may not reply right away, and it could be up to a week or so till you reply, and that if immediate help is required, they should call my phone. And that’s what I’ve done.

But back to the main point about batching… make a list of things you’re doing quite repetitively in your daily life and see how you can batch them!

The most common question I’ve received over the last few years, since starting my own businesses back when I was in college till today is “How do I manage college study, running businesses as an entrepreneur and my social life?”

The answer’s I have always given come down to these three things and they’re my tools for time and energy management:

(1) Only watch sport on TV, nothing else. (Going to the cinema is allowed!)

(2) If you can complete a task in one minute, do it NOW.

(3) For every new commitment you take on, drop another equal commitment.

In saying this and actually doing a lot, I still feel I waste a lot of time. More processes and systems will save time in doing the things I don’t like so that I can grow the businesses to even more higher levels. That’s my goal to have in place by 31st May, 2007.

Doing my public speaking gigs over the last year has really taught me some powerful and insightful lessons for life, business, marketing and sales.

One thing I used to do in my sales pitches (and I see a heck of a lot of speakers doing the same) is to ask the audience, “Do you have any questions?”

Guess what the response from the audience was? Nothing. Nil. Nada. Zip. They were quiet. Nobody asked a question. Either they were blown away or knew right away that what I was offering wasn’t for them. No questions.

Why? I’ve come to the conclusion that the question was just to broad. If I asked a more specific question, I would have got a more better response. It’s simple NLP stuff, yet I didn’t put into practice in this particular instance.

An easy and specific question, an easy and specific answer, and while they’re talking, they bring up what’s really on their mind.

Pyschologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi who studied positive emotions in the 1990s outlined his theory that people are most happy when they are in a state of flow and total oneness with who they are and what they are doing at that precise moment. Being in the flow for many is the same as being in the zone.

So you could simply be drinking coffee, riding a bike, playing football, running one business, running an empire of businesses, being a doctor, or anything else and so long as it’s something that’s aligned with you and you enjoy the activity, you’re in the flow.

But is it really easy to find one’s passion? I don’t think it’s as easy as many self-help guru’s make out to be. Take today, for example. I was having another conversation with my 15-year old brother about entrepreneurship. (I say ‘another’, because we’ve been having one nearly every other day this last few weeks…) He’s been inspired to take some of the things he enjoys and turn them into profit for himself, I guess inspired from the people around him.

And as we look at the plethora of business ideas around us that he could venture into, it’s not so easy to seek out one where there will be long term passion (as well as market, of course!). So here was my advice to him in helping him find the activity that will keep him in the flow, up all day and night regardless of whether it rains or it’s sunny.

I said, “Notice what you daydream about when you’re at school. (he’s a teenager, maybe it was a stupid thing to tell him, but I hope he got what I really meant!) Notice what catches your eye when you go to the bookshops. Remember what you said when you were just a few years younger. Notice the things you just can’t get out of your head”

These are all inclinations from your gut that you have a passion and a real strength about something and it’s time to act on it. Because if you’ve missed the message from your gut, guess what…? It’s another missed opportunity.

So the bottom line is this: make sure you keep an eye and ear out all the time, open your horizons wider to being more aware so you can take in more information, regardless of whether you think you have your passion found or not. They could be changing. So it’s important you change with it. Then do it with your full head and heart and get in the flow.

There are some great questionnaires from psychologist Dr. Martin Seligman that I think you should check out for yourself. They’re here: www.authentichappiness.com

In The Road Less Travelled, a book that has sold over 10 million copies worldwide, the author M. Scott Peck talks about problems and says that what makes life difficult is the process of confronting and solving problems which can be a painful process. Today I want to explore with my own thoughts a little on this topic.

Most people, when they face problems, end up feeling some kind of discomfort and loneliness. Other emotions such as anger, guilt, annoyance and frustration may also show. The word ‘problem’ is itself used because of such feelings endured, right?

If there were no problems or challenges in life, I feel it would be meaningless to continue to live. Even when living in luxury, problems and challenges meet us at the doorstep. Just like you need to eat fruit and vegetables daily to keep healthy, you need to have problems regularly to exercise your courage and wisdom so you can grow mentally and spiritually.

And as every personal development “guru” will tell you, it is through facing problems and challenges head on that we learn. Not by running away from them. As Benjamin Franklin said, “those things that hurt, instruct.”

So what do you think wise people do? That’s right — wise people love to face problems and do what they can to deal with them. They know that inside and outside of them they have the resources to achieve anything. They will continue to fall down 7 times, knowing that they will easily get up for the 8th time. But most of us are not so wise.

How can we become wiser day by day?

Tonight, my friend Tej Samani rocked the show as a guest on London’s Club Asia Radio. Tej is an Optimum Performance coach and helps individuals and athletes be more mentally prepared with the mindset and strategies to achieve their goals, very similar to what we do at Inner Rhythm for musicians. Tej also used to be a professional tennis player on the tour.

Tej covered topics from goals, WHY’s and hows as well as anchoring with some people on the call. Like many of the presenters who run talk shows, they just don’t know when to stop butting in and let the guest do what they do best. Same with Tej and of course, same as what I’ve experienced on radio shows too.

But what I picked up as an exciting line was what Tej calls 3-D. Here it is: Disappointment is Drive in Disguise. He says turn every disappointment into a moment where you can have drive. Turn every disappointment into a position of drive that fuels you forward. Great advice and I’m pleased to share it here right away. Check out Tej Samani at www.tejsamani.com

There are two types of fame. The first is where you can’t walk anywhere because you get recognised (the hollywood and sports personality type) and the second is where you can walk in airports without getting recognised, but when you want into an event in your own industry, you’re immediately surrounded by people who want to ask you questions, speka with you and network because they know who you are and what you’ve done.

Regardless of what industry you should be in, every business or venture owner should look to have the latter type of fame. It’s amazing when you just want into an event and people start to come up to you because they want to ask you questions. That’s customers and clients knocking at your door to tell you, “hey, I want to learn from you!”

Most big corporations make the face of the company the name of the business and what prospects and customers associate with. But what is puzzling is that those who are entrepreneurs and who are building relationships with their prospects, customers and clients are also doing the same — changing from being known as an individual to being identified as a company (even if they’re still a one-man show!)

I think it is a backward move in business, regardless of what industry you’re in. Take Microsoft for example, they’ve got a brand, but regardless of the brand, one of the things that comes to mind when you think Microsoft is it’s brainchild, Bill Gates. And I’d also be willing to place a bet on the fact that the whole company is personality driven rather than brand or logo driven (whatever the opposite would be).

When I started Inner Rhythm in 2004, our newsletters from line read “Inner Rhythm”. Very soon, I changed it to “Kavit Haria” and noticed an immediate rise in the number of people that opened my emails, clicked on a link and even replied.

However, I do have to say the opposite works as well. A recently new service called Living Jain sends daily inspirational emails to your inbox with a spiritual twist to it. Each day when you receive their emails, the from line reads “Living Jain” and not the name of the person(s) behind it. However, what will happen here is that when Living Jain becomes very well known in its industry, people will start to find out who is behind it.

Sidenote: I’ve got to put this here. I’ve been receiving Living Jain daily emails every day for the last week and I think they are phenomenal. If you like inspirational emails with a spiritual twist to them, subscribe for free to their service here.

So think about your venture. How are you portraying yourself? Are all your emails reading “company name” or do they read “your name”? Which do you choose to use?

“This coffee falls into your stomach . . . sparks shoot all the way up to the brain. From that moment on, everything becomes agitated. Ideas quick-march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages. Memories charge in, bright flags on high; the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop; the artillery of logic rushes up with clattering wagons and cartridges; on imagination’s orders, sharpshooters sight and fire; forms and shapes and characters rear up; the paper is spread with ink—for the nightly labor begins and ends with torrents of this black water, as a battle opens and concludes with black powder.”

– Honore de Balzac