Keep | Moving | Life Lessons
The Simplest Way I Always Use Moving Ahead in Life — Personal & Professional
You don’t have to wake up at 4 am to achieve success.
After completing many 30-day challenges, I learned that only the easy stuff works.
It’s an easy task that helps to build a routine.
It’s the easy task that motivated us in the beginning.
However, you will only stick to it if it gets harder in the long run.
You have to challenge your brain to stay curious.
It reminds me of the following quote.
It’s supposed to be complicated. If it were easy, everyone would do it. — Jimmy Duggan
I am a content creator, an engineer, and a full-time reader.
I love to read books to find ways to improve my life. If something works for me, I make sure to share it with my readers.
Why do I read?
I read to optimize these three primary components of my life.
i) Health ii) Family iii) Money (work)
I am a prominent advocate of developing a reading habit to solve your daily problems.
Last year, I read a book by Indra Nooyi, the former CEO of Pepsi.
She explained everything in her book — My Life in Full, which taught me a lot. I don’t remember everything she said, but the following got stuck in my brain forever.
Whenever the executive team gave her more responsibilities, she was always ready for them by following this one trick.
The most straightforward trick she followed was to take more opportunities by embracing continuous learning.
After accepting the task, she would go to the bookstore, buy many books on the new responsibility topic, start reading, and ask as many questions as she could to understand the new role.
Gladly the trick worked well for me in the past few years with a tiny twist.
I have a mentor who is an Executive at a big firm.
We meet once or twice every 2–3 months. He is always there to help.
Early in my career, I was reluctant to contact my boss to ask about the following two things.
1 — I wanted to have a big title. I truly believe that North American culture is highly title-driven.
2 — I wanted to get more responsibilities.
3 — I wanted to get more compensation.
My mentor always encouraged me to talk to my boss every 3–6 months, take him out for lunch, and tell him what I had done in the past 3–6 months and where I wanted to go.
After our lunch, I always send a detailed email explaining what I will do in the next 3–6 months and what I expect regarding title, responsibilities, and total compensation.
Most of the time, he would say, give me 1–2 weeks to get back to me; ironically, he accepted everything, as I said, a title (for example, Manager to Sr. Manager) and more responsibilities.
However, he always had a tendency to talk about total compensation. As I was in the tech sales role, my total compensation was usually added in the percentage and a little bit incorporated into the base pay.
What did we learn from this story?
ONE THING Nothing will happen until you ask, especially in the corporate world.
Your boss will not give you a better title or pay, but they will keep increasing your workload.
It’s you who needs to decide what the right time to ask for MORE.
Book recommendation:
Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read
As a new reader, please check my holistic health, productivity, and well-being stories reflecting my reviews, observations, and 30+ days of experiments (29 completed so far) to build a sustainable healthy lifestyle.
I also write about the general philosophy of life. For your convenience, here are the links.
Mental Health/Brain Damage, Hiking, Cofee (New Research), Technology, Healthy Lifestyle, Life Lessons, Productivity, Learning, Money
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