May 2020 | Puneeth's Blog

Before you go live.

Going live is exhilarating. With platforms designed to appeal to the attention of your audience, they do put you on the edge.

You have only one shot at it and the feedback is instantaneous. Your adrenaline does kick in! For most, it’s too much to handle. While some thrive on it, many steer away from it.

Going live is a double-edged sword. It only gets complicated when multiple individuals are involved.

5 pointers to make it work for you:

1: Before you begin, Take a few deep breaths and speak with your guest for 15 – 20 minutes. You’ll need to ease into the conversation with the guest.

2: Look into the camera lens as you speak. Cause if you are looking at yourself, you lose eye contact with the audience (and the guest)

3: Your face must be the major part of the screen. If the audience is focused on your background then you are doing something wrong!

4: Test your audio, video, data and battery levels. I have a limited data connection and I always keep a buffer 10Gb data that kicks in once my daily data exhausts.

5: Always, always, always save the video before publishing. It’s so easy to miss this and repent for days.

A negotiator eats bargain-hunters for breakfast.

Negotiation is about creativity, your ability to recognize what could be of high-value to you and low-cost to them and some convincing skills.

More than anything else, It’s about creating a win-win deal.

A bargainer has only 1 factor: Price.

A negotiator has multiple: Price, extended warranty, insurance, additional training, fee waiver, free installation and on. The more creative you are the merrier.

Our culture encourages us to save money and the quickest way to demonstrate it is to pinch rupees here and there. It isn’t the wisest though.

Instead, focus to get creative to get the best out of the big deals. Be assertive on the value you get instead of the price you are footing.

That way you save money during the purchase and through the life of the product.

On vs In

Most aggressively study theory as they are usually adept with memory, recalling abilities and are logical. (Like, they know where they can score!)

Many students skip the theory sections and head straight to practicals. (Because of their learning style may be more hands-on, auditory or feeling driven.)

The society in-general places practicality on a pedestal and tuck aside all-things -theory (Thanks to the intellectual bullying they’ve experienced)

This has led to a bad rep for theory.

What does this mean for the millennial entrepreneur?

The focus is on being reactive, deploying tactics and achieving success. They are obsessed with working in the startup and ignore working on the startup.

To work on the startup means being proactive, strategising and systemising across the venture.

Thanks to their bad taste with theory, stumbling, fumbling and outright avoiding grappling with the theory is the usual route most take.

It’s time we as a culture transformed this! Being bookish is good, the theory is crystallised wisdom and knowledge is potential power.

It’s hard to get someone to open up in a studio environment. The bone-chilling AC, the overwhelming headphones, the blankness of a mic. It’s difficult to forget them all and speak as if nothing existed. Their hums, breaths and ah’s are easy to capture though.

It’s easy to get somebody comfortable in their homes, at their office or even at their usual cafeteria. But it’s hard to get their voice right, to keep the echos at bay and maintain audio consistency through this episode and the next and the one after that.

So, the average podcaster faces a dilemma that actually matters less than the soul of the show: The interaction itself.

Laser-focus on getting the interaction ringing right. The average Indian audience has ordinary headphones but an extraordinary sense of accommodation.

We’ve grown-up reducing the quality of streaming to save data, made good with a poorly-pirated version of everything and have thrived despite technical uncertainty.

Focus on what matters. The interaction first. Your audio recording resources are enough for us.

Bring your voice to it.

Go, go, go!

3 tactics to make the most of your day.

We all make plans from to-do lists, priorities, agendas, time tables to Pomodoro timers!

You need the discipline to see the plan through despite going off track, deviating to a tangent or experiencing the happenings of life.

A few tactics may be of value to you as you plan your day:

1: Discipline the distractions: Allow for a slot to engage in miscellaneous activities, scroll social media, check personal Whatsapp and mail. This slot also acts as a buffer.

2: Train your team to schedule their got-a-minute conversations in specific time slots within your schedule. Slots that you have control of.

3: Turn off notifications for all non-essential apps. Your machines are for your convenience. To empower you to become proactive and not reactive.

Because your work matters.

I don’t have any reassurance to give.

However, if you have been adding value to people that care. If you have been making a difference in their lives through your work. If you are being missed when you don’t show up.

Then, your work matters.

If not, now is a good time to step back and reconsider why you are doing what you are doing.

Start small, stay focused and build study. Because your work matters.

Is this right?!

Many decisions we make are not black and white, they lie in between. Amongst the various shades of grey.

Your principles, value systems and varied experiences are a compass to asses and incline towards the better choice.

What you choose will choose your future.

I hope you’ll take the hard, good and high road moving forward.

Wait for…it.

The pulse of the interaction, the tension beneath it, the rapport behind it is felt in the pause.

The pause makes you lean forward, slide to the edge of the seat and pay rapt attention as the suspense builds.

It nudges you to future-spect, to take a side, to get emotional.

Pauses are not buffers, breathing breaks or boring! They are bundles of unknown. Placed abruptly it can break hearts. Positioned purposefully and the next word is emphasized. Inserted well and a few moments can seem like an eternity.

Practice pausing. It’s a secret to legend-wait for it-dary!

Mastering your time.

Being on time, all the time. Time after time.

It’s a habit worth building. It urges you to say no to things that matter little so you can say yes to what really matters.

It means planning buffers or empty slots in your calendar to take a breath, accommodate a delay or a quick set of 25 pushups.

It makes you reliable, easy to trust and worth the premium.

It requires you to fight the resistance and show up as a professional. Especially on days, you don’t want to.

Build this habit with one activity at a time. Like the time of your coffee break, sleeping time or reading time.

Start small. Show up on time and stay the course.

Month: May 2020