Let’s taco ’bout hope

It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my beliefs, because sometimes they seem so absurd and impossible to believe in.

Especially when everyone’s trying to influence them by listing out hundreds of reasons to not believe in them anymore.

Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything, I still believe that the heart knows the best.

Or intuition.

Or gut feeling.

Whatever you call it.

There is so much good in this world, and inside everyone of you, and it’s worth fighting for.

When you have lost hope, you have lost everything.

And when you think all is lost, when all is dire and bleak, there is always hope.

Always.

So when life feels like a taco shell without any filling, just hold onto the hope that the beef, cheese, guacamole and optional hot sauce is coming.

Because it will happen.

Eventually.

Just kiss the girl

Most of the times, I do not understand women.

They can be complicated, complex, highly intelligent, and clever sentient beings that never seem to follow the laws of nature.

This makes it hard for most of the guys to get their message across.

And thinking along these lines, many guys follow “rules” and “advice” given to them by others.

They read everything related to the subject matter they can find.

Just to be ready for when the opportunity is right.

Waiting for that perfect kiss.

And we apply the same logic to every other aspect of our lives. Our hobbies, a career change, or anything different we’d like to do.

We keep reading about it and finally when the opportunity comes, we feel like we’re not ready for it, because we don’t have the experience or skills to do it.

Think about this: why would you spend all this time and energy reading about and researching? Just so you can have the perfect kiss?

Bullshit.

Just kiss her. And you’ll learn things you won’t ever find out by reading and researching.

Things like the actual experience of doing it, trying and stumbling awkwardly, and the “chemistry”.

And that’s true for everything.

So stop preparing for it.

Just kiss the girl.

All in

A lot of people wait for the right set of cards to go all in.

A lot of people wait for the right time to go all in.

Or the right situation.

In life.

Only to end up never having played a single hand.

Whenever someone asks me when will I stop doing whatever it is I do, I tell them this:
“Never.”

Alright, I don’t say this to my mom or dad. So don’t tell them I said this.

But it’s all about creating an environment where you can go all in. And once you create that environment you should go all chips in.

But how do you know if your hand is good enough? How do you know you’ll be able to push through tough times? How do you know if this is your time to go all in?

I guess you need to ask yourself this:

“Are you going to regret NOT going all in in future?”

“Are you going to WISH that you should have taken that offer?”

“Or said YES to that guy/girl?”

“Or changed your life with a single decision but you didn’t?”

If your answer is NO, then you should not go all in. Work and wait for better set of cards instead. Improve the environment.

But if your answer is yes, then you should take all your chips and go all in.

And never look back.

Because of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, “It might have been.”

We can stand still

It’s okay to feel stuck every once in a while.

It’s okay to not know what the next step is.

It’s okay to get in touch with your emotions.

That’s where humans are different from machines.

We can stand still.

Machines cannot.

A machine has to run all the time. If it’s not working, it needs to be fixed.

Humans don’t have to run all the time. We can stand still.

In reality we have to stand still every once in a while.

Because if we don’t, we will break down.

Eventually..

Just show up

It’s easy.

Easy to NOT stick to a plan and be consistent.

Easy to NOT be on attack at all times.

It’s easy to complain and make excuses.

To worry too much about your losses.

It’s easy to just say,

“That’s the best I can do.”

Until you realize that you’re 100-FUCKING-% in charge of your life.

And instead of crying about the way you want it to be, you can react to the way it actually is.

You have to accept yourself and go all in on yourself.

No one else is going to do it for you. Ever.

And when you’ve done that, just show up everyday.

Show up everyday and work your ass off.

And then do it again tomorrow.

And the day after that.

And after that.

It takes nothing more, but more importantly, nothing less.

Hoping and dreaming will result in nothing.

Executing against your skills is how you get it.

Just show up.

And work.

If it’s easy

We all want easy.

We all want the same thing. The easy thing. And the greatness of doing that thing is split among everyone wanting that thing.

Until there’s no greatness left in it.

Only mediocrity.

Mediocrity is the death of human potential.

When everyone wants the same, easy thing, our stories become the same.

And when our stories become the same, we all become the same.

We lose our uniqueness.

A great story told once is amazing.

A great story told over and over again is boring as fuck.

So next time when you find yourself thinking what to do, think about your story.

Think what will happen to it if it’s easy..

I love to fail

So it’s been more than a month since Spring Break passed, and with planIt, we were expecting that many TCU students will travel using the website and get started with creating trips online.

Guess what?

That didn’t happen.

We put out great social media content for over a month, used yard signs for advertising throughout the campus, and sent out emails to signed up members. Not one person gave a single shit about it.

Clearly, we’re doing something wrong. But what is it?

After thinking (too much) about it, this is what I came up with:

First, we aren’t getting the message across clearly. People are still doubtful on what is it and how it works.

Second, let’s say you go somewhere on spring break, so you need to return back too, and that’s highly unlikely to happen since the number of users is so limited on the website as of now.

In short, we failed. But not really.

I’ll be the first one to admit, it sucks. It sucks big time when you work your ass off on something that you HOPE people are going to use and they literally say, “Screw you.” But it’s okay. Not the end of the world.

This is just a micro-failure. It is recoverable. Just one of the few micro-battles that we lost. But what’s important is that we tried it.

Personally, I love to fail. Or at least trying to fail. There’s this struggle you have to go through when you’re trying something new, and chances are, 99.99% of the times you’re going to fail. And I love that struggle. That struggle alone has taught me most of what I’ve known about anyone or anything. When you’re in that struggle phase, you deal with things you never expected to face. So you throw yourself in this unknown territory where nothing is black or white but all gray and unclear. And there you take the most practical approach available to humankind.

Try. Fail. Learn. Repeat.

People ask me how I’m good at writing being a non-writing major, or how do we win business competitions with having zero background in it. Here’s a fun fact: for my first 100 posts or so, no one gave a shit about this blog. I’d post, and one or two random people bored on the internet would read it and not even say anything about it. At that time, it looked like I failed, but what that really was just micro-failing in order to get better at writing and learning how to use different platforms to reach out to more people. Same with business competitions, or any other aspect that I’ve spent time on.

Nothing valuable comes fast.

It takes time to build something out of nothing. Whether you’re trying to make your app work, or learning how to swim, or being great at basketball, it’s not going to happen overnight. All those micro-failures will one day result in your macro-win. You just have to know where you want to be and do the dirty work to get there.

With planIt, we want to create a social transportation network, where people utilize empty seats in their cars to make traveling easier for people looking for cheap alternative to get somewhere. This comes with a lot of dirty work to be done. And a whole lot more micro-failures. But that’s fine. If not in the first round, we will win the game in second, or the last round, but we’ll keep on trying.

Even if we lose the game, it’ll definitely make one hell of a story.