What is Self Help
On this page, you can browse videos, articles and workshops on how to improve, how to be better, how to be more productive in work and in one’s life. Most articles are in English, most videos are in Urdu.
These are hand-picked, proven, field-tested material that has been shown to work! I wish you all the best! Do join our community if you want regular updates when such content is added!
Work-Life Balance: Why you should not do it
I met an old friend. Works in one of the largest banks in Pakistan. He has a high ranking post: he manages the operations for pretty much half of the country. He told me a little story. “I was at this opening ceremony on behalf of the bank,” he said, “and one of my...
Do This to Live a Boring, Mediocre Life
Beginner’s Luck is the ultimate mistress, always there to seduce me into thinking I am good enough. You try something for the first time, and you surprise yourself. The first time I let go of the arrow, it hits the bullseye. The first time I send in an article...
Journey of a Thousand Miles begins with THIS
Journey of a thousand miles… Someone somewhere is baking a cake for the first time. The cake comes out OK: it’s eatable. But it tastes funny. On a scale of 1 to 10, ten being the best and one being the worst, the cake is hovering between minus 3 and minus 2. A few...
Job, Career or a Calling
There are three ways to look at our work. Either we think it’s a job, it’s a career, or we think it is our calling. And at least one of these categories is very, very bad for us (no prizes for guessing which one though). +++ There was a study done by Dr...
The Job and The Struggle
Recently we talked about identifying our job. We also saw how we can ritualize the work: show up everyday for our job. My job is to write. To design. To solve problems. Not necessarily in that order. I do it every day. I must. That’s my decision. I have also...
Simple, Not Easy
I recently had a discussion with Yasir Nisar over a cup of warm tea and hot samosas. Yes, tea and samosa. Yasir is a professional photographer here in Pakistan. His pictures can sell upwards of 50,000 rupees each. Each. His calendar for the next few months, by his own...
A Word of Advice on Words of Advice
A lot of people share and keep sharing Steve Job’s Commencement Speech at Stanford. The official video released by Stanford 6 years ago, has so far garnered 18 millions views. It’s a great speech. If you haven’t watched it, you must. A lot of people...
The Collector of Good
I had just arrived in Islamabad via Daewoo, and the old friend who came to pick me up was having car trouble. The car’s headlights were just not functioning, and it was getting dark. We assumed the problem to be the simplest: a fuse had shorted and a simple...
Acknowledgments and Your Invisible Team
I am re-re-re-reading The Lean Startup as I am preparing a workshop on business growth. I noticed the Acknowledgments section which I had of course seen before, but haven’t read read it. Then I took out my pen and listed the people Eric Ries acknowledges. About...