3 Things I Will Remember From My USA Tour

Think Big

Think Big! That’s what I kept experiencing in my US tour in October. A coffee cup would be five times larger and fifteen times costlier in the USA than my office in India. Everyone was talking about changing the world. Everyone was talking about millions. I couldn’t stop but get infected by this passion.

Now I am not really taking on “bigger means better” or “bigger is superior”. I am really talking about freeing up your thinking. Thinking about the great impact you can make on humanity if you pursued your dreams and vision. Thinking about the “grand design” of your business. Thinking and being convinced that you can and will achieve great results. Believing that the world is really “flat”. Expanding self-imposed limits on what and how much you can do.

I am taking on the practice of thinking big. How about you?

Think Small

Think about this – that five times larger coffee cup is filled with hot liquid and can be difficult to hold with bare hands. So what do you do? Well, you invent the coffee cup sleeve! The sleeve would easily fit the cup and protect your hands from that heat. Getting used to the large amount of coffee I could notice at least a dozen remarkable items about that coffee cup that are the result of thinking small – thinking details – thinking improvements.

Now you may be just too used to a large coffee cup (with a sleeve) to ignore all the thinking that’s gone into making one. When we create goals and plans, we skip implementation details and end up with a fraction of results. When we build a product we may forget to think about small details and end up with customers – and not raving fans.

This all sounded too familiar! So I resolved to start thinking small right after thinking big!

There Is No Point Thinking If I Don’t Act

I haven’t yet made contact with 95% of people I met during my tour. Not even people I thought could be great mentors / feedback providers. There are notes I took at conferences that I haven’t even looked at. Whether I am thinking about a big world transforming idea or am stuck with fear in going up to a celebrity and making contact, action is the only way forward.

An example I give my team is that in the game of cricket, a player won’t make any runs if he stands holding his bat and keep thinking about how many runs he can make. To make runs he has to act. As a matter of fact he has to keep taking action just to survive in the game.

Similarly if I just keep thinking about sharing my lessons from the trip, I will never get around it. I got to take action. 🙂

Memories From The Trip