11 Practices for a more meaningful life

Over the years, after huge number of iterations, I’ve learned certain practices that have helped me lead a more meaningful life, which I wanted to share with you all. These practices will not teach you to get richer, or more successful - but will help you lead your life of more fulfillment. I hope they do ??

1. Eliminate sugar from your life, or keep it to a bare minimum. Keep your nutrition high in protein and fibre. Picking the right things to eat is one of the best brain exercises to make healthier choices at work or people in your life.

2. Invest in lesser, but deeper and more meaningful relationships with people. Embrace one good long conversation instead of 10 meaningless quickies.

3. Learn to crack a bad joke, to dance like nobody is watching, to exactly be yourself with zero alcohol in your system. Way too many people get to be themselves after they have alcohol, so if they’ve embarrassed themselves, they can blame it on the alcohol next morning.

4. Love your work. Know that your work is not a hookup, it is a marriage. Your fight against the world is not just to be the richest or the most successful, but it is to stay relevant against all odds. Aim not just to have a job or a business, but a 40 year long career.

5. Decrease the people in your life who gossip about the things that are wrong with their lives, increase the ones that solve those wrong things.

6. Know that money isn’t your biggest asset, your time is. Leverage your money to make the best use of your time.

7. Embrace the fact that sometimes in life, it is okay to not be okay.

8. Document your life - it is an easy way to know much you’re changing as person everyday, or if you’re not.

9. Practice a form of art with your job and get really good at it. More often than not, the creativity you acquire in your art is going to fuel your work, and you’d naturally be way better than your peers at work just because you can consistently think fresh, which is an irreplaceable skill.

10. Acknowledge the fact that sometimes in life, people elder to you, more experienced than can be wrong. This includes your mentors, relatives or even your parents, whose opinions might come to you as a cumulative of their good and bad experiences, which can be different from yours. Believe in your gut feeling sometimes, and execute on it - it somehow knows what it wants. You going wrong is the worst that’ll happen, but will train your gut feeling to take better decisions, just like a machine learning algorithm. Training and trusting your gut feeling is just as important as training your brain for a more meaningful life.

11. Express gratitude everyday - for friends, family, work. If you have none of these, express gratitude for being alive today, it actually is a big deal.