I am Paul Singh

Sukhi’s getting older — and so am I. Yikes.

We had a little surprise (but I think Sukhi had it figured out) party for her last night. Good times.

Pictures: Sukhi’s 25th Birthday

If you ask me, the most important trait that any entrepreneur should have is the desire for self-improvement.

I’ll leave the definition of self-improvement up to you, but I can’t stress enough that you really need to be doing all you can to increase your own knowledge (through formal/informal education - reading books, blogs, whatever) and striving to better yourself every single day (through practice, experience, etc).

Not many people ever make it overnight (atleast, I haven’t read any real success stories like that yet). You build success through incremental and positive steps toward self-improvement.

Technorati Tags: entrepreneur, discipline, self-improvement

My favorite uncle and babe #2 celebrated their 25th anniversary — congratulations to them. Now that all the aunties and uncles have heard about daalandroti.com, I’m sure we’re going to start to see them hanging around the blog a little more often. (So let’s try to keep all the topics and comments clean ya’ll!)

Anyhow, here are the photos from last night. For all you newbies, click directly on the link below and you’ll be taken directly to the photos where you can see all the slideshows you want.

Enjoy!

Here are the pictures!

As you can tell by my asking for a raise and afraid of your boss articles, I’ve been in the improve-your-life/career mood lately. It’s holiday time and everyone’s workload is probably leveling off today before they head into the long weekend. I figured that this is the best time for people to think about whether you are seriously doing what you love or not.

I can recall throughout my schooling, people would always remind us all to “do what you love” and “you have one life to live” and “no regrets” and that sort of mumbo jumbo. Motivational speeches are all well and good, but how come most people I come across always have something bad to say about what they do for a living? (Think: I wish I didn’t have to go to work today! I hate my boss! My work is boring!) Clearly, people aren’t responding to this motivational rhetoric as much as they really should be. Let’s talk about why you should do what you love with an example:

• Paul really loves Indian food and decides to start up a new Indian restaurant.
• Mike’s got an awesome Web 2.0 social-networking-taken-the-next-level idea.

Who’s more likely to be successful?

If you picked Paul, you’re damn right. Paul’s going to build a small restaurant and slowly build success. He’s going to continue to build on that success by setting up a franchise system or opening more stores.

On the other hand, Mike’s going to work his butt off until he gets the next latest and greatest idea in his head. He’s going to jump around from opportunity to opportunity and he’s never really going to be able to build on his past successes.

According to Wharton and Stanford professors, “doing what you love” drove the super-successful:

Whether you are Jack Welch or the Dalai Lama, it is dangerous not to do what you love. If you don’t have a level of passion that drives your thinking about what you’re doing day in and day out, there will be others out there who are passionate who will overtake and outrun you. People who care will take the initiative away from those who are half-hearted. So loving what you do is a competitive imperative, not simply a nice thing to have.

Now, I’m not saying you can’t be a bazillionaire by creating the next big thing online (or offline). I’m just saying that success seems to favor those who really love doing what they do. Really kicking-ass at what you do takes persistence, discipline, and heartfelt dedication in staying real to what makes you tick.

Believe me, finding what you love to do is much easier said than done but when you find it, you’ll know. I’ve been doing what I thought I loved for quite a while now but found myself feeling unfulfilled. I’m now starting to see the bigger picture and I’m finally taking the first steps to move in that direction. You probably should start thinking about making that leap too.

Ask anyone I know and you’ll probably find out that I spend quite a bit of time each day catching up on my favorite blogs. Generally, they range in topics from photography to personal finance to entrepreneurship and I do believe that doing all this reading has really helped me take my career to the next level. (We’ll discuss that in another post.)

There’s one blog that I’ve been following for quite some time now and it’s JohnChow.com. Many of you might have noticed that I started experimenting with Adsense and overall monetization of the blog itself — that’s a direct result of reading some posts on John’s blog that walked me through the process step by step. Granted, I don’t make as much money on the blog as John mentions but I’m getting there!

More recently, John has been reviewing other ways to monetize blogs and there have been some awesome tips in there that I haven’t gotten around to trying out for this blog just yet. However, today he asks readers to review his site in exchange for a link from his site — that’s truly a no-brainer for me! There’s a ton of other useful information on his blog and you can view his top all-time posts here.

Be sure to check his site out ASAP!

Technorati Tags: john chow

It seems that more than a few of my friends have been asking me for advice on how they can potentially ask for a raise. Unfortunately, I wish there was a single clear cut answer that I could give to all of them.

Here’s a few pointers that I’ve learned over the years and hopefully they’ll help someone out:

• Never start job hunting if your only motive is to throw the offer letter in your current employer’s face and see if they’ll match it. It’s only going to cause resentment from your manager and you’re probably going to shoot yourself in the foot when you decline the new company. (Trust me on this — been there, done that.)
• Do your homework early on. You need to start looking around to see if the salary you want is even realistic within your career, industry and geographic area. There are tons of resources out on the internet, you’ve got no excuse.
• Going along with that last item, you should refer back to your notes to refresh your memory on the millions of things that you’ve assisted the company with. What’s that? You don’t keep notes of your successes over the past few months? You better fix that — stop reading this and start writing that stuff down!
• Request a meeting with your boss but don’t tell them what the meeting’s about. This is all about maintaining the upper hand. You say, “hey boss(man|woman), can we meet later on today for a few minutes?”

Now that you’ve done your salary research and reviewed your personal notes, you’ve got your ammo all ready to go. Now it’s down to the meeting:

• The goal here is to make yourself appear confident (even uber-confident), but you definitely do not want to come across as “that cocky SOB” to anyone (especially your manager).
• Shut up. You talk to much. (Don’t worry, everyone does.) You’re going to sit down and say something along the lines of “hey boss(man|woman), I’ve been doing some thinking and I feel I deserve a raise. Here’s a few things I’ve done over the past few months: created _______, saved the ______ project from impending doom and scored us some new work with ______’s company” and then you shut up. The next person to open their mouth loses. Notice that we haven’t specifically asked for a number yet? (Good things come to those who wait.)
• If you played your cards right, your manager will start to probe you for numbers and reasons. You need to keep this vague and never, ever say that you need the money for personal reasons. You want to refrain from giving the managers numbers. Remember, you’re negotiating here.
• Let’s assume things are going well and the manager comes back with a new offer (in writing, of course). Regardless of how good (or bad) it is, you take that piece of paper and you walk away. You don’t accept or decline on the spot — never.
• If you accept, you go back the next day and do it. If you want to negotiate further, it’s going to get messy — but that’s what you did all that salary research for!

Keep in mind that this isn’t the know-it-all guide to asking for a raise, it’s merely a brief synopsis of the tips that I’ve learned through my own experiences over the last few years so your mileage may vary.

Good luck and don’t forget to send me my 5% advice fee.

Here are some other resources you can use:

Forbes.com: Seven No-Nos When Asking For A Raise

So you wanna: ask for a raise

eHow: how to ask for a raise

Technorati Tags: salary, negotiation, raise

According to this study, you’re not the only one.

• Thirty-seven percent reported that their supervisor failed to give credit when due.

• Thirty-nine percent noted that their supervisor failed to keep promises.

Here’s another little gem:

According to the researchers, “Employees stuck in an abusive relationship experienced more exhaustion, job tension, nervousness, depressed mood and mistrust. They also were less likely to take on additional tasks, such as working longer or on weekends, and were generally less satisfied with their job. Also, employees were more likely to leave if involved in an abusive relationship than if dissatisfied with pay.”

Unfortunately, I’ve heard way too many stories about bad managers like this from the people I know. It’s almost like this is the norm that we’ve come to expect — stressful jobs with tough supervisors that don’t know how to manage people (or worse, managers that don’t know how to (not) supervise).

Full Article: Who’s afraid of the big bad boss? Plenty of us, new FSU study shows

Technorati Tags: manager, management, tips, morale, FSU

A lot of my friends seem to think that I know everyone. While that may be true, it didn’t just happen on it’s own — I’ve had to learn how to network with everyone I’ve met along the way.

Also, while I’m in the “tell-all” mood — a lot of my friends seem to think that I’m pretty outgoing and personable. In fact, I don’t think I am at all. I’ve had to force myself out of my comfort zone in order to be able to really learn to talk to people.

I came across a blog post today that has some good networking tips that are good for anyone to keep in mind — whether you’re an introvert or not.

Networking is an investment, not a nuisance. Imagine if you could always find what you needed in just 1 or 2 phone calls. If you are well networked, you probably can. By putting in the time to build your network, you save time when you need to get things done. Well networked people don’t have to waste time firing off random emails to people they don’t know, buying leads or industry lists, or hunting through hundreds of resumes for the right candidate. Pick your poison. Do you want to put in the time now, or later?

Invite people to lunch. Or invite them to coffee or for a beer after work. If you meet a fellow introvert, he/she is unlikely to do the inviting, so you have to do it.

There are a ton of other useful tips in the article so be sure to check the link at the end of this post.

The majority gets to set the rules, and the majority of people are extroverts (70% I think). Networking is an important key to unlocking your own potential. So play by the rules of the game the best that you can, or don’t sit and complain when you have a great idea and no one to help you launch it. I hope you can learn from my experiences, so that you don’t waste as much time as I did fighting the inevitable.

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Full Article: Businesspundit: How To Network: For Introverts

I’ll admit that I’ve started to drink more soda than I used to. (But, man oh man, it’s so easy to just grab a cold soda out of the fridge and keep on chugging when you’re on a roll with something else!)

Lately, it seems that I drink enough Coke to empty out the fridge and by the time I go back to get another, there isn’t anymore in the fridge! Vat to do?!

Luckily, I ran across this comment from Adam Savage (yeah, the TV host from MythBusters) and bingo! Problem solved.

That would be about 20-25 minutes in a freezer. If you put [the can] in a bucket of ice, that would halve that time. If you put water in that ice, it’d be cold (+- 5c) enough to drink in about 4-6 minutes, if you put salt in that water, you’d reduce the chill time to just over 2 minutes. Agitating the can in the water, rolling it around, reduces the chill time even more. The fastest possible way is to grab a CO2 fire extinguisher and unload that sucker on the can.

Disclaimer: I’d recommend that you stay away from the fire extinguisher idea unless you really know what you’re doing. (And you won’t get in trouble for it.)

Full Article: How long in the freezer to chill a Coke from 89F to 35F?

No doubt, everyone knows that you can get your credit reports for free once a year. Did you also know that you can get your CLUE report absolutely free too?

Obviously you want to know what CLUE is — it’s short for Comprehensive Loss Underwriting Exchange, it’s basically the insurance version of your credit report and it tells you exactly what the insurance folks are saying about you at any given time.

I probably don’t need to say this but you should be requesting both of these reports once a year to make sure that there’s no incorrect information on there. And don’t be a lazy ass, it takes less than 2 minutes to request both reports and they’ll email you the results immediately too.

Sukhi and I requested our reports earlier this year and we’re glad we did — you’ve got no excuse now.

Free Annual Credit Reports: AnnualCreditReport.com

Free Annual CLUE Reports: ChoiceTrust