Kanishk Razdan

On an "online presence". It always felt weird/fake to me. I used to think the only time I'll choose to write something is when it's a discovery, when it's original.
- Slight change in thought since having started trying to sell my own products:
  - The number of followers you have can actually drive a ton of attention to what you're building, so more revenue, more attention, more customers etc.
  - Gaining followers is an actual game you can learn how to play. So treat it as that.
Fight the hard battles. I've refrained from them most of my life. But only at 25 I realized how important it is. Fight the battles where the problems seem insurmountable, where the rewards are disproportionate. Give yourself a chance to fight those battles at least. You might surprise yourself.
Don't assume context. Don't assume that anyone other than you has context. Be as descriptive and contextual about your thoughts as possible.
Give honest, ruthless feedback. You don't like the smallest thing — share feedback on it. Get it fixed. You're responsible for the problems you face, you should be the one who gets them resolved. The more aggressive you are about getting something fixed, it increases the overall probability of it being fixed. Better yet, go beyond feedback, actually solve it on your own.
- Sidenote: This doesn't happen unless you're deeply attached to the problem.
On disagreements with your boss/colleagues. When you disagree with someone over a point of view, it's always worth taking a step back and asking, do I disagree so strongly that it's worth halting the progress of this entire thing.
- Try getting to the root of why you disagree with something
- It's almost always better to keep things moving, getting things done
However, having said that, always voice out your disagreement. If you're not 100% convinced to back down and do think it's worth halting stuff, do your best to get what you wanted.
Getting someone to do something for you. When you want someone to do something for you, think of ways to help them out.
- What can you do that would make it easier for the other person to do that thing for you
- We often underestimate the effort required on the other person's part when we ask them to do something
  
  For them to go out of their way, show that you're invested in the thing you're asking them to do, make them realize the importance of it.
  
  Example: Asking a developer to write some code for you which fetches data on user signups. Instead of "hey, can you get some data on user signups from Mumbai", how about:
  
  Hi! Can you please help me with this data about client signups from Mumbai? We're discussing how to solve some of the onboarding issues specifically originating from there. It's directly impacting a fair share of our revenue. It'd be great if you can help me track, i) MoM user signups, ii) bounce rate during onboarding, iii) which part of the onboarding has the highest attrition. We could create a dashboard on Metabase and make the following tables:
  
  Table 1 - Mumbai Signups Overview
  Purpose: Track MoM user signups and analyze their trends. Requirements: Total signups, percentage contribution to overall signups, and growth/decline rate compared to the previous month.
  
  Table 2 - Onboarding Metrics Purpose: Identify stages with the highest attrition to address bottlenecks. Requirements: Bounce rate at each stage, progression numbers per stage, and a highlighted stage with the highest attrition percentage.
  
  Do let me know if there's anything else I can do on my part to make getting this data easier!
Make it easier for others to work with you. Your colleagues, your boss etc. The important thing to realize is they want the same thing as you do.
Try things when you're young. When you're young, the best way to find the direction you want to go in is trying multiple things and quickly checking off things you don't want to do for the rest of your life. A good question to ask is "can I do this for the rest of my life?"
Work hard. Working long hours, weekends is helpful not to the one you're working for, it's for you. It's a testament to how much activity you can get your mind involved in. How much you can go beyond what's expected.
Avoid FU responses. FU responses are lazy responses where you don't bother going deep into explaining why you would/wouldn't do something. For example: "This isn't in line with our current product strategy, thanks for the suggestion though."
Don't get followed up with. One of the hardest things to do is going to be becoming someone who doesn't need to be followed up with. If you had to aim for one thing you'd want to get great at doing, it would be to not get others to follow up with you. It all ties down to how well you have your todo planned out, how well you set reminders for yourself etc.
Avoid lazy work. Lazy work is doing extremely superficial work without digging deeper into things just because it's rare that somebody pulls you up on it. Most times, it's easy to get away with lazy work which makes it compelling to pursue.
- In the long run, non-lazy work gets noticed more often. Promotions, Appraisals, Good feedback always ends up being an outcome of non-lazy work.
Get into a flow state as much as possible. When your body and mind work in synergy in a way where you don't feel time passing by, that's the point you want to be at. It's almost as if your body goes into automatic mode. For example: In the gym, after 1-2 years my body would operate automatically, requiring less conscious thought. After doing something repeatedly for a while you unlock auto-pilot mode.
Walk away from drama whenever you can. Sometimes it's hard to escape but other times it's easier. Family drama is hard to escape, work drama slightly easier, friendship drama even easier and so on. Cutting out drama leaves more time for your mind to wander and do things that it wants to rather than be involved in things because it has to.
Cut the small talk. The best conversations are the ones which involve deep talk. The best part is you could do deep talk with literally anyone, even a stranger. My favorite question to ask at the moment of writing this article is, if you didn't have to work for money and money wasn't a problem, what would you spend the rest of your life doing?
On Alcohol. Drinking alcohol is fun but it's not the alcohol that makes it fun, it's the presence of those around you. You could probably have the same amount of fun without drinking. What do you do when trying to avoid peer pressure 👉 just keep saying I've stopped drinking for extremely long periods of time and people will stop forcing you.
Good work takes time, effort & focus. Let's say you're given 3 different projects to do of varying degrees of effort and impact, you obviously want to impress your boss and ace all those projects. Do you divide your day daily working on all those projects and assign time based on the effort required to complete those projects? I've tried. And failed. Every time.
- From what I've noticed, if you want to be great at executing, figure out the most important thing you should be working on and double down on executing it really well. It's hard to do as an employee since as an employee if you don't show execution, there's not much to show for.
- Having said that, it's not worth getting stuck in an iteration loop, I'm not saying that you keep making and improving something over and over again, all I'm saying is that if you want to execute something really well, you need to spend time with it, sleep with it, keep thinking about it everyday, understand the problem to the core, divide it into multiple parts, and execute each of those parts really well.
Don't debate with family. Debating often is to try and prove a point. With family, debating is like a monopoly game. Nobody's happy at the end of it.
Oration is extremely overrated. Substance is extremely underrated.
Don't oversell yourself on the promise of an expectation, if it works out anyway, great. If it doesn't, you never expected it to anyway.