10 Life Lessons I Learned The HARD Way!

in this video i want to tell you 10 learnings that i had written down in a diary about a year and a half ago yesterday i was looking at what i'd written and i realized hey none of this is too bad to be said on camera so maybe i should go and tell my audience all the things that i'd learned from my life so this video is going to be 10 life tips from varun maya's life so before i get to the tips i want to tell you that this is not all just business stuff some of it is but it's mostly life stuff it's mostly personal stuff things i've learned in my personal life tip one make sure you brush your teeth twice a day

day and also make sure you floss now i'm sure you heard this advice like a million times from your dentist you probably heard it from your parents you've probably seen it on tv but i've actually learned it the hard way so genetically my family and i have very crisscross teeth right one tooth in the front one tooth and back so the problem with that is that food particles can get stuck in between the teeth because of course they're in weird crisscross shapes and the problem with that is that big bad bacteria can come and start chewing on that food while they're chewing on the food they also start eating through your teeth for the first few years of my life i really didn't care right um i didn't brush my teeth too often when i went to hostel i used to brush my teeth once a day maybe one and a half times a day but that caught up to me and i started having a lot of cavities uh i had to have like almost four root canals so it's not the most fun place to be luckily when you get your tooth root canal it's like a permanent crown that they put on you can't tell the difference between a real tooth and a fake tooth um but yeah i wish i'd been more regular brushing my teeth and because of the shape of my teeth i also had to floss which i completely forgot over the last year i've been brushing and flossing every single day twice a day flossing you know just before i head to bed and my teeth have been better than they ever have right so it's just a life tip take it how you want to if you have crisscross teeth like me make sure you hit the brush the next thing is don't hold on to your opinions too

dearly see i had a video about entrepreneurs and arrogance see when you're young it is good for an entrepreneur to be arrogant because if you're not arrogant you'll just be underconfident and it is so tough that you need that extra confidence that comes from the arrogance to go tackle whatever you're tackling but one problem with being arrogant especially when you're young is that you hold on to your opinions too dearly you believe in something and it could be half baked you might not like really understand it but you're like i get it and i'm gonna hold on to this dearly don't do that because when you've lived as long as i have in startup land or just general in life for the last 10 years and done as many things as i have sometimes your opinions will end up being wrong even if you're damn sure of them be a student of the world we're not here to make ultimatum decisions right the world decides nature decides and we have plain passerbys right we have a little bit of control over our environment but we do not decide the outcome of events so don't hold on to your opinions dually be easy going the next thing is to understand the

underlying currents of other people's emotions see when i'm having a conversation with people these days i not only listen to what they're telling me the substance i'm also trying to listen to what's the emotional undercurrent for example sometimes when i fight with my wife she might be complaining about groceries but the underlying current could be the fact that you know she's frustrated at work or she's angry with me because i left the geezer on right so i've noticed that what a person says and what they're really meaning can be two different things right and it's true even at work so an employee could come and tell me we really need to do this is a great idea but the underlying current could be the fact that he might have told another employee that you know i think this will work and he's trying to get that agenda pushed so i always listen with two years we've got two years the first year is to listen for the actual substance the other year is to try and understand the emotional undercurrent the minute you can put one and two together not only can you make better decisions you also become a much more empathetic human being right you let things slide because you know where it's coming from the next thing is that i've realized over the

years that people are a product of their circumstances there's a saying right past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior i've actually seen that to be true many times if a person is a certain way in a particular year there's a very high likelihood unless they have crazy awareness that they're going to be exactly the same four years later they might be doing something different but their personality doesn't change much the way they behave doesn't change much and we've learned this with a lot of things including with integrity with some of our employees we've learned this with work ethic we've learned this with you know just everything basically if you're with somebody who's like super toxic don't expect that person to change right you can't save that person if you're with somebody that's optimistic don't expect that person to change four years later so that's why it's more viable for you to be with somebody that's optimistic rather than constantly pessimistic because the optimist is always going to be like that right and your days are going to be better if you're with a pessimist or a toxic person you spend so much energy just dealing with that person waste of time the next thing i've learned is to

choose your life partner wisely if done right and i think i got it right it can change who you are and what you're capable of life gets tough right and i've been through my share of tough instances right both with work with health with a bunch of things and my partner has always been there with me right i know india now has gotten this be single revolution and that's fine right if it works for you but if you can get a great life partner life gets easier and dude we're put here in a very tough land right just dropped here from the sky into a very tough place why not do it with companionship the next thing i've learned is that nobody's

truly there for you apart from your family and a few friends and a few well-wishers and it's very hard to tell who's a good well-wisher and who's a who's somebody who will not be a well-wisher two years later so it takes a lot of effort to surround yourself with good people and i've realized as i age that i've lost so many friends and that's because i've gained a very solid core set of friends and family and i don't need any more it's always a give and take relationship i always keep my circle tight and i keep all favors i ask from outside measured the next thing actually comes from taleb book skin in the game and i've seen this throughout right if somebody's giving you advice maybe it's your mentor maybe it's your teacher maybe it's your parents if they don't bear the brunt of that advice if it goes wrong then don't take that advice from them like i've seen a lot of people right who give gyan who go on the internet and say and including me right on this youtube channel right now i could give you some gyan i could say don't do this or do this but tomorrow me or the other people are not going to bear responsibility for what happens so what is ideal is somebody who can take or share that responsibility with you so when shashank my co-founder tells me something i'm much more likely to listen and i'm more likely to dive in with him because both of us bear the brunt of those decisions if doesn't work both of us are responsible and i know he will help me pick it back up and he knows i will help him pick it back up right whereas if some random person on the street says oh you should do this with your startup i'm not going to listen whether startup succeeds or fails that person is just going to be on the road giving advice he or she is not going to pay the price for the outcome of that decision this is the reason i distrust wealth managers people who give random health advice on the internet financial advice and so on and so forth right and you could also put me and my youtube channel in this category so that's why i always tell people right and even i think siddhartha gautam buddha also said this if i say something that you don't agree with or that i don't fully bear the consequences of listen to it but eventually take your own decision right use me as a factor in your decision making but don't let me make the decisions for you and it's not just limited to me right i think i'm one of the few people that actually has awareness of this right of the consequences of what i say but there are a bunch of influencers on the internet who don't bear those consequences so please listen to them but make your own decision at the end of the day they are not going to take the fall for your fall the next thing is make friends with

yourself so i actually have a code name for the me inside right so i treat the me inside my head as a monkey right so i know there are two me's inside we've had conversations before sometimes it's always like i always tell myself hey why don't we figure it out i actually started calling him at least in the last few years i've started calling him v so i just say hey we will figure it out and i'm talking to myself sometimes i'm on the road walking just talking to myself i'm very sure people think i'm crazy right but i have such a good rapper with myself we've been through hell together obviously uh and heaven together i've seen some people who know there's another person and i think all of you kind of know that there are two people inside you the relationship is very poor it's either toxic contradictory you don't trust the other person doesn't trust you it's very weird right so what i say is build a rapper with each other which actually starts with accepting everything that's going wrong and everything that's going right i'm not going to go deep into it but i felt sick for a while and for a long time i didn't trust my internal me right we were having conflict all the time but today we're in much better place because i accept i just accept everything that's gone wrong and everything that's gone right all the successes all the failures both personally and professionally just accept it build a relationship with yourself and that starts with radical acceptance it doesn't matter who you are it doesn't matter if you're fat thin etc don't worry about it build a rapper with yourself because you need your team to go take out the world the next thing and again this is personal advice you don't have to do this is learn to code

bro i've had so many opportunities in life because i've learned to code and it's like you can see the difference right people who can code are 100 times you can just tell from salary range a senior quota today is like 50 lakhs to a crop marketeers with like four five years of experience don't make anywhere close to that amount there's huge demand if you're a coder you always have job security you in fact are more likely to go out and raise capital because vcs know that investing money in somebody who is engineering heavy means there's good return out of it right because it is a product people can use a product only engineers can make products so coding whether you're making a physical product or a digital product coding is still necessary today right even for physical products unless you're selling a house which you know is a very different kind of engineering so yeah learn to code low cost very high outcome and opportunity and purely skill based you don't need to like a factory or a house you don't need to put in you know few crores to make a few more crores you can put in zero and make a lot of money out of it and there's also something really magical about being able to talk to machines look i'm communicating with you right now i'm speaking english i could speak hindi i could speak kannada and i could communicate with you why do you think it's different with machines i want this beautiful computing device with all the power inside it i want that for me i want to be a wizard i want to control it right i want to be able to give it instructions and i wanted to be able to understand right now you know how to give instruction if you can speak any language like hindi english karana whatever you already know how to give instructions right you can go outside and tell another person go straight and take a left you can do that right now all you have to do is learn another language learn a syntax to give those same instructions to a different device you're over hyping it in your head and you're seeing this battle going on media with white hat junior and whatnot and that is misleading you to a certain extent right ignore the noise coding is about building a better future for yourself think about it you don't have to do it but think about it the last thing is build a network and keep it warm i've said this a million times now

when you're young it's about what you know when you're old it's about who you know right so build a strong network people you can call and of course remember that not everyone's going to return your call help you out in times of crisis but it doesn't hurt to build a network because if you have three people who can help you in a crisis maybe one of them will respond in a particular field in a particular context today i have so many people on speed dial on my phone who i can just call for any advice right all the way from marketing to sales to life to what should i do next should i raise capital to even which game should i download next so it's a beautiful thing to have a great network right don't underestimate the value of people you can still be an introvert in your own bubble i'm an introvert by the way on social media doesn't look like it but in real life i'm a very very deep introvert but i still make it a point to try and maintain those relationships i keep my distance but you know i try to help them when they need help and i try to ask for help when i need help don't be a solo yellow type of person who doesn't ask anybody for help and doesn't have a network because you will be caught like a sitting duck especially when things get hard that's it for me bye