Entrepreneur Geek

First, some introspection!

How was the last month for you? What are your achievements? What are the things you wanted to complete, but did not?

And if you could redo yesterday, how would you work? If you could really relive yesterday, how would you start your day? What all actions would you take? What would you not do?

More than 80% of us would like to be more productive, more expressed and more satisfied if they could relive yesterday. Why did we not live yesterday like that than? It’s not that we couldn’t do it. It’s not a question of ability, it’s a question of going beyond the usual.

You may know that we have a Monthly Review Meeting in Magnet. Different teams meet once a month to review the last month, share the learnings and to create something for the month ahead. We started with these introspective questions this time.

Our habits determine our productivity

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Mozilla Foundation is coming to India. If you are interested in Firefox, are a contributor, or want to contribute, you must grab this opportunity!

Seth Bindernagel (Community Program Manager) and JT Batson (Head, International Marketing Efforts) of Mozilla Foundation are coming to India in mid July. The purpose of the trip is build further community involvement and start to find people who can help localizer drive the adoption of Firefox 3. This includes both supporting current volunteers in contributing more and providing resources.

Magnet did most of the localization for Firefox and other open source tools for Gujarati. Continuing our endeavors, we are organizing a one day event at our office to promote and support Firefox on 21st July 2007. Seth and JT will speak about community, localization, Firefox 3 and also promotion!

Note: The event will not be on 14th July now, since Mozilla will be attending the open source conference in Ahmedabad on 13th and 14th July. We will have it on 21st July now.

Here is the plan for the day:

• 10.30AM – Registration (it’s free!)
• 11AM – Introduction & Welcome
• 11.30AM – The State of Mozilla
• 12.00AM – Do we need an EN_IN version of Firefox? Local English, local search providers, certain spellings and other India specific items. Brainstorming, and team formation.
• 1.00PM – Lunch break
• 2.00PM – Brainstorming on promoting Firefox in India (Spread Firefox.in?)
• 3.00PM – How to localize Firefox? How did we localize for Gujarati? – small workshop
• 4.00PM – Firefox 3 – what’s up the sleeve?
• 5.00PM – Completion

The day is going to be exciting. It’s going to be mix of development, community and brainstorming sessions.

Who should attend?

• Everyone who’s helped in localization of Firefox / other Mozilla Software
• Students and Open Source evangelists who want to promote Mozilla / Firefox
• Community organizers & marketing enthusiasts
• Anyone who’s interested in Mozilla / Firefox

Location:

Many thanks to HBCSE for hosting this event. Directions here.

RSVP:
Please add your name to wiki (link below), if you wish (you should!)  to attend the event:
http://db.glug-bom.org/wiki/index.php/Upcoming_meet_RSVPs

We plan to have a Mumbai GNU/Linux Users Group meeting in the evening with a talk on Ruby on Rails. The plan on that will be announced on the mailing list soon.

Participants

1. Seth Bindernagel
2. JT Batson
3. Chris Hofmann
4. Venky Hariharan
5. Kartik Mistry
6. Nirav Mehta
7. Dibya Prakash
8. Vipul Mathur
9. Barkha Khatri
10. Dilip Khanolkar
11. Mehul
12. Osric Xavier Fernandes
13. Mitul Lambani
14. Easwar Hariharan
15. Joel
16. Gaurav Chaturvedi
17. Anurag
18. Mohan S N
19. Sanjay Bhangar
20. R. K. Rajeev
21. V K Bharadwaj
22. J. T. D’souza
23. Prashant Shah

I took an introductory session on Leadership for the new Magneteers on Friday. The session was superb. I myself was amazed at the results we produced and the impact it made on the team.

I have learnt a lot of leadership from Landmark and Robin Sharma, so I based my session on the learnings from those two sources. We talked about self leadership, the areas in life that the participants were not fully satisfied in, and created action items by the end of the session that led to breakthroughs for them. (I talked to one participant today, and he said he got outstanding results by following the action item.)

Here’s the outline of the session.

1. What is Leadership?
2. Leadership != Management!
3. Leadership is people around you producing expanding results.
4. Self Leadership
5. There is nothing nobel in being superior to others. True nobility lies in being superior to your former self.
6. It is not the mountain that we conquer but ourselves. – Sir Edmund Hillary
7. Yellow Glasses
8. All leadership begins within
9. We see the world not as it is, but as we are
10. Anything less than a conscious commitment to peak personal performance is unconscious commitment to weak personal performance
11. Never settle for mediocrity when you can attain mastery
12. Principles of Self Leadership – Personal Renewal, Abundant Knowledge, Discipline of Physicality, Early Awakening, Death Mentality
13. What’s opening up for you?
14. Questions?

I was glad the team shared their lives and participated. I was actually feeling grateful for the honor of witnessing the breakthroughs they will be causing for themselves. Truly blissful!

We are carrying out a series of sessions on creativity and problem solving in Magnet right now. It’s already been six sessions and I want to write about them here! Actually I am planning to do a podcast for them. Wish I can do it soon!

Hello!

What comes to your mind when you think about leadership? What pictures come to your mind when you hear the word leader?

Do you see Mahatma Gandhi? Hitler? Your boss? Your dad? Your self? Jack Welch? All of them indeed are super leaders. But let me tell you this, You are the leader of yourself! We are the leaders of our lives. Life may put us in any circumstances, but we decide how we react to them. We are the leaders who shape our lives.

You don’t need to have a formal designation to be a leader. In your work, you can simply decide to be the leader of the job you are responsible for.

One of the most important attributes of a leader is, in Robin Sharma’s words, “Absolute Personal Responsibility”. A leader takes absolute personal responsibility for her environment. All too often, we try to blame things on others. We want to escape from the responsibility. Remember, responsibility is not a burden. Responsibility is an honor you give to yourself. Treat it well.

Second, it is perfectly alright to fail. No journey is without a puncture or two. Failures are your friends. When you fail, you take responsibility for it; learn from it; and move on. Don’t worry about what others will do or say when you fail. Remember, it’s better to fail than not to try at all.

Leaders are always pushing the envelop. One of the things that gives me a lot of power is the urge to make things better all the time. To go beyond the achievements and excel. Under promise, over deliver. This does not mean you promise less, but you deliver more than the expected. Do you remember a time in your life when you got more than you expected? How was the feeling? What if you create that same joyous feeling for others? For your family, friends or clients?

Life is about taking leadership. Be a leader for your life. Decide how you want to shape your life and work on it. If you fail, treat it as a lesson. Just don’t stop at big ideas and inspiration. Take on doing something like a leader every day. I am sure this will bring tremendous breakthroughs to you!

Life is about personal leadership. Lead your life.