Shasti Medical Devices

24/10/2022

19/02/2021

Is your daily routine mindful or mindless?

Do you serve a customer to make money? Or do you serve a customer to serve a customer? Do you wash dishes to get them clean? Or do you wash the dishes to wash the dishes?

Here's a story from Buddhist Monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, about 'washing the dishes to wash the dishes' and the difference between mindful and mindless:

"In the United States, I have a close friend named Jim Forest... Last winter, Jim came to visit. I usually wash the dishes after we've finished the evening meal, before sitting down and drinking tea with everyone else.

One night, Jim asked if he might do the dishes. I said, "Go ahead, but
if you wash the dishes you must know the way to wash them." Jim replied, "Come on, you think I don't know how to wash the dishes?" I answered, "There are two ways to wash the dishes. The first is to wash the dishes in order to have clean dishes and the second is to wash the dishes
in order to wash the dishes."

Jim was delighted and said, "I choose the second way-to wash the dishes to wash the dishes." From then on, Jim knew how to wash the dishes. I transferred the "responsibility" to him for an entire week.

If while washing dishes, we think only of the cup of tea that awaits us, thus hurrying to get the dishes out of the way as if they were a nuisance, then we are not "washing the dishes to wash the dishes."

What's more, we are not alive during the time we are washing the dishes.
In fact we are completely incapable of realizing the miracle of life while standing at the sink.

If we can't wash the dishes, the chances are we won't be able to drink our tea either. While drinking the cup of tea, we will only be thinking of other things, barely aware of the cup in our hands. Thus we are sucked away into the future
- and we are incapable of actually living one minute of life."

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Are you focusing more at being successful, or being mindful? It is a conscious choice that shows up in your daily routine - Being present in every moment shows up in the quality of your products, your service, your communication.

Being aware leads to care. It's the contrast of being careful and being careless. This care becomes quality, and that's why greater mindfulness leads to greater success.

Your daily routine isn't a means to an end. It's an opportunity to experience the miracle of life every day.

"Be here now."
~ Ram Dass

18/02/2021

Imagine you came up with an idea that could get people healthy and help the environment. Imagine you quit your dream job, launched a startup around the idea and 2 years later had turned the idea into a billion dollar company.

That’s exactly what David Wang has just done.

Two years ago David quit his job as General Manager of Uber in Shanghai after thinking “Why don’t I create an Uber for bikes?”

He launched his company, Mobike, a year ago. Each of his bikes has a pedal-powered GPS, smart lock and timer, so you can find a bike and unlock it with your Mobike App, get charged 15c per hour, and then leave it wherever you finish your ride.

David knew the key to his idea was making his own low cost, high tech bikes. So he started bike-building, and launched the service in Shanghai in April last year.

The bikes were so popular, in August he attracted $10 million from Panda Capital. Then, a month later he raised another $100 million from well known VCs.

By the end of 2016, Mobike’s Shanghai GM, Michael Yao (in photo) said: “We just announced passing the 100,000th bike in Shanghai earlier this month. We are currently operating in nine cities: Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Chengdu, Ningbo, Xiamen, Foshan and Wuhan.”

Shanghai has now become the No.1 bike-sharing city in the world, and China is now producing more ride-sharing bikes than all the rest of the world put together.

This month Mobike raised $215 million from Tencent and a group of VCs, likely at a valuation of over $1 billion, and this week Xiaofeng did a deal with Foxconn which will get 10 million Mobikes on the road by the end of this year.

Less than 2 years after starting his company, David has 1.5 million users taking 500,000 bike rides each day. That's 1.5 million users getting healthy and improving the air quality of China's cities each day. He now plans to be in 100 cities in China and around the world by the end of this year.

In his announcement of the Foxconn deal this week, David said “In 2017, we aim to enable residents in a hundred cities in China and internationally to enjoy our unique and convenient solution.”

That solution is the bicycle, invented in 1817 (and celebrating its 200th birthday this year), with some high tech upgrades.

In other words, he took a 200 year old invention and turned it into a billion dollar startup.

Sometimes the best ideas are the simplest.

In fact, the technology that David is using for his bikes is freely accessible to anyone to start a similar company.

The difference is, he took massive action.

What simple idea are you delaying today?

Where will you be in 2 years from now by simply taking that next step?

Time to get on your bike!

“Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot, but make it hot by striking.” ~ William Butler Yeats

17/02/2021

If you’re chasing perfection, give yourself a break. Literally.

In my 20’s, I tried to do things perfectly. The more I tried, the more I failed. No matter how good things were, I thought they could be better. No matter how well I did, I thought I could do better.

Then a mentor told me that each of us are unique in our imperfections. That it is our failures that shape us. That it is our heartaches that make us human.

The Japanese have turned this idea into an art. Kintsukuroi is the art of “repairing with gold”.

When a pot breaks, instead of throwing it away, craftsmen repair it with a gold lacquer that celebrates its flaws. In doing so, the pot becomes more valuable than when it was “perfect”.

It’s the flaws that tell the pots story, and it’s your challenges that tell your story. So celebrate them, embrace them, and know you are all the more valuable for having them.

“There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in.” ~ Leonard Cohen

16/02/2021

Who’s your hero? In 2008, 13 year old Joseph Schooling got to meet his hero, Michael Phelps, when the Olympian visited Singapore prior to the Beijing Olympics. Today, 8 years later, Joseph just made history by beating Michael to Gold in the 100m Butterfly finals - the first Singaporean to ever make (let alone win) an Olympic swimming final.

After meeting his hero as a young teenager, Joseph said “Michael Phelps may be my idol, but I just want to make my own career.”

He then became fully committed to his swimming and, 3 years later in 2011 Joseph beat Michael’s age-group (15-16 years) time over the 100 yards butterfly. At the time, Joseph said, "It's been a target of mine and I'm really happy to do that. It is a huge boost… Hopefully, I can get more of his records."

In 2012, at 17, he finally got his dream of swimming in the same race as Michael, saying it was "a tick off on my bucket list.”

That was the year Joseph first qualified for the Olympics in London, but then disaster struck when he was told his goggles weren’t olympic standard just before the race. He rushed to get replacements, but ended up getting a poor time in his heats and didn’t get through to the semi-finals. It was Michael who was there to comfort him:

"I was walking behind Phelps after my race when he looked at me and asked, 'what's wrong?'

"I told him what happened and he hugged me and said, 'you're only so young, you still have a long way to go. It's a learning experience so keep your head high and just keep moving on'."

Again, it was his hero who motivated Joseph on, and he thought: "I know that as I get older, I'll become stronger, and I'll fare better beside him.”

Today, Joseph not only became stronger, but strong enough to win gold in Rio, clocking a new Olympic record time in the 100m Butterly in 50.39 seconds.

Michael, who has already won 4 Gold Medals in Rio, ended up in a 3-way dead heat for Silver with South Africa's Chad le Clos and Laszlo Cseh of Hungary, three quarters of a second behind Joseph. After Joseph’s win, Michael was the first to swim over and congratulate him.

Who is your hero? Who inspires you so much that you’re committed to do them the honor of committing to be even better than they are? And then achieve it?

"If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants." ~ Isaac Newton

A big congratulations to Joseph Schooling on the Gold. And to Michael Phelps for the inspiration.

(More on Michael Phelp's extraordinary climb to the Rio Games here http://bit.ly/from-rock-bottom)

15/02/2021

John Pemberton invented Coca-Cola when he was 55 years old.

Ray Kroc bought McDonald’s when he was 59 years old.

Colonel Sanders began franchising KFC at 62 years old.

Tim & Nina Zagat were 51 yr old lawyers when they wrote the 1st Zagat guide.

Charles Darwin was 50 years old before he wrote “On the Origin of Species”.

Julia Child was also 50 years olf when she wrote her first cookbook.

Henry Ford was 45 years old when he created the Model T car.

Microfinance pioneer, Muhammad Yunus, launched the Grameen Bank at 43 years old.

Samuel L. Jackson was 43 years old before he had his first hit film, “Jungle Fever”.

It’s never too late to succeed.
It’s always too early to quit.

“You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.”

14/02/2021

How resilient are you? Here’s an amazing story of how to bounce back when things get tough:

The Elon Musk of China, 43 year old Jia Yueting, was under such financial stress 2 months ago, in November 2016 he wrote a letter to the staff and shareholders at his company, LeEco, telling them of the financial issues and saying he was cutting his salary to one yuan (15 cents).

To make things worse, he had used all his listed shares in Leshi Internet as security against the loans he had taken, but Leshi Internet’s shares had dropped 30% and all the shares were at risk of being lost in a margin call. So the company suspended trading in its shares - and they have been frozen ever since.

What happened next? While the world was on holiday at the end of December, Yueting staged a turnaround as dramatic as the one Elon Musk achieved in 2010.

The result? Today he announced a $2.2 billion cash investment from property developer Sunac China Holdings, for 8.61% of the company - which gives him the cash he needs and now values LeEco at $25 billion.

Who is Jia Yueting, and how did he create a company that’s now worth $25 billion?

Born to a teacher and housewife in 1973, his first job was in a government tax office. When he was 31, in 2004, he launched “Leshi” (which means “Happy TV”) as the first Internet streaming TV company. Over the next 6 years it grew into the Netflix of China, and in 2010 - when Elon Musk was broke - he listed the company and became a billionaire.

From there, he launched a series of new companies - LeMusic (live concerts), Le Vision (films), LeMobile (smartphones) and Le VR (virtual reality), which all became part of “LeEco”.

Jia Yueting is 2 years younger than Elon, and has been largely unknown in the West - until January last year, when he launched “Le Supercar” at CES - to compete with Tesla. The car is being built by LeSEE - his electric car company in partnership with Faraday Future.

Then, in February 2016 LeEco made Fast Company's 2016 "Most Innovative Companies” list, and in July he bought America’s leading smart TV maker, Visio for $2 billion… and the US tech industry began to take notice.

So if Yueting has been so successful in growing a billion dollar business, how did he end up in such financial trouble?

Yueting, like Elon Musk, Richard Branson and many leading entrepreneurs, drive their businesses to the upper limit of growth. For Yueting, 2016 was the first year he entered the US market and costs rose dramatically.

In his November letter he described the situation as “a simultaneous time in ice and fire” and said “We blindly sped ahead, and our cash demand ballooned. We got over-extended in our global strategy.”

Some think that when you achieve success, the problems disappear. The reality is that as things multiply, the risks grow with the rewards.

Success then, feels less like flying higher in the sky and more like sailing deeper in the ocean - with higher highs and lower lows.

So if you’re on that journey, get ready for the ride.

Yuetlng, like other great captains before him, is on a journey which just became more epic.

He was on the verge of losing it all and then bounced back by using every great entrepreneur's secret weapons:

Resilience and perseverance.

“Never give up. Today is hard, tomorrow will be worse, but the day after tomorrow will be sunshine.” ~ Jack Ma

13/02/2021

Best advice if you're just starting or growing a business:

Focus at your customer more than your product. Get fixed on your customer experience, and your product will keep changing to serve them best. But fix your product, and customers will find a path that fits them, with or without you.

If you're waiting on the street corner, wondering where all your customers are, this post is for you.

We've moved from the industrial age where it was all about the product and productization to the technological age where it's all about the customer and customization.

Instead of focusing at product development and production lines (which we learned about and were a part of at school), focus at customer experiences and customization lines.

Your business doesn't start when you have a product. It starts when you have a customer. So who is your perfect customer? Start from there and ask yourself (and them):

Problem - What's the problem they need solved?
Promise - What's the benefit you deliver to them by solving it?
Product - How will you solve it better than others?
Proof - Why should they trust you?

Keep upgrading your answers (and your products) regularly. Because what your customers need, their expectations and how they are being served will keep changing fast. And once you get into flow, you'll begin to know what they need before them, and they'll begin pre-buying your next product.

"Get closer than ever to your customer. So close that you tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves." ~ Steve Jobs

The easiest way to future proof your business is to have customers that love you. The easiest way to fail is to love your idea or product more than you love your customers. So find your soul-market and fall in love all over again.

12/02/2021

Motivational story:

How long does it take to create an overnight success? For John Hanke it’s taken him 20 years to create Pokémon Go.

This week, the Pokémon Go app has broken all records, with 10 million+ downloads in the first week, exceeding Twitter in daily active users, and with higher average user time than Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram & WhatsApp.

How did John Hanke create such a massive overnight craze? Here’s the 10 times he levelled up in his lifetime to reach Pokémon Go:

1st Level up: In 1996, while still a student, John co-created the very first MMO (massively multiplayer online game) called ‘Meridian 59’. He sold the game to 3DO to move on to a bigger passion: mapping the world.

2nd Level up: In 2000, John launched ‘Keyhole’ to come up with a way to link maps with aerial photography, and create the first online, GPS-linked 3D aerial map of the world.

3rd Level up: In 2004, Google bought Keyhole and with John’s help, turned Keyhole into what is now ‘Google Earth’. That’s when John decided to focus at creating GPS-based games.

4th Level up: John ran the Google Geo team from 2004 to 2010, creating Google Maps and Google Street View. During this time, he collected the team that would later create Pokémon Go.

5th Level up: In 2010, John launched Niantic Labs as a start-up funded by Google to create a game layer on maps. John explains why he called it Niantic:

“The Niantic is the name of a whaling ship that came up during the gold rush and through a variety of circumstances got dragged on shore. This happened with other ships, too. Over the years, San Francisco was basically just built over these ships. You could stand on top of them now, and you wouldn't know it. So it's this idea that there's stuff about the world that's really cool but even though it's on the Internet, it's hard to know when you're actually there.”

6th Level up: In 2012, John then created Niantic’s first geo-based MMO, “ingress”:

John explains: “In the case of Ingress the activity is layered on top of the real world and on your phone. The inspiration was that it was something that I always used to daydream about while I was commuting back and forth from home to Google."

"I always thought you could make an awesome game using all the Geo data that we have. I watched phones become more and more powerful and I thought the time would come that you could do a really awesome real-world adventure-based game.”

7th Level up: In 2014, Google and the Pokémon Company teamed up for an April Fools’ Day joke, which allowed viewers to find Pokémon creatures on Google maps. It was a viral hit, and got John thinking the idea could be turned into a real game.

8th Level up: John decided to build Pokémon Go on the user-generated meeting points created by players of Ingress, and the most popular became the Pokéstops and gyms in Pokémon Go:

As John says, ”The Pokéstops are submitted by users, so obviously they're based on places people go. We had essentially two and a half years of people going to all the places where they thought they should be able to play Ingress, so it's some pretty remote places. There are portals in Antartica and the North Pole, and most points in between.”

9th Level up: John raised $25 million from Google, Nintendo, the Pokémon Company and other investors from Dec 2015 to Feb 2016 to grow a team of 40+ to launch Pokémon Go this year.

10th Level: John and his team launched Pokémon Go on July 6th in USA, Australia and New Zealand. Since its launch, Nintendo’s share price has risen $12 billion, and the app is already generating over $2 million daily in in-app purchases, making it an overnight phenomenon.

The overnight success of Pokémon Go has taken John Hanke 20 years to create. Throughout these 20 years, while he had a big vision of a game layer over the world, he didn’t know what form it would take. At every step, he just focused at his next level up.

At each new level, he had new powers, new team members, and new items in his inventory…

Are you, like John, treating your own entrepreneurial journey like one big MMO?

Keep the end in mind, but focus today on simply levelling up.

At every level, grow your powers, your team, and your luck.

And know it takes many levels to win the game.

“It takes 20 years to make an overnight success.” ~ Eddie Cantor

Pokémon Go

11/02/2021

Motivational story:

How Mark Cuban couldn’t keep a job, so started his own company instead and made $3 billion.

“I joined Mellon Bank after graduating from Indiana University in 1980 at 22. A lot of my peers at Mellon were just happy to have a job. I wanted to be more entrepreneurial. I started writing a newsletter. I did updates on current projects. I tried to inject a little humor. I thought my boss would love me for doing these things.”

“Instead, my boss called me into his office one day and ripped me a new one. "Who the f--- do you think you are?" he yelled."

"I told him I was trying to help Mellon make more money. He told me I was never to go over him or around him, or he'd crush me. I knew then it was time to get out of there. That's how I found myself back in Indiana, then on the road to Dallas.”

“In Dallas, I moved into a tiny apartment with five buddies at a place called The Village. We had only three bedrooms and three beds. I slept on the floor.”

“Our rent was $750 split six ways. In order to get some extra time to pay our rent, the guys would write checks to one guy who would collect them all and make a deposit and he would then pay the bills. It would give us three or four days of float. One time our roommate Dobie collected all the checks and skipped town. That was the last we ever saw of him.”

“I initially got a job as a bartender at a place called Elan, which was a hot Dallas club. While tending bar, I applied for jobs. I got an interview with a company called Your Business Software. I got the job.”

“I was happy. I was selling, making money. About nine months in, I got an opportunity to make a $15,000 sale to a guy named Kevin. I was going to make a $1,500 commission, which was enormous. It would have allowed me to move out of the apartment and maybe have a bed.”

“I asked a co-worker to cover me at the office. I called my boss, the CEO, whose name was Michael, and told him I was going to pick up the check. I thought he'd be thrilled. He wasn't. He told me not to do it. I thought: "Are you kidding me?" I decided to do it anyway. I thought when I showed up with a $15,000 check, he'd be cool with it.”

“Instead, when I came back to the office, he fired me on the spot.”

“But being fired from that job was the determining factor in my business life. I decided then and there to start my own company. I was 25.”

“I went back to that guy with the $15,000 job and told him that I didn't have the money at the time, but if he let me keep this job and the money, I would do the work and it would help me start my own company. He said, "Sure."

“I started a company called Micro-Solutions. I remember one day I had to drive to Austin for some PC part, to a place called PCs Limited. The place was run by this kid who was younger than I was. We sat down and talked for a few hours. I was really impressed by him. I remember telling him, "Dude, I think we're both going places." That "dude" was Michael Dell.”

“That year I made the decision to get MicroSolutions into local-area networks. We were one of the first to do that. This was literally the foundation of my later career. MicroSolutions grew into a company with $30 million in revenues. I sold it a few years later to CompuServe.”

“That start enabled me to found AudioNet, which became Broadcast.com, which my partner, Todd Wagner, and I sold to Yahoo. Then came the Dallas Mavericks and everything else, of course.”

“Oh, yeah. A few years ago, I got an e-mail from my old roommate, Dobie. It said, "How you doing, man?" I wrote back that I wasn't going to talk to him until he paid me the $125 he owed me for rent back from The Village. He sent me the check. I cashed it.”

Mark Cuban is now worth $3.3 billion. He wrote this story in Forbes.

Whatever life throws at you, as Mark says, it “doesn’t matter if the glass is half-empty or half-full. All that matters is that you are the one pouring the water.”

10/02/2021

Mark Zuckerberg tells the story of when he asked Steve Jobs for advice:

"Early on in our history when things weren't really going well. We had hit a tough patch and a lot of people wanted to buy Facebook.”

“I went and I met with Steve Jobs, and he said that to reconnect with what I believed was the mission of the company, I should go visit this temple in India that he had gone to early in the evolution of Apple, when he was thinking about what he wanted his vision of the future to be.”

"So I went and I travelled for almost a month.”

Mark travelled to Kainchi Dham Ashram, in Nanital, Uttarakhand. The same place Steve had visited, and where he got clarity on his life purpose. For a month, Mark meditated in the temple and travelled through India.

“Seeing how people connected, and having the opportunity to feel how much better the world could be if everyone has a strong ability to connect reinforced for me the importance of what we were doing and that is something I've always remembered over the last 10 years as we've built Facebook.”

Mark returned from the trip, rejected all the offers for the company and committed to push on with his mission to “connect the world”.

That one piece of advice from Steve Jobs, that one decision to take action on it by Mark Zuckerberg - and leave his company and country for a month to follow it - has proven to be worth over $35 Billion as Facebook has grown to connect over one billion people today.

Today, who can you learn from?

Today, what action are you willing to take?

Earning always follows learning.

“I realized my mission in life was to learn more, not earn more.” ~ Surya Das

09/02/2021

Can you see order in chaos? Can you hear the signal in the noise?

Today 15 year old Canadian student, William Gadoury, hit the news for discovering an entire ancient Mayan City - by looking at the stars.

3 years ago, William got interested in Mayan cities when he learned about the end of the Mayan Calendar in 2012. As he began learning he said “I didn’t understand why the Maya built their cities far away from rivers, in remote areas, or in the mountain.”

So he began studying the patterns of the cities, and then studied the patterns of 22 Mayan star constellations. He saw the links, and when he superimposed the constellations on a map of the Yucatan Peninsula on Google Earth, they linked perfectly with 117 ancient Mayan cities.

He also found the brightest stars linked to the largest cities.

Despite being only 15 years old, William is the first person to make the correlation.

William then looked at a 23rd constellation of three stars, and found only two cities. So he guessed there must be a city in the third spot.

What do you do if you think you’ve found a city? He contacted the Canadian Space Agency, who then got satellites from NASA and JAXA, the Japanese space agency.

Scientists were blown away when they found evidence of a previously un-discovered large, 86m high pyramid and thirty buildings exactly where William predicted.

Not only was it a new city, based on its size some experts predict that it could be one of the five largest.

As Canadian Space Agency’s Daniel de Lisle says, “Linking the positions of the stars to the location of a lost city along with the use of satellite images on a tiny territory to identify the remains buried under dense vegetation is quite exceptional.”

William’s discovery is now being published in a scientific journal and he will present his findings at Brazil’s International Science Fair next year.

Also, Mexican archaeologists have promised William he can join their expedition to the area to verify the find. William says “It would be the culmination of three years of work and the dream of a lifetime.”

If 15 year old William can discover an entire city, what could you find by looking more closely?

When I met Richard Branson on Necker Island last year, a friend asked him “Do you analyse data or use your gut when making decisions.” Richard replied, “It’s not really one or the other. I see patterns. If things fit, I do it.”

Science, exploration, art, music, sport - and entrepreneurship - all share a common theme: Patterns.

When, like William, you see the patterns, you can fill in the gap - Whether it’s your next step, a new innovation, or a new, ancient city.

“Learn how to see. Realize that everything is connected to everything else.” ~ Leonardo Da Vinci