Be this One. Mere study is not sufficient. Study gives us information. Scriptures and śāstras only give us a road map. However much you may study the road map, you will never reach the pilgrim centre. Study the map, roll it up and keep it handy by your side, as it may be useful en route during the journey. Now get up from your chair, get into your vehicle and move on along the 'way' the map indicates so clearly.

Chinnamayananda, Practice of Vedanta

I am reaching the end of the start of my Sadhana, having now practiced for 6 months. This does not in any way mean I am close to any sort of mastery, but I define it as the end because I do think I have a framework and a set of teachers that I can follow instead of just jumping from one to another. I think this is the hardest part as there are just so many different teachers and paths to follow. I have read some shastras, the shastras to be read are endless.

At some point, a person has to pick their path and make that path the core focus of their life. Mine is Raja Yoga as it is the path I am passionate about and because it incorporates the other paths within its fold.

The Raja Yoga path, in a sense, is measurable which gets the engineer in me excited. The gist of it is: How many hours of meditation have I done? If I am are keeping accurate count this also tracks the rest of my life. You need a sattvic life to have good meditation. You need a simple life to have good meditation. To be able to sit for a long time without getting distracted is needed for good meditation. Bad meditation has your mind reeling, you just don’t want to be there. You feel dull and everything within you feels far away.

In that regard good meditation requires a purity of the rest of one’s life. This purity work is a lifetime of work.

• Health and Hatha
• Cleanliness: Home, Body, Mind
• Being a good parent
• Being a good businessman
• Volunteering
• Removing tamas and rajas from the mind

All of the above are the prime focuses that I have with the goal of making my sitting meditation better. But the real goal is that sitting meditation and everyday life should not have a difference. All Yoga is meditation.

In that regard the next steps of my progress are plain and simple. It is to setup a process. This process is to go on forever, continuously finding error in myself and fixing those errors using Patanjali’s eight limbs as the framework. I don’t think a massive change all at once will work as it will lead to burnout. Small incremental improvements is the goal.

The primary means to coordinate all of this improvement is through Japa as the bridge. The mind needs to dwell on something at all times so that it isn’t idle or preoccupied with the past or the future. It needs to focus on the present.

यावानर्थ उदपाने सर्वत: सम्प्लुतोदके | तावान्सर्वेषु वेदेषु ब्राह्मणस्य विजानत: || 46||

To an enlightened person who has known the Self, all the Vedas are of as much use as is a reservoir of water in a place where there is a flood.

• Bhagavad Gita 2.46

I am rolling back on my Vedanta practice and focusing on Yoga practice for the time being. Advaita Vedanta is subtle and I don’t have the mental stillness to understand those subtleties. So I am rolling back my focus to be completely around Yoga and disciplining myself around Patanjali's 8 Limbs first. While the Vedanta philosophy is what I ultimately aspire for I need to purify the body before ultimately focusing on the Vedantic philosophy.

This is in part a larger problem I am facing. The goal of Sadhana is liberation. But it seems now I am addicted to the reading of texts instead of the practice. The practice is what is important, the texts are ways to improve the practice. Over time as the mind achieves stillness that is when Vedanta and the pure essence of reality can be learned.

As part of this focus on Yoga practice I am fine tuning my Sadhana framework by focusing on a few key key teachers. I am working my way through their teachings and incorporating them into my practice. But at some point I will run out of the teachings to read and will have to focus on the practice itself.

I think that is the point.

Sadhana is simplifying one’s life. In this regard my life has had way too many moving pieces with my attention pulling me in every which way. But as part of streamlining my life and reducing stress I have decided that there is only one number that matters:

• Number of Meditation Hours per month

Really nothing else matters. How long can you sit, and working backwards from them what lets you sit for that long.

The last decade has lead to a massive amoutn of new instruments in the FinTech world. There are so many instruments to choose from. I got caught up in this world with money moved all over the place leading to all sorts of issues.

It has made my finances brittle. Because I got caught up I ended up speculating in things I had no mindset to invest in like real estate, crypto, and futures. This splitting of energies is painful and not fruitful. It becomes impossible to read a financial statement and you have no idea how you are performing. How do you value a speculative futures contract with a real estate investment and equities? You have to read them differently and if they are on the same balance sheet it becomes impossible to read.

So I am focusing on something very different from what I was doing previously: focusing. I am taking the cues of JP Morgan's Jamie Dimon and building a Fortress Balance Sheet. As I noted before my balance sheet is a mess. There are accounts all over with little pockets of money causing me all forms of confusion. To look at my balance sheet it is impossible to know how I am performing. So this is the primary focus of my next two years.

1. Move from the 10+ institutions I have assets to two. One for business and one for personal. Most of what I need are available at two banks/brokerages. I will be closing any other accounts I have and moved to similar resources within these two institutions. I will be moving away from neobanks alltogether.
2. Get rid of debt. Currently, I have a bunch of debt that I just can't seem to get rid of. So I will be doing whatever I can to get rid of this debt from the books even if it means becoming cash poor for a while.
3. Building deeper relationships with the two banks. Instead of spreading myself thin I will focus on building long term deep relationships with the two banks I am going to use.

The end result of this consolidation means I will only be focused on two businesses:

• Investments. Focused completely on the personal side of things I will be largely investing in public markets based on the methods of value investing.
• Ventures. Optimize for the same things I do in the public markets. The only reason I will take out dividends is to pay off debt, otherwise I will only give myself a base salary. The rest of the money will be reinvested into the growth of the Ventures business.

We now have five new members of the opsZero team who will be working on various projects related to our Ventures primarily focused on marketing and sales related work. They are:

• Swarup
• Vaishnavi
• Dhruva
• Swathi
• Nagaraj

This is an internal infrastructure update where we have setup Google Workspace according to products. Interestingly what M365 calls Sites can just be considered as Shared Drives in Google Workspace. We are now organized according to this structure. How this is setup is described in the Infra document.

Github is also organized according to products and agencies. An agency does the services work and then builds out individual products. This makes it easier to manage the code and the products.

WhatsApp is now used for a majority of the communication. We use communities and divide teams into various groups that execute tasks for their silos.

I now have a single financial infrastructure for the entire company. This allows me to run the company as a single person business.

All of these changes will help scale faster as we add 5 new members to the team this week.

After nearly half a year of practice I have finally settled on a framework for my Yoga practice. This practice is oriented around Patanjali Yoga Sutras, each of the eight limbs incorporating the other Yogas. By creating this end to end framework I have a holistic end to end guide for my own practice. I don’t know if this is correct, but it does seem to create a system that I find helpful.

This month has been setting up this framework and discovering how the other yogas include Karma, Bhakti, Jnana, Kundalini and Hatha overlap within the Patanjali's Raja Yoga framework. Though is is hard to pin any of these down to a single limb, I have found that they can be mapped to the limbs of Patanjali Yoga Sutras. In that regard I am pretty satisfied with the framework I have created.

For the future, my goal is to dive into each of the limbs and master each. I believe that this will take lifetimes, but I am excited to see where it takes me.

Why We’re Consolidating on Google Workspace​

After spending the last year wrestling with Microsoft 365, we’ve decided to make a clean break and standardize our operations back on Google Workspace. The experience with Microsoft’s suite wasn’t just frustrating — it was actively slowing us down.

Microsoft 365: Built for Enterprise, Not for the Rest of Us​

At its core, Microsoft 365 feels like a suite built for large enterprises — and increasingly only for large enterprises. As a midmarket business, we found ourselves constantly running into limitations that weren’t due to lack of features, but due to complexity, brittleness, and weird user experiences.

Basic tasks often became tangled in layers of permissions, sync issues, or strange UI behavior. It felt like we were spending more time trying to make the tools work than actually using them. Worse, with Microsoft shifting 30% of its engineering focus toward AI, the quality of core features seems to have taken a hit. Things just don’t work as well as they used to — or as reliably.

While certain things like Excel are amazing, trying to make it work within the OneDrive ecosystem was a nightmare with endless amounts of lost syncs.

Why We're Going Back to Google Workspace​

Google Workspace isn’t perfect, but it is consistent, lightweight, and designed with modern workflows in mind. Its web-first architecture means apps are tightly integrated and behave predictably. It just works — which is what we want from tools that are supposed to help us move fast and collaborate seamlessly.

Beyond that, our long-term bet is on Gemini, Google’s AI offering. We believe that Google’s approach to AI — integrated deeply into everyday productivity tools — will yield better results for how we work. The synergy between Docs, Gmail, Sheets, and AI is already showing promise.

Final Thoughts​

This isn’t just a tooling decision — it’s a strategic shift. We want our team to spend time building and thinking, not troubleshooting and clicking through endless dialog boxes. We believe Google Workspace, with its simplicity and forward-thinking AI integration, is better aligned with the needs of agile, modern teams.

So yes — we’re consolidating on Google Workspace. And we’re not looking back.