Life

I read this story recently about a man who went fishing in his boat. After some waiting, something tugged on the line. He got it out.

He saw the fish had silver and gold-coloured fins. It was very beautiful. He put it in the boat, even as the fish started struggling for life.

Then, to his surprise, the fish spoke, “Let me go into the river. Just put me back in the water. I will give you three wishes. You can ask for anything but put me back in the water now.”

The man thought for a few minutes. The fish was struggling for life, getting weaker and weaker.

Then he said, “Okay make it five wishes, I’ll let you go.”

The fish said, “No, three.” Its voice was already weak.

[Read more…] about The 41st Lesson

Money often costs too much. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The tragedy dates to 1859, when around 450 passengers on the Royal Charter, returning from the Australian goldmines to England, drowned when their ship was wrecked off the north coast of Wales.

What caused this shipwreck? Well, many of those on board were weighed down by the gold in their money belts that they just wouldn’t abandon so close to home.

[Read more…] about The Secret of Money

Businesses die, like we do.

However, in contrast to us (I mean, humans…because some bots and aliens may also be reading this post) gradually increasing our average life expectancy over decades, more businesses are dying faster than any time in history.

While there is no real research done on Indian businesses, as per Credit Suisse, the average life span of S&P 500 companies in the US, which stood at 60 years in the 1950s, has now fallen to under 20 years.

The biggest culprit for this is the disruptive force of technology, which is killing off older companies earlier and at a much faster rate than decades ago.

Anyways, today’s post is not about what businesses can do to stave off their deaths, which is mostly inevitable in these rapidly changing times.

[Read more…] about How to Survive the Death of Businesses

Yesterday did not start on a good note for me.

I broke three cups.

Sunday is when I usually prepare tea for the house. As I was pulling out three teacups from the cabinet, all with a single hand while holding the cabinet door with another, one of them slipped.

I watched, aghast, wanting time to stop. But it didn’t. In fact, it seemed to move faster. The cup was lost.

However, if that was not all, as I vainly attempted to catch it in that millisecond, the other two cups also dropped out of my hand.

All three were gone.

As I was cleaning up the mess, a realization struck. Maybe the second-best thing for me to do to save the two other cups was to let the first one go. The best thing, of course, would have been to not try pulling them out of the cabinet with one hand.

Life teaches us lessons almost all the time. We only need to observe well, and sometimes be prepared to hear the sound of breaking glass.

January 11 2013 was a sad day for the Internet world. That day, Internet pioneer and open information activist Aaron Swartz committed suicide at a young age of 26.

Swartz’s “crime” – he had logged into JSTOR (Journal Storage), a database of scholarly articles, and rapidly downloaded those articles with the intent to make them public.

He didn’t “hack” the network to secure those downloads. MIT is anyways an open network.

He didn’t crack any special password system to get behind JSTOR’s digital walls. All he did was figure out how JSTOR was filing the articles that he wanted and wrote a simple script to quickly gather those articles and then copy them to his computer.

If Swartz had lived to be convicted of the charges against him, he either had to accept the label of a criminal and go to jail for 50 years or fight a million-dollar lawsuit.

Aaron decided to take a third option. He hanged himself!

[Read more…] about Safal Niveshak, Uncopyrighted

I was an average student in school. Though I was surrounded by high achievers, and never questioned the importance of being extraordinary, I somehow never expected myself to rise to their levels. The most common remark I found in my annual report cards read something like this – “An obedient boy who can do better than average with more hard work.”

I knew I could not work any harder and rise above being average.

Anyways, I never had the credentials to get into the best college after school, there were no scholarships on offer for me, and no one in my family, including myself, expected me to become a star in life.

Life continued this way even when I got into doing my MBA, again from an average college in Mumbai. My first job profile was average too, and it paid an average salary that, in my father’s eyes, was below average.

Living in a costly city like Mumbai also meant I never had better than average savings for the first few years of my life, even though I was saving as much as possible.

More than twenty-five years have passed since I started considering myself as an average person with average capabilities and average ambitions in life. Somehow, being like this in the world where people are seeking alpha, keeps me happy and satisfied with myself.

[Read more…] about Being Average in the Age of Alpha

I have a ritual of writing a note to myself on every birthday, and this is one of those for I complete forty years in my present state of existence on this Pale Blue Dot.

Life’s passing by too fast, or so it seems. I’m not usually one to make a big deal about my birthday, but as always, it has given me an opportunity to reflect.

“How in the world did that happen?” I asked my wife this morning as she woke me up from my slumber. It seems like yesterday I was twenty, just into college, and with no idea about where life was about to take me (still no idea!).

[Read more…] about The 40th Lesson

“Alexa, how can I get rich?” he asked staring at a speaker kept at a distance.

Nothing happened for a few seconds.

“Alexa! Alexa!” he shouted.

Nothing happened even then.

“Huh!” he blurted in frustration and went back to his playful ways.

This is a small conversation I heard of a 9-year old at our Camp Millionaire workshop in Mumbai on Sunday during a small break before we play musical chairs to explain kids the concept of demand and supply.

Well, the speaker on the other side of the intended conversation was not Alexa – virtual assistant developed by Amazon – but a plain one that operated on Bluetooth. But this 9-year old mistook it for one, and thus wanted to start a conversation to a get a quick response to his question. The question, however, sounded more like a command.

[Read more…] about Alexa, How Can I Get Rich?

One of the most profound thoughts I’ve ever read on the child-parent relationship comes from the noted Lebanese-American artist and poet Kahlil Gibran, who wrote the following under the title “On Children” –

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.

The first time I read these thoughts, my first reaction was – “If my children are not my children, then whose are they? And what do you mean they are not mine?”

[Read more…] about One Big Investing Lesson I Learned Late in My Life