Poke the Box: The Hardest Part is Starting

Let’s Start with Safal Niveshak
Just in case you missed any of this on Safal Niveshak over the last few days…

• Breaking News – Anshul got a super awesome double treat yesterday in the form of twin daughters. Congratulate him on Twitter. 🙂
• Ian Cassel of MicroCapClub shares his insights on investing through an interview with Safal Niveshak.
• Check if you are making this mother of all investing mistakes.
• Bull markets create a curse that leads people to give up on their sound investment philosophy and become impatient. Read more here.

Book Worm
I was recently reading the book Beyond Wealth: The Road Map to a Rich Life by Alexander Green where he writes about his life experiences and lessons he learned along the way. In one of the chapters, Alex writes about the importance of walking for your health and mental well-being. Here is an extract from that chapter I liked the most –

For most of our history, walking wasn’t a choice. It was a given. Walking was our primary means of locomotion. But, today, you have to choose to walk. We ride to work. Office buildings and apartments have elevators. Department stores offer escalators. Airports use moving sidewalks. An afternoon of golf is spent riding in a cart. Even a ramble around your neighborhood can be done on a Segway.

Why not just put one foot in front of the other? You don’t have to live in the country. It’s great to take a walk in the woods…A long stroll slows you down, puts things in perspective, brings you back to the present moment. In Wanderlust: A History of Walking (Viking, 2000), author Rebecca Solnit writes that, “Walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes suddenly making a chord.”

Yet in our hectic, goal-oriented culture, taking a leisurely walk isn’t always easy. You have to plan for it. And perhaps you should. Walking is good exercise, but it is also a recreation, an aesthetic experience, an exploration, an investigation, a ritual, a meditation. It fosters health and joie de vivre.

Cardiologist Paul Dudley White once said, “A vigorous five-mile walk will do more good for an unhappy but otherwise healthy adult than all the medicine and psychology in the world.”

A good walk is anything but pedestrian. It lengthens your life. It clears, refreshes, provokes, and repairs the mind. So lace up those shoes and get outside. The most ancient exercise is still the best.

Stimulate Your Mind
Here’s some amazing content we read in recent times…

• Six things running can teach you about leading.
• Several lessons on life from Rahul Dravid in his brilliant speech at the MAK Pataudi Lecture 2015-16.
• Peter Thiel on the end of hubris and the lessons from the Internet bubble of the late 1990s.
• One of the great things to learn from Darwin is the value of extreme objectivity. In investing, this is akin to seeking disconfirming evidence.
• Here’s how to deal with investment noise, and there’s lot of it these days.

“Sometimes the hardest part isn’t letting go but rather learning to start over.” ~ Nicole Sobon

If I look back at the most difficult period I went through in my journey of Safal Niveshak, it was the time when I was making the decision to start. The usual fears of quitting a well-paying job and thoughts of not being able to earn enough to feed my family were my chief concerns that led me to several pauses before I finally decided to start this journey.

As I have realized over and over again, and I am sure you would vouch for it, starting something is the hardest part of anything — of cleaning the house, of getting into yoga, becoming fit, or planning a trip, writing a post like this, of learning meditation, or building a relationship.

Starting is no doubt the steepest step, the biggest hurdle, the most giant obstacle standing between where you are and what it is you want to achieve.

But then, as I have also realized, it’s up to you to make your goals your reality, because although we wish it wasn’t so, dreams don’t just magically unfold simply because you wish them to.

You have to start when you want to start. Careful and well-studied action is the biggest truth and your biggest asset. Even though it hasn’t been easy, I have found solace in the knowing that starting is and will be the hardest part of anything I wish to do in life. What about you?

Start something. Now.

Be kind to others, and to yourself.

Stay happy, stay healthy, stay blessed.

With respect,
Vishal & Anshul