🎁 15th Anniversary Offer: Today, 9th July 2026, Safal Niveshak turns 15. To celebrate, my books are on discount, individually and in combos, till 15th July. Click here to buy.
Safal Niveshak turns fifteen today.
I still find it hard to believe when I say it out loud. Most things in my life, including some opinions and even some friendships, have not lasted fifteen years. But this small corner of the internet, somehow, has.
Now, I want to be careful with that word ‘somehow’, because it is doing a lot of work in that sentence. When something lasts this long, people assume there must have been discipline behind it. They use words like ‘grit’, ‘perseverance’, or ‘staying power’ to describe it. And I have received emails over the years saying as much. But every time I read one, I feel like a bit of a fraud.
Because the truth is that staying with Safal Niveshak has never required courage from me. On the contrary, it has been the easiest thing in my life.
I have kept coming back to this work for fifteen years for the same reason a man who loves his morning tea keeps returning to it every day. It’s not out of willpower, but because he loves it. In the same way, I stumbled into work that I love doing for its own sake, and once that happened, continuing was never really a choice I had to make.
I heard the podcaster David Senra say something recently that put this better than I could have. People often say that if you love what you do, you would do it for free. Senra says there is a level beyond that. If you really love your work, “they couldn’t pay you to stop.”
When I heard it, I laughed out loud, because after fifteen years I finally had the right words. Thankfully, nobody has offered to pay me to stop writing Safal Niveshak. But if someone did, I already know my answer.
Senra also said he does not want to do his work for ten or fifteen years, but forever. That is exactly how today feels to me. Fifteen was never a milestone I was walking towards. There was never a finish line in this. There was only the walk.
So, if anything, these years have made me suspicious of how much credit we give people for persistence. I think much of what looks like perseverance from the outside is simply someone who got lucky enough to find the thing they cannot help doing.
So, I believe that the real lottery is not in the staying, but in the finding. And I did nothing clever to win it. I just happened to trip over my thing early, in 2011, and had a family patient enough to let me keep at it through the years when it earned very little and proved even less.
That is what I find myself thinking about today. Not what I built, but how much of it was given by:
- Readers who forwarded my posts to their friends in 2011 and 2012, when I had no other way of being found;
- Strangers who wrote back to a nobody’s newsletter and made me feel the writing mattered;
- My wife, who absorbed the financial uncertainty of those early years without ever once asking me to go back to a proper job, though she had every right to;
- My children, who grew up sharing their father with a website and never held it against me; and
- Teachers I never met, including Buffett, Munger, and Krishnamurti, whose thoughts I have spent fifteen years borrowing, rearranging, and passing along, often getting more credit for them than I deserved.
Take all of that away and there is no Safal Niveshak. There is just a man with opinions, typing.
For years, this last part made me uncomfortable. What right did I have to teach when so little of what I said was new? Then I came across a line in Stephen Nachmanovitch’s Free Play that settled the question for me. He wrote:
The creative process is a spiritual path. This adventure is about us, about the deep self, the composer in all of us, about originality, meaning not that which is all new, but that which is fully and originally ourselves.
That is the only originality I can claim. Nothing I have written here in fifteen years was new. But all of it, the good and the clumsy, was fully and honestly me. Perhaps that is why some of you stayed.
Anyway, my own body added its lesson a few months ago. When your heart makes you slow down, as mine did, you stop assuming there will always be a next year to continue in. Since then, I have held this work a little more loosely. Strangely, that has made me love it more, not less. Every ordinary morning at this desk now feels slightly less ordinary.
I do not have a grand lesson for you on Safal Niveshak’s fifteenth birthday. But if there is one thing these years have taught me, it is that when you find work that pulls you back to it without needing motivation or a five-year plan, pay attention. That pull is worth more than any opportunity, any payoff, or any applause.
Most of the good things in my life have come from following it, and most of my regrets have come from ignoring it in favour of something that merely looked impressive.
Kabir said this centuries ago:
धीरे-धीरे रे मना, धीरे सब कुछ होय। माली सींचे सौ घड़ा, ऋतु आए फल होय॥
Translation: Slowly, slowly, O mind, everything happens in its own time. The gardener may water the plant with a hundred pots, but the fruit comes only in its season.
I have been at most a gardener here, and not even the only one. Many hands have watered this plant.
I wrote last year that freedom for me has never been about doing whatever I want, but about not having to do what I do not want. That has cost me money over the years, and I know it. I would pay it again.
Thank you, dear reader, for reading my work, for writing back, and for putting up with me repeating myself. Some of you have been doing this for over a decade now. I do not know what I did to deserve that kind of patience, but I am grateful for it, more than I usually manage to say.
If Safal Niveshak has meant something to you in these fifteen years, please tell me about it in the Comments below. I read everything, and today of all days, hearing from you would mean a lot.
Here is to the next stretch of the walk, my friend. I am in no hurry, and I hope you are not either.
With gratitude,
Vishal
P.S. Birthdays are for giving, and books are the only gifts I know how to make. To mark fifteen years, all three of my books are at up to 25% off till 15th July. You can find them here. And if you already own them, please ignore this entirely and accept my thanks once again.
Leave a Reply