Life

The last time I wrote a long letter to my daughter was when she was less than eight years old. She completes sixteen today, and being a teacher (with a man-with-the-hammer syndrome) I could not think of anything better to offer her than sixteen lessons on living a good life.

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Wish you a very happy birthday.

The last time I wrote a letter like this to you, I rued the passing of the first seven-and-a-half years of your life, which went by like the blink of an eye.

Now, as I write this, another eight-and-a-half years have passed, and the thought is bittersweet. As you move further away from my protective arms, I worry about how the world will change you.

Over these past sixteen years, you have gone from being my newborn princess cradled in my arms to my little princess experiencing the joy and independence that life can bring. You are smart, strong-headed, bold and confident, and I can already visualize the wonderful woman you will be one day.

And like I wrote to you in my last long letter, being a father to you has helped me discover my own potential, and that was important because there was no other way I could have showed you by example how I want you to live your life.

Today, as you complete sixteen years, I wish to offer you sixteen lessons on living a good life. As you go through these lessons, I hope you remember that you will always be my greatest gift and one of my most significant achievements in my life. I share these lessons with you in hopes that they will serve as a compass on your journey through life, helping you to pave your path, achieve your dreams, and find your joy.

Here I go.

1. Love yourself above all else: Your worth is not determined by your looks, your weight, or by some other person in your life. You do not have to be prettier, smarter, cooler, quieter, or stronger than you are. Never wait for someone to make you feel complete – because you are already whole. You are enough – just as you are. And so, always love the person you are.

2. Choose joy: While happiness happens to us, joy is a choice we make. Happiness depends on external factors. Even though we may seek it, desire it, pursue it, etc., feeling happiness is not a choice we make. Joy, on the other hand, is more than emotion. It is an attitude. It’s a lens to see the world through. Learn to take every moment as grace. It’s a choice you make. And with this choice, you will get to joy.

3. Don’t change who you are to fit in: Be true to yourself, live your own dreams, and be proud of what makes you unique instead of feeling the pressure to follow the crowd. Have friends you can talk to and associate with, but beware of changing who you are to fit in with a certain group of people.

4. Have courage: Life is not always easy. But you get through it with courage. There will be times in your life where you’d rather hide or run or bury your head in the sand than face whatever challenge is in your way. In those times, I want you to remember to be brave and show courage. Also, do not be afraid to take risks. You can accomplish great things by taking the right kind of risks. Do not also be afraid to make mistakes, but make sure you learn from them. There are, after all, no mistakes…only lessons. Most importantly, when you fail, get back up, dust yourself off, and try again.

5. Be kind, always: Put kindness first. Kindness is when you empathise with others in their troubles, when you treat others the way they want to be treated, when you think and act selflessly without expecting anything in return, when you appreciate others for their work, when you forgive others for their mistakes, and when you carefully listen to someone sharing their problems. “Everyone you meet is fighting a battle, everyone’s lonesome,” said Marion Parker. Given this, learn to deal kindly and compassionately with others. That is your only hope to happily live yourself and leave this world a better place than you found it.

6. Live with acceptance: Life is unpredictable. You will not always get what you want. A lot of things can happen that will transform who you are and have an impact on your life. Cultivate the ability to truly accept whatever comes and embrace it. Of course, life will bring many challenges, and it is not easy to embrace them when you are suffering and wishing those things would have never happened. But if you start cultivating acceptance in your life, you will likely cope with future crises in a different way and view them from a different perspective. Now, acceptance does not mean that you are resigned to a life of just putting up with things. Acceptance is not resignation, failure, or agreement. It is simply accepting the truth and allowing things to be as they are. That approach to life is truly liberating.

7. Seize each day: When Steve Jobs was your age, as he shared in his commencement speech at Stanford University in 2005, he read a quote that went something like: ‘If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.’ This is what Jobs told the students – “It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past thirty-three years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?’ And whenever the answer has been ‘No’ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.” Keep this perspective that you don’t live forever and should focus on doing what really matters, today. This moment, this day, is all you have. Seize it.

8. Embrace your imperfections: As we wade through life’s muddled waters, especially as young adults, we tend deep down to be hopeful that we will eventually manage to settle down well and find perfection in a number of areas. We dream of one day securing healthy relationships, deeply fulfilling work, happy family life, and the respect of others. But life, as it is, has a habit of springing surprises, and rushing us in its overwhelming tide. It sometimes deals us a range of blows, leaving our dreams shattered. And like a favorite cup or plate, we sometimes crack. We may even break.

Obviously, you must not throw yourself away when this happens. Instead, you can relish the blemishes and learn to turn these scars into art – like ‘kintsugi,’ an ancient Japanese practice that beautifies broken pottery. In Zen aesthetics, the broken pieces of a ceramic pot should be carefully picked up, reassembled, and then glued together with lacquer inflected with gold powder. The Japanese believe the golden cracks make the pieces even more valuable. It embraces the breakage as part of the object’s history, instead of something unacceptable to be hidden or thrown away.

It is beautiful to think of kintsugi as a metaphor for your life, to see the broken, difficult, or painful parts of you as radiating light, gold, and beauty. It teaches that your broken places make you stronger and better than ever before. The times when you get hurt and broken, you can feel totally rotten. But there can also be a strange beauty in the way you process the cracks in your life and the lessons you take from them afterward. You can decide to cover up, or you can decide to walk out into the world as yourself, with your cracks shining gold.

9. Find your true desire, then live it: In a thought-provoking lecture many years ago, British philosopher and writer Alan Watts told the audience this –

Students…come to me and say, ‘We’re getting out of college and we have the faintest idea of what we want to do.’ I always ask the question, what would you like to do if money were no object? How would you really enjoy spending your life? …Students say, we’d like to be painters, we’d like to be poets, we’d like to be writers, but as everybody knows, you can’t earn any money that way. Let’s go through with it, what do you want to do? When we finally got down to something which the individual says he really wants to do, I will say to him: you do that and forget the money. Because if you say that getting the money is the most important thing you will spend your life completely wasting your time. You’ll be doing things you don’t like doing in order to go on living that is to go on doing things you don’t like doing, which is stupid. Better to have a short life full of what you like doing, than a long life, spent in a miserable way. After all if you really like what you’re doing, it doesn’t matter what it is, you can eventually become a master of it. The only way to become a master of something is to be really with it. And then you’ll be able to get a good fee for whatever it is…Therefore, it’s so important to consider this question: What do I desire?

What you desire is the reason for which you get up in the morning. Go, search for it. And till you find it, keep looking and do not settle.

10. Live with an inner scorecard: Never let anyone tell you can’t do something or measure you up on whatever you have done. That’s like living with an outer scorecard, which is an external measure of success that attempts to answer elusive questions like, “What do people think of me, my success, my image?” Maintaining an Outer Scorecard means being concerned by how the world sees you and thinks of you, and then acting according to that. Inner Scorecard is intrinsic. It defines who you are at the core of your values and beliefs. When you live with an Inner Scorecard, you focus on being the most authentic version of yourself and doing the right things instead of what other people think you should do. The world is indifferent to what we often want. But if you can find joy and satisfaction in your work, because you live with an Inner Scorecard, you will not need to look anywhere else for happiness but within.

11. Love your family: Few people in this life will provide you unconditional love and support that your family will provide. Now, there are two types of family I am talking about. The family you were born with and the family you will choose to keep — your closest friends. Whether you are family by birth or choice, the bond is forever.

Invest in your friendships because this investment will stay with you forever. Your true friends will love and care for you despite your flaws and imperfections. They will pick you up when you fall and will be your greatest champion. Your family will elevate you to achieve all your dreams and life’s ambitions. Regardless of where you end up in life, it would be best if you always remembered where you come from.

12. Live like a verb, not a noun: I recently came across this thought-provoking paragraph from the English actor, comedian, and writer Stephen Fry, while browsing a notebook I had scribbled thoughts in some years ago – “Oscar Wilde said that if you know what you want to be, then you inevitably become it. That is your punishment. But if you never know, then you can be anything. There is a truth to that. We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing — an actor, a writer — I am a person who does things — I write, I act — and I never know what I am going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun.”

Learn to give yourself permission to ‘do’ what brings you the greatest joy – except, say, getting involved in drugs etc. That’s the way you will find satisfaction in life. What will lead you to a fulfilling life isn’t the nouns you may use for yourself – dancer, writer, investor, teacher – but the verbs you will be – the growing, learning, and pursuing that will happen in the process.

13. Forgive over and over and over: You are going to have your heartbroken. Whether it’s a fall out with a friend you thought you were close with, or that career that you wish you got. It’s life, it’s going to happen. Take it for the lesson it was and move on. And never hold on to grudges against others and yourself. When we harbor unforgiveness and blame others for all our misery, it slowly eats us away, breeding hatred, and destroying our relationship with that other person, and also with our inner self. But when you decide to forgive, it is like an instant miraculous healing process. It is the key to moving on.

When people do not act as you would wish them to, exercise the muscles of your good nature by shrugging your shoulders and saying to yourself “Oh well.” Then let the incident go. Also, try to be as kind to yourself as possible, by forgiving yourself for mistakes made. The Greek philosopher Epictetus advised, “Do not measure yourself against others or even against your ideal self. Human betterment is a gradual, two-steps-forward, one-step-back effort. When you learn to forgive, others and yourself, and let go, you will be surprised to discover the lightness and freedom that unfold thereafter from within you. Forgiveness won’t necessarily erase all your pain. But it does mean that the hurt is no longer center stage.

14. Take good care of your health: I know you feel invincible now, but you will not always feel that way. Your health is important, much more important than you think. Eat right and stay active. Go on walks, run if you want to. Go to bed at a decent time. You will thank your older self later.

15. Do not take life so seriously: At your age, you know this better than me. But lest you forget as you grow up, remember to always have fun. Our DNA is 96% chimpanzee, so what’s the point of taking life any seriously than a chimp does? Laugh at yourself when you make mistakes. Do not worry about things you cannot control.

You get around 80-90 trips around the sun. Embrace them and enjoy your ride to the fullest. 99% of what you will think as problems won’t even be real problems anyway, just situations your mind would make into some big and unnecessary drama. So, remember to relax. Do not live in your head so much.

16. Chop wood, carry water: Let me tell you a story. A young boy became a monk. He dreamed of enlightenment and of learning great things. When he got to the monastery he was told that each morning he had to chop wood for the monks’ fires and then carry water up to the monastery for ablutions and the kitchen. He attended prayers and meditation, but the teaching he was given was rather sparse. One day he was told to take some tea to the Abbot (head of the monastery). He did so and the Abbot saw he looked sad and asked him why. He replied, “Every day, all I do is chop wood and carry water. I want to learn. I want to understand things. I want to be great one day, like you.” The Abbot said, “When I started I was like you. Every day I would chop wood and carry water. Like you, I understood that someone had to do these things, but like you, I wanted to move forward. Eventually, I did. I read all of the scriptures, I met with Kings and gave council. I became the Abbot. Now, I understand that the key to everything is that everything is chopping wood and carrying water and that if one does everything mindfully then it is all the same.”

Many of us get caught up in the end results of what we’re working toward or the way things will be when we finally achieve something. Many of us think that once we achieve some future state – promotion, financial independence, enlightenment, the top of the mountain, etc. – we will finally be content. We tend to live in the future or the past … in our heads. But the truth is that none of these destinations will bring lasting contentment. Further, getting to where we want to go or being successful doesn’t mean that the work that led us there goes away. Instead, we must realize that contentment can only be found in every ‘now,’ in being fully present with ordinary daily activities – with chopping wood and carrying water. When you’re able to find fulfillment in these ordinary activities, you can finally be at peace in life.

So, these were my sixteen lessons for you, Kavya

Even as you take these lessons, it’s your own life to live, so live by your own means.

Being alive means we must make the most of the life we are entrusted with, Life is not ours to possess – it is a precious gift that we must treat as if it were placed in our care. And whatever lifespan we are given, we must take the utmost care to give it back.

Remember that life’s worth is not measured by its duration – long or short. What is important is how you use the life you are given.

The experiences, the suffering, and the pain you are going to endure over the next few years will make you the adult that you are going to become. It might seem harsh and unfair at the time but in the end, it will turn out to be one of the biggest gifts of your life and you will remember these years forever.

You will soon learn about what you really can achieve when you set your heart, your mind, and every muscle in your body to it. Because remember, you are enough. And I love you.

Happy birthday once again.

Love,
Papa

This is not a post on investing or human behaviour.

It’s on starting up, which has helped me become a better behaved investor.

I recently shared on Twitter a few lessons on starting up from my personal experience of the last ten years. Here is a slightly detailed version of the same –

1. When you start up, say yes to everything that comes your way. Opening your doors means the world will come to you. Over time, you will get to choose which door you enter, so you then need to learn to say no. When I started in 2011 as a content writer, I said yes to writing stuff that I did not like and that paid peanuts. But that helped me run my house partly, while I was building something I could be proud of (Safal Niveshak). Over time, I learned to say no to a lot of things that could have helped me earned more money but would have led me to the slippery slope of unhappiness.
    

2. Try as much NOT to have a Plan B that you can go to if Plan A fails. With no Plan B to fall back upon, I had just one path to walk upon, and I am still walking on that very path. All you need to not have a Plan B is a Plan A that you believe in completely. It’s like your backbone. You’re willing to fight for it.
    

3. Sometimes you might have a solution that people want, but you need to stick it out long enough so that people come to trust you. So, once you have taken the plunge, DO NOT give up. Things get scary at times but persist for the time you’ve pre-decided upon. And it should not be a few weeks or months. I gave myself two years’ time to see the fruits of my work show up. Good things take time. But if you keep working on things that you believe in, and what many people will pay you for, keep at it. It took me more than 15 months to move up from the bottom of the curve, but it was worth the wait.
    

4. Even when you have decided to persist, set a timeline to accept that things may not work out the way you expected. Try multiple ideas, and learn from what did not work for you and what did. Kill what doesn’t work, and get better at what does. Writing for others didn’t keep me happy for long. Writing for myself did. And that’s what I worked on, and on, and on.
    

5. Start small. People try to build their new business into a massive launch, but this is a mistake. Start as small as possible, giving a minimum viable product to a few friends, and let them test it out. Better, take a leaf out of Seth Godin’s book, The Purple Cow, and build a ‘minimum remarkable product’. I started very small in 2011, with just one idea, a blog, and have remained small ever since. To my distracted mind, that gives the ability to focus hard on what matters. Being small hasn’t just been a stepping stone for me, it’s been my journey, my destination, everything.
    

6. You would be more than lucky to execute on just one simple idea or revenue stream, let alone three or four. So, focus on just one idea to start, and give your heart and soul to it. Like Charlie Munger said, “Take a simple idea and take it seriously.”
    

7. Experiment as much as you want, just ensure that none of the experiments must burn you out or kill you financially. No one knows you at the start, so experimenting and then failing should not worry you anyways. Despite no steady revenue stream, and uncertainty about the future, my first revenue generating model of conducting workshops was open-priced. People could pay anything, whatever they wanted to pay after the workshop. Some paid nothing, some paid next to nothing, but thanks to a few kind souls, I always covered my expenses and kept some tiny amount back. I did that for almost two years, and that’s the most memorable model I’ve worked upon since then.
    

8. Aim to be truly loved by a few you serve than be liked by thousands. True love is rare, so even if you can find just people 100 people who love your work so they will talk about it with their friends, you’ve hit the ball out of the park. This is also what I learned from my father. He always said that the best life one could live was not one in which a person did big, great things that influenced the lives of millions, but one in which you made a difference in the part of the world you touched, no matter how small. He said that a life in which you helped only one person because that was the only opportunity you had to help someone else was just as great a life as that of someone who changed the lives of millions. Safal Niveshak had very few readers by the end of six months, the first of them being my father. But I wrote almost daily. And he loved what I wrote. And so I tried to write more and better for him, and he became that person whom I had in my mind whenever I sat down to write my posts. He’s no more, but that’s the plan I still follow.
    

9. Don’t spend on SEO or social media marketing. These are bottomless money pits, and don’t add any value for your customers. Let your work – your blog, product, service – speak for you and bring in people. I’ve done basic SEO work on my site, and on my own, and that has worked well so far for 10 years. By the way, as I type this, there are 1,774,777,646 websites online right now in the world, many vying for the same audience. That’s the competition and everyone wants to be ranked #1. No SEO can take you there. Only your work can. Like if you search for “value investing course”, Safal Niveshak is the first non-advertised website on Google. For “value investing”, Safal Niveshak is on page one. All this without spending a single rupee on SEO or online marketing over the past ten years. By the way, these ranks mean nothing to me, but I just shared to show why your work matters more than any marketing.
    

10. While you don’t need to spend money on marketing, you must still learn to sell, that is to positively convince, influence, inspire people to buy what you are building. If you can build but cannot sell, you won’t get much done. Your work should be your best salesperson. All I have done over the past 10 years is work (write). No advertising, no networking, nothing. Just plain simple work. And it seems to have paid fine. By the way, one of the best ways to sell well is to write well, clearly and simply…as if you’re talking to your friend. Clear writing also helps in clarifying the thought process. So, learn to write.
     

11. Do your best work, and forget about numbers, especially targets like page views, subscribers, revenues, etc. Those are meaningless, especially when you are starting out. Instead, worry about how much you’re helping people. You can’t put numbers on those things. All I have tried to do all these years at Safal Niveshak is create an abundance of confidence by giving away a large amount of value for free so people trust me in return. And, in my work, there is nothing more precious to me that that trust. I hold as tight to it as I do to my integrity and reputation.
     

12. Get ready to be alone and lose friends. While family and close friends will always be supportive, most others may not understand the work it takes to build something from scratch. I lived such a life after starting up. Looking back, I do not regret any moment of it.
     

13. Practice lean living at least a year before you start out. Instant compromises are heart breaking! Save money to use as initial capital, and keep expenses low. Bootstrap as much as possible. Don’t borrow money till you aren’t generating cash. Try not to borrow at all. Spending other people’s money may sound great, but there’s a noose attached. You give up control. When you turn to outsiders for funding, you have to answer to them too. That’s fine at first, when everyone agrees. But what happens down the road? Well, often, it’s not a happy question to answer. Also, not having enough money of your own is a way of not having a Plan B, because that will lead you to work harder on building something so great that people will pay for it in advance, that they’ll eagerly sign up to use what you’re making.
     

14. If you believe in your work and the ways of doing it, ignore the critics, keep your head down, and quietly do your work. People ready to pull you down are everywhere. Remember Theodore Roosevelt’s famous ‘The Man in the Arena’ talk wherein he said – “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” This talk has been one of my saviors all these years.
     

15. Don’t believe people who tell you – “How I started up on my own, doubled my income and cut my hours in half”…or something like this. They will not help you if you reach a point of no return. Learn from others, but believe in just yourself and your work.
     

16. Build your work around the life you want to have. Avoid being a workaholic and make time for family, leisure, and self-care. Don’t forgo sleep. It’s easy to get caught up in the challenges of starting up. But it’s also easy to fall into the habit of making it your only priority.
     

17. Celebrate little wins. I clapped for myself every time someone subscribed to my free newsletter in those early days. And mostly one person subscribed on most days. Initially, the wins are slow and infrequent. But celebrating in your own little ways will keep you charged up.
     

18. Never compromise on what you set out to do, and the way you set out to do it. Never walk the path that may lead you to regrets. Hold tight on integrity. Avoid short cuts. Say no to what would not let you sleep peacefully at night, even if that seems lucrative financially.
     

19. Learn to be okay with NOT knowing. You will not know what will happen with your business. World is changing. Your business will change. You will change. You don’t know anything, really, and that’s fine. Just keep working on what keeps you happy when you wake up everyday.
     

20. Enjoy the journey, with all its speed breakers and potholes. Avoid getting caught up in the black and white of success and failure. Don’t forget to enjoy what you are doing. Forget about success and failure. They are just two imposters. Stay the course. Enjoy the scenery.

That’s all I have to share as of now.

Mark Twain is quoted as saying – “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”

If you have been waiting to start out for long, know that there will never be a perfect time to do anything. Do something and stick to it. And yes, you don’t have to quit your day job to start something, just as you don’t have to drop out of college to do so. You have weekends and evenings and all that time you’re online.

A Few Resources on Starting Up:

• Seth Godin’s Blog
• How to Get Rich: Naval Ravikant
• Paul Graham’s Essays
• Rework by Jason Fried
• The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
• Zero to One by Peter Thiel
• The $100 Startup by Chris Guillebeau
• Business Model Generation by Alexander Osterwalder
• Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss
• The Hard Thing about Hard Thing by Ben Horowitz
• Talk to business owners who have survived 10+ years 🙂

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Stay safe.

With respect,
— Vishal