Life

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.

[Read more…] about Doing the Work is NOT Enough

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

Here is a story I shared with my daughter yesterday and thought this deserves to be shared with a wider audience. It’s that good!

This story is from the life of Charlie Munger, from long before he was rich and famous, and before he had such a large and happy family –

Image Source: Poor Charlie’s Almanack; Photograph is of Charlie celebrating his forty-fifth wedding anniversary with his family in 2001
The story dates to 1953 when Charlie, then 29 years old, got divorced from his (first) wife of eight years. Divorce had a huge social stigma attached at that time and it was the first blow for Munger.

His wife also got almost everything in the separation, including the house. Charlie’s friends revealed that he moved into “dreadful” conditions after this divorce.

[Read more…] about A Story of Courage and Hope from the Life of Charlie Munger

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