Life

Being locked down at home isn’t something new or unusual for me. I have been working from home for the past nine years. And when I say working from home, I mean consciously being locked down, with my eyes in my books or on the computer screen and my hands on the keyboard most of the time.

However, this situation is unusual for my kids. Like all kids, they are finding it uneasy not being able to meet their friends and go out and play, though they understand the responsibility of not doing so as of now.

So, one of my responsibility as a “locked-at-home-father-with-locked-at-home-kids” is to come up with ideas to keep them from getting bored. And one of those ideas has been for our kids to tell us stories that they have read or heard. It’s like they are enacting as parents and me and my wife as kids, waiting to hear good night stories before we sleep.

Here is a story my eight-year-old told us last night, which I thought had a great lesson for most of us chasing success, fame, wealth, and everything that we think makes life better.

[Read more…] about Life is Easy. Why Do We Make It So Hard?

I have not yet read Matt Haig’s book Reasons to Stay Alive, but here is an excerpt a friend shared, which instantly touched a chord –

The world is increasingly designed to depress us. Happiness isn’t very good for the economy. If we were happy with what we had, why would we need more? How do you sell an anti-ageing moisturiser? You make someone worry about ageing. How do you get people to vote for a political party? You make them worry about immigration. How do you get them to buy insurance? By making them worry about everything. How do you get them to have plastic surgery? By highlighting their physical flaws. How do you get them to watch a TV show? By making them worry about missing out. How do you get them to buy a new smartphone? By making them feel like they are being left behind.

To be calm becomes a kind of revolutionary act. To be happy with your own non-upgraded existence. To be comfortable with our messy, human selves, would not be good for business.

[Read more…] about What Nobody Told You About Financial Freedom

I wish you a very happy, healthy, peaceful, and fulfilling 2020.

Life’s moving really fast (it’s nearly nine years since I started Safal Niveshak), so let me not waste another moment and thank you for being here for me.

As I begin 2020, here are a few things I aspire to do each day. These are more of notes to myself than advice to anyone. But if you wish to take it, I won’t mind at all. 🙂

Here I start.

[Read more…] about Ten Rules to Live By in 2020

Dear Tribe Member,

Trust 2019 treated you well. It certainly was good for Safal Niveshak. The tribe crossed 60,000 members.

Anyways, right before the year ends, I thought I’d share a handful of ideas I’ve learned, re-learned, and wrote about in the past twelve months. Here are 51 of them categorized under the subjects of investing, learning, and life. I hope you find these useful, as much as I did.

[Read more…] about 51 Ideas from 2019

Okay, people change all the time.

School back-benchers turn around, finish college with top scores, get jobs or start businesses and lead mature, responsible lives.

Introverts move out of their shyness and make friends.

Stammerers get over their difficulties and become great speakers.

Alcoholics stop drinking and become mature.

Criminals convert to religion and leave the life of crime behind.

Lazy and selfish people become altruistic and devote their lives to the service of others.

Sinners become saints.

Traders who cannot see beyond an hour become investors (rare, but still) who see beyond years.

[Read more…] about People Don’t Change

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