Life

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

I have a ritual of writing a note to myself on every birthday, and this is one of those for I complete forty years in my present state of existence on this Pale Blue Dot.

Life’s passing by too fast, or so it seems. I’m not usually one to make a big deal about my birthday, but as always, it has given me an opportunity to reflect.

“How in the world did that happen?” I asked my wife this morning as she woke me up from my slumber. It seems like yesterday I was twenty, just into college, and with no idea about where life was about to take me (still no idea!).

[Read more…] about The 40th Lesson

“Alexa, how can I get rich?” he asked staring at a speaker kept at a distance.

Nothing happened for a few seconds.

“Alexa! Alexa!” he shouted.

Nothing happened even then.

“Huh!” he blurted in frustration and went back to his playful ways.

This is a small conversation I heard of a 9-year old at our Camp Millionaire workshop in Mumbai on Sunday during a small break before we play musical chairs to explain kids the concept of demand and supply.

Well, the speaker on the other side of the intended conversation was not Alexa – virtual assistant developed by Amazon – but a plain one that operated on Bluetooth. But this 9-year old mistook it for one, and thus wanted to start a conversation to a get a quick response to his question. The question, however, sounded more like a command.

[Read more…] about Alexa, How Can I Get Rich?

One of the most profound thoughts I’ve ever read on the child-parent relationship comes from the noted Lebanese-American artist and poet Kahlil Gibran, who wrote the following under the title “On Children” –

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.

The first time I read these thoughts, my first reaction was – “If my children are not my children, then whose are they? And what do you mean they are not mine?”

[Read more…] about One Big Investing Lesson I Learned Late in My Life

You seem to be stressed out today?” asked my Yoga teacher, a gentleman in his late fifties.

“Oh, not really!” I said.

“No, you look a bit stressed. Are you unwell?”

“Not at all. Just feeling a bit confused.”

“May I help?”

“Knowing you, I think you can.”

“Shoot!”

“You see, I have been a stock market investor for many years now, and now also don the role of a teacher trying to help people make saner and better investment decisions. But I am often faced with a dissonance.”

“And what’s that?”

[Read more…] about 3 Iron Rules of Life and Investing

For my twin toddlers, the instant attention-grabbing words are — Once upon a time. They drop everything and dash to whoever uttered those words.

It’s my only weapon to break their fights and tantrums. But once those words slip out then there is no escape.

“Tell me the story, Papa. Please tell me the story.” To their relentless prodding, I give in every time.

It doesn’t matter how interesting or boring the story is. Neither does it matter if I am telling them the same narrative for the hundredth time. Fed up they’re not. Any pause to catch my breath is cut short by an impatient stare demanding an exciting twist in the tale. Their eyes widen as if it’s not the ears but eyes they’re listening with.

Kids are suckers for stories. So are adults. Aren’t we?

The content may change but the fascination for stories is deeply ingrained trait that evolution has bestowed on the human brain.
[Read more…] about On Stories We Tell

There is a story, not often told, in Mahabharata where the eldest of the Pandavas, Yudhishthira, comes upon a lake and finds that his brothers lay dead on its banks.

Before beginning the search into his brothers’ murder, the prince in exile finds himself burning with thirst and reaches into the lake to drink, not knowing that it was drinking from the lake that brought his brothers’ end.

At that moment a celestial appears, a Yaksha, no god or angel but instead a presence of power presiding over the lake. The Yaksha warns Yudhisthira not to drink lest he suffers the fate of his brothers.

He has an alternative: Yudhisthira can instead answer Yaksha’s questions. There are said to be eighteen questions that Yaksha asked Yudhisthira, but here is the one that concerns what I am writing today.

[Read more…] about Meditations on Mortality in Life and Investing