Life in Bangalore

 “It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare, it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.” ….Seneca "Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things 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." … —H. Jackson Brown Dreams Aren't those That You Have when You are Asleep, Dreams are Those that Don't Let You Sleep till They are Fulfilled...AKON “Knowing is not enough, we must apply. Willing is not enough, we must do.” …Bruce Lee “I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”- Bruce Lee “When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got be twenty-one,I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years”…Mark Twain If you can’t explain it s

Dave Ramsey , personal finance guru knows it better about Debts than most of us all…Dave has personally helped thousands of people come out of the financial abyss, through his Books, Seminars, TV shows and Radio talks One of his controversial technique is the “debt snowball plan”…a plan to get people out of the debt. The traditional and common-sense approach to debt elimination is ….if you are faced with a mountain of debts , rank them in priority of the interest rates or the quantum of loans… and then proceed to close them off in that order from the Top. This is the analytically unquestionable  way to resolve debts. The problem though is ..it works only on paper…When the rubber hits the road , most people fall by wayside to the common-sense approach of getting rid of debts..why?  If you do it by the "biggest debt first" approach, it gets way too long to see the debt cleared…and Oh Boy..Man cannot wait for that….Don’t get me wrong…Man is anything but rational because Co

In the post-1  of Your Money or Your Life book review, we saw about the fulfillment curve that is emphasized again and again in the book . “How much money is enough? “ to lead a life of Living is indeed a very tough question …Is it not? What is enough for one individual may not be enough for another …To help answer this question of fulfillment, Vicki Robin provides an interesting analogy between personal finance and dieting. For the starters, Diet simply is not the solution for weight loss… what !!! If Diet is not the cure , then what is ?...Being conscious of what you eat is the cure…so instead of dieting , the experts recommend the following: 1)       Eat when you’re hungry 2)       Eat exactly what your body wants 3)       Eat each bit consciously 4)       Stop when your body has had enough Sounds Simple…is it not? It is all about being conscious and mindful ! Looking at the dieting  analogy and applying it for personal finance , the equivalent steps can be:

  In the past of couple of posts ( Your Money or Your Life ), we saw about how the book Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) , explains our (easy/uneasy) relationship with money .I will use this post just to reiterate the need for this book in each of your life… Please take some 2 minutes to answer the questions below…surely, the questions are not mine…(I am not smart enough!) …It comes straight from the YMYL book…these are closed ended questions requiring just an Yes or No So ready…steady…Here you go! 1)       Do you have enough Money? 2)       Are you spending enough time with family and friends? 3)       Do you come home from your job full of life? 4)       Do you have time to participate in things you believe are worthwhile? 5)       If you were laid off from your job, would you see it as an opportunity? 6)       Are you satisfied with the contribution you have made to the world? 7)       Are you at peace with your money? 8)       Does your job relate to you

“When you first start to study a field, it seems like you have to memorize a zillion things. You don’t. What you need is to identify the core principles – generally three to twelve of them – that govern the field. The million things you thought you had to memorize are simply various combinations of the core principles.”—John T. Reed “Everything in the middle looks like a Failure” ...Rosabeth Moss Kanter “Ego = 1/Knowledge” …Albert Einstein “I can accept failure…I can’t accept not trying” …Michael Jordan “Holding on to anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die” …Lord Buddha “I’ve learned that People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel” … Maya Angelou “When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive – to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love” …Marcus Aurelius “Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished” …Lao Tzu "The m

The problem of Change is always the same…be it with Self, Organization or the Society … It boils down to : Can you get people to start behaving in a different way? And it all lies in our mind. To get a better insight of mind at work, Authors Dan and Chip Heath through their book "Switch" provide this  interesting analogy: Imagine a 6-tonne Elephant with a Rider perched on top of it …and then there is   a Path (Change !) that the Rider & Elephant need to take to. Emotional side of the brain is the Elephant & our rational side is the Rider. While the Rider seems to be on the top of the Elephant …he is too small relative the Elephant. Anytime the 6-tonne Elephant and the Rider disagree about which direction to go, Rider is going to lose.  Take your own experience of daily exercise..the rational Rider in you tells that you need to do it daily for a long-term health benefit. The emotional Elephant in you that looks for a instant gratification would want to sleep

For old timers like me, John McEnroe is vivid in our memory…for his outbursts! That’s outrageous because , John McEnroe was supremely talented tennis player who could turn a game on its head any given day. In the 1984 French Open, McEnroe lost to Ivan Lendl after leading two sets to none…According to McEnroe, it was not his fault…An NBC cameraman had taken off his headset and a noise started coming from the side of the court ! So  Mr. McEnroe ,why did you not train to improve your ability to concentrate or emotional control ? According to Carol Dweck, the Stanford University psychologist , John McEnroe had a fixed mindset…that made him to believe that he was special, superior and entitled. Then there is Michael Jordan…”Superman”..”God in person”…”Jesus in tennis shoes” …according to his fans. Jordan does not think that way…He knew how hard he had to work and develop his abilities. He was not inherently better than others …He had to struggle and grow. This was evident in the h