Quotable Quotes

 “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 simply, you have not understood well  enough” …Albert Einstein

"Never give up on a dream just because of the length of time it will take to accomplish it. The time will pass anyway…—H. Jackson Brown

Trick your mind!

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 Common sense is anything but common….

Dave Ramsey calls debt clearance as  20% head knowledge and 80% behavior!…so he lays the following debt clearance plan out: “List your debts in order with the smallest payoff or balance first. Do not be concerned with interest rates or terms unless two debts have similar payoffs, then list the higher interest rate debt first. The principle is to stop everything except minimum payments and focus on one thing at a time..Paying the little debts off first gives you quick feedback, and you are more likely to stay with the plan.”

According to Ramsey, “You need quick wins to stay pumped up enough…When you start knocking off those easy debts , you will start to see results and you will start to win in debt reduction” .

 So do you understand the trick that is at play here? …Anytime you think of a change to be done, be it your physical exercise routine or a new diet routine or learning a new language :

1)      Start Small & Gain a quick win

2)      Increment small 

3)      Stay in the game without a break to above two routines

You are going to see through the Change ! You are going to sail through it without Pain! 

Trick is to trick the brain…with quick wins to stay long enough in the game!

Your Money or Your Life – Post 4

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:

1)      Spend to satisfy you needs

2)      Okay..Okay…And then you are allowed some luxury in your life…spend a bit on your wants

3)      Spend each rupee/dollar/pound consciously…(remember Life Energy = how much hours of your life you have traded for to buy this item)

4)      Spend only “Enough”

a.       Did I receive fulfillment, satisfaction and value in proportion to the life energy spent?

b.      Is this expenditure of life energy in alignment with my values and life purpose?

c.       How might this expenditure change if I didn’t have to work for a living?

In the Post-2  we saw the tool to track every expense that looked something like this :

	Total Rupees/Dollars	Hours of Life energy
Rent
Electricity
Groceries
Eating out
Fuel
Vehicle expenses

                                                       *Hour of Life energy = Expense in Rupees or Dollars

                                                                             Actual  Hourly rate (Rupees or Dollars)

This should be a pretty simple exercise , as long as you have recorded the daily expenses….

Now comes the clincher of the book…answering “how much is enough?” … 3 columns have been added to the above table, namely, Fulfillment-Alignment & After Financial Independence (no need to work for a living !!!) …In these last three columns , put a ‘O ‘for being neutral in each cell against each expense , put a ‘+’ if expense provides alignment/fulfillment, put a  ‘-‘  if the expense is a bit of a pull-down on you.

	Total Rupees/Dollars	Hours of Life energy	Fulfillment	Alignment	After FI : ( If I don’t work for a living, How will this expense change)
Rent
Electricity
Groceries
Eating out
Fuel
Vehicle expenses

The above monthly with information recorded now is not a mere financial statement … it is more of an awareness tool . The point is then to realize your where “-“s  are, and  how to adjust your spending until you have Os and +s in all your columns…Remember the diet analogy…being conscious is what helps the body weight loss … not the dieting. Above chart provides you that consciousness on personal finance…

In the next post, we will see further tools to track the  progress you would make with the YMYL approach…

Your Money or Your Life: Post 3

 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 your values?

9)      Do you have enough money to see you through six months of living expenses?

10)   Is your life whole? Do all the pieces-your job, your expenditures, your relationships, your values – fit together?

If you answered no to even one of these questions, this book is for you! 

If you still have doubts, please drop in an email with your question @ mukundcs76@gmail.com

Quotable quotes

“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 miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green earth, dwelling deeply in the present moment and feeling truly alive" …Thich Nhat Hanh

Book Review : Switch : How to change things when change is hard

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 an extra hour just for today even as you wake up early in the morning. Changes often fail because the Rider cannot simply keep the Elephant on the Path long enough to reach the destination. So, the Rider is the long-term guy while the Elephant is short-term.

Is then the Elephant then the only weak link in a change process?  No, not really! Rider is a professional when it comes to spinning his wheel..Rider tends to over-think and over-analyze things. In the quest for providing planning and direction to the Elephant, sometimes, all the Rider can provide is a circular path!

Through this analogy, the authors clearly explain why a Change effort dooms! …also through it, they provide the mechanism of what makes a successful change : an Energized elephant and crystal clear Rider treading together the defined Path. 

That is how the book is laid-out: a 3-part framework for the Change behavior :

·         Direct the Rider:                               Providing the clarity

               

·         Motivating the Elephant:              Make the elephant in the mind to get on the Path and cooperative

·         Shaping the Path:                            (Nothing to say here!)

Dan and Chip Heath, through a well-defined set of scientific studies and successful change examples explain the above 3-part framework. "Switch" is an easy read (no neuro-linguistic jargons !) with lot of examples from our daily life. You may be doing whatever, convincing your kid take a bath after the cricket match or you would want to save yourself from shopping urges that is killing your financial freedom…this book is worth the read.

Mindset : The new psychology of success - Book Review

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 his struggle on the comeback season after his first retirement. He never complained about the backache or the tabloids or the cameraman on the basketball court for the loss in the semi-finals.Jordan simply felt that he was not good enough to win the NBA championship and had to train better. Jordan went back and trained aggressively that helped his team win the subsequent NBA championship. Michael Jordan had a Growth mindset…

Hope the above two examples provide you a vivid picture of what Carol Dweck explains in “Mindset: The Psychology of Success”. So it could be Sports, Business , Parenting , School or relationships.. Our mindset is going to define “What Success means?” and the related attainment of it.

Here is a brief comparison of characteristics that govern the two different Mindsets...

Fixed Mindset	Growth Mindset
Ability is an endowment	Ability can be grown
Success is to Win	Success is in indomitable effort
Failure is fatal	To Fail is to learn better
Failure is not my fault	Failure is when you start to blame others
Happiness is from results	Happiness is from process
No ability at start, Don’t work at it	Whatever ability at start, you can always improve with Effort

This book is about belief and it is refreshing…Check it out and I am sure you will have a new perspective in how you see the World after reading this book!