25th April 2020

Why Does Pessimism Sound So Smart?

Pessimism isn't just more common than optimism, it also sounds smarter. It's intellectually captivating, and paid more attention to than the optimist who is often viewed as an oblivious sucker.

Optimism sounds like a sales pitch, while pessimism sounds like someone trying to help you.

Pessimism is "SELL, GET OUT, RUN," which grabs your attention because it's an action you need to take right now.

Optimism is mostly, "Don't worry, stay the course, we'll be alright," which is easy to ignore since it doesn't require doing anything.

All You Need Are a Few Small Wins Every Day

Trees that grow tall and live long grow slowly—especially at first—but then grow steadily.

They may be underground a long time, and a vulnerable sapling for longer still, but like a good idea or a new habit, once the roots are in, they’re hard to dislodge. So it goes with businesses and net worths.

Plutarch tells the story of a rich Delian ship-owner who was asked how he built his fortune. “The greater part came quite easily,” he said, “but the first, smaller part took time and effort.”

Creating anything of consequence or magnitude requires deliberate, incremental and consistent work. At the beginning, these efforts might not look like they are amounting to much. But with time, they accumulate and then compound on each other.

In one of his most famous letters to Lucilius, Seneca gives a pretty simple prescription for the good life. “Each day,” he wrote, “acquire something that will fortify you against poverty, against death, indeed against other misfortunes, as well and after you have run over many thoughts, select one to be thoroughly digested that day.”

One gain per day. That’s it.

Creator Or Consumer -Who Are You?

Richest people in the world are creators or the people who propagate/improvise or sell the original ideas/products/services created by the creators.

Absolute success comes to those who think like creators, creating something that the world needs, improving something that the world consumes – and that too on a scale.

18th April 2020

Is It Time To Panic ?

It’s not time to panic. In fact, it’s never time to panic.

It’s in our DNA to feel fear when threatened—but, we have to first recognize it, then control it before it controls us. Once we lose control, it’s game over.

But most of our panic -attacks don’t happen to be in life-and-death situations . Most of these fearsome moments happen to be related to the times where our expectations are met with some diametric opposite results.

There is a lesson for very one from the divers , the divers who happen to be in life & death situation more often than average people .

A great diver learns to stand down his emotions. At the moment he becomes lost or blinded or tangled or trapped, that instant when millions of years of evolution demand fight or flight and narcosis carbes order from his brain, he dials down his fear and contracts into the moment until his breathing slows and his narcosis lightens and his reason returns. In this way he overcomes his humanness and becomes something else.

In this way, liberated from instincts, he becomes a freak of nature.

Avoid the Zeros

Why Avoiding Bad Decisions is More Important Than Making Great Decisions.

Most of you must have read the story of Hare & Tortoise .

For those that aren’t familiar, the story centers around a race between a fast, arrogant rabbit and his much slower, shelled counterpart. But what makes this race intriguing is that, after gaining a sizable lead, the hare decides to take a nap during the race, believing that his victory is all but assured.

Unfortunately, the hare wakes to find that the tortoise has passed him. Despite making a mad dash toward the finish line, the hare comes up short and loses the race. While most people see the moral of the story as “don’t be overconfident” or “slow and steady wins the race,” .

I see it as a warning against terrible decision making. After all, it is the hare’s bad decisions and not the tortoise’s good decisions that lead to the hare’s defeat.

In a winner’s game, the outcome is determined by the correct actions of the winner.

In a loser’s game the outcome is determined by the mistakes made by the loser.

The Long Game - Power Of Compounding !

Power of compounding - it is time to remember it again as remembering an important lesson of life is also an act of compounding good thoughts in our life .

Your outcomes are a lagging measure of your habits.

Your net worth is a lagging measure of your financial habits.

Your weight is a lagging measure of your eating habits.

Your knowledge is a lagging measure of your learning habits.

You get what you repeat.

Cultivating passion and purpose in life

Society tells you that if you work hard-er, success will come your way.

It doesn’t matter that the original ideas behind these themes are much more nuanced.

There’s more to success than hard work and natural skill. Passion and purpose matter. The great thing is that passion and purpose can be cultivated.

It feels like, if you aren’t successful (enough), you just aren’t working hard enough. You are to blame.

But there is way more to the story

11th April 2020

Why is gold useful? Because it is useless

Gold is useful because it is useless.

Because it is useless that’s why it is valuable as an asset !

Surprised ?

Well to understand this self -contradiction , put your thinking hat and start reading . Let’s first look why and what we hoard ( you must be hoarding few things in these lockdown days .

If you tried to hoard onions and not gold, that would definitely not go down well with your neighbours, especially in an environment where there is scarcity.

The same would be true if you want to buy and hold copper. Industries that use copper won’t like it.

The same can be true if you buy and hold some form of grain such as rice or wheat.

In a world where nearly 79 million people are being added to the dinner table every year, hoarding grain would definitely not go down well.

And that’s why people hoard gold, whenever they feel that there is likelihood of their money losing value.

The Most Important Skill Nobody Taught You

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

Everything that has done so much to connect us has simultaneously isolated us.

We are so busy being distracted that we are forgetting to tend to ourselves, which is consequently making us feel more and more.

It’s the fear of nothingness — our addiction to a state of not-being-bored.

Almost everybody thinks of themselves as self-aware.

They think they know how they feel and what they want and what their problems are. But the truth is that very few people really do.

And those that do will be the first to tell how fickle self-awareness is and how much alone time it takes to get there.

In today’s world, people can go their whole lives without truly digging beyond the surface-level masks they wear; in fact, many do.

We are increasingly out of touch with who we are, and that’s a problem.

The Feynman Technique Of Learning Anything

Have you stopped learning new things or you have stopped learning because you struggle to learn new things ?

If you struggle to learn new things but you’re passionate about learning , one can use Feynman Technique.

Richard Feynman was a Nobel prize-winning scientist and he was also known as “Great Explainer”.

Feynman Technique, also known as Feynman Mental-Model is considered a technique to help you learn pretty much understand anything – to understand concepts you always struggle to deal with, to remember stuff you have already learned, or to study more efficiently.

20 Rules for Markets and Investing

Few good insights in investing :-

-There is no reward without risk. If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.

-The longer your holding period, the higher your odds of success.

-Concentration = fastest way to build wealth & fastest way to destroy it.

-Saving is more important than investing. No savings = no investing.

And many more ,go through the linked article.

4th April 2020

Cut out everything that’s not surprising

People only really learn when they’re surprised.

If they’re not surprised, then what you told them just fits in with what they already know.

No minds were changed.

No new perspective.

Just more information.

Why Time Has Slowed

A lot of this lately:

“I used to dream of a limitless holiday because I was in this high stress job,” he says. “Now that I have it and I’m disturbed by it."

A limitless holiday only feels good when you can do what you want and everybody else still has to be in their normal lives.

Time seems to have slowed down.

March felt like it lasted longer than some years. February feels like a different lifetime.

It’s not just you.

Everyone I talk to feels the same.

High Agency ,Low Agency People

When Hanibal, one of the greatest commanders of history was told that crossing the Alps was impossible, he responded,’Aut inveniam viam aut faciam” (I shall either find a way or make one).

This is how high agency people respond to bad odds, to frustrating situations or whenever they are caught in big doubts.

High Agency is a sense that the story given to you by other people about what you can or cannot do is just that – a story.

And the person with High Agency believes that he has control over the story

The Four Rules of Pandemic Economics

“WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF.”

With this tweet, President Donald Trump summarized a disturbingly common reaction to social-distancing measures. Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick expressed the same sentiment when he told Americans to “get back to work,” even if doing so means more death.

But the balance may lie in the prescription given in this very thoughtful article :ensure it doesn't get worse than "a short and deep slowdown", take steps to avoid the imminent domino effect from one sector to another, focus on household liquidity, bet on science.

Applicable around the world.

28th March 2020

What smartphone photography is doing to our memories

Scientists are finding that constant photo taking actually diminishes our ability to recall our experiences, diverts our attention, and takes us out of the moment. Constantly sharing photos may even be changing how we recall events in our own lives.

At the same time, new research suggests that cameras can also be used to enhance our memories of certain experiences.

This research is in its early stages, but it also provides clues as to how we can best use smartphones: to enhance both our memories of an experience and our enjoyment of them.

If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich? Turns out it’s just chance.

The distribution of wealth follows a well-known pattern sometimes called an 80:20 rule: 80 percent of the wealth is owned by 20 percent of the people. Indeed, a report last year concluded that just eight men had a total wealth equivalent to that of the world’s poorest 3.8 billion people.

Why should so few people have so much wealth?

The conventional answer is that we live in a meritocracy in which people are rewarded for their talent, intelligence, effort, and so on.

Over time, many people think, this translates into the wealth distribution that we observe, although a healthy dose of luck can play a role.

But there is a problem with this idea: while wealth distribution follows a power law, the distribution of human skills generally follows a normal distribution that is symmetric about an average value. For example, intelligence, as measured by IQ tests, follows this pattern. Average IQ is 100, but nobody has an IQ of 1,000 or 10,000.

The same is true of effort, as measured by hours worked. Some people work more hours than average and some work less, but nobody works a billion times more hours than anybody else.

And yet when it comes to the rewards for this work, some people do have billions of times more wealth than other people.

How Coca-Cola, Netflix, and Amazon Learn from Failure

Why so many successful business leaders urge their companies and colleagues to make more mistakes and embrace more failures?

In May, right after he became CEO of Coca-Cola Co., James Quincey called upon rank-and-file managers to get beyond the fear of failure that had dogged the company since the “New Coke” fiasco of so many years ago. “If we’re not making mistakes,” he insisted, “we’re not trying hard enough.”

In June, even as his company was enjoying unparalleled success with its subscribers, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings worried that his fabulously valuable streaming service had too many hit shows and was canceling too few new shows. “Our hit ratio is too high right now,” he told a technology conference. “We have to take more risk…to try more crazy things…we should have a higher cancel rate overall.”

Achieving Greatness -Path & Pitfalls

A great person is usually a person who is confident of his abilities, who is optimistic and who is ready to take risks. Now think about some person who failed – you would find the same traits in that person.

The risks are enormous -the qualities which make one person great, same can make him go bust.

21st March 2020

Stocks Are in Chaos. Control the One Thing You Can

Whether the market goes up or down from here, it’s time for an honest assessment about what you can do to minimize your regrets

Inside Saudi Arabia’s Decision to Launch an Oil-Price War

Riyadh prepares emergency budget for oil at $12 to $20 a barrel; ‘It’s all about egos now’.

Oil prices lost a fifth of their value Monday, after Saudi Arabia over the weekend slashed its crude prices and signaled it would boost its output next month.

The move followed Russia’s rejection of a Saudi-backed plan by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries to cut crude output in response to dwindling demand in China and elsewhere

Risk -Few Take-Aways

Risk is what you don’t see coming.

Risk exists in the future, and it’s impossible to know what the future holds. Expectations of the future are formulated on the basis of what happened in the past, but the events of the future may be completely different than what happened in the past (e.g. 9/11, 2008 sub-prime crisis, COVID).

People who usually expect the future to be like the past, they underestimate the potential for change.

Why Avoiding Bad Decisions is More Important Than Making Great Decisions

Hope you have heard the story of Hare & Tortoise ?

The story centers around a race between a fast, arrogant rabbit and his much slower, shelled counterpart. But what makes this race intriguing is that, after gaining a sizable lead, the hare decides to take a nap during the race, believing that his victory is all but assured.

Unfortunately, the hare wakes to find that the tortoise has passed him. Despite making a mad dash toward the finish line, the hare comes up short and loses the race.

While most people see the moral of the story as “don’t be overconfident” or “slow and steady wins the race,” I see it as a warning against terrible decision making. After all, it is the hare’s bad decisions and not the tortoise’s good decisions that lead to the hare’s defeat.

14th March 2020

Why is Friday the 13th unlucky? A look back at the history of this ominous date

There are several beliefs behind many people consider the date and of Friday ,the 13th as unlucky date.

One of the major superstition is related to the the Last Supper, which was attended by 13 people – Jesus Christ and his 12 disciples – on Maundy Thursday, the night before his crucifixion by Roman soldiers on Good Friday.

The number 13 is therefore associated with Judas Iscariot, Christ’s betrayer, and is regarded as imperfect when compared with 12, which represents the number of months in a year.

Why Does Pessimism Sound So Smart?

Pessimist people sound smart to average masses due to several reasons.

It has been observed that not the man who hopes when others despair, but the man who despairs when others hope, is admired by a large class of persons as a sage.

Harvard professor Teresa Amabile shows that those publishing negative book reviews are seen as smarter and more competent than those giving positive reviews of the same book.

“Only pessimism sounds profound. Optimism sounds superficial," she wrote.

What’s Halo Effect /Error?

Halo Effect ( also known as Halo error) refers to our behavior when we see one agreeable characteristic in something and we tend to believe that other characteristics of that person are also agreeable.

For example, if we’re having an argument in a certain group and if someone supports our side of the argument, we start liking that person and start thinking that he is just like us. Although it may not be true in most cases.

Rana’s ‘Yes’ Bank

Your short-term thinking may push you back in the long term.

Lessons from failure of India’s 4th largest bank -Yes Bank .

High roller jailed Yes Bank founder, Rana Kapoor, had a penchant for glitterati, a sharp mind, hard ambition.

Rana Kapoor issued big cheques quick and easy. Was it wilful swagger or plain oversight?

If nobody will lend you money, Rana Kapoor certainly will.

Rise and fall of Rana Kapoor can be summed up by why Bobby Jones once said: "Golf is the closest game to the game we call life. You get bad breaks from good shots; you get good breaks from bad shots...but you have to play the ball where it lies."

7th March 2020

The Knowledge Trap

But ‘knowledge is power’ is misleading.

There is more knowledge, information, and ideas to make life better than ever before, but millions of people are still not better off with everything we know as humans.

There is more than enough knowledge in this world to change our circumstances, but so many of those who have it — don’t act.

Toy Markets

Investors should know how important it is to bet on toy markets.

They’re the ones who have learned, again and again, that the biggest companies start out looking like toys. Amazon was for selling books online when relatively few people used the internet. Google was a search engine in a landscape crowded with search engines that weren’t themselves gigantic businesses. Ebay was for selling beanie babies.

Domino Effect of Early Success

The best sportspersons get the best coaches; the best students get admitted to the best schools, they get the best teachers and the best performers in organizations are provided the best available training.

It also happens in the market place- the books that come into the “best-sellers” list sell more – more sales begets more sales.

Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds

False beliefs can be useful in a social sense even if they are not useful in a factual sense. For lack of a better phrase, we might call this approach “factually false, but socially accurate.” When we have to choose between the two, people often select friends and family over facts.

This insight not only explains why we might hold our tongue at a dinner party or look the other way when our parents say something offensive, but also reveals a better way to change the minds of others.

29th February 2020

Crowds

When crowd starts getting into something ,that’s the time to look for something new.

The rewards are there for being early and breaking through before the rest of the crowd.

The rewards for coming later, when the risk is less severe and the tools are more widespread and easily adopted, are significantly diminished.

If you find yourself doing things just because the whole crowd around you is doing them, it may feel safe at the present time, but over the long-term, that safety is not going to yield anything more than the mediocre results everyone else in the crowd will be topping out at.

Being special requires taking a risk and doing something unproven – and difficult – before it becomes just another selfie opportunity for everyone else.

Putting Your Intuition on Ice

Why we don’t change ?

What gets in the way of clear thinking is that we have intuitive views of almost everything.

So as soon as someone presents a problem to me, I have some ready made answer. And many a times I stop listening as I have already made up my mind.

What gets in the way of clear thinking are those ready made answers, and we can’t help but have them.

We have a tendency to form an impression very quickly, and then we spend most of our time confirming it instead of collecting evidence.

Peter Principle -Promotions In Organisations !

The Peter Principle refers to a tendency observed in most of the organization hierarchy – it tells that every employee would rise in an organisation through promotion until he reaches a level of incompetence i.e. he does not have capability to perform at that promoted role and he would stuck in that promotion permanently.

As a result , the world is filled with people who suck at their jobs -they’re incompetent in those position, they will remain where they are and hence would be bit frustrated too.

The Story of Singapore

Few expected Singapore to survive and no one imagined that it can become what it is today when it became an independent country in 1965.

It was a tiny, impoverished island with a diverse population of recent immigrants.

They had little shared history and no natural resources.

Singapore had been colonized, occupied, and abused for over a century, and it was surrounded by hostile nations in a region succumbing to pressure by Communist forces.

22nd February 2020

What Can We Learn from the World’s Happiest People?

If you live in an unhappy place, the best thing you can do is move to a happier place.

If you want to be happy, you have to have what I call a diversified portfolio of life satisfaction and good daily emotions and purpose.

In Denmark ,ambition and status are not celebrated , people are in a position to take a job for passion. They’re spending their days making wonderful furniture, design, architecture, not some job they take because they need health insurance. They’re spending most of their days doing something they enjoy.

The Key to Good Luck Is an Open Mind

Luck can seem synonymous with randomness. To call someone lucky is usually to deny the relevance of their hard work or talent.

What makes them different ? It seems lucky people “appear to have an uncanny ability to be in the right place at the right time and enjoy more than their fair share of lucky breaks.

What do these people have that the rest of us don’t?

It turns out “ability” is the key word here. Beyond their level of privilege or the circumstances they were born into, the luckiest people may have a specific set of skills that bring chance opportunities their way.

People Don’t Change Unless ?

People don’t change their nature unless there’s some immediate threat e.g. threat of losing a job, breaking of a relationship which is close to someone’s heart, imminent risk of a disease or death.

One of the reasons for people not changing is to remain in their default mode.Letting go of what’s familiar to someone is like transplanting him in a new land where you don’t speak the language, where you don’t understand the culture.

The other reason why people don’t want to change lies in the fact that most people actually want someone else to tell them when something can be done, how something can be done. That way when something goes wrong,they can blame the someone else for the failure -an easy way to remain in a comfort zone.

Dice Roll: The Phantom Gambler

There’s a particular romance to all-or-nothing gamblers. They lend themselves easily to myth. Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades wagered the In the book of Mahabharata, the ancient Indian epic, the king Yudhishthira is tempted into a dice game in which he wagers his kingdom, his army, and his slaves, along with the freedom of his brothers, his wife, and himself—and loses. Is it better to have rolled and lost than never to have rolled at all?

As Nietzsche asks in Thus Spake Zarathustra: “A throw failed you. But you dice-throwers, what does it matter?”

To roll the dice is to submit to chance. The grander the wager, the starker the confrontation with the mysteries of fate at the core of the cosmos.

15th February 2020

The Shadow Side of Greatness

Every strength has a shadow side.

Some shadows are darker than others.

Success is complicated.

We love to praise people for becoming famous, for winning championships, and for making tons of money, but we rarely discuss the costs of success.

Success in one area is often tied to failure in another area, especially at the extreme end of performance. The more extreme the greatness, the longer the shadow it casts.

To phrase it differently, the more one dimensional your focus, the more other areas of life may suffer.

It’s the four burners theory in action. The more you turn up one burner, the more you risk others burning out.

The things that make people great in one area might make them miserable in others.

Avoiding The Behaviours That Turn Nice Employees Into Mean Bosses

I’ve observed that people rise on the basis of their good qualities, but their behavior grows increasingly worse as they move up the ladder. This shift can happen surprisingly quickly.

In one of the experiments, known as “the cookie monster” study, The experimenter brought people into a lab in groups of three, randomly assigned one to a position of leadership, and then gave them a group writing task.

A half hour into their work, a plate of freshly baked cookies was placed -one for each team member, plus an extra—in front of everyone. In all groups each person took one and, out of politeness, left the extra cookie.

The question was: Who would take a second treat, knowing that it would deprive others of the same? It was nearly always the person who’d been named the leader. In addition, the leaders were more likely to eat with their mouths open, lips smacking, and crumbs falling onto their clothes.

Why having a Plan B can sometimes backfire

Research has found that having a backup plan might actually sabotage your efforts toward Plan.

A backup plan can make you less excited about your main plan.

It could also water down your motivation.

Going all-in on a big, scary goal has served many people very well

What 2,000 deaths can teach us about living a good life

Lesson from reading obituaries - from the things what other say one someone dies !

One way to achieve success: help other people succeed.

It takes time to make a mark.

Our lives can have great meaning without great recognition

8th February 2020

Bruce Lee Achieved His Life Goals by 32 Because Of One Trait

Intense purpose or dire need -impact is so deep to ignore .

In the early years ,Bruce Lee wrote a letter to himself:
My Definite Chief Aim
I, Bruce Lee, will be the first highest paid Oriental super star in the United States. In return I will give the most exciting performances and render the best of quality in the capacity of an actor. Starting 1970 I will achieve world fame and from then onward till the end of 1980 I will have in my possession $10,000,000. I will live the way I please and achieve inner harmony and happiness.

Bruce Lee
Jan. 1969

Four years later, he was dead.
But in those four years, Bruce achieved everything he said he would and more.

Wealth Is What You Don’t Spend

A group of researchers last year found a fourth reason: The majority of those exercising for weight loss either lose no weight or not nearly as much as they should.

The reason, the researchers found, is simple. Exercising makes you feel like you accomplished something healthy, which can rationalize a post-workout food binge. Eating a pizza after sitting on the couch all day might bring guilt, but doing it after a jog feels like a justified treat.

You can’t measure the benefit of exercise by merely looking at how much you sweat. The gap between what you gain and how much you avoid offsetting that gain is the figure that matters most.

The same goes for saving money.

The Ferrari Way

That purring engine. The buttery soft leather. Those sleek curves.

The essence of a Ferrari transcends any one particular design element to immerse its drivers in pure, unadulterated pleasure.

“The overarching goal is to create an experience—a sensual experience,” says Harvard Business School Professor Stefan Thomke, who wrote a case study about the Ferrari company in 2018. .

Is the Chinese Language a Superstition Machine?

In China , a uniqueness exists in the sound of the words .

It leads to many rituals , ceremonies as well as many superstitions.

Every year, more than a billion people around the world celebrate Chinese New Year and engage in a subtle but obvious linguistic dance with luck.

To lure good fortune into their lives, they may decorate their homes and doors with paper cutouts of lucky words or phrases.

Those who need a haircut make sure to get one before the New Year, as the word for “hair” (fa) sounds like the word for “prosperity”—and who wants to snip away prosperity, even if it’s just a trim?

The menu of food served at festive meals often includes fish, because its name (yu) sounds the same as the word for “surplus”; a type of algae known as fat choy because in Cantonese it sounds like “get rich”; and oranges, because in certain regions their name sounds like the word for “luck.”.

1st February 2020

Self Talk

The world will either shrink or expand depending on whether your self-talk is positive or not. Which one will it be?.

The Fascinating World of Your Brain’s Reward System

Understanding how the brain’s reward system works allows us to understand much more about who we are.

It’s a mechanism that, ultimately, regulates how we view our behavior, both positive and negative.

The Mind of Leonardo Da Vinci

Genius takes many forms, and in Leonardo’s case we recognize his limitations

He was defensive about his lack of formal education; he called himself "omo sanza lettere" (a man without letters). He had trouble with basic arithmetic operations, and his Latin skills were weak

He surely would not have performed well in a modern school system, and his IQ might have been tested as low as an average person.

What I Learned from Losing $200 Million

I’d lost almost $200 million in October. November wasn’t looking any better

It was 2008, after the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy. Markets were in turmoil. Banks were failing left and right

I worked at a major investment bank, and while I didn’t think the disastrous deal I’d done would cause its collapse, my losses were quickly decimating its commodities profits for the year, along with the potential pay of my more profitable colleagues

I thought my career could be over.

26th January 2020

There’s nothing wrong with that. Earning more is wonderful, just like exercise. We just shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that earning more will do little for building wealth if every extra dollar is offset by a dollar of new spending.

Why not to use two axes, and what to use instead

The scales of dual axis charts are arbitrary and can therefore (deliberately) mislead readers about the relationship between the two data series.

Block title

So far, we have scientific evidence for nine different causes of depression and anxiety. Two of them are indeed in our biology. Your genes can make you more sensitive to these problems, though they don’t write your destiny. And there are real brain changes that can happen when you become depressed that can make it harder to get out.

But most of the factors that have been proven to cause depression and anxiety are not in our biology.

2020 Startup Themes

The increase in revenue comes at the cost of long-term customer satisfaction, but nobody knows how to really measure that, so investors don’t care. Now Instagram has too many ads and finding a genuine phone charger on Amazon requires a degree in investigative journalism.

18th January 2020

Kodak vs. Fujifilm

In 2001, the film sales peaked worldwide but as the president of Fujifilm remembers: “a peak always conceals a treacherous valley.” First, the market began shrinking very slowly, then picked up speed and finally plunged at the rate of twenty or thirty percent a year. In 2010, worldwide demand for photographic film had fallen to less than a tenth of what it had been only ten years before.

Your Body Clock & Your Health

Majority of Indians suffer from chronic circadian rhythm disruption because of their eating patterns. Some of this is shaped by culture and some by the new urban lifestyle. It is customary for people to wake up early and have a cup of tea or coffee and a snack. This breaks their overnight fast. The body can efficiently process food for the next twelve hours at best. But they eat dinner late, often after 9pm. More than a third of their food is consumed when the body cannot optimally process it. Consequently, the incidence of pre-diabetes, diabetes, hypertension, heart attacks and general inflammatory diseases are on the rise even in people in their 30s and 40s.

Success is not permanent

How GE got killed and who killed it ?

Of course, GE is not dead, and it may well revive and flourish as a company. After all, IBM came back from the dead in the 1990s. But the GE model is dead — and there’s a long list of possible suspects.

How to remember anything forever

Spaced repetition can do wonders to improve your memory of data .

11th January 2020

Great Companies and Average Companies

Successful companies built one product at a time. They do not clutter.

Lesson from Magic

A Magician Explains Why We See What’s Not There.

Our brain is constantly picturing what the future should be.

All the information and data is not important

You don’t need read /react or reply to all the news , all the TV shows , all the emails , all the messages .

With too much data around , one needs to categorize & pay attention where he/she should spend time .

Like information which is useful but expiring is less important than the information which is useful and permanent

Acknowledging luck is not a sign of weakness

When we assess others, we tend to attribute successes to circumstance and failures to character — and when we assess our own lives, it is the opposite.

Everyone’s relationship with luck is somewhat self-interested and opportunistic.

04th January 2020

Building of Prestige - Bankruptcy To A Billion

I took every day as it came. I did not have a master plan that this was gonna become this big. If somebody had asked me 40 years ago if I will be talking to a TV channel, billionaire, what have you…I would have said, ‘No. No chance.’ So everything was by taking it as it comes. What will I be doing, what I am, it is all…I don’t like to use the word fate. It is chance.

Interesting Website

What you want to become in future ?
Write a letter to yourself !

Setbacks can take you to the top

Top athletes – it turns out, many others – have a way of turning pain into rocket fuel. The defeat becomes a reason to push themselves even further the next time.

Which Business Model You Need To Pursue

The decision? Whether to grow slowly, organically, and profitably, or whether to have a big bang with very fast growth and lots of capital.

How Much Information You Need

Beyond a certain minimum amount, additional information only feeds — leaving aside the considerable cost of and delay occasioned in acquiring it — what psychologists call “confirmation bias.”

28th December 2019

Myths of the Indian Consumption Story

In Taiwan for example, the economy experienced accelerated growth on the back of huge investments in education. A highly skilled labour force and a high savings rate provided the perfect recipe for economic prosperity. However, Latin America largely squandered its opportunity. Policy Makers in India are well aware of this fact. In fact, SBI only recently warned about the dangers of India losing its demographic dividend by citing the example of "empty primary government schools in Karnataka". Unless there is an environment that facilitates useful education, the demographic dividend will likely remain a pipe dream.

The Psychology of Prediction

During the Vietnam War Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara tracked every combat statistic he could, creating a mountain of analytics and predictions to guide the war’s strategy.
Edward Lansdale, head of special operations at the Pentagon, once looked at McNamara’s statistics and told him something was missing.
“What?” McNamara asked.
“The feelings of the Vietnamese people,” Landsdale said.
That’s not the kind of thing a statistician pays attention to. But, boy, did it matter .

It’s harder to be kind than clever.”

If you can’t be kind, if you won’t empathize, then you’re not on the team. That team is Team Humanity, where we are all in this thing together. Where we are all flawed and imperfect. Where we treat other people’s point of view as charitably as we treat our own. Where we are civilized and respectful and, above all, kind to each other—particularly the less fortunate, the mistaken, and the afraid.

Interesting Website

Want to know certain complex subjects in an easier way , well you should visit this website
My favourite ones are :
The Size of Space
The Deep Sea
The Baby Map
Paper

2020 Startup Themes

Online Advertisement -This increase in revenue comes at the cost of long-term customer satisfaction, but nobody knows how to really measure that, so investors don’t care. Now Instagram has too many ads and finding a genuine phone charger on Amazon requires a degree in investigative journalism.
As this chewing gum loses flavor in the coming year, there might be an opportunity for startups to traverse previously impassable peaks and attack an incumbent head-on. A new search engine. A new social network. It’s been a while since we had a new consumer startup, and it might just happen next year.

Key Employee Risk

Parachutes were so precious to the Apollo program that only three people in the nation were qualified to hand-pack the parachutes for the Apollo 15 capsule: Norma Cretal, Jimmy Calunga and Buzz Corey, who in 1971 — the year of that mission — all lived in Ventura County. Their expertise was so vital, they were not allowed to ride in the same car together for fear that a single auto accident could cripple the space program.

21st December 2019

Does This Make Any Sense?

China’s economy is two-thirds the size of the U.S. economy but has 4 times as many people. Yet the U.S. has a stock market capitalization that’s nearly 16 times larger than China’s.
India has 4 times as many people as the United States but an economy that’s one-tenth the size and a stock market that’s 1/50th the size.
Does this make sense?

7 customer service lessons from the best Uber driver ever

Schwartz argues that “the human brain is like a factory with two foremen: one is a ‘no man’ and the other is a ‘yes man’ . . . If you give the job to the ‘no man,’ your own mind will start finding logic and reasons to prove how can’t you do this job.”

State of Indian Economy

Savings and incomes are down and the economy is in a tailspin.

What happened to India’s dream of emulating China?

Focus on creating something beautiful, wealth would follow

Love something,learn it, master it,create it.Wealth automatically follows.
Till date,Mariah Carey has earned Rs 500 crores(US $ 70 Mn)from this song in royalty .
Majority of it comes on Christmas Days-whenever it is played -YouTube ,Alexa , iTunes etc.

Being ‘Busy’ Doesn’t Mean You’re Successful

Every time you say you’re busy, you’re actually saying that you can’t prioritize your life.

Most people identify being busy with being successful. But unlike 95% of the people I know, I don’t think being busy means you’re successful.

The truth is: If you’re busy, you don’t live at all. You just exist.

14th December 2019

Illusion of Transparency: Your Poker Face is Better Than You Think

Most of the time, other people can’t correctly guess what we’re thinking or feeling. Our emotions are not written all over our face all the time. The gap between our subjective experience and what other people pick up on is known as the illusion of transparency.

Things We Take for Granted, and Things We Don’t Miss

Suitcases with wheels didn’t become popular until the mid 90s. This was one of those things that made me stop and think, wow, I haven’t once thought about what a pain in the neck it was to travel when you had to carry your luggage.

A Deadly Day of Chaos at the Top of Mount Everest

Off late , the Everest experience often seems to have devolved even further into a circus-like pageant of stunts and self-promotion. In April 2017, DJ Paul Oakenfold outraged mountaineering purists by hosting an EDM concert at the base camp in Nepal; this year three Indian climbers returned home to celebratory crowds after they supposedly summited on May 26, only to be accused of fraud after other mountaineers claimed that they never made it past 23,500 feet.

The Greatest Story Ever Told

  • Stories can be more powerful than tangible things.
  • Stories are often wildly disconnected from our productive capacity.
  • We confidently convince ourselves of absurd stories.
  • We’re in a new era of storytelling, which changes how all of us need to think about investing.

I Passed on Berkshire Hathaway at $97 Per Share - MicroCapClub

Much of what I learned, I learned from watching extremely successful investors make and lose money. And from losing my own money.

6th December 2019

Elon Musk: The Architect of Tomorrow

They’re jerks who want us to die,” Musk elaborates. “They’re constantly trying to make up false rumors and amplify any negative rumors. It’s a really big incentive to lie and attack my integrity. It’s really awful. It’s…”

Avoiding Stupidity is Easier than Seeking Brilliance

In expert tennis, about 80 per cent of the points are won; in amateur tennis, about 80 per cent of the points are lost. In other words, professional tennis is a Winner’s Game – the final outcome is determined by the activities of the winner – and amateur tennis is a Loser’s Game – the final outcome is determined by the activities of the loser. The two games are, in their fundamental characteristic, not at all the same. They are opposites.

Overconfidence-An Autobiography

The most dangerous of all people is the fool who thinks he is brilliant.

The Path Of Least Resistance

The principle is that energy always moves along the path of least resistance and that any change you attempt to make in your life will not work if the path of least resistance does not lead in that direction. Find out how the universe , then acts accordingly.

How Life Imitates Chess by Gary Kasparov

The lesson here is that if you play without long-term goals your decisions will become purely reactive and you’ll be playing your opponent’s game, not your own.

1st December 2019

If you’re not spending 5 hours per week learning, you’re being irresponsible

We need 5 hr per week of learning to retool ourselves .

The grandmaster diet: How to lose weight while barely moving

Want to lose weight- be any analytical person , or become a chess player or take too much stress.

How Travel Can Change the Way You Think

Here are some goals if we want to take full advantage of travelling to new place .

  1. Try to actively know the place you are in. Observe the customs. Interact with the locals.
  2. Learn the whys behind the observation. Explore the history. Ask questions. Try to understand the answers in relation to what you are experiencing now, setting aside any previous assumptions.
  3. Notice how the journey is affecting you. What memories surface? What new insights do you have? Are your opinions and beliefs challenged?
Don’t plan out every detail. Explore. The map is not the territory.

1000 Fans & Business Success

If you want to be a successful businessman, to be a successful creator you don’t need millions.
You don’t need millions of dollars or millions of customers, millions of clients or millions of fans. To make a living as a craftsperson, photographer, musician, designer, author, animator, app maker, entrepreneur, or inventor you need only thousands of true fans.

About Excellence

Research highlights three main factors that lead to excellence:

  1. Qualitative changes in behavior
  2. Recognition of talent as a useless explanation
  3. Mundane actions, compounded over time

You See What You Want To See

This concept, known as confirmation bias, demonstrates why we tend to ignore or reject information that goes against our most deeply held beliefs.

Want to Become a Multimillionaire? Do These 14 Things Immediately

"The greatest reward in becoming a millionaire is not the amount of money that you earn. It is the kind of person that you have to become to become a millionaire."  -- Jim Rohn

Read Better, Think Better,Be Above Average

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