Month: September 2018

When your glass is half filled

You are making a delicious recipe which calls for chilly powder. You reach for the magic red stuff, when you realise to your horror that the jar is … empty!!! How could you have missed it? Damn it! You have to do without chilly. Or you have to stop cooking and go shopping. If you are like what I was a couple of months ago, you have been caught in this position several times. Delaying replenishing your supplies until you run out of them and then either making do without them or making a dash for it to get fresh supplies.

While some of you may be good at re-stocking the kitchen, you probably run out of talk time in the middle of a call with your spouse, who is half-way around the globe on a project. Only when your laptop pings about the hard disk being full after copying 7.7 GB out of an 8 GB Blue Ray HD movie do you realise that you should have paid attention to the free space.

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How to leverage your partner for your success?

When I talk about leveraging your partner for your success, I don’t mean marrying into money like ‘Who wants to marry a multi millionaire‘ or the ‘Millionaire Match maker‘. With the disclaimer set aside, lets see what I am talking about.

superpower
superpower

How can you guarantee Failure?

Once we can remove things that guarantee failure, success will eventually happen if you try hard enough. Following through and sticking to a process does not guarantee success. But not doing so can guarantee failure. We have already discussed about the importance of the process here, here and here. When I look at things and events in my life where I have guaranteed failure vs risked success, one thing stands out: An Accountability partner.

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Let’s fall in love with routine

In the post In Praise of Effort, Priya talks about the effectiveness of being consistent with your efforts as a habit. She shows how an overnight success is often glorified and untrue, when in truth those success stories ran several days, months or years in the making. In fact, more than your talent, it is your ability to show up and put in the work everyday that defines your success or failure. Martial arts expert and actor Bruce Lee summed it up as, “I fear not the man who has practised 10,000 kicks once, but the one who has practised one kick 10,000 times.” Continue reading Let’s fall in love with routine

Is debt bad?

We have seen finance experts like Dave Ramsay tell us to cut up our credit cards. We have seen how delinquent home loans not only caused people to lose their homes but also a systemic crisis that spread across several financial institution and countries during 2008. Repossessed cars and two wheeler are common in many low income households. To add to this trouble student loan defaults have become high all over the world as the income opportunities often don’t match up with the cost of some of these courses.

So is debt a bad thing? Should we indeed cut up credit cards? Save for 15+ years to buy a home. Never take a loan in our life?

From Shylock of ‘Merchant of Venice’ to today’s bank that offer Personal loans and credit cards with dubious terms the bankers have been portrayed as Vultures. It is often joked ‘Banks will only lend money to those that don’t need them.’. Are these Financial institutions just vultures that serve no real need?

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