You should do what you have to do, TO DO what you want to do !

This is top 10 quotes ever.

First pass, it gives the wrong meaning. You might think it says, "I know what you want to do but for doing that you should do what you have to do now".

No it does not, close but completely irrelevant meaning.

It says the following -

Find out what you want to do, for doing that thing, make a list of things that need to happen. It says you have to do those things whether you want em or not because they enable you to do what you want to do.

Here is what makes the difference - if what you have to do now has nothing to do with what you want to do, then theres no pint doing them.

Where is the happiness ?

I used to think the children of America today are losing the life that we had in India - eat whatever we want, play whenever we want. I read an article upper middle class life style, rediff.com: How India Lives: Why K R Babu is happy with infaltion in which the housewife says - she does not keep sweets, chips in her house. Only diet pepsi for her children.

I am sure she is making her children healthy. But wheres the fun dudy ?

Be Helpful and you will be Successful

Business is based on relationships. No amount of talent, contracts, patents can do as much as what relationships can do to you. A successful businessman spends a lot of information time with his or her primary customers.

Now, how do you improve relationships ? Simple, be helpful. Even when you are not asked for help, actively find the biggest pain that your customers and your people have, reach out to them and help relieve their pain. They will remember you for ever. And thats the starting point of a beautiful relationship and a successful relationship.

Cognitive Myopia

Cognitive myopia is the concept of recent past playing a unpropotionally significant role in making judgments.

Remember the last time you were pretty angry about someone close to you about something they did. Did you think about all other good things that he or she did over the years or you just are consumed about the last thing that he or she did that made you angry ?

Remember the last time you thought stock market would be going up and up and did not sell stock. I bet its right after you have seen the stock market going up. Remember the last time you thought the stock market will never end going down and sold stock - its the time after it went down and down. You actually bought high and sold low. Even if you knew the stock market was up long ago before it went down recently or viceversa that did not enter into your judgmental analysis ?

Remember the last time when you ate a lot even though when you are diet. The recent past of happiness played way significant role in your judgement !. We will all be happy when we recognize and control cognitive myopia don't we ;)

What is a good career for me ?

Parts of the book "what color is your parachute" are truly revealing to me. This is what you need to know for a successful career - What do you love to do most ?

Think about what would you do love to do now if you don't have any worries about getting paid. Think about what makes you exiciting, think about what your freinds or mother or wife has to drag you to stop doing. Continue doing that and money (enough for a comfortable living) will come.

Sounds too good to be true ? It is true. It follows these simple principles - There is some money for any job in this world. There is good money if you excel and are the expert in any particular job. They key to excel in a job is to love doing it all the time.

Now it might not work some situations. You are in the mid point of your career and cannot just stop what you are doing now, you have a family. Well you are lucky, you can use the comfortness (hey you are getting money now) of the existing platform to jump on to what you love to do most.

For people like me, there is another problem - I don't know what I love or I love too many things. For those, first write down what skills/work_sets you would love to do - Writing, giving speaches, kicking somebody, gossiping, photography, cooking, watching TV etc. Now go find careers which involves those skill sets.

Trust me, there are people who make lot of money running celebrity blogs and writing movie reviews !

Complacency, attitude and reasonable people

I am watching Bangladesh and SA cricket match - Mortaza was so mad at himself for so long for failing to stop a ball surely going towards the boundary when SA was down 6 wickets for a score below 100. I thought hey its reasonable that he did not stop the ball, it was so hard, almost impossible to stop it. Freakishly, it reminded me of a question that my smart, hardworking 8th grade cousin asked when I went to India last time - why not take engineering track, there are so many engineering colleges and there are so many jobs for engineering graduates that I will get a very decent job.

If theres one thing that kills businesses and people its complacency, attitude and all those reasonable people. The business is going alright, why worry ? I will get an alright job, why worry ? Everything works this way, why should I worry ?

Its not that if you have a chalta attitude, you wont a decent tomorrow, you wont have customers for your business tomorrow or you wont survive if you are a reasonable person or you team will lose if you fail to stop one four. But you or your business would be killed over time because the world around you is constantly improving. I have had many businesses cases where complacency killed a product (BMCs flagship product ..) and excessive paranoia kept a company alive (Samsung CEO attitude).

So my answer to my cousin was its not like you wont get a job. Because of your attitude, you would be always complacent and because of that you would be always sliding downwards, if you are lucky in your life. I think that is what Chappel was trying to say to Tendulkar. I am not saying you are not great, I am saying you are not constantly improving. And progress wont happen with reasonable people - A Reasonable Person Adapts Themselves to Their Environment. An Unreasonable Person Endeavors to Adapt the Environment to Their Vision Therefore, All Progress Depends on Unreasonable People (and thanks to JD and JBS for introducing me to this quote).

Guess who won the match today and who got killed :)

Want innovation ? Do not hire the 10% people !!

If you want innovation, do not hire the top 10% of a class.


Innovation requires you to be radical, not follow the rules, not afraid of failure, not afraid of taking risks. IMHO, The top 10% of a school are not innovators, they are followers. They got excellent grades because they chose to follow the rules of the game. The bottom 10%, though they are in par with the rest of the class when they entered it (meaning they can perform if they want to or passionate about it), but chose to not follow the rules (or cannot follow the rules).

You want to invest in a person ? Ask his freinds and relatives !

The chinese government officials have a cool way of deciding on promotions. They will interview your freinds, collegues, parents and see whether you have been a good man or not. Your drinking and gambling habbits will receive a very bright red flag.

Actually, thats the exact process in which arranged marriage evaluation process works in India. Those exact same things receive serious red flags. Interestingly, that is close to what VCs do when they are investing in a project - they would interview all sorts of people who can tell what sort of a person you are. Businesses use a flawed version of this - its called the 360 degree evaluation !

In my investing demystified article, I make a comment about how the person you want to invest in should be a person to which you should be willing to marry your daughter to. I think thats the way you should select life partners, business and work partners !

Progress paradox

I was looking more seriously at a chart pasted in our breakroom called "is it depression ?". It has a series of tests such as "cant sleep" "feeling sad" "feel like hittin somebody" "gettin angry at your manager" to see whether you have depression and recommends to see a doctor.

I am like what? Arent we the among the best paid employees in the US market ? Arent we able to feed our families ? Why should then we get depressed ? It reminded me of a book called "progress paradox".

Its all related to being psychologically happy ?

That book has some interesting stats like

* the disabled and chronically ill people are more happy than healthy people because of the appreciation they have developed for life
* the old people are generally more happy than young people because of the appreciation they have for forgiveness and non-material things
* lack of money makes you unhappy for sure, but having money does not make you happy
* depression is a 50 billion market and there are less people who get treated for depression as you pass down the class chain

For people who are suffering with depression, I have one pill - have gratitude. Count your blessings than inventorying your complaints. Trust me, even if you get all those complaints sorted out and solved, you would still get unhappy. Have a "just let it go" attitude. Beleive me, there is research area called forgiveness, which says people who forgive more tend to have a more cardiovascular diseases and lower immune system functions.

Chasing Life = Book Review

This book is about things that you can do starting now (or things you should stop doing now) to live a healthier, happier, longer and funcational life. I would recommend this book to anybody who is not into regular exersices and not conciously eating healthier food.

The strenghts of the book:

- Sanjay Gupta explains medical lingua in a way that common people can understand.

- He has a bullteized to-do items at the end of each chapter, which make you come back to what he is trying to tell you after all the medical slang.

- He touches each and every aspect of leading a healthy life from basics, such as vitamins and antioxidants to stress to HGH, stem cells to exersices. He not only explains the medical reasons why or why not each of those topics contribute to healthy functional life, but he also boils them down to the ten things you can/should do.

Here are a few things that I learnt myself to do (including the medical reasons behind them) and have already started working for me

Diet

1. Push away the food when you are 80% full
2. Eat a breakfast, it helps you eat less calories through out the day
3. Add a fish, a glass of wine a bar of brown choclate a week

Exersice

1. Add upper body weight resistance to cardiovascular
2. Be more active, have more movement during the day
3. Surprise your body with newer activities

Stress

1. Learn how to reduce or manage/enjoy stress
2. How optimistic attitude can help you live happy, longer life

Democracy and cognitive myopia

I thought for a while now that democracy would work in a country only if people of that country are educated. Thats my justification for democracy not working in a few countries (free electricity or a film star or an extremist organization would win an election).

In retrospect, I think democracy itself is a problem. It has nothing to do with the literacy of the people. It has everything to do with short term popularity - It has striking relations to stock market. People would not vote on long term thoughtful position on an issue, but on what the news snippet is that week, the same way most people would not buy a stock on long term but on a short term news snippet.

At the end of the day, both free elections and stock market are like a popuilarity contest. Whoever lines in with the most popular trend of the day wins for the day, however they lose it in the long run.

Semi dictator ship in China, Singapore and Malaysia worked well. I am not sure there is any other way to determine a stock price than let the populus to determine it.

Life and Happiness

I have two recommendations for ya'all people - Goes back to a few us who are on constant search for meaning of life and such. Each of the videos tell a lot of gripping lessons about "leading life:

Movie Recommendation - The Pursuit of Happiness:
http://imdb.com/title/tt0454921/. I somehow missed the movie when it
was released but it is a very good movie and it has some very good
subtle messages about happiness told in an interesting way.

Video Recommendation - The last lecture of Randy Pausch, a CMU professor
and pioneer of vision and virtual reality who is going to die in a few
months :http://youtube.com/watch?v=4HqdnjgkExY

Good decisions have nothing to do with the result

Each minute in our life is made of decisions. All we can do is analyze the situation, take into account all the data and all the decision choices, assess the risks and rewards of each decision and take one. If you do all that, it is a GOOD decision, IRRESPECTIVE of what the result is. Now comes my book recommendation.

Book Recommendation - Hard Call: Great Decisions and Extraordinary
People Who Made Them by John McCain and Mark Slater. Not all the
stories are good, but some of the stories are great enough to make the
book a good read, especially the story that the book starts with.

The most importent investment of your life

Your Reputation.

No, I am not talking about the online reputation thing. Its real reputation. Real reputation is your most valuable investment.

Your suggestions, the way you behave when you or your friends are in crisis, the way you treat people in troubled times will always SAVE you not just when you are in trouble. Good people will try to flock around you - they can give you the most return of any investment. Your reputation can ruin all your real investments. Nobody good will be willing to work with you.