Gratitude – Part 2

Fear, Financial Independence, Gratitude, Happiness, Human Brain, peak Performance

if you do a split of my posts, they can get equally split between Marketing, Financial independence, Human Mind & Performance, Charity / Karma / Gratitude.

I have mentioned multiple times that when I am feeling low, I decide to go and do charity. It gives me a high of a different kind. This is something which I seriously started doing when I heard Joe Polish on his podcast ilovemarketing.com. He had other ideas also about things which you can do when you are feeling low and don’t even have the money to do charity.

While continuing reading the book The Art of Impossible by Steven Kotler, I realised that the human performance is very strongly linked to the human mind – nothing new here, but what was surprise was the scientific reason behind why gratitude or doing good for others helps improve performance.

As per the research which Steven talks about – gratitude trains the brain on looking at the positive things, for which you are thankful. The brain is otherwise seasoned to look for things which can ham us, so that it can protect us. When you are in the state of gratitude , the negative things which can harm us, get filtered out by the brain automatically. When the negative things are filtered out, there is reduced fear. Once that happens you automatically get into a good mood and you feel happy.

When we are in a good mood, we feel safe and secure. When we feel safe and secure, our mind is willing to wander and think. Due to this your creativity also gets enhanced. To get into the more technical details of how the neurobiology and neurochemistry work I would highly recommend reading his book.

Coming back to where I started this post, while I was splitting the Human Mind & Performance , from Charity / Gratitude / Karma, it seems from the research that Steven has done that actually these help improve the performance of the human mind.

So actually my blog posts then, have a skew towards the human mind and performance compared to other areas of marketing and finance. This is interesting.

While I have always had an inclination to continuously find ways to improve myself, I had never actually taken the rigorous analysis that Steven has done on improving myself.

Tell me what do you enjoy more – my posts on marketing, financial independence or human performance.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

You cannot have financial freedom without financial discipline- Part 3

compounding, Financial Independence, Habits, Human Brain, mindset

In yesterday’s post I wrote about how the urgent tasks took over my schedule and missed out on buying the asset whose deadline was yesterday.

Actually the middle class / service class people mistake busyness for success. For us the incoming email or phone is more important than taking financial education.

We keep watching the mail as if the next PO or promotion or next big challenge, is just about to come and it does not come that day, then it does not come the next day and we end up wasting one more day and another and suddenly we realize life has just passed us by.

The rich on the other hand first and foremost understand the discipline they have to follow. And it has nothing to do with education. Even if you discount the likes of Bill Gates, there are lots of others who don’t have college education but have become millionaires.

One of the reasons I think is that a University Degree makes us specialized in some specific area and we like to solve challenges in those areas. The human brain is wired to get attracted to familiar faces, familiar environments. So when we see an email with a familiar topic, we get immediately attracted to it.

Compounding only works in the long term, so you have to ensure that you start very early in life. If like most of us you start late then you have to ensure you are systematically investing over long durations without a break. Financial freedom takes discipline.

To bring in that discipline you need to ensure you eliminate the usage of your brain. Things should happen without your brain taking a decision. That’s where an automatic system helps. Today technology allows it so you should take advantage of it.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

You cannot have financial freedom without financial discipline- Part 2

Financial Independence, Human Brain

I had written on this topic in May also. Financial discipline is absolutely critical if you have to be able to come even close to getting financial freedom.

Our biggest problem with the education that is imparted to kids in India is that they are not given any training on financial matters. I know because I am part of the same problem.

I think its a similar problem in North America as you will notice from the amount of student debt and the lack of savings that exist for retirement for the baby boomers.

Sine we did not learn it in our 16 years of education we tend to have inertia to try and learn it. Anything where there’s inertia, the brain tends to put it back in the line, because it has to do more work to get into action.

The more urgent and easier things take precedence like a phone call from a customer or an email or one more meeting and the day gets over. And I am not preaching this. It happens to me all the time and it happened to me today again.

I was supposed to deposit money into my account for buying a stock whose deadline was today. But being the quarter end , there were supplier pressures, there were our own pressures for closing order bookings and this just slipped out of my mind.

Which brings me back to the basic problem for humans. If you leave it to your mind, chances are that it won’t happen. And for us middle class folks , this costs us dearly in the long run. Therefore I keep writing about ensuring money goes out of your bank automatically into whatever investment you target on a regular basis like a SIP (Systematic Investment Plan).

That’s the only way I have been able to bring in some kind of discipline into my financial life.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Velocity of Cash – Part 2

cash flow, Financial Independence

A few days back I had written a post on this topic. I have been working on seeing how the same money, multiplies itself just based on the velocity it can get.

FMCG companies are a perfect example of creating wealth due to the velocity of cash.

On a typical tube of toothpaste or a bar of soap, each of these companies only makes a few cents. But because they sell to the distributors in bulk and realize their money, they invest it back again in making more and selling more.

Their model is primarily driven by volume even though the per unit margin is very low.

If you look at these companies they generate so much cash, they give out such huge dividends on a consistent basis only because of their ability to generate velocity on the cash.

Cash if it’s kept stagnant in your home cannot generate wealth. Wealth can only get generated when cash keeps moving. If it’s moved into consumption items then it generates wealth for that entity. If it’s moved into productive items, then it will create wealth for you.

One of my philosophies of buying stock , similar to Peter Lynch, is to buy stocks of companies whose products I consume, so that some of the money that I spend comes back to me in dividend and capital appreciation.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!