Forcing functions

Uncategorized

I had written this headline more than 2 months but I did not write anything because I wanted to check for myself if this worked.

The idea of a forcing function – and I read this idea first in the book Will Power Doesn’t Work by Dr. Benjamin Hardy – is that you first decide the deadline and then work backwards to meet the deadline. Though Dr. Ben Hardy is a very young guy, he has written some really interesting stuff. One of the key things which I have learnt from his books is the fact “your environment” decides how successful you become. If you want to succeed you need to change your environment.

Once you have the deadline decided, you automatically then do not take assignments or activities which can divert your mind from the deadline. You put on your calendar your schedule well in advance so that when you get even other enticing but conflicting requirements , you just refuse without feeling the guilt.

I have put this on a daily basis for myself now. There are 2 things which I now do very religiously – writing my journal and writing my blog. And both have been put on my calendar. So anything else which even has a chance of disturbing these 2 things in my calendar gets discarded.

The advantage that I have seen because of this is that now I no longer have to take decisions to do these 2 things. They are now part of a habit.

I have now put this into some other areas of my life where I have already decided on some goals with a deadline and am working backwards to ensure that divert my attention.

I have a very distracted mind and I can get distracted with a bird chirping or if I hear a music note being played far away. The bigger the distraction, the longer that I would fall away from my targets. And then I would realise after the end of the year that I had passed one more year without achieving much.

Try this for yourself and let me know how you benefit from this.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Burning bridges or keeping options

asset allocation, Financial Independence, Human Brain

I always have this dilemma, whether having options is the right thing or deciding on one path and dedicating all your energy and finances

There’s one theory attributed to Tariq ibn Zaiyad, who is said to have invaded the Iberian peninsula and ordered all the boats be burned after his troops landed.

The idea being if people don’t have an option left then they will concentrate all their energy in trying to figure out how to succeed within the constraints. In case people have an option they don’t put all their energy in solving the problems because they know they can go back to the other option.

The other way of l looking at it is that if we have too many options then we also end up being undecided and take no action.

A lot of investment gurus suggest that you should only focus on 10-15 stocks in your portfolio after you have identified the best stocks as per your risk profile. The idea is that it’s not possible to monitor more than 10-15 stocks. And the percentage of holding within these should be based on your conviction of growth so that you can get maximum returns. After that you should only focus on these for the long term and monitor them.

On the other hand you have people who say you should always have a safety net so that in case of a problem you know you can fall back

In the finance industry this is the concept behind ETFs and most MFs. so the returns are always averaged out to the market and there is a lower chance off loosing money. As Warren Buffet says the first rule of investing is Never lose Money and the second rule is never forget rule number one.

In my own operations I always have this argument with my peers when we are making the budget if we should only focus on one new initiative in a year and make it successful or should we have 2-3 simultaneously and see which moves. My opinion is that it’s very tough trying to ride multiple boats in parallel

Somewhere I think it may also have to do with bandwidth.

What’s your view. Would you rather go beyond the point of no return, choose only one option and make yourself a success or would you rather place bets on multiple things. I would love to heard your comments.

Till next time.

Carpe Diem!!!

Serendipity

Everyone has heard the cliché “all that glitters is not gold” but we still end up taking a lot of decisions based on the way something is shown.

Today however I have to tell you how accidentally decided to hear a podcast episode and it turned out to be such a revelation. Pure serendipity.

I have mentioned multiple times to you about the podcast ilovemarketing by Joe Polish and Dean Jackson. If you have any thing to do with marketing, you should listen to this podcast.

Anyway….to today’s story….I was actually intending to hear the episode where Joe Polish talks about his sabbatical. While going through the episodes list I accidentally pressed the episode with Chris Voss.

If you haven’t heard of Chris Voss, he was the chief hostage negotiator of FBI and has written the amazing book Never Split the Difference.

Coming back, when I heard the first few words at the start of the podcast talking about the difference between assertive and aggressive and collaboration and cooperation I got captivated.

I love people who can give the nuances between words and know how to use the right word…. true wordsmiths

But as I heard the podcast further it had so much wisdom, that I was enthralled. I had no intention of listening to this episode when I had started Google podcast. but I got so much value listening to it.

Sometimes you are looking for something and you accidentally come across something so amazing. I would strongly recommend , that if you’re in any way involved in doing negotiations or love how human interaction can be improved, you should watch this episode on YouTube.

Till next time….

Carpe Diem!!!

The good people in Paris

Great People, Karma, travel

Yesterday I wrote about how in my opinion Good Karma has helped me in far off places like South Korea.

This time I will narrate one of the many situations which I encountered in Paris.

My family and I were visiting Paris in 2018. In Paris the best way to travel around town is using the Metro. However one of the challenges of using the metro you need to understand the inter-change because all of them are marked in French. I had been to Paris multiple times earlier when I was a very small kid along with my parents and elder brother. Since then I had the intention to take my family to Paris since I find it very beautiful.

We were staying at a relative’s house which was in a suburb of Paris.

On this day, when this incident took place, we had taken the cruise on the river Seine and after a late evening walk to Trocedero to have a look at the Eiffel Tower we were totally exhausted.

So we walked over to the metro station and identified the station where we had to do the interchange to take the metro to our stop. Once we reached the station where we had to do changeover to the other line of the metro we could not find the exit from which we would get into the station for our metro line.

It was quite late in the night, we were exhausted and there were no one to help us identify the location and we kept going round in circles. Even though Paris is relatively safe for tourists, when you are with your family in an unknown place and its kind of late in the night, you tend to get a little anxious.

The other challenge is that Google Maps at that time would get confused in identifying French locations because we were using the English interface.

While the three of us were moving around, un-noticed to us, on the station there was a person who was cleaning the platform. He saw us walking around 4-5 times around the same point with map in hand.

He came to us on his own. He didn’t know English. We didn’t know French. But he sensed our anxiety and worry.

In his own sign language the person asked our issue. We showed him the location we had to go to and metro line we had to take. He simply asked us to follow him in his sign language.

Leaving his broom in a closet, he led us through a flight of stairs and then about 5-7 minutes of walking to the point where the escalators to the other platform were located. That’s when we heaved a sigh of relief.

This gentleman pointed to the escalator. We thanked him profusely and tried to tell him in English how grateful we were, but he only understood the “Merci” , waved as if he had done nothing spectacular and walked back to go to his location to clean up the platform.

People do try to help a lot in Paris especially when they realise you are coming from India to see their country and don’t know their language.

Like I have said earlier, inspite of all the negativities the politicians and the news may make you believe the world is a pretty decent place and you will find good people in all places.

Till next time -stay positive stay enerrgised.

Carpe Diem!!!