Living abundantly

Abundance, compounding, dreams, Financial Independence, Human Brain, mindset

I keep talking about getting financial freedom or financial independence and how you utilise the magic of compounding to help you get financially free. However compounding is a very very long term game.

While you should be investing, it does not mean that you stop living your life Today. It does not mean scrimping through life. I was telling one of my relatives today, on this same philosphy, that you should learn to live abundantly . What is the point of having money which you save all through your life, but you yourself never enjoy it.

If you’re scrimping to save everything, so that you have something in the future that you will enjoy, then by the time you reach the age when you think you can enjoy, you will be too old to enjoy.

That’s why I mention, that you need to save also for your dreams and tick of the things on your bucket list while you are saving money. I have a huge bucket list of my own, which keeps growing. So while there’s some amount you are investing for the long term, you also need to have a fund to achieve various dreams that you have. And when you hit that target you need to actually go out and do that activity to achieve your dream.

At the moment because of the Covid restrictions, we cannot travel out of India, I am right now active every weekend exploring different countries on YouTube and listing out what I will do when restrictions get removed. Not sure in what shape and form travel will be allowed but I am still putting things on my bucket list.

Now your dreams could be making a boat, or weaving a carpet or going on a hike, take your time to do these activities. Because when you achieve your dreams, it helps improve the performance of your brain. If the brain performs better you actually achieve more and you get more abundance overall. You trick your brain by living abundantly and therefore get more abundance. Its a mindset issue. I am not taking about taking loans and living out of your means. However I am definitely asking you to invest money for your short term dreams, mid-term aspirations and long term goals, instead of only long term goals.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Scarcity or Abundance

Abundance, mindset

If you look at the news channels everyday more often than not you will see things that are wrong , with our world.

On the other hand if you see poor illiterate farmers are using cell phones in India and various parts of Africa. I was surprised to see a demo of how a fertilizer company has given a Voice BoT as part of their mobile application and farmers use it in their language.

Earlier when I used to go to get my haircut done at the salon, after the cut the barber would hold a mirror at the back of my head. Since there were mirrors in the front also, I would see the reflection of the reflection of the rear mirror. Now after the pandemic I have avoided going to the salons because there’s a lot of people. I use a local utility App and they send me a barber at home.

This utility app connects me to the barber because he’s also using a smart phone. After my haircut this barber now takes the photos of how he has cut my hair and shows me. I can zoom into the photo and get the finer details of my cut which I could not get before in the salon. Some people are looking at creative uses of what they (the smartphone) instead of thinking of what they don’t have (the large mirrors of a salon)

Another example of how semi literate people are using the smart phone to cut the time in decision making for closing an order. I was getting a chest of drawers being made. To close the laminate to be put, my carpenter didn’t bring me samples to approve before fixing it in his factory. Instead he saved time and money ( 1 hour in traveling each side and then the time to show me the various options) . He just sent me the photos of all the options he thought would look good and then asked us to choose. Zero cost.

There was a time less than a few years back when we used to spend about a dollar a minute to call North America from India. Today we do video calls virtually free. So much abundance.

The news papers and television channels would make you think the world is coming to an end, because they run a business. They need a higher viewership so that they get advertising revenues.

However if you look at the world around you, you will see so many good things happening. Become inquisitive about them.

Till next time keep an abundance mindset.

Carpe Diem!!!

Our human brain

Breathing, Health, Human Brain, messaging

As I have written in my post a couple of days back, these days I am reading the book The Art of Impossible: A Peak Performance Primer by Steven Cutler. Steven does a lot of research for the books he writes. Some of his earlier books which I have liked a lot, jointly written with Dr. Peter Diamandis, include Abundance, Bold.

While the television and newspapers throw so much negative news all around us, if you read these books, you realise that the world is a much better place to live in today than what it was say 300 years back. And a major reason for that according to the authors is the fact that technology is playing such a major role in making this place a better place to live in.

As I mentioned earlier, Steven does a lot of research for his books. If you have been reading my blogs, you will also notice that I am always trying to find ways to improve the performance of my brain and my body. Whether its reading faster or breathing techniques which help build stamina, I am always looking for queer facts about this complex machine called the human body.

One thing which caught my eye today was the fact that our brain can only process about 126 bits of incoming information per second. The key word is incoming i.e from various senses to the brain, which interrupt the processing function of the brain. These bits need not be equivalent to binary bits (0,1) that technology folks look at since the brain works in a more abstract fashion.

This does not include the processing capability which the brain has, which is enormous. And that’s why people talk about being focused so that you are interrupting your brain with less inputs and doing more processing.

I don’t know about you, I have always considered myself to be easily distracted and I am not able to comprehend things, if they come too fast at me. For example trying to find my gate number for the flight from 5 screens of arrival and departure information.

Or if someone gives me too many food options from which to choose very fast.

I have to deliberately slow down the intake of information. In meetings to avoid such situations when too many people are speaking, I have to ask people to just be quiet and answer only the questions which I ask.

Today I realised this is not a problem only with me. Its a problem for al human beings. If our brain can only process so much information at a time, then for us to be able to influence someone we need to be able to give information in such a way that is simple to process and can get analysed. That’s where I guess charts look are understood compared to reports.

For a practitioner of marketing it means that are messages should be small simple sentences with more pictures, images.

Can you think of what other implications can this have for us in marketing. Pls write in your comments below.

Till next time then

Carpe Diem!!!