dan sullivan

Financial Independence  – Happiness revisited

Financial Independence, Happiness

This post will move in two directions.  I have been seeing an advertisement on television where there’s a philosophical point being made by the protagonist about wanting money under any circumstance to enjoy life and her husband talking that money is not the only thing in life.

Its something similar to “money can’t buy happiness” or “money is the root of all evils”.  Like I mentioned earlier these are philosophical points with no end to debates especially in countries like ours where over the last 75 years people have seen massive poverty and are only now coming out of it.

Good Health and Happiness are very closely related. If you’re happy, you will generally be in better health and will fall sick less often. I have written multiple times earlier also that Happiness is not the destination,  its the journey.  We should be enjoying the journey and be happy.

Recently I was reading a book Gap and Gain by Dr. Benjamin Hardy and Dan Sullivan.  In this book Ben talks about how long term toxic stress and unhappiness can cause your lifespan to reduce dramatically. He’s given examples of various studies to showcase this. They also mention how people with less toxic stress are able to fight infections better and stay healthy longer.

While not all causes of toxic stress are related to money, in a lot of cases , the lack of money causes discontent which leads to toxic stress. One of the primary reasons for divorce is also lack of Enough money, the operating word being enough, which is subjective for different people.

So while “money can’t buy happiness ” its the next best thing, because it can help keep a lot of the stress causing items at bay. So if you have money to ensure that your basic needs are met and you don’t have to struggle for the basic things in life, then you have less reasons to be unhappy. There will always be some people who will find reasons to be unhappy, but that’s another story.

When I write about financial freedom or financial independence I write from the perspective that you should have enough money so that your basic needs are met and that you don’t have to be a slave of money.

Till next time then….make money work for you and get financial independence.

Carpe Diem!!!

Financial Freedom – keep counting the gains – live your life

Abundance, Financial Independence, life

A lot of times we get obsessed with saving for investing because we are unsure of the actual amount we could need for the future. It becomes a moving target. If you get to 100K you think you need 500K to survive. When you hit 500K you think you 1M to survive. This way you are never happy with what you have. You never learn to live your life in the moment and value what you have.

Something which I have mentioned earlier also, which I learnt from reading Dan Sullivan’s books and watching his videos, is the concept of counting gains.

So I started writing the blog posts on financial independence and freedom not because I had become wealthy but because I saw that I could find systems of investment which can help me grow. As these investments started growing I could take up activities which enhanced and expanded my life. And I wanted to share these learnings with everyone , so that others need not go through the same challenges which I went through.

From a stage where I had zero investments and zero financial backup, I kept clawing upwards. Now I can decide to feel sad that my investments have still not made a dollar denominated millionaire or I can feel happy that I was at zero and today I have hit some value while also living through lovely experiences along the way. This gives me the feeling of abundance.

When you are driving down from Washington DC to NewYork City you see the milestones for the amount of distance pending to reach NYC. Since the destination is fixed, it makes sense to know how much time and distance is left to reach it. However if you were to change the destination en-route from NYC to Rochester, then to Albany, then to Toronto, you will go crazy trying to figure out when you will eventually hit your destination. It then makes sense to think in terms of how much distance you have already gained towards your destination rather than how much is pending.

With your finances also you need to keep counting your gains and feel happy that you have been able to achieve some intermediate targets. Tony Robbins also had this concept of creating buckets and making investments according to the buckets. Once the bucket is full you need to use it. Like if there’s a bucket for vacations, then once the bucket gets full based on the target you need to go out and have a vacation. This way you will actually live your life.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Lazy weekend – nothing worth writing

Rest

Today I actually don’t have anything to write. It happens sometime to me when I have not focussed on anything in particular during the day.

This weekend I had taken a long weekend holiday and I just tried to give my body some rest. I have been working for too long without a break. These last 3 days I didn’t look at my official email. Luckily my office folks also didn’t give me a call. What that meant was that whenever I got an opportunity, I decided to take a break and took a nap.

Sometimes its good to just go blank. As a matter of fact Dan Sullivan talks that all entrepreneurs should divide their time into 3 zones and plan these well in advance. One of those 3 is time to recover by taking a break at regular intervals. One of the reasons that I want to become an independent entrepreneur is so that I can get a control over my time….at least I hope I will be able to.

When you do nothing, you give your brain some time to solve some problems in the background which it does not get an opportunity to do when we are constantly getting interrupted with the next urgent thing. This is what causes fatigue which in my opinion is a more brain related thing rather than a physical thing.

Anyway to cut the long story short……I didn’t have to tell anything today…..tomorrow I will hopefully put out a more sensible piece of content.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Procrastination – is it your brain playing games

Energy, Fear, Human Brain, procrastination, Productivity

Your brain occupies about 2% of body mass but uses upto 25% of the energy. Nothing new here. These facts are more or less known for a very long time. What was new to me when I was reading Steven Kotler’s book The Art of Impossible was the fact that the brain tries to conserve energy, so it tries to do tasks which require less energy and creates a resistance to anything new, novel, unknown etc.

I have been a big procrastinator all my life. And till now I used to feel the biggest reason for me to be like this was that I was scared, I had a fear – of just about anything. I have tried a lot of things to get out of this habit of procrastination and over the years have improved tremendously. One of the best things that I learnt was identifying the task which can have the most impact on my day and then finishing that one task, before moving to anything else.

When you have a team and you also have to coordinate with peers, you may not be able to close all things that you plan in advance.However for that I use my electronic calendar and shift the dates to follow-up with my colleagues and they remain on my calendar till completely closed. So in that sense I have become more action oriented, but there are still a huge amount of areas where I can be many times better, except for my procrastination.

Dan Sullivan has different take on procrastination, and he and Dean Jackson have a podcast called the “joyofprocrastination”. where they talk extensively about how procrastination is actually your friend. I have used some of their concepts also in my journey to improve my productivity.

However after I read the above facts in Steven’s book, it kind of made an “aha” situation for me. My brain resists my doing something new or unknown because it will have to spend more energy. Since the new or novel thing could also hurt me, it will have to do even more work to protect me.The more work it has to do, the more energy it will need to spend. Since the brain is also a pattern recognition system, it tries to keep predicting how things could shape up and therefore predicts the amount of energy it may end up spending. So it suggests avoiding the task altogether as an easy way out to conserve energy.

So now I know, I won’t blame myself for my procrastination habit. I will blame it on my brain for playing games with me. You could also check out and see if this logic holds good for you as well.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!