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!!!

Financial freedom – Happiness

Affirmative action, compounding, Financial Independence, Happiness, travel

You would have seen so many posts from me on compounding and rates of return and long term planning to build a large asset base even with small monthly automatic deductions from your account.

The objective of doing all this is not to stop living today for a better tomorrow.

The idea of financial freedom that I talk about is to ensure that you are no longer forced to do things for earning money. I have always wanted to have financial freedom so that I could go out and achieve all the items on my bucket list.

These items on my bucket list are what will give me experiences with my family which will in turn make me happy. I have already shared how I used these principles to travel to different countries.

The end objective of getting Financial Freedom and Financial Independence is Happiness today and in the future.

If you have to work in a job ,which does not make you happy, just because you don’t have the money then you find another job or use the magic of compounding so that over a period of time at least you are in a position to leave the job and do things which make you happy.

Through intermediate milestones, in accumulating wealth, you use the wealth to get experiences . Wealth is not to be accumulated for the sake of getting to a number. You have to enjoy the journey and be happy through all of it.

Till next time then find reasons to be happy.

Carpe Diem!!!