No Universal Prescription Please

 There is no silver bullet which can solve all the problems. 

Prescription has to be customized. 

Lets take investment as an example someone will say if you are this age  you have put X amount in Equity and Y amount in Debt that could be more of a guideline not a prescription. 

You need to consider the person's financial goal, career stability and many other things like his aptitude for risk etc and give him a customized solution. 

Similarly to spiritual path 

A guru comes and says follow my path and he has a big event having 10k people where he teaches Kriya

After few months how may people will be doing the Kriya and also even if they do it, does that really add vale to their life. 

A guru, let me call him a coach since that seems to be a better term. 

The spiritual coach (or for that matter any coach like finance/ health/ career coach) should first understand his capability to guide and should know the level the disciple is and give a training program at that level and he may have to calibrate the training program based on the progress. 

But if this is not possible, then the aspirant can look for gurus learn from them, also get blessings from them if  he can (since its believed that you need the blessings from Gurus for spiritual progress)

Basically most of the time you may not be able to afford a coach (in many areas of life since they may be costly and you may have to be in a level and then only you can start affording a coach)

So you can be your own coach attend some online classes or workshop and review and reflect and recalibrate. 

May be you meet some gurus in some of your training and after sampling you may decide to go to them for help. 

If they are a good guru they may not give an universal prescription for you, it should be a customized solution. 

Whether the Guru can do that or not is not in your control. 

But you can create your own customized solution and recalibrate. 

Dont surrender to your Guru. 

Your aim is progress and it need not be a blind surrender. 

I bless you have the energy and intellect and grace to find your current customized solution for various aspects for your life. 

With that you can have progress. 

Remember for deliberate practice you need to measure, review, report and reflect 

Themes dont change only the implementation does

Humans have been evolving for a long time and the last couple of centuries saw a drastic change in the lifectyle of people but when you look holistically themes never gets changed only the implementation. 

Humans want to be entertained by stories is a theme  

In nomadic days they lit a fire and gather around and the grand old person narrates story, now we consume stories in movies, audio book etc 

So themes don't change only implementation. 

Tracking Habits and Goals - Instant Gratification

Some of your goals are milestones some of them are ongoing. 

Examples of milestones

1. X amount of Money as Assets

2. Becoming VP 

3. Building a dream house

4. Starting a company 

Ongoing goals

1. I am an Athlete

2. I have pleasing personality 

Please note that ongoing goals when you get started you may not be there so you may have some milestones to achieve and then maintain once achieved 

But since most goals are long term and milestones in nature if you have a habit trackers (daily, weekly) and may be a Goal tracker monthly, Quarterly, Yearly.

When you track and put a tick on a habit or a goal you get instant gratification even though the goal is not reached you have the happiness in measuring the goal and Habit and see that the progress is happening. 

So delayed gratification is good but our evolution has put in the instinctive "instant gratification" in our genes . 

Why can't we gamify the delayed gratification goals to a series of instant gratification?

Note: Need to acknowledge that most of these ideas were crystalized as part of mindvalley and life book  

Habits that helps winning in many areas of life

 I am a life long leaner and dont have a second thought related to investing money for getting paid courses. 

Some of these investments are hit and few are misses but its ok. 

I am having a goal of a fixed amount of money for donation and may be for courses for which I don't find value I will simply feel it as donation. Its better to pay someone for more than the value they provide then just giving donation isn't it. 

I loved mindvalley all access (I have taken a break from it now should be back when they have new courses since I already consumed whatever I needed to consume)

I also completed  life book + mastery  and I should say my life is changed permanently. 

What I found in that course was there are many aspects of your life (they say 12) of which 5 is all about you

1. Health 

2. Intelligence

3. Emotion

4. Character

5. Spiritual

There are some habits which you do will check more than one aspect of life. As Jon says "A win anywhere is a win everywhere"

What if you can have daily habits which can touch many aspects. 

Couple of examples:

If I do exercise (as a person who never did exercise previously) it checks my 

1. Health

2. Emotion - as body moves you get happy 

3. Character - it takes discipline

Similarly if I do Meditation it improves my

1. Emotion 

2. Spiritual 

If I upgrade my skill technical or non-technical it improves my intelligence and career

What is important is to bring consciousness to everything. 

If you can have a vision and you build a goal and break some of them to Habit and then if you can track it and reflect (or report it to an accountability group) then nothing can stop you from making measurable progress to the ideal vision of your life. 

This is how companies are run and some companies go bust but few great companies survive for a long time constantly reinventing themselves and check the entropy. 

Why can't we do this in our own life and have a good progress in our life vision 

Take the example of this blog. This affects the following areas of my life

1. Intelligence - my creativity and communication increases

2. Spiritual - I am giving. I am creating

3. Emotion - this makes me happy

4. Social - I am connecting with some people 

5. Finance - Either directly or indirectly I improve my skills and give value and so I should get something in return financially also 

6. Career - this may make me communicate effectively and can help me in my current career or may help me in my part-time career or my  next career 

I urge you to explore your areas of life and find a habit or a ritual which could be the highest leverage across all the areas. The best return of investment. 

Back to Blogging

 I am back 

After a long Hibernation. 

I am back to writing. 

I have an aim to publish something once a week in this blog (I also have other writing aims like being a published writer and will also work on it)

Overcoming Behavioral Mistakes

SN: What tricks do you use to save yourself from behavioural biases? What are the most common behavioural mistakes you make?

HH: Most mistakes in investment stem from lack of knowledge. When one is walking in the dark, other senses become heightened. Similarly, when one is operating in the field of investments and one does not know what one is doing, the basic human survival instincts (being with the crowd – herd mentality, avoiding danger – loss aversion, etc.) kick in. These instincts sometimes may mislead one in stock markets which is a massive melting pot of human emotions.

Many advocate changing behavioural responses. I think if you try to do that you are up against thousands of years of evolutionary survival strategies. Instead, focusing energies on accumulating knowledge is a more reasonable task.

http://www.safalniveshak.com/value-investor-interview-huzaifa-husain/

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Ten Kings couple of doubts

I have read Ashok Banker’s Ten kings today. The story is interesting it shows one day battle between King Suda and Ten Kings.

Just couple of things needs clarification

1.  There was a scene between Vashista and Vishwamithra, wherein Vishwamithra advices Vashishta to stop a project, which Vashishta does not accept. But as they were speaking the ten kings were already trying to execute a coup. So it seems that whatever dialogue had happened between Vashishta and Vishwamithra had no significance since coup was to happen anyway. So why was the scene created?

2. How was the queen asked to play her role in the coup and why did she did what she did