This is my 50th published blog and well it is about blogging :) I would like to thank you all my dear friends for all the support, encouragement, appreciation and share some of the most heart warming experiences about what I learned through them in this golden jubilee 50th blog of mine. (I created the image below to express my emotions :) )
The idea of blogging came to me because of something really funny. After a painful wash out during the 2008 crisis and several years of experiments, I finally found the right approach to investment and wealth creation. I figured that there is way too much to learn & remember here and it is going to be a really long journey. I was learning, discovering things at a hectic pace and in huge volumes and wanted some way to keep track of all this. For me ever since my schooling days, I never had confidence on my memory, add to that as I grew up I developed this phobia that some day I am going to lose my memory maybe to alzheimer's or something like memnto .. just a phobia ...
So I wanted to persist all I am learning somewhere that is safe and I can easily refer to. At the same time I didn't want it to be just a theoretical dump of "10 Principles of Investing" because investing is so personal, subjective and contextual. It is a form of art instead of accounts. So I wanted to save my learning with some context and personal experience embedded into it along with a crystal clear message that the experience highlights.
My goal
At the same time while interacting with my friends, relatives, colleagues I realized that there are so many people who are interested in growing their wealth and worried about shortage of money for essentials like family support, education, marriage and healthcare or what happens after retirement. One thing I saw common atleast at that time was that everyone had one common idea about retirement and that is "once I save one crore rupees, I can happily retire" According to me that was so wrong. Even more worrying was that people with "1 crore retirement planning" would realize that they are wrong only after retirement when it is already too late to fix things. The time to correct was now, not after 60.
Another common thing I realized was that everyone correlated more wealth with more hard work. We especially in India have been brought up to believe that we need to struggle and work hard to become rich and successful and once again that is so wrong. We just need to understand the game. Money is the most abundant resource on this planet.
Through my blogs, I have also tried to encourage everyone to pursue their passion and take calculated risks in life instead of trying to always play it too safe and structured according to social expectations. Yes, accidents will happen but the victories will also be sweet. Life should not be about reaching your goals but blasting through them and setting new ones!
Some life lessons
The phase of my life post 2008, to put it very simply was very heavy for a few years in a row. For me if I could use my experience and help atleast one other person avoid learning these life lessons in the hardest possible way, it would make everything much more meaningful. And so I published my first blog on retirement planning last year on June 17th. Way beyond my expectations, I got such a terrific response from all of you for my first blog. Close friends from childhood, college, early work days with whom I had lost touch pinged me and wished me for writing this blog.
Some friends messaged me on how reading the blog changed their perspective about money which they had developed due to scarcity & difficulty in their childhood days. That was such a satisfying outcome for me, considering I myself came from a background of unnecessary scarcity and that had impacted me so deeply for such a long time. Even after earning and saving enough with a stable and well paying job, spending even a small amount for something as basic as food used to pinch me because of my early experience.
I literally had to train myself, unlearn my fear of spending money and learn to enjoy it. It was difficult. More than that, it was unnecessary. It is now my goal to influence as many people as possible to switch from savings mindset to earnings mindset. Spend freely but focus on earning more than you need to spend. Too much focus on saving can lead to unnecessary stress on families, especially for kids who can grow up thinking that they are a burden on the family because their parents have to spend money on them. Such issues creep in slowly without we realizing it and have far reaching impact in later years for everyone. Very unnecessary & undesirable.
Even as individuals and as a country, our focus on savings, limits us whereas focus on earnings can offer unlimited growth and help us realize our dreams way beyond food, shelter & clothing. We have to make that cultural shift.
A long thank you note
Anyways, seeing that my writing has atleast some connect with friends, I decided to pursue it sincerely and today I am writing my 50th blog in less than 15 months from my first blog. Without naming anyone I would like to thank all of you for all the wonderful wishes and messages for my blogs. A friend's sister whom I never met commented on one of my blogs and appreciated it. It was so great to know that my blogs were reaching out of my circle of immediate friends. A few friends (also my investment buddies) with whom I regularly chat, expressed how my blogs helped them fix their misconceptions about stock market and gave them the right approach to start their investment journey. They also let me know about how they were doing pretty good and above all enjoying it. This is exactly what I wanted to achieve through these writings. It would be my greatest pleasure if one, some or all of my friends who got inspired into stock market investing because of me become millionaires and billionaires and live an abundant, worry free life. Many people in office including my boss and managers appreciated my writing and also let me know how others far off in different geographies who didn't know me also appreciated my blogs and inquired about me. They also encouraged me to write more. Your boss encouraging you to do something other than daily office work, that's good right? Through many people, my blogs became a part of my introduction when meeting new people. Some appreciated for the humor quotient and some for the wisdom. That is all very generous of you. Thank you ! Few friends went through it in detail and helped me correct few mistakes here and there to make my blogs more readable. Cannot thank you all enough considering my language skills are very challenged. If it was not for auto-correct and spell check most of my blogs would hardly be readable :) thanks to technology ! Few friends are very expressive, few just hit like silently in the shortest possible time after I publish my blog (not sure if they read it at all) and few just let me know casually at the tea vending machine that they enjoyed reading my last blog. Thank you all, means a lot to me. Maybe there are few who don't like it .. in that case thank you for not making it very explicit or public and probably just ignoring it .. never got a nasty message about my blogs :). When you publish something in public, you always risk exposing your stupidity to everyone, but I think all my friends have been extremely kind to me. In a strange way my blogs have helped me improve my friendship & relationship with so many of you which is really great !
Hopefully I will be able to continue writing, hopefully it will be meaningful. Hopefully it will be positive for all of us. And if at all I lose my memory some day due to alzheimer's or some memento kind of thing, I have a small request to all of you my friends. Please .. please direct me to this blog ! :)
The idea of blogging came to me because of something really funny. After a painful wash out during the 2008 crisis and several years of experiments, I finally found the right approach to investment and wealth creation. I figured that there is way too much to learn & remember here and it is going to be a really long journey. I was learning, discovering things at a hectic pace and in huge volumes and wanted some way to keep track of all this. For me ever since my schooling days, I never had confidence on my memory, add to that as I grew up I developed this phobia that some day I am going to lose my memory maybe to alzheimer's or something like memnto .. just a phobia ...
So I wanted to persist all I am learning somewhere that is safe and I can easily refer to. At the same time I didn't want it to be just a theoretical dump of "10 Principles of Investing" because investing is so personal, subjective and contextual. It is a form of art instead of accounts. So I wanted to save my learning with some context and personal experience embedded into it along with a crystal clear message that the experience highlights.
My goal
At the same time while interacting with my friends, relatives, colleagues I realized that there are so many people who are interested in growing their wealth and worried about shortage of money for essentials like family support, education, marriage and healthcare or what happens after retirement. One thing I saw common atleast at that time was that everyone had one common idea about retirement and that is "once I save one crore rupees, I can happily retire" According to me that was so wrong. Even more worrying was that people with "1 crore retirement planning" would realize that they are wrong only after retirement when it is already too late to fix things. The time to correct was now, not after 60.
Another common thing I realized was that everyone correlated more wealth with more hard work. We especially in India have been brought up to believe that we need to struggle and work hard to become rich and successful and once again that is so wrong. We just need to understand the game. Money is the most abundant resource on this planet.
Through my blogs, I have also tried to encourage everyone to pursue their passion and take calculated risks in life instead of trying to always play it too safe and structured according to social expectations. Yes, accidents will happen but the victories will also be sweet. Life should not be about reaching your goals but blasting through them and setting new ones!
Some life lessons
The phase of my life post 2008, to put it very simply was very heavy for a few years in a row. For me if I could use my experience and help atleast one other person avoid learning these life lessons in the hardest possible way, it would make everything much more meaningful. And so I published my first blog on retirement planning last year on June 17th. Way beyond my expectations, I got such a terrific response from all of you for my first blog. Close friends from childhood, college, early work days with whom I had lost touch pinged me and wished me for writing this blog.
Some friends messaged me on how reading the blog changed their perspective about money which they had developed due to scarcity & difficulty in their childhood days. That was such a satisfying outcome for me, considering I myself came from a background of unnecessary scarcity and that had impacted me so deeply for such a long time. Even after earning and saving enough with a stable and well paying job, spending even a small amount for something as basic as food used to pinch me because of my early experience.
I literally had to train myself, unlearn my fear of spending money and learn to enjoy it. It was difficult. More than that, it was unnecessary. It is now my goal to influence as many people as possible to switch from savings mindset to earnings mindset. Spend freely but focus on earning more than you need to spend. Too much focus on saving can lead to unnecessary stress on families, especially for kids who can grow up thinking that they are a burden on the family because their parents have to spend money on them. Such issues creep in slowly without we realizing it and have far reaching impact in later years for everyone. Very unnecessary & undesirable.
Even as individuals and as a country, our focus on savings, limits us whereas focus on earnings can offer unlimited growth and help us realize our dreams way beyond food, shelter & clothing. We have to make that cultural shift.
A long thank you note
Anyways, seeing that my writing has atleast some connect with friends, I decided to pursue it sincerely and today I am writing my 50th blog in less than 15 months from my first blog. Without naming anyone I would like to thank all of you for all the wonderful wishes and messages for my blogs. A friend's sister whom I never met commented on one of my blogs and appreciated it. It was so great to know that my blogs were reaching out of my circle of immediate friends. A few friends (also my investment buddies) with whom I regularly chat, expressed how my blogs helped them fix their misconceptions about stock market and gave them the right approach to start their investment journey. They also let me know about how they were doing pretty good and above all enjoying it. This is exactly what I wanted to achieve through these writings. It would be my greatest pleasure if one, some or all of my friends who got inspired into stock market investing because of me become millionaires and billionaires and live an abundant, worry free life. Many people in office including my boss and managers appreciated my writing and also let me know how others far off in different geographies who didn't know me also appreciated my blogs and inquired about me. They also encouraged me to write more. Your boss encouraging you to do something other than daily office work, that's good right? Through many people, my blogs became a part of my introduction when meeting new people. Some appreciated for the humor quotient and some for the wisdom. That is all very generous of you. Thank you ! Few friends went through it in detail and helped me correct few mistakes here and there to make my blogs more readable. Cannot thank you all enough considering my language skills are very challenged. If it was not for auto-correct and spell check most of my blogs would hardly be readable :) thanks to technology ! Few friends are very expressive, few just hit like silently in the shortest possible time after I publish my blog (not sure if they read it at all) and few just let me know casually at the tea vending machine that they enjoyed reading my last blog. Thank you all, means a lot to me. Maybe there are few who don't like it .. in that case thank you for not making it very explicit or public and probably just ignoring it .. never got a nasty message about my blogs :). When you publish something in public, you always risk exposing your stupidity to everyone, but I think all my friends have been extremely kind to me. In a strange way my blogs have helped me improve my friendship & relationship with so many of you which is really great !
Hopefully I will be able to continue writing, hopefully it will be meaningful. Hopefully it will be positive for all of us. And if at all I lose my memory some day due to alzheimer's or some memento kind of thing, I have a small request to all of you my friends. Please .. please direct me to this blog ! :)
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