I have enough money to last the rest of my life

Do i have enough money?
I have enough money to last me the rest of my life, unless i buy something.
- Jackie Mason

Life, Philosophy & Balance sheet!

Birth is our opening balance,
Death, our closing balance,
Prejudiced views are our liabilities,
Creative ideas and good deeds, assets.

Heart is our current asset,
Soul, our fixed asset,
Brian, a fixed deposit,
Thinking, our current account.

Goodwill and achievements are our capital;
Character and morals, our stock-in-trade,
Friends our general reserves,
Values and behaviour, our goodwill.

Patience is interest earned,
Love, our dividend,
Children, our bonus issues,
Education, a brand,
Knowledge is our investment.

Profit and loss is karma earned.
Before final assessment (death),
Balance your sheet!

- Anonymous

Signing of the first decade

Signing of the current decade with a lot of things still incomplete... but feeling 100% complete.

Adios and Cheers for the new decade.

Insights from the One Minute Entrepreneur

There are only four things to remember to be a successful entrepreneur
• Your sales have to exceed expenses
• Collect your bills
• Take care of your customers
• Take care of your people

At any given time, we are becoming the average of the five people with whom we are most closely associated.

Keep a notebook of the wisdom you read, hear and learn and distill that learning into one minute insights.

Try your best to make good, well-thought-out decision. Often the decisions you make when you are young are more important than those made later in life, because they have more years in front of them.

Be guided by values.

What is right is more important than who is right.

If you want a life of success and balance, your values will be the vehicles to get you there.

Once you decide you admire the content, the values, and the style of a writer, devour every one of that author’s books.

You can get everything you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want.

Everyone loves to buy, but they hate to be sold.

Lead with your ears! Ask questions, assess needs and develop relationships. If you’re really good at it, people will practically beat your door down to buy from you.

In reality, everyone sells their ideas every time they open their mouth. So why not get good at it.

If you can sell and sell well, nobody can every quarterback you out of a great future.

Success can only occur when opportunity and preparation meet.

The single biggest salesmanship lesson you must learn is that periodic rejection is very much a part of the success process.

Sales champions know that success is not determined by how much verbiage you can dish out. Its all about how much rejection you are willing and able to eat.

No matter how good you are, you’ll experience a lot of failure. The greatest sales professionals are those who experience a ‘no’ and immediately go on their next call with total confidence, giving as good a presentation as they ever have, unfazed by the previous rejection.

When you feel moments impacting your destiny seize the opportunity.

The humility as a result of failure is a good thing. It is with humility that we admit we don’t have all the answers. It is humility that gives us the desire for a higher degree of focus, and its with that intense focus that we learn and grow.
For every yes you get, you’ll probably have to endure eight to ten no’s.

Know your numbers and conversion rates. If you take care of your numbers, your numbers will take care of you.

If you measure it, you can manage it.

Know your numbers.

‘Content’ and ‘Delivery’ of presentation plus call count will determine sales success.

Your fears will subside as you master the basics of business.

Psyche yourself up before every meeting with client groups. Be your best every time.

Ambition is the fuel that can drive life-changing events.

Identify what you’re passionate about doing. Look to do more of it.

Don’t quit your day job until you’ve got some success under your belt.

If nobody will pay you to do what you love, you have a hobby, not a career.

It’s ok to fall in love with looks and personality but marry character.

Don’t throw away your dream.

Substitute strategic patience for crisis management.

We were doing all the right things… we just need to keep doing them, one day at a time.

If you focus only on managing costs, your business will never grow.

Watch your ego, especially when you succeed.

Profit is the applause you get for taking care of your customers and creating a motivating environment for your people.

The secret to success is generating CASH, CASH, CASH.

Growing pains are a great problem to have.

Taking care of your customers is not optional – it’s imperative.

There are three secrets to creating raving fan customers; decide, discover and deliver.

Moment of truth is anytime a customer comes in contact with anybody in an organization in a way they get an impression.

Giving can be much more rewarding than receiving,

Servant leadership.

It is better to patiently implement a strategy than to recklessly push for growth.

To live a happy and fulfilled life, be generous with your wealth, time and talent.

Leave a legacy. Be intentional about making a positive difference with yours.

You can’t predict the good that can come from helping for forgiving someone.

Keep building one minute at a time… one block at a time.

Did you know 4.0

Just one week ago, The Economist, in partnership with XPLANE released "Did You Know 4.0," the official update to the XPLANE's original "Shift Happens" video. This completely new version focuses on the changing media landscape, including convergence and technology. It has quickly become one of the most popular videos on YouTube with over 250,000 views.

After Gen X, Y & Z it is back to future with Gen A (Alpha)

Born between 1995 and 2009, Gen Z makes up for 18 per cent of the population of any city, reports an Australian website. This latest generation is made up of today’s babies, children and teenagers and they are the future.

They are responsible money-wise, have a strong work ethic and have grown up on the staple diet of every social networking site. In stark contrast to Generation Y, these youngsters know the importance of saving money and working hard and are even more computer savvy according to social researcher Mark McCrindle says.

“If Gen Ys were regarded as empowered and the ‘me now’ generation, were superficial and appeared to flit between jobs, we’re seeing the pendulum swing back with Gen Z to traditional values, a strong work ethic and financial conservatism,” he said. “They have been significantly impacted by the economic downturn when in one’s formative years they see parents downsize or lose their jobs... they realise you have to prepare for a rainy day,” he added.

McCrindle believes that this change in Gen Z is a result of being exposed to a more mature upbringing. “Traditional trades struggle to market themselves to Gen Z, because they fail to see reason in trying to reach out to the dot.com world. But that’s wrong thinking,” he said.

The next generational cycle begins on January 1, 2010 and is christened Generation (A) Alpha.

Source: Times of India

Interesting additional read: Ten commandments of Generation Z

Rediscovering the joy of playing through table tennis

After college playing games have become a rarity. Always had it in my heart to want to play a game... basket ball, cricket, tennis whatever but never took the effort to find the time or the opportunity to fulfill the desire.

Ii now realise that there are two very simple but very critical factors if you are keen on a playing hobby... one, access to a place where you can play the game. For instance hoop for basketball, court for tennis. Secondly, someone who is equally inclined to play. Happy to report that i found both and have started playing table tennis for the last five weeks. So every Saturday evening it is a dose of wholesome physical fun.

Control bias

Read an interesting article about risk and perception of control on Value Research site. Though this was written in the context of investing... i found the concept interesting and relevant in other areas of life's decisions as well. Read on.

The author Dhirendra Kumar of Value research came across this concept in an article by an American security expert named Bruce Schneier.

We are all overconfident. We have this natural assumption that if we are doing something ourselves, we'll do it better than anyone else. Psychologists call this 'Control Bias' and it applies to all sorts of areas of human behavior.

It also goes on to add that people tend to overrate the risks they face from rare, but dramatic events and underestimate the risks that they face from everyday events. We as humans tend to underestimate risks in situations where we are in control and tend to overestimate risks in situations when we are not in control. The most common example is the fear of flying versus the perception of risk while driving. There's clear evidence that flying in a commercial airliner is by far the safest mode of transport that there is. In contrast, Indian roads are quite unsafe. Yet, many sensible people have a deep fear of flying, but are quite unconcerned about taking huge risks while they are driving.

Worse, people take slippages in safety levels on the road unthinkingly. They chat on their phones while driving (it's not unusual to see two-wheeler riders type SMS messages while driving); they drive after having had a couple of drinks; they drive when they know their brakes or tyres are not good; they overtake while turning, so on and so forth — the list is endless. And yet, they are scared of flying. All these could be examples of ‘Control Bias’. When we are doing something ourselves, we have an illusion of control, which feeds a biased view of safety. We underestimate risk because we are in possession of all the facts and we feel that we can control the situation when in reality we can't. When flying, we really don't know what's happening so we do not have the illusion of control.

I find that this illusion of control is exactly what makes investors underestimate risk while investing. Many investors don't actually know enough to be dabbling in stocks. Yet they do so because they have a large amount of information which makes them believe that they know enough to be in control. Someone sells investors a story about a stock and that story appears to have enough information to give an adequate illusion of control. If the story is dished out by a brokers' employee and is dressed up as research, then it appears to be all the more believable."

In a different context this could also explain why a large number of employees who lack job satisfaction stick to their jobs rather than give wings to their passion. Hate as they might... their knowledge and sense of control dissuades them from trying anything new. The perceived risk of failure is a strong barrier for taking the plunge into trying something new.

Theory vs life

Recently came across a scribbling that i had made on top of my management notebook from my first year of graduation (1993). Don't know where i had sourced it from... obviously i must have thought it interesting to make note even then...

A student of business with tact
absorbed many answers he lacked.
But acquiring a job he said with a sob
"How does one fit answer to fact?"

The value of a Balance sheet

Though your balance sheet is a model of what balance sheets should be
Typed and ruled with great precision in a type that all can see
Though the grouping of the assets is commendable and clear
and the details which are given more than usually appear
Though investments have been valued at the sale price of the day
and the auditors certificate shows everything ok
One asset is omitted and its worth i want to know
The asset is the value of the men who run the show
- Unknown source -