Month: October 2013

I’ve been doing a lot of swimming over the past 2 months. For the first month or so, I used to touch the water every time I pass the pool to the showers. “It’s too cold” – my mind would say. Nevertheless, I’d take the plunge and immediately start swimming.

And you know what happens next – the water would feel completely normal.

I still touch the water when I pass the pool (I’m sure I’ll get to removing that part of the process soon enough) but I’ve learnt to ignore the weather report. Just get under the shower, jump in, and swim.

We all get mental weather reports before we attempt something new. It’s always too hot/cold/uncomfortable. I guess it is not too different from getting into the water to swim.

Get in and just swim..

This week’s book learning is part 6 of a 12 part series on The Ascent of Money by Niall Ferguson. (Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

The concept of a public company originated from the Dutch East India company or VOC. Instead of raising money for expeditions to the East from royalty, they offered parts of their company to the public (=shares). The initial promise was that the company would be dissolved in 21 years. But, their success led to other advancements. Instead of dissolving it, they started paying “dividends,” allowed their shareholders to trade shares, elected a board of directors, among others.

(The company took its profit making duties a tad too seriously though. It made more money from destroying ships and looting other European expeditions than by any other means.)

The stock market owes its origins to a shrewd Scottish gambler by name John Law. He tested the stock market idea in France (the only country that allowed him to do so) by taking ownership of the French territory of Louisiana. Interestingly, John Law went onto establish the French central bank (the first of its kind) and centralized all of the government’s in flow and out flow. But, over time, he gained such a stronghold that he became equivalent to the head of the federal reserve, reserve bank, and treasury all at once.

Then, in his attempts to enlarge the central bank, he issues shares of the bank at crazy prices, leading to people selling shares to get more paper money from the bank in return to buy more shares of the bank!

Sketch by EB

In essence, John Law was the French economy and he caused a massive bubble by issuing irrational decrees. Eventually, the bubble burst resulting in catastrophic consequences for the French; the economy never recovered leading to the French Revolution.

In contrast, the Dutch and British companies did much better thanks to consistent returns on investments of shareholders and they took a lesson from John Law to set up regulated stock markets.

When we speak of others around us, we typically play victim/hero. After all, they are the ones with all the annoying habits and idiosyncratic behaviour.

Today, let’s stop for a moment and empathize with those who deal with us. Our parents, spouses, roommates, and colleagues who see the best and worst of us on a day-to-day basis. And then our friends who’ve been with us through our highs and lows.

I, for one, know they have a hard job. They have to put up with so many of my annoying traits – taking things and myself too seriously, perennially correcting them especially on annoying little things like pronunciation (my wife calls this habit “pulling a Rohan Rajiv”.. ;-)), my insistence on a point-of-view before changing my mind and insisting the opposite. Man, I must be hard to live, work, and have fun with!

Luckily, they’ve stood by me for a long time.. and for that, I’d like to thank them (thanks guys!).

I hope you take 5 minutes today to remember and laugh at your most annoying traits and then follow that up with a lot of empathy and gratitude for all those great people who add so much to your life. It’s amazing how a touch of gratitude makes us feel so much better.

The company we keep determines the conversations we have. People involved in real estate talk about houses, stay-at-home moms talk about household chores, people who travel talk about hotels and airlines, bankers talk about money, and so on. The conversations we have are the source of our opinions, our world-view, and eventually, our identity. Our identity then determines what we think about and thus, what we do.

The question, then, is – what identity do we want to have? What impact do we want to have on the world?

If it’s impact by being the best version of ourselves, we must take care to have those conversations as often as we can with people who want the same thing. Yes, we can shape our audience to have the conversations we like to have but the chances are higher if we work on finding like-minded people who want to have conversations of that nature.

Our identity and impact can be shaped by circumstance. But, we can actively make an effort to shape it by seeking out the conversations we want to be a part of.

The choice is ours.

2 years or so ago, I used to play a game on the iPhone before going to bed. Somewhere down the line, I had begun to ask myself if I liked the habits that made up my day and if they were sustainable. My gaming habit failed both. My effort to change it involved installing a bed side reading light and books on the bed side table. That worked very well and the coming of the Kindle app on my iPad effectively sealed the deal. I’ve read a ton of fiction over the past couple of years as a result.

The next habit I’m looking to change is the sifting through email habit when I wake up. I’ve had periods of occasional success with this one but the overall effort has clearly been a failure. I don’t like it as it leaves me prone to responding to email that annoys when I’m drunk (sleepy = drunk). Thanks to “The Power of Habit,” I now have a more scientific approach to changing habits. So let’s deconstruct it –

Cue: Opening both my eyes and deciding I can’t be in bed any longer

Routine: Switching WIFI/3G on on my phone and browsing through email/feeds

Reward: Getting something done while still waking up

The cue will remain. The goal now will be to switch the routine from switching WIFI/3G on and heading straight to to brush instead.

I’ve found almost no process more singularly frustrating than changing little habits that make up my day. But, our habits make us or break us and they’re worth the effort. More importantly, the act of exercising control over these little habits leave spare willpower to deal with other more important things.

Here’s to change!

The space between a reaction and a response is just a matter of seconds. When someone gives you bad news, your body begins to react – the impulse is a choice between fight, flight, and freeze.

Give it a couple of seconds, though, and you’ve reached that magical space between stimulus and response. A few more seconds and you’ve reached the point where you begin to respond. You realize you have more choice than you initially thought and are aware of better choices every second. The problem isn’t that bad after all.

Once you get to response, you never want to react again. Why spend all that effort trying to undo a hasty reaction when you can invest a few extra seconds to respond? The process may take just a matter of seconds but the results can save you hours of unwanted pain.

Getting to response isn’t easy even if it takes just a few seconds. It’s a skill worth developing though; and the first step to developing the skill is to be aware that we want to develop it.

To response!

“I hope to make a positive difference in this world.”

Don’t hope. Just do it. If you’re finding it hard to think about what you can do, here are 5 ideas  –

1. Volunteer at an organization that helps the under privileged

2. Help someone with a problem they are trying to solve

3. Give some money away to a not-for-profit organization you trust

4. Start a blog and help others with something you know

5. Engage positively on social media. No more whining or complaining – share ideas that make others’ feel better when you pop up on their feed

Don’t worry about reaching 100,000 people. Help just one. If you can’t find one, just work on yourself. It’s harder to do and has higher long term impact.

Be the change. Permission not required.

A close friend just lost all her data thanks to a hard drive crash. Luckily, she only had 6 months or so of data that wasn’t backed up and has now learnt a harsh lesson – hard drives always fail. It’s a question of when, not if.

So, how do you get prepared? Here is my suggested approach.

Step 1 – Prepare a list of the data that you absolutely need backed up. Think key documents, pictures, music, etc. Then think about whether some of this data can be recovered – e.g. if you buy all your music on iTunes, it can be downloaded pretty easily. Movies, on the other hand, might take a bit longer but this can still be done.

Documents and pictures, however, are probably much harder to recover.

Step 2 – Use Dropbox or Sugarsync for all your documents. Dropbox gives you 2 GB of free space with multiple add ons (I have 8.63 GB thanks to various space handouts) and Sugarsync gives you 5 GB. This should more than suffice for all your documents.

I would suggest moving all your document folders onto Dropbox/Sugarsync or both. This way, you never have to worry about your documents being lost. The moment your document is saved, Dropbox makes a copy on the cloud that you can access on Dropbox.com wherever you are.

Step 3 – If you value photos, invest in a cloud based back up solution for photos. I invested in CrashPlan a few weeks back. It is a unobtrusive service that runs in the background. I am backing up all my pictures and outlook data files onto Crashplan right now and am looking forward to not worrying about hard drive crashes in a few days.

CrashPlan+ is a great deal for 9 computers and costs roughly $1/month/computer if you find family and friends to share it with. A low price to pay for peace of mind. If you’re looking for company, please let me know and I’ll be happy to share a couple of empty spots on my plan.

Step 4 – Back up all this stuff onto an additional hard drive anyway. Never hurts. Do it but don’t rely on it.

Hope it helps!

This week’s book learning is part 5 of a 12 part series on The Ascent of Money by Niall Ferguson. (Parts 1, 2, 3, 4)

The Rothschild family’s success, culmination of decades of financial experience of the Jews, was a huge talking point in Europe. No war could be fought without their backing. Their own thinking had, however, changed. While war had helped them get very rich, they had transitioned to becoming fund managers carefully watching their own collection of government bonds. So, war was not helpful to them.

This was a problem because of the civil war in the United States. The south were in need of financial backing because their supply of money was running out. They tried salvaging it by selling cotton based bonds and then controlling supply of cotton (=rise in value) which was 80% of the raw material for Britain s textile industry. This worked very well until the fall of New Orleans – the last key port to move into Northern hands.

With both sides courting Rothschild support, they made a significant move – they sat out.

This was a disaster for the south – without ports, the south could no longer guarantee supply of cotton as collateral (i.e. the basis for their bonds – if they failed to meet their debt repayment, cotton would be paid to their investors). That was the beginning of a slippery slope that resulted in the fall of the confederacy 1 year later.

Sketch by EB

A few additional notes –
– Most of the world’s public museum art collection has been donated anonymously by the Rothschild family
– The south of the US lost the English market forever as the British moved onto other cotton sources – China and India
– The Rothschild owned the largest private collection of wealth, ever, at the peak of their powers. They gave away large amounts and some were even elevated to royalty.
– The Rothschild’s were the godfathers of modern investment banking and led the way for Messrs Goldman, J.P.Morgan, et al.

Need some inspiration? Go interview someone that inspires you. If you want to do it immediately, start by interviewing your mom.

It’s the simplest idea in the world. We’ve learnt so much doing it and felt inspired to no end. Send us a note if you’d like help and we’d be happy to help you do it..