Month: December 2019

Jana, a colleague + wiser friend, conducted a learning session on personal finance and investing for Executive Admins at LinkedIn. He shared these presentations on his blog and I thought I’d share them with you.

• • The Joys of Compounding (read it with this spreadsheet)
  • What’s getting in your way
  • How to think about investing

I love the simple presentation style and was grateful to him for reinforcing 3 important lessons –
1. Compounding is both magical and backloaded
2. The hedonic treadmill is likely getting in your way of saving for the future
3. Keep investing really simple – after paying off your debts and setting aside an emergency fund, max out your 401(k), and invest in low cost index funds.

A simple tip for when you perform calculations (SUM, SUMIFs, etc.) on a spreadsheet – add checks.

Here’s how it works –

1. Keep the “master” data separate from the calculations – this ensures you never pollute the original data.

2. Once you complete the calculations, ensure you periodically check your math. You can do this by using “=”. For example, it might be =SUM(all cells in calculation)=SUM(all cells in source data)

This is harder to explain with an abstract example. So, here is an example of how you might add checks to a spreadsheet when you are attempting to split costs after a trip with friends. I’ve highlighted the check cells in yellow.

As we work through details on spreadsheets, it is easy to get small details wrong. When that happens, you can rely on these cells to immediately become “FALSE” and save you the trouble of dealing with flawed math.

Checks in spreadsheets are simple mistake detection investments that pay off in a big way.

Just as in other areas of our life.

I spent a couple of hours at a casino recently and was intrigued by the behavior* of a few folks at a Roulette table.

They first placed their bets with pursed lips and frowns, muttered phrases of encouragement to themselves (and got encouragement from a watching friend in one case), and reacted with shock and disbelief when the outcome wasn’t in their favor.

If I didn’t know the roulette game was all about luck, I might have mistaken this show to be about a game that required a high level of skill.

It made me wonder how often we end up mistaking luck with skill in games (both real and metaphorical) we play.

*I didn’t have anything to compare their behavior to – so, this may be normal.

Growth mindset = Fixed Mindset (default) + a deep commitment to the process of learning + a disregard for failure / a love for challenges + a faith in the outcome working out in the end.

We start with a fixed mindset. We then need to cultivate a deep commitment to and appreciation for the process of learning.

That, then, helps us disregard failure/embrace challenges thanks to that deep commitment.

And, underlying all of this is a faith that the juice will be worth the squeeze.

Great teachers understand a simple truth – a great teacher’s most important role is to inspire her student to learn the subject.

To facilitate this, great teachers often enforce a lot of rigor. For example, one of the best teachers I know used to assign a lot of thought provoking pre-work and expected us to come to class fully prepared (and we did). Another refused to let anyone in after the class started. And, yet another – this time at work – put extraordinary emphasis on never using a pie chart.

The purpose of this rigor is to remove all the noise that can get in the way of understanding and appreciating the subject/skill at hand. Appreciation speeds up understanding and understanding inspires more appreciation.

And, once a student makes it past the rigor to understand and appreciate what she is learning, there’s no turning back.

Rigor is a powerful tool to inspire focus.

We still listen to music the “old school” way in our home – i.e. we buy our music on iTunes vs. stream on Spotify. As a result, we have an eclectic playlist with tunes in various languages that we’ve accumulated over the decade.

One of the issues with such a collection is it doesn’t lend itself well to being background music when we have friends over (and we love having music play in the background). You are just as likely to listen to Coldplay or Taylor Swift as you are to Mozart as you are to a Hindi or Tamil artists.

Over the past year, however, our go to has changed to the wonderful stations/playlists on Amazon Music. Even when we’re away from home, we just fire up the Alexa app and ask for “good music” (Top 50 most played) or “nice music” (Mellow Folk) and turn our attention to enjoying games or a good conversation.

Till date, these stations have always delivered. I’m grateful for that.

When everything around us is made convenient, the race to take control of our lives is won or lost depending on the amount of friction we’re willing to add to convenient activities to make space for the more inconvenient thought and conversation that actually matters.

I recently learnt about a few cases of sexual abuse that affected people I know – that either happened to their kids or happened to them when they were kids.

The worrying pattern was that, regardless of whether it was a boy or girl child, most of them involved an adolescent boy they knew well.

On the one hand, it really sucks to learn of these stories.

On the other, as a parent of toddler who needs to (sadly) acknowledge reality, it is a reminder to exercise care and caution.

Whenever we travel, I’m reminded of the concept of soul food.

Every once a while, we taste some incredibly special food in places we visit – food that just touches our heart and mind. Sometimes, this happens at expensive places. More often than not for us, it happens in some hole-in-the-wall spot with that awesome intersection of $ (or $$) and 4.5+ stars on Yelp.

But, then, after a few meals of this delicious food, I find myself craving for “soul food.”

My soul food is simple fare – rice mixed with plain yoghurt – a staple where I’m from*. Throw in a spicy side and a scrambled egg and I’m in heaven. This costs next to nothing and, yet, I’d choose this over meals that cost hundreds of dollars.

That’s the beauty of soul food. It is generally simple stuff that we grew up with that somehow touches our heart, mind, and soul.

It serves as a wonderful reminder that we don’t need a lot of money or stuff to be happy. All we need is to surround ourselves with the simple things that feed our soul.

*In case you are wondering, this can’t be described as Indian food or even South Indian food. The analog would be European food or South European food. We have to get a lot more specific to get to the right label. :)

It has become an yearly tradition of sorts to dust off this quote from the late J P Morgan during this time of year – “I can do a year’s work in nine months but not in twelve.” 

In saying this, the late J P Morgan referred to the fact that he kept a workaholic schedule for 9 months a year in New York but made sure he had at least 3 months away from work every year to ensure he kept his spirits up and got enough perspective.

It is a fascinating way to think about the relationship between intense work and breaks. While few can take a quarter off from their chosen path every year, there’s something to be said for prioritizing breaks that are long enough for us to get some distance and perspective.