Book summary: Rich dad’s guide to investing by Robert Kiyosaki

Book title: Rich dad’s guide to investing
Author: Robert Kiyosaki
ISBN-10: 1612680216
ISBN-13: 978-1612680217
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What this book is about

Robert Kiyosaki, the author of the famous book, “Rich dad, poor dad”, has written a book named “Guide to investing”, which helps you build the right attitude to help you become rich. The book starts with a young Robert going to meet his mentor, whom he calls ‘rich dad’, and rich dad’s son. They are talking about investing in a very lucrative opportunity. While Robert asks to join in, the two politely respond to him that he couldn’t do it, since the opportunity was legally only for the ‘officially rich’, i.e. a networth of $1,000,000 and above. Stung by the incident, Robert consults his one and only guide on how to grow rich – his rich dad. The book is a culmination of what rich dad taught Robert about getting rich. Continue reading Book summary: Rich dad’s guide to investing by Robert Kiyosaki

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How beauty adds life to a home (and it doesn’t have to cost a lot)

Essential Beauty

We have been visiting several Architectural wonders of ancient India in the last few weeks. Temples made of soft rock with round pillars, intricate carvings in the ceilings and sculptures in every facade, churches where every wall, ceiling and glass said a story, tombs, minarets, beautiful wooden roofs without a single nail, palaces with wall murals in natural dye, furniture made with wooden carvings, stone railings with elephant and bull heads etc.

The buildings were built by different kings, often different kingdoms. Some where places of worship of different faith and some where houses. The theme of decoration changed, the materials used changed, the message conveyed changed, but there was one thing that did not change between these different types of buildings.

Continue reading How beauty adds life to a home (and it doesn’t have to cost a lot)

From masterpiece to mediocrity

We have seen this quite often. We love a certain brand of chocolate dearly. Let’s call it Toffee X. Over the years, the taste of the Toffee X changes gradually until one day we feel that the chocolate is tasteless. We try to reason it as a natural change of taste associated with growing up. But no! Your friends say the same thing. Well, they have grown up too. But no! The kids in your block say that Toffee X isn’t a tasty chocolate at all. They wonder why their parents were hyping it so much!

After poking around, you find that the makers of Toffee X did indeed change the taste. To cut costs, they kept cutting back on certain ingredients. The amount of cardamom was halved, butter was replaced with margarine, the size went down by a third and they used refined sugar instead of honey. From being the market #1, they are now just also-rans. This is a typical example of a work of masterpiece degrading over time and dying a slow death due to short-sightedness and lack of commitment and cutting corners as a result. Continue reading From masterpiece to mediocrity

A simple two-sided trick to get better at discipline

Travelling by bus through the Himalayas, we noticed a man attempting to throw three empty plastic water bottles out of the bus window. We immediately told him not to do that. The man looked at us, then withdrew the bottles, thankfully not converting the beautiful landscape into a landfill. After a while, he walked to us and asked if we ever planted trees. When we said no, he launched into a virtue-loaded story about how he planted a tree on his birthday every year from when he was a certain age and on special occasions like Diwali, children’s day, etc and now that he was 57, he must have planted more than 50 trees. Priya (my wife) and I did our best to listen and keep up with his bragging.

The man’s story was good. He had focused on what he should do to increase the earth’s green cover one tree at a time. However, what about garbage and their harmful effects? What about his non-biodegradable plastic bottles meddling with the Himalayan landscape and causing a hazard for the soil, the plants and the animals?

The man had focused only on what to DO and had ignored what NOT to DO. The man would have benefited from a DOs and DON’Ts list. You often need both to enforce discipline. Continue reading A simple two-sided trick to get better at discipline

The Other Side…

The Situation

I was standing with my friend Kalpana outside the office building. She had asked me to wait today so that I can meet her fiance. She was quite excited to meet him after a few days and was also equally excited to introduce him to me.

We had been waiting for 30 mins and I was running late. I was feeling bad for her. She was unable to reach him and we were unsure if we had to wait further or leave.

Continue reading The Other Side…

How do you react to failure?

You are driving through a busy street in a city and need to park your vehicle. You find a spot that’s perfect to parallel-park your car between two others. Finally, your tiring drive can end. But while backing your car into the spot, you graze your car’s rear into a light pole. This is the side of the car to which you are blind-sided, and can only use judgement. There are an ugly scratch and a dent. After a few more twists and turns, you finally park the car. But your parking attempt suffered a failure. You can take this failure either like a loser or as a person who looks at it as something learnt. Continue reading How do you react to failure?

Four Steps to Setting and Achieving Your Financial Goals

Financial Goals

This is Part of our Personal Finance Education Series. You can check Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV here.

From our expenses Account, we know how much money we spend/need every month. We also know where we stand today in terms of wealth, from calculating our Net worth. The next step is to know where we need to go

What are your short term and long term Financial Goals?

Money is only a means to get somewhere. Instead of simply saving money for the sake of it, we need to clearly define goals against which want to save money for.

Continue reading Four Steps to Setting and Achieving Your Financial Goals

Theme your days to get more done

In his website Smart Passive Income, host Pat Flynn, also the author of Will It Fly, describes how he sets a different theme to every day of the week. This helps him focus on a certain project for the day by pushing everything else to other days with respective themes. Read about it in the “Communication and Calendar” section here.

I have already discussed how I use a calendar to schedule my days. However I soon realised that a calendar has its limitations. In Pat Flynn’s podcast with Mike Vardy, they discuss how a calendar is an example of horizontal scheduling and how it leads to focus being fragmented and on particularly distractive days, how nothing gets done.

The solution is to use a concept called day-wise themes.

Continue reading Theme your days to get more done

You complain so much!

Whiners. You can always recognise one when you have a conversation with them. A tell-tale sign. When you are around them, you feel the shadow of negative energy as they start berating. How bad their day is, how this government should never have been chosen, how insensitive homo sapiens are. As if problems on just the planet of earth are not enough, they start complaining about how harsh the sun is these days and how the ozone layer is depleting and causing global warming! Choose any topic. Name it, and they have a complaint.

While not everyone is a serial whiner, I am sure that everyone can do with a little less complaining. I used to complain a lot, but I realised a few things about complaining that forced me to reduce my habit. I am not 100% successful, but I have significantly reduced the number of whines and complaints to 2 – 3 every week. In this post, you will read about why complaining is bad and what you can do instead. Continue reading You complain so much!

If I fail..

A friendly conversation,

B: ‘Exam is in a week, why don’t you put more efforts into study. You know this exam is difficult is to crack’
A: ‘Well, that’s exactly why. It’s difficult to crack and I probably won’t. If I put in as much efforts as you do, I’d feel terrible about having failed. Now that I’m cool about it, I wouldn’t feel as bad when I fail’
B: hmmm…

Continue reading If I fail..