Special Report

The key to living a memorable life is the pursuit of a memorable life. We share few ideas to stock up your personal happiness store, without spending too much money.

Let me ask you a question – “Can you recall what you did on each day for past 30 days?”

Don’t feel bad if you can’t because it doesn’t indicate a poor memory. In fact, if it gives you some comfort, here is an interesting fact – according to a study most people can’t remember more than 3 days from their past 30 days of life.

Surprising, isn’t it? So what happened to all those forgotten days? You might as well have not lived them since they, in hindsight though, appear to be a complete waste of time.
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People generally go about philanthropy the wrong way. Like money, the social impact of your efforts has a tendency to compound provided you get involved early.

Philanthropy is harder than business. You are tackling important problems that people with intellect and money have tried in the past and had a tough time solving. ~ Warren Buffett

Few years back, one of my friends asked me if I would donate money for charity. My smart-alec answer to him was, “Charity begins at home. So I choose to donate myself first.”

And then, to further flaunt my deep thinking abilities, I backed it up with another logic.

“In case of emergency, recommends the flight safety announcements, you should wear the oxygen mask yourself first and then help the other person. So I believe that I should first get rich myself and then only think about charity and giving back to society.”

I thought it wasn’t a selfish attitude. It was a perfectly rational answer to anybody who wanted to exploit my guilt about not giving back to society.

“So how much money do you think you should have before you can call yourself rich?” asked my friend.

Of course I didn’t have any answer to that question, which made me wonder if I was just making up rational sounding excuses to avoid thinking about a difficult subject. Perhaps I was.
[Read more…] about Life 2.0: Recycling Wealth

Some of the greatest things, the greatest discoveries, have come about by serendipity. Let’s explore its magic here.

I recently wrote about the mental model of Inversion in Safal Niveshak’s Latticework series. ‘Inversion’ suggests that sometimes you stumble upon very useful insights by inverting the problem.

Now, what use is a mental model if you can’t implement it? So let’s use it, for the sake of personal amusement, to investigate one of the most popular problems in the world.

Yes I am talking about the conundrum of – “How to get rich.” The inherent assumption here is that everyone wants to be rich and they are just looking for the “how” part. Keeping that in mind, one of the ways to invert this question is to ask – “Is getting rich worth it?”

Before you decide to skip this article thinking that it’s another one of those “money can’t buy happiness” rant, just stick with me for few more lines and I promise that you won’t regret.

I consider this as an opportunity to wear my curiosity cap and look at the real and practical problems faced by super rich. Now given the fact that the author, yours truly, isn’t so rich (money wise), is it justified for him to comment on problems of rich? So in my defence all I have to say is that I never let my lack of first-hand experience with a topic stop me from speculating on it.

Unlike previous Life 2.0 articles, this post doesn’t aim to provide any ‘how to’ advice. My intention is to share with you a different perspective, the view from the other side of the fence where grass seems greener.
[Read more…] about Life 2.0: Is Getting Rich Worth It?