Oprah Winfrey told an interviewer in 1991, one of the secrets of her success is sometimes not acting:

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned recently is that when you don’t know what to do, you should do nothing until you figure out what to do because a lot of times you feel like you are pressed against the wall, and you’ve got to make a decision.

You never have to do anything. Don’t know what to do? Do nothing. I wait. And that has been a big lesson: to be willing, to be still with myself, and trust myself and my higher power to help me make the right decision. And to not feel pressured.

Smart, well-meaning people have tried to plan economies at amazingly precise levels of detail. Consider the five-year economic plans of the former Soviet Union. Essentially, a group of economists would decide, say, how many dump trucks would be needed in Latvia in five years. Then they would work backwards, deciding how much steel would be needed for that many trucks, and then how much iron ore and manganese would need to be mined to supply the steel mills, and then . . . you get the idea. The calculations for dump trucks alone were incredibly complex, not to mention insensitive—they had no way to allow for any changes in the economic environment over the next five years. It simply couldn’t be done, which is why the Soviets often ran out of things like toilet paper, and why we now speak of the former Soviet Union.

By contrast, the capitalist system seems chaotic. No centralized body decides what the supply of any given product should be. No one is minding the store. Yet somehow the system self-organizes over time. When was the last time you wanted to buy popcorn, but couldn’t? Or toilet paper? Or a dump truck, for that matter? Somehow, our needs are met quite well in the almost complete absence of master planning. Given certain premises—that people tend to act in their own self-interest, that they will benefit from their own labor and innovation, that those who don’t play fair will be punished— over time spontaneous order succeeds where central planning could not. With extremely complex systems like economies, in fact, self-organization may be the only choice.

Time Mastery: How Temporal Intelligence Will Make You A Stronger, More Effective Leader by John K. Clemens, Scott Dalrymple

Full article here.

Given that most Indians still live hand-to-mouth, he said, proposals to give freer rein to investors and banks to do as they see fit could backfire as they did in Southeast Asia in 1997 when the collapse of a credit bubble and a run on the Thai baht led to economic calamity in the region.

“We cannot afford to take the kind of risk that other countries can, because of our large population,” says Yaga Venugopal Reddy, the former governor of the Reserve Bank of India. “As a smaller emerging market economy, I might not be able to get the type of money that is required to get over a crisis.”

Now retired and living in the southern city of Hyderabad, which is geographically and culturally distant from the power centers of New Delhi and Mumbai, Mr. Reddy has no official role in Indian policy making. But he and his views are respected and shared by many political leaders, bankers and economists here.

He dismisses the calls for greater financial reform, which come from economists and some in the government. To be successful in India, he said, regulators must tailor proposals to fit the “time and context” in which they are working.

Right now, he says the government must focus on its fiscal health, invest in infrastructure and improve education, health care and governance. Until India addresses those issues, he said, further financial reforms will not be effective and, in fact, could make it more vulnerable to crises.

by JONATHAN

I’ve found the secret to being excited about waking up every day; and I’ll tell you what it is right now. It’s starting a Revolution. I didn’t always think in these terms though…

I used to ask: What can I gain? How can I turn this into a business that will support me?

I focused on helping others by sharing my perspective, but that was the extent of it. When I did that, working on this blog would be exciting sometimes, and at other times it would feel like just a chore.

Now, I can’t even contain my energy for the work I’m doing. I feel like there’s electricity in the air. I’ve changed my mindset and made the decision to do something epic. Now I’m focused on creating a social movement of people living on their own terms. Because of this, I’ve moved from ego-centric to collective-centric.

It’s bigger than me now.

Guess what happens when you make something bigger than you? You get plugged in. You become connected to this amazing source of energy that was never previously available to you.

Now I ask: How can I take action that will support this vision? How can I create momentum to further ignite this revolution?

The biggest benefit to working on a revolution is that it gives you an insane amount of energy. Working on a revolution will make you want to wake up. You might even have a hard time falling asleep at night, because you’re so motivated to take action on your vision.

Once in a while you’ll question whether or not you’re up to the task.

But something else is even scarier: what you left behind.

The ordinary, conventional, safe, secure, default life that you could have chosen instead. That’s what’s really scary. Remember that and you’ll be okay.

Try an experiment. It involves an old-fashioned sandglass, now known as an hourglass or three-minute egg timer. Fill one end with sand, then turn it over and watch the sand pass from the upper chamber to the lower.

Everyone knows intuitively that the sand must flow through the bottleneck at a constant rate. Yet the sandglass presents us with an apparent paradox. When the upper chamber is full, it seems that the amount of sand in it decreases at a slow, steady rate. But when it is about half empty, we perceive that the speed of the emptying sand increases.

And then, when it is almost empty, the flow seems to increase exponentially. Now time, which seemed so languid before, races ahead. This is not only a metaphor for how events seem to flash by as we grow older, but also an example of the variability in how we perceive time.
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If a routine task is too simple, then boredom results and time seems to pass slowly. If a task is complex but not routine, then it requires our conscious attention and time seems to pass slowly. But when a task is complex enough to sufficiently engage the brain, yet familiar enough to be routine, then time shows its elasticity quite clearly—it actually seems to flow at a faster rate.
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Here are some actions you can take to turn your knowledge of time’s elasticity into practice:

Stop crises by stopping time. Maintain your objectivity when a crisis occurs, rather than getting caught up in the subjective frenzy. Time masters ‘‘stop’’ time by asking why rather than when—or, better yet, by making a completely out-of-context suggestion. Such reframing gives everyone an opportunity to reboot and brings fresh perspective to a problem.

Don’t restrict yourself to ‘‘clock time’’—living by minutes and hours. As important as these can be, ‘‘event time’’—the occurrence of meaningful events—can be even more important.

Be aware of the time-related differences in team members. Recognize that everyone has a ‘‘time personality,’’ a set of unique characteristics and individual differences that disposes each person to act and react temporally in different ways.

Slow time down. Recognize that top speed is not always the most appropriate pace. Take the time, if needed, to do more research or ask more questions. Don’t get caught up in a momentum that might bring you to market before you’re really prepared, or lead you to make a decision that isn’t yet ripe.

Time Mastery: How Temporal Intelligence Will Make You A Stronger, More Effective Leader by John K. Clemens, Scott Dalrymple

From Wikipedia.

The gambler's fallacy, also known as the Monte Carlo fallacy or the fallacy of the maturity of chances, is the belief that if deviations from expected behaviour are observed in repeated independent trials of some random process then these deviations are likely to be evened out by opposite deviations in the future. For example, if a fair coin is tossed repeatedly and tails comes up a larger number of times than is expected, a gambler may incorrectly believe that this means that heads is more likely in future tosses. Such an expectation could be mistakenly referred to as being "due". This is an informal fallacy.

Full Article here.

Back in 1971, when the web was still twenty years off and the smallest computers were the size of delivery vans, before the founders of Google had even managed to get themselves born, the polymath economist Herbert A. Simon wrote maybe the most concise possible description of our modern struggle: “What information consumes is rather obvious: It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.” As beneficiaries of the greatest information boom in the history of the world, we are suffering, by Simon’s logic, a correspondingly serious poverty of attention.

Google is making us stupid, multitasking is draining our souls, and the “dumbest generation” is leading us into a “dark age” of bookless “power browsing.” Adopting the Internet as the hub of our work, play, and commerce has been the intellectual equivalent of adopting corn syrup as the center of our national diet, and we’ve all become mentally obese.

One of the weaknesses of lifehacking as a weapon in the war against distraction, Mann admits, is that it tends to become extremely distracting. You can spend solid days reading reviews of filing techniques and organizational software. “On the web, there’s a certain kind of encouragement to never ask yourself how much information you really need,” he says. “But when I get to the point where I’m seeking advice twelve hours a day on how to take a nap, or what kind of notebook to buy, I’m so far off the idea of lifehacks that it’s indistinguishable from where we started. There are a lot of people out there that find this a very sticky idea, and there’s very little advice right now to tell them that the only thing to do is action, and everything else is horseshit.

“The Plural of Anecdote is Not Data.”

"Results matter, efforts don’t"

“Priorities are like arms: If you have more than two of them, they’re probably make-believe”

Never borrow for personal needs

I have inherited the value systems and principles from my parents. My father followed the golden principles—never borrow money for personal needs and don’t ever give guarantees. He would always say: ‘The repayment liabilities are yours. You can’t disown them. On the other side, the asset that you believe belongs to you, may or may not remain of that value always. So, the value of assets goes down but the liabilities stay with you. Live within your means.’ So, he would also explain to us by saying: ‘Liabilities are like taxi meters, which keep running 24 hours, even when you go off to sleep. The interest meter runs all the time. If you do business with your own money, you can withstand any bad time.’”

Nimesh Kampani, Chairman & Managing Director, JM Financial


Take risks but one at a time

My personal friend and philosopher, Prof. Lord S.K. Bhattacharyya, Head of Warwick Manufacturing Group, has had an enormous influence on my growth as a business leader. His advice: never take more than one risk at a time. He typically classifies risks into people, markets and money—three legs of a tripod. If you take more than one risk, the tripod loses balance. For instance, he would say only when you have a strong team and a stable market, can a financial risk such as an acquisition be attempted successfully.

Venu Srinivasan, Managing Director, TVS Motor Company