To my 11yr old self, the utility of money was simple - any $ you gave me, I would calculate the amount of chocolates, crisps and sodas I could buy. That was what money could buy, that was material happiness.

When I first heard the term “mental health” years ago, I was young, brash and probably too confident of myself. I remember thinking it was for weak people who could not cope up with harshness of the reality.

But over the years, I have started looking at world class champions, entrepreneurs and people who seem to push through unusual odds and I noticed how strong their mental resolve was.

The social signaling and currency is going through a dramatic change. We have gone from baby boomers establishing social status via material wealth and objects to millennials using experiences sprayed across social media to establish social credentialing. Gen Zs are changing the paradigm…..

Specific knowledge is something you learn and knowledge you cannot be trained for. Specific knowledge is found by pursuing your genuine curiosity and passion rather than whatever is hot right now. Become the best in the world at what you do (your specific knowledge) and keep redefining what you do until this is true.

Exploring what is mine, and hopefully it makes you think what is yours.

5 years ago, last week of October 2015, I landed in USA for the sixth time. Soon, I would make this country my home and work towards creating a new life.

If I wanted to succeed long-term in this country, I needed a network of people who can enable that. I needed relationships. I needed a team. You don’t succeed alone.

Compounding is a very powerful concept, easier to understand with a money example. $1 on day 1st of July, doubling it every day of the month vs $100 million - if given an option, one should chose the former. That $1 a day doubling for just one month is $1billion+.

This is easy to understand, but I find compounding has an incredibly profound impact on two other aspects of your life.

The personal computer revolution started in 1980s, and took 30 years to reach 1.5 billion units worldwide. The smartphones boom started in 2007/08 and it took almost 10 years to reach ~3 billion smart-phone users in the world.

Phone and computers are limited by number of people. Sensors are not and there are more things than people.

For purpose of this writing success is narrowly defined as the pursuit of wealth and influence over capital, labour, technology or ideology - the drivers of modern day capitalism.

In this narrow scope of success, I have found few fundamentals to hold true and few things which enable the pursuit of aforementioned success.

Those two words sum up a lot about human nature and opportunities. We are either fighting for survival or defending it, or we are reaching a little higher to rise up in whatever endeavor one might be perusing. We seldom can do both simultaneously.

When you are rock climbing, you clip the quickdraws to bolt before going any higher. You ensure survival and then you go higher.

Decision Making is like sex, everybody engages in it but most people don’t take the time to read about it or learn it methodically. This results in sloppy decision making.

We make decisions everyday, but every-time we have a critical decision - a job prospect, a life partner prospect, a decision to move countries or cities - we start from the ground up, we think about what we truly want, make pros and cons and discuss with our trusted and loved ones. This is an extremely sub-optimal way of decision making

Andy Rachleff in his famous class at Stanford “Aligning Start-ups with their market” teaches that a common misconception is that technology disrupts markets or companies, but it is not technology, but business models that disrupt markets and companies. Technology is merely an enabler of this new business, a new method to create and capture value.

We all have to make this choice. We have to make it few times in our life. This is my attempt to synthesis broad frameworks I have learnt from Andy Rachleff (Benchmark, Wealthfront) and Eric Schmidt (Google). This has helped me, and I hope the same for you.

Many start-ups are building artificial intelligence products for businesses to use. There are hundreds of machine learning, computer vision or deep learning businesses propping every week.

Everyone has a boss. Someone said this, and is true.

You are likely to manage people and be managed by someone. If you are a freelancer, it could be your clients. If you are an entrepreneur, it could be your board. Since we will all share this fate, we must try to understand the kind of managers that you might encounter and more importantly, understand the type of manager you want to be.