What is the best investment?

When we think about investments we usually think about various investment options like real estate, stocks, bonds, fixed deposits, various metals (gold, silver and other metals), cryptocurrencies, retirement funds (401k) etc.  We tend to research which asset class outperforms others.  Some of us even think that buying expensive houses and cars are investments too and that is a different discussion altogether.  While there is nothing wrong investing in these various asset classes, we often forget about an investment that is essential and may potentially offer exponential return with little risk. So, what is this best investment?

My belief is that the best investment that I can make is on myself.  Often we neglect this fact.  We spend a lot time researching about traditional investments but seldom spend time to research on the ways that we invest on ourselves.  What are the ways that we invest on ourselves?

Although there is no fixed list, I think the following are some specific ways to invest on yourself:

1. Investing in your mental and emotional health: Few ways we can invest in improving mental health is by meditating, praying, reading books on various subjects.  
2. Investing in your physical health: Exercising everyday, proactively taking care of health by periodically undergoing physical/dental/vision assessments. 
3. Investing in your profession: Taking professional courses, attending conferences, networking with people.  I found the concept of "Interesting people fund" suggested by Reid Hoffman in his book "the start of you" very intriguing.  This is a portion of your savings dedicated to meeting new, interesting people.
4. Investing in your hobbies: cultivating hobbies.  Hobbies are best ways to recharge yourself and who know sometimes hobbies may develop in to interesting professions.
5. Spending quality time with family: Spending  quality time with family instead of passively consuming television, social media etc.  Going on vacations.  Teaching kids new things instead of giving them tablets and phones.
6. Keeping in touch with friends:  regularly meeting friends, inviting them for dinners, skype calls with close friends who are away.
7. Participating in community events: being part of some community.  Man is a social animal.  Research proved that people who live among strong and helping community live longer, happier and healthier.

Lessons from my profession

I wrote my first blog 12 years ago and drafted few posts over the years but never published them.  I looked my drafts and found this one which I drafted in the year 2012.  I am finally hitting the publish button on this post now.

"Boring, Mundane, Routine, Dull, Frustrating, no learning opportunities", this is how I used to think about my job during the initial days of my career.  I was often complaining about my job I was thinking that I should find some other interesting job.  I decided to search for an interesting job and wrote many exams to switch my career.  But when a sit down and think whether is it really bad and aren't there any learning opportunities/lessons from my profession taught me.  Indeed there are many lessons I have learned from my profession which I can correlate with my life and which gave me an opportunity to improve/enhance my personal life too and made me a better person.

Problems?  Sit on top of them:  I have to deal with issues and problems everyday.  During my early days of careers, I used panic when we get a major incident or issue.  However, as I was able understand the systems we maintain and started resolve issues I then realised that issues are common in any system.  This experience has helped me to look at the problems I face everyday.  I stopped worrying about the problems in my life and realized that problems are indeed common in anybody's life and one has to deal with them instead of worrying about them or running away from them.  This idea has helped me to be happy about my life.

Help thy friends: When I look at the best people around me in my profession I often wondered what made them so effective at work.  When I looked even closer at the qualities which made them specials, the stars are not the extremely intelligent ones.  They are the ones who helps others and communicates effectively and keep in constant touch with their team and even the other teams in the organization.  Since they help other when others need it, they usually get the help back when the stars need them.  In case of emergency and highly critical issues, they are able to resolve the issues with working together and getting feedback from other team member and other teams.  This is true with our life too.  Happy and successful people are the ones who lend their hand when someone is in need.

Man is a tool using animal:
Thomas Carlyle correctly said that Man is a tool using animal.  What makes man different from other animals is his tool making and tool using capability.  Using appropriate tools at my work made my work easier and gave me more time to explore new technologies, interact more with people, improve my productivity and gain better knowledge.  When I extended this truth to my own life and started using more tools the results made my life better and enriching.  Using tools even helped me in avoiding fights, often for trivial things, with my wife and to become a happier soul :)

Maintain thy system well: One of the important things at my work is to maintain the systems well by monitoring them, doing regular health checks and house keeping on the systems to keep the productions systems up and running all the time avoid unplanned down times.  In these busy times most of the people are not even consciously caring about their body and health.  I learned to look at my body as a more important than "Production System" and started to give attention to it.

Manage change with care: 
Although we hate to make changes to the productions systems, it is inevitable to upgrade or add new features to the systems in order to allow growth of the organization.  We make so much of planning and take a lot of care and even devise roll back plans when upgrading a Production System.  Same is true with our life or career.  Although we would love to play safe with our career or life and have stability, it is often important to move to a different role or job or company to grow personally and professionally.  I realized that one should have proper plan and be careful while changing career etc as we do with the Production Systems.

After spending some years in my company and job and thinking consciously about my job, I now feel that there is no "perfect" profession or job.  I believe that it is up to us to show dedication, explore and learn new things everyday, spend lot of time on it and take our job to next level.  If we do it we will realize that no job is boring, dull or routine.  It often takes 10 years for one to excel in one's profession.  I know the initial years might be a little difficult to go through, but one should be patient enough till he/she gets some level of experience.

Linux tools: tmux

I am an admirer of Ray Dalio and I read/watch many of his articles and videos.  I like his youtube video titled How The Economic Machine Works.  He had the following fantastic advice at the end of this video:

rule 1: Don't have debt rise faster than income.
rule 2: Don't have income rise faster than productivity.
rule 3: Do all that you can raise your productivity.

You may think what is the relation between Economic Machine and a Linux tool called tmux.  It has to do with his rule 3.  I always look out for tools and techniques that save my time and improve my productivity.  The tool tmux is one of such tools which can save a lot of my time at work.  Few weeks ago my colleague introduced it to me and I have been using it daily since.  It took me sometime to get used to the keyboard short cuts to use the tool.

Tmux is short form for terminal multiplexer and can be used on Linux/Unix environments.  It lets you access multiple terminal sessions on a single console.  I found this particularly useful when debugging my code, monitoring status of jobs on different machines etc.  This easily saves at least few minutes of my time daily (and potentially many hours during months and years).  You can check the following GitHub pages and blogs for more information on using tmux:

Tmux source code and wiki
tmux cheat sheet

Beginer's tip: You have to press control key (Ctrl+A/Ctrl+B) and then release keys, then press any other command key.  I didn't knwo I had to release control keys before pressing any command keys and wasted sometime figuring this out 🙂

Path to fitness - week 1

So, the first goal that I have is drop my weight by 8 pound by end of this year.  I have 8 weeks time and I believe it is realistic and healthy to drop 1 pound a week.  The math to reduce 1 pound of weight is to either burn 3500 additional calories or consume 3500 lesser calories than the typical calorie intake requirement.  I am planning to increase my physical activity and reduce my calorie intake.

I am a believer of the quote "you can't manage what you don't measure".  So I am going to start using the following tools to measure my progress.:

1. MyFitnessPal app to log my calorie intake.
2. Fitbit app to log my work outs.
3. This blog to post the progress.

This week's goal is to eat lesser than 2000 calories a day and complete 10000 steps a day.  I am also planning to visit a physician to have my currently yearly health check done and see where I accurately stand.  More updates soon.

Path to fitness

Few weeks ago I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, stepped on a weighing scale and hesitantly opened my eyes to check my current weight.  I still do not forget that scary number on the scale.

Last 2 years have been hectic in my life as we welcomed our first baby in to our lives and I tried to complete my part time Master's degree while juggling with day job.  I neglected my fitness and stopped being conscious about it.

I feel now is the time to get back on track.  My goal is to be the fittest version of myself.  I thought writing this blog with keep me motivated with this journey.  I will post updates on the progress of this goal in the blog.

Happyness Sale!

Happyness sale or unhappyness sale?

Today morning I opened newspaper and found many advertisements about "discount sales" in almost all shopping malls in Hyderabad. As my roommate is planning to buy a new suit for his MBA interview, we thought this is good time to do shopping and three of us started for shopping enthusiastically. We went to a well known shopping mall in Hyderabad, where almost all apparel brands are available. Each and every brand is offering "50% discount" or "Buy 1 Get 1" deals. The shopping mall named this discount season as "Happyness Sale". I felt so good and bought two shirts of otherwise costly brands. They offered me 50% discount on my bill of 3000 bucks. I felt really happy and thought that the name "Happyness Sale" is apt. I went to one of the sales guy and asked him why are they offering this much discount and whether do they get profit on my transaction. He eagerly replied, "Sir, this is end of season sale. February and March months are dull period for us in terms of sales. In order to get rid of unsold stock and to improve sales in these two months we offer discounts during this period every year".

So far everything was good and I was feeling happy about the "Happyness Sale". Just before leaving the shopping mall I came to see one shirt. As on all other shirts, the mall is offering 50% discount on this shirt too. But, I got irritated with this offer and thought "Nooooooooooo, this is unfair!!". Suddenly I felt the "Happyness Sale" as an "Unhappyness Sale". I called my friend, shown him this shirt and expressed my dissatisfaction about the discount on this particular shirt. He was surprised and asked me what is wrong about the discount on this particular shirt. I told him, "One month back I bought exactly similar shirt for 1500 bucks and now they are selling the shirt for just 750 bucks". He stared at me for a second, bursted out laughing and said "chal be saale".

Rann movie

Today I watched RGV's movie Rann. RGV targetted media in this movie. He has shown how the news channels have become mad about creating sensational news instead of reporting news to people in the quest of higher TRPs. The essense of the movie can be captured with a dialog in Amitabh's speech in the climax, "Providing news should be the goal of media and money should be the medium to achieve this goal. But now a days, Earning money has became the goal of media and news became the medium to earn money"

All the artists have performed very well in their roles. Especially Amitabh delivered splendid performance as Harshvardan Malik, most respected journalist and owner of a news channel. Paresh Rawal is the best fit in the role as a cunning politician. Sudeep impressed in his role as son of a well respected journalist. Ritesh Deshmukh did justification to his character. Cinematography and background score are strengths of this movie.

Its a movie worth watching and deserves a rating of 4 out of 5.

SPIKES

SPIKES...
A National Level Student Symposium
Organised by Department of Instrument Technology
College of Engineering
Andhra University
25-26 Febraury, 2005.



Never before in the history of our department had been organised an event like this by the students, thanks to our faculty for their guidance.

An event like this demands great moral support, thanks to our alumni for their support.

When we were in dearth of technical papers we were flooded with papers, thanks to all our participants for their encouragement.

We were blessed with enough funds to accomplish our task, thanks to our sponsors for their financial support.

We feel proud when we see what have achicved as a team, thanks to one and all who are behind this great event.


Students of the batch 2002-06.