Expectations of growth. When we invest, we expect steady growth. Day after day, high returns while the capital is preserved. We try to choose such investments which have zero risk, and most of population is happy about the apparent slow growth as they cannot bear the fluctuations of the market. And the anxiety it brings day after day. Yet as a person who understands the zero of life , I can show you thousands of examples to show the growth is not liner. Not even in natural world. Not even in man mad world. Timber Growth Woodyard example. If you have ever been to a Woodyard, you would have noticed massive trunks which were cut into halves. They are the greatest example for growth. If you looked closer at these trunks you would see the rings made out of newly grown cells over each year. If a tree behaved like us, expecting same growth each year, the thickness of each layer should be similar. But that is not the case. Some winters are harsh. Other summers are ideal for growth. Each year the tree grows slowly. Maybe half a centimeter in thickness, but variable. Some years it may barely make few millimeters. But remarkably after few hundred years, they become massive. Teaching us the lesson that we are far more impatient and naiver when it comes to growth. This is not the only lesson trees teach us about life. You may read the previous article about bamboo theory and fractals . Let's move on. Sir David Attenborough on growth. - Growth is never linear in nature. A long time ago as a young student I happened to watch Sir David Attenborough's series on plants. That was an era where we did not have digital phones with us. I was looking at one such episode where the still camera has captured a plant growth over months and years. I still remember how it looked like. It was pulsatile. Like everything moved to a magical heartbeat of mother nature. It was not linear at all! But with each beat, each pulse everything moved an inch. Inch by inch, into a fully grown mature jungle of life nourishing every beast good and bad. So, I suggest you search for a plant growth in action next time when you start random YouTube scrolling. Plant Growth Growth spurts of humans. Nothing we call ourselves we bring from anywhere other than nature. Not even the piece of DNA that helped to bring out life. I just feel like its myself and so I claim it myself. Like every truth that we believe to be true there can be element of false in this belief. So, if we look at the growth of a child, again we will see the patterns of nature, not linear. As an example, the height of a person happens in spurts if you consider it in months. In some months a child can grow three centimeters while during next barely making any visible growth. But if you are more advanced, and measured the height daily with modern instruments, you might even see ups and downs of height even within a day. Just like a natural stock market. But we wouldn't worry about it right? Warren buffet on Markets. Non-Linear Growth I may have confused you with so many examples of nonlinear growth. After all I am a philosopher. But I have seen many experts of growth preaching the same when it comes to investing and growth. Consider what Warren buffet had said years ago. Imagine you buy a business, a stock, or invest your time in a project. Everyday Mr. Market comes to you and gives feedback and tell you either you are doing good, average or bad. And every day he tries to convince you either to buy or sell a piece of your business. What will you do? For any rational person this would feel an absurd question as the answer is crystal clear. You say, "Shut the f*** up to Mr. Market and concentrate on improving your work" You do not worry about short term setbacks as you are looking for the end game. That is the Championship mentality . As you can see it is not an artificial theory that someone made to beat the market. It is even present in a thick jungle where there is a growth in chaos. And who breaks the canopy are the ones who learned this by nature. Hope this will help the next time when you have a temporary failure in your life.

I was addicted. I am addicted. YouTube is not just an app. It's a notorious addiction. Just like drugs. Just like cocaine. But if we understand the mechanism of YouTube addiction there are simple strategies we can use. Same traits of YouTube which make it an addiction can be used to overcome the mindless scrolling. Instead utilized to give a value to our time. It was a long time ago that I wrote about Hook method . It is the mechanism utilized for these highly addictive apps, to get human consciousness hooked again and again. If you need to understand basics you can read that article here. But in this article, I am going to give you a practical way of beating YouTube addiction. YouTube addiction On YouTube Addiction Watching YouTube videos are not going to be very productive. Mostly they are made to hook our natural curiosity to learn new things. Infact, a YouTube short of 10 seconds is a great example. It is unlikely you learn some significant thing looking at a 10 second video. It's just entertainment. However, the addictive nature to these 10 second clips can keep you glued to the phone for hours and hours. If you forget the fact that an hour is just a collection of seconds. Exactly 3600 seconds. Not that big right? When I put it that way. Easily you will scroll through 200 YouTube shorts and learning nothing, feeling exhausted, tired and drained. So how are we going to beat the system? Is there an easy way, without using a hard motivation draining dopamine detox? Fortunately, there is. To understand you need to know how YouTube works. It monitors data. By various means. By your likes, comments, watch history, search history etc. And once they have enough data about you, they will label you as type BBV. Next part easy. YouTube will bombard you with what other type BBV humans are watching. As this perfectly matches your character, you will get hooked. And it is really hard to break that addiction. Making it green Beat YouTube addiction Method 1 Now think about what will happen if you convince YouTube you are a Type AAA person. Who is learning, trying to educate yourself through YouTube. One way to do it is to deliberately use YouTube to search what you like to learn. Documentaries, instead of random clips. Motivational videos instead of movie clips. Over time YouTube will figure out that you are looking for something and provide you with more and more good stuff, that you are unable to reach even with search queries. So good that you will be hooked to get motivated! Next easy step is to subscribe to good channels. Ones which give a meaning to your life. And lose other non-motivational entertainment kinds. Low value stuff. Overtime YouTube will again provide you with good stuff. Beat YouTube addiction Method2 - A mini-University? Let's say you fail to do that. That you are too lazy to figure out what is good and do a search on good stuff. But if you are mindful, you will see occasionally YouTube provides a motivational video, good documentaries etc. randomly in your feed. What you can do, if you don't have time to watch these is to save to watch later. I am sure there comes a time during the day or the week, that you are inherently motivated to see the good stuff. But how likely you are going to find good stuff easily without any distraction unless you have bunch of stuff saved in your to be watched list. You know they are good as you have screened them. More importantly like in the previous scenario, things once saved will make the algorithm alert for similar content and suddenly the YouTube can become a mini university where just hanging out will improve your knowledge. Call of the wild So, those are my suggestions. I would like to know about yours.

Growing Trees and fractals Trees. I like to look at trees. More often than not I become fascinated by them. Big or small. They teach about life many things more than animals do. The problem with animals is that they run. And when you run things get too complicated and you won't have time to observe anything. As things move so fast. But trees are different. They stay at one place and you can observe what is life over the years by looking at the slow change. There is no running involved, like humans or animals. Let's learn about how remarkable they are yet again with fractals. Fractal Patterns Fractals Fractals are mathematical concepts where repeated patterns occur in different scales. Good examples include snowflakes, a natural river, when seen from space with all its branching brooks, a tree with multiple branches. Consider a branch of a tree, it looks like a small tree by itself, except it doesn't have roots. A branch of a branch looks the same. In fact if you are about to draw a tree you might use the same pattern to draw it. Even a lightning in the sky looks the same before it hits the ground. I consider this a good way to search for potential. Let's look at philosophy of a tree. Philosophy of a tree Imagine the point of view of a tree. It has the need to grow. It needs to explore its options. What does it do? The natural way is to branch out. Explore some more space, looking for more sunlight. Keeping the connections with the trunk! And this is essential for any growth. It doesn't matter if you are a high-school student or a professor in a university. If you think about growth, you need to factor out your resources. Some may not work. You may find the sunlight is blocked from a nearby building and you need to lean right to avoid it. Think about what you are going to do in future and you can think of a hundred more ways to branch yourself into this. But just don't look at what happens above the ground. I have seen a fundamental mistake done by many individuals who seek growth. We don't have to look anywhere else. Consider the roots of the tree. A river from Space Consider a coconut tree. A slender trunk, raising higher and higher each year, branching out. But the secret to its growth is underground. If you pull out a coconut tree, it has a gigantic ball of roots, just as big as its crown. You may have seen one by the beach. The bigger the tree, the bigger its roots and deeper and farther they reach on the ground. Again factoring out, keeping the connection with the trunk. And it's these roots that make it possible for the tree to branch out and reach new growth. Really speaking it's a parallel process. Just like branching out, as the tree grows it roots deep.  Philosophy of life Now let's consider a person as a tree. With time often we see people grow out, with their careers, friendships and relationships. They branch out like trees, a complicated factored out pattern. Sometimes big, sometimes small, sometimes shading thousands of tiny creatures. But it is only possible if they equally invest resources in themselves. Like a ball of roots for a tree. It may be inner peace , telos of life , mindfulness or a feeling of ethical happiness that you are seeking. Unless you start investigating self in parallel to the outward growth, it won't be sustainable.  But like any tree, which was there on earth, even after a thousand years, there comes a time that time takes over. It may not matter to the world, a fallen giant. But it matters to the tree which has fallen. Let's be mindful about these facts. Which are yet to explore, by future us.

Following article discuss philosophy of believes. But a background in mathematics, and probability is handy. Bayes theorem, example. Here I will give you a simple example of Bayes, theorem. You do not need to understand the mathematics involved. But simply look at the question, and the conclusion, after the math. The math involved is not hard, its simple arithmetic, proportions, but the implications to real life are far more important. Now here is the Example. Beehive Example: From ChatGPT. Imagine a rare disease that affects only 1 in 1,000 people. A medical test exists that correctly identifies the disease 99% of the time when a person actually has it, but it also gives a false positive in 5% of healthy individuals. Suppose a patient takes the test and the result is positive. At first glance, this might suggest a high chance of having the disease — but Bayes’ Theorem gives us a more accurate picture. We want to calculate the probability the patient has the disease given the positive result, using the formula: So despite a positive test, the actual probability that the patient has the disease is only about 1.94%. This surprising result shows how even highly accurate tests can produce misleading outcomes when screening for very rare conditions, due to the relatively high number of false positives compared to true cases. Applications of Baye's Theorem When I look at bayes theorem, I do not worry about the math.I am a philosopher, trying to tackle the life. Yet, I know, that applications of scientific princilples to philosophy is something which has rarely done before. So, lets see application of bayes theorem to philosophy. In previous article I discussed about the truth.That every truth, is just a belief with some probability of being true. Consider, Atheist, consider, God, consider Devils and heavens. All these are believes with some probability of being true. But when new evidence comes, the probability of being true will actually go down over time. Just like in our case scenario about the rare disease. heaven Let's apply baye's theorom to the probability of "God". In ancient world people did not know, what is sun, moon and Planets represent.They did not have satellites to take photographs on Mars. So, it is reasonable for them to believe that The existance of "God" is about 99%. But in the new millenia, we have more knowledge and eqquipment. We can travel to the Moon, and Mars, and atleast we know there is no such God in physical form, there. So, the earlier probability of 99% has now gone down, to let's say 60%, As more and more new evidence accumilate, this probability will further go down. Let's say, in next 10000 years of humanity, if undisturbed by nature, will understand probabiliy of God has gone down to 1%. But the real question is will there be anything which achieve 100% A real Question about Truth Can we ever exclude or include any observation, that we make about nature as 100%? I am not sure, how many of consiciousness reading this are able to understand the question. But, the bottom line is, we are far away from detecting a 100% truth. Until then the Bayes, theorom will help us approach the untouchable truth, reducing the margin of error in our believes every day. Well done to humanity!

Money as a Tool Money is a subject that everyone loves talking about. Yet, in private. As often we consider it as the language of the devil. Sometimes, it's a taboo to talk about it. I think it's time for everyone to correct themselves and know that money is an instrument. Like any other tool. Consider a scissor, nobody has any problem talking about it. It is indeed an important tool for our day to day activities. The same is true for money. If you need to build a house for comfortable living, you will use the instrument money to make it happen. If you need to fill it with furniture, you can use the same tool. If you need the house to function automated for most of the day, still money is the way to go. In fact, money can be the most versatile tool other than your own consciousness. Once you get hold of the concept of money we can ask the next question. What will you buy with it?  Money As a Tool How to make more money? I am sure everyone talks about how to make more money, once you have some. The way to make the initial sum of money is by sharpening your skills. This is easy. If you do not have any skill, still you can physically help someone with money, to do some work and get whatever that person pays you. The more you help that person to grow, the more he will give you. As everyone in our society is in this game of collecting green papers with numbers. And this simple truth was not taught to us anywhere. Everything that we do is associated with money in some way. If you look at every human activity you will understand this.  So, when you walk towards your home today I need to look around. The roads you walk on, the cars you see travel on them, the oil which burns inside of them. All these were possible because of money. As a philosopher I can reach you through Internet and spread some wisdom, only because egotic capitalist mechanism which runs on the wheels of money, which lets everything moves faster. Instead of being greedy, we can now appreciate the fact it's just a tool. Money on wheels What would you buy with money? Let's say you already have some. What are you going to buy with money? What will you buy? It's really very simple. You have two options. Either Buy assets, which overtime increases the lump you have. Or you can buy liabilities, which will let you satisfy your urges but reduce the size of the lump. This is supposed to be a philosophical argument. Hence, I will not go into details of each asset class, or liabilities. But just let you know a wise person would balance between these two. As the latter is about the present, while the former is about the future. Which is unknown. Instead, I would tell you that if you had a choice, you should focus on buying your freedom. Some may call it financial freedom. And once you have bought, or built enough assets which produce more income than your expenditure, you would be financially "free". Yet it is not so simple when we start it practically. Fortunately there is another kind of freedom. And that doesn't cost a penny. Simply ask the question, what holds you from being free in your life. Just start losing them one by one. Is it your job? Is it your spouse? Is it your children? Is it your ambition? Is it hunger?. Instead try to solve them, start learning the language of mind, which is called mindfulness to see what really happens. Take a walk back into the jungle of mind where everything seems to have originated from. Then one day, the illusion of everything that we assume to be true will break and we will be able to touch the untouchable freedom.

You played games when you were a kid. I have played games. I often observe how kids play games. It's far from adult games. Consider chess. When I play with an adult or on the computer I know how I can move. I know how pieces are moving. Basically I know the rules of the game. But when I play with the kid, it's going to be chaotic. Rules are not fixed. Sometimes the rook might move diagonally and the Knight might move six squares. And in such a game with dynamic rules even Magnus Charleson will lose to a kid. It made me realise two things about life.  Chess The first way to win a game is to master the rules. That is what we are used to doing, most of our lives. Sometimes we call these rules, science physics mathematics. Sometimes we call them geography, grammar or law. Most of the time we spend a good half our lives learning the rules of the game of life. And we play a game of chess, with an opponent who has mastered the rules, and as expected we lose these games. And we blame our intellect, and say that we haven't done a proper job in mastering the skill. I would say this is like learning to draw a perfect circle, like in the zen story.   Often as it happens, and it happened to me, we think we are in the wrong game. And we move to a different game, play it for a while, trying to beat the system. I would say this is like being inside a casino, moving from table to table. Black Jack to poker to ping Pong. Yet each and every table, you might win a little, lose a lot and keep playing as you are addicted. There Is no other game that you know. Sadly this is how most of us spend our lives, till we die. Either winning a little, or losing big, drunkards from thinking about it. But occasionally there are people who takes a step back and think about everything holistically. They do not change all their money and make chips and start to play. They think through consequences. The risks associated with each game. And see, the odds of winning such games are always unfavourable. They also take their time to look at the owner, who has a birds eye view on every table from upstairs. And understand how he strategically lets some people win, while making others lose. Study each table to see what is the mechanism of each game, and why we are unable to win.  Instead of playing other people's games now, this wise person can create his own game. Either make another table in the same casino, or entirely different one. You may not like the word casino. Yet if I said, make a profitable blog, a tesla company, or a KFC your eyes will glisten. These are truly legal ways of gambling game of life. Yet we all function best in a world with some stupid games like these. Playing games of life If you are curious to see and build some system like that, go ahead and do it. I have recently written so much about, philosophy of building a skyscraper to putting up a shop . But I am more interested if you ask me a different question. Like "Isn't it absurd, to play life like a game with arbitrary rules, that we set for ourselves?". Can there be any meaning to all these stupid games we are forced to play, or that we are trying to make others play?. I would say that is when you break the bubble . Often people's eyes glisten when I mention money or being rich. But what they do not understand is that being rich is the easiest way of losing value of money, and everything around it, to a level you become free from your own life. That will happen if you started with philosophy instead of success. If you are curious about the latter, I would applaud. As it is a very rare trait of human consciousness. The world needs more of that kind, not the former.

Everytime, we are out of town, for a vacation or a day out, the first song which would be played is the Burger Dog by Bluey. It had been not the case as exactly one year ago, it was the "Baby shark song. As the time went by "Shark song" became less favourable, option. But if you check youtube top 100, these baby songs are even seen more than any Justin Beiber or Selena Gomaz songs. Infact more than double the world population have seen these songs, if we consider collective views. It occured to me that it is a good idea to make one of these a national anthem. And I can give you several reasons to why. Baby Shark What is a national Anthem? The purpose of a national Anthem is to provide unity. Generally in any country there are different ethnicities. Yet to function as a selfish being, a country needs a method to unite these people. Otherwise it is doomed to faliure, just like the right hand goes aginst left in a single person. Consider any country which has gained significant development in the world. And compare this to any country which is under-developed. You will see these ethnic and cultural clashes have drained countries, not only blood but potential of their growth. Any difference, is used and exploited by selfish leaders to make themselves more powerful agianst each other. What is true for a country is true for The whole world. This is exactly the point, I was making when I wrote the article about the Universal King. As long as we are clashing in Wars against each other, there would be no overall growth. Infact although national Anthems, in traditional sense unites a country. Same national Anthem is a reason for division, when we consider the whole world. Think about you sing a National Anthem in English, where some people speak a different language. Instead feeling united, you will feel divided. Same is true for Olympic. When we hear some other national anthem is playing, we might feel distant and even sad, if it is not the one we expect to hear. What is good for a national Anthem? Burger Dog, Baby Shark vs Despecito Now we can get back to our Original question. You see a Podium ceremony where The Gold madelist is proudly standing next to the Bronze and silver. And instead of the national Anthem of Germany, Either "Burger Dog" or "Baby Shark" is played. Consider how many happy people would be there if we do that. As, there is no discrimination. I am sure the new generation of kids, would grow up and do it one day. It may be not the Burger dog or the Baby shark. But something Universal, like Despecito. Podium This little wisdom, has not limits. Some people, like Microsoft owner, the Billioneir Bill Gates, say Crypto, is just as a scam, as it is not backed by government. But I would say, just like our national Anthem Example, people have already found a solution for a Universal Currency, which is backed up by thousads of people across nations. It is not going against the "law" but, adapting a more futuristic view on how we should be functioning in a such a nondescriminating society. So, I would say, in this hypothetical future world, which is ruled by a universal king and, traded by crypto-currency, "Burger dog" is a good candidate for a Universal Anthem. Which can be sung by not only earth animals but also by inhabitants of Mars. So, what do you think is the Good candidate from these? Or have you written a better song?

Outline Three ways. Educate yourself Associate with some known People, hire them. Experiment with yourself. How to deal with unknown. Previously I have written an article about, seen and unseen. And there I argued the unseen is always bigger in life . But recently I noticed this is true for other things as well. As an example. Un smelled things are bigger than what you have smelled in life. Untasted stuff is bigger than what you have tasted so far. What you did not learn in your life is always far bigger than what you have experienced and learnt. Somehow our ego tends to make us believe, that we are the great "knower". But if you sit on a bench and think about it for a while, you may understand the truth is far from this. If every knowledge in the universe is a beach, we just know things smaller than a grain of sand. the question is universe has zero interest in what you know. Infact, it doesn't care about the knowledge that we have. It will function as it has been before, throwing us in chaos after chaos in life. Although this is an observation, if you would really like to master your life, you should be prepared to tackle these unknown Knowlege. More you know about things you do not know, more you will be able to achieve what you yearn for in this life. Let it be money, power, or any stupid Zero value thing . But it is possible. So, here in this article I am going to show you the practical ways to tackle the unknown knowledge and show them in order and difficulty. Let's dive deep into How to deal with Unknown. Experiment Number 3 - Experimentation. Experimentation is the way of science to tackle the unknown. We manipulate the reasons, observe the outcomes over time and see, whether it has the expected results. To prove or disprove our hypothesis. You may or may not be familiar with formal process of the scientific method. But, in life everyone has to experiment on their own life. This is why Grandpa, without dementia, can make better decision than a teenager. As he has, experimented more, as he has been there for a longer period of time. If you do not know by now, mindfulness is the way of experimentation of your own thoughts, and mind . Hence, why I write about it a lot in my blog. Let's stop there. Comparatively, this is difficult and need time. But I would say if you wanted to understand life it is essential to experiment. Number 2 - Reading books/ learning from others. Second way to tackle unknown is to read about it. Often previous people who has come across same problems have written exactly what they went through. We just have to access this knowledge, via, web, the library, or AI tools. Even YouTube is good if you are clever. As an example, recently I started reading about Co-operate finance, and suddenly, my YouTube feed was bombarded with financial lectures, by Great professors around the world. Free of charge. So, this is a great advantage for us for being in the era of abundance. Let's stop complaining about what we do not have, and smart using what we have. This method unfortunately takes time, and like anything which is time dependent, has its own limits. There is a limit, to how many books you can read per day. There is a limit to how much time you can allocate learning a new skill. Specially if you are reading this after 30, your job and family might be your priority than any book you are going to read. Knowledge Number 1- Getting help from domain experts. This is where you can be smart. If you are too lazy to read a book, or experiment yourself, you should definitely think about hiring someone, who had spent their life doing exactly that. Consider what it means. If you cannot allocate time to do an audit, by yourself, you can hire an Accountant. If you do not how to draw, you hire an artist. If you cannot make a website or a blog, you can hire a IT professional. And I greatly recommend you doing this, as you have only 24 hours to reach any target, and more people you hire faster you can reach any goal. It is the smart way of doing things. But there is a flow. Whenever we hire someone else, we cannot expect them to work for us, in the same enthusiasm, like ourselves. They have their own selfish agendas. That is the rule of nature. Everyone struggles to survive, even at the doom of others. So, the best way to do that is, find the one who's selfish needs align with yours. So, you both become unstoppable in per suing life. Thank you for reading.

I have written a book. Approximately 2 years ago. And it was an utter failure. It was an eBook, sold in amazon for 7 pounds but it did not sell. I was wondering, it is not valuable, experience of a lifetime to be written on paper. But recently I noticed what was the problem. I did Zero promotion, did not do any online presence, did not talk with any salesperson. Mediocre results for Mediocre effort. Mark Manson, Best "Seller" Recently I came across a story where a writer faced a similar problem. A novice writer did his first novel and wanted to be successful. With hopes, he spent whatever from his pocket to print his book and to make it a successful one. Yet, he did not find success, he did not make any sale. And he seeks advice from a "best seller author" from NYK. Straight away this author showed him an introductory sales course. Now the novice had questions. He asked "Hey, I am supposed to be a famous writer, why should I be a salesperson?" And the second author far away in his game replied, "Listen my friend, I am going to show you to become the "Best-selling author" Not the best author. Do you see the difference. Selling a book is part of the art. It is different but I would say the most important part of the "Writing career" As a book which is not sold would not give you any profit, no matter how good the material in it is. It made me realize, what I have been doing wrong, expecting sales with 0 effort in marketing. One thing I should have done is enroll in a sales course rather than start writing books. Otherwise, hire someone to work for me on that end. After all, any author would be happy only when they have fans, reaching out to give a comment on their work. Luckily for me, I started a blog in parallel to the eBook. Although it took years, made me realize, even a blog, to be able to reach some actual people, we need to put massive Effort. Hours and hours of endless optimization of the articles. So, anyone who likes to become an author, I have a warning, "Be good at marketing first". And for that end I have written plenty of "Philosophy" for better experience in sales. Shop. A good place to start. How to be a bestseller, Author. You can start by learning " What is a shop ." or " How to build a skyscraper " More even you can deep dive into philosophy of Values , how they are generated. In human consciousness each and every passing second. I think learning it is fundamental to be "rich" in lay terms. Or to be wise in more mature terms. So, becoming a Bestseller Author, doesn't say anything about your writing skill. It just say that you are good at resilience, of the world which rewards, the people who grasp the fundamental laws that it is build upon. Unless you know some philosophy, our egotism has nothing to do with this. So, here I will invite you to be, the "Best selling version" of whatever you are doing right now. Drop your ego and learn the craft. After all nobody carries anything to their graves.

Introduction. I heard this phrase from YouTube video and wondered that it is true. And it appears hold fundamental truth about life. "What matters in life is what you do next". Not what you have done, or not what you have planned for the next year. Some people would say, this is incorrect, that our past experience matters and our future plans are the most important. So, let's dive deep into the life to understand whether there is any truth. The loop of life. Forget about the facts, I think this is great news for anyone who is used to procrastinate a lot. Including myself. Think about what it means. Imagine you are halfway through to the semester, and you have been partying all the time, not doing your homework. Now within next half semester you are supposed to study and pass the exam. And what would be more helpful than saying yourself "What matters in life is what I do next". And that would be a good way to kick start your engine. Because as Mike Posner once said, "Every journey begins with a one step". Your past has less value than you think. But we must look deeper. If we think that the above quote is true, it has two meanings, like I said earlier. First is, values we give to our past is far less important than what we assume. If we consider the above case scenario, this is why the work you have done will become relatively less important, if you continue to work better during the latter half of the semester. Even if we consider the extreme case scenario, a guy who has worked minimum during the semester, and crammed 7 days in a row without any break, out of fear, or out of courage, might still get better results on paper than someone who has done work entire semester. If you add some smartness to your work definitely it is going to make a better result. And we do not have to limit ourselves to the University life. If someone has been lazy until they are 40 years of age, what matters is the work they do in the year 41. Which will make a difference to the rest of his/her life. If you have been a drunkard until you are 89 years, what matters is what you do when you are 90, you might die sober, with a smile. If you have failed 99% of the time doing a startup, what matters is 100th attempt, not the 99 you lost. Your future has less important than you think. One step at a time. Now consider the future. You may have plans for next 5-10 years lined up. If you are an organized person. If not, you might just have an ambition. "To be rich" or "To be a Lawyer", to "Travel" or to do "Charity". But, whatever this future plan, has less value, than what you are experience right now. In a way this is exactly what I meant when I wrote previous article about the best feeling you can have is what you are experience now . This is just another way of framing that concept for a practical value. Understanding these steps make me better equipped for life challenges. If you are sad, what will you do next will make you happy at the end of the day. If you are happy, what you chose to do next will keep you happy at the end of the day. Consider today, consider next hour, consider next minute, and you will catch the moment where everything happens right now. And the little thing that you chose to do, once you finish reading this article is where life is. Nothing more nothing less. And I can say, you are a mindful practitioner, if you chose to just do that. At least remember it when you are panicking a couple of days prior to your next exam. What happens in life is what you do next, no matter what happened.

I have been learning Corporate Valuation recently. It's just out of interest, yet I see the life of a corporation is the same as the life of a person. These concepts of Valuation of a company are fascinating as I have been on the other side of the spectrum Valuation life, thoughts and generally value of anything. In fact I have written a great deal about Values , in the following articles. Yet will summarize in a sentence. The value of anything remains only in the consciousness of a person at the exact moment he or she is thinking about it. With this principle in mind, I would like to compare the valuation of a company by the method introduced by professor in Finance, Aswath Damodaran who is one of the greatest valuators of our times. He introduces the value of a business doesn't depend on numbers alone. It also depends on the story behind the numbers. Yes, even stories value billions! If you do not believe me, listen to the master himself who is talking about valuation of companies like Uber, and twitter. Generally, in the start of a company, or the young company the story matters more than numbers. Obviously, this is because they do not even have numbers! But more mature the company numbers matter more as they take over the story. Compare this to a young enthusiastic boy with a lot of potential. We would never know where he would end up, as he has a lot of trajectories to choose from. But at 40 years a mature individual cannot go back and change their numbers, or suddenly change their character and become a young potential again. Their story is already written in numbers. Story matters in life, often more than numbers One thing I would like to point out and emphasize is the value of a young company could be much more than the book value of assets. To be truthful, the future potential story of the startup can even double or quadruple the book value of the company. Someone might say this is absurd. But if you apply the above principle of values, it can be greatly appreciated and understood why it is what it is. Even the values of the stocks of a company fluctuate daily mainly due to the reasons that chaotic thought patterns and decisions made by individuals show a combined chaotic value at the end of the day. This really is unpredictable. I am not saying there are predictable patterns. Some intellectual people will get together and exploit these predictabilities to make an income. But it is just like being a rat, and eating out other people's values. Obviously, someone will lose when one wins, in any game. Valuation of a company vs valuation of life More I learn these things; more I understand the shaky grounds we build everything upon. Think about it for a second. Let's consider Google stock. The value of this stock will depend on anything which affects, the individual thoughts of any shareholder. Even the weather in New York is going to affect tomorrow stock prize. If you do not believe me you can ask the inventor of the Medallion fund the former CEO of renaissance Technologies Mr. James Simons. Similarly Panic of a pandemic can plummet the value of a company overnight, If it changes the minds of stockholders. So, I would say nothing is stable as they appear to the commoner. More likely is that everything is unstable, just like a thought in the mind of anyone. Art is not inherently valuable, nothing is. So, the real question is not how to build stability on shaky grounds. But appreciate the fact that with better stories, we might even sell a tunnel in nowhere or a picture on a canvas which cost a few dollars to make, in billions. To understand that no matter how much we search in life, there is a big chance that we will never find a true value. As everything seems to disappear in a fraction of a second in any consciousness. Let's stop it here. Reflect back. I would be even happier if you understood one paragraph from above. After all philosophy is not for faint hearts, but for brave people like you who would seek even if it made one to destroy the image of self by losing its value, like 29th September 2008.

Some definitions Medallion fund - considered one of the best performing funds in the world with 66% returns over a period of 30 years. The fund is capped at 10-15billion dollars and run by algorithms made by mathematicians to gain small advantages from predictability of the stock market. It is a closed fund only allowed for the employees to invest. Gold Philanthropist- is generally a successful person who turned a well-wisher for the society. A great example is a rich person who at the end of his life starts to donate whatever he has accumulated in life. Maybe not everything, except for the private Yacht. So, depending on what they chose to give either they can be a full Philanthropist or a partial Philanthropist. Rat Philosophy - is a term given by the great investor Warren Buffet, who believed in fair game rather than cheat codes. Who says algorithm based trading bots are kind of rats, who try to eat some cash from other people's pockets. And as this feels unethical that people behind those trading bots must be Philanthropists themselves at the end otherwise, it's not a fair game by any means. Being a Philanthropist, Is it good? If you are kind of a person with a good IQ, I am sure I do not have to write the rest of the article. You might do a google search on all of the above three topics and get the full picture. It's just how the mind can connect some random dots to build up a story. As an example someone might say I am accusing the medallion fund owners to be rats in the game of market, and they have turned themselves into philanthropists to make up for it. But even in front of a court nobody can prove it, I just gave three unrelated facts and a hypothesis that consciousness can develop naturally. But is it true? Is using your intellectual ability to gain an advantage over the other person a crime, where you can be compared to rats? Then what about copyright laws, patents and intellectual property? On capitalism Capitalism I can agree and disagree on the above. But as the world functions best on the pillars of capitalism, the above statement is incorrect. If the rewards are disproportionate to the effort someone put in, or willing to put in, either by intellectual ability, or by pure sweat, nobody would do extra work. Nobody would do creative work. Nobody would work hard to build up a science and put new theories, if there is no clear benefit for doing this kind of work. Yet we can see that is not the case, for any developed and progressing society. If you do the hard work, you might get paid better. If you do the smart work, or creative work, you might even be paid more. Essentially there is no boundary to how much you will be paid if you are doing the smart work. And that is exactly what is shown by the growth of the medallion fund. But consider what it means. In any game, there are winners only as there are losers. So there is nothing called a fair game. If you play you risk losing and winning. In fact this is clearly shown from our stock market example. There are as many losers as there are winners. So maybe it is unfair for Warren to say that he did play by the rules. And winning long term is more ethical than short term rat philosophy of medallion fund. Instead, a good question to ask is not how much to win in a game, but to assess and acknowledge how much value others have lost during our own winning.  Take Home Message Understanding these boundaries will not make us anything except a little more humble. Even losing a little bit of money or value might make you happy when you realize when someone around the world is going to get benefitted from the exact amount you lost. It doesn't matter, we all contributed a dollar to make billionaires rich a little bit more each year. But if you understand the values, the remarkable thing about that is its really subjective and relative, and it only depends on what you are thinking currently. So I can show you the best investment you can ever make in your life is to give your mind enough information for it to understand itself. And not to play the game of life might be a correct choice at least if given as a single best answer question. With a 50% chance of being correct shared with the answer "I do not know".