My Principles

"What cannot be built overnight must be nurtured over time💡" 


The basics of life, such as good health, strong skills, and financial literacy, do not grow overnight, but require at least a small contribution to be made on a daily basis; in other words, they take time, discipline, persistence, and consistency to achieve.


The greatest proverb of all time "Health is wealth" is/was a mantra of every school-going child. But if you take a moment to understand, the value of the greatest proverb loses its value over time as we grow older. From my understanding, what I essentially notice is that as we grow older, the fact that we consciously take care of our health diminishes. I say consciously because almost everyone agrees that they know they need to take care of their health, but the main problem that everyone blames is time. I say this is absurd because the whole point of leading a content life fundamentally lies in good health. Again, I would like to remind you of the teaching from our school days, which said that "when health is lost, everything is lost". It is fundamentally true, because if you build your skills, your financial literacy, and so on, at the expense of your health, then there is no point in achieving them. So you might ask, what is good health? Is it just about the physical body? Of course not, when we say good health it is the combination of physical and mental well-being. There are different ways of achieving good health on both levels. On the physical level, by doing sports, going to the gym, jogging, cycling, following a healthy diet (drinking enough water, reducing sugar and salt intake, avoiding junk food), etc. On the mental level, by maintaining a regular sleep cycle, practicing pranayama (breathing techniques) and dhyana (meditation), etc. In short, I truly believe that good health is one of the greatest wealth one can have. One who understands and follows it daily can reap the full benefits of his achievements in life.


"A skill is the learned ability to act with specified results with good execution, often within a given amount of time, energy, or both" (definition from Wikipedia). We learn skills from our parents, teachers, peers, managers, bosses, and so on through seminars/forums/internet and so on. For most of us, learning a skill does not take a long time, but scaling it up and making a niche out of it essentially takes a longer time. Skills can be anything from cooking to coding to gardening to using technology to create value. In my view, as we are at the height of the information age, the dogma of the last few decades that prevented us from learning just one set of skills and repeating them for the rest of our lives is going to be worthless. That's not to say that you should have a lot of skills, but what I'm trying to emphasise is that, with almost everything available at your fingertips, you should be evolving with the information and knowledge that is freely available to you, and building a niche out of it. Many jobs are becoming saturated because of the imbalance in the basic equation of supply and demand. The number of candidates exceeds the actual number of jobs available in the market. I think the main factor (among others) driving this is limited skills. Of course, the other factor is automation, which could easily replace humans at a certain level, but I am sure that having multiple skill sets that are somehow connected or having the ability to connect different skill sets will only help to stand out from the crowd, which will give us an edge over our peers.


Finally, let's talk about financial literacy. Just like health, money is something that affects each one of us, no matter what our position, nationality, or profession. When I say financial literacy, I mean knowing the basics like income, expenses, assets, liabilities, and cash flow. You need to understand what financial freedom is to reap the benefits of financial literacy. As defined by Wikipedia, "Financial independence is the state of having enough income to pay one's living expenses for the rest of one's life without having to be employed or dependent on others". Getting to this stage takes a lot of effort and time. To achieve it, you need to understand the basics of personal financial management. I have extensively covered it in my series of blogs under the topic of personal finance management (refer: Part-1, Part-2, recommendation). Here are the key takeaways:


I am a big believer in karma, what you give and do to others comes back to you in equal or greater measure. I feel it is our responsibility on this journey of life to share, care, and give back to the society and people we live in in any way we can. I take with me one of the greatest lessons I learned at my S-VYASA yoga university, that each of us has five kinds of debt in life: 


Now, you may ask, what is the point of having good health, strong skills, financial literacy, and at the end of the day giving back everything we have? Well, as Chanakya says in his Chanakya Neeti, every single action of our life till death is decided at our birth and no one can change it. The only option we have is to live with it with all our efforts. What I take from this Sutra is that everyone in the world does not have the same opportunities and certainly there is a huge disparity due to various reasons which are beyond our control. So I would like to conclude by saying that if you are one of those people who have good health, good skills, good financial skills, and you don't believe in karma, at least take a moment to reflect on your opinion about the huge inequality in the world we live in, and make a difference in the lives of others through the process of giving back.