iBlog: Nishit Shah

You don’t hear it much any more, but for a long time, If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich was a pretty effective line for the average Joe when dealing with somebody who was smarter than him. The expression has kind of fallen out of fashion lately. Nowadays, there are too many rich smart people.

The line worked because, for most of history, being smart wasn’t really a big advantage in becoming rich. Aside from things like inheriting/marrying wealth, or winning the lottery, there are basically two paths to wealth:

Option #1 is the “millionaire next door” way to wealth: live below your means, save and invest, and let compound interest and the natural growth in the markets work its magic. If you do this–and you live long enough–you’ll eventually be wealthy.

Option #2 is to be an entrepreneur: find some need, and then create a product or service that can satisfy it at a profit. Unlike living frugally and saving, this is not a sure way to wealth. Many new businesses go broke. Many of the rest muddle along making less money than the owner could have made working a regular job. But lots of entrepreneurs make good profits and a few become wealthy.

The downside to option #1 has always been that it took too long. Unless you lived very frugally indeed, it could take 30 or 40 years to turn an ordinary salary into real wealth. (Even then, success depends on living long enough–and if bad luck or bad choices pushed your income down, your expenses up, or weighed on your investment returns, “long enough” could turn out to be longer than you’ve got.)

So, for most of history, option #2 has always been the way to go if you wanted to be wealthy. But being an entrepreneur took a certain set of personality traits–a set that notably doesn’t include being smart, but includes things like a tolerance for risk, a burning desire for wealth, a thick skin, and a willingness to put running the business ahead of other interests (like hobbies, friends, and family).

Over the past generation, the “knowledge economy” has made intelligence a bigger advantage than it used to be. Besides the dotcom boom (which made it possible for people with only a modest entrepreneurial bent to get rich following option #2), it’s been possible over the past couple of decades to accelerate option #1 as well: an ordinary smart person, working at an ordinary good-paying job, has been able to support a family at an ordinary middle-class standard of living, and have enough of a surplus for saving and investing to become modestly wealthy in a decade or two. (Of course, lots of smart people failed to do so, but that’s just because smart people are as prone as dumb people to suffer from the natural human inclination to let the cost of living rise to whatever one’s income will support.)

Smart people of the world: This is your shining hour. There’s no telling how long just being smart will translate into the kind of income advantage smart people have enjoyed these past couple of decades. This is very much a “get while the getting is good” kind of situation. Don’t miss it.

Did a CTRL-C + CLRL+V from here.

Its almost here! BarCampMumbai3 is just a fortnight away. After attending BarCampMumbai2, BarCamp Techfest & BarCampPune4, I thought of working behind the scenes for BarCampMumbai3. BarCampMumbai2 rocked with more than 200 attendees and this time around we scaled up the infrastructure to meet the enthusiastic crowd. BarCamp is a place where anyone can speak, anyone can participate, the agenda is drawn collectively at the start and any topic is welcome as long as you have others interested as well. You are free to walk-in and walk-out anytime you wish ! This edition will also host a BlogCamp which will have people talk about all things blog and also other aspects of social media and marketing. There is also FireTalk where you can talk about your idea and exhort like minded people to join you – it can be a cool app or a full scale business plan. The people gathered thus prepare a broader blueprint offline and then present it to larger audience later in the day. To participate just edit the Wiki at http://www.barcampmumbai.org/BCM3_registrants This time around we have Directi and Sun Startup Essentials as our sponsors.

BarCampMumbai3 @ IIT- Bombay on 29th March’ 08 ..meet u there…

Saw this movie late last night and Juno is by far one of the funniest movies I have ever seen. Juno is a fresh, unusually intelligent comedy with dialogues that are quick, witty and funny.Ellen Page gives a wonderful performance as Juno, convincingly portraying her as a real independent free spirit. Michael Cera was good and funny. For the first time I liked the soundtrack of a movie too. All the songs are too good. Hope to get my hand on its OST. Don’t wanna write anything about the plot / synopsis. All I can say is that its a wonderful movie dealing with teenage pregnancy. Watch it b4 it gets out of theaters. Also, listen to the dialogues carefully, they are damn funny. This movie won the Oscar for the best original screenplay and was nominated for 3 other awards in 2007.

Its been a long time since I had gone for a trek and I just managed to join my office junta for the last trek as the summer has already set in and the trekking season will now resume from monsoon. I am sure now that I am not gonna miss any of those now. How easy or how difficult it is to plan a trek @ Directi ? All one needs to do is to edit the intranet Wiki about the upcoming trek and folks who are interested just edit it and add their names or comment on it. A couple of days before the trek, the POA is added and the place and time to meet and things to carry along are decided. We had decided to meet at Dadar station and catch a 4:45 am local to Karjat but as people joined in a bit late, we had to let go it and catch the next one heading to Karjat @ 05:30 odd. It took little more than 2 hours to reach Karjat and from there we took a ST bus which took us to a small village called Ambivali not to be confused with similar sounding Amby Valley We just managed to grab a couple of vadapavs and some juices before we started towards our destination. We were 9 of us and everyone was carrying atleast 2 litres of water and some food. Since it was damn hot, we were getting dehydrated very quickly. In the beginning we followed long wide road laid with stones. It was not very steep but very tiring as it was getting hotter and we were getting exhausted quickly. After an hour or so, we reached the plateau which is normally the first proper rest for the trek to Peth. Peth fort or Kotligad (1550 ft) was a watch post for soldiers guarding the Bhor Ghat, an important trade route between Pune and Kalyan. We could see the Peth fort from there and the had a sigh of relief as we knew that we were on the right track. Its easy to get lost while trekking. I remember last time I had gone trekking in Kashmir, me and one of my friend were way ahead and lost and ended up in an Army base camp far far away from where rest of the group were. We finally managed to unite with them after almost 3 hours of searching !! That was fun. We took a lot of snaps and rested for a while and started again. Luckily, on our way, towards the Peth village we found few people working on some stone quarry. They had a tractor which was going back to the village and they gave us a ride. The roads were obviously very uneven and the tractor ride was very bumpy. With all the body parts in my stomach shaking it gave me a feeling of a ride at Esselworld. We reached the base village and started walking towards the fort. This time around the climb was very steep and since it was noon the sun was exactly over us. With no trees around, we got exhausted very quickly. Somehow we managed to reach on the top. The slope was very steep and I managed to hurt my hand little bit as I slipped on dried leaves.

The fort was amazing. The view was most amazing from there. I could see small farms, villages from the top. It felt like I was playing Age of Empires in real world ! The fort had a couple of water tanks, a canon, temple and some neatly carved pillars. We took a lot of snaps and ate whatever we were carrying in our bags. Being a guju, I have never cherished theplas but here I relished eating every bit of it. While coming to the top we had asked a villager to prepare lunch for all of us so that we could have it after we came down. We reached the village somehow by 3 in the afternoon had lunch, hired a tumtum, and took a long ride to Karjat Station. Managed to jump in a Deccan which was coming from Pune and reached home by 7pm. Little sister surprised me with the sizzler that she had made. This was by far the best Sizzler I had ever had ! Slept peacefully for 9 hours that night !

I wanted to learn Ruby but didn’t know where to start. I just happen to stumble upon this wonderful site which has online courses on Ruby. Signed myself up for it just b4 the course started. Its a free online self-study course. Hope to get something out of it. Its kinda difficult at times to take out some time after or b4 work. Guess I need to manage my time more efficiently for this.

The course can be accessed here.