Self Help & Misc. Instresting Stuff.

[Blackhole]

Its Not mine!

Source : This article is taken from net( traders la b ra tory)

The Confessions of a Hard Working Trader

NOTIFICATION TO ALL READERS: THERE ARE SEVERAL LINKS PLACED IN MY TEXT THAT APPEAR AS SPAM TO ME. THEY WERE NOT INTENDED TO BE INCLUDED IN THE ARTICLE AND I'M HOPING THAT TL IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR THEM OR IT WILL BE THE LAST ARTICLE I PLACE ON TL.

I’m about to pull out what little hair I have left. I keep running into the same brick wall over and again. I’ve been trading 5 years and I win consistently when "play money" is on the table. But the moment I move from paper money to real money and really risk my capital, things just go haywire. And I don’t know why.

I’m well trained. I know how to trade my plan, but I don’t do it. I know that I should be patient, but still, five years later, I jump into trades I know I shouldn’t get in. I know risk management so I try to keep my losses small, because that is how you manage risk in trading, but instead I add to my losses – and hope things will turn around – but they don’t. And I even catch myself as I make stupid decisions (in the moment) – but I do it anyway. I’m like one of those characters in your book. It’s like you wrote about me.

I've "been there and done that" with trader psychology. I’ve spent good money on programs that promised that I’d become a disciplined trader – but I haven’t. I’ve been promised that I would learn techniques that would keep my emotions from railroading my perfectly good rational mind into becoming a runaway freight train. But here I am 5 years later still sabotaging my trading. It’s almost like I don’t really want to win, deep down.

I can go from one to three weeks without losing and then get mad and give it all back plus a lot more. This is the sabotaging pattern that I keep repeating. How do you figure that out and can you overcome it?

I love trading, but I need to come to overcome these destructive patterns. I don’t have an unlimited source of capital. So if I can’t get past this hump, I need to face the music and move on.
John Doe


Waking Up in Free Fall
Have you ever felt this way? I get numerous emails all the time, just like this one. So if you have ever felt at the end of your rope in trading, don’t feel alone. (Not that this is a consolation to your situation.) This guy is trying hard. (And, I imagine, so are you.) He is smart and working hard. He knows HOW to trade. No doubt he has experienced a pretty reasonable degree of success in his career or business before he came to trading. But, like many drawn to trading, he was not satisfied with running a business or dealing with the corporate world anymore and wanted more personal and financial freedom. Then he discovered trading as a means to his dreams of independent living.

After being shown the blue-sky side of trading and being sucked into its enchantment, he is convinced he could learn how to trade successfully and make those dreams come true. No one tells him about the psychological side of trading - or that he is going to come face to face with sides of himself of which he was blissfully unaware. (And if he had been warned, he would not have listened anyway.) Now he has chosen trading as a career, while thinking that trading is simply a way to make money so he can enjoy life.

He invests money in methodology training and learns how to trade in simulation. As proof of his increasing skills, he is able to take his sim account to impressive paper profits. And now he is ready for live trading. He is confident in his methodology and knows that he is capable of making money in the markets. His past skills that brought him success are ready to be employed in his new career. He is ready and begins trading. For the vast majority of traders this moment (moving from simulated trading to live trading) is like falling off a cliff. It is a long way down and the landing is brutal. Suddenly undiscovered emotions become involved in his decision-making that whipsaw his "mind that knows HOW to trade" into a mind that cannot seem to make a rational decision in the newly pressurized environment of risking his own capital.

Often, traders who have experienced confidence and discipline in past careers find themselves suddenly over-trading and impulse-trading. Once confident people, who were accustomed to making things happen by being “large and in-charge”, they are now paralyzed with fear – both at entry points and at exit points. And the more they try to “man up” to the problem and push through it, the bigger the problem gets.

How can a guy with proven confident and disciplined personality traits (that brought success in a past profession), use those very same traits in trading - with such poor results?

Career Development and the Notion of Work: Urgency to Act vs. Patient Observation

A set of attitudes has to be developed for a successful career in trading that is different from a career in a profession or business. No one comes to a career in trading with the traits necessary for instant success in trading, although they are certainly led to believe this by their trading trainers. These attitudes and assumptions have to be developed right alongside the knowledge of how to trade. But this is not taught. The left brain of the trader, where logic is king, is taught. But the right brain, where emotion is king, is ignored.

The flawed assumption that many people bring to trading is that the traits that brought them success in their careers and business will also generalize into developing a successful performance in trading. And they assume that the very confidence and discipline that drove them to prior successes will work in trading also. But they will not. In fact, far from it. These past traits, so essential to their prior success, will become the primary obstacle to the very success that they seek.

The kind of confident discipline necessary for trading success is very different from the confident discipline found in business. In business success there is an urgent discipline that is ready to take action and conquer goals by sheer will power. When this attitude is brought into trading and applied to the mind that actually trades, disaster is not far behind – or at least slow descent into pain. There is a bias toward urgency to act, to get into trades, because this is the work of trading. (You’ve got to be in trades to make money, right?) The moment that urgency enters the trading mind, the trader is no longer in the state of mind necessary for successful trading.

Read that last sentence again. This is very counter-intuitive to the experience of a trader's past successes, so he will continue with even more urgency because he now must make trading "happen" as a career (and make up for prior losses). The formula of a focused work ethic bringing career success worked in the past, so the trader simply tries harder to make success happen in trading. And the pattern continues until the trader stops to re-evaluate what mental and emotional traits are really needed for success in trading.

When traders are successful, they practice a patient discipline where they calmly lie in wait (ambush really) until the market comes to them – and then they strike. How different this is from our vignette at the beginning of this article! His trading is based on urgency while successful trading is based on patience. The notion of work is different between the two. Rather than work with urgency to action to achieve a goal, work takes on new meaning to the evolving trader. The new paradigm becomes patient observation, allowing the conditions to come to you. The trader is no longer chasing the trade (an urgency mentality), but is waiting for the trade to come to him so he can strike. This is the successful mind built for trading.

Less becomes more. Now, the career development of the trader has taken a quantum leap. Freed from a historical notion of action that brought success in another time and place, the trader now has the newer organization of mind that allows him to manage his emotions, his mind, and his methodology for a successful career in trading.

Neither one is better or worse than the other – only different. It simply means that success in business and success in trading require different forms of discipline for success. Without the development of patient discipline, a trader will continue to crash and burn. And it all has to do with the way the trader perceives work.

Work as the Coordination of Effective Action

I invite you to examine the assumptions of work habits you bring to trading. Really start noticing whether you drift mindlessly into an “urgency to trade” mentality – because that mindset produced success in another time before trading. Does working mean doing and pushing forward to you? Or is there room for a deconstruction of the beliefs you have about work? If you can accept that work is really about the coordination of effective action, then you can examine the effectiveness of your beliefs by examining your trading account. The effectiveness of your beliefs about work being projected onto the markets is demonstrated in black and white right there, in your trading account. It is the final judge about the effectiveness of the mind you bring to the performance of your trading.

Then, as you become more mindful of whether your notions of work are effective for trading, start to recognize patient observation as the key to effective work in trading. And realize that success in one domain does not generalize mindlessly into another domain, such as trading.
If this is your career, you are going to need to develop the mind that trades right alongside the knowledge base of knowing how to trade. It takes both. Developing the mind you bring to the performance of trading is not an option to a successful career in trading – it is a necessity. And it is going to have to be re-invented for you to be effective in trading.

 

[Catch22]

http://www.ted.com/talks/seth_godin_on_sliced_bread

How to get your ideas to spread.

In a world of too many options and too little time, our obvious choice is to just ignore the ordinary stuff. Marketing guru Seth Godin spells out why, when it comes to getting our attention, bad or bizarre ideas are more successful than boring ones.





Subtitles and Transcript

I'm going to give you four specific examples, I'm going to cover at the end about how a company called Silk tripled their sales, how an artist named Jeff Koons went from being a nobody to making a whole bunch of money and having a lot of impact, to how Frank Gehry redefined what it meant to be an architect. And one of my biggest failures as a marketer in the last few years, a record label I started that had a CD called "Sauce."

Before I can do that I've got to tell you about sliced bread, and a guy named Otto Rohwedder. Now, before sliced bread was invented in the 1910s I wonder what they said? Like the greatest invention since the telegraph or something. But this guy named Otto Rohwedder invented sliced bread, and he focused, like most inventors did, on the patent part and the making part. And the thing about the invention of sliced bread is this -- that for the first 15 years after sliced bread was available no one bought it; no one knew about it; it was a complete and total failure. And the reason is that until Wonder came along and figured out how to spread the idea of sliced bread, no one wanted it. That the success of sliced bread, like the success of almost everything we've talked about at this conference, is not always about what the patent is like, or what the factory is like -- it's about can you get your idea to spread, or not. And I think that the way you're going to get what you want, or cause the change that you want to change, to happen, is to figure out a way to get your ideas to spread.

And it doesn't matter to me whether you're running a coffee shop or you're an intellectual, or you're in business, or you're flying hot air balloons. I think that all this stuff applies to everybody regardless of what we do. That what we are living in is a century of idea diffusion. That people who can spread ideas, regardless of what those ideas are, win. When I talk about it I usually pick business, because they make the best pictures that you can put in your presentation, and because it's the easiest sort of way to keep score. But I want you to forgive me when I use these examples because I'm talking about anything that you decide to spend your time to do.

At the heart of spreading ideas is TV and stuff like TV. TV and mass media made it really easy to spread ideas in a certain way. I call it the "TV-industrial complex." The way the TV-industrial complex works, is you buy some ads, interrupt some people, that gets you distribution. You use the distribution you get to sell more products. You take the profit from that to buy more ads. And it goes around and around and around, the same way that the military-industrial complex worked a long time ago. That model of, and we heard it yesterday -- if we could only get onto the homepage of Google, if we could only figure out how to get promoted there, or grab that person by the throat, and tell them about what we want to do. If we did that then everyone would pay attention, and we would win. Well, this TV-industrial complex informed my entire childhood and probably yours. I mean, all of these products succeeded because someone figured out how to touch people in a way they weren't expecting, in a way they didn't necessarily want, with an ad, over and over again until they bought it.

And the thing that's happened is, they canceled the TV-industrial complex. That just over the last few years, what anybody who markets anything has discovered is that it's not working the way that it used to. This picture is really fuzzy, I apologize; I had a bad cold when I took it. (Laughter) But the product in the blue box in the center is my poster child. I go to the deli; I'm sick; I need to buy some medicine. The brand manager for that blue product spent 100 million dollars trying to interrupt me in one year. 100 million dollars interrupting me with TV commercials and magazine ads and Spam and coupons and shelving allowances and spiff -- all so I could ignore every single message. And I ignored every message because I don't have a pain reliever problem. I buy the stuff in the yellow box because I always have. And I'm not going to invest a minute of my time to solve her problem, because I don't care.

Here's a magazine called "Hydrate." It's 180 pages about water. (Laughter)

Articles about water, ads about water. Imagine what the world was like 40 years ago, with just the Saturday Evening Post and Time and Newsweek. Now there are magazines about water. New product from Coke Japan: water salad. (Laughter)

Coke Japan comes out with a new product every three weeks, because they have no idea what's going to work and what's not. I couldn't have written this better myself. It came out four days ago -- I circled the important parts so you can see them here. They've come out... Arby's is going to spend 85 million dollars promoting an oven mitt with the voice of Tom Arnold, hoping that that will get people to go to Arby's and buy a roast beef sandwich. (Laughter)

Now, I had tried to imagine what could possibly be in an animated TV commercial featuring Tom Arnold, that would get you to get in your car, drive across town and buy a roast beef sandwich. (Laughter)

Now, this is Copernicus, and he was right, when he was talking to anyone who needs to hear your idea. "The world revolves around me." Me, me, me, me. My favorite person -- me. I don't want to get email from anybody; I want to get "memail." (Laughter)

So consumers, and I don't just mean people who buy stuff at the Safeway; I mean people at the Defense Department who might buy something, or people at, you know, the New Yorker who might print your article. Consumers don't care about you at all; they just don't care. Part of the reason is -- they've got way more choices than they used to, and way less time. And in a world where we have too many choices and too little time, the obvious thing to do is just ignore stuff. And my parable here is you're driving down the road and you see a cow, and you keep driving because you've seen cows before. Cows are invisible. Cows are boring. Who's going to stop and pull over and say -- "Oh, look, a cow." Nobody. (Laughter)

But if the cow was purple -- isn't that a great special effect? I could do that again if you want. If the cow was purple, you'd notice it for a while. I mean, if all cows were purple you'd get bored with those, too. The thing that's going to decide what gets talked about, what gets done, what gets changed, what gets purchased, what gets built, is: "Is it remarkable?" And "remarkable" is a really cool word, because we think it just means "neat," but it also means "worth making a remark about." And that is the essence of where idea diffusion is going. That two of the hottest cars in the United States is a 55,000-dollar giant car, big enough to hold a Mini in its trunk. People are paying full price for both, and the only thing they have in common is that they don't have anything in common. (Laughter)

Every week, the number one best-selling DVD in America changes. It's never "The Godfather," it's never "Citizen Kane," it's always some third-rate movie with some second-rate star. But the reason it's number one is because that's the week it came out. Because it's new, because it's fresh. People saw it and said "I didn't know that was there" and they noticed it. Two of the big success stories of the last 20 years in retail -- one sells things that are super-expensive in a blue box, and one sells things that are as cheap as they can make them. The only thing they have in common is that they're different.

We're now in the fashion business, no matter what we do for a living, we're in the fashion business. And people in the fashion business know what it's like to be in the fashion business -- they're used to it. The rest of us have to figure out how to think that way. How to understand that it's not about interrupting people with big full-page ads, or insisting on meetings with people. But it's a totally different sort of process that determines which ideas spread, and which ones don't. They sold a billion dollars' worth of Aeron chairs by reinventing what it meant to sell a chair. They turned a chair from something the purchasing department bought, to something that was a status symbol about where you sat at work. This guy, Lionel Poilâne, the most famous baker in the world -- he died two and a half months ago, and he was a hero of mine and a dear friend. He lived in Paris. Last year, he sold 10 million dollars' worth of French bread. Every loaf baked in a bakery he owned, by one baker at a time, in a wood-fired oven. And when Lionel started his bakery, the French pooh-pooh-ed it. They didn't want to buy his bread. It didn't look like "French bread." It wasn't what they expected. It was neat; it was remarkable; and slowly, it spread from one person to another person until finally, it became the official bread of three-star restaurants in Paris. Now he's in London, and he ships by FedEx all around the world.

What marketers used to do is make average products for average people. That's what mass marketing is. Smooth out the edges; go for the center; that's the big market. They would ignore the geeks, and God forbid, the laggards. It was all about going for the center. But in a world where the TV-industrial complex is broken, I don't think that's a strategy we want to use any more. I think the strategy we want to use is to not market to these people because they're really good at ignoring you. But market to these people because they care. These are the people who are obsessed with something. And when you talk to them, they'll listen, because they like listening -- it's about them. And if you're lucky, they'll tell their friends on the rest of the curve, and it'll spread. It'll spread to the entire curve.

They have something I call "otaku" -- it's a great Japanese word. It describes the desire of someone who's obsessed to say, drive across Tokyo to try a new ramen noodle place, because that's what they do: they get obsessed with it. To make a product, to market an idea, to come up with any problem you want to solve that doesn't have a constituency with an otaku, is almost impossible. Instead, you have to find a group that really, desperately cares about what it is you have to say. Talk to them and make it easy for them to tell their friends. There's a hot sauce otaku, but there's no mustard otaku. That's why there's lots and lots of kinds of hot sauces, and not so many kinds of mustard. Not because it's hard to make interesting mustard -- you could make interesting mustard -- but people don't, because no one's obsessed with it, and thus no one tells their friends. Krispy Kreme has figured this whole thing out. It has a strategy, and what they do is, they enter a city, they talk to the people, with the otaku, and then they spread through the city to the people who've just crossed the street.

This yoyo right here cost 112 dollars, but it sleeps for 12 minutes. Not everybody wants it but they don't care. They want to talk to the people who do, and maybe it'll spread. These guys make the loudest car stereo in the world. (Laughter)

It's as loud as a 747 jet.

You can't get in, the car's got bulletproof glass, because it'll blow out the windshield otherwise. But the fact remains that when someone wants to put a couple of speakers in their car, if they've got the otaku or they've heard from someone who does, they go ahead and they pick this.

It's really simple -- you sell to the people who are listening, and just maybe, those people tell their friends. So when Steve Jobs talks to 50,000 people at his keynote, who are all tuned in from 130 countries watching his two-hour commercial -- that's the only thing keeping his company in business -- it's that those 50,000 people care desperately enough to watch a two-hour commercial, and then tell their friends. Pearl Jam, 96 albums released in the last two years. Every one made a profit. How? They only sell them on their website. Those people who buy them have the otaku, and then they tell their friends, and it spreads and it spreads. This hospital crib cost 10,000 dollars, 10 times the standard. But hospitals are buying it faster than any other model. Hard Candy nail polish, doesn't appeal to everybody, but to the people who love it, they talk about it like crazy. This paint can right here saved the Dutch Boy paint company, making them a fortune. It costs 35 percent more than regular paint because Dutch Boy made a can that people talk about, because it's remarkable. They didn't just slap a new ad on the product; they changed what it meant to build a paint product. AmIhotornot.com -- everyday 250,000 people go to this site, run by two volunteers, and I can tell you they are hard graders – (Laughter)

They didn't get this way by advertising a lot. They got this way by being remarkable, sometimes a little too remarkable. And this picture frame has a cord going out the back, and you plug it into the wall. My father has this on his desk, and he sees his grandchildren everyday, changing constantly. And every single person who walks into his office hears the whole story of how this thing ended up on his desk. And one person at a time, the idea spreads. These are not diamonds, not really. They're made from "cremains." After you're cremated you can have yourself made into a gem. (Laughter)

Oh, you like my ring? It's my grandmother. (Laughter)

Fastest-growing business in the whole mortuary industry. But you don't have to be Ozzie Osborne -- you don't have to be super-outrageous to do this. What you have to do is figure out what people really want and give it to them.

A couple of quick rules to wrap up. The first one is: Design is free when you get to scale. The people who come up with stuff that's remarkable more often than not figure out how to put design to work for them. Number two: The riskiest thing you can do now is be safe. Proctor and Gamble knows this, right? The whole model of being Proctor and Gamble is always about average products for average people. That's risky. The safe thing to do now is to be at the fringes, be remarkable. And being very good is one of the worst things you can possibly do. Very good is boring. Very good is average. It doesn't matter whether you're making a record album, or you're an architect, or you have a tract on sociology. If it's very good, it's not going to work, because no one's going to notice it.

So my three stories. Silk put a product that does not need to be in the refrigerated section next to the milk in the refrigerated section. Sales tripled. Why? Milk, milk, milk, milk, milk -- not milk. For the people who were there and looking at that section, it was remarkable. They didn't triple their sales with advertising; they tripled it by doing something remarkable. That is a remarkable piece of art. You don't have to like it, but a 40-foot tall dog made out of bushes in the middle of New York City is remarkable. (Laughter) Frank Gehry didn't just change a museum; he changed an entire city's economy by designing one building that people from all over the world went to see. Now, at countless meetings at, you know, the Portland City Council, or who knows where, they said, we need an architect -- can we get Frank Gehry? Because he did something that was at the fringes. And my big failure? I came out with an entire -- (Music)

A record album and hopefully a whole bunch of record albums in SACD, this remarkable new format -- and I marketed it straight to people with 20,000-dollar stereos. People with 20,000-dollar stereos don't like new music. (Laughter)

So what you need to do is figure out who does care. Who is going to raise their hand and say, "I want to hear what you're doing next," and sell something to them. The last example I want to give you. This is a map of Soap Lake, Washington. As you can see, if that's nowhere, it's in the middle of it. (Laughter)

But they do have a lake. And people used to come from miles around to swim in the lake. They don't anymore. So the founding fathers said, "We've got some money to spend. What can we build here?" And like most committees, they were going to build something pretty safe. And then an artist came to them -- this is a true artist's rendering -- he wants to build a 55-foot tall lava lamp in the center of town. That's a purple cow; that's something worth noticing. I don't know about you, but if they build it, that's where I'm going to go.

Thank you very much for your attention



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[Catch22]

How Philosophy Can Make You A Better Manager -Greg Satell ,

http://www.forbes.com/sites/gregsatell/2015/07/31/how-philosophy-can-make-you-a-better-manager/

Benefit of philosophy: it teaches practical skills that managers need now more than ever.

The Logic of Aristotle

Logic is a term that is frequently misused. Often, when people say something is “logical” or “valid,” they mean that they think it is true, but that’s a misnomer. Logic applies only to whether a statement is internally consistent. Something can be logical and false, just as a statement can be logically nonsensical, but true nonetheless.

That’s the essence of Aristotle’s logic, which survived for nearly 2000 years without any significant addition or amendment. At the core of Aristotelian logic is the syllogism, which allows us to judge the validity of statements by their structure alone, even when stripped of content.

Once you become trained in logic, you will find a surprising amount of common business communication doesn’t meet its standard. For example, if I say that social media is a good idea because “everybody knows it is,” I am making a logical error called begging the question, because I am taking for granted precisely what is in dispute.

In the digital age, it is becoming increasingly difficult to separate logic from technology. Learning calculus is useful for engineering bridges, but software engineers code by logic. I might even go as far as to say that logicians make better coders, but that would open me up to accusations of confirmation bias, which often leads to logical errors.

Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems

Although Aristotle’s theory of logic is almost unparalleled in its power and longevity, by the late 19th century, people like Frege and Cantor began to notice that it had flaws. They tried to patch up the system, but every time they did, more holes appeared. Eventually, Russell’s paradox unearthed a contradiction that no one seemed to be able to reconcile.

That created a full-scale crisis which threatened the very fabric of western thought. Logicians scrambled to close the hole, but in 1931 a 25 year-old Austrian logician named Kurt Gödel published his incompleteness theorems, which determined that logic was broken forever. In effect, he proved that every logical system crashes eventually. It’s just a matter of time.

Managers should take note. Every time you think you have built the perfect system for compensation, logistics or whatever, be assured that it is inherently flawed. That’s not a bug, it’s a feature of all logical systems. As much as we may wish otherwise, it’s a basic fact; not only of life, but of logic.

Ironically, our current dependence on logic is based on the Austrian’s work. A few years after he published his famous theorems, a young Alan Turing used Gödel’s methods to develop a universal computer, which led to the digital economy we know today.

Wittgenstein On Communication

One reality that executives need to face is the increasing importance of communication and collaboration. As Leonard Read aptly pointed out in his 1966 essay, I, Pencil, even the manufacture of a simple object is beyond the reach of a single person. Today, the world has become far more complex and the need to communicate effectively even greater.

The journal Nature recently noted that the average scientific paper has four times as many authors as it did when Read published his essay, so communication has become essential for innovation. Unfortunately, many executives communicate quite poorly, but can find very helpful guidance from Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Wittgenstein’s work in this area is vast, but perhaps his most important idea is his refutation of private language. Anybody who has sat through a jargon filled meeting is familiar with the problem of a private language. Acronyms and neologisms can provide helpful shorthand for complex ideas, but can also obscure their meaning.

Wittgenstein’s point was not only that private languages such as jargon can confuse the listener, but also the speaker. In effect, he argued that if you can’t explain something in a public language that everyone can understand, you don’t really understand it yourself.

So, while technical language can be helpful, even necessary, try to explain things in everyday terms—even to yourself. Not only will you become a better communicator, your own grasp will improve as well.

Rawls’ Veil Of Ignorance

A final issue that is of great concern of executives today is fairness. From executive pay to discrimination complaints, treating people fairly is no longer just a moral concern, but a major source of liability. Besides legal liability, consumers often levy a heavy social tax on firms they see as acting unfairly.

Executives are often urged to show empathy—to put themselves in others shoes—and that can be helpful in one-on-one encounters. However, for creating a just organization, John Rawls’ concept of the veil of ignorance can be much more helpful.

The basic idea is to think about how you would like things to work if you had no idea where you would end up in the system. So, for example, if you were a line worker, you might be offended by the higher salaries of executives. On the other hand, if you were a manager, you would also want to be compensated for your advancement and achievement.

The veil of ignorance, like other philosophical concepts, doesn’t lead to easy answers, but it does help lead to the right questions And that’s the true value of philosophy in business life. It can lead, as Dr. Brendel argues, to valuable self reflection. But perhaps more importantly, it can help us think more clearly about the practical issues we face everyday

 

[DSM]

I am an Agrawal....

I am a Patel.....

I am a Dalit.....

I am a Kayastha.....

I am a Nadar......

I am a Khatri.....

I am a Saini.....

I am a Hindu......

I am a Sikh......

I am a Muslim.....

I am a Parsi.......

I am a Christian.....

That is the reason it was so easy for the British to rule over India for 200 years.... because they could not find one 'Indian'

 

[NJ23]

I am an Agrawal....

I am a Patel.....

I am a Dalit.....

I am a Kayastha.....

I am a Nadar......

I am a Khatri.....

I am a Saini.....

I am a Hindu......

I am a Sikh......

I am a Muslim.....

I am a Parsi.......

I am a Christian.....

That is the reason it was so easy for the British to rule over India for 200 years.... because they could not find one 'Indian'

British, now our politicians!

 

[sumitalwar]

You may have heard this story many times before, yet for the one who has time to reflect on one’s life, there’s a deeply moving and inspirational message in it.

Guru Nanak Dev was barely eighteen summers old when this incident took place. His father Mehta Kalu was a business owner and he had been vainly trying to lure him into the worldly ways. Guru Nanak, however, was not just anybody but a rare spiritual being to grace our planet who was only interested in the welfare of mankind. Yet, his father hoped that one day his son would put his spiritual mission on the back burner and immerse in a material life like most others.
With that intent, giving him twenty rupees, he told Guru Nanak to go into the next town and do a profitable trade.
“If you come back and report a profit,” Mehta Kalu said, “I shall give you more money next time.”

The young Nanak smiled because since childhood nothing had been able to tie him down and here his father was still trying hard. Guru Nanak was beyond attachment and detachment, absence or presence of money made no difference to him. He saw that twenty rupees gave him an opportunity to earn good karma by obeying his father as well as utilizing the funds to generate profit.

He quietly left with Mardana, his friend and companion who like Ananda to Buddha devoted his entire life in service of the master and followed him like a shadow.
“We must do a true bargain, today,” Mardana said to Guru Nanak. “Let’s generate a profit that’ll please your father.”
“Yes, Mardana,” Nanak said mystically, “today we’ll do the most profitable deal.”

Nanak’s most compassionate eyes looked around and he saw a group of ascetics who had been hungry for days. Handing the twenty rupees, he instructed Mardana to make arrangements for a hearty meal. At first, Mardana tried to reason with Guru Nanak that this was not the best use of the money but soon he realized that his friend knew exactly what he was doing. Arrangements for a meal were made and soon other poor and hungry people joined in.

Guru Nanak served them with his own hands as each one enjoyed a meal of their lifetime.
“We didn’t make a dime,” Mardana said on their way back. “Your father will be livid. We spent all his money.”

“Mardana, we did not spend his money,” Nanak said absorbed in tranquility, “Instead, we invested it. This was the most profitable transaction. What could be a truer bargain than feeding those who are hungry? No one lost in our deal. Everyone flourished. I shall always choose this trade over any other.”
He called it Sacha Sauda, true deal or exchange.


When you work selflessly, nature lends extraordinary potency to your words. Such were the words of Guru Nanak, uttered in his selfless and pure sentiments, that even now *— more than five hundred years later — all Sikh temples, all over the world, feed millions of people everyday from all walks of life, from any religion. At no charge.
This is the greatest reward of selflessness: your words don’t fail. Like seeds they germinate and turn into giant tress laden with fruits providing for one generation after another. As I’ve said on several occasions earlier, God or Nature or whatever-name-you-want-to-give automatically leans towards those who help creation thrive and advance. When you help others, you help nature.

If there was a term for “spiritual gravity”, I would say it’s selflessness. Just like earth draws objects to it because of its gravitational force, selfless people attract everything in enormous magnitude by virtue of their altruistic demeanor. By selflessness, I’m not suggesting that you ignore your own needs or torture yourself. Selflessness is simply a way of life, a sense of understanding that we can’t be happy unless we pay attention to the happiness of others too. You may have a complete meal on your own, but it’s truly fulfilling when you share it.

If you doubt me then try having a meal in a restaurant all by yourself. That meal may be filling, you may feel full, but it won’t fulfill you. Why? Because it was all about you. No matter how bedecked the table may be, it is going to be a lonely meal. Most of us have a mistaken view of life that my life is only about me. If our lives were only about us as individuals, we wouldn’t even have survived as a species. Take care of others and nature takes care of you.
When you dine at a restaurant and have a $50 dinner, while it may help the economy, the truth is that you and I both know that helping the world wasn’t the intention at the first place. The intention was to feed yourself. This is no charity. But, when you pay a $10 or $15 tip at the same restaurant, you’ve just made a difference to someone’s life directly. We never tip to lure someone into serving us better (if that was the case, we would all tip at the beginning of a meal). By tipping we express our gratitude. It’s not entirely selfless but it comes pretty close.

Life gives you a million opportunities to be selfless on countless occasions. Trust me, utilize every one of them. That’s all that will matter in the final analysis, that’s all that will go with you — your karma, that’s all that will give you peace and fulfillment. Paradoxically speaking, whatever you give others is the only thing that will stay with you. You give love, love stays. You give hate, hate stays. You give nothing, nothing stays. Only emptiness. The only way to expand your existence is by giving. If you haven’t the heart to part with what you believe is yours then at least share it. Sharing is the next best thing to giving.

In this transient life, in our temporary world, the only true deal is the deal of charity. It’s the most profitable transaction. Be kind, be selfless. Whatever you embark on will lead to success then. Dust will turn into diamonds in your hands. Your mere touch will turn iron into gold — you’ll become a touchstone. Your plans won’t fail, your words will come to pass. How come, you may wonder? Because Nature can’t afford, much less dare, to mess with a selfless person.

Altruism is the seed of all positive emotions. Selflessness is the mother of spirituality. It helps you look past yourself so you may be awed, baffled and astonished to see what great a wealth is at your disposal to make your dreams come true (and others’ too).


source ---- the internet

 

[sumantra]

If you examine the lives of the greatest, the most successful people, you will find one trait jumping right at you, a quality they held uncompromisingly, an aspect of personality they all possessed, they might have been humble, yet they all operated with a degree of self-importance, they held their work in the greatest esteem, sometimes even blurring the line between proud and pride, between affirmation and arrogance.

Confidence comes from making yourself feel important, conviction comes from believing your work is important, and, contentment comes from making others feel important. In fact, ability to instill a sense of significance in others is a primary differentiator that sets apart leaders from bosses, extraordinary from the average.

Self-importance is a term generally frowned upon, it is often held synonymous to ego, it may have certain negative connotation to it, however, it is a necessary ingredient for a successful living, particularly when it is leveraged properly. Allow me to categorize the subject matter in two parts:

1. Believing you are important
When you feel what you do is important, if you believe in yourself, you gain great inner strength. Believing your work is significant, however small, feeds your self-esteem, such morale boosts your confidence, and confidence, in turn, is a critical success factor in attaining your goals, be they spiritual endeavors or material pursuits.

How important you feel about yourself is greatly affected by three factors: first, how you see yourself, second, how successful you are in what you do, and third, how others see you. If you sincerely work towards what matters to you, the first one gets a boost automatically. As one and two improve, the third one ceases to matter after a while.

Elsewhere, I once quoted a story from the life of Rabindranath Tagore, a Nobel Laureate, an Indian philosopher and writer, I would like to share it here:

Tagore had a disciple who was very good at painting. However, he worried about what people thought about him, his work, and their opinions. So much so, it hindered his creativity. On multiple occasions Tagore told him to listen to his heart, that when it came to art, he should draw what he cared about and that the canvas was supposed to be his playfield and not a dumpster of others’ opinions.

One day, he drew a beautiful portrait of Tagore. It was perfect in every sense. Tagore himself approved it but the disciple remained unsure, he asked him if they should get others’ views on the portrait. Tagore thought it was a good opportunity to impart a lesson.

“Okay. If you really want to know what others think,” said Tagore, “go and place this portrait in a corner of a busy marketplace in the morning. Leave my original photo, a set of pencils and a note asking people for their opinion. Let it be there for the whole day and bring it back here in the evening.”
The disciple concurred. Two days later he went back to Tagore. He was visibly upset and downright pensive.
“I’m shocked at my painting skills. You said it was perfect, but I knew it wasn’t. That’s what everyone else thinks too,” he scorned and flashed the portrait in front of Tagore. It was full of black marks. In fact, black spots had completely marred the canvas. People had marked mistakes all over the portrait.
Tagore maintained quietude for a few minutes and said, “These opinions mean nothing. I still think it is perfect. What did you write on the note?”
“The note said, ‘Please compare this portrait with the original and mark wherever you see a mistake.’”
“Alright. Erase the black marks and take back the portrait. This time change your note to say, ‘Please compare with the original and correct any anomalies.’”
At the end of the experiment, he took the portrait back to Tagore and said, “There is not even one mark this time. How come? It’s the same sketch but no one corrected anything.”
“It’s easy to find faults, son. Most can’t distinguish fault from a feature. If they could, they would be busy making their own features and not finding faults in others. Trust your instincts when it comes to your own art.”

If you do not believe in what you do and who you are, how can you possibly expect others to endorse your proposition. Positive self-importance comes from being honest with yourself, your opinions about yourself and your work. Learn to love yourself, take care of yourself, treat yourself, believe in yourself, this is how you make yourself feel important.

2. Making others feel important
This is a quality all leaders possess, it helps create harmony and understanding in relationships. Irrespective of the nature of the relationship, professional or personal, if you wish to inspire someone, have them believe in you, make them your own, you need to make them feel important. When you make someone feel special, you create a special bond with that person, your relationship and the leverage you have from it becomes special, it is a sign of love, of care, you automatically solicit positive emotions from the other person.

There are three easy ways to make others feel important:

a. Complement
You will be amazed to see what a genuine complement can do. There is always some goodness in everybody, focus on such goodness and express it. That way, your complement remains true, genuine, a factual statement, and, its impact profound and long-lasting. It is easier to nurture any relationship when both sides are happy.

b. Care
When you show care with your words and gestures, you make the other person feel special, closer, loved. Care does not mean you always have to do something grand, it could be simple little gestures to express your love and care, to show that they mean something to you, that, their well-being, their happiness, is important to you.

c. Attention
When someone is talking to you, all you have to do is give them your undivided attention. This is where, from my observation, most people fall short, especially in a close relationship. When the other person is talking to you, and you make it a point to listen to them, they feel significant, important, special.

When you make others feel important, they gain strength, composure, faith. In return, they are able to love you better, be there for you more. You must be genuine though.

Mulla Nasrudin went to a shop once. “I would like to buy a greeting card for a woman I love the most,” he said.
The shop owner showed a card that said, “You are the only one I live for, and the one I can die for.”
“This is beautiful,” said Mulla, “give me six of these.”

Ingenuity is transient, be real.

If you love yourself, you will find it easy to love others, if you feel important, you will make others feel the same. We make others feel what we truly are ourselves, deep within. If you want to feel all that you are not presently, all you have to do is start giving it to others, Nature will reciprocate.

Go on! help someone feel special, make their day, express yourself.



SOURCE --- THE INTERNET

thanx......................................................

 

[sumantra]

British, now our politicians!

absolutely...........................................spit on the politicians who want to remain castes within our society.

 

[Catch22]

It saddens to hear the sudden passing away of Kyle Jean-Baptiste the lead actor of broad way show , Les Miserables ‘.
Had been side- lining ‘.from seeing this show .Les Miserables ‘ .as it deals with the darker side of Life’ .

But this time chose this over others ... Little did I know one of the actors ‘ would be no more within the next 2 months ..Was fortunate to watch and hear , His voice could draw anyone’s attention . He was in that show one of the side actors .
However ,from the news today , got to know ,within a month he had risen to become the youngest to play lead role‘ . Very sad indeed, a remarkable young talent is no more .

Just goes to show ,that Life is short ,Time is now to say Hello ,and to say Thank you and also to tell sorry ,if and when..For , we never know who is here tomorrow , who is not ‘
Social problems go beyond frontiers. Humankind's wounds, those huge sores that litter the world, do not stop at the blue and red lines drawn on maps. Wherever men go in ignorance or despair, wherever children lack a book to learn from or a warm hearth, little incidents happen ,knock at the door and say: "life beautiful ,and is short ".

 

[DSM]

Just great!!! Thanks for posting.

Just goes to show ,that Life is short ,Time is now to say Hello ,and to say Thank you and also to tell sorry ,if and when..For , we never know who is here tomorrow , who is not. Social problems go beyond frontiers. Humankind's wounds, those huge sores that litter the world, do not stop at the blue and red lines drawn on maps. Wherever men go in ignorance or despair, wherever children lack a book to learn from or a warm hearth, little incidents happen ,knock at the door and say: "life beautiful ,and is short ". ‘