Categories
Humor Quora

Why are Indian girls crazy about pani puri?

(Hat tip Ajay)

Q:Why are Indian girls crazy about pani puri?

A.In the Mahabharata, as soon as Draupadi was married to the Pandava brothers, she was taken to their house. Kunti was worried that her daughter-in-law might create a rift amongst her sons by showing extra affection to one over the other. It was tough times and she also wanted to see whether this new bride would be able to successfully manage resources. So she decided to test her

Kunti gave her just enough dough (atta)  to make one puri and told her to satisfy the hunger of all five of her sons. There was also some left over potato masala from last night. It was then that the ingenious Draupadi invented Pani Puri. This also goes on to explain why every standard plate has 5 pieces. Kunti was so amazed with her daughter-in-law’s creativity that she blessed her dish with immortality.

Thus every Indian girl eating pani puri secretly wishes for a good husband and wants to show to the 5 men ogling her at a pani puri wala that she is more than capable of being a good wife..

Hope your intellect is satisfied. And on a more serious note, your intellect needs to get a life.-by Jaganathan Abhinav in Quora

Categories
Quora

How does it feel like to suddenly lose all your wealth?

When I had money, I had a good life.  When I lost it all, life started to suck.

And 12 years later, life still sucks.

I never had millions – I was just very comfortable.  I had a decent apartment, a good wife, enough money to take four vacations a year and all of the toys that I could reasonably have wanted.

But it all went in 2000 when I trusted the wrong person to be General Manager of my company.  He got greedy, started stealing money from the company and kept on stealing until it sent the company under.

I wasn’t too worried when it happened initially.  I had lost a business before and was able to start a second one immediately afterwards which was even more successful,  I thought that it shouldn’t be too much of a problem to do it all again as I was bright and prepared to work hard and was a firm believer in “the harder you work, the luckier you get”.

But I was wrong.

I sunk my life savings into a new business venture that didn’t come off and so had to move back in with my parents while I searched for a job.  I thought that it should not be too much of a problem finding a ‘real job’, but I was wrong.  I found out the hard way that employers are nervous about hiring anyone who has been self-employed for a decade – especially those without any very specific skills.

So for most of the last decade since I lost everything, I have had to survive on starting small business of my own with no capital behind me.  Since then I have been barely scraping a living and have continually had problems with getting screwed over by more partners.  My wife stood by me for the first couple of years of having no money, but she got impatient after a while and divorced me.  I’ve been single for most of the decade as I haven’t been able to support myself let alone anyone else.

I really don’t know how I would have survived without my parents coming to the rescue on numerous occasions – providing me with somewhere to live when it all went wrong again, and unsecured loans to get me through the bad patches until I am able to settle my debts and start again.

If I had to summarize what it feels like to lose all your wealth in one sentence, I would say that it feels like being involved in an accident where you end up being partially paralyzed.  You spend the rest of your life thinking back on the event, wondering if you could have avoided it somehow, feeling sorry for yourself that life is never going to be as good as it was again and feeling nostalgia for the times when life was good.

It’s the flipside to the American Dream that doesn’t get much exposure.  History is written by the victors, so we usually only get to read the stories of those that went from rags to riches, rather than those who took the journey in the opposite direction.

I will agree though that there have been some upsides along the way.  I remember a line from Fight Club – “you don’t own your possessions; your possessions own you.”  This I have found to be true.  I don’t regret losing all my toys.  It is very liberating to know that you can fit your entire worldly possessions into a suitcase, hop on a plane and start all over again.

“Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.”

I’ve also had some pretty exciting adventures over the last decade – living in four different countries on three continents and have been involved in setting up a whole host of different businesses in completely different fields – a far more interesting life than had I just lived a moderate middle class life owning a moderately successful business.

But, if I had the chance to live my life all over again, I’d change most of it.

-By Nick Pendrell in Quora

Categories
Quora

How to become an Idea machine

In the mid-90s I had an idea that lasted about the amount of time it  takes to drink two beers. I say this because I had the idea at a bar and  it was quickly squashed by the two friends I was with.

I wanted to create a reality cable channel. All reality TV all the  time. Reality TV was just beginning. “MTV’s The Real World” and HBO’s  “Taxicab Confessions” were the only real two successful examples at that  point. The day before, I had gone to a seminar at the Museum of  Television and Radio about “The Real World”. All of the guests of my  favorite season (but not Puck or Pedro, who was dead) were there  answering questions. I felt reality TV was a cheap way to produce TV and  people would get obsessed by it, particularly if sex was involved.

“What a dumb idea,” a friend  said. “There’s only so much reality.” Which strikes me as funny now.

The other guy said, “you’re not a big TV company. How will you get the cable companies to go for the idea?”

So I never thought about it again. I put up a fence around the idea  and decided I would not be able to leap over that fence to execute on  the idea. Now EVERY television channel is basically all reality all the  time, or at least 50% of the time.

My real problem was: I didn’t have confidence. And I  didn’t know what the next step was. In retrospect, I should’ve written  down my idea, written down ten ideas for possible shows to launch with,   and started pitching TV companies to get someone to partner with me on  it. That would’ve been simple and not taken too much time before there  was some payoff.

Note: what might be too big for you (thinking of the next step) might  not be too big for someone else (they might easily know, and not be  afriad of, what the next step is).

Two examples:

I was first asked a similar question a few months ago and I replied  that an idea would be too big if you can’t think of the next step. I  then added that  if I wanted to start an airline with more comfortable  seats and internet access and better food and cheaper prices I might  have a hard time because even if it were a good idea I wouldn’t know  what to do next.
Then I read about Richard Branson.

When Virgin Records was making him a tidy profit of about $15 million  a year he decided there should be a more comfortable cross-atlantic  airline. What the hell did he know about making an airline? Nothing. Not  only that, airlines are a difficult business.  Three of the best  investors in history: Howard Hughes, Carl Icahn, and Warren Buffett have  crashed and burned buying airlines. Warren Buffett once said something  like “that the best way to end up with a billion is to start with two  and buy an airline. ”

And yet Branson came up with the idea and that very day he called up  Boeing to find out what it would cost to lease an airplane. He made a  great deal with them that if it didn’t work out he could return the  airplane. Else if it did work  out, he’d be a great customer for them.  I’m assuming he made a similar call to Airbus and took the best deal. He  then probably found out what it cost to lease space in the various  airports he would need to use. They were probably happy with more  business. And then, I’m guessing, he hired some pilots, some ground  crew, and put an ad in the paper advertising his new air routes and he  was in business.

Virgin Air is successful (I just flew it from NY to LA a few weeks  ago) and has since spun off Virgin Galactic. So this scruffy kid who  started a record label is now sending rocketships into space.

Note the important thing: the day he came up with the idea  he also called Boeing and got a plane from them. So he took the next step. For me, I would’ve convinced myself that the “next step” in starting an   airline was too big for me. And then it would’ve been too big for me.  This is not quite the same as “the secret” – the idea that our thoughts  can create our reality but…they do. If you think you can do something,  if you have confidence, if you have creativity (developed by building up  your idea muscle discussed in many other posts here), the big ideas  become smaller and smaller. Until there is no idea too big. Nothing you  can’t at least attempt.

On a much smaller scale I can state a few examples of my own but I’ll  stick with one. I had an idea to create a financial news site that  didn’t have any news but was just a site made up of various methods to  come up with investment ideas. In particular, by piggybacking the  investment ideas of the greatest investors. I spec-ed out the site the  morning I had the idea, I put the spec on Hire freelancers and find freelance jobs instantly, several developers  contacted me with prices, and I hired one of them. Within a few weeks,  version 1.0 of the site was released, Stockpickr! Your Source for Stock Ideas. 7 months later and  millions of unique users later, I sold the profitable company to Stock Market – Business News, Market Data, Stock Analysis – TheStreet.

So the question is not necessarily, “when is an idea too big” it’s: “how do I make all ideas smaller and achievable”. You do this by developing the idea muscle:

A) Every day, read/skim, chapters from books on at least four different topics. For myself this morning I read from a biography of Mick Jagger, I read a  chapter from “Regenesis”, a book on advances in genetic engineering, a  topic I know nothing about. I read a chapter in “Tiny Beautiful Things”  by Cheryl Strayed. Her recent book, “Wild” is an Oprah pick and was also  excellent.  I read a chapter from “Myths to Live By” by Joseph  Campbell, and  I, to waste time, I played a game of chess online.

B) Write down ten ideas. About anything. It doesn’t  matter if they are business ideas, book ideas, ideas for surprising your  spouse in bed, ideas for what you should do if you are arrested for  shoplifting, ideas for how to make a better tennis racquet, anything you  want. The key is that it has to be ten or more.

You want your brain to sweat.

To hurt to come up with more and more ideas. One possibility right  now is to list ten ideas that are “too big for me” and what the next  steps might be. For instance, one idea might be “launch solar panels  into outerspace to more efficiently generate solar power”. Another idea  might be, “genetically engineer a microbe that sucks the salt out of  water”. I have no idea if that’s even possible. Another idea might be,  “within one year I am going to write a book and give away a million  copies for free”.

The first step would be to write the book. Then maybe I can crowd  fund on kickstarter to give the book away for free. OR, I can maybe  print  up nano-sized copies of the book so that you can only read it  with a microscope but it would only cost me a couple of sheets of paper  to print up a million copies. And so on. With the solar panels, I can  call up SpaceX and see how much it would cost to rent space. For the  microbe that desalinates…I have no idea. Can you help me?

You don’t ever have to look at these ideas again. The purpose is not  to come up with a good idea. The purpose is to have 1000s of ideas over  time. To develop the idea muscle and turn it into a machine.

C) Be a transmitter. Two farmers live side by side  and drink their water from wells they’ve each built on their property.  One farmer’s well runs out of water and he needs rain to come quickly or  he will  die of thirst. The other farmer did the work and dug his well  so an underground stream ran right into it. So his well was always  filled with water and he never had to worry.

How do you create this underground stream?

By making sure the other parts of your life are in balance: you have  no bad emotional situations/relationships happening or you are doing   your best to stay disengaged from them. You are keeping physically  health, no drinking, eating well, sleeping well. And spiritually (a word  I hate because of 200 years of meaningless connotations that have been  applied to it but I can’t think of a better word), you realize that you  can’t control everything in your life, cultivating a sense of surrender  to the present moment as opposed to time traveling to your regrets of  the past and your fears of the future.

D) Activate another part of your brain. I write  every day. So sometimes I am  drawing too much water from the well, from  that underground stream. Just like I wrote you need to diversify all  aspects of your life, you also need to diversify your brain. The other  day Claudia and I took a watercolor class. I haven’t watercolored in my  life. We got there and the next thing I knew it was three hours later.  My brain didn’t even notice the time passing. What did I have to show  for it? The worst excuse for a sunset, some mountains, some clouds, ever  watercolored. But my brain felt good.

E) Collisions. I have another blog post coming on this topic. Stay tuned.
F) No pressure. This is  similar to the “burnout”  question that came up in my last post. Sometimes you plant seeds and not  every seed works out and grows into a beautiful plant. In fact, very  few do. If you pressure yourself that every seed will be the most  amazingly beautiful plant in the world then you are going to set  yourself up for burnout and disappointment. Sometimes I have to work on  something and it’s enough to just jot down some ideas, or look at what  I’ve done so far, and then set it down again. Get my subconscious  working on it.

G) An exercise to get you get your subconscious working on an idea: I  have a very strict routine every day. I wake up, read, write, exercise,  eat, meetings (phone or live), then reverse the process: eat, write,  read, sleep.
But sometimes when I need to rejuvenate a little bit I have to shake things up. Do something different.

Maybe take a walk at 5 in the morning instead of read. Maybe sleep in  four hour shifts one day instead of eight hours straight. Maybe spend a  day writing handwritten letters instead of going on the computer.  Shaking things up makes the brain  say, “what the hell just happened?”  And while the conscious brain is confused the subconscious slips in and  drops off what it’s been working on while your conscious brain has been  too busy. Write down your routine. Make it as detailed a possible. What  can you change today?

H) List your childhood passions. When I was six  years old I was passionately interested in both comic books and Greek  mythology. In high school and college I took five years of French and  spent some time in France (even had an office there with my first  business). Right now I can’t remember a single word of French except for  maybe “oui”. But I remember vividly almost every comic and book I read  about Greek myths from when I was six. From the very first comic (the  “legion of superheroes” had to come back in time and stay with Clark’s  parents in Smallville) to every comic afterwards.

We only ever remember the things we are passionate about. Ultimately,  these become the fields where  ideas  bloom and are harvested.  Everything else dries up inside and dies.

Try to think back and think of all the things you ever were  passionate about from the age of five on. You’ll be surprised how many  things there were. And  how many ways these passions can now be  cross-fertilized and mate with each other to provide your next set of  passions and ideas.

I) Surf the Internet. I just saw an “infographic”  (Infographics are quickly becoming the new blog posts) on how to be  creative. It said “turn off the computer”. Sometimes this is true.  Sometimes not. With the entire world of knowledge at our fingertips it  sometimes is fun to get sucked down the rabbit hole like Alice and drift  around in Wonderland. Some good places to start are braindroppings, The Browser | Writing Worth Reading, and (not safe for work), GoodShit. I  might not get any ideas from what I see but seeds might be planted. I  find that I get a similar feeling to when I go into the book store at a  museum, pick out a bunch of books and sit down and skim through them. It  tickles the brain and lights things up that may have been dormant.

J) Ugh, I can’t come up with the tenth idea on “how  to exercise the idea muscle”. My brain is hurting too much. If you have  more ideas for this, please put them in the comments

-By James Altucher in Quora

Categories
Quora

Is getting rich worth it?

Question:Is getting rich worth it?

 

Answer:

I made $15m in my mid-20s after I sold a tech startup. I talked to a lot of people about this question, and thought a lot about how to stay the same person I was before and after making money.

Here’s my answer: being rich is better than not being rich, but it’s not nearly as good as you imagine it is.

The answer why is a bit more complicated.

First, one of the only real things being rich gives you is that you don’t have to worry about money as much anymore. There will still be some expenses that you cannot afford (and you will wish you could), but most expenses can be made without thinking about what it costs. This is definitely better, without a doubt.

Being rich does come with some downsides, though. The first thing you are thinking reading that, is, “cry me a river”. That is one of the downsides. You are not allowed to complain about anything, ever. Since most people imagine being rich as nirvana, you are no longer allowed to have any human needs or frustrations in the public eye. Yet, you are still a human being, but most people don’t treat you like one.

There’s the second downside. Most people now want something out of you, and it can be harder to figure out whether someone is being nice to you because they like you, or they are being nice to you because of your money. If you aren’t married yet, good luck trying to figure out (and/or always having self doubt) about whether a partner is into you or your money.

Then you have friends & family. Hopefully your relationship with them doesn’t sour, but it can get harder. Both can get really weird about it and start to treat you differently. They might come and ask for a loan (bad idea: if you give, always give a gift). One common problem is that they don’t appreciate Christmas presents the way that they used to, and they can get unrealistic expectations for how large a present should be and be disappointed when you don’t meet their unrealistic expectations. You have to start making decisions for your parents on what does and does not cost too much, and frankly, it’s awkward.

Add all of these up and you can start to feel a certain sense of isolation.

You sometimes lay awake at night, wondering if you made the right investment decisions, whether it might all go away. You know that feeling standing on a tall building, the feeling you might lose your mind and jump? Sometimes you’re worried that you might lose your mind and spend it all.

The next thing you need to understand about money is this: all of the things you picture buying, they are only worthwhile to you because you cannot afford them (or have to work really hard to acquire them). Maybe you have your eye on a new Audi — once you can easily afford it, it just doesn’t mean as much to you anymore.

Everything is relative, and you are more or less powerless to that. Yes, the first month you drive the Audi, or eat in a fancy restaurant, you really enjoy it. But then you sort of get used to it. And then you are looking towards the next thing, the next level up. And the problem is that you have reset your expectations, and everything below that level doesn’t get you quite as excited anymore.

This happens to everyone. Good people can maintain perspective, actively fight it, and stay grounded. Worse people complain about it and commit general acts of douchebaggery. But remember this: it would happen to you, too, even though you might not think so. You’ll just have to trust me on this one.

Most people hold the illusion that if only they had more money, their life would be better and they would be happier. Then they get rich, and that doesn’t happen, and it can throw them into a serious life crisis.

If you’re part of the middle class, you have just as many opportunities to do with your life what you want of it. If you’re not happy now, you won’t be happy because of money.

Whether you’re rich or not, make your life what you want it to be, and don’t use money as an excuse. Go out there, get involved, be active, pursue your passion, and make a difference.

 

-from Quora