I never worried about money. I grew up in a middle-class family, so I never thought I would starve. And I learned at Atari that I could be an okay engineer, so I always knew I could get by. I was voluntarily poor when I was in college and India, and I lived a pretty simple life even when I was working. So I went from fairly poor, which was wonderful because I didn’t have to worry about money, to being incredibly rich, when I also didn’t have to worry about money. I watched people at Apple who made a lot of money and felt they had to live differently. Some of them bought Rolls-Royce and various houses, each with a house manager and then someone to manage the house managers. Their wives got plastic surgery and turned into these bizarre people. This was not how I wanted to live. It’s crazy. I made a promise to myself that I’m not going to let this money ruin my life. – Steve Jobs
You have to be empathetic to reality. You can bend reality but you cannot break it. On cash in India, my team here worked on me for a long time to make that happen. If you get stuck too much with the way you want the world to be, you’ll find that the world passes you by. As an entrepreneur and as a startup, you have to find a balance between where you want the world to go and where it actually is. Hopefully it will follow the path you think it will, but sometimes unexpectedly, it bends the other way and takes the fork on the road. That’s part of the fun. So yes, we accept cash in India – Travis Kalanich, Uber.
To assume that all who are entrusted with the task of administering, will do so flawlessly and then to blame them when the system fails; is not the mark of a good policy. The effective strategy is to take people to be the way they are and then craft incentive-compatible interventions – Economic Survey.
India operates on fuzzy logic and there is ambiguity in the way people do things so Indians are able to cope with ambiguity better. In a European environment, managers are unwilling to cope with situations when things go wrong. If you have been working in a growth situation and then you hit the brick wall people surrender; so I think the ability to think on their feet and cope with the uncertainty of the future has given me a positive impression of Indian managers. Indians working outside of India have turned around tough situations in a different cultural situation. (James Douglas, EMA Partners International)
“Whatever limit us we call fate”- whoever says this, hasn’t seen enough of life.
The greatest conflicts are not between two people, but between a person and himself.
A fool gets annoyed at the slightest provocation. A wise man overlooks an insult – Bible.
Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored.
For a general about to fight an enemy, it is important to know the enemy’s numbers, but still more important to know the enemy’s philosophy…
The man who is a pessimist before 48 knows too much; if he is an optimist after that, he knows too little – Mark Twain
To withdraw is not to run away and to stay is no wise decision when there is more reason to fear than to hope.
Every morning in Africa, a Gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning a Lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest Gazelle or it will starve to death. It doesn’t matter whether you are a Lion or a Gazelle. When the sun comes up; you’d better be running.
Knowledge workers cannot be controlled; they must be motivated. They must serve a purpose more meaningful than personal profit – Peter Drucker.
If it’s 20 per cent left in your body, just give that 20 per cent…