Theory | wealthymatters

Be Smart To Be Luckier

August 22, 2014 Leave a comment

wealthymatters My roommate would hardly ever prepare for exams, just do a night-out (study all night) before exams from my notes, leave out complete chapters and manage a decent 65%!

Lucky? No. Smart! She zeroed in on the right notes to read, had the sense to drop the non-payers and concentrate on the correct stuff.

Somewhere, the line between luck and smartness is thin and merges. What we see as being born luck is a sort of skill in focussing on getting the most out of life with the least expenditure of resources.

Filed under Entrepreneurship, Theory, Tool Kit Tagged with born lucky, luck is a skill, luck is smartness, lucky, postaday

Richard Wiseman’s Experiment

August 22, 2014 Leave a comment

wealthymatters Psychologist Richard Wiseman surveyed a bunch of people to find out who considered themselves lucky or unlucky, then performed a very interesting test:

He gave both the “lucky” and the “unlucky” people a newspaper and asked them to look through it and tell him how many photographs were inside. He found that on average the unlucky people took two minutes to count all the photographs, whereas the lucky ones determined the number in a few seconds.

How could the “lucky” people do this? Because they found a message on the second page that read, “Stop counting. There are 43 photographs in this newspaper.”

So why didn’t the unlucky people see it? Read more of this post

Filed under Entrepreneurship, Theory, Tool Kit Tagged with how to be more lucky, lucky, postaday, Richard Wiseman, unlucky

Generation Gap

August 22, 2014 Leave a comment

wealthymatters

“I spent 35 years building a 100 crore trucks business and you want to be a bungee jumper?”

“Dad, I don’t want to be a bungee jumper. I want to start an adventure tourism company”.

“That means what? A tour guide? You’ll take foreigners to some rock in Himachal and make them jump? You went to Harvard B School.”

“That’s exactly why I don’t want to spend my life negotiating with Jharkhand toll booth operators”.

This was conversation I was privy to last week between a successful 60-something Mumbai businessman and his 30something son. The father fought his whole life against an insanely bureaucratic system and built his business. A Herculean task in a time of 97% taxation, sporadic socialist agendas, petty cronyism, suspicion of businessmen.He dug in for the long war against safari-suited socialists, teethgritted, thrived and won. Today, the entrepreneur saw the Arabian Sea from his penthouse. On the verge of handing over his 50-city trucks empire to his only son. There was only one problem. His son didn’t want it. Read more of this post

Filed under Theory Tagged with generation gap, handing over the business, heir to the business, postaday, succeeding to the business, taking over the business

The Market Value Of Beauty

August 21, 2014 Leave a comment

wealthymatters Supermodel Linda Evangelista famously wouldn’t get out of bed for less than $10,000; this year it could be said Gisele did not leave the house for less than $128,000 a day. This Brazilian supermodel made $47 million in the last 12 months before taxes and fees, making her the world’s highest-paid model for the eighth year in a row.

Along with lucrative contracts for H&M, Chanel, and Carolina Herrera, Gisele gets a cut of sales from the jelly sandals she designs for Brazilian shoemaker Grendene. The face of Pantene hair products and Oral-B in Brazil, Bundchen’s line of Hope lingerie — Gisele Bundchen Intimates — also plumps up her earnings.

Gisele Bundchen has an estimated net worth of $290 million.