That which cannot be built overnight has to be nurtured over a period of time!

"That which cannot be built overnight has to be nurtured over the period of time!" Of course, I am not teaching you any philosophy class here, haha 😁 but the point that I am making is the fundamental principle with which I am leading my life. I hope by now you may have read my bio and it highlights that I spend a significant amount of my time learning, experimenting, and implementing in areas such as health, building skills, and financial literacy. I am sure now most of you agree with what I am trying to convey. Yes, that's right! Basic essentials in life such as good health, strong skillsets and financial literacy does not grow overnight instead at least a small contribution should be made on an everyday basis, which in other words, need time, discipline, persistence, and consistency to achieve it.

The greatest proverb of all time is "health is wealth" and is/was a mantra of every school-going child. But if you closely take a moment to understand that the value of the greatest proverb lost its value over time as we grew older. From my understanding what I essentially notice that as we grow older the fact that taking care of our health is consciously diminishing. Why I emphasize it is conscious because almost everyone agrees that they know they need to take care of their health but the main problem that everyone blames is time. I say it is absolutely absurd because the whole point in leading a contentment life fundamentally lies under good health. Again, I want to remind the learnings from our school days, which said, "when health is lost everything is lost". It is fundamentally true because when you build your skillsets, financial literacy, so on, at the expense of your health then there is no point in achieving it. So you may ask what is good health? Is it about the physical body only? Of course not, when we say good health, it is the combination of physical and mental well-being. There are different ways to achieve good health at both levels. At the physical level, actively involved in a sport, going to the gym, jogging, cycling, practicing a healthy food diet (consuming adequate water, less sugar, and salt consumption, junk food), etc. At the mental level, following a regular sleeping cycle, by practicing pranayama and meditation, etc. In the nutshell, I truly believe that good health is one of the greatest wealth one can have. One who understands and follows it on an everyday basis can reap the fullest benefits of his achievements in life.

The definition from Wikipedia, "A skill is the learned ability to perform an action with determined results with good execution often within a given amount of time, energy, or both". We learn skills from our parents, teachers, peers, managers, bosses, through seminars/forums/internet, so on. For most of us, learning a skill does not take a long time but in order to scale and actually make a niche out of it essentially requires a longer time. Skills can be anything from cooking to coding, gardening to using technology to create values. In my opinion, as we are at the peak of the information age, the dogma in the last decades which kept us from learning just one set of skills and repeatedly doing it for the rest of life will be worthless. It doesn't mean that you should know plenty of skills, but what I want to emphasize is that as almost everything is available at just the tip of your finger, you should evolve with the information and knowledge gathered that are freely available to build a niche out of it. Many of the jobs are getting saturated because of the imbalance in the fundamental equation of demand and supply. The number of aspirants exceeds the actual number of vacancies available out there in the market. I believe the main factor (among others) driving for this is the limited skillset. Of course, the other factor is automation that could easily replace humans at a certain level, but I am sure having multiple skillsets linked to each other in some sense or having an ability to connect various skillsets will only help to stand out in the crowd which will indeed build an edge with our peers.

Finally, let's get into financial literacy. Just like health, money is something that no matter what irrespective of your position, nationality, and job, has its influence on each one of us in our life. When I say financial literacy it means knowing the fundamentals such as income, expense, assets, liability, and cash flow. One has to understand what is financial freedom to reap the benefits of financial literacy. According to the definition from Wikipedia, "Financial independence is the status of having enough income to pay one's living expenses for the rest of one's life without having to be employed or dependent on others". To reach that stage requires a lot of effort and time. One has to understand the basics of personal finance management to achieve it. I have extensively covered it in my series of blogs under the topic 'personal finance management' (refer: Part-1, Part-2, recommendation). Here are the key takeaways:

1. Know your assets (appreciating/depreciating) and liabilities (loans).
2. Know your income (inflow) and expenses (outflow).
3. Start saving and investing at an early age.
4. What is inflation and how to beat it?
5. The power of compounding (the 8th wonder!).

I am a big believer in karma, what you give and do to others comes back to you at the same magnitude or higher. I feel it is our responsibility in life's journey to share, care, and give back to the society and people where we live in any form that is possible from us. I take with me one of the biggest lessons that I learned at my Yoga university, Swami Vivekananda Yoga Anusandhana Samsthana (S-VYASA), that everyone of us has five kinds of debt in life: 

1. Deva runa (debt to nature).  
2. Bhuta runa (debt to plants and animals).
3. Pitru runa (debt to parents and ancestors).
4. Manushya runa (debt to society and people).
5. Rishi runa (debt to teachers).

Now, you may ask what is the point in having good health, a strong skillset, financial literacy, and end of the day giving back everything that we have? Well, as Chanakya says in his Chanakya Neeti each and every action of our life until death is decided during our birth and no one can change it. The only option we have is to live with it with our full effort. What I essentially take out of this sutra is that everyone in the world is not given equal opportunity and certainly there is a huge disparity because of various reasons which are beyond our limit. Hence, I want to conclude if you are one of those who have good health, skillset, and financial literacy, and don't believe in karma, at least take a moment to reflect your opinion on the huge disparity in the world we live in to make a difference in others lives through the process of giving back.

-----------------------------------------

I hope you liked this blog post. Feel free to provide your comments and feedback and I am open to having any conversation regarding the same. Thank you for your time and support!