S and I are expecting a baby. The approximate due date is on August 22nd. Although during the first trimester S had terrible morning sickness (why do they call it morning when it occurs throughout the day?), she is fine now.
"The test is positive". I heard these earth shattering words in Las Vegas at 8:25 pm on Dec 20th. Of course I did not believe it till a few days afterwards when a doctor confirmed it for us.
As you can imagine, it is a period of great excitement as well as anxiety for us. We have experienced a range of emotions that we never knew can be felt like by humans. More than once I’ve said "Oh my God, what have we done!". And when S’s mom was going back to India, I felt like shouting "You are not going to leave us alone, are you?". But every night we fall asleep to dreams of a baby and every morning brings us that much closer to the faithful day.
In his latest post How Hard Could It Be?: Start-up Static, Joel Spolsky compares a new business to a shortwave radio.
In my mind, an entrepreneur is like a kid playing with his first shortwave radio. He takes it home and turns it on, and what does he hear?
Nothing. Static.
This might be demoralizing. So he tries a different frequency.
Nothing. Static.
And this might be demoralizing again.
Joel says that this is where a lot of start-ups fail. People get demoralized and stop working on their business. I couldn’t agree more with him. Time and time again, I’ve just stopped trying when I did not see the results after the initial effort. In fact I should be doing just the opposite.
You have to fiddle patiently with all the dials until you get the reception you want
Say you decide to open a restaurant. You rent space, fill it with tables, stock the kitchen, and hire a bunch of waiters and a host to seat people and answer the phone and take reservations. And then, on the night of your grand opening: [imagine the sound of crickets here].
At this moment, a founder who is incapable of careful morale management will think to himself, Maybe a career in HR management isn’t so bad after all. Meanwhile, the determined founder will start playing with the dials — rethinking the menu, trying new promotions, and adjusting prices. And what he’ll find is that, just like the tuner on a radio, certain aspects of a business can be off by only a little bit and then, one tiny adjustment, and BING! The thing starts working.
Just you keep at it, continue to tweak the things that don’t work. Whether it is a new project or building a relationship with you team or anything else, continue to adjust the dials until you stumble upon the right formula.
This morning I read an excellent post by Seth Godin (who is he?) titled Solving a different problem. In the post he notes that when the telephone came along, it had none of the advantages of the telegraph.
Here’s why people liked the telegraph: It was universal, inexpensive, asynchronous and it left a paper trail.
And yet the telephone destroyed the telegraph. The reason it was able to do so despite not having any of the attributes mentioned above was because it solved a different problem (real time communication) very effectively. If you set out making something, you’ll get much more for your effort if it solves a different problem, rather than a problem for which solutions already exist.
If the telephone guys had set out to make something that did what the telegraph does, but better, they probably would have failed. Instead, they solved a different problem, in such an overwhelmingly useful way that they eliminated the feature set of the competition.
Always try to bring something unique to the table.
Over the past few months I’ve come to realize that my 401K asset allocation was too aggressive and not diversified enough (portfolio being down by 33% was one indication). And so after spending the last few days reevaluating my investment philosophy and questioning my earlier decisions here’s what my new asset allocation looks like:
I’ve diversified quite a lot, but I’m still going to stay fully invested in equities. Being quite far away from retirement I’ve chosen to be aggressive. But at the same time I have a very small percentage in mid cap and small cap stocks and no growth stocks, but this is primarily due to a lack of a good choice in my 401k plan. I’ve realized that I have keep a closer look at the performance than in the past, but hopefully the new allocation strategy will produce better results.
I use Mint to track my expenses, credit card spending, investments, 401K accounts etc. As it updates my accounts one of the things it computes is my net worth. Net worth is nothing but the difference between your assets (cash in banks, CD’s, investments, 401k, car, house, etc) and your liabilities (credit card debt, loans, bills left to pay, etc).
Currently I do not own anything (such as a house or a boat, etc) that is difficult to valuate, and so my net worth figure is pretty accurate. I feel that it is the single most important financial figure. It’s how I can measure my progress in towards my short term (saving for down payment towards a house) and long term (financial independence) goals.
If I am able to track changes to my net worth with any sort of regularity for a decent amount of time, hopefully I can use it to guide my financial decisions. So I’ve decided to track my net worth going forward. Keeping in mind the huge swings in the securities market, I’ll look at it only once every month (usually around the 15th).
