9 to 5 Job

 You are a lucky person if you have to work only from 9 to 5 i.e. for 8 hours, perhaps for 5 or 6 days in a week.

There are millions in this world like housemaid, housewives, labourers, guards, cops who have virtually no working hour and no scheduled holidays.

You must appreciate that every single working day, you have 16 hours at your disposal and you have 24 hours at your disposal on the weekends, holidays and leaves.

The number of free days you can enjoy in a year would be in the range of 100-150 days.

What a lucky person you are?

You have reasons to be happy and satisfied with so much time and resources at your disposal.

Millions of people would consider themselves lucky, if they can get your job.

When you are working 9 to 5 job, you also don’t have to worry about the health of the company because you can always change your job.

You also get sufficient money as salary to live a decent life and take care of your family.

The real problem with 9 to 5 job is that almost everyone you see around yourself has it.

Hence, you don’t feel special being an employee as you have nothing great to boast off.

You have been conditioned to believe that you are a special person who deserve something special in this world.

Hence, you feel ordinary and common doing the same thing over and over again and get bored.

Many people leave their jobs and start their own company or business to get rid of this routine.

However, most of them end up making their life worse rather than better for the following reasons.

• According to Bloomberg, 8 out of 10 entrepreneurs who start businesses fail within the first 18 months Thus 80% new entrepreneur lose all their savings, get burdened by debt and then back to 9 to 5 job soon.
• When you start your business, you have to work 12-14 hours a day for almost 7 days in the week. Even when you are not going to the office, you are working from home.
• You have to worry about cash flow, office rent, competitors, and employees all the time.
• You have to worry about the legal compliance of your company and managing with tax payments etc.

If you decide to follow your passion and choose to become a writer, painter, singer, actor, musician etc., you struggle for earning your bread and butter until you reach to the top.

Don’t get fooled by the success of a few in these fields by listening to the interviews of those who have made it to the top.

For every successful person in the glamourous profession, there are hundreds who are struggling with life in these areas.

Learn to appreciate and value what you have rather than running after illusions and making your life miserable.

Instead of thinking that you are stuck in your job for the rest of my life, realize that your living is assured for life thanks to your job.

-Awdhesh Singh

How much time to prepare for a Govt Job ?

20s 30s ?

 I am way past that age, but I have some really good advice for you.

• You really do not have to worry too much about the time you have lost. Unfortunately that time would not come back, but you can do some significant improvements in your life and lifestyle for future.
• Fortunately, you can make up for all the things you could not do back in your twenties.

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• First of all, what you really need to do is to eliminate things that do not matter in your life. For example, cut connections with negative people, and then negative activities.
• You have to put an immediate stop to all those things. Without this you really will not change, and nothing will be better in future.
• This will sound hard, and feel bad in the beginning, but this is actually good for you. It will bring an immediate impact and then you can focus on great activities.

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Next, you should find three things in your life: Inspiration, motivation, and discipline.

• Inspiration: You have to find a set of people with whom you are willing to swap positions. Write down on a paper why you think those people are amazing. They must have done some great things in their lives. You have to identify those things. You have to read books and increase knowledge. You have to gain the experience they gained. You have to develop the habits they developed, and refine those habits for your purpose.
• Motivation: You have to look up to the great things you can do now, and how things in your life would look like when you have achieved them.
• Discipline: You have to build daily habits that help you get closer to your dream. You have to be very consistent with these habits, and keep tracking your progress on a weekly basis.

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Some greedy approaches:

• You can find out from others what are good skills to learn whether you like them or not. You have find out from others what daily habits they follow and reason with them why those habits are valuable.
• Last but not the least, you have to tell yourself, that any great success comes to you in 10 years, and a short version of it can be realized in five years.
• If you go by this plan, and systematically work on your life, you can achieve a lot, and your future can be significantly bright.

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Stay blessed and stay inspired!

-Rohit Malshe

Life Problems

Regret

No one else, but we put locks in our brains ourselves. Here is how it works:

 No one else, but we put locks in our brains ourselves. Here is how it works:

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• An old man used to live in a small town (more like a village). His home was very close to a school, and the school premises were often misused by people as they used to find a shortcut to places through the school premises. He did not want people to use school premises as a shortcut, but still wanted to use the shortcut himself for his commute.
• Here is what he did: He put a lock on the gate of the school, and observed the people. He watched that people would make it to the gate, but then seeing a lock, they would turn back and would take the long-cut.

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Then, in a few days, he took out the lock, but left the chain tied over and over around the gate. Note that now it was possible for anyone to un-tie the chain, and use the premises as shortcut. There was no stopping. There was no announcement. It wasn’t anything illegal.

BUT! People would see the chain, and would get discouraged anyway, and would walk away.

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He started calling this a mental lock. We all have mental locks in our brains, put by ourselves.

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• We tell ourselves that we cannot succeed.
• We tell ourselves that we are depressed.
• We tell ourselves that we have been cheated.
• We tell ourselves that we are not smart.
• We tell ourselves that we would not be considered for a job.
• We tell ourselves that everything that holds us back.

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There is no physical lock. The lock is in the brain. I had heard this story of the man who used to put the chain around the school gate, and I had this story in the back of my mind.

• One day, when me and my sister got two cats, we both didn’t want them to go to the kitchen area.
• We put a child barrier in our home, so that the kitten would not cross it.
• As the kitten grew to being cats, they still could not cross it, not because they had any physical limitations, but the lock was in the brain.

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Life will throw a lot of mental locks your way. They would be thrown by your family, friends, colleagues, supervisors, and so on. It is you who put those locks in your brains. You have to unlock them yourself.

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Your motivation will always end, when you will see some locks. If you stay disciplined, you can not just break some locks, but walk through walls.

Stay blessed and stay inspired!

-Rohit Malshe

Average Student All Life ?

Bhakts ?

 There are two types of people in the world.

• Emotional people
• Rational People

The emotional people decide everything based on their feelings.

An emotional person can’t differentiate between a person and his acts. Accordingly,

• If he likes a person, all his actions are good.
• If he hates a person, all his actions are bad.

A rational person on the other side differentiate the person and his actions. He can evaluate each action based on its merit. Accordingly,

• If an action is good, he appreciates the action
• If an action is bad, he criticizes the action

Most Indians are highly emotional and they have little or no ability to use their rational mind to judge every action of the government.

They already have formed the government either as good or evil based on their feelings about the leader.

Hence, they would either praise or criticize all actions of the government irrespective of merit.

Therefore you shall be branded either as a ‘bhakt’ (Nationalist) or ‘desh-drohi’ (Anti-national).

-Awdhesh Singh

There is a concept called....

Live by Principles Not Feelings

Are you like this guy ?

 I had a classmate who was finding it really hard to get a job.

We had just graduated at the time and he was looking for a job.

It was about a month since he started his search and one day I decided to call him up asking whether he got the job.

Me : “Hey man, how is your job hunt going? , any leads yet ?”.

Him: “Not yet, I am still struggling to find one”.

Me: “What exactly are you done so far? What companies have you applied for?”

Him: “I have setup profiles on a couple job portals, also applied for a couple jobs , waiting for their response but no response yet.”

Me trying to help : “Make sure you apply for a ton of jobs, most companies on job portal sites are fake and are setup by job agencies so make sure to …..”

He interrupts me mid-sentence.

Him: “Hey I got to go, Im out with my friends for a movie”.

Me: “Okay, bye”.

Upon disconnecting the call, I was like WTF ? This guy is jobless, calls him selves as someone who is struggling and is yet out with friends for a movie ?

He was not a local, he was living in a shared apartment, surviving on his parents money and yet was so relaxed.

A couple days later, I was in his locality for a client meeting after the meeting was over I decided to visit this classmate to see what was going on.

He was alone at the apartment as most of his flatmates went to work. He was laying on a mattress on the living room floor with his laptop watching a movie.

He still didn’t get a job and used to spend the entire day all alone at his room watching movies.

Upon asking about his job situation, he replied: “I was called for a couple interviews but was rejected by all of them.”

I asked: “So what’s your plan ahead?”

Him: ”I decided to enrol in XYZ institute to learn Java, they also have a good placement record, I can do the course for a couple months and also get a job”

Me: “Have you already paid the fee for the institute?”.

Him: “Yes, I did. The batches start next week”.

I knew that most institute courses are trash and the placements are even worse, However I decided not to tell him about it as he had already paid the fee and I didn’t want to discourage or demoralise him.

Him: ”Life is hard and unfair man, there is so much struggle.”

Me: “Yes it is, I know. But we got to work hard, skills is all that matter, maybe you should work on your skills and Im sure you will get the job”.

Him: “heck no, I don’t think skill matters, you see the guy “X” form our class, even he got placed despite of being so dumb. I am much better than him at all costs”

I nodded my head, even if I knew that X had far better skills than this dude.

After a while, I left for home.

A couple months later I come to know that he went back to his native place and was now working at his family farm.

In this entire duration of time, I had still other couple friend who had found a job off-campus and were doing quite well. Even I had started freelancing at was doing well. Whereas this guy “struggled” and yet didn’t get any job and had to go back.

Here are the reasons why:

He had an illusion that he was struggling, in reality however he was just being lazy. The real strugglers were my other friends who literally spent days applying for job, attending multiple interviews in a single day while this guy was spending his parents hard earned money watching movies.

He thought life was unfair only to him, even though his parents gave him enough time to find a job and settle. He could have been grateful for that and could have worked hard but instead he invested all his energy into the victim mentality.

He was entitled, he thought he deserves a job and companies are out here just to give people jobs. Rather than being responsible for his own actions and his future, he laid his future in hands of an institute which promised him a job.

He never saw a fault in himself, but always thought others were wrong. Had he focused on his own shortcomings analysing why he was rejected in an interview, and had worked on it, he would have easily managed to get a job.

So to answer the question:

Why do some people couldn't achieve much success, they should have achieved, despite putting effort and hard work?

Hard work is a relative term.

I know a lot of people who think they “work hard” but in reality they just have an illusion of working hard.

Yes, luck plays an important role. But the doors of luck only open up when you work hard.

Also, hard work is not just about doing manual labour and just completing a task at hand.

Hard work also involves self analysis, taking hard and life changing decisions, and being critical of yourselves.

-Saurav Sharma

Do this before any goal...

Grit............

Financial Failure ?

 I see broadly 3 characteristics that differentiate success and failure from a financial sense:

1. Not investing enough: You could ask how can a poor “invest”. There are a lot of things besides money. I see so many “poor” people unable to invest time or money in learning/ know-how, connections/relationships, etc. For instance, many IT workers whose whole work is based on knowledge don’t spend anything to keep upgrading the knowledge (with books, courses) and then complain when their company lays off in the middle of their career.
2. Not thinking for a long-enough period: Poor people often cannot afford to think long and thus make very expensive choices with money. Rich has a longer horizon to plan.
3. Getting into bad debt: When successful people get into debt it is for leverage — to multiply their power. It is always for a fast-growing asset. When poor people get into debt it is for a non-asset or a fast depreciating one. I see so many young people in my company and elsewhere who buy expensive phones, car, bikes on EMI. That is a road to ruin.

-Balaji Viswanathan

Product Market Fit

Why are we poor and others rich ?

Rich people work hard or is it just luck ?

Wealth creation is rarely about individual effort alone or pure luck—it's typically about intergenerational advantage. It is not "hard work vs. luck". It is more about how a family can work in tandem to build an advantage over multiple generations. Rich people pass on wealth, wisdom and connections to the next generations, while poor people don’t pass much.

We live in an instant-everything world where we assume that wealth is built in a few years. It doesn’t happen that way. Advantage of any kind is built over generations often taking a century or more. The ones who have the patience to think this and plan for not just themselves but help their kids and grandkids tend to be successful.

The Multi-Generational Path to Wealth

A typical wealthy family today often traces back 3-4 generations:

1. The great-grandfather might have started with nothing, working himself to exhaustion but prioritizing education for his children
2. The grandfather could secure stable employment, moving the family away from starvation
3. The father, with better education, could take calculated risks and build connections
4. The current generation inherits not just financial capital, but social capital, business networks, and opportunities

This pattern appears consistently across successful families. Consider these examples:

• The Tata family built their empire over two centuries, starting with trade during colonial times
• Bill Gates benefited from his mother's IBM connections
• Elon Musk's father (who owned mining operations) provided early advantages
• Even historical figures like Mahatma Gandhi benefited from educational privileges most Indians couldn't access

Family Stability as Economic Advantage

The primary way to build the multigeneration advantage is at the family level. Poor families often have absentee parents, often drunkard husbands. My father used to work in rural development activities of his bank when I was a kid and as I visited the families of poor. The thing that always struck me was how different the fathers were from those in successful families. If the fathers think in terms of multiple generations of slowly building an advantage, the family gets a substantial boost.

Research shows a growing "marriage divide" that reinforces wealth disparities:

• Middle and upper-class Americans [and Indians] have higher marriage rates and more stable families
• Working-class and poor Americans experience higher rates of family instability and single parenthood
• This divide didn't exist before the 1970s but has grown significantly since

The Marriage Divide: How and Why Working-Class Families Are More Fragile Today

Editor’s Note: This research brief is an edited version of a research brief prepared for the Opportunity America-AEI-Brookings Working-Class Group. Go here to read or download the full brief. When it comes to marriage and family life, America is increasingly divided. College-educated and more affluent Americans enjoy relatively strong and stable marriages and the economic and social benefits that flow from such marriages. By contrast, not just poor but also working-class Americans face rising rates of family instability, single parenthood, and life-long singleness. Their families are increasingly fragile and poor and working-class Americans pay a serious economic, social, and psychological price for the fragility of their families. 1 The Fragility of Working-Class Marriages and Families Before the 1970s, there were not large class divides in American family life. The vast majority of Americans got and stayed married, and most children lived in stable, two-parent families. 2 But since the 1960s, the United States has witnessed an emerging substantial marriage divide by class. First, poor Americans became markedly less likely to get and stay married. Then, starting in the 1980s, working-class Americans became less likely to get and stay married. 3 The current state of marriage and family life and the class divisions that mark America’s families can be seen by looking at contemporary trends in marriage, cohabitation, nonmarital childbearing, divorce, children’s family structure, and marital quality. One of the most dramatic indicators of the marriage divide in America is the share of adults age 18–55 who are married. Figure 1 indicates that a majority of middle- and upper-class Americans are married, whereas only a minority of working-class Americans are married. This stands in marked contrast to the 1970s, when there were virtually no class divides in the share of adults married, and a majority of adults across the class spectrum were married. 4 At the same time, Figure 1 indicates that working-class Americans fall almost halfway between poor and middle- and upper-class Americans when it comes to the share who are married.* When it comes to coupling, poor and working-class Americans are more likely to substitute cohabitation for marriage. Figure 2 shows that poor Americans are almost three times more likely to cohabit, and working-class Americans are twice as likely to cohabit, compared with their middle- and upper-class peers age 18–55. Taken together, these figures suggest that lower- income and less-educated Americans are more likely to be living outside of a partnership. Specifically, about six in 10 poor Americans are single, about five in 10 working-class Americans are single, and about four in 10 middle- and upper-class Americans are single. However, when it comes to another fundamental feature of family life—childbearing—working-class and especially poor women are more likely to have children than their middle- and upper-class peers (see Fi

https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-marriage-divide-how-and-why-working-class-families-are-more-fragile-today

Two-parent households provide substantial advantages:

• Shared parenting responsibilities reduce exhaustion
• Combined resources and focused attention benefit children's development
• Long-term planning becomes more feasible with dual support

The Cooperative Advantage of Wealth

Rich people also tend to do work in a group settings better. Poor communities are often scattered in terms of their work and far more prone to infighting. This allows the rich to support each others children in a quid pro quo arrangement as they all want similiar things. Since they all think long term in terms of advantage, they can work in cooperative settings better.

Wealthy communities demonstrate patterns that reinforce advantages:

• Better ability to work cooperatively toward shared long-term goals
• Mutual support networks that benefit each other's children
• Common values around education, career development, and wealth building

Meanwhile, poverty often forces short-term thinking that makes cooperation more difficult:

• Immediate needs take priority over long-term planning
• Diverse urgent priorities make community alignment challenging
• Limited resources can intensify competition rather than cooperation

This creates a middle-class squeeze where upward mobility becomes increasingly difficult—caught between established wealth networks above and fragmented support systems below.

The question isn't simply about who works harder. It's about understanding how advantage accumulates across generations, creating systems where some people's work yields far greater returns than others in similar or even more demanding roles.

As a reader you could point to exceptions about families with hardworking parents but poor and vice versa. It does happen, but it doesn’t last very long. In a couple of generations, the hardworking family eventually gets to the wealthy track while the ones that are throwing away their advantages will get back to poverty.

-Balaji Viswanathan

Luck or Hardwork ?