Rikith Reddy's Blog

Sept 20, 2020: 5:30 pm, I was taking a stroll on my terrace. It had just rained. The atmosphere turned cosy, the cool monsoon breeze, the cloudy sky and the lush green vegetation all around.  Turned out I was not the only one out there, enjoying this enchanting weather. Birds: I saw a pretty large number of birds that were flying around. I could recognise a few sparrows, kingfishers, parrots and cranes. To my surprise, there were also a large variety of small birds which I couldn't recognise. I was so curious about these birds, soon I found myself studying their behaviour. Some liked travelling in groups while others enjoyed flying in solitude. I couldn't help but notice that each bird had different flight patterns. Few flapped their wings continuously, while some liked to glide as few flaps as possible. As I watched these birds, one particular blackbird caught my eye. This little one was a size of a sparrow and had been flying around alone. Not sure what piked my interest but ...

Do you often find yourself wasting time on social media like Instagram and Snapchat? Do you find yourself addicted to them? Often we blame ourselves for the lack of self-control for getting addicted to these apps. But that's not entirely true.  What we fail to realise is that these apps are designed to be addictive. For example, take the 'streak' feature in Snapchat. You build up a streak with your friend as you keep sending a snap to them every day. Sending a snap can become a habit since the action is easy to perform. We also have an immediate reward with the streak number growing up. Hence people are bound to repeat this action every day. Studies suggest that an action repeated for 21 days becomes a habit.  “It takes 21 days to form a habit and just 66 to make it automatic. We’ve been in this virtual space for 300+ days. I suspect it’s sticking with us for quite some time!” – Futurist Jim Carroll Since this habit is easy to perform, it sticks. And as time goes on, we att...

In my previous  post   on the book  Psychology of money , I talked about how understanding the concept of  Compounding  can give you an edge in your investment journey. (In case you did not read that  post ,  I recommend you start with it as it also introduces the core concept of this book ). In this post, I will be talking about Luck and Risk  and how they play a very important role in everyone's life. Luck & Risk More often than not peoples' success is attributed to their hard work and their failure to some bad decisions. The issue with that is, no one talks about the role of Luck and its counterpart Risk which happen to play a major role in a person's success. Generally, t here are two reasons why people don't talk much about them. If we start attributing some other person's success to luck it makes us sound jealous. On the other hand, if we talk about our success as luck, It is kind of demoralizing. To acknowledge the fact that they ...

Money management is one of the most important skills in life. However, making financial decisions is difficult. We have c omplicated spreadsheets, a large number of technical terms and a huge amount of varying advice from people on what's the best thing we can do with our money.  The result? We end up in a confused state.  For a long time, I found myself in a similar situation until  I finally read the book " Psychology of Money " by Morgan Housel . This book talks about money in a very different way. It portrays finance as a soft skill in contrast to complicated maths as it's generally shown as. It demonstrates that having a good hang of human psychology is enough for you to do well with your money. I would be sharing a series of blog posts, where I will be putting posting some important ideas from this book. I hope they will be helpful for you to make better financial decisions.  The Crazy Rich Janitor This book starts off with this very intriguing story The Story...