Remember Steve Jobs speech when he says that Connecting the dots can happen only in retrospect? Wow seemed such an insight, and so damn true.

I started life as a CA. Living in a Gujju area gave me the advantage of thinking like one – I never applied for a job. Ever. I came close to taking up jobs, but luckily for me I treated them as assignments and moved on to the next instead of staying there and rotting. That is for another day of course.

Being in a G locality I still did my CA and used the degree to enter ‘sub-broking’ to make a living. Meeting many clients was very useful  to judge human behavior – especially when it came to investing and paying income tax. I must have dealt with more than 3000 individuals (or their family representatives) for filing income tax returns, attending to the hearings, and representing them in the Tribunals and Company Law Board.

In retrospect the training to be a lawyer – I have been to the Supreme Court for 5 clients – was a great learning – again in human behavior. I met the most expensive, brilliant lawyers on the route – and I think every rupee paid to each one of them was worth it. Another super experience. I would suggest this experience for every upcoming CA, lawyer and potential analyst who wants to be a fund manager or build his own portfolio. It teaches you to see human behavior under stress. Exactly how Arjuna called out for help from Sri Krishna. You also see accounting and legal documents very very closely. This kind of attention to detail I had not paid during my 3 years of Articles training while being a CA. Seriously training as a lawyer – not just as a solicitor – paid me huge dividends.

As an equity analyst I must have met many promoters. My respect for 3-4 promoters went sky high. My respect for the uneducated man on the street building his own business went sky high. My respect for the educated  blood sucking employee went down dramatically. My view on ethics and morals of doing business changed dramatically from the text books to real life situations. No doubt about that. I could suddenly feel huge respect for employees who thought like entrepreneurs and went down for the corrupt, incompetent employee CEO. I have met some very honest, clean, clear CEO who can put their company’s interest about them. Of course they are in the majority and I try doing business with such people.

Enough of misery handling, I moved from law to brokerage and wealth management. Sub brokerage to member National Stock Exchange. Again meeting people from a wealth creation point of view. Amazing trust. Sure we created wealth at a time when we were rewarded well for our research and efforts. It was in 1993. When the reward equation changed to being rewarded for activity (low brokerage high frequency transactions) we decided not to use our money or a VC’s money (which was very easy to get), all of us moved on to do something else. I choose training. Thanks to some amazing trainers who led me to believe that training will be at least intellectually rewarding, if not financially rewarding.

Training was another amazing experience. I have done training in Srinagar, Guwahati, Rajkot, Goa, Trivandrum, Cochin, – and all states in between! The attitude of a Bong vs a Gujju vs Malayalee vs Punju vs…..is a good learning. Training also took me to meet the senior RM of Citibank, StanC, Amex to the bottom of the pyramid. Such experience is so useful for blogging. I have done training for entrepreneurs, CEOs, rm, ifa, doctors….an amazing range of people.

Training meant I had content. Brokerage and Research gave me experience of dealing with rich and very rich promoters. Legal training gave me experience of dealing with people with problems. The fact that they could hire expensive lawyers meant they had money too!

This is clearly an unfair advantage to write a book. So came out the first book “Retire Rich: Invest Rs. 40 a day”. Like all first time authors I wanted the book to be a success. My publisher said 5000 copies should be the sales to be called a bestseller. Well it sold 5000 copies about 34 times over! Yes it sold 170,000+ copies – not including the Hindi version. It still sells – 10 years after it was first sold. Blowing my own trumpet? Partially yes, but if I don’t who will?

I do think there was a huge, huge demand for retirement books, websites, lectures, workshops – and is hardly being met. So this book goes for a second edition. By End Jan you will see the second edition. Bigger – it is 350 pages.

I wrote a book for doctors “Wealth Prescription for Doctors”. It led to meeting/addressing more than 5000 doctors. An amazing interaction. So much so that it has led to a second book on “Questions Doctors Ask”. Not sure about the title of the second book, but yes there is something in the offing.

I also realized that in the wealth creation process it is not the markets performance that is important. What is really important is the GOALS that you have. So along with Pattabhiraman came a book called “You can be rich too – with Goal based Investing”.

All the books are bestsellers. And that could be because it is all published by Bestsellers 18 !!

You can buy all the books at Amazon or Flipkart….

So here is my story of connecting the dots….

Some more dots in the creation. I can do a similar story after 10 more years!!