How To Find A Mentor

This is an email from my daily morning Stoic Wealth emails, you can sign up on https://sendfox.com/shivam

I got a few DMs on Instagram as well as Twitter of people asking me to mentor them.

Here is something I can tell you about mentors and how I had cracked my chance to work with someone like Grant Cardone.

I had dived in value first. So rather than saying “hi, whatsup, would you be my mentor?”

I had simply searched the projects he was working on, did my research and found a solution to a problem he was in(he had mentioned it on his social media) and shared a solution with him.

I got no response, then next day I reiterated on the solution and sent another message via snapchat, this time he saw the message from that day as well as the day before.

He responded with something along the lines of “Would love for you to take care of it, connect with the head of staff at ___ email”

Now, I am not saying that you find a solution to my problems and email me but I am saying that no matter who the person they are going to value your input if it is worthy.

Hope you got it, let’s move ahead.

Remember, it is lonely at the top so the people there when find someone who wants to give instead of ask their eyes light up and they see a part of themselves in you.

They get thousands of emails and messages every day of people asking them for favours. Rarely someone gives first.

Will everyone reply? No, of course not, but it for sure will increase your chances of getting a reply.

So this weekend reach out to someone you follow but instead of simply asking for something start a conversation and see how you can be of value.

Directly ask what you need to ask. I have also seen people sending something like “hi, can I ask you a question?”, you just wasted an email, there is no chance they are going to reply to that.

In fact try this, if you simply ask them about one book that they have gifted the most(I learnt this from Tim Ferriss by the way), they are almost always bound to respond.

I recently did the same on my twitter and got responses from a couple of amazing people and also ended up sparking a quick twitter conversation with Nikhil Chinapa.(AMAZING)

Not only did he recommend me an awesome book but also gave me a couple of pointers about what to think while reading and oh also after reading I tweeted again tagging him to which he responded again to the lines of it’s a fun book and shared a few of his favorite parts from the book(one of them was my favorite too!)

With me till now?

Alright moving on,

When asking a question asking them which book changed their life is tricky, because they will have to spend 10 minutes and think which book changed their life.

But usually there is going to be more or less 1 book that they gifted other people the most. So ask for a book that they gifted the most.

The reason I ask amazing people for a book recommendation is because we all learn to think from other sources, usually through education and books.

If I can read the book that they have read, learn from the same source and apply I might actually be able to get one step closer to where they are.

That’s how you can look for mentors. Oh also make sure to watch what they do in their lives and not just what they say. (A video coming on this next weekend xD)

Doing Less Is What Helps Us Succeed

“Remember that very little is needed to make a happy life.” – Marcus Aurelius

Marcus Aurelius points the importance of a minimalistic lifestyle.

Excess of anything is harmful. Even excess of water can kill a human being.

In the age of social media, we are bombarded with an excess of information.

It often happens that people just collect information and in the act of doing so start believing that this is actually a productive act that they are doing.

But in reality, only a little information is needed to take actions.

Similarly, it often happens with teens that they have a huge so-called friend circle. 

They feel like they are making friends, making memories for life, while that is an important part of life; we all need friends and should have friends who we have a deep connection to.

However, we just need company of very few like-minded, ambitious, and goal-oriented friends, friends that help us grow in life.

In many situations very less is needed to make the most out of our lives.

So this week let’s try and remove 1 unnecessary thing from your life. It can be anything, it can literally be a hobby that you maybe do sometimes, don’t enjoy much too.

Eliminate things and watch yourself getting happier and progressing faster on the other things that you will have left.

The 0 Competition Path To Success

So, I published a 50 minute in depth YouTube video today on Grow With Shivam channel.

The aim was to go deep and talk about my journey as a YouTuber, lessons learnt, making money and everything else that a beginner will need to start on YouTube.

The average watch time is 2 minutes. Usually people run videos at 1.5x speed but when the video itself is 50 minutes long even a 1.5x speed is not going to get you done within a minute.

Average view duration is 2:05 out of 400 views in the first 3 hours

This shows us that more than 99% of the people in this world have reducing attention spans, reduced patience and do not want to learn stuff in depth.

Here in lies our opportunity.

Since maximum people are not interested to go in depth or to be patient with the process there is literally 0 competition for people like us.

0 competition for people who want to build their own category in whatever they want to do. Instead of fighting others in a pre-existing category it is better to create one of our own.

This is also a classic business strategy thing that we use and the technical term that everyone uses for this is the Blue Ocean Strategy.

There is practically 0 competition when it comes to “long form business, marketing and finance videos in English for the Indian audience”

So naturally I am going to tap into this and be one of the few creators doing this in India.

Now of course the size of my potential audience will be much smaller, maybe across India there are like 100k to 200k people interested in such content as of now.

That is just fine, more than enough people. Even if there were 1000 people who would listen to such content from start to end I would still do it because those 1000 people are my perfect audience and I have literally 0 competition to reach them.

Take the 0 competition path to success, create your own category!

The Goal Is Not Important

Let’s say I plan to setup an emergency fund for me and my wife.

If our monthly expenses are INR 75,000 then technically our emergency fund should have INR 2,25,000 – INR 4,50,000.

Now if I take our usual savings and investing rate of 15% each with an approximate salary of INR 1,20,000 then I must at any costs save at least INR 36,000 per month, taking us about 6-12 months to reach the emergency fund target.

Usually what I would look at is the amount of money in my emergency fund on a weekly or monthly basis.

However what if once I know that I need to save at least INR 36,000 towards my emergency fund every single month I stop looking at how big the fund is getting.

What if all my focus is to get that 36,000 saved. Maybe some months I try and save more than that by lowering other useless expenses.

This is me focusing on the process. As an example let’s say something happens and we need to withdraw 75k from the emergency fund.

What now? The amount of money there has gone down, so do I look at the money in the fund or do I simply tell myself that this is a minor setback and we should get back to our regular process of saving 36k.

2.2 Lakh emergency fund is an outcome based goal while saving 36k is a process based goal.

What I have 100% complete control over is actually the process, what I can do to the best of my abilities is the process. The outcome then is the side effect of the process I have been following for the past many months.

It isn’t the goal that matters. Instead it is the process that has the magic engrained in itself.

If we focus on the process, sincerely do everything that the process demands, for however long it demands then getting to the goals is nothing but the side effect of following that process.

We tend to get distracted by the fact that if we hit or miss our target.

It is not about the target.

Now this philosophy can be applied to literally everything in our lives.

Do let me know one such process goal that you have set for yourself.

Here are 2 of mine: Publish at least 2 articles every week on this blog and send a daily finance, money and career newsletter.

Be Financially FREE By Doing Nothing Special

Nobody wants to be wealthy when they are 90 years old, have health problems and cannot really enjoy the wealth itself that they might have taken decades to build.


We all want to get rich and live a great life when we are young. We do not want to look at the price when ordering food, we might want to order from a great restaurant, sponsor drinks for our friends at the bar or maybe even randomly buy a gift for our parents or spouse.


Now that is what I call a great life. Being able to anything we want with our money and knowing that money is not something that is a problem.


All it requires is a proper and conscious plan to save and invest regularly, without involving hours of research picking stocks or watching YouTube videos trying to find that one crypto coin that will make you an overnight millionaire.


The strategy is A.S.A.I.


Pretty much like the Acai Berry but with an S.


Let’s tackle the A.S. part first – Auto Savings


Look neither you have time nor me, nor anyone else to come home from 10 hour work days and then try to find time and put in effort to make transfers for our savings, emergency funds or even investing.


We want to come home, or get done with work and then relax, live life, spend time with our friends and family.


To make that possible we need to automate stuff so that we can focus on what makes us truly happy, that is living life the way we want it.

In finance we say “Pay Yourself First”


What this means is the moment you get paid a fixed portion of your earnings should automatically go towards your savings and investments because that portion is what will make you financially wealthy.


On an average a minimum of 10% of your income every month should go into savings.
You can pretty much automate this either by creating a bank transfer mandate or simply set an SIP in a liquid fund of a fixed amount.


So for example, let’s say you make INR 1,00,000 per month paid to you on the 3rd of every month and 10% of that is INR 10,000.


So an SIP of 10,000 on 3rd itself would be awesome.


What this will do is take that money out of the picture, so in essence you only see INR 90k per month.


Now let’s move to the A.I. part, the AUTO INVEST.


It is great to invest at least 20% of your monthly income, once again automagically!


You want to keep things simple, so instead of wasting hours on picking stocks just go for an index fund, and invest into the top 50, 100 or 250 stocks through an ETF or an Index fund and go about living your life and spending time with your family.


I love this auto approach because it accomplishes multiple tasks for us. It not only allows us to build our savings and investment corpus automatically but also takes away some of our income without us even getting to see it.


That pushes us to focus on improving our income, because all our brain sees is INR 70k per month.


This would allow you to not only build a corpus that can potentially make you financially wealthy a couple decades before your retirement age but also motivate you to build proper skills, motivate you to do better at your job or business and earn more.


A perfect system if you ask me.


Here is something I really liked, this structure comes from the one and only Ramit Sethi.

These kinds of automatic systems to invest are the systems that actually create long lasting wealth for the 99.9% of us. Rest 0.01% of the people end up becoming Warren Buffett. And I for sure am not coming close to the kind of wealth he has generated.
Save automatically, Invest automatically, be rich early.

Simple.