Kunal Shah, founder of Freecharge and Cred is well known for his innovations in the fintech world and this guy is full of entrepreneurship and creating wealth. And so here are some powerful lessons from Kunal Shah that can blow your mind.
Not everyone is built to gain fame. Everyone wants to be a celebrity on Youtube or become an Instagram influencer. But the problem is that only some people are built for that.
The reward for getting on the stage is fame. The price of fame is you can’t get off the stage.
Naval Ravikant
Can there be 1M successful Instagram influencers? Probably, NO. But can there be 10M millionaires? Yes. So which is the reason why chasing the skill, knowledge, and depth, or simply put chasing wealth is way better than fame.
Here is another good example:
Can there be 4000 winners for throwing the Javelin in the Olympics? Definitely Not. Can there be 5000 millionaires in the month of July 2021? Probably, Yes. That’s where the difference comes. Some businesses by design do not have the space for more people to exist.
Why do you want to fight for that? Only 11 players can play at a time in a cricket team. But there are unlimited ways to create wealth at any given point in time.
Time and Money are the two currencies that we spend (or waste).
We make transactions in both time and money. We spend 300 Rs. on petrol and we spend 2 hours watching a movie on Netflix. But spending money (Netflix subscription) and time (Watching movies & TV shows) for Netflix is exciting whereas spending time and money to fill the gas in the vehicles isn’t fun.
We Indians complain about petrol prices and we don’t get excited when we go to a petrol pump. So, that’s a boring transaction we make in both time and money. But at the same time, we get excited to plan a trip (spend money) & go on a trip (spend money and time). So, that’s an interesting transaction.
Now, what if you could create a business that can reduce/remove the boring transactions in people’s lives? Or at least make it easier or interesting?
So, what if you developed a car that doesn’t need you to fuel your car? Now, this is an extreme example, but the point I am trying to make here is this is really a good aka clever mental model that answers at least to some extent of the questions like “What business should I build”, “How to find better startup ideas”, etc.
Kunal Shah really values constant learning. This is something common among all the wise and wealthy people like Naval, Charlie Munger, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, etc. Constant learning on the things that you are curious about, will get you ahead. And makes you better than everybody else, eventually.
It’s just that we don’t put that constant effort into learning stuff.
When talking about spending time on learning skills over spending time watching cool content, here is what Kunal said: “Our time spent on entertainment (watching cool videos on Instagram) has gone way too up. Nobody tells us to stop using our phone too much. Our parents have already given up telling us to spend less time on mobiles. So the thing is does it (watching content) make us feel less good? It makes us feel less stressed, but life is not going to get better by watching these things.”
Kunal Shah recommends researching a word like “inflation” on Youtube and spending an hour watching a few videos (if you are interested in economics). Then you’ll definitely come across a new word that you don’t know. And spend more hours learning about that word. And this process goes on.
This is what happened to me when I got curious about crypto. I learned as much as I could from blogs, youtube, and following the leaders/experts of crypto on Twitter.
The point is we just need to be curious enough.
“Most people have no clue how money works. or how an investment works. or how compound interest works. or how the economy is working. or what is the impact of the US printing more dollars. We have no clue.” Kunal believes that if we improve our relationship with money from childhood, it makes the economy better.
But the issue is we were never taught about this in school. Talking about money is taboo. We don’t talk about loans and credit card bills. We only talk about our latest purchases.
In the end, how we understand money matters a lot.