Growth Mindset - Realize your potential, limited by imagination !!!

Can you draw?

Can you play guitar?

Can you run Marathon?

The answer to these questions can be ‘Yes’ OR ‘No’, based on your comfort level in the skill. However, is it possible that instead of answering in ‘Yes’ / ‘No’, one answers as ‘not now, but I can learn it?’, and that’s the growth mindset. I, myself turned answer to these questions from ‘No’ to ‘Yes’ for me.

In a growth mindset, we believe that most of the skills can be learned through dedication and hard work—brains & talent are just the starting point. The way two atoms in different orbits need different activation energies to move to Nth orbit, two people with the different talent level of a skill will need to put varying degree of efforts to reach the same level of expertise in the same skill.

As is mentioned somewhere on a web portal:

“Believing that your qualities are carved in stone—the fixed mindset—creates an urgency to prove yourself over and over. If you have only a certain amount of intelligence, a certain personality, and a certain moral character, well then you’d better prove that you have a healthy dose of them. It simply wouldn’t do to look or feel deficient in these most basic characteristics…I’ve seen so many people with this one consuming goal of proving themselves—in the classroom, in their careers, and in their relationships. Every situation calls for a confirmation of their intelligence, personality, or character. Every situation is evaluated: Will I succeed or fail? Will I look smart or dumb? Will I be accepted or rejected? Will I feel like a winner or a loser? But doesn’t our society value intelligence, personality, and character?”

So essentially Growth Mindset means, whatever skills you have is just the starting point, not your full potential, and you can always work diligently to improve and grow, and the same is applicable to others, they can also grow, beyond their demonstrated capabilities, if given constructive feedback and praised for efforts, not talent.

Now, if your answer to my first question (Can you draw?) is still ‘No’ then you should watch this TED video by Graham Shaw. And if you approach it with Growth Mindset, I am sure your answer will become ‘Yes’ in few minutes ;-)

The power of a Barcode !!!

As world moving towards digital economies, two issues often come up are security and usability of various transaction methods in this digital world. While security aspect may have multiple layers, usability largely revolves around how easy it is for a customer to pay through digital payment methods.

Many times, when using a digital payment method, consumer or merchant has to enter the instrument no. (Credit card #, or some other Id number) manually, which takes its own time and also makes the method vulnerable to user-side security attacks.

However, this problem can easily be solved by the barcode technology. At zero cost, it can bring in the much-required anonymity in the transactions.

So you may ask what the hell I am talking about and if it's something new, how can it be implemented. Valid questions and this is how we may do it:

Until Credit, debit, and other payment cards start having the only barcode on them and not character string, users can easily create a barcode of any string of characters, which, when scanned with a barcode scanner will regenerate the string. This string can be encoded to ensure it can not be intercepted by external attacks at any point in the network.

Barcode reader & generator are simple apps and don't need any additional hardware. Individual users can carry simple prints of those barcodes and scan them at merchant kiosks or during online payments.

It will not only allow secure Card transaction but also, mobile# based payments, email based payments, and all other kinds of identity-based payments.

Identity payments, in particular, will get the greatest push from this as they are based on individual identities such as SSN (in the USA), SIN (in Canada), Aadhar (in India), and similar in other countries. In many countries, your national identity is a private key (for ex. SSN) that shouldn't be shared with others and therefore payment based on this haven't been expired yet.

Once it could be done through barcode entry method, the biggest concern that didn't allow this possibility from becoming reality will go away.

5 Steps to Digital India

A lot of water has flown under the bridge of de/remonetization which was launched last month by the PM Modi himself. There is all kind of arguments on both sides of the table. There are few people who have already declared the initiative a failed one, while there are others who are waiting patiently and watching the situation unfolding. Economists have their opinions but are not able to find a precedent to back their opinions. 

In this write-up, I would stay away from declaring this effort a success or a failure. I would only focus on how can we use this opportunity in a better way to reduce M0 and M1 money (currency in circulation) and march towards a less-cash India, if not cashless.

As has been said about PM Modi also, you may like demonetization, you may hate it, but you are very lucky if you can ignore it as it means you are not impacted by the exercise very much. In last one month, if you haven't stood in an ATM queue even once, then either you are rich enough to have somebody to stand for you OR you are already fully digital and having a gala time with cashless transactions.

Whatever may be the case and situation you may be in, one thing we all would agree is that cash is still a coveted commodity even after a month. To face this enormous challenge, a push to Digital money was inevitable. And undoubtedly, what might have not happened in next 5 years, has happened in last one month, at least on Digital Payment front. People who had never used the plastic money, OR had never heard of Mobile Wallets, are getting accustomed to them. The government has also rolled out a plethora of campaigns and discounts to push it to the lowest strata of the society.

With 5 different ways (Netbanking, Credit/Debit Card, UPI, MobileWallets, and USSD) of making a cashless payment, India is doing everything under the sun to ensure everybody has a way to make the cashless transactions, which itself is not a mean feat.

However, one thing I am not sure is if the government is hitting the nail on its head or sideways. People who have made or accepted cashless payments are very much aware that it is the 'transaction fee' that stops people from adopting the plastic money OR mobile wallets. I strongly believe, the government hasn't put its focus to deal with this till now. If India wants a wide-spread adoption of Digital payment methods, it shall take following five steps immediately:

• First, it shall redirect all the campaign & promotional money to make these transactions cheaper or at least as expensive as the Cash transactions are, which essentially means free.
• The second step for the finance ministry is to make a fresh push for UPI and make it more user-friendly with a state-owned app. It should become SBI(Government backed entity commanding the trust of ordinary Indians) of digital payments.
• The third step, ensure each and every bank of India has a Rupay-based Credit/Debit Card. It will reduce the transaction cost from 2-3% to .75%, OR even lower.
• The fourth step is to put a renewed focus on telecom infrastructure, call drops, and taking 2G/3G to each nook & corner of the country. This would be the lifeline of Digital economy.
• The final step, the government should declare any cash transaction above Rs. 50,000/- illegal from April 2017 while also declaring a cash quota for every individual to Rs. 50,000/-.

I hope Mr. Prime Minister & Mr. Finance Minister appreciate the fact that to replace cash, we need a weightless (no burden of transaction charges) payments.

Bit Coin – The rise of an International Currency?

I have always wondered why we have so many currencies in the world. Could there be a way to have a universal currency? And it seems I got that answer when I got to know about the ‘BitCoins'. But wait, can we consider Bitcoin ‘money'. Does it have characteristics required to qualify it as money? Well, let’s examine them.

The primary characteristic of the money is that it should be acceptable to barter for goods of my use. Sure, Bitcoin is acceptable in the digital world and also in a small part of the physical world. But so is, Gold, which we don’t consider a currency, but only a commodity.

The second characteristic of money is that it should be rare to produce and easier to identify in a transactional system. Bitcoin passes this test, but not gold, the value of which can only be assessed on careful, time-consuming, and also expensive examination.

The third characteristic of money is that it should be divisible in smaller denominations to be used as a medium of exchange for goods and services. Bitcoin passes this test as well because it can be transacted in lower denominations namely satoshi (one billionth of a bitcoin), microbitcoin (µBTC), and millibitcoin (mBTC).

So, now can we say that bit coin can be qualified as a currency? Not exactly. Because there are questions about the stability of the Bitcoin as a currency. In last five years, the value of Bitcoin has gone up from $1 to $1230 before going back to $164, at its lowest price since then. In last one week itself, it has appreciated by 20%. Because of limited acceptability and regulatory uncertainties emanating from various government statements, Bitcoin has seen a sinusoidal appreciation and depreciation in its value.

Many critics of Bitcoin say that physical currency has some underlying asset, which might not be entirely correct. When US Government started the quantitative easing to bring its economy back on rail, it was nothing but updating the numbers in the treasury database, giving us an impression of more money in the system. There was no underlying physical asset, the only asset this new money was based on was the trust in the US Government and its ability to run the economy. In the case of Bitcoin, although there is no government trust in the backing, there is a distributed blockchain ledger system based on a secure, decentralized, cryptographic solution.

Now let’s talk about how what kind of problems Bitcoin solve. First of them, beat national inflations. Because of its global value discovery mechanism, Bitcoin wouldn’t be as affected by the local issues of any country as would be the local currency.

So in a nutshell, although acceptability and regulatory reasons are the biggest uncertainties around Bitcoins, its growing network and potential to solve real world problems has been encouraging for its proponents. Therefore, with a great potential, Bitcoin has a long way to go before it could become first universal digital currency.