WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum's rags to riches story

Jan Koum, an immigrant from Ukraine, was so poor as a teenager that he used to save his old Soviet notebooks for school and queued with his mom for food stamps.

Brian Acton lost a small fortune in the dot-com bust and was rejected for jobs at Twitter and Facebook.
Now, the friends behind the hot mobile messaging startup WhatsApp are the newest tech industry billionaires.

Facebook this week bought WhatsApp in a stock-and-cash deal worth up to $19 billion and gave Koum a seat on the social network's board of directors.

Make Everyone Happy !!!

You need not be concerned about money. Be concerned, instead, about joy. How much joy are you experiencing in this moment? How much joy are you bringing to this moment? The joy you experience will be the joy you bring. If you are waiting for joy to be brought to you, you do not understand what you are doing here. And if you think that joy has anything to do with money, you really do not understand what you are doing here.

There is a person waiting right now, right this very minute, for you to uplift them. Do that...and you will be rich.

- Neale Donald Walsch

Good Morning & have fantastic Sunday.

God Bless.

Story : WHERE IS GOD ?

Once a king wanted to know answers to three questions about which he had been contemplating for a long time. One day the king raised these questions in his Court Hall. The questions were:

Where is God?
In what direction does He cast His look?
What does He do?

None could answer these questions. The King then summoned with due honour a sage to his court. He asked the sage to answer these questions.

The Sage replied: "Like butter in the milk God is everywhere".

To answer the second question the sage asked for a lamp. He lit the lamp and asked the King: "In which direction does this lamp shed its light?"

"The lamp sheds its light in all the directions" replied the king.

The sage said "Likewise God is Effulgence itself and His vision is not directed to a particular place or person. He is all seeing".

The king asked: "What does He do?"

The sage said: "Since I am in a way instructing you in spiritual matters, I am in the position of a preceptor, you a disciple. So we have to exchange our places. Are you prepared for this?"

The king agreed and came down from his elevated position and sat on the seat in which the sage sat.

The sage said with a twinkle in his eyes: "This is what God does. He brings down the mighty and elevates the humble. He can make the poor rich and the rich poor. He can do anything. He is all pervading. He is all seeing and Omnipotent."

The king was very much pleased with these answers. He expressed his gratitude to the sage and honoured him in a fitting manner.

Like the king in the story, every one of us should try to understand the true characteristics of God:

*Aano bhadra krtavo yantu vishwatah. (RIG VEDA)

"Let noble thoughts come to me from all directions"

Short Story : The Donkey Struggle

One day a farmer's donkey fell down into a well. The animal cried piteously for hours as the farmer tried to figure out what to do. Finally he decided the animal was old, hat the well needed to be covered anyway and that it just wasn't worth retrieving the donkey. So he invited all his neighbours to come over and help him.

They all grabbed a shovel and began to shovel dirt into the well. At first, the donkey realized what was happening and cried horribly. Then, to everyone's amazement, he quietened down. A few shovel loads later, the farmer finally looked down the well and was astonished at what he saw. With every shovel of dirt that hit his back, the donkey was doing something amazing. He would shake it off and take a step up. As the farmer's neighbours continued to shovel dirt on top of the animal, he would shake it off and take a step up. Pretty soon, everyone was amazed as the donkey stepped up over the edge of the well and trotted off!

Life is going to shovel dirt on you, all kinds of dirt. The trick to getting out of the well is to shake it off and take a step up.

Story : The Mind !!!

Adi Sankara was walking through the market place with his disciples.

They saw a man dragging a cow by a rope.

Sankara told the man to wait and asked his disciples to surround them.

“I am going to teach you something” and continued...

“Tell me who is bound to whom? Is the cow bound to this man or the man is bound to the cow?"

The disciples said without hesitation, “Of course the cow is bound to the man! The man is the master. He is holding the rope. The cow has to follow him wherever he goes. The man is the master and the cow is the slave.”

“Now watch this”, said Sankara and took scissors from his bag and cut the rope.

The cow ran away from the master, and the man ran after his cow.

“Look, what is happening”, said Sankara.

“Do you see who the Master is? The cow is not at all interested in this man. The cow in fact, is trying to escape from this man.”

This is the case with our MIND.

All the non-sense that we carry inside is not interested in us.

WE ARE INTERESTED IN IT,

we are keeping it together somehow or the other.We are going crazy trying to keep it all together under our control.

The moment we lose interest in all the garbage filled in our head, and the moment we understand the futility of it, it will start to disappear.

Like the cow, it will escape and disappear.”

We can allow disappearing, all the unwanted things in our mind and feel relaxed.

Story : Stopped By A Brick

About ten years ago, a young and very successful executive named Josh was traveling down a Chicago neighborhood street. He was going a bit too fast in his sleek, black, 12-cylinder Jaguar XKE, which was only two months old.

He was watching for kids darting out from between parked cars and slowed down when he thought he saw something. As his car passed, no child darted out, but a brick sailed out and - WHUMP! -- it smashed into the Jag's shiny black side door! SCREECH...!!!! Brakes slammed! Gears ground into reverse, and tires madly spun the Jaguar back to the spot from where the brick had been thrown.

Josh jumped out of the car, grabbed the kid and pushed him up against a parked car. He shouted at the kid, "What was that all about and who are you? Just what the heck are you doing?!" Building up a head of steam, he went on. "That's my new Jag, that brick you threw is gonna cost you a lot of money. Why did you throw it?"

"Please, mister, please . . . I'm sorry! I didn't know what else to do!" pleaded the youngster. "I threw the brick because no one else would stop!"

Tears were dripping down the boy's chin as he pointed around the parked car. "It's my brother, mister," he said. "He rolled off the curb and fell out of his wheelchair and I can't lift him up."

Sobbing, the boy asked the executive, "Would you please help me get him back into his wheelchair? He's hurt and he's too heavy for me."

Moved beyond words, the young executive tried desperately to swallow the rapidly swelling lump in his throat. Straining, he lifted the young man back into the wheelchair and took out his handkerchief and wiped the scrapes and cuts, checking to see that everything was going to be OK. He then watched the younger brother push him down the sidewalk toward their home.

It was a long walk back to the sleek, black, shining, 12-cylinder Jaguar XKE - a long and slow walk. Josh never did fix the side door of his Jaguar. He kept the dent to remind him not to go through life so fast that someone has to throw a brick at him to get his attention.

Some bricks are softer than others; feel for the bricks of life coming at you.

Story : The Touchstone

When the great library of Alexandria burned, the story goes, one book was saved. But it was not a valuable book; and so a poor man, who could read a little, bought it for a few coppers.

The book wasn’t very interesting, but between its pages there was something very interesting indeed. It was a thin strip of vellum on which was written the secret of the “Touchstone”!

The touchstone was a small pebble that could turn any common metal into pure gold. The writing explained that it was lying among thousands and thousands of other pebbles that looked exactly like it. But the secret was this: The real stone would feel warm, while ordinary pebbles are cold.

So the man sold his few belongings, bought some simple supplies, camped on the seashore, and began testing pebbles.

He knew that if he picked up ordinary pebbles and threw them down again because they were cold, he might pick up the same pebble hundreds of times. So, when he felt one that was cold, he threw it into the sea. He spent a whole day doing this but none of them was the touchstone. Yet he went on and on this way. Pick up a pebble. Cold – throw it into the sea. Pick up another. Throw it into the sea.
The days stretched into weeks and the weeks into months. One day, however, about midafternoon, he picked up a pebble and it was warm. He threw it into the sea before he realized what he had done. He had formed such a strong habit of throwing each pebble into the sea that when the one he wanted came along, he still threw it away.
So it is with opportunity. Unless we are vigilant, it’s asy to fail to recognize an opportunity when it is in hand and it’s just as easy to throw it away.

Short Story : The Controversy

A 'devotee' wrote a letter to the editor of a newspaper and complained that it made no sense to go to the Temple.

'I've gone for 30 years now, he wrote, and in that time I have heard something like 3,000 mantras. But for the life of me, I can't remember a single one of them. So, I think I'm wasting my time and the Gurus are wasting theirs by giving services at all.

This started a real controversy in the 'Letters to the Editor' column, much to the delight of the editor.

It went on for weeks until someone wrote this clincher:

I've been married for 30 years now. In that time my wife has cooked some 32,000 meals. But, for the life of me, I cannot recall the entire menu for a single one of those meals. But I do know this... They all nourished me and gave me the strength I needed to do my work. If my wife had not given me these meals, I would be physically dead today.

Likewise, if I had not gone to the Temple for nourishment, I would be spiritually dead today!

When you are DOWN to nothing.... God is UP to something! Faith sees the invisible, believes the incredible and receives the impossible!

Thank God for our physical AND our spiritual nourishment!

Story : Lunch With God

A little boy wanted to meet God. He packed his suitcase with two sets of his dress and some packets of Cakes and he started his journey. He walked a long and felt tired. So he sat in a park on the way and opened a packet to take a cake to eat. Then he noticed an old woman sitting sad with hunger nearby, so he offered her a piece of cake. She gratefully accepted it with a wide look and smiled at him. Her smile was so pretty that the boy longed to see it again. After some time he offered her another piece of cake. Again, she accepted it and smiled at him. The boy was delighted! They sat there all afternoon eating and smiling, but they never said a word. While it grew dark, the boy was frightened and he got up to leave but before he had gone more than a few steps, he ran back and gave her a hug and she kissed him with her prettiest smile. When the boy opened the door,his mother was surprised by the look of joy on his face. She asked him, "What did you do today that made you look so happy?" He replied, "I had lunch with God." Before his mother could respond, he added, "You know what? She's got the most beautiful smile I've ever seen in my life!" Meanwhile, the old woman, also radiant with joy, returned to her home. Her son was stunned by the look of peace on her face and asked, "Mom, what did you do today that made you so happy? "She replied, "I ate cakes in the park with God." Before her son responded, she added,"You know, he's much younger than I expected."

Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring,

all of which have the potential to turn a life around.

Remember, nobody knows how God will look like.

People come into our lives for a reason, for a season, or for a lifetime.

Accept all of them equally!