“History is written by the victor.”

You’ve definitely heard of this quote.

Something about it never sat well with me. It felt a bit reductive, even if there is some truth to it. I don’t think of it as right or wrong, but rather an irresponsible and cynical take.

• Irresponsible because we offload accountability for the flawed nature of history on the victor and take none of it upon ourselves. If history is inaccurate, we are to be equally blamed.

• Cynical because it feels gloomy in an intellectual sense. Somehow it implies that if history is already biased, why bother studying it? If all it does is glorify the victor, there’s nothing of substance to learn and pick.

I'd rather believe that it is more on us than the simpleton academics who wrote the history. We as a society want the victor to be glorified, to be right and virtuous.

Here’s my chain of thought on how I landed on that:

We created morality and religion to keep society from falling apart, but we needed something to preserve its sanctity and validity.

A great way to do that was to prove that if you abide by those morals, you will defeat every enemy and live an amazing life. However, we started noticing that the true victors in the world, the ones with all the riches and luxuries of life, aren’t always as morally pure as they should have been, as prescribed in the books of religion.

So, in an attempt to make ourselves feel good, we mould these victors into moral heroes as well. We, especially the devout religious of our bunch, forget and discard their evils because we want to believe that they are good people. That is why you will find so many right leaning people to be sympathizing and defending the likes of Elon Musks and Ambanis of this world.

To reiterate and be clearer, I believe:

We don’t just remember who won. We rewrite what their victory means. We turn violence into necessity, conquest into destiny, and the victor into a hero.

I am writing this essay because I came across a problematic story about Arjuna and Krishna that has been ignored and overshadowed by the good they have done. Even mentioning a story like this offends a few; I had a first-hand experience of that very recently (more on this later).

I also started researching similar stories from other religions and came across the story of Joshua and his conquest of Jericho in Canaan from the Old Testament. Very weird story, similar flavour!

Let’s start with Arjuna and Krishna first!

#1: Gastric Issues and the Khandava Forest

It all starts with something mundane: ghee.

It’s a common Hindu tradition to pour ghee (a form of butter, popular in the Indian subcontinent) into the sacred fire of a Yajña.1

Now, because of consuming so much ghee, Agni Dev, the Hindu god of fire, got an upset stomach. In search of a cure, he went to Lord Brahma, who told him that he needed to consume the Khandava Forest, and only that could help him regain his vitality. Easy right? How difficult would it be for a God to consume a small forest?

Unfortunately, for the fire god Agni, it wasn’t that simple because Indra, the God of thunder, was there to create a nuisance.

Every time Agni tried to consume the forest, Indra made it rain and subdue the fire because his friend Takshaka, the Naga king, lived in that forest.

So Agni called on Krishna and Arjuna to help. Arjuna used the divine Gandiva bow and created an impenetrable wall of energy. The rain couldn’t come inside, and nobody could escape. Nobody. Not a single inhabitant, including all the birds, animals, and the Nagas who lived there2. Not only that, but there were also tribes of Rakshas and Danavas living in that forest,3 who, in this particular case, did no harm to the Gods and died an inconsequential death.4

Thousands of creatures died at their hand, yet stories like these often get ignored. These are the heroes of the Mahabharata, idealised beyond criticism.

#2: Joshua and the Conquest of Jericho

Ohh, the promised land of Israel, you have created enough chaos already!

Around the 15th century BCE, the Israelites, led by Moses, were journeying toward the land of Canaan, which God had promised to their ancestors. God sent around 12 spies to find out what was going on there. To their surprise, they found that everything on this land was huge. The grapes, the figs, the pomegranates, but so were the people. Giants were inhabiting the place.

Two of those spies, Joshua and Caleb, argued for the conquest, believing God would deliver the land to them despite the strength of its inhabitants. In contrast, the other ten spies argued against it, warning that the Israelites would not be able to defeat them.

God became furious and, because of their lack of faith in him, they would have to spend another 40 years in the wilderness. Old Testament God was one hell of an insecure prick. You can’t even dare show a hint of disbelief in his plans, or he’ll punish you with decades of homelessness!

Anyways, after their punishment period ended, God miraculously parted the Jordan River for them to cross into the promised land. With Joshua as their leader, they were about to engage in six battles. For brevity, we will only talk about the first battle, in the city of Jericho.

This was the same place where Caleb and Joshua had spied 40 years ago. Joshua went ahead to survey the land, and God appeared to him in human form and gave him very specific instructions. Since the city had massive walls that were nearly impossible to break, he told Joshua to have his men of war march around the city every day for seven days. And on the seventh day, these mighty walls fell flat to the ground.

But before they entered the city, God told them not to leave anyone alive and to completely annihilate every human being, including women and children. And they did the same!

Now, this is a more popular story in the West compared to the one about the Khandava Forest. Still, the gruesome ending is usually skimmed over and overshadowed by God’s miracle of making the walls fall. That is why it made the list.

Coda and a few points of clarification

We reshape and mould these characters to fit our standards of morality, so that we can feel good about the world. So that, during times of existential crisis, we can tell ourselves that those who do good will receive the same in return, even though we know that’s not how the world operates.

It’s all very Nietzschean, and it touches on exactly the kind of moral history he explores in On the Genealogy of Morality, particularly his criticism of how our moral values are constructed. But that’s a discussion for some other day.

We create these deliberate lapses in our collective conscience over the centuries to forget the flaws in our heroes. And maybe it’s a good thing!

Maybe we need these larger-than-life virtuous, heroic characters in our mythology to uphold ourselves to the highest standards of good.

Over the last few months, I moved from a culture so dynamic and intense that it was borderline toxic, full circle, to a culture too comfortable for my own sanity and growth.

This is me unpacking that phase of my professional life where work got a little too comfortable, and I had to figure out how to grow anyway. Writing it partly for myself, but if the full thing feels like a lot, these takeaways are all you really need:

• If your job feels too easy for too long, that’s not peace; that’s you slowly getting comfortable doing the same things on repeat.

• Don’t wait for work to show up. No one is tracking your “growth curve” for you; you have to find gaps and start filling them.

• Courses are fine, but they’re mostly top-down abstractions. You’ll learn faster going bottom-up, by building something real, breaking it, and iterating until it works.

• Talk to people. Not just your manager. Reach out to at least three stakeholders if growth feels stagnant and you want more responsibilities, keep your manager in the loop, and don’t stop at the first dead end.

• Don’t read too much into cold responses. Most of the time, it’s timing, not rejection.

• If something feels vague, make it measurable. That’s when it stops being a thought and starts being useful.

Irrespective of this crisp summary, I’d still recommend you read the full thing, as I believe stories add more meaning and depth to lessons like these, rather than the same old fiction over a self-help argument.

And here it goes…

A bit about my professional journey before I start venting out my frustration1.

For most of my career, I’ve worked for startups. Started two of my own in college and then joined and worked for three over a span of 7 years.

Earlier in 2025, I finally landed in a company that has 10X the headcount and around 100X the revenue of all the previous companies combined. And you can guess already that I am not adjusting very well.

One can say it’s a bit of a ‘don’t look a gift horse in the mouth’ situation because things are super chill. I’m not overworked; there is no pressure of harsh deadlines, and everyone is kind and nice.

It’s just that I feel it is too comfortable for my own good. I have always worked in fast-paced environments, always pushed to do more and figure things out on my own. These weren’t necessarily healthy workspaces. In fact, 40% of my time in places like this, I felt losing myself to my sleepless nights and anxious nightmares.

Which is exactly why I pursued something more relaxed and stable. And I got it and loved it… only for the first 4 months.

The Cracks

I work in GTM Sales Enablement, providing the sales team with assets such as pitch decks, one-sheets, and battlecards. I am also responsible for training them on any new product launches and how to sell them, i.e., go-to-market. On top of that, I own and manage our sales enablement tool end-to-end, from setup and structure to ongoing updates and usage.

The job sounds exciting until you realize I barely had a chance to actually train on the new launches in the first 10 months because there were zero new releases during that time. You can make a case that the product team was a bit of a mess.

The company is and was doing great revenue-wise, nothing to worry about as such.

So in crude terms, my job has mostly been drafting copies for case studies, pitch decks, and ideating how they should look2. And to be honest, I like writing, so I don’t really mind what I do. On top of that, all of my work has had an incredible impact on the bottom-line revenue outcomes.

However, I have been doing this for a while now. I started feeling that I am not learning anything new, and there is no real growth so far. So, I took the reins in my hand and decided to switch gears.

Kickstarting The RevOps Engine

I have been very fascinated by the RevOps industry. My novice understanding of RevOps has been that they manage and configure tools used by marketing and sales. I know crude, but also fascinating because of my time as a CSM in a Bangalore startup, where the majority of my work was figuring out the root cause of issues that our customers ran into and eventually resolving them with as little involvement of the engineering team, apart from the usual MBRs and upselling/cross-selling.

It also involved pushing product features to their limits and figuring out novel ways to implement them. It felt like I got my hands on a LEGO set that can be used to build a thousand things, as long as you have a good amount of creativity and logic.

The product I was working on was heavy on automation, so it felt like magic when I’d set up an auto-reply for emails our customers received from their customers based on specific words in the email.

I got a taste of it again in my next job as a Growth Marketing specialist, which involved a decent amount of Marketing Ops, creating workflows in HubSpot to prevent churn, increase adoption, and engage existing users with webinars and newsletters.3

So naturally, I leaned in and asked my current manager if I could be involved more in any RevOps/CRM related projects that also fit the sales enablement role.

What It Means To Be High Agency

I asked my manager, but she didn’t have any projects in mind. She wasn’t against the idea of it either and was happy to see me take the initiative. She did try to put me up for something, but it was already in flux, and I felt more lost and disoriented being there.

In hindsight, I do think I could’ve asked for a better KT, but it wasn’t exactly the kind of project I was looking for; it involved more coordination with a 3rd party vendor than the sum total of logic and creativity I yearn for. And it always felt like I was not required to be a part of this, and I might only add noise and friction.

After that project, my manager mentioned that her manager had requested to create some Salesforce reports. I created a shared chat to check in with the RevOps team, but they were clueless and, in turn, asked my manager for clarification. She had to reach out to her manager for clarification, but the guy was occupied with other priorities. So, yeah, not much happened there either.

I did not give up even there and asked to be a part of any Salesforce-focused projects, but there wasn’t much going on.

I decided to be more proactive and do whatever was possible in my power. I picked up courses on Design Thinking and Product Marketing and finished them within a couple of weeks. Started reading more blogs by growth marketing agencies and taking notes on how the information in our CRM can be used to inform sales and GTM teams.

I reached out to another sales leader in our team who was always very supportive and shared a document with ideas for a few reports and dashboards. I was met with a rather cold response to that. Not his fault, we were closing the fiscal year at that time, and the company was going through a pivotal phase.

After meeting with disappointment from those three stakeholders, I still kept going for it and decided I needed to get a grip on things. THIS IS WHAT TRUE AGENCY IS.

The Acts of True Agency

My first step toward becoming an autodidact in the world of RevOps / Marketing Ops was to take a HubSpot course on RevOps fundamentals, which I finished in a few weeks as well. But it didn’t feel enough. I felt it caused a very marginal increase in my knowledge, and almost nothing of substance has been shared.

I continued and completed around 3 courses in total. However, in parallel to that, I used ChatGPT to teach me Salesforce reporting. Instead of a top-down approach to learning, I decided to go bottom-up. I believe it’s a very underrated way to solve so many problems in life.

I thought about the most fundamental tasks a RevOps person would be performing, and figured that creating and monitoring reports and dashboards is one of them.

I simply prompted ChatGPT to treat me as a novice and share problem statements that Salesforce reporting can solve, tailored to my responsibilities. And fuck it! It was beautiful. I don’t know how many of you have felt this, but learning a new skill makes you feel invincible. I guess solving problems is the meaning of life.

The first 5 reports that ChatGPT asked me to create felt like a cakewalk. So, understandably, I pushed it a notch above. The next set of problems made me feel like there was some challenge. It was pure problem-solving entertainment and made me go through a pretty decent mental gymnastics.

After this journey of self-learning, I was ready to add some real value to our enablement process.

The Real Impact

So, I decided to create a report that would pinpoint exactly where we were losing deals by mapping our pipeline stage by stage, analyzing conversion rates, and tracking the time spent at each step to separate true bottlenecks from dead ends.

When I hit a roadblock with inconsistent visibility into how long deals were actually sitting in each stage, we introduced a “Days to Close” metric to standardize that view.

This transformed a vague gap into a measurable signal, enabling faster diagnosis, sharper prioritization, and more targeted action to improve overall win rates.

My manager loved the initiative and how I spearheaded everything in a silo on my own. We have already identified assets we can build to support the areas that need the most help, and are working on training plans simultaneously.

Share

But ignoring my blog has been a constant nag in the back of my mind. It is a critical part of my identity, which got me to where I am. I started to feel like I was ignoring something sacred and divine. With all this weight in my mind, I turned to the Stoics for enlightenment.

The first guy I came across was Cato the Younger. He was a Stoic senator in ancient Rome and was known for his uncompromising principles, so much so that he even died for them.

Cato was known for his discipline, never allowing procrastination to interfere with his duties. His commitment to virtue and duty inspired many in his time and is a testament to the power of Stoic principles in overcoming procrastination.

Death and Procrastination

Seneca famously observed, "We are always complaining that our days are few, and acting as though there would be no end of them."

I highly doubt that even Seneca could truly feel the depth of his own quote. Neither you nor I will ever be able to feel it either. Let me explain why.

You go to bed each night thinking about the next day's tasks because you've woken up every morning without fail for tens of thousands of days. This routine gives you an ingrained certainty about waking up.

While you can intellectually grasp the idea of going to sleep and never waking up, you can't truly internalize or live by it because your brain is conditioned by countless mornings of waking up. You're so sure you'll be alive the next day that you don't even consider the alternative. For most of us, including myself, there have been very few nights when we genuinely doubted we’d not wake up the next morning—I can recall only one.

You’d never be able to feel it to your core. However, I hope with my explanation, you’d understand how severely blind you are to your own mortality. And maybe try to consciously make up for it by procrastinating less.

Use Virtues As Your Compass

For Cato, virtue was supreme. Cato was so devoted to his virtues that he killed himself instead of compromising them. He was a big believer in the idea of a Republic i.e. he believed in a country with an elected leader.

However, Ceaser was completely against that idea and wanted to establish a monarchy. From the beginning of his political career, Ceaser had displayed clear signs. That’s why Cato absolutely despised him (and also because Ceaser slept with Cato’s sister and made her his mistress).

Cato tried everything in his power to prevent Caesar from becoming Rome’s ruler but was unsuccessful as we all know. Caesar's actions ultimately led to the end of the Roman Republic and the creation of the Roman Empire.

Faced with the prospect of living under Caesar’s rule, which Cato viewed as tyranny, he chose to take his own life.

One fine day, Cato drove the blade into his abdomen with great force, intending to end his life quickly. However, the wound did not immediately prove fatal. His servants called for medical help and attempted to save him by stitching the wound.

But Cato had already made up his mind. He waited until he was left alone. Despite the excruciating pain, Cato ripped open the stitches with his bare hands, causing his intestines to spill out. He succumbed to the severe blood loss and internal injuries, finally achieving the death he sought. This is how much Cato was devoted to his virtues.

For me, one of those virtues is seeking and sharing knowledge. And I have not been able to stay true to that virtue. Truth be told, I haven’t even been reading much lately (currently reading two books and listening to one audiobook to make up for that). However, I started watching more video essays lately to fill up for that. But I still miss books.

So, find your virtue and make sure you’re aligned with it. If you doubt the power of virtues, read this essay to understand how they helped a man survive a holocaust.

There Will Be Consequences

Stoics also recommend visualizing the consequences of procrastination. Epictetus was born into slavery but later became a renowned teacher. He used to advise his students to reflect on the potential outcomes of their actions. This practice, known as negative visualization, helps cultivate a sense of urgency and motivation to act promptly on tasks.

I use it unintentionally at work all the time. I know if I miss a task it’s going to reflect badly. My manager said this to me on day 1: “You can do 100 things right and they will go under the radar, but that one missed task or mistake will not.”

At work, you cannot let your tasks leak. You just cannot. And nothing helps you prevent leaking tasks like a simple to-do list. Aurelius was also known to keep a journal where he wrote down his thoughts and tasks for the day.

Today’s world with 1000s of project management tools can make things a little confusing. Just remember that when it comes to modern-day tools for creating To-do’s, pick the simplest tool to use. Don’t overcomplicate it with Notion, Obsidian, Roam, etc. For me, nothing comes closer to Apple’s and Mi’s notes apps. Beyond all these, pen and paper is still unbeatable.

The most important goal is that the tool should be accessible. It should not take you more than two clicks to add a task, anything more than that you might end up procrastinating on documenting that task in the first place. And hence, things will fall through the cracks.

Stick to simple and easy! It should be effortless for you to add your tasks.

To sum it up all, live a virtuous and passion-driven life where you actually care about your craft, and it’d be hard for you to procrastinate. However, if you still find yourself procrastinating, just remember, that life is too short and unpredictable to procrastinate on things that matter. And your brain is almost incapable of comprehending the latter.

Some housekeeping notes before we start. I know I haven’t been writing as frequently on this newsletter as I used to. So to get back into the habit of writing I will be writing very short snippets around psychology, cognitive science, leadership, etc.

If you are receiving this in your promotions folder please make sure to move it to your primary folder. This will help the upcoming editions to land directly in your primary inbox.

Let’s talk about anxiety—the fear that something bad will happen, and you are losing control over things to prevent that from happening. The most natural response of people in situations like this is to avoid thinking those scary thoughts—the bad things that can happen to you.

I don't think trying to escape the fear or dreadful results is helpful. Sit down with a close friend or an open notebook and analyze that fear. A great piece of advice came from "How to stop worrying and start living" - think of the worst possible outcome and admit it happened.

Think about how bad it can get in detail while being reasonable to some degree. Face your fears, look them directly in the eye, and then do everything possible to not make them happen.

Imagine what you will do in that situation. Be as elaborate in your construction as you can. Think of all the people who will be affected by that outcome and how you will interact with them, how you will break this news to them, and play out the entire conversation and dialogues in your head.

Even though this essay is not an advice for clinical anxiety, journaling is medically proven to help with that and many other psychological disorders.

Two Benefits

The reason to do this exercise is to get rid of the anxiety you're dealing with. While interacting with your worst-case scenario, you will become more comfortable that even if you fail it will still be manageable. You will realize that your worst case in this situation is still not the worst thing that can happen to someone.

Not only will this exercise make you comfortable about your worst-case scenario but it will also help you have a more holistic plan moving forward. Your worst-case scenario might not have a high likelihood of happening, but it can still happen to you.

A good plan is where you can identify all the bad things that can happen to you and have a solution for them in place. You will have to think about all the contingencies and risks and have a solid plan that addresses them as well.

I have been following this mindset of granular planning for a long while but my belief in this strategy was reaffirmed after I read Extreme Ownership by Jocko Wilink and came to know that Navy Seal officers are recommended to have a similar planning procedure.

To conclude, don’t be afraid of thinking about the worst outcome. It’s already in the back of your head, and by suppressing it you are giving it more power. Confronting your fears is the biggest display of bravery in the modern world.

And always remember what Ra’s al Ghul said in Batman Begins:

“What you really fear is inside yourself.”

I have been hesitating a lot to write and publish this blog. I just felt that the following words were a little personal and forced me to expose the vulnerable side of my personality. The only reason why I am writing this is because I want to convince myself that there are more people like me. Honestly, I am pretty sure that there are — most probably you are as well.

I am talking about the curse of mediocrity. As a kid, I was good at studies — neither great nor horrible. Always scored between 70-80%, sometimes an occasional 90% out of the blue. The same pattern kind of continued in my graduation as well. I was like the 8th or 10th smartest (highest scoring) kid in my classroom. Rarely the first.

And sadly, I have been going through this pattern in my professional career for the last 5 years. Started two startups during my graduation - one did well, and we made decent money for two clueless nineteen-year-olds trying to navigate the world of tech. The second one was a straight-up failure even though we got incubated under a government scheme. Couldn’t even finish building the product.

You see the pattern? Neither great nor worse, somewhere in between all along. Something that you cannot continue pursuing, but even the idea of quitting makes you uncomfortable.

After graduation, the corporate world chose me. Met a founder on Twitter and he offered me a job. I had nothing better to do at the moment, plus I had some financial obligations and responsibilities — so I said yes. It’s been almost two years since I have been working at the place. Great people, incredible learnings, with the usual struggle of being in a tech company.

One day I was sitting with my CEO and he was giving me some feedback on my declining performance over the last few weeks. This is exactly what he said, “If I have to rate Harsh, he’s somewhere around 6 or 7. But have we seen the 8s and 9s? Yes. That is why the expectations we have from you are higher.”

That’s when it clicked to me, the same pattern has started to repeat all over again — that I have been mediocre all along my life. I was sitting in the shades of blue for a very long time, thinking about all the times I was stranded in the middle of stupid and brilliant. I could feel the curse of mediocrity.

Even the efforts I put in to excel at something have never been extraordinary. Like the time when I was preparing for IIT-JEE, I heard kids studying 8-10 hours a day — while I was only able to stretch myself for 3. My dad with a 30k/mo salary was paying for my expensive coaching classes and study material. I understood the financial burden of things, but I just couldn’t do it. No idea how kids of autowalas crack the exam on their first attempt. I was born into a very middle-class family, and my dad’s salary never exceeded beyond 40k1. The curse started to feel hierarchical. As if, that’s where we are supposed to be. I felt bad that I might be just another version of my dad’s financial mediocrity.

I understand that you might find undertones of self-pity in this article. But trust me it’s not. I’m sharing a journey of self-exploration.

Let’s continue. So after my CEO’s comments, I started wondering how I could escape this curse of mediocrity. I was into bio-hacking for a while — sitting in the sun, consuming nootropics, etc. And these things did help. But it soon started to dawn upon me that it was probably not the right solution. I realized I needed a big change in my life. And I also realized that most people are mediocre — so there’s probably no escape.

This was also the time when my sister started to force me to move to the US for an MBA. I made some false promises and did nothing about it — had some reasons that that option did really make much sense to me. I didn’t like the idea of turning into a liability from an asset. So I continued with my work and tried to figure out ways to get better at it.

But my sister’s offer did make sense. That was the moment of revelation. I mean, isn’t it better to be a mediocre student at a mediocre college in the United States than to be in a mediocre college in Delhi for a person born in a third-world country? Of course, it is. This is when I realized that I might not be able to escape the curse of mediocrity, but in some cases2 it’s better to be a mediocre person in a brilliant place than in a bad or mediocre place.

This is only one way that I have found to sort of escape the curse of mediocrity. I am sure there are many others to be found and discussed. I will keep my journey alive and share the insights along the way. Until then, keep trying to rise above mediocrity.

I am not sure if moving to the States is the answer, but one thing’s for sure. Life is asking me to make a big change in my life, to take a leap, to maybe take a step back to move in the right direction.

However, not all rules are worth following. If that was the case, then Hitler, Mao, and Stalin probably didn’t do anything wrong. And this is where the spirit of a society lies. A society’s consciousness is not awake when they are following all the rules they are told to follow by a higher authority — that’s the dystopia and grimness of 1984. Society is truly WOKE when they know they can break some rules without facing serious repercussions. This is the central point of this blog, and how India’s roads and streets are evidence of how awake this country is.

The Mountains Took a Shit

If you follow me on Twitter, by now you probably know about my recent trek with a friend of mine. Spending two nights and three days in a place that has no electricity, no water or gas supply, and no washrooms as well. Met very interesting people. It was literally like what my Instagram caption said: I lived a movie. I have always been on the receiving end of these stories — feels good to be on the other side of the story for the first time.

Day 1 - we were supposed to be in Manali and start our trek in the morning. But because of a landslide, we were stuck for 8hrs since 5 am in the morning at the same place. Our bus won’t move at all. There were about 30 - 40 vehicles in front of us and a huge pile of mud after them.

The Way Out

There was only way out was booking a cab and driving through the narrow paths that the buses couldn’t take. So we did that. But because of our lack of resourcefulness, things got a bit more interesting. Booking a cab from Mandi to Manali would take us 4-5k and we were tight on budget. So like most people in that situation, we started hunting for people who could join us on our journey and split the bill. For 2-3 hours we were talking to people and networking to find two more people. We did well at that time, but most people found some other alternative and fucked off. Finally, my friend decided to ask a foreigner, thinking that they’d already be panicked, so they’ll stick with us. Plus we knew most people won’t have those charismatic conversational skills to ask them for it1. We just wanted to get the fuck out of that place - because I had my office and an important project to work on right after our trip.

So a Canadian girl, Cassandra, agreed to join us and mentioned that there is another lady she knows, Sasha, who is willing to join us. So we called the cab guy and told him we are all set to go. However, it would take him 2hrs to come to us. We waited and had a great conversation with those two people. It turned out that the grandfather of the other lady (30-35) was a great Sufi artist based out of India. The cab guy took longer than expected to come. But it was alright, considering we had good company.

Finally, our cab ride started, and the round of Harsh Singh asking random ass questions without shutting up started. We talked throughout the journey about random things like paranormal activities, indigenous people in Canada and America and the atrocities they faced, sharing life-changing book recommendations, and a lot of other things.

Roads of India's Collective Consciousness

The most important reason I am writing this blog is about something I mentioned to the Canadian lady and it fascinated her (I am a narcissist and it’s my blog, plus white validation, so fuck it).

I told her how India is a great country, not because of our diversity or the geographical beauty or how welcoming people are in most parts. But because we break rules.

We, Indians, are infamous for breaking traffic rules and for our crazy driving etiquettes, how crossing red lights is not a big thing for us, how we never drive in a single lane, and how we drive on the wrong side of the road all time.

But if you look at the statistics we have the same number of traffic accidents as the US or any other rule-abiding nation2.

People think of Indians as stupid illiterates but the academics-driven world fails to account for our intuitive knowledge on the road and that’s what makes us genius. Any country that follows all the rules that the government has prescribed them to follow has lost its soul — it’s ability to think for themselves — it’s ability to understand that all the rules fall on a spectrum and breaking some rules don’t cause as much damage as breaking other rules.

The fact that Indians don’t follow all the rules the government has told them is a testament to how awakened our consciousness is. And that is how I envision an ideal society to be — where people know that it’s okay to break some rules given the circumstances are alright. Now don’t be a dumbass and start commenting about murders and rapes, I am obviously not talking about that.

People from foreign nationalities think that Indians are crazy and chaotic on the roads. We are crazy but not chaotic. The fact that those people don’t understand and are confused about the way our traffic operates doesn’t mean that our road transport is dysfunctional. We are pretty skilled and aware of what we are doing on those roads. We are a lot smarter than our government thinks — because we comfortably break the rules they deem to be dangerous for us.

We are an awakened consciousness. I don’t see any point in Americans not changing their lanes when they can and there is space to do that. You are just sheeps in a herd, tied to the ropes of those who hold power. At least, we Indians understand the boundaries and exceptions to those rules3.

Imagine your friend, Fat Tony, makes a very bold and uncanny argument about something. He explains it in an elaborate and convincing tone with his brilliant storytelling skills and emotional rigor — throwing his hands in all directions and enacting every minute detail. Now the first thing you’d do is to verify it on the internet because the claim is too odd to be true.

You look it up and you find that it’s not true. It was just some Reddit meme that a few people took too seriously and exaggerated over the internet.

This is good right? The internet makes us skeptical about random information that can be harmful in some way. Well, I think it is kinda cool but I also think that there is a downside to this particular effect of the Internet — a very indirect and subconscious effect on our psyche. And I think the people who are suffering the most are the intellectual ones who Google stuff a lot and made their account on ChatGPT in the first month it was rolled out.

The abundance of information makes the search for truth very difficult because one can only go through a certain amount of information. So people get lazy in their journey and resort to weak arguments of subjectivity (we can talk about this later someday, I have a lot to say).

It also makes it difficult to be confident about anything because there is always a chance that you might have missed some crucial piece of information that goes against your assertion. So you never hold a strong position for it. You use words like ‘maybe’, ‘probably’, ‘I think so’, etc. Your language becomes weak.

The Internet has created an age of doubt. People are doubtful and unsure about everything. They have this lingering sense of constant fear that maybe almost everything they believe in is wrong. Imagine the existential angst that it creates. You are doubtful of your entire identity altogether. Every shred of you is in constant scrutiny.

If you extrapolate this doubtful nature bred by the internet I think it has a deep impact on the internet power users’ ability to believe in their dreams and goals. I mean it’s obviously not a direct impact of the Internet but you have to understand what Internet has done with the nerds of the 21st century. We are unsure and doubtful about everything, so it is obvious that this impact on one part of our psyche will get absorbed into others. Osmosis bitch! If you are unsure about everything, how can you be sure about your goals and dreams? As a nerd, your natural state is of being doubtful, you are always in a state of uncertainty. Only God knows how will you hold yourself together when things don’t go your way — when the outside world adds and creates chaos in your plans.

Now don’t get me wrong, I totally think skepticism is a virtue. People who don’t have it are usually very obnoxious to talk to as they have caged themselves in a box and they just can’t get out of it. But at least the box has defined boundaries and dimensions. This means that they live in more certainty than us nerds (and hence have more psychological stability).

My uncle used to say that the dumbest people are usually the happiest. Now I get the total depth of it. Since the internet is a machine that produces doubt at a mass scale, it has given birth to a bunch of super-smart kids who can’t do shit because they are so dispassionate all the time. I think academically intelligent people usually don’t make it big because they think too much.

Here’s a quote from Top Gun Maverick that reflects the emotions I am feeling right now:

To summarize, I think the Internet is a great thing but I believe it has turned us into weak, dispassionate, doubtful, and mentally disturbed individuals who think too much and live in constant existential dread.

This is your sign to be more assertive in your arguments, to hold your ground as long as you can, and to tell fake stories like Fat Tony — even if your friends Google it at least they will get a good laugh at your expense. And when it comes to pursuing your goals, you need the spirit of an unstoppable bull that just keeps running with its steady momentum, no matter what comes the way. You cannot win with absolute Rationality!

Good leaders are what good teachers feel like. They believe in you, they uplift you, and they correct you.

Good leaders know that their time is valuable, so they don't waste it. But they also think the same for your time and apologize when they're late for meetings and approving a creative.

Bad leaders only do 50% of that job. They value their time but don't care for yours. They will assign you tasks at random with outrageous deadlines.

When good leaders assign you to take up a new project — they talk and let you talk! They share their ideas, make you pitch your insights, and give you enough time for the required research for developing the right framework. Good communication skill is an indispensable part of a good leader.

Bad leaders, on the other hand, are mostly unavailable, there is always a communication gap and don't even bother to try to improve it. They think this is how leadership is done.

When a good leader calls you, it gets you excited to pick up the call.

Bad leaders usually call to point out your mistakes and fuck-ups. Eventually, you start to dread their calls and avoid them entirely if you could.

Good leaders often know when to handhold and when to let go and give you full ownership. This process is usually gradual in nature. The worst thing about bad leaders is that they expect it to happen at once. They either expect you to do everything on your own or end up micro-managing you.

Good leaders encourage participation. They push you to share your ideas and opinion. They help you break your shell of hesitation until you are comfortable in the team. They will randomly ask you in team meetings: “Wdy think about this, Harsh?”

Bad leaders are usually agnostic about your participation. If you want to, you can talk, but they won’t facilitate that in group calls.

Good leaders are responsive, available, respectful of your time, and mindful of your availability and efforts. They acknowledge good work and appreciate it.

Bad leaders are watchful of your mistakes and ignorant of your achievements. They are usually unavailable when you’re in need of help. They are quick at correcting mistakes (because that is more important for them) and absent when it comes to talking about your progress.

Leave a comment

Asymmetry in Business

My obsession with Taleb doesn't seem to go away. It's funny how he ruthlessly blocks people even if they show the slightest sense of disagreement. I am blocked for a while now.

Whatever you say about this man, I love his writings. He dares to challenge grand ideas of the status quo. Today, I want to draw another parallel from one of his prominent ideas — asymmetry!

Humans engage in different types of games for different pay-offs with different motives. Not all games are equally rewarding and punishing. Let's say you have $50k worth of savings.

1. You can either keep that cash in a locker for 25 years and it will have the same monetary value in the end. Its spending capacity will be worse, adjusted to inflation.

2. Or you can put it in FD and turn it into $150k at a 4.5% interest rate in the same period of time.

3. Or you can invest the same cash in index funds and get $850k by the end of 25yrs at a 12% interest rate!

4. Or maybe you are a little more courageous, and you decide to invest in a business idea. And you might end up with a multi-million dollar organization!

The point I'm trying to make here is that there is a fixed upper limit to the first three options - at best you can add/subtract $50k to what you will get by the end of 25yrs in the index fund investments.

However, quite fascinatingly, there is no upper to how much money you'd make by starting a business. If you're solving a crucial problem you might even turn into a trillion-dollar industry.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not oversimplifying the struggle of entrepreneurship. It's not a piece of cake to build a million-dollar business.

What I'm trying to say is that given the choice, trust me, the best choice is to invest your money in the option that offers you a positive asymmetry.

You can use this model to think one layer deep as to what business idea you should go for. Food and medicine are eternal — there is no expiry date attached to their demands. Starting a grocery store or a pharmacy might not be a bad idea. Probably that is why the Indian startup ecosystem is fighting so hard to be at the forefront of fast grocery delivery services.

Grocery and pharmacy are just examples; you can think of more such examples for them.

There is a very fair chance that you will lose all your money if you decide to invest your cash in a business. But the key takeaway is that there is no upper limit here. You could work on it for 3 years and cash out $22Mn - as Elon did with PayPal.

Value of Conspiracy Theories

Conspiracy Theories fascinate me. Not because they're revealing some hidden and censored truth. In most cases, they're just fluff (or maybe not 👁️).

The point isn't to care about their validity but rather to let yourself experience an uncomfortable perspective.

Conspiracy Theories get too much bad rep even though most of them are pretty harmless — like the one about the royal family being shape-shifting aliens.

Some of them are totally absurd and hard to digest. However, I believe the line between truth and conspiracy theories is a blurry one. Many contrarian ideas that may have some validity get shunned by getting labeled as conspiracy theories.

It has turned into a great way to shame people from consuming a certain category of information. And so far, it's been a very successful strategy.

Saying that Dalai Lama was a CIA agent who received millions of dollars for helping the USA to suppress the communist rule of China sounds like an overtly absurd conspiracy theory. But you'd be surprised that it is actually true (Watch this).

To conclude this section, I am not encouraging you to accept a suspicious theory at its face value. I am merely asking you as a curious person to give them a chance. Isn't this the entire meaning of being to explore ideas that most shit on?

Leave a comment

Appreciate your patience in reading this long essay. I am glad that you made it to the end. Hope you learned how to create high-impact systems and processes.

I have been running this newsletter for the last two years, sharing the bits and pieces of my intellect with thousands of readers every week.

Even though it’s a free newsletter, it takes a lot of time and energy. If you want to support this newsletter, buy me a coffee or you can follow me on Twitter.

If you are new here and have a curious soul you’d love to explore my archive of 50+ essays.

And if you know someone who’d resonate with my content feel free to share it with them.

How to make people fulfill all your expectations!

Here's a story from Greek mythology that will make you a better lover, manager, parent, and teacher:

Pygmalion, King of Cyprus, was a very skilled sculptor. Once he was working months and days tirelessly carving a female figurine out of marble.

When he was done, he took a step back and got submerged in the awe of his creation. The sculpture was his most beautiful creation ever — almost life-like. By the time he regained his sanity, he fell in love with her.

He named her Galatea, which meant: “she who is white like milk.”

Pygmalion would bring her gifts, shells, ornaments, birds, and flowers to charm her. He would grace her with rings, bracelets, and necklaces, and dress her up in fine silk dresses.

He would caress and kiss Galatea’s statue and spend hours talking to her. He was madly and passionately in love with a woman who could never love him back.

Impressed by his devotion to the statue, Aphrodite, goddess of sex and beauty, brought her to life. Pygmalion and Galatea married soon after.

Psychology of Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

At the first glance, the story of Pygmalion sounds like just another mythological story with very little to learn from. But at the very core of this tale, there is a significant idea that’s a very psychologically relevant tool.

Think of it like this: Pygmalion passionately loved his marble with every inch of his heart and treated her as if it were a real person. He had no doubts about it — she was as real to him as the girls in his neighborhood. In the end, the fiction he created for himself got manifested in reality (I promise I won’t talk about the law of attraction).

This was a breakthrough lesson in the history of humanity. We learned for the first time that how you treat a person can influence their entire personality — that your expectations of them can make them act differently.

The Seed of My Writing Career

My colleagues and friends always ask me when did I first start writing and what pushed me into it. I never really cared to think of an answer to that question. I just shrugged it off with modesty.

However, I think it is important to talk about it in the context of this blog. Here’s a snippet from my 6th grade about what got me into writing:

It was a regular school day. Our english teacher was going to hand out our unit test answer sheets. Her flow was ritualistic: She’d announce the marks and give the sheets with a little mockery on how bad you did at the test.

When my turn came she said that I got pretty average marks, but there was one thing she was impressed about: my writing!

At once I thought she was being sarcastic about my bad handwriting. She sensed it and clarified that it’s not about it. She was talking about my writing skills and she wasn’t fooling with me.

We had to write an informal letter to our friend describing our birthday party. Most students followed the basic monotonous trope. While I added some flavours of storytelling to it — by adding cute cliffhangers and elements of suspense.

She applauded infront of the entire class for my creativity. That was the best I ever felt in my school.

From that day onward, I became the writing guy of the school. Any competition or presentation, she would loop me in. She had expectations, and I had the burning desire to fulfill them. To keep up with the pace, I started to write more and more, and get better at it.

And that's how it all started. This one to Rita ma'am. It wouldn't have been possible without you.

Data Behind The Theory

The idea is simple: teachers’ expectations about individual children become self-fulfilling prophecies. If a teacher believes a child is slow, the child will come to believe that, too, and will indeed learn slowly. The lucky child who strikes a teacher as bright also picks up on that expectation and will rise to fulfill it.

The Research behind this finding is solid. In 1968, psychologist Rosenthal (founder of the Pygmalion Effect) found out that students who were expected to perform well scored better marks than those who weren’t. Rosenthal also claimed the former group also experienced a greater IQ change — but it was probably just bad science and the Pygmalion effect does not affect IQ.

Pygmalion Effect in Parenting and Management

The original study on the Pygmalion effect was centered around kids in school but it turns out that this psychological effect has a great deal of application in management and parenting.

If you are a team lead or manager:

Create high-performance expectations for your subordinates. Communicate those expectations clearly in their KPIs & OKRs. If you want to learn how to set SMART KPIs — read this!

Tell them that their intellect and competence are high and that is why the expectations have been set high as well. Tell them that you have faith in them and they will be able to fulfill the set goals. Trust me, they will give it their everything to reach that bar for you.

If you are a parent or elder sibling:

The Pygmalion effect is the best tool to make sure that your kids grow up into respectful and responsible citizens1. But it's equally difficult.

Children are more impressionable, so the impact of PE on their personalities is amplified. They will be quick to pick up cues like facial expressions, tone of voice, and body language to sense what you expect from them.

If they sense any frustration in your verbal and non-verbal communication when they ask stupid questions, they might start acting stupid in a while. The best response to your kid’s absurd questions (if you don’t know the answer) is “I don’t know, what do you think about it?.” Now just sit back and observe their creativity spur into action.

Conclusion:

Set specific expectations, communicate and express them in a positive tone, and make them believe that they are fulfilling those expectations even if they are not. Once you create this illusion for them, it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

If your employee is acting lazy, tell them that you love their energy and spirit of productivity. Tell your entire team: “this guy works & delivers fast!”

If you think your partner never asks you about your day, compliment them for the opposite sincerely out of the blue: “I love it how you always ask me about my day at work.” If possible do that in the presence of her friends.

People will do anything to hold the integrity of the myths you’ve created for them. Turn your expectations a part of their identity.

Appreciate your patience in reading this long essay. I know I am publishing after a very long while — things have been changing pretty fast in my career: kudos to your constant support and motivation! 🙏

I have been feeling guilty about not being able to return the favor. This newsletter is a lot more than just a place for my writings — it is a part of my identity. Not writing anything here has been eating me up from the inside.

I am going to write less frequently. Probably once a month. But I will do my best to make it worth your time. It took me months, but I have figured out better time management strategies to post something regularly.

This blog might not be my best work, but it was very necessary. I needed to write something. And I'm glad I did. It broke the activation energy barrier for me. What comes next is going to be 100X better than this! Stay tuned. 🚀

Forward this to your friends who want to improve their cognitive capacity! Let's think better.

92% of them never achieve any of them.

Most people quit their goals and ambitions due to certain blockers.

These blockers to productivity are everywhere in the entire process of completing a task. Most of you quit on your goals at one of these three phases in your journey:

1. High Activation Energy: Sometimes, it is daunting to start something because you are not prepared to put in the activation energy required to initiate the task.

   There are many things you want to do, but you never start at all. You get scared by the resource-intensity required to complete the task.

   For instance, building a profitable business is a long, exhausting journey; and the size of the task is big enough to scare you off. So you quit right before you even get started2.

2. Dysfunctional Process: Sometimes, it’s challenging to continue what you have already started because your process sucks or because you lose motivation. The latter can be an effect of the former.

   In this case, you start, but you quit after a while, as you don’t get any substantially motivating results from your current process.

3. Undefined Milestones: On other occasions, you lose faith in what you are doing due to some external influence. Flipping NFTs is cooler than starting a SaaS business — “fuck you, Arvid Kahl, Bored Ape is the king.”

   It can happen because your expectations and reality don’t overlap along the journey. You start doubting your decisions and think that what others are doing is more rewarding.

An important thing to keep in mind as we move forward is that it's okay to quit in some conditions. If you are responsible for feeding your family, it makes sense to quit your unprofitable startup and get a job to look after them.

So if you face a moral dilemma like this—trust your gut; ask yourself what’s the right thing to do and go on with it. I have no opinion on that front. In other more optimistic situations: keep this essay handy.

Today we will learn to create systems that make it easier to start and persist — a strategic thought-process that you can use to:

a) reduce the activation energy;

b) create better, more rewarding processes;

c) take decisions independently with full ownership.

1. How to Reduce Activation Energy ⏬

Before we decode how you can reduce the initial mental struggle of starting a resource-intensive task, let’s take a quick look at the mental model of activation energy.

In chemistry, every reaction requires a certain amount of energy to begin working. Most of us have a general idea of the heat necessary to start a fire.

We know that putting a single match to a large log will not be sufficient, and a flame thrower would be excessive.

We also know that damp or dense materials will require more heat than dry ones. The imprecise amount of energy we need to start a fire represents the activation energy.

In real life, when you are working on something, and you are asked to switch tasks, it takes some effort to do that — depending upon the magnitude of the shift in your tempo is required.

For instance, if you are planning to watch a web series and suddenly your friend asks you to play tennis with him, the shift in tempo required is high. You’ve already made your mind for a leisurely activity. So you’d take some time to make your mind and move around to pace up the tempo shift. But if you were working out in the gym and your friend has the same request, you are good to go instantly.

The reason why it is difficult to quit your job and start a business is that the tempo shift required is significantly high. In the case of humans, activation energy is just the amount of mental and physical tempo shift needed to get on a new task.

The most effective way to reduce activation energy is in James Clear’s book Atomic Habits: Divide a big goal or ambition into tiny actionable steps.

Before task division, your goal was to create a profitable business. After task division, the next thing you have to do is market research or customer validation or get your finances in place. Since the tempo shift required in the latter is low, the activation energy is also low; hence it becomes easy to get started.

Another fact about activation energy that is helpful is that it’s difficult to start, but it is relatively easy to continue doing that thing once you have started. So if you’re procrastinating over something, just do the most minor thing you need to do to get started.

For instance, if you want to exercise but are feeling lazy to do it, just warm-up, do a few jumping jacks, and it will get you in the mood of working out. Helps me every time. Great hack!

2. How to Create a High-output Process ⚒

“An hour of planning can save you 10 hours of doing.”

— Dale Carnegie

After working with some of the most skillful people for the last 4 years, I have observed that they all value processes a lot. Under their guidance, you will learn that an effective process has two main characteristics:

1. Replicability

2. Scalability

Let’s talk about both of them with some patience.

Replicability:

If it’s not a replicable process, every iteration of the same task will require you to rethink and plan your workflow entirely from scratch. Your process should look like a template that you can use infinite times with minor tweaks.

The act of creating a process might take more time, effort, and mental energy than implementing the entire process. That’s precisely why you need a process.

Imagine you are an indie hacker who creates a small no-code tool every month. But you suck at marketing because you don’t have time for it. The ideal thing for you to do is to create a repeatable process. Creating a process is a pain in the ass but using the same process, again and again, feels like a blessing.

Here’s what a replicable process for your product distribution might look like:

• Actively respond to an influencers’ tweets in your niche

• Cold DMing those influencers’ followers

• Write Reddit posts in relevant communities

If you are a content creator, a product marketer, or an indie hacker, this is a plan to steal. It’s not the best, that’s for sure, but I’ve seen it work like magic. The biggest upside of this plan is that it is repeatable. Doesn’t matter what product you create; it works for all of them.

Scalability

Now imagine that you are a Product Growth Manager in a startup, and you want your product to reach 100k people. You can use the same process we mentioned above to do that. Just add a pinch of delegation and a spoonful of automation. That’s scalability — whether your process can be used on a bigger scale or not.

It’s a solid process, but I think maybe you’d need to add a few more channels like Quora, FB groups, Slack, etc, and you are good to go.

Metacognition

Again, no process is perfect, and there is always a scope for improvement, which brings me to my next mental tool for creating an effective process — metacognition.

You need to actively evaluate your process. Double down the things that work well and limit your resources that don’t. At the same time, keep an open eye for new elements that you can add to your process.

3. How to Stay Persistent 🏔

Most people think that most people quit because things get hard. It's not true. They quit because things stay the same. Boredom makes your journey stagnant, which in turn leads to decay.

To keep things exciting, most importantly—unboring, on a long journey, you need to set realistic milestones to create a sense of achievement every now and then. Not only that, you need to stay genuinely devoted to these milestones. It’s easier to abandon your side of grass because the herd is moving the other way.

To follow up on all these things, we have an umbrella term. It's called self-authorship. There are a lot of academic definitions, but in simple terms, self-authorship is creating your own rules to play your own game.

Self-authorship is the belief that you can rely on your own internal values to make decisions. However, you need a lot of instinctive wisdom to build self-authorship. It might take years to get to a point where you can reliably use your own set of internal commitments to guide your decisions.

In the meantime, observe people you admire and pick their internal values. Working with competent individuals is helpful. Reading biographies is helpful. Following up on my 'Think Like a Genius’ series is helpful.

Shoutout 📢

If you want to expand your intellectual horizon, subscribe to the 10+1 Things newsletter.

It is curated by Rishikesh featuring 11 interesting things handpicked from the vast universe of information.

He shares everything from Twitter threads to book recommendations and cool websites.

Subscribe here: 10+1 Things

Appreciate your patience in reading this long essay. I am glad that you made it to the end. Hope you learned how to create high-impact systems and processes.

I have been running this newsletter for the last eighteen months, sharing the bits and pieces of my intellect with thousands of readers every week.

Even though it’s a free newsletter, it takes a lot of time and energy. If you want to support this newsletter, buy me a coffee or you can follow me on Twitter.

If you know someone who’d resonate with my content feel free to share it with them.

Share

Amazon’s market cap increased from $114Bn in Q4 2012 to $1.57Tn as of Feb 2022.

Their share price during the IPO was $1.5; today, it’s around $3000. That means $1000 invested in Amazon’s IPO would have been 2.34 million dollars in 2021.

Amazon now owns more than four billion-dollar companies, including the giant Whole Foods Market, and the futuristic startup Zoox that is developing autonomous vehicles.

Amazon is a giant, and Bezos is a genius for creating such a monopolistic global empire. It doesn’t matter if you think he is evil; he is rich, and that’s it. 

From being born to a teenage mother to building a trillion-dollar conglomerate, it is a hell of a journey. It takes sharp intellect and a bold personality to achieve what he did.

Let’s take a small tour of Bezos’ life, the journey of a curious and inventive boy becoming a business shark.

LESSONS FROM BEZOS’ LIFE

Jeff Bezos had a quite unordinary childhood than the rest of us. Being born to a teenage mother, life wasn’t easy for them.

Though his biological parents got married, his father wasn’t there for long. His parents got divorced a year after their marriage in 1965. Three years after the divorce, his mother married a Cuban immigrant, Mike Bezos1.

1. Strength of Self-reliance

When he was a young kid, filled with insatiable curiosity, Bezos spent more than a dozen summers on his grandfather’s wide-open ranches in Texas.2

He credits the time he spent with his grandfather on the ranch for making him self-reliant and resourceful.

When a bulldozer broke, he and his grandfather built a crane to lift out the gears and fix them.

Together they castrated the cattle, built windmills, laid pipe, and had long conversations about the frontiers of space and technology3.

— An excerpt from the super-awesome book by Walter Isaacson: Invent and Wander

His grandfather would even make his own needles and take up tasks that he didn’t know and then learn to them anyhow. Bezos shared some interesting insights about his grandfather and how his influence made him conscientious in this interview:

Later in his life, when he started Amazon in his garage, he’d use his grandfather’s lessons to build tables for his team.

Bezos went to Home Depot and bought three wooden doors to save money. Using angle brackets and 2-by-4s, he hammered together three desks at the cost of $60 each.

2. Inventive Mindset

We all had that nerd friend who was obsessed with science projects, who’d use electronic waste to make marvelous little gadgets. Bezos was kind of like that friend, but a lot more interesting and fun.

His mother encouraged his passion for electronics and mechanics by letting him turn the family garage into a science project lab. She would also drive him to Radioshack multiple times a day.

“I was constantly booby-trapping the house with various kinds of alarms and some of them were not just audible sounds, but actually like physical booby traps.” — Jeff Bezos

Probably this inventive mindset led him to launch so many hardware products after the success of Amazon and AWS.

3. Be The Tortoise

Bezos was stubborn as a kid. He had infinite persistence for things the tasks he took upon. Fast-forward to his professional life; it took years of persistence for all his startups and ventures to become profitable.

Amazon was founded in 1994, and its first profitable year was 2001. Before that, they were burning cash while Bezos was getting everywhere in the industry.

At one point during the dot.com meltdown, he was on NBC Nightly News (i) special with Tom Brokaw.

“Mr. Bezos, can you even spell ‘profit’?” Brokaw asked.

“Sure,” Bezos replied, “P-R-O-P-H-E-T.”

“The teacher complained to my mother that I was too task focused and that she couldn’t get me to switch tasks, so she would have to just pick up my chair and move me.”

“And by the way, if you ask the people who work with me, that’s still probably true today.”

Bezos used to advise his team — “Be the tortoise and not the hare.”

4. Trifecta of Wisdom

In the introduction of Invent and Wander, Walter Isaacson mentioned a few common traits he has observed in all the Geniuses of history.

One such trait was curiosity. From Steve Jobs to da Vinci and Benjamin Franklin, he found it in all of them.

One final trait shared by all my subjects is that they retained a childlike sense of wonder. At a certain point in life most of us quit puzzling over everyday phenomena.

Our teachers and parents becoming impatient, tell us to stop asking so many silly questions. We might savor the beauty of a blue sky, but we no longer bother to wonder why it is that color.

Walter believes that the trifecta of humanities, business, and technology is what made Bezos successful.

5. Regret Minimisation Framework

After completing his graduation, Bezos went to New York to work for the hedge fund of David Shaw. While working there in 1994, Jeff came across the statistic that the web had been growing by more than 2300% per year.

He decided to get aboard that rocket and came up with the idea to start an online retail store. However, it made more sense to start with one product: books.

When he told David that he wanted to leave the hedge fund, David tried to convince him otherwise.

“I think you are onto a good idea here, but this would be a better idea for somebody who didn’t already have a good job,” he said on a two-hour-long walk with Bezos.

To make the decision, Bezos used a mental exercise that became a famous tool for his risk-calculation process. He called it a “regret minimization framework.”

He would imagine what he would feel when he turned eighty and thought back to the decision. His goal was to minimize the number of regrets he’d have on his deathbed.

“I want to have minimized the number of regrets I have,” he explains. “I knew that when I was eighty, I was not going to regret having tried this. I was not going to regret trying to participate in this thing called the internet that I thought was going to be a really big deal. I knew that if I failed, I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried. I knew that that would haunt me every day.”

Subscribe now

6. Mental Model of One-way & Two-way Doors

Certain decisions in business and life are more complex to deal with than others, primarily because the former choices are irreversible or the friction to reverse is too high.

Bezos used the allegory of one-way doors and two-way doors to explain the concept of irreversible and reversible decisions.4

If you walk through a one-way door decision and don’t like what you see on the other side, you can’t get back to where you were before. He said that these decisions must be made methodically, carefully, slowly, with great deliberation and consultation.

However, he believed:

…most decisions aren’t like that—they are changeable, reversible—they’re two way doors. If you’ve made a bad two-way door decision, you don’t have to live with the consequences for that long.

You can reopen the door and go back through.

7. Lindy Effect

The Lindy Effect is the idea that the older something is, the longer it’s likely to be around in the future. Taleb also talks about it in his book Antifragile.

“If a book has been in print for forty years, I can expect it to be in print for another forty years. But, and that is the main difference, if it survives another decade, then it will be expected to be in print another fifty years.”

Bezos believes in something similar but with his unique spin on it. He usually gets asked about big changes the world might experience in the next ten years. It’s an interesting question, but Bezos believes that asking the opposite question helps you discover untapped opportunities.

“What’s going to change in the next 10 years?” That is a very interesting question; it’s a very common one. I almost never get the question: ‘What’s not going to change in the next 10 years?’

And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two — because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time.

In our retail business, we know that customers want low prices, and I know that’s going to be true 10 years from now. They want fast delivery; they want vast selection. It’s impossible to imagine a future 10 years from now where a customer comes up and says, “Jeff I love Amazon, I just wish the prices were a little higher.”

Or, “I love Amazon, I just wish you’d deliver a little slower.” Impossible. So we know the energy we put into these things today will still be paying off dividends for our customers 10 years from now. When you have something that you know is true, even over the longterm, you can afford to put a lot of energy into it.

Appreciate your patience for reading this long essay. I am glad that you made it to the end. Hope you learned something useful from the Genius of Jeff Bezos. Part 2 of this essay will be shared soon

I have been running this newsletter for the last seventeen months, sharing the bits and pieces of my intellect with thousands of readers every week. If you want to support this newsletter, buy me a coffee.

Nature rewards those who embrace pain and extract strength from the challenging experiences of their lives.

One such brave man was Zeno of Citium. Anything I can write about his wisdom is insufficient to describe his philosophical contributions.

He's the man who founded the philosophy of Stoicism, laying the foundations of the most credible mental health treatment, and gave credit to an accident that took all his fortune.

Let’s relive Zeno's grand journey of founding the Stoic school of philosophy.

A Shipwreck that Gave Birth to Stoicism

Ancient Phoenicians made their fortune by trading a famous purple dye extracted from the murex sea snail. It’s called Tyrian or Royal Purple.

It was used to dye robes of kings but making it was an excruciating task. Thousands of decaying shellfish had to be laboriously dissected by hand just to extract a few grams of this super-expensive dye.

One fine morning Zeno of Citium, from the island of Cyprus, was transporting his cargo of the royal purple dye across the Mediterranean when a storm caught him.

The ship sank, but he survived somehow, washed ashore at a port near Athens. Tragically gloomy, Zeno was left wandering on the streets of a strange city with all his fortune taken away from him.

Sad and disappointed, he visited the famous Delphic Oracle pleading for guidance from God Apollo.

The Oracle said Zeno would have to dye himself not in the blood of dead shellfish but of dead men. Confused and upset, he went back to Athens.

Later, while reading the work of Socrates in a bookshop, he realized what the Oracle meant when she said he had to dye himself with the color of dead men.

His destiny was to study the life and opinions of philosophers like Socrates from previous generations and permanently color his mind with their teachings.

He was so touched by the wisdom of Socrates he jumped to the bookseller and asked him: “Where can I find a man like this today?”

And he replied, “Talk to that guy over there!” Because by chance, the famous Cynic philosopher Crates of Thebes was walking right past them.

Zeno trained with Crates and other Socratic philosophers for the next twenty years. He flourished and became famous as a philosopher himself.

Eventually, he founded a school on a public porch in Athens called Stoa Poikile, near the agora where Socrates used to teach. His followers came to be known as the Stoics or philosophers of the porch.

Congruency of CBT and Stoicism

Zeno lived a respectful life after founding his school.

After his death, the Athenians honored him by creating a bronze statue.

Zeno considered the biggest tragedy of his life as the most fortunate incident of his life. During his time in Athens, he always used to say this:

“My most profitable journey began on the day I was shipwrecked and lost my entire fortune.”

This attitude of saying “fuck you” to the mishappenings of life is something that Stoics followed religiously.

Fuck you, shipwreck; I’m on my way to establish a school of philosophy that will be read and distributed by humans for the next twenty-three centuries—that’s Zeno in a nutshell.

No matter how hard the modern human tries to ignore and mock the wisdom of the ancients, Science slaps us on the face of our ignorance.

This is probably why the most statistically credible mental health treatment is just Stoicism in disguise.

Stoicism claims that events that happen in the external world are not in your control, but it’s in your hand how you react to them. There are no painful or rewarding experiences; the human mind makes them that way.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy talks about something similar. CBT claims that counterproductive or unhelpful thinking patterns, called cognitive distortions, cause unproductive behavior and undesired emotions.

Precursors of fundamental aspects of CBT have been identified Stoicism.

"The philosophical origins of cognitive therapy can be traced back to the Stoic philosophers."

— Aaron T. Beck, father of CBT

Epictetus, one of the most respected Stoic philosophers, said that one could use logic to identify and discard false beliefs that lead to destructive emotions.

This idea has influenced how modern cognitive-behavioral therapists identify cognitive distortions that contribute to depression and anxiety.

Let’s understand cognitive distortions in a little more detail.

Cognitive Distortions

Our minds can play tricks on us depending on how we interpret events. They can influence us to believe things that aren't true, even if they appear to be rational.

For some of us, distorted thinking is merely a blip on the radar. When we fail a math test, we get upset. Instead of realizing we need to study more, we briefly reason that we're bad at math. However, we usually move on and try again.

Others experience cognitive distortions as a way of thinking that disrupts their lives and relationships.

In these situations, distorted thinking can lead to long-term anxiety, depression, and behavioral issues like substance abuse.

There are different types of cognitive distortions that play devious games with our minds and cause unproductive thought patterns. Some of them are polarized thinking, overgeneralization, catastrophizing. “should” statements, etc. ill talk about them in my next Twitter thread.

Appreciate your patience and dedication to reading this long essay. I am glad that you made it to the end. Hope you learned something new that will equip you to be more persistent when the friction of reality is unbearable.

I have been running this newsletter for the last seventeen months, sharing the bits and pieces of my intellect with thousands of readers every week. If you want to support this newsletter, buy me a coffee.

You sit in your car, the wind blew and gave it a little push. Even though this force is negligibly small, you will start moving at a very slow speed1.

After this, your car can travel beyond the expanse of the observable universe at the same speed2. Though you might die of old age before you even make it out of your country. 🙃

You don’t have to worry about gas prices now. It’s all free energy. Congratulations, your car has infinite mileage.

As soon as the wind stops blowing, the force applied to your car is zero, and yet it will continue to move at a constant velocity until it crashes into a wall or something.

So it is fair to conclude that an object can move at a uniform speed without the application of a force on a frictionless surface.

When an object is moving at a uniform speed on a frictionless surface there are no forces acting on it in any direction.

Technically, in ideal conditions, the uniform speed of an object is self-explanatory of the fact that the force applied on that object is zero. Since Force = Mass x Acceleration and acceleration is nothing but change in speed per unit time. So we can say that:

F = M x (change in speed)/t

Since the vehicle is moving at a uniform speed, the change in speed is zero the wind stopped pushing your car.

F = M x (0)/t

F = 0 Newton

In this experiment, the energy applied by wind is around 50J. To give you some perspective on how small that number is, imagine that it takes around 82000 Joules of energy to make a cup of coffee. Now imagine that for just 50 Joules, you’re getting infinite energy.

Okay, let’s get out of our bubble for a second. Unfortunately3, in the real world, we have friction. And a force of 1N wouldn’t even move your car from an inch; in the real world, where we have friction, it’d take about 7000X more force just to overcome the frictional force.

Ideal, Physical, Real

You need zero force to maintain a uniform velocity in an ideal world. A moving object will keep moving at the same velocity unless a force is applied to stop it4. Now remember this, an object moving at uniform velocity is still making progress, it is changing position with time. 

In the physical world, you need to apply a force all the time to move at a uniform velocity. And to accelerate, i.e., to increase your speed with time, you need to increase the force as well.

However, here’s something that I’ve discovered recently. Reality has an additional dimension of friction. The friction of reality is so intense that it takes a constant force even to keep things the way they are. Things rot when left unattended.

Let’s understand the application of this mental model on various aspects of human life on a micro and macro scale.

The Eternal Loop of Struggle

If you are fit and healthy right now, it will take you consistent effort to stay that way. You cannot just work out one day and stay healthy forever.

You will need to hit the gym again the next day and the next day and the next day; else, your body will start to degenerate. It will begin to gain fat, your endurance level will start to fall, and you will become prone to a heart attack.

In the ideal world, inaction can cause progress.

In the real world, inaction keeps the object where it is.

However, in the matrix of reality, inactivity leads to degeneration. Things fall apart if they stop moving.

This is why it is so hard to get along with new habits — because you are new to the friction of that habit. Your mind/body takes time to get used to it.

That’s why it takes anywhere from 18 to 254 days for a person to form a new habit and an average of 66 days for a new behavior to become automatic.

Don’t let the friction of initial days hold you back. It’ll get easier. Nobody comes trained out of their mother’s womb, except, of course, if you are Abhimanyu.

This mental model is applicable to all facets of life, whether it’s personal finance, your mental health, or your relationship with others.

Now let’s see how it makes sense in the context of the growth of nations.

Why Some Countries Progress Faster Than Others

Before we discuss the macroeconomics of nations, let’s understand a few things about the force of friction.

The frictional force that a body experiences while moving over another object is directly proportional to:

• the relative roughness between the two surfaces.

• the weight of the moving body or, in more technical terms, the normal reaction5.

When these two things are clear, it’s no rocket science to understand that the force of friction a vehicle experiences increases as the number of passengers increase.

Now let’s keep this insight with you while I share snippets from this article on World Economic Forum’s website. From these excerpts, we will understand why some countries develop faster than others.

A hundred years ago, Argentina was amongst the seven wealthiest nations in the world but now ranks 43rd in terms of real per capita income. In 1950, Ghana’s per capita income was higher than that of South Korea; now, South Korean people are more than 11 times wealthier than the citizens of Ghana.

After reading a few articles and research papers by credible scholars, I have observed the same argument repeatedly. Countries that progress faster are able to pull that off because of generalized divergence i.e. they have a rich diversity of actively pursued professions.

Countries that have a greater variety of capabilities can make more diverse and complex goods, just as a Scrabble player who has more letters can generate more and longer words.

Think of different professions as different vehicles; the more people sit in a car, the slower it gets. And if all the people or a vast majority of them decide to sit in a very few cars, at one point they will stop moving. Some cars will move while others won’t. This creates a traffic jam — now nobody moves.

To make sure that all the vehicles are moving at their optimum speed and capacity, we need a balanced distribution of our citizens in those vehicles.

What Causes This Friction?

Humans are not creatures of rationale; we are emotional beings driven by our primate desires. We behave in complex and illogical ways. So when it comes to your individual lives, the additional layer of friction is created by your emotions and archetypes.

Some habits are hard to pursue because others are more leisurely, and humans are of rest and comfort in their natural state. Then there is the distraction of status and FOMO as well, everyone’s watching Witcher S2, and here you are missing out on it while reading this blog.

There are many aspects of human behavior that create this additional layer of friction. The list is truly endless.

When it comes to societies and networks of individuals, the friction is created merely by the existence of that network. In a year-old article, I shared how interconnected systems are more complex and unpredictable than others. 

In an interconnected system, things that happen in your life matter a lot on the decisions of those around you. The control of your life is not entirely in your hand. But the only thing you can do to reduce this friction is to act as if you are.

Appreciate your patience and dedication to reading this long essay. I am glad that you made it to the end. Hope you learned something new that will equip you to be more persistent when the friction of reality is unbearable.

I have been running this newsletter for the last seventeen months, sharing the bits and pieces of my intellect with thousands of readers every week. If you want to support this newsletter, buy me a coffee.

Buy me a coffee

I do that occasionally with the people I interact with. As a keen observer of my environment, I can’t resist. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t do that wishing to be correct and claiming myself to be a mind-reader of some sort.

I observe people and come up with a bunch of theories about their personalities and behavior. But before putting them out in the world, I test them for their validity. After that, I keep the ones that work and discard those that don’t.

I have written about this habit in extensive detail in my blog — Creating Mental Models — one of the most successful pieces I have ever written in this newsletter.

Now I know what you are looking for. The assumption that I made about you guys was that you have a large appetite for contrarian ideas — Ideas that challenge mainstream narratives, that are offensive for the intolerants, that put a big question mark on the face of those who never dare to question the popular ideas.

As a writer, cultivating and promoting this spirit of skepticism has been one of the most outstanding achievements of this newsletter. I am sharing this small list of books, blogs, and podcasts that the mainstream hates to entertain to celebrate the new year.

New year, new ideas.

1. I am below average

Ninety-six percent of cancer patients claim to be in better health than the average cancer patient.

Ninety-four percent of professors say they are better-than-average teachers.

Ninety percent of students think they are more intelligent than the average student.

Ninety-three percent of drivers say they are safer-than-average drivers.

I don’t think you’re blind to observing the paradoxical nature of these statements.

It’s easy to assume that you’re better than the average population regarding a few specific things. But the chances are that you’re not. Even if you are, it pays to believe that you aren’t because that belief pushes you forward to learn and be more open to helpful information when it strikes you.

I am below average

2. Tyranny of Time

There are two types of people in this world — one who shit once a day, precisely at 8 AM, and the second who take their dump whenever they want to.

One who is a slave of mechanical ticks and clicks, and the other who’s a fucking hippie.

Now, these are two extremes, and I’m not a Gastroenterologist (yes, I Googled it) to objectively claim which of the above-mentioned defecation routine is more healthy.

The gist of this insightful essay is that clocks are suitable for meetings and deadlines, but your body has a rhythm of its own, and not everything about it deserves to be controlled at the whims of your clock.

You can read it here.

Tyranny of Time

3. Psychology’s Replication Crisis

I started this newsletter as a journey to explore human psychology and behavior. But my brain is a pervert for ideas.

And that’s how I started to flirt with a bunch of different topics—from economics to science to business management and a lot more.

My respect for and attention to psychology diluted as it became a part of the mainstream with time. That’s when I came across this article.

Psychology is going through a crisis. Most of the studies conducted in the past don’t hold true when replicated today: same theories, same parameters, same measurement criteria, different results.

This puts a big question mark on whether we should even consider psychology a form of science as most theories are not objectively true.

Psychology's Replication Crisis

4. 12 rules for life

It’s a sad sight that nihilism has become mainstream these days. Something that used to be on the extremes is now in the middle, turning us into lazy, irresponsible, and weak individuals.

12 Rules for Life is the most sigma book I’ve read. Jordan Peterson is a Chad, and his words are transformational.

A very few books are capable of doing this, but I am definitely a different person than I used to be when I started reading this book. And as a kid, I would’ve admired the new me.

12 Rules for Life

5. Antifragile

It’d be a surprise if I didn’t include this book in this list. This book challenges the post-modernist narrative that intervention is necessary to improve the effectiveness of specific systems.

Taleb openly criticizes economists and healthcare experts. He shares a lot of case studies where intervention did harm to a system while leaving it alone to endure its randomness was far more effective.

It might seem like that, but Taleb’s argument is not against interventionism. He admits that in a lot of situations, interventions are necessary. What he’s trying to convey is that we should intervene only when it’s required instead of being blind to the upsides of non-interventionism.

To read some of the case studies, he shared in his book; you can read my previous blog — Death of God and the Denial of Antifragility.

Antifragile

6. The Rational Optimist

Bad news spreads like wildfire while good news moves like a fucking snail. The world is obsessed with negativity, with the messages of doom -- Experts flaunt their intelligence by making gritty predictions about the world.

Humans and their self-loathe have become mainstream. The idea that humanity and human society have degraded over time is becoming more popular.

Rational Optimist shares deep historical data to claim that we have made significant progress to make lives better, contrary to what the media makes us believe. This is an excellent book with an in-depth analysis of refreshing ideas.

The Rational Optimist

7. Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science

A few years ago, I struggled to communicate my views about the subjectivity-objectivity argument. Things would have been a lot easier for me if I had read this book.

My argument was that a lot of human behavior that is labeled as social constructs with no logical rationale, in fact, has objective roots. They say: beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder. I tried to argue against that in a thread once.

There are a bunch of such arguments post-modern intellectuals usually quote, where they say that certain things are the way they are because a section of society enforced it upon others. And if things are to be turned the other way, it would make the world a better place. However, there is a reason why those things are like that; there are hidden upsides to them.

Alan Sokal’s book addresses the biased use of lousy science these pseudo-intellectuals do to prove their argument’s validity. Don’t miss out on this one.

Fashionable Nonsense

8. Range

One of the most interesting books I read in 2021. David Epstein’s book talks against the mainstream narrative that glorifies specialization.

With a bunch of anecdotes and evidence, David points out that many geniuses like Federer and Da Vinci were not specialists, rather they were generalists who followed along with the intellectual fetish of curiosity.

The most important takeaway from this book was the mental model of analogical thinking. It states that having knowledge of one system, say engineering, can improve your understanding of some other unrelated system like business or poker.

To read more about this mental model, you can read my blog that I wrote a while ago.

The Thinking Bat Newsletter

Analogical Cognition: Thinking Outside Experience

Throughout the mid-1990s, Intel had resisted providing cheap microprocessors for inexpensive PCs. During a 1997 training seminar, however, Intel’s top management team learned a lesson about the steel industry from Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen…

Read more

6 years ago · 11 likes · Thinking Bat

Range by David Epstien

The good news is that I am over with that phase of everyday exhaustion, ready to put out some more ground-breaking contrarian wisdom.

I hope this 1300+ words essay will satiate your hunger. A small heads up before you start: this one’s going to be a little controversial and might offend a few of you.

With the dawn of modern science, humanity started to lose its faith in God. A lot of things that we believed to be controlled and created by him turned out to have a very sophisticated chain of reasoning.

We used to believe that God is responsible for the sunset and sunrise, but soon we discovered that it is due to a change in the relative position of Earth and the Sun. God was erased out of this picture entirely.

We thought the seeds turn into trees by the grace of God, but after William Beal’s groundbreaking discovery — the result of a 142-year-old experiment — we came to know about Germination. The disbelief in God grew strong.

The biggest blow to God’s existence was Darwin’s contribution to science. The birds, horses, daffodils, and lions were no longer an act of absolute creation but rather a result of gradual progress made on the matrix of random luck.

God is dead, and science killed it. None of us was ready for what happened after that. Everything about human society changed.

The Silent Observer Vs The New God

The more science progressed, the more we became doubtful of God’s contribution to the functioning of this world. From the helmsman of this world, he turned merely into a silent observer.

With the progress in medicine and anatomy, we learned to cure the incurable.

With the advent of fire extinguishers, we learned to control the uncontrollable.

With the invention of spacecraft, we learned to explore the unfathomable.

Name one species on this planet that can even think of achieving any of it.

The biggest takeaway from all this scientific progress? — Humans have more control over the world than God himself. With time we figured out that the problems he seemed to be agnostic about were not that difficult to solve.

Modernity made man the new God.

The Paradox of Power

The more you profit from something, the more you try to control it, consequently disturbing the natural harmony it was functioning in to produce those profitable results.

You must have heard the story about the goose that laid golden eggs. It’s a classic example of the paradox of power.

In case of dictatorships, revolution by the oppressed citizens kickstarts the paradox of power.

The lesson is simple — the more you try to control certain things, the less profitable/resourceful they become. Not all things, but at least a few of them.

For instance, human-made fertilizers and pesticides increased the crop yield by hundred times. Not only that, they made the soil even better for the subsequent crops.

Looking at this example and many other facets of life, it is assumed that intervention improves the productivity and health of all systems. But we will discover later in this essay that intervention is not always helpful.

Powerless Gods

Science and technology made it easier for us to control the world we live in.

Quite paradoxically, this gain of power, this realization of the fact that humans can fix everything, made it easy for the authoritarian powers to get a foothold.

The delusion of control turned us into blind fools, making us believe everything in the name of academic credibility.

You might think that science empowered us. But for the most part, it made them ignorant. Why bother reading a research paper that's behind a paywall when you can trust that news article which cited it.

The truth is that it's very easy to manipulate scientific studies to create favorable results. Media publishes research that gets more jaws gaping. That's something I've discussed at great lengths in one of my previous essays— The Four Horsemen of Science.

You cannot trust something just because a science paper said so. You will have to do your own research. Most people don’t do that. They never gain the courage to question the mainstream narratives. Science didn’t make man the new God, man made Science the new God.

In the coming sections, we will take a look at instances of negative intervention in certain systems. How our belief in modernity and science made us ignorant to some of the most apparent side-effects of their existence.

The Lies of Medical Science

When you visit a doctor, you usually agree to his diagnosis.

You take the diet plan, buy the prescribed medicines, and avoid doing things he asks you not to do.

Even if you don't do any of them, you believe that his advice is constructive. You rarely question and doubt him.

Why?

Because he is an expert and has a medical degree.

Progress in medical science indeed increased the life expectancy rate. It helped us fight so many deadly infections and viruses. We all know that.

What we don't know is that the same healthcare industry is rigged with wide loopholes.

Here's a small snippet taken out from Nassim Taleb's book Antifragile:

Medical error still currently kills between three times (as accepted by doctors) and ten times as many people as car accidents in the United States. It is generally accepted that harm from doctors—not including the risks from hospital germs—accounts for more deaths than any single cancer.

He’s not lying. A study conducted in 2016 suggests that medical errors are now the third leading cause of death in the USA.

He believes that the healthcare industry encourages us to receive overtreatment to reap off as much cash as they could.

According to Taleb, the decision-making process in the medical industry is outdated, as they intervene in medical conditions where they shouldn't— where leaving the system to fix itself on its own would be more helpful.

The story is quite similar when it comes to the Pharmaceutical industry. Tricking us into buying more medicines and selling overpriced drugs.

All of this data begs for the question: can we really trust the healthcare system?

If you're looking for it in Taleb's wisdom, the answer is a big bold NO. He believes that you should consult a doctor only when you have a fatal injury. Your body will take care of itself in most cases.

Let’s jump into another system that was disturbed by our desire to control it.

Traffic Signs

In the Netherlands in 2003, a “counterintuitive traffic engineer” named Hans Monderman proposed removing traffic lights in the interest of what he called shared space.

When his theory was put to the test, the results were extraordinary, and they led to a series of “red-light-removal schemes” across Europe and America.

Here is an excerpt from an interview of Monderman:

with the observation that, when an electrical failure incapacitated traffic lights, the result was improved flow rather than congestion. As an experiment, he replaced the busiest traffic-light intersection in Drachten, handling 22,000 cars a day, with a traffic circle, an extended cycle path, and a pedestrian area.

In the two years following . . . the number of accidents plummeted to only two, compared with thirty-six crashes in the four years prior. Traffic moves more briskly through the intersection when all drivers know they must be alert and use their common sense, while backups and the road rage associated with them have virtually disappeared.

Monderman likened it to skaters in a crowded ice rink who manage successfully to tailor their movements to those of the other skaters. He also believed that an excess of signage led drivers to take their eyes off the road, and actually contributed to making junctions less safe.

Monderman believed that drivers become more alert and cautious when there is more uncertainty on the road. So basically, intervening with the traffic system made it worse. On the other hand, removing the element of intervention made it more strong.

Final Words

The world is a paradoxical place, efforts to make systems better might not always produce desirable results. Sometimes it’s better to leave them and recover on their own.

The death of God gave us the delusion of control, but under that delusion lies the truth of randomness.

Remember that this essay is not about the healthcare system, road networks, or even science. It’s about chaos. It’s about the things that gain from disorder. It’s about the antifragility of certain systems—those systems can be anything from education to athletics to business and leadership.

The framework is the same, the system you apply to can be anything.

This one to the upsides of chaos.

See you next week.

Appreciate your patience and dedication to reading this long essay. I am glad that you made it to the end. Hope you learned something new that will equip you to make better decisions in your business and life.

I have been running this newsletter for the last thirteen months, sharing the bits and pieces of my intellect with thousands of readers every month. If you want to support this newsletter, buy me a coffee.

She, our new teacher, was the epitome of perfection. Extremely well-spoken, punctual, specific, and rigid. A stoic, no-nonsense teacher who took her job very seriously.

She was the kind of person that you can only admire from a distance but never feel a sense of connection.

The day I developed a crush on her, was the day I realized that she shares the same world with me, the day her façade of perfection sublimated.

That day she stubbed her toe on a table and yelled at it as if it was a living and breathing object. It was pretty funny to see her react that way, however, she was quite embarrassed by herself.

Those few moments literally changed my perception of her. It made her a more relatable person.

Apart from being someone having all those admirable qualities, she was now also someone who felt more accessible. Before that moment, she was a part of an entirely different world, a world of perfection, where foul souls like myself would never be allowed.

At that time it struck me as odd to feel that way. She displayed a very clumsy, immature behavior, and that for some weird reason, made me like her even more.

It didn’t become clear to me until recently when I came across the Pratfall Effect.

Let’s talk a bit about it in a little more detail, and understand its implications on business leadership, influencer marketing, and romantic relationships.

What is the Pratfall Effect?

Being a competent person makes you more resourceful. So, it is fair to assume that humans are more attracted to competent individuals. It is also fair to conclude that as the graph of their competence leaps, they will become more attractive.

However, it’s not entirely true. Super-competent people, the ones that are competent on all dimensions of life, can be intimidating as well. Being in their company can make you feel like a loser and you might start to feel you are undeserving to be with them. So your attraction toward people might not increase as they become more competent.

That’s what the pratfall effect is all about. It states that your interpersonal appeal changes after an individual make a mistake depending on the individual’s perceived competence.

Notice that I’ve used the word ‘perceived’ because what might appear to you as competence might be an attempt to fool you. It is nearly impossible for a person to be adept in all aspects of life, but a lot of people try to camouflage themselves under the cloak of perfection.

To sum it up, here’s what the researchers of the University of Texas concluded in a study conducted in 19661:

An experiment was performed which demonstrated that the attractiveness of a superior person is enhanced if he commits a clumsy blunder; the same blunder tends to decrease the the attractiveness of a mediocre person. We predicted these results by conjecturing that a superior person may be viewed as superhuman and, therefore, distant; a blunder tends to. humanize him and, consequently, increases his attractiveness.

Implications of Pratfall Effect in the real world

In Relationships

There’s an episode in the sitcom, Parks, and Recreation, where one of the protagonists, Ann Perkins, gets pregnant. She was experiencing a lot of physiological problems that most women go through during this time. Her husband, being an ideal partner, was extremely careful with her. He tried his best to solve those problems.

However, instead of comforting her, his honest and warm efforts annoyed Ann. While talking to her friends, she said that she just wants him to be with her and acknowledge her problems, instead of always trying to solve them2.

It didn’t make much sense to me then, but now while writing about the Pratfall effect, I think it was a very obvious reaction on her part3.

The point is that we think we deserve someone only when we are the perfect version of ourselves, especially men. However, that’s not true, your flaws make you more humane and accessible. Being flawless is intimidating. And no one wants to be in a relationship with an intimidating person.

In the Creator Economy

Creators like Paras Chopra etc share more intellectually rich information than a lot of mainstream creators. Yet, more people follow the latter than him. Why? Because he appears to be too perfect4 and perfect is boring. With his tweets about random facts and mental models, you fail to relate with him.

The only time he felt relatable was when he shared his massive pile of books concerned about his overspending habits.

Most successful creators5 on social media are flawed to their core, and they don’t shy away from sharing or displaying those flaws.

The lesson here is that if you want to nail it as a content creator, try to reflect an intellectual persona, or whatever talent you have, but don’t hide your imperfections. The former attracts more followers, that latter helps you with retention.

In Business Leadership

To create a positive culture in your company, make sure that you as a manager occasionally share your imperfect side. It’s a super-easy way to increase your employee retention rate.

Doing this will also help the employees to feel more connected to you and your company, and they might even sacrifice the higher-paying job offers just for the culture you have created.

Just make sure, that you are not doing it quite often, or else they will start to perceive you as an incompetent leader, and all your subsequent mistakes will make them dislike you even more.

I appreciate your patience and dedication to reading this essay. I am glad that you made it to the end. I hope you learned something new that will equip you with time-tested mental tools for making better decisions in your business and relationships.

I have been running this newsletter for the last thirteen months, sharing the bits and pieces of my intellect with thousands of readers every month. If you want to support this newsletter, buy me a coffee.

buy me a coffee

More than having a large audience, I want a sustainable group of the right people. People who get something out of these weekly essays. If you know someone who fits the bill, feel free to share my work with them. If you are new here and like what you just read, then by all means subscribe.

Subscribe now

To which she responded with this statement —

“nothing is real in this world, your name is a gibberish of random symbols and yet you respond to it every time someone calls you by it.”

Makes sense. She’s right. My name is unreal, the language we speak is unreal, the songs we sing are unreal, it’s all just noise. Language is just a combination of weird noises restricted by some made-up rules (grammar) that we blindly abide by. They are not objective facts that all of us can agree upon the way we can about the numerical value of pi and the speed of light.

If someone tells you that the value of pi is 2.5, you are right to point out their inaccuracy. You cannot do that if you have a disagreement with someone whether the thing you rest your head on is a pillow or an oreiller.

However, there is a fine distinction between the unreal things we discussed and astrology. The distinction of utility. Your name and the language we speak serve a purpose that is far more superior than that of astrology1.

It won’t make difference to this world if the practice of astrology magically disappears tomorrow. The world would be pretty much the same place. But it is difficult to conclude the same for a world where nobody has a name. It will be absolute chaos.

Your Rights Are Unreal

John Locke said that irrespective of the political recognition granted to the individuals by the state, they possess certain natural rights. Locke argued that natural rights flowed from natural law.

However, no other species on this planet seems to be concerned about the human rights of their individuals.

Tear open a human body and you will find a liver, two lungs, small and large intestines, a stomach, and a bunch of other organs. What you won’t find are the human rights Locke mentioned.

The entire Judicial System of your country is unreal, it doesn’t exist in nature. Your national constitution—the most important book for the entire population of your country—is just a collection of made-up laws to govern you. It’s not real, yet the utility it serves is what keeps your state in order.

Mental Model of Utility

As a conclusion to this essay, I would like to share a personal mental model with you. I use it quite often in my conversations about social constructs. While analyzing social conventions and ceremonies, instead of arguing whether they make sense or not, focus on the utility they serve. A lavish wedding ceremony with 100+ guests might not make sense from a financial pov, but it creates a sunk-cost bias2. By throwing a grand party in the presence of a large group of people you establish a substantially rigid social commitment. So when chaos falls upon your relationship, instead of running away from it, you will try to fix things.

Also, it’s a great chance for old friends to get in touch again. And the food’s great, so can’t complain. 🙃

The real question, however, is that whether the utility of lavish weddings deserves that amount of resource allocation. Think. Let me know in the comments.

We can discuss weddings some other day, so let’s get back to the main point.

The gist of this section is that you need to get over your obsession with real and unreal, rational and irrational. Change your perspective and think in terms of utility.

I turned 30 last week1 and a friend asked me if I'd figured out any life advice in the past decade worth passing on. I'm somewhat hesitant to publish this because I think these lists usually seem hollow, but here is a cleaned-up version of my answer:

1. Never put your family, friends, or significant other low on your priority list.  Prefer a handful of truly close friends to a hundred acquaintances. Don’t lose touch with old friends. Occasionally stay up until the sun rises talking to people. Have parties.

2. Life is not a dress rehearsal—this is probably it. Make it count. Time is extremely limited and goes by fast. Do what makes you happy and fulfilled—few people get remembered hundreds of years after they die anyway.  Don’t do stuff that doesn’t make you happy (this happens most often when other people want you to do something). Don’t spend time trying to maintain relationships with people you don’t like, and cut negative people out of your life. Negativity is really bad. Don’t let yourself make excuses for not doing the things you want to do.

3. How to succeed: pick the right thing to do (this is critical and usually ignored), focus, believe in yourself (especially when others tell you it’s not going to work), develop personal connections with people that will help you, learn to identify talented people, and work hard. It’s hard to identify what to work on because original thought is hard.

4. On work: it’s difficult to do a great job on work you don’t care about. And it’s hard to be totally happy/fulfilled in life if you don’t like what you do for your work. Work very hard—a surprising number of people will be offended that you choose to work hard—but not so hard that the rest of your life passes you by. Aim to be the best in the world at whatever you do professionally. Even if you miss, you’ll probably end up in a pretty good place. Figure out your own productivity system—don’t waste time being unorganized, working at suboptimal times, etc. Don’t be afraid to take some career risks, especially early on. Most people pick their career fairly randomly—really think hard about what you like, what fields are going to be successful, and try to talk to people in those fields.

5. On money: Whether or not money can buy happiness, it can buy freedom, and that’s a big deal. Also, lack of money is very stressful. In almost all ways, having enough money so that you don’t stress about paying rent does more to change your wellbeing than having enough money to buy your own jet. Making money is often more fun than spending it, though I personally have never regretted the money I’ve spent on friends, new experiences, saving time, travel, and causes I believe in.

6. Talk to people more. Read more long content and less tweets. Watch less TV.  Spend less time on the Internet.

7. Don’t waste time. Most people waste most of their time, especially in business.

8. Don’t let yourself get pushed around. As Paul Graham once said to me, “People can become formidable, but it’s hard to predict who”.  (There is a big difference between confident and arrogant. Aim for the former, obviously.)

9. Have clear goals for yourself every day, every year, and every decade.

10. However, as valuable as planning is, if a great opportunity comes along you should take it. Don’t be afraid to do something slightly reckless. One of the benefits of working hard is that good opportunities will come along2, but it’s still up to you to jump on them when they do.

11. Go out of your way to be around smart, interesting, ambitious people.3 Work for them and hire them (in fact, one of the most satisfying parts of work is forging deep relationships with really good people). Try to spend time with people who are either among the best in the world at what they do or extremely promising but totally unknown. It really is true that you become an average of the people you spend the most time with.

12. Minimize your own cognitive load from distracting things that don’t really matter. It’s hard to overstate how important this is, and how bad most people are at it. Get rid of distractions in your life. Develop very strong ways to avoid letting crap you don’t like doing pile up and take your mental cycles, especially in your work life.

13. Keep your personal burn rate low. This alone will give you a lot of opportunities in life.

14. Summers are the best.4

15. Don’t worry so much. Things in life are rarely as risky as they seem. Most people are too risk-averse, and so most advice is biased too much towards conservative paths.

16. Ask for what you want.

17. If you think you’re going to regret not doing something, you should probably do it. Regret is the worst, and most people regret far more things they didn’t do than things they did do. When in doubt, kiss the boy/girl.

18. Exercise. Eat well.  Sleep. Get out into nature with some regularity.

19. Go out of your way to help people. Few things in life are as satisfying. Be nice to strangers. Be nice even when it doesn’t matter.

20. Youth is a really great thing. Don’t waste it. In fact, in your 20s, I think it’s ok to take a “Give me financial discipline, but not just yet” attitude. All the money in the world will never get back time that passed you by.

21. Tell your parents you love them more often. Go home and visit as often as you can.

22. This too shall pass.

23. Learn voraciously.

24. Do new things often. This seems to be really important. Not only does doing new things seem to slow down the perception of time, increase happiness, and keep life interesting, but it seems to prevent people from calcifying in the ways that they think. Aim to do something big, new, and risky every year in your personal and professional life.

25. Remember how intensely you loved your boyfriend/girlfriend when you were a teenager? Love him/her that intensely now. Remember how excited and happy you got about stuff as a kid? Get that excited and happy now.

26. Don’t screw people and don’t burn bridges. Pick your battles carefully.

27. Forgive people. 

28. Don’t chase status. Status without substance doesn’t work for long and is unfulfilling.

29. Most things are ok in moderation. Almost nothing is ok in extreme amounts.

30. Existential angst is part of life. It is particularly noticeable around major life events or just after major career milestones. It seems to particularly affect smart, ambitious people. I think one of the reasons some people work so hard is so they don’t have to spend too much time thinking about this. Nothing is wrong with you for feeling this way; you are not alone.

31. Be grateful and keep problems in perspective. Don’t complain too much. Don’t hate other people’s success (but remember that some people will hate your success, and you have to learn to ignore it). 

32. Be a doer, not a talker.

33. Given enough time, it is possible to adjust to almost anything, good or bad.  Humans are remarkable at this.

34. Think for a few seconds before you act. Think for a few minutes if you’re angry.

35. Don’t judge other people too quickly. You never know their whole story and why they did or didn’t do something. Be empathetic.

36. The days are long but the decades are short.

I appreciate your patience and dedication to read this essay. Glad that you made it to the end. I hope you enjoyed these nuggets of wisdom from Sam Altman—the most intellectually sound celebrity of the startup world.

To read the original version of this blogpost, click here.

I have been running this newsletter for the last thirteen months, sharing the bits and pieces of my intellect with thousands of readers every month. If you want to support this newsletter, buy me a coffee.

More than having a large audience, I want a sustainable group of the right people. People who get something out of these weekly essays. If you know someone who fits the bill, feel free to share my work with them. If you are new here and like what you just read, then by all means subscribe.

Subscribe now

Not only do the people but the objects in your vicinity influence your mood, your behavior, your productivity, and your mental state. Let us discuss how they do that.

Shapes and Colors

Every object around you has its own personality—which is related to the color and shape of that object.1

The sharp ones look intimidating, while the round ones look friendly and comforting, squares represent safety and reliability, triangles represent motion and direction.

If you want to know more about the influence of different shapes on human psychology, refer to this article.

Similar to shapes, the colors of objects have their own significance. We all know that they have a direct influence on our emotions, but, surprisingly, they can also enhance the effect of placebos.

For example, red, yellow, and orange pills have a stimulant effect, while blue and green are lead to a tranquilizing effect.

Not only do colors have psychological effects on an individual level, but they have also been used for the collective good of society.

In 2000, the city of Glasgow installed blue street lighting in a few neighborhoods and subsequently reported the anecdotal finding of reduced crime and suicide rates in these areas.

The key takeaway is that shape and color of objects influence your mood and behavior in ways that you cannot even imagine. The same objects in your room that you casually ignore might be making you more depressed.

Objects fill up the world to be half of your reality. Even though we interact with them every time, we never sit and reflect on the objects we spend most of our time with. Let’s do that today!

Introspecting the Material World

Most of the time when our self-help influencers talk about introspection, it is only centered around introspecting the emotional fluctuations caused by other human beings. However, I believe that it falls short to help you analyze your emotional state in its entirety.

The state of environment you are kept in—excluding the human element—has a deep impact on your emotional state at that time. Something that the interior designers will agree with. Their entire work is focused on optimizing the inside of your house to be more psychologically pleasing. Not only do they consider what your eyes experience, but they are also concerned about sensations your nose experiences. This is why the best part of going to a Starbucks is the aromatic smell of coffee floating in the air.

Here’s an interesting snippet—that underlines the importance of introspection of objects around you—from Venkatesh Rao’s super-awesome book Tempo:2

Suppose I believe being calm and relaxed at work is good for me, and that having plants makes me more relaxed. So I keep a plant on my desk as an externalization of my mental model about calmness at work.

Now imagine a successor inherits my desk and potted plant. He has no opinion on plants, and keeps the plant as default decision, watering it occasionally. Despite himself, he finds that he feels calmer and likes the feeling. If he is introspective, he might infer and adopt the same beliefs: being calm and relaxed at work is good for me, and that having plants makes me more relaxed.

Now imagine a successor inherits my desk and potted plant. He has no opinion on plants, and keeps the plant as default decision, watering it occasionally. Despite himself, he finds that he feels calmer and likes the feeling. If he is introspective, he might infer and adopt the same beliefs: being calm and relaxed at work is good for me, and that having plants makes me more relaxed.

With an introspective mind, you can optimize your environment to improve the efficiency and the quality of your work.

Most Important Place in Your Life

You cannot optimize every environment you interact with, but you can start with the ones that you come across most frequently i.e. your room.

Here comes the Jordan Peterson inside of me:

You spend most of your time in your room, by that logic you should consider it to be the most important place in your life. Your room is the physical manifestation of your psychological state—declutter it and your mind will clean up.

You and your room are bound in a closed-loop relationship. You both take feedback from each other and externalize those feedbacks.

This implies that if you’re emotionally disturbed then your room is going to get untidy; also if your room is untidy, it is going to harm your emotional stability. Look around and fix what you can.

Every next elemental idea is related to the previous one. The natural leaning of biased human thinking is to treat LT as a straight chain of elemental axioms. However, the most polished arguments are formulated when LT is treated as a branch of inter-connected ideas.

To get a better understanding of all these concepts let's consider a stupid conclusion I came up with while brainstorming for this essay.

Absurdity Explained

I make an argument that an increased sales of regular-use footwear is a bad sign for for the pharma industry. At first it sounds like an absurd statement devoid of logic. Pause for a moment and try to come up with your explanation.

Here’s how I used LT to come up with that conclusion:

• Increased sales of regular wear footwear indicates that people are frequently changing their footwear that they use daily.

• This means that their footwear are wearing out at a faster rate.

• Which is probably due to the fact that they are using it more often i.e. they are walking or running more often.

• Taking regular walks keeps your brain, bones, and heart healthy.

• If people are more healthy they’d need less drugs.

• The decreased demand of medicinal drugs will lead to less profits for the pharma industry, hence increased sales of regular use footwear is a bad news for pharma.

I am not an expert of either the footwear or the pharma industry, so there might be some loopholes in my argument, which are totally irrelevant to the context of this essay.

The validity of my statements is not the main highlight of the last few statements—even if I’m factually incorrect, I don’t care, and neither should you.

The important thing here is the sequence of these statements, how one follows the other in a logical sequence.

The statements—individually—make absolute sense. What's doubtful is whether they make sense in this system of ideas.

What if there are more reason for why people are buying more footwear? What if it's not that people are taking longer walks but rather something else that is beyond the horizons of our comprehension?

Branched logistical thinking allows us to consider all the alternate reasons that caused a particular event to occur.

Individual thoughts lose their identity in a dense network of connected thoughts. It is not important whether these ideas make sense individually, what matters is whether they make sense as a part of a particular system.

Weightlifting techniques are of no use in a chess tournament. It doesn't means that the former is factually incorrect, it is just contextually irrelevant.

To sum it up, these are the two things that you have to keep in mind while playing with LT:

1. Individual thoughts should be kept close to truth.

2. Secondly, the first one is not sufficient in itself, all the ideas should also make sense in their respective positions as a part of the system.

Unexplained Opinions

Even though there is no space for subjective opinions in logistical thinking, you can use it to explain, understand and test your opinions.

You might have your reasons to believe in something, with the help of LT you can create a network of those reasons on the framework of truth. The first and last statements may not make sense together, but the network of thoughts between them should.

Logistical thinking is a living and breathing mental tool analogous to a child’s puzzle of connecting the dots. The entire picture being your theory, while the dots are the underlying ideas that connect with each other to make your theory look convincing.

Just make sure that your dots are where you see them, and not where you want them to see, or else you will mess up the final image. 😉

I appreciate your patience and dedication to read this essay. I am glad that you made it to the end. I hope you learned something new that will equip you with time-tested mental tools for making better decisions in your life.

I have been running this newsletter for the last thirteen months, sharing the bits and pieces of my intellect with thousands of readers every month. If you want to support this newsletter, buy me a coffee.

More than having a large audience, I want a sustainable group of the right people. People who get something out of these weekly essays. If you know someone who fits the bill, feel free to share my work with them. If you are new here and like what you just read, then by all means subscribe.