Abhishek Chakraborty

Post-traumatic Growth

I believe everyone — without exception — will eventually face an irreversible tragedy they did not expect — and they didn’t prepare for it specifically because they did not expect it. While there’s no way to avoid it, we can, at the very least, mentally prepare for what is about to come.

The Politics of Victimhood

The instinct to think like a herd has been prevalent in human beings since prehistoric times. Even a smalltime politician knows that if they can tap into this sentiment, they would become massively popular within the group.

Why We Fool Ourselves

We lie to ourselves through our teeth. Our minds habitually distort (or ignore) critical information. We routinely engage in what we call wishful thinking, we bury our heads in the sand, and once in a while we drink our own Kool-Aid. Is there any reason for that from an evolutionary point of view?

Probability is Not Destiny

If a hundred people eat a chicken burger every day from the local eatery, over the course of a lifetime one of them will get colon cancer (in addition to the five who would have gotten it regardless). That’s not a risk you may want to take, but it’s not a death sentence for sure.

That One Quality of a Good Decision Maker

A startup that has been in business for about two years, and that is growing pretty well, has just been offered a billion dollars. The twenty-something founder, after considering the offer long and hard, refuses to pass.

All Things Don’t Scale

Every strategy, rule, and principle has an acceptable size where things work well, but break when we try to scale them into a different size or speed. There are no human-sized hamsters for a reason.

The Problem is Not the Problem

A lot of us waste our time worrying about specific problems — how to deliver a project, how to get funding, how to crack an interview — whereas the real problem is we don’t know how to think about the problem correctly.

Strong Opinions Weakly Held

This is a great principle to move forward despite uncertainty. But the problem arises when bad agents in a group abuse it and turn strong opinions weakly held into strong opinions assumed to be true until you prove otherwise.