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How to Think About Your Life’s Work

Being a doctor is not the way it’s portrayed on House. Being a lawyer is not the way it’s portrayed on Suits. Being a gangster is not the way it’s portrayed on The Sopranos. It’s hard to get an accurate picture of most jobs from stories and narratives.

Action Bias: Why Waiting and Watching Is Torture

Do Something Syndrome is the outcome of our tendency to always do something by intervening when, in fact things should be left as they are. This bias is a mix of a lack of patience and a strong desire to intervene without thinking, or considering the possibility of a downside.

The Benjamin Franklin Effect: Why It’s Better to Ask For a Favour Than Do One

He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another, than he whom you yourself have obliged. The better way to build rapport is to ask for a favour rather than doing one.

Seneca: “Take Some of Your Own Time For Yourself Too”

We often get more engrossed in the balance-sheet of a business than that of our own life. We convince ourselves that we’ll live for ourselves later, after we have accomplished what we have set out to do.

Externalities: Handling Things That Are Out of Your Control

An externality is something that affects us without us agreeing to it. Externalities can be both positive and negative. Understanding the types of externalities and how they impact your life can help you improve your decision making, and how you interact with the world.

The Minimum Validation Principle: How to Stay Motivated in Life and Business

When you create something new, you put immense pressure upon yourself to make it grow. Growth usually means more sales, more customers, more subscribers, etc. It makes sense to grow a venture. But this mentality has major side-effects. It has a strong propensity to make you miserable.

The Ethics of Manipulation

Reid Hoffman says that he doesn’t invest in businesses that don’t exploit one of the Seven Deadly Sins. But when it comes to building a company, you also gotta ask yourself if your end goal is to make the world a better place, or is it to exploit and cash out.

Inversion: Working Backwards to Solve Problems

Inversion is an interesting way to relook a problem by turning it upside down. It is immensely helpful when you are stuck and there’s no way to move forward. Inversion forces you look at a difficult problem backwards, or from a completely new perspective.

The Psychology of Optimism

Optimists see the world differently. No matter how bleak the outside world is, their mental image is different. In their head, their chances are more favourable than usual. But it’s not all sunshine and rainbow. Optimism may sound like a superpower, but it isn’t without its kryptonite.

Mental Models: The Best Way to Make Better Decisions

What are Mental Models? Why should you use them? How can they help you understand how things work? How can they help you solve problems, and make better decisions?

When Life Gives You Lemons, Make a Stoic Lemonade

Reality is often different from your mental image. And it’s not always easy to deal with. No matter how smart or how cautious you are, reality always finds a way to hit you in the head with a brick. The sooner you beat it to the ground, the sooner you would get rid of anxiety and negative emotions.

3 Lessons from Arnold Schwarzenegger

Arnold Schwarzenegger is not only a successful actor, but also a brilliant strategist and a businessman. Here are three lessons on life and strategy that you can learn from him.

Second-Order Thinking: How to Uncover Hidden Consequences While Making Decisions

First-order consequences often have opposite desirabilities from second-order consequences. This results in big mistakes in decision making. Especially when you are treading in uncharted territories.

Capturing The Value You Create

There is a difference between the value you create and the value you capture. If you only create value you won’t be able to make a living. If you only capture value you’ll go out of business.

A Better Way of Saying, “I Don’t Know”

It’s better to stay quiet than blabber endlessly without any logic or coherence. While this way of thinking definitely helps you grow, it does have some downsides. Downside not in your growth, rather, downside in how others perceive you.

The High-Ground Manoeuvre: A Better Tactic to Justify Your Position

“Koi desh perfect nahi hota. Use perfect banana padta hai.”— Rang De BasantiFlipkart is the Indian version of Amazon. Back in 2014, Flipkart had its first Big Billion Day—its biggest ever sale day on October, 6th. People were thrilled, excited, and exuberant.Unfortunately, the traffic was way more than Flipkart had predicted, and it brought the whole site down. Big Billion Day lasted

Two Ways to Win. No Way to Lose.

Back when I was in college, I was fascinated by the billionaire college dropouts like Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs.I was foolish enough to contemplate dropping out of college myself. I actually thought that it would be cool. Tomorrow when I start a business and it becomes successful, it would feel damn good to say that I’m a successful college dropout.It

A Short Introduction to Behavioural Philosophy

“Take the situation in which you have a lot to lose and little to gain. If an additional quantity of wealth, say, a thousand Phoenician shekels, would not benefit you, but you would feel great harm from the loss of an equivalent amount, you have an asymmetry. And it is not a good asymmetry: you are fragile.”— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile“But while he

Understanding Coca-Cola’s Brand Strategy Using Pavlovian Conditioning

In 1897, the Russian scientist Ivan Pavlov was studying the digestive system of dogs when he observed that a stimulus unrelated to food made the dogs salivate.In one experiment he rang a bell just before giving food to the dog. He repeated this several times until the dog salivated at the sound of the bell alone.No sight or smell of food was

Why Punishments Don’t Always Work

The job of a reward is to promote certain behaviour. But, what if we wish to discourage certain behaviour? We’ve talked about positive reinforcements-the carrot. But, what about the stick?We had touched upon the importance of disincentivising undesirable behaviour before. Here we discuss the various methods, and their implications. Let’s start with Punishments.Punishments are responses that decrease our likelihood to

How to Design Effective Reward Systems

Rewards reinforce desired behaviour. Rewarding your dog makes him learn new tricks faster. Rewarding school kids for good grades motivates them to study harder.But rewards have to be varied in quantity and intervals to be truly effective. BF Skinner’s experiments revealed that a hungry pigeon would tap a lever 12,000 times an hour while being rewarded on average for only every

Operant Conditioning: How to Incentivise and Reinforce Desired Behaviour

In the 1920s, B.F. Skinner conducted a series of experiments to study how rewards and punishments affect our behaviour.Skinner, unlike his contemporaries, refused to hypothesise about what happened inside the minds of people and animals, and preferred to focus on what we can observe. He believed more in objective measurements, such as how much people ate, and less about subjective matters such

Why Compensation Systems Fail

When Hanoi was under French colonial rule, they discovered that their villages had a rat problem. So the regime created a bounty program that paid a reward for each rat killed.To get paid, people would provide a severed rat tail and get a little cash. Colonial officials, however, began noticing rats in Hanoi with no tails.The Vietnamese rat catchers would capture rats,

How Disincentivising Bad Behaviour Reduces Corruption

“If a builder builds a house and the house collapses and causes the death of the owner of the house-the builder shall be put to death. If it causes the death of the son of the owner of the house, a son of that builder shall be put to death. If it causes the death of a slave of the owner of the house-he

A Scientific Way to Call BS on Someone’s Argument

Predicting the past a pseudo-intellectual’s job. It doesn’t matter if you are right or wrong in your prediction, because there’s no way to empirically verify your claim.