The Stress Response Cycle: The Surprising Science Behind Feeling Better The internet is littered with a lot of content to manage stress, and nobody knows what they are talking about. The basic premise is this: learn to chill. But if it was so easy to chill and relax, there wouldn’t have been to many motivational videos in the first place.
Fermi Problems: How You Think About A Problem Is More Important Than The Solution If a question is asked in a school exam, you know that the answer exists. But in a wicked world, often there’s no clear indication that you are approaching the correct solution. Therefore how you think about solving problems becomes more important than the solutions themselves.
Life Is A Death Sentence: You Can Either Get Busy Living Or Get Busy Dying Life is a death sentence. We all die eventually. It can be sooner or later, but die we will. With that information, you can either get busy living, or get busy dying.
Inside View: Why This Time It’s NOT Going to be Different We focus on a problem by using information that is close at hand. We make predictions based on our unique set of inputs. The more closely we know a problem, the more confident we are. This is wrong!
The Perks of Being A Renaissance Man People who try out different things and dabble with new domains are labelled as "jack of all trades, master of none." It cannot be further from the truth.
Kind v Wicked Domains: Why Sports Champions Aren’t Your Success Gurus Knowledge and experience cannot be generalised. Skillset in one domain isn’t always transferable to another domain, i.e., they are often domain dependent. A great chess player isn’t automatically a great strategist. A good poker player isn’t automatically a good dealmaker.
Where Do I Begin? Before starting to learn something, you hunt for the best book, the best blog post, the best video, the best tutorial, the best online class before you even begin to learn. This method is flawed!
Healthy Friction: When You Want Something, All The Universe Conspires Against You As a kid, whenever I wanted something for myself, my father turned it into a challenge. This was his way of putting a “healthy friction” in my way to test my conviction—do I really want it? How much do I want it? How hard am I willing to work for it?
Living Deliberately: The Importance of Long Walks, Paintings, and Board Games Growing up, I didn't own a computer. That gave me a lot of free time to play with friends, take long walks, go out on bike trips, read books, and do paintings. Unknowingly, I was living deliberately.
Digital Declutter: The Crucial Philosophy Nobody Ever Taught You Technology, despite making our lives efficient, has also added a lot of complexities. It has stolen our time from us. Whether we are doing work or scrolling mindlessly, we are always connected to others, and that’s where lies the problem.
How to Make Money by Building Something Bragworthy Instead of USP, focus on UBP i.e., your Unique Bragworthy Proposition. When you make a product or service that is significantly better and far more efficient, your users brag about it to others thereby becoming your biggest evangelists.
What’s The Most Difficult Leadership Skill? Organisational design, process design, metrics, hiring and firing are all relatively straightforward skills to master. There’s not much ambiguity. But the toughest skill a leader has to master is to manage your own mindset.
The Limits of Our Knowledge: Why Only a Few Know How to Avoid Bad Decisions Awareness of the limited extend of your knowledge is an essential component in decision making, yet it’s easily missed. Crises like the 2008 housing market crash and the Coronavirus pandemic have made it even more obvious just how little we know about the future.
The Inner Scorecard: How Good Do You Want To Be? “The big question about how people behave is whether they’ve got an Inner Scorecard or an Outer Scorecard. It helps if you can be satisfied with an Inner Scorecard.” — Warren Buffett
The Feynman Technique: The Ultimate Guide to Learn Anything The Feynman Technique is a learning concept you can use to understand just about anything. This technique doesn’t let us fool ourselves into thinking we’re masters of a subject when we’re really amateurs.
Richard Feynman On The Difference Between Knowing the Name of Something and Knowing Something Knowing the name of something doesn’t mean you understand it. In order to talk to each other, we have to have words, but we often talk in fact-deficient, obfuscating generalities to cover up our lack of understanding.
25 Common Logical Fallacies That Sway You From Winning Arguments People knowingly and unknowingly engage in bad reasoning—especially in meetings and arguments. Here’s a list of common logical fallacies that would help you arm yourself against false arguments disguised to look good.
Thinking in Bets: Use This Simple Framework to Vet Ideas And Avoid Misbeliefs In the beginning, gossip gave us an advantage over apes, and thereby helped in the progress of Homo Sapiens. Later, gossip helped us form social groups and bands. In practice, gossips are not very distinguishable from facts—that’s where lies the problem.
Mediocristan and Extremistan: The Two Categories of Random Events We misappropriate the correlation between one event for some reason and another event for a different reason. What we need to be concerned is with systemic effects: things that can affect more than one person should they happen.
How to Build a Virtuous Feedback Loop Bad feedback or no feedback at all prevents the exchange of dialogue between members. Most of the things are left unsaid, and this leads to build up of resentment. Despite that, it’s actually hard to build an efficient feedback culture, unless we start understanding the root cause of the problem.
Oversimplification: There Are Hidden Risks Inside Quick And Easy Solutions People often oversimplify things to sound good or make their ideas easily comprehensible. It’s common in professions where they are rewarded for perception, not results. Just because something sounds simple, or just because a lot of people subscribe to it, doesn’t make it right.
The Lindy Effect: Things That Age In Reverse According to the Lindy Effect, while a book that has been a hundred years in print is likely to stay in print another hundred years, a 100 year old human being has only a couple more years to go.
Control What You Can Control. Devise a Strategy For The Rest. There are things that are in our control, and there are things that aren’t. But we often confuse between the two, and repent over spilt milk. Preparing for your upcoming physics exam is completely in your control. But wishing friends and families to live forever is foolish as it isn’t up to you.
Learning Through Thrills and Pleasure The opposite of learning through pain is learning through thrill and pleasure. Doing experiments to find faults in the laws, doing mathematics to find errors in the theorems makes studying a whole new game.
Cargo Cult Science: When You Follow The Instructions But Don’t Understand The Process Cargo Cult Science looks like science, and follows all the basic traits of a scientific experiment. But it blindly copies instructions without understanding them, confuses correlation and causation, and is overtly focussed on outcomes without having clear fundamentals.
