@coffeeandjunk — notes on structured thinking and decision making

How to Win Arguments with Honesty

Honesty and truthfulness are not the same thing. Being honest means not telling lies. Being truthful means actively making the full matter known.

Societal Mass: Why Harmful Things Stay On

Despite being absolved of all responsibility, absinthe was outlawed and remains unobtainable in many liquor stores, whereas lead, known to be poisonous for over 2000 years is still being readily used. Why?

Metalearning: The Essential First Step of Learning That Nobody Taught You

Metalearning is the process of figuring out how to learn a particular subject based on how knowledge is structured and organised. If learning was a building, metalearning helps you figure out how to reach the top floor—whether to take the stairs, or the elevator, or scale the walls like Spider-Man.

You Are More Resilient than You Think

If we were asked how we would feel if we lost our job, or the person we love, we would feel devastated, and not without good reason. But the truth is that we blow it out of proportions when we imagine the aftermath of a traumatic event. We are surprisingly more resilient than we think.

Thought Experiments

Thought Experiments help us engage in deliberate reasoning by exploring various circumstances, and predict their implications without conducting any real life experiments. Mastering thought experiments can help us stretch our minds by confronting difficult questions.

Optionality: When More is Merrier

When you have options, you don’t have to care about the average outcome—only the favourable outcomes. Because your wins far outweigh your losses. You get a larger payoff when you are right, which also makes it unnecessary to be right too often.

The Adjacent Possible: When Innovation is Just Waiting to Happen

Had Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim started YouTube in 1995 instead of 2005, would it have been equally successful? Why did Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine prove to be such a short-term dead end, whereas his Difference Engine went into mass production only a couple of decades later?

Private v Public Decisions

A private decision is something that affects only you. A public decision, on the other hand, affects others as well—who don’t take part in the decision-making process. Therefore, how you approach them are completely different.

Invisible Rules

Our thoughts and decisions have a set of taken-for-granted assumptions behind them. These are the Invisible Rules that guide us. Unless we uncover them, it’s almost impossible to understand what’s driving our decisions, and what are the flaws, if any, in our logic and thinking.

Make Your Failures Insignificant

Most of us aren’t willing to fail. We may understand intellectually that we’ll fail once in a while if we are trying something new, but most of us aren’t ready to take that punch to the gut. The paradox of success is that everybody wants to be successful, but nobody wants to fail to get there.

Chasing Uncertainty

The future is uncertain. No matter what we think or believe, we have no control over it. Uncertainty will be a factor in everything we undertake. It makes no sense to try to guess it. The best we can do is to learn to control what we can, i.e., our thinking, our decision process, and our reactions.

Find Gems Hidden in Plain Sight

We tend to give experts infallible statuses. We take their ideas at face value without ever challenging them. On the other hand, we dismiss ideas from non-experts without enough consideration. This is wrong!

What it Takes to be a Contrarian

When you take a position the market disagrees with, or when you build upon an idea that everyone says is ridiculous, it pays off tremendously. Being a contrarian has its benefits. The question is, how do you become one?

What Games are You Playing?

We call everyone who invests money “investors” like they are cricket players. When you realise how wrong that notion is, you see how vital it is to identify what game you’re playing.

Are You Asking The Right Questions?

We form opinions even if we don’t consciously think about them, albeit these are unstructured and ambiguous. But asking the right questions can help you uncover these automatic thoughts, and bring clarity in your thinking.

Constraints: How to Bend Space And Time to Solve Problems Creatively

The biggest hurdle any creative has to overcome is starting out. To overcome this, we need constraints. But arbitrary constraints—that are set for the sake of setting constraints—are useless. We have to learn how to choose the appropriate constraint based on the creative goals we are pursuing.

Work Rules

A set of guidelines to build a work culture that promotes calm and peace over stress and anxiety.

Know Your Competition

Whenever there’s a finite resource, there’s competition. It’s not important to lose your sleep over that, but it would be foolish to ignore it. Knowing where you are standing is important, because that helps you find leverage, and build a specific strategy.

Anchor Mechanics: A Framework to Ruthlessly Prioritise Creativity Over Fixed Plans

While pursuing creative endeavours, it’s impossible to follow any fixed plan—be it while writing an essay, or building a startup. Creatives endeavours are bound to be chaotic. There’s a lot of figuring out to be done on the way.

Why Work Doesn’t Look Like Work

If you are a knowledge worker, your biggest job is thinking. But if all day all night you are busy being busy, ‘thinking’ takes a backseat, and you end up doing a lot of things without getting anything done. You don’t waste the hours, but you waste the years.

The 85% Rule: Why You Should Not Do Your Best

“Do your best and forget about the rest” is good advice. It prevents you from the anxiety of results, but that’s half of the problem. The other half of the problem is the continuous pressure while performing at full-throttle. Truth is, you don’t produce your best work when you give your 100%.

Compound Thinking: How to Make Time Work For You

When we plan to improve ourselves or grow a business, we pursue dramatic changes like, run 10 km everyday, or grow 10x a month. It’s not sustainable. There’s a better approach.

Demand-Side Sales: Everybody Wants to Buy, But Nobody Wants to be Sold to

The art of selling has got a bad rap. For some reason, it feels icky. Like an unnatural push to get people to buy what you’re offering. Mostly because we’ve got the whole narrative of selling backwards.

Giving Advice is Not Giving Solutions

On an average, I get asked at least 10 times a day for some kind of advice related to business, management, relationship, productivity, negotiation, mental health, life, etc. To make sure I don’t do a sloppy job, I’ve devised a framework to give advice that I’ve polished over the years.

Alternative Histories: How to Judge The Quality of a Decision

In the real world, it’s very hard to know if a [decision is correct] even if the outcome is positive. Due to randomness, the positive outcome might just be a fluke. If you flip a coin to make an investment decision, not matter how much money you make, it’s still a bad decision.