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.
The Novelty-Familiarity Gap: Be Original, Just Not Too Much. Arijit Singh is an extremely popular Bollywood singer. Have you wondered why all his hit songs sound similar? Also, why are all talkshow and sitcom formats so similar? Why are franchises more popular than standalone films?
Conformity: Why Everything Popular is Wrong No matter how rational you are, consensus is hard to resist. Even if you choose to stick to your guns in the beginning, you are bound to capitulate at the end. It’s hard to look like a bozo for a long time, especially when you are the only bozo in the room.
Graceful Context-Switching: The Art & Science of Multitasking Efficiently As much as everybody—starting from productivity gurus, bloggers, YouTubers, authors, advisors, conference speakers, and ballroom attendees—would like to tell us how unproductive it is, multitasking is here to stay.
Don’t be Number One. Be The Only One. People don’t back you because you are right. They back you because you’ve got a backbone. It doesn’t matter if you are right or wrong. What matter is that you have skin in the game. You stand up for what you believe in. You are not number one. What matters is you are a “Category of One”.
Margin of Safety: An Antidote to Risk, Uncertainty, and Ignorance No matter how smart or confident you (think you) are, it would be foolish to assume that everything is in your control, and nothing would go wrong. There are unknown unknowns lurking around. You need a Margin of Safety in your bets. Always!
You Don’t Need More If You Have Enough We are brainwashed by society and culture to assume that more money equals more success, and hence more happiness. How true is that? Is it okay to be content with just enough? How much is just enough? Is the threshold same for everybody?
Effective Mentorship: Why The Best Leaders Don’t Create Followers What is effective mentorship? How can we use rapport, optimism, character development, and loyalty to propel growth in others?
Antilibrary: Why What You Don’t Know is More Valuable Than What You Know An antilibrary—the unread books in our collection—represents what we don’t know. It’s a reminder of our ignorance. It’s a delineation of the fact that even if we pursue knowledge for the next 100 years, we won’t be able to know everything there is to know. In fact, not even a tiny fraction of it.
If You Are Not Writing, You Are Not Thinking No matter which field you belong, few exercises help clarify your thoughts better than writing. Writing is the ultimate test of whether your thoughts make sense, or are merely unstructured feelings. Writing is the best way to question your notions and opinions in order to make them stronger.
Desirable Difficulties: Why Effective Learning is Full of Mental Struggle And Frustration The way schools teach is very archaic. It might have worked fifty years ago these days the jobs that have the most impact require us to be able to solve unexpected problems. School education has got a lot of catching up to do in that respect.
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
