Abhishek Chakraborty (Page 7)

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.