In Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige, we follow the lives of two magicians Robert Angier and Alfred Borden played by Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale respectively.

We get introduced to them as two young men who want to make it big in the showbiz of magic until something goes terribly wrong which causes them to become dreadful rivals of each other.

This ruthless competition causes both of them to become obsessed with each other. What is the secret of the other? What is their trick? Can it be surpassed? Needless to say, this obsession doesn’t bode well for either of them.

The most common advice on competition is two-fold: “competition is for losers” and “compete with your past self.” Both sound great but aren’t always super helpful. Let me elaborate.

Your ultimate goal is to become a monopoly and get out of the rat race. That is what the first adage is all about. This essentially means: don’t play others’ games. Do things differently. Create your own game.

This is good advice but you don’t always have the luxury to create your own rules, especially when you are only trying to get promoted before your (rival) friend.

The second adage is about having a growth mindset. Competing with others can be stressful and in fact degrade our performance. We should instead measure ourselves against our past selves and see how far we have come. This will definitely give us a sense of accomplishment. Also, we should measure ourselves against our future ideal self. This will give us a sense of purpose.

While this is a good textbook advice, human beings aren’t wired that way. We are social animals. While we love to help those in need we also to love to compete and win.

Competition gives us a framework to measure ourselves against others. It tells us where we stand in the world, how far ahead or behind we are from those similar to us.

This sense of competitiveness acts like a stressor that motivates businesses to innovate, athletes to break records, investors to make more money. Competition pushes humanity forward.

But, like all stressors, too much of it is harmful.

While competition helps us measure ourselves against others, if we measure ourselves — our career, our wealth, our status, or success — solely relative to others, we’re plagued by a never-ending feeling of inadequacy, incompetence, and poverty.

Humans tend to do better with acute rather than with chronic stressors. Too much competitiveness results in chronic obsession which is not very different from the plot line of The Prestige. It never ends well.

There will always be someone who is smarter, luckier, more popular, better looking than you. If your only yardstick is comparing with others, nothing you do will ever feel that great.

Chronic obsession leads to chronic depression.

We need a sense of competitiveness, but in the right dose. Too little and we become flaccid. Too much and we don’t feel happy or fulfilled.

We should be motivated by opportunity but not plagued by FOMO.

When a colleague gets a promotion (they don’t deserve), it’s good to be motivated to game the system to your advantage but it’s foolish to obsess over it. And the difference is very subtle.

This is when having an internal yardstick comes handy. While measuring yourself against the world tells you where you stand, measuring yourself against your own standards advises what you should do about it.

Do you really need that promotion or do you just want it because your colleague got it? What is the price you have to pay for that? Is it really worth working 100-hour weeks and squeezing every penny out of your career potential?

If you are doing good according to your standards, you don’t really have to do anything even if everybody around you is becoming more successful or making more money.

In The Prestige, Robert Angier and Alfred Borden had opposite traits. Angier was a showman while Borden was a craftsman. They had ample opportunities to compete and learn from each other. But they obsessed only with beating the other. There was no internal yardstick, only extreme competitiveness.

A person whose sense of competitiveness has gone into an overdrive is blinded by FOMO. They lack the peripheral vision to look at the big picture and make strategic decisions. No matter how good they are, no matter how much they achieve, it’ll never be enough.

The sense of competitiveness is innate in us. But it’s a double-edged sword. While it can help us grow, too much of it can hurt us as well. It’s an animal instinct. We cannot solely depend on it to make decisions. We have to balance it out with an internal yardstick — the human supervision necessarily to control the animal in us.

There is a scene in the movie Sherlock Holmes starring Robert Downey Jr. where Holmes analyses Mary Morstan, Watson’s soon-to-be, at dinner. Even though he hesitates in the beginning, he relents after Mary “insists”.

Holmes deduces some rather embarrassing details about Mary which makes her throw a drink on his face. Even though Holmes said the truth, it “hurt” Mary’s feelings.

There are two fundamental ethical orientations that guide human behaviour: deontological ethics and consequentialist ethics.

Deontological ethics is an absolutist view of ethical standards. The rule is final. It dictates everything. There are no exceptions. For example, it’s never correct to lie, no matter what the circumstances.

Consequentialist ethics, on the other hand, evaluates actions based on consequences. For example, It is at times acceptable to lie to spare someone’s feelings.

Humans operate under both systems. If your wife asks you if she looks overweight, you will utter “no” without flinching, whatever you actually think. On the other hand, all of us consider it morally wrong (under all circumstances) to make sexual advances on children.

There are however no clear rules about when to operate under which system. This fuzziness creates an interesting dilemma.

Say a professor from a reputed Indian university announces she wants to study the relationship between religion and intelligence. Say she decides to see how being a Hindu or a Muslim or a Christian or a Sikh in India affects our intelligence, would you be able to keep a straight face?

Let’s take a bit more extreme example: if a politician criticises a religion, say Islam, and its growing influence in India, isn’t there a good chance you’ll call him Islamophobic?

But if you think about it, people should have the right to criticise a religion in a free society. They should have the right to do so, and of course their criticisms are themselves open to criticism. Isn’t that the essence of freedom of speech and thought?

In fact, the above examples aren’t completely fictitious.

In 2010, Geert Wilders, a Dutch parliamentarian, was charged with a slew of crimes for criticising Islam and its influence in the Netherlands. When Mr. Wilders sought to call on expert witnesses to show that his concerns weren’t unfounded, the response from the prosecutor’s office was: “It is irrelevant whether Wilders’s witnesses might prove Wilders’s observations to be correct. What’s relevant is that his observations are illegal.”

In 2018, British sociologist Noah Carl was investigated and subsequently dismissed from his position as a Toby Jackman Newton Trust Research Fellow at St Edmund’s College, Cambridge after over 500 academics signed a letter refusing to accept his research on race and intelligence.

A deontological view asserts that it is never justified to suppress the truth. A consequentialist perspective asserts that the truth must at times be altered, fudged, or suppressed to avert bad consequences.

A consequentialist perspective forces you to be “politically correct” which is important in a lot of circumstances but is a fundamental problem when it comes to the pursuit of truth.

Any human endeavour rooted in the pursuit of truth must rely on facts and not feelings.

Legal proceedings are a good example. We do not establish the innocence or guilt of defendants using feelings, do we? Instead we rely on a broad range of available facts to make a case. The threshold for establishing guilt is set purposely high: the cumulative evidence must be beyond a reasonable doubt to convict someone.

It is important to be concerned about feelings, especially when it comes to sharing the truth, but this concern should never prevent us from finding the truth!

For example, if gender or race really affects intelligence, it’s natural to be concerned about longterm adverse consequences if this information is shared publically, but this concern shouldn’t stop somebody from pursuing the answer.

Otherwise it’s a slippery slope. If we prohibit somebody from studying the relationship between gender and intelligence today because we are afraid of “public sentiments”, tomorrow we might prohibit them from studying the relationship between lack of education and religious fanaticism, or the authenticity of palmistry, or the effectiveness of gau mutra (cow urine). Soon all we’ll care about is public sentiment (which loosely translates to: make sure people like us) and have clue about what the truth really is.

While it might have been okay if Holmes would have saved Mary from the truth and didn’t hurt her feelings, it wouldn’t be okay if he didn’t catch a criminal because it would hurt somebody’s feelings. The nickname of Bengali detective Byomkesh Bakshi (created by writer Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay) is Satyanweshi or the pursuer of truth, and this isn’t without reason. It’s their job; their only job.

The pursuit of truth should always be deontological. There’s no room for exceptions or feelings or public sentiment or political correctness in the quest for truth.

Feelings are related to humans; truth is related to the universe. The universe doesn’t care about humans. Truth ignores feelings.

Truth is relentless. Truth is ruthless.

I’m a Product Manager. Part of my job is to make product and business decisions. Every month I come up with a gameplan, a list of things we should do. I present them to my team and explain the rationale behind them.

Over the years I’ve faced many a situations where I don’t have a very strong reason behind doing something that I’m recommending. This is a big problem. Here’s why: if I simply say, “Even though I’m suggesting this, I don’t have a strong reason,” others will hear, “Basically, what I’m trying to say is I don’t know what I’m doing.” Needless to say, this won’t help my career.

I also don’t have the option to not come up with a plan, especially when I don’t have any good ideas. A business has to work, a startup has to grow, engineers have to build, and a product needs release. “What do you mean you don’t have a plan?! Planing is your bread and butter.”

Even though I’m giving a work example, I’m sure you can relate to this in umpteen trivial scenarios as well. Why do I like certain YouTubers and dislike others? Why am I watching a particular movie? Why did I decide to cook dinner instead of going out on a weekend?

There’s usually no strong reason behind every tiny decision we make everyday. When someone asks why about something, we try to think of the most plausible-sounding answer that doesn’t raise eyebrows.

I try to do something similar at meetings as well. I come up with a plan and think of plausible-sounding reasons to justify why I think this will work. Even if there isn’t a tonne of logic in coming up with an idea (it might be just “gut feeling” or “hunch” or “intuition”), we need logic to discuss ideas with other human beings. That’s why post-idea rationalisation is important.

I felt like a fraud for a long time. Am I duping my teammates who trust me to make the right decisions? Am I not good enough at my job? I see all these confident faces who know what they are doing and here I am, concocting reasons to justify something I don’t even believe in. Turns out, it isn’t really like that.

You have a lot of conviction when you are either personally attached to something or you have a lot of experience to know what you should be doing. But this isn’t always possible.

There are times when you may not know for sure if this is the right decision. There are times when you don’t know anything about something, and you’re still asked to do something about it. These kinds of situations are in fact more common than others.

What do you do? You do the best you can. You don’t need surety. You don’t need confidence. You don’t need conviction. You need a plan. Not a good plan. Just a plan. Something to work with.

Your plan might break in the face of arguments and that’s okay. It’ll get the ball rolling, and that’s important. If it’s broken, it can be fixed. If it has flaws, it can be improved. Having an okay plan can help you come up with a better plan.

If you think about it, it’s in fact better not to have too much conviction. Otherwise you would be married to your idea and turn a blind eye to all counter arguments. Lack of strong conviction opens you up to others’ points of views instead.

Bottom line is this: it’s important to know what to do, confident or not. It’s important to act, conviction or not. What kills you at the end is rarely action but lack of it. Have a bias towards action. Always! Get started. You’ll figure out the rest on the way.

The Sopranos is my all time favourite show. In Season 1, Episode 8, Tony Soprano’s nephew (in fact cousin) Christopher says, “I don’t know, Tony. It’s like just the fuckin’ regularness of life is too fuckin’ hard for me or something.”

Chris is working on a screenplay about the mafia. He’s been trying to write an arc for his character. He realises his own life has no arc. He is depressed because his life is mundane compared to characters in ‘stories’.

The recurring advice for writing any good story: keep the interesting parts, remove everything else. If you watch a good biopic, you wouldn’t want to know about their boring afternoon visit to the doctor unless it contributed to the screenplay of the movie.

In movies, everything happens for a reason. Chinatown won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. In the movie, each and every scene, every event, every interaction contributes to a cohesive screenplay. Life isn’t like that.

Life isn’t a story. Life has numerous mundane details that don’t contribute to the overall arc. Things happen at random, often without reason. Even though we concoct several reasoning to add a narrative that makes sense to us, there’s often ‘nothing written’ from the start. Logic is an invention of man that is ignored by the universe. God after all is not a screenplay writer.

Without a definitive plot (like that in stories), a clear protagonist, an interesting setup, a serious conflict, a powerful climax, a conclusive resolution, life can feel very regular where nothing meaningful ever happens. Like Chris in The Sopranos, this regularity can be depressing.

But just because it’s just a series of events and there’s no arc, life doesn’t necessarily have to be mundane.

Life is regular when it’s too obvious. The root cause that makes it obvious is: too much comfort. When I’m in Bengaluru, I can get a cab in 2 mins, daily veggies in 10 mins, access to an electrician, plumber, dietician, whatnot in 15 mins. Everything is too damn easy — at the touch of a finger or click of a button.

According to laws of economics, humans want to spend bulk of their time in high-leverage tasks and outsource all the low-impact chores so as to save as much time as possible. Logically this makes sense, but according to psycho-logic, it’s not the best way to live. Why else do you think we spend good money to deliberately choose discomfort, such as going on treks, skydiving, and mountain biking?

Had we been Homo Economicus instead of Homo Sapiens, the adventure sports industry wouldn’t have existed. If you’d think about it, climbing a mountain isn’t the most ‘comfortable’ activity. In fact, we do it precisely because it is uncomfortable.

As much as entrepreneurs and economists believe, efficiency isn’t our primary motive. Sometimes, we don’t just need to be alive, we also need to feel alive. Mountaineering, long distance running, jungle hiking makes us feel alive. What all of them lack is ‘regularness’.

But you don’t have to go on a vacation every now and then beat the regularity of life. I realised this the first time I was in Meerut.

My partner is from Meerut, a city in Uttar Pradesh. When I visited her place for the first time I realised that I rarely looked at my phone or opened my laptop during my stay there. There were just so many things happening throughout the day that I never had a chance to get bored or distracted.

For starters, there are five dogs and four cats — too much of fur to spend time anywhere else. On top of that, it’s a big house so there are a lot of people coming and going at any given time. To add to that, there’s no easy way to order food, hire a carpenter, courier a parcel, or buy groceries. You have to go out, call somebody up, observe them while they do it to make sure they do their job right. Or, do it yourself.

This is highly inefficient. But like I said, econs (short for Homo Economicus) look for efficiency everywhere. We aren’t econs. We are humans. For human beings, a bit of inefficiency that breaks the monotony goes a long way.

But the curse of modernity is that it’s designed for econs. Since things are too easy, there’s lack of variety. In pursuit of too much efficiency, life has become full of regularity.

What we need is a bit of chaos, a slight discomfort — just the right amount, not too much, not too little — that’ll make life a bit more uncertain and hence a bit more interesting.

Fixing the toilet (once in a while) may feel like a waste of time, but it does add a bit of ‘masala’ in life. Your brain gets some variety. It’s uncomfortable yet challenging. At the end of the day, you don’t feel like “I dunno where all my time went.”

Your life may not have an arc, but it does get some richness.

My father passed away on 19 December 2021, at 1:20am. My life hasn’t been the same ever since. Here’s how I’ve been trying to deal with everything and if you ever have to face such a situation, hopefully this will help. This essay is more personal than usual.

There are certain events in life, after which, everything changes irreversibly. There’s no way to get back to the old way of things. For me, it when I got the call from the hospital.

The first call came at 12:43am. “We’ve some bad news. His heart has stopped working. There’s no sign of life. We are trying CPR to revive him. We’ll call you again in 15 mins.”

We didn’t get the next call until 1:27am. My mother, my partner, and I were waiting in absolute dread. These were the worst 45 mins of my life.

The funny thing is that I was still hopeful. I still believed that my father would fight back and revive. It was such a hopeless situation that I had nothing but hope to lean on. False hope! Naive hope! But hope, nonetheless.

By the time the second call had ended, I realised that there’s no way to turn back from that moment. My life will be divided into two parts from then on. The time when I have a father, and the time I don’t.

That moment marked the beginning of the life where I don’t have a father and my mother doesn’t have a husband. It was an ‘irreversible’ moment. Thenceforth everything was going to be about how we deal with this.

When you lose a loved one all of a sudden, the information registers logically but not emotionally. You know that this person is no more but your habits, reactions, behaviours aren’t attuned of the new way of things. Somebody tells you something and suddenly you think, “I should tell him this” only to realise that this can’t happen. It’s a very sad realisation.

Time takes care of this, but time is a double-edged sword. Time takes care of the pain but time also makes you forget your memories. You don’t remember everything about the person after a couple of years, and very little after a decade.

Time doesn’t heal the pain, time erases the memory. This is the real tragedy, not the passing of a loved one.

I don’t want it this way. I would rather cherish his memory, inculcate the traits I admire in him, and keep him alive — not as a memory, but as an idea. Ideas, unlike memories, live forever.

My father was a simple man but he had some unique traits that made him extremely likeable which in turn gave him a lot of advantages.

Following are my favourite lessons that I constantly try to emulate. I believe they don’t work alone, and instead build up on top of one another as a package.

1. Be authentically humble: I had heard my father say this on multiple occasions that he has gotten way more than he deserves or is capable of in this life. I dunno if it’s true but that’s not important. What important is that he believed in it with all his heart. This belief kept him extremely humble, and people loved him for that. Over the years I’ve heard countless people say something like, “Your father is among my favourite people in the world.” I believe it’s only because he was a genuinely humble person, from the bottom of his heart. There was no trickery. Authentic humility sure has its benefits. It kills ego and makes you a better human being.
2. Don’t talk behind someone’s back: There’s a saying, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything.” My father never said anything bad about anybody, at least not publicly. If he had to give strong feedback, he gave that privately. He didn’t gossip about others, not even within his closest circle. Over the years, this garnered him tremendous trust and respect. This trait set him completely apart from others. Knowing they won’t be judged, folks were genuinely honest with him. People love to gossip, especially about other people. It’s tempting. But not giving into this urge can make people feel safe with you.
3. Don’t shy away from asking for help: My father is the biggest hustler I know. Trust me, anyone who has met him even once would realise that he wasn’t even close to being one. Yet I’ve often noticed people going out of their way to help him out. He’s a nice person, yes, but another unique trait about him was he never hesitated to ask for advice or help from others — not only in important matters such as which hospital should be best for my mother’s eye surgery, but even in trivial matters such as what colour of light bulb would be good for the washroom. This made people feel important and useful. It also increased their liking for him and they naturally loved helping him out.
4. Don’t worry too much: For a typical middle class person, my father knew how to have fun. He dressed extremely well. He loved to travel. He took good care of his health. More than everything, he was always relaxed. My mother often blamed him for being way too much relaxed. And she wasn’t wrong. But I believe he remained relaxed because he was always prepared. His finances were in place. He never took any undue risks. He was disciplined and responsible. He tried to do right by everybody. This gave him a sense of freedom to relax and take it easy in the rest of the things. He knew what was in his control. He ignored what wasn’t.
5. Enjoy the little things: This was a man who took a tonne of pleasure in the simplest of things: a nice cup of black coffee, a quick chat with friends, watching a TV show with family, having a plate of potato fries, etc. He took his time to enjoy them deliberately. In no real hurry, he put his mind into enjoying everything he did throughout the day, even if it was cleaning the toilet. This made him a joyous person. He loved and enjoyed living. You could see that in his face. That’s why people enjoyed being around him so much.

I miss my father. I miss him everyday. When he was at the hospital I visited him everyday. It was hard to see him like that. I cried everyday. But I haven’t cried since he has passed. Even though I miss him a lot and wish he were here, I still force myself to see the bright side and cherish his life the way he lived.

Even if our loved ones leave this world, they don’t have to leave our hearts. I don’t believe my father has left us — me and my mother. He might not be with us physically, but his lessons, his love, his teachings, his advice, are with us. Always!

Psycho-logic, coined by the great Rory Sutherland is the logic by which human beings function (by default). The common cognitive biases, mental errors, and System 1-driven choices exist for a reason. They make us human. Yes, they have drawbacks and we should be aware of our biases. But, being too logical, as we’ll soon learn, can have detrimental effects as well.

I shifted to Bangalore from Mumbai recently and I got a pretty nice place for myself and my partner. The society is modelled after a park with lots of greenery. I despise too much concrete, and out of the 25ish places we visited, this one stood out.

Yes, this place isn’t without its flaws. Any rational person would notice that the society is a bit old, the maintenance charges are high, and the bathroom fittings aren’t stylish.

As much as I adore the design of a good wash basin, it’s not a must-have for me. But I do need a place with lots and lots of trees and plants. On that aspect, this place is a catch.

I realised that if I choose a house the way most people do, I would end up competing with a lot of people for the same houses. On the other hand, if I look for a place using wildly divergent criteria and eccentric tastes, I’ll find a place that was relatively undervalued.

When most people look for a house, their order of search is as follows: price, location, age and size, other parameters such as security, amenities, etc. “How does it feel like to walk inside the society” doesn’t exist on the list. The fact that it isn’t quantifiable devalues it further. But if you value something that others don’t, you can enjoy a fabulous house (or pretty much anything else) for much less.

Hence I put more emphasis on the garden value of the society than on the number of bedrooms. This eccentric approach surely isn’t without drawbacks. We had to pass a pretty great place next to a lake just because it was all concrete and no green. On any given day, we would be spending more time inside the society than beside the lake, so we passed and took the place that’s just 800m away from the lake.

My place might be a bit old but I don’t look at it that way. In my mind, it doesn’t suffer from age, it has a vintage look. Also, did I mention it’s cheaper than similar societies in the locality!

You have to be logical, especially when you are making public decisions around a business or investment, but when it comes to “being happy” too much logic is unhealthy.

Logic is a good way to defend a decision, but it is not a good way to make a decision. Logic that works in theory may not work in practice. A place might meet all the important criteria on paper but still may not be liveable. A person might meet all the textbook criteria of a good partner, but life might still be hell with them.

It doesn’t pay to be logical if everyone else is also being logical. Conventional logic is a straightforward mental process that is equally available to all and will therefore get you the same place (and same life partner) as everyone else.

But if you have an eccentric yardstick, you have an edge. You can look at things from a different perspective and get what others don’t. This also helps you get out of status games because you no longer value the metrics that others do.

Cultivating eccentric taste is as simple as paying attention to things that aren’t easily measurable, such as walkability, garden value, warmth of neighbours, architectural quality, etc. One of the reasons Apple products feel so beautiful is because they pay an insane amount of attention to these factors.

In conclusion, we should be wary of paying too much attention to numerical metrics. Numbers (such as number of rooms, floor space, journey time to work, height and colour of the person) are easy to compare, and hence monopolise our attention. Walkability or sense of humour do not have numerical scores, and tends to sink lower in our priorities. But there is no reason to assume that something is more important just because it is numerically expressible.

Logic has its limits. It’s good to know where logic ends so that we can calibrate our plans accordingly.

There are benefits of being curious just for curiosity’s sake instead of pursuing a higher goal—something I believe nobody can teach us better than Leonardo da Vinci. Here’s an example to illustrate my point.

At the time when he was perfecting Mona Lisa’s smile, Leonardo was spending his nights in the depths of a morgue, peeling the flesh off cadavers and exposing the muscles and nerves underneath.

He became fascinated about how a smile begins to form and instructed himself to analyse every possible movement of each part of the face and determine the origin of every nerve that controls each facial muscle.

This may seem reasonable for a perfectionist such as him, but the interesting part is that tracing which of those nerves are cranial and which are spinal were not necessary for painting a smile. But Leonardo needed to know.

He painted the Mona Lisa for fourteen years until his death in 1519. If he had lived another decade, he likely would have continued to refine it for that much longer.

Delivering a work, declaring it finished, freezes its evolution. Leonardo did not like to do that. There was always something more to learn, another stroke to glean from nature that would make a picture closer to perfect. For example, he updated Saint Jerome in the Wilderness after thirty years, when his anatomy experiments taught him something new about neck muscles.

Leonardo enjoyed the challenge of conception more than the chore of completion. One of the reasons why very few of his paintings were finished.

Yes, he was wildly imaginative and creative across multiple disciplines, but none of these skills were innate. Leonardo had no schooling and could barely read Latin or do long division. His genius was based on skills we can aspire to improve in ourselves, such as an insatiable curiosity and intense observation .

His curiosity was often about phenomena that most people over the age of ten no longer puzzle about: Why is the sky blue? How are clouds formed? Why can our eyes see only in a straight line? What is yawning?

Apart from questions he wanted to explore, he also listed things he wanted to figure out. For example, he writes, “Observe the goose’s foot: if it were always open or always closed the creature would not be able to make any kind of movement.” Or, one quite eccentric, “Describe the tongue of the woodpecker.”

I mean who on earth would decide one day for no apparent reason that they wanted to know what the tongue of a woodpecker looks like! It’s not information Leonardo needed to paint a picture. But there it was.

Other topics he listed in his notebooks were more ambitious. “Which nerve causes the eye to move so that the motion of one eye moves the other?” “Describe the beginning of a human when it is in the womb.” Along with the woodpecker, he lists “the jaw of the crocodile” and “the placenta of the calf” as things he wants to describe.

His curiosity was aided by the sharpness of his eye, which focused on things that the rest of us glance over. One night he saw lightning flash behind some buildings, and for that instant they looked smaller, so he launched a series of experiments to verify that objects look smaller when surrounded by light and look larger in the mist or dark.

The trick for closely observing a scene or object, according to Leonardo, is to look carefully and separately at each detail. He compared it to looking at the page of a book, which is meaningless when taken in as a whole and instead needs to be looked at word by word.

“If you wish to have a sound knowledge of the forms of objects, begin with the details of them, and do not go on to the second step until you have the first well fixed in memory,” instructs Leonardo.

Apart from things he wanted to observe, Leonardo also had the day’s list of things he wanted to learn, especially from others. “Get the master of arithmetic to show you how to square a triangle. Ask Giannino the Bombardier about how the tower of Ferrara is walled. Ask Benedetto Protinari by what means they walk on ice in Flanders. Get a master of hydraulics to tell you how to repair a lock, canal and mill in the Lombard manner. Get the measurement of the sun promised me by Maestro Giovanni Francese, the Frenchman.” And so on.

The beauty of Leonardo’s notebook is that it indulges his provisional thoughts, half-finished ideas, unpolished sketches, and unrefined drafts. He occasionally declared an intent to organise and refine his notebook jottings into published works, but never did.

As he did with many of his paintings, Leonardo would hang on to the treatises that he was drafting, occasionally make a few new strokes and refinements, but never see them through to being released to the public as complete.

The trove of work that he left unpublished testifies to the unusual nature of what motivated him. He wanted to accumulate knowledge for its own sake, and for his own personal joy, rather than out of a desire to make a public name for himself as a scholar or to be part of the progress of history.

“I have no special talents,” Einstein once wrote to a friend. “I am just passionately curious.” Leonardo actually did have special talents, as did Einstein, but his distinguishing and most inspiring trait was his intense curiosity.

Being relentlessly and randomly curious about everything around us is something that each of us can push ourselves to do, every waking hour, just as Leonardo did.

And what about all of the scholars and critics over the years who concluded that Leonardo squandered too much time immersed in studying unrelated subjects and pursuing multiple disciplines? The Mona Lisa answers them with a smile.

Today, let’s talk about Black Swan events. More precisely, something I call the Black Swan Bias. A Black Swan is a rare event that comes as a surprise, has a major impact, and is often inappropriately rationalised with the benefit of hindsight later.

By definition Black Swans don’t occur very often. Common events have a high probability of occurring, and this is something we often forget. This is Black Swan Bias. Let me illustrate with an example.

Do you remember the last time you had a headache or back pain or flu (or just about any ailment) and you went online to diagnose and search for a possible cure? There’s a good chance you stumbled on something like, “…in rare cases, it can be a sign of cancer.”

Even though this information is enough to trigger a mini panic attack, this is a false alarm. According to the law of averages, common events have a high probability of occurring than rare events. The headache is due to lack of adequate rest and not a sign of cancer.

There’s some wisdom in the saying, “Lightning never strikes (the same place) twice.” Black Swan events maybe rare but the distortions caused by them don’t disappear for a long time. For example, the dotcom crash in 2000 was the biggest since the crash of 1929, and the lessons learned from it defined and distorted almost all thinking about technology in the next decade.

Suddenly bold moves were replaced by incremental advancements. Moving fast with breakneck speed got replaced by staying lean and avoiding hypergrowth. Slowly these lessons became dogma. Those who ignored them were presumed to invite an eventual doom (the lightning).

Something similar happened after the financial crisis of 2008. Even a slight tremor in the market and pundits started predicting the next crash is nigh, and it’s even bigger this time. They discounted the odds of average recession, an average bear market, or average growth.

At every corner, they started seeing extremes.

There’s an interesting paradox here. The reason we pay so much attention to the 2000 crash, or the 2008 crash is because they are rare. But paying so much attention to them makes us overweigh the odds of them happening again. We start discounting the odds of the common in favour of the rare.

Black Swan events shape our world. In both business and investing, it’s a good practice to be on the lookout for them. But respecting the outlier and finding them in every nook and corner are two different things.

You want to be aware of the risks of starting a startup. 9 out of 10 startups fail within the first few years. But you don’t want to be someone who thinks every other hiccup is a sign of the impending doom.

The whole wisdom of Black Swan events is that we underestimate their impact. But overestimating can be just as dangerous.

Accurately diagnosing a serious business risk isn’t an accomplishment if you made 100 dangerous false-positive diagnoses before it. Accurately predicting a financial crisis isn’t an accomplishment if you spent a decade before it falsely predicting doom.

The takeaway is something that sounds blindingly obvious but we often forget: Rare events are rare, so we should expect more common events to have a higher probability of occurring.

Average events that go unnoticed—the little lack of minerals in the diet, the accumulation of tiny debt in personal finance, the slow churn of customers in a business—have a compounding effect in the long run.

Mark Watney is hands down one of my favourite characters from a movie (and/or a book). Matt Damon played it brilliantly in The Martian for which he got an Oscar nomination.

Apart from his one-liners and uplifting sense of humour (even in the direst of situations), what makes Mark Watney standout from the rest of us is his limitless resourcefulness. You can put him in an impoverished habitat on a barren planet and he would manage to grow potatoes using his own poop. Who wouldn’t want to be more like him!

The opposite of being resourceful is being hapless. Paul Graham writes:“Hapless implies passivity. To be hapless is to be battered by circumstances—to let the world have its way with you, instead of having your way with the world.”

Resourcefulness is about finding a way to get what you want, without waiting for conditions to be perfect or otherwise blaming the circumstances.

Resourceful people either push through in the face of adverse conditions or manage to reverse the adverse conditions to achieve goals.

After coming to terms with his new reality (being alone on mars with limited food) Watney’s attitude was, “I’m going to have to science the shit out of this,” instead of, “I’m gonna die” or “My teammates are effing stupid” or “It’s NASA’s fault. It’s their responsibility to save me now.”

Of course NASA would do their part, but Watney didn’t just put it all on them. He took the shared responsibility of solving the problem, without worrying about whose ‘mistake’ it was or thinking about whose ‘responsibility’ it was. That’s resourcefulness!

Resourcefulness isn’t creativity. People often confuse between the two. Yes, we have to be creative to be resourceful, but that’s not all. You need creativity to paint or write well, but you need to be resourceful to find a way to be seen or get published.

Being creative doesn’t make you resourceful by default.

Resourcefulness implies that the difficulties are novel. You can’t just look up and follow a set of prescribed steps. You can’t simply apply a tried and tested solution because you don’t know the nature of the problem. You have to keep trying new things. This is the essence of being resourceful.

Resourcefulness isn’t an attitude. You cannot wake up one day and decide to be resourceful henceforth. It needs to be cultivated over time. Unless you have the required tools, compounded by creativity, along with a curious and positive attitude, it’s impossible to be resourceful.

Mark Watney wasn’t a nobody. He was a NASA astronaut, a botanist, and an engineer. He had enough knowhow to burn hydrazine to generate water, grow potatoes from his poop, modify a rover for a long journey by adding solar cells and additional battery, using Morse code to communicate after he accidentally shorting out the electronics of Pathfinder, and whatnot! You cannot be resourceful unless you have ‘resources’.

The most successful people are Watneyesque. They have all the necessary knowhow compounded by a positive attitude. They are neither hapless nor helpless. They don’t have to be babysitted. In other words, they can “take care of themselves.”

But we don’t have to be a NASA astronaut left for dead on Mars to be resourceful. There are ample opportunities on Earth.

When the Airbnb guys rented air mattresses to pay rent, they displayed resourcefulness. When they targeted the Democratic National Convention (2008) attendees, they displayed resourcefulness. When they sold cereal boxes to pay their credit card bills, they displayed resourcefulness.

Can this quality be learnt? Yes, of course! The first step is to learn the fundamentals of as many things as we can. This will help us build a latticework of mental models that we can apply in numerous situations.

The second step is to shift our thinking from reactive (victim) to proactive (victor). For example, going from “There’s nothing I can do” to “What are my alternatives?” This simple step, this shift in mindset reframes our mind to look at problems from a different perspective. Where there were shut doors, suddenly there are windows of possibilities that can be leveraged. We are no longer paralysed by our circumstances.

Resourcefulness is not for everyone. While many have a natural curiosity to try out new things, to experiment, to throw many darts and see what sticks, others are pathologically passive, and there’s nothing much that can done. But for the rest, it’s a good practice to science the shit out of things!

It may not guarantee success, but it does increase our odds tremendously!

Like everything, even success comes with a price tag. The key is figuring out what that price is and being willing to pay it. The problem however is that the price of a lot of things is not obvious (or remain hidden) till the very end.

If you want to ace in your exams, you have three options: you can either study for the exam, not study and still give the exam, or cheat in the exam. Even if we ignore ethical reasons, most people would avoid the third option because the consequences of getting caught outweighs the upside.

But say you want to start a business, make a million dollars, sell the business and retire in peace after 10 years. Does this reward come free? Of course not! The world is never that nice.

There’s a price tag, a bill that must be paid. In this case the price is a lot of uncertainty, seemingly endless struggle, a never-ending taunt from a world which gives great success and takes them away just as fast.

To give an investment example, the India Sensex Stock Market Index grew on average ~16.8% per year from 1979 to 2021, which is great! But the price of success during this period was dreadfully high. There were times when the market was at least 25% below its previous all-time high. This one time it fell by 128%.

As Morgan Housel writes, “Like everything else worthwhile, successful investing demands a price. But its currency is not dollars and cents. It’s volatility, fear, doubt, uncertainty, and regret—all of which are easy to overlook until you’re dealing with them in real time.”

Netflix stock returned more than 35,000% from 2002 to 2018, but traded below its previous all-time high on 94% of days. Of the 242 investors Howard Schultz approached, 217 rejected his cafe idea that eventually turned into Starbucks. Meesho, an Indian social commerce unicorn, valued at $4.9Bn wasn’t able to raise seed funding during their time at Y Combinator. The bigger the returns, the higher the price.

People often say things like, “Had you invested $10,000 in Tesla 10 years back, or had you invested $1,000 in Bitcoin 10 years back…” but it doesn’t work that way. If you had put $100 into bitcoin back in the day, you’d have sold it when it reached $1,000. Maybe $10,000. Nobody (in the right mind) would have held on to $100,000 in the hopes it’d turn into a million. The price is unaffordable!

The inability to recognise that everything has a price can tempt us to try to get something for nothing which, like stealing, rarely ends well.

General Electric was the largest company in the world in 2004, worth a third of a trillion dollars. It had either been first or second each year for the previous decade.

Then everything fell to pieces.

The 2008 financial crisis sent GE’s financing division—which supplied more than half the company’s profits—into chaos. It was eventually sold for scrap. Subsequent bets in oil and energy were disasters, resulting in billions in writeoffs. GE stock fell from $40 in 2007 to $7 by 2018.

One of its many faults stems from an era under former CEO Jack Welch. Welch was a rockstar CEO. He became famous for ensuring quarterly earnings per share beat Wall Street estimates. He was the grandmaster of gaming the system.

If Wall Street analysts expected $0.25 per share, Jack would deliver $0.26 no matter the state of business or the economy. He’d do that by massaging the numbers, often pulling gains from future quarters into the current quarter to make the obedient numbers salute their master.

Under Welch’s leadership, stockholders didn’t have to pay the price. They got consistency and predictability—a stock that surged year after year without the surprises of uncertainty. Then the bill came due. GE shareholders suffered through a decade of mammoth losses that were previously shielded by accounting manoeuvres. It’s often said that more fiction has been written on Excel than Word. GE’s case is a classic example. The penny gains of Welch’s era became dime losses later.

The world does not look kindly upon those who seek a reward without paying the price. As Karl Mordo says to Dr. Strange, “The bill comes due. Always!”

It sounds trivial, but thinking of volatility, stress, fear, doubt, uncertainty, and regret as a fee rather than a fine is an important part of developing the kind of mindset that lets you play the game well.

Success is never free and never will be. It demands you pay a price, like any other product. You’re not forced to pay this fee. You can get out of the game and go live in the woods. You might still have a good time.

But if you are planning to get higher returns on your life’s investment (in terms of money, fame, success, whatever), uncertainty is the cost of admission into the game.

There’s no guarantee you’ll make it. But if you view the admission fee as a fine, you’ll not be able to enjoy the ride.

Contrary to its literal meaning, vulnerability is not a weakness. As we shall learn, vulnerability is actually about confronting our deepest fears so that we can be honest with ourselves and, by extension, others.

Vulnerability makes us strong because there’s no courage without it. Even though it can be distressing to discover parts of ourselves that are fragile, it’s hard to find moments of courage that doesn’t require uncertainty and exposure (both emotional and physical). So, the more we become familiar and learn to accept these fragile parts of ourselves, the more courageous we become.

Vulnerability comes from caring. You see, it’s hard to care—really care! Be it about a person, a pursuit, or a movement. Things don’t always go the way we want them to. You lose the race. The project goes down the drain. Your startup doesn’t get funded. Your spouse leaves you. Your new initiative is shot down. Your friend is diagnosed with cancer. You get fired. It always hurts when we care.

A common defence we often use against getting hurt is preventing ourselves from caring at all. We refrain from giving something our everything. We put up a wall around us—a barrier between our deepest (and most fragile) parts and the world. Maybe the hurt isn’t as intense this way. Maybe! But neither are the joys.

Our life isn’t full without vulnerability. By saving ourselves from vulnerability, we miss out on a lot of life’s richness.

Truth is, vulnerability is not a choice. It is the underlying, ever-present, and abiding undercurrent of our natural state. Being vulnerable is being human. To run from vulnerability is to run from the essence of our very nature. Yet, we fight it every day. We try to hide it all the time.

Trust me, nobody is immune to vulnerability. Having interacted with celebrity execs, top investors and VCs, I know one thing for sure. Nobody has everything figured out. Nobody has all the answers. Nobody is one hundred percent certain. Nobody is without struggle or self-doubt. Not even the billionaires, the powerfuls, the successfuls—the people who (we think) have ‘made it’ in life. All of them have parts in them that are more fragile than they are strong.

Therefore, pushing away our vulnerabilities and trying to convince ourselves (and others) that we are more certain than we are is the easiest way to develop impostor syndrome. Because deep down inside, we’ll know we are faking it.

But, by accepting that we don’t know everything, that we don’t always have everything together, we become more strong. This is the paradox of humility. Strength is gained by owning one’s limitations and not by being overly concerned about being the best of all.

As the wise Tyrion Lannister said, “Never forget what you are, for surely the world will not. Make it your strength. Then it can never be your weakness. Armour yourself in it, and it will never be used to hurt you.”

Interestingly, vulnerability has an evolutionary purpose as well. About 12,000 years ago, during the agricultural revolution (when we were shifting away from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to a more settled one), the evolutionary process shifted from selecting for traits like brute strength to selecting for traits like vulnerability, compassion, and connection.

Our ancestors who survived weren’t those who were the strongest by traditional measures, but those who were most effectively able to share their weaknesses with one another and work together to overcome them. We are the descendants of the vulnerables.

Vulnerability is how a child bonds with their mother. Within just one hour of being born, the child adjust their heads to make eye contact with their mother’s gaze. On day two, they start responding to their mother’s voice. As helpless infants this is how we show our vulnerability and bond with our caretakers.

Vulnerability is also how partners become close, long lasting friendships are forged, and strong bonds are made. Vulnerability is how we survive and thrive.

On the flip side, it’s so hard to pretend that we have everything together. Keeping up this act is exhausting. We fear that when we’ll let our guards down, others will view us as weak. This isn’t always true, especially if we choose to be vulnerable in front of the right people.

When we open up to others (be it our acquaintances, our fans, or our colleagues), they feel relieved. They think: finally, someone who isn’t faking it! Someone who is more like me! They gain the permission to stop their own tiring act of perfection and start revealing their cracks and stretch marks instead.

When Naomi Osaka took a break from professional tennis to focus on mental health, while a small set of people dissed her, the rest came in full support, mostly because they could relate to her.

“It has become apparent to me that literally everyone either suffers from issues related to their mental health or knows someone who does. The number of messages I received from such a vast cross section of people confirms that. I think we can almost universally agree that each of us is a human being and subject to feelings and emotions,” she writes. “I do hope that people can relate and understand it’s O.K. to not be O.K., and it’s O.K. to talk about it. There are people who can help, and there is usually light at the end of any tunnel.”

When you are vulnerable, it doesn’t just remove your shackles, it also removes the shackles from those around you. The result is more freedom and trust, which supports better, more nourishing, and more effective relationships—both one-to-one and one-to-many.

The irony is that all the time and energy we spend developing a personal brand is a hindrance to creating the kind of close bonds that we desire most. We’ve become so good at pretending that vulnerability doesn’t come easy any more.

In Greek mythology, the god Pan resided just beyond the village boundary. When humans mistakenly wandered into his space, they would be overcome with panic, fear, and dread. When they tried to escape, even the most trivial obstacles—small stones, little holes in the ground, gusts of wind—would elicit paralysing fear. The victims would spiral down to their deaths in their fear.

Yet, to those who deliberately ventured toward Pan and chose to pay him worship, he was harmless. He bestowed upon his willing visitors abundance, health, and the ultimate gift—wisdom.

We’ve all got our Pans. If we can stop avoiding and running from them—and learn to accept them instead—we’ll also have wisdom.

It’s interesting that the most practical problem-solving lessons are business lessons. It’s because the stakes are real in business and you have real skin in the game. If you don’t make the right decisions, death is certain.

In fact, the default outcome for any startup is death. This means you have to move quickly and decisively to avoid that fate at all costs. Words such as “prioritisation” and “focus” takes on a whole new meaning here. Naturally when you are busy assembling an airplane after jumping off a cliff, it doesn’t leave a lot of time for dotting every i or crossing every t.

When the stakes are this high, there are far more problems clamouring for attention than you have the resources to address. You might feel like a firefighter, except it’s not just a building but the entire neighbourhood that’s ablaze. You might want to divide and conquer and save as many building as possible or, you might want to focus all your effort in eliminating the biggest fires and let the rest burn.

We usually choose the first and here’s why you shouldn’t.

Steve Jobs once said, “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying ‘no’ to 1,000 things.”

While it’s easy to say no to new ideas, it’s 10x harder to say no to existing problems. In this context, focus is in deciding which fires should burn so that you can fight the fires which, if allowed to rage unchecked, will bring the whole thing down.

In February 2000, transaction volume at PayPal was increasing 3 to 5 percent every day. Business was growing but with each passing day the team was falling behind in addressing customer emails. This problem kept on compounding as the users who didn’t get a response kept writing over and over.

Out of a forty-person team, they had two support people. In other words, they didn’t care about customer support. Conventional wisdom would have called for them to devote as many people as possible to customer support. But that’s the opposite of what they did.

PayPal ignored their customers. When customers started calling (after not getting any replies on email) they stopped picking up the phones. That sounds highly counterintuitive, but not when you see all the other fires that were burning.

For example, they were raising their first major round of venture capital, starting to compete with Billpoint (eBay’s new PayPal killer), and negotiating a merger with Elon Musk’s X.com. Compared to these, customer support was the least important fire to fight. Solving that problem wouldn’t have moved the needle on the expected outcome. It would have been a wasted effort. So they let it burn.

Reid Hoffman gives a great example to illustrate this point. “Picture an emergency room surgeon trying to save the life of a trauma patient; as she’s conducting emergency surgery, she might notice a suspicious-looking mass, but she’s going to focus on patching the patient’s arteries first—there will be time for biopsies and tests later. After all, if the patient dies on the operating table, even a potential tumour will be irrelevant.”

Customer service was important but it wasn’t urgent. We often confuse between the two. We also have this inherently wrong notion that if we keep on solving problems, at some point there won’t be any problems left to solve. We (subconsciously) imagine a utopian future that is devoid of problems. One where we can simply relax.

That’s not true.

Problem Solving is a misnomer. We cannot eliminate all problems. Solving one problem creates another set of problems. Problem Solving is in reality Problem Trading. In other words, there will always be problems and they won’t get any easier with time. The good thing is that we don’t have to solve all of them. We just have to pick what problems we are willing to live with so that we can focus on the rest.

We have an inbuilt habit to help those in need. While it wouldn’t be wrong to assume that human beings are good in spirit and hence they help out, it wouldn’t be as much interesting to understand why we really help others (as a species) and how it actually benefits us (as an individual).

Let me spoil it for you. Altruism isn’t free. There are selfish reasons behind all our random acts of kindness. To illustrate my point, let me draw an example from The Elephant in the Brain and tell you about the curious case of the Arabian babbler, a small brown bird that lives in the arid undergrowth of the Sinai Desert. They have nothing to do with humans, yet we might find some of their traits familiar.

Babblers live in small groups of 3 to 20 members who collectively defend a small territory of trees, shrubs, and bushes that provide cover from predators. Their social life is rather curious. The male babblers arrange themselves into rigid dominance hierarchies. The alpha male, for example, consistently wins in small squabbles with the beta male, who in turn consistently wins against the gamma male, thereby establishing a pecking order.

Once in a while, an intense fight erupts between two babblers of adjacent rank, resulting in one babbler’s death or permanent ejection from the group. But for the most, they get along pretty well with each other. In fact, they help one another and the group in a variety of ways. For example, they donate food to each other, bring food to their communal nestlings, attack members of rival groups, and stand on “guard duty” to watch for predators while the others look for food.

At first glance, these activities appear altruistic. A babbler who takes guard duty, for example, foregoes his opportunity to eat. Likewise, a babbler who attacks an enemy incurs risk of injury. But on more careful inspection, these activities turn out not to be as selfless as they seem.

First of all, babblers go out of their way and “compete” to help others—often aggressively! For example, high-ranking babblers often force down food into the throats of unwilling birds. Similarly, when a beta male is standing on guard duty at the top of a tree, the alpha will fly up and harass him (to throw him off his game). The beta meanwhile isn’t strong enough to bully the alpha, but he will often stand insistently nearby, offering to take over if the alpha allows it. Similar jockeying takes place for the “privilege” of performing other altruistic behaviours such as fending of rivals group members.

Now, if the goal was to really be helpful, why waste effort competing to perform them? One hypothesis is that higher-ranked babblers are stronger, and therefore better able to forego food and fight off predators. And so, by taking on more of the burden, they’re helping weaker groupmates. We imagine something similar when we see someone with wealth and power helping others who aren’t that privileged.

But this hypothesis has a loophole. It has been observed that babblers compete only with those immediately above or below them in hierarchy. The alpha male, for example, almost never tries to replace the gamma male from guard duty; instead the alpha directs all of his competitive energies toward the beta. If the goal were to really help weaker members, the alpha should be more eager to take over from the gamma than from the beta.

Even more damning is the fact that babblers often interfere in the helpful behaviours of their rivals, for example, by trying to prevent them from feeding the communal nestlings. This makes no sense if the goal is to benefit the group as a whole.

So if these activities aren’t really altruistic, what’s the real reason? The answer is that altruistic babblers develop a kind of “credit” among their groupmates—what we humans call “status”. This earns them at least two different perks. The first perk is mating opportunities. Males with greater prestige get to mate more often with the females of the group. Ring any bell?

A prestigious alpha, for example, may take all the mating opportunities for himself. But if the beta has earned good prestige, the alpha will occasionally allow him to mate with some of the females. In this way, the alpha “bribes” the beta to not challenge him, which brings me to the second perk (which is twofold).

If the beta gains high prestige points, it’s only through his demonstration of strength and fitness. This means he is a threat to the alpha. An alpha who goes beak-to-beak with a prestigious beta is less likely to win, so he gives the beta more leeway than he would give a beta with lower prestige.

On the other hand, if a prestigious beta has shown himself to be useful to the group, the group is more likely to keep him around. High prestige reduces the risk of getting kicked out of the group.

Thus babblers compete to help others in a way that ultimately increases the group’s chances of survival and reproduction. What looks like altruism is actually self-interest. It’s similar in us humans. We (are programmed to) love status games.

The point that I’m trying to make isn’t that human beings are selfish. It’s too obvious and very much accepted. What I’m trying to say is that we shouldn’t take human behaviour at face value—none of them. The surface-level logic of a behaviour harbours deep and complex motives.

This is true even in species whose lives are much simpler than our own, so we can’t expect human behaviours, like voting, or making art, or loving your spouse to be straightforward either. Look deeper. Always!

We hear people yearning for a stable life all the time. A stable life is one where—in theory—nothing goes wrong. You have an okay job, a happy marriage, good kids, you live in a decent neighbourhood with helpful folks, etc. But soon we’ll learn that longterm stability is only a ticking time bomb and, if we know any better, we should avoid too much stability too much reliability too much comfort at all costs.

Imagine someone extremely punctual who comes home at exactly eight o’clock every evening. You can use their arrival to set your watch. This person, even though super reliable, runs with a hidden risk of causing their family extreme anxiety if they are a few minutes late someday. But someone with a (slightly) more volatile—hence less reliable—schedule (with say a half-hour variation) won’t cause any such problems.

A little randomness in a system prevents it from big catastrophes. For example, there’s a reason why small forest fires are beneficial. They periodically cleanse the system of the most flammable material, so that they don’t accumulate and cause a wildfire. If we clear them out, we only create an illusion of stability. Systematically preventing forest fires from taking place “to be safe” makes the big one much worse.

For similar reasons, too much stability is not good for businesses. Devoid of setbacks, companies become weak during periods of “steady” prosperity. Hidden vulnerabilities accumulate silently under the surface and the company is underprepared even for tiny shocks. This is true for governments as well.

Likewise, a bit of volatility is important in the market. A stable market that’s on a steady bull run for a long time would crash badly if it goes down even slightly. People aren’t used to seeing losses for a very long time, and even if the market dips a little, they’ll panic and exit in hoards thereby bringing the whole thing down. Remember the dotcom bubble? A market that everyone thinks cannot fail is just waiting to crash big and hard.

This is the very reason we vaccinate ourselves. We inject ourselves with a little bit of harm in the short term to prevent ourselves from becoming suckers in the long term. One of the reasons why small fights keep relationships alive for a long time.

The gift (and curse) of modern life is our focus on too much stability. Modernity treats hardship as a disease, something to be eradicated. But human beings don’t mind hardship, in fact we thrive on it. What we mind is not feeling necessary, not having thrill and pleasure. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes:

We are moving into a phase of modernity marked by the lobbyist, the very, very limited liability corporation, the MBA, sucker problems, secularisation (or rather reinvention of new sacred values like flags to replace altars), the tax man, fear of the boss, spending the weekend in interesting places and the workweek in a putatively less interesting one, the separation of “work” and “leisure” (though the two would look identical to someone from a wiser era), the retirement plan, argumentative intellectuals who would disagree with this definition of modernity, literal thinking, inductive inference, philosophy of science, the invention of social science, smooth surfaces, and egocentric architects. Violence is transferred from individuals to states. So is financial indiscipline. At the centre of all this is the denial of antifragility.

To prevent stagnation of the mind, we have to take few risks, get into some fights, add a bit of volatility in our lives. Do something a little crazy. Do something that feels slightly stupid. Set yourself up for failure. Visit a new place. Break some rules. Take up a new hobby. Ignore efficiency. Forget stability for a while. Focus on feeling alive, don’t just survive!

Today, let’s talk about fairness. Have you ever experienced this feeling of being treated unfairly? Maybe an undeserving colleague got promoted instead of you? Or when somebody broke the line at the ticket counter? Such injustice!

Human beings have a strong need for fairness. Big or small, when we see something unfair done (especially against us), we are enraged. Even a three-year-old has the common sense to scream when they get a smaller portion than their sibling. Not just humans, even monkeys have a sense of fairness.

To illustrate how the perception of fairness affects us, let me explain what researchers call ‘the ultimatum game’. The game is played by two people. One person receives some money (say $100). This first person offers to split the money with the second person (say $50/$50, $70/$30, $80/$20, or whatever they want). This offer is an ultimatum, so the second person only has two choices: to accept or reject the offer. If it’s accepted, they both keep the offered split, and if rejected, they both get nothing.

The purely logical way to play the ultimatum game is for the first person to offer the minimum (e.g., a $90/$10 split) and for the second person to accept it, since otherwise they would get nothing, and there is no other negotiation possible. In practice though, the second person rejects offers lower than 30% of the total, because of the ‘perceived’ unfairness of the offer.

People would rather deny others anything, even at the expense of receiving nothing themselves.

In 2012, when Greece was in the fifth year of recession, they had just agreed to a second aid package from the EU, totalling $174 billion, but their future was still not looking very good. Germany, the largest contributor in the bailout would have none of it. Germany declared there’ll be no more money if Greece couldn’t turn itself around soon.

The rational course of action would have been relaxing some austerity measures for Greece (for example, slim government budgets weren’t boosting the economy) and giving them a little more aid and a little more time to reform. But the EU wasn’t arguing about what the most sensible economics policy was in order to prevent something like a Grexit (where Greece would default on its debts and abandon the EU). They were arguing about what was fair. This inevitably caused some problems.

The Germans thought it was unfair to support Greece that lived beyond its means and piled up debts they couldn’t repay. The Greeks were certain that it was unfair for them to suffer years of slim budgets (and high unemployment as a result) in order to repay richer neighbouring countries (such as Germany).

The grievances weren’t unreasonable on either side, but the focus on fairness made it hard to reach an agreement.

We care so much about fairness that we are willing to sacrifice economic well-being to enforce it. Research shows that people are willing to pay money to punish others who are taking from a common pot but not contributing to it. Just to ensure shirkers get what they deserve, we are prepared to make ourselves poorer.

Similarly, the ultimatum game experiments illustrate that people will walk away from free money if they feel that an offer is unfair. Even when there’s a solution that would leave everyone better off, a fixation on fairness can make agreement impossible.

It is more important to have the right system in place than a fair system. From the perspective of society as a whole, concern with fairness has all kinds of benefits. It limits exploitation, promotes meritocracy, and motivates people. But dropping ‘effectiveness’ of the system in pursuit of complete ‘fairness’ is suicidal. We have to learn to stop asking ourselves what’s fair and start asking what works.

In medieval Europe, when the court couldn’t determine if a defendant was guilty they would offer them an option: either accept the punishment or put their hand in boiling water. If they weren’t guilty, God would (miraculously) save them. If you’ve watched Game of Thrones, you know how it works.

Ideally, nobody would actually go through the boiling water test. The defendants were judged solely by their intentions. Only an innocent would take the test while the guilty would avoid it—at least, theoretically.

But if nobody was ever made to go through the boiling water test in front of the crowd, the trick would lose its effectiveness. People need to see some defendants suffering the boiling water torture to believe in its authenticity. This means some innocent people will have to go through the torture. This is unfair to them but this would maintain sanity and order in society. This is sometimes referred as the “greater good” which, if you ask me, Machiavelli’s The Price is all about.

Machiavelli’s philosophy was driven by this very notion: an orderly state in which citizens can move about at will, conduct business, safeguard their families and possessions, and be free of foreign intervention. Anything which could harm this greater good, Machiavelli argued, must be crushed ruthlessly.

Failure to do so out of weakness or kindness is contrary to the interests of the state, just as it would be contrary to the interests of a patient for his surgeon to refuse an operation out of fear of inflicting pain.

As Charlie Munger says:

It is not always recognised that, to function best, morality should sometimes appear unfair, like most worldly outcomes. The craving for perfect fairness causes a lot of terrible problems in system function. Some systems should be made deliberately unfair to individuals because they’ll be fairer on average for all of us. I frequently cite the example of having your career over, in the Navy, if your ship goes aground, even if it wasn’t your fault. I say the lack of justice for the one guy that wasn’t at fault is way more than made up by a greater justice for everybody when every captain of a ship always sweats blood to make sure the ship doesn’t go aground. Tolerating a little unfairness to some to get a greater fairness for all is a model I recommend to all of you. But again, I wouldn’t put it in your assigned college work if you want to be graded well, particularly in a modern law school wherein there is usually an over-love of fairness-seeking process.

A fair system is where the guilty gets punished. This sends a signal to the people: the system works. This also sends another (more important) signal: there are consequences for your actions.

There’s good reason why there’s rampant corruption, extortion, rape, abduction, and theft in certain parts of India, and it isn’t unobvious. In pursuit of too much fairness—in trying to make sure that even if 100 guilty go free, no innocent should be punished—the system has become impotent.

Our need for a 100% fair system often gets in the way of having an efficient system, one that works. On paper, it’s good to have 100% fair system, but in practice, an 80% fair system is fair enough. Unlike a theoretical system, it gets 100% of the job done.