Thinking - @coffeeandjunk

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?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Via Negativa: The Process of Making Good Decisions By Eliminating Bad Ones

When we set goals—both personal and professional—we tend to focus on what we should do, rather than focussing on what we should avoid. Humans naturally know more about what is wrong, what is bad, what is harmful, or what won’t work, more than they know about what is right and what would work.

Green Lumber Fallacy: The Disconnect Between Academic Knowledge and Practical Wisdom

What works in real world may not match our stories of why or how it works. Unimportant details and post-hoc narratives can often distract us into thinking we know the reasons for something when we really don’t.

How to Think About Your Life’s Work

Being a doctor is not the way it’s portrayed on House. Being a lawyer is not the way it’s portrayed on Suits. Being a gangster is not the way it’s portrayed on The Sopranos. It’s hard to get an accurate picture of most jobs from stories and narratives.

Seneca: “Take Some of Your Own Time For Yourself Too”

We often get more engrossed in the balance-sheet of a business than that of our own life. We convince ourselves that we’ll live for ourselves later, after we have accomplished what we have set out to do.

The Ethics of Manipulation

Reid Hoffman says that he doesn’t invest in businesses that don’t exploit one of the Seven Deadly Sins. But when it comes to building a company, you also gotta ask yourself if your end goal is to make the world a better place, or is it to exploit and cash out.

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