Category: Everything else

Sometimes, I think life, happiness and all the other good stuff is just about learning to balance two ideas. The first is that it could always be better. And, the second is that it could always be worse.

They seem in conflict. But, they aren’t.

It could always be better is what inspires us to wake up in the morning and get things done. We’re taking up space in this world and we might as well make it count. This pursuit to make things better makes us better. And, in time, as we get better, we can choose (for it is a choice) to help make our families and communities better.

But, a blind pursuit of better rarely brings happiness. Gratitude, on the other hand, does. And, gratitude comes with realizing that it could always be worse. There is so much we take for granted every single day.

PS: This is a classic illustration of the importance of opposing forces in our lives. Such forces bring the necessary tension for learning and growth. Extremes are rarely useful because we lose the opportunity to learn from each other. That’s a useful lesson as we discuss and embrace faith, ideology and even political views.

The word “essay” comes from the French word Essayer which means “to try.” An essay is something you try to figure something out. Paul Graham, who shared this thought on his blog continues —

Figure out what? You don’t know yet. And so you can’t begin with a thesis, because you don’t have one, and may never have one. An essay doesn’t begin with a statement, but with a question. In a real essay, you don’t take a position and defend it. You notice a door that’s ajar, and you open it and walk in to see what’s inside.

If all you want to do is figure things out, why do you need to write anything, though? Why not just sit and think? Well, there precisely is Montaigne’s great discovery. Expressing ideas helps to form them. Indeed, helps is far too weak a word. Most of what ends up in my essays I only thought of when I sat down to write them. That’s why I write them.

In the things you write in school you are, in theory, merely explaining yourself to the reader. In a real essay you’re writing for yourself. You’re thinking out loud.

I shared this today as part of my last technology note this year as part of the Notes by Ada project. I generally share the longer version of these notes on Medium and LinkedIn (experimented with both over the course of the year) and a synopsis of sorts here. I thought the above paragraphs beautifully summarized why I set out to do this. I had many questions about technology and figured I’d write my way to clarity.

This is also why writing here every day is such a fascinating experience. Writing clarifies thinking and I’m grateful for the opportunity to think out loud, share my notes with you and, every once a while, hear back from you when things resonate.

Here’s to more essayer. :)

We have a natural propensity to spend a lot of time in our lives sharing what happened.

As a result, we’re stuck with status update meetings, chronological/career focused introductions and dinner table conversations about events around us.

What happened, it turns out, isn’t a good question. There are numerous other questions that are more powerful. For example –

• What did you learn from what happened?
• How has what happened change your perspective?
• What are you going to do about it?

If a poker game was decided simply by the cards that were dealt, it would be a really boring game indeed.

So, the next time you’re tempted to talk about or agonize about what happened, consider re-framing the question. In conversations, meetings, careers, and life, what happened matters far less than what you decide to do about it.

WordPress Founder Matt Mullenweg shared an excerpt from from Adam Robinson. It is from Tribe of Mentors by Tim Ferriss. Matt’s note – “Worth considering, especially if you strive to work in a data-informed product organization.”

Virtually all investors have been told when they were younger — or implicitly believe, or have been tacitly encouraged to do so by the cookie-cutter curriculums of the business schools they all attend — that the more they understand the world, the better their investment results. It makes sense, doesn’t it? The more information we acquire and evaluate, the “better informed” we become, the better our decisions. Accumulating information, becoming “better informed,” is certainly an advantage in numerous, if not most, fields.

But not in the counter-intuitive world of investing, where accumulating information can hurt your investment results.

In 1974, Paul Slovic — a world-class psychologist, and a peer of Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman — decided to evaluate the effect of information on decision-making. This study should be taught at every business school in the country. Slovic gathered eight professional horse handicappers and announced, “I want to see how well you predict the winners of horse races.” Now, these handicappers were all seasoned professionals who made their livings solely on their gambling skills.

Slovic told them the test would consist of predicting 40 horse races in four consecutive rounds. In the first round, each gambler would be given the five pieces of information he wanted on each horse, which would vary from handicapper to handicapper. One handicapper might want the years of experience the jockey had as one of his top five variables, while another might not care about that at all but want the fastest speed any given horse had achieved in the past year, or whatever.

Finally, in addition to asking the handicappers to predict the winner of each race, he asked each one also to state how confident he was in his prediction. Now, as it turns out, there were an average of ten horses in each race, so we would expect by blind chance — random guessing — each handicapper would be right 10 percent of the time, and that their confidence with a blind guess to be 10 percent.

So in round one, with just five pieces of information, the handicappers were 17 percent accurate, which is pretty good, 70 percent better than the 10 percent chance they started with when given zero pieces of information. And interestingly, their confidence was 19 percent — almost exactly as confident as they should have been. They were 17 percent accurate and 19 percent confident in their predictions.

In round two, they were given ten pieces of information. In round three, 20 pieces of information. And in the fourth and final round, 40 pieces of information. That’s a whole lot more than the five pieces of information they started with. Surprisingly, their accuracy had flatlined at 17 percent; they were no more accurate with the additional 35 pieces of information. Unfortunately, their confidence nearly doubled — to 34 percent! So the additional information made them no more accurate but a whole lot more confident. Which would have led them to increase the size of their bets and lose money as a result.

Beyond a certain minimum amount, additional information only feeds — leaving aside the considerable cost of and delay occasioned in acquiring it — what psychologists call “confirmation bias.” The information we gain that conflicts with our original assessment or conclusion, we conveniently ignore or dismiss, while the information that confirms our original decision makes us increasingly certain that our conclusion was correct.

So, to return to investing, the second problem with trying to understand the world is that it is simply far too complex to grasp, and the more dogged our at- tempts to understand the world, the more we earnestly want to “explain” events and trends in it, the more we become attached to our resulting beliefs — which are always more or less mistaken — blinding us to the financial trends that are actually unfolding. Worse, we think we understand the world, giving investors a false sense of confidence, when in fact we always more or less misunderstand it.

You hear it all the time from even the most seasoned investors and financial “experts” that this trend or that “doesn’t make sense.” “It doesn’t make sense that the dollar keeps going lower” or “it makes no sense that stocks keep going higher.” But what’s really going on when investors say that something makes no sense is that they have a dozen or whatever reasons why the trend should be moving in the opposite direction.. yet it keeps moving in the current direction. So they believe the trend makes no sense. But what makes no sense is their model of the world. That’s what doesn’t make sense. The world always makes sense.

In fact, because financial trends involve human behavior and human beliefs on a global scale, the most powerful trends won’t make sense until it becomes too late to profit from them. By the time investors formulate an understanding that gives them the confidence to invest, the investment opportunity has already passed.

So when I hear sophisticated investors or financial commentators say, for example, that it makes no sense how energy stocks keep going lower, I know that energy stocks have a lot lower to go. Because all those investors are on the wrong side of the trade, in denial, probably doubling down on their original decision to buy energy stocks. Eventually they will throw in the towel and have to sell those energy stocks, driving prices lower still.

I am reminded of the “I love the whole world” song from the Discovery Channel this morning.

I was fortunate to spend the whole day yesterday in a place with a wonderful view. I spent a lot of time just taking in the fresh air and feeling grateful.

The world is a beautiful place and we are very lucky to have the opportunity to share it with each other. It is hard to keep that luck in perspective on a daily basis while we’re busy fighting our many, often trivial, battles.

But, that’s what traditions like thanksgiving are for. If you are reading this on a laptop or a cell phone somewhere, it is likely that you have plenty of privilege to be grateful for.

Here’s to making that privilege count.

A friend recently described a moment he had recently. He was in a situation where he realized exactly what his old self would have done. As he chose a new and different response, he realized how much had changed over the past few years.

I go through moments like that every once a while and can speak to how liberating it feels. You know you’d have been tied to a certain script a while ago. But, now, you can choose different.

It feels great.

I’ve met and spoken to people who are steadfast in their belief that people can’t change – that they think a certain way or are only capable of doing a certain kind of thing. There’s a part of me that always finds that sad. It isn’t sad because they think less of people around them. It is also not because they are always wrong.

But, I’ve come to realize that where there is desire and strength of character, change is not just possible. It is probable.

And, I am saddened because looking at everyone around us with a fixed mindset confines us to one too. There is certainly joy in watching others change because of something we did.

But, there are few more powerful moments in our lives when we’re able to look into ourselves in the mirror and say – “I can change.”

The possibilities are endless.

If an email exchange exceeds 4 back-and-forth emails with limited progress on what you’re trying to communicate – stop. Pick up the phone.

If you are going back and forth on whatever chat tool you use for longer than a minute – stop. Pick up the phone.

If your text message spree isn’t solving the problem – stop. Pick up the phone.

If you are attempting to text while driving – definitely stop. Pick up the phone.

Or, if these folks live with you or work close to you, go meet them in person.

Asynchronous communication has a time and place. Best to use it when it is effective.

There was a time when being “in the know” meant meeting a few members of the community who, combined, had all the news. In one catch up conversation, you learnt who was doing what, marrying whom, living where, etc. Being “in the know”, beyond the evolutionary usefulness of gossip, was a useful asset as it meant you had network intelligence. And, such information had the potential to bring insight.

Now, of course, you don’t need any such catch up. Your life is full of feeds that keep you “in the know” about close friends, acquaintances, and the like. Network intelligence is just one click away.

And, yet, we’re constantly seeking to be “in the know.” So, we’re fed more about the events occurring in the lives of people we’ve met. But, events matter little in the long run. And, a mind overwhelmed by absorbing and keeping track of events has little time in dwell in ideas.

So, maybe, we should go the other way and take pride in a certain amount of obliviousness. What if you knew very little about what was going on in the lives of people you met? What if you only looked them up before a business meeting? And, what if you only paid attention to important events in the lives of those who were close to you?

Community gatherings become old-style fun again. And, besides, this path may just be comparison-free, mindful, and happy.

Worth a try.

Israeli researchers have theorized an invisibility cloak. This only further blurs the already fuzzy boundaries between real life and magic.

Experiments using algae to solve our issues with carbon di-oxide emissions are an example of the magical nature of science these days. The Algoland project in Sweden is working toward zero emission cement (cement produces 5-6% of the world’s carbon di-oxide).

We’re still in the early days of exploring this. But, it is very encouraging.

While we’re hopeful science will help us solve problems created by our consumption, the fact remains that our consumption model is broken. A few examples –

• Consumer powered — In 2007, consumers contributed to more than 60 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. They (/we) also contributed between 50 and 80 percent of total land, material, and water use.
• Food — as income rises, people consume more dairy and meat products. These are the food categories with the highest environmental footprint. In fact, the global livestock industry produces more emissions than all cars, planes, trains, and ships combined. A study by Oxford University calculated that a global shift to a vegan diet would reduce food-related emission by 70 percent by 2050.
• Clothes — The world now consumes 400 percent more clothes than two decades ago. According to the World Bank, textile processing causes 20 percent of water pollution globally. Cotton, the “thirsty crop,” makes up about half of our clothes and requires 5,300 gallons of water to produce 1kg of cotton.
• Waste — Only 9 percent of all plastic waste produced since the 1950s has been recycled. The rest ends up in landfills or polluting our environment. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation projects that, by 2050, oceans will contain more plastic than fish.

This isn’t limited to food and clothing – but, to ideas as well. We ascribe a lot of blame to Facebook. But, Facebook’s product managers only shape their product based on what we indicate we like. They don’t control the feedback. Or, as Ben Evans eloquently puts it –

You can shape things, sometimes. You can ride and channel the trend. But I think we attribute vastly too much power to a handful of product managers in Menlo Park, and vastly too little power to the billions of people who look at their phone screen and wonder which app to open. Facebook writes algorithms, and designers cut the cloth, but that doesn’t mean they control what people look at or what people wear.

The point of all this is not to parse out what we do well and take a self righteous stance. Self righteousness is dangerous because it often precedes or accompanies a complete lack of self awareness.

For example, in our household, we are minimalist in our consumption of goods or clothing in our household. We sort our trash, recycle and even use a compostable diaper service to ensure diapers don’t go into landfills. Our diet is mostly vegetarian.

But, being self righteous about any of the above would overlook that we drive petroleum based cars, enjoy dairy and chicken every once a while, and so on.

It also inspires very little actionable change.

My hope, instead, is that this spurs reflection around 2 questions —
1. What is my consumption model like?
2. How can I do better?

A wise friend told me that the best diet is the one that is a bit better than the one you currently consume.

I think it works the same for consumption. We need to fix our consumption models. Over time, that’ll help us fix the consumption model of our families, organizations and communities… i.e., our world and, eventually, the world.

Change begins with us.

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Longer version on Medium or LinkedIn.

Life delivers a mix of major and minor setbacks through the course of our journey. For most people, major setbacks happen once every few years while minor setbacks happen all the time.

Major setbacks typically deal with the mortality of people dear to us, our health or difficulties in our relationships. For these kinds of setbacks, I think the fundamental choice we have on our hands is akin to the line from Timon in “The Lion King” – “You can either run from it… or learn from it.” 

But, this post isn’t about major setbacks.

It is about the many minor setbacks we deal with as part of our day-to-day. As I grow in my ability to separate stimulus and response and keep things in perspective, I realize there something incredibly powerful when you realize that you can choose to not just deal with setbacks but to have fun with them.

I had a minor setback recently when I found myself stuck for a few hours. After a night of sleep, I went through the following internal dialog –

“Okay, it is what it is. I can’t change the situation. It sucks.” (acceptance)

“But, in the big scheme of things, it isn’t that bad and could be much worse. In fact, there are many positives.” (perspective)

“Now, I’m going to have fun with it.” (response)

And, have fun with it I did.

For many years, I didn’t really understand the concept of “keeping good humor.” But, with a bit of perspective, I’ve realized that good humor isn’t far away. And, where there’s perspective and humor, there’s the ability to choose to have fun with it.

And, so we should.