Why Post on Social Media

It’s easy to get sucked into the “dopamine trap”, and start taking your social media presence as a measure of your worth. It is important to remember, however, that the value your work brings cannot be ascertained by the likes & comments of folks with no knowledge of what you say.

If that’s true, you may ask, why should people put their work out on social media (LinkedIn, insta, Facebook, blogs, etc etc)? Well, for one, it creates awareness. While becoming an influencer isn’t a worthwhile goal for me personally, keeping my thoughts to myself doesn’t help either.

Secondly, it leads to dialogue & discovery. And that helps improve your thinking. Sometimes, the most value you get from your own work, is from the polite disagreement of knowledgeable peers.

Thirdly, (very occasionally), what you write might reach someone who needs to hear that particular idea or thought, at that particular time.

Keep thinking, keep working, keep writing.

#wednesdaymusings #musings #writing #socialmedia #dialogue

My reading journey

I’ve been a reader, ever since i can remember.

I grew up in really small towns, where the only modes of entertainment were sports with friends, and books. There was no television, since the town was surrounded by hills that prevented television reception. And with very few people, the sports you could play were limited as well. So, i read.

Thankfully, my parents encouraged this. My father did a deal with me when i was barely 5 years old: every test i got full marks in, would get me a book. By the age of 10, i had more books than all my friends combined 🙂
And our school principal (bless your soul Fr. Castelino) built a school library, despite being told he should be spending his money on a million other things.

I kept reading everything i could lay my hands on, through college, and beyond. And for years i was surprised to meet people who didn’t read. I had learnt not to judge, or grudge, people their choices but i found it amazing that someone might not find a book or two they could somehow relate to. The written word, after all, is proof of human civilization.

I came across a new genre of books when i went to study management. Thick tomes that proposed to explore & lay bare the mysteries of “business management”. And i dove right in. Through those 2 years, as so many of my friends spent their time in classes & projects, i read – about 170 books.
(To be honest, i now think i was wrong in doing so. The few classes i did attend were interesting, the professors curious & aware, and the subjects complex enough to demand debate & discussion.)

For years, management books were a staple diet of mine. And then, about 10 years ago, i stopped reading them. I now think most business management books get unduly prescriptive about issues & problems that are far more complex than are made out to be. They also draw conclusions from data sets that aren’t large enough, long enough, or replicable exactly. Of course, my own rebellious streak also comes in the way of accepting such prescriptive answers. 🙂

This is not (i repeat, not) to put down the whole genre. Of late, writers like Adam Grant, Atul Gawande, Hans Rosling, Seth Godin, and others have been doing great work. A number of other writers and thinkers have been looking into personal productivity, into fleshing out your personal paths in alignment with values and psychology. However, I think most of these are not about “management”, but about personal effectiveness.

I do not want to be prescriptive about this. It is a personal journey that everyone has to undertake, and discover their own path, discover what works for them, themselves. There are lots of great books out there, in every genre, that will help you discover things that work for you. I still remain open to suggestions on what to read, but today I think poetry & literature teach you more – far more. And so I increasingly look to fiction to derive my lessons about life, about self, about managing.

Regardless, whatever you decide to read, please read with an open mind. Look to apply what you learn, discard what doesn’t work, and to pass on your learnings to others.

#management #business #books #journey #life #wednesday #reading

Dealing with Tsundoku

Oliver Burkeman talks about the “information overload problem“

To return to information overload: this means treating your “to read” pile like a river (a stream that flows past you, and from which you pluck a few choice items, here and there) instead of a bucket (which demands that you empty it). After all, you presumably don’t feel overwhelmed by all the unread books in the British Library – and not because there aren’t an overwhelming number of them, but because it never occurred to you that it might be your job to get through them all.

Wealth destruction: a primer

(When we say wealth has been wiped out, people ask…) Where did all that wealth go?

The short answer is: It didn’t “go” anywhere. It vanished. It stopped existing. That’s not a natural or intuitive idea — how can wealth just disappear? — so this post is an explainer of how that works. And as we’ll see, this has implications for policy, for how we think about inequality, and for how we plan our own financial futures…

Ultimately, wealth isn’t a physical property of the Universe itself. It’s just how much humans value stuff like stocks, crypto, bonds, houses, or gold…

maybe you’re starting to wonder if… the numbers we use for wealth are simply fake.
Well, in fact, it is a little bit fake. Not entirely, but a little bit. The reason is something called price impact…

“But if price impact means the wealth numbers are somewhat fake, then why don’t we calculate wealth as the amount of cash you COULD get out if you DID sell?”
Well, the answer is: Because we can’t. We just don’t know. The only way to find out price impact is to actually sell. So we can’t really calculate how much cash people could get from selling all their stock or all their Bitcoin, because we don’t actually have any way of knowing how much it is in advance…