Don’t go overboard with delayed gratification

If you expect to do anything important in life – stay healthy, develop expertise, build a business, become financially independent – there is one quality that you absolutely need: the ability to delay gratification Knowledge, skill and experience are essential, of course. A little bit of luck now and then is useful too. But without a healthy dose of patience, the willingness to forgo some…

Book Review: Totto-chan, The Little Girl at the Window

Childhood experiences have a profound impact on how we experience the world as adults. They establish the expectations we set for ourselves, those we interact with, and the world in general. The home environment – parents and caretakers – plays a huge role in the child’s development. But the school environment, and teachers, play an equally important, in some regards even more so, since these…

Certainty doesn’t exist but we’re just never aware of it.

One of the many ironies of the pandemic is the way it has intensified our awareness of how little control we have over the future. It has intensified our awareness; it has not created uncertainty. In our pre-pandemic world, we reassured ourselves with the story that we were in control. The pandemic refutes such blindness. Change is the…

On the Value of Values

Imagine you just received a job offer. It’s from a reputed corporation and comes with a fantastic compensation package, but the job itself is boring and requires you to be on the road most of the time. What would you do? For some, this would be a dream come true – “What? All that money AND I get to travel AND I don’t have to be learning all the time. Of course, I’ll take it.” For others, this…

Career advice for high-schoolers

A few weeks ago I participated in a career panel for high-schoolers at my son’s school. Generally, I avoid advising people I’m not familiar with, but I thought about my younger self, realized how valuable such a forum would have been to him, and decided to share whatever experiences I had with the students.

After my fellow panelists and I introduced ourselves, the students got to their…

Why we’re always late

When I set out to write this blog I had a very modest goal: to publish one post every two weeks.  And yet, for the duration of this exercise, I’ve been able to keep to this plan only once, missing my deadline by at least a day on every other occasion. Being delayed on an inconsequential personal project is hardly surprising. What is surprising though is that even well-resourced, highly…

Routines are deliberate choices about how we use our time

  For most people, the idea of repeating a fixed set of actions day in and day out, maintaining a routine, in other words, conjures vivid images of boredom and monotony, the apparent sameness suggesting their lives lacks excitement. But everyone I know who produces consistently lives and swears by a routine. They take advantage of the things we dread the most, monotony and predictability, and use…

Adding friction to your online shopping experience

Shopping in the modern world is an experience to behold: access an unlimited array of products any time of day from the comfort of your own home and with only a few clicks have it delivered to your doorstep, sometimes, in only a few hours. Online shopping wasn’t always this easy. Retailers started shifting their stores online in the mid to late 90’s but even in the late 00’s, a good fifteen years…

Probability is not a mere computation of odds on the dice or more complicated variants; it is the acceptance of the lack of certainty in our knowledge and the development of methods for dealing with our ignorance. Outside of textbooks and casinos, probability almost never presents itself as a mathematical problem or a brain teaser. Mother nature does not tell you how many holes there are on the roulette table, nor does she deliver problems in a textbook way (in the real world one has to guess the problem more than the solution).

Say you’re walking around at a conference and someone stops you and asks, “How good are you at what you do? How much do you know about your area of expertise? How confident are you in the decisions you take?” How would you respond? Most people with only a slight hesitation will confidently rate themselves “above average,” in the 50th percentile or greater, relative to their mostly unfamiliar…

Developing technique for everyday activity

Pick up a book, any book, preferably one with dense text. Open to a random page and read for five minutes. Don’t worry about comprehension, just read until your time is up and count the number words read. Now repeat the test with a slight modification – use the index finger of your dominant hand to underline the text as you read. You should notice a measurable increase in the number of words read…

Bertrand Russell on the importance of leisure

Humans are obsessed with work. Work serves as the lens through which we, as individuals, societies, and nations, evaluate progress and development. And according to this view, leisure is a nuisance, that only serves to slow down progress. The importance of work over leisure is apparent in the literature from the past two centuries. Technological advances of the past few decades have allowed human…

Peter Drucker on how to create your career path

 The work we do, to a large extent, acts as our primary interface to the world. It’s in the time we spend at work that we develop skills, get exposed to unfamiliar ideas, learn to deal with people, and hopefully, form an objective view of the world. The accumulation of knowledge and experience happens over a long period and can significantly impact our ability to contribute to society. It is…