My wife was saying that giving my daughter a head bath did not have enough RoI because she was going swimming anyways.

And sure enough, my daughter who is the consummate questioner asked “What is RoI?”

Well, first I had to explain what an investment was to a 4 year old.

What is an investment?

Essentially, It’s something you do today so you can get something nicer later. Often its something you do not really want to do. But then I realised, sometimes the today’s stuff can actually be quite nice. So it’s not quite the same as delayed gratification.

I believe startups are best built by high agency individuals focussed on a joint goal.

Why? The nature of a startup typically involves:

1. A market opportunity - a problem faced by some set of people that is not being solved at scale.
2. A non-obvious solution - although the founders are typically in a place where the solution seems somewhat obvious to them.

That means often the path to take is not exactly clear and the primary thing that determines a startups success is the rate of experimentation.

One of Homo Sapiens’ most powerful skills is our ability to work together and strategize on a larger scale than any other animal. It is believed that this is what helped us edge out our other hominid competitors.

Why are we able to collaborate better than other animals?

It seems we have a unique ability to communicate abstract concepts using specialized language centers in our cerebral cortex. We are able to communicate concepts like possibilities, flow of time. For example “yesterday there was a lion near the river, and I saw it go near the mountain. It is possible you might encounter it near the hill today” vs “lion near river, dont go”. This way we can share more nuanced information and benefit from each other’s knowledge and coordinate better at greater distances and at a larger scale. 

Wow, it’s been 3 years since I wrote. I want to practice putting my thoughts into words again, so here we go.

Let’s talk about shared myths.

The reason we, homo sapiens have been able to scale our societies so well (> 7B globally and almost fully interconnected) is our ability to create and believe in shared myths. It is what differentiates us from our ape ancestors, and it is the reason we have become the dominant species on earth (by being able to coordinate at unprecedented scale). This is one of the core ideas of “Sapiens” by Yuval Noah Harari.

I usually take the train to office. Here is a breakdown of the state of my mind during the journey -

• 10 min walk to station, stand on the right platform - active

• Less than 5 min waiting - mostly on auto-pilot

• 5 min train ride, mostly standing - active, looking out for the right stop

• 5 min walk to switch tracks - active

• 5 min train ride, mostly standing - active, looking out for the right stop

Sometimes, you do better when you increase difficulty.

I occasionally play Flight Commander when taking a quick break. It’s a simple game - direct aircrafts to airstrips by drawing a path and make sure the planes don’t crash into each other. Each plan landed gives you a point.

I was terrible at it, till I noticed the “»” button at the bottom. It doubles the speed of the game, technically making it twice as hard to play. I started using it to get through the easy initial stages, and slowed the game down again once there were too many planes in the air. I was still terrible at it.

Here is another gem from Derek Sivers. To extend his point, all our opinions, beliefs (and the meaning we give to life) are subject to change. If our projected meaning or beliefs change, our outlook changes, and our actions change.

In that case, isn’t it only fair that we allow others the freedom to change as well? To give people a second chance? To not pass lasting judgement based on one-off incidents?

We know it’s 42, but what is the right question?

Here is some food for thought from Derek Sivers. Nice analysis, and I agree. He says,

“Life has no inherent meaning. Nothing has inherent meaning. Life is a blank slate. You’re free to project any meaning that serves you. You’re free to do with it, anything you want.”

The meaning of life, then is within you - not outside. There is no absolute / inherent meaning in life, only what you project onto it.

I recently read that, of the Big5 personality traits, the ones that distinguish an entrepreneur are

- “Openness” (to new ideas)
- “Conscientiousness” (ie. willingness to work hard towards a goal) and
- “Disagreeableness” (willingness to not conform, and be ridiculed)

It struck a chord with me. I think these are nice “rules of thumb” to evaluate a startup culture!

is directly proportional to the amount of work you do.