Reviewing 2020 #2 contd.

 

Hi friends. Here is a continuum of my 2020 learnings. As the pandemic afforded a lot of time to read and learn, there is a lot to share. I am writing in parts viz:

RANDOMNESS

This is incomplete knowledge, uncertainty. The knowledge in the ancient world doubled in 1500 years and now, the information doubles in 1 year. With this explosion, the randomness has increased exponentially. How do you deal with it? By being convex to it. Hone your edge, take a few bets in life with asymmetric payoffs ie small losses but huge gains if you won. That's exactly what a venture capitalist does by betting on multiple ventures. With vast information asymmetry, you just can't know which horse will win the race. And you have to play your stakes to succeed. The luck factor also becomes all-important and often underrated. And the business of prediction is the worst to be in. Invest in preparedness to profit from uncertainty preferably with open-ended payoffs. The most important events in my life my first job, my first company, my wife, my travels have all been random and I love it.

       

The central tenet of Taleb's book Fooled by Randomness ( FBR) is to acknowledge the huge uncertainty around you and not be fooled by it. Rather profit from it. In other words, you ought to know what you don't know. As the great Yogi Berra said, You have to be very careful when you don't know where you are going for you may not get there. This means there is huge uncertainty and you have to be on alert always. Taleb adds further, In our Natural habitat of 130000 years most of which was spent in African Savannah, we led a simple life and did not need much information and neither was it there anyway. Much of our problem comes from the fact that we have evolved out of such a habitat faster, much faster than our genes. Even worse, our genes have not changed at all. For a detailed study, I recommend reading FBR.

Touristification in All Spheres of Life

Sucking out randomness out of your life is touristification. It means being an unsuspecting victim of a plan. The best example is the travel industry where everything is predecided. And we are suckers for it. We rely on their( travel agencies) travel plans for our holiday instead of doing our research. They are inflicted with profit bias. On my first visit to Southeast Asia, we were picked up from our hotel at 6 am ( we were on a holiday) and taken to such boring destinations that completely sucked us. Just imagine while in Singapore, we missed Mariana Bay, Sands Skypark observation deck inter alia. Be a Rational flaneur in life and you will enjoy traveling like never before. I climbed my first Glacier KAFNI ( Trek to Kafni) in 2013 and it was random. I set out to conquer PINDARI instead locals advised me to reach for KAFNI as it was prettier and tougher. I didn't regret it. Randomness can take you to destinations that travel agents will never recommend to you ever. 

In business being opportunistic is great. As some great man said, the best plan in life is no plan at all. Go with the flow and exploit randomness, Optionality where ever. Steve Jobs was a great flaneur who traveled eclectically for inspiration. The IPads and phones were inspired by ancient Japanese Toyotas Takumi artisan Shakunaga who begins his work of porcelain crockery at the source. There was a randomness to this inspiration and what Jobs achieved post it was his genius. Even JK Rowling got the idea of Harry Potter while riding a train that she wrote down on a piece of paper. Rest is epic.

In my career, I have built three companies. The latest is WeCarePg. This is about residential spaces to the students studying in Delhi University, doing pretty well till Covid at least. We are rebooting. There has always been randomness to the ventures. Things hardly went per plan but innovation, tenacity navigation in choppy uncertain waters are the key I guess.

Many thanks for taking out time to read me.

Photo Credit: Valiant on UnSplash.