The Listening Skill

We get to see further than our predecessors, not because we have a greater vision or greater height, but because we are lifted on their gigantic stature.

There are giants in every field. Don't let them intimidate you. Take from anywhere that resonates with you and inspires or fuels your imagination. Build upon it and improve it. Doing this will make your work authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent.

Wisdom is not as simple as just reading. The rules and simplicities given by others may make us feel we're getting brighter, but it is not real.

Owning wisdom requires a discipline to continue learning and not to shun the details and complexity. It is boring. It takes time. But it is the only way.

Compounding is exponential growth. We tend to see the immediate linear relationships in the situation, e.g., how one test diagnoses one person.

The compounding effect of that relationship means that increased testing can lead to an exponential decrease in disease transmission because one infected person can infect more than just one person.

In the absence of enough testing, we need to use probabilistic thinking to make decisions on what actions to take. Reasonable probability will impact your approach to physical distancing if you estimate the likelihood of transmission as being three people out of ten instead of one person out of one thousand.

When you have to make decisions with incomplete information, use inversion: Look at the problem backward. Ask yourself what you could do to make things worse, then avoid doing those things.

We increasingly find it difficult to focus on the hear and now without checking our phones. We seem to go through life in a state of "continual partial attention." We're there but not aware of where we put our attention.

While modern technology has its advantages, our attention span is suffering. Teachers are noticing that current students find it hard to read books that previous students used to enjoy. Teachers think that students' ability to read has been compromised by short text messages and video games.

• Sensory: We can more easily tune out from sensory distractions. For example, the feel of your tongue against your upper palate is an incoming stimuli your brain weeds out.
• Emotional distraction is more difficult to tune out. When you overhear someone mention your name, it's almost impossible to ignore.

Those who focus best are relatively immune to emotional disturbance.

The job of a leader is to get the right team, which according to an estimate provides three times more output than an average team.

The work of a leader isn’t as simple as hiring the best talent, and merely putting smart people together as a team is not an effective strategy.

Any combination of individual intelligence does not make an intelligent group, no matter how logical it sounds on paper.

The ‘A’ Players, the cream of individual intelligence, bring in drive, integrity and the ability to mentor, but all of which is not possible without the collective effort of other players of the team, who are not A players.

Multiple brains work well when the answer is a simple numerical figure or fact, and the question is not coming from the collective intelligence themselves. It helps when the input mechanism posing the problem to the collective intelligence has strict quality control.

Individuals, when given substantial powers, start to achieve ‘optimal stupidity’, especially when they are not held accountable for the results and consequences.

Scientific communities make good use of the peer-review process (individuals checking each other) to achieve quality on the basis of a meritocracy.

No mechanism is fool-proof, with bad reporting, incompetency and self-delusion among many individual contributors diminishing the quality of the solutions.

It means to be able to break down a big system into its sections and putting it back together. The target is to identify the strong and weak links: how the sections work, don’t work, or could potentially work and applying this knowledge to engineer useful outcomes.

There is no engineering method, so modular systems thinking varies with contexts.

• The ability to see a structure where there’s nothing apparent.
• Adeptness at designing under constraints.
• The capacity to hold alternative ideas in your head and make considered judgments.

• When automobile safety laws were introduced, the drivers started taking more risks while driving, leading to more pedestrian accidents.
• Children (and even adults) take more physical risks while playing a sport with protective gear.
• Safety features like Anti-lock brakes in vehicles ended up increasing the accidents for taxi drivers in Germany
• Child-proof caps on medicine bottles made parents careless about their being opened by kids, including the ones which don’t have the safety feature.

Having a safety device in place, and armed with the knowledge that we can push the envelope a bit, the appetite for risk increases.

• People who have an emergency fund in place tend to be less careful about their investments.
• People wearing a face-mask in this global pandemic feel like they are safer in crowded places (It’s a face mask, not an Iron Man suit).

"“I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers.”"

Apart from people, the observer effect is famously highlighted in the thought experiment of the physician Erwin Schrödinger.

He states that if a cat is placed in a box of radioactive atoms that may or may not kill it in one hour, the cat is in the state of limbo until someone observes it by opening the box. The final outcome does not happen until someone observes it.

External beauty and pleasing appearance often influence our perception, and we believe that this would dictate our experience after we attain it.

The day-to-day experience of living in a particular place cannot be judged by its outer beauty. Our relationships and social health are more important than architecture.