It does not matter how frequently something succeeds if failure is too costly to bear. ( Like playing russian roulette)

Skewness Issue

Quality of a decision cannot be solely judged based on its outcome.The epic poet (Homer) did not judge his heroes by the result: heroes won and lost battles in a manner that was totally independent of their own valor; their fate depended upon totally external forces, generally the explicit agency of the scheming gods (not devoid of nepotism).Heroes are heroes because they are heroic in behavior, not because they won or lost.﻿One cannot judge a performance in any given field by the results, but by the costs of the alternative (i.e. if history played out in a different way).

We Are Obsessed With Outcomes

The notion of path, as opposed to outcome, indicates that it is not a mere MBA-style scenario analysis, but the examination of a sequence of scenarios along the course of time.﻿We are not concerned with what the investor's worth would be in, say, a year, but rather of the heart-wrenching ride she may experience during that period.

Stochastic processes

For an idea to have survived so long across so many cycles is indicative of its relative fitness. Noise, at least some noise,was filtered out.People tend to infer that because some inventions have revolutionized our lives that inventions are good to endorse and we should favor the new over the old.

Old Vs New Ideas

It is frequently said in the markets, Bad trades catch up with you.Mathematicians of probability give that a fancy name: ergodicity. It means, roughly, that (under certain conditions), very long sample paths would end up resembling each other.

Ergodicity

Over a short time increment, one observes the variability of the portfolio (variance), not the returns. Our emotions are not designed to understand the point. We think with our emotions and there is no way around it.It serves better to check portfolios at sufficiently large intervals to avoid letting your emotions take the driving seat.

How Often Should We Check Our Portfolio ?

A negative pang is not offset by a positive one (some behavioral economists estimate the negative effect to be up to 2.5 the magnitude of a positive one). It leads to an emotional deficit.

Negative Vs Positive Emotions

If I am going to be forced to eat pork, it better be of the best kind.

I can use data to disprove a proposition, never to prove one. I can use history to refute a conjecture, never to affirm it.There are only two types of theories1. Theories that are known to be wrong, as they were tested and adequately rejected.2. Theories that have not yet been known to be wrong, not falsified yet,but are exposed to be proved wrong.

Falsifiable Vs Verifiable

There is no rational reason to keep a painting you would not buy at its current market rate.

Emotional Investments

Have you ever heard about people say these words 'don't be fooled by numbers, the mind wants you to see what you see.'

Fooled by Randomness is a standalone book in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s landmark Incerto series, an investigation of opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision-making in a world we don’t understand. The other books in the series are The Black Swan, Antifragile, Skin in the Game, and The Bed of Procrustes. Fooled by Randomness is the word-of-mouth sensation that will change the way you think about business and the world. Nassim Nicholas Taleb–veteran trader, renowned risk expert, polymathic scholar, erudite raconteur, and New York Times bestselling author of The Black Swan–has written a modern classic that turns on its head what we believe about luck and skill. This book is about luck–or more precisely, about how we perceive and deal with luck in life and business. Set against the backdrop of the most conspicuous forum in which luck is mistaken for skill–the world of trading–Fooled by Randomness provides captivating insight into one of the least understood factors in all our lives. Writing in an entertaining narrative style, the author tackles major intellectual issues related to the underestimation of the influence of happenstance on our lives. The book is populated with an array of characters, some of whom have grasped, in their own way, the significance of chance: the baseball legend Yogi Berra; the philosopher of knowledge Karl Popper; the ancient world’s wisest man, Solon; the modern financier George Soros; and the Greek voyager Odysseus. We also meet the fictional Nero, who seems to understand the role of randomness in his professional life but falls victim to his own superstitious foolishness. However, the most recognizable character of all remains unnamed–the lucky fool who happens to be in the right place at the right time–he embodies the “survival of the least fit.” Such individuals attract devoted followers who believe in their guru’s insights and methods. But no one can replicate what is obtained by chance. Are we capable of distinguishing the fortunate charlatan from the genuine visionary? Must we always try to uncover nonexistent messages in random events? It may be impossible to guard ourselves against the vagaries of the goddess Fortuna, but after reading Fooled by Randomness we can be a little better prepared. Named by Fortune One of the Smartest Books of All Time A Financial Times Best Business Book of the Year

Fooled by Randomness

When you spend years responding to problems, you can sometimes overlook the fact that you could be preventing them.

Downstream actions are reactions to problems. These efforts are fast and tangible.Upstream actions attempt to prevent those problems from happening in the first place by systematically reducing the harm caused by those problems. These efforts are slower and broader. A sign of upstream work is that it uses systems thinking.Example: You can offer a homeless person a meal today, but to figure out how to reduce evictions so that people don't become homeless might take years.

Upstream thinking

<ul><li>Expedia: 58% of customers who booked travel on Expedia placed a call afterwards for a copy of their itinerary. No one was responsible for ensuring that customers didn't need to call for support. It was identified as an upstream problem. Once changes were in place, the need for customers to call for help decreased to 15%.</li><li>Dutch Bicycle Company: VanMoof regularly received complaints that many of its bikes were damaged during shipping. They started printing images of flat-screen televisions on their shipping boxes, thinking couriers would be more careful. It resulted in 70 - 80% less damage.</li></ul>

Examples of upstream thinking

<ul><li>Problem blindness. "This problem is inevitable." You can't fix a problem you can't see.</li><li>A lack of ownership. "It's not my problem to fix." People resist acting on a problem because they may feel it is not their place. When no one owns the problem, it probably won't get solved.</li><li>Tunnelling. "I can't solve the problem right now." Researchers found when people lack money, time or mental bandwidth, the little problems take preference over the big ones. When people juggle many issues, they give up trying to solve them and instead adopt tunnel vision.</li></ul>

Barriers that prevent upstream thinking

In 2014, the C-section rate in Brazil was 57%, the highest in the world. In the country's private health system, 84% of children were delivered by C-section. The system was designed to prefer C-sections. After educating doctors and patients, the upstream solution caused a 40% increase in natural childbirth.The move away from problem blindness is the shocking realisation that you've come to treat the abnormal as normal.

Example of problem blindness

Organisations have a tendency for downstream thinking. To succeed, leaders should change the focus to upstream thinking.<ul><li>Identify problems early</li><li>Target leverage points in complex systems</li><li>Find reliable methods to measure success</li><li>Consider new ways of working together</li><li>Embed their successes into systems.</li></ul>Find new ways of working together:<ul><li>Hand the problem to the right people.</li><li>Give them enough notice of that problem.</li><li>Align their efforts toward preventing instances of the problem.</li></ul>

Upstream thinking in leadership

Measures can fool you in three ways:<ul><li>“A rising tide lifts all boats.” Your measure shows that you're succeeding, but you mistakenly attribute your success to your own work.</li><li>Your short-term measures don't align with your long-term mission.</li><li>Your short-term measures became the mission and undermined the real work.</li></ul>

Ghost victories

<ul><li>“Rising tides” test. What else might explain the short-term success other than our efforts?</li><li>Misalignment test. How can we find misalignment as early as possible? What alternative measures could provide potential replacements?</li><li>Lazy bureaucrat test. What would someone do to succeed on the measures with the least possible effort?</li><li>Defiling-the-mission test. If short-term success undermines your long-term mission, what was the cause?</li><li>Unintended consequences test. What if we succeed at our mission, but cause negative unintended consequences? What should we pay attention to?</li></ul>

Find reliable ways to measure success

Banning plastic bags in San Diego caused serious unintended consequences.The deadly 2017 hepatitis A outbreak in San Diego is attributed to the lack of plastic bags. Homeless people used the bags to dispose of their own waste. But when the bags became hard to come by, the alternatives were much less sanitary.

Unintended consequences example

This book is about how to build a good product

Wall Street Journal Bestseller New York Times bestselling author Dan Heath explores how to prevent problems before they happen, drawing on insights from hundreds of interviews with unconventional problem solvers. So often in life, we get stuck in a cycle of response. We put out fires. We deal with emergencies. We stay downstream, handling one problem after another, but we never make our way upstream to fix the systems that caused the problems. Cops chase robbers, doctors treat patients with chronic illnesses, and call-center reps address customer complaints. But many crimes, chronic illnesses, and customer complaints are preventable. So why do our efforts skew so heavily toward reaction rather than prevention? Upstream probes the psychological forces that push us downstream—including “problem blindness,” which can leave us oblivious to serious problems in our midst. And Heath introduces us to the thinkers who have overcome these obstacles and scored massive victories by switching to an upstream mindset. One online travel website prevented twenty million customer service calls every year by making some simple tweaks to its booking system. A major urban school district cut its dropout rate in half after it figured out that it could predict which students would drop out—as early as the ninth grade. A European nation almost eliminated teenage alcohol and drug abuse by deliberately changing the nation’s culture. And one EMS system accelerated the emergency-response time of its ambulances by using data to predict where 911 calls would emerge—and forward-deploying its ambulances to stand by in those areas. Upstream delivers practical solutions for preventing problems rather than reacting to them. How many problems in our lives and in society are we tolerating simply because we’ve forgotten that we can fix them?

Upstream

SMALL, SMART CHOICES + CONSISTENCY + TIME = RADICAL DIFFERENCEThe Compound Effect is the principle of gathering huge rewards from a series of small, smart choices. Small, seemingly insignificant steps completed consistently over time will create a radical difference.

The Compound Effect

Everything in your life exists because you first made a choice about something. Choice is at the center of all success and failure. It is what we choose that makes the biggest difference.Too often we sleepwalk through our choices. We default to choices that our society and culture tells us we should do. And it's not big choices, but ones that you think don't matter or count for much that derail us.

Choices Shape Your Destiny

<ul><li>95 percent of everything we feel, think, do, and achieve is a result of a learned habit.</li><li>With enough practice and repetition, any behavior, good or bad, becomes automatic over time.</li><li>That means that even though we developed most of our habits unconsciously (by modeling our parents, responding to environmental or cultural associations, or creating coping mechanisms), we can consciously decide to change them.</li><li>The habits you indulge in could be compounding your life into a repeated disaster.</li></ul>

Creatures of Habit

Repeated choices become habits. The first step toward change is awareness and the best way to become aware is to measure.<ul><li>Track every action that relates to the area of your life you want to improve.</li><li>Start off with an easy tempo. Just track one habit for one week.</li><li>Pick the habit that has the greatest control over you; that’s where you’ll start.</li><li>Once you start tracking your life, your attention will be focused on the smallest things you’re doing right, as well as the smallest things you’re doing wrong.</li></ul>

Become Aware Of Your Choices

<ul><li>Identify your triggers: Look at your list of bad habits. Figure out the “who,” the “what,” the “where,” and the “when” underlying each bad behavior.</li><li>Clean the house. Get rid of whatever enables your bad habits.</li><li>Look again at your list of bad habits. How can you alter them so that they’re not as harmful? Can you replace them with healthier habits or drop-kick them altogether?</li><li>Ease in. For some of your old habits, it may be more effective to take small steps to ease into unwinding them.</li></ul>

Strategies for Eliminating Bad Habits

<ul><li>Or jump in. We are all different and some researchers have found that it can be paradoxically easier for people to make lifestyle changes if they change a great many bad habits at once.</li></ul>

<ul><li>Set yourself up to succeed. Any new habit has to work inside your life and lifestyle.</li><li>Think addition, not subtraction. Think what you can choose to “add in” so you can enrich your life experience.</li><li>Go for a Public Display of Accountability. Once you put it out there on the public record, you knows that you'll be held responsible for any action.</li><li>Find a success buddy. There are few things as powerful as two people locked arm and arm marching toward the same goal.</li></ul>

Techniques for Installing Good Habits

<ul><li>Competition & camaraderie. There’s nothing like a friendly contest to whet your competitive spirit and immerse yourself in a new habit with a bang.</li><li>Celebrate. There should be a time to celebrate, to enjoy some of the fruits of your victories along the way.</li></ul>

<ul><li>Objects in motion tend to stay in motion.</li><li>The hardest part of momentum is the beginning. But once you get moving you can keep going very easily.</li><li>With momentum, you can continue succeeding with less work. It's easy to keep things running once you have momentum.</li></ul>

Momentum Is Huge

<ul><li>The most motivating choices are ones that align with your “why” and your purpose.</li><li>You need a deep why for doing stuff. With a why that is meaningful enough, you will do almost anything.</li><li>The access point to your why-power is through your core values, which define both who you are and what you stand for.</li></ul>

Find Your "Why" Power

<ul><li>Your core values are your internal compass. They act as the filter through which you run all of life’s requests, requests, and temptations, making sure they’re leading you toward your intended destination.</li><li>Getting your core values defined and adjusted is one of the most important steps in redirecting your life toward your own definition of success.</li><li>Decision-making is also easier when you are certain of your core values.</li></ul>

Core Values: Your Personal GPS

<ul><li>When you define your goals, you give your brain something new to look for and focus on.</li><li>Top people have very clear goals. They know who they are and they know what they want. They write it down and they make plans for its accomplishment. Unsuccessful people carry their goals around in their head like marbles rattling around in a can.</li><li>Make a list of your most important goals. Go for whole-life success: balance in all the aspects of life that are important to you: business, finances, health and well-being, spirituality, family and relationships, and lifestyle.</li></ul>

Setting Goals

Preparation (personal growth) +  Attitude (belief/mindset) + Opportunity (a good thing coming your way) + Action (doing something about it) = Luck

The Formula for Getting Lucky

A great book to read about wealth accumulation and being lucky.

The New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller, based on the principle that little, everyday decisions will either take you to the life you desire or to disaster by default. No gimmicks. No Hyperbole. No Magic Bullet. The Compound Effect is a distillation of the fundamental principles that have guided the most phenomenal achievements in business, relationships, and beyond. This easy-to-use, step-by-step operating system allows you to multiply your success, chart your progress, and achieve any desire. If you're serious about living an extraordinary life, use the power of The Compound Effect to create the success you want. You will find strategies including: How to win--every time! The No. 1 strategy to achieve any goal and triumph over any competitor, even if they're smarter, more talented or more experienced. Eradicating your bad habits (some you might be unaware of!) that are derailing your progress. The real, lasting keys to motivation--how to get yourself to do things you don't feel like doing. Capturing the elusive, awesome force of momentum. Catch this, and you'll be unstoppable. The acceleration secrets of superachievers. Do they have an unfair advantage? Yes they do, and now you can too!

According to Eric Ries, there are two main reasons for startup failures:<ul><li>Traditional management methods do not work for a highly uncertain startup</li><li>The second reason may seem completely opposite to the first one </li><li> seeing that traditional management approaches do not work, entrepreneurs let things go by themselves and are guided by the "just do it" principle.</li></ul>

Why Do startups fail ??

<ul><li>Many people share the opinion that entrepreneurial success is a combination of perseverance, intelligence, a good product, and the luck of being in the right place at the right time.</li><li> Routine, small things, and boring details do not matter. </li><li> it is nothing more than just a myth, partly imposed by pop culture. </li></ul>It's exactly the boring little things that are critical to a startup's success.

What is a Lean Startup?

<ul><li>Entrepreneurs are everywhere. </li><li>Irrespective of the size of the venture if you guys are working on a product that solves a problem in a new and better way then you are entrepreneurs</li><li>Entrepreneurship is management. Startups need a new type of management that will handle the conditions of extreme uncertainty.</li><li>Confirmation by facts. A startup needs continuous learning through a scientific approach and empirical hypothesis testing.</li></ul>

Five Principles of the Lean Startup:

<ul><li>Instead of making complex plans based on many assumptions,</li><li> you can make constant adjustments with a steering wheel called the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop. </li><li>Startups are greatly analogous to driving a car to our office as we know the destination but we may change the routes according to our ease  </li></ul>

Startups are not rocket science they are like car rides

The feedback that a startup receives in its experiments can be qualitative (which product options they like and which they don't) or quantitative (how many customers use the product, the number of registered users).The Lean Startup concept is based on a Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop. The most important challenge of startup management is to strive to reduce the feedback cycle time. But all the elements of this cycle deserve equal attention.

How to go into practice?


<ul><li>For a startup, you need to start creating a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) as soon as possible. </li><li>MVP is a version of a product that allows you to start the Build-Measure-Learn cycle with minimal effort, spending as little development time as possible.</li><li>Such a crude product may be devoid of the options that will be most appreciated by customers in the future. </li><li>Still, at the same time, enough to be usable and understandable by first users.</li></ul>

Build #step-1

<ol><li>Video MVP {A video that explains your product or solution to measure traction}</li><li>The Concierge MVP {idea that when you’re just starting out you don’t need to be able to handle thousands of customers, you just need to make one customer happy} great way to validate your hypothesis</li><li>The Wizard of Oz MVP. In a Wizard of Oz MVP customers believe they are interacting with your technology product; however, the reality is that behind the scenes a human is doing the work</li><li>Landing Page MVP: make a landing page with an explanation of your solution if people are showing interest and interacting its a good sign </li></ol>

Types of MVP


<ul><li>"Measure" means determining whether the efforts to create a product are producing the desired results. </li><li>And this is the key difference between Lean Startup valuation and standard methods, where deadlines and budget utilization are assessed, </li><li>but it may not be considered that the startup has created a useless product. </li><li>The primary assessment method in a Lean startup is innovation accounting.</li><li>This is a quantitative approach that allows us to find out how successful our attempts to trigger the growth mechanism are. It also helps identify intermediate learning outcomes.</li></ul>

Measure #step-2

<ul><li>It means to figure out whether the chose path lead to success or we need to pivot</li><li>When an entrepreneur sees that the chosen path does not lead to success, </li><li>he must be ready to find a new strategic hypothesis and stop spending money on following the unnecessary direction.</li></ul>

Learn #step-3

<ul><li>It is not uncommon for entrepreneurs to first create a product and then find out consumers' reactions. But the point is to do the opposite.</li><li>The goal of creating a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is to start learning and testing in practice as soon as possible. </li><li>An MVP is needed to test the hypotheses of entrepreneurs. It should not be perfect. It should be quality enough to attract the first customers, but no more.</li></ul>

Do what scares perfectionists

<ol><li> Create MVP and get feedback to understand the real state.</li><li>Try to bring metrics closer to ideal ones. It can take a lot of trying.</li><li>Decide whether to move in the same direction or make a pivot.</li><li>If you are close to the ideal metrics, you need to move in the same direction.</li></ol>

Three stages of innovation accounting:

<ul><li>If nobody uses your product, then optimization or marketing will make no sense. </li><li>A startup must be very clear about making clear and well-founded predictions to prove that a good business can be built with the product. </li><li>The necessary indicators are often replaced by those that look nicer but are useless ("vanity metrics"). </li><li>These metrics usually include ad views, page visits, app installs, and more.</li><li> Real metrics should prove the value of your project, that it really solves user problems.</li></ul>

Vanity metrics

<ul><li>When it becomes clear that the initially chosen path will not lead to success, </li><li>the entrepreneur is required to make a pivot - to radically change the strategy, create and test a new hypothesis about the product.</li><li>The pivot's essence is to take into account everything that you have learned earlier, but at the same time radically change the strategy to get even more grounded knowledge.</li><li>It is a combination of the scientific method of hypothesis testing and vision, intuition, and creativity.</li></ul>

When should you make a pivot?

Small batch approachThe Lean Startup methodology is based on a small batch approach, borrowed from the concept of lean manufacturing.<ul><li>When working in small batches, the finished product is produced every few seconds. </li><li>When working in large batches, all the finished goods are produced simultaneously, at the very end. </li><li>Imagine what this means when it comes to hours, days, weeks. </li><li>What if a customer suddenly decides they don't need a product? </li><li>Would we like to know about this earlier? In the small batches approach, this risk is minimized.</li></ul>

How to get traction?

<ul><li>The rules that govern sticky growth are pretty simple: if the acquisition rate exceeds the loss rate, then the popularity of the product rises. Therefore, companies need to track consumer losses.</li></ul>

1. The sticky engine of growth

<ul><li>For a company to grow steadily over a long time using a paid-growth tool, it needs a differentiated ability to 'monetize' a particular group of users.</li><li>For example, at IMVU (Ries' ex-company), this was due to introducing the ability to get off funds from mobile phones, which helped the company attract more customers than competitors who focused only on bank cards.</li></ul>

2. Paid engine of growth.

<ul><li>The lean startup is developing a product based on the expressed desires of the market.</li><li>The lean startup uses validated learning, which is a process by which companies assess consumer interest.</li><li>Lean startup methods focus heavily on customer-related information such as customer churn rate, lifetime customer value, and product popularity.</li><li>In lean startup practices, experimentation is favored more than adherence to a rigid plan.</li><li>Lean startup standards will involve releasing a small form or early concept products to assess the customer reaction to the product.</li></ul>

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

This book is a good business bible for new approach to manage a new company known as startups in the post - modern 21st century as the world economy is becoming a knowledge economy where human is at the centre of producing goods and services.

Outlines a revisionist approach to management while arguing against common perceptions about the inevitability of startup failures, explaining the importance of providing genuinely needed products and services as well as organizing a business that can adapt to continuous customer feedback.

The Lean Startup

I watched this TED Talk by Angela Duckworth about the secret recipe of success of people. Her research did confirm as what conventional wisdom said, 'good attitude and stay focus is the way for you to grow.'

“Success is never final; failure is never fatal. It’s courage that counts.”

<ol><li>Grit is about maintaining the same top-level goal for a very long time.</li><li>GRIT has four psychological assets: (1) interest (2) practice (3) purpose (4) hope.</li><li>Gritty people perform more deliberate practice and experience more flow.</li><li>For paragons of grit, the long days and evenings of toil, the setbacks and disappointments, and struggle, the sacrifice—all this is worth it because, ultimately, their efforts pay dividends to other people.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Often, the critical gritty-or-not decisions we make are a matter of identity more than anything else.</li></ol>

5 Main Ideas

The concept of GRIT can be explained in terms of perseverance. Only perseverance will lead to high achievement. A high achiever never believes that they will ever reach their goals, they are always striving more, and are the exact opposite of complacent, constantly unsatisfied. But in a weird way, being unsatisfied and constantly chasing more is satisfying to them. Someone with true grit has enduring passion, they push through pain and frustration, giving up is simply not an option for them."A combination of passion and perseverance makes high achievers special. High achievers have grit."

What is GRIT?

“I won’t just have a job; I’ll have a calling. I’ll challenge myself every day. When I get knocked down, I’ll get back up. I may not be the smartest person in the room, but I’ll strive to be the grittiest.”

Society places a huge amount of emphasis on talent, a natural ability. The author questions why talent is always perceived as the hero, and that talent is the only reason we ever have good results.The idea that high achievers have some miraculous skill is more appealing than the fact that we are simply average and don’t put in enough effort. This magical skill that someone might hold means we simply don’t need to consider ourselves in the same league as them, therefore there is no reason to compare ourselves.

Talent & Effort

“Enthusiasm is common. Endurance is rare.”

“If we overestimate talent, we underestimate everything else.”In reality, Duckworth recognizes that exceptional performance is most often the result of countless accumulated acts of practice. She ties the psychology of achievement up in a simple formula:Talent x Effort = SkillSkill x Effort = AchievementIn achievement TALENT matters but EFFORT counts twice.As Duckworth sums it up:“Talent is how quickly your skills improve when you invest effort. Achievement is what happens when you take skills and use them.”

TALENT matters but EFFORT counts twice

Grit isn’t just about working hard. It’s about staying the course and achieving mastery over a long period of time. To do this requires not just the core character, but coordination and purpose.This coordination can be envisioned as goals in a hierarchy. Low-level goals are short-term activities and to-dos, which in turn feed into mid-level goals and finally top-level goals.

Goals & GRIT

<ol><li>A gritty person must have INTEREST and PASSION. </li><li>The second characteristic is the ability to PRACTICE. Someone with grit will dedicate themselves to practicing every day, and always striving to be better than the day before.</li><li>The driver behind passion is having a PURPOSE. Someone with grit will understand their purpose and why they do the things that they do.</li><li>Finally, HOPE. A gritty person must have hope, it’s a critical element of perseverance.</li></ol>

Characteristics of GRIT

Finding this passion is in most cases a process of discovery, followed by a lengthier period of interest development, cultivation, and refinement. What separates the grittiest from the rest is their capacity to stick at interests for the long term, identifying nuances that keep them interested and exploring their passion at a deeper level.Seminal research by Anders Ericsson (the 10,000-hour rule) suggests that what separates experts is not just the rate at which they practice at an early stage, but the way in which they practice.

The Power of Passion and Practice

“Passion for your work is a little bit of discovery, followed by a lot of development, and then a lifetime of deepening.”

We typically follow a progression starting with a relatively self-oriented interest, moving through self-disciplined practice, and finally integrating our work with some other-centered purpose.What supports this purpose-based grit is an underlying optimism which the gritty exhibit, and a willingness to look forward despite confronting failure after failure.Duckworth links this idea to growth or fixed mindset. To move towards a true growth mindset, she recommends practicing optimistic self-talk and updating our beliefs on intelligence and talent.

The Guiding Light of Purpose and Hope

“I have a feeling tomorrow will be better is different from I resolve to make tomorrow better. The hope that gritty people have has nothing do with luck and everything to do with getting up again.”

I always believed in the conventional ‘Attitude is the key to success.’

"In this must-read book for anyone striving to succeed, pioneering psychologist Angela Duckworth shows parents, educators, athletes, students, and business people--both seasoned and new--that the secret to outstanding achievement is not talent but a focused persistence called "grit." Why do some people succeed and others fail? Sharing new insights from her landmark research on grit, MacArthur "genius" Angela Duckworth explains why talent is hardly a guarantor of success. Rather, other factors can be even more crucial such as identifying our passions and following through on our commitments. Drawing on her own powerful story as the daughter of a scientist who frequently bemoaned her lack of smarts, Duckworth describes her winding path through teaching, business consulting, and neuroscience, which led to the hypothesis that what really drives success is not "genius" but a special blend of passion and long-term perseverance. As a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Duckworth created her own "character lab" and set out to test her theory. Here, she takes readers into the field to visit teachers working in some of the toughest schools, cadets struggling through their first days at West Point, and young finalists in the National Spelling Bee. She also mines fascinating insights from history and shows what can be gleaned from modern experiments in peak performance. Finally, she shares what she's learned from interviewing dozens of high achievers--from JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon to the cartoon editor of The New Yorker to Seattle Seahawks Coach Pete Carroll. Winningly personal, insightful, and even life-changing, Grit is a book about what goes through your head when you fall down, and how that--not talent or luck--makes all the difference"--

Grit

I think it’s possible for ordinary people to choose to be extraordinary.

<ul><li>LEVEL-1: Living in the Culturescape: How You Were Shaped by the World Around You.</li><li>LEVEL-2: The Awakening: The Power to Choose Your Version of the World.</li><li>LEVEL-3: Recoding Yourself: Transforming Your Inner World.</li><li>LEVEL-4: Becoming Extraordinary: Changing the World.</li></ul>

Levels of Extraordinary Life

We live in two types of worlds - absolute truth (where everyone agrees on the same) & relative truth (ideas, models, and myths that are passing through the generation). This world of relative truth is known as the culturescape.﻿"Extraordinary minds are good at seeing the culturescape and are able to selectively choose the rules and conditions to follow versus those to question or ignore. Therefore, they tend to take the path less traveled and innovate on the idea of what it means to truly live."

TRANSCEND THE CULTURESCAPE

Consciousness Engineering is an operating system for the human mind. Your models of reality are like the hardware: They’re your beliefs about yourself and the world. Your systems for living are like the software. We live with outdated beliefs and habits without even knowing it. When you swap out old, expired models and systems that limit you, you’re elevating your consciousness and opening the path to extraordinary living.

CONSCIOUSNESS ENGINEERING

﻿"Extraordinary minds understand that their growth depends on two things: their models of reality and their systems for living. They carefully curate the most empowering models and systems and frequently update themselves."

A Brule is a bulls**t rule that society adopts to simplify its understanding of the world.﻿"Extraordinary minds question the Brules when they feel those Brules are out of alignment with their dreams and desires. They recognize that much of the way the world works is due to people blindly following Brules that have long passed their expiration date."

QUESTION THE BRULES

It’s up to us to choose what we want to believe about ourselves and our lives— and give our children the power to do the same."Extraordinary minds have models of reality that empower them to feel good about themselves and powerful in shifting the world to match the visions in their minds."

REWRITE YOUR MODELS OF REALITY

Take a break from your busy life and ask - why we’re doing it?Extraordinary minds are always looking to learning something new and refresh their systems for living. Then they evaluate to see how well those systems are working. Then they upgrade to the system."Extraordinary minds consistently spend time discovering, upgrading, and measuring new systems for living applied to life, work, heart, and soul. They are in a perpetual state of growth and self-innovation."

UPGRADE YOUR SYSTEMS FOR LIVING

As you start playing with consciousness engineering, questioning the Brules, and experimenting with new models of reality and systems for living, life starts to feel spacious and exciting. You’re moving toward a powerful upgrade. As Vishen calls it Bending Reality.There are two key things you feel in this state: <ul><li>You have a bold vision for the future pulling you forward.</li><li>You’re happy in the NOW.</li></ul>

BEND REALITY

Blissipline: The discipline of daily BlissBlissipline Systems -<ol><li>The Power of Gratitude</li><li>Forgiveness </li><li>The Practice of Giving</li></ol>Happiness is not some amorphous state outside of your control. It’s a trainable skill.

LIVE IN BLISSIPLINE

<ul><li>Means Goals—goals that are a means to an end—and usually about meeting or conforming to society’s Brules.</li><li>End Goals - when follow our heart, the goals that excite and inspire us, and put our ultimate target in our sights.</li></ul>Pursuing end goals accelerates our momentum toward the extraordinary.

CREATE A VISION FOR YOUR FUTURE

﻿Extraordinary minds create a vision for their future that is decidedly their own and free from expectations of the culturescape. Their vision is focused on end goals that strike a direct chord with their happiness.

It involves understanding two particular models of reality:<ol><li>SELF-FUELED GOALS: These are end goals that you have absolute control over. No one can take them away from you.</li><li>YOU ARE ENOUGH: You need not to prove anything to anyone.</li></ol>

BE UNFUCKWITHABLE

The Uniqueness of extraordinary people is that they’re driven by a vision so big that they’re operating beyond the conventional limitations of work and life.﻿"Extraordinary minds are motivated by a quest or calling—a drive to create some positive change in the world. This drive propels them forward in life and helps them to gain meaning and make a meaningful contribution."

EMBRACE YOUR QUEST

I read this book in the year 2018 when I stumbled upon an ESL and a self-improvement mentor by working for him as his content writer for his blogs, providing show notes for his podcast and rewriting his English as a second language teaching materials. Despite Vishen Lakhiani, the founder of Mindvalley, a self - development publishing company and hosting Awesomeness Fest event in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia is controversial man, but his book did make some sense to think about conventional thoughts that we were taught since we were growing up. 

Everything we know about the world today follows an invisible set of rules-how we work, love, parent, spend our money, and define success. But what if we could remove these outdated ideas and start anew? What would our lives look like if we could redefine the meaning of happiness, purpose, and success? The Code of the Extraordinary Mind blends computational thinking, integral theory, modern spirituality, evolutionary biology, and a little bit of humor to provide a revolutionary framework for re-coding ourselves with new, empowering beliefs and behaviors so we can live extraordinary lives. Throughout, Vishen Lakhiani shares transformative insights from legendary thinkers including Elon Musk, Richard Branson, and Arianna Huffington, among others, helping us to think like the greatest creative minds of our era-questioning, challening, and creating new rules for our lives. Lakhiani's 10 laws help us retrain our minds to grow and achieve more than we ever thought was possible, showing us that we do not need to follow convention and can succeed on our own terms no matter where we are starting from.

The Code of the Extraordinary Mind

“For those who know how to use technology wisely, it is the easiest time in history to teach yourself something new.”

“Over the last twenty years, the amount of knowledge easily accessible from a quick online search has exploded… Yet despite this incredible advance, it is not as if the average person is thousands as times as smart as people were was a generation ago. Being able to look things up is certainly an advantage, but without a certain amount of knowledge inside your head, it doesn’t help you solve hard problems.”

It is a strategy for acquiring skills and knowledge. Ultralearning is a potent skill for dealing with a changing world. It has three main characteristics:<ul><li> It is a strategy. A strategy is not the only solution to a given problem, but it maybe a good one.</li><li>It’s self - directed. It’s about how you make decisions about what to learn and why.</li><li>It’s an intense process. Ultralearners always search for and take unusual steps to maximize their effectiveness in learning.</li></ul>

Ultralearning

<ul><li> Economics: Average is over. But even if the economic landscape is rapidly changing may, we can engineer our response to it by aggressively learning the hard skills we need to thrive.</li><li>Education: Ultralearning can fill some of those gaps when going back to school isn’t an affordable option.</li><li>Technology: The space of learning possibilities is immense, just waiting for ambitious autodidacts to come up with new ways to exploit.</li></ul>

Why Investing In Mastering The Art Of Learning Hard

<ol><li>Meta - learning: Start by learning how to learn the subject or skill you want to tackle.</li><li>Focus: Carve out time in your bday, and hack back distractions.</li><li>Directness: Practice the thing you want to learn. Learn by doing.</li><li>Drill the weakest point: Break down complex skills into small parts </li><li>Retrieval: Testing isn’t simply a way of assessing knowledge but a way of creating it.</li><li>Feedback: Know how to use it without letting your ego get in the way.</li><li>Retention: Understand what you forget and why. Learn to remember things.</li></ol>

9 Principles Of Ultralearning 

8) Intuition: Develop your intuition through play and exploration of concepts and skills.9)!Experimentation: Get outside your comfort zone by cultivating an experimental mindset

At some level there’s a craving that drives us to do something else, there’s an aversion to doing the task itself or both.Much procrastination is unconscious. We’re procrastinating, but we don’t internalize it that way.

Why We Procrastinate?

<ul><li> Your environment: be aware of what environment you work best in, and test it. Multitasking may feel like fun, but it’s unsuitable for ultralearning.</li><li>The task you’re trying to learn: certain activities, due to their nature, are harder to focus on than others.</li><li>Your mind: negative emotions, restlessness, and daydreaming can be some of the biggest obstacles to focus.</li></ul>

Learning: Common Sources Of Distraction 

<ul><li> Outcome feedback: this tells you something about how well you’re doing overall but offers no ideas as to what you’re doing better or worse.</li><li>Informational feedback: this feedback tells you what you’re doing wrong, but it doesn’t necessarily tell you how to fix it.</li><li>Corrective feedback: the best kind of feedback to get is corrective feedback. This is the feedback that shows you not only what you’re doing wrong but how to fix it</li></ul>

Three Types Of Feedback

”Knowledge expands, but so does ignorance, as with a greater understanding of a subject also comes a greater appreciation for all the questions that remain unanswered.”

Future-proof your career and maximize your competitive advantage by learning the skill necessary to stay relevant, reinvent yourself, and adapt to whatever the workplace throws your way in this essential guide that goes beyond the insights of popular works such as Extreme Productivity, Deep Work, Peak, and Make It Stick. Faced with tumultuous economic times and rapid technological change, staying ahead in your career depends on continual learning—a lifelong mastery of new ideas, subjects, and skills. If you want to accomplish more and stand apart from everyone else, you need to become an ultralearner. In this essential book, Scott Young incorporates the latest research about the most effective learning methods and the stories of other ultralearners like himself—among them Ben Franklin and Richard Feynman, as well as a host of others, such as little-known modern polymaths like Alexander Arguelles, who speaks more than forty languages. Young documents the methods he and others have used and shows that, far from being an obscure skill limited to aggressive autodidacts, ultralearning is a powerful tool anyone can use to improve their career, studies, and life. Ultralearning explores this fascinating subculture, shares the seven principles behind every successful ultralearning project, and offers insights into how you can organize and execute a plan to learn anything deeply and quickly, without teachers or budget-busting tuition costs. Whether the goal is to be fluent in a language (or ten languages), earn the equivalent of a college degree in a fraction of the time, or master multiple skills to build a product or business from the ground up, the principles in Ultralearning will guide you to success.

Black swans are not inconsequential anomalies, but a significant phenomenon that shapes the very world we live in. Many historical events that drastically impacted our societies and lives were actually Black Swan events. These include the 2 world wars, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the 11th September 2001 terrorist attacks, the rise of the internet or the 2019 - 2020 Covid pandemic.In all these cases, no one could’ve predicted the events in advance

Overview

For thousands of years, it was widely believed that all swans were white. Then in 1697, a Dutch explorer Willem de Vlamingh discovered black swans in Australia, debunking this universal “truth” overnight. The term “Black Swan” has since been used to describe the occurrence of a seemingly impossible event

What Are Black Swans And Why Are They Imp

Taleb identifies 3 key features of Black Swans: <ul><li> Rarity: Black Swans are outliers that can’t be reasonably expected to happen based on based past events.</li><li>They have a profound impact on our society/world.</li><li>Retrospective predictability: Although the events are unpredictable, humans tend to explain then on hindsight as if they could be perfectly understood and predicted.</li></ul>

Three Lessons:

Black Swans dramatically change the reality of those, who aren’t aware that they’re comingThe author calls an even a “Black Swan” if it’s unpredictable not because it’s random, but because our outlook on what’s possible was too narrow. Imagine you’d known about the 9/11 attacks in advance. You wouldn’t have been surprised. In some cases, a Black Swan is only a tragedy for a single person. However, often it affects entire societies. Just think of Copernicus’s discovery that the sun is the centre of the universe, not the earth, or Armstrong set foot on the moon.

Based on the only we can be certain of - what was happened in our lives in the past - we weave a narrative that makes sense and expect that the future simply must unfold this way. For example, imagine you’re turkey and for years you live on a farm, get to roam free everyday and are fed great food by a farmer. Why would you expect anything to change? But if tomorrow’s Thanksgiving, you’re just 24 hours away from getting killed, stuffed and roasted.

Don’t Use Your Past To Explain The Future

Trying To Assess Real - World Like You Would In A Game Can Lead you to making the wrong choicesAnother fallacy Taleb describes is called the music fallacy. This one explains why we do such bad jobs at getting the right insurance policy, for example.When faced with the task to assess risk in the real world, we usually try to imagine the risk like a game, where there’s a set of rules and probabilities that we can determine up front, in order to then make the right decision.

<ul><li> In mediocristan environments, there’s a limit to the amount of randomness or deviation from the average. Inequalities exist, but they’re mild or controlled. Usually, there’re some physical constraints (e.g. height, weight, running speed) which limit the amount of variability. For example, if you add the tallest or heaviest man in history to a sample size of 1,000 people, the outlier won’t make a real difference to the average.</li></ul>

2 Types Of Uncertainty: Extremistan Vs Mediocristan

In Extremistan environments, there can be wild randomness and extreme deviations. Typically, there’re no physical constraints and no known upper/lower limits (e.g. knowledge, financial markets, e-books sales, social media “likes”). Thus, the outliers can make a big difference - if you add the net worth of Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates to a group of 1,000 people, it will drastically shift the average.

Extremistan

The uncertainties to the world events can b me unpredictable.

The most influential book of the past seventy-five years: a groundbreaking exploration of everything we know about what we don’t know, now with a new section called “On Robustness and Fragility.” A black swan is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was. The astonishing success of Google was a black swan; so was 9/11. For Nassim Nicholas Taleb, black swans underlie almost everything about our world, from the rise of religions to events in our own personal lives. Why do we not acknowledge the phenomenon of black swans until after they occur? Part of the answer, according to Taleb, is that humans are hardwired to learn specifics when they should be focused on generalities. We concentrate on things we already know and time and time again fail to take into consideration what we don’t know. We are, therefore, unable to truly estimate opportunities, too vulnerable to the impulse to simplify, narrate, and categorize, and not open enough to rewarding those who can imagine the “impossible.” For years, Taleb has studied how we fool ourselves into thinking we know more than we actually do. We restrict our thinking to the irrelevant and inconsequential, while large events continue to surprise us and shape our world. In this revelatory book, Taleb will change the way you look at the world, and this second edition features a new philosophical and empirical essay, “On Robustness and Fragility,” which offers tools to navigate and exploit a Black Swan world. Taleb is a vastly entertaining writer, with wit, irreverence, and unusual stories to tell. He has a polymathic command of subjects ranging from cognitive science to business to probability theory. Elegant, startling, and universal in its applications, The Black Swan is a landmark book—itself a black swan.

The Black Swan: Second Edition

The inspiring from this book is about why generalists will flourish.’Kind vs ‘wicked’ learning environmentsLearning environments can be split into two:<ul><li class="ql-align-justify"> The kind one, where patterns repeat and specialists get better with experiences, such as in chess.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">The wicked ones, where there is a lot of spontaneity and unpredictability involved and experience doesn’t necessarily correlate with success, such as when researching.</li></ul>

Why Generalists Will Flourish?

Modern work demands knowledge transfer and abstract thinking, things which are not being actively taught in our highly - specialized academic curriculums.It’s harder to be creative in a field the longer you have been studying it. It is best to insist on ‘having one foot outside your world’, to try to have broad interests and not focus on solely one thing in your learning path.

Cognitive entrenchment and abstract thinking 

Children who try their hand at playing multiple instruments have a higher chance of becoming elites in one (even if they specialize later in life) than those who have been presented with a particular instrument from a very early age.The figlie of the Ospedale Della Pieta in Venice are good example of that

Breadth Of Training Predicts Breadth Of Transfer 

<ul><li> Fast and easy is a no - go when it comes to learning. Painful and uncompetitive as it may sound, slow and difficult is the proper approach to learning.</li><li>We want knowledge that is durable (it sticks) and flexible (it can be applied broadly).</li><li>”Spacing” (leaving enough time between learning sessions around the same material) and “interleaving” (switching learning contexts frequently) are two key concepts of meaningful learning.</li><li> </li></ul>

Slow Learning And The Power Of Mistakes

<ul><li>When learning, one should aim for a “desirable level of difficulty”, i.e. having obstacles that make learning difficult in the short term, but much more beneficial in the long term; make mistakes, think, conceptualize.</li></ul>

The importance of generalists in the 4th Industrial Revolution.

The #1 New York Times bestseller that has all America talking: as seen/heard on CNN's Fareed Zakaria GPS, Morning Joe, CBS This Morning, The Bill Simmons Podcast, Rich Roll, and more. “The most important business—and parenting—book of the year.” —Forbes “Urgent and important. . . an essential read for bosses, parents, coaches, and anyone who cares about improving performance.” —Daniel H. Pink Shortlisted for the Financial Times/McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award Plenty of experts argue that anyone who wants to develop a skill, play an instrument, or lead their field should start early, focus intensely, and rack up as many hours of deliberate practice as possible. If you dabble or delay, you’ll never catch up to the people who got a head start. But a closer look at research on the world’s top performers, from professional athletes to Nobel laureates, shows that early specialization is the exception, not the rule. David Epstein examined the world’s most successful athletes, artists, musicians, inventors, forecasters and scientists. He discovered that in most fields—especially those that are complex and unpredictable—generalists, not specialists, are primed to excel. Generalists often find their path late, and they juggle many interests rather than focusing on one. They’re also more creative, more agile, and able to make connections their more specialized peers can’t see. Provocative, rigorous, and engrossing, Range makes a compelling case for actively cultivating inefficiency. Failing a test is the best way to learn. Frequent quitters end up with the most fulfilling careers. The most impactful inventors cross domains rather than deepening their knowledge in a single area. As experts silo themselves further while computers master more of the skills once reserved for highly focused humans, people who think broadly and embrace diverse experiences and perspectives will increasingly thrive.

Bite-sized knowledge
to upgrade
your career

Jiun Ting Yong
@jiunting

Fooled by Randomness

Upstream

The Compound Effect

The Lean Startup

Grit

Bite-sized knowledgeto upgradeyour career

Jiun Ting Yong@jiunting

Fooled by Randomness

Upstream

The Compound Effect

The Lean Startup

Grit

Bite-sized knowledge
to upgrade
your career

Jiun Ting Yong
@jiunting