I Could Relate with That

In recent times, I found myself being able to relate totally with a couple of lines I read on the Net, simply because I’d experienced the feeling just recently.

The first one was when we bought a new TV and discovered that all LCD/LED TV’s above a certain size are necessarily smart TV’s. You don’t even get the non-smart version at those sizes anymore! The guy who came to install it, right after setting it up, pulled out his smartphone and showed how to project stuff from the phone onto the TV. “Install the app and you can do the same”, he said. And so when I read this line by Ben Evans, I could fully relate to it:
“TV, once thought of as the next phase after PCs, turned to be an accessory to smartphones.”

The same week, I attended this company training on adopting a faster, nimble and less bureaucratic way of working. As you may have noticed, trainings nowadays cannot just be informative; they need to be entertaining too to keep people engaged rather than dozing off. Of course, that approach has its downside: touristification, a term Nassim Taleb coined in his book, Antifragile:
“What a tourist is in relation to an adventurer, or a flaneur, touristification is to life; it consists in converting activities, not just travel, into the equivalent of a script like those followed by actors.”
That is probably why I was nodding my head when I read these lines by Seth Godin:
“Merely looking at something almost never causes change. Tourism is fun, but rarely transformative. If it was easy, you would have already achieved the change you seek. Change comes from new habits, from acting as if, from experiencing the inevitable discomfort of becoming.”
Amen to that!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Europe #3 - Innsbruck

The last city we visited in Europe was Innsbruck in the Austrian Alps. After the cold and windy experience (at times) of Paris and Netherlands, Innsbruck was a wonderful change – it didn’t feel that cold, it was not windy all of which made it easy to walk around. Something absolutely necessary given how scenic the place is.   Since the hotel check-in time was much later in the day, we left the baggage and went to the Swarovski HQ-cum-museum about an hour by bus from Innsbruck. The crystal exhibits were brilliant – colorful, bright, shiny. Jewellery aside, it was a display of what one can do with crystals. While my wife and daughter loved the jewellery, I liked the superhero themed exhibits of Batman, Spiderman, the Hulk, and Star Wars. We didn’t buy anything there, though we did buy stuff in the Swarovski store in Innsbruck – jewellery, not the superhero stuff.   Innsbruck is a major tourist attraction during the skiing season but now in summer, we saw many groups of ...
Read more

Why we Deceive Ourselves

In their book, The Elephant in the Brain , the authors describe this weird aspect of deception that we practice: deceiving ourselves! That is so weird: “If our minds contain maps of our worlds, what good comes from having an inaccurate version of these maps?” The Sigmund Freud school of thought treats self-deception as a defense mechanism, “a way for the ego to protect itself”. The mind seeks to protect itself from anxiety and other negative emotions. Many object to this reasoning: since accurate information is so critical to our survival, surely distorting information would be dangerous. Wouldn’t the goal of protecting our self-esteem have been better achieved by making the brain’s self-esteem mechanism stronger instead? The new school of thought explains self-deception as “primarily outward-facing, manipulative, and ultimately self-serving”. This is based on Thomas Schelling’s work on game theory: “In a variety of scenarios, limiting or sabotaging yourself is the winn...
Read more

Chess is too Boring

“Chess has problems at the grandmaster level...They're not getting a great game”, wrote Christian Donlan . Amen to that: Anand and his challenger, Magnus Carlsen drew their first game in just 16 moves. It gets worse: games between the top 20 end in draws 60% of the time. And Donlan adds that “games often end in resignation when an actual victory starts to loom on the distant horizon.” That often means that the average player (or fan) often has no clue why one guy won (since he can’t see that far ahead)! Then there’s all that memorization (of openings, of end games and everything in between). All that memorization is sort of against the spirit of the game, says Zachary Burns, “We want it to be a game of creativity and positional play.” Many have tried to change the rules of the game in the past for these exact reasons, including Bobby Fischer with his Chess960 variant. More recently, David Sirlin tried to make things interesting via his variant, Chess 2. So what are his c...
Read more