Viswanathan K's Thoughts

In the competition , the randomly enrolled, volunteer forecasters crushed the other groups. Year after year. So what made for good forecasters? In his terrific book, Superforecasting , Philip Tetlock says there are many aspects to being a great forecaster. For one, good forecasters don’t subscribe to one Big Idea. Rather, they hold multiple perspectives and don’t get carried away by ideological beliefs. “There is no divinely mandated link between morality and competence.” They also do not believe anything is destined to happen. As Daniel Kahneman famously said, there was a 50% chance that each of Stalin and Hitler could have been born as girls, not boys. It was only a 25% chance that both were boys. And who can really say that history wouldn’t have been very different then? Who’s to say that the Soviet Union would have imploded peacefully even without a Gorbachev at the helm? The best forecasters can break down seemingly impossible questions (“Will they find plutonium ...

In her book, Mindset , Carol Dweck points out what every one of us knows is wrong with the famous story of the hare and the tortoise: “The lesson was supposed to be that slow and steady wins the race. But, really, did any of us ever want to be the tortoise? No, we just wanted to be a less foolish hare.” Then there is the story of Arjuna and how he saw nothing except the eye of the bird he was shooting at. Concentrate, focus: that was the lesson. While that’s obviously necessary for certain types of goals, isn’t Max Gunther right in what he says in many other cases, especially goals spread over long time periods? “If you put blinders on yourself so that you can see only straight ahead, you will miss nearly everything. This is what the unlucky typically do. They stick to preplanned life routes even when they are going nowhere or are actually plodding downhill to disaster.” Consider how Lee Kuan Yew made Singapore what it is today. In his terrific book, The Ocean of Churn ,...

Politicians love to give soundbytes, catchy phrases that stick. They don’t care if it’s just talk, doesn’t mean anything and will never be fulfilled anyway. And then there’s Neil Gaiman, author of science fiction, fantasy and children’s literature who is such a good speaker that “he has millions of devoted fans who eat his every word like air”. He doesn’t do soundbytes, he enthralls you with entire paragraphs! Back in 2012, at a keynote address at the University of the Arts , Gaiman said: “The problems of failure are hard. The problems of success can be harder, because nobody warns you about them.” I was curious about the second line, the problems of success. In another interview , he elaborated based on his own experience: “This (success as an author) has huge problems, which are mostly about writing. I’m currently dealing with how to go back to being a writer. Rather than whatever it is that I am. A traveller, a signer, a promoter, a talker, a lecturer. I’m building new w...

Some get there through hard work. Others via raw talent. We tend to admire the gifted guy (he makes it look easy). Even envy him (he didn’t have to slog). Until I read this passage from Haruki Murakami’s book, Norwegian Wood , I didn’t realize that the gifted guy is often incapable of hard work. Here’s why: “You see them do it, and you’re overwhelmed. You think, ‘I could never do that in a million years.’ But that’s as far as they go. They can’t take it any further. And why not? Because they won’t put in the effort. Because they haven’t had the discipline pounded into them…They’ll take some piece another kid has to work on for three weeks and polish it off in half the time, so the teacher figures they’ve put enough into it and lets them go to the next thing. And they do that in half the time and go on to the next piece. They never find out what it means to be hammered by the teacher; they lose out on a certain element required for character building.” Wow! I never thought of ...

"Success is dangerous because often you don’t understand why you succeeded. You almost always know why you’ve failed" -          Marc Pincus, CEO of Zynga I liked the above quote the moment I read it. It took me a while, though, to realize that the statement reflects a philosophy as well. The same philosophy that it’s advocated in The Black Swan by Nicholas Nasim Taleb. If you haven’t read the book, let me state the philosophy. It states that in an environment that has tens (if not hundreds) of variables, it’s often difficult, if not impossible, to identify why exactly someone succeeded. Or failed. It could be just simple luck at times. At others, you pick Reason X for your success when in reality it was Reason Y! Like, most people in IT were lucky: we graduated at the right time (post liberalization and post all the communication investments done by the West in the dot com era). But many IT guys will delude themselves into believing that they...

So many people place way too much emphasis on intent . It sometimes even reaches a stage where they ignore the success or failure of what was intended! Vinod Khosla, the billionaire venture capitalist and co-founder of Sun Microsystems, pointed out the problem with that misplaced emphasis when he made this comment about NGO’s: “I am relatively negative on most N.G.O.’s and their effectiveness . I am not negative on their intentions .” I sometimes wonder whether that overdone focus on intentions is partly a cultural thing. Doesn’t the Bhagwad Gita tell us to focus on the act and not on the reward? Sure, going to the other end of the spectrum and focusing only on the success/reward isn’t good either. The ongoing (or just ended, depending on who you ask) Recession is an example of what results from the other extreme. That said, if we want the lives of the poorest to improve, it is important to focus on the methods that work. Rather than terming every sincere attempt as p...