Tag: tim ferriss

Ben Casnocha in Tokyo

How to travel better, and how to write about my travels better are among two of my “goals” for 2024. Goals is in inverted quotes because I’m very good at not meeting them.

What do I mean when I say travel better? Travel more, for one. But more importantly, it is to observe more, and observe better, while traveling. Observe what, exactly? Everything! And I do mean everything, ranging from how the Vietnamese use their footpaths, to the fact that raspberries are called “himbeer” in German (a berry that grows when it is snowing, get it?)- and everything in between.

What do I mean when I say write about my travels better? Observing better while traveling is just the start. Writing about my travels and my observations helps me make connections between what I have learnt, observed, seen and experienced at home, and while traveling. In other words, I understand my world better when I travel, and when I make connections between what is familiar, and what isn’t.

Take tirphal, for example, a spice familiar to most people in Western Maharashtra. Turns out this is likely a close cousin (if not kind of the same thing) of Sichuanese peppercorns!

“Learn how to build bridges for yourself between your home and the rest of the world” is one way of putting it, and like I said, I would like to get better at it.

Lots of examples come to mind when I talk about writing about travel better. There’s Tim Ferris talking about entire families in Japan taking a both together. There’s David Perell talking about Austin. There’s Devon Zuegel talking about what sometimes feels like the whole wide world. There’s Derek Sivers on Japan, and what a lovely little story this is. And that’s just short from content – books are a whole other story.

But for the purpose of this post, and this year for me personally, I want to get better at observing, and creating notes when it comes to travel. And an excellent example of the kind of notes I have in mind is Ben Casnocha’s notes from his travels in Japan.

For example:

On one of my first days in our private office in Tokyo, some light jazz music suddenly began playing out of a speaker built into the ceiling. I couldn’t figure out how or why the music started. 30 mins later, the music hadn’t stopped, and I grew concerned that what was supposed to be a quiet, private office in a coworking space actually was subject to some building-wide music system steered by a jazz aficionado building manager. (Hey, it could have been a worse genre of background music.)

I pulled out Google Translate and typed English sentences: “There is jazz music playing in my office. I did not turn it on. Why is it playing? Can you turn it off?” Google Translate spit out out the Japanese version and, clutching my iPhone, I swung open the door to my office to stomp to the front desk and inquire.

As it happens, two men were already standing outside my office in official, erect poses. What luck. I clicked “Play” in Google Translate to ask my pre-loaded question in Japanese. They micro head bowed as they listened — the micro bow where your head drops ever so slightly in rapid succession: the most common type of bow in Japan.

Then they spoke back into my phone: “Deep apologies,” Google’s translation’s said back to me. “The jazz music means the fire alarm system is working. We are conducting a test of the fire alarms in the building. The jazz music plays if the alarm is working. Thank you very much. Thank you very much.” They proceeded to deeply bow and walked off. Only then did I notice they were wearing fire department helmets.

It had never occurred to me that a fire alarm building test could be anything other than bone-tinglingly loud.

https://casnocha.com/2024/01/impressions-from-a-longer-stay-in-tokyo-2023.html

I’ve never traveled to Japan, alas, but I have traveled to Japan twice in the recent past. Once by reading Ben’s post, and once by reading a book about a lady who works as a concierge in Paris. To cut a long story short, the protagonist uses the washroom in a Japanese gentleman’s home in Paris, and is embarrassed beyond belief when the flush, in addition to doing its job, also plays Mozart’s Requiem at full volume (The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barberry, if you were wondering about the book).

And so if and when I travel to Japan, I run the risk of being surprised and disappointed if flushes and fire alarms don’t play music.

But you see what I mean about traveling better, and observing better, don’t you?

Anyway, all of this is to tell you that Ben’s post is, to me, a great example of traveling well, and writing well about having traveled well. I hope you like it, and I hope you get to do a fair bit of traveling yourself!

It is the process that matters

Regarding yesterday’s post, which you might want to read before tackling this one, a follow-up point that should have struck me much earlier – the answer lies as much in that ChatGPT query that I ended with as much as it does in a post written a while ago by Navin Kabra:

One of the most influential modern theories espoused by many successful people is known as “Process-Oriented Thinking” or “Systems-Mindset.” The main point is that focusing on your process, or your system, instead of focusing on the goals, or the outcomes is the key to success.

https://futureiq.substack.com/p/karmanyevaadhikaraste-in-modern-life

I have linked to this post before, and I doubtless will again. But please, if you have not read this post yet, do so in its entirety. It is well worth your time. And please note the title of Navin’s post!

Whether it is a NAAC visit or a G20 visit, why should that act as the catalyst to Get Things Done? Why should, in other words, Senapati Bapat Road look awesome only when foreign dignitaries come a-visitin’? Why should a campus look fantastic only when the NAAC committee comes a-visitin’?

Because we’re focussing on the outcomes, but ignoring the process (note that targeting outcomes is important, but without having a process-mindset, the targeting is next to useless). The PMC is not following the karmanyevaadhikaraste philosophy if the Senapati Bapat Road relapses to its old state once the summit is over. A college is not following the karmanyevaadhikaraste philosophy if the bathrooms are back to being dirty the week after the NAAC committee has vacated the building. By the way, in the defense of both the PMC and the college/university, it is hard to follow the karmanyevaadhikaraste philosophy. I rarely succeed in it myself across all of the things I try to do (this blog included) – and so while I have enjoyed trolling both the PMC and colleges, I do have some sympathy for ’em.

But regardless of whether it is hard or not, if you are looking for an answer to the question of how do we get Senepati Bapat Road to always be spic-and-span, the answer lies as much in ChatGPT’s answers as it does in ancient wisdom. And it is, as Navin says, worth following this advice in one’s own life, to the maximum extent possible.

On a related note, one my of my resolutions for the year was to listen to more podcasts, and I’m happy to recommend to you a conversation about what we’ve been talking about between Tim Ferriss and James Clear. Lots of excellent takeaways, including the quote that they’ve chosen to lead with:

Every action you take is a vote for the kind of person you wish to become

And if you’re wondering, yes, that is a very large chunk of the reasons behind I trying to write everyday. It really is all about the process!

How Might You Use Incentives in Your Own Life?

It’s all very well to dispense gyaan about incentives, but what is the TMKK?

For those of you new in these parts, TMKK stands for To Main Kya Karoon? Learning about economics for its own sake only make sense in terms of scoring marks in an examination. But a subject truly comes alive when you are able to understand its relevance and importance to your own life – preferably directly, but at the very least tangentially. Don’t get me wrong, I am not at all suggesting that intellectual pursuits for their own sake are not worth it. But I am very much suggesting that the ability to answer a TMKK for oneself makes it much more interesting.

So how should once use incentives in one’s own life?

  1. You can make museum visits less boring.
  2. You can lose weight. I cannot find the reference I’m looking for right now, but Tim Ferriss once spoke about how you can send a truly embarassing pic of yourself to a friend, with instructions to post it on social media by the end of the month – unless a certain amount of weight loss has been achieved. If pics on social media is not your thing, give an amount of money that will truly pinch you to your friend, with instructions to donate it to a cause/political outfit that you truly loathe – again, unless a certain amount of weight loss has been achieved.
  3. What is the Pomodoro technique if not an incentive mechanism? There is more to it, sure, but incentives are certainly involved, no?
  4. If you have a gym buddy, yes, that too is an incentive mechanism. There is another phrase for it – peer pressure. That simply means that it’s not so much about you missing gym, but about the pressure you feel for letting your friend down. But the underlying mechanism? Incentives! In this case, it is a non-monetary, negative incentive.
  5. In my opinion, nobody does gamification using non-monetary incentives better than Duolingo.
  6. Ask ChatGPT3 for more examples! I could have done this myself, of course, but you really should get in the habit of using ChatGPT3 as a tool to do all kinds of research – it’s what you’re going to be doing in your careers in many different ways, so the correct time to get started is yesterday.
  7. Think about examples from your own life where you’ve tried to design incentives for yourself. Ask yourself which ones worked and which ones didn’t, and then ask yourself if we humans treat positive and negative incentives the same way.
  8. Best of all, try designing incentives for somebody in your family. See how they respond to your incentive mechanism, and see if you can iterate it (the mechanism) for the better. If you’re looking for an example – what if you promise to make breakfast in bed for a family member who promises not to look at their phone after dinner throughout the week. Will this work? Try it out! (Note: not a single “I just need to do this one little thing” allowed!). Try the same experiment the next week, but this time, use a “punishment” instead. Say, a fine of a thousand rupees, payable to you, if they break the rule.
  9. If you do “run” the experiment in pt. 8 above, ask yourself if Goodhart’s Law applied.
  10. Get better with every passing week at designing incentives, refining them and implementing them, both for yourself and for others. You’ll be surprised in two regards. First, you’ll be surprised at how easy it is to design better and better incentives. And second, you’ll be surprised to learn that GoodHart’s Law is always applicable. Tricky little beasts, incentives.

The Economist on What To Read To Understand How Economists Think

Here’s the article, and I hope you’re able to access it.

Just in case it is behind a paywall for you, here is a quick summary:

  1. The Economist says that thinking like an economist is primarily about two things:
    1. There is no such thing as a free lunch, which is another way of saying you can never avoid opportunity costs
    2. When possible, try to put numbers on things
  2. The article then lists out five books that help you think along these lines:
    1. Capitalism and Freedom, by Milton Friedman
    2. The Worldly Philosophers, by Robert Heilbroner
    3. Africa: Why Economists Get it Wrong, by Morten Jerven
    4. Capitalism Alone, by Branko Milanovic
    5. Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

I’m about to share my own list, but before I do that, a couple of points.

I’ve read the first, second and fifth book, and they’re all great books to read. I look forward to reading the other two, and the description of the fourth in particular sounds particularly exciting to my ears:

This is the book to read if you want to understand why capitalism—and economists’ way of thinking—has triumphed the world over. By the beginning of the 1990s, it was clear that the capitalist system had defeated the communist one. Today, however, many people yearn to move to a new system, such as “millennial socialism”. A left-leaning scholar, Mr Milanovic sympathises with these feelings. But ultimately he finds many radical prescriptions unconvincing. A country which tried to de-marketise on the scale envisaged by socialists would, he says, be unstable and dissatisfied in other ways. Shifting towards a much shorter working week, for instance, would leave it poorer than its neighbours. For how long would people put up with that? Capitalism is far from perfect, his book shows, yet it is hard to shake the notion that it is the only system that broadly works.

https://www.economist.com/the-economist-reads/2022/08/09/what-to-read-to-understand-how-economists-think

In a way, this reminds me of Churchill’s quote about democracy being the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried. And it rings true – there’s many things that we all wish could be “better” when it comes to capitalism, but one of my favorite econ questions is very apposite here: relative to what? That is, if you say capitalism is not good/not perfect, you need to answer the question “relative to what”?

Second, please don’t interpret this blogpost as a critique of the list put out by the Economist. This blogpost is very much in the spirit of “Yes, and” rather than “No, but”. But that being said, my own opinion of the main features of thinking like an economist are slightly different. I couldn’t agree more with the first feature (opportunity costs), but I do disagree with the second one. I would argue that it is entirely possible to get the most out of life without having to put a number on it. In fact, as Russ Roberts recently pointed out in a podcast, it simply isn’t possible or desirable to put numbers on some things. I haven’t read the book yet, but the podcast was instructive in many different ways. Here’s one apposite quote (Russ is answering a question by Tim about how to decide whom to marry):

Alain de Botton has a wonderful YouTube video I recommend on that; I think the title is “You’re going to marry the wrong person.” Fantastic short video. Don’t show it to my wife because she thinks she married the right person, I don’t want her to see it and depress her. But seriously, there’s no best. And part of the theme of my book is that most of life is a matrix. And by that, I don’t mean the movie, the red or blue pill. What I mean is that it’s a set of complicated attributes that are pluses and minuses for all kinds of things.
So the person you’re with, that you’re seeing now, whoever’s listening out there, there are certain levels of attractiveness, there’s a certain level of kindness, there’s a certain level of intelligence, or a certain level — many, many, many attributes. And then there’s chemistry and sexual attraction. We’ve got all those things working. And so, which is the best one? Oh, well I need a formula to add up all those measurements so I can get a single number, and then I’ll just pick the one that gets the best score. And I’d argue that’s the wrong way to think about life. It’s the wrong way to think about how to pick your friends. It’s the wrong way to think about how to find the best job. It’s the wrong way to think about most things.

https://tim.blog/2022/08/07/russ-roberts-transcript/

As I mentioned, I haven’t read the book yet – sometimes I think I should get a T-Shirt with this line printed on it. But I very much belong to the school of thought that would argue that not everything in life need be quantified.

So if I disagree with “if possible, put numbers on everything”, what according to me are the main features of thinking like an economist? If I had to pick just two, here they are (and I’m going to cheat, so there):

  1. Opportunity costs are everywhere
  2. Incentives matter
  3. Life is a non-zero sum game

Getting incentives right, and worrying about what happens if incentives go wrong ought to be part and parcel of your toolkit an an economist. And if you asked me to recommend a book about this topic, my pick would be Discover Your Inner Economist, by Tyler Cowen.

Bonus: check out the podcast between Russ Roberts and Tyler Cowen on this book.

Bonus Bonanza: reflect on the very first comment at the top of the page!

More Bonus Bonanza: Learn about callbacks.

And re: life being a non-zero sum game, I would recommend In The Company of Strangers, by Paul Seabright. If you do end up reading the book, you might end up coming away with the “complaint” that it is about much more than just life being a non-zero sum game, but in my world, that’s a feature, not a bug. But for the moment, here’s a relevant excerpt from the book:

Once bands were willing to make tentative peaceful contact with other bands, they could exchange with them, thereby enormously expanding the kinds of foods, tools, and resources to which they had access. We have evidence of exchange between hunter-gatherers from many thousands of years before the foundation of agriculture, although their lifestyle must have made such contacts sporadic and limited by comparison with the opportunities available to sedentary farmers in later millennia. Some of the oldest known symbolic artifacts, carved beads dating back over forty thousand years, may have played a role in facilitating such exchanges.7 In more recent times, the Yir Yoront aboriginals of Northern Australia had stone axes even though they lived many hundreds of kilometers from the nearest stone quarries (they exchanged stingray-tipped spears for them with neighboring tribes) and even steel ones, well before their first contact with European traders at the end of the nineteenth century. Trade allowed access not only to their neighbors’ skills but to those of their neighbors’ neighbors, and so on.

Seabright, Paul. The Company of Strangers (pp. 46-47). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

And a final recommendation: please also do read The Undercover Economist and The Undercover Economist Strikes Back, both by Tim Harford.

The Economics of ReCAPTCHA

This has been doing the rounds on my Whatsapp groups recently, and maybe you’ve seen it too:

Mildly funny, but the story behind it is quite something.

Bots have been a problem for many many years – much before Elon Musk thought of buying Twitter. And as long as sixteen years ago, folks were trying to solve the problem of stopping bots from signing up for services. So how does a computer make sure that the entity trying to sign up for a service actually is a human?

Well, by showing images such as these, and asking the entity on the other side to make out what the word is:

We’ve all been subjected to a variant of this, haven’t we.

Now, one of the folks who came up with this system – it’s called Captcha (say it out aloud and you can figure out the reason behind the name) ran the numbers:

And at some point I did a little back of the envelope calculation about how many of these were typed by people around the world, and it turns out the number I came up with was about 200 million.
So about 200 million times a day somebody would type one of these CAPTCHAs, and that’s when I started thinking, “I wonder if we can do something with this time.” Because the thing is each time you type one of these, not only are they annoying but also they waste about ten seconds of your time, and if you multiply ten seconds by 200 million, you get that humanity as a whole is wasting like 500,000 hours every day typing these annoying CAPTCHAs.

https://tim.blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/135-luis-von-ahn.pdf

Work that will gladden the heart of any economist. And so the guy who did these back of the envelope calculations tried to figure out how these 500,000 hours might be put to better use. Thus was born reCAPTCHA. And the idea was a very, very good one.

When you digitize, or scan books for the first time, there will be books with old fonts, outdated fonts. And therefore there will be a fair few words that computers will not be able to decipher. And not just books, this is also true of newspaper archives.

So if we have scanned books and newspaper archives that are non-machine-readable, and we have humans spending 500,000 hours every day… what about connecting the two, and having humans read these words, one at a time?

Scanned text is subjected to analysis by two different OCRs. Any word that is deciphered differently by the two OCR programs or that is not in an English dictionary is marked as “suspicious” and converted into a CAPTCHA. The suspicious word is displayed, out of context, sometimes along with a control word already known. If the human types the control word correctly, then the response to the questionable word is accepted as probably valid. If enough users were to correctly type the control word, but incorrectly type the second word which OCR had failed to recognize, then the digital version of documents could end up containing the incorrect word. The identification performed by each OCR program is given a value of 0.5 points, and each interpretation by a human is given a full point. Once a given identification hits 2.5 points, the word is considered valid. Those words that are consistently given a single identity by human judges are later recycled as control words. If the first three guesses match each other but do not match either of the OCRs, they are considered a correct answer, and the word becomes a control word. When six users reject a word before any correct spelling is chosen, the word is discarded as unreadable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReCAPTCHA

The system has evolved since then, and this version of reCAPTCHA (known as reCAPTCHA v1) is no longer around. We now have reCAPTCHA v2 and reCAPTCHA v3, and if you’re curious, you can learn more about it here.

But I really like the idea behind reCAPTCHA v1, even though it is no longer in use. It used the opportunity presented by a necessary but time-consuming activity by matching it with a necessary but money-and-effort-consuming activity, to the benefit of all concerned.

Turns out the person who came up with the idea has been thinking about computers and human brains as being complementary to each other for a fairly long time, even writing a PhD thesis about it:

Von Ahn’s Ph.D. thesis, completed in 2005, was the first publication to use the term “human computation” that he had coined, referring to methods that combine human brainpower with computers to solve problems that neither could solve alone. Von Ahn’s Ph.D. thesis is also the first work on Games With A Purpose, or GWAPs, which are games played by humans that produce useful computation as a side effect. The most famous example is the ESP Game, an online game in which two randomly paired people are simultaneously shown the same picture, with no way to communicate. Each then lists a number of words or phrases that describe the picture within a time limit, and are rewarded with points for a match. This match turns out to be an accurate description of the picture, and can be successfully used in a database for more accurate image search technology. The ESP Game was licensed by Google in the form of the Google Image Labeler, and is used to improve the accuracy of the Google Image Search. Von Ahn’s games brought him further coverage in the mainstream media. His thesis won the Best Doctoral Dissertation Award from Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_von_Ahn

There’s an old talk by Louis von Ahn on the topic as well, if you’re interested.

And here’s the kicker: the same idea, human computation, is at work another venture that Louis von Ahn has started. You may have heard of it, it has got this cute little green owl as its mascot:

So the way this works is whenever you’re a just a beginner, we give you very simple sentences. There’s a lot of very simple sentences on the web. We give you very simple sentences along with what each word means. And as you translate them and as you see how other people translate them, you start learning the language. And as you get more advanced, we give you more complex sentences to translate. But at all times, you’re learning by doing.

https://www.ted.com/talks/luis_von_ahn_massive_scale_online_collaboration/transcript?language=en

Both reCAPTCHA v1 and Duolingo have different business models now, of course. But as students of economics, its’s worth appreciating the idea of complementarity between humans and computers, and the idea of turning a necessary but time intensive activity into a socially useful one.

It may be a funny Whatsapp forward, sure, but as it turns out, there’s quite a story behind it. No?

Happy Birthday to Kevin Kelly

70th birthday that too!

Who is Kevin Kelly, you ask? Lots of ways to begin, but my favorite learning from Kevin Kelly (so far) has been the idea of 1000 true fans:

To be a successful creator you don’t need millions. You don’t need millions of dollars or millions of customers, millions of clients or millions of fans. To make a living as a craftsperson, photographer, musician, designer, author, animator, app maker, entrepreneur, or inventor you need only thousands of true fans.
A true fan is defined as a fan that will buy anything you produce. These diehard fans will drive 200 miles to see you sing; they will buy the hardback and paperback and audible versions of your book; they will purchase your next figurine sight unseen; they will pay for the “best-of” DVD version of your free youtube channel; they will come to your chef’s table once a month. If you have roughly a thousand of true fans like this (also known as super fans), you can make a living — if you are content to make a living but not a fortune.

https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/

I cannot for the life of me remember where I read about 1000 true fans first, but it most likely was via Tim Ferriss. (As an aside, Kevin Kelly has advice about this as well!) The extract above is an assertion, and if your reaction is along the lines of “but why is this assertion true?” – and I hope that is the case! – you will want to read the rest of the essay. It’s got spin-offs too, this essay, which only drives up my opinion of the original.

But Kevin Kelly is a person who you should spend time learning more about. Start with his Wikipedia page, listen to his multiple episodes with Russ Roberts over on EconTalk, visit the Cool Tools section on his website, subscribe to his related newsletter, listen to his podcasts with Tim Ferriss, and as a bonus, listen to Tyler Cowen’s podcast with Stewart Brand. And read his books, of course.

Long story short, he is a person worth knowing about, and trust me when I say we’ve only scratched the surface, if that. But today, I wanted to point you to his birthday gift to all of us, a lovely set of 103 observations that he has called “103 Bits of Advice I Wish I Had Known“. It goes without saying that all 103 are worth a ponder, but I’ll list here ten that especially resonated with me right now:

  1. About 99% of the time, the right time is right now.
  2. Anything you say before the word “but” does not count.
  3. When you forgive others, they may not notice, but you will heal. Forgiveness is not something we do for others; it is a gift to ourselves.
  4. When you lead, your real job is to create more leaders, not more followers.
  5. It is the duty of a student to get everything out of a teacher, and the duty of a teacher to get everything out of a student.
  6. Productivity is often a distraction. Don’t aim for better ways to get through your tasks as quickly as possible, rather aim for better tasks that you never want to stop doing.
  7. The consistency of your endeavors (exercise, companionship, work) is more important than the quantity. Nothing beats small things done every day, which is way more important than what you do occasionally.
  8. Half the skill of being educated is learning what you can ignore.
  9. When you have some success, the feeling of being an imposter can be real. Who am I fooling? But when you create things that only you — with your unique talents and experience — can do, then you are absolutely not an imposter. You are the ordained. It is your duty to work on things that only you can do.
  10. Your best job will be one that you were unqualified for because it stretches you. In fact only apply to jobs you are unqualified for.
  11. It’s possible that a not-so smart person, who can communicate well, can do much better than a super smart person who can’t communicate well. That is good news because it is much easier to improve your communication skills than your intelligence.
  12. For the best results with your children, spend only half the money you think you should, but double the time with them.
  13. Don’t bother fighting the old; just build the new.
  14. You are as big as the things that make you angry.
  15. Efficiency is highly overrated; Goofing off is highly underrated. Regularly scheduled sabbaths, sabbaticals, vacations, breaks, aimless walks and time off are essential for top performance of any kind. The best work ethic requires a good rest ethic.

The observant among you might have noticed that I ended up picking fifteen rather than ten, but why short change myself and my readers? I didn’t bother culling out five – and to be clear, this is not to imply that the other eighty-eight are somehow inferior. These fifteen resonated the most with me, and I sincerely hope that your list is completely different from mine.

Note to self: of the ones I have selected here, the fifth one is the one where I really need to pull up my socks.

And speaking of hope, it would be nice if this list sparked conversations and your own lists!

Past mentions of Kevin Kelly on this blog are here.

Maximizing Soul

I wrote this essay yesterday, and spent all day on it. I didn’t get anything else done. And in terms of the week coming up, that was an expensive thing to do. But as will become clear after reading this essay, I do not regret it one little bit.

David Perell on The Microwave Economy

David Perell’s latest essay resonated with me, and for multiple reasons. The essay is centered around a point that I have been playing around with for a while: we live in a society that overrates efficiency.

He uses the metaphor of a microwave meal in this essay. Not the kind of microwave meal that Krish Ashok has in mind, but rather the kind of microwave meal that a large number of urban Indians are increasingly familiar with. Cut packet, dump in a bowl, nuke and eat. That kind of microwave meal.

This is a meal robbed of its soul. It is functional, yes. It is, in its own way, nutritious enough. One could argue that it is tasty enough. But there is no romance, originality or effort in it. As Robert Pirsig might have put it, it is bereft of quality.((I am a huge, unabashed fan of Robert Pirsig, and so is David Perell. Pirsig will make numerous appearances in this essay: consider yourselves warned.))

Perell’s essay extends this point about the microwave meal to the economy.((I’d go a step further and say that it is equally applicable to society at large. But I’d rather not go down the rabbit hole of teasing apart the differences between an economy and society in this essay, so I’ll use society from here on in, unless I’m quoting from Perell’s essay.)) Most of what we do in our lives today is centered around the same misunderstanding of convenience that gave birth to the idea of a microwave meal. The result, as Perell puts it, is “an economy that prizes function over form and calls human nature “irrational”—one that over-applies rationality and undervalues the needs of the soul.”

What if, for example, I and my family decided to drive down to Goa for a holiday? Which route should we take? We would do exactly what every right-thinking person in our place would do: look up Google Maps. Whatever route Google Maps suggests is the one we will take. 

Here’s a quote from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the first of Pirsig’s two books:

“The best ones connect from nowhere to nowhere, and have an alternative that gets you there quicker.”

He wrote this line in the context of learning which roads in America were the best for motorcycle riding, and the next two to three pages are lessons on how to ignore Google Maps. Google Maps wasn’t even on the horizon when the book was written, of course. It is just that Google Maps is the modern day evolution of the idea that Pirsig was battling when it came to choosing roads to ride on. 

That idea being efficiency.

A long, rambling drive through quiet serene countryside might mean an extra day, sure, but isn’t that a price worth paying – at least  worth considering? Pirsig isn’t arguing for never getting there, wherever “there” may be. He is saying the same thing that the poet did, years and years ago. We have lost the desire to stand and stare. The monk said the same thing when he spoke about the journey being as important as the destination. Getting there is important, of course it is. But how you get there is equally important, and we live in a society that doesn’t care about the journey anymore. ((NH4 until Kolhapur and then turn right for Amboli is what we usually do, in case you were wondering.))

Our society over-applies rationality and undervalues the need of the soul. Pirsig knew this, of course. It is why the last part of his sentence speaks about an alternative that gets you there quicker. He knew the coming of Google Maps was just a matter of time.

Perell’s essay is a lament for what might have been: a world that prioritized the soul and not the other way around. There is a lot of truth in it, and I have absolutely no quarrel with Perell’s solution. But his essay helped me concretize something that I have been playing around with in my mind for quite a while, and that is what this essay is about.

Minimization, not Maximization

“We’ve overwhelmingly used our wealth to make the world cheaper instead of more beautiful, more functional instead of more meaningful.” 

That sentence, to me, is the core focus of David Perell’s essay, and I couldn’t agree more. In fact his argument grows even stronger on reflection, because I think the word cheaper is applicable to more than just prices. 

We have also used our wealth, for example, to make the world cheaper in the case of time.

I read more today than I did about ten years ago, but the reading is infinitely more bite-sized in comparison. I much prefer essays to books, blog posts to essays, and tweets to blog posts. ((“Prefer” here is used in the context of what I end up actually consuming of each, as opposed to what I claim to prefer.)) And I suspect I am not the only one. I can make the same argument in the case of sports. We as a society have deliberately and consciously chosen ODI’s over test matches, T20’s over ODI’s, and now of course we have The Hundred. Another argument: of all the hours that you have spent staring at video content across all devices, how many hours were spent in watching movies – as opposed to TV series, documentaries, YouTube videos or TikTok? 

When David Perell says that we have made the world cheaper, what I think he is saying is that we have figured out ways to cheapen the effort that we are willing to put into the act of consuming something. That something could be a meal, but it could also be extended to reading, viewing, or listening as well – and more besides. ((Perell’s essay has a lovely section on the music bit, especially. Do read it.))

The world has also been made cheaper in terms of effort.

I base my buying decisions on the buying decisions that others have made. My PowerPoint templates are standardized ones that Microsoft offers me. My tables in Excel are formatted as per the default mode, or based on the templates made available within the software. What to eat tonight is a function of an algorithm, the title of which is “popular in your area”. Relying upon my own research, or on serendipity is either a lost art, or has become one that is looked down upon.

I teach economics for a living, and the best definition of the subject that I have found comes from a textbook written by Alex Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen:

Economics is the study of how to get the most out of life.

The word “most” in that sentence necessarily implies optimization. And optimization necessarily implies maximizing something, or minimizing something. Getting the most out of life can be thought of in two ways. It could mean living life to the fullest (however you might define this for your own sake). It could also mean getting the most out of life by minimizing time, effort and cost spent on any activity. ((And it could, of course also mean both at the same time. But even in this scenario, which of the two one focuses on the most is going to get us back to the point of this essay.))

Consider an example from my life. I love eating good food. In fact, the point of life, if you ask me, is to have as many good meals as possible. How can we apply the points in the paragraph above to my life?

A good meal on a Sunday, for example, could mean spending all day researching the best version of a recipe for a dish I have in mind, then walking to the market to get the best, freshest ingredients possible, then lovingly preparing them, and then getting the whole dish together, so that friends and family can have a wonderful, relaxed meal together.

I’d call that living life to the fullest. It is all but a guarantee that I get nothing else done on that Sunday, but I have maximized contentment.

On the other hand, I could just order the dish from a restaurant whose version I really like. Or I could decide that this particular dish is too expensive, and just make myself a sandwich instead.

I’d call this getting the most out of life by minimizing time, effort and cost. I haven’t maximized contentment, of course, but I have saved time and effort.

And as you may have guessed, I end up doing the latter far more than the former.

And this for something I really and truly love: eating. We feed our passions, even, by minimizing time, cost and effort, instead of maximizing contentment. Our necessities don’t stand a chance.

That is what we have become: a microwave economy.

The Rajan Economy

Chef Rajan is the chef de cuisine at the JW Marriott in Pune. He has, over the years, become a really good friend. By rights, he ought to be best friends with my doctor. For Chef Rajan has ensured over the past seven years or so that there are far too many inches on my waist. But it is for that very reason, of course, that he and I are such good friends. The man loves to feed people, bless him. 

The Rajan economy is his fiefdom in the JW Marriott. This fiefdom is the 24-hour restaurant in the lobby, called Spice Kitchen. ((His role has changed over the years, of course, and is greatly expanded today. For the purpose of this essay, I will focus on just the one restaurant.)) Procurement, staffing, menu design, day-to-day operations and customer relationship management – Chef Rajan is involved in all of these in one way or the other.

I, my extended family and a lot of other people in Pune are frequent visitors to his restaurant for a variety of reasons. There’s the attention to detail, the friendly customer service, the frequently changing menu and much else besides. But there is one non-negotiable rule that I’ve never broken, and he won’t consider breaking.

There’s never been a question about a discount on the bill.

Chefs who used to be in charge of the restaurant before him have waived off the bill on a couple of occasions – maybe a birthday being celebrated there, maybe some other occasion. Not, let me be clear, because I asked for it. It was their way of deepening the relationship with a customer. And once offered, of course, I was going to take it. Why wouldn’t I?

But ever since Chef Rajan has been in charge of the kitchen (which, if memory serves me right, was in 2015), there has never once been the suggestion of a discount. Not once.

And that has left me even happier as a customer over these past few years.

Because the Rajan economy is not about cost minimization. It is, instead, about maximizing customer delight. ((Which, over the long run, ought to lead to true profit maximization. But this footnote is another essay in the making, so we will leave it at that.)) The Sunday brunches, or brunches on special occasions such as Christmas day, are expensive affairs. ((By Pune’s standards. They are cheap compared to what’s on offer in Bombay.)) But I doubt anybody can walk away from that spread thinking that they did not get their money’s worth. The extent of the spread, its presentation, the quality of the ingredients, the number of times that freshly prepared batches are brought out of the kitchen – all of these speak to the quality of the restaurant. ((Taste is a subjective thing, and so I’ve left it out of the discussion here.))

Chef Rajan’s philosophy at the Spice Kitchen isn’t about cost minimization, it is about maximizing customer delight. Never once have I sat down for a meal at the Spice Kitchen and not been sent a little something that is over and above whatever is on the menu that day. If it is a special occasion, the little something could be quite elaborate. On other days, not so much. But there will always be a little bit more than expected, or a little bit more than is part of the stated deal.

You will pay full price, in other words, but you will get more than you bargained for.

I signed on for an online course conducted by Amit Varma last year, called The Art of Clear Writing. ((Any shortcomings in this essay are down to me, of course, not Amit!)) It was a wonderfully organized course, and was slated to last a couple of months or so. But it is still not over! There is a community that has been formed of present and past students. Talks about writing are organized and a newsletter is in the works. Regular writing prompts are handed out to those who wish to continue practice writing. This writing regularly receives community-based feedback. Again, the price of the course is non-negotiable, but you will get more than you bargained for.

There are two ways to live life and conduct business, when thought about from the framework we have been dancing around in this essay so far. Charge the bare minimum and provide the bare minimum is one of them.

There is an argument to be made to go the Rajan/Amit way instead.

Soul Satisfaction is the Opposite of Cost Minimization

One of my favorite books to read was Anti-Fragile, by Nicholas Nassim Taleb. The key point in the book for me was that there are certain things in the world that don’t do well when exposed to risk. These things we call fragile. There are other things that don’t do badly when exposed to risk. These we call robust. 

Antifragility isn’t about not doing badly when exposed to risk. It is about getting better because of exposure to that risk. Or as he puts it in the book, robustness isn’t the opposite of fragility – it is antifragility.

In a similar vein, I think we have prayed for far too long at the altar of cost efficiency. We have focussed so much on ridding ourselves of inefficiencies in our society that we have killed off the idea of satisfying the soul.

But there is a very good reason for this – our ability to measure everything, everywhere. It may have been a blessing at one point of time, but today, I would call it a curse.

There is this part in a conversation between Tim Ferriss and Seth Godin in which Tim asks Seth about meditation. After Seth’s answer, Tim has a follow-up question about the length of time that Seth spends in meditating, and if Seth has a preference regarding time of day. Seth’s answer is worth quoting in its entirety:

“No. I don’t quantify that stuff. I quantify almost nothing in my life”

Our ability to measure and therefore quantify every single aspect of our lives is increasingly becoming a problem.((I can measure my pulse rate, my O2 levels, my hours of sound sleep, the number of steps I have walked, the number of calories I have consumed, the number of minutes I have spent looking at my phone (and with drilldowns to boot) and a dozen other things with just a smartwatch and my phone. And then tabulate it, analyze it and improve upon it.)) The reason it is a problem is because quantification gives us the satisfaction of having done something about the task ahead of us – whatever that task may be. We have quantified our effort, and analyzing said quantification allows us to become “better” over time.

Let’s use a concrete example: I can measure the amount of time I spend staring at my phone daily. Apps that allow one to do this are freely available on, or even baked right into, all popular mobile operating systems. The reason I want to do this is because I have a lot of work to do in this quarter, and I want to minimize wasted time.

After a week of logging in the data, I can then decide how to either allocate my time on the phone better (more Kindle app, less Facebook), or reduce the number of minutes I spend on the phone daily. 

I might even get good at this. Maybe, after a month, I now spend markedly less time on the phone, and what little time I spend on it, I spend on “good” apps. The problem, however, is that I now have one more thing to do – track, analyze and optimize how I spend my time on the phone. 

That is, because I could measure time spent, I optimized it. The point, however, was to do more work this quarter, not analyze how I am spending my time instead. The quality of the work – what I refer to in this essay as soul satisfaction – is inherently immeasurable. And so we optimize the measurable, and continue to ignore the immeasurable.

It is, unfortunately, the immeasurable that is important.

Now you could, of course, attempt to measure the immeasurable. Chef Rajan, or somebody else at the Marriott could conduct a survey to find out how satisfied the customers are. Amit Varma might circulate a Google Form to find out how satisfied his students are with the course. ((Neither of them have done any such thing.))

But even if this was attempted, the wrong thing would be quantified. ((And it would be imprecisely quantified, but that is a story for another day)) The customer’s satisfaction would be (imperfectly) measured. 

What we really want to measure is how soul-satisfied are the creators with their work, and measuring this is pointless: the creator already knows.

In our rush to find something to measure in order to prove that we are efficient, we measure, analyze and perfect cost, time and effort minimization. And we therefore fail to do what we set out to in the first place: good, high-quality work.

If you will forgive a lengthy extract in an already lengthy essay, David Perell points this out in his essay as well:

As Mumford observed almost a century ago, the world loses its soul when we place too much weight on the ideal of total quantification. By doing so, we stop valuing what we know to be true, but can’t articulate. Rituals lose their significance, possessions lose their meaning, and things are valued only for their apparent utility. To resist the totalizing, but ultimately short-sighted fingers of quantification, many cultures invented words to describe things that exist but can’t be defined. Chinese architecture follows the philosophy of Feng Shui, which describes the invisible — but very real — forces that bind the earth, the universe, and humanity together. Taoist philosophy understands “the thing that cannot be grasped” as a concept that can be internalized only through the actual experience of living. Moving westward, the French novelist Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said: “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” And in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig describes how quality can’t be defined empirically because it transcends the limits of language. He insists that quality can only be explained with analogies, summarizing his ideas as such: “When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process.” All these examples use different words to capture the same idea.

https://perell.com/essay/the-microwave-economy/

But a headlong rush to measure, analyze and optimize the measurable has resulted in us losing sight of the big picture. We have become a society of optimization through minimization. We’ve become very good at extracting the very last bit of juice out of a lemon. So good, in fact, that we’ve forgotten all about growing more lemons. ((And if I may be permitted to squeeze every last bit out of this analogy: or growing mangoes instead.))

The point was to be as content as possible. We’ve settled instead for being as content as we possibly can be after minimizing costs, time and effort.

Soul Satisfaction Maximization

It is a mouthful, I’ll be the first to admit. And if anybody reading this can coin a better phrase, I’m all for using that one instead. But call it what you will, it is the idea that I am focused on, not its name. We need to move away from minimizing that which we can measure, and try and move towards maximizing that which we can’t.

Cowen and Tabbarok’s definition remains perfectly valid. Economics is indeed about getting the most out of life. All of us are often unclear about what we are optimizing for in life. Is it a fulfilling family life, or is it income, or is it something else? Every economics professor will sooner and later ask her student: “what are you optimizing for?”

I’d suggest a follow-up question: how are you optimizing for it?

And by way of example, let us return to my favorite thing to think about: food.

If, on a Monday night, you are wondering what to cook, don’t think about which recipe can be made as quickly as possible. That would be time, effort and cost minimization.

Choose instead, the recipe you want to make, and cut out everything else in your life that stops you from making that recipe. And if this still doesn’t give you enough time, then try to see if you can eliminate certain steps in the recipe. See if certain steps can be done in advance. See if hacks can be used to accelerate certain processes.

In other words, what you want to maximize is non-negotiable. Don’t give up on your dream. But compromises in order to achieve that dream – well, that is inevitable. 

Let me put it another way. Consider these two statements:

  1. This is all I have to give. Under these circumstances, which dream is most attainable?
  2. This is my dream. Given my circumstances, what do I need to do to attain it?

I argue that we have, as a society, grown far too comfortable with the first idea, and we need to learn to do more of the second.

But whatever you do, don’t microwave a meal. 

Nilay Patel interviewed Marques Brownlee, and I took notes. Lots of notes.

I’ve been watching MKBHD videos for a while now, but a favorite activity for my daughter and I this past summer has been to watch them together.

As anybody who has watched them will attest to, they’re impeccably produced, and always manage to strike that perfect balance between being fun and informative. And trust me, getting that balance right is hard. But my daughter, who notices these things much more than I do, also points out his (Marques Brownlee‘s) diction, the way he sets up his backgrounds (or set, or whatever you call it) – and also how much better his voice seems to be than in other videos.

And since she’s mentioned it, it’s hard to ignore. It’s clear that a lot of work goes into producing these videos – and to put out over a hundred of them in one year is seriously impressive – which his channel did last year. What’s even more impressive is the fact that he plans to launch more channels this year, let alone videos.

I got to know about this in a very well done podcast, in which Nilay Patel spoke with Marques about what I wrote about in the preceding paragraph, and a whole host of things besides. Reading the transcript as an economist was interesting, for a lot of things resonated with concepts we teach (and don’t, but should) in class. They weren’t referring to the concepts, of course, for both are (probably) blessedly unaware of boring ol’ econ texts – they were just solving, or thinking, about the challenges they face in the course of their work.

But if you’re somewhere between the age of 18 to 24, and wondering where the hell (and how) to apply things we teach you in your classes – well what better way to learn than this? Ec101 applied to MKBHD videos – whatay way to learn, no?

Notes and brief explanations follow:

  • “You’ve got to embrace uncertainty.”

    A point that both of them agreed upon, and the context was noise in the background. As a statistician, when I think noise, I’m thinking randomness, and that makes this quote even better. You can have the most refined system in the world for doing stuff, but you have to make leeway for unanticipated stuff. Things can go wrong, pandemics can spread, neighbours can make lots of noise. Anticipate it: embrace it!

    The larger point, in simpler words: make a plan, of course, but budget for chaos. It’s always there.
  • “I couldn’t believe I was finding something that I didn’t see in those other videos. So I was like, the obvious answer is to add to that collection of information, so when someone else is choosing what to buy, they can make a better choice than I did.”

    Scratch your own itch is advice that you often hear in entrepreneur world, and Marques is speaking about exactly that over here. Except of course, he isn’t just speaking about it, he is quite literally doing it. In fact, he did it 11 years ago, and has just kept at it ever since. That’s a pretty good business model, if you ask me.

    Teach like you wish you had been taught is what I want to do in life, by the way, although I cannot claim to have come anywhere close to figuring a business model out.
  • “So there’s a lot more going on, but I think the teamwork of it all is something that can be pretty underrated.”

    Marques says this in the context of how he plans to scale up his work this year. Here’s the thing – learning how to do something (assuming you want to learn it in the first place) is a lot of fun. Teaching others how to do it is also a whole lot of fun.

    Building a team of such people, and getting them to do what you want to get done – and that too, just so – that is oh-my-god-hard. “Pretty underrated”? That’s pretty understated!
  • “We have a big cast of characters at The Verge. MKBHD, that’s just you. You are a pretty unscalable property. That group of people you’re bringing in and hiring, is that to help you spend more time in front of the camera or is that an attempt to scale you in a different way?”

    Marques’ answer is pretty instructive, but if you’re looking to start a business, and looking to scale it, one challenge you will face is getting folks to do what you want them to do, plus anticipating the fact that in businesses such as this one, Marques himself is the biggest draw. Imagine The Seen and the Unseen without Amit Varma, or Mark Wiens’ videos without Mark Wiens. You have two choices: plan on not scaling, or fight a very hard battle. It’s easy to draw a diagram that teaches you the theory of scaling – doing it in the real world is bloody hard.
  • “You were just intently focused on completing a motion graphics course that you had been taking. And now it’s several years later and you’re not that deep in the weeds. You’ve just hired a motion graphics person and you’re talking about scaling your business and using your facilities in a different way.”

    That’s part of a question that Nilay asked Marques, but if you’re not thinking pin factory, your econ prof and you need to talk. One important part of scaling is what Adam Smith referred to as the division of labor. You can’t – nobody can – do every single thing in a business. Some parts of it need to be outsourced to lawyers and PR firms, as they speak about in the interview later, some parts to motion graphics persons – whatever.

    But you have to let certain tasks go. Which tasks? To whom? How to recruit the most perfect person possible? How to get that person to stay? How to get that person to work with the other folks on the team? Pretty underrated indeed!

    Oh and by the way, this part we don’t teach you in college. We should, if you ask me, but we don’t.
  • “We’ve basically shot all of our videos with my directors on Zoom and I’m just like, “man, this is not even close.” It’s very fun, and then that novelty fades and you just miss having everybody there.”

    This might not be true (hopefully!) after 2021, but if you’re looking to intern this summer, or start work this year, this is a real problem. Americans have this thing they call “watercooler conversations”. If you’re Indian, we’re talking about chai/sutta breaks. Doesn’t matter if you’re a smoker or not, that’s not the point. Conversations in a more relaxed environment after you’ve been in the heat of battle together is where informal debriefings happen, and that is going to suffer this year. There are businesses trying to virtualize this – but color me skeptical. In person is always better, and that’s the worst part of graduating in this of all years.
  • “One question from our video team that I thought was really interesting: as you’ve been on the path of growing bigger and bigger, you haven’t had a boss. How do you grow and improve when the audience is overwhelmingly telling you that you’re great? Where do you find the incentive or the self-criticism to improve? You’ve obviously wildly improved over time, but where does that really come from?”

    Marques’ answer to this question is worth reading in its entirety, but the larger point is that you need people who have the ability to give you frank feedback. That’s hugely underrated. A spouse, a friend, a significant other, a business partner, a junior – whoever. But you need it!

    This reminds me of a reply that Seth Godin gave to a question Tim Ferris asked him in a podcast some years ago:

    “But the other kind is so rare, so scarce, so precious I only get little dribs of it now and then. Which is someone who gets you, someone who can see right through to your soul who, with generosity and care, can look you in the eye, hand you back something and say: I think this would be better if you did it again. I had a business partner, Steve, who was like that in 1979 and ’80, ’80 and ’81. And finding that again in a consistent way is really precious and really hard.”

    (It goes without saying: listen/read the whole interview. Just wonderful.)
  • “We’ve never really set view count goals, but we did have a goal to make 100 videos in the calendar year and we did end up doing that, which is great. A lot of that stuff that we’re aiming for is more, I guess qualitative is the word, but it’s hard to define.”

    What are you optimizing for? This is related to yesterday’s post, and it ought to be a question you ask yourself everyday. I don’t ask myself this question everyday, but I wish I did. It really and truly helps, because if what you are doing isn’t helping what you’re optimizing for, then you shouldn’t be doing it.

    Marques isn’t optimizing for views. He’s not looking to maximize hits, views or any of those metrics. He’s setting a target for quantity, as he says in the quote above, but he also is (implicitly in the quote, but trust me explicitly in his work) optimizing for quality. As I said towards the end of yesterday’s post, get the process right. The rest takes care of itself. (See also: Goodhart’s law)

    Also read this excerpt from Tyler Cowen’s interview of Jimmy Wales:

    “When we think about things at Wikipedia — for example, we could probably increase engagement if we use some of the very basic machine learning techniques to start showing people random promotional links to other things than Wikipedia and then have the machine learn over time how to show you links that are more interesting so that you end up staying on the site longer.

    Now, it might turn out that that’s completely normal and thoughtful, in fact, if you go to a well-known economist, that it turns out that the way to keep you on the site longer is to show you other concepts of economics and economic theory. But it might turn out, and probably would turn out, the best thing to do is, when you go to look up Tyler Cowen, to show you on the sidebar links to Kim Kardashian, Donald Trump, whatever the hot topic of the day is and so on, which is not really what you want from an encyclopedia.

    When we think about that, our incentive structure at Wikipedia is not to optimize time on-site. It’s to say, look, every now and then, normally at the end of the year, we say, “Hey, would you donate some money?” Nobody has to donate. The only reason people do donate — and this is what donors tell us — is they think, “This is meaningful. This is important to my life. This should live. This should exist.”

    Bottom-line: If you are not clear about what you’re optimizing for, you will struggle. Get that clear, for yourself, and be ruthless about sticking to it. (It’s easy for me to say this, but it is very difficult for me to do it. Just so we’re clear!)
  • “I live inside of Google Calendar and Google Tasks. I would be a lost human without those things. I kind of think about this a lot — how much time I spend doing the thing versus managing how we make the thing. And it turns out that the management part has become a lot more of my job, but almost necessarily, to make it a better thing.”

    Managing time is hard. It is really, really, really hard. I have tried I don’t know how many different things, apps, methods and what not, but it is hard. If you are going to make a plan (for spending your day, for studying for your exam, for starting a business, whatever) budget twice the amount of time you think you will take to do something, because you will waste time. That, I am sad to say, is my lived reality.

    Nilay’s next question is about exactly this, by the way.
  • “I think I tweeted a couple of weeks ago how many emails I get that are just like, “Hey, this is us. We’ve got this idea. When can we hop on a call?” But I don’t really want to do that. If you can’t get your idea down in a couple sentences in an email, it’s probably not a good enough idea.”

    Something that I have started to do over the last two years or so: whenever I have to give an assignment, it’s usually along these lines.

    “Write in fifteen sentences (or lesser) your understanding of [whatever it is that they’re supposed to write about]. No conjunctions, no colons, no semi-colons.”

    It is fascinating to me how what seems to be good news to the students turns out to be a problem, because Pascal.
  • “We say no to 99 percent of the things that we get offered to do. But that last 1 percent of things, we think very deeply about, and work with a lot of people to try to make the right decisions and pull it off well.”

    Derek Sivers has an interesting book about this.
  • “If it’s a bad product, it’s not worth doing it at all, even if we would’ve made a ton of money. If it’s a bad integration or if it’s a bad company to work with, I have to say no, because it just doesn’t fit. So that fit is often more important than the math of the per-minute or per-project basis.”

    The preceding questions (to this quote) are about what metrics Marques uses, and you should read about it if you are in this business, but the larger point is what Marques is saying here – and this was referred to earlier in this post as well. Metrics are all well and good, but do the work – and work means quality work. The rest follows.
  • “I know celebrity culture is different in everyone’s heads, but I look up to Michael Jordan the athlete and nothing else about him.”

    My personal opinion, but that is exactly how it should be. But that is a separate post in its own right.
  • “The way I see YouTube is, it’s kind of like driving for Uber. If you stop driving for Uber for a week, you won’t make any money that week. And I think adding more people to this team makes it feel like putting that Uber on autopilot so I’m not doing quite as much of the lifting, but it still has to drive.”

    Read The Four Hour Work Week.

Up until the last bullet point above, this post was 2,455 words in length. That, I suppose, is about enough for a blogpost. But there’s more, much more, in this interview. So please, read/listen to it in its entirety.

But hey, I’m clearly on a roll, so I cannot resist one final piece of advice. Take notes, and write down your thoughts about what you’ve consumed. Even if nobody else is ever going to read it.

It really and truly helps.

Notes on “Re-aligning global value chains”

There is a danger that this may well end up becoming a habit, I publishing notes on an article written by Gulzar Natarajan, but well, it’ll be a worthwhile habit.

Here’s the one sentence take-away: “Good luck trying to move these chains away from China. Especially India.”

Ok, two sentences. My blog, my rules.

The article begins on a fairly upbeat note, if you think that a re-balancing of these chains away from China is a good idea. Japan has been mulling on this idea for a while, and the trend has only accelerated since the pandemic struck.

It goes on to speak about how the USA, and ‘like-minded’ nations such as Australia, India and Japan have also been considering walking down this path.

But then we enter into problematic territory:

  1. The pandemic has only accelerated this trend, as we already mentioned.
  2. Good luck.

Gulzar Natarajan pulls an extensive quote by Tim Cook from Inc. A part of it is quoted below:

“And the part that’s the most unknown is there’s almost two million application developers in China that write apps for the iOS App Store. These are some of the most innovative mobile apps in the world, and the entrepreneurs that run them are some of the most inspiring and entrepreneurial in the world. Those are sold not only here but exported around the world… China has moved into very advanced manufacturing, so you find in China the intersection of craftsman kind of skill, and sophisticated robotics and the computer science world.”

Tim Ferris had a useful insight that is relevant in this context. I’m paraphrasing here, but my takeaway is that it is perhaps better to be very good at a few things than be perfect at one and abysmal at everything else.

China is very good at a few things, and that makes it difficult to shift away from that country. It’s not enough, any longer, to be very good at cheap manufacturing. Not if you want to compete with China, because they’re still very good at that – and so much more.

And speaking of being very good at manufacturing:

“She is just one of dozens of workers we see at sewing machines and assembly tables at this umbrella factory. The factory tells us each worker will sew 40 umbrellas an hour, 1,600 a week. By year’s end, that’s 80,000 umbrellas a year from each worker like Chang. More than half those umbrellas will be sold in the United States. The factory chairman Lu Xinmiao reveals to us one of their biggest clients is Costco.”

And, from the same article…

“The head of the factory, Zhejiang Qingyi Knitting Company, tells us that if they could, they would hire 200 more workers today. He tells us that there is now more competition for workers. Some estimate it will take another 45 million workers from rural China within the next five years just to keep up with the demand for product. Here in Datang, Lu Xinmiao has given his employees 20 percent raises to make sure they stay. Cheng now makes 2,500 yuan a month, equal to $357.”

The article I quoted from speaks about umbrellas. Gulzar Natarajan speaks about coffins and bras.

Sample this, from The Economist:

“In this “Town of Underwear”, as the local government likes to call it, there are thousands of similar factories. Gurao produces 350m bras and 430m vests and pairs of knickers a year for sale at home and abroad. Undies account for 80% of its industrial output.”

But we can go on and on – specialized manufacturing that is still relatively cheap, especially when you take into account scale and (at least adjusted for the price that you’re paying) quality, means that China is still – even now! – a world beater in the manufacture of almost anything.

And the days of the bottom of the “manufacturing smile” are long since past for China as a whole:

“China now ranks second only to the United States in terms of start-up investment. From 2014 through 2016, China provided just under 20 percent of the world’s venture capital.”

That is from a McKinsey report titled Asia’s Future is Now. Left unsaid in the title is the fact that this is so because China would want it to be so.

In tomorrow’s essay, we’ll take a (big picture only) overview of how much of this cheap manufacturing shift away from China – to the extent that it happens at all – will actually come to India.

Tech: Links for 29th October, 2019

  1. Aadisht writes on his blog about a podcast he listened to recently, about journaling. Worth reading, and maybe listen to the podcast too? I haven’t.
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  2. I used this service for a long time, and did daily journaling fairly regularly for a period of about three, maybe four years. But OhLife wasn’t financially viable, and since then, I just haven’t been able to get into the habit again. It was a very simple service – every night, at 8.30, they’d send you an email, asking you to log your entry, and over time, they’d show you what you’d written a week, month or year ago. Haven’t found anything as good, or as simple, since.
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  3. Tim Ferriss explains his morning routine when it comes to journaling, and explains its importance.
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  4. Zapier lists out ten journaling apps (I don’t have a clear favorite…)…
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  5. As does Lifehacker.