WSJ: “We like to think we will our success into existence with our own hard work. And yet, so many of us knock wood, consult tarot cards and read horoscopes, or repeat affirmations to manifest our way to happiness…It feels like our fate often comes down to circumstance and coincidence, maybe even a bit of magic. But we have more power than we think to make ourselves luckier. You can create your own serendipity, says Richard Wiseman, a psychology professor at England’s University of Hertfordshire and author of a seminal book on luck. He and his team studied hundreds of people who considered themselves especially lucky or unlucky. The former tended to be cheery, optimistic, open and resilient. The latter had their metaphorical heads down, unable to spot and seize opportunities. “When you are stressed and worried and anxious, you gain a kind of tunnel vision,” Wiseman says.”
The Generalist: “While the incontinent fever dream of 2021 has hopefully taught us some lessons to carry into the coming years, it hasn’t dulled my high-level belief in the power of technology and its universal importance. It’s startling how youthful many disruptive technologies are. It was scarcely sixteen years ago, for example, that Steve Jobs strode on stage and revealed the iPhone. It helped spawn the mobile internet and has changed our lives in innumerable big and small ways. While the form factor may change, the magic of having constant access to a global, connecting, multifarious superbrain won’t. Surely, its impact has just begun. Even more cutting-edge movements deserve a mention, too. Who knows what artificial intelligence, biotech, crypto, and beyond will manifest? (For better and worse.) That fundamental belief in the technology story contributes to my optimism about the venture capital asset class. As long as there are entrepreneurs taking risks and pushing the horizon forward, risk capital will be needed.”
The Verge: “The first killer app of AI for businesses, it appears, is a simple thing: to be able to find information in the morass of files, folders, attachments, incompatible enterprise software apps, and everything else that constitutes modern knowledge work. Notion, which aims to replace most of those things in a single tool, is launching a feature it thinks can help. It’s called Q&A, and CEO Ivan Zhao describes it to me as essentially an all-knowing AI executive assistant that knows everything about everything and can find it in a second or two.”
Ninan: “[Mumbai] has overtaken Delhi with the scale of its belated infrastructure build-up and a parallel boom in real estate construction. Almost anywhere you go in the city, giant construction equipment can be seen moving massive mounds of earth, pylons enclosed in scaffolding to support metro lines and overhead roads, plus excavation for tunnels that will cut under the city in different directions…The promise is that all this will transform a city traditionally short of basic transport infrastructure. Three metro lines now function in the suburbs, longer stretches are under construction. There is a massive coastal road project with dedicated bus lanes, to bypass existing traffic corridors and carry four times the traffic of the existing, short sea link; a 22-km trans-harbour link over the water from mid-town Mumbai to the mainland nearing completion; a new airport under construction; overhead connector roads to link the east and west of the city; and multi-kilometre tunnels under the city as well as the sea. Construction work is on at a furious pace as most of these projects are slated for completion in the next couple of years. The only thing not being expanded, it would seem, is the suburban rail network that is the city’s lifeline.”
