Category: Thinks

Shane Parish: “The best way to improve your ability to think is to spend time thinking. Most of us are too busy to think. We have too many meetings. Too many calls. Too many priorities. Too many demands on our time. With no time to think and make good decisions we rush and make bad ones. And because we made bad decisions, our precious time is further strained as we correct our previous decisions.”

Nikola Tesla: “Gentlemen, some of the ideas I have expressed may appear to many of you hardly realizable; nevertheless, they are the result of long-continued thought and work. You would judge them more justly if you would have devoted your life to them, as I have done. With ideas it is like with dizzy heights you climb: At first they cause you discomfort and you are anxious to get down, distrustful of your own powers; but soon the remoteness of the turmoil of life and the inspiring influence of the altitude calm your blood; your step gets firm and sure and you begin to look—for dizzier heights.” [via Yuvaraj]

Read:  Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

New York is using Ranked Choice Voting for its mayor election. A tutorial.

How to Do Hybrid Right: from HBR. “To design hybrid work properly, you have to think about it along two axes: place and time.”

Richard Epstein: “No one can expect miracles from a system of limited government – but the smaller the size of the government and the more disinterested its administration of the laws, the more likely it is that diverse communities can thrive under its rule. Communitarian values, rightly understood, are best served by small governments, not large ones.” [via CafeHayek]

India must make the most of its demographic dividend: by Ejaz Ghani. “First, investments in human and physical infrastructure will need to be scaled up dramatically to promote entrepreneurship and create jobs. Second, promote entrepreneurship and job creation. Third, it is now time to implement the next generation of economic reforms to deliver efficient public services. What will happen if India fails to capture its demographic dividend? The most likely effect will be that a large number of young working-age people will be left unemployed or underemployed.”

Compounding Incumbent Advantage: by Adam Inoue. “Getting your foot in the door” is permanent permission to enter the fast lane…Knowledge-worker incumbency advantage compounds on itself. Over time, my basic signals get stronger—I have more years on the resume and slowly gain a reputation in my areas of expertise—but also my actual skills tend to get stronger at a pace that would be unsustainable for someone who isn’t already in the industry and has to spend 40+ hours a week doing something else.”

A Few Short Stories: by Morgan Housel.

Investing advice from Andy Kessler: “My advice is always to invest in the fog. When everyone else is incredulous, look for scale. Usually, no one else can see it. Squint hard, but don’t make stuff up. If you can see something that everyone dismisses, and that will get cheaper over a long period of time, maybe decades, buy in cheap and go along for the long ride. Others will eventually overpay. On the flip side, when the fog clears and we’ve moved from the acceptance to hype, it’s time to unload your shares to those late to the party.”

Agriculture policy should target India’s actual farming population: by Harish Damodaran. “Most government welfare schemes are aimed at poverty alleviation and uplifting those at the bottom of the pyramid. But there’s no policy for those in the “middle” and in danger of slipping to the bottom…Whether it is crop, livestock or poultry, agriculture policy has to focus on “serious full-time farmers”, most of them are neither rich nor poor. This rural middle class that was once very confident of its future in agriculture today risks going out of business. That shouldn’t be allowed to happen.”

Robert Mundell: Obit by Vivek Dehijia. “Widely considered the greatest macro economist of the second half of the last century, in the generation after John Maynard Keynes, Mundell was in rarefied terrain. Indeed, the only other credible contender for this title would be the late Milton Friedman, who was his colleague at the University of Chicago when Mundell taught there during the late 1960s. Mundell was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in 1999.” More from Madan Sabnavis and TCA Srinivasa-Raghavan.

HBR on new research about customer loyalty programs. “Customer loyalty programs are ubiquitous, accounting for more than 3.3 billion memberships in the United States alone…New research, conducted by professors at the Wharton School along with the customer experience consultancy the Verde Group, reveals an important downside of loyalty programs. When loyal members encounter service failures—shipping issues, problems with returns, stockouts, and the like—they get more upset than customers who are not members of the program…The researchers call this the boomerang effect, because the very loyalty a brand engenders comes back to hurt it.”

Covid and India’s Middle Class: by Udit Misra. “In 2020, Covid disruption resulted in reducing India’s vibrant middle class by one-third. “Prior to the pandemic, it was anticipated that 99 million people in India would belong in the global middle class in 2020. A year into the pandemic, this number is estimated to be 66 million, cut by a third. Meanwhile, the number of poor in India is projected to have reached 134 million, more than double the 59 million expected prior to the recession,” stated the Pew report.”

Make Time for “Me Time”: from HBR. “you can take steps to make sure that you put focus and attention on taking care of yourself each day. “Always on” doesn’t have to mean you must sacrifice your needs. It just means sometimes finding the time to make sure that your focus is on yourself.”

How mRNA vaccines like Moderna’s and Pfizer’s are propelling us into the ‘new golden age’ of vaccinology: from Fortune. “Unlike other vaccine types, producing RNA and DNA vaccines is a matter of assembling nucleic acids and packaging the fragile genetic material in such a way as to protect it until it can make it into a cell. In the case of current vaccines, that package is a tiny particle of fat. This process means the vaccines are quick to make, compared to other kinds of vaccines that use components that have to be grown, and they can be modified with relative ease.”

The CEO of Pfizer on Developing a Vaccine in Record Time: in HBR. ” It took a moon-shot challenge, out-of-the-box thinking, intercompany cooperation, liberation from bureaucracy, and, most of all, hard work from everyone at Pfizer and BioNTech to accomplish what we did in 2020. Organizations of any size or in any industry can use these strategies both to solve their own problems and to produce important work that benefits society.”

Atanu Dey: “The cost of any economic good is the cost of the energy that went into its production. We can go into why this is so later. If this is true, then it follows that the cost would fall if the cost of energy falls. And if the cost of energy tends to go close to zero, then the cost of everything would tend toward zero. In other words, super abundance…Super abundance is just round the corner, just over the horizon.”

Ninan on what is likely in India — tax and spend. “With economic disruption, growing inequality, & lack of government resources, economic practice is coming full circle…Higher tax rates, central banks pumping out cash, protection for home industry, suppressing interest rates, increased social welfare pay-outs — it all harks back to pre-Thatcher-Reagan. Sure, taxes will not go back to the 70-90 per cent range that existed once in Britain and the US (as in India), and governments still believe in market orientation when it comes to products and services. But they are re-assuming the primary role in building physical infrastructure and funding research.”

Sunil Jain in Financial Express: “The government should use this opportunity to raise corporation tax rates; companies are doing exceptionally well and can afford to pay a higher tax rate for a couple of years. A 30% tax rate won’t kill them. These are extraordinary times and call for special measures. The rates can be reversed after two years. Meanwhile, the additional revenue can be used to bring some succour to MSMEs and also the less privileged; MGNREGA allocations can be increased and more cash transfers can be made.”

According to me, India needs exactly the opposite: this is the time to implement the ideas in the Mission 10-20-30 blog series I wrote a year ago.