Rajesh Jain

Winston Churchill: “To each there comes in their lifetime a special moment when they are figuratively tapped on the shoulder and offered the chance to do a very special thing, unique to them and fitted to their talents. What a tragedy if that moment finds them unprepared or unqualified for that which could have been their finest hour.” [via Shane Parish]

Visual neuroscientist Jenny Bosten on colour: “Physically, the rainbow is a continuous spectrum. The wavelengths of light vary smoothly between two ends within the visible range. There are no lines, no sharp discontinuities. The human eye can discriminate far more than seven colors within that range. But in our culture, we would say that we see seven color categories in the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. That’s historical and cultural…I’ve always seen color as something really fascinating, especially the subjective experience of color. It’s still a complete mystery, how the brain produces that.”

Dr. Joe Bak-Coleman on the idea of a hive mind: “Under what conditions can we expect a group of individuals to act cohesively and effectively as a collective, and in what circumstances does human behavior prevent such action? I believe this is a defining question for science in the coming decades, as we develop systems that alter our interactions with one another and with technology, all the while facing challenges like climate change, pandemics, and war that threaten our existence as a species…We’ve learned how remarkably sensitive emergent behavior can be to the structure and nature of interactions between individuals. Changes to the network size or structure, altering how information is shared, or adding feedback tends to degrade collective behavior into failed states.”

The Generalist: “In the world we actually see evolving today, new AI tools effectively democratize facility and efficiency in unprecedented ways. In doing so, they’re empowering individual professionals to achieve new productivity levels while enabling society to achieve productivity gains that may exceed those unleashed by the Industrial Revolution. Not only that, but people will also find their jobs more engaging and fulfilling because they’ll have more time to focus on the most creative, strategic, and novel aspects of them. This future is here. There will be an AI amplifying tool for every major profession within five years. These tools can catalyze human excellence across occupations – right brain, left brain, and any brain.”

WSJ: “Algorithms are capable of predicting the new fashion styles, managing the supply chain, making optimal pricing decisions and reducing waste. But the problem, at its most basic level, is that the technologies often collide with the age-old wisdom of the experts who are the foundation of the industry: the designers, buyers, planners, factory craftsmen and merchandisers on the front lines of the fashion houses. That collision, however, need not be fatal, as our research has shown. Here are five ways we have found that fashion-industry managers are tripping themselves up—and how they can avoid those mistakes.”

NYT: “In February 2020, in the midst of a vitriolic presidential election, an idealistic group of donors from across the ideological spectrum met to plan an ambitious new project. They called themselves the New Pluralists and pledged to spend a whopping $100 million over the next decade to fight polarization by funding face-to-face interactions among Americans across political, racial and religious divides. Fixing what is broken in American democracy requires more than changing voter ID laws or the shape of our congressional districts, they argued. It requires forging deep personal connections that will change hearts and minds and ultimately American culture itself. Their experiment rests on a basic idea: Far too many Americans lack the skills, the opportunity and even the inclination to work together across lines of difference toward a common goal. Part of the solution, these donors believe, is embracing a very old idea that has fallen out of fashion: pluralism…a big question remains: Can a group of wealthy donors change American culture from above? How exactly does that work? If you are trying to change a law, you hire a lobbyist. To change American culture, whom do you hire?”

WSJ has suggestions on how to stay healthy while working from home. Among them: “Combine meeting and walking. If you don’t need to be on camera, or need to take only minimal notes, go for a walk during the call. I’ve found that these meetings often allow me to be more creative—and make a stronger personal connection—than what happens on a video call, perhaps because it is easier to focus on the substance of a conversation without the distractions of screen sharing or on-screen appearance.”

Aaron De Smet: “Deliberate calm is a personal tool kit to help leaders learn, change, and adapt when it’s the most important and hardest. It draws on a number of related concepts: self-awareness, situational awareness, emotional self-regulation, and emotional intelligence. It puts them all together and combines it with creativity, adaptability, and learning agility in a very simple, practical way of figuring out when I need to change and how I need to change. It helps me change how I see and behave in the world, it helps me unlearn my old habits and reactions, and it helps me invent the new ones that are going to serve me well for the challenge or opportunity in front of me.”

McKinsey on PEs recruiting chief performance officers (CPOs): “A great CPO contributes to diligence and the creation of an investment thesis in critical ways. They assess whether C-suite leaders have the capabilities to deliver on the deal thesis, as well as whether the workforce has the scale or depth of skill required. They identify cultural issues that could provoke problems, such as a talent exodus or work slowdown, and flag inefficiencies throughout the organizational structure. CPOs are experts in organizational change, deploying people analytics that make understanding talent as data-driven as any other business metric, and creating collaborative networks of chief human resources officers (CHROs) across a firm’s portfolio companies.”

Alan Mulally: “Who you are as a person is going to have more to do with your success in whatever you’re choosing to do than anything else.” [via Shane Parish]

Donald Boudreaux: “The discipline and guidance supplied by private markets – markets embedded within the law of property, contract, and tort – helps to ensure that the ‘fantasies’ of entrepreneurs bear a significant attachment to reality, for the market will quickly halt the pursuit of wildly improbable ventures. But matters with government differ categorically. Government officials spend other people’s money and order other people about. The right to say ‘no’ is severely attenuated when the offers commands come from the state. Government officials – having no personal claim on whatever residual monetary revenues their schemes might leave after paying all costs – are neither incited in their imposition of these schemes by the lure of personal monetary profit nor disciplined by the fear of personal monetary loss. And these officials’ decisions, being intended to override market signals, are of course not guided by market prices. Dreams and fantasies pursued through government inevitably make life more hellish (except for those individuals currently issuing the commands).”

Auberon Herbert in 1908: “Establish freedom and open competition in everything, and all forms of trade and enterprise, all relations of men to each other, tend to become healthy and vigorous, pure and clean.” [via CafeHayek]. Donald Boudreaux: “Herbert correctly understood that in practice protectionism is not only inevitably economically inefficient, it is also inevitably and grotesquely unjust. Protectionists miss this inefficiency and injustice because they see only the relatively small handful of concrete firms and flesh-and-blood individuals that benefit from protection. Only by ignoring protectionism’s inescapable economic damage and its unavoidable encouragement of special-interest-group rent-seeking can protectionists convince themselves and others that their restrictive schemes are good for the country as a whole.”

McKinsey: “Research on the omnichannel experience shows more than half of B2C customers engage with three to five channels each time they make a purchase or resolve a request. And the average customer looking to make a single reservation for accommodations (like a hotel room) online switched nearly six times between websites and mobile channels. If these customers encounter inconsistent information or can’t get what they need, they may lose interest in a brand’s products or services. And this can translate into business outcomes. Omnichannel customers shop 1.7 times more than shoppers who use a single channel. They also spend more.”

Wired on Rust: “There are fads in programming languages, and new ones come and go, often without lasting impact. Now 12 years old, Rust took time to mature from the side project of a Mozilla researcher into a robust ecosystem. Meanwhile, the predecessor language C, which is still widely used today, turned 50 this year. But because Rust produces more secure code and, crucially, doesn’t worsen performance to do it, the language has been steadily gaining adherents and now is at a turning point. Microsoft, Google, and Amazon Web Services have all been utilizing Rust since 2019, and the three companies formed the nonprofit Rust Foundation with Mozilla and Huawei in 2020 to sustain and grow the language. And after a couple of years of intensive work, the Linux kernel took its first steps last month to implement Rust support…Rust is what’s known as a “memory-safe” language because it’s designed to make it impossible for a program to pull unintended data from a computer’s memory accidentally.”

T.H. White: “The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.” [via Atanu Dey]

FT: ““The only positive I see from the games getting banned is that Indian studios have started developing battle royale,” Anurag Khurana, a veteran executive and founder of esports company Penta, said. “The biggest negative thing is that the foreign publishers are afraid to make investments in India — they don’t know whether their game might get banned.” Redseer Strategy Consultants estimates that 450mn Indians played at least one game last year and valued the industry at more than $2bn — though much of that comes from games involving real money, such as online rummy or fantasy sports.”

Cato: “Central bankers need a clear guide to monetary policy—and that guide can’t be the price of credit, which should be determined in free capital markets, not by government officials. Most importantly, in a pure fiat money regime, there needs to be a credible, transparent rule for the conduct of monetary policy that ensures stable money—that is, a rule that prevents stop‐​go policy and preserves, as much as possible, monetary equilibrium…In a fiat monetary regime characterized by discretionary government management, the likelihood of monetary disorder increases compared to a rules‐​based regime. The Fed and Congress need to listen to those who propose monetary alternatives based on rules rather than discretion. Attention should turn away from the day‐​to‐​day operation of the Fed and focus on fundamental guiding principles and learning from past mistakes.”

Howard Schultz: “Sometimes you need to look much deeper, even when the company is financially performing well, as to what’s behind the curtain.”

Samuel Gregg: “But those living in a society in which economic security is generally prioritized over liberty, and where the state is considered the primary institution responsible for securing such security, are more likely to trade off various economic liberties in return for economic security via the government – the long-term price being gradual stagnation.” [via CafeHayek] Adds Donald Boudreaux: “A great deal of government intervention is aimed at increasing the public’s satisfaction today with little or no regard for the consequences of these interventions tomorrow. The political impulse is to protect today’s jobs despite the consequent negative impact on creating better jobs tomorrow. It is to keep inflation going for another day despite the accumulating damage that cannot avoid being paid tomorrow. It is to use antitrust to break-up or otherwise obstruct successful firms today despite the resulting negative impact on industrial structures and practices tomorrow. It is to fund spending today with debt that must be repaid tomorrow…If I can drink all I want this evening knowing that the resulting hangover will be suffered, not by me, but by strangers – and, further, by strangers who are unlikely to hold me accountable for their nausea and headaches – then pour me another, and keep ’em coming!”

Michael Munger: “We all say we admire honesty. But whenever we actually have to choose, we pick the person who tells us what we want to hear. In economic policy, especially, that means that we can get hurt, when we pick promises over prudence…We ignore people who (rightly) point out that simple solutions to political and economic problems make things worse, not better. We vote for, and reward, charlatans who pretend to know the answers, and zealots who actually believe their own superficial galimatias. Ultimately, it’s a collective action problem: it would be better for society if our leaders were humble and honest about how little they actually know. But it’s better for the candidates for leadership if they pretend to be committed to a whole dog’s breakfast of truths that just ain’t so.”

Watched: Kantara (Hindi version) and Avatar: The Way of Water. Liked both.

FT: “In her research on how remote teams communicate, Catherine [Cramton] analysed thousands of messages across email and chat logs from geographically dispersed teams. She identified that conflicts arise from one of five reasons: differing contexts; unevenly distributed information; inconsistent interpretations of what’s important; individuals accessing information at different speeds; and understanding the meaning of silence in disparate ways. Shared context is the most important factor, says Catherine, but it’s also the most challenging to achieve for dispersed teams. When you have coworkers in another country, for example, it’s more difficult to gain awareness of your differences. Everything from local holidays and customs to workplace facilities will affect your interactions.”

Nathan Baschez: “You can think of the post-launch phase of a startup as one big optimization problem. You have a bunch of goals—engagement, retention, growth—and a lot of levers you can pull to achieve them. The challenge is figuring out which goals you should focus on, and which levers actually work. The good news is that there are some frameworks you can use to think through this problem.”

Julian Simon (in 1996): “There is one resource that has shown a trend of increasing scarcity rather than increasing abundance – the most important of all resources – human beings. Yes, there are more people on Earth now than ever before. But if we measure the scarcity of people the same way that we measure the scarcity of other economic goods – by how much we must pay to obtain their services – we see that wages and salaries have been going up all over the world, in poor countries as well as in rich countries, throughout the preceding decades and centuries. The amount that you must pay to obtain the services of a driver or a cook has risen in India, just as the price of a driver or cook – or economist – has risen in the United States. This increase in the price of people’s services is a clear indication that people are becoming more scarce even though there are more of us.” [via CafeHayek]

WSJ on science-based strategies to eat better: “Set one or two specific rules, and stick to them. Make a grocery list, and shop online. Good sleeping begets good eating. Don’t eat alone.”

FT: “Writing the Revolution [by Heather Ford, about Wikipedia] evokes two themes that together encompass practically every contemporary anxiety about truth and technology: how humans create knowledge, and how machines manipulate it. We privilege Wikipedia content, writes Ford, because we believe it is a product of mass consensus, what the journalist James Surowiecki first dubbed in 2004 “the wisdom of crowds”. And we trust that its editors adhere to strict policies, the main ones being that articles should present a neutral point of view, and that all contestable claims within them should be reliably sourced. In an age of hyper-awareness around subjectivity and disinformation, these beliefs are reassuring…Wikipedia content is further privileged, she writes, because it is encoded as structured data about objects in the world and their relationships to one another. This transforms it into machine-readable data, meaning it can be digested by the algorithms that power the products of major commercial players, from Google’s Knowledge Graph (the fact boxes that appear next to Google search results), to Apple’s virtual assistant Siri.”