The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.
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Good Research Requires Being Underemployed
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Making Something Truly Different
Do something all of your own, and you can make something truly different.
– Charanjit Singh, music innovator and acid house pioneer
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On Measurement
Measurement is not an alternative to judgement. Measurement demands judgement – judgement about whether to measure, what to measure, how to evaluate the significance of what’s been measured, whether rewards and penalties will be attached to the results, and to whom to make the measurements available.
– Jerry Muller, The Tyranny Of Metrics
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The Absence Of Talent As A Gift
Imagine having no talent. Imagine being no good at all at something and doing it anyway. Then, after nine years, failing at it and giving it up in disgust and moving to Englewood, N.J., and selling aluminum siding. And then, years later, trying the thing again, though it wrecks your marriage, and failing again. And eventually making a meticulous study of the thing and figuring out that, by eliminating every extraneous element, you could isolate what makes it work and just do that. And then, after becoming better at it than anyone who had ever done it, realizing that maybe you didn’t need the talent. That maybe its absence was a gift.
– Alex Halberstadt, on Rodney Dangerfield
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The Human Introspective Blind Spot
Human beings are primates, and primates are political animals. Our brains are therefore designed not just to hunt and gather, but also to get ahead socially, often by devious means.
But while we may be self-interested schemers, we benefit by pretending otherwise. The less we know about our own ugly motives, the better. And thus we don’t like to talk — or even think — about the extent of our selfishness. This is “the elephant in the brain,” an introspective blind spot that makes it hard to think clearly about ourselves and the explanations for our behavior.
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Theory-Induced Blindness
Once you have accepted a theory and used it as a tool in your thinking, it is extraordinarily difficult to notice its flaws.
– Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow
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Patience
Patience is not about waiting, but how we act when things take longer than we expect.
– Paulo Coelho
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India’s Economic Future
Harsh recently wrote an excellent piece on how India’s economy will grow from the current $2.5 trillion GDP to $12 trillion by 2030. His prediction rests on on two planks: increasing participation of women in the workforce, and technological change.
The Solow growth model – one of the few economics topics I actually remember something about from business school – takes three inputs, namely capital, labour and productivity growth, to project what the future output of an economy might be. Harsh has made a persuasive case from first principles, on how an increase in women’s participation in the workforce combined with the mobile internet revolution will propel India’s GDP to $12 trillion by 2030.
These media reports add a lot of colour to what can sound like a routine development – it is anything but that:
Rural Indian Girls Chase Big-City Dreams
Latest HRD survey shows girls going to college out number boys in seven states
Their Postcards For 2018: From 18 places, girls who turned 18 this year speak out
Harsh’s point on technology too is visible and obvious – Reliance Jio’s entry into telecom is making 4G mobile connectivity ubiquitous. Over the next 3-4 years, we should see 5G (with speeds on the order of hundreds of MB per second) rolled out across India. Consider what this will do for education, health care, media and entertainment. The possibilities are enormous.
Last year, I had co-authored two op-eds with investor Navroz Udwadia on how India can achieve sustained double-digit growth, by fixing the banking sector and building infrastructure for agriculture. The former addresses the capital piece of the Solow model, the latter helps increase productivity for agriculture through “technological” interventions. The introduction of GST too is a technological step change, the longer-term benefits of which monthly or quarterly economic data cannot capture.
There are real changes underway in how India allocates capital, in the composition of our labour force, and in technology. These will all mutually reinforce each other and the gains will compound. It can be difficult to see the bigger picture when we ourselves are inside the frame. I feel very positive about India’s economic future. It’s a great time to invest in India and to be an entrepreneur here.
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Imaginary vs Real
We want to lead an imaginary life in the eyes of others, so we try to make an impression. We strive constantly to embellish and preserve our imaginary being, and neglect the real one.