Getting Behind
/** I have a problem. I have a page on my Notion where I keep thoughts, drafts, and tidbits that I want to elaborate on later and turn into a coherent article and I keep accumulating these tidbits (from real life observation, conversation, reading, thinking) but never finish converting them to articles.
I now have a backlog of many fragmented things I’d want to share but think I need to balance how much to elaborate on a single point as I think I need not go such in depth on things that do not warrant it.
This is a balancing act as some topics would benefit from lengthy explanations and even writing about them leads down alleys that weren’t seen from just mental thought, but it is about weighing pros and cons.
I was away recently and will discuss this in a future article (explaining the gap in articles) but we will work through this backlog.
Prepare for intentional scattered content in near term. Now let’s begin:
/ I may have written about this before in a different context, but I feel it is important to identify the context for a person’s behavior or speech, primarily to understand if they are conflicted in their intent and if that positively benefits you or negatively benefits you as the listener.
Basic example: if you are a salesperson and you are compensated for the amount of outbound calls you make, you will aim to increase outbound call volume and compromise quality of each call. If you are compensated on leads closed, you may spend more time preparing for each individual call to increase your probability of success.
Next example: if you benefit from being viewed by others very positively and trustworthy, you may opt to be overly optimistic and open vs. more of a realist. You may mislead people by being very grandiose, vague, not as grounded, and “high-level” because this benefits you.
Solution: A balanced perspective is often best and when taking advice, it is important to balance optimistic views and pessimistic views. This can apply to literally anything.
/ This guy (Soren Iverson) has been a rather popular (and fun) account to follow for parody product designs. Another account (here (WILL ADD WHEN I REMEMBER THE TAG)) had interesting designs as well.
The point I make doesn’t resonate if you have not seen a number of these parody designs and this thought came to me from one of the designs from an account I fail to recall thus I apologize if this is superficial.
I noticed that many of these viral posts in essence increased transparency and candidness of the product.
I got this from one of Soren’s posts imaged here (image here here).
Multiple other examples have this same commonality (in my view), and it was an interesting observation. What if society/life was 10%, 20%, 50% more transparent overall? People would be exposed to criticisms more often yet know all compliments would be genuine (I think). I think being deceitful would be more difficult. True intentions would be more public. A number of other second-order consequences would arise as well…
On a similar note, I still believe that privacy is one thing and authenticity/openness is another, and you can have both. It may be difficult/uncomfortable at first?
/ I saw this tweet (here) and really enjoyed how well-phrased it was and how it summarized perfectly a lot of the intellectual journey in my view.
I can say with a high degree of accuracy that my math degree (and I’m sure many other degrees/pursuits) can be (loosely) summarized by these 4 things.
/ Similarly, I also saw this tweet that I felt is, so far, my favorite tweet of 2023 (and competing with favorite tweet of all time). I’m still young and lack experience/judgment to really understand this but regardless, this stands out as something of great importance and I’d think is EXTREMELY underrated.
Sure, there are exceptions and qualifiers and nuances but with all that said…this is in my view conducive to allowing someone to really be naturally optimistic, high energy, balanced, and I think they wouldn’t get mad at trivial things (or potentially have less irrational behaviors), although still thinking about this.
More to come,
Vishal
Published on March 20, 2023.