An Insight a Day

Perhaps speaking in public isn't all that different from writing in public.

Instead of facing blank pages, you'll just be facing blank faces.

“Italy is known for tomatoes. Thailand for chilies. Germany for sauerkraut.

But tomatoes originated in Peru. Thailand imported chilies from Central America. Sauerkraut started in China.

Everything is a remix—and the world is better for it. Share what you know. Learn from others."

James Clear

If you look hard enough, you'll find that a lot of ideas originated from one place or time but became popular in another (here's another example). The hard part isn't to be original, it's to take existing ideas and turn them into something others would want.

Sometimes, it's easy to get trapped in a YouTube binge. Or maybe you get trapped in a medium or news article binge. Or perhaps you're the impulse buyer type who can't resist shopping and buying stuff. What do you do if you want to break free?

Instead of trying to stop using willpower, you need to learn how to trick your brain. Your brain is really smart, it's been tricking you this whole time trying to get you to do stuff you know you'll ultimately regret. So you need to trick your brain in return. How do you do that? With the power of procrastination.

Procrastinate on those YouTube videos, just bookmark that video and promise yourself you'll watch it later. And keep doing that, watch your to-watch list grow bigger and bigger. In a few weeks, you'll look back at all those YouTube videos you were supposed to watch but didn't and wonder why you wanted to watch so much videos in the first place. So you delete them.

Now, do the same for all your other addictions and uncontrollable consumptions. Just save it and promise yourself you'll do it later. Because I know how bad we are at keeping such promises, which is why this tactic will definitely work for a lot of us.

If it was easy, anyone could do it and reaping the benefits.

If it was easy, most people would either just do it themselves or outsource it for cheap.

If it was easy, what makes you think you can do a better job than all the other people you're competing with?

It's easy to run on flat ground, but faster people can easily outrun you. That's why you must run uphill and through difficult obstacles to make those with a natural speed advantage give up on the chase. That's why you need to choose to do the hard things.

The only thing that's ever consistent in life is change. From the physical world to your mental world, everything is changing over time. You are no longer the person you were 10 years ago, your habits and preferences have changed thus far, what makes you think they won't change again in the next 10 years?

Consistency is cool and all, but it's a bit like clinging to certainty. We want things to stay the way they are, we don't like uncertainty or unexpected changes. But that's not how things work around here. The only thing we can expect to be certain or consistent is change.

Talent is overrated, and no, I'm not trying to imply that hard work triumphs over talent. There's that, too, but let's save that for another time. When we're looking to hire someone, most of us default to looking at their CVs. What's their talent? How is their performance? Are their numbers high?

Almost no one looks at their trustworthiness. Can you trust this person with your business or customers? Can you trust this person to treat others with respect and not poison the work environment? Can you trust this person not to sacrifice others for personal gains?

But there's no easy way to measure trust, so most people simply take it for granted during the hiring process. And once they found out that the person they hired is high performance and low trust, they're reluctant to fire that person, probably because of sunk cost and the pain of hiring another person.

Of course, everyone hopes to hire someone who is high performance and high trust, but such gems extremely hard to come by. The more realistic choice is, would you prefer to work with someone who is high performance but low trust, or would you rather they be low performance but high trust?

I was browsing through YouTube and found this video by Simon Sinek. Towards the end, he mentioned something interesting which I’ll paraphrase a bit below.

Right now, the dam is leaking, but you can’t just point at it and say it’s broken. We know it’s broken, but we’re also the ones up there fixing it. So we’re gonna get wet, we’re gonna get wet for a while.

It’s the same with every broken system or problem we face, you can’t just point at it and say it’s broken. There are a lot of broken things in this world, but we’re also in the process of fixing them. And you have to ask yourself, are you part of the solution, or are you part of the problem?

It's the simple physics of Parkinson's law, work expands to fill the time allocated. On the days where I have limited free time, my mind is forced to concentrate and focus on the task at hand. But on the days where I have seemingly unlimited free time, like today, my mind tends to wander off and do other stuff.

When time is scarce, we have no choice but to act. But when time is plentiful, what's stopping us from wasting an hour here and there? We'll still have plenty of time to act, until we don't. In which case, time becomes scarce and we have no choice but to act. Isn't this how a typical procrastinator behaves? Isn't this how we all behave?

I've discovered an interesting quote today.

As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death.

Leonardo da Vinci

We should strive to live life to the fullest so we can leave life with no regrets, much like how a productive day leads to a satisfying sleep.

I have this irrational fear when interrupting others, particularly when they seem to be working on something important. Doesn't it seem like a bad idea when they appear so engrossed in their work? But the thing is, I can never tell if they're working on something important or just staring at their screen reading news articles. So why not interrupt anyway?

I guess I'd also need a good enough reason to interrupt. Obviously, I can't justify interrupting to ask something that can be looked up in 5 minutes. But if it's an urgent matter involving things outside my scope of responsibility, I guess it justifies the interruption? But what about everything in between?

Perhaps this is the appeal of sticky notes, email, and text messaging. It makes it feel like you're not interrupting, not directly anyway. But this extremely low cost of communication has a side effect, it encourages people to ask or email just about anything. Especially the queries we would never think to interrupt someone face-to-face just to ask.

Remember that query I had that could be looked up in 5 minutes? Without the option of texting someone, you would have to either interrupt them in their office to ask, or look it up yourself. But given the choice of texting someone, there's a high chance you would do just that and not even consider the possibility of looking it up yourself.

As a result, you might end up interrupting others more often because now, they have all sorts of messages coming their way that demands their attention. It's kinda ironic, isn't it?