Category Archives: Gems from Others

Waiting before Shipping

Jerry Seinfeld in talk with Tim Ferris said this about writing:

When you write something (or create anything worth sharing), be kind to yourself as you have just accomplished a difficult task. Savor the feeling of having done something good. In case you share that with someone and they find problems with it, your sense of achievement would go down the drain immediately. Instead, sleep on it and wait for 24 hours before sharing it. After such a duration, you would be more open to getting critiqued and you can also go through it again to make it better. Shipping immediately isn’t the best when it comes to creative arts.

This applies to everything except cooking. That’s why Twitter might not be the right medium for being actually creative. Meme-making might work there but not art.

Leaky Faucet Theory

Peter Shankman of ‘Faster Than Normal’ says:

Think about it (problems) like a leaky faucet that’s overflowing the sink onto your kitchen floor: you could spend all your time constantly cleaning up the water that’s destroying your floor (i.e., fixing the things that happened because a trigger set you off) or you could fix the leak in the first place. Fixing the leak is a lot easier, right?

Often when things go awry, we tend to blame non-important things instead of fixing the source. Finding the source might not always be hard if we really try.

I am not intending to impart wisdom here. I am just reminding myself of this. 🙂

Pygmalion Placebo

In this post on the A Learning A Day daily blog by Rohan Rajiv the Pygmalion Effect is mentioned.

Pygmalion Effect, also called Rosenthal effect, says that if you and everyone around you believe in something, there are more chances of you making it happen. In other words, high expectation lead to better results while lower expectations lead to poorer. It is a bit similar to the Placebo effect in Medical Science.

Right now, there are 3 or more Vaccines with high efficacy are peeking from the horizon. While there are skeptics, there’s a huge populace which is betting on its success. Even if they end up being reasonable in effectiveness, this effect might make it more effective.

Same thing works with confidence. Isn’t it?

Header Photo

So I recently read: ‘Your Life in Weeks’ on WaitButWhy.com

I generally don’t think long term. I do have ambitions and I have a general plan but there is no more irksome question than “Where do you see yourself after 5 years?”. Memes about this question being asked in 2015 are already aplenty. All your plans, goals, and targets crumble as soon as a personal calamity occurs.

Continue reading “So I recently read: ‘Your Life in Weeks’ on WaitButWhy.com”