MONTHLY MULLING💡
Myth of Multitasking, Indian Chai, and What Really Matters for Investors?
Hi👋 Tapan here.
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Happy Sunday y’all!
I took a trip to Paris 🇫🇷 last week which was terrific! Paris is the city of love, but many people forget, it has had a tremendous impact on the history of mankind.
Every cafe you walk past, you feel writers from the lost generation such as Hemingway will be discussing their writing or Rousseau, from the Age of Enlightenment, talking about how humans are inherently good.
🙏🏽 On a separate note, can I please ask you to share Monthly Mulling💡 with your friends or family? I am only 8 subscribers away from hitting my 2022 goal! Thanks for your support 🫶🏽
💡Today, we will talk about: The myth of multitasking, how chai came to India (by Suraj Devaraj), and what really matters (by Howard Marks, Safal Niveshak).
📖 Currently, I am reading: Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman
In Humankind, Rutger Bregman investigates the philosophical debate between Hobbes and Rousseau about whether humans are inherently evil or good? This book is quite opposite of Sapiens and takes an optimistic outlook on mankind. It is definitely one of my top 3 reads from 2022! I will share my reading list for 2022 in the next newsletter.
Onwards 🚀
🤦🏽♂️ The Myth of Multitasking
I get annoyed when someone tells me they are good at multitasking.
Computers can multitask because of their operating systems and ability to switch tasks. Human brains cannot do that. We are not truly capable of multitasking.
Multitasking wasn’t even a thing before computers. Humans just quickly switch between two tasks and think they multitask. But this actually drains them.
- Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes
When someone says they are multitasking, they are essentially rapidly switching between two tasks which can lead to a decline in performance and an increase in mistakes because of switching costs.
We lose about 40% of our productive time shifting between tasks (article on switching costs). Now imagine doing this over and over again during the day, while you check Insta between work or respond to emails while working on a separate project. You lose a lot of your productive time by multitasking.
Multitasking is simply fake productivity. You think you're crushing it but you're just running around churning out a bunch of C+ work.
- Sahil Bloom, The Curiosity Chronicle
🤔 So, what can we actually do?
🚫 Get rid of to-do lists, and focus on one big thing - What’s the one thing that you did alone today, your day will be successful? Explained by Shaan in this article.
🗓️ Compartmentalize and focus on the one key task at hand -
Ali Abdaal explains the benefits of planning your ideal week, start blocking your calendar in advance
Use the Pomodoro technique and work in 25-minute sprints
📴 Turn off the distractions (duh!) - Smartphones have a bunch of features that help you achieve this
I don’t write about productivity often but a recent conversation led to this rant 😂. I have previously talked about time management and finding time in your busy schedule if you want to check that out!
🫖 The Truth About the Indian Chai
Suraj makes brilliantly edited videos on topics that make you curious.
His recent video is on how chai was brought to India under the East India Company. It’s a story of drugs, bloody wars, and smuggling 👇🏽
I wanted to add to the marketing campaign that Suraj briefly mentioned at the end of his video.
In Lizzie Collingham’s book, Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors, she talks in detail about the marketing campaign run by the Indian Tea Association to increase the consumption of tea in India.
💸 In the initial days, for the majority of the Indian populace tea was far too expensive a foreign habit as it required teapots, china cups, milk, and sugar.
📈 During the First World War, the marketing campaign gained momentum as tea stalls were established outside factories, coal mines, and cotton mills where thirsty labourers provided a captive market.
🚂 The next market was the Indian railway. Indian Tea Association equipped small contractors with kettles and cups to sell tea at major tea junctions. Guidance was provided to these contractors on how to make proper tea which (luckily) was ignored.
These contractors started making tea with a lot of milk and sugar. And thus, chai was born.
🛕 Next, was the compartmentalized spaces in cities where the industrial and business workers could drink chai during their breaks. The vendors came up with another genius solution to break the reservations of men from various castes and religions from sharing the same drinking vessel. They started serving chai in cheap earthenware which could be destroyed after its use.
So, there you go, a few crates of smuggled tea leaves and a successful marketing campaign made chai a household beverage in India.
Other than chai, I also find the below Indian food history really intriguing:
🥔 The potato was introduced to India by the Portuguese who used to call it batata. This is still the term used for potato in Gujarati/Marathi language in India.
In addition, the Portuguese introduced bread in India. The only kind of bread available was a flatbread called chapati. They started baking a sweet bread called pao.
The Goan population over the years made this sweet bread into a savoury one and thus, we got the pav! Truly, we should thank the Portuguese for vada pav.
🍛 From Persia, pilau spread throughout the Muslim world. In Turkey it was called pilav; in Spain, with the addition of seafood and an emphasis on saffron, it became paella; in Italy, butter transformed it into risotto.
In India, where Persian and Central Asian culture fused with that of Hindustan, pilau was to undergo yet another transformation in the kitchens of the Mughal emperors with the addition of vegetables and spices. Biryani was created!
💰 What Really Matters?
Howard Marks published a new memo on what really matters for investors.
Here are the key points thanks to Safal Niveshak -
🚫 What does NOT matter:
Short-term events
Trading mentality
Short-term performance
Volatility
Hyperactivity
✅ What matters:
Performance of your holdings over the next five or ten years (or more) and
how the value at the end of the period compares to the amount you invested and to your needs.
⭐ An investor’s most important job is to:
Study companies and securities, assessing things such as their earnings potential;
Buy the ones that can be purchased at attractive prices relative to their potential;
Hold onto them as long as the company’s earnings outlook and the attractiveness of the price remain intact; and
Make changes only when those things can’t be reconfirmed, or when something better comes along
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