MONTHLY MULLING 💡
The Knowledge Pipeline, Cities and Ambitions, and the Illusion of Time ⏰
Hi👋,
Tapan here.
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Happy Sunday y’all!
Yesterday I spent some time wandering around the city with a friend (thanks Arsh!) and he brought up an interesting topic - The Great Fire of London.
The fire started from a bakery and burned the entire city down in 1666. Imagine being the baker!
Prior to the fire, all the buildings were built from wood including the original St. Paul’s Cathedral. The entire city was rebuilt using stone. St. Paul’s, which you can see in the image above, was actually built after the fire. Pretty cool.
Moving on🧠
THE KNOWLEDGE PIPELINE - HOW TO CREATE KNOWLEDGE, THE SMART WAY? (Article - 20 mins)
I released a new article! It’s the culmination of months of note-taking and reading on this topic.
Next time you are out with friends, family, or alone – stop and look around. There is a high probability that people around you are consuming something that was created in the last 24 hours. Heck, they might be consuming something that was created in the past hour. We are being smothered with content.
But what content do you consume? It is said, you are in fact a mashup of what you choose to let into your life.
You are only as knowledgeable as the source of your data.
The Knowledge Pipeline is the process of converting the data you consume into information and finally knowledge. Pretty straightforward.
There are 4 major steps involved.
Data Collection
Data Filtering
Information Conversion
Knowledge Creation
With so much new data constantly being created, the Knowledge Pipeline helps you understand - what to let in? What data should you be consuming? Do you consume everything? How to deal with Information Overload? How do you generate ideas? Is there a way to filter out useless information? How do you become more knowledgeable!?
I also share my Knowledge Pipeline in the article.
Also, can I ask you to share the article if you like it?😊
💭MULLING
🤔 Cities and Ambitions by Paul Graham (Article - 15 mins)
Great cities attract ambitious people. You can sense it when you walk around one. In a hundred subtle ways, the city sends you a message: you could do more; you should try harder.
NYC tells you to be rich, powerful. SF tells you to be innovative, creative. Boston tells you to be smarter. Mumbai, I think, tells you to work harder.
Why does this matter? As James Clear puts it in Atomic Habits, your environment plays a huge role in shaping your habits, your behavior.
If you live in a city that aligns with your goals, you will find more success. People surrounding you are chasing the same goals. You will find more motivation.
What does your city tell you?🏙
💰 The Biggest Killer of Investment Returns by Safal Niveshak (Article - 7 mins)
Somewhere, right this very moment, an investor you know of is having more fun than you. He has made a lot of money – more than you – in the stock market surge of the past few months. And you missed out on it.
In fact, you may even know of someone who owns all the stocks that are rising, and you are cursing yourself for not being that person, plus envying him.
As YNH puts it in Sapiens, from time to time we need to indulge our hunter-gatherer instinct. We have the need to gorge on all available sweet fruit under the fear of missing it out to the local baboon.
We gorge on the food we know is bad for us, and stocks we understand may be risky to us. This is because we fear missing out on the instant gratification we may get from consuming/buying them.
FOMO is a powerful motivator, but also understand that it often causes even the smartest of investors to do stupid things, like go all out at the worst possible moment. It’s one of the biggest killers of investment returns.
We discussed this idea in CBM recently when discussing Bitcoin and Gamestop. Check out the GameStonk $GME episode!
⏳ The Illusion of Time by VSauce (Video - 30 mins)
I love all videos published by Michael Stevens aka VSauce. So, I was naturally excited when he posted a video almost after 6 months. It’s about the Illusion of Time.
There are a lot of takeaways from the video but here are my favorites -
You measure time retrospectively or prospectively: A 4-hour long delay before you start your holiday feels like a lot. However, when your holiday actually begins, you feel the days are tremendously short. This is a prospective feeling.
Once when you're back from the vacation, you won't even remember the 4 hour-long delay (it seems short) but would remember the exciting days you had. This is retrospective timing.
Proportion Theory: As you grow old, the time you lived feels shorter compared to when you were young. This is because you compare it to the total time you have actually lived.
Chronological Illusion - We cannot sense and grasp the concept of long periods. So we tend to place them based on our understanding of the subject. For example, MLK and Anne Frank were born in the same year but most of us would think Anne Frank was a different generation.
📚TREAT YO’ SHELVES
READING CHALLENGE 2021
Check out my 2021 Reading Challenge page (read 30-pages per day). You can join us on Goodreads, we have a group for the challenge!
😎 SHOW YOUR WORK BY AUSTIN KLEON
Book summary in one line: To be found you have to be findable; you need to be out there while honing your craft.
Important Lessons:
Share something small every day: don’t wait to publish the perfect thing, publish daily what you can.
Open up your cabinet of curiosities: before you become a creator, you become a curator. Share what influences you.
Stick around: harness the power of compounding and consistency. Ideas for the next project come from the previous project. When you finish a project, think about the weak links in the project and work on those next.
Favorite Quotes:
In the beginners’ mind, there are many possibilities. In the expert's mind only a few - Shunry Suzuki
If you work on something a little bit every day, you end up with something massive - Kenneth Goldsmith
Whatever excites you, go do it. Whatever drains you, stop doing it - Derek Sivers
Originality of ideas depends on the obscurity of sources - John Hegarty
📚 I am currently reading
Algorithms to Live By by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths
The Origins of Political Order by Francis Fukuyama
🎙PODCASTS
💰COLD BREW MONEY
📈 #32 - SPACs, SPACs Everywhere: Our 101 episode on SPACs - what they are, how to find them, and should you bite?
🤯 #33 - Discussing the Indian Banking System with Dr. Viral Acharya - our friends at Dollar Gujarati talked to Dr. Viral Acharya who was the youngest Deputy RBI Governor. Serious knowledge bombs in this one!
🎧 APPLE | SPOTIFY | GOOGLE PODCAST | ANCHOR | CASTBOX | JIOSAAVN
Chala.
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