MONTHLY MULLING💡
Mark Manson on Fallacies, Valuation, and the QWERTY keyboard
Hi👋,
Tapan here.
Monthly Mulling is a newsletter sending the best ideas from the web to your inbox for free. High signal. Low noise.
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Happy Sunday y’all!
Two major updates for this edition of Monthly Mulling.
I moved to London!🥳
After 14 months of delays and procedures, I was finally able to move to London. I had to quarantine for 14 days taking the tally of total days spent in quarantine/self-isolation this year to 31!
We hit 100 subscribers!🥃
I started this newsletter in June as a means to spread ideas that I came across on the web. I never thought I will hit 100 subscribers in a span of three months organically. I really appreciate all the support from each one of you!🙏
Onwards.
💭MULLING
🤔Three Pieces of Advice from Guy Raz (Podcast - 52 mins)
I was listening to The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk and the guest was none other Guy Raz of How I Built This fame (one of my favorite podcasts!).
Other than Guy going over his background and why he started the podcast, he gave three important lessons that he has picked up from his conversations in How I Built This and his own experiences -
Learn to Sell - Guy says everyone should work in sales for at least a year or two to learn how to sell. Sales is one of the most important life skills you will ever pick up and the lessons from sales can be applied anywhere in life.
I have realized the importance of sales recently and I suck at it!😂 But trying to get better. As Naval says,
Learn to sell. Learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable.
Solve Problems - All good products are solving real-life problems. Guy says one of the best ways to build a product is to find problems and solve them. Observe your environment or be cognizant of issues you’re facing. Others may have the same problem. Solve that problem and you have a product! He says is constantly aware of his surroundings, looking for problems🤯
No Risk, No Reward - You cannot expect rewards without taking risks. It does not work like that. A business-owner takes a lot more risk than a 9-5 employee and hence, the reward is significantly higher. Guy tells how his parents moved to the US without anything, built a business from scratch, and they were rewarded for their courage.
🧠Mark Manson on Fallacies (Article - 15 mins)
Mark Manson discusses 8 Logical Fallacies that mess us all up! People don’t realize that logical fallacies—that is, errors in judgment and reasoning—are incredibly common in day-to-day life. Worse, we’re mostly unaware of how they disrupt and harm our lives, often in profound ways.
Here are some of them -
Correlation is not Causation: Just because two things regularly occur together does not mean one causes the other.
This one is one of the most common fallacies that you will notice in personal and work life. I did an Insta post on this as well.
Red Herring: Red Herrings are arguments that seem relevant to an issue but actually are not.
This is a common fallacy which you can see every day on the news channel where people argue on random things that are not relevant to the issue.
Person A: “Government needs to do something about the conditions of the road. They are pathetic!”
Person B: “Our soldiers don’t have roads on the border. And they are fighting for you and me.”
Person A: “But…but then the government should build better infrastructure for the civilians and soldiers. We pay taxes!”
Person B: “Soldiers aren’t complaining. Only you are. Anti-national.”
Appeals to Authority: The hyper-social nature of our species causes us to appeal to outside influences. We all want to belong to a community. We all want to associate with high-status people. We all want others to know we’re kind and considerate.
When in an argument, it’s tempting to skip the logic and go straight to appealing to some outside source to make your point feel more resonant.
Person A: “Why the f*ck are you drinking a cleaning agent!?”
Person B: “Well, the president said it’s true, so it must be true!”
Further reading: My article on Logical Fallacies, Biases, and Heuristics.
😏Well, that’s a Dumb Idea (Article - 1 min)
From Seth Godin’s blog -
As dumb as selling shoes, an item that comes in 100s of sizes, over the internet.
As dumb as expecting people to find a date or a spouse online.
As dumb as building an encyclopedia that anyone can edit.
You get the idea. Electric cars with a 100-mile range, vegan hamburgers, milk made from oats, free college courses…
The next breakthrough is almost certainly going to be something really dumb. Or perhaps merely obvious and unoriginal.
⌨ Is the QWERTY Keyboard Really Efficient? (Video - 5 mins)
Have you ever wondered why all the keyboards look the same? Why do all companies produce the “QWERTY” keyboard? And most importantly, is it really efficient?
I had seen this video a very long time ago but recently while reading Fooled by Randomness I was reminded of it again.
Nassim Taleb says that the theory of evolution postulates the survival of the fittest, not the best. Sometimes things that survive the longest are the sub-optimal choice.
QWERTY is a good example of this. We have become so habitual of this keyboard and it is so wide-spread that it has become difficult to collectively switch to something a bit more efficient. Something better.
🎶Mongolian Throat Singing (Video - 3 mins)
This is a random one. I feel a lot of people have never heard about Mongolian Throat singing. And I want to change that!
I first heard throat singing in the Netflix series, Marco Polo and it is one of the most interesting videos you’ll see (throat singing starts at 00:58 in the video).
🆕CONTENT UPDATE
I wasn’t able to release any articles in the past 3 weeks because I have been really busy settling in. But a new article is in the works. Check my Instagram or Twitter for updates!
We are currently in the recording phase for What the HAT!? Season 2! If you guys have any recommendations for someone who would be interested in talking to us or you would like to listen to, just send the recommendation our way!
You can reach out to me on Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, or just reply to this email!
🎙PODCAST
💰COLD BREW MONEY
Our weekly podcast discussing money because your friends and family won’t. We are now on YouTube! Hit that subscribe button!
🍎Looking for MOATS - Apple: In this episode, Atit very patiently teaches me how to read a financial statement and look for line items that correspond to a company being a MOAT. We look at Apple’s financial statement. (ALL MAJOR STREAMING PLATFORMS)
📈Intro to Valuation: Have you ever wondered how to value a company to find out if it is worth investing in? This episode is Investing 101. A must listen! (ALL MAJOR STREAMING PLATFORMS)
🤓Getting Started with Intrinsic Valuation: This one is a continuation of the previous episode. We are discussing Discounted Cash Flow which is a method of valuing a company. It’s a bit technical but worth it! (ALL MAJOR STREAMING PLATFORMS)
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