đ Hey there! My name is Abhishek. Welcome to a new edition of The Sunday Wisdom! This is the best way to learn new things with the least amount of effort.
Itâs a collection of weekly explorations and inquiries into many curiosities, such as business, human nature, society, and lifeâs big questions. My primary goal is to give you some new perspective to think about things.
Iâm a master procrastinator. In fact Iâm procrastinating this very moment as Iâm writhing this email. Iâm supposed to do something else that Iâm (sub)consciously avoiding. The original plan was to write this email yesterday but guess what, I spent the entire day working on something else. đš
I get by because I have umpteen interesting things to do at any given moment. Things that are cognitively challenging yet super fun to work on. If there are hard deadlines and the task is super boring, I wait till the very last moment.
Instead of treating it as a flaw I look at procrastination as a tool to get something (else) done. So far I havenât faced any issues and this system has been more or less successful.
Iâve spoken about it in details here. I would also love to hear what methods have worked for you. Iâm sure my methods donât apply to everybody and there are multiple drawbacks that Iâm oblivious to. Do let me know.
A few of you had shared recipes with me after reading last weekâs email. It meant a lot. I urge you to reply to this email (or write in the comments) as well. Iâve often been asked how can somebody overcome the friction to start writing. Well, this is me subtly nudging you to do just that. Start by writing a short reply to this email. Baby steps! đž
Iâm sure youâve put a lot of thought into dealing with procrastination. We all have, consciously or not. You just have to put them into words and share with me. Hope to hear from you. đ
Now itâs time to read and learn.
Q: What do we do with problems that are impossible to solve?
When somebody tells you to relax, itâs probably because you make a bigger deal out of your problems than you should.
Hereâs some counterintuitive advice: you donât have to relax yourself, relax your problems instead.
Letâs take a problem. A man named Lincoln Abraham works as a lawyer in a city. He has to ride hundreds of miles over many weeks and move through towns in numerous states to try cases.
Itâs a hard job and wastes a lot of time. One fine day Mr. Abraham decides to optimise his route. He asks himself, how I can visit all the necessary towns while covering as few miles as possible and without going to any town twice?
Mr. Abraham soon realises that this is gonna be harder than he thought. What he is trying to solve is a popular problem known as the travelling salesman problem.
The question isnât whether we can find the shortest route. One can simply crank out a list of all the possibilities and measure each one. The real issue is that as the number of towns grows, the list of possible routes connecting them explodes.
At anything beyond the smallest scale, the travelling salesman problem is beyond the reach by even the most powerful computers.
In simple terms, a route is just an ordering of the towns. Trying them all by brute force is the equivalent of sorting a deck of cards by throwing them in the air until they land in order. This works only in theory.
The travelling salesman problem is an example of an intractable problem. One that is practically impossible to solve! But this isnât the end of the story. This is an opportunity for us to learn something:Â how to best approach problems whose optimal answers are unreachable. Or, how to relax problems.
The simplest way to relax any problem is to relax one or more of its constraints and try solving it. In other words, instead of solving the real problem we try solving the problem we wish we had.
For instance, you can relax the travelling salesman problem by letting the salesman visit the same town more than once, thereby letting Mr. Abraham retrace his steps for free. On doing this, youâll soon see that solving this looser problem takes no time at all.
While this loose solution isnât the answer to the real problem, it is quite useful all the same. Itâs the next best thing you have to an ideal solution. Trying to solve it any further may have diminishing returns â the effort for accuracy far outweighs the benefit of the difference. In many problems, the next best solution is the best solution.
We often relax problems in real life without knowing it. If you have ever asked yourself, âIf money wasnât a problem would I be doing what Iâm about to do?â youâve engaged in relaxation. What you are doing here is making the intractable real life problem tractable by removing some of its constraints.
These questions help you make progress in a loose form of the problem before porting it back to reality. If not a practical solution, this loose version gives you direction and clarity.
There are multiple cases in life where relaxation in necessary. For example, when you have to deliver a five-day-work in two days, or when you have to squeeze a one-hour presentation in 10 minutes.
You can either relax the quality of the output, for example deliver a less-than-ideal solution in time, or, you can take more time and face the consequences. Both are strategies of relaxation, and chances are you already use them in real life.
Relaxation is the best way to mitigate analysis paralysis. An answer at least half as good as the perfect solution in less time is a more practical solution. Always!
Businesses that move fast and deal with a lot of ambiguity follow this method. Rather than wasting time searching for a perfect answer, they simply ask, âHow close can we get to the perfect solution with a relaxed problem?â Turns out, pretty close!
Unless youâre willing to waste eons striving for perfection every time you encounter a hitch, hard problems demand that we imagine easier versions and tackle those first. When applied correctly, itâs one of our best ways of making progress.
The message is simple but profound: if weâre willing to accept solutions that are close enough, then even some of the hairiest problems can be tamed with the right techniques.
Chances are, you are already practising it in some form.
Why Hard Work DOES NOT Work in Office
We all have read those quotes. â80% of your success depends on your communication skills.â I never believed them. They sound too salesy. Isnât good communication sugarcoating of poor ideas? Isnât it a bit like manipulation? Shouldnât good ideas speak for themselves? Maybe!
As an introvert I struggle at âtawkingâ everyday. It doesnât come naturally to me. But as much as I would hate to admit, good communication is extremely important. Especially in this day and age when people have the attention span of a two-year-old.
This is the first part of a four-part series. As much as we would want to believe, simply hard work doesnât work any more. In order to earn money and recognition, we need more.
Interesting Finds
I.Â
Leaving missed callsâeffectively using a mobile phone as a kind of latter-day pagerâwas a consumer hack that grew more popular than texting in India in the 2000s. A missed call could mean âI miss you,â âCall me back,â or âIâm here.â The fact that the missed call demanded only basic numeric literacy made them accessible to the third of Indiaâs population that was illiterate.
â The Rise and Fall of a Massive Industry Based on Missed Calls
II.
Effective altruism does not actually aim at the elimination of global poverty as is often supposed. Indeed its distinctive commitment to the logic of individualist consumerism makes it constitutionally incapable of achieving such a large scale project. Effective altruism is designed to fail.
â Effective Altruism Is Not Effective
III.
Letâs zoom back to 2005, when pre-mobile Internet photo sharing services were one upping each other on storage, features, and slickness. Across Photobucket, Shutterfly, Flickr and Picasa, there were high-res uploads, preview navigation, theme tags, search by colour, and more. Then Facebook introduced something simple yet super powerful.
â A Two-Engineer Project that Changed Everything
Quote to Note
Although certain state services may be more easily provided and distant addresses more easily located, these apparent advantages may be negated by such perceived disadvantages as the absence of a dense street life, the intrusion of hostile authorities, the loss of the spatial irregularities that foster cosiness, gathering places for informal recreation, and neighbourhood feeling. The formal order of a geometrically regular urban space is just that: formal order. Its visual regimentation has a ceremonial or ideological quality, much like the order of a parade or a barracks. The fact that such order works for municipal and state authorities in administering the city is no guarantee that it works for citizens. Provisionally, then, we must remain agnostic about the relation between formal spatial order and social experience.
â James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State
Seeing Like a State is a heavy book. Itâs counterintuitive, interesting, and very well-written. It deals with the drawbacks of topdown and centralised development in multiple areas (for e.g. forestry and city planning) where the pursuit of order decimates the little chaos and randomness needed for creative ideas to flourish.
My Directive
Look at the things that people take for granted in their everyday life. Observe them. Mull over them. Take them apart and piece them back together with bits from other such pieces.
Ideas are generated when two things come together and collide. You get ideas from confluence. Be on the lookout for confluence.
Before You GoâŚ
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Iâll see you next Sunday,
Abhishek đ
PS: All typos are intentional and I take no responsibility whatsoever! đŹ