clips of logic

There are many ways you could make life better for others even for a moment. You could offer your seat to an old lady in the bus or give directions to a tourist on the street. But where do you draw the line?

It’s fine when someone asks for directions or help to move something. But if a stranger asks for cash, the answer is no. It might be mean but the real world isn’t exactly that nice either.

If it’s an emergency where he needed to get something, I’ll rather buy the item than giving cash directly to him. But either way it’s a tough call and I don’t the right answer.

Sometimes your decision to help a stranger can be a matter of life and death, yet more often than not, they are probably just preying on your altruism. Under what circumstances are you willing to help a stranger?

In Ignore Everybody, Hugh MacLeod talked about the Pissed off Gene that cause us to be dissatisfied no matter how well things are going. It’s the urge that motivates us to create, improve and enhance our lives. He argues that we all have it in us. It’s built-in since the caveman days.

The only people who can change the world are people who want to. And not everyone does.

Sadly, not everyone act on this urge and most will happily trade it for cash. If you are annoyed at how some things appear to be broken, use it as the drive to create something new. Apparently, it’s okay to be pissed off sometimes.

Both might sound the same but I think they are really two entirely different approaches to learning and solving problems.

The natural approach to learn about something is to experiment and try out new things. You might not get it in the beginning but eventually and hopefully after a few tries you’ll get it right.

However, there are some that are so worried about failing and getting it wrong, their approach is instead to not make any mistakes. I’m all for minimizing mistakes but this doesn’t work if you don’t even understand how something work.

Man greatest inventions and innovations are found through countless experimentations and relentless trials and errors. Thomas Edison tried thousands of times before he finally got it right and invented the light bulb. Imagine if he were to worry about getting it wrong.

In many situations, you’ll noticed that all you need is one big break that pulls you out of a string of failures. The huge win that wipes out all your losses. You see this in investments, businesses and games.

But of course, it also works the other way round more often than it should. You probably know someone who lost everything in a bad bet. After all, losing is part of the game so someone got to take the hit.

It is best to expect losses and aim to reduce its damage but Nassim Nicholas Taleb took it a step further and used the inevitability of losing as his strategy to win big. He planned his investment strategy around the fact that sooner or later a financial disaster would occur and aims to cash in on that.

He used a financial instrument known as options where you can make bets against the future of the stock price. You can obtain options to buy or sell stocks at a certain price. He systematically purchase options to buy stocks at a price which is most likely higher than it will be during a market crash.

Obviously the market doesn’t crash that often, so most of the time he is slowly losing money. (due to the transaction cost of trading options) But when the day comes, he will exercise his options to recoup his losses and more. He limits the money he can lose while leaving the opportunity to make a much larger amount.

I think this is probably the best strategy you can ever adopt. You should try apply it not only to your investment portfolio but to everything in your life. We can’t prevent failures and losses. So losing is fine as long as it’s small but remember to leave the door open for yourself to win big.

As someone who prefer to do something by myself, I tend to avoid working in teams. The reasoning is that if it’s something that matters, you can only rely on yourself to get it done. Obviously, I need to embrace teamwork and understand the value it brings.

It’s good to be independent but there are times that you have to realize that you are going to need help from others. The most obvious reason is the scale of the task at hand. Hosting a party at your house can be a solo effort but organizing a fund raiser event is entirely different. Whenever you feel like you want clones of yourself to get things done, that’s when you need a team.

Some environments have a preference for teamwork. If you played any multi-player game, you will realize that some stuff simply can’t be done alone. Players plan and organize to meet up in game (sometimes skipping sleep/work) to raid dungeons. A well planned and executed raid can be very fulfilling and addictive. Teamwork is fun when done right.

Teamwork is also critical when everyone have something at stake. Each member is accountable for the performance of the team. The most common issue here is that in real world situation, it’s virtually impossible for everyone to have the same stake. This lead to situation where only those who care about the result doing the bulk of the work.

Although sometimes working in a team can seem to slow down progress with unnecessary procedures, meetings and conflicts, teamwork is invaluable for tackling tasks thats too big for us to handle alone. If you think you can do everything by yourself, maybe the things you do are too small to matter. And if it matters, others will volunteer to join your team.