Conspiracy Theories, Good Leader - Bad Leader, Asymmetry in Business: #3GIM
Good Leader - Bad Leader
Good leaders are what good teachers feel like. They believe in you, they uplift you, and they correct you.
Good leaders know that their time is valuable, so they don't waste it. But they also think the same for your time and apologize when they're late for meetings and approving a creative.
Bad leaders only do 50% of that job. They value their time but don't care for yours. They will assign you tasks at random with outrageous deadlines.
When good leaders assign you to take up a new project — they talk and let you talk! They share their ideas, make you pitch your insights, and give you enough time for the required research for developing the right framework. Good communication skill is an indispensable part of a good leader.
Bad leaders, on the other hand, are mostly unavailable, there is always a communication gap and don't even bother to try to improve it. They think this is how leadership is done.
When a good leader calls you, it gets you excited to pick up the call.
Bad leaders usually call to point out your mistakes and fuck-ups. Eventually, you start to dread their calls and avoid them entirely if you could.
Good leaders often know when to handhold and when to let go and give you full ownership. This process is usually gradual in nature. The worst thing about bad leaders is that they expect it to happen at once. They either expect you to do everything on your own or end up micro-managing you.
Good leaders encourage participation. They push you to share your ideas and opinion. They help you break your shell of hesitation until you are comfortable in the team. They will randomly ask you in team meetings: “Wdy think about this, Harsh?”
Bad leaders are usually agnostic about your participation. If you want to, you can talk, but they won’t facilitate that in group calls.
Good leaders are responsive, available, respectful of your time, and mindful of your availability and efforts. They acknowledge good work and appreciate it.
Bad leaders are watchful of your mistakes and ignorant of your achievements. They are usually unavailable when you’re in need of help. They are quick at correcting mistakes (because that is more important for them) and absent when it comes to talking about your progress.
Asymmetry in Business
My obsession with Taleb doesn't seem to go away. It's funny how he ruthlessly blocks people even if they show the slightest sense of disagreement. I am blocked for a while now.
Whatever you say about this man, I love his writings. He dares to challenge grand ideas of the status quo. Today, I want to draw another parallel from one of his prominent ideas — asymmetry!
Humans engage in different types of games for different pay-offs with different motives. Not all games are equally rewarding and punishing. Let's say you have $50k worth of savings.
You can either keep that cash in a locker for 25 years and it will have the same monetary value in the end. Its spending capacity will be worse, adjusted to inflation.
Or you can put it in FD and turn it into $150k at a 4.5% interest rate in the same period of time.
Or you can invest the same cash in index funds and get $850k by the end of 25yrs at a 12% interest rate!
Or maybe you are a little more courageous, and you decide to invest in a business idea. And you might end up with a multi-million dollar organization!
The point I'm trying to make here is that there is a fixed upper limit to the first three options - at best you can add/subtract $50k to what you will get by the end of 25yrs in the index fund investments.
However, quite fascinatingly, there is no upper to how much money you'd make by starting a business. If you're solving a crucial problem you might even turn into a trillion-dollar industry.
Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not oversimplifying the struggle of entrepreneurship. It's not a piece of cake to build a million-dollar business.
What I'm trying to say is that given the choice, trust me, the best choice is to invest your money in the option that offers you a positive asymmetry.
You can use this model to think one layer deep as to what business idea you should go for. Food and medicine are eternal — there is no expiry date attached to their demands. Starting a grocery store or a pharmacy might not be a bad idea. Probably that is why the Indian startup ecosystem is fighting so hard to be at the forefront of fast grocery delivery services.
Grocery and pharmacy are just examples; you can think of more such examples for them.
There is a very fair chance that you will lose all your money if you decide to invest your cash in a business. But the key takeaway is that there is no upper limit here. You could work on it for 3 years and cash out $22Mn - as Elon did with PayPal.
Value of Conspiracy Theories
Conspiracy Theories fascinate me. Not because they're revealing some hidden and censored truth. In most cases, they're just fluff (or maybe not 👁️).
The point isn't to care about their validity but rather to let yourself experience an uncomfortable perspective.
Conspiracy Theories get too much bad rep even though most of them are pretty harmless — like the one about the royal family being shape-shifting aliens.
Some of them are totally absurd and hard to digest. However, I believe the line between truth and conspiracy theories is a blurry one. Many contrarian ideas that may have some validity get shunned by getting labeled as conspiracy theories.
It has turned into a great way to shame people from consuming a certain category of information. And so far, it's been a very successful strategy.
Saying that Dalai Lama was a CIA agent who received millions of dollars for helping the USA to suppress the communist rule of China sounds like an overtly absurd conspiracy theory. But you'd be surprised that it is actually true (Watch this).
To conclude this section, I am not encouraging you to accept a suspicious theory at its face value. I am merely asking you as a curious person to give them a chance. Isn't this the entire meaning of being to explore ideas that most shit on?
Appreciate your patience in reading this long essay. I am glad that you made it to the end. Hope you learned how to create high-impact systems and processes.
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