On being a contrarian

Being a contrarian for its own sake is suicidal. Not being a contrarian at all means by definition you can’t outperform. Being genuinely contrarian means you are going to be uncomfortable sometimes.

Bezos abhors what he calls “social cohesion,” the natural impulse to seek consensus. He’d rather his minions battle it out backed by numbers and passion, and he has codified this approach in one of Amazon’s 14 leadership principles—the company’s highly prized values that are often discussed and inculcated into new hires

Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit. Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting. Leaders have conviction and are tenacious. They do not compromise for the sake of social cohesion. Once a decision is determined, they commit wholly.

Four principles for being miserable

Four prescriptions for being miserable from Charlie Munger [that you can instead invert]:

1. Be unreliable.

2. Learn everything you possibly can from your own personal experience, minimizing what you can learn from the good and bad experience of others, living and dead.

3. Go down and stay down when you get your first, second, and third severe reverse in the battle of life (i.e., if at first you do not succeed then do not try again).

4. Ignore evidence contrary to your opinion by remaining certain in your views.


http://www.thecrosshairstrader.com/2014/08/charles-t-munger-and-the-prescription-for-a-life-of-misery/

Patience and Compassion

The patience and compassion of Bhoo Devi (Mother Earth) is also praised by Thiruvalluvar.

Tirukkural 151: “Agazhvaarai Taangum nilam pOla tammai, Igazhvaarai poruttal talai”.

Meaning:

• When someone insults you or disrespects you, please be patient and do not take revenge.
• Just as the earth that bears the man who tills and digs it, to bear those who speak ill of them, is a quality of the highest respect.

I pray to God to always bless me with patience and compassion.

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Bitter guard chips

Last Saturday I made bitter guard chips on my wife's request. This was my first time.  

Turned out good.  

Bitter guard chips with mint chutney. 

Inputs to the function:

1. Thinly sliced bitter guards.
2. 2-3 cups of gram/besan flour.
3. 2-3 tea spoons of rice flour.
4. 1-2 tea spoons of Turmeric powder, Chillie powder, Salt to taste.
5. Bowl of tamarind water.

Function: 

1. Soak the thinly sliced bitter guard pieces with salt water for 15 minutes to kill germs.
2. Soak the thinly sliced bitter guard pieces with tamarind water. 
3. Mix gram/besan flour, rice flour, chillie powder,  turmeric powder, salt. Sprinkle tamarind water to make the powder mix into a batter.
4. Dip the thinly sliced bitter guard pieces into the batter and deep fry them.

Output:

Both my wife and my daughter loved this together with mint chutney.

Fear of missing out

Warren Buffett in his February 28, 2001 Chairman’s letter : "Nothing sedates rationality like large doses of effortless money. After a heady experience of that kind, normally sensible people drift into behavior akin to that of Cinderella at the ball. They know that overstaying the festivities—that is, continuing to speculate in companies that have gigantic valuations relative to the cash they are likely to generate in the future—will eventually bring on pumpkins and mice. But they nevertheless hate to miss a single minute of what is one helluva party. Therefore, the giddy participants all plan to leave just seconds before midnight. There’s a problem, though: They are dancing in a room in which the clocks have no hands."


Fear of missing out (FOMO) is driven by an innate human desire to avoid regret. They key takeaway from the 2001 bubble, for me, is that when it happens is not predictable. If it is a bubble and it does bust, the day before is like any other day. 

Do you see any "tells"? Please leave them in comments...

Frozen pond near our house

Feynman [Problem-Solving] Algorithm

1. Write down the problem.
2. Think real hard.
3. Write down the solution.

Low-flying hawk

History behind naming a new building in Seattle as “low flying hawk”

“Low-flying-hawk”: In the early days of AWS, the most vocal, highest standard, critical (of us) AWS customer was a person who called himself low-flying-hawk on the AWS Forums. We would constantly be trying to see what low-flying-hawk thought of new features, pricing, issues we were experiencing, etc. He was like a customer in our meeting rooms, without being there. One day, about a year into obsessing about low-flying-hawk, somebody innocently asked "how much money does low-flying-hawk spend per month with us?" We'd never asked ourselves that (which I liked). The answer was something like $2.37/month. But not caring about whether low-flying-hawk was a big spender or not, and treating his feedback as importantly as our biggest spenders, and trying to make sure the customer experience was fantastic for individual developers helped us raise our standards and serve the all-important (and viral) technorati well in the first few years.”  

-Andy Jassy