Mountains Beyond Mountains

This is not a blog about entrepreneurship. This is a book club. That said, a common theme amongst successful entrepreneurs is a brand of fearlessness — the people we respect most in our histories are the ones who were crazy enough to change things. And I think it’s a mentality we can all learn from.

Please join me in reading a tale about Paul Farmer in Mountains Beyond Mountains.

20/20 Hindsight

It’s hard to believe that once, in the early 1980’s, human beings didn’t know what a personal computer was. Most techies may argue about how the computer caught hold in general populace — whether it was Mac or Windows — but all will agree that the 80’s was the era of computer revolution.

It’s hard to believe that once, in the early 1990’s human beings didn’t know what the internet was. Blah blah blah, the internet changed the world. We’ve all heard this before. All will agree that the 90’s was really the era of the web revolution.

It’s hard to believe that once, in the early/mid 2000’s, people didn’t really do that much on their cell phones. In fact, at the turn of the millennia, most of us (or in some cases, most of our parents) didn’t even have cell phones. Many will agree that the early 2000’s was beginning of the mobile revolution.

Personally, I find it hard to believe that once, in the mid/late 2000’s, I had to call and email people to coordinate events. It really does take some effort to think about how different life was without the social networks we have today.
The way I see the last three decades is like this:
Personal Computers in the 80’s -> More computers in the 90’s, which encourages the development of a computer network (the Internet) -> Computer technology advances through the 90’s + Infrastructure for the internet -> Development of smaller, cheaper mobile devices in the 2000’s -> Larger, and larger network of both computers and mobile devices (and with the development of online identities) -> Social Networks that take people who are already connected, and fosters those connections on the web -> ?????

 

I’ve had some pretty interesting conversations about where the big, bad world is taking us, but I wanted to get everyone’s thoughts on the matter… A pretty strong answer seems to be “The World of Big Data.” This makes sense to me — people are putting more and more data on the web every day, so naturally we need utilities that can parse through and make sense of all of this data. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the matter.

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In addition, I’d like to point out that Daniel Kahneman believes that all of this thinking ahead and thinking behind is… almost pointless. Out of everything I’ve read so far in Thinking Fast and Slow, I find this point the hardest to grapple with. From a future standpoint, the progression of computing from its inception to the current day is pretty clear. One thing just naturally led to another. Look at us now — with our phones and our computers and our social networks — we find able-minded entrepreneurs are starting companies left and right. Some of us are really doing what we’re passionate about, while others are putting down bets and speculating what the future will bring.

From Kahneman’s perspective, all of this speculation is unproductive, however. In his mind, the future is just an amalgamation of different possible scenarios that may or may not take off — he believes that there’s a significant amount of managed luck that contributes to the actual development of our current technologies. To me, looking back with 20/20 hindsight is an encouragement to look forward too, to see what’s to come.

So I’m not exactly sure how I feel about Kahneman’s thoughts on the matter.

 

Thinking Fast and Slow — The Hope, The Hopeless

I’ve always liked to consider myself as someone who is uniquely special. Not just special — no no, we’re all special. Uniquely special.

In particular, I’ve always thought of myself to be someone who enjoys the game of thinking. Thinking more than others is something that I’ve always thought separated me from normal human beings. Myer’s Briggs says I’m an ENTJ, where J stands for “judging.” I guess I really do relate to the fact that I am a judging individual.

And then here, we have this Dr. Kahneman telling me that I am — in fact — not special at all. Kahneman splices our minds into two categories, which he calls System 1 and System 2. Now, if there’s anything my friend Robert Pirsig has taught me, it’s that categorizations are almost always rough approximations. Kahneman’s dichotomization of thought into these two categories seems like a heavy statement, and it’s one that I don’t necessarily agree with. But as much as I’d like to fight with him, I really do think he has a point: people live their lives on the fringes of their conscious minds, where their intuition meets rationality. On numerous occasions, Kahneman cites examples of how human intuition is actually deeply flawed — in fact, completely absent of the rational concepts of probability. And even when we are informed of our psychological shortcomings, we still fail to reform ourselves. In fact, studies suggest that most people continue going about their lives influenced by the same biases, regardless of whether they are informed of not.

This fact concerns me. In particular, I’ve always believed in the cliche that accepting you have an issue is the first step to reform. Setting aside the fact that I am uniquely special, how are we able to overcome the biases we face in our daily lives to become the best individuals we can be?

I was watching a video of Anthony Robbins some years ago, where he stated the interesting fact that the difference between success and failure is 1%. Minute changes in our perception can cause drastic changes in our character and personality. The question I ask myself is how I can make that 1%.