Just finished the book that’s often called a deeper, and a more philosophical version of the popular book Deep Work by Cal Newport. The Shallows by Nicholas Carr explores what the Internet is doing to our brains. Even though the book was written in 2010, it’s eerily accurate abou … | Continue reading
What’s the most effective way to change habits? I’ve been diving deep into this topic lately, and here’s what I’ve learned. Relied mainly on two sources: [Review article] Wood, W., & Neal, D. T. (2016). Healthy through habit: Interventions for initiating & maintaining health beha … | Continue reading
I’ve written earlier that startups shouldn’t solve technically challenging problems. I still maintain the same view but wanted to add an important caveat to that claim. The caveat is that startups shouldn’t exclusively rely on a specific technical innovation as their main advanta … | Continue reading
We’re Aakanksha Gaur and Paras Chopra, a couple living in Pune, India. We understand that for a young person with high potential, a little bit of money can be life-altering. It can help start a company, fund a project, buy instruments, conduct experiments, or create art. If you’r … | Continue reading
1/ Startups get funded when they’re expected to be valuable, and they’re valuable when they can generate a continuous stream of profits for its investors. 2/ With this view, the value of a startup comes mostly from its expected moat, i.e. how well can it defend its business from … | Continue reading
1/ Do you know how big companies make decisions? They build scenarios and models on spreadsheets. They do this because often the decision maker’s job is at stake, so all substantial decisions by that person require justification which is often to be had from numbers. 2/ It’s a my … | Continue reading
Entrepreneurs generally confuse their 30 second pitch as something that needs to be about what they’re doing. This interpretation is understandable because usually anyone they meet ends up asking them what they do and the entrepreneur faithfully launches into her pitch. Unfortuna … | Continue reading
Neurons were first extensively illustrated by Cajal in ~1890. When he looked at a tissue of the brain, here’s what he painted: At that point in time, we didn’t know that galaxies other than the Milky Way existed. We didn’t even know that atoms consisted of electrons and protons. … | Continue reading
It’s mind-blowing that we humans are able to talk about what happened in the first 3 minutes of The Big Bang. This book was written in 1976 which was quite a while back but it’s interesting to note that while there have been extensions in the ideas presented, I’m not aware of any … | Continue reading
Hi, I’m Paras Chopra, founder and chairman of Wingify, a SaaS company known for its market leading A/B testing product called VWO. This freely accessible online book contains what I feel are the most effective mental models for startup founders and business leaders. There are a t … | Continue reading
Lately, I've been feeling a lack of a well-deliberated, explicit moral code. The world is changing really fast - we have Elon Musk trying to set up a human colony on Mars while Earth's bio-ecosystem is degrading by the day. So, should I support the investment of resources into ma … | Continue reading
Imagine an economy that keeps on growing indefinitely. It's essentially a non-zero sum economy - as the pie becomes bigger, everyone becomes better as even a small percentage of a really large number is substantial.Can such an economy exist in our universe? | Continue reading
This essay is inspired by the book Factfulness where the key idea explored is that the world has witnessed significant progress over the last few decades, but most people are unaware of that fact because they hold distorted views. | Continue reading
Do we see reality as it is? I discuss this question with Donald Hoffman who is professor emeritus at the University of California, Irvine. He studies consciousness and perception from an evolutionary point of view. His research has led him to make a bold claim that while we do no … | Continue reading
Do surgeries work? Most of us assume they do, but is there any scientific evidence that they do?In this episode, I talk to Dr Ian Harris who is a Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery at the University of New South Wales in Australia. He is a practicing orthopedic surgeon specializing … | Continue reading
A massive, 100-part essay.I recently finished this excellent short book titled What Has Government Done To Our Money. It's available on the Internet for free and I highly recommend reading it. But in case you want the key insights, here are my notes. | Continue reading
Determined to never let a crisis go to waste, I and rest of the leaders at my company reflected on how the year went by for us and the lessons that stood out. I decided that it'll be a good idea to publicly share these learnings, so here they are. | Continue reading
You create value when you fulfill the unmet desires of people better than the alternatives they have (from competitors). However, a fatal but common mistake that entrepreneurs make is misjudging what makes something valuable. | Continue reading
1/ The first level related to the metaphysical and spiritual domain. It says that Brahman is all that exists and our material world (Maya) comes from ignorance. The Brahman is not a God. It is beyond any quality – it isn’t intelligent, good or bad. It just is. 2/ It also suggests … | Continue reading
A decade is a long time, about 1/8th of an average life span if you happen to live a long life. I came across Scott Alexander’s post where he wrote about his intellectual progress in 2010s and thought it’ll be a good idea to do the same for myself. When I had turned 30 two… Read … | Continue reading
Is there an arrow of progress in our universe? Or do things change without any particular direction as a goal, like a dust particle engaged in a Brownian motion, bumping and tumbling along randomly? I don’t think there’s an answer to those two questions. Our thinking is designed … | Continue reading
In the last year or so, I have been reading on various topics indiscriminately. As I’m discovering connections while reading and thinking, my conviction towards some ideas has grown stronger. I wanted to mention some of such ideas that I suspect are true. I’ll also mention why I … | Continue reading
1/ The world is more materially abundant than ever, we’ve eliminated several diseases, lifted millions out of poverty. Yet, people aren’t reporting higher levels of meaning or happiness than before. 2/ Why is this happening? Rising income or material abundance does not automatica … | Continue reading
I recently read Venkat’s synopsis of the book Seeing like a state, which I followed up by an excellent blog post titled The Meridian of Her Greatness. Venkat challenged people to summarize the most important ideas from that post in a tweetstorm. He said if it gets more than 100 l … | Continue reading
One of the many wonderful things about life is that like a good game, it allows players to develop their own playing styles. This essay is an attempt to document the two most salient dimensions of playing the game of life. Note that there’s no objectively right way of playing and … | Continue reading
The original post was published on Medium. I’m starting to port many of my posts that were published elsewhere to InvertedPassion. Here’s a design quiz for you. Go through the list of two options shown from the same category and from your first impressions decide which one is bet … | Continue reading
Are you a bot? No, seriously how can you prove that you are not. How can you prove that you are not some sort of algorithm crawling YouTube videos trying to make sense of this world? And how can you prove that I am not a bot, that I am not one of those Google’s … Continue reading … | Continue reading
In my experience, entropy as an idea is generally misunderstood. Like many, I had a gut level understanding of “entropy is disorder”. It’s easy to misapply that intuition and draw wrong conclusions about areas far removed from physics (business, economies, cultures, etc.) Remembe … | Continue reading
Startup founders have many biases. Some are classic cognitive biases that impact decision making, while others are specific biases that impact their product thinking. There’s yet another founder bias whose impact is not felt for a long time. It occurs when founders assume employe … | Continue reading
Let’s imagine Artificial Intelligence, but in reverse. In such a world, humans are equivalent of machine learning algorithms (like deep learning) and some aliens (or our simulation overlords) feed labeled information from their world into us and ask us to “learn” the mapping betw … | Continue reading
From your high school classes, do you recall the image of an atom where electrons revolve around the nucleus (just like planets go around the Sun)? I’m talking about images of this sort: This analogy of electrons as tiny planets is so common that most people imagine electrons to … | Continue reading
Mental health issues were the primary cause of the recent deaths of famous celebrities such as Anthony Bourdain, Kate Spade, Avicii and Chester Bennington. I wish peace to their families and friends. I hope that these deaths don’t go in vain but serve as a wake-up call for the re … | Continue reading
Wingify, a company that I founded, turns 8 today. Over these years, I’ve seen myself evolve from a silly little punk doing a side project to the Chairman position where I’m responsible for creating future leaders within Wingify. In my career, I’ve observed a few people rapidly ri … | Continue reading
We thrive on stories. We want to know who did what to whom and what happened after that. People watch the news for hours and binge on Netflix because we’re evolutionarily wired to seek stories. Our ancestors who told and listened to stories had a higher survival rate because stor … | Continue reading
Big decisions in life are gut-wrenching. Who to marry, where to work, who to hire, how to fire, which subject to major in, how to make a career change, which car to buy, where to invest, et cetra. We stall and brood over those because all such decisions represent major forks in o … | Continue reading