“He, who does not obey himself, will be commanded.” - Nietzsche


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should you switch jobs? - A quantitative decisioning framework

Image
A friend recently reached out to me and sought my advice about a new job offer he had received. Good, reputable firm, decent hike in compensation, same role but elevated title. The role required him to move from Bangalore to Mumbai, but the company was ready to pay for the relocation expenses. The only caveat was that they wanted a confirmation from my friend by the end of the day. No stress, should have been quite a no-brainer to take this job. Or was it? While making decisions, especially when we are restricted by time and with too many unknowns thrown in front of us, we instinctively turn to bounded rationality for aid. Bounded Rationality is the idea that our decision making is limited by the information we have, the cognitive limitations of our minds, and the finite amount of time we have. We also let our cognitive biases influence our decisioning. The new employer can try to anchor our decision by offering a higher title or by offering a higher compensation 'as per ind...
Read more

Impostor Syndrome

I had enrolled myself in a live project to develop a hospital management system during my first year of computer science engineering. I had to work on the patient repository module for the hospital, which would accept patient’s date of birth as an input and show his or her age in years, months and days as the output.  I wrote a long piece of code for this with my very limited understanding of programming languages. It was essentially just a very large sequence of nested if-else statements. I tested it rigorously to include odd and even months, leap years and whatnot. It was not the smartest piece of code that I ever wrote, but it worked. Always.  When my project lead saw my code, he asked me why I didn’t use any libraries in it. I told him “because I’m still learning and I wasn’t aware of the library you’re talking about”. My code was rejected and I was fired from the project.  I was never able to get over it.  I went on to do well in college — I got in the merit lis...
Read more

Give them a chance

I’m thinking about the gentleman who took my visa interview in 2014. I had been rejected thrice for the visa before. I had screwed up my first interview. The other two went well but I’d still get rejected. But this person was different. He asked me a lot of questions and made a lot of notes. He wanted to be really sure as if he’d have to personally go and explain why he decided to reverse the earlier decisions. It was the longest visa interview I ever gave and I was so anxious that I didn’t even ask his name. In hindsight, it feels like he was just on my team. He wanted to give that visa to me. That interview ended with him making a rare gesture of extending his hand across the glass counter to congratulate me.  Getting that visa was a launch pad for my career in advertising. I travelled across the globe and every time I’d step on a plane, I’d think about this gentleman. He had no reason to, but he took a chance on me. I hope I didn’t let him down.  This story has played out ...
Read more