I'm Arjun. This is my digital garden.

Selected notes from  Maria Konnikova 's published articles and interviews about her learnings about life and decision making The most important thing is that we have to make the best decision we can even though we don't know anything and we're never going to know everything. Be comfortable with uncertainty. Be comfortable with not knowing everything. Be comfortable that you can't control everything. While playing poker, you have two cards and you can control whether you play them or not you're going to be passive or you're going to be aggressive whether you'll raise or you'll call There are 5 cards that are going to come out when the dealer deals them and you cannot control what they are. You can only make guesses based on how people are reacting about whether they like those cards or not You can guess whether its likely that you're going to get a good card or a bad card (based on your intuition or/and experience) Learning to be okay with saying that

Never be emotional at work. People will not look at you professionally ever again. Always stick with the facts at work. If your personal credibility is lost once, it will never recover. A job is a transactional relationship between you and your employer. You get paid to work. Not liking your work or the people you work with is no reason to not be good at your job. Everything you do at work MUST only answer at least one of these two questions. Everything else is just noise. Will doing this get me a promotion / raise / goodwill? Will doing this make my boss shine in front of her boss? Be nice and kind to the people at the bottom - Admin, IT, peons, janitors, cafeteria staff and receptionists. Don't fake it and only be kind when it directly benefits you. Over the long term, people see it for what it is. HR’s only responsibility is to look for company’s good. Your HR may be a nice person, but her and your professional alignments will always be at odds. Everyone you will ever talk to ou

If there was one thing that I wish someone would have insisted that I learn early in my career, it should have been to recognise and implement the power of aligning my incentives with the incentives of the people I was dealing with day-in-day-out. It’s such a simple concept and appears to be so obvious, but in my experience, it is also one of the most under-utilised psychological frameworks used by us humans. “There is only one way to get anybody to do anything. And that is by making the other person want to do it.” - Dale Carnegie I’ve spent days, weeks, months and years in trying to close deals that never closed, in trying to prove to my managers that I deserved a promotion or a raise, in trying to persuade recruiters that I was a good fit for the role I was applying for. I’ve also spent an inordinate amount of time in personal relationships that just fizzled away eventually. In hindsight, had I understood what these clients‘, bosses‘, recruiters‘ and friends‘ incentives were, perhap