Conversation

Great insight. (In fact, one of these days, I want to do an entire article on VC thinking in normal life)
Quote Tweet
Buying books for kids is like VC investing. Kids will be uninterested in most of them. But, they will love one or two books which they will read 50+ times.
4
15
Replying to
You mean can't we live without trying to apply such techniques and mental models to our life? That's just saying that the techniques and mental models installed by your parents are good enough. Certainly a reasonable approach for many. Not one I would choose.
2
3
Replying to
My concern is about the "investor" model. Investor expects return. I am looking for fencing off some areas of life that are there just for sake of it - close relationships, friendships, hobbies, art, etc.
1
5
Replying to
This is a tricky one. On the one hand, I agree with you that looking at ROI for every life activity is a bad idea. But on the other hand, I think we do ROI thinking in everything. Some of them are explicit like this, others are instinctual. Not clear that the latter is better.
3
5
Replying to and
All our instincts and emotions are hard-coded ROI calculations based on years of evolution and years of tradition. Just because we don't think of them as investor strategies doesn't make them any less investor strategies. But...
2
2
Replying to and
But I agree with you that our explicit investor strategy thinking can be quite short-sighted, unsophisticated, and counterproductive. The instincts and emotions, due to millennia of evolution are more sophisticated than we realize.
1
4
Replying to
ROI, hacking the mind, etc may be helpful for "work". Most people end up generalizing these newly learnt skills to all aspects of life with devastating effect. I believe that techniques that work for 1 in a million kind of mind may be actually counter productive for mere mortals.
2
4