Hi there,
Yes I’m still alive, very much so after a kicking Indian tea.
What was that? A fair question, the longest ever hiatus from this project.
A mixture of unavoidable disruptions - going away to India, travel on Sundays - and also a lack of inspiration towards writing. A dearth1 of ideas that I deemed worthy enough to cobble a post together about.
Anyways, we look forward. The week has been calming, after a 2-and-a-bit week storm of India. A return to the gym, seeing plenty of friends and perhaps most excitingly, starting driving lessons! Getting behind the wheel has been quite nice, and it’s wonderful to gain that sense of progress in a skill - ‘newbie gains’ if you will.
Highlight of the week: helping out at a local business event. Very happy that I enjoyed spending an evening at Four Oaks Tennis Club, being a “vibe capturer” and helping hand to a friend of my school with an event he ran (more soon); met some fantastic people, ate some brilliant food, took some awesome shots - what more can you ask for?
Going to India was a welcome ‘refresh’ on my understanding of India. One big thing was the ‘purchasing power of money’, now that I am far more in control and clued up about money. Being able to buy clothes, food and transport at fractional prices compared to the UK was brilliant (the boosted GBP quite helped 😁).
This exchange rate advantage made money decisions interesting; one of the interesting discussions I had with Dad was about the difference in spending money on either helping a less-well-off distant relative for a kidney operation or spending more on jewellery. There was also a point about whether or not you should spend in the ‘local economy’ when we were at a shopping mall, and I was debating buying a tea.
From our point of view, choosing to spend between the relative and jewellery was an ‘opportunity cost’ problem. The ‘opportunity cost’ is defined to be the next best opportunity to forego (can’t have) when making a choice.
However, let’s flip the glasses. From the other point of view, it is a ‘utility’ problem. More microeconomics: utility is a fancy term for ‘satisfaction’, how much value do I gain from something. The utility value that the relative would get far outweighs what we might get from the jewellery, namely the ability to live a more pain-free and longer life.
With the tea example, Dad framed it as “if you spend here now, in the local economy, that will drive growth in the area and, eventually, make the city a better place for you and your kids to visit in 20-30 years time”. Far-fetched? Yes. Long-term? Indeed. But true.
This mindset allows us to look at every decision from at least 2 angles - what’s the effect on my life? How does it affect the recipient’s life? And this brings the concept of leverage into play: what are a few moves I can make whose utility value outweighs the opportunity cost?
I finish by encouraging you to always think in twos: what’s the upside/downside of doing this? What’s the short term/long term outcome? Remembering to consider the other angle might just convince you buy a headache-melting tea.
A substandard post today, imo, but one nonetheless. Unlike the weather, seems I’ve dried up of ideas: if there’s anything at all which you would like me to write about, please send me a message, every suggestion will be appreciated.
Podcast of the week🎙️
This was a brilliant conversation, featuring one of our times’ best thinkers. He is very logical in his predictions about the future, intertwined with human psychology and evolution
What I’m grateful for this week 🙏
Raaj Shamji for giving me a chance to help out at his event, and his guests for being so encouraging - you’ll hear more about the event very soon
Quote of the week 💬
The reason why we struggle with insecurity is because we compare our behind the scenes with everyone else's highlight reel. Steven Furtick
An exciting week ahead - lots of gym (those India calories aren’t going to burn themselves 🙈), lots of human connection and (hopefully) lots of learning too, all brain food for our next blog post together - thank you for reading.
Adi
The first fancy word I could think of