Chaitanya Patel

Our life is full of ups and downs, twists and turns, love and loss. You can’t have the good without the bad, you need to learn to accept the bad so you can endure and overcome. Let’s look at some situations which many face in their life.

Losing the Job

“The company is scaling back, and I’ve been told to reduce the size of the group”, my boss told me as we sat down. “Sadly we would have to let you go! “You’re kidding right!’ was my immediate response, but then I found myself stammering. ‘You can’t do that – I’m doing so well, in the performance appraisal you gave me Exceeding’ I said.

He looked helpless with an expression of pity on his face. “It’s totally unfair,” I said as I walked out. I was shell-shocked. I went for a long walk afterwards trying to figure out what I was feeling.

I said aloud, “I just lost my job”. The words felt so strange in my mouth. What will I do now? For last few years I have been caught in the daily routine.  This job was huge part of my life.  I am cut loose and I’m either floating or falling, like Kati Patang. I went through range of emotions – fear, anger, sadness, pain, confusion, embarrassment. The future has become this big unknown thing and it’s scary. Is this the end of my story? I asked myself.

You are diagnosed with…

It’s just after midnight and Rajan was sitting with her laptop trying to work. No matter how he positioned his body the pain kept creeping up. The pain scared him, these attacks have been coming frequently now and it made him angry.

The next day he visited the doctor and he prescribed some tests. “Just routine tests, we can talk when we have the report”. He was at her desk at work late in the afternoon when the phone rang. It was a call from his doctor’s office– the answer to why he was so exhausted, having constant migraines, and a number of other painful problems.

“You have cancer” said the doctor.

Home Loan EMI due

“Your Home Loan EMI is due”, said the letter from the bank. Shuttling between hospitals and house in last few days, Ananya just didn’t find time to open the letters that had been piling up. Her mind went back to few days back when she got the call from the hospital. “Your husband’s life was saved, but since the accident was near fatal we had to perform some crucial operations.”

Ananya remembered her father’s words that property was one of the best, most reliable investments you can make because it was scarce—after all, you can’t make more land. And they had found this house and moved in after taking a home loan. Why is the EMI due? Didn’t Rajesh opt for ECS? He never told her much about finances, saying “Why are you worrying about it. It’s my job just like handling home is yours”. Now with the EMI due and Rajesh still under treatment Ananya wished she had taken more of an interest.

Adversity is inevitable. Life brings with it many challenges and many things to learn. It’s how you are prepared to face these challenges, how you overcome these adversities that makes all the difference, what you learn from them that makes up your life. How we wish we could just skip this uncertain part and jump ahead to.  Every challenge we successfully conquer serves to strengthen not only our will, but our confidence, and therefore our ability to confront future obstacles.

So, the next time you find yourself standing in front of a huge mountain that feels impossible to climb–whether it involves your job, partner or business– refer to these words

“Khudi ko kar buland itna ke har taqder se pehle Khuda bande se khud pooche bata teri raza kya hai.” Khudi is ‘self’ which in this context means mind/psyche/soul, Taqdeer here means fate and Raza  means desire.Raise thyself to such heights, That God Himself may Ask- What do you wish me to write your fate?

Be armed with a plan and face adversity head on!  #KhudKoKarBuland

This is a sponsored post

I’ve commented earlier on this blog about how investment banks indirectly fund scientific research – by offering careers to people with PhDs in pure sciences such as maths and physics.

The problem with a large number of disciplines is that the only career opportunity available to someone with a PhD is a career in academia. Given that faculty positions are hard to come by, this can result in a drop in number of people who want to do a PhD in that subject, which has the further effect of diminishing research in that subject.

Investment banks, by hiring people with pure science PhDs, have offered a safety net for people who haven’t been able to get a job in academia, as a consequence of which more people are willing to do PhDs in these subjects. This increases competition and overall improves the quality of research in these topics.

Beef is like investment banks to the dairy industry. I recall an article (can’t recall the source and link to it, though) which talked about V Kurien of Amul going to a meeting called by the Union government on banning cow slaughter. Kurien talked about his mandate from his cooperative being that everything was okay as long as cow slaughter wasn’t banned – for that would kill the dairy industry.

Prima facie (use of latin phrase on this block – check)  this might sound like a far-fetched analogy (research to cows). However, cow slaughter has an important (positive) role to play in encouraging the dairy industry.

When you buy a cow, you aren’t sure how good it is in providing milk, until you’ve put it through a few cycles of childbirth and milking. If after purchase it turns out that the cow is incapable of producing as much milk as you were promised, it turns out to be a dud investment – like getting a PhD in a field with few non-academic opportunities and not being able to get a faculty position.

When cow slaughter is permitted, however, you can at least sell the cow for its meat (when it is still healthy and fat) and hope to recover at least a part of the (rather hefty) investment on it. This provides some kind of a “safety net” for dairy farmers and encourages them to invest in more cows, and that results in increasing milk production and a healthier dairy industry.

This is not all. Legal slaughter means that there is a positive “terminal value” that can be extracted from cows at the end of their milking lives. Money can also be made off the male calves (cruel humans have made the dairy industry one-to-many. Semen from stud bulls is used to impregnate lots of cows, and most bulls never get to fuck) which would otherwise have negative value.

A ban on killing cows implies a removal of these safety nets. Investing in cows becomes a much more risky business. And lesser farmers will invest in that. To the detriment of the dairy industry.

There are already reports that following the ban on cow slaughter in Maharashtra last year, demand for cows is going down as farmers are turning to the more politically pliable buffaloes.

Similarly, with the investment banking industry seeing a downturn and the demand for “quants” going down, it is likely that the quality of input to graduate programs in pure science might go down – though it may be reasonable to expect Silicon Valley to offer a bailout in this case. Cows have no such luck, though.

“When you come to one of the many moments in life where you must give an account of yourself, provide a ledger of what you have been, and done, and meant to the world, do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man’s days with a sated joy, a joy unknown to me in all my prior years, a joy that does not hunger for more and more but rests, satisfied. In this time, right now, that is an enormous thing.”

***

Dr. Paul Kalanithi was 36 years old and in his final year as a neurosurgical resident when he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. His beautifully written memoir, When Breath Becomes Air, published posthumously, chronicles his lifelong quest to learn what gives life meaning.

Kalanithi’s wife Lucy, also a doctor, explains in the epilogue why he chose to write about his experience.

Paul confronted death – examined it, wrestled with it, accepted it – as a physician and a patient. He wanted to help people understand death and face their mortality. Dying in one’s fourth decade is unusual now, but dying is not.

In a letter to a friend, he writes, “That’s what I’m aiming for, I think. Not the sensationalism of dying, and not exhortations to gather rosebuds, but: Here’s what lies up ahead on the road.”

In When Breath Becomes Air, Kalanithi shares his journey along that road as he transitions from doctor to patient and comes face-to-face with his own mortality.

As a student

Before studying medicine at Yale, Kalanithi had earned a BA and an MA in English literature, a BA in biology and an MPhil in the history and philosophy of science and medicine. He was interested in discovering where “biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect”.

I was driven less by achievement than by trying to understand, in earnest: What makes human life meaningful? I still felt literature provided the best account of the life of the mind, while neuroscience laid down the most elegant rules of the brain.

Throughout college, my monastic, scholarly study of human meaning would conflict with my urge to forge and strengthen the human relationships that formed that meaning. If the unexamined life was not worth living, was the unlived life worth examining?

After years of theoretical discussions about mortality and the meaning of life, he came to the conclusion that “direct experience of life-and-death questions was essential to generating substantial moral opinions about them”. And so, he chose to study medicine.

As a physician

In Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, Dr. Atul Gawande, calls for change in the way medical professionals deal with illness. While medical science has given us the ability to extend life, it does not ask – or answer – the question of when life still has meaning.

The problem with medicine and the institutions it has spawned for the care of the sick and the old is not that they have had an incorrect view of what makes life significant. The problem is that they have had almost no view at all. Medicine’s focus is narrow. Medical professionals concentrate on repair of health, not sustenance of the soul. Yet – and this is the painful paradox – we have decided that they should be the ones who largely define how we live in our waning days.

As a neurosurgical resident, Kalanithi was well aware of this paradox and the interplay between our medical choices and the things that give our lives meaning.

While all doctors treat diseases, neurosurgeons work in the crucible of identity: every operation on the brain is, by necessity, a manipulation of the substance of our selves, and every conversation with a patient undergoing brain surgery cannot help but confront this fact…At those critical junctures, the question is not simply whether to live or die but what kind of life is worth living. Would you trade your ability – or your mother’s – to talk for a few extra months of mute life? The expansion of your visual blind spot in exchange for eliminating the small possibility of a fatal brain hemorrhage? Your right hand’s function to stop seizures? How much neurologic suffering would you let your child endure before saying that death is preferable? Because the brain mediates our experience of the world, any neurosurgical problem forces a patient and family, ideally with a doctor as a guide, to answer this question: What makes life meaningful enough to go on living?

Both Gawande and Kalanithi help us recognize that knowing what we – and our loved ones – value in life will inform the choices we make about death when that time comes.

As a patient

What happens to your identity and sense of purpose when your plan for the next 40 years is suddenly wiped off the table?

My brother Jeevan had arrived at my bedside. “You’ve accomplished so much,” he said. “You know that, don’t you?”

I sighed. He meant well, but the words rang hollow. My life had been building potential, potential that would now go unrealized. I had planned to do so much, and I had come so close. I was physically debilitated, my imagined future and my personal identity collapsed, and I faced the same existential quandaries my patients faced. The lung cancer was confirmed. My carefully planned and hard-won future no longer existed.

After the diagnosis, Kalanithi was forced to re-evaluate what was most valuable to him.

While being trained as a physician and scientist had helped me process the data and accept the limits of what that data could reveal about my prognosis, it didn’t help me as a patient. It didn’t tell Lucy and me whether we should go ahead and have a child, or what it meant to nurture a new life while mine faded. Nor did it tell me whether to fight for my career, to reclaim the ambitions I had single-mindedly pursued for so long, but without the surety of the time to complete them.

Like my own patients, I had to face my mortality and try to understand what made my life worth living…

The old adage to ‘live each day as if it were your last’ loses strength under scrutiny. What gives our lives meaning on any given day depends to some extent on how imminent we believe death is.

Grand illnesses are supposed to be life-clarifying. Instead, I knew I was going to die – but I’d known that before. My state of knowledge was the same, but my ability to make lunch plans had been shot to hell. The way forward would seem obvious, if only I knew how many months or years I had left. Tell me three months, I’d spend time with family. Tell me one year, I’d write a book. Give me ten years, I’d go back to treating diseases. The truth that you live one day at a time didn’t help: What was I supposed to do with that day?

In searching for solace, Kalanithi returned to his love of literature.

And so it was literature that brought me back to life during this time. The monolithic uncertainty of my future was deadening; everywhere I turned, the shadow of death obscured the meaning of any action. I remember the moment my overwhelming unease yielded, when that seemingly impassable sea of uncertainty parted. I woke up in pain, facing another day – no project beyond breakfast seemed tenable. I can’t go on, I thought, and immediately, its antiphon responded, completing Samuel Beckett’s seven words, words I had learned long ago as an undergraduate: I’ll go on. I got out of bed and took a step forward, repeating the phrase over and over “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”

That morning, I made a decision: I would push myself to return to the OR. Why? Because I could. Because that’s who I was. Because I would have to learn to live in a different way, seeing death as an imposing itinerant visitor but knowing that even if I’m dying, until I actually die, I am still living.

In one of the most profound passages of the book, Lucy and Paul discuss whether to have a child, “Don’t you think saying goodbye to your child will make your death more painful?” she asks, and he responds, simply, “Wouldn’t it be great if it did?”

Kalanithi comes to believe that life is about striving, not about avoiding suffering.

Years ago, it had occurred to me that Darwin and Nietzsche agreed on one thing: the defining characteristic of the organism is striving. Describing life otherwise was like painting a tiger without stripes. After so many years of living with death, I’d come to understand that the easiest death wasn’t necessarily the best. We talked it over. Our families gave their blessing. We decided to have a child. We would carry on living instead of dying.

He leaves behind this impassioned message for his daughter, Cady, eight months old at the time of his death.

When you come to one of the many moments in life where you must give an account of yourself, provide a ledger of what you have been, and done, and meant to the world, do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man’s days with a sated joy, a joy unknown to me in all my prior years, a joy that does not hunger for more and more but rests, satisfied. In this time, right now, that is an enormous thing.

When Breath Becomes Air, paired with Being Mortal, will get you thinking about what matters in your life and about ‘what lies up ahead on the road’.

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It is then we must remember that all good days in human life come from
the mastery of the days of trouble that are forever recurrent.
-J.C. Penney

Many are unaware that the department store J.C. Penney was originally the work of a man named, appropriately, James Cash Penney. Penney was raised in Missouri by a father who doubled as a preacher and a farmer. After a career full of turbulence, James became manager of a Golden Rule store in Evanston, Wyoming. The stores traded in dry goods — grain, flour, beans; anything that wouldn’t spoil. After a few years of success, Penney was offered his own store in Kemmerer, Wyoming, and took his shot.

Penney turned the venture into a great success, and by 1913 had ownership of 34 Golden Rule stores which were renamed J.C. Penney. He’d go on to expand the chain into a dominant national department store chain that continues on today, albeit in a less prosperous form.

In 1949, Penney published a very slim book called My Experience with the Golden Rule — it didn’t describe in detail his retail experience, but instead his thoughts on the Rule itself. The little volume has some beautiful passages worth sharing. He speaks with a bit of a Southern Baptist tone, but whether you are a spiritual person or not, the lessons hold.

On the Teachings of Life

He starts with a refrain which echoes our favorite from Joseph Tussman:

As I look back over the entire range of my life’s journey I would say that discipline has never let up. I seem to have moved from one contest to another—from one hard situation to another. As I try to read it all now it seems to me as if life has been trying to make me understand that a man has only to work with the universal law and purpose and they, in turn, will work for him. But if he decides to work, trusting wholly to his own judgment, ignoring all wiser leadership, he will get hurt.

On The Challenge of Ethical Principles

I want to show that we build lasting values for later life precisely as we are motivated in our youth. For what we do in the beginning of our careers capitalizes us all the way along. If it happens that one is challenged in youth by ethical principles and if one is led, or even compelled, to adopt them, he will begin to have high altitude experiences. In other words, it is well for every one of us to be forced by whatever circumstances to work righteously. This is the supreme benefit even if, in the doing it, it seems to “go against the grain.” We learn, slowly, that all accomplishment and advancement are gained only by a contest—a fight with the circumstances and conditions through which we pass.

And we gradually begin to see that great principles have it in them to make the going rough, hard and foot-wearying. To seek to do best for ourselves by doing right for all concerned is by no means an easy proposition. It is, in fact, infinitely hard. But at the same time it guarantees us safety and security as a dividend on the investment of the effort we make. It does not keep us from attaining material success, hard as the going may be. But it makes the way safe and the method effective.

[…]

There were a lot of cowboys in Kemmerer in my time. One of them put the fact I have in mind in better words than I can command. Speaking of a rodeo he said: “There is one thing about a bronco that is always true. With never an exception. He is full of unexpectedness.”

The point is this, any ethical principle that one may adopt is just as full of unexpectedness. I mean, in the challenge it puts up to one. The problem with the bronco is to get on and stay on.

On the Value of Having One’s Principles Tested

Penney proceeds to tell the story of his father forcing him to start earning his own money if he wants new clothes. Upon earning a small amount, he buys a pig and uses the earnings from the first pig to bankroll the purchase of many more, until he’s got about a dozen. It’s then that his father tells him he must get rid of the pigs due to complaints, even though James would have to take a loss on the sale.

It was a long time after the event that I was able to look back upon the experience as one might look back upon a mountain range where he has been tramping and see its skyline. Let it suffice for me to say that what I leaned out of that business experience and the three parties concerned, namely, myself, my father, and the neighbors, proved to be a treasure worthy to possess.

My father knew that if I was compelled to clothe myself it would make me think and search and find ways of earning the money to do it. And furthermore he knew that I would learn this important fact:

We do not meet the demands of life with money. But with the imagination, forethought, plans and energy that earn the money.

Through life we learn many principles of business operation. But this one is of high rating among them all. Then, one thing further, my father took pains to make me understand:

–That I would not exercise my ingenuity to get money if by so doing I caused distress to other people.

–That any effort is worth only what can be gotten out of it by the action of a fair deal.

[…]

My father said to me one day: “We would resent it if a neighbor distressed and discomforted us in any way. Therefore, you see that a neighbor will resent distress and discomfort if we cause it. This means,” he said, “we must do to everyone as we wish to be done by.”

And so there emerged into my youthful experience the Golden Rule.

On Holding Fast to Ethics When You’re Riding High

Penney spends some time discussing his relationship with employees and his hope to develop them to their highest purpose. His basic idea is that “…to hire a man and literally leave him as is, is the beginning of a degree of human dissatisfaction that can go to any length.”

And then he returns to the Golden Rule:

So I come back again to the condition that the Golden Rule, if one adopts it, is a difficult master to serve. The ship’s captain will not throw the compass overboard because the wind blows fair and the day is funny. For he knows, from the experiences of the ocean’s instability, that the danger days of storm are always “just ahead.” So the compass must always be handy and obedience to it must always be loyal. And so with the Golden Rulle—the compass must be ever at hand through life’s journey. It will see us through trying times. And perhaps the most trying of all times comes when success is riding high and we may be tempted to “throw the compass overboard.” It is then we must remember that all good days in human life come from the mastery of the days of trouble that are forever recurrent.

On Advice to Young Men in Finding Their Purpose and Career

Penney closes with an admonition that the purpose of life is to find the calling to which you can devote your time and energy and feel fulfilled. As he makes clear, devoting your energy to something which you care about and feel fulfilled by is the highest purpose you can achieve:

To young men my advice is as simple and distinct as my own experience. It runs like this:

Take time to discover what you would prefer above all else to make your life work. You may have to do a lot of temporary jobs before you reach the one your ambition places above all others. But if your idea is clear and your determination firm, you will surely reach it.

Remember that it is often necessary in life to learn to work hard at many things before you arrive at the very great privilege of working hard at the one thing you prize the most.

Think persistently into great principles. That many have persisted for thousands of years simply because their truth is unassailable, applies to all of us in all situations and problems. Hence the great Proverbs, the Golden Rule, the Decalogue, the Sermon on the Mount, and, along with these, the testimony of men who have sought their way to the rare privilege of doing what they most wanted to do.

Remember that all this effort to reach your preference in life work and your further effort to perfect it within the scope of your ability is for just one purpose. And the purpose is to give service to the utmost of your ability.

Still Interested? You can find the book here, but it’s out of print and a bit pricey for such a short volume. Another one to learn more about J.C. Penney is a book about his life and career, Main Street Merchant. If you want more on ethics and wisdom, try some of our posts on Seneca.

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“The physical universe is subject to rational analysis and the methods of science. The spiritual universe is not. All of us have had experiences that are not subject to rational analysis. Besides religion, much of our art and our values and our personal relationships with other people spring from such experiences.”

***

Alan Lightman, whose beautiful meditation on our yearning for permanence in a universe that offers none, looks at the tension between science and religion in The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew.

In the essay, “The Spiritual Universe,” Lightman sets out to reconcile his personal struggle between religion and science. In so doing he sets out the necessary criteria for science to be compatible with religion:

The first step in this journey is to state what I will call the central doctrine of science: All properties and events in the physical universe are governed by laws, and those laws are true at every time and place in the universe. Although scientists do not talk explicitly about this doctrine, and my doctoral thesis adviser never mentioned it once to his graduate students, the central doctrine is the invisible oxygen that most scientists breathe. We do not, of course, know all the fundamental laws at the present time. But most scientists believe that a complete set of such laws exists and, in principle, that it is discoverable by human beings, just as nineteenth-century explorers believed in the North Pole although no one had yet reached it.

Our knowledge of scientific laws is provisional. We do not know all the laws but we believe in a complete set of them. We further believe, in principle anyway, that humans will uncover these laws. An example of a scientific law is the conservation of energy.

The total amount of energy in a closed system remains constant. The energy in an isolated container may change form, as when the chemical energy latent in a fresh match changes into the heat and light energy of a burning flame— but, according to the law of the conservation of energy, the total amount of energy does not change.

Even scientific laws that we already know about are updated and refined over time. Lightman offers the replacement of Newton’s law of gravity (1687) by Einstein’s deeper and more accurate law of gravity (1915). These revisions are part of the very fabric of science.

Next, Lightman provides a working definition of God.

I would not pretend to know the nature of God, if God does indeed exist, but for the purposes of this discussion, and in agreement with almost all religions, I think we can safely say that God is understood to be a Being not restricted by the laws that govern matter and energy in the physical universe. In other words, God exists outside matter and energy. In most religions, this Being acts with purpose and will, sometimes violating existing physical law (that is, performing miracles), and has additional qualities such as intelligence, compassion, and omniscience.

Lightman then offers a continium of religious beliefs based on the degree to which God acts in the world. At one end is atheism — or denying the existence of god. Moving along the spectrum, we find deism, which was a prominent view in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that God created the universe but has not acted since this spark.

Voltaire was a deist. As God’s role expands we find immanentism, which holds that God created the universe and its scientific laws. Under this view, God continues to act through the repeated application of those laws. We can probably put Einstein in the immanentism camp. (Philosophically both deism and immanentism are similar because God does not perform miracles.)

Opposite atheism lies interventionism. Most religions, including Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism subscribe to this view, which is that God created the universe and its laws and occasionally violates the laws to create unpredictable results.

Lightman argues that all of these views, except interventionism, agree with science.

Starting with these axioms, we can say that science and God are compatible as long as the latter is content to stand on the sidelines once the universe has begun. A God that intervenes after the cosmic pendulum has been set into motion, violating the physical laws, would clearly upend the central doctrine of science.

Lightman cites Francis Collins, who offers some thoughtful advice on reconciling a belief in an interventionist God and science, or at least, deciding which to turn to for answers to the right kinds of questions. They are often very different.

“I’ve not had a problem reconciling science and faith since I became a believer at age 27 … if you limit yourself to the kinds of questions that science can ask, you’re leaving out some other things that I think are also pretty important, like why are we here and what’s the meaning of life and is there a God? Those are not scientific questions.

Under this reconciliation, miracles cannot be analyzed by the methods of science. This is an echo of Richard Feynman, who put it most clearly in one of his letters, saying that science only tells us if we do something then what will happen? Cause and effect. It doesn’t give us any guidance on the question of should we do it?

Lightman, himself, falls in the atheist camp.

I am an atheist myself. I completely endorse the central doctrine of science. And I do not believe in the existence of a Being who lives beyond matter and energy, even if that Being refrains from entering the fray of the physical world. However, I certainly agree with (Other Scientists) that science is not the only avenue for arriving at knowledge, that there are interesting and vital questions beyond the reach of test tubes and equations. Obviously, vast territories of the arts concern inner experiences that cannot be analyzed by science. The humanities, such as history and philosophy, raise questions that do not have definite or unanimously accepted answers.

And yet we must believe in things we cannot (yet) prove. Lightman himself believes in the central doctrine which cannot be proven. At most we can only say there is no evidence to contradict it. This is what Karl Popper called real science – a process by which we hypothesize and then attack our hypotheses. A scientific “fact” is one that has stood up to extraordinary scrutiny.

With much of life, and much meaning in the world, there are often things outside of the scientific realm. These are worth considering.

I believe there are things we take on faith, without physical proof and even sometimes without any methodology for proof. We cannot clearly show why the ending of a particular novel haunts us. We cannot prove under what conditions we would sacrifice our own life in order to save the life of our child. We cannot prove whether it is right or wrong to steal in order to feed our family, or even agree on a definition of “right” and “wrong.” We cannot prove the meaning of our life, or whether life has any meaning at all. For these questions, we can gather evidence and debate, but in the end we cannot arrive at any system of analysis akin to the way in which a physicist decides how many seconds it will take a one-foot-long pendulum to make a complete swing. The previous questions are questions of aesthetics, morality, philosophy. These are questions for the arts and the humanities. These are also questions aligned with some of the intangible concerns of traditional religion.

Lightman recalls his time as a grad student in physics and the concept of a “well-posed problem” — a question with “enough clarity and precision that it is guaranteed an answer.” Put another way, scientists are trained not to “waste time on questions that do not have clear and definite answers.” And yet questions without clear and definite answers are sometimes just as important. Just because we can’t apply the scientific method to them doesn’t mean we shouldn’t consider them.

[A]rtists and humanists often don’t care what the answer is because definite answers don’t exist to all interesting and important questions. Ideas in a novel or emotion in a symphony are complicated with the intrinsic ambiguity of human nature. That is why we can never fully understand why the highly sensitive Raskolnikov brutally murdered the old pawnbroker in Crime and Punishment, whether Plato’s ideal form of government could ever be realized in human society, whether we would be happier if we lived to be a thousand years old. For many artists and humanists, the question is more important than the answer.

The question is more important than the answer — just as the journey is more important than the destination and the process is more important than outcome.

As the German Poet Rainer Maria Rilke put it a century ago:  “We should try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue.”

“As human beings,” Lightman argues, “don’t we need questions without answers as well as questions with answers?”

The God Delusion, a widely read book by Richard Dawkins, uses modern tools to attack two common arguments for the existence of God: Intelligent Design (only an intelligent and powerful being could have designed the universe) and that only the action and will of God explains our morality and desire to help others. Dawkins convincingly shows that Earth could have arisen from the laws of nature and random processes, without the intervention of a supernatural and intelligent Designer. Our sense of morality and altruism could be a logical derivative of natural selection.

However, as Lightman reminds us, refuting or falsifying the arguments put forward to support a proposition does not necessarily falsify the proposition itself.

Science can never know what created our universe. Even if tomorrow we observed another universe spawned from our universe, as could hypothetically happen in certain theories of cosmology, we could not know what created our universe. And as long as God does not intervene in the contemporary universe in such a way as to violate physical laws, science has no way of knowing whether God exists or not. The belief or disbelief in such a Being is therefore a matter of faith.

Lightman is troubled by Dawkins’ wholesale dismissal of religion.

Faith, in its broadest sense, is about far more than belief in the existence of God or the disregard of scientific evidence. Faith is the willingness to give ourselves over, at times, to things we do not fully understand. Faith is the belief in things larger than ourselves. Faith is the ability to honor stillness at some moments and at others to ride the passion and exuberance that is the artistic impulse, the flight of the imagination, the full engagement with this strange and shimmering world.

Indeed, William & Ariel Durant have argued that we need religion; it is part of our fabric of understanding and living in the world.

***

With that, Lightman brings the essay to a beautiful conclusion.

The physical and spiritual universes each have their own domains and their own limitations. The question of the age of planet Earth, for example, falls squarely in the domain of science, since there are reliable tests we can perform, such as using the rate of disintegration of radioactive rocks, to determine a definitive answer. Such questions as “What is the nature of love?” or “Is it moral to kill another person in time of war?” or “Does God exist?” lie outside the bounds of science but fall well within the realm of religion. I am impatient with people who, like Richard Dawkins, try to disprove the existence of God with scientific arguments. Science can never prove or disprove the existence of God, because God, as understood by most religions, is not subject to rational analysis. I am equally impatient with people who make statements about the physical universe that violate physical evidence and the known laws of nature. Within the domain of the physical universe, science cannot hold sway on some days but not on others. Knowingly or not, we all depend on the consistent operation of the laws of nature in the physical universe day after day— for example, when we board an airplane, allow ourselves to be lofted thousands of feet in the air, and hope to land safely at the other end. Or when we stand in line to receive a vaccination against the next season’s influenza.

Some people believe that there is no distinction between the spiritual and physical universes, no distinction between the inner and the outer, between the subjective and the objective, between the miraculous and the rational. I need such distinctions to make sense of my spiritual and scientific lives. For me, there is room for both a spiritual universe and a physical universe, just as there is room for both religion and science. Each universe has its own power. Each has its own beauty, and mystery. A Presbyterian minister recently said to me that science and religion share a sense of wonder. I agree.

The Accidental Universe is a mind-bending read on the known and unknowable, offering a window into our universe and some of the profound questions of our time.

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The issue of setting compensation seems to be struggled with in every organization. Most are pretty lazy about it — hiring someone else to take care of it and failing to think through the incentives they’re creating.

Some companies are different. Nucor, a steel company, under the leadership of Ken Iverson is one of them. Iverson details his thoughts in the masterful Plain Talk. (This isn’t the first time we’ve covered Iverson’s wisdom on running a company. His genius was exploiting unrecognized simplicities.)

Under Iverson, compensation at Nucor had two components: A small but meaningful base pay and a very simple weekly bonus based on production. Outside of benefits and a little profit sharing, that was it. Simple, straightforward, and powerful. No subjective criteria.

The real beauty of Nucor’s compensation system, in my opinion, is that there is nothing to discuss. Daily output and corresponding bonus earnings are posted, so employees know exactly what their bonus will be before they tear open their pay envelopes. No judgment. No negotiation. No surprises.

There are three beautiful aspects to the design of this program.

The first is that it’s eminently clear what you will be paid for: making more steel. It’s so simple. Your compensation is never at the hands of someone who may or may not like you. You have no reason to say it’s unfair: You signed up for it when you signed on. If you worked at Nucor under Iverson, the first thought you had every morning was how to make more steel.

Secondly, it offers immediate feedback. Human nature, and the nature of many other higher-thinking animals, is such that immediate rewards work better than delayed rewards. B.F. Skinner knew this, but some corporations haven’t figured it out yet. A year-end bonus isn’t nearly as effective as a weekly bonus. A year-end review isn’t nearly as useful as immediate feedback. It’s simple.

And lastly, this program gave Nucor’s employees tremendous skin in the game. Everyone was working towards the same goal. Rowing in the same direction. And that makes a tremendous difference.

Nucor’s great success in harnessing incentives reminds me of Charlie Munger’s discussion on Federal Express:

From all business, my favorite case on incentives is Federal Express. The heart and soul of their system—which creates the integrity of the product—is having all their airplanes come to one place in the middle of the night and shift all the packages from plane to plane. If there are delays, the whole operation can’t deliver a product full of integrity to Federal Express customers.

And it was always screwed up. They could never get it done on time. They tried everything—moral suasion, threats, you name it. And nothing worked.

Finally, somebody got the idea to pay all these people not so much an hour, but so much a shift—and when it’s all done, they can all go home. Well, their problems cleared up overnight.

So getting the incentives right is a very, very important lesson. It was not obvious to Federal Express what the solution was. But maybe now, it will hereafter more often be obvious to you.

Does this mean every company should model their compensation program after a steel company? Hell no. But you want to think about it. It’s easy to come up with a suboptimal incentive system — just look around corporate America. The difference between a suboptimal compensation system and an optimal one is huge.

The principles for an effective compensation system work at all companies. Let’s invert — think about the common reasons that compensation systems likely fail. First, most of them are hard to explain. They are overly complicated and wordy. (At Nucor everyone from the CEO to the newest employee could explain it.) Second, the rewards are small and untimely. Yearly bonuses anyone? Third, the program has to be designed in a way that the people in it (and the people running it) can’t game it. Finally, everyone is subject to the same plan.

Done poorly, compensation systems foster a culture of individualism and gaming. Done properly, however, they unleash the potential of all employees.

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I’ve gotta get this shit of my chest.

I fuckin’ love all the opportunity that is out there today. It has NEVER been a better time to start a business, to go out on your own, to pave your own path.  Never!

But to the majority of you running around calling yourself an entrepreneur, while you have a full-time job, collecting a paycheck from someone else, stop! You’re not.

Anyone can start a business in seconds. They can throw up a website. They can create a Twitter account. They can open up an eBay store. The can sell shit on Etsy. Anyone can call themselves an expert, a thought leader, a kingpin or a badass and start selling something.

But just because you have business cards, or slick website, or 1,00,000 Twitter followers, a million Periscope fans, or a savage Instagram account, it doesn’t make you an entrepreneur.

You’re an entrepreneur when your company is your job. When the only way you feed your family is when your company says you can. You’re an entrepreneur when the only time you go on vacation, is when your company says you can. You’re an entrepreneur when the only time you buy a new car, a new couch, a new house, go to a badass, kickass, dry aged steak dinner with a ’75 Chateau Lafite Rothschild is when YOUR COMPANY says you can.

Then and only then are you an entrepreneur.

In today’s world, everyone has a side gig. It’s easy to sell something to someone today. It’s easy to make money. The Internet has virtually removed all barriers to starting a business and it’s fucking awesome.

But the truth is just ’cause you can make a few hundred or even a few thousand bucks a month selling something, it doesn’t make you an entrepreneur — it’s a hobby.

An entrepreneur is in full tilt. An entrepreneur has bet everything on their company. They are all in. There is no safety net of a full-time job. If you have a full-time job, you’re not all in.  You’re not 100% committed to the business.  It’s a hobby or your dabbling.

Until you’ve felt the fear of missing your mortgage, you’re not an entrepreneur.  Until you’ve walked to the mailbox 4 times a day desperate for a check to come or you miss payroll, you’re not an entrepreneur. Until you’ve not been able to go grocery shopping, buy a new shirt, or had to skip a haircut, cause you couldn’t afford to spend the money, you’re not an entrepreneur.  Until you’ve woken up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat terrified your biggest client is about to switch, you’re not an entrepreneur. If you go to work every day for someone else and collect a paycheck. You’re not an entrepreneur.

With this said, there are two types of entrepreneurs, successful ones, and failures. Being an entrepreneur is hard enough, but being a successful one, that’s an entirely different discussion.

Guess who gets to decide if you’re a successful entrepreneur or not?  The market – not you! And this is why 99% of most people are not entrepreneurs or are failed entrepreneurs and don’t quit their real job. It’s fuckin’ hard.

When you’re at home working on your business, in between and after your full-time job, that’s the market telling you that your business doesn’t offer enough value to enough people. It’s the market saying to you,  hey not enough people (buyers) give a shit about your product, your service, your whatever so don’t quit your full-time job. That’s a real voice you need to listen to. If your offering provided enough value, and enough people knew about it, you wouldn’t have to work for the man. But, you do, because it doesn’t and you’ve yet to change that.

The market crowns successful entrepreneurs. Successful entrepreneurs don’t crown themselves.

Now before you go get your panties in a wad, I’m not saying those that are successful didn’t do it themselves. You bet your ass they did, but what they did was get the market to see the value in what they had to offer in a manner that got us to spend tons of money. And they didn’t do that working on it “part-time.”

You can’t win over a market workin’ for someone else and doing your thing on the “side.” You just can’t, eventually you have to jump in, all in,  or it’s just a hobby.

Now that I’ve got most of you all worked up because I called your part-time hustle a hobby, take a deep fuckin’ breath.

You’re a good person. You hustle. You’ve got grit. You grind it out. You are worthy . . . you’re just not an entrepreneur.

You’re an entrebetweener (entre-between-er): Someone who has started a business but still works for someone else full-time collecting a paycheck.

If you’re an entrebetweener be proud, but have a goal, have a launching point, know when you are going to jump and commit your entire being to your business. In many ways, that should be more important than actually running the business. ‘Cause if you don’t pick a date, a moment, a milestone to go all in, you never will.

Reasons NOT to take risks are a lot easier to come buy than to take them

Not Taught, Chapter 5 Have the Balls to Make it Happen

To all those huslin’, grinding, passionate, entrebetweeners I salute you. But please, stop calling yourself an entrepreneur — ’cause you’re not!

This thought from Isaac Asimov sums up much of Farnam Street’s ethos in how to operate ethically in the world.

From the book he co-authored with his wife How to Enjoy Writing: A Book of Aid and Comfort.

Integrity, is, to me, a somewhat stronger word than “honesty.” “Honesty” often implies truth-telling and little more, but “integrity” implies wholeness, soundness, a complex philosophy of life.

To have integrity is to stand by your word, to have a sense of honor, to do what you have agreed to do and to do it as best as you can. To have integrity is to be satisfied with nothing less than the best job you can do.

In that sense, anyone can have integrity, regardless of how small and unimportant a role he may play in the world…

A bit later, Asimov gives a short example of his concept of integrity:

Integrity not only simplifies your life by making it easy to come to a decision, but it may keep you out of trouble.

A writer I knew slightly once suggested that I write a book very quickly and that I then engage in complicated financial dealings that would involve my risking some money to begin with. The book I wrote would, however, fail and that would enable me to write off so much money as a loss that I would save on taxes many, many times what I had invested in the book. Of course, we would have to be certain that my book would be a failure, so I would have to undertake to write a really bad one. I would be taking advantage of a “tax shelter” in this way, and it was all perfectly legal.

I shook my head. “No,” I said. “It’s perfectly possible for me to write a bad book while I am trying honestly to write a good one, but writing a bad one on purpose is more than I can undertake to do, no matter how much money it would save me on taxes and no matter how legal it might be.”

I walked away and, a couple of years later, I read that the fellow who had advanced this proposition to me was now on trial for this same “tax shelter,” I was rather relieved that I had been simpleminded enough to have integrity.

Still Interested? See our post on The Difference Between Truth and Honesty.

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Much speculation exists that the government will change the nature of Long Term Capital Gains tax for equities – from zero to…something.

For the record, I would fully support a change in this regard, because I’m against any specific exemptions – they all skew the game in favour of something or the other at the cost of something else. I will explain, but let’s do a bit of a history thing. 

Why Tax Capital Gains? And Why at a Lower Rate?

The government taxes income of any sort. If you earn money as a salary there’s tax on it and you don’t get to account for any expenses. If you put your savings into a bank deposit, the interest you earn is your next year’s income and you’re taxed on that too. If you get money from any source – gambling, lottery, horse races, consultancy, or from a business you run, you will pay tax on it.… (Read On...)

The post Latticework of Mental Models: Switching Costs appeared first on Safal Niveshak.

    

After reporting a Rs. 550 cr. loss in December, Jindal Steel and Power Limited has seen a downgrade in its bond rating by Crisil. They were moved from BBB+ to BB+ (a full letter down, which is three notches).

The downgrade reflects CRISIL’s belief that the JSPL group’s liquidity will deteriorate significantly in the near term as stake sale in rolling mill and the receipt of proceeds from settlement in Bolivia may take longer. CRISIL had earlier expected these to be completed before March 31, 2016; delays would adversely impact group’s debt-servicing ability in the near term and increase group’s reliance on timely refinancing of debt taken for Angul (Odisha) steel plant. Any delay in the said refinancing beyond CRISIL’s expectations of March 2016 could lead to severe pressure on cash flow and will hence remain a key monitorable.

Recent introduction of minimum import price for steel products by the Government of India will not provide immediate respite to the group’s liquidity.

I have a policy that whenever I make a mistake, I admit it. I believe that suppressing an error does more harm than good in the long run, and it is superior to admit it at the time of discovery and correct course rather than keeping things under wraps until the shit hits the fan (a la Nick Leeson, for example).

There is another reason I like to admit to my mistakes – by doing so frequently, I want to send the signal that I’m self-aware and self-critical and aware of what I’ve done wrong. This, I believe, sends a signal that I should be trusted more, since I have a grip on rights and wrongs.

It doesn’t always work that way. There was a company I once worked for, where my responsibilities meant that my errors had an immediate material impact on the company. I don’t know if this (direct material impact) mattered, but my signalling went horribly wrong there.

The powers-that-were came from a prior belief that people would suppress their mistakes as much as they could, and that I was admitting to them only because I couldn’t suppress them further. Their reaction to my constant admission of mistakes (I was writing production code, a bad bad idea given my ADHD) was that if I were admitting to so many mistakes, how many more of my mistakes were yet to be discovered?

In other words, the strategy backfired spectacularly, possibly given the mismatch of our priors, and I later figured I might have done better had I tried suppressing (or quietly fixing) rather than admitting. That, however, hasn’t led to a change in my general strategy on this issue.

I was reminded of this strategy when State Bank of India and Punjab National Bank released their quarterly results last week. Their stocks got hammered on the back of drastically reduced profits on account of higher provisions – an admission that a significantly higher proportion of their loans had gone bad compared to their earlier admissions.

The question that comes to mind is whether the increase in provisioning and admission of bad loans should be taken as a credible signal that these banks are cleaning up their balance sheets (which is a good thing) or whether it only indicates a bigger tip of a bigger iceberg (in which case I’d be paranoid about my deposits).

Not knowing what strategy these banks are playing (though statements from the RBI suggest they’re likely to be cleaning up), I guess we have to wait for results over the next couple of quarters to learn their signals better.

I had lunch today at a rather fancy Japanese restaurant here in Barcelona (I’ve forgotten if I wrote that blog post last year on how you get fantastic East Asian food of all kinds here). I didn’t pay a fancy price – this concept called “Menu del dia” (menu of the day), one of the very few good things instituted by General Francisco Franco meant that you can get cheap weekday lunches at most restaurants in Spain.

I must say I quite like the Spanish concept of a late, heavy lunch with beer. Katsudon (rice with pork cutlets) at uribou, a fantastic Japanese place close to home

A photo posted by Karthik Shashidhar (@skthewimp) on Feb 16, 2016 at 6:21am PST

The above (Katsudon and beer), along with some noodle soup and two sushis and a cup of coffee, set me back by €13, which isn’t too bad by Barcelona standards (most weekday lunch platters at restaurants cost ~€10).

While eating I noticed that other patrons at the restaurant were walking up to the bar to pay the owner directly, rather than asking for the bill at the table.

So once I was done with eating and drinking, I went up to the bar to pay. The owner had seen me coming and had prepared my bill, which he presented to me. As I reached into my pocket, he got out the card swiping machine.

It might have been a shock to him when I presented a €20 bill instead, and he had to scramble to produce the change from somewhere inside the kitchen (the other patrons before me had all paid by card).

While this is one data point, it’s interesting how the economy here has moved to a situation where the default method of payment is through credit/debit card, rather than by cash (though my favourite bakery refuses to accept card for payments less than €5). The ease of card payments (most debit cards nowadays come enabled with NFC, though a fair number of merchants still insert the card to read the chip) combined with ubiquity of cards has meant that card usage has started trumping cash.

It will be interesting to see how the payments ecosystem will develop in India, which is still largely a cash economy. My belief (and hope) is that India will leapfrog credit/debit cards (as it has leapfrogged landline telephones and big box retail, moving directly to mobile phones and e-commerce) and take up electronic payments in a big way.

IMPS (immediate payment service) is already a fantastic protocol for bank-to-bank transfers, and the costs are extremely low. In April, the Unified Payment Interface (UPI) will be rolled out, which makes transfers to hitherto unknown people even easier! If our banks do a good job of implementation, there is a good chance it might get adopted widely (long back I’d made a case for the RBI to subsidise such payments).