Finding Clarity in an Ambiguous World
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Hypocrisy
hy·poc·ri·sy noun the practice of claiming to have moral standards or beliefs to which one’s own behavior does not conform; pretense. We see it everywhere: people condemning others for the very thing that they do themselves. And we see the response to this, people railing against, complaining about, and outraged with other people’s hypocrisy. After all,…
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Vivid Memories From When We Were 6 Months Old
What do you remember from back when you were 6 months old? Most of us can’t describe a memory that long ago and so we falsely believe that we have none. The reality is that we all have many vivid memories from that stage of our life. Wiggle your fingers. Grab a pen. When exactly…
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By Experience Alone
Back in college I took a math class called Discrete Mathematics which taught among other things, that if you have 5 pigeons but only 4 cages, one of those cages must have at least two pigeons in it*. Yes, super exciting. The professor was not the greatest — he ended up having to bump everyone’s…
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Vulnerable
At one point, my family traveled to Africa to visit my sister who was working on a medical mission. We decided to go on a safari as a family but the company only took cash. The largest size bill they had in Kenya was not very large and as a result, my dad had to…
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Stuck In A Box
Some years ago, I took the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test. This personality test tries to identify your preferences on a few different spectrums: introverted/extroverted, thinking/feeling, sensing/intuitive, perceiving/judging. It made some observations about my type (Extroverted, Intuitive, Thinking, Perceiving) that were useful in understanding myself. This was the first test that was actually useful. All of the…
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The Imperfect Balance In Relationships
Several years ago, when my friend’s wife turned 30, he invited many of their friends to play a game at their house. Each person came dressed as a particular character and then played out their role. The premise was that we were all stuck on an island, there were a limited number of boats and…
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Wake Up!
Wake Up! You’re going to be late for work! But I don’t want to wake up, I was having such a good dream. Just let me sleep a little longer. All of us have had this experience and felt this way, especially as children. It’s very unpleasant to wake up from a dream only to…
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The Cost Of Intervention
Back many years ago, when stock brokers received orders from their customers to buy or sell stocks there was trust that the broker would work in the best interests of his client. He would find the best price in the market and sell it there. Some brokers abused this trust and used markets that had…
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We’re All Famous
Sometime ago, my wife and I were on a plane from Bangalore, India to New Delhi. I opened up the Air India In-Flight magazine to find a picture of a man who I’d seen on a number of billboards and various advertisements. I wondered who this guy was, and now had the opportunity to find out,…
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The Adult Version Of Chicken
We’re all familiar with the rather silly adolescent game of chicken — A group of people stand in the middle of on-coming traffic and the last one to jump out of the way “wins”. Or in another version, two kids drive cars toward one another and the one that swerves “loses”. As adults, we look…
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