With Bernie's chance to secure Democratic nomination getting thinner with each passing day as of May 12, I am still hopeful of some miracle coming along in the Bernie's way. That is why I have found MEME to be funny.
Friday, May 13, 2016
Meme of the Day:Don't Discount Bernie Yet
With Bernie's chance to secure Democratic nomination getting thinner with each passing day as of May 12, I am still hopeful of some miracle coming along in the Bernie's way. That is why I have found MEME to be funny.
The Illusion of Creating a Masterpiece: Why Writing Is Hard
Why do we write? Writing, in the simplest sense, implies that you want to say something. You want to communicate something that you feel is worth communicating; Without doing it, you feel that you are having an itch, and that itch is not going anywhere unless you say it. You put letters to make words, weaving them back and forth, to create sentences that make sense, that tell what you have been intending to tell, all along; Your ideas live since then. You give it a form.
How do our ideas go on to live? We use canvases. We station our ideas in playgrounds that are shared, that can be accessed by others to read, like, dislike, enjoy, debate. Once the writing is done, we feel settled: the itching is gone. We get rid of the stranglehold of our words, feeling that we brought justice to the truth-- what we initially set out to say all along. In between all of the process, we feel anxious as to if we are making the right choices with words, tones, length, judgment, and details. We depict pictures into readers’ mind. We think about these pictures. We reread, reexamine, and reemploy our senses to determine whether our initial hunches about our message got reflected into what we wrote.
We also worry about the medium where our writing lives on, as if we feel failing to choose the right medium will cost us the message. Our precious hunches might not be communicated well. We worry that our emotions will go unnoticed, our intentions will get misdirected, and our important little truths will be misinterpreted.
In between the details of writing, the relationship dynamics between you, me, us, and them are complex. We want to make sure our writing reaches the right audience, helps them connect, and lets them reciprocate with us in some ways. For this reason, as writers, we sweat on the details, making sure our words don’t carry racial tone, employ judgments that might hurt the feelings of others, or simply, fail to tell the truth. We sweat over political correctness, religious interrelations, and the power dynamics that our writing contain. This ordeal takes a toll on us, putting our cognitive load to fullest. As writers, after all, we all want to be loved. We worry about instruments that might cost us love. It’s a scary line we want to walk on when we sit to write.
Now, as it may happen to almost to many writers, that we set out to say initially, got never said. We find that our ability to employ words to tell the truth is not enough. There are plenty of rooms for errors. We may have employed wrong words, organized the critical pieces incoherently, rambled on unnecessarily, or simply, failed to deliver a punch line when it was due.
Realizing that now we are stuck between we want to tell the truth and we devised the story sub-optimally , we debate whether we should publish it. What might be called as the great dilemma of being a writer. There are so many scopes for improvement, leaving us with a feeling that the difference between creating a great writing and creating a not-so-great writing is us. We are not impressed by us, considering our shortcomings to deal with lacking good sense, measured tones, and omission of bad words.
We retreat back to inaction, believing in the lie that we were never set out to tell the story. All we had few hunches, the random itches of senses that mind produced when we thought we had something to say but we somehow ruined saying it.
That I feel is the great tragedy of the commons: emotions, story clues, truths, and important hunches going unnoticed, unscratched, and lost in the vast deep ocean of sensory illusions.
How do our ideas go on to live? We use canvases. We station our ideas in playgrounds that are shared, that can be accessed by others to read, like, dislike, enjoy, debate. Once the writing is done, we feel settled: the itching is gone. We get rid of the stranglehold of our words, feeling that we brought justice to the truth-- what we initially set out to say all along. In between all of the process, we feel anxious as to if we are making the right choices with words, tones, length, judgment, and details. We depict pictures into readers’ mind. We think about these pictures. We reread, reexamine, and reemploy our senses to determine whether our initial hunches about our message got reflected into what we wrote.
We also worry about the medium where our writing lives on, as if we feel failing to choose the right medium will cost us the message. Our precious hunches might not be communicated well. We worry that our emotions will go unnoticed, our intentions will get misdirected, and our important little truths will be misinterpreted.
In between the details of writing, the relationship dynamics between you, me, us, and them are complex. We want to make sure our writing reaches the right audience, helps them connect, and lets them reciprocate with us in some ways. For this reason, as writers, we sweat on the details, making sure our words don’t carry racial tone, employ judgments that might hurt the feelings of others, or simply, fail to tell the truth. We sweat over political correctness, religious interrelations, and the power dynamics that our writing contain. This ordeal takes a toll on us, putting our cognitive load to fullest. As writers, after all, we all want to be loved. We worry about instruments that might cost us love. It’s a scary line we want to walk on when we sit to write.
Now, as it may happen to almost to many writers, that we set out to say initially, got never said. We find that our ability to employ words to tell the truth is not enough. There are plenty of rooms for errors. We may have employed wrong words, organized the critical pieces incoherently, rambled on unnecessarily, or simply, failed to deliver a punch line when it was due.
Realizing that now we are stuck between we want to tell the truth and we devised the story sub-optimally , we debate whether we should publish it. What might be called as the great dilemma of being a writer. There are so many scopes for improvement, leaving us with a feeling that the difference between creating a great writing and creating a not-so-great writing is us. We are not impressed by us, considering our shortcomings to deal with lacking good sense, measured tones, and omission of bad words.
We retreat back to inaction, believing in the lie that we were never set out to tell the story. All we had few hunches, the random itches of senses that mind produced when we thought we had something to say but we somehow ruined saying it.
That I feel is the great tragedy of the commons: emotions, story clues, truths, and important hunches going unnoticed, unscratched, and lost in the vast deep ocean of sensory illusions.
Why I Love Economics
I started out my undergrad journey studying economics. I still remember those joyous nights of reading Mankiw, learning Poker, dwelling in The Economist website, and day-dreaming about becoming next John Nash. I still remember that joy I felt when I learned the insight about human behavior that people respond to incentives. It makes so much sense. Such a great combination of beauty, truth, and elegance is wrapped within one principle.
More than anything else, I loved how economics taught me how to think about life. For example, we face trade-offs: we can't have everything we want. That if we want something, we have to think about the price we want to pay for it. And the price of something is what we are willing to give up to get it. It can be time (e.g. investing in relationship). It can be hours of work that we put to reach that magical score to obtain admissions into our dream colleges.
Perhaps, the most elegant among the economic principles to me is the one that says rational people think at margin. Margin means edge: that we always weigh in the benefit that we will get for one extra unit in exchange of the cost of that unit. For rational people, marginal cost-benefit analysis needs to make sense; otherwise, they shouldn't move forward with the decision.
Don't we ask al the time that "is it worth it?" Exactly, here we employ the thinking at margin principle. It's really powerful if you get to apply it in most of your decision making processes. I hope I apply it more actively and more often. I hope you do it as well.
Besides, sharing why I love economics, I want to make a small point. Much of what I write or am going to write occasionally is my attempt to produce more as I want to balance between my consumption diet and creation habit. I am hoping to write more, mostly summaries of readings that I do or my opinions of things that I read or think. I very much hope to receive feedback from you.
Ratio Thinking - An Approach to Life
Just now I came across reading an article by Joel Gascoigne, the founder of Buffer. In this article, Joel discusses about how the ratio thinking shapes how he thinks, operates, and runs his business. It's an an interesting way to approach life. Ratio thinking is based on the "law of averages" as explained by entrepreneur and author Jim Rohn, who said:
"If you do something often enough, you’ll get a ratio of results. Anyone can create this ratio."
That means, if you want to increase achieving the number of your intended successes, you need to attempt more. More attempts, done with creative adjustments, will yield in more intended outcomes. For me, increasing my ratio means taking those chances that I am uncomfortable of taking: sending those emails that I fear of getting no response, asking for those helps that I feel will not be returned, and many more. The sooner we realize the power of ratio thinking, I believe the better are our chances for winning.
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