as i grew up, i always transformed my new learning into a mental model, about how the world functions & used the model to deal with various situations that i faced in life
below here i am describing the three models that i have used and how i end up developing them at various stages of my life:
hard work brings success – a model based on the teachings of my gurus in India
i attended a traditional & conservative school in Delhi, India, where i was taught that hard work is key to success & i followed that advice by heart … studied text books sincerely and lot more from libraries … my Sanskrit teacher Sh. Jaydev Dat Gautamji encouraged me to study Bhag.vad.geeta in middle school (a book that generally folks study when they are in 50s) .. so i did; & learned the concept of Karma at the age of 12 … studied Ramayana & Mahabharata, learned Vedic rituals … my teachers advised me to focus on math & science, & i followed their advice sincerely … my parents suggested me to earn money by running a retail business; so i did & became independent at the age of 12 … later i attended engineering college & learned about how to turn concept from science into engineering ideas; used logic to build computers & learned programming of my own .. as i look back, the most funny aspect of my thinking was that until the 3rd year of my engineering, i thought that the job of an engineer would be to build new things … & boy, i was wrong, more on this later ..!
got nice jobs in India and USA, the hard work paid off … it’s a fantastic model to develop an individual; however, hard work could only take me this far.
as i progressed in the corporate world, i started to face problems, as i realized that most people (not all) only make minor modifications of existing stuff (i.e. incremental improvements) .. & even for that so many people are involved and with people comes politics … so originality & effectiveness is not even a concern in most cases .. rather that people are dependent on others for so many things & most folks in corporate world are average / mediocre (has to be statistically speaking!) & so is the output produced by them … of course, i didn’t know how the business world works … how people work in a corporate setup, as people’s opinions/ideas matter based on who is going to lunch with who [at low levels] & who is sleeping with whom [at higher levels] or how folks exchange favors, build alliances & support each other’s mediocrity by exploiting the democratic process & weaknesses of others ..!
seeing me struggle in business world, my boss at Sun Microsystems. Achim Zippel, suggested me to go through the MBA program; so i did.
art of the business world – a model that i learned in my adulthood in US
in the business management program, it felt like i am starting all over again; e.g. i never studied Microeconomics or Macroeconomics before .. i enjoyed both as i could see the life around me that can be explained using mathematical equations; economics & finance helped to understand how to make better decisions & understand cause & effect in the world-wide economic situation … how the health of a business can be determined using accounting/financial statements? how a company stock can be valued using various valuation models? how marketing can influence people’s decision? how innovation & learning is important for the growth of a company/business? how management concepts can help you develop shared vision, motivate people & team building? how politics works in a corporate environment? … & i practiced all of the above; made good money & had reasonable success in corporate world, but then i got stuck, again ..!
as i realized that in many situations, what the individual contributors are doing is fixing up the screw-ups made by the CEO/senior management & my job in middle management is to motivate employees to clean other’s shit, as i always took my job seriously … even in startups, some big shot does a partnership with totally unrelated entity to exchange some favor and your job in engineering is to spend the weekend and make it work; otherwise, you are not a team player … or hire an army of contractors to finish a 9 month job into 3, who end up producing shitty stuff (not contractor’s fault) & it takes three year to clean the mess (like have 9 women to produce a baby in one month!) bottom-line: i did not enjoy many of my activities & i kept on wondering, what it is that i am missing in these situations.
let me raise a few more situations before i talk about the next one:
if what’s written in economics books is true and people are rational, then why do conflicts occur … can’t people resolve an issue with a rational argument/decision making?
you got to be damn smart & generally IVY schools educated to become a Venture capitalist & work for prestigious firms in Silicon Valley, then how do you justify them throwing millions of dollars behind startups in 1999 that failed miserably ..?
if the financial markets were driven by rational people then why do boom & burst occur – like the dot com boom & bust and the real-estate boom & bust followed by financial crisis … were the people in Silicon Valley or WallStreet not smart enough to know that those prices were ridiculous in respective situations?
or is there something that take over you and turns a smart fellow making dumb decisions in certain situations?
& IF people are rational, why do they gamble in Las Vegas to lose money ..!
as you can guess, the business world model, as taught in schools doesn’t provide answers to any of the above questions … & that’s when i started working on the third model, which is based on human behavior; btw, it is not that the above two models were wrong, but they were incomplete.
it’s all about cause & effect and human behavior – a Yogi’s model
lately when people ask me what do i do .. i tell them that i am a Yogi (an aspiring one !) .. in nut-shell, it’s about seeing the world just the way it is ~ Sadhguru
& not how i would like it to be, as most people do ..!
Lord Krishna, who, in my opinion, was the first & ultimate guru in human behavior described the whole thing in Bhag.vad.geeta about 5,000 years ago, which many people know in summary as principle of Karma and here is my understanding of it, that a man is responsible for his actions (or in-actions), which follow reactions & have consequences; the reaction to an action is not symmetric, as it depends on the context (unlike Newtons’ 3rd law of motion, which is only applicable for physical objects); so do not expect a specific or immediate outcome (chapter 2), and keep in mind that God has the reset button (as described in chapter 11).
applying the above in the human world, think in terms of cause & effect, & the context; & not in absolute terms … & the missing piece in my earlier models was the role of actions or in-actions (i.e. causes), which are not part of traditional economic models, but can be explained in terms of human behavior.
further, this model signifies that:
1) the effects follow certain patterns those are found in nature
2) the patterns are the same irrespective of the domain; e.g. physics, human behavior or financial markets
3) most of the effects in the universe can be described as a cycle; & a universal pattern to cyclic solutions as described in geometry is an ellipse (which becomes a circle for e = 0) & in physics, it’s pendulum [to understand the behavior] – check Nature/Geometry page – in life whatever goes up, has to come down … whosoever is born, has to die … there are no right & wrong sides of an ellipse/circle & so are the movements of a pendulum .. therefore, see the world just the way it is … moreover, even God is unable to create something that is absolutely positive & perfect, as negative things keep popping up, so Lord Vishnu needs to visit repeatedly to turn things around & start a new cycle – check Wellness/Sanatan Dharma page.
here is a situation based on cause & effect and human behavior from Ramayana – केकयी ने वरदान माँगा, क्योंकि राम को वनवास जाना था … और राम को वनवास इसलिए जाना था, क्योंकि उन्हें रावण का भध करना था … और केकयी ने जो किया, वो एक माँ का व्यवहार था .. जो उसने भरत के लिए किया
& for those who are not familiar with the Indian epic Ramayana, here is a latest news story (Oct 2018) about Supreme court nomination of Judge Kavanaugh, which became a public debacle … it’s not about truth because even the truth as describe by one is based on personal experience, it’s not about facts because man invented statistics to deal with facts; rather it’s about the logic that you can build based on your state of intelligence … how come all the republicans go in favor, and all the democrats, who are equally smart and looking at exactly the same thing/situation, go against … not even a single exception … because each of them has a personal goal and agenda and they only see what they want to see … it’s not about the observed, rather it’s about the observer; it’s about human behavior, which is about a person’s (observer’s) mind; therefore, his/her biases, which are based on a person’s ideology, background & other factors ..!
an action causes its effect to move the thing to its next state .. & causes of the action can be explained in terms of human behavior … this turned into my 1st principle — see Markets/Behavior page … this model works perfectly [at least for now until i get stuck again] .. as what happens in humans life, corporate world or financial markets, all can be explained by human behavior.
i want to assure you that building this principle is not a theoretical exercise or topic of a PhD thesis, i always turn my principles into practical applications, although it is an extremely slow process, and what could be a better subject than Wall Street
so i applied this principle on her; i.e. if she behaves this way (others call a random walk), there must be a cause, & the rest of the website talks about this experiment as Mission & Vision[1], which started in 2014 & completed in 2024.
