chowyonghan Author

Ego prevents us from getting necessary feedback

(Excerpt from The Great Mental Models Volume 1: General Thinking Concepts by Shane Parrish) First, we’re so afraid about what others will say about us that we fail to put our ideas out there and subject them to...

August 9, 2020| Ego Read More

Getting someone’s winning lottery numbers

(Excerpt from Beware of Advice by Derek Sivers) When successful people give advice, I usually hear it like this: “Here are the lottery numbers I played: 14 29 71 33 8. They worked for me!” Success is based on so...

August 9, 2020| Life, Survivorship Bias Read More

Social media enables divided people to meet each other

I thought Twitter was driving us apart, but I’m slowly starting to think half of you always hated the other half but never knew it until Twitter. Michael Arrington, Founder of TechCrunch...

August 2, 2020| Life, Yin Yang Read More

Optimism is a necessary ingredient to progress when the odds are against you

(Excerpt from Same As It Ever Was by Morgan Housel) We tell ourselves stories about our potential for progress because if we’re realistic about how common failure and pain is, we’d never get off the couch. Few would...

August 2, 2020| Overconfidence Bias, Success Read More

Investing strategies need to evolve

(Excerpt from Keep Running! By Morgan Housel) In his book Investing, Robert Hagstrom wrote about strategies that once worked but eventually withered: In the 1930s and 1940s, the discount-to-hard-book-value strategy...

July 31, 2020| Adaptability, Investing, Map Is Not Territory Read More

Some people see the thing that they want, and some people see the thing that prevents them from getting the thing that they want

(Excerpt from Simon Sinek’s speech, transcript by Goalcast) There were some free bagels and they had picnic tables set up. On one side was a group of volunteers. On the table were boxes of bagels and on the other...

July 13, 2020| Success Read More

We cannot expect businessmen to operate out of benevolence but we also cannot expect goodwill from customers

Adam Smith was spot on to observe that people do not start businesses out of altruism. They start out of their self-interest. But this is what made capitalism work because trade and transactions could happen – the...

July 12, 2020| CYH Read More

New and Old Economies

Tech is currently driving the world’s economy while finance is taking a passenger seat. This is even more evident during Covid-19 – tech adoption was accelerated as consumer behaviours were reshaped....

July 8, 2020| CYH Read More

Types of education business

(Excerpt from Monday Musings 6 Jul 2020 by David Perell) Some observations on the future of education from Tiago Forte: Most online courses until now have been performance-driven, as in “direct response...

July 8, 2020| Learning, Strategy Read More

Outcomes = hard work x talent x luck

(Excerpt from Taylor Pearson’s Interesting Times 3 Jul 2020) Let’s say you have the opportunity to play a very attractive game. You flip a coin. If you get heads, you get six times your wager back. If you get tails,...

July 8, 2020| Luck Read More

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