Inverted Passion

Be passionate about the territory, not the map

All posts by Paras Chopra

What Gita teaches us and what it doesn’t

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Notes and Summaries, Psychology

1/ I recently finished Menon’s translation of Bhagavad Gita, the holy book of Hindus. There’s a lot to like about it, but it leaves a few issues unresolved.

Here are my notes.

2/ The story revolves around the warrior Arjuna who faces conflict during a war with his cousins. He simply cannot bring himself to kill the people he grew up with. So he tells his charioteer, Krishna, that he’d rather die than go to war.

3/ This conflict is used as a backdrop by Krishna, who actually is an incarnation of God, to reveal the truth of the world to Arjuna. The ideas and concepts in Gita are consistent with other Hindu philosophies and ideas. ...  Read the entire post →

What is truth?

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Personal, Psychology, Systems

A tweet-thread like micro-blog on a topic that I’ve been obsessing over lately.

1/ Whenever someone says “this is true”, or “I’m a truth-seeker”, ask them to first define truth. (Or if you’re asking this question, answer what evidence will constitute truth for you).

2/ Getting a hold of the definition being used for truth is especially important when talking about complex systems like business, politics, economics, ecology or essentially any field where you usually can’t just read error-free data from a well-isolated system. ...  Read the entire post →

You cannot plan for happiness (but you can discover it)

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Personal, Psychology

Most of our waking moments are spent either doing things that we expect will make us happy or trying to be happy. It’s like happiness is a currency and we want to hoard it as much as we can, as fast as we can. But the more we chase happiness, the less we’re able to get it. Yet if we momentarily forget about our desire to be happy, we find ourselves to be happy.

Before dissecting this contradictory nature of happiness, it’ll help to first define happiness. Everyone has their pet definition of happiness and each dictionary will define it in its own way. There’s no United Nations mandate specifying ingredients for happiness. It seems that happiness is hard to pin down and, as you’ll see, that’s precisely why you cannot plan for happiness. ...  Read the entire post →

Writing is defragging brain

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Personal

I write for myself.

I write when there’s an incredibly hard idea that I need to teach myself. I write when I have a glimpse of an insight that’ll remain hidden until caught and penned down. Writing is a way of having long conversations with myself.

Sometimes I use the double column technique to reason out emotions. Every day I do garbage collection in my mind and dump it on a todo list. I maintain two dairies: one for distilled insights from stuff I’m reading and thinking about, and the second for rough sketches and workings. ...  Read the entire post →

Inverted Passion 2018 in Review

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Personal

Last year in December, I decided to take two months off for a sabbatical. What I wanted to do in that period was to write a book on my experience and learnings bootstrapping Wingify to a multi-million dollar SaaS company. What I ended up doing is starting this blog and a community around it. A year later, it's a perfect time to reflect on this thing which was never planned to be.

Why is enterprise software so ugly?

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Psychology

People debate whether good design is subjective. I’ll argue that it’s not. Good art is subjective, but design isn’t. The main difference between art and design is that while art is made for oneself, design is made for someone else (the user) to achieve her objectives (not yours).

Designing for the user isn’t as easy as it sounds. One of the most difficult aspects of being a designer is to avoid letting your personal preferences dictate what’s good for the user. Thinking from user’s perspective doesn’t come naturally. Evolution has trained us to think from our own point of view. This is why great designers are rare — they are able to suppress their worldview and their preferences to think from the user’s point of view.

Notes from ‘Nonzero: the logic of human destiny’

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Notes and Summaries

I make notes of books that really impact my thinking. Earlier, I made notes from The Elephant in the Brain and Skin in the Game. This time I make notes from a book that traces the arc of human history. My notes are not verbatim (unless quoted). It’s mostly what I found illuminating.

1/ Here are my notes from ‘s book – Nonzero: the logic of human destiny. I enjoyed the book very much.

The basic premise of the book is that history has a direction which favors co-operation and non-zero sum games, and that causes an increase in complexity. ...  Read the entire post →

The Reverse Turing Test and proof-of-human currency

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Economics, Systems

Are you a bot? No, seriously how can you prove that you are not. How can you prove that you are not some sort of algorithm crawling YouTube videos trying to make sense of this world? And how can you prove that I am not a bot, that I am not one of those Google’s AI?

This question may seem funny, but I find it one of the most important one facing our generation. Actually, the question is less about whether you are a bot or not, it’s more about how can you prove that you are human.

If you prefer watching a video instead of reading, I’ve narrated the entire essay in the following 8 minute video. ...  Read the entire post →

Why do introverts get depressed easily?

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Psychology

Earlier I’ve written about building mental immunity to prevent depression. Lately, I’ve been very interested in the predictive processing theory of mind, and trying to build has intution about how gets depression takes shape.

I connect a few concepts from evolutionary psychology and predictive processing theory to explore why introverts are more susceptible to depression. Watch the 10-minute video essay below.

In case you prefer text, I tweeted the main ideas from the video as a thread. ...  Read the entire post →