Inverted Passion

Be passionate about the territory, not the map

All posts in Personal

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.

How to become a leader in 10 hard steps

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Personal, Psychology

Wingify, a company that I founded, turns 8 today. Over these years, I’ve seen myself evolve from a silly little punk doing a side project to the Chairman position where I’m responsible for creating future leaders within Wingify.

Wingify’s office in 2011. We had one long table where everyone sat back to back 🙂

In my career, I’ve observed a few people rapidly rise in their careers within while most others simply drift along. What distinguishes leaders from non-leaders?

Our eighth anniversary is as good as any other day to reflect on the subject of leaders. So here goes my advice and observations, listicle style. ...  Read the entire post →

The metathinking approach to making big decisions

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Personal, Psychology

Big decisions in life are gut-wrenching. Who to marry, where to work, who to hire, how to fire, which subject to major in, how to make a career change, which car to buy, where to invest, et cetra. We stall and brood over those because all such decisions represent major forks in our life. Usually (but not always) these are one-way roads. After all, you don’t buy a house or choose a company to work for every other day.

Given the importance of big decisions in our lives, it’s a surprise that nobody teaches us how to handle them. We’re taught solving for lever and pulley problems (something we’d never encounter in real life) but we’re not taught how to choose a career. ...  Read the entire post →

Review of Life

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Personal

There’s a new multiplayer game out in the market. It’s called Life. I’m half way through it, so thought of reviewing my experience of it so far. I’ll try publishing the full review once I’m done playing.

It’s hard to pick a genre to categorize this game into. Its open ended nature means it can be action, adventure, fantasy, horror or all of these combined at once. I’m told that the gameplay differs from player to player, and in fact it could change while you’re playing it. (Honestly, I’ve never seen a game before where the genre changes all the time) This fluid nature of the game is definitely confusing and that makes it hard to box into a label. It really is a genre-busting game. ...  Read the entire post →

I turned 30 and here’s my scorecard

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Personal8 Replies

Last week (on 3rd June 2017), I turned 30. I don’t have any bittersweet emotions about ageing and I certainly don’t feel old. In fact, I feel really good. Now I know more about the world and people than before. I have friends and family around me. Most importantly I married my best friend. So no qualms about turning 30. None at all.

But this date is semi-important to me for two reasons. One is because I recently realized that my life has been been blazing through and I haven’t been doing enough reflection on my mistakes or experiences. Sure, I used to (and still do) think about questions such as what is money, what philosophy is about and why freedom is important. But I haven’t reflected enough on my own life experiences and mistakes. I thought reflecting on my 20s will be a good start. ...  Read the entire post →

Best books that I read in 2016

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Personal5 Replies

Happy New year folks! Someone asked a question on Hacker News on best books read in 2016. I put up my answer there and am cross posting the same here. Do check out the thread on HN, it contains a lot of interesting suggestions.

2016 was the year I ended up reading most books that I have ever read in any year of my life so far! I read a total of 60 books and you can find all of them on here (it has 59 books, one book that isn’t there is called Ray Dalio’s principles). The books I read in 2015 (a total of 34) is also on ShelfJoy. You can check out my all lists here shelfjoy.com/paraschopra. ...  Read the entire post →