Inverted Passion

Be passionate about the territory, not the map

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Twitter Threads

I tweet on a lot of topics. This page is an archive of all my twitter threads organized in one place.

Here are the major categories:

Ask me anything:

Crowdsourced wisdom:

On life:

On career and personal growth:

On games:

On human psychology:

On mental health:

On physical fitness and body:

On thinking and cognitive biases:

On reading and writing:

On environment and climate change:

On business:

On investing:

On startups:

On economy:

On science:

On systems:

Case studies:

On AI, Machine Learning and Deep Learning:

Notes from books, chats, articles and papers: ...  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.

The happiness paradox

Happiness is fundamentally an emotional feeling. You see, we feel happy. If happiness was a physical object located somewhere in our 4D spacetime, we could have sent space missions to find it and bring it back to us. If happiness was an idea, we could have ordered a book on Amazon and wrote reviews about it. If happiness was a person, we could marry it and be done for life. But happiness is none of it. If we knew what happiness was and how to get it, the entire self-help industry would have been long bankrupt. Yet the market for heres-how-you-get-happy is thriving because we’re suckers for happiness.

What I find most paradoxical about happiness is that we often think about it. Thinking is a process where we state some assumptions and work through their implications. Thinking is full of biases and is limited in its capacity (we aren’t able to store more than a couple of assumptions in our working memory). Thinking works best when there are a few variables involved. You’re fine thinking about whether Socrates is mortal (or discovering quantum mechanics), but you’re not ok thinking about how the future will unfold because it has far too many variables than what you can hold in your head.

Emotional feelings like love, disgust or happiness are a product of millions of years of evolution of our mind. There’s no single thing or principle that makes us happy. There’s no grand unified theory of happiness. Yet, we deploy our thinking hats trying to plan for a happier life. Thinking is significantly underpowered for this simulation: how our body and mind will react to billions of combinations of ingredients that make up our daily life and its context.

Miswanting: wanting things that won’t make you happy

There’s an idea in psychology called miswanting. It’s the difficulty we have in predicting what’ll make us happy. Here’s a simple example to illustrate miswanting. Suppose you think a beach holiday will make you happy. Since thinking is linear and full of biases, what leaps to your mind is pristine beaches, sun, beer and perhaps good food. Feeling pleasant and excited, you book your tickets. When the day arrives, you discover that the flight is delayed, or there was a cranky baby in the flight. Or when you reach the hotel, you find out that you forgot to pack sandals. On the beach, you get irritated by all the sand that’s stuck on your feet. There are tourists everywhere. It’s loud. Sun is harsher than you thought.

When you’re planning for a holiday (or any other experience you expect to derive happiness from), you obviously cannot think of all the nuances that’ll ruin the experience you planned for ...  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.

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.

2/ Starting from the first replicating molecule which co-operated with an outer layer to form first proto-cell, evolutionary and cultural history is full of examples where two entities come together to survive and progress a lot more than they would have done individually.

3/ This co-operative entity fares much better than two individual entities because of specialization. If two entities are in the same boat – that they win together or lose together – then trust is implicit.

4/ In a non-zero sum game, trust causes entities to focus on what they do best. For example, eukaryotic cells – the ones animals and plants have – emerged when two proto-cells merged, and one took the role of energy generator (mitochondria), the other specialized in protection.

5/ Some scientists believe that even nucleus in a cell is a result of an early cell merging with another cell. So M&A is not a recent phenomenon, entities have been merging because of common interests ever since life started. ...  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.

This question’s importance is due to the fact that with increased automation, humanity faces the grave danger of going jobless. This has already started to happen in many industries: right from replacing drivers that make up a significant majority of any working population to doctors, lawyers, and artists. Automation is increasingly taking over all the jobs that traditionally humans used to do and the economic implications of this automation is that more and more wealth is getting concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. The rise of Google, Apple, FB can be directly attributed to tech’s recent dominance, which is now accelerating at a very fast pace, concentrating wealth in the hands of a few shareholders.

One solution for the jobless world is the universal basic income (UBI) ...  Read the entire post →

Building mental immunity against depression and anxiety

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Psychology

Mental health issues were the primary cause of the recent deaths of famous celebrities such as Anthony Bourdain, Kate Spade, Avicii and Chester Bennington. I wish peace to their families and friends.

I hope that these deaths don’t go in vain but serve as a wake-up call for the rest of us. Across one’s lifetime, there’s a very high likelihood of going through a mental health issue. Studies suggest that about 25% of all people suffer a mental disorder in any 12 month window. This means that it’s likely that one in four people you know have recently gone through a depression or an anxiety episode.

This figure is shockingly high and doesn’t seem to match with our everyday experience. For the most part, our friends, family, and co-workers seem to be their normal selves and sometimes even happy. You surely think you would have noticed when people you know were mentally not well.

But, would you really have?

Depression and anxiety are these weird invisible monsters that usually only the sufferer can see. Talking about these things in public is an unfortunate taboo that I wish goes away. People going through an episode usually come up with valid-sounding excuses to avoid social situations and when they’re forced to attend, they’ll put up a smile so you wouldn’t notice. In fact, in my experience, people who are hilarious in social situations are often anxious or depressive in their private lives. Humor and depression may be related.

For those who don’t know what depression feels like, I found Hyperbole and a Half (Allie) depict it with haunting accuracy in this two–part series.

Yep, that’s the feeling. (via Hyperbole and a Half)

Anxiety is a different monster. While depression is a complete lack of motivation to do anything, anxiety is that constant churning of worst case scenarios in your head. What if you die? What if you lose all your money? What if your loved ones die? What if the plane crashes? And so on.

Relatable? (via College Humor)

Note: before I dive into the rest of the post, let me mention that I’m not a practitioner. A lot of what I write in the post is my personal experience, and may or may not be corroborated by scientific research. If you’re going through a depressive or anxiety episode, please consult a medical professional now, or at least read this article. At the lowest points of life, when motivation is low and reasoning is clouded, you just have to rely on faith and trust. So, trust me, go see a psychiatrist or a psychologist. You will get better, as almost everyone going through this does. The only decision you have to make is to see a doctor.

Brain as a prediction machine and depression is when it predicts that actions don’t matter

The decrease of neurotransmitter dopamine is linked to depression and

dopamine is associated with brain’s prediction of a reward in the environment ...  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.

Imagine the damage this big miss in our education has caused. If we had Decision Making 101, we could have reduced regrets, moved faster in life, saved money and get psychological peace and comfort from making confident, thoughtful decisions.

Our brains didn’t evolve to make the ‘right’ decisions

We need to first admit that thinking is hard, and deep thinking is even harder. This is because our brains never evolved to be certain, they evolved to ensure we survive and reproduce. While we want to optimize (take the best possible decision), our brains want to satisfice (take a good enough decision).

This difference in what we want (choosing the best career) and what our brain gravitates towards (choosing a “good enough” career) results in that familiar gut-wrenching confusion. Once we take a gut-backed decision, we keep asking ourselves: “what if I negotiated a little bit more?”, “what if I had chosen a different major in college” and our brain happily remains undecided because even it doesn’t know! (How would it know if you haven’t done proper thinking?)

The default method of deciding for most people is really sloppy. If there’s a big decision hanging up in the air, we immediately start considering options that occur to us. Then we do a Google search or ask our friends and family. In most cases, this decision making process relies on luck (availability bias): whatever comes to mind or whatever Google search turns up influences not just the decision but what we value.

We’re forgetting how to think

Thinking is hard enough already, but even that ability is slowly getting lost. Reflect on this: when was the last time you closed your eyes and really thought hard about something for more than 5 minutes?. If you do that regularly, fantastic! But with Google just a few keystrokes away, our default method of thinking is becoming web search. We’re delegating our thinking to Google.

Internet is great at giving us pre-thought ideas and knowledge but it is taking away our ability to think in return. This loss of thinking happens in two ways:

  • Social media makes us react, rather than to act. Our opinions and preferences are constantly getting shaped by what we see and read around us. Do we really know what we want anymore?
  • Google lulls us into a feeling of “thinking” without actually doing any thinking. Reading a Quora answer or Medium article is not thinking, but it feels like that because our brain gets an expanded perspective (one that it didn’t have before).

    •  ...  Read the entire post →

    Notes from The Elephant in the Brain

    Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Notes and Summaries

    1/ Reading @robinhanson and @kevinsimler new book ‘Elephant in the brain’. Here are my notes on big ideas from the book.

    via official book website

    2/ Human intelligence evolved as a result of arms race of getting ahead in social situations where two contrasting incentives always existed: to co-operate or to compete.

    3/ Unlike chimps where hierarchy is strictly from alpha male to least powerful individuals, language allowed humans to form coalitions and keep most aggressive individuals in check. These coalitions are where laws and norms come from

    4/ Since norms cannot be exactly specified, human brains evolved to find subtle ways to work around them (lying) and to detect others working their ways around them (detecting lying)

    5/ Since humans have to co-operate but others suspect that our intentions are not true, we evolved honest signals such as body language, shame, guilt, etc.

    6/ Since other humans can detect our dishonest intentions, lying to others is difficult but we still have to find ways to take opportunities to exploit social situations to get ahead – to get sex, status, power.

    7/ Our brains evolved to lie to themselves in order to give honest signals in social situations. That is why in order to blend in a social society, it’s not just enough to lie that you believe in god, you have to actually believe that (taking help from all sorts of cognitive biases)

    8/ Since we act and verbalize conscious thoughts in social situations, our brains give censored version of reality to consciousness that mostly contains info that makes us feel good about ourselves (such that others mistake us for actually being that good)

    9/ This last idea is radical.

    This means all our conscious thoughts (and ideas about ourselves) are hopelessly twisted ...  Read the entire post →

    Copying ideas is highly underrated

    Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Business, Economics

    No man’s an island and, as a corollary, no startup is truly unique. Media oversells us the virtue of breakthrough ideas. Journalists are paid to highlighting what’s new and noteworthy. Imagine the number of clicks an article would get if it was titled: ‘Here’s the nth example of a Chinese firm copying what’s working in the west’.

    To catch our attention, publications run stories that celebrate innovations.

    Wright brothers got the fame, but someone else made all the money

    The invention of the airplane was definitely a breakthrough moment for humanity and the Wright brothers deserve all the fame they got. But economically they didn’t do as well as Boeings and Airbuses of the world. Wright brothers knew it themselves that they’re never going to make money from what they were doing. In a conversation with their biographer, Orville Wright said:

    “If we had been interested in invention with the idea of profit, we most assuredly would have tried something in which the chances for success were brighter. You see, we did not expect in the beginning to go beyond gliding”

    Startup success is like solving a multi variable equation

    There’s nothing inherently bad with pursuing truly innovative ideas. What’s bad is pursuing that path with the intent of making money. (There’s a reason why librarians make money than scientists). If you’re a tinkerer or an explorer, go ahead and innovate to your heart’s glee. But if you’re a startup founder, you’re in the business of making money and being innovative might work against your objectives.

    Visualize startups solving a multi variable equation and the solution to this equation is a fast growing business.

    Startups profit seeking missiles in a multidimensional landscape

    In the model above, I’ve condensed many factors into a few variables but in reality there’s so much more that has to go right for a startup that it shouldn’t be surprising that most startups fail. For a startup to succeed, metaphorical stars have to align perfectly.

    And more variables you tweak, the more likely that you’ll fail in solving the entire equation. This is because all these variables are dependent on each other. Startup success is like a jigsaw puzzle where one missing piece spoils the joy and two or more missing pieces is a horror.

    The problem with innovation and what copying solves

    When you’re innovating, you’re juggling with most of the balls up in the air. If you were one the Wright brothers, your problem space is somewhat known: people really do want to travel. But everything else is unknown. You have no idea of product’s efficacy (will people fear being up in the air?), you have no idea about unit economics (can we make it profitable?), you have no idea of distribution channels (how to profitably reach to customers who most need air travel?), you have no idea of competitive advantage (what benefits should we focus on to compete with cars and railways?).

    It doesn’t matter whether you get most of the answers right, because if there’s one answer wrong, you may burn all your funding or patience before seeing any commercial success

    So, why not simply copy instead? Tell me.

    Copying is wonderful because it gives you evidence and clues for a solution to the startup multi variable equation exists. It allows you to let other entrepreneurs make mistakes in solving the equation and save you time and effort.

    I’m not alone in my observation that copying rocks. Check out this graphic from the HBR article: imitation is more valuable than innovation.

    via this HBR article

    I recommend reading the original article but the gist is in this line: “Today’s lions are the descendants of copycats.”

    Successful copycats are smart

    When I started VWO, it wasn’t the first web A/B testing tool (Google Website Optimizer was, VWO’s differentiation was in making A/B testing easy). Then, when I started PushCrew, it wasn’t the first web push notifications tool (OneSignal and Roost were there in the market, PushCrew’s differentiation was focus on midmarket). In contrast, whenever I tried innovating, coming up with breakthrough products they failed (read through postmortems of our ‘innovative’ products here and here).

    We all know iPhone wasn’t the first smart phone, neither was Google the first search engine, nor Facebook the first social network.

    Of course, you know that being first in the market means little if you’re in the wrong market (you knew that right?). But what’s important to note is what copying alone doesn’t guarantee success. There are smart copycats and then there are dumb ones (tip: you want to be the former).

    Smart copycats know the value of timing in the market. As a market evolves, you want to enter into it early when it’s nascent and growing. Enter the search market today by copying Google, and you’re going to be crushed. This lesson was learned by Cuil that raised $33m in 2008 to compete in search market and failed miserably. As Peter Thiel says, be the last the monopolize the market. I’ll add my caveat: also don’t be the first to innovate.

    When you’re copying, you can’t do surface level copying – you have to commit yourself to understand why a new and emerging category is growing like wildfire and what you can do to beat existing players in your discovered market. Having a strong differentiation over existing players is important, but my fear is that differentiation is a highly misunderstood word. Just because Google differentiated from AltaVista through their PageRank algorithm, it doesn’t mean that differentiation can only happen via technology In Facebook’s case, differentiation was done by limiting signups to the Harvard campus only.

    Similarly, you can differentiate by taking the same idea and tweaking one variable in the startup success equation. Perhaps explore the same idea in a slightly different market, or introduce it at a different price point, or reach the growing market via a new distribution channel. Instagram’s copying of Snapchat stories is a perfect example of successful copying. They copied a feature that teens on Snapchat loved and exposed it to their audience (many of whom had never used it before). Bringing a great feature to millions of users is indeed creating new positive value in the world. We entrepreneurs see the act as copying, users see it as their life becoming better.

    On the subject of copying, Instagram’s VP of product said: “this is how the tech industry works”. If a billion dollar company is shameless about copying, why you – my dear entrepreneur – are hell bent on innovating?

    To make how to copy clearer, let me quote Prof. Oded Shenker from the HBR article that I linked above.

    Good imitators don’t wait; they actively search for ideas worth copying. And they often look far from their industry or home country. They also don’t just copy an idea, they come up with a cheaper or better—increasingly it’s cheaper and better—mousetrap. They disrupt the innovator, whose costs are higher by a third, on average, and who’s still sinking investments into the innovation while the imitators are building an offering based on the market reaction to it.

    Don’t be afraid of copying, you can’t copy perfectly anyway ...  Read the entire post →

    Your cold emails compete with cat pictures for my attention

    Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Business, Psychology

    Unsolicited emails – the cold emails – have notoriously low reply rates. I’ve seen sales people celebrating 1% reply rates as a huge win. Honestly, isn’t that a bit embarrassing? Only 1 reply out of 100 emails and even that one reply is usually “no, thanks” or “don’t email me again“.

    Common justifications for this abysmal reply rate is either people are too busy or simply throwing up hands and saying: “who the hell knows”. I think we can do better than this when it comes to understanding why cold emails don’t get replies.

    Your email is a product in itself

    First things first, what’s the objective of your cold email? Is it to inform people about your products or services? Is it to create interest in your products? Is it to get an introduction to someone?

    Note that, by default, when we’re sitting and drafting emails, what comes to our mind is our objectives – we need more customers, prospects, intros and what not. By default, our brain is in me mode because that’s what jumps to our minds automatically: our goals and wishes.

    This bias towards making everything about ourselves is what leads to cold emails that don’t get replies.

    Sorry, but I’m too busy to simplify my IT based on just one email

    I had to find the email above from my spam folder because even Google knows how bad it is (yet, companies don’t stop sending such emails).

    If you’re thinking that the email above looks all fine and dandy (because perhaps you’ve been sending similar emails), don’t worry you’re not alone. Writing bad emails is a cognitive bias that you can get better at if you’re aware what’s going wrong.

    Bad emails serve your goals, good emails serve recipient’s goals

    This blog is called Inverted Passion because I believe that the only way to make other people care about you is to first solve their problems.

    The tweet above is from my post on MER framework for marketing. The advice applies not just to products, landing pages or banners, but even for emails. People are busy with their lives, daydreaming about what they’ll eat in lunch or reading about Trump or making plans to avoid going to the dentist. The last thing they want is an extra email to reply.

    I know you believe that your products and services are the best, and they can change customers’ lives. While this enthusiasm and passion is great, it leads to a dead end because people don’t care what you’re passionate about (they care about their problems and goals). So, while you are drafting your emails mentioning how great your products are, the recipient is wondering when were his TPS reports due.

    So in order to get interest in your emails, make emails about the recipient’s goals.

    • If you want an intro from someone, think and highlight what goals can the recipient achieve by introducing you in his/her network. Does s/he care about looking cool? Does s/he genuinely want to help a friend? Address their motivations, and don’t make the email about you or your needs.
    • If you want a business meeting with someone, research what typical responsibilities a person what that title/role has and what problems do they face. Highlight their goals and problems in your email, not your solution.

    Good emails require minimal effort from recipient, bad emails overwhelm them

    When people come across a product or a landing page, they have zero previous experience to guide whether all their effort spent reading and exploring is going to be worth it. In absence of a proof (like a brand or an intro from someone they know), they default to giving you minimum attention. Think about your own behavior online. What do you regret more: not spending enough time going through all marketing messages in detail OR missing a chance to use a product or service that you could anyway Google and find out?

    As I mentioned in my earlier article on applying prospect theory to product design, the cost v/s benefit analysis in customers’ mind goes something like this:

    Good vs bad sales, onboarding, product usage or any other customer experience

    When the recipients don’t even know you and are busy with their lives, your email is an extra task for them. You cannot expect them to re-prioritize their lives (say, give you a meeting, or sign up for your product) based on your one email.

    That’s what’s wrong with this email that I received.

    Nope, my one hour is expensive (~ 100 cat pics)

    So, some business manager is in the town and I should take out time to meet him so that he can meet his sales quota? If I were an engineering manager and if I wanted a QA service, why can’t I find it myself? What’s in there for me to meet this dude?

    In addition to overreach in what they ask from the recipient (me), the email above is also an example of mismatch in motivation. Why would you email about QA services to CEO/Founder? Address my goals, make it easy for me to respond and I’m very highly likely to reply.

    There's an art to getting help from other people:

    – Keep it specific. Respect people's time
    – Do your research. Ask them what they haven't been asked before publicly

    People with experience are busy, so pin pointed questions that they can answer in <2 minutes is your best shot. ...  Read the entire post →