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First Things First
Of Blank Slates And First Principles Thinking
It’s always good to start off anything by breaking a rule — Sigrid Nunez, Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag
The world is very beautiful. The people living in this world even more so. Each with their varied experiences and ways to look at the world. Unfortunately, when we meet someone we are busy thinking about their net worth, their weaknesses and how their life stacks up against our own. That’s because money is the single most important yardstick of success the world understands. Jealousy and our tendency to compare ourselves with others as old as our conscious thought. In addition to being a self consuming cancer, comparison with other people is often an exercise in asymmetric information-we don’t know much about the people we compare ourselves too. People are not comparable, they are just different.
Likewise, as the old saying goes ‘we should not compare apples to oranges’ but we often do. Think about comparing the success a country like Estonia has in digitizing everything. If we start comparing Estonia to India, China or USA and ask ourselves : ‘why can’t India be like Estonia?’ , we are comparing a nation with different DNAs. Analogy is useless in many dimensions.
