Engaging in thoughtful conversations with interesting people on WhatsApp may be the ideal form of debate once you transition to a family-centered life with numerous responsibilities. Recently, one such question in a group chat was - What drives human beings?

You can see my answer above and little explain below.

The drive doesn’t need to be big or flashy. It could be a sport you’re playing on weekends, a complicated trip you’re planning with your spouse (complicated is the key here), or the excitement of picking up a new skill (I picked up skiing late in life and, man, do I love it). Maybe one day it’s teaching something new to your kids. It could just be finishing a book that makes you think in new ways. The point is: anticipation keeps us moving.

I’ve also come to believe that happiness is simpler when you keep a small, trusted circle of family and friends. People who matter, who you can be real with. No showoff, no performance, no keeping up with anyone. Just connection.

And then there’s curiosity. For me, life feels full when I keep diving into new interests. It might be experimenting with different kinds of coffee, learning about boats or cars, trying a new sport, picking up a new language, or exploring music in depth or just go deep in your area of work. Not to impress anyone. Not to prove anything. Just for the joy of going deeper into something new. Understanding something deeply and then applying that IRL is the most satisfying thing in the world for me.

At the end of the day, what really drives us isn’t money or status or the need to be seen. It’s the small engine inside that runs on anticipation, growth, and connection. When you live for your own happiness rather than trying to impress others, life becomes less about chasing and more about enjoying.

So if I had to sum it up:

• We need things to look forward to.

• We need to keep learning and growing.

• We need relationships that are genuine.

• And we need to live for ourselves, not the crowd.

That’s it. That’s the engine. Everything else is noise.

And maybe that’s the real question to ask yourself: what’s the next thing you’re looking forward to?

Best,

Rohan

Hello 👋🏽

An algorithm generated the picture you see above. It took me 10 minutes to set up and I can generate anything you can think of in some form. Imagine the information you will see going forward - how will you understand whether what you see is real or not?

In a world where the skill gap is increasing day by day, I wonder what will the social standing of people who are either not a part of such advances or do not understand the latest technologies. Will they become a target of sophisticated misinformation campaigns that will take advantage of them politically, socially, economically, financially, personally, and in countless other ways?

However, I think all new technologies are horrible when they are invented. The stable diffusion technology which I used to generate the picture above may be threatening to artists and creators, but isn’t that how painters felt when the camera was invented or bookmakers felt when the Printing Press was invented?

Check out some examples of what stable diffusion is capable of on 👉🏼 twitter.

Thoughts 🤔

I recently read The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles and encountered a very interesting paragraph -

But maybe, I was thinking as I was driving over the Hudson River, just maybe the will to stay put stems not from a man’s virtues but from his vices. After all, aren’t gluttony, sloth, and greed all about staying put? Don’t they amount to sitting deep in a chair where you can eat more, idle more, and want more? In a way, pride and envy are about staying put too. For just as pride is founded on what you’ve built up around you, envy is founded on what your neighbor has built across the street. A man’s home may be his castle, but the moat, it seems to me, is just as good at keeping people in as it is at keeping people out.

Do you feel the same way about staying put? I couldn’t agree more with this thought and would love to get another perspective.

Success 🏆 and Failure 🔻

I read about an observation made somewhere that talked about how you can be successful in very few ways but you can fail in a lot of ways - just like you can arrange a jigsaw puzzle incorrectly in so many ways but there is just one correct arrangement out of millions. Something along the lines of Tolstoy - All happy families are alike but all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way.

Is this the reason why so many people do similar things to be successful - they study, go to college, get a nice job, save money and retire? Are the very successful people who did not take a defined path outliers?

Her Majesty 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

Queen Elizabeth, the Monarch of Britain, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Jamaica, Solomon Islands, Bahamas, Belize, Saint Lucia, Grenada, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Antigua and Barbuda, Saint Kitts and Nevis and Tuvalu died on September 8, 2022. A historical day indeed.

As a person who moves on in life, I am really excited to see the coronation 👑 of Prince Charles III.

In the last few weeks, I have been involved in a lot of things at work and after analyzing at the end of the month I realized I did not do any meaningful work during this time. This made me recall an article, I read earlier this year, by Cal Newport on Slow Productivity. It is definitely a game-changer.

Building on the idea of System 1 and System 2 in the book, Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, it could be said that short-circuiting our brain to achieve our assigned task would not be at par with the quality of work that was well thought of using our logical brain a.k.a. System 2. Given a high volume of work, our brain does exactly that - it starts finding shortcuts. Quality work especially in science and technology requires you to analyze and understand the problem deeply which requires mental effort. Therefore, the volume of work assigned to you should be limited as human beings are adapted to make good strategies to achieve a longer-term goal not so much for short-term goals.

However, I wonder, for jobs requiring thin-slicing, as Malcolm Gladwell talks about in his book Blink, which would mostly engage System 1, should the volume of work assigned be more? Take police officers for example - they usually look at a person and make an opinion which results in some action. I guess they are pretty good at doing this - would their efficiency decrease if they spent a long time before taking action? Let me know in the comments what you think.

I find this idea of slow productivity applicable in all sorts of ways. In today’s world, where you have enumerable emails to check, blogs to read, work to complete, movies to watch, series to binge, and on and on - taking a moment to enjoy what you are doing right now makes the current task meaningful. For example, while cooking you should not think about taking the trash out or replying to an email - just cook and enjoy it while you are at it. If someone is waiting, let them wait.

Other interesting things I encountered last week

Act now! 🥊

The most difficult thing is the decision to act. The rest is merely tenacity. The fears are paper tigers. You can do anything you decide to do. You can act to change and control your life; and the procedure, the process, is its own reward. - Amelia Earhart

Oh, the Brits! 🇬🇧

The Economist had interesting statistics that the British Economy sank by 11% in 2020, the largest fall in GDP since 1709.

The Internet 🌏

An NYT opinion piece by Farhad Manjoo had a terrific opening for his article - The internet is the most comprehensive compendium of human knowledge ever assembled, but is its size a feature or a bug?

Think 🤔

This blog talks about important lessons from History. I highly recommend reading it. Here are a few that I found interesting -

👉🏼 Unsustainable things can last longer than you anticipate.

During the Vietnam War, Ho Chi Minh put it bluntly: “You will kill ten of us, and we will kill one of you, but it is you who will tire first.” Something similar seems to be going on in Ukraine.

👉🏼 Progress happens too slowly for people to notice; setbacks happen too fast for people to ignore

In careers, where reputations take a lifetime to build and a single email to destroy.

Cheers 🍻

Rohan Singh

Here are two things that I pondered 💭over the weekend.

What do you want in life?

A snippet from the Collaboration Fund newsletter blog by Morgan Housel (Author of the Psychology of Money) -

… Fifty-four years ago… Sunday Times offered £5,000 to whoever could sail solo nonstop around the world … The two men, Donald Crowhurst and Bernard Moitessier, are astounding examples of how the quality of your life is shaped by whom you want to impress. Their stories are extreme, but what they dealt with was just a magnified version of what ordinary people face all the time, and likely something you’re facing right now…

This article will give you a profound sense of how your life can end up in a very different place given what you value today.

I realized I am somewhere between the two extremes that are discussed, but I never realized that it is up to me to balance the two extremes.

Something to think about

If you can do something in the old paradigm you should, but when there is a new paradigm, like the internet, you want to find things that you just can't do in the old paradigm to exploit the full potential of the new paradigm. — Jeff Bezos

I found this thought/quote very powerful while listening to David Rosenthal and Ben Gilbert on the Acquired podcast on Amazon.com. It is a long episode, over 3 hours - but it is interesting and very well narrated.

The Amazon podcast made me think how a new paradigm could have saved so many businesses/companies only if they made the investment to change themselves and get a temporary hit on their profitability. Imagine if Barnes and Nobel went full steam selling books on the internet!

I always loved writing and this is my first newsletter! I hope you like it. Please share your thoughts/feedback in the comments.

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