Poke the Box: Think Like a Child

Let’s Start with Safal Niveshak
Just in case you missed any of this on Safal Niveshak over the last few weeks…

• Here are 36 lessons from 36 years of my life. And here’s the 37th.
• The legendary Howard Marks on contrarianism.
• Lesson from a 2,000-year-old Stoic philosopher on what to read in investing.
• Is maximizing shareholder value a dumb idea?

Book Worm
The Pleasure of Finding Things Out is a collection of short works from American physicist Richard Feynman, including interviews, speeches, lectures, and printed articles. A sweeping, wide-ranging collection, it presents an intimate and fascinating view of a life in science. From Feynman’s deep thoughts on science in our culture to his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, this book will fascinate anyone interested in the world of ideas.

Here is an excerpt from the book, where Feynman talks about the importance of understanding what you are trying to do instead of blindly following the rules –

My cousin, at that time, who was three years older, was in high school and was having considerable difficulty with his algebra and had a tutor come, and I was allowed to sit in a
corner while the tutor would try to teach my cousin algebra, problems like 2x plus something. I said to my cousin then, “What’re you trying to do?” You know, I hear him talking about x. He says, “What do you know -2x + 7 is equal to 15,” he says “and you’re trying to find out what x is.” I says, “You mean 4.” He says, “Yeah, but you did it with arithmetic, you have to do it by algebra,” and that’s why my cousin was never able to do algebra, because he didn’t understand how he was supposed to do it. There was no way.

I learnt algebra fortunately by not going to school and knowing the whole idea was to find out what x was and it didn’t make any difference how you did it – there’s no such thing as, you know, you do it by arithmetic, you do it by algebra – that was a false thing that they had invented in school so that the children who have to study algebra can all pass it. They had invented a set of rules which if you followed them without thinking could produce the answer: subtract 7 from both sides, if you have a multiplier divide both sides by the multiplier and so on, and a series of steps by which you could get the answer if you didn’t understand what you were trying to do.

Stimulate Your Mind
Here’s some amazing content we have read in recent times…

• List of some amazing books shared by Prof. Sanjay Bakshi.
• Inspiration plus aspiration plus perspiration make for a deadly combination. Read in this nice post on Zen Habits.
• Philip Tetlock on the art and science of prediction.
• Alan Watts on happiness and how to live with presence.
• Read how a checklist investor has crushes the market by 1100%.

Keep poking.

Think like a child.

Be kind to others, and to yourself.

Stay happy, stay blessed.

With respect,
Vishal & Anshul
Chief Pokers – Poke the Box