The Good Fight is a spin off from legal drama The Good Wife.

The show starts with Diane Lockhart trying to retire from her previous firm but realises that she can’t for bad retirement investments. With some power struggles she later goes on to join a new firm as a named partner.

What I like about the Good Fight is the moral dilemma, ethical stances that these lawyers decide to take throughout the series.

(Spoiler alert)

I love how the show deals with Trump and Trump impeachment trials.

I love how Diane asks her husband whether he voted for Trump before moving in with him. Shows that political views between you and your partner really do matter.

I love that the show allows Luca Quinn to not wanting to disclose her pregnancy for the fear of losing out on existing cases or being treated differently by the partners.

The show unlike other shows deals with the problems that millennial face.

Chapter 1-4:

Ray talks about finding the truth will enhance your life and allow you to make the best decision possible.

Think for yourself to decide:
1. What you want
2. What is true,
3. What you should do to achieve 1 and 2

There are two main things that get in the way of your finding truth: One is your ego and emotions and the other is your blind spots (things that you don’t know you don’t know).

Ray goes on to talk about acknowledging strengths and weaknesses. To quote him

“Successful people change in ways that allow them to continue to take advantage of their strengths while compensating for their weaknesses and unsuccessful people don’t. The important thing you notice that beneficial change begins when you can acknowledge and even impressed your weaknesses.”

My thoughts: I like the part where Ray talks about taking advantages of your strengths rather than being overly cynical about your weaknesses. It’s important to figure out how to overcome or compensate your weaknesses instead of spending a lot of time turning your weaknesses into strengths. I’ve previously spent misdirected enormous amount of time trying to convert my weaknesses into strengths and haven’t been able to do so. Turns out, neither could I take advantage of my strengths, nor was I getting any better on my weaknesses.

Learning from mistakes

I absolutely loved the part where Ray discusses about mistakes his employees were committing. Instead of getting angry or firing them (Bridgewater is an investment firm and mistakes costs millions), Ray started collecting logs of mistakes and thinking about how to avoid more of such occurrences. At Bridgewater, you were fine in case you made a mistake and logged it. You weren’t fine in case you made a mistake and didn’t log it.

Transparency and Principles in any relationships (personal or professional)

Ray explains very nicely that it’s important for any relationship to have principles and be transparent about it to make it work.

Three work principles important were:

- Put our honest thoughts out on the table
- Have thoughtful disagreement in which people are willing to shift their opinions as they learn
- Have agreed upon ways of deciding (eg voting, having clear authorities) if disagreements remain so that we can move beyond them without resentments

My thoughts: The third point is extremely important and can’t stress enough. At CleverTap we have these bonding sessions by Anil Thomas (not related to Clevertap cofounder Sunil Thomas :P ) where he’d mention that for a company it’s very important to have disagreements but there should be no resentments later, in-fact after disagreements everyone should commit to the outcomes of the meeting irrespective of the fact that your suggestions weren’t considered. As a company it’s very important that everyone’s on the same page, only then the company as whole can succeed.

I had always wondered why reading a book isn’t the widely popular mode of entertainment among people. It’s cheap, a typical book costs Rs 150 to Rs 700 and can captive you for anywhere between 4-5 hours depending on the number of pages. Whereas other modes of entertainment, be it cinematic pleasure, travels, among others cost a lot more. Agreed that these are mostly group activities for many. You won’t typically find a lot of loners at the movie theater. Solo traveling is yet to catch on.

I recently came across this blog post and this line struck a chord:
The peak of the joy a medium brings, is right at the edge of complexity a consumer can still comprehend.

And I think that’s the essence of why reading a book isn’t widely popular yet.

2017 has been very generous for me. I got done with physically attending French classes. Obviously there’s more to French and this is where the real learning starts.

However, getting done with the classes freed up a lot of time for me which I decided to commit towards reading books. Within six months I savaged around 21 book, mostly non-fiction. I used to read earlier too, though this time it’s been more of active reading than passive.  I took a lot of notes in Trello and remember a lot more from the books than when I read books earlier. If you’re looking on how to remember more while reading, Shane Parrish has an amazing blog post on it - https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2017/10/how-to-remember-what-you-read/

Not all titles from the 21 I read were worth it. Here’s the list of books I read and recommend:

1. Re-read Thinking fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. I discovered this book back in 2015 I believe and read it but I wasn’t in the right state of mind to grasp its awesomeness back then.
2. If you liked Thinking fast and Slow you’ll love reading “The art of thinking clearly”. In this book the author lists over 90 thinking errors. Identifying the error in thinking is half the battle. It’s of course impossible to avoid all thinking errors. I plan to re-read a few chapters here and then and have purchased the kindle version for it.
3. Work Rules. I love the fact that this stresses how important people are to a company. If you’re an entrepreneur you should definitely pick this up.
4. Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. Way too many people around me recommended this book and I absolutely loved spending time with this one. I couldn’t read it one go and had to let the ideas marinate a little. This book possibly took the longest to be read.
5. Power of Habits. You don’t have to read the entire book but it has some compelling ideas on why having good habits is important. When you’re growing up, you often hear from your parents to not spend time doing unproductive things. I always dismissed those advice. This book puts a lot of things into perspective.
6. Originals by Adam Grant.
7. Rise and fall of nation. This one again took a lot of time reading and give you a nice brief on which decisions affected to the rise and fall of nations. My best take away from the book was that how sudden changes in policies can slow down an economy as businesses will halt investments if there are too many restrictions. Policy changes have to be done gradually. I wish Modiji would read this book.
8. Tools of Titans. This was gifted to me by Samal and I read it in 2016. But I keep coming back to this book. It’s filled with way too many good thoughts and Ideas. I plan to read Tribe of Nations by Tim Ferris this year.
9. Hit Refresh by Satya Nadella. I recently picked this up from Anand’s desk and before I know it, I’ve read through it. I love reading how Satya’s putting empathy ahead of anything to bring Microsoft of new generation. I’ve noticed this in the products that Microsoft brings out these days and is among one of the companies I’d like to work for.

Some fiction I read:

1. To kill a mockingbird.
2. The Kite runner.

There were many books I bought but haven’t gotten around reading them yet.

In 2018, I plan to read more than 21 books. I’m sure more of it would be fiction than non-fiction. For some reason whenever I read fiction it’s difficult to continue reading more than 20-30 pages at a time. Last year I read about three fiction and plan to read more than five in 2018. I’ll try to read sci-fi to see if that makes any difference. If you have any suggestion on sci-fi titles I SHOULD read, please hit me up.

The reason I want to read more though is for the fact that the more I read, the more I feel stupid. There’s so much knowledge available out there and there’s so little I know despite having spent more than three decades on this planet. Reading more just increases my paranoia. It shouldn’t feel like this.

Reading more should increase one’s thinking capabilities but in reality is a source of my anxiety these days.

I never thought I would work in a stressful and fast paced environment. But working under such environment is like taking drugs. The more you do it the more you want to do. (Not that I’m a drug addict but I imagine this is how it would feel).

Over conversations I’ve come to realise that I wouldn’t want to change anything though and I imagine going back to a relaxed job would bore the shit outta me.

Another aspect of it being I don’t see myself retiring at 60. I used to claim that I would want to retire by 40 and lead a peaceful life. However, I don’t see myself doing so any longer just because being a couch potato wouldn’t keep me content. I think.

But then to think about it, the way things are heading I believe one can’t even afford to retire by 60. Unlike our parents generation I don’t see us getting any meaningful pension to lead independent “golden years”. And with our desk jobs it shouldn’t be that difficult either.

I recently read somewhere how retirement age came into existence. Apparently a railroad company in West Canada asked how old is too old to drive a rail and the answer came out to 65. Rest of the world has been using this as a benchmark ever since. By the time I’ll be 65 there would be enough jobs where I just have to command and robots would execute it.

To put it mildly working during our declining years would be expected and feasible.

These are just random rambling.