Convincing Ourselves

The idea of having healthy levels of self-esteem, self-worth, and confidence is well recognized in psychology literature. In fact, since at least the 70s there has been a lot of work done on this and for a few decades raising self-esteem and self-worth was considered pivotal in treating clients with psychological disorders, bringing up healthy children, and even success in general. The idea of 'ego strengthening', as it came to be known in hypnosis literature, was ubiquitous in almost all kinds of therapy and change. However, while going through some videos of Jordan Peterson discussing the idea of social hierarchies and going through some literature on related ideas, I begun to wonder if ego strengthening alone is enough, or perhaps have we defined it well enough. Success in a society means being on top of the social hierarchy. You are the CEO, the Politician, or were born in or married into money and power. Whatever shame or form it takes, success is being on to...

This post is based on a thought I had after listening to Bilal Hafeez on his last appearance on Bloomberg, talking about the impact of the coronavirus on the markets. I am not an expert in finance by any means and Bilal is essentially a veteran of the industry. He discussed what many others before him have spoken about as well. Algorithmic trading is now a massive part of global financial markets and trading. The thinking goes that because machines are doing a lot of trading, it is possible that they will make irrational mistakes and make the market crash eg during the recent Coronavirus incident. Modern Algos: Algorithmic trading is essentially now mainstream. The biggest and most successful of fund of them all is the legendary Madallion fund run by Renaissance Technologies. The fund uses leverage but is capped and not open to outside investors. It is arguably the most successful fund of its size. However, RenTech and its many funds are not the only players. Citadel is als...

O ne of the very basis of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is Positive Statements that are used to replace negative statements once they are identified. On the internet, in the self-help space as well as the New Age community, these are known as affirmations. However, I believe those practicing Affirmations can learn a bit from CBT and related therapies such as DBT, and expand the way they talk to themselves. The idea is to give themselves evidence of what they are telling themselves. The simplest way to do this is to add ‘BECAUSE’ after the affirmation or positive statement you are repeating to yourself and improvise from there. For example, if your statement “It's easy for me to eat healthy food”, just add ‘because’ after it…so it becomes “It's easy for me to eat healthy food…because”….eg “I understand the value of health” or “I enjoy healthy food” or “I enjoy taking care of my body” and so on There is really no limit to how many statements you can have after ‘...

The Scam: Ah, law of attraction and other similar self help scams. So common now on the internet and the self help section of any book store. They have tonnes of money by playing on people's emotions. Tell people its easy and they will buy it! This is the same trick used by fitness product promoters and TV commercials and it has worked well for decades. As soon as you find out that this is not the 'answer to everything', you start seeking the next 'quick or easy fix''. Its a dirty trick and plays on our search for easy answers, the magic pills, and the easy answers. They say losing weight is as easy as a few minutes on this machine, or getting rich is as easy as visualizing, and before you know it, you have giving out your cash and realized soon enough that this is not the answer you were looking for. So what gives? is this all fake? is law of attraction or the self help motivational books nothing but a waster of time? Yes and No: There is a lot o...

There is no magic formula to success. We need to work harder and smarter and then there is luck/chance/right place right time. We can not do much about luck but we can surely work on everything else. There are many people who want to be successful in a certain field, but for some reason cant get themselves to be the best. What can we do? Well, as always I believe it is all about convincing ourselves of various truths and realities that we usually ignore. Step 1-Know what you want The first step to being good at something is to know convince yourself that this is something you want to be good at. I once wanted to do a PhD, but my proposal was never accepted. After getting rejected several times I realized that as much as I wanted to be 'known' as a good academic, it is not something that I really wanted to do. I believe I might not have even finished my PhD as I probably would have gotten depressed in between.  To be good at something, we need to give a lot of effor...