Financial independence and running a freelancing business has narrowed the field that I read. In those days when I worked for other people, I read books on running businesses and office politics, it feels quite good that I can free up some of the mindshare to read more deeply into quantitative finance and technology.
Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte is a fairly nice read with interesting ramifications for knowledge workers. I enjoyed this book and will be putting in several articles to blog on it.
I think one surprising point of personal improvement is to simple ask ourselves, what are the big questions we are grappling right now ? In this world where folks are narcissistically trying to increase personal pleasure and reduce personal pain, refocusing on the big questions about life can bring more focus into what the modern knowledge worker is trying to do. I think this is particularly relevant in an era where younger Millenials / Gen Z are trying to focus on mental health / doing fuck'all / lying flat, when older Millenials / Gen X are too busy sipping champagne, spending their money on expensive holidays, and accusing some other generation of being lazy and self-entitled.
Seems like in all cases, Millenials seems to be root of their own problems.
In this book, the author recommends that all knowledge workers prepare about a dozen questions that they'd like answered. This is almost like the GP papers that A level students will have to do except the answers may take a lifetime to answer. A dozen questions is too much, but I think having 2-3 questions is more reasonable. While the author does not have a system to qualify these questions, I think it's worth applying the ikigai framework as a test to see whether it is worth solving - we should be asking ourselves whether answering the questions is profitable, desirable, something you enjoy working on, and something you can credibly solve one day.
Once you have these great questions embedded in year head, you will automatically employ a cross-disciplinary approach looking at it. Solving good questions often require mental models and skills from multiple disciplines.
It's fairly obvious what question I was fixated with in my 20s and 30s.
My question was simply what does it take to become financially independent such that I can decouple my survival from my need to work the corporate world. When I asked myself this in my mid-20s, the IT industry was reeling from the first dot-com crash and the beginning of the outsourcing revolution which eventually took the life of an European colleague of mine.
Everything I did, from earning multiple degrees, building a dividend portfolio, downgrading from economic rice to vegetarian beehoon, dabbling in Stoic philosophy, reading 2-3 books a week, was channeled to answer this one question. And even after solving it for myself, even as I can systematize my solution to teach other PMET, I can't seem to show low income Singaporeans how to solve this problem.
I think a good question or problem will probably not be solvable over a lifetime, so I'm not beating myself up over this, I just keep improving my knowledge over time.
There are other questions that animate me and would motivate make me expend sufficient effort to solve it if the opportunity arises :
- What will it take for Singapore society to do away with commissioned salespersons in the financial advisory industry?
- How can we increase the conscientiousness of ourselves and our children?
In my second part of the review of this book, I will talk about the multi-million dollar question of how to infuse conscientiousness into someone.
In the meantime, feel free to share the big questions you are currently looking at.
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