Karthik Iyer

Tweets are primarily notes for myself.

[Karthik Iyer @skarthik89]

https://t.co/ZKUZLkdDPn

[Mayukh @mayukh_panja]

A lot of smart people I know have given up talking about politics because they understand that all problems are downstream of people not having access to opportunities.

So the most patriotic thing a person can do is create jobs. This can be in many ways and at different scales: running a small company to building frontier tech has might spawn new industries.

And when we have a critical mass of such people and they are enabled, a lot of dissatisfaction will automatically go away.

Money and abundance, and this is probably not a very palatable truth for many, do genuinely solve a huge number of problems.

Ideally we should build a country that has such levels of abundance, that a handful
of exams don’t carry so much weight
- both emotional and material.

[Blake Scholl 🛫 @bscholl]

Request for Startup: Health insurance that lets you self-insure (i.e., cash pay) for small stuff, with reinsurance for extraordinary events.

No claims processing except for extraordinary unpredictable things.

[Karthik Iyer @skarthik89]

@cesifoti Many parts of that description reminded me of India.

[César A. Hidalgo @cesifoti]

Argentina’s behavioral crisis in the World Cup final has brought to light traits many of us in Latin America have internalized and that we need to come to terms with.

In many countries, emotional self-control and the ability to admit mistakes are seen as virtues. A behavioral problem in parts of Latin America is that there are social circles where the opposite is often celebrated.

This is the idea that someone who remains in control of their emotions is a coward or, depending on the situation, a traitor.

If someone offends you, your family, your team, the reaction that is celebrated in these circles is not restraint but flipping the table. The more berserk you go, the more you show that you care. That is a harmful value to hold, and also, one that many of us once shared. I certainly had it internalized when I left Chile 20+ years ago. In fact, I’ve spent much of my adult life trying to unlearn what I grew up believing was the socially acceptable behavior.

The second trait is an unwillingness to admit mistakes. You can always find an excuse, move the goalposts, or, once again, start a fight instead of publicly accepting that you’ve made a mistake. Admitting fault is a sign of weakness. Defending a losing position is a symbol of courage or, in sports, a test of loyalty.

Together, these two traits are behavioral dynamite. People explode because they cannot admit fault, and double down. Instead of learning from their mistakes, they become prisoners of them.

I grew up watching football with my father. When I was 10 or so, I was learning what was right and wrong from the way he interpreted the game. This included behavior both on and off the field. Only later in life did I realize that every penalty he called for, or contested, had little to do with the play itself. Whether a call was fair depended entirely on which team benefited. He was happy if his team received a nonexistent penalty or an opposing player got an undeserved red card.

These traits are among the things that pushed me away from the continent. They are certainly not exclusive to Latin America or the Southern Cone. I’ve encountered them in people all over the world. In an important sense, these are behaviors that all of us exhibit as children. What strikes me as unusual from the place I am from is having been part of social circles where these behaviors were not seen as flaws of character but as virtues to be admired, celebrated, and enforced.

These excessive forms of pride are not conducive to learning. They make it psychologically difficult to update one’s beliefs, accept responsibility, or improve. Although they become particularly visible in sports, they are by no means confined to them.

Something I am proud to have learned is to apologize quickly and often. Not because it is too difficult, but because it was like learning a new language at old age. That doesn’t mean becoming a pushover. But I’ve learned that a man who never apologizes cannot be a man of integrity, because we all make mistakes.

Argentina’s behavior on and off the field during the World Cup final was, to me, a particularly blatant expression of values that many people continue to defend. In some circles, these attitudes have become intertwined with ideas of national identity and loyalty. Yet they are shackles that ultimately limit our development, not because they make us lose a football match, but because they make it harder for us to learn from our mistakes.

The right thing to do now is the least likely: offer an honest apology. If my interpretation is even partially correct, we are more likely to see the opposite. Never back down. Never apologize. Never control your emotions. There is such a thing as having the wrong values. I hope that one day we can do better.

[Orange Book 🍊📖 @orangebook]

A common mistake that people make as they get older is that they subconsciously lower their standards to accommodate the feelings of people around them. An insecure person is not going to gain confidence just because you became insecure too. Respect yourself, keep aiming higher.

[Karthik Iyer @skarthik89]

@alz_zyd_ I suspect (only because of vibes) that this kind of GDP inflation has been happening for a few decades already.

[Orange Book 🍊📖 @orangebook]

It becomes extremely obvious as you get older that most efforts are wasted:

people spend months traveling everywhere until they realize that building a real home requires the courage to make a choice and commit to it,

they spend years working diligently until they realize that they were in the wrong industry,

they spend decades building a family until they realize that they were married to the wrong person;

in other words, your most important asset is your mental clarity:

if you can simply apply and compound better judgment to your daily life,

if you can simply maintain enough humility to question and improve your vision of the future,

if you can simply avoid the mistakes that the vast majority of the people somehow keeps making generation after generation,

then you are already on your way to experience a meaningful life that will be aligned with your core values,

and walking that journey itself is where you will "accidentally" find your definition of success, wealth, and peace of mind.

[Karthik Iyer @skarthik89]

@orangebook Yeah. Courage is the meta virtue, because other virtues are dormant without it.

[Justin Skycak @justinskycak]

Many activities we associate with school are purely performative.

They pass time in a way that feels like learning, and looks like learning, but turns out not to be learning, once you actually try to measure what was learned.

Watching a lecture to learn a skill is like watching a workout to get abs.

Trying to learn by copying notes is like trying to build strength by letting your spotter lift the weight for you.

These activities might *feel* like learning because the information is passing through working memory.

But the feeling is completely artificial.

Simply having information in working memory is not what increases retention.

What really matters is how the information got there.

The main action that increases retention is lifting information from long-term memory into working memory.

If you bypass that lift, then you bypass learning.

[Nicholas Decker @captgouda24]

I am looking for a partner. If you would like to talk, please do reach out! It’d be really wonderful. Link to the date-me doc is below; now pls pls pls pls algorithm send this far and wide!

[Fahd Ananta @fahdananta]

This is the Canadian immigrant dream

It’s accretive to the society and the individual. If you dont want to adopt some of the values of the place you’re going to then there’s no point of moving

[Sunita Sayammagaru 🇮🇳🇬🇧 @drsunita02]

We Indians should remove the stigma of attending marriage counseling.

So many couples are better off attending marriage counselling and getting to know the root of the problems and trying to improve relationships.

Marriage counselling also gives some clarity on whether to continue with the relationship, live separately or take a divorce.

Relatives are not an alternative for counselling the couple in majority of cases as biases exist.

#MaritalCounselling

[Karthik Iyer @skarthik89]

@lilastories Could not relate to any of the things described here.

[Justin Skycak @justinskycak]

It's incredible how much mileage you can get out of decreasing your cycle time.

Any kind of problem-solving. Any area of life.

Strip out the parts that don't really matter and lock down the parts that do.

Compress it. Compact it down.

Because then that opens your bandwidth for more stuff that matters.

Rinse and repeat.

[Karthik Iyer @skarthik89]

@justinskycak Ah this hurts because I did exactly this and stopped getting better at Math in college.

[Priyanka Lahiri @PriyankaLahiri_]

My mentee Tushar Lost 61 kg weight in 48 weeks inspite of having ankylosis Spondylitis and Type 2 Diabetes

He started with 154 kgs and today he is 93 kgs.

Someone who couldnt sleep with his back straight can now lift heavy, walk 12k steps a day and can swim. Do you want to know how?

[Karthik Iyer @skarthik89]

@jsensarma 😂

[Karthik Iyer @skarthik89]

Tweets like this and still only 10k followers! The connection seems obvious once it has been made, but I had not made the connection myself until I read this.

[jss @jsensarma]

Common people intuit that best people in other countries are pretty useless where they are.

So they would rather take slower growth for higher equity in the outcome. Same tradeoff many bootstrapped founders make.

VCs otoh care only about growth - they get equity via capital

[jss @jsensarma]

Common people intuit that best people in other countries are pretty useless where they are.

So they would rather take slower growth for higher equity in the outcome. Same tradeoff many bootstrapped founders make.

VCs otoh care only about growth - they get equity via capital

[Gurpriya @GurpriyaSidhu]

A lot of people grow up hearing 'we sacrificed so much for you', 'we did so much for you' instead of 'we had so much fun raising you', or 'those were the best years'.

No wonder people want to opt out of having kids given a choice.

Even aunties who want you to have kids will not sell it as something you may enjoy but as something 'you just have to do.'

For generations, kids have not been a choice for parents but duty. Everyone did duty, some did it happily, some did it gruntingly. It shows.

I was talking to an older cousin of mine and it was probably the first time I heard someone say, "I would always say have kids, we enjoyed it so much, I wish we could do it all over again."

That's how you sell the idea of having kids. Not what you may reap off them later, not what you may or may not regret later, but just that raising kids in itself is fun and meaningful.

There are parents who enjoy that process and that's how they talk about it later.