I recently published my abstractions. You can think of them as my mental models/principles.
I was hesitant to publish them, but eventually decided to. I dedicated a page on this blog and made it part of the main navigation. Let me know what’s yours.
Sympathy, empathy, and compassion
This morning I was thinking about empathy, it was triggered by a call I had with a friend yesterday where I could’ve been more empathetic. This made me also think about sympathy, and compassion.
I tried to think of my definitions of the three.
Sympathy is about identifying the existence and causality of feelings.
Empathy is having feelings because of someone else’s feelings.
Compassion is taking action/saying something to ease the pain.
You are naive
A friend of mine recently said “I decided to be naive” . My answer was “You are naive”.
Naivete is about knowing unknown unknowns. Unknown unknowns are things you don’t know, and you don’t know that you don’t know them.
The naive kid who touches fire doesn’t know heat exists, and it hurts. And the naive entrepreneur who starts a business doesn’t know how bad things could get until they do.
When we find out those unknown unknowns, we realize how naive we were when we didn’t know they might exist.
Naivete has two interesting characteristics: It is always present, but only realized in hindsight.
There are always unknown unknowns, and because they are unknown unknowns, we can’t find them out, because we don’t know what to search for. This is what makes naivete always present.
And when we realize the unknown unknowns, their state changes from unknown unknowns to a different state. Only then we realize how naive we “were”, which is why we can’t relize naivete in the present. This realization only happens in hindsight.
You might think standing still protects from your naivete by avoiding unknown unknowns. This is a common fallacy, because you might realize your inaction was a result of your naivete trying to avoid consequences that were only in your head. Again, another example of not knowing unknown unknowns.
I hope I could explain what’s on my head. It is a bit hard to wrap your head around it let alone writing it down.
What you don’t know that you don’t know?
Books
My manager wanted to surprise me with a gift of books. He knows I love my Kindle so he went to my goodreads.com profile and bought me 3 books from my “to-read” list. How sweet is this?
I didn’t update my goodreads for long time. It was cool back then during the social media boom. It was nice because it allowed sharing all things books. No wonder it got bought by Amazon.
Luckily, my manager figured out that the list wasn’t updated and he bought me three books of his choice. However this reminded me that I should update or delete my goodreads account. I decided to go with the latter.
I stopped reading physical books. All my readings are now on Kindle. I hate physical books. They are heavy and I can’t hold them for long. Kindle gives me all I want. And I can share what I am reading with the world, which removes the need for a goodreads account. So came the deletion.
On the other side I decided to list all the books I read & listened to. You can check the full list at the end of this post. This will save me time whenever someone asks me to recommend a book.
My takeaways from listing these books is that I read a lot about psychology. I deeply care about understanding the people & the world around me. I like books that are thought provoking, and books that carry a contrarian thought.
My biggest two authors are Dan Ariely & Malcolm Gladwell.
Gladwell was recommended to me by Amr Samir. The first book I read by him was Outliers. Since then I read all his books except blink. I know he is being criticized for using his amazing storytelling abilities to convey messages that may not be scientifically proven or using weak studies. Still, something is captivating about his writings. And it gets better if you listen to his books. He reads them himself. You feel the excitement in his voice.
Dan Ariely I think was recommended by Ahmed Essam, or Amr Samir. I don’t really remember. Dan’s books are revealing. They show you how many of what you think about human behavior is wrong through simple experimentation and observations. I recommend reading Predictably Irrational as a start.
Another takeaway is that I read four books about social media marketing. Those were from my days at Microsoft where I was doing smm. Once I left I stopped reading about the topic.
Here is a link to the full list: http://mostafanageeb.com/books/