When Breath Becomes Air, and Start With Why
When Breath Becomes Air is a book that I bought five years back. It stood on my book shelf, waiting to be picked up all these years. Till last week, that is. I have been avoiding it for it comes across as a heavy book — one that would make me think about mortality. When I did finally start reading the book, I couldn’t put it down. It’s by Paul Kalanithi, a neurosurgeon, who died in 2015 from lung cancer. This book is his autobiographical account of the time when he was fighting the disease — a fight that he eventually lost. His account is like a checkered wall, interspersed with hope and despair. More despair than hope. When you are forced to face death in the near future, how do you decide to live your life, is a question that Kalanithi struggles with. For instance, he’s told that he could live for a month or for up to ten years. How do you decide to spend your days when the time frame given to you is of such stretched approximations? Kalanithi decided to take up surgery again if he has five or so more years to live. His choice would have been different if he had only a few weeks. This is a book that made me sad and hopeful in equal parts. Sad, for I was reading the account of a dying man clinging to the filmiest of the hopes. Hopeful, for he died acting on executing the wish that he always had — of writing this book.
I found this piece that was published in the WSJ insightful. It explains how the pandemic has impacted pricing strategies. In brief, the article describes how clothing retailers are improving their profit margins by reducing their inventory and offering fewer discounts. The clothing manufacturers are doing so after being stuck early on in the pandemic with inventory that they could not sell (a problem worsened by the supply chain disruptions). Moreover, by doing away with discounts they aim to make consumers buy on the spot than wait for the end of the season sale. Doing more with less seems to be the mantra, at least for this industry.
Though Simon Sinek’s Start With Why is perhaps one of the most read books, I am late to the party. I have finally bought the book, and to warm myself up to it, I recently watched this 40-minutes-long speech by him explaining the core ideology behind his book. If you are living under the rock (as I have been apparently) and have not read the book, then I highly recommend this talk that he has given to a network of entrepreneurs. What stood out in the talk for me was how he connects his Golden Circle (Why-How-What) to how the parts of the brains have developed during evolution. Neo-cortex governs language and logic and emerged much later, while the limbic brain, the ‘old’ brain, governs our feelings and that’s the part of the brain that resonates most when we start with why.
A quote that I came across:
“Desire is a contract that you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want”
— Naval Ravikant
