You cannot grow alone

Story time

Let me tell you what happened today. (Skip story)

The story does not have a lot of significance with the topic but is mentioned for me to relate to the roots of the thought process which I feel are important

Our Wireless & Mobile Networks course in college is being taught by Dr. Mayank sir. Due to college placements going on, there were barely around 5-6 students attending classes of all courses. This is not good, neither for the college or students, but understandably nothing much can be done about it.

Mayank sir considerably told us CRs to schedule and finalize few online classes over the weekend to cover up the course for it to be accessible to all batch mates later on as well. It would help the future batches as well to refer to before exams as course material. 2 such classes took place and it was going good. There were just 2 students who used to reply and discuss in class, remaining as usual were there for attendance. And most still did not even join, but it did not matter as the syllabus was being covered, could be referenced later and those who were serious were attending.

But today, someone started muting and removing those two people who used to engage in class. And obviously sir was bound to be angry. Class was cancelled and CRs were called and informed that classes would not be continued online. I am one of the CRs and I completely agreed with sir’s position. It was no place or time for mischief and him being the most reputed professor of the college makes it even clearer.

Takeaways

He discussed with us regarding the current market situations and other stuff, but 2 important takeaways I realized after listening to him were

• Knowledge is relative
• Only few people take advantage of a low market

These takeaways hit me instantly and they are common knowledge. But very few people inherently realize them.

Knowledge is relative

Like most things in life we humans like guarantees. We don’t like risks or in general chances. Most people would prefer a fixed income rather a chance to win a lottery which might be 1000x the income from the job. Same way we have evolved to measure things absolutely. But the fact always is there is nothing absolute in this world. Einstein proved that physics was all relative, and I feel so is everything in life. But this is fine. It is nature and nature has no mistakes. The issue arises when we don’t have a third party to compare stuff with.

We are born dumb. We learn from our mistakes and we learn from others mistakes. But all this time, what knowledge are we comparing to? our own right. Same way we judge other people’s intelligence based on our’s. A average person might be considered smart for a dumb person and a smart might be considered dumb by a genius. But even when I say this line the words I use have no definite meaning. We do not have a good immortal way to define intelligence. The definition itself is evolving. So then why aren’t we?

Why are people compared collectively when the requirement is specific? Am not sure, but it’s worth realizing

Only few people take advantage of a low market

This one is obvious. If you have even a little idea about how the stock market works, you must know this feeling. After seeing the chart one can always say that buy low, sell high. If we know this then why is it difficult to buy when prices are falling and why aren’t a lot of people making money out of it? It’s because you are in the present. You are making the future and not following the future. There are a lot of choices and a lot of decisions that will impact the same. The important part is that this applies not only to stock market but any market in general. The job market, the supply chain market etc. Just the scale, currency, companies and choices are different. Identify the market and make decisions accordingly.

Well there’s nothing so significant about knowing this that can change your life. But it’s like those cognitive biases. They are not necessary or sufficient, but always good to keep in mind while making decisions.

You cannot grow alone

The final thought which I felt after thinking all this was that as humans we are meant to and cannot survive or grow on our own. This for a fact is something many don’t realize. As the coming generation get more and more isolated for the real world, as more and more people prioritize social media than the social life, the mentality of being self sufficient is growing like wild fire. People do not feel the need of other people. And this is seriously bad. It fades away the cultures, the love, the fun and eventually whatever happiness remains.

This too like many other things I say, apply to a lot of domains. Wherever you are learning something, whatever you are learning it’s always from others. There’s only a few things nature can teach us and that takes time. Rest all we rely on others. Now one could say that the technologies have evolved and have let us communicate and made knowledge reach places where it could once never. But now what? And do you realize why was it built the first place? The fact that it was built to share knowledge at “far off places” implies that we really do not need the technology to interfere whatever communication we had over short distances. If I have bread at home why would I go to the bakery? Same way you know what your friends are doing, you know what everyone is doing, why would you care to go visit him irl?

There is a limit to what a person can do alone, but there are not limits to what people can do together. Think about it, and the next time you get an opportunity, meet you friend, meet you family, discuss ideas with your professor, build some projects with your workmates, do something. Just don’t replace these with anything tech.