The One Percent Almanack

Wit and Wisdom on Investing, Business, and Life

📚 The Lessons of History

At the beginning of the First World War, 27-year-old British soldier Henry Tandey was serving with the 5th Duke of Wellington’s Regiment. On September 28, 1914 a weary German soldier wandered into Tandey’s line of fire. The German soldier was wounded and did not even attempt to raise his own rifle. Tandey chose not to shoot. The German soldier saw him lower his rifle and nodded his thanks before wandering off.

The German soldier was Adolf Hitler.

Historical research throws serious doubts on whether the incident actually ever occurred. Question is how do you even prove or disprove it? And that’s the dilemma every historian faces — what to accept as historical facts and what to discard as apocryphal account.
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Spotlight: The Illiterate of the 21st century

Michael Schumacher is widely regarded as the greatest Formula One driver of all time. In his career, he has under his belt the most number of World Championship titles, the most number of Grand Prix wins, and the most number of fastest laps.

You could call him the Sachin Tendulkar of racing, which brings me to the fact that Tendulkar himself has been a long time fan of Michael Schumacher. In 2002, Sachin met with Schumi. Both being sportsmen, they must have exchanged a few notes about keeping fit.

Sachin came back astounded with the amount of time that Schumi devoted to just one part of his body: the neck. “He exercises it for one-and-half hours. Can you believe it?” he marvelled.
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📚 Guns, Germs, and Steel

None of the history classes in my school answered what is thought to be one of the biggest and most important questions about human civilization —

Why do some societies advance so much faster and further than others? In other words —

…why were Europeans, rather than Africans or Native Americans, the ones to end up with guns, the nastiest germs, and steel?

Jared Diamond, in his book, argues that societies that had a head start in food production advanced beyond the hunter-gatherer stage, and then developed writing, technology, government, and organized religion. These were the people who developed potent weapons of war and adventured on sea and land to conquer other cultures.

And this early advantage in food production was conferred to these societies because of their geographical milieu. Which means the sequence of events that eventually shaped the modern world, can all be tied back to environmental factors.
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Behaviouronomics: A Few Data Biases

Paras Chopra, an Indian tech entrepreneur, runs a successful (bootstrapped and profitable) SaaS company with annual revenue of 20+ million dollars. Recently he shared his experience related to one of his products. He wrote —

In June, we ran a test on our homepage and while I was looking at conversion rate by segments, I noticed that users from Windows had a 400% higher signup rate for VWO free trial as compared to users using Mac OS X.

Now, that’s baffling and our team spent a good deal of time trying to understand why was that happening. Someone in marketing hypothesized that perhaps Mac OS X users have a better design aesthetic and our homepage wasn’t appealing to them. Was it true?

However, the first conclusions are often wrong, especially when you’re dealing with complex systems.

Consider the case of a stock market investor who goes to a newly opened Mall and sees a long queue in front of a fast-food chain. Being curious, he finds that the fast-food chain is owned by a quick-service restaurant brand that has issued new stocks in a recent IPO.
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Behaviouronomics: How to Actually Change Your Mind

In February this year, when it became clear that Covid19 was not just another seasonal flu to lose steam on its own and people started stocking masks, the world health organization (WHO) declared that masks were required only for health workers. Very soon WHO changed their opinion and said that those who were sick and had symptoms should don the mask and others don’t need the mask. And within a few weeks, WHO changed their statement again, recommending that everyone should wear masks.

This frequently changing stance invited a lot of flak from the people. Some even accused WHO of consciously misleading people to safeguard the interest of certain special people.

In our culture, we hold people accountable for being consistent in their opinions and actions. Especially from politicians, corporate executives and other leading figures.
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