Work and Life

How to Lose Weight in Your Late Forties

The general belief is that it is far easier to lose weight when you are young. In your forties, what you got is what you got, they say. I wanted to put this belief to the test this year. So my new year resolution for 2013 to lose weight. By the way, the 2012 resolution was to take it easy and let go a bit; so my weight at the beginning of the year was about 82kg (180lb). With my unenviable stature of 170cm (5’7″), that weight put me firmly in the overweight category. So this year, I started with a modest target of getting to the other side of 75kg (165lb) and staying there by the end of the year, although my ideal weight is less than 70kg (155lb).

Before we go much further, a word of caution. The program outlined below is something that worked for me, but your level of fitness may be different, and you may need a completely different regime. My regime is borderline extreme. So please use your better judgement before adopting it. If in doubt, of if you have any health conditions, please consult your doctor first.

With that disclaimer out of the way, let me give you the good news first. With barely two months into 2013, I’m hovering below 73kg. I have already recalibrated my target to 72kg, but that’s going to be breached in a week or two. Then the target will have to change to an enviable “don’t lose too much” kind. How did I do it? That, of course, will involve a bit of bad news.

The mathematics of weight loss is pretty simple. In order to lose weight, you have to burn more calories than you eat. In other words, you have to create a caloric deficit. That means you have to know the number of calories in everything you eat. At this point, most of us give up. Who has the time to memorize or look up all that ? Fortunately, I have an easy answer for you. If you don’t know the number of calories in something you are about to devour, and if you feel that it is kind of good, or the portion is kind of small, assume that it has 100 calories. So a glass of juice, a fruit, a small serving of nuts, a slice of bread, a strip of bacon all have about 100 calories. If it is something a bit sinful, assume it has 300 calories. Examples: a scoop of ice cream, a milkshake, a good streak etc. If it is something kind of in between, assume it is 200 calories. Say a latte or a cocktail or a glass of wine. Of course, this counting will never be perfect. It is only an approximation. But then, so are all the calorie numbers you would read up on the Internet. After all, how do they know how big your ice cream scoop or your wine glass is? My point is, it is much better to have a rough idea than to give up and have no clue at all. Besides, the errors tend to cancel each other (as Enrico Fermi used to say) and your estimate is going to be probably much better than you think.

Ok, now you know how to count calories — which is the first step in creating a caloric deficit. The second step is to know host many calories you burn. They say a man burns 2200 and a woman burns 1800 calories a day. I don’t know why this estimate is sexist, but there you have it. The highest caloric deficit your body can tolerate is about 1000. So you need to eat at least 1000-1200 calories, plus about 300 calories more if you work out. But realistically, you will miscount your calories probably by about 200-300 calories, which is something to remember. With a deficit of 1000 calories a day, you will lose about 1kg (2lb) a week, which is what I did in the last 10 weeks or so.

The next part is the hardest bit. How do we shed 1000 calories worth of food? Let’s take a look at a typical day and do a calorie count. (Actually, this was my typical day last year.)

Morning coffee 100
Breakfast (egg, toast, bacon, juice) 500
Latte at work 200
Lunch 500
Afternoon snack 200
Dinner 500
Wine 200
Nightcap 200
Uncounted 200
Total 2600

How in the world can we bring it down to 1200? Yes, we can. Here is my day now.

Morning coffee 0 Scrapped
Breakfast (egg, toast, bacon, juice) 400 One of each
Latte at work 0 Scrapped
Lunch 200 Two portions of fruits
Afternoon snack 100 Some nuts
Dinner 300 Reduced quantity
Wine 0 Scrapped
Nightcap 0 Scrapped
Uncounted 200
Total 1200 Deficit of at least 1000

The main thing is that I gave up coffee and alcohol, and took up Perrier instead (as if to celebrate my French connection). That is what you will have to do as well, if you want to shed weight. I know, I know – you really really need that coffee, or you will feel like a zombie the whole day. You are so stressed out, you cannot unwind and fall asleep without a drink, what’s the harm in that? Well, if you are serious about losing weight, every calorie counts, and you need an iron will.

I also hit the gym four or five times a week, and play badminton two or three times, often both on the same day. If you think that is tough, consider what a black belt test entails – 100 pushups, 100 burpees, 100 squats, 100 kicks and 10 board breakings. Impossible in your late forties, right? A classmate of mine has just managed it. And no, he wasn’t one of those health nuts throughout his life. He says it took him about six months to get to the black belt level. I guess that also calls for an iron will. And an iron will is what some of these dudes have bucketfuls of. Me included, fortunately.

Books, Corporate Life, Quantitative Finance

Trading Platform

A trading platform is a program that enables the front office traders to price and book trades, the middle office professionals to manage the trade lifecycle and risk, and the back office staff to settle them. This definition contains a lot of jargon: front/middle/back offices, booking a trade, trade lifecycle, risk management, settlement etc. Don’t worry, we will go through the lingo in great detail in the subsequent posts. Some of it will become clear in this post.

Trading Platform

First, let’s be clear about what we mean by a trading platform. It is a piece of software that answers to a set of requirements coming from the business side as well as from the software architecture perspective. From the business side, the trading platform acts like the repository of the pricing models coming from the in-house quants. Since most of these models would not be ready when the system goes live, we should be able to add models on the fly. In other words, the trading platform should be incrementally deployable. It should also have built-in sockets to receive and archive market data feeds from multiple providers. In addition to persisting the market data, the trading platform should have a database backend with a robust schema to persist the trade data. It should be able to support regular processes like daily marking-to-market of the trades, flagging fixings and cash-flow requests etc. As with all financial programs, the trading platform should be able to provide indelible audit-trails, coupled with a highly granular access control mechanism. These security and authentication features have become even more relevant in light of the high-profile rogue trader instances of last decade.

All these high-level business requirements translate to architectural choices in the program. The design of the trading platform calls for a higher level of code maintainability than is obvious in normal software engineering, because the banking field suffers from a rather large personnel attrition rate. In order to minimize the key-person risk, we should insist on detailed documentation in addition to sound development practices. The scalability requirement of a trading platform is also more stringent than is common in normal programs. The volume of trades can jump from a handful to hundreds of thousands in a matter of weeks when the system goes live. Similar to that kind of scalability is another requirement — the ability to incrementally add modules to roll out the pricing models originating from the mathematicians of the bank, which calls for a very careful design. The robustness of the system will also have to the very high even at single transaction level. We have to ensure transactional integrity (no half-booked trades, for instance), and zero downtime because, after all, time is money in the bank. The authentication and security mechanisms are to be top-notch. To top it all, the performance has to be top-notch as well. So the design of trading platform is a daunting task from a software architecture perspective.

Why a Trading Platform

The question is not whether a modern bank should have a trading platform. All banks do. In fact, they have multiple trading platforms. The question is not even whether they should attempt to build a trading platform in-house. Again, most modern investment banks do build their own in-house platforms. The question I want to explore here is regarding the advantages and disadvantages of doing so. And to study some of the options when it comes to deciding how deep we want to go in the endeavor of building a trading platform in-house.

The real impetus behind any endeavor in a bank, of course, is money. An in-house trading platform is essential to harness the efforts of the highly paid model quants. In its absence, their mathematical models and implementations will be a confusing mess of prototypes and spreadsheets. A well-designed quant library and a trading platform riding on it can turn them into revenue generators. If the trading platform is built in-house, it offers additional advantages of speediness to respond to transient market conditions. For these reasons, most modern banks decide to invest in at least one in-house trading platform.

How to Get a Trading Platform

Once we decide to build it in-house, we have a slew of choices. First, we can think of extending the existing commercial trading platform. We can ask our vendor to incorporate our models and thus customize the platform. But this option usually doesn’t work out well because it tends to be slow and expensive. Besides, once the modules are developed for us, the vendor might want to sell the system to our competitors as well, unless we are prepared to accept even more expensive terms and conditions. This aspect will pretty much nullify any profit motivations that the bank had to begin with.

Another option is a middle ground of using the vendor’s interfaces (API) to implement our models on the commercial system. Although it might initially look attractive, it’s allure diminishes at closer inspection; once we realize that vendors have no incentive in making it easy for the users to modify the system. If anything, it only increases their support headaches with uninitiated IT managers mucking up the core functionalities. Perhaps for such reasons, vendor APIs tend to be both expensive and incomprehensible. Besides, this route of designing a customized trading platform ends up creating highly-skilled and mobile key persons, with the associated risks.

For ultimate control and flexibility (and for most fun), nothing beats a fully in-house designed trading platform. It can be highly nimble and responsive. But it is also an adventurous and error-prone undertaking. Nonetheless, it is this route we will explore in great detail in my book, and to a lesser degree, in this series of posts.

Books, Corporate Life, Quantitative Finance

Agendas

In the dog-eat-dog corporate jungle, there always is a hidden agenda. Always. In writing this series of posts, I have a hidden agenda as well. It is to promote my book – Principles of Quantitative Development. Everything I say here is described in much more detail in the book. And, the book goes into topics that I do not plan to touch upon here – like a review of computing principles for quants, quant developers and people involved in trading and trade lifecycle management. Finally, the book comes with a mini trading platform illustrating many of the principles described.

Hidden Agendas

If these compelling reasons have failed to convince you to fork out fifty or so dollars to order the book from Amazon, consider your own hidden agenda. Why are you reading these posts? You are probably considering a lucrative career as a quantitative professional in a bank. Or, as a junior quant professional, you would like to know more about how the whole thing works. And Principles of Quantitative Development may help you in that quest.

To get back to my point, there always is a hidden agenda, and the associated petty politics. If you cannot play the political game, a bank is not the right place for you. That may sound like bad news to you. Let me give you the good news. Almost everybody is better at politics that they think they are, And almost everybody in the bank, regardless of how high they are, goes about feeling that they are not doing as well as they should, because they don’t play the political game . So don’t worry too much about it even if you fee that you are not good at it — you are probably better than you think you are.

My real point is just that you should be aware of hidden agendas — in day-to-day interactions, corporate memos and announcements etc. For instance, let’s suppose you get a congratulatory email from your big boss about a project you are working on, saying you did an excellent job, it’s going to save or make so many millions of dollars, and everybody is mighty pleased about it. You may also feel mighty pleased about the message, and start thinking of that big break, promotion, bonus, corner office, expense account etc. But it may turn out to be a precursor to letting you go — after all, you did such a wonderful job, and your work here is done!

Topics

Regarding the agenda of these posts, this series of posts will cover the items listed in the picture above. In the next post, we will go through what we call a Trading Platform because that is the arena of Quantitative Development. The next few posts will be on the structure of an investment bank, from the perspective of a quant and a quantitative developer. The structure, in some sense, is the static topology. How trades flow through it will be the subsequent few posts, which will be the dynamic evolution of a trade. As ia trade moves from one department to another in a bank, the players involved use their own work paradigms and perspectives to view and deal with it. It is important to understand these perspectives so that a quant developer can understand and appreciate the myriads of requirements thrown at him. After all, his product — the trading platform — mediates everything.

In order to give you more of a flavor for the workings of a bank, the whole series of posts will be peppered with some little tidbits of information that may read like newspaper columns — after all, I started my writing career as a columnist. In my book, these tidbits are called the BIG PICTURE.

Books, Corporate Life, Quantitative Finance

Off the Beaten Track

Recently, I gave an invited lecture to the Master of Financial Engineering students at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. I thought I would make a series of blog posts out of my talk with the belief that there is a wider audience out there who would like to know how an investment bank (or, more precisely, the structured and exotic products trading side of a bank) works.

Principles of Quantitative Development

First things first. I work for Standard Chartered Bank, Singapore. But the views expressed here in the talk and in this series of posts are my own. They are not influenced by my employer’s policies or client relationships. They are not meant to be any kind of investment or career advice. This disclaimer is a legal necessity before I can say anything related to banking and finance.

Off the Beaten Track

Since the talk was originally given to MFE students, who are expected to be pretty well-versed in the mathematics of quantitative finance, and possibly of computing as well, I tried to tell you something different. In any case, all the mathematics and computing stuff is something you can pick up from any number of standard text books. The stuff I’m about to share with you is something you will learn from only a few books, or by working in a bank for a while. That brings me to my hidden agenda. (Well, not so-hidden after this introduction.) And to the first moral of this lecture — there always is a hidden agenda in the corporate jungle. I will have more to say about it in the next post.

Since this series of posts is not quite on quantitative finance, nor on computing, it is a bit off the beaten track. Hope you enjoy it. In any case, you will develop and appreciation for the “Big Picture”. A few years ago, I published a well received article in the Wilmott Magazine on the same theme, and the positive feedback I received from it was the inspiration to write my book.

In this talk, and in my book, I lay out the foundations of Quantitative Development. Quantitative Developers (who tend to be computer science professionals) are different from Quants (who tend to be mathematicians). Quants tend to develop pricing models or other mathematical tools for the rest of the banks to use, and make them available in the form of prototype programs, or the so-called quant libraries. Quantitative developers make them available in existing, familiar systems (“productionize” them, to use the horrible jargon) so that the rainmakers of the bank can bring in profits. In that sense, their role in the bank is sandwiched between the model quants and the traders, from a functional perspective. If you don’t like that perspective, and would like to have a more abstract, mathematical sort of view, you can think of quantitative development as being in between pricing models and systems (which we will call Trading Platforms very soon). Or from a corporate hierarchy perspective, the job of quantitative developers falls in between the front office and the information technology division, so much so that they can actually be integrated with either one of them.

Life and Death, Philosophy, Work and Life

Home No More

I have been called a lot of unflattering things in my life. One of the earlier ones of that series was that I was hard-hearted, which I countered by pointing out that I was perhaps harder on myself than anybody else. Thankfully, my accuser concurred. One of the recent epithets in the same vein is that I’m cold and calculated, and I use my head to think rather than my heart;  I believe it is a fair assessment. Then again, using my head is the only way I know how to think (which, of course, is exactly the sort of cynical comments that earned me the said assessment.)

Continue reading →

Computers

Missing Events and Photos in iPhoto?

Let me guess – you got your new iMac. You had a recent Time Machine backup on your Time Capsule. Setting up the new iMac was ridiculously easy — just point to the backup. A few hours later, your new iMac is just like your old Mac, right down to the wall paper and browser history. You shake your head in disbelief and say to yourself, “Man, this thing just works! This is the way it is supposed to be!”

A couple of days later, you fire up your iPhoto. It says it needs to update the database or whatever. No sweat. Just a couple of minutes — the new iMac is ridiculously fast. Hullo — what is wrong with the last four events? How come they have no photos in them? Well, actually, they do have something, you can see the thumbnails for a second, and then they disappear. The events seem to have the right number of photos. They even list the camera model and exposure data.

You scratch your head and say to yourself, “Well, may be the Time Machine backup didn’t unpack properly or whatever. May be the version upgrade messed up some data. No sweat. I can use the Time Machine and find the right iPhoto Library.” You fire up the Time Machine — probably for the first time for real. You restore the last good backup of the iPhoto Library to your desktop, and launch iPhoto again. Database update again. Anxious wait. Hey, the damned events are still missing.

Panic begins to set in. Mad Google for answers. Ok, hold down the Option and Command keys, and launch iPhoto. Regenerate thumbnails. Repair the library. Rebuild the Database. Still, the ****** events refuse to come back.

How do I know all this? Because this is exactly what I did. I was lucky though. I managed to recover the events. It dawned on me that the problem was not with the restore process, nor the version update of iPhoto. It was the Time Machine backup process — the backup was incomplete. I had the old Mac and the old iPhoto library intact. So I copied the old library over to the new iMac (directly, over the network; not from the Time Machine backup). I then started iPhoto on the new machine. After the necessary database update, all the events and photos showed up. Phew!

So what exactly went wrong? It appears that Time Machine doesn’t backup the iPhoto Library properly if iPhoto is open (according to Apple). More precisely, the recently imported photos and events may not get backed up. This bug (or “feature”) was reported earlier and discussed in detail.

I thought I would share my experience here because it was important piece of information and might save somebody some time, and possibly some valuable photos. And I feel it is disingenuous of Apple to tout the Time Machine as the mother of all backup solutions with this glaring bug. After all, your photos are among the most precious of your data. If they are not backed up and migrated properly, why bother with Time Machine at all?

To recap:

  1. If you find your photo collection incomplete after migrating to your shiny new iMac (using a Time Machine backup), don’t panic if you still have your old Mac.
  2. Exit gracefully from iPhoto on both the machines.
  3. Copy your old iPhoto Library from the old Mac over to the new one, after properly exiting from iPhoto on both machines.
  4. Restart iPhoto on the new Mac and enjoy.

How to prevent this from happening

Before the final Time Machine backup from your old Mac, ensure that iPhoto is not running. In fact, it may be worth exiting from all applications before taking the final snapshot.

If you want to be doubly sure, consider another automated backup solution just for your iPhoto Library. I use Carbon Copy Cloner.

Photo by Victor Svensson

Work and Life

Eye Catcher

Long time ago, my teenage gang saw a pretty girl whom we called the Eye Catcher. One of my friends in the gang insists that he came up with the name, although I distinctly remember that it was I who first used it. I remember because it was from the last page of India Today of the time, which had a column titled “Eye Catchers.” But my friend has always been more articulate than me, and it is quite possible that he coined the catchy name without any help from India Today.

Time has flown, and today has become yesterday. During the years spanning that age of innocence and now, whenever our gang met up (once a year or so in the beginning, once a decade of late), the Eye Catcher was a topic that always came up. And once, one of us wondered if we would talk about her if we met at the age of fifty, which was incomprehensibly far away then. (Again, I think I was the one who came up with it; may be I like to take credit for every witty thing that happened around me.)

Now with the distant fifty just around the corner, I wonder. Was it the prism of adolescence that amplified her beauty, or was she really that eye-catching? Now, of course, the ravages of time would have surely dulled any beauty she may have possessed, and made cynics of the beholders prompting them to consider prisms of adolescence and ravages of time. I think I prefer not to know the answer. Often the blurry pictures with fading colors are more beautiful than the garish reality in high definition.

It is similar to the scratchy Malayalam songs I listen to in my car. My English-speaking family laughs at me whenever I do. To them, the lyrics don’t make sense, the beat is silly, and the sweet melody of Yesudas is almost gross, like cold pancakes swimming in stale syrup. I don’t blame them. Even to me, it is not just the words and the sounds that bind my heart to the songs; it is the fading colors of the past. It is the faces and scenes that the songs bring to mind, like the smell of June rain, the orange hue of the muddy potholes, and the tall coconut trees against blue skies and white cumulus, gently swaying their heads in assent to whatever adventures the day had in store. And the faces of the simple souls who played out their part on that stage of life and bowed out. Memories of a paradise lost.

But those players played their part well enough to imprint themselves on the songs for good. And with the twilights peeping over the horizon now, I often wonder — what am I going to leave behind? What are you?

Computers

Slow Time Machine with Time Capsule – SOLVED!

Let me guess — you bought a new Time Capsule, set up your Time Machine to back up half a terabyte of family photos and home videos, and expected it to be “hands-free” from then on? Then you got this progress bar saying that it will take 563 days (or some such ridiculous number) to sync?

Your next step was to trawl Google, which would have shown you that you are not alone. You would have tried disk utility to repair your Time Capsule disk, disabled Spotlight indexing, connected your Mac directly to TC etc. Nothing has helped so far? Fear not, here is what you need to do.

First of all, launch your software update pane from your system preferences on your Mac.

Mac Software Update
Ensure that you have this update, which specifically addresses this problem.
Mac Software Update

Here is what Apple says about this update:

About OS X Lion 10.7.5 Supplemental Update
The OS X v10.7.5 Supplemental Update is recommended for all users running OS X Lion v10.7.5 and includes the following fixes:

  • Resolves an issue that may cause Time Machine backups to take a very long time to complete
  • Addresses an issue that prevents certain applications signed with a Developer ID from launching

If it is not installed, click on the “Scheduled Check” tab, and install it. Note that it may be installed as bundled with other updates. So, as long as your Mac is up-to-date, you don’t have to worry too much about missing this particular update.

In all likelihood, this update is all that you will need to fix your slow Time Machine on Time Capsule To verify, restart your machine and launch Time Machine. Give it a few minutes and see if the speed is acceptable (about 10-20 MB a second on your wired Gigabit network).

If it is not, or if you have other reasons for not installing the update, there are a few other these tips you can try.

  • QuickSilver and Dropbox iconsQuit applications that may be indexing the file system. Dropbox, QuickSilver etc.  Find them on your menu bar. Right click on the icons and select Quit.
  • Finder optionEnsure that Finder is not set to show all size. Open a Finder window, hit Cmd-J to bring up these options, and ensure that the Calculate All Sizes is not ticked (despite the fact that it is shown ticked in the screenshot here).

    Note that it is not under the usual Finder preferences, which you would bring up using Cmd-I.

  • Kill FinderThe last thing to try is to kill and relaunch Finder. Click on the Apple logo on any menu bar, select “Force Quit…” to bring up the window show, select Finder and hit the Relaunch button

The last step (of killing and relaunching Finder) has been touted as something that definitely works. So do give it a try if nothing else helps. Another way of killing and relaunching Finder is to issue the command killall Finder from a terminal window.

If these tips didn’t work, you are pretty much out of luck. There are still one more thing you could try, which probably will not work. It certainly didn’t, for me, but gave me a sense that I was “fixing” the problem.

Connect your Time Capsule (TC) directly to your Mac. In order to do this, follow these steps.

  • First, connect your TC to your network, and set it up using the Airport Utility.
  • Disconnect it from your network. (Disconnect the ethernet cable.)
  • Disconnect the ethernet cable from your Mac, and connect TC (one of the three output ports) to your Mac.
Science, Topical, Work and Life

Are You an Introvert?

Here is a simple 20-question quiz to see if you are an introvert or an extrovert. Introverts tend to agree with most of these statements. So if you get a score of close to 100%, you are a confirmed introvert, which is not a bad thing. You are likely to be a quiet, contemplative type with strong family ties and a generally balanced outlook in life. On the other hand, if you get close to 0%, congratulations, I see stock options in your future. And you are a party animal and believe that life is supposed to be wall-to-wall fun, which it will be for you. I’m not too sure of those in the middle though.

[ezquiz]
I prefer one-on-one conversations to group activities.
I often prefer to express myself in writing.
I enjoy solitude.
I seem to care about wealth, fame, and status less than my peers.
I dislike small talk, but I enjoy talking in-depth about topics that matter to me.
People tell me that I’m a good listener.
I’m not a big risk-taker.
I enjoy work that allows me to “dive in” with few interruptions.
I like to celebrate birthdays on a small scale, with only one or two close friends or family members.
People describe me as “soft-spoken” or “mellow.”
I prefer not to show or discuss my work with others until it’s finished.
I dislike conflict.
I do my best work on my own.
I tend to think before I speak.
I feel drained after being out and about, even if I’ve enjoyed myself.
I often let calls go through to voice-mail.
If I had to choose, I’d prefer a weekend with absolutely nothing to do to one with too many things scheduled.
I don’t enjoy multi-tasking.
I can concentrate easily.
In classroom situations, I prefer lectures to seminars.
title: Are you an introvert?
[/ezquiz]

These questions are from Susan Cain’s best seller, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, and a prelude to my review of it. The questions are copyrighted to Cain, and are reproduced here with the understanding that it constitutes “fair use.” If you have any concerns about it, feel free to contact me.

Books, Corporate Life, Work and Life

Quiet Me

I’m an introvert. In today’s world where articulation is often mistaken for accomplishment, introversion is a bit of a baggage. But I have no complaints about my baggage, for I have been more successful than I expected or wanted to be. That’s one good thing about being an introvert — his ambition is aways superseded by the need for reflection and introspection. To an introvert, the definition of success doesn’t necessarily include popular adulation or financial rewards, but lies in the pleasure of finding things out and of dreaming up and carrying out whatever it is that he wants to do. Well, there may be a disingenuous hint of the proverbial sour grapes in that assertion, and I will get back to it later in this post.

The reason for writing up this post is that I’m about to read this book that a friend of mine recommended — “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking” by Susan Cain. I wanted to pen down an idea I had in mind because I’m pretty sure that idea will change after I read the book. The idea calls for a slightly windy introduction, which is the only kind of introduction I like (when I make it, that is).

Like most things in life, extroversion, if we could quantify it, is likely to make a bell-curve distribution. So would IQ or other measures of academic intelligence. Or kinesthetic intelligence, for that matter. Those lucky enough to be near the top end of any of these distributions are likely to be successful, unless they mistake their favoured curve to be something else. I mean, just because you are pretty smart academically doesn’t mean that you can play a good game of tennis. Similarly, your position on the introvert bell curve has no bearing on your other abilities. Whether you are an introvert or an extrovert, you will be badly and equally beaten if you try to play Federer — a fact perhaps more obvious to introverts than extroverts. Therein lies the rub. Extroverts enjoy a level of social acceptance that makes them feel as though they can succeed in anything, just like a typical MBA feels that they can manage anything despite a total lack of domain knowledge. That misplaced confidence, when combined with a loud assertiveness hallmark of extroversion, may translate into a success and make for a self fulfilling prophesy.

That is the state of affairs. I don’t want to rant against it although I don’t like it. And I wouldn’t, because I estimate that I would fall about one sigma below the mean on the extroversion curve. I think of it this way: say you go and join a local tennis club. The players are all better than you; they all have better kinesthetic intelligence than you can muster. Do you sit around complaining that the game or the club is unfair? No. What you would have to do is to find another club or a bunch of friends more at your level, or find another game. The situation is similar in the case of extroversion. Extroverts are, by definition, social and gregarious people. They like society. Society is their club. And society likes them back because it is a collection of extroverts. So there is social acceptance for extroversion. This is a self-fueling positive feedback cycle.

So, if you are introvert, and you are seeking societal approval or other associated glories, you are playing a wrong game. I guess Susan Cain will make the rest of it pretty clear. And I will get back to this topic after I finish the book. I just wanted to pen down my thoughts on the obvious feature of the society that it is social in nature (duh!), and therefore extrovert-friendly. I think this obviousness is lost on some of us introverts who cry foul at the status quo.

To get back to the suspicion of sour-grapishness, I know that I also would like to have some level of social approbation. Otherwise I wouldn’t want to write up these thoughts and publish it, hoping that my friends would hit the “Like” button, would I? This is perhaps understandable — I’m not at the rock bottom of the extroversion distribution, and I do have some extrovert urges. I’m only about a sigma or so below the mean, (and, as a compensation, perhaps a couple of sigmas above the mean in the academic scale.)

Bernard ShawMy wife, on the other hand, is a couple of sigmas above the mean on the extroversion department, and, not surprisingly, a very successful business woman. I always felt that it would be swell if our kids inherited my position on the academic curve, and her position in the people-skills curve. But it could have backfired, as the exchange between George Bernard Shaw and a beautiful actress illustrates. As the story goes, Mrs Campbell (for whom Shaw wrote the part of Eliza Dolittle in Pygmalion) suggested to him that they should have a child so that it would inherit his brains and her beauty to which Shaw replied: “My dear lady, have you considered that it might inherit my beauty and your brains?”