Half A Thought

In this interview, David Perell aka "The Writing Guy" and host of The North Star Podcast discusses effective techniques to think, write, and create content, while also offering life advice, productivity tips, and ideation strategies. 

We realize that one of the most important things about being human is that we are able to express ourselves in different ways. Here, we just break the surface of the ways in which we express ourselves: words, speeches, accents, writing and many more. Join us for our first steps into better understanding expression. Welcome.

"When I get ready to talk to people, I spend two thirds the time of thinking what they want to hear and one-third thinking about what I want to say" - Abraham Lincoln. Speeches are some of the most inspirational forms of communication, and here, we choose two speeches that have great meaning to us. In this episode, we try and uncover something more to speeches than just them being said. 

In this episode, we talk about what makes our accents unique and why, in general, accents make a difference in our way of expression. 

We talk about how Abhinav has been unproductive this week -- it all starts with a TV show. We then talk about the importance of leisure, why we need to decouple it from work, and why we should not associate guilt with "unproductivity." Happy Quarantining.  

Ali and Abhi explore the subtle nuances about love by looking at the concept of "Love is Blind," a Netflix show in which partners choose each other on the basis of their conversation. The key struggle: Does the quality of conversation supersede physical intimacy as a criterion for sustainable love?

We talk about why we underestimate risks until they actually hit us, how we can adapt to change and not be resistant to it, and why we should plan things out in peacetime. 

I talk about a new concept I'd thought about -- The Habit Gradient -- that rethinks our habits, not as discrete things but continuous variables. Then, Ali and I talk about how we can re-examine our relationship with productivity, and continue with "Finite and Infinite Games," a concept popularized by Simon Sinek. 

We are untrained to deal with time-abundance when time is not a scarce commodity anymore. In this episode, we talk about specific strategies, tips, and ideas, along with the challenges of making good use of time in this quarantine-time.

COVID-19 is the one black swan event that has drawn more attention than Trump’s twitter feed. In this episode, Arth and I share some thoughts on life, explore COVID-19's economic impacts, and think about how quarantined campuses and the sudden change in our lives can help us rethink habits, life, purpose, and of course, meaning itself.