If you are competing in a professional car race, there are three ways of driving - you could focus on the side-wall or, you could focus on the other cars, or you could focus on the road.

The coaches would tell you that if you focus on the other cars, you will be left behind, eventually. If you focus too much on the wall, you will drive straight into the wall, inevitably. The key for a successful driver is to always focus on the road, especially when you go around a turn.

As the story goes, a pottery teacher divided her class into two groups.

The first group would be judged by the number of pots they produced. They would have to submit all the pots they produced during the term; the best ten pots would be rated A, the next ten would be rated B, and so on.

The second group would be judged on the quality of their finest pot. They had no compulsion to produce more than one pot during the entire duration of the course. They were only required to submit one of their best pots, on which they shall be graded.

Wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it - Herbert Simon

The weather department now has more data than it ever had, yet have less predictability in their forecast than ever. Likewise, despite news available instantly through social media or the 24x7 news channels, it is impossible for us to separate information from misinformation. And the plethora of choices available when shopping online doesn’t necessarily make it any easier for us to find our preferred product.

In this modern world, data is abundant, thanks to connectivity; and the more data you look at, the more noise you are likely to get. More data - like the effect of Marilyn Monroe pictures in the room, on boost in demand - can fool you into building correlations where none exist.

It is a bit counter-intuitive, but more information can sometimes be less helpful in decision making than having less information.

When buying something new, there are always three options - go for the very best that money could buy, go for something nice (moderately expensive but not too obscene) or buy the cheapest possible thing.

Imagine you are buying earphones for yourself. The cheapest reliable ones are readily available for as low as 1000 bucks. You can get ones that work pretty well most of the time for around 2500 bucks. The best in class might cost 5000 or more.

Which ones should you buy?

Some things are worth spending a lot of money on. Others aren’t. Like, buying a designer T-Shirt for daily wear might be a bad idea, even if you are rich.

How do you decide when to break the bank and when to go for the cheapest one?

How trivial the things we want so passionately are - Marcus Aurelius

Back in the days, after graduating from college, I started my first job at Webaroo. The rule was that employees would get a laptop only after they complete six months with the company. Till then, they need to work on a desktop computer.

It was 2006. Laptops were not all that new, but I had never owned a laptop until that point. I desired that Dell Inspiron 15” Laptop so passionately. I imagined that if I had one, it would boost my productivity; I could work from anywhere - from home or a cafe instead of being stuck in the office. I was envious of the folks who had it. I wrote lengthy emails to HR complaining about how the rule was so unfair. I even told my manager how it was the single biggest thing hurting employee productivity and morale (in reality, it wasn’t).