Poke the Box

Mental Model of the Week: Self Deception and Denial

“Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true.” ~ Demosthenes

Denial, as the old joke goes, is not just a river in Egypt. It’s proof of modern society’s deepest sins like irrationality and cynicism.

Eric Beinhocker in ‘The Origin of Wealth’ writes – “People have a general bias toward spinning their reality in positive ways and ignoring uncomfortable facts. It takes a real jolt to make them see that everything is not OK.

Jack Welch was infamous for popping the unduly optimistic bubbles of his people, and one of his dicta was that managers must ‘face reality [and] see things as they are…not the way they wished it would be.”

But most of us live a life of constant denial, which is a failure on our part to be able to tell fact from fiction, and, worse, the devastating failure to know ourselves.

In his famous 1974 commencement address at Caltech, American physicist Richard Feynman warned against self-deception: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.”

Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said in ‘Culture and Value’: “Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.”

You see, we have to see the world as it is. Not for what it was or for what we want it to be. Refusing to look at unpleasant facts doesn’t make them disappear.

Often, bad news that is true (like you have lost money on a bad business) is better than good news that is wrong (like you have made money on a bad business that you think is a good business).

So please get over your denial…and stop deceiving yourself!

Poke of the Week – See the Positive

“The Mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.” ~ John Milton

I’m a pretty positive person — I consider it one of the keys to the modest success I’ve had in creating new habits and achieving things in the last few years.

Without seeing the positives in my actions, I couldn’t have begun on my journey of living my passion. I couldn’t have eliminated my debt, or quit my job.

So, I don’t feel that I’m particularly “incredible” – just lucky that I live with a positive attitude towards my life and actions.

Here is what Roger von Oech writes in one of his creative whack pack cards…

Most people have a warning device in their minds to alert them to new ideas. Unless the idea cleanly dovetails into what they’re doing, they’ll react by saying:

“It won’t work.”
“It’s dumb.”
“I don’t get it.”

When you evaluate new ideas, however, remember that your purpose is to help get good ideas produced — not to revel in the beauty of your criticism.

Thus, when you judge new ideas, focus initially on their positive and interesting features. This will counteract a natural negative bias, and help you to develop more ideas.

When you start feeling like the idea of being a positive person is hard to achieve, remind yourself that all it takes is one small step in the right direction to move yourself toward a more positive attitude.

Believe in yourself and remember the most important lesson of all: A positive outlook is a choice that you can always make.

Finally, Herm Albright said – “A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.” 🙂

Mental Model of the Week: Cumulative Error

Do you remember playing the “telephone game” in your childhood where a secret message was whispered from child to child until it was announced out loud by the final recipient?

To the delight of all, the message was typically transformed into something new and bizarre, no matter the sincerity and care given to each retelling.

You see, when information travels through multiple channels – like in the telephone game – it’s easy for some elements of the message to get distorted — by biases, or simple human error.

The effect of the spread of misinformation is called “cumulative error”, like you see in this stock market cartoon…

Living in an age where information can travel across the world in nanoseconds, this concept has never been more real or dangerous.

So, when a company’s management says something, the lead analyst hears something else, his report to the fund manager says something else, the fund manager understands something else, his broker understands something else, the broker’s analyst assumes something else, he blurts out something else to the TV anchor, the anchor – thinking how smart she is – shouts out something else, and you – enamoured with the anchor – understand something else.

If I were to condense the history of stock investing mistakes in a few words, those will be what you just read!

Somehow, we expect information to be faithful to its origin, no matter what history might have corrupted it. And that’s why it is so important to cut yourself from the noise – that create cumulative errors – and concentrate on independent thinking.

This is especially true while investing your hard-earned money, where you don’t just need to minimize mistakes, but minimize cumulative mistakes – those that add up to wreak havoc on your savings.

A joke isn’t funny anymore if it’s repeated too much. The same goes with information. The more you hear the same things, the more they get dangerous.

So please be careful!

Poke of the Week – Failure Liberates Success

“Failure is not something to be avoided but something to be cultivated. … It is a sign of weakness and often a stigma that prohibits second chances. … Yet the rise in the West is in many respects due to the rise in tolerating failure. Indeed, many immigrants trained in a failure-intolerant culture may blossom out of stagnancy once moved into a failure-tolerant culture. Failure liberates success.” ~ Kevin Kelly, author of What Technology Wants.

I have learned a lot of life lessons just seeing my daughter grow up. Like when she was just a year old and was trying to take her first steps and repeatedly fell down, she tried again…and again…and again.

Sometimes she laughed. Sometimes she cried. Sometimes she laughed and cried at the same time.

But she kept trying and trying…laughing and crying. She did not labelled her experience as a “failure”. She just enjoyed it.

Unlike us adults, our babies don’t know the possibility of a failure, so they happily keep falling down until one day they take a few steps, and then a few more. Before long, they’re jumping and running. All their trying pays off.

They fall but never fail.

As grown-ups, what if we also simply choose not to fail?

What if we treat our mistakes and failures as not things to be avoided but things to be cultivated?

Like Warren Buffett said…

“You’re going to make mistakes. You can’t play in the game without making any mistakes. I don’t think about it, I just move on. Most business mistakes are irreversible setbacks, but you get another chance. There are two things in life that you don’t get another chance at – marrying the wrong person and what you do with your children. Business, you just go on. It’s a mistake to dwell on mistakes, it’s unproductive. It’s like Mark Twain’s story about the cat that sat on a hot stove – he never sat on a hot stove again, but he never sat on a cold one again either.”

Life teaches us each day that stuff happens (and sometimes shit happens!), but we don’t need to give each of our experiences a label.

Good, bad, hard, easy, success, failure etc. do not exist but as labels in our minds.

All we need to do to hold our head high is to break through these labels.

Mental Model of the Week: Contrast Effect

Robert Cialdini, in his book Influence, shares a story of two brothers, Sid and Harry, who owned a men’s tailor shop…

Whenever the salesman, Sid, had a new customer trying on suits in front of the shop’s three-sided mirror, he would admit to a hearing problem, and, as they talked, he would repeatedly request that the man speak more loudly to him. Once the customer had found a suit he liked and had asked for the price, Sid would call to his brother, the head tailor, at the back of the room, “Harry, how much for this suit?”

Looking up from his work — and greatly exaggerating the suit’s true price — Harry would call back, “For that beautiful all-wool suit, forty-two dollars.” Pretending not to have heard and cupping his hand to his ear, Sid would ask again. Once more Harry would reply, “Forty-two dollars.” At this point, Sid would turn to the customer and report, “He says twenty-two dollars.”

Many a man would hurry to buy the suit and scramble out of the shop with his “expensive = good” bargain before Poor Sid discovered the “mistake”.

Well, Sid and Harry made their moolah even as the customer thought he got a ‘great’ deal! 🙂

Now look at this image below. The black dots you see are fleeting, and any individual dot will turn white as soon as you focus on it. Clearly, all the dots are actually white, yet at a glance we still perceive some of them as being black.

This is due to a principle in human perception, called the “contrast effect”, which affects the way we see the difference between two things that are presented one after another.

The contrast affect also works when we are studying physical appearances of people. Research investigating attractiveness reflects the importance of physical appearance.

Despite common phrases such as ‘beauty is only skin deep,’ there is no longer any doubt that being attractive has its benefits.

Attractive individuals are consistently treated significantly better than their unattractive counterparts. Additionally, attractive adults are judged more positively in work-related competence than unattractive counterparts, and are perceived as higher in social appeal and interpersonal abilities.

These results hold true even when familiarity is taken into account. Not only are opinions influenced by attractiveness, but behavior towards attractive children and adults echo the importance of being physically attractive.

So if you are talking to a beautiful woman at a party and are then joined by an unattractive one, the second woman will strike you as less attractive than she actually is.

Just look at how big accounting scams are created.

Here is what Ramalinga Raju’s aides at Satyam must have told him before the scam came to light – “If we slowly and gradually over time manipulate the numbers, the auditors won’t notice it.”

Incidentally, in this case, even the auditors were involved! But the Satyam scam did not come to light till Raju confessed of riding a tiger.

You see, contrasts may blind us to change until it’s too late. For example, we often don’t notice the bad behavior of others (like we ignore “small” accounting manipulations at companies) if it goes sour gradually over time. Often we see reality as constant, although it gradually changes.

It is, after all, the small, gradual, invisible changes that harm us the most.

Poke of the Week – Appreciate Your Problem

“That which opposes produces a benefit.” ~ Heraclitus

There was a time when I was slightly overweight and combined with the rigorous daily travel, suffered from a very bad backache. I didn’t feel in control of my health, because I couldn’t give enough time to improve it.

Or maybe the lack of time was just an excuse to not consider my health a priority. Thinking about my deteriorating health made me feel horrible, so I didn’t want to even think about it!

It was a downward spiral, and really hard to stop.

Most of us don’t like the problems, conflicts, and challenges we face in our lives, because these seem like roadblocks in the path of what we are trying to do.

But Heraclitus, as he writes in the above comment, invites us to consider how these problems — the headwinds we face or things that are moving against us — can benefit us.

If you are an investor in the stock market, your current portfolio of stocks may seem like a big problem to you achieving your financial goals, especially given that stocks across the board are falling like ninepins (and those talked about on Safal Niveshak are falling even faster :-))

So, as a result, one of the following might happen:

1. You eliminate the problem by selling duds from your portfolio even while suffering the losses but avoiding permanent loss of capital;
2. You find a few other stocks that are much better businesses and are available cheap after the crash;
3. You question whether you really want to stress out speculating in stocks and would rather learn the rules of sensible investing that will earn you lower short-term return than speculation, but much higher return per unit of stress.

In short, the problem you think you are facing currently can lead you to stop and re-think what you were doing all this while, and thus lead you to something good.

Think about it: the history of discovery and invention is filled with people whose routines were interrupted and who were forced to come up with alternative solutions.

Even America was discovered as a by-product of the Europeans’s search for pepper!

So, think of the biggest problem you are facing currently and positive things you can discover in seeking the solution?

Like, ask yourself this question now – “What would I have been doing if money was not a problem?”

Then, just do it!

Idea Source: Creative Whack Pack

Mental Model of the Week: Second-Level Thinking

Here is what Ben Graham wrote in The Intelligent Investor…

“The art of investment has one characteristic that is not generally appreciated. A creditable, if unspectacular, result can be achieved by the lay investor with a minimum of effort and capability; but to improve this easily attainable standard requires much application and more than a trace of wisdom.”

The ironical truth about investing is that, despite hundreds of rules that guide the practice of being an investor, there is no rule that works all the time, and in the same manner.

Investing is, after all, not like a game of football where the ground and the ball remain the same throughout the ninety minutes of play. It’s more like cricket where the pitch changes its behaviour with every new ball, and the ball changes is shape every time it’s bowled.

So, when you are an investor, the environment in which you play isn’t controllable, and circumstances rarely repeat exactly. What’s most important then is how you behave when others are behaving oddly.

One of the best tools to think and behave better in investing is what Howard Marks calls the “second level thinking”. Here is how Marks explains it in his book The Most Important Thing…

• First-level thinking says, “It’s a good company; let’s buy the stock.” Second-level thinking says, “It’s a good company, but everyone thinks it’s a great company, and it’s not. So the stock’s overrated and overpriced; let’s sell.”
• First-level thinking says, “The outlook calls for low growth and rising inflation. Let’s dump our stocks.” Second-level thinking says, “The outlook stinks, but everyone else is selling in panic. Buy!”
• First-level thinking says, “I think the company’s earnings will fall; sell.” Second-level thinking says, “I think the company’s earnings will fall less than people expect, and the pleasant surprise will lift the stock; buy.”

In other words, first-level thinking, as the name suggests, is what comes to our mind first. And given that our mind is searching for simplicity, in most cases, this kind of thinking is simplistic and superficial, and just about everyone can do it (a bad sign for anything involving an attempt at superiority, like in investing).

In essence, if you wish to perform better than the rest – or in other words, perform better than average – your thoughts actions, expectations, and portfolio have to diverge from the norm.

Most importantly, you don’t have to be just different, you also must get it right…not 100% of the times, but it’s good to aim for a distinction…that is 75%. And for that, you need to practice second-level thinking.

Poke of the Week – Make it Fun

“Those who approach life like a child playing a game, moving and pushing pieces, possess the power of kings.” ~ Heraclitus

Sure, children are stubborn, noisy, and often hard to deal with. But they also possess some of the most fearless and creative minds in the world, a trait that should be made second nature to anyone grown up.

My daughter, for instance, won’t take “I don’t know” for her “Why?” questions. She is fearless in the face of things I consider as daunting – like trying something new.

She will look at everything in a new, fresh way. For her, there isn’t “one right way” do a thing.

To a child the world is a playground and everything therein is a toy. If, as grown-ups, we can look at life, work, and our problems in the same way and then try to find solutions, we would indeed possess power of kings.

You see, there is always enjoyment hiding in what you do, you just have to find it. Start taking a look at your world with a renewed sense of vigour, like a child does.

You will be much happier with the results of your hard work.

The renowned chair designer Bill Stumpf was once asked what criteria he used to select new projects.

He responded – “There are three things I look for in my work: I hope to learn something, I want to make some money, and I’d like to have some fun. If the project doesn’t have the promise of satisfying at least two of these, then I don’t sign on.”

That’s the way to go!

Mental Model of the Week: Base Rates

I heard this recently in a radio ad of a leading insurance company – “For every minute you are stuck in the traffic, we settle five claims.”

Sounds great, right? Five claims in one minute is quite a number.

“But, five out of how many claims that you receive, sir?” I wanted to ask. When I got back home and checked the claim-settlement number, it was around 70%! Now that’s poor!

“There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact,” said Sherlock Holmes.

Then, Bertrand Russell said, “Obviousness is always the enemy to correctness.”

It happens so often in life that we come out with wrong conclusions because they seem the obvious based on a single observed effect.

When someone remarked to the French writer Voltaire, “Life is hard,” he retorted, “Compared to what?”

We tend to ignore alternatives, and therefore we fail to make appropriate comparisons. Often we only consider information or evidence that is presented or available and don’t consider that information may be missing.

In effect, we ignore the base rates, which simply mean that if 1% of the public were “medical professionals”, and 99% of the public were not “medical professionals”, then the base rate of medical professionals is simply 1%.

In the same way, if 2% of penny stocks earn good long-term return, and 98% don’t, then the base rate of success in penny stock investing is just 2%.

Here is what Prof. Sanjay Bakshi said in his interview with Safal Niveshak…

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One of the great lessons from studying history is to do with “base rates”. “Base rate” is a technical term of describing odds in terms of prior probabilities. The base rate of having a drunken-driving accident is higher than those of having accidents in a sober state.

So, what’s the base rate of investing in IPOs? When you buy a stock in an IPO, and if you flip it, you make money if it’s a hot IPO. If it’s not a hot IPO, you lose money.

But what’s the base rate – the averaged out experience – the prior probability of the activity of subscribing for IPOs – in the long run?

If you do that calculation, you’ll find that the base rate of IPO investing (in fact, it’s not even investing…it’s speculating) sucks!

That’s the case, not just in India, but in every market, in different time periods.

What you don’t see can really kill you! And people don’t see the base rates.

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When you evaluate whether smoking is good for you or not, if you look at the average experience of 1,000 smokers and compare them with a 1,000 non-smokers, you’ll see what happens.

People don’t do that. They get influenced by individual stories like a smoker who lived till he was 95. Such a smoker will force many people to ignore base rates, and to focus on his story, to fool themselves into believing that smoking can’t be all that bad for them.

What is the base rate of investing in leveraged companies in bull markets?

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By the way, here are some base rates of dying for different reasons (as per the US National Center for Health Statistics)…

• Hand gliding – 1 in 560
• Grand Prix racing – 1 in 100
• Motorbike racing – 1 in 1,000
• Mountain climbing – 1 in 1,750
• Bicycling – 1 in 140,000
• Running/Swimming– 1 in 1 Million (1 Million = 10 Lac)
• Car driving – 16 in 100,000 drivers
• Motorcycle riding – 21.5 in 100 million vehicle miles
• Airplane – 1.3 deaths in 100,000 flight hours
• Smokers – 22x more likely to die of lung cancer than non-smokers
• Lifelong smokers – 50% die before age 70
• Dance parties – 1 in 100,000

Finally, regardless of all risks, your probability of dying during a given year doubles every 8 years!

So watch out for base rates before making any decision in life (and investing), and please be careful.

Poke of the Week – Take Risks

The leading American entrepreneur, author and public speaker Seth Godin has had a great influence on my life as a writer and thinker.

In his recent book titled The Icarus Deception, Seth writes about the story of Icarus, whose father Daedalus fashioned two pairs of wings out of wax and feathers for himself and his son to fly out of a prison they were captivated in.

Daedalus tried his wings first, but before taking off from the island, warned his son not to fly too close to the sun, nor too close to the sea, but to follow his path of flight. However, overcome by the giddiness that flying lent him, Icarus soared through the sky curiously, but in the process he came too close to the sun, which melted the wax.

Icarus kept flapping his wings but soon realized that he had no feathers left and that he was only flapping his bare arms, and so he fell into the sea.

The Icarus myth is often used as an example of when hubris or over-confidence – of flying too high – can go badly wrong.

However Seth, in his book, points out that there is another part of the story – Icarus’s father Daedalus also told his son not to fly too low as the water could also damage his wings.

As per Seth – “Society has altered the myth, encouraging us to forget the part about the sea, and created a culture where we constantly remind one another about the dangers of standing up, standing out, and making a ruckus.”

However, he writes, settling for too little is “a far more common failing”.

You see, we all have the potential to do great work in life. However to do so, we need to leave our comfort zones – to fly closer to the sun, and to fail sometimes.

If you’re not failing every now and again, it’s a sign you’re not doing anything very innovative.

Looking from another angle, if you’re hitting bull’s-eye every time, maybe you’re standing too close to the target.

Like when it comes to investing, I have a long list of great stocks that I did not buy or sold early, for a simple reason that I feared taking some risk.

But since these errors of omission won’t show up in my profit and loss account, I often ignore them.

The reality is that our errors of omission – not flying high and close to the sun – can be more costly than the errors of commission – flying too close to the waters.

Thankfully, what I omitted – taking risks – in my investing life, I committed in my work life, and that led me to quit my job to pursue my passion.

Ask yourself what stops you from taking risks in your life – not risks based on arrogance and blind overconfidence, but well-calculated risks like…

• Building up a saleable skill that people would pay for, and then telling your boss that you won’t need his services soon
• Telling your boss how his excel-based projections could go haywire
• Starting a business that you have been wanting for years
• Researching businesses and then investing in them independently
• Spending time learning a third, or a fourth language
• Learning how to swim or drive…or cook

Arthur Koestler put it so well – “If the Creator had a purpose in equipping us with a neck, he certainly would have meant for us to stick it out.”

Just answer this question – “What would our world look like if more people moved out of their comfort zones, made a ruckus, and took risks to change their and others’ lives?”

Maybe this could be your permission slip.

Mental Model of the Week: Social Proof

Have you ever been in a situation when you looked at the sky, or at something, just because someone else was staring there? Like in this image below…


I remember playing a few of such pranks during school days, when a group of us friends started looking at the sky and then giggling at passers-by following us in doing so.

It’s another matter that I did not realize then that I was getting the passers-by to indulge in what psychologists call as “social proof”.

As per Wikipedia, social proof is – …a psychological phenomenon where people assume the actions of others in an attempt to reflect correct behavior for a given situation. This effect is prominent in ambiguous social situations where people are unable to determine the appropriate mode of behavior, and is driven by the assumption that surrounding people possess more knowledge about the situation.

In simple words, social proof is all about ‘what-you-think-I-think…what-you-do-I-do”.

Social proof is what is at work in canned laughter – what you hear in comedy shows. The reason such laughter exists is because it causes the audience to laugh longer and more often when humorous material is presented and to rate the material as funnier.

In fact, you will hear the laughter even when there’s nothing to laugh about. I propose they add such laughter to business channels as well, so that people stressed hearing the experts can get a few laughs. 🙂

Social proof applies especially to the way we decide what constitutes correct behaviour. We view a behaviour as more correct in a given situation to the degree that we see others performing it.

Whether the question is what to do with an empty popcorn box in a movie theatre, how fast to drive on a certain stretch of highway, or what to put on the plate at a dinner party, the actions of those around us will be important in defining the answer.

Social proof works to both our advantage and disadvantage. When someone shouts “Bomb!” at a packed theatre, it pays to run with others for safety without being analytical.

It also helps us find books we’ll like (Amazon reviews), restaurants to eat at (Zomato, Burrp), and places to travel (TripAdvisor). We don’t make our decisions in a choice vacuum. Our social circles influence our actions and our purchases, and that’s normal.

Anyways, social proof also works in stock market investing.

Why do you think most of us are always on the lookout for others’ opinions on the stocks we own or want to own?

Social proof is the reason you will find most fund managers owing similar stocks in their portfolios. The thinking is – “If I outperform, I will be a star…but if I underperform, I will be like others!”

But then, Somerset Maugham said, “If 40 million people say a foolish thing, it does not become a wise one.”

You will scold your child who misbehaves and then says, “But everybody else is doing it.” Have you ever scolded yourself for investing like everyone else is doing?

Social proof also works at a bigger level…inside companies. That is what drives most CEOs to act like their peers. So they will acquire companies just because a competitor is doing so. And they will conduct accounting frauds just because many others are doing so!

Warren Buffett on Social Proof
Here is what Warren Buffett wrote to his managers in September 2006, when his peers in corporate America were all under the spell of social proof to justify their misdoings…

The five most dangerous words in business may be “Everybody else is doing it.” A lot of banks and insurance companies have suffered earnings disasters after relying on that rationale.

Even worse have been the consequences from using that phrase to justify the morality of proposed actions. More than 100 companies so far have been drawn into the stock option backdating scandal and the number is sure to go higher. My guess is that a great many of the people involved would not have behaved in the manner they did except for the fact that they felt others were doing so as well. The same goes for all of the accounting gimmicks to manipulate earnings – and deceive investors – that has taken place in recent years.

You would have been happy to have as an executor of your will or your son-in-law most of the people who engaged in these ill-conceived activities. But somewhere along the line they picked up the notion – perhaps suggested to them by their auditor or consultant – that a number of well-respected managers were engaging in such practices and therefore it must be OK to do so. It’s a seductive argument.

But it couldn’t be more wrong. In fact, every time you hear the phrase “Everybody else is doing it” it should raise a huge red flag. Why would somebody offer such a rationale for an act if there were a good reason available? Clearly the advocate harbors at least a small doubt about the act if he utilizes this verbal crutch.

Avoiding Social Proof
How to get over the social proof tendency? Here is some advice from Peter Bevelin’s Seeking Wisdom…

• The 19th Century American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson said: “It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”
• What is popular is not always right. If you don’t like what other people are doing, don’t do it. Warren Buffett says: “We derive no comfort because important people, vocal people, or great numbers of people agree with us. Nor do we derive comfort if they don’t.”
• Disregard what others are doing and think for yourself. Ask: Does this make sense? Remember the advice from Benjamin Graham, the dean of financial analysis – “Have the courage of your knowledge and experience. If you have formed a conclusion from the facts and if you know your judgment is sound, act on it – even though others may hesitate or differ. You are neither right nor wrong because the crowd disagrees with you. You are right because your data and reasoning are right.”

Poke of the Week – Ask “Why?”

“Why can’t I buy that toy, papa?” “You already have another one like that.” “But why can’t I buy one more?” “You won’t like playing with two similar toys. Isn’t it?”

“Why are you saying this?” “I know that dear, because I was a kid myself!” “Why have you grown up, papa? If you were still small, you could have played and enjoyed with me and my toys!”

“Everyone has to grow up, my baby!” “Why papa?”

Why? Why? Why?

If you’re a parent of a small child, you most likely hear this question several times during a day – “Why?”

While all children are inquisitive, there are some who love to prick your brain by asking questions until they find a satisfactory reply from you. My 8-year old daughter falls in this very category of hyper-inquisitives.

I find myself bombarded with her questions every now and then. There are some questions that I have replies for. And then there are many for which I have no replies.

But I enjoy her questions as they most often force me to think beyond the obvious to pull out the answers that satisfied her inquisitiveness.

There is a reason a child asks so many ‘Why?’ questions. And this is something most of us adults don’t understand.

The reason is that when a child asks a question on a subject she is not familiar with, she has no point of reference. She’s coming from nowhere in her inquisitiveness regarding her question.

It’s same as you walking into a space scientists convention. Would you be able to understand the intelligent discussion that’s going on, or even ask a simple question that didn’t give the scientists the hint that that you don’t fit in with the crowd?

I bet most of us couldn’t, because most of us have no point of reference regarding space science. Similarly, a child will continue to ask questions till the time she gets something that she understands and appreciates.

So ask questions. Don’t be afraid to show your ignorance!

Give yourself a license to expose your lack of knowledge about a particular subject, and ask “why is that?”

That’s the fastest way to get a little wiser each day.

By the way, can you please tell me if we call oranges ‘oranges,’ why don’t we call bananas ‘yellows,’ or apples ‘reds’? 🙂