Ram Writes

Source : Penguin Random House Oftentimes concrete real-world examples or stories help in summarizing a difficult concept.  I came across one such story while I was reading the book Nudge. Nudge was written by Richard Thaler, Nobel Prize Winner for his work in the field of behavioural economics. And the book is about his award-winning behavioural concept. T he story that follows will help you understand what it is. Read on!  Mr.Thaler had prepared a draft introduction about his book. He had intended to explain what his book is about to a friend. He sent an email but forgot to attach the draft. His friend was with Google at that time and wrote back asking the author to send the missing attachment. He added that Google is experimenting with a new feature for Gmail that solves this problem. When a user mentions the word “attachment” but doesn’t include any file, an alert  “It seems like you forgot to attach a file” will be shown. Source:  Gmail I don’t know about you, but this feature has

Loss Aversion Photo by  Peter Feghali  on  Unsplash I hate to lose. I hate it even more to lose my money. I started to invest in stocks soon after I started to earn. I was naïve enough to ignore sane advice. I didn’t do my research and picked stocks when they were ripe at a pretty insane price and eventually, it became sour. I am a bit of a hygiene freak. I don’t even consume apples that have been cut like 10 minutes ago.  I throw them away or give it to others.  I should have done this to my sour stocks as well. But I didn’t. Instead, I held them too long, hoping to sell it at least at the price I had bought them.  I sold good stocks, made a profit and felt happy. I held dear my bad apples. My portfolio was full of bad apples and in red. I sold them off sadly at throwaway prices. But there are still a few bad ones which I cannot even sell. I learnt my lesson, “Throw away bad apples (stocks) when I see one and cut down on my loss”.  Oh, by the way, holding on to the losers hoping to se

Photo by  Alistair MacRobert  on  Unsplash Miller, a Harvard Professor, in the 1950s conducted experiments to know maximum items or things a normal person can remember. It turns out an average person can remember 7 items. Miller called it “ Magical Number Seven ”. Come to think of it, humans have utilized number 7 to the fullest. There are 7 wonders in the world. There are 7 colours in the rainbow, or at least only 7 colours are visible to us, humans. Then there is Steven Covey’s bestselling book “7 Habits of Highly Effective People”. A google search on basically any self-help topic redirects us to a blog or website that more often than not has “Here are 7 ways or steps to achieve whatever you want” listed somewhere in the page. And then we have M.S Dhoni whose jersey number is, well, you guessed, 7. Totally unrelated fact, but ok. And surely there are more than 7 ways to help me remember grocery items but none came to my rescue when I needed them the most. You see, I had listed item