Morning-After 03 – A case for being selfish.

When I said that I thought the best thing for us is to cooperate and trust each other, it’s not that I don’t think (and believe) cheating is the best outcome event in game theory on a short run. But on further reasoning, I also think that in the long run, it’s better for everybody to co-operate than to cheat. But not everybody has went so far with game theory because some of them are living their lives on a day-to-day basis. In their lives, the longest they can think of is today. I don’t think I can blame them for not thinking past that point. But I think people who can think of that should be the ones who understand it and change their behavior accordingly to correct for these biases.

This is something in India that I have seen, I’ve felt many shopkeepers had shortchanged me in our first transaction, but they corrected it the second time and started doing the kind of business I wanted to do. I guess they use a different kind of Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD) strategy that goes like this. Their strategy is that they defect once, but if you don’t do a tit-for-tat in the next game, they start co-operating with you from there on. They are the people who think of short term gains, but given a second chance, would co-operate. because at that point they realize it’s better for them.

There are also people who would defect even after we don’t do a tit for tat, those are the people who we need to keep away from. There would be a point where they eventually start co-operating. I think that’s a high risk option, but we would never know until we try it out.

I think my PD strategy is co-operate twice in most cases before I think of a tit-for-tat depending who I play it with in an repeated PD experiment. I think I’d rather stop playing after two and write off the losses as learning. I think I’m saying this because if I give away the strategy that people could use to beat me, then I can think of ways to understand better the people who intend to use that strategy while avoiding playing with them.

Everybody we see are in phases of their lives that we once were or may be at some point of time in our lives. We would never know. So why wouldn’t we do the things we would have done if we didn’t know where we would end up in the first place? This thought makes us more just and makes us see some of our own biases and change our behavior accordingly to the way we would like to be treated if we were them.

Karma is a bitch in the long run. We reap what we sow. So in our best interest, it’s better for us to co-operate and give more chances because we never know who can change our lives and whose life we may be changing by our seemingly trivial actions. At this point, we start giving chances to people because we are selfish.

If we want to be in a world that we like to see ourselves in, we have to be selfish in surrounding ourselves with people who share the visions of our “good life”. That way,  one could argue that the people who give the most selflessly are the most selfish ones. That’s probably the only time I think I feel good about being selfish.

So many people wrote me lately, thanks to everybody. Talking to many of you made me look at things in a new way. It looks like this is an experiment to check the reproducibility of existing things (which Science is now doing less often than it should). The worst case is that we might find a way to do things better and change to it.

I also looked up “Believe-in-a-stranger” project thinking that it cannot be an original idea and found the Strangers Project (Check it out, you’ll end up spending more time than you intended to). That’s a project I’d love to redo some day combining it with my current street photography project. I’m looking for collaborators who would be interested in doing it with me. Thinking of it, I guess I also drew some inspiration from Brandon Stanton of Humans of New York, but I never liked to photograph the people whose stories I’m telling because I wanted my pictures to say the story themselves or the viewers to come up with their own stories. But I’m rethinking now, maybe this is part of my evolution too.

I also looked up other BIAS projects thinking that could also not be original. The only other BIAS project was Bayesian methods for combining multiple Individual and Aggregate data Sources in observational studies which made me biased towards my BIAS.

The Believe In A Stranger (BIAS) project – Update 1

This is my first update of my first believe-in-a-stranger project, or what I call BIAS project, the Vicky Project.

I think BIAS is an apt name for it as it has already made me aware of some of my own biases.

These project updates are where I discuss the things that I tried and I think I learned. These are live projects, so any feedback is very welcome so that I can add to or correct for my actions. I’ll also try to draw some parallels between how things are done scientifically in Science and in Common Sense.

Sometimes it takes little or nothing to give a stranger a shot at chasing his dreams. What would we have chosen for ourselves if we didn’t know where we would have ended up? Did we ever think that there were points in our life where we thought we deserved another chance?

This makes us more forgiving and we give more chances to people, both to strangers and the people we know. We start trusting others more. Vicky was one such person in my life. Our first exchange was during an autorickshaw ride, then over our meetings, I realized that he was someone who had the values I liked to see more in the world. I wanted to give him a chance. That was my reason to fund his dream.

When we went looking for places to rent, he chose the smaller and cheaper place because he thought that starting small and gradually growing by trust was the way he liked it. I am happy that he taught me that was the more sustainable way than the “think big” that I am used to (But I also think that one should always think big).

After removing the “To Let” sign!

That’s the empty space we had

 

 

 

 

That’s how the place looks now

He didn’t want to spend a lot on furnishing the place, so he went to the used furniture shops and got some shelves for cheap so that he can keep his things safe and organized.

Storage shelves and the ramp done for the bikes by Vicky

We went to the local tool market yesterday to buy the tools we needed, I was just there to look for some good moments to steal from the market for my street photography project and just to see how he does business with his sellers.

He selected the best tools and we even overspent a bit. He thought (or I inferred that he did so) that by having all the right tools and the good tools, he could do things better and don’t worry about repair maintenance. That’s the first lesson on preventive maintenance. In common sense terms, you get what you pay for.

He said that by buying everything from one person, he would be in a better position for getting the best prices for everything and it’s better to negotiate in high volume trades than in smaller ones. In a sense, he was trusting the shopkeeper to do the same, and in the end it worked out. He told the shopkeeper about his shop and how he might bring more business. He leveraged his future business to get the best pricing now, and he also talked the shopkeeper into giving him a gift for the shop (and he gave us a nice screw driver, the green one next to the red box in the picture). I think that was the start of his trust based business with that guy. And the shopkeeper also wanted his buyers to come back so that he was also gaining from the relationship. That’s how trust based relationships grow.

We bought Rs 14k worth of tools (which would have costed us over 25k in a tool store)

All the tools in a sack

Tools sorted again

The big ones

 

Vicky starting to set up the tools

Business values : Sustainability, Quality control, Cost control, Trust. I guess that’s good enough to start with and stay in a business. Good luck Vicky!

A different kind of Networking – I am taking part in an entirely new way of networking these days. Most things happen by going out and meeting people in India. You go to a tea shop and talk to some strangers about the place you are looking to rent or a place to get something made or the place for buying tools, you always find someone who knows the guy or someone who knows the guy who knows the guy. People are helpful if you ask for help.

Thinking about it, that’s exactly what happens at scientific conferences and big technology events, you find the best people from around the world and try to collaborate with them. In my current scenario, it happens at a very local level.

As much as I like seeing the local businesses grow together by bringing more trust based business to each other, I also think sharing these experiences and learnings with people around the globe makes us think about it and build ideas together. That’s my “think big” thought.

So here I am, saying it’s possible when you start doing it. And also, if I can do this, I’m sure anybody can do better.

This is our total expenses

Rent + Deposit – Rs 13000

Tools + furniture + starting miscellaneous – Rs 25500

Name board – 1500

Basic spare parts – 1100

Rs. 41100 (~ $ 600)

Update

Morning-After 03 – The serendipity of life

It now seems that my life professional life changed with a mistake (well, not the one by which I was born). The one where you royally screw up the the first assignment given to you.

I realized it just after I did that and went “Holy ****, what have I done?”.  It was not the first time that happened to me and I think everyone of us would have had plenty of those moments. But in that particular case in my life, that was as bad as it could get, or that’s what I thought then.

(For scientists, I used a rat microarray on a mouse sample and I was using a wrong array format too. But when I think of it now, those were outdated arrays, something that was gonna be wasted anyway. So the actual cost was of the chemistry and time and as we had labelled sample backups, it was just the time required to do the hybridizations that was lost. In the real world of science, these days would be counted as “pretty good days”, of course I did not know it back then).

As soon as I realized I was wrong, I reported it and ruined the mood (at least for me), for the welcome party happening that night for newcomers including me. That project was taken away from me and I was moved to some low priority projects, the things that only a few people in India were working on, or the things that were really new.

When this happened, I thought I’d messed up really bad and I can forget about the possibility of any growth in the company, but when I look at it now, that incident lead to one of my best learning periods. When stuff that didn’t work eventually got working, more of these things came to me, giving me more room for trial and error and more learning.

I think that’s when I found my love for tweaking things and building things. I can remember of placing the tubes on a custom made adapter (read a piece of styroform) on the vortex inside a fridge to lyse yeast. I was trying to  to simulate a fastprep machine in a cold room which I didn’t know existed until I went to EMBL (thanks to the courier guy who did a random act of kindness by delivering my visa after his work hours when I told him that the visa was for my early morning flight the next day).

At EMBL, I was working with amazing people and having access to all the new technology. But I was not very happy paying Covaris 7 Euros per sample prep for the thousands of samples we had for sequencing, it was like they were making more money from my work than I made. They are the really good at what they do, but what if someone didn’t have the money to afford it? To me, that was a problem that science must be looking at too.

I found an old ultrasonic waterbath and a rotary shaker in the trash from a lab that was moving out and I made a sonicating waterbath with a makeshift rotor attachment to replace the Covaris machine, at least for me, again. Since my competitor was Covaris, I named my machine Lavaris (a hindi word that means heirless) in my lab notebooks, yeah, I do have a poor sense of humor.

That machine did the job virtually for free (because the machine was free and all it took was PCR tubes) saving us over 20k Euros. The quality of the fragmentation was reproducible and consistent so that we started using this machine for most of our uses. It cost us the 2 months it took me to test it to the level that I was confident enough to do my own experiments with that (despite a decent amount of skepticism from my colleagues) 😉

After we tested it, used it for our large projects, and published it, the core facility of EMBL (GeneCore and it’s wonderful people) also started using that machine for their even larger projects. (Does that unintentionally make me a person behind the biggest sh#t project cheaper for EMBL?) I also built a magnet for doing bead cleanups in PCR tubes which is still used in the lab and at EMBL. During these times, I also started experimenting with old lenses and cameras and flashes to make use of the old things that were built to last. I think these events made me realize that I like using existing solutions to solve existing problems.

The reason for this musing is that I realized that my seemingly worst mistake then is what lead me to this thought after a long time. This is what retrospection does, it makes us put things in perspective, or it helps us find an argument that makes ourselves happy, whichever way one wants to look at it.

That’s a morning-after after 8 years.

 

 

Morning-After 02: Evolution

I see

I’d been a recluse for the last 9 months, I haven’t talked to the people who’d been a part of my daily life for the last 6 years. I think my reason was that I didn’t have anything to add to our last conversation and that was gonna be the first question of our next conversation.

This is for all the people I know and want to talk again to, but cannot do it until I finished telling my story since the time we last met, and to anyone who don’t know me yet, but might want to talk to me.

I quit my job in Germany in September 2015 and moved to India.

---

Mid September – mid November 2015 – renovating my tiny house (updates coming soon as too many people have been asking that), learning how to paint walls, mixing cement and building with bricks and working with people who did these jobs for a living. Weeding my farm (well, not really mine) and preparing the soil, working 10-12 hours a day in the South Indian heat. My carpenter was the only person whom with I could have an intellectual conversation during these times.

Life was wonderful, I got to see all the birds coming to the farm and how quickly nature decomposed things in the soil. I saw the starfruits and mangoes mature in my garden and spent my afternoons reading and watching a bunch of parrots devour the fruits and how the ants cleared away the leftovers in the ground.

Learnings : I saw a different life that had an order to it although it seemed so chaotic when looked as separate events. It helped me look at my life as a cascade of events, and recall some of the seemingly-trivial but truly profound conversations, and remember those people and thank them. I think it made me more Epicurean. 

---

November 2015 – February 2016 – A friend of mine calls up and ask, do you wanna start a genetic diagnostics company together?, and I said I wanna know who’s in it before I say yes. I fly to Delhi and on the third day and we “deliberately lost” our third guy, an MBA from one of India’s top B-schools who didn’t seem to care about the reason why we wanted to do the start-up (the original reason was starting a conversation on genetic privacy laws in India and to create more awareness) and he didn’t understand the just way of equity distribution (his logic was, if there are 3 people in a partnership, everybody gets a 33% irrespective of their contribution in building the idea, and my friend and I believed in a more scientific and just equity distribution and we thought it was better to have “the talk” when we didn’t have any money).

We did the market research and negotiations with service providers and got some sample kits shipped from Canada. Then I went on a 2 week travel during when I realized that the startup was taking too much of my time and I was not finding it purposeful although it could have been a pretty lucrative one. We suspended that idea realizing the team was not complete.

Learnings: The whole exercise made me think how morally crippled the system is, or more rightly, how crippled we make it. It made me think how our small actions unintentionally contribute to the very things we are trying to change.

It made me think of sunk costs in a new way. Just because we spent so much time and effort to learn something should not be the reason to stick with it if it doesn’t make us happy anymore. 

It also made me realize that I like doing new things and listening to people, thinking of the nuances and giving things a practical and human touch 🙂

---

March-April 2016 – Working on my tiny house again and customizing some furniture and painting them (when space comes at a premium, one has to think creatively). The worst summer in some years grounded me into mostly reading and going through my archive of street photographs.

I tried to travel and do street photography in India, which I had never done before. But I realized that I could not press the shutter when I saw something interesting. I was in a creative rut or something was stopping me. I am figuring that part and doing something about it now.

Afterthoughts – I was asking myself why I was doing street photography and the answer was, I enjoy doing it. 

---

May-June 2016 – Life in my home town was getting progressively harder because nobody seemed to try to understand my reason for taking a break, but they all seemed to know what was best for me (I should have gone back to Germany or to the US according to them, well meaning people). Then there were some weeks where I thought if I was actually crazy to be doing what I’m doing. I decided it was time to move to a city.

I met a stranger (who is now a very good friend) on the first day of moving to Bangalore who got me into collaborating on developing new learning methods for 11th and 12th grade for a school. Spent some time going back to books and realized how we could do things differently to make learning more efficient and fun. Spent a day in a classroom discussing with 12th grade students and spent a month updating the biotechnology modules, just a hint on the gravity of the issue, the things the text books were mentioning as revolutionary were the discovery of restriction enzymes and genetically engineered Insulin whereas we are planning of synthesizing whole human genomes now.  The curriculum is still the same that I had in 12th grade in 2001. 

The problem was that I had no experience in teaching or making modules for teaching, I had absolutely no idea what pedagogy was. But on the other side I’d been to way too many seminars than a normal person would ever be in a lifetime to understand what works and what doesn’t. I realized it’s called common sense by normal people and pedagogy by experts.

I also met Vicky, a stranger who is now a friend, a mechanic and an auto driver who wanted to have his own motorbike workshop and I decided to fund his dream. Currently, I am also spending some of my time helping him set up his business.

Learnings – I realized I could put things in a logical order and ask questions that help people to think more about their own ideas because I now understand the significance of all the people who asked me some questions while I was in a similar state.

That made me feel that sharing my experiences and writing would help me improve the way I articulate and let me have more meaningful conversations with people.  

I think my decision to start writing also comes from the feeling that I had been limiting myself with pictures alone as my medium of expression, I wanted to add more to it, so I started writing and recording sounds of life. I’ve no idea why I am doing this now, but then I also had no idea why I was doing street photography when I started it. 

I think this is what John Locke meant when he said “Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours”.

---

PS: Sorry for the long post. It feels like the last 9 months had been more eventful and exciting than the 32 years of my life put together, but of course, it is something that came out as a result of those years 😉

 

 

MorningAfter – Meeting new people

Meeting new people is an amazing way to understand how much you have changed and people around you have changed (or not changed, as Vladimir Benes added in a conversation!). I’d been meeting at least 1 new person each day for the last 8 months and maybe 2 per week for the 3 years before that and having a conversation that I can remember. That was a lot of stories and data.

They were from all walks of life, startup founders, garbage men, women who sell themselves for a living, “happily married” husbands who would cheat on their wives but can’t tolerate it if their wives cheated on them. Through their stories, I felt love, pain, companionship, heartbreak, trust and happiness.

That made me think of many people I’d come across earlier in my life and how I would have done certain things differently if I had heard these stories myself at that time. I was doing a lot of analysis of game theory in daily life. I am connecting some dots and sharing my experiences and what I think I learned after looking at them. I am hoping that it might help someone to see things from a new perspective, But I’m already happy that I’m doing what I think I want to do.

I took a break from my normal life 8 months ago where I was already happy, just to see if a change could make me happier. Looking at it now, I am very happy that I made that decision. All these people who I met on the way made me feel they all have a story worth listening to. I had been scribbling down snippets of our conversations in my journal. Lately I thought it would be good to re-analyze those conversations to see things in the light of new experiences. After all, aren’t our thoughts our biggest big data and isn’t preserving our thoughts and sharing them that makes us see things we never saw, hear things we never heard and feel things we never felt? That was the original idea of LifePickle.

But I had to start with thanking the people behind this. I was thinking of making a list of people who I wanted to thank and realized that list was extremely long that it actually made me poetic, (Really Manu, you gotta be kidding me; some of my friends would have said).

When we take a step back and see, our flowchart of gratitude includes all the people who we ever met, the ones who inspired us and encouraged us to do what we think is right, and the ones who showed us how not to be.

Just remembered that when I made mine, I had not thought of the street artists whose works had inspired me the most to try something of my own. I am sorry, my brothers and sisters, you showed me how to do things we like even if no one else cared. I felt good talking to you guys.

Here’s Jan, a stranger who I met during one of my walks in Berlin last year. He told me his story of biking all along the Spanish mediterranean coast with his girlfriend on bikes they put together from trash. I was his stranger. Ah, Berlin, I’ll be back someday for more of your life.

This is how your mobile service provider is charging you for 13 months a year.

 

Something that I noticed after I moved back to India was that all the mobile phone and internet packs in India were valid only for 28 days. Hmm, interesting, I had to do the math.  

365 days/ 30 days = 12.16 months per year

365 days/28 days = 13.03 months per year

Holy ****, that’s worse than I thought.

This is how companies trick us by betting on how bad we are at calculating things when the scales are changed and how unlikely we would be to do something about it. There are behavioral economists working on that front. If they had a 30 day month period, it’d have been easier for us to calculate. Make it 28, it gets a bit harder and as most people won’t bother to think of it, they can safely bet that they can get away with it.

So this is the deal we get, we pay 13 months in a 12 month year for whatever “it” they give us. Let’s do the math on how much money they make out of this seemingly small thing.

Apparently there are 733 million mobile users in India, Imagine everybody pays INR (₹) 100 every month towards their internet and mobile phone (I think that’s a very reasonable assumption to make).

₹ 100 x 733 million users = ₹ 7333 million or ₹ 733 crores or $ 108 million

I spend about ₹ 2000 (₹ 300 x 2 – 2 Airtel SIMs, 300 – Airtel mobile internet, 1300 – MTS 3G USB dongle (btw, if anybody living in Bangalore would recommend the best broadband provider, I’d be eternally indebted)) every month on my internet and phone combined and I guess I can safely assume 10% of the population might be using a similar range.

10% of 733 million = 73.3 million

73.3 million x ₹ 2000 = ₹ 146600 million or ₹ 14660 crores or $ 217 million.

If we just stop counting there, it’s already USD 325 million (which I think is a very conservative estimate). That’s a lot of money and I think the telecom service providers owe an explanation to the people. I’d love to hear from my telecom provider why they are making me pay for 13 months a year.

Not that I think they’d come up with something that convinces me, but I think one should also hear their side; what if we are missing something?

Airtel, Vodafone, MTS, (and everybody else), I’m listening. 

To the people who know how to deal with these things, I’d love to hear if we can do something about this and maybe even sue their asses for unscrupulous business practices to get that money for some public projects. Don’t you think not letting the rich corporates loot our money is one of the best ways to bring more social justice? 

 

 

Morning-after, An afterthought series

I’d been having a lot of reflections and afterthoughts lately. I thought it would be easier for me to catalog it online as my journal isn’t enough for this anymore (thinking of a journal, that’s a habit I picked up from a stranger) and having it cataloged online helps to build more ideas.

People who know me would know how I hate the internet for it’s data privacy issues and how I hate sharing personal stuff on the internet (I am someone who quit Facebook and Whatsapp for 2 years just to prove that point). I exchanged ideas with a lot of new people over this time and realized that the people who were the most different from me were the people who I learnt the most from (not an original idea either). And internet is my window to connect to my network of wonderful people away from me, who share similar thoughts and want to build ideas on it. I decided to write a blog so that I could have more thoughts built upon these ones with other people and refine them or trash them (yeah, I do have a lot of bad ideas).

This is the kind of afterthoughts I have after I look at the things that I have done. I’m gonna catalog them as Morning-afters from now on. These are thoughts that I added to my own thoughts in the past after analyzing the newly available data.

 

Flow chart of gratitude

While I was writing about my believe-in-a-stranger’s-dream, I was thinking of the people who I am thankful to, and I realized there were too many faces more than the ones I had expected to see. It was so overwhelming that I thought of a poem. I’ve never done this before, so forgive me for the quality.

____________________________

Making my flow chart of gratitude

I lay counting the tides in solitude,

so many faces come flashing to my mind,

to me, who were generously kind,

they lent me their hands when I was stranded

they inspired me to look out for the stranded,

then one day I wanted to change the life of a stranger

that’s when I saw it, I was their stranger.

_______________________________

30.6.2014

My first time as an Angel investor to a stranger

I had not written for the past 3 days although I promised myself to write something every other day at least, but now I think the wait to write something worth writing was absolutely worth it. I was being the angel investor for my first believe-in-a-stranger’s-dream.

About 6 weeks ago, I met an auto (call it rickshaw or rick or tuk tuk) driver who lives close to my neighborhood and from the things we talked, I felt that we had a meaningful conversation, the kind that you go home with a lot of thoughts and you wake up with a new point of view and think about your own actions and world-views.

We met 5 or 6 times again and I found his company to be intellectually stimulating as I could see things from a perspective that I had never looked from. Maybe because he was someone from a walk of life whose only usual exchange to me is “Sir, where do you want to go?” and “so-and-so rupees, sir”.

From various bits of conversations, I figured he used to be a bike mechanic for 8 years and quit that because he made more money by riding somebody else’s autorickshaw than working as a mechanic in a workshop. But he was feeling that riding an auto would not give him enough money to spend on renting a place and buying the tools to start his own garage.

At some point, I mentioned to him of my need for a better and brighter bike lamp because Bangalore is so bike un-friendly and he gave me some ideas to do it (people with a need or a passion for developing this, please let me know, we could come up with something for the Indian market, I am already meeting some people). The conversation then went on to an idea of a bike customizing business and he said that it would not be very successful unless you have a reputation as a mechanic, so it’s better to start with a motorbike garage and have a service station and puncture repair for a steady cashflow. I thought he was thinking practically and can think ahead of time as he was already talking of diversification and generating passive income. Some other time in the conversation, he talked about fixing minor things for free as a part of building trust and retaining the customers.

I realized that he was thinking of financial independence and building trust. So he knew the common sense of why do your own business and the best way to stay in business. I could also see the shine of pride in his eyes from the thought of creating jobs for somebody else by starting his own business. I thought these were good enough reasons for me to say I’d support his dream.

Until then, my identity to him was of an aspiring photographer who does odd jobs for a living (it still is) and we were just two strangers turned acquaintances or friends involved in a brainstorming session. I offered to lend him  ₹ 100,000 (~ €1500) for renting a place and the tools and asked him to think about it.

He almost had tears in his eyes when he asked me why I am doing what the people he knew would not do for him. I told him that if he believed he can do it, I trust him on it and I believed I can find people who trust my ability to help people who share the same values as theirs and spread our values together (as I told him I was borrowing money from friends). He said he would do it and the deal was sealed.

We went to see some shops yesterday and we liked 2 places that were about 500m apart, one that had a rent of ₹ 9k and ₹ 50k as a deposit and the other with ₹ 1k and ₹ 10k (for half the size) respectively. I was leaning towards the former as it was closer to the highway, but he reasoned that if we take the 1k place and build a reputation, people would happily travel that 500m to come to him and he could charge them less because his costs are also less. He also said he could rent the place and buy tools for just 50k if he took the latter option. I was happy to realize that he was already thinking like a businessman who values trust and quality and understands the importance of staying lean and profit sharing.

He used to call me “Yasma” (translates to owner or lord, something I’d never been called before and seemed to create a huge gap between two people) when I met him, now he calls me Manu or Bhai (brother), I think I’m already happy with the tears I have when I think of that change.

See

Lately, I had been asking the people who complain about everything if they have done something about anything except complaining, which is usually where the conversation ends abruptly because they just spotted a “friend” they hadn’t seen in ages and say “it was really nice talking to you”. To be honest, I did not know what I was doing about the thing that bothered me the most  either. I was just trying to figure out what I could do about what bothers me the most and do something about it in a way that I enjoy what I am doing and meet people I’d love to meet.

I was thinking about those moments now and realize that I was looking for people who cared about the things that bothered me. I met many of them and had wonderful conversations with them. I was learning more about me and what makes me happy and what bothers me the most. This is one small thing that I did to make myself believe that I did something about the thing that bothers me the most, unfairness.