Vision, Leadership and Winning the Lottery - An Open-Ended Discussion

Vision, Leadership and Winning the Lottery - An Open-Ended Discussion

Podcast

In this episode we take a ramble through a number of topics from statistics to value propositions to what we'd do if we won the lottery to Animal Crossing. Enjoy!


Table of contents

In this episode we take a ramble through a number of topics from statistics to value propositions to what we'd do if we won the lottery to Animal Crossing. Enjoy!

Some of the highlights from our discussion:

People struggle with uncertainty and look to draw conclusions from percentages which are probabilistic estimations rather than fixed numbers. Given that it’s not the norm to communicate in terms of uncertainty instead of fixed statements or figures, there is a lack of critical thinking around statistics. This leads to the dismissal of statistics if they appear to have low percentages but often this leads to misleading conclusions – for instance, a 29% that Trump would win the US election in 2016 was dismissed as highly unlikely, but in reality it correlates to almost 1 in 3 which isn’t that unlikely at all.

Vision is a nebulous concept that takes on differing levels of importance at different stages of your business. When you start leading a team of people, it does matter what your vision is because from the vision, you set what your goals are which leads to what your day-to-day mission is going to be. It’s also easier to clarify for certain businesses than others – for instance, Taimur has quite a clear goal with Causal but outlining a similarly distinct vision is more difficult for Ali in terms of finding a succinct summation of his overall business vision.

Asking the question of what you would do if you won the lottery is a good way of ascertaining if you are really enjoying what you are currently doing. The question removes the issue of money and hence focuses the mind as to what you would like to do if money was not an obstacle to achieving that goal or pursuing that path.


Leave us a Review
If you enjoy listening to the podcast, we'd love for you to leave us a review on iTunes / Apple Podcasts. Here's a link that works even if you're not on an iPhone :)

Send us an Audio Message
We really want to include more listener comments and questions in our episodes. If you've got any thoughts on this episode, or if you've got a conundrum or question you'd like us to discuss, send an audio file / voice note to hi@notoverthinking.com.

For any non-audio comments, drop us a tweet or DM on Twitter - https://twitter.com/noverthinking


Listen to Not Overthinking for free

What is this? Not Overthinking is a podcast about happiness, creativity, and the human condition. We talk about things to help us think, do, and be better. Things like social interaction, lifestyle design, mental models...things that are hard to examine, but important to explore. And hopefully, things that make for a fun and interesting chat every week.


Follow Not Overthinking on Twitter: https://twitter.com/noverthinking.

Who are we?

Ali is a junior doctor and YouTuber working in Cambridge, UK. He makes videos about medicine, technology, productivity and lifestyle design. His links: YouTube, Blog, Newsletter, Instagram

Taimur is a data scientist and writer, working on his own startup Causal. He writes on his blog and as a columnist for Medium. His links: Blog, Twitter, Medium, Instagram

Browse Topics

Sunday Snippets

Sign up for Sunday Snippets - my weekly newsletter where I share actionable productivity tips, practical life advice, and high-quality insights from across the web, directly to your inbox.

Join 157,912 friendly readers


Join 157,912 friendly subscribers getting Sunday Snippets every week

You've successfully subscribed to Ali Abdaal
Welcome! You are now a Ali Abdaal subscriber.
Welcome back! You've successfully signed in.
Success! You are now a paying member and have access to all content.
Success! Your billing info is updated.
Billing info update failed.