The Cyb3rSyn Kaleidoscope - Episode 3

NWe are going to cover a diverse set of topics in the 3rd edition of the Cyb3rSyn Kaleidoscope (after a long break) … Let’s dive in.

Table of Contents

• Practical Thoughts about Practical Thoughts

  • A Game of Trade-offs

  • The Stories We Tell Ourselves

• Threat Modeling

• The Great Tragedy of Modern Life

• Karma Yoga for the 21st century

• Two Questions

Practical Thoughts about Practical Thoughts

I met an old buddy of mine after a long while. We went for a walk, and I was excitedly talking to him about the new Cyb3rSyn Community where I’m bringing multidisciplinary thinkers (along with their exclusive books and other content like videos/courses/interviews) together with Tech. Practitioners, executives, and entrepreneurs - to enable interdisciplinary learning and exploration.

He said all that sounds exciting - but when it comes to systems thinking, cybernetics and complexity, tell me what you have done for your own personal life / personal finance perspective.

As the saying goes personal finance is more personal than finance. But, I shared two perspectives with him, which I’ll summarize here.

A Game of Trade-offs

Most of us seek happiness. But in pursuit of that, it is so easy to fall to the trap of optimizing for what’s quantifiable - e.g. net worth for wealth, and ignore other not-so-easy-to-quantify things like relationships, health (including how you feel throughout the day), work/purpose, community, etc. It is not about just one thing, but finding the alignment/balance in all of them.

Systems Thinking naturally invites you to self-explore yourself in more deeper ways. You become more aware of the role of the observer - the perspectives/biases we all bring together with us in the way we view our world.

It makes you question what you desire and why you desire it. It makes you more aware of where you are (and not) drawing the boundaries (in both space and time) and what your values are.

So, you end up striking a different balance in your life. You become aware of mimetic desires vs what you truly desire and what makes you happy - it might be as simple as more unstructured time with your kids vs that Rolex watch.

But, I confessed to him that this is nothing new and the ancient Eastern texts (both Sanskrit and my mother tongue, Tamil) have discussed this extensively. The Ramayana or The Mahabharata are good recommendations for those that read fiction. They also contain a lot of negative advice - what not to do. They talk about the dangers of addiction, envy, leverage, debt, keeping up with the Joneses, etc.

They showcase the folly of humankind via stories, the best and oldest compression technology ever invented. But only to those that know how to use it. The most important part of reading a story (or a book for that matter) is the thinking that follows.

To summarize, this type of thinking leaves you with different trade-offs than you are currently making simply because you become aware that there are more choices available to you than you originally imagined. The change is not just in thinking, but your actions also change. Let’s look at a practical exercise in the next section.

The Stories We Tell Ourselves

We know that “knowing” something alone is not enough. Let’s be real. We all “know” that we must exercise, eat healthy, sleep well, etc. But, only when you try to change yourself you’ll understand the true you. You need to deal with the emotional side of you that tries to maintain the status quo.

For example, when you ask someone what their top priority is and let’s say that it is their health. Now, how do you know if there is a deviation from their proclamations vs actions? For this, we use the lens of ‘values based spending’.

There is only one true currency of life: Time!

But, for this exercise we will include fiat currency as well. Ask them go back in life and look at their actual spending - any online spend tracking/budgeting tool can help you do this:

•  What % of your annual spending is aligned towards this priority? Gym Membership, Personal Trainer, Gym equipment, Eating from fast food vs Shopping at farmer’s market and so on.

• What % of the day are you spending towards this priority? Time exercising, walking, playing a game, etc.

The priority might be different for each of us - family, relationships, work, community, charity, hobby, learning, etc. But, the output of this ‘spend analysis’ exercise will be revealing. We can see our stated preferences vs revealed preferences. You can then think about the underlying reasons to course-correct and continue to steer in the direction you’d like to go.

Setting a numerical weight-loss goal and killing yourself at the gym is never the long-term answer. Sustainable behavior change is very tricky without intrinsic motivation and a change in identity.

Let’s now use the lens of inversion and negative advice and apply them to the discipline of cybersecurity.

Threat Modeling

Gunnar Peterson (CISO at Forter) wrote a good LinkedIn post explaining how the practice of threat modeling in the field of cybersecurity (Good book by Adam Shostack) inverts the focus from functional goals to the things that can go wrong.

This directly connects to the idea of inversion that the multidisciplinary thinker and legendary investor Charlie Munger talked about.

Munger’s advice to our personal life is the same! Threat model your life and avoid the catastrophic mistakes that other people made - it is not uncommon to see rich traders, actors and sports celebrities go bankrupt overnight.

Let’s now discuss what Munger has said about complexity from an organizational design perspective.

The Great Tragedy of Modern Life

Listen to Munger talk about the great tragedy of modern life - bureaucracy:

I have spent the last several years studying this phenomenon that Munger is talking about. I’ve worked in three different countries with vastly different cultural nuances (India, Japan and USA). I’ve been high flying consultant and also a full-time employee. I’ve worked in small companies working directly under the CEO - to very large corporations that went through hyper-growth.

Munger was a huge proponent of multidisciplinary thinking. A few technologists have started to explore similar style of multidisciplinary thinking on management/leadership, entrepreneurship, cybersecurity and software development on the Cyb3rSyn Community.

My startup, Cyb3rSyn Labs, is betting on the idea that tremendous productivity improvements in the 21st century will come from innovations in psychology rather than just technology.

I can't wait to bring systems thinkers and cyberneticians together with Tech. Practitioners. and see what emerges from the cross-pollination of ideas! The Cyb3rSyn community is currently in beta & will go LIVE in Jan 2025. If you haven’t already upgraded, please consider joining them here using the exclusive pre-launch discount link:

I’ll now apply these ideas in an organizational context for the premium-tier customers and:

1. Introduce the idea of ‘Karma Yoga for the 21st Century’ to today’s executives/entrepreneurs by inverting the age-old advice from The Bhagavad Gita

2. Outline the two questions that executives can ask themselves to use as a heuristic to judge how dysfunctional their organization might be.

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