The Bald Beggar Principle

A couple of months ago, while stuck at a traffic signal on the western express highway, it struck me, like a bolt from the blue- there were no bald beggars!

 

A close look at the beggars at the traffic signal showed me that none of them was bald. Once I reached home, I called up friends and family and asked them, whether they had seen any bald beggars, most of them said no.

 

This response set me thinking, on one hand, you have a multibillion haircare industry telling you how to get a lustrous mane. On the other hand, a horde of unwashed and smelly humanity sporting the elusive mane. Who is right? You decide.

 

Net result is that I have stopped using shampoo and make do with soap. Though I tried to follow the beggars completely until my wife threatened to un-mane me. Jumped to comply, as the difference between man and mane is a single alphabet.

 

The above example set me thinking that most of us, follow conventional thinking, even when the contradiction is staring us in our face.

 

Even a cursory look at most important inventions and discoveries will tell us that a whole lot of them were due to mistakes.

 

Case in point can be X-Ray, Play-Doh, Superglue, Velcro, America, Saccharine, etc. The point here is not that we should make mistakes, but we need to see. For example, the implantable pacemaker was invented, when the inventor put in a wrong transistor, that send out pulses instead of recording heartbeats. The inventor then really saw an opportunity and the pacemaker came into being.

 

The difference between the above inventors and others was that they were able to believe what they saw and utilize it. Most of us in these circumstances would have beat our breasts and thrown the aberration out and got back to the grind.

 

Imagine, if the inventor of the pacemaker had done the same, the world would have lost a lot.

 

The Beggar Principle allows us to do the following:

Really see and not blindly believe

See what is available, put aside the heuristic and discover the underlining reality. Do not be swayed by the majority of the money,

Test others’ hypotheses

Just because someone is an expert or has the experience, do not believe what they recommend. Ask for empirical evidence. Make sure their skin is in the game.

The success of a process or service does not promise longevity

Most of the time, the process becomes a strategy. Before the enforced lockdown due to COVID-19, work from home was looked at askance, but today, it is the only way businesses can survive. Also, this will continue in the future until something else replaces it.

Yardsticks need to be relooked at

There are many yardsticks to measure success in business, society or life. These need to be re-looked again to find out if they are relevant today. For e.g.- various ratios to judge companies, banks, and other organizations.

Just because experts say something will not happen, it will not happen

There are too many examples before us. Right from Tsunamis, Subprime etc were events that experts said that cannot happen. 

 

This article is meant to stimulate thinking and observing. The author does not claim to know all the answers.

So, why don’t you go outlook for your own bald beggar?