It is important to know how to be "poor" as it is to know how to be "rich"
Learning to accept "poverty" when it comes will make you more self-reliant and appreciative of the simple gifts of life.
During my last semester in Engineering, right after I had finished my final round of campus interview, my professor suggested that I attend a presentation on how to deal with money. One of the approaches he conveyed was the importance to know how to be poor as it is to know how to be rich.
If you know how to be poor with dignity and grace, nothing short of massive financial disaster can affect your peace of mind.
Knowing how to be poor requires developing an instinct for the difference between what is essential and what is only desirable.
It means not getting caught up in what is lacking, but finding meaning in what you have. Know how to live with style and creativity without basing your life on money.
This approach serves as a good reminder in the AI era that we currently live in. For instance, it’s important to learn and know how to write (and think) in addition to using AI for auto-generating content.
Why bother writing an article if AI can do it for you?
Half of Americans now use artificial intelligence large language models like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and copilot, making LLMs the fastest adopted technologies in history.
So, why bother writing an email/essay/article/presentation when you can type a few words and have AI generate one for you?
AI is powerful but writing (/teaching someone) about a topic is one of the best ways to learn. Richard Feynman mastered this skill.
AI is convenient but writing makes you realize that you don’t understand what you’re talking about.
AI is great and many things can be done by tools that write for you, but they won’t help you learn to understand a problem with deep fluency.
If you can’t explain something in simple terms, you don’t understand it — Richard Feynman
Here’s an excerpt of one of Feynman’s lectures:
Feynman was a truly great teacher. He prided himself on being able to devise ways to explain even the most profound ideas to beginning students. Once, I said to him, “Dick, explain to me, so that I can understand it, why spin one-half particles obey Fermi-Dirac statistics.” Sizing up his audience perfectly, Feynman said, “I’ll prepare a freshman lecture on it.” But he came back a few days later to say, “I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t reduce it to the freshman level. That means we don’t really understand it.”
With Love,
Keshav