Lesson 27: Solving Percent Problems: Fill & Download for Free

Call me Asher. This here is me (below).I am a physician, and this is what I learned. In chronological order.I learned that your mental health matters. There is no point to slogging through two years of pre-med only to enter med school suffering from psychological burnout.I learned that just because an adult says something confidently does not mean it is unequivocally true. Pre-med teachers who coach you to get into medical school often spin yarns about what life in medical school is like. Most of them are talking out their arse. They never went to med school themselves. They’re not telling you what life in med school is like, they’re telling you what they think it must be like.I learned that applied human biology has a very different learning rhythm from other forms of biology. You can hate botany and zoology but love medical science. The difference is in the value society attaches to the ability to apply that knowledge to life.I learned that early adversity is an advantage. Ragging/hazing actually prepared me for the maelstrom of harsh expectations and occasional embarrassment my class and I experienced at the hands of our professors.I learned that money cannot buy everything. Those of my class who thought buying their way into med school was an easy way (to get the same experience the rest of us worked hard for) found they were wrong. If you know in your heart you do not deserve it, you will never be the first at the dissection table or the most forward in clinical rounds.I learned that life is one organic entity because all of life is deeply interconnected. If you can understand the reason why something is named what it is named, or why something behaves the way it does, and if you think about this all the time, and learn to recognize it in daily life, you will never need to memorize it.I learned that people who get all their self-worth by borrowing it from academic structures will be perpetually frustrated. Doctors who count their degrees and journal publications are neurologically identical to social media addicts who count their likes and followers and up-votes.I learned that we are all a**eholes at some point in our lives without even knowing it. In fact, our lack of knowledge about it is what makes us an a**ehole. That is inescapable. But it can be remedied by going back to the person and restoring their dignity and making amends.And so I learned that the real winner of a fight is not the person who walks away from it without engaging, but the person who has learned not to keep score. If you tell yourself that you’re too good to fight, then walk away, but spend every waking minute fantasizing about what you would have said or done, then you are still in the fight, in your head. You lose. You need to know this because of the egomania rampant in medicine.I learned that substance abuse solves nothing. If you have a problem, and that problem causes you to drink, or smoke, or drug, or gamble, or f**k, then after you’re done drinking, smoking, drugging, gambling or f**king, surprise-surprise, the problem is still there. And now you have another problem: a substance abuse problem.I learned that death is all around us. And thus, by subtraction, life is all around us too. We just don’t realize it at the time.I learned that today, some moment, when I am least expecting it, just like that, BAM! my life can end. Every single road accident victim I ever autopsied on the mortuary slab had one thing in common. When they got up that day and put their clothes on, they had no idea that this was the day they were going to die. And that taught me……to dress well. I learned to dress well before I stepped out for the day, so if I died that day, I’d at least look good lying on that cold mortuary slab as they cut my clothes off me.I learned that a sick baby is basically an alimentary canal with a big mouth at one end and no sense of f**king responsibility at the other. F**k!! What is their problem?! We should wear brown coats in pediatrics, not white coats.I learned that most of what most people know is not worth knowing. Humans fill their head with garbage. They hold in their hands devices that can connect them with the sum total of the knowledge of their race; but will use it to browse cat memes and stalk vaguely attractive women they secretly know they will never date. This would be all right if it didn’t come at the cost of knowledge that might save their life, such as the fact that Homeopathy cures absolutely nothing or that swallowing supplemental iron tablets daily for no specific reason can kill you. This is because…Humans are mostly stupid. They’re often stupid about stupidity itself. They don’t realize that an education is about learning to think and developing a habit of reading. If they knew that, they would read and form correct conclusions on their own, instead of desultorily demanding the busy doctor explain it to them. But they won’t. They won’t read the links you list for them, they won’t watch the YouTube videos you tell them to. This is because…Humans are deadly lazy. I mean that literally. They will be lazy even if they theoretically understand their laziness can kill them. They will not develop exercise habits when they are young. They will suffer heart attacks, only to be pulled back from the point of death by us, and then will finally do what they should have done six decades earlier: stand in the middle of the gym (obstructing the traffic) in brand new workout gear and shyly ask the nearest trainer to show them how to work the elliptical.I learned that anger solves nothing. Yelling at a human being for knowing useless things, being stupid and lazy does not fix the problem; but just adds one more (return to no.8). I learned that I should say nothing when I am angry, because I will regret it later one hundred percent of the time. Instead it helps to just…Talk slowly and smile often. You don’t need to attend any creepy neuro-linguistic-programming seminars if you can master the basics of human interaction. Look a person in the eye when you shake their hand. Smile at them if they give you a reason to like them. Tell them you like their tie if that is the truth. They will like that. They will smile back. You will like that. You will like them. That reminds me.I learned that humans have an infinite capacity to love but a finite capacity to hate. This is because the former adds to one’s strength but the latter subtracts. If someone who reads Ayn Rand books tells you to never step across a line for someone unless you know what’s in it for you, screw them! Do it! Step across lines for people you do not know without asking what you will get out of it (let that be a surprise). Do this especially for people no one cares to know. Why?Because most of what you are has nothing to do with you. You did not choose your genes. You did not choose your blood group. You did not choose your height or your biochemical predisposition to obesity. So before you fat shame someone, study the biochemical basis of obesity and realize that but for one misplaced codon, you could be them. You could have been born the beggar on the street you walk past but for… wait. Speaking of inheritance, I need to expand on no.6.Not only can it not buy everything, money cannot buy anything of value, with one exception: a great education. Never hesitate to invest in that one asset. That is the only thing guaranteed to accrue over time (if you polish it regularly). This is true for one simple reason, and that is…The geek shall inherit the Earth. The age we live in is called the Knowledge Worker Age. If you have knowledge that allows you to do something that someone without your knowledge cannot do, you have value. You need to know this because you might be a fan of Friends or HowIMetYourMother or any of those secretly terrible sitcoms that make fun of people who are enthusiastic about knowledge. Those scripts are written by people who live on another world called Hollywood. Here on Earth, if you can talk about things (that have real value) with enthusiasm, you’re sexy.I learned that the real world is a more complex place than the most carefully designed simulator. Exam performance tells you some things about yourself. But those are only a small part of the big story of your life. If you make your exams your life, you make your life a small part of what it could have been.I learned that a foul-mouthed person with a sense of honor is a far nicer person that a polite person with no empathy. I would rather live and die beside some of the swearing-cussing physicians who work for Médecins Sans Frontières than beside some of the pastors who run my church.I learned my generation is smarter than my parental generation by virtue of evolution. I’ve learned that anyone who says, “Kids these days have it easy, in my time we…,” is disconnected from reality. We’ve had to deal with much more even earlier. We’ve had to learn to navigate a complex world our parents are naive about. So I learned that we are in this on our own. That’s why you’re on Quora, aren’t you? Because you know by the time you graduate medical school as an adult that…Most adults have no idea what they’re doing. They’re just winging life and trying to look confident while doing it. I don’t blame them. Life is the greatest school of all, and death is the greatest exam. And so the only two rules of this great game I trust to save my life are these (below).Work hard. Be kind. There are no true shortcuts. Shortcuts take you to a shallower place. You don’t want to go there.So I learned all that by the time I graduated med school. I also learned that you can actually walk a rounded railing while reciting from the Bible while slightly drunk, but I just saw someone I haven’t seen in a while, and I would like to say hi, so that’s a story for another time. Bye.P.S. I learnt much more in the years since, but the question specified what I learned in med school, so that’s that.What? You want that too? Fine. Here you go. Asher Nitin's answer to What advice would doctors give to a student just starting med school in India?

In May 2017 I released a free book called Silicon Valley for Foreigners (www.siliconvalleybook.com). This is what I shared on the chapter named “The Ugly Side of Silicon Valley”.A land of contrastsForeigners that have not been to the San Francisco Bay Area have the erroneous impression that Silicon Valley is the Eldorado of the developed world, where futuristic buildings abound, rich people stroll in the streets with their latest gadgets, and the infrastructure shines on. Regrettably, the actual scenario is quite the opposite.Despite being one of the richest regions in the world, Silicon Valley boasts a Third World infrastructure. Compared to European or East Asian countries, the public transportation is inefficient, slow, and expensive, roads are full of potholes, and basic services like broadband internet or public schools are just average. Airports are old, the largest cities are dirty, and a huge concentration of homeless and crazy people share the streets with the wealthy.Oakland became the third most violent city in America and even in San Francisco people do not feel totally safe. There are too many break-ins, car thefts, and drug addicts wandering around. The super rich cities of San Jose and Palo Alto also have enormous bastions of poverty.I really do not understand how this can happen. My impression is that local politicians are either incompetent or corrupt. The Bay Area has a GDP equivalent to Switzerland and even so, sometimes, you wonder where all this money from taxes is going. Cities like Shanghai or Tokyo, which are several times the size of the Bay Area, look like futuristic outposts of more advanced civilizations.Maybe the chaos and the wealth inequalities of Silicon Valley influence, somehow, the creativity of local entrepreneurs as they go through extremes during the same day, from working on the artificial intelligence to make cars self-driving to calling the police to remove a homeless person defecating on their doorstep.AffordabilityYou may have heard that San Francisco is now the most expensive city in the world due to a housing crisis. Locals are being expunged from the city due to the influx of tech millionaires. Residents pay premium prices for living here and receive, in return, mediocre service. The same happens all around the South Bay.Affordability is a big problem for the ecosystem. Entrepreneurs are having problems paying their bills, and the cost of living is becoming so high that even a $150,000 gross salary is not enough for a couple to save money or to have a comfortable life. A one bedroom apartment rental in San Francisco, with utilities included, costs around $4,000.Higher rentals mean higher salaries which, therefore, mean less competitive companies and more expensive products. If Silicon Valley does not solve the affordability crisis in the short term, the ecosystem will probably lose talent to other cities in the United States and the world.Bad behaviorSilicon Valley prides itself on its work ethics, meritocracy, and progressive values, and I sincerely believe most people living here are doing good to the world. However, there have been, recently, numerous cases of discrimination, fraud, misogyny, and favoritism in the Valley; and they happen more frequently than I would like to admit.Theranos, for instance, pitched a story about a young Stanford dropout inventing a new painless blood test that would require only a drop of blood. Its founder, Elizabeth Holmes, was a media darling for many years and often compared to Steve Jobs. Theranos attracted $700 million dollars in venture capital and, in 2015, was valued at $9 billion.Her secret? She was born into a rich and influential family, and her company was able to draw important political, military, and business figures to the board to add credibility to her startup. The strategy did not work for long as the company fell into a downward spiral after a whistleblower revealed the truth to the Wall Street Journal, proving their technology did not work and that the company lied to regulators and investors.After the episode, Elizabeth continued to double down on the lies. She did not present any evidence to shut up the criticisms about Theranos technology and accused the health care industry of orchestrating a smear campaign. It was too late as the startup’s reputation in Silicon Valley and elsewhere was already destroyed. Key people left the company, which is now facing, along with Elizabeth, criminal and civil lawsuits. Theranos alleges innocence.Lily robotics is another emblematic case. The startup ran a very successful Kickstarter campaign for a cute drone that could be thrown in the air to follow users autonomously. The company got $35 million in pre-sales and $15 million in private funding. By all accounts, Lily Robotics was considered to be a success and an example of Silicon Valley’s ingenuity.In late 2016, however, everyone was caught by surprise when the startup announced its bankruptcy alleging manufacturing difficulties. It was demonstrated that the startup’s video on Kickstarter was faked with footage belonging to a rival drone and that Lily Robotics was never able to make a final product. As of May 2017, Lily was being sued by San Francisco’s district attorney for fraud and was required to reimburse all the customers who paid for the product on Kickstarter.Uber has also been in the news due to many cases of misogyny, unethical behavior, and unsavory attitudes from the executive team toward women, drivers, competitors, and the press. Differently from Theranos, though, Uber’s CEO apologized, took responsibility for their actions, and promised to change course. Time will tell if the Uber brand will recover from the accusations and mess-ups caused by a hyper competitive and toxic culture.These cases are emblematic because they affect the reputation of the whole ecosystem. Fortunately, the majority of startups in Silicon Valley take their responsibilities seriously, and most investors, executives, and entrepreneurs have voiced their repudiation against bad apples.The immigrant Catch 22Around one-third of the Bay Area’s population was born outside the United States. On the one hand, this makes diversity and acceptance of differences a core tenet of the Silicon Valley ecosystem. On the other hand, some attitudes toward immigrants continue to be truly backward.One of them is the indifference and lack of appreciation toward the numerous struggles foreign professionals face to come here. Americans tend to treat immigrants as if they were coming from another state. I heard once from an investor that he understood what I went through in my journey because he too was an immigrant, from Chicago. This is no joke.I think most Americans do not realize how life is tough elsewhere and how difficult it is to immigrate to another country and adapt to a new environment. Sometimes, immigrants fight for years for the opportunity to come to a better place and, internally, they are completely burnt out. What I advocate is not compassion, but recognition of immigrants’ talents that may be useful to the ecosystem. Talents like persistence, optimism, charisma, and interpersonal skills.I could argue immigrants have solved very hard problems to come legally to the United States, but the skills used to make their journey a reality are not taken into consideration in job interviews or when raising money for startups. Actually, it is quite the contrary.Immigrant entrepreneurs are expected to behave exactly like a white American Stanford graduate even though they face financial, linguistic, cultural, and educational adversities for many years. Companies seem to not have any programs to acclimatize recently arrived foreigners and explain to them how Silicon Valley’s culture works and what is the expected behavior.What happens is that local Silicon Valley folks take their culture for granted and do not think this is a big deal. Some people said to that, if someone wants to be here, he or she will find a way. As if entrepreneurs can solve unsolvable problems like Visas, a bad educational system in their country of origin or lack of history in Silicon Valley.Often, the best immigrants may take years to learn the basic lessons contained in this book and this lack of sync with the Silicon Valley culture ends up being prejudicial to the ecosystem’s overall productivity.Tech’s dark secretOne might think that mental health issues in the Bay Area may be restricted to the homeless population, but this is far from the truth. Entrepreneurship is harder than people imagine and can really crush one’s mind. It is not uncommon to hear stories about depressed founders or people who took their lives because they could not withstand the pressure.Austen Heinz, the founder and CEO of Cambrian Genomics, took his life in 2015 after a trip to Del Mar. “That was a reminder to me that you can’t predict which founders are struggling,” said former Y Combinator president Sam Altman. Many others have followed this path as well, including Aaron Swartz, the Reddit co-founder who faced (unfounded) hacking charges that could have landed him in jail for decades.These founder suicides are just extreme cases of the tech industry’s quiet battle with depression and other mental illnesses, exacerbated by the stress of starting a company and creating something successful. Actually, a recent study by Dr. Michael Freeman, an entrepreneur and clinical professor at UCSF, was one of the first of its kind to link higher rates of mental health issues to entrepreneurship.Of the 242 entrepreneurs surveyed, 49 percent reported having a mental-health condition. Depression was the number one reported condition among them and was present in 30 percent of all entrepreneurs, followed by ADHD (29 percent) and anxiety problems (27 percent). That’s a much higher percentage than the U.S. population at large, where only about 7 percent identify as depressed.More surprising was the incidence of mental health in the families of entrepreneurs: 72 percent said they either had mental-health problems themselves or in their immediate family.According to Dr. Freeman, a founder who has no history of mental illness from a family with no history either is the exception, not the rule.Monolithic cultureA very annoying cultural phenomenon has been consuming Silicon Valley over the last five years. We refer to it as the Hollywoodization of the ecosystem. This recent issue, caused by high wages and dreams of getting rich fast, is attracting spoiled young professionals with big egos and a sense of entitlement that does not reflect the Valley’s down to earth values. These new entrants in the San Francisco Bay Area are epitomized by HBO’s Silicon Valley TV series as the “brogrammers.”Foreign immigrants also complain the region gravitates too much around tech and business. When you go out to a party or to a bar, the subjects always gravitate around startups or what someone is doing. It is rare to have a normal conversation about life, culture or politics. Or a dinner without talking about business.Silicon Valley should be more aware and self-critical about this monolithic culture because it may impair the attraction of future talent. People have much more to offer than their entrepreneurial skills.A true meritocracy?Over the last few years, I have witnessed many successful entrepreneurs or executives, coming from countries that privilege relationships over meritocracy, having trouble understanding and adapting to Silicon Valley’s rules. Often times, these folks start questioning if the ecosystem is truly meritocratic.For example, I met a super smart European girl with several Ph.D.s that was pissed with the interviewing process at Facebook, where the interviewers asked her to solve real problems before being hired. She found the request really offensive and really did not understand why there were so many interviews if her academic credentials were so great. She thought the Valley was a fraud because, at home, everyone was fighting to hire her.Another acquaintance was a super successful entrepreneur in Latin America who came here to build a tech startup. His business got a lot of media, a lot of hype, but he was never able to be successful in Silicon Valley. He started blaming it on everything the Valley represented and moved out after he felt ostracized by the ecosystem.As I have explained before, people in Silicon Valley expect any immigrants that come to the Bay Area to prove their value by succeeding here. Due to the cultural and behavioral adaptations immigrants need to face, that can take years, even for the most talented foreign entrepreneurs. It is super hard, and it changes you. The options are either to run from the realization you are not special or be humble and learn within the ecosystem. Most people choose to run.My two centsTo finish this chapter, and to be fair to everyone that welcomed me so warmly and openly, I want to say that, despite all its imperfections, Silicon Valley is the closest thing to a true meritocracy I have ever experienced.After living in many countries and doing business with different cultures around the world, I could compare the pros and cons of each ecosystem and say meritocracy in Silicon Valley is as real as it gets. There are indeed injustices and bugs in the ecosystem, but the results obtained by local companies are the best evidence the system functions pretty well.If you are smart, work super hard, and assimilate to the culture, you will find your way in Silicon Valley. Success, though, requires strategic patience, fast learning, collaboration, and the humility to withstand an emotional rollercoaster.

How absolutely essential it is to raise your price. Undercharging is the #1 reason first time entrepreneurs fail.I'm sure you have had that eye-opening moment…That moment when you add up all of the hours you've worked over the life of your business, and you come to a scary realization:You could've made more money working at McDonald's or in a basic office job!If you're an entrepreneur, you've probably had this realization at least once. (Maybe you're even experiencing it right now.)This is the dark side of entrepreneurship that few people actually talk about.Despite what you read in the media about entrepreneurs living lives of passion, purpose, and prosperity, the opposite is true more often than not.There's a simple way out of this Walking Dead cycle. It's so obvious that I'm surprised it's not talked about more ...Increase your price.The Simple Change That Almost All Entrepreneurs Should Immediately MakeUndercharging is one of the main reasons that entrepreneurs end up in the Walking Dead vicious cycle. Yet a surprisingly large share of entrepreneurs undercharge (27 percent to 57 percent, depending on the source you use).I started off my career failing because I was undercharging. I remember the exact moment when I realized I would have actually made more money per hour if I had just stayed at my bartending J-O-B that I hated. From my trial and error over time, I figured out a way to 100x my price. As a result, my profit jumped from $90,000 to $1.5 million.It is hard to overstate how big that jump is. It's the difference between saving a few thousand per year and living a middle-class lifestyle, and living a rich lifestyle, never having to worry about money, and saving more in one year than most people save in a lifetime. It means being able to hire a world-class team and working fewer hours; I only work 20 hours per week.Here are six real--and surprising--reasons, from my business experience and academic research, that you should raise your price today.Reason No. 1: It Allows You to Buy Traffic and Scale Your Business More EasilyWe live in an amazing time. You can precisely target the people who are the best fit for your product or service and send them a message in the form of an advertisement.Buying traffic is amazing, because it's so easy to scale. Once you have a funnel that works, when you want to grow your business, you just have to buy more ads.Would you rather get a steady, scalable stream of qualified leads like clockwork using the same ad over and over?Or would you prefer to keep beating on doors every day just to get new leads?I pay $40 to $50 for every potential client that books an appointment with us.I gladly pay this, because my programs range from $5,000 to $25,000, and one out of every 12 leads turns into a sale.Reason No. 2: A Small Increase in Price Often Leads to a Larger Increase in ProfitLet me illustrate this through a simple hypothetical example. In this case, doubling the price multiplies the profit by 11 ...The same principle applies across companies of all sizes. For the average S&P 500 company (one of the 500 largest U.S. companies), McKinsey estimates that a 1 percent increase in price would increase profits by 8 percent.Reason No. 3: Charging 10x Doesn't Require a Significant Change to Your BusinessTo justify a 10x price increase, you don't need to invest 10x in your product.Small, strategic tweaks can create exponential growth.As I explain in a previous Quora answer, you just need to tweak these three things correctly:Update your service's value proposition to potential customers.Streamline your product to deliver on that value proposition.Target the most profitable customers in the sales funnel.Reason No. 4: It Attracts the Right ClientsIn many ways, your price determines whom you attract. If you raise your prices (especially 10x), you will attract people who value their time so much that they are willing to pay a premium price to have their problem solved.Lower prices often attract a do-it-yourself market who pride themselves on minimizing their costs even if it means sacrificing their time.A more profitable customer can mean the difference between a $20,000 business and a $2 million one.Reason No. 5: It Gives You a Margin for ErrorIt's impossible for us to predict all of the things that will happen. Unexpected problems occur. Markets change. Employees don't work out. The only thing that is sure is that something will probably go wrong.The result is that things always take longer than you think they will.When you have a razor-thin profit margin and a project takes too long, you lose money on each customer.This is the sad reality that many entrepreneurs find themselves in.They're working themselves to the bone to lose money. That's when you start wondering if you should've taken a job at McDonald's.Why go through all of that agony?Having premium pricing allows you to still be very profitable even when unexpected things happen.Reason No. 6: People Will Value the Product and Brand More HighlyWe tend to evaluate higher-priced products as better quality. This is otherwise known as the price-quality heuristic, a mental shortcut we use to assess a product.Even the taste of food can be enhanced when you change the price. A study of 140 restaurant buffet diners showed that people who paid $8 rated the buffet as being 11 percent better than those who paid just $4. That's double the price, and they liked the food even more!Take ActionWhen you don't make the profit you want, what do you do?Most entrepreneurs take the hard way ...They raise capital.They work harder.They get more customers.In my experience, for nine out of 10 service-based businesses, these are all the wrong approaches, because they don't solve the fundamental problem.The core problem is often not charging enough!The beautiful thing is that this also happens to be the easiest solution.For my step-by-step process on how I raised my price 100x, read Use This Strategy to Get 5 High Paying Customers in Just One Week.---This Quora answer is a modified version of a guest post I originally wrote for Inc.