Being an original thinker:

What does it mean to be an original thinker? Original means something unique, thinker means someone who thinks. Why are most people not original thinkers? Lots of reasons; culture, media, environment, friends, family, work, celebrities, etc. Most people steal other people’s ideas and take them as their own.

The thing is, that’s what you're supposed to do. Steal ideas. Steal the best ideas from the people you admire. But think about them in the context of you and your own circumstances. People’s thoughts on certain subjects do not always apply in your life. Let’s take a statement like ‘Listen to your parents.’

Well listening to your parents will often get you far depending on who they are and what they want for you, but you also have to realize their deflecting their own experiences and biases into their words. They think that life works the same way it did when they were growing up. But everything is different. The context in your life is different than it was in their life. I’m the prime example of this.

Over the years, I’ve had many conversations with my parents, and my dad in particular, about the best paths to take for my future.

First it was in high school. I was in the pre-IB program in grade 9 & 10 and I absolutely hated it. I was a kid who took on a lot of pressure and stress on myself, mostly because of the parental pressure to perform. When grade 10 hit and I was having 4-5 hours of homework a night plus not producing the grades I was used to, I went into a very dark place.

Yet my dad saw that and thought that IB would be the best decision for me and my future. At the time, I had aspirations of going to school abroad and he thought the only way it was possible was to do IB. Also, because we had a family friend who went through the program, my parents were more convinced of its potential.

I said no thanks.

I’ll never forget that day. It was the end of February 2010. My dad organized a meeting with my IB counsellor to get him to convince me why it was important for me to stay in IB. After the meeting, we walked out of the IB counsellor’s office and my dad said to me, ‘so you’re signing up for IB next year right?’ He thought I was convinced.

Nah B, I’m not.

That look of disappointment on his face is one I’ll never forget.

2 years later, I opened up my email at lunch sitting at my locker by my grade 12 chemistry class and I had gotten into the University of St. Andrews and the University of Edinburgh to study medicine. After school, I got home and after hugging my parents, I just started crying. Balling. It meant so much. To be able to prove to your parents they were wrong and you were right.

Bet on yourself.

Then again as I was going through medical school, they were convinced I was going to be a clinician doing residency in Canada. I was too at the beginning. But life happens.

As I was approaching my final years of school, I knew I had an opportunity to leave medicine. I didn’t do well on the Canadian exams, had no residency interviews in Canada and couldn’t get a residency job in the UK for the next year to continue medicine. I had a year out to figure out what I wanted to do. My parents were convinced I’d do a masters degree in that time, then return to medicine to be a doctor.

I had a different idea. This was my chance to leave. That summer after I graduated, I spent the summer applying to every job I could find outside of medicine while preparing to go to the Masters program at UCL. Got rejected from all of them and had another tough convo with my dad. He said ‘what are you even doing with your life? Are you even applying for jobs? I don’t think you should’ve left medicine.’ As you can probably imagine, he wasn’t smiling when he said this. He was angry because why wasn’t I listening to him?

Life happened again and I was presented with an opportunity to work as a venture capitalist at a top healthcare firm in Europe. Checkmate.

Then 6 months later, as I was finishing my time there, my parents thought I was done. My little experiment outside of medicine was over and now it was time to go back. I’ll never forget having a convo with them on a Sunday morning in Amsterdam. They said ‘why don’t you just go back to medicine?’

Nope.

Busted my butt again and thankfully found a job at the best healthcare VC firm in Canada.

Bet on yourself. Again.

Throughout this time post med school, I kept learning. I kept reading. I kept writing. I kept meditating. 100+ books, hundreds of hours of reading, 800 journal entries and hundreds of hours of meditating later have taught me a lot.

All of this has reiterated to me, walk your own path. No one knows anything. Everyone is making up life as they go. The best are the best because they learn more than other people and take more risk than other people. Most of the time they fail, but the times they succeed, they succeed in a big way. We think of these people as original thinkers, and they are in the risks that they take, but the paths are all very similar throughout history.

History remembers the intellectual misfits who took risks when other people didn’t. It’s hard to have an idea about something, work on it for a long time when everyone tells you you’re a fool and then be proven right, sometimes not till decades later. Galileo and Isaac Newton are examples of thinkers in history who were vilified at the time of their discoveries because it seemed so crazy to everyone else. But history remembers them fondly because they said something and made predictions based on evidence when no one else believed them.

I’m at the same stage. I believe the stock market is going to crash this year. In 2021 it will be because of hedge funds, over-leveraging, naked shorting, retail investors, Reddit and meme stocks. This is a bold prediction and not something most people will say. There’s too much reputational risk or risk of looking like a fool because what if you’re wrong?

Good. I hope I’m wrong because when the market doesn’t crash, people are generally happier. When it does crash, a lot of people will suffer. I obviously don’t want that but this is how countries, economic cycles and history work.

I am also willing to fail in public. I’m willing to stake my reputation where it matters. I’m willing to enter the arena. History remembers those people fondly because at least they did something when everyone else was too scared.

Always remember the man in the arena. Exceptional speech by Roosevelt but the best part of his speech is this:

‘It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.’

Time to enter the arena.