What is Water Cooler Conversations?

"Those who don't know history are condemned to repeat it."

I never liked history before. I found it boring and overwhelming given the huge amount of information present and my ignorance regarding what I'm gonna do with it. There were so much names, dates, places, and events to keep in mind.

4 years ago however, I acquired a game-changing perspective from my history professor. She told me that history wasn't about the what, the where, and the when. It was about the why and the how. Since then, history got interesting.

Why did various countries go into war with each other? How did the Nazis kill 6 million people - did no one bat an eye? Why do people uphold such an idiotic backward thinking ideology? Are they inherently bad people who lack the part in their brain responsible for empathy?

These are the important questions that lead to important answers that can make a huge positive impact in our lives.

Hungry for these game-changing information or heuristics that can spell the difference between greatness and mediocrity, I found utter interest in conversing with great people - leaders of their field, those who call the shots in their respective fields.

What's going on inside their heads? What do they eat for breakfast? What books do they read? How do they face adversity? What keeps them going?

I believe that success is not just a matter of effort. Some actions have more leverage than others. I don't think the chairman of the board is working any harder than the grocery store clerk or the farmer planting to the bones.

Knowledge is leverage. It enables us to know that a straight line is the fastest way from point A to point B, that honesty is not always the best policy when bad people are looking for your family, and that selling shovels in a gold rush is better than digging for gold. As mentioned in the book "Guns, Germs, and Steel", had the native American-Indians known how capable they were of resisting the colonizers given their number, their land would've remained theirs.

Water Cooler Conversations is a blog series that aims to support this advocacy. It aims to be of guidance, enlighten, and bring about a better sense of direction with regards to what we're doing with our lives for humans aren't spineless beings just being carried away by the wind.

Here's to a life of learning and better decisions.