The fundamentals of fundamentals

Cliche'd isn't it ? May be not. There are a few times in life , when some seemingly trivial incidents make you look things in new light. A casual dinner conversation with a friend turned into one of the most intellectually stimulating discussions I ever had. It all started with why I want to pursue business education and then drifted around environment consciousness, global warming awareness and at this juncture my friend said something that kind of shook me. It goes something like this.In a few years time, may be in the next 15-20 years, we will not have to worry about resource shortage. In essence, humans will have mastered the technology to 'manufacture' everything. These are the so called believers in nanotechnology. At the outset, this seems too far fetched. It's like the movie Matrix becoming a reality. How can EVERYTHING be manufactured. I mean we are talking about manufacturing the most fundamental living organisms - the cell or even at a more fundamental level - the DNA. How radical would that be ? Like Morpheus said in Matrix, 'Humans were no longer born, they were made". Not to go too far in time, but the realization that dawned upon me was how this concept of 'fundamental level thinking' is neglected in day to day life. It then did occur to me, how distantly far I was from the day to day fundamentals, operating at a 10,000 ft macro level.

As I started questioning a few basic assumptions, based upon which these macro things (for simplicity, let's call these macros) are looked at - the macros just fell apart. Something as simple as buying a company's stock (a macro behavior) based on the EPS (the fundamentals) just fell apart when I realized that the EPS was in fact not the most fundamental tenet of a company. it's just a logical entity derived from several underlying fundamental factors. Even mundane problems such as a headache - are looked at a very macro level. I don't get to the most fundamental part of why I got the headache in the first place. There's relief right at hand in the form of Tylenol and I take this short cut. I'm sure many of us do. I can think of many such examples.

I think we are, or for sure I am so sucked into the world of macros that I have lost the vision of fundamentals, or in some cases, forced to take my vision away from the fundamentals. It's so wrong.

As I think more about how to get to these fundamentals, one thing becomes very clear. It's very hard and time consuming to get to the fundamentals. At some point of time, I give up and take a short cut. It's high time I stopped taking such short cuts and focused more on the most fundamental aspects of life.