Slower

I usually take the train to office. Here is a breakdown of the state of my mind during the journey -

• 10 min walk to station, stand on the right platform - active
• Less than 5 min waiting - mostly on auto-pilot
• 5 min train ride, mostly standing - active, looking out for the right stop
• 5 min walk to switch tracks - active
• 5 min train ride, mostly standing - active, looking out for the right stop
• 10 min walk to office - active

Quick predictable rides, fast walk, listening to an audiobook @ 1.5-2x. I actively and consciously drive most of the journey.

Contrast that with a bus ride to work -

• 5 min walk - active, but much less than walk to train.
• 1-15 min wait for bus - active, need to look out for and board the right bus. Can be minimize by planning ahead / looking at bus schedule.
• 15-30 min bus ride, usually sitting - mostly auto-pilot, hard to miss the stop, many more visual cues to work off. Very passive.
• 5 min walk to office - active

High variance. Duration of bus ride varies based on traffic, time of day, bus schedule. When I am on the bus / waiting for it, there is nothing I can do to speed the journey up. It's a passive journey, with few decisions, mostly done on auto-pilot.

Both journeys, if planned right, take roughly the same time.

My parents visited me recently, and my dad was curious as to why I took the train when the bus ride was so much easier!

Well, the bus ride killed my momentum, I felt sleepy at the end of it. The train ride switched my brain on for the day ahead. Built momentum, woke me up, thanks to all those mini-decisions I had to make.

That's what I told him.

But really? The more I think of it, the train ride forces me to flex my decision muscle early on in the day. I reach the office running, continue running because I want to use my momentum, and then I take the train back (still running), reach home tired, and sleep. Repeat.

If I can't sit calmly for 20 mins without losing momentum, perhaps I need to slow down. The more I reflect, the more I feel I was taking solace in the busy-work that taking the train offered. If I spent my prime morning time looking out for MRT stops, isn't that time lost to thinking about bigger problems?

I take the bus now. I walk slowly and deliberately to the bus stop, listen my audio book at 1x speed (I used to do 1.5-2x) on my trip to work. Then I walk - slow and deliberate to office. I arrive fresh, thoughtful and composed. On my way back, I sit and reflect. Let my mind wander.

Sometimes, you need to slow down.

Faster

Sometimes, you do better when you increase difficulty.

I occasionally play Flight Commander when taking a quick break. It's a simple game - direct aircrafts to airstrips by drawing a path and make sure the planes don't crash into each other. Each plan landed gives you a point.

I was terrible at it, till I noticed the ">>" button at the bottom. It doubles the speed of the game, technically making it twice as hard to play. I started using it to get through the easy initial stages, and slowed the game down again once there were too many planes in the air. I was still terrible at it.

One day, I decided to play an entire game at double speed and see how far I could go. I tripled my high score. Every time I played at double speed, I scored 3-4 times my normal scores.

That got me thinking, and I think a couple of factors are at play here 

1. I lack patience and get distracted easily hence losing focus. 

2. I get into flow when I make the game faster. Hence gaining focus. 

Sometimes, to increase output, we need to tweak our tasks and impose constraints on them to convert them to optimal difficulty so we reach a state of flow. And time seems to be a very good tool to achieve this.

Allowing people to change

Here is another gem from Derek Sivers. To extend his point, all our opinions, beliefs (and the meaning we give to life) are subject to change. If our projected meaning or beliefs change, our outlook changes, and our actions change.

In that case, isn't it only fair that we allow others the freedom to change as well? To give people a second chance? To not pass lasting judgement based on one-off incidents?

Newton's first law only applies when there are no external forces. Our world is full of external forces. It does not make sense to assume constancy by default. Of ourselves, or of others.

What is the meaning of Life?

We know it's 42, but what is the right question?

Here is some food for thought from Derek Sivers. Nice analysis, and I agree. He says,

"Life has no inherent meaning. Nothing has inherent meaning. Life is a blank slate. You're free to project any meaning that serves you. You're free to do with it, anything you want."

The meaning of life, then is within you - not outside. There is no absolute / inherent meaning in life, only what you project onto it.

The natural question now is how do you know what "serves you" or what you "want"? We want so many things, often conflicting things. We want different things as time progresses. The meaning that serves me now will not serve me forever. What if your future meaning is incompatible with your present meaning?

The inherent assumption in all this discussion is that a life with meaning, is more fulfilling than a life without meaning. If that is so, what about a life with meaning that keeps changing? Is that so bad?

My approach is this:

Widen your options, talk to people, and pick a meaning that makes sense now based on your current perception of life. A meaning that you think will hold true for you in the foreseeable future. And then set a tripwire - 2/5/10 years from now depending on how long term you feel the meaning will be.

Write down the meaning, this is your answer to life. Don't doubt it, go live it! Until the tripwire is triggered. At which point, repeat the process. Decide on a meaning you want to live by, based on your current situation, and go live it. Until the next tripwire!

Life now becomes a collection of sub-lives each with their own meaning. The right question then is

"What is your meaning of life, at this point in time?"

My answer? "8128"

Open, Conscientious, and Disagreeable

I recently read that, of the Big5 personality traits, the ones that distinguish an entrepreneur are

- "Openness" (to new ideas)
- "Conscientiousness" (ie. willingness to work hard towards a goal) and
- "Disagreeableness" (willingness to not conform, and be ridiculed)

It struck a chord with me. I think these are nice "rules of thumb" to evaluate a startup culture!

The total time available in a day..

is directly proportional to the amount of work you do.

The Big and the Small

I just finished reading Malcom Gladwell's random collection of stories*. It was an entertaining read and there were a few interesting take-aways.

1. Remote misses can be a big advantage.
   When we encounter hard times and survive, there are 2 possible outcomes:
• A near miss - we get hurt badly, are unable to get up, and are crushed. This is bad.
• A remote miss - we get hurt, but somehow manage to overcome the difficulty and develop a layer of immunization. We might also develop strong compensating skills enroute.
There are always remote-misses in a large-scale disaster that allow us to bounce back as a community.
2. Change your pond, if it is too big
   We usually evaluate ourselves based only on the local population we are part of. When we feel like a small fish in a big pond, perhaps we should change the pond such that we are a big fish in a small pond!
3. Too much can be as crippling as too little.
   The law of diminishing returns is quite pervasive. This means that
• Having less resources might be advantageous, when you are competing against someone who has more than the optimal amount of resource.
• If you are the big guy, you can't always keep throwing more resources at a problem. After a point, it makes more sense to force a constraint instead.

In summary, If you are the underdog, you can become the champion by changing the rules to match your strengths. What looks like a disadvantage, need not be one!

*My theory is that he had a book of "stories" that was getting filled up too fast, so he decided to encash a bunch of them under the vaguely relevant title "David and Goliath". It was a fun read though.. lots of interesting stories!

Decisions vs. Decision Processes

Following up on my previous posts, one of the key points reinforced in the book is to pay attention to the decision making process, instead of the decision itself.

I was discussing this with my dad when he shared 2 anecdotes - 

1. When my uncle did really well in his high school, many elders / mentors suggested he move to a bigger city for better and greater opportunities. My grandfather wasn't too keen (change is difficult - plus there were job perks associated with their current location), but grandmom forced the issue and it was to be Vellore or Chennai.

Everything favoured Vellore. It was closer. Decent college. Nice city. Grandfather could get a transfer.

Chennai was the bigger city, and it didnt have much else going for it. Nevertheless it was deemed that the choice was best made by the Gods. An elaborate ceremony followed, offerings were made, and God's will was focussed onto a ballot. God picked Vellore. Mentors prevailed though, God was ignored and he went to Chennai. It was definitely the better decision and was instrumental in opening up doors and ushering in financial stability for the family.

2. Soon after coming to Chennai, he got a promotion and was assigned to a town called Gwalior half-way across the country. No-one in my family had heard of the place before, nor knew anyone who knew about it. So it was decided to keep things simple, reject the promotion and stay in Chennai. Until the officer in Gwalior, worried that he couldn't go back home if my uncle rejected the offer, personally came over to re-assure him and convinced him to go. Good decision again, it gave him more exposure and pushed his career forward. 

Both were decisions with positive long term results, and the "right" things to do in hindsight. But the process to decide them was non-existent, and borderline hilarious. There was no strong reasoning, and the decisions could have swayed one way or the other purely based on external forces.

To rephrase the Bhagvat Gita a little, my take-away is this:

"You have the right to create a decision making process, but you are not entitled to the fruits of the decisions you make.

And do not let the fruit be the purpose of your process, so you won’t be attached to the lack of a process."

What do you watch for when you make decisions?

I just finished the fantastic book "Decisive" by Chip and Dan Heath. Here is my compressed cheat sheet. Do read the book - it is full of examples and useful nuggets on how we can build a better decision making process.

So, there are 4 main villains of decision making

1. Narrow framing
2. Confirmation Bias
3. Short term emotion
4. Overconfidence

So, how do you counter them?

Here is a list of questions to ask yourself when you are making a decision

1. Narrow frame -> Widen your options

• Are you asking a "whether or not" question?
• What else could you do with the same amount of resources?
• What if you current options disappeared?
• How can you try multiple options at the same time?
• Are you stuck in the prevention / promotion mindset?
• How do you find someone who has already solved a similar problem?
• Can you think of analogies, inside and outside your scope, of similar problems?

2. Confirmation Bias -> Reality-Test your assumptions

• What would have to be true for the opposite opinion to be the very best choice?
• What facts would have to be true for your assumption to be wrong? Find those facts and check them.
• Are you too caught up in an assumption? Have you tried making a deliberate mistake?
• Are you too zoomed in? If so, try zooming out
• Get a broader (average) picture. Experts are good at giving you this.
• Are you too zoomed out?
• Zoom in : Get a close-up view of a sample
• Did you try doing a trial run? (except when you need commitment)

3. Short term emotion -> Attain distance

• How would this decision affect you in 10 hour /10 months /10 year
• Are you going with the flow (familiarity)?
• Are you over-emphasized on avoiding losses?
• What would you tell your best friend to do?

4. Overconfidence -> Prepare to be wrong

• What would happen in the best case? How can you prepare?
• What would happen in the worst case? How can you prepare?
• Have you set tripwires to revisit this decision in the future?

Finally, here are some good practices to follow generally to make better decisions:

• Build a playlist of questions to ask for different types of decisions
• Define and focus core priorities
• Build a "Stop doing" list
• Ask every once in a while : Am I doing what I most need to be doing now?
• Focus on the process, and less on the decision.
• In a team, decisions must be seen as fair even if they are not favorable.
• Bargaining helps
• Procedural justice is imporant
• State back the other side
• Defend a decision by pointing out flaws

If you must compromise, do so on the brilliance not culture

"Why I Never Hire Brilliant Men" says the unconventional title of the article a friend shared.

That sounds wrong, with all the talk of hiring only A players to build an A team. I found the article (written almost a 100 years ago) quite interesting though, simply because it went against conventional wisdom and offered an analysis to support the view. But it looks like the author completely missed the concept of a "Cultural Fit"

It looks like the author was looking at hardworking A-players to build a steady slow growing business. I would call them brilliant men too, men who have control over themselves and have figured out how to provide consistent low risk returns with good processes, hardwork and dedication. The author was however, not ready to handle the kind of brilliant men with bigger risk appetites who liked to shoot for the moon. Or the kind of men brilliant only in creating an illusion of brilliance. They would obviously contradict the culture he was looking to build.

Perhaps the maxim should be "Always hire brilliant men who fit with your values and culture. If you must compromise, do so on the brilliance"

What affects our energy levels?

I have been observing what affects the level of energy I have to work on something, and how to optimize it.
My first "Equation" was that, we had a long term base level formed by good / bad habits (health, inner peace etc). Our "state of mind" then acted as a multiplier on short term modifiers like level of sleep, hunger, coffee and so on influence the amount of energy we had at any point. But after some discussion with friends and observation, I realized that this is only our store of "potential energy".

We also need a trigger (or "Do Work") to convert this into Kinetic energy that is actually used. Tiggers could be a deadline, an interesting project, good company, energetic environment, force of habit, nice weather or probably even Coffee.

To optimize for energy, we need to watch our potential energy reserves and keep them high, and then look for triggers that allow us to use them. And then be mindful of how fast an activity drains our potential energy reserve. For an introvert like me, talking to people drains my reserve pretty fast, while being in the zone working on an interesting project is a much slower drain.

What should you measure?

One of my thrusts this year is to understand myself better using data and objective analysis. 

The way I am going about this is to collect whatever data I can, look for patterns, form hypotheses, and then try to verify them.

Online activity, Phone calls, location are some relatively easy ones. RescueTime can help you track your computer activity, phone logs can be obtained (with difficulty) from phone companies, and location data from foursquare or a similar API. Fitbit tells you how active you were. These require little effort,  but might not give all the information you need to measure performance.

Other things like mood, productivity, output, food consumption are more specific but require more effort to collect.

The challenge is to figure out how to collect maximum relevant data with minimal disruption.

Pull or push?

I think there are 2 types of innovation - The pull, and the push.

Pull is more lean-startup. Look for the lowest hanging fruit, pluck it as fast as possible, and iterate. A consumer problem creates demand for a solution which pulls development of solution. Like Dropbox. And I think Amazon was pretty lean too.

Push, on the other hand is more like traditional research. Someone feels Solution X will benefit the world, builds it and pushes it into the market. Like Tesla, SpaceX.

There is a lot of focus on lean startups these days, but I think we need a balance of both. While pull innovation reduces risk and forces companies to start creating value quickly, we also need a healthy dose of wild swings and huge bets to keep shaking things up and push new ideas into the market.

After all, greedy algorithms don't always lead to the best solutions.

The "Small Data" problem

I have written about the need to consolidate the crazy amount of information available at our disposal these days. In fact, companies like Google make their living from analysing and “understanding” the ridiculous amount of information they gather, and this has led to some pretty powerful techniques and tools being implemented.

On the other hand, there are also instances where there is not enough data to analyse. Or worse, there is partial or incomplete data. Two instances of this are the medical industry (we are working on this at Klinify). The other is personal information.  Sure, there is enough information to track a person (and have everyone screaming about privacy), but if I want to objectively understand myself using data, do I have enough information to do it? There is a lot of focus on this and we are making progress with the surge of wearable technology, but the data gathered isn't really enough. I think it is something worth exploring!

We are now a funded startup!

We just raised our seed round at Klinify (http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/03/klinify-raises-600k-seed-round-to-build-an-evernote-for-doctors-in-south-asia/). It has been in the works for a while, nice to make it official now!

So what has changed?

1. I can stop freelancing / borrowing / begging to pay my bills and focus full time on Klinify. This happened a while ago, and it is very liberating to be able to put all your brain power into the 1 big thing you are building.

2. There are 3 big confidence boosters in a early startup - Convincing a customer to part with money to use your product, convincing someone experienced to join you full time, and convincing an investor to invest in you. And they vouch for different aspects of your business - it is reassuring to be able to check all three!

3. We can now think farther ahead. We can realistically look at 5-6 month plans, and even outline 1 year plans. And have the resources to fund them. This gives us much more flexibility into what we try and how we approach things - we can afford to take a step back and take bigger shots!

4. The stakes are bigger (you d be sinking a much larger ship if you crash), so the responsibility is bigger. It's a little scary but quite exciting too!

5. If people ask "Klini-who?", I can say "You don't know? Google it." And they'll see a Techcrunch article.

Most things haven't changed though. The objective is the same and the ride is as crazy, unpredictable and awesome as ever - just that the game just got a bigger!

Stress is in the mind

http://www.ted.com/talks/kelly_mcgonigal_how_to_make_stress_your_friend.html

This is very interesting. She says the effects of stress depend on how you think about it. I completely agree. I believe our mind has a way of controlling and influencing our body. A lot of these responses are unconscious but it is possible to reprogram it to our benefit. Stress is a beautiful example.


I am sure we have all had scenarios where a little bit of stress has increased our performance dramatically and also helped us feel better. At the same time stress has also crippled our ability. The difference is in our attitude and how we think about the stress - which is very  much in our control even if its seems difficult to tame at times.

Taking stands

To continue on the previous point on black and white, consider this announcement:
http://open.bufferapp.com/introducing-open-salaries-at-buffer-including-our-transparent-formula-and-all-individual-salaries/

Buffer has decided to be completely transparent about their salaries. This is pretty extreme. We do not know what the repercussions will be or whether it will pay off in the long run.

But what is inspiring is that they took a stand and took it all the way! It shows their commitment to transparency, and it will attract more people who value transparency and further strengthen their culture.

It also means that they cannot backtrack anymore. They are committed. Either it succeeds very well or it fails.
But it creates that unadulteracted focus that I feel is a necessity for greatness.

Black, White and Grey

The world is almost always grey, is it not? Events are relative, opinions are relative, and Einstein says even the most basic "facts" are relative. So, is there any use of having strong absolute opinions?

I think the purpose is to trick our brain. Absolutes lead to conviction. And conviction, I feel has led to greatness. A lot of people who dramatically changed the world were completely convinced of their ideals and approach and this gave them the push to change the world. If they had doubts, they suppressed them. Or convinced themselves that the doubts were unwarranted.

To break boundaries, you need focus. Grey leads to discussion, compromises and balance. Perhaps not greatness. We need some black and white to push boundaries.

Making open offices work

Seems like "studies" show that open offices don't really work.

From my experience playing around with our open office structure, they promote spontaneous interaction and help generate ideas which can be quite important in a small company.

However, precautions need to be taken to maintain balance and avoid disruptions, especially to people in the maker's schedule.

Strategies that worked for us:

1. Passing the cost of disruption to the disruptor. Post-it notes passed on with a "Need 5 mins for X" do this nicely. The "disruptee" can then attend to X when convenient.
2. Split offices, one for each kind of schedule (we are beta testing this). Interaction needs to happen in other ways though. You don't want to completely separate your team.

If it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong!

A beautiful description of the scientific method:

He doesn't say, "if it agrees with experiment, it is right!". He says, "If it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong!"

We make this mistake many times - finding some pattern in the world that matches our hypothesis and then accepting it as "proven". To gain true understanding, we ought to look for patterns that go against our hypothesis.

120 words, thrice a week.

I want to become better at evaluating and consolidating the information I consume. And big goals require effective processes to support them 

Hence I have started a series of blog posts. The rules are:

1. Post length is limited to 120 words (to make me think and consolidate),
2. Every post expresses 1 idea / view point.
3. 3 times a week to create a habit.

Let's see how this goes!

Wisdom from Elon - Part II - SCurve and Prediction

Around minute 34, he mentions the popular "S" Curve of technology life cycle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_life_cycle#The_four_phases_of_the_technology_life-cycle).

What I thought was an interesting angle was how that affects estimates. By default, we extrapolate trends linearly. And that has an effect on our predictions when the rate of change is changing. We underestimate new technology and over estimate mature technology. Something to be mindful of!

Wisdom from Elon Musk - Part I - Conviction

I saw this very nice interview between Elon Musk (Tesla) and Sal Khan (Khan Academy)

The first thing that struck me about Elon Musk is his conviction.

He wanted to be at the forefront of humanity's technological progress, so he identified areas where the biggest progress would take place. This part is not hard.

And then he just went all out. That conviction, in my opinion made all the difference. Fear of failure usually holds us back - but I feel that, given the force of his conviction, even if things hadn't worked out so well, he wouldn't have fallen too far.

Do or do not. There is no try.

I changed my new design to the first of blogger's (new?) templates. Definitely feels simpler and easier on the head. I am trying to be more aesthetically conscious these days you see..

I also dropped my "pseudo" (I used to be a pseudo geek, now I am a geek. Yay!).  Because Yoda told me to.

I like the ostrich though, so that stays. It's kinda goofy and reminds me not to take myself too seriously.

A happy new year to all! Here's to simplicity, decisiveness and curiosity!