Month: September 2024

Om Malik – one of tech’s “OG” journalist voices – shared a beautiful post on his blog today. He reflected on a brutal review he shared about an app called “Path” that, in his words, was critical, harsh, and unkind.

He shared – “I don’t have regrets because I failed to do my job or wasn’t honest. I have regrets because I forgot that the English language allows us to make points with elegance and eloquence. How could I, as a practitioner of the bard’s language, forget its original tenet? I regret using the words I did because they minimized the efforts of individuals who dreamed up something new.

I look back and often think perhaps I should have approached my work with empathy, carefully chosen words and a measured tone. While our culture often encourages harsh takedowns, we should consider the impact of our words.“

He reflected on this as he commented on the brouhaha surrounding Marques Brownlee’s new app. Marques Brownlee – a.k.a. MKBHD – is one of the most influential tech review YouTubers on the planet. His reviews have had the ability to destroy new products and companies. Marques shipped a product of his own recently – likely in a move to leverage his brand and diversify revenue streams.

However, the product – a wallpaper app that charged $50 per year – released to harsh criticism about both the product and its pricing. It just didn’t work.

Om shared – “However, the fracas around Panels should serve as a learning opportunity, not only for Brownlee but also for those who review products and offer opinions. It reminds us that creating something new requires effort, courage and dedication.

Putting oneself out there inevitably invites criticism and feedback. This situation serves as a reminder for both creators and critics to approach their work thoughtfully, balancing honesty with kindness and keeping the audience’s needs at the forefront.“

It is a powerful reflection and one that resonated a lot.

Here’s why – I’ve been building technology products as a Product Manager for a few years now. Before I started working in product management, I spent a lot of time reviewing products and simulating prioritization decisions. It was my way of learning what I hoped would be my craft.

But the more time I spent attempting to build products, the more I came to appreciate the nuance and challenges involved. Things that felt like obvious fixes to a user turned out to involve challenging technical and organizational trade-offs. There were frustrating user experiences that seemed trivial to fix from the outside. But, having spent time with the constraints, I knew just how challenging this was.

This is not an excuse for the mistakes I’ve made and continue to make as I build products. It is recognition of a simple truth – building good things is hard. Tearing down them and criticizing them with smart comments and wit is easy.

I don’t expect every user to understand this. I’ve been on the receiving end of many harshly worded complaints and frustrations. I get it – job seeker is a painful experience. It is annoying and the user believes we should be doing better. And we have a lot of space to do better – without question.

However, thanks to this experience, I have built more empathy for anyone attempting to build something. I am learning that I need to do my best to summon that empathy and choose my words more carefully.

Especially when I don’t know or understand what constraints they’re working with.

The story of the Green Revolution can be traced back to the synthesis of Ammonia by the Haber Bosch process. This is because it became clear to anyone who studied land productivity that we needed a way to bring back Nitrogen into the soil. Ammonia turned out to be the answer.

Synthesizing Ammonia, however, required a breakthrough. While this is often ascribed to two geniuses, Haber and Bosch, the truth was far from that.

While Haber provided the initial insight, Bosch and a large team of scientists at BASF synthesized ammonia after relentless iterative experimentation. The result was a process that enabled us to all benefit from cheap fertilizer that was crucial to ensure that soil remain productive for farmers.

The result wasn’t just profits. This laid the foundations for victory in a fight against famine and starvation. It was expected that countries like India and Pakistan would see hundreds of thousands of death due to starvation in the 1970s.

However, thanks to Ammonia-based fertilizers and disease resistant wheat varieties created by Norman Borlaug, the green revolution came to be.

In hindsight, it is also fascinating that there was a lot of resistance in India and Pakistan to this innovation. Opposition arguments warned about all sorts of societal problems if it worked or if it didn’t.

Thanks to fertilizer and the “dwarf wheat” varieties, India ended up becoming an exporter.

3 reflections:

(1) As I read Matt Ridley’s “How Innovation Works”, it is clear just how repetitive the pattern of innovation is. While one or two people get the credit, it took an army to go from insight to mass adoption.

(2) Even the most obvious innovations face opposition.

(3) Innovations build on each other and produce a compound effect. The Green revolution wouldn’t have been possible if it wasn’t for the synthesis of Ammonia. Compounding is the most powerful force in the world.

Often, the most important step we take toward solving difficult problems is reminding ourselves that there is no silver bullet.

We have to do the work and get there – the old fashioned way.

One of the toughest challenges when calibrating talent in my experience is unconsciously weighing like-ability more than judgment.

Some thoughts on what we pursue.

Once we’re fortunate to have our essentials taken care of (security, food, shelter), we begin a journey in the pursuit of wealth.

The wealth we ultimately seek is the ability to have a rich life filled with great memories and quality time.

However, a rich life, like success and happiness, is an outcome that cannot be pursued. It ensues when we earn the right combination of inputs.

We can pursue two kinds of input wealth –

(a) External wealth (this is easily visible): Financial or status.
External wealth is a necessity. Financial wealth tends to be less fickle than status wealth.

(b) Internal wealth (this is visible only to self/close relationships): Physical (fitness), mental (equanimity), emotional (relationships/love), and spiritual (purpose).
Internal wealth, in the long run, often shows up in the amount of external wealth we have. Often but not always.

The challenge, in any given season of our life, is choosing which inputs to focus on and in what order.

A friend shared this piece by the late actress Portia Nelson.

Chapter 1
I walk down the street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I fall in. I am lost….I am helpless.
It isn’t my fault.
It takes forever to find a way out.

Chapter 2
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the side walk.
I pretend I don’t see it. I fall in again.
I can’t believe I am in the same place.
But it isn’t my fault.
It still takes a long time to get out.

Chapter 3
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I see it is there.
I fall in….it’s a habit…but my eyes are open.
I know where I am. It is my fault.
I get out immediately.

Chapter 4
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I walk around it.

Chapter 5
I walk down a different street.

---

The arc of this story is beautiful – she managed to say so much with so little.

It resonated.

As humankind entered the 1980s, small pox was eradicated, and polio and cholera were in retreat. However, malaria was still impacting hundreds of thousands of people.

A group of scientists came up with an ingenious experiment. They started with 36 mosquito nets – some of which were for double beds and some were for single beds.

Half of these were soaked in Permethrin (a powerful insect repellent). And half had holes torn into the nets to simulate wear and tear. They expected most nets to be torn – and for the owners to not have enough money to replace them.

In sum, there were 9 nets each with combinations of treated/untreated and torn/intact. Those treated with Permethrin were all laid flat in the sun for 90 minutes and then installed in 24 huts.

These huts had mosquito traps – some were designed to catch mosquitos inside the house and some as they left.

Between 8pm-6am for 6 days a week, volunteers slept in the huts. Mosquitos were collected 3 times during the day and live mosquitos were kept under observation.

After 21 weeks, 4,682 female anopheles mosquitos (Malaria vectors) were collected.

The researchers were expecting the Permethrin treated nets to be very effective. However, they were skeptical about the performance of the torn nets.

The results were astonishing.

The Permethrin treated torn nets reduced mosquitos entering 70%, increased mosquitos leaving the hut from 25% to 97%, and reduced the blood meal between 20%-10%.

This was unexpected as these tears in the net were large. And what’s more, even after 5 months, the Permethrin was still highly effective

It proved to be a breakthrough. The widespread use of impregnated bed nets stopped Malaria mortality from increasing and started to decline. These nets were twice as effective as anti-malarial drugs and sprays… and were responsible for almost halving the death rate from Malaria.

This was such an elegantly designed experiment – a beautiful illustration of the scientific method in action.

H/T: How Innovation Works by Matt Ridley

Plastics have negative externalities. The cost of plastics don’t reflect these negative externalities – so we all end up paying for them. There’s a story we like to believe about plastic recycling. However, most plastic isn’t recycled.

So we end up with microplastics and nanoplastics – in our food and our water – that end up in our bodies. It isn’t easy yet to just phase out plastics from our life. They’re cheap and ubiquitous.

The single highest leverage thing we can do is ask our elected officials to ban single use plastics. But, in the absence of that, here are 4 things we can do at home:

(1) Steel water bottles instead of plastic bottled water: Plastic bottled water, it turns out, is a great way to eat plastic. We don’t need that. Just keep steel water bottles with you – they’re better in every way.

Soft drink companies are going all in on marketing these as people reduce soft drink consumption. But plastic bottled water is a farce in developed countries where tap water is high quality. And, if we’re very picky about our neighborhood water source, we can use a filter.

(2) Refuse to take new plastic grocery bags: That will ensure we either bring cloth bags or reuse our existing plastic bags. Both can work.

(3) Replace plastic detergent and laundry pods: These are very convenient and innocent looking. So much so that I didn’t even realize they were plastic (duh). Liquid laundry detergent made of natural materials is an easy replacement.

Plastic-free dishwasher detergent can be harder to find – we’ve found Blueland’s pods very good so far.

(4) Use the compost bin: All food material and paper can go into the compost bin. “Hold On” has good 4 and 13 gallon compost bags that can be used together (depending on the size of your bin).

These are all small ways in which we can contribute to reduced microplastics.

They add up.

The easiest way to make sure we eat healthy is to not bring ultra-processed food at home.

No need to work on ways to add willpower and self control.

Just subtract the temptation.

I’ve loved reading Matt Ridley’s “How Innovation Works” so far. A point he makes emphatically is that the nature of innovation is always misunderstood.

Crucial innovations are often thought to have been accelerated by war. However, most innovation has happened incrementally and has been driven forward by many people.

For example, aircraft fatalities have gone from 3000 people per trillion miles to 50 people per trillion miles between 1970 and the 2010s. An incredible advance – it is 700 safer to be on a jet vs. to drive a car.

This happened not because of one person -but because of many experiments in manufacturing and crew communication best practices.

This is how the jet engine, the car, the electric bulb, and so many other inventions became part of our daily life.