Author: alearningaday

Whatsapp is my favorite social network by a country mile. I blogged about it six months back, it’s numbers and growth have been consistently through the roof, and Facebook has now validated it by paying $19 Billion for it.

A few observations/thoughts –

1. Mark Zuckerberg is probably reading “The Innovator’s Dilemma.” I think this is a smart move. There was a time when Facebook was the best social network out there. Now, Whatsapp is the best social network (in my opinion) everywhere outside the US and China – certainly in terms of time spent and overall usage. Ben Evans describes it as Facebook’s attempt to be the “next Facebook.” Sounds about right.

2. Facebook is investing heavily into mobile with Whatsapp and Instagram. I think it is doing the smart thing by not attempting to integrate all these companies into Facebook in an obvious way. Let them be. Let them do their thing. It’s good for everyone.

3. Whatsapp have done a phenomenal job being completely under the radar.

4. Once again, Whatsapp demonstrate the power of the combination of a great product and a bit of luck. Companies like Google got their break because of a killer product while companies like YouTube probably had a healthy slice of luck. In case of Whatsapp, they had a simple product that just worked and even though they had competition from Kik and Viber, the very viral nature of the product ensured they grabbed most of the online mobile user-base globally (except perhaps China and the US – where WeChat and Snapchat/Kik reign).

5. The rate at which Google, Facebook and Amazon go about acquiring companies is truly mind-blowing. It validates the now conventional wisdom of leading venture capitalists who ensure companies are focused on acquiring users and their product before revenue. If you build an outstanding company with 300M users and almost no revenue, you still have a great shot at being bought out  by an internet giant who won’t have trouble footing the bills to capture your reach. Granted – 300M users is no easy thing but it probably still makes it easier for entrepreneurs to focus.

And, straying off topic for a moment, enough with the social web already. I’d like to see this sort of innovation in agritech and wellness. There’s a lot of good work waiting to be done.

Congratulations to the Whatsapp team – well deserved. And good job Facebook.

You might have started your blog/website with the noble intention of making the internet better by sharing your passion for a topic of choice. You then did the usual – signed up for Google Analytics, a Facebook page, a Feedburner account, etc.

Click through on any of these and you see numbers and stats thrown at you – total reach, number of page views, number of unique visitors, bounce rate, etc., etc. You notice that one post has had more visitors than others – maybe you should post many more like that one? These numbers then prime you when you begin writing your next post and make you wonder what you can do to further increase your reach. Should you perhaps start paying for a bit more reach?

Suddenly, you’ve lost track of that initial objective of making the internet better. Suddenly, it’s all a competition.

A blog is just one example, of course. Numbers and stats in any domain can mess with our original intentions. Charities go about trying to increase the number of donors, partners and regularly forget about focusing on impact (which is much harder to measure). Companies focus so hard on the stock price race that they forget about serving customers and the problems they set out to solve.

Don’t let everything become a bloody competition. Use numbers and stats where necessary. Throw them away if you’re trying to make art. Figure out why you’re doing what you’re doing. Then just do it.

One of the hardest things to do in a game of poker is to separate decisions and results. If the focus is on results, the game can quickly become an exercise in gambling. If the focus is on decisions, the game becomes rooted in logic and sense.

In poker as in life, decisions are best made using a process. However, in both poker and life, there is no guarantee that results will follow decisions. It is easy to assume a great result followed a great decision and vice versa.  

So, if you’re experiencing a bad result – go back to the decisions made. If the decisions were the result of a good process, then revisit the process. If you are convinced the process is a good one, don’t worry about a bad result in the short term. You will definitely make more good decisions than bad in the long run. And that makes all the difference in the world.

PS: It’s hard not to question your process and thus, yourself, when results don’t go your way. Keep the faith. You are meant to learn something from these experiences.

People of influence in our formative years leave indelible marks on our lives – I call these marks imprints. Kids, for example, always carry imprints from parents and key teachers through life. If a child’s parents were harsh and critical, the chances are high that the child carries those insecurities for life. At the same time, if you find a child with parents have been largely supportive, you probably have a kid who is confident of his/her decisions and open to failure.

While imprints are best made in our formative years, an open person can continue to be impressionable as he/she grows up. The more positive imprints a person experiences, the more likely that person is open to more. Conversely, people who’ve been scarred early are going to be very hard to influence/change. In short, both of these create recursive loops.

There are a couple of questions that arise. The most obvious one is if we are generally impressionable or not. Do we employ wariness or openness as our default reaction? Being wary is safe and risk-free while being open can bring a combination of learning experiences and failure.

The most interesting implication, however, is on how we do as people capable of leaving an imprint. We leave imprints in 2 ways –

1. In positions of influence or power – As parents, elders, managers, leaders, and teachers.
2. In every day-to-day interaction. The impact of the imprint is largely proportional to the size of the personality.

The size and impact of our imprints are not to be underestimated. For example, a friend of mine used to regularly sing in her primary school years. In the sixth grade, she participated in a school play during which the teacher in-charge told her mother that “She’s like a peacock. It works best when she keeps her mouth shut.” She has never sung in public since.

I don’t intend to take moral high ground here. I am sure I’ve made remarks that have scarred people – especially as an insecure teenager with a strong personality. But, after having experienced both positive and negative imprints, I’m learning to be careful.

The lesson for today is simple – make a conscious effort to think about the kind of impact we have on people in every interaction. I would hazard a guess that the sum total of these imprints over the course of a lifetime is truly game changing and probably our only real legacy in this world. Let’s ensure its a good one.

I’ve wanted to get into the habit of switching off completely on Saturdays. I managed to do it for a bit a while back but fell back into old habits. There always seems to be so much to do – I work on all my projects over the weekend and it feels like I’m constantly pushing away ideas to the next weekend for lack of time. I should know better – when you least feel like you need a break is when you most need one. Knowing to take time off is a big part of being consistently productive.

So, today will be different. I’m going to switch off completely till tomorrow morning. No checking email and definitely no work. Just a movie, perhaps some reading and a lot of being completely present to enjoy time with family and friends.

If your schedule allows it, I hope you try it too.

One of my favorite Seth Godin posts of all time (there are a few that share this title) is “The Paradox of Expectations”

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Low expectations are often a self-fulfilling prophecy. We insulate ourselves from failure, don’t try as hard, brace for the worst and often get it.

High expectations, on the other hand, will inevitably lead to disappointment. Keep raising what you expect and sooner or later (probably sooner) it’s not going to happen. And we know that a good outcome that’s less than the great one we hoped for actually feels like failure.

Perhaps it’s worth considering no expectations. Intense effort followed by an acceptance of what you get in return. It doesn’t make good TV, but it’s a discipline that can turn you into a professional.

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I love this post because it highlights something I need to learn. I am one of those who habitually falls prey to high expectations. When Seth published this post in September 2011, I remember shaking my head in disagreement. I didn’t even get it then! So, this post is representative of my own learning curve around expectations. I began seeing the wisdom in having no expectations last year but I’m still far away from getting there.

“Intense effort followed by an acceptance of what you get in return. It doesn’t make good TV, but it’s a discipline that can turn you into a professional.”

I am going to work hard on this. Thanks Seth.

Blackstone Vice-Chairman Byron Wein has a lovely list of 20 lessons he’s learned in 80 years on this planet. The full list is here. My favorites from a great list are –

Read all the time.  Don’t just do it because you’re curious about something, read actively.  Have a point of view before you start a book or article and see if what you think is confirmed or refuted by the author.  If you do that, you will read faster and comprehend more.

When someone extends a kindness to you write them a handwritten note, not    an e-mail.  Handwritten notes make an impact and are not quickly forgotten.

Don’t try to be better than your competitors, try to be different.  There is always going to be someone smarter than you, but there may not be someone who is more imaginative.

When meeting someone new, try to find out what formative experience occurred in their lives before they were seventeen.  It is my belief that some important event in everyone’s youth has an influence on everything that occurs afterwards.

Never retire.  If you work forever, you can live forever.  I know there is an abundance of biological evidence against this theory, but I’m going with it anyway.

After a lean last 3 months of the year in terms of reading books, I’ve begun doing some heavy reading over the past few weeks. I’ve been enjoying reading books on technology companies. So, after completing “Hatching Twitter” and finding myself more than halfway on “The Everything Store” (Amazon), “In The Plex” (Google) was a natural choice.

As I’m reading these books, I seem to repeatedly find the power of the influences of the founders. Here are a few examples –

– Steve Jobs “got” music. He was a die-hard music fan and even dated Bob Dylan’s ex-girlfriend. He ended up disrupting the music industry first as part of the iTunes revolution.

– Jeff Bezos “got” books. He was a voracious reader whose first step in understanding anything was to read a book. Amazon’s first foray was books. His initial attempts at disrupting the music industry failed because he just didn’t understand it. Jobs, on the other hand, never really got his head around books because he didn’t believe in them.

– I haven’t read a great Bill Gates book yet but I’d argue that he was probably best placed to understand the power of Microsoft Office in corporates. I know this is extrapolating a bit but Jobs was a far better designer than he was a corporate citizen, especially in his early avatar, and the Mac has never cracked the corporate market.

– Next, new media. Twitter was founded by 4 very geeky founders – one of whom described it as the place to go when he felt alone. Every one of them “got” that. I’d wager that the best new media/”social” start-ups are probably created by geeky founders who’ve fought a lot of loneliness as they grew up and thus understand the real value of being connected online – Facebook and Tumblr seem to support this thought.

I’m not sure what the Google story is, yet, but I’m looking forward to read that. I realize that I’m really cherry picking here – in that these are still relatively young companies and are outliers by nature. But, nevertheless, I find it interesting how the personalities and influence of their founders has influenced their business success.

I was reminded of my long commute year yesterday.

I commuted 1 hour 45 minutes one-way nearly every day in 2012. It started as a 4 month thing and got extended for all good reasons. I remember being completely freaked out by the prospect in the first month. I gradually began accepting it and even shared some of my early reflections in month 2. Over time, it just became habitual – leave home at 7:15am, get to work by 9, work like a mad person as you knew you had to get out by the 5:30/6:30 bus, take some work back on the commute and get back by around 7:15pm.

It helped that there were others who shared the same/similar commute. It created a nice feeling of camaraderie. There were a few who had been doing so for 5-6 years. Over time, I learnt to optimize every part of it – for example, I replaced the last leg – a 20 minute bus ride – with a bicycle ride through a park. This was good exercise even if it was occasionally freezing cold.

That commute serves as a great reminder of our ability to get used to anything. Our minds and bodies are very adaptable and we can thus get used to most things. The unimaginable and uncomfortable can just as easily become habitual. That’s very good to know.