Author: alearningaday

I first tried a robot vacuum cleaner 5 years ago. We bought a Eufy and it taught me a valuable lesson – I needed to either understand how it works or be able to predict what it would do.

The Eufy I’d purchased functioned on a “bounce” algorithm. So it ping-ponged its way through a room and eventually our home. This sounded reasonable before I bought it.

But it drove me crazy. As it was hard to predict, I ended up using its remote control to take it where I wanted it. At that point, however, it was easier to just vacuum myself.

I’d picked the Eufy up on sale. It reminded me of another old lesson – if you decide to buy something, invest in making it good. It pays off over time.

3 years ago, as we moved into our home, I purchased the Roborock S7. This time, it wasn’t about the sale (lesson learned). I did extensive research and I decided to try the Roborock for 3 reasons –

(1) Feedback on its mapping technology was great. The Roborock promised to map out our home and go through the map systematically.

(2) It had mopping functionality. That sounded very cool.

(3) It also had auto-empty functionality. This meant emptying the dust and dirt every few months vs. every time we used it.

3 years in, our Roborock – nickamed Zorro – has become a key fixture in our home. It has delivered on all the above with impressive consistency.

Zorro is a great example of an AI tool that adds a ton of value to our home. It uses its vision to see around the home and uses its intelligence to navigate and clean. A big part of my job these days is to build AI tools, I look to Zorro as inspiration for what a great tool does.

First, it solves real problems well. In doing so, it removes time spent on tedious tasks.

Second, it does so in a manner that makes the output predictable. When we delegate control to a tool, it helps us ensure the tool is working in a way that solves our problems in a manner that works for us.

Dr Casey Means, in her book “Good Energy”, shares a piece of advice on working with the US healthcare system (and perhaps many healthcare systems) – Trust the system on acute issues, ignore it on chronic issues.

Her experiences studying and practicing medicine kept pushing her toward a siloed approach to understanding problems. This meant a raft of treating symptoms vs. understanding the problem holistically. In medicine, the suffix “itis” means inflammation. And inflammation in various parts of the body were treated with specific medication that, in her experience, repeatedly didn’t work.

Her insight is that inflammation takes root because fof core dysfunctions in our cells that impact how they function, signal, and replicate themselves.

As a result, one simple measure that can powerfully reframe how we understand health and disease is by looking at how well or poorly the mitochondria (that converts food energy into cellular energy) in our cells are making energy.

When the body is healthy, they produce “Good Energy.” And, when these cells had are metabolically dysfunctional and underpowered, we are stuck with “Bad Energy” which shows up in all our biological markers.

It reminded me of Peter Attia’s notes about Medicine 2.0 (modern medicine that is great at stopping quick deaths) vs. Medicine 3.0 (medicine that helps us prevent slow deaths from diseases like diabetes, cancer, and Alzheimer’s). He wrote in depth about metabolic dysfunction… but Dr. Casey Means points to metabolic dysfunction as the key to that bigger question.

It is a powerful way to think about wellness.

It resonated.

“There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.” — Edith Wharton

It resonated.

H/T: Arjun

I’ve been thinking about this story a bunch over the past days – I first read it a decade ago.

When Ben Horowitz was working for the web server team at Netscape, Microsoft created a rival web server product that was 5 times as fast as Netscape’s and gave it to customers for free. So, Ben began working hard on potential acquisition targets that could help Netscape overcome this problem.

When he shared the idea with his engineering counterpart, Bill Turpin, Bill listened and said – “Ben, those silver bullets that you are looking for are all fine. But, our server is FIVE times slower. There is no silver bullet that is going to fix that. We’re going to have to use a lot of ‘lead bullets.’”

So they decided to focus on simply fixing the performance issues. Once they did, Netscape beat Microsoft’s performance and grew web servers to a 400 million dollar business.

Later, as CEO of Opsware, when he found competitor BladeLogic consistently beating them on big deals, Ben had colleagues who suggested silver bullets like other acquisitions and pivots. But, he had learnt his lesson – they had to build a better product. No silver bullets, only lead bullets.

When we’re dealing with difficult problems, it is natural to look for silver bullets. But those don’t generally exist.

The hard way tends to be the way.

I called an optometry store nearby the other day after hours.

Like other stories, they asked me to leave a voicemail.

Like other such asks from stores, I ignored it.

A few seconds later, I got an automated text from the store asking about my call. I texted them about the item I was looking for. A few minutes later, someone responded they had it in stock.

It is a simple addition to their process – a text in addition to the voicemail to follow up on customer interest.

And yet, that simple exchange guaranteed they kept a customer they might have lost. It is one of the better examples I’ve seen of maintaining a water-tight funnel.

Well played.

Whenever we work on driving change within an organization, we will run into situations where things feels stuck or broken. Everyone was bought in to the promise of the change – but now we’re stuck and unable to make progress.

Every experienced operator knows that is normal. There is generally no shortage of possible ideas – the challenge is finding the one that actually works despite all the constraints.

And the more consequential the decision, the more the constraints (and the number of people who remind you of the constraints).

The key, in these situations, is to get the core group of stakeholders together with one goal – to agree on why things are broken / why we’re stuck.

No expectation on getting to a solution. Let’s just align on the problem we’re solving.

That ends up being the most important thing we can do to get unstuck.

“What best distinguishes our species is an ability that scientists are just beginning to appreciate: We contemplate the future. Our singular foresight created civilization and sustains society. A more apt name for our species would be Homo prospectus, because we thrive by considering our prospects. The power of prospection is what makes us wise. Looking into the future, consciously and unconsciously, is a central function of our large brain.”  | Martin Seligman

A beautiful distillation of what it is to be human.

To be is to ponder about the future.

A recent paper shared the results of a 5 year observation study of 12,000 individuals with Obesity taking GLP-1 drugs (e.g., Ozempic, Wegovy) by a collection of Chinese researchers.

There’s an impressive looking graph in the paper that shows a significant reduction in adverse outcomes (stroke, cardiovascular issues, etc.).

A commentor on the thread, Hank Green, summarized the punchline beautifully.

That’s a ~90% improvement in mortality.

There’s a lot we need to fix in our society with regards to diet and movement. There’s far too much ultra-processed food going around and far too less exercise.

But such changes take time. Obesity needs urgent attention. And while we’re still early in understanding the long-term impact, a 90% reduction in the odds of death should make us all sit up and take notice.

This global population growth chart, from Steven Johnson’s post, blew my mind. It illustrates what happens when growth goes from linear to exponential.

In Steven Johnson’s words – “That’s the 6,000 year history of human population growth. You might notice, if you really squint your eyes, that something interesting appears to happen about 150 years ago. After millennia of slow and steady growth, human population growth went exponential. And that’s not the result of people having more babies—the human birth rate was declining rapidly during much of that period. That’s the impact of people not dying. And while that is on one level incredibly good news, it is also in a very real sense one of the two most important drivers of climate change. If we had transferred to a fossil-fuel-based economy but kept our population at 1850 levels, we would have no climate change issues whatsoever—there simply wouldn’t be enough carbon-emitting lifestyles to make a measurable difference in the atmosphere.

The key idea here is that no change this momentous is entirely positive in its downstream effects. Trying to anticipate those effects, and mitigate the negative ones, is going to take all of our powers of prospection.” 

It also illustrates why I’m particularly interested in the technology adoption curves of solar energy and other renewable energy sources. In cases where the externalities (or second order impacts) are positive, great things happen when growth goes from linear to exponential.

Feedback often shows up like a lump of coal in a clean room – unwelcome and annoying. Heres what we need to do to help us get to actionable feedback –

(1) Acknowledging that all feedback is between 1% and 99% true. It is our responsibility to figure out what we want to do with it.

(2) There’s no point reacting to any emotion around it.

(3) If it comes from someone in a position of authority, best to take them seriously instead of literally.

(4) When we get ideas suggested to us, we need to do the work to understand the problem the ideas are intended to solve. Then we can find the right solution to those problems.

These steps unearth the diamond within the coal.