Category: Everything else

9 surprises from 2018

Bill and Melinda Gates shared their 2018 annual letter yesterday. I loved the format – 9 surprises and their thoughts on the action they need to take. My 3 favorite bits of insight were –

(1) The 5 areas we need to solve for zero emissions – electricity generation, agriculture, manufacturing, transportation, and buildings. I’ve been searching for a pie chart like this for a while.

2) The modern flush toilet was patented in 1775 (!). Bill Gates has been writing about innovations in this space and I love the idea of having a toilet that requires no zero infrastructure and that converts feces and urine into useful byproducts.

Even more fascinating was the impact this might have on the lives of women. Rather than risk defecating in a dangerous urinal, women in some nations have developed kidney trouble because of holding on to their urine all night.

3) And, I loved their note optimism

We get asked a lot these days whether we’re still optimistic about the future. We say: Absolutely. One reason is that we believe in the power of innovation. But an even bigger reason is that we’ve seen firsthand that for every challenge we’ve written about in this letter, there are people devoting their ideas, their resources, and even their lives to solving them.

When we’re feeling overwhelmed by negative headlines, we remind ourselves that none of us has the right to sit back and expect that the world is going to keep getting better. We have a responsibility to do everything we can to push it in that direction.

In that way, we’ve found that optimism can be a powerful call to action. And it has a multiplier effect: The more optimists there are working for a better future, the more reasons there are to be optimistic.

PS: As I mentioned in my post yesterday, I’m traveling in India over the next few weeks. Unlike in the past, I’m trying to keep normal email schedule – however, that occasionally means two posts arriving on the same day. Apologies!

Pens and circumstances

I walked into a store near our place to buy pens yesterday. As I entered, I realized the shop was rather dimly lit. But, I intended to buy a couple of pens and went about trying to do so. However, the lady at the shop was so unwelcoming that I abandoned the idea just as I was about to pay for them.

As I walked out, I wondered why we ended up in that situation. The obvious initial focus was the unhelpful storekeeper. However, the situation she was in wasn’t great either. The shop dimly lit and didn’t have air conditioning turned on (not ideal in our home city in India). Would a good attitude last in such circumstances?

Then again, why would someone with a desire to do well choose such a circumstance in the first place?

I ended up realizing that the relationship between our circumstances and our mindset are that of a two way loop that reinforce each other. Once we accept our circumstances, we get to shape them.

Then, they shape us.

Repetition – the smart version

My mom recently was asked to narrate a story to our two year old daughter ten times in a row. This wasn’t a particularly entertaining story – it was the back story of how a fixture at home got there. But, nevertheless, she wanted to hear the story ten times and was an enthusiastic listener every time.

Such repetition isn’t out of place in a two year old’s life. As they take in new sights, sounds, and language, familiar stories help them find a balance of “explore-exploit” that they’re comfortable with.

The incident did get me thinking about repetition however.

Are there many other ingredients that are more important to a life well lived than repetition? And, if the repetition is smart – i.e. if it incorporated learning from the previous round – so much the better.

The act of loving those we care about contains a lot of repetition – giving many hugs and kisses, appreciating them for the little things they do, and consistently doing the little things that matter to them ourselves.

Building expertise in any skill involves a lot of smart repetition – deliberate practice, consistent routine, and a daily willingness to progress beyond physical and mental pain.

Love, wealth, happiness, and everything else that makes this life worth living is borne out of smart repetition.Take action -> learn from it -> do it better. Rinse. Repeat. Watch your efforts compound over time.

Every student of this journey comes to that point when he/she realizes that this life isn’t about doing big things. Instead, it is about doing those small things with extraordinary care – with plenty of smart repetition.

Your fiction recommendations

Nick wrote in wondering if I could publish the fiction recommendations I collected during the holiday season thanks to recommendations from those of you who wrote in. Thank you so much for sharing again… and here goes –

Armada by Ernest Cline

Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card

Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

All the light we cannot see by Anthony Doerr

Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt

Avogadro Corp by William Hertling

Mr. Pennubra’s 24-hour bookstore by Robin Sloan

The Books of Babel by Josiah Bancroft

The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chamber

The Rosie Project by Don Tillman

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

Cixin Liu’s trilogy starting with the Three-Body Problem

The Punch Escrow by Tal M Klein

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer

The Emperor’s Blades by Brian Staveley

Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman

Druss the Legend by David Gemmell

Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge

Foundation by Isaac Asimov

The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt

Lamb by Christopher Moore

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

The library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins

Seveneves by Neal Stephenson

Sundiver trilogy by David Brin

The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

Extinction Point series by Paul Anthony Jones

Blasphemy and Tyrannosaur Canyon by Douglas Preston.

Watership Down by Richard Adams

Replay by Ken Grimwood

Daniel Kahneman’s success equations

I began working my way through “The Science of Why” yesterday and was reminded of Daniel Kahneman’s equations for success from “Thinking Fast and Slow” –

Success = talent + luck
Great Success = a little more talent + a lot of luck

As someone who loves this topic, his equations made me chuckle. I tend to break up talent into a mix of privilege and mindset. But, that aside, it is nice that he omits hard work altogether.

The importance of luck – specifically in being in the right place at the right time – in our extrinsic success can’t be overstated. If you are swimming in an area where the tide is in, you don’t have to paddle.

Knowing when you need a coach

Most of us know a friend who can pick up skills at will. They say they want to learn the guitar today, watch videos on YouTube for the next 3 months, practice, and emerge as a good guitar player. Or, they actually act on their new years resolution and go to the gym.

We know we can summon up the will necessary to do that for something that’s urgently needed at work. But, we’re generally unable to prioritize stuff that’s longer term/important.

My working theory is that this ability to do self-driven skill building is a function of two things – 1) how driven you are by achievement (vs. other motives) and 2) where you lie on the spectrum between obsessive compulsive and attention deficit. That combination results in a place in the skill building spectrum

For most of us, skill building isn’t easy because we either need a peer group or, in most cases, a coach.

All this gets us to the key takeaway – the solution to accelerating our ability to learn and get better is not to kick ourselves for not being able to finish that course or go to the gym. It is to simply understand our preferences and get help from a professional.

PS: For what its worth, I think this is the greatest challenge for online learning. Only 3-6% of folks finish an online course they start. Imagine what we’d enable if we provided the support that many of the others needed.

SpyCloud – dealing with password breaches

Attacks to online security and password breaches are getting larger and more frequent.

While 2 Factor Authentication (2FA) will help prevent an “Account Take Over” following a breach, we’re in a better place to deal with potential problems when we know something happened. For example, “Account Take Over” aside, spammers might target you with emails claiming to be able to access your account because they have a password from a few years ago.

SpyCloud does exactly that. SpyCloud’s free service notifies you of any breach that involves your email address. It is becoming a must-have along with 2FA in our cyber crime defense toolkit.

Reading non-fiction – breadth and depth

It is interesting how often new year resolutions involving non-fiction books focus on breadth (e.g. targeting x books to read per month) and how few, if any at all, focus on depth.

As I’ve come to realize, breadth targets with non-fiction books are the equivalent of vanity metrics. If the goal is learning and growth, there is often more to be gained by picking ONE great book on a topic that matters to us and seeking to simply master the concepts of that book over the course of the year.

That’s because the act of reading alone doesn’t result in learning. It is the synthesis, reflection, and action that follows that results in learning.

In books as in many other things, choosing depth points to wisdom and potential transformation.

The right way to lift weight

As I’ve belatedly been learning in the past week, the right way to lift something heavy is not to bend down to lift it. Instead, it is to do a squat.

Image Source: Healthwise

The reason to do the squat is because it enables us to keep our back straight and ensures our back muscles are supported by our leg muscles.

If this sounds obvious to you, good for you.

For me, on the other hand, learning this was a reminder that doing something in a certain way for a long time doesn’t make it right. That holds true for habits that seem to come “naturally” as well.