A Learning a Day

One of the lessons I’ve learnt from following careers of footballers (/soccer players) over the years is that we frequently overemphasize the role of individual talent.

In reality, there’s a certain alchemy when we bring together the right player in the right team under the right manager.

Talent – especially of the precocious nature – helps a footballer get noticed and give them options. But if that mixture goes wrong, even the best of talents can flounder.

The opposite is also true. Players with mediocre relative talent can push close to world class in the right environment.

Applicable well outside football of course.

The difference between experiencing flow and feeling overwhelmed is often just prioritization.

Developing a system that just helps us continuously decide the one or two things that matters and helps us focus on those till they get done is among the most important investments we make for our mental health.

A few months ago, I’d shared a post about how our Powerwall had made us so much smarter about our energy use. These kinds of numbers are invaluable in understanding trends in energy use. Once we have this kind of visibility, we inevitably become smarter about our use.

I shared last week that I’m on a 4 week stretch with a Continuous Glucose monitor. Once you see how your body responds, you can’t un-see it. It changes you.

I’ve been looking for an equivalent device for our water. We finally got to installing a Moen device yesterday for our main line. It immediately gave me more visibility into our usage than I have had in years. It’ll be the first of many Moen devices in our household in the coming days.

Once you see the trends, it is hard to un-see them.

We must first see. Then we will understand. And then we will change.

We often talk about giving someone the “hard sell” when we want to convince them.

I’m a big fan of the opposite – the hard anti-sell. With the hard anti-sell, you clearly lay out all the reason someone shouldn’t, say, join your cause.

This isn’t about being negative. It is simply about laying out all the trade-offs explicitly so they have a clear understanding of the deal.

If they still decide to do it, you know you’ve found the right person

There’s a great line (among many) from Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits – “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.”

This is the sort of catchy line that is easy to repeat – but challenging to implement.

It is hard enough to get to clarity about what matters. Then maintaining that level of clarity as we deal with all the noise from the world around us is a whole different matter.

The main thing is indeed to keep the main thing the main thing.

How to dramatically increase the impact we drive with 2 simple steps –

(1) Pick 1-2 problems (and no more than 2) to focus on at any given time.

(2) Stay with them till they’re solved.

Of course, it is so much easier to spread ourselves thin on multiple problems. And then switch course to something different when making progress on meaningful problems inevitably get hard.

The two steps above are simple. But simple is hard.

There’s a lot written about DeepSeek’s AI highly efficient and optimized AI models. There are 3 lessons I’m taking away –

(1) It is clear we’re early in the AI adoption cycle given the amount of hype around an unknown competitor making big dents in efficiency. I think there are going to be many more twists and turns. And, in time, everyone will be more sanguine about these kinds of announcements. In sum, keep calm and keep shipping.

(2) If you’ve been using GAI regularly, one idea that has become evident over time is that foundational models are increasingly commoditized. Open AI hasn’t been the only game in town for more than a year. Excellent open source alternatives (Llama, Mistral, Qwen, etc.) provide access to useful models. The limiting factor is just having the infrastructure to run these in cost-effective ways.

(3) That, then, brings us to DeepSeek’s innovation. I was reminded of Steven Johnson’s idea that innovation isn’t just about doing more, it is about doing more with less. For the past couple of years, we’ve celebrated AI models doing many more amazing things – with Nvidia stock going up at every step given the compute required. Then DeepSeek came along and showed everyone that more is possible with significantly less – and open sourced all that knowledge no less.

This innovation was borne out of a real constraint. DeepSeek had access to fewer NVIDIA chips – so they just worked around it.

But that is just what high performing teams do. They focus on what they control, get dialed in on their execution, and work around their constraints to get what they want done.

That’s one lesson we all can take from this episode.

One of the harder things to do when we’re attempting to build something is to separate the exercise of determining the “what” from the exercise of determining the “how.”

Growing up in India, one of the strongest associations I made with wealth was comfort.

In a country with a large population, help was easily available. And the wealthier someone was, the more they seemed to be able to afford help of all kinds. This in turn meant wealthy folks I saw didn’t have to do any chores within their home. The help did their shopping, cooked food, ran behind their kids, and so on.

Things were outsourced and got done.

It is worth pausing a moment to consider the word we use for household tasks. We call them chores – the definition of a chore is an unpleasant but necessary task. That means the equation is simple – the more chores we outsource, the better.

And while help isn’t as cheap in other countries, the gig economy has made it possible for us to outsource chores in ways we might not have thought possible. So, if you work with the assumption that comfort is the goal, we can outsource said chores to Instacart, a weekly help-service, and so on.

My biggest reflection since wearing the CGM / continuous glucose monitor in the past 2 weeks is just how much I’ve grown to appreciate chores. After eating a meal or a snack, I look forward to getting things done around the house. That movement ensures any glucose I’ve taken in gets metabolized.

I think this has parallels to every part of our life. It has never been so comfortable to let media or the internet take over our attention. And every indicator shows AI agents will only accelerate this.

Keep extending this trend and the state of the humans in Wall-E are suddenly not unimaginable.

While it is an exaggeration, I am not sure it is all that far off. Every statistic around obesity and chronic diseases borne out our sedentary lifestyles is sobering. It isn’t surprising – the more we solve for comfort, the worse our health outcomes become.

It turns out that we are just built for discomfort. We are built to stand and to move (a lot), to do things around our homes, to lift heavy things, to sprint, to buy and eat whole non-sugary food, to get out in the warmth or the cold and take in fresh air, to wake up with the sun and sleep once it goes down, and to use less toxins and chemicals in our lives.

So many of these things are the antitheses of the image of comfort we all might have in our minds.

But we’re built for discomfort.

Ironically, the more we embrace that, the more comfortable our life will likely become in the long run.

“I created the OASIS because I never felt at home in the real world. I didn’t know how to connect with the people there. I was afraid, for all of my life, right up until I knew it was ending. That was when I realized, as terrifying and painful as reality can be, it’s also the only place where you can find true happiness. Because reality is real.” | James Halliday (fictional billionaire creator of a virtual reality simulation), Ready Player One

In other words – log off, take a walk, smell the fresh air, give a hug, try things, fail… and live.