Category: Thoughts

Steve Jobs

What a life. Now it will be – what a legacy. I admire Steve Jobs for his ruthless nature with details. Very few people are both adamant and right. Steve Jobs was. He has been right about a lot of things and there are many things I see now which I think now as a customer to Apple has placed me in the right place too. I know that from open source point of view – Apple isn’t all saintly. But whatever it is, it was the making of Steve Jobs. No where it is possible to be a company like Apple.

I have been digesting his passing away since yesterday. It feels weird and I have 2 things to write about.

1. How I came to know about Macs: When I finished my college I took one year off to study and prepare for IIMs – the prestigious management institution. People spend a year to prep for the entrance test because if you get into IIM your life won’t be same again. During that period – this was 1995, I came across a newspaper ad about how there is a Macintosh computer expo in one of the 5 star hotel. I didn’t know what a Macintosh is but looking at the picture, it looked like a standard PC and I was interested in anything that is remotely like a PC.

At that time I was really wanting to own my very own computer – which was really pricey to have but I went in to check Macs out. It was awesome. The computer smiled when you turn them on and the way it looked was beautiful. Then I saw the price tag – I was like shit. It was like 2500$ even back then. There is no way I can ever afford to buy one. I spent about an hour there wandering and looking at all the models.

I knew I couldn’t buy a mac, but my interest in a mac was spiked up. So, I went straight from there to a book store and bought a Mac for Dummies book. I studied it from end to end and there was an end to that story. After I came to US in 2001 – I have always had an eye on Mac. I checked the apple site often and always looked at the price tag and felt bad about spending so much money on something which I wasn’t sure would be useful for my work.

Finally in 2007 we were about to move to India for a year, my job was ending, we got rid of all the stuff we had and I had just enough savings to buy one. I bought my first Mac Book Pro on June 29th 2007 just 4 days before I left for India. It also happened to be the day iPhone got released and the store was mobbed and I probably was the only guy buying a laptop that day. I remember on that day we were going to our friends place for dinner straight from the store and I was just waiting to get back home and checkout my very own Mac.

I was a Ubuntu Linux user till then and after a painful incidents of my computer stalling and my win PC not working like the way I wanted it to – I made the switch. I had too many gripes about macs – like no right click button, not higher resolution that win pc etc – but all that were gone once I started to use it. No matter what you say about Mac’s closed nature – the hardware rocks. I have never had any serious issues with my mac ever. After that – all I bought was macs. Sangita uses Mac Pro, we have a Mac Mini running as our media center. Airport for wireless. iPod for music etc. Mac gave me peace of mind.

2. Detached Sadness: How could it be my blog post without me feeling something. I have been feeling bummed for his death. I have no personal great incidents with SJ or anything but all this thinking about his death – has made me reflect on couple of things.

a. I noticed that how weird my thinking is that all the time Steve was alive, when I looked at his pics in media or his talk all I thought was what media was telling me. It never occurred to me that there was a person behind that monster character that media is portraying him as. Just 2 day back I saw an article about how SJ parks in handicap spots and that too occupying 2 spots. And I thought what a jerk. But I totally missed how he is a person behind all that noise. A rather warm person. Just goes to show how swayed I am by the stupid media.

b. I was talking to JD last night about this and I was saying how death kinda gives me no place to stand. Like my mind goes into this gaping void where I am speechless and can’t think of anything else. As we talked I realized that I am not that afraid of my own death but I am afraid of far greater thing than that. I think I am afraid that I would die without realizing my purpose in life. That was kinda crazy as it occurred to me.

I think Steve Jobs was all about that – single minded purpose. And he marched to his own band – that made him epic. And my greatest fear came to me that I would die with the music stuck inside me – never getting a chance to realize my purpose. It’s still reverberating in my heart and I am still pondering on it.

It does make me sad.

It’s been said that long time back in 1973 he traveled to India to visit Neem Karoli Baba but just missed him by few days. Neem Karoli Baba passed away few days before Steve arrived. It’s the same Baba whose disciples are Ram Dass and Krishna Das and I think it’s a fitting tribute – a bhajan by Krishna Das on Baba.

 

 

Pulling Back

Suffering is the unyielding attachment to that one stale thought obsessively. Behind these attachment there lies *witness*. When I pull back from these attachments I sense the “gap”. The gap is ever present, I am just not aware of it.

Gap is the cosmic dust that fills the universe.

Gap is the space between trigger and response

Gap is the void that needs no filling

Gap is the sound of the one hand clapping

Gap is what Rumi, Hafiz, Gibran experienced and J.Krishnamurti, Yogi Paramananda talked about, Lincoln, Gandhi, MLK did in actions.

Gap is the humm of life.

I experience it only when I pull back the senses. It’s time.

On the things that I have been taught

Advance, and never halt, for advancing is perfection. Advance and do not fear the thorns in the path, for they draw only corrupt blood.  – Khalil Gibran

Remember when you have that tingling pain in your leg and you have a busy day and don’t bother to think about it? As the day goes on the pain lingers but you keep it off because you are busy. Sometime at the end of the day you can’t take the pain anymore. But just before you pop the pill in you check what the pain is about – for a brief moment you recognize it and become one with it. You feel where it is and know it much more than that morning.

I think something similar happens with us at mental level. This rush and keep-me-busy life is racing forward and there are pains that ebb in the mind but we are in no rush to attend to them. I think meditation is one way to get to know these things. I think meditation and self-introspection kinda leads one to these deeper channels. With what little time I can spend on introspection – through free writing and meditation – I have found out a lot about the things that I have been taught. It’s kinda more like things I have learned, but then when you are young – the surroundings affect you more than your own self. Here are some observations from my own reflection. This whole discovery process has been very cathartic.

1. Perfection: The education system in India is very competitive. Those 5 years of rigorous college where there was very little to do anything other than studies – I think the idea of perfection and getting a centum (I know that’s a crazy word) has been honed well into me. But the side effects of that is – I have so many half baked ideas, projects that I always wanted to work/launch but never could because they never are perfect in my eyes.

Creation is dirty. I mean raw. Potential is raw – it needs it’s rough edges to become something. But the eyes of perfection can only see ugliness in it. They reject the raw baked idea and what I get is a dull humming of judgmental mental chatter. Not worth it.

2. Out there solution: The strong belief that there lies a greater solution out there. There lies a messiah out there to save me. There lies a perfect trick that could fix me. This mental cog is a strong one. Because of the duality of this world and the nature of mind to dissect and box everything – it’s easy to believe that the solution is out there. It’s an illusion.

3. Knowledge: That all knowledge is contained in books and teachings. That I could gain everything and learn it all if I acquire it. What a hogwash. This is nothing but brainwashing for more brainwashing. It’s like the never ending loop. You can’t eat up all the food in this world, you can’t digest all the knowledge of this world.

4. Linearity: This one is like a big cousin to Causality. Because we see cause and effect, we have come to believe that everything around us is linear. It’s good to have a check list and work through it, but not everything is linearly dependent. Freakanomics tells us that we confuse correlation with causality. There would come a day where all this linear thinking will mis-lead us. That would be be the day we would have to chuck that linear list.

5. Time: This one is so weird. There are 2 aspects to this – short term and long term. When it comes to others’ priorities we are told that we don’t have time. It needs to be done yesterday. This causes us to put our priorities away for the long term. So, this causes an imbalance – where we are knocking out a lot of stuff for others’ or a lot of un-important stuff and the most important things that matter to us are lying there in dust. We are taught to live as if  we are going to be here forever! What a fine trick.

Remember Gordian’s knot? My to-do list is like that knot that could never be undone. Because I put stuff in there which was prompted by my brainwashed subconscious over period of schooling and wrong company. The only way to undo is to cut it open. That’s what Alexander did.

I believe fate and destiny are like 2 sides of the mobius strip. Entangled. The mind has it’s limitations for it’s reasons. It’s very smart at discovering short cuts. That’s how we survived. And I think the best way to feed it is to give it short and few targeted goals. Not a barfed up list of minutiae. The mind works on heuristics and short cuts. It’s time to clean up the learned tug of war between heart and mind. It’s time to get clear on goals.

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass the world is too full to talk about. — Rumi

Deliberate Practice, Habits and Rituals

A conversation with friends at dinner made me think about deliberate practice a little bit more tonight. I have been thinking about Habits and Rituals for quite some time. Countless articles and books dissect genius and find out that the success is basically nothing but an outcome of “deliberate practice”. It is said that if you practice anything deliberately for 10,000 hours you would be one of the very few masters of that thing on this planet. I believe it’s completely true. Malcolm Gladwell talks about this and everyday some blog post talks about this.

If we all knew that the secret of success is deliberate practice why aren’t we all super stars in our chosen field already? Because it’s far more harder to do that than to say it. I mean the practice may not be that hard at all, but the deliberate part of it is definitely hard. I have been reading Tony Schwartz’s The Power of Full Engagement. It’s a very interesting idea of looking at our lives from the perspective of *energy*. There are many ways we can divide up our lives. We humans can’t take the whole day by it’s own – we have our own way of chunking and handling our days. Some people divide it by tasks. There is a whole plethora of books, techniques, like GTD,  about how to best manage tasks. Some people divide it by time – instead of taking up a task and doing it, they spend certain amount of time on the task at hand, once the time is up they relax take a break and may be decide to spend another chunk of time on it – Pomodoro technique is one of the many available ones.

But Tony Schwartz talks about dividing it up based on energy. He doesn’t completely define or care about how enthusiastic you are at any given time or whether it’s physical energy etc – but it’s more subtle than that. He talks about how we have certain energy (a mix of physical, mental and emotional) and we don’t have whole lot of it. So, his core idea is – to manage energy. How does he recommend it? Rituals.

Think about it, the most successful people around you definitely have some kind of ritual that makes them stand apart. The friends who are healthier than you are the ones who have a ritual of working out religiously. The people who are peaceful are the ones who attend meditation regularly. Similarly people who are good at doing what they do have some ritual which they follow – no matter what comes into their life.

So these rituals are very simple steps that these people follow to make them who they are. The cool thing about a ritual is – once you get a hang of it, once the body and mind gets used to it – its welcomed whole heartedly. And there are theories around that too (like 21 day rule, or 40 day rule etc). But rituals make or break a successful career, path etc.

Next comes habit – once you follow these rituals regularly and get over that hump of resistance – it’s all smooth sailing from there. It will become a habit. Habit is a mental shortcut. It’s what we do without thinking consciously. It’s the mind’s way to store up a whole lot of instructions in very few synapses. Habits can go both ways. Habits could be a mental short cut helping you or they could also be your blind spots. Habits that are resourceful are the ones that help us.

So what does it entail in the end? Why am I talking about this? I think the only way to make deliberate practice easy is to make a habit out of it. And the only way to create a successful habit is through a ritual. I think that pretty much is a sure path to success in whatever you are planning to do.

Being a programmer it’s nearly impossible to keep track of all the technology that flows by. I am like a kid in a toy store when it comes to all the technology around me (no not the gadgets part of it, but the problem solving part of it). But I can’t be successful in what I want to do if I don’t deliberately practice good problem solving in my career. To make my life easier, here are couple of rituals I have been following –

1. First 90 mins of my day are really important – when I wake up, my mind is fresh and anything I take up at that time just gets absorbed. So, for the first 90 minutes of my day I work on stuff that I love most – in this case – Cocoa programming.

2. Priority List – The night before I sleep I make a list of highest priority things for the next day. That way I can just get on the most important things immediately without wasting time.

3. Email and Chat – When I am focusing, I turn off my email and chat – that really helps.

4. While driving (alone) –  I take up a idea/concept I learned and try to explain it to the non-present 5 year old sitting next to me. Just try to break it down. (I know I know it’s kinda crazy, but it’s part of my ritual)

5. While idle – I try to chant and focus on my breath trying to stay in present.

There are couple of things I want to add to my ritual  like blogging – both personal and technical but I don’t want to overwhelm myself and lose it.

So there you go. The secret of any success is : Deiberate Practice <– Habits <– Rituals. Craft easy and simple rituals and pretty soon you will be successful at what you want to achieve.

Here are some of the books to explore if you want to learn more:

1. The Power of full Engagement

2. The now habit

3. War of Art (not the other Art of War)

Addicted to New, Obsessed with More

That is how I would describe sometimes I feel. I mean, I can start to think about million things and I can blame it on all of them for this unsettling feeling. But in the end it all comes down to taking responsibility for my own feelings and my own issues. There is this constant nagging within which basically lures me into this trap of “Newness”. It’s like I am a *bee* which just goes from one flower to flower seeking more and more and something new. I am addicted to newness. This shows up very easily as to what I do when I read news. I jump from link to link not even giving my brain a full reading opportunity. It’s like Twitter has set a internal reading limit on my brain and I can’t read anything more than 2 sentences. Boredom has become more of a habitat than a situation. Boredom has become so easy to acquire.

Then the obsession with “Moreness”. I want more and more of stuff. It could be anything. As long as it tickles my 140 char taste buds I will take it. Boredom also plays a role in this. The natural pull has become to seek new and then get bored easily and then see more new. This vicious circle has literally has me in it’s grip (there you go, I am objectifying my problem and putting it outside of me).

This is crazy. I mean sometimes I feel like I think this situation is medical – like ADD. But I don’t think that’s correct. I wasn’t like this before. It’s just one of those weird stages I am in. There is only one way to fix this – becoming aware of it and cutting the habit off. It’s hard when you have Google reader and subscribed to 4000 blogs. It’s like falling in a bottomless pit.

In addition to becoming aware of it I also need to get back to my daily meditation. I know, with a baby arriving in the next 1 week – it might sound as an impossible task to do. But I think I will take this baby step first and try. Because the other option really sucks.

Re-friending, re-trying

Today after a long long gap we got to hang out with a bunch of old dear friends whom we had lost couple of years back. It was very nice to catch up. The initial awkwardness aside – great food and drinks really helped. It was fun. It was kinda nostalgic and also left us with a feeling of warmth. Hope this attempt would work this time.

I think, in my life there have been 2 kinds of responses to these conflict based situations.

  1. Give up on situation
  2. Give up on people

Giving up on situations was easy. Totally mental and never felt any emotions. Giving up on people has been hard. I think it’s hard because it’s connected to the heart. There were so many times in my life where I was faced with decision where I had to give up on a friend. It was becoming too toxic. It was painful. They also leave too deep a scar. No matter how many times I have done it, it never gets easy.

So here is to hope that we would be successful this time.

The 40 bits

It is said, scientifically that our brains are processing 4 billion bits of transactions per second. Out of these 4 billion we are consciously aware of only 40 bits at any time. Just 40 bits. The whole body working, the awareness of mind about it’s surroundings, everything is taken care without even us being aware about it.

It’s a very efficient design. Our mind gives us exact information we can process (if we mind gives us info to process – who is processing? That’s another blog post). But, as you can make a guess there is amazing amount of info that is being either discarded or filtered. And this is not always a good thing.

40 bits is our cognitive upper limit. 40 bits is metal awareness limitation. This in-place limitation affects our daily life. We tend to think that these 40 bits are “The Truth”. And over a period of time these Truth’s are turned into Beliefs and belief systems. All this happens even without our knowledge. These 40 bits are the thin veneer pulled tight over our eyes.

Just because we have a limitation, it doesn’t mean we can’t break it or over come it or at least use it smartly. Here is where the Creativity process comes into picture. There are 2 steps to over come this limitation.

  1. Becoming aware of it
  2. Replacing, reusing the 40 bits

1. Becoming aware of it: I have talked about this here, here and here. I don’t want to go into more details, but the gist of it is – you need to be aware of your own thoughts. The inner chatter that happens is where all the action lies. There are a bunch of ways to become aware of it.

  • Just being still
  • Being in the moment
  • Meditation
  • Being in Nature
  • Taking a stand whole day – Like “I will not judge anyone or anything all day today” and keep watching yourself over that stance.

Recently I have came across a great book which does this process but with Questions. It’s Byron Katie’s ‘The Work’. It’s a very simple 4 questions inquiry process which is tremendously powerful once you start to use it. I would highly recommend that to adopt a inquiry process if you don’t have time to meditate. Another thing you could do is to read ‘Bhagavad Gita’ every night. I know I sound so totally Hindu here. But, I am recommending Gita not from a standpoint of religion but from the point of view of Philosophy. It drums this whole thought system which, if used, is very powerful. I would recommend Jack Hawleys – Bhagavad Gita for Westerners (not much on mythology and a small book)

2. Replacing, reusing the 40 bits: Well this has been my day to day thing all my growing up years. I always thought that there exist some system out there by which we can be more creative. I have ready and used many many systems – but the whole idea behind it is – you need to stretch out your mind by opening yourself up with new information. In this age and day there is no dearth of information – but if you always seeking the same info- they you are always keeping the same info in that 40 bits you got.

So, 2 books come to mind. Any book by Edward De Bono – he might come out as dry and simple. But trust me try the tools. Another one is by author Dan Roam – He has a visual problem solving framework. His books are here and here. The advantage of using a visual model as compared to textual model is you can put those 40 bits to maximum use. Like if you draw a picture – you can refer to it probably using just 1 or 2 bits – like a pointer for all those computer guys.

I know it’s not easy being aware of our own 40 bits. Awareness is scary and processes are hard. But again it’s something you do on a long term learning basis. You can’t get this done faster. It doesn’t work that way.

2 Absolutely Necessary Qualities in an Offshore Team/Member

After a recent event – where I ended up working all day Saturday, I have been thinking a lot about Offshore developer/teams and Onsite Clients’ requirements. Having worked on the other side where the Client looked down upon us for every little mistake – but couldn’t let us go because it doesn’t get any better – I have realized couple of things.

Here are 2 absolutely necessary qualities that I would expect in any Offshore development team or member.

1. Escalate: Offshore development kinda happens in future. I mean the timezone wise they are always ahead of us. This needs to be used as an advantage. Whenever something goes wrong or something doesn’t work – the Offshore team needs to escalate it to their Clients Onsite. This helps the Client to take necessary action even before this issue turns into a roadblock.

I am not sure of any other country, but of what I have seen mostly in India. So, these observations are based from my Indian work experience. It is such a strange medley of opposites and paradoxes. Indian developers are very smart to grasp technical ideas but their smartness fails them when it comes to communications. From the childhood, most Indian parents encourage their kids to become class toppers (Believe me, topper is a household word there, I was once a topper too.). There is no emphasis on clear communications. Parental authority in the initial stages and later work based hierarchy system actually supresses any communication abilities a person may have.

The end result is – a brilliant mind, but a numb tongue. So, if only the developers or the team members can learn to voice their opinions much more vocally – we would not have so many issues. Escalate problems as you see it. Raise red flags whenever you can. Your Onsite manager is not your Dad, he won’t be mad at you or judge you for bringing up a problem/issue.

2. Proactive: Most Indian developers I meet are reactive in their approach to development. If I give them a problem they will solve it based on their knowledge. But life doesn’t come in neat packets of problems. It’s a big mess that just overwhelms you.

Being Proactive means, anticipating delays, anticipating what might come up and prepare accordingly. It is said that only 300,000 years ago Humans developed – Pre-Frontal Cortex, the area under your forehead which gives us the ability to simulate any situation just by imagining it. Prior to that, we had no clue of any experience which we have NOT faced it physically. Just imagine how important this is. We got a whole extra add-on. We got a simulation laboratory right in our heads. This gives any human to use Imagination to try to simulate things, situations, actions, behaviors etc without even physically experiencing them.

So, developers – please put that to good use. Use that 1/4th of your brain to basically see the future. It’s something everyone does without being observant. It’s called day dreaming. When you are dreaming of that beautiful girl sitting in front of you in a Coffee shop or when you are dreaming of that vacation you have been wanting – all these things use your frontal brain. So, next time just use it in your projects to fore see what would happen if you did something and what possibly could be your response to it.

An example: We setup a stage server and I asked the developer to add some changes there and test them. He made his changes, but when he went to test them – the login didn’t work. So out of habit of his reactive mind – he assumed that he is powerless and basically sent out an email to me (from the future) telling me that the login doesn’t work. Well, you are the developer – if login doesn’t work then you gotta fix it. That’s what I did. When he said, the login didn’t work – I debugged it and figured out what was happening and I fixed it. The only difference between what he did and what I did – is not technical, but psychological.

That’s all. I don’t want any more features in my developer from India. I don’t care about your sex, about how you look, about your skills, about your coding powers etc. All I need from you is – A good red flag raising capacity and the ability to fore see them coming.

That would save the whole industry of Offshore development from using double the bandwidth in communications – back and forth.

Patterns of Dualism

We all live in a dualistic world. The Philosophy of Dualism has been proposed long time back in Indian Vedanta Philosophy. It’s called Dvaita. The concept is very simple, but hard to remember and use to our advantage. In simple terms it just states that – we perceive (actually our sensory perceptions) our reality in the form of ‘subject’ and ‘object’. This is the basic logic behind it. Now everything is built on top of it and it can get very complex that we become un-aware of it.

Below are some patterns I have consistently come across in my perception. These things are nothing new. We all know these. Just like we have ‘Design Patterns’ in Computer Science, we also can find patterns in dualism. Here are some:

1. Rise and Fall

This pattern just states that whatever goes up, will come down and vice versa. You can try to observe this around you. The stock market, population growth patterns, traffic etc. Any data you take, you would see this pattern embedded within it.

Rise and Fall
Rise and Fall

What is important to note is in this rise and fall, everything is advancing towards the future or moving forward.

2. Big and Small

This is very easy to see. In any scenario or situation – there is someone who is big or with power and there is someone who is small or powerless. And and in most of the cases, there is always a tussle going on between these two entities.

Big and Small
Big and Small

We see this every where in our society. The middle east conflict, the Sri Lankan Sinhalese & Tamil conflict, the minorities in India, US. This is prevalent everywhere. The division may be based on power, money, population etc – but the pattern is same. One group is Big and another Small. We are so obsessed with this pattern that we make folklore & mythological stories based on that. Example: David and Goliath, Kauravas and Pandavas.  We love to root for the underdog.

3. The Choice Paradox

This one is a little complicated. These are the mental locks or physical situations we get into where there is no way out. This is ambivalence that results after two equally opposite values try to pull us in either directions. This is most powerfully experienced at the person level as compared to the previous two which play out much more at the society or group level.

Examples: The things that make us happy can also make us sick. Chocolate. Some morally questionable activities may give us more joy. We have a common name for this pattern called Catch-22

choiceparadoxThese are few which I see around me. As I said, there are many more patterns and I am pretty sure you may see them or come across them. Let me know if you have any and I will add them here.