The Candy House - Jennifer Egan

I recently read this book as part of a reading challenge. The author wrote this book in a peculiar format. A side character from one chapter becomes the narrator in the next chapter and so on. By doing this, the author is able to use different narration techniques in the same book. It also helps us understand a situation from different points of view. She is a real wordsmith. She writes one chapter as a field guide to a spy and another through messages between the characters. 

Bix, the founder of a successful social media company, is looking for new ideas to expand his company. As part of this, he attends a meeting at a college by a professor, Miranda Cline. Bix has used Miranda's original ideas about trust to build his social media company. In this meeting, he learns of a technology to transfer the consciousness of animals to the cloud. Bix takes this idea and creates a new product call Own your Consciousness. With this product you can transfer all your memories to the cloud. You can also change some recent traumatic memories and re-implant them back to your brain. Uploading your memories to the collective, gets you proportional access to others memories. 

This is very enticing and most of the world starts uploading their memories. Most people use this for personal and societal needs - to catch who was the kid that beat me up? What happened to that guy I shared a beer with at the Cafe? Who killed my friend etc. Chris remarks that the problem is that it is so attractive that people will give it everything. And the collective is omniscient. It is a Candy House - giving away your memories has benefits, but it can lead to unintended consequences. In fairy tale Hansel & Gretel, the witch uses the Candy House to lure them into the house. She feeds Hansel in the hopes of eating them. This reminded me of the aphorism in silicon valley, if you are not paying for the product, you are the product. 

Egan doesn't explore all the pros and cons of Own Your Unconscious. She tells us how the lives of different characters and how they live in the world with this tech. Charlene uses it to see her dad smoking pot at a commune when she was waiting for him to come home. Another daughter Roxy tries to relive a London trip with her father. Only it is leaves her with hurt. Later she uploads her memories and dies, finally feeling the connection with her dad. Alfred's character mocks the overperformance in social media. He hates it and takes to screaming in public to get an authentic response from people. 

Not everyone is enthusiasitc about sharing all the memories with the collective. Chris leads the resistance to this collective by building an app called Mondrain. He helps people elude from the collective by using proxies. They use fiction writers work to mimic them using their memories from the collective. 

Lincoln is a counter who helps identify the proxies and cut them. Lulu is a citizen spy with electronics called weevils embedded in her. Even after stint as a spy has ended, she faces trauma. She worries that the government is spying on her husband using the weevil implanted in her. There is Ames Hollander who runs an off the books store to remove weevils from former citizen spies. This helps them relax and not worry anymore about govt. spying. 

Bix's youngest son, Gregory doesn't share his father's interest about Own your unconscious. His father has shown his uploaded memories to the family many times. Those memories start with a blank space where his dad doesn't have any ideas. That interests Gregory. 

Later when he grows up, he comes to know that his father willed a lot of money to the Chris's resistance non-profit. He feels that he didn't know his Dad enough. One snowy day, he realizes that the blank vision his father started with was not blank. It was the human collective with each person doing different things. So it needed him to write his book to makes sense of all that. 

This novel is a huge panomara with lots of characters. There is no overarching narrative to the novel, except exploration of the lives of people around this technology. That is how Egan makes her point - stressing the importance of fiction in making sense of the human stories. 

“Only Gregory Bouton’s machine—this one, fiction—lets us roam with absolute freedom through the human collective. But knowing everything is too much like knowing nothing; without a story, it’s all just information. ” 

And that's why you need a narrator to connect the information into a narrative. 

These are the stories I liked the most - 

• Lincoln's story where he uses maths to understand the elusive thing that can make M fall in love with him. It is a clever expression of a math obsessed kid who loves M but can't express it to her in a way she understands.
• The story of Lulu, Molly, Chris and Colin when they share a close moment together on a pier. The teenage friendship, love and awakening moments was touching. 
• The story of Miles Hollanders' fall and redemption. Miles predicted that no one likes being right the first time. He then goes on to follow the script by falling from grace and then rising to be a state senator. 
• The story written in messages about Lulu's interview plan with Jazz Attenborough. It was clever and shows projects take shape.  

River of Smoke

In the second book in the Ibis series, Amitav Ghosh writes about the situation in China before the start of the opium war. Through the various characters, he writes about the English, American and Indian traders in Canton. He continues exploring the lives of the various people who cames from Ibis to China, Mauritius and other islands nearby.

This made me think about the opium war and the lessons we can learn from it.

Britian had trade deficits with China. To reduce the deficits, they started pushing opium. Chinese get addicted to opium and they lose valuable bullion.

Conscentious Chinese mandarins appeal to both the British merchants and the Queen. Their appeal is logical since British ban it in their country. So how can their morals justify selling it in China?

They also ban bringing opium to China. Then the traders started smuggling opium by selling it from the outer islands. These smugglers then bring it to China in fast crab boats. They bribed the local officials and still continued the business. A new official comes and threatens the chinese traders. They burn these fast crab boats and stop any opium from the outer islands. They quarantine all the foreign traders in Guangzhou till they turn in all their opium.

They don't harm any merchants but destroy the opium. This angers the companies who have lost their profits from the opium trade.

They force the British government to act and go to war against China.

Due to the powerful ships and military equipment, British win. They extract unequal treaties from China and addict the Chinese even further. All this so they can earn money without any regard to the damage done by Opium.

The lesson here is that if you're not powerful, people will walk over you. Even if countries talk a big game about values and morals, you cant trust them. They will not hesitate to use their power in an unfair situation.

This causes an arms race as each country wants to be in a more powerful position than the other.

It also tells about how Indian traders from Bombay also took part in the opium trade.

Before the opium war, Canton (present day Guangzhou) was the only port open for foreign trade.

The arguments from the British side for the war are also interesting. They argued that China was not allowing free trade. It is stopping their people from getting the things they wanted. The book also provides an interesting counter for that. It argued that the British used the free trade argument when it suited them but not always. As an example, the British set the rules for procurement of ships in a way that only British firms can meet. This caused Indian shipbuilders to lose their business.

PM traps to avoid - 2

 I have worked as a product manager for the past three years. If you've read books about product management but have never worked as a PM, you have a rosy picture of what a PM does. 

So I wanted to share a few traps that await you when you become a PM and how you can avoid them. 

You can read the first one - Don't be a warm body.  This post is about the second one. 

2. Don't buy into the hype machine

Your exec team have an idea. It fits with the strengths of the company. If this idea is successful, then your company will be wildly successful. They start selling this idea even before vetting it. They make plans about it. They talk about it in the all hands meeting. They bring you in as the PM for the product. 

You buy in to the idea and focus on building the product and getting it out to the market as soon as possible. 

You speak to your engineering team and they tell you it will take a long time to build. Given the hype inside the company, you don't find it difficult to get resources for the build. 

You speak to prospective customers and who appear super excited. If you ask for concrete committments everyone asks you to get back once the product is ready. After a long build time the product is now ready. You go back to the prospective customers who have expressed interest before. Now they are a little bit cool. They say the idea is good but it is lower in their list of priorities. One customer who helped you spec out the product says that the way you've built it is incompatiable. They ask for many changes to the product before they can integrate it. Now you realize that none of the prospecitve customers want to use the product. 

You wonder how can a product which is the future of a company fail so bad? 

Here what happened is that you've failed to test if the idea you have is solving a real problem? 

You allowed a costly build to happen without knowing if the product is useful. 

Understand that it is the PMs job to cut the hype and identify the hits from the duds. 

How to avoid this trap? 

• It is the job of the exec team and sales team to be rosy about prospects of the products and product ideas. 
• You as the PM should test the ideas as cheaply as possible to make a product usable, feasible and viable. 
• When faced with such a situation, you should speak with your customers. Use the Mom Test to understand if the problem you are solving is real
• Get concrete committments from interesting customers to understand the viability of the product. 
• If you are not able to get committments, it could be because of two reasons. First reason being it is not a real problem. Second reason they need to see the product to see the value. 
• If it is the first then  communicate it and help the company pivot to some other product. 
• If it is the second then use the testing strategies like mockups, static demos etc to test it out further. 
• Try a Debate meeting - Kim Scott in her Radical Candor book talks about Big Debate meetings. You can schedule one big debate meeting to discuss your concerns about what are the different ways in which it can fail and why it is not a great idea. That way you can easily persuade others that it is not an idea that is meant to be persued. 

Understand that it is the PMs job to cut the hype and identify the hits from the duds. 

PM Traps to Avoid - 1

I have worked as a product manager for the past three years. If you've read books about product management but have never worked as a PM, you have a rosy picture of what a PM does. 

So I wanted to share a few traps that await you when you become a PM and how you can avoid them. 

1. Don't be a warm body 

When you join a team as a PM, especially in the initial stages, you can't choose your product. Your seniors assigns a product for you. Once you come upto speed, you notice that the prodcut doesn't make sense. Or atleast it is not the best use of your time and company resources. 

How can this happen?  - 

A company gets started with a single revenue generating product. They achieve product-market fit with that product. They start selling the product and hire hoping the good times continue. Then they do well and sature the market for that product. Now the company wants to build new products to keep growing and sustain their valuations. For that they do some brainstorming, listen to customers, think of the market to come up with new products. 

They confirm it with a few customers and they respond well. They get a product built and deliver to this customer. They are able to sell this product to a few customers but they can't grow it anymore. This gets assigned to a new PM, you. 

You realize this is not a good product or not a product that can grow. Here I'm not talking about product trying to solve a real problem but doesn't solve it completely. Here I'm talking about products you know there is no market. i.e. you are not solving anybody's problem. 

Ultimately, it is your job as the  PM of the product to own it. The sooner you can raise the alarm about this, the faster the company can pivot.

But the director has this product in his portfolio and he needs someone to continue building it. You speak to him and tell what you think. You suggest some new products to grow that business. Those are risky ideas but if they succeed there is a chance to grow the business. They need bigger budget. All valid reasons for why we cannot work on those new ideas. But since he has a budget to spend,   it compels you to work on ideas which you know don't amount to much. 

What can you do when you find yourself in this trap? 

• Once you realize this is a dead product, you owe it to speak the truth to power. 
• Create a deck or a document detailing your analysis and recommendations. 
• Tell them what outcomes you can expect if you continue in the same path. 
• Generate alternative ideas which you can persue/test out to meet the same objectives.
• Speak to other internal teams to get their reading of the situation. 
• Include bytes from customers and internal folks about the situation. 
• Use formal and informal forums to talk about what you found. 
• Your goal is to get everyone to acknowledge the situation. Then drive towards making a change to the next promising idea. 

Lots of times, everyone is busy to notice this. Ultimately, it is your job as the  PM of the product to own it. The sooner you can raise the alarm about this, the faster the company can pivot. 

Next, I will speak about how to the avoid the second trap - buying into the hype machine

Sea of Poppies Review - Amitav Ghosh

I recently read the book Sea of Poppies written by Amitav Ghosh. It is a fictional story written in the backdrop of the Opium wars with China in 1830s. 

This is the first book in the Ibis Trilogy. Ibis is an American ship used for slave trade. After American abolished African slave trade in 1808, a British trader buys the ship. He plans to use it to transport indentured labor to Mauritius. Mauritius' sugarcane cultivation was labor intensive. Abolition of slavery caused acute labor shortage. Hence the plantation owners decided to import labor from India. 

This journey on Ibis to Mauritius brings together a group of people each one showing a different side of British colonialism. 

There is a  mulatto American who is on the crew of Ibis as it sails from Baltimore to Calcutta to espace racism.  There are the lascars who help with bringing the Ibis to Calcutta and later to Mauritius.  There is a chaste king of Raskhali whom the British sentence for forgery and send to Mauritius. There is a high caste lady who married an opium addict and wants to die by Sati but a low caste man saves her.  She is on the run and gets into the ship for indentured labors. There is the daughter of French botanist whom a Muslim lady raises and is at home in Bengali customs. When her father dies, she gets into the ship to escape a marriage. These and many other characters all come together in Ibis on the trip to Mauritius. 

Through the stories of these people, Ghosh tells us about the opium trade with China. There was great demand for tea, porcelian and silks from China in Britain and Europe. But the British didn't have anything that China liked to trade with them. Because of this, the British had to pay in silver and gold for the trade. They started exporting opium to pay for these goods. The Emporer banned trade of opium as the opium was addicting the Chinese. Even after the ban, opium was being smuggled. To stop it, the chinese captured the ports and destoryed the opium. Opium was one of the biggest revenue generators for the empire. So Britian went to war with China to allow them to trade opium. The Chinese lost this war and in a later opium war had to give away HongKong for lease. 

To get all this opium to sell, the British leaned on Indian farmers. They compelled the farmers to cultivate opium by entering into unfair advance contracts. This devasted the farmers as the opium cultivation was uprofitable. The land was being diverted from food crops so they couldn't grow their food anymore. This caused lot of farmers and poor to migrate to Mauritius as slave labor. 

It illustrated a part of colonial history I was not familiar with and wanted me to read more. The consequences of all these events are still visible in the world. India is a biggest legal opium producer for pharmaceutical purposes. Mauritius still has a large Indian origin population. China still uses the opium war as insult to national pride. 

Ghosh using different languages and dialects was able to make the story real. The book was an easy read and I couldn't put it down. If you have any interest in colonial history, it is a great read. 

Thoughts on ChatGPT and AI Tools

What is ChatGPT

• ChatGPT is an AI application that can answer any question you ask it. OpenAI trained it on human generated content up until 2021. It is something called a Large Language Model (LLM) where it generates some text based on the question.
• One surprising thing about chatGPT is how good it is at providing answers to questions. Normally, you would need to search Google and read through multiple pages to find an answer. ChatGPT provides you a single answer, as if it were an expert.  So you don't have to navigate through multiple pages to find the information you need.
• I've tested ChatGPT  by chatting with it about facts, code, soft skills, and creating plans. It gave great to good answers for most. 
• It is not perfect.  If you know what you're asking about you will know its limitations. Even with these limitations, it is immediately useful for lots of things. For me it is most useful for organizing things I already know, remember things that I knew of but forgot and helping with coding syntax instead of having to look up documentation. 

Where is the immediate impact

• It is a great companion to our work. It can be a great tutor when you're learning something.

• It writes code and creates essays so well, it seems that it will affect any test based on textual input. Think school essays, online coding tests etc.

• ChatGPT together with other AI tools like DALL-E, MidJourney will change creative fields. 

• You can know generate poems, stories, create artwork all through AI. 

• You can create animations and videos with prompts and scripts. 

• You can create designs and copy for your product. 

• AI generated content will explode. It will difficult to know what is AI created vs human generated.

• It will democratize all these skills so people who are bad at these can already do an OK job using these AI tools. 

• Good creators, developers, designers, story tellers, editors, animators will always have demand. Because after all AI is doing for now is regurgitating what these masters have been doing.

 

Good creators, developers, designers, story tellers, editors, animators will always have demand. Because after all AI is doing for now is regurgitating what these masters have been doing.

 

What about the future

• AI has exceeded human capacity in some games like Chess and GO. It makes moves which a human thinker can't think of. 
• With more progress, AI will also be able to create great content. The downside is that AI will also create useless content. It will again need humans to review the output to choose the best ones. And may be combine them to create an even better one.

With more progress, AI will also be able to create great content. The downside is that AI will also create useless content. It will again need humans to review the output to choose the best ones. And may be combine them to create an even better one.

Final Point

In summary, with this AI revolution, we will add a few more tools in our toolset to create things faster and better. 

What I learnt from my effective PM colleagues

I always wanted to build products and scale the impact I was having. So when I got an opportunity to work as a product manager, I jumped at it. As I was new to the PM world, I read some books to understand what that role entails and how to do the work.

But there are somethings that can't be learnt from books. I got a chance to work alongside some great PMs whose effortless way to get things done blew me away. I decided to learn as much as I can from those colleagues. I'm super thankful to have had the chance to work with them and learn from them.

I wanted to list the things I learnt in no particular order.

• Be proactive in approaching people and building relationships. - Even when they were new, they took the time to understand who can help, setup a meeting with them and introduce themselves. 
• Keep people updated, give and take help - Since they had built the relationship if they had any question about something, they didn't hesitate to reach out and ask for help. In the same vein if there was something they could help with, they would take the time to help with anything that they could help with.  
• Do the hard work to form an opinion and then express the opinion to rapidly test it and solidify it. - They take the time to understand the problem they are trying to solve, think about it from various angles and form an opinion. Then they would express the opinions any chance they get so that they can clarify and improve it rapidly. 
• Stay organized - They take the time to keep everything organized so they don't need to hunt for things when they need share or work on something. 
• Externalize your knowledge in writing and visuals to bring everyone to the same page - They would find ways to write out their opinions. As you know writing is a way to clarify your thinking. Another bonus is if you can draw simple diagrams showing all the parts of the system, that would help improve your thinking and also help explain things to people and bring everyone to the same page. 
• Always look out for opportunities to evangelize the products we are building. Use it to motivate the team and brag about the impact. - They always kept the vision and impact of the products they are building in mind. So they would also bring it in to anywhere required to motivate and also subtly brag about their and their teams impact. 
• Gently prod people to set high expectations - When someone suggests an unmotivated solution or a leisurely timeline, they would gently remind them about their effectiveness and help them set a lofty goal. 
• Co-create things with your team - To effectively work with others, they would start a draft and then use that to facilitate the discussion, all the while updating it live as others give their opinions and suggestions. This will both make everyone feel valued and help capture all the notes without wasting time later. 
• Keep the sales and account management team close. It helps to know the pulse of your products and helps you sell it better. - They worked closely with the sales and account management team to identify the beta customers, understand which customers would like the product, what possible impediments might be there in adoption etc which helps to keep the product moving smoothly from inception to launch. 

Using time-travel to make better decisions

 Temporal discounting 

• People would like to have $100 now than $110 a month later. This tendency to favor present-self at the expense of future-self is called temporal discounting
• We can use mental time travel to make sure we don't discount our future so much. 
• Think about how a decision you make now will feel in 10 mins, 10 months and 10 years later to trigger this time travel to see the impact of the decisions. 
• Move regret in front of a decisions helps you avoid that regret and also prepares you about how to handle it if it comes to pass. 

Ticker tape vs zoom lens

• If you see the ticker tape of any stock, you will see many highs and lows. But if you zoom out for the same stock you can see that all these daily ups and downs smooth out. 
  
• Our happiness is also like that. If you stress our daily up and downs you'll not be able to get the right perspective. Happiness is a long term game. 
• If you're blowing something out of proportion, your learning pod can ask questions about whether this thing matters in the future to snap you out of it.

Path dependence of happiness 

• Happiness is path-dependent. If you win some money and lose it all, you'll be bitter compared to when you start by losing some money and then making it back. 
• Time travel helps you see that both outcomes are identical and one shouldn't be better or worse than the other.

Ulysses Contracts

• You can use pre-commitments or Ulysses contracts to prevent you from irrational behavior due to too much present focus. 
• You can use either limit access to things that aren't good for you or you can increase access to things you want to do more. 

Decision swear jar 

• Based on your or language of the people around you, you can identify if anyone is not being truth seeking. 
• These are generally overconfidence, being all knowing, blowing things out of proportion, generalizing, shooting the message, leading the witness, being overgenerous in editing our story, moaning or complaining, lack of self-compassion etc. 
• Being aware of this, you can shift yourself to be more truth-seeking. 

Mapping the future 

While planning it is important to identify the full range of futures, the probability of each. By making our decision making process explicit, we will have a more realistic view of the world and we can also prepare our response for each kind of future so we are better prepared. 

Backcasting

• Thinking backward from a goal and think about the steps, events that need to happen to reach that goal. 
• It helps us identify low probability events and work to improve them so that they are more likely to happen 
• It also helps us adapt the plan to the unfolding future as we know what we are expecting to happen at each time. 
• It also helps to identify inflection points for reevaluating the decisions.  
• Company can plan pre-committments for anything that we identified during the plan. 

Premortems

• In a premortem we start by asking what will cause this decision to fail. 
• This will help us to identify all the risks to the decision
• It will give voice to any person who is doubtful of the decision but doesn't want to come out and say it. 
• Research also found that my imagining a negative future we are likely to work to avoid that. 

Hindsight Bias

• Backcasting and premortems are complementary as they help us see the full space of the future. 
• If we don't see the full future space, we are likely to think that the outcome was bound to happen. 
• It becomes impossible to realistically evaluate the decisions and probabilities after. 

How to get closer to reality by betting

We are always choosing 

• We make many decisions without thinking of all alternatives and just doing the first good thing we can think of. 
• By making a decision a bet, we make explicit that we are choosing between multiple alternatives each with its benefits and risks 
• This helps us anticipate risks and protect ourselves against irrationality that causes us to act against our own interests. 

We bet our beliefs 

• Our bets are based on our beliefs and are only as good as our beliefs 
• We think we form our beliefs by rigorously testing them before we form them but in reality when we hear something, we believe it. Then only when we have the inclination and time to think about it will we test our beliefs. 
• When something challenges our belief we generally double down on it and seek out information that confirms our beliefs rather than updating it. 
• Being smart also doesn't help as they even more blind spots
• Being asked to bet causes you to examine your beliefs as now you're concerned about being right.
• When we incorporate uncertainty in our beliefs, it becomes easier to update them. For eg going from 80% confident to 60% confident is easier than thinking I am wrong about something. 
• When we express our certainty, it makes us better collaborators. It allows others to provide information that would help us to update our beliefs faster. 

Outcome fielding & self-serving bias 

Experience is not what happens to a man. It is what is a man does with what happens to him - Auldous Huxley

• The way to improve our decisions is to use the outcomes of our decisions to update our beliefs. 
• The outcomes in our life happen either due to skill or luck but it is difficult to tell which it is due to ambiguity. 
• We generally tend to associate a decision to skill if it went well and we associate it to luck when things go bad. We can't learn from others as we do the opposite with respect to others decisions. 
  
• This is due to the self-serving bias where we want to have a positive self-update with respect to others. 
• To change this habit, we need to keep the reward (positive self-updates wrt others) the same but change the routine of comparing not based on outcomes but to being a better truth-seeker, better credit giver, better mistake admiter 

Switching the mindset to truth-seeking

• Meditation allows us to be an observer of things without getting affected. But that would need us to be away from others etc.
• Another way is to change the mindset where we consider wrong outcome fielding (associating an outcome to be due to skill or luck) as a big risk. Treating outcome fielding as a bet can trigger this mindset change. 
• Thinking in bets is hard and is not a cure all. But if we can update a few of our beliefs to be closer to reality, it can make a huge difference. 

Truth-seeking groups

• To further improve our outcome fielding, we can form a group with people who are also interested in truth-seeking. 
• It is easier for others to see our blind spots. So by forming a group it is easier for each other to help see their blind spots. 
• The truth seeking group should have a charter with 
• commitment to accuracy - the idea is to get to the truth and not just conformity improving objectivity and open-mindedness
• accountability - the members have advance notice. 
• openness to diversity of ideas
• Dissent channels and red teams where organizations seek out dissenting information is one way of getting all sorts of ideas. 
• Norm is towards homogeneity and conformity. So we should seek out ways to improve diversity and guard against our group becoming a clone of ourselves. 

The only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind. No wise man ever acquired his wisdom in any mode but this; nor is it in the nature of human intellect to become wise in any other manner. - John Stuart Mills

Seek out dissent to win 

• For our group to make the right decision and provide good suggestions, we should share all the data related to a situation. If an information makes us uncomfortable, we should definitely share it. The group should also query for more info if something is unclear. 
•  Don't ignore a message just because you don't like the message or the person who gave the message. Thinking of the message as being delivered by a person we admire can help us overcome this. 
• Try not to bias the group by not telling what the result was, who gave the idea, what your opinion on it etc. Just state the facts and let the group come up with its recommendations. 
• Skepticism means trying to see why something is wrong, not why it is right. This helps us to overcome our conformity bias and get a rational view of facts. Getting a devils advocate will help you see how to succeed. 
• To communicate in a truth seeking manner
• express uncertainty - this helps people help you by sharing their thoughts
• lead with assent - acknowledge their thoughts and then add more information. Use 'And' instead of but. 
• Ask if they are looking for advice or just venting. 
• When giving advice focus on the future - ask how they can improve in the future which decreases defensiveness. 

Source: Thinking in bets - Annie Duke 

Why a bad outcome doesn't make it a bad decision

TLDR; Our minds are not rational, most of the time we take shortcuts in our decisions which cause errors in our decisions. To overcome these, we need practical tools which Poker can teach us. We cannot be 100% certain our decision was right or wrong based on the result due to the influence of luck and or incomplete information.So we should not just put the decision as right or wrong but calibrate it between different shades of gray. A good decision involves following a process where we try to accurately map the state of our knowledge and taking the best guess based on that. 

Our minds are not built for rationality

Our minds have two different systems of thinking. System 1 is the reflexive mind. It has evolved to keep us safe, help us live in this world by creating a world that makes sense. It is fast and it takes shortcuts in thinking which may or may not be true. System 2 is the deliberative mind. It follows a more methodical thinking process and is used to take decisions about what we want to achieve where we think carefully. This is slow and energy consuming. 

The important thing is to realize that we only decide what to do using deliberative mind but when we are executing those decisions more often than not, we will be using the reflexive mind. Most of the errors in our decision making happen because of the pressure on the reflexive mind to do its job fast and automatically. 

The deliberative mind is already overtaxed and more will power or being aware of the fact that reflexive mind doesn't think carefully doesn't help us make use of deliberative mind more. We can only look for practical workarounds to overcome these limitations. 

Poker is a great place to learn how to execute well in face of uncertainty

Poker is a good place to learn these practical workarounds and poker players face the same challenges. They have to take decisions fast and under pressure but still have to make sure these decisions align with their long-term goals taken with a deliberative mind. 

Decision quality doesn't depend on results 

We tend to judge a decision based on the outcome. But an outcome may not be correlated to the decision due to the influence of luck and hidden information. What makes a good decision is a good process where we try to try to accurately represent the state of our knowledge. It necessarily involves some version of I don't know. 

Best poker players are aware of this and instead of looking for 100% certainty they take their best guess and calibrating their decisions along the way.

When we know we are not 100% sure we will not fall into the black and white thinking pattern where we put decisions in either the right or wrong bucket but we will see different shades of gray and we calibrate our decisions based on these. When we misrepresent the world in the extremes of right or wrong, it limits our ability to take the right decisions.  

We have to redefine wrong due to influence of luck & incomplete information

We have to redefine wrong as we can't be 100% sure that our decision caused the result.The decision might have been good but luck or incomplete information intervened. When we redefine wrong, we can let go of the anguish we feel when we get a bad result and we can let go of the happiness when we get a right result. We can get off the roller coaster. 

Since we can't be 100% certain but we keep taking decisions, it means we are always guessing. It helps us allocate our resources. 

Source: Thinking in Bets - Annie Duke

Why are you so distracted and how to beat them?

Have you ever wondered why you get distracted so easily? 

Lori Gottileb in her book, "May you should talk to someone" says that most of our destructive habits start with the need to fill an emotional void. You find something easy to distract yourself and hide behind to forget the void. Before you know it the habits become so strong that you can't stop. 

To break the destructive habit, you have identify and fill that void. 

The best way to identify and break that is by giving yourself the space to observe the behavior from a distance. Meditation is exact tool that caters to this need. Once you become an impartial observer to your own thoughts, you can understand your needs. 

Then begins the real work required to meet those needs. You no longer need to hide behind a distraction.  

Welcome to Holland

 Today I want to introduce you to a thought provoking article written by Emily Perl Kingsley - about her experience about parenting a child with a disability. I came across this in the book - "May be you should talk with someone" by Lori Gottileb

I'm reproducing it in full here - 

When you're going to have a baby, it's like planning a fabulous vacation trip - to Italy. You buy a bunch of guide books and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum. The Michelangelo David. The gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It's all very exciting. After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The stewardess comes in and says, "Welcome to Holland." "Holland?!?" you say. "What do you mean Holland?? I signed up for Italy! I'm supposed to be in Italy. All my life I've dreamed of going to Italy." But there's been a change in the flight plan. They've landed in Holland and there you must stay. The important thing is that they haven't taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease. It's just a different place. So you must go out and buy new guide books. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met. It's just a different place. It's slower-paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you've been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around.... and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills....and Holland has tulips. Holland even has Rembrandts. But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy... and they're all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life, you will say "Yes, that's where I was supposed to go. That's what I had planned." And the pain of that will never, ever, ever, ever go away... because the loss of that dream is a very very significant loss. But... if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn't get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things ... about Holland.

Source: https://www.dsasc.ca/uploads/8/5/3/9/8539131/welcome_to_holland.pdf 

It is not just about parenting a child with disability. It is an apt metaphor for any kind of dream cut short. It was really beautiful and impactful. Whatever your life situation, if you come across a situation where you cannot achieve something you always wanted, then this gives you a new perspective. Look around and see how to have whale of a time in Holland! 

 

Past, Present & Future

 We expect something to happen in a certain way. We have built a future on that happening. It doesn't and we get depressed. 

There might be something that happened in the past either done by us or done to us. Either way, it caused us pain and we regret that. We keep going back there and hope to erase that. 

In both of these situations, what we are doing is not helpful. Both of them are a story that we tell ourselves and we have the power to rewrite the story. 

Lori Gottileb in her book - "Maybe you should talk to someone" talks about how to manage the pain the past and the future. 

Pain feels like it's in the present but it's actually in the past and the future. If we don't accept the notion that as much as we try and fix what happened years ago, our pasts will keep us stuck. We need to change our relationship to the past.  

Our notion of future can be as powerful roadblock to change. Future happens later but we're creating it in our minds everyday. When the present falls apart, so does the future we associated with it. 

If we try to spend the present trying to fix the past or control the future, we will remain stuck in place in regret. The solution is to focus on the present and focus less on the future. 

My health journey and thanks to my wife!

 
 I'm a vegetarian. I don't eat much street food or packaged food. So I expected to be healthy. So imagine my shock when I learned that I was pre-diabetic when I went for annual health checks a few years ago. That triggered my interest in learning more about food and improving my health.  My wife is also very interested in health and food and she was game for it. Thus began our research and experimentation with food.  The first change we made was to try slow carb diet. It did improve my markers a little bit. Then I had to move to Boston and got busy and food habits went back to the old ways.

In my next test, I discovered that not only was I pre-diabetic, but I had unhealthy cholesterol levels. This prompted us to work on our diet again, this time with more focus. We learnt more about seed oils and how they are dangerous. We changed oils to healthier ones and reduced the oil consumption. We improved our diet to add more salads, more beans and lesser rice. With all these changes, I'm happy to report that my blood markers have returned to normal levels.

Now if you read the above it might seem like simple changes. But the most important thing is to be consistent. For that, I'm super grateful to my wife. She took upon herself to integrate these changes into our life. She cooked the meals daily with fresh and healthy ingredients. Cooking meals daily from scratch three times a day is grinding work. Without her efforts, it wouldn't have been possible. I'm taking this chance to express my gratitude for her unsung and invaluable efforts!

Growing lettuce indoors

Too many simple carbs: 

As a person of south indian origin, rice is our staple food. Our family used to  eat everything with rice. Also being a vegan, we our meals were mostly carb loaded. As you know having too many simple carbs is dangerous. It is the main cause of diabetes and cardiovascular diseases. This inspired us to improve the meals we had. Long story short, we tried reducing the amount of rice by having more salads. Once we found great dressings like this olive oil vinaigrette, olive oil sesame seed dressing and maple vinaigrette it was not tough to make the switch. 

Getting organic greens a hassle: 

The fact that we are eating the lettuce and spinach raw, we decided it is better to have these organic. We had some trouble having these things available in store. If we buy a lot of supply, something the green were getting damaged too. 

Can we grow it ourselves ?

So we were inspired to try growing lettuce ourselves. We figured that should be economical too. The only problem was that we live in a cold place, so we can't really grow it outside. The only solution was to grow it indoors if we want to grow it. 

We didn't have the experience before, but was still excited to give it a try.   

The setup: 

It seems to grow it indoors, the light we from the windows is not sufficient. So we need to buy a grow light for that. I bought a Mars Pro Sp 150 light. It was a good light with the accessories to hang it easily. 

Next I headed over to the home microgreens store to buy the soil, containers and seeds for growing. They have very helpful videos about how to plant and grow lettuce. These videos were very helpful to me in getting started. We planted them in a tray with holes in them (planting tray) and put them in another regular tray (watering tray). This way we can water it in the tray under and the roots from the top tray will absorb it. The seeds germinated in three days. We turn on the light around 7 am in the morning and then turn it off when we go to sleep around 10 PM at night. We water it once a day in the watering tray. After three weeks the lettuce was well grown and is ready for harvest. 

Results: 

I grew it in a small container to see how it grows. You can see the results for yourself below.  It grew very well and now we are planning to grow in bigger containers so that we have enough supply for our fresh salads. Not only lettuce, we also want to  grow herbs like cilantro, basil and mint. 

Conclusion: 

Once the initial setup is figured out, I am pleasantly surprised how easy it was to maintain them. If any of you are considering it, hope this shows how easy it is. Let me know if you grow something indoors or outdoors! 

Decentralized Internet

 

• Dove into the fascinating world of decentralized internet building blocks developed by Blockstack.  These are the things I learnt
  • Blockstack is trying to build decentralized building blocks for the internet. The basic blocks like TCP, DNS are already decentralized but the cloud apps built on top of them are not. 
  • It is building a decentralized identity system
  • It is building a decentralized database (which only encrypts and can save it anywhere)
  • It is building a blockchain system for security and privacy (used for identity and smart contracts)
  • What this enables is that there is no one who owns your data but you yourself. Then there will be no difference between your data and cryptocurrency. They are all encrypted by the same keys
  • What that means in real life is
    • it will become easier for new startups to emerge once enough users own their own data as they can easily share the data with new companies without permission of google or fb
    • It also means that things will not be free (paid by ads) though that is also possible and it will be a more direct transaction than the indirect transaction that is today
    • Users should also get used to paying for their username, database to store things (Google is already moving in this direction anyway, but this has the benefit of being privacy preserving). Given the purchasing power differences between different currencies, if the price has to be same everywhere, this might be out of reach for most of the world. 
    • What this also means is that things will be a little slower (data has to be encrypted and decrypted) compared to the centralized applications which has huge implications for the deployment of these apps. If this problem is solved then it means a totally different set of companies will come up.
    • Having things centralized also had the benefit of faster iterations and machine learning. But if this approach of DApps becomes popular, then it directly improves the development of privacy preserving machine learning approaches where models are trained on device.

Investing policy

 This policy is mostly influenced by Ramit Sethi and Warren Buffet. 

Invest in cheap index funds. Don’t try to beat the market. Just buy into well run businesses with lot of profit and hold for a long time for compounding to work its magic. 

Generate your alpha with your work. Invest in yourself and succeed. 

Innocent Jokes

These are things I found funny when I was talking with my son.

My son and I a looking at the globe talking about various countries in the world. He asks - "Dad which countries have you been to." I said "USA and India". He asks - "Why didn't you go to any other country. Are you not interested to go anywhere else?" I say - " Not it is not like that. It is just that I don't get the time." My son know I work in a start up, so he says - "Dad, since you have lot of work in a start up, why don't you join an endup. There you will have time to take a vacation." :)



My son and I  wanted to go to the park. It was cloudy outside, so I said lets check the weather and I go to weather.com and see that it is going to rain soon. My son's ear is red and I tell him -  "Looks like you scratched the ear a lot. Let me apply some cream to reduce the itchiness. " He says - "No I don't want that." I say - "Upto you. It might itch more." He says- can you open 'mirror.com', I want to see how my ear looks :) 

Hold the space for your cravings.

Here is a quote from Tamara Levitt, a mindfulness instructor in the Calm app.

Hold the space for your cravings, observing them until they pass. To heal, we must bravely stay, rather than run. 

This is a great idea and as always it requires a lot of practice. The author also asks us to focus on our breath while observing the craving. Hope this helps.

She has a lovely video up on her website with the message that failure is a brave effort that should be celebrated. We all need that reminder once in a while.

Year of articulation

This year I want to focus on articulating my thoughts. I want to have and express an opinion on things that are relevant to my work. I want to be able to persuade people to see my point of view. I want to practice using logos, ethos, and pathos to be an effective communicator. This will be the focus of my speaking, reading, listening and writing practice. 

I to use this to communicate my thoughts, persuade people to use my design, debate the merits and demerits of my architectures. I want to use this to make allies, to motivate people and generally be an effective communicator. 

I want to do this so that I don't try to translate things from my mother tongue and waste precious time or create awkward pauses when speaking. I want to do this to sound confident and fluent. 

I want to be able to do this to move to a better role and to make a bigger difference in the world. All my heroes are very articulate and great speakers. In the direction where my work is taking me, this is a superpower and I want to learn that and wield that.