Apr

29

Why limit your own thinking?

Filed Under goal setting, google, innovation, passion, people i like, quotes, self improvement, startup, things to ponder about, things to remind myself | 1 Comment

Paul Buchheit brings up a very valid point about visionary super-achievers, that when it comes to possibilities–it’s not about belief but disbelief.

If you think about it, a vision is by definition, something that is a little farther ahead than the current state of things. It wouldn’t be a vision if it was already achieved, would it? By the same token, if a vision is too far fetched, would we label the person championing it as a psychopath who doesn’t understand reality?

I think the important lesson to be learned here is that when imagining the world of possibilities, as long as you ground yourself in reality, do not fear society disbelieving you. Let’s look at the opposite case: If everyone absolutely believes your vision in its entirety — wouldn’t that just really indicate that your vision isn’t really that visionary after all? At the very minimum, a vision would require a small leap of faith. Leap of faith equals risk, and we all know risk is proportional to reward.

Holding back when imagining the world of possibilities while in search for a solution to a problem is counter-productive, you’re just fighting this internal battle — and the only person that really loses is yourself. I have felt like that at times, and now when I notice myself running in such loops, I quickly disengage from such irrational fears.

In his presentation at Startup School 2007, Paul reminded us that when someone tells you, “That’s impossible” it should be translated as “According to my very limed experience and narrow understanding of reality, that’s very unlikely.” Everyone continuously builds a different set of experiences in their respective lives, and therefore everyone’s understanding of reality is fundamentally different.

Reality is larger than we can possibly comprehend. Are you certain of something? If so, is it possible that you aren’t seeing the big picture? Perhaps you would change your mind if your understanding were a little broader. Maybe invention is a simple matter of observing what has always existed, and change happens when you notice parts of your self that were there all along.

I met Paul last year at Stanford. Paul is Google employee #23, and among other things, creator of Gmail, and the “Don’t be evil” motto.

Maybe big ideas are only impractical for those who lack vision and imagination.

Apr

26

Difference between a normal person and a scientist

Filed Under geeky, humor | Leave a Comment

Sadly, I might not be normal. I would say “Hmm, interesting .. let’s see if we can reproduce the problem”.

But hey, I pride myself in being a computer scientist who likes to experiment/study and solve problems, so there!

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Apr

25

It’s just “stuff”, bitterness is really pointless

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I was reading this article on NYTimes about the difficulties of being rich. Yes, the rich too, have problems, albeit different kinds of problems from the not-rich.

Long story short, David Hayden, an entrepreneur, was screwed over once in his first company when someone blatantly broke their promise. Then, in his second company, the same person that backed out from the first deal before, reassured David that history wouldn’t repeat and said “If a problem ever comes up, I will fall on the sword for you”. The title of that article is “The Perils of Being Suddenly Rich”, so as you can probably guess, something did happen in David’s second company despite all that he was promised, and he got screwed over, yet again.

I must say, I admire David’s perspective on the bigger picture — a perspective I think is good for not just entrepreneurs, but anyone in general.

Despite a multimillion-dollar judgment against him by arbitrators, he remains philosophical. “It’s just stuff,” he says.

To pay bills, Mr. Hayden is gradually selling off furniture and paintings. Yet he appears to harbor surprisingly little bitterness. “It’s better that way in the end,” he said. “Otherwise you focus on stuff that doesn’t matter.”

And he is staying philosophical about his situation. “It’s just stuff, and it’s important to not let stuff get in the way of what’s important,” he said. “People, happiness, health, children, and putting money in the right places.”

Moral of the story:

  • Don’t let day-to-day problems run your life and deny you happiness (It’s just stuff)
  • Don’t let day-to-day problems slowly divert you from your goal/direction in life (You focus on stuff that doesn’t matter)
  • Don’t let day-to-day problems make you forget what’s important (People, happiness, health, children, and putting money in the right places) *

* a.k.a. if you got loads of money, invest in something that will help change the world for the better by helping others

Last but not least, get used to people in the money business screwing you over despite all the swear-on-my-mother’s-grave promises. They’re just money-faced, nothing personal.

You take care of that stuff, David. You tell ‘em.

Apr

19

“Next Action”: Identifying the next step

Filed Under goal setting, project management, time management | Leave a Comment

If you work on multiple projects at work, you will realize that it’s pretty similar to juggling balls in the air with your two hands. You might be thrown a new ball in addition to what you already have in the air (new project), you might be trying to place a ball on the ground without dropping the other balls currently in the air (tying up any open ends left on a mostly finished project), and perhaps you might also have your eyes peeled for the next ball you want to juggle (perhaps you have a semi-vivid vision of a project that will positively impact your team/dept/company’s bottom line).

If the above sounds familiar to you, then perhaps the phrase “analysis paralysis” would also ring a bell. Analysis paralysis is described in Wikipedia as an informal phrase applied to when the opportunity cost of decision analysis exceeds the benefits. In other words, too much planning or a discussion that goes nowhere, and no execution. Also known as “all talk and no bite”. I really hate that.

I’m a fan of David Allen’s GTD book and it has helped me manage my work flow better. In it, he talks about the “next action”, and I have come to realize how much important it is just being able to identify what to do next, without actually doing it yet. I’m trying to emphasize the value of planning without executing immediately which I have discovered by experience, speaking as a guy who likes to execute immediately after planning, and doesn’t really care about planning right away, after executing.

When multi-tasking and switching between tasks so often, it is easy to lose track of the end goal of each individual project. This is especially true when operating in an R&D environment where you are pushing the limits — so by definition, your end-goal cannot be rigidly specific. I found that planning the current project’s next step before temporarily halting it to work on another project to be a huge load off my shoulders. Allow me to illustrate.

My work queue would look similar to an old-skool single core processor (with no hyper-threading) such that at any given time, I am focused on a single project. Each project (because they are large), are broken up into smaller bite-size chunks.

Time t1=0 t2=t1+n t3=t2+m t4=t3+x t5=t4+y
Project A
(step 1) 		Project B
(step 1) 		Project C
(step 1) 		Project A
(step 2) 		Project B
(step 2)

After step 1 in project A and before step 1 in project B, I first identify the next step (as step 2) for project A, with the understanding that I’m just merely identifying the next step towards project A’s goal, but I will not actually do it yet. Then, I move on to execute step 1 of project B. Likewise with the end of project A, after step 1 of project B, I quickly determine project B’s step 2 before moving on to step 1 of project C.

What’s nice about this is that after I am done with step 1 of project C, when going into step 2 of project A, I no longer have to dig up my recollection of where I last left project A. I don’t have to ask myself, “alright, where did I last leave this project?”, and “Okay, now what was that next incremental step that I had meant to take again?”. I had already thought out the “next actions”, as Dave Allen would call it, and I can jump right into execution mode!

On the flip side, what I did before was that I would jump into execution right after planning a next action, resulting in me spending too much time on a single project, and neglecting other projects. In operating systems theory, that would be the equivalent of thread starvation because another thread is hogging all of the CPU. Also, from a psychological perspective, the longer you have neglected a project, the harder it is for you to jump back in it. Why? Because so much has happened since then, and now it’s way more difficult to remember where you last left it.

In addition, while working on my current project, my mind will often worry and think about that other neglected project — which is really unnecessary and just eats up memory and brain power, causing severe inability to focus on the current issues at hand.

I’m an advocate of action and don’t like worrying, so I prefer to act on a worry, than to worry. Acting on a worry gives me a peace of mind.

The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.
– Mark Twain


Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

Apr

8

Happy Easter ‘07

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My aunt called me today to exchange greetings and mentioned something about how it appears that all we do when our families get together is eat. A lot. The lunch/dinner is usually spread out over at least 4 hours, combined with a lot of chatter and storytelling. My reply to her was that it’s not so bad, because the central theme is not actually the food, but the catching-up with each other. Eating is just secondary e.g. something to do, while catching up. The relationship is the central theme.

Isn’t it funny how sometimes when you think of someone and wonder if they are thinking of you — and that that very same moment, they are thinking of you, wondering if you are thinking of them.

On this very day, as I was driving to an Easter lunch party at a friend’s, I was thinking about where my college dorm suite-mate Brant Phillips would be today, if he was still around. He always joked about studying so damn hard, just to work at Wal-Mart (he was in pharmacology, he was going to be a pharmacist at Wally’s World). Til today, I’ve always been puzzled and amazed by how we could both be the best of friends — considering that I’m a techie who knows zero about anything chemistry/biology, and how Brant in pharmacology with zero knowledge in my nerdy stuff, could hit it off so well.

Anyway, I’ve regretted plenty of times on numerous occasions for not saying something when I should have, until it’s too late, so I’m going to spill my guts right here, right now. Yes, this is my fucking blog.

Brant, I miss you, and you’ll always my brother no matter what. I think of you always when I hear this song. Happy Easter, Philly.

Apr

1

Gauging maturity — telling the boys from the men

Filed Under things to ponder about | Leave a Comment

Maturity does not necessarily increase in a linear fashion at a growth rate that is proportional to age. I don’t know how to quantify maturity, but let us for a second assume that we have today, a maturity scale that would weigh a person’s level of mature-ness. Take a specific quantity of mature-ness and assuming that everyone will at some point obtain that level of maturity, you will see that not everyone will reach that level at the same time. I’ve met all sorts of people throughout my life, and in particular, people older than me who I thought should have been more mature, and people younger than me who I thought were much more mature than their peer age group. That’s all the proof I needed to know that age does not necessarily equal maturity.

However, I’ve never actually sat down to think about my exact precise definition of maturity. It’s kind of hard to describe. More education doesn’t necessarily make one more mature, increased skill-set experience too doesn’t necessarily equal maturity. More money won’t buy you more maturity, although contrary to popular belief, it might cause more in-maturity (more proof that you can’t throw money at just any problem to make it go away).

When my gut feel tells me that someone isn’t mature, how do I put that in words if I had to describe to someone why I thought another person wasn’t mature? I was reading an essay written by Paul Graham today when a passage stuck out to me:

One test adults use is whether you still have the kid flake reflex. When you’re a little kid and you’re asked to do something hard, you can cry and say “I can’t do it” and the adults will probably let you off. As a kid there’s a magic button you can press by saying “I’m just a kid” that will get you out of most difficult situations. Whereas adults, by definition, are not allowed to flake. They still do, of course, but when they do they’re ruthlessly pruned.

The other way to tell an adult is by how they react to a challenge. Someone who’s not yet an adult will tend to respond to a challenge from an adult in a way that acknowledges their dominance. If an adult says “that’s a stupid idea,” a kid will either crawl away with his tail between his legs, or rebel. But rebelling presumes inferiority as much as submission. The adult response to “that’s a stupid idea,” is simply to look the other person in the eye and say “Really? Why do you think so?”

Paul put had put it in words for me. These two metrics, are part of what my gut feel uses when gauging someone’s maturity. I don’t think these two alone are all of the metrics for maturity, but at least now I know of two. The first point is basically the finger-pointing and blame-pushing game, where nobody wants to take responsibility over spilled milk and tries to blame it on someone else. Grown-ups don’t do that. If you are to take 100% credit for success, then by definition, you are to also take 100% blame upon failure. Risk is proportional to reward.

The second point is basically how you react under pressure. Life is colorful, and not without challenges (if you literally have no challenge or face no difficulties in life; then life must be too boring for you). In the face of adversity, do you choke and breakdown? Do you constantly complain to others as a way of coping, or wish every night that through inaction, your problem will magically disappear? Now there are a few things in life where the solution _is_ inaction, but most problems I’ve seen only get worse or the worry is just unnecessarily prolonged through inaction.

It’s easy to run a company when times are good; it’s during the bad when one’s character truly shows. I vividly remember the time when Google founders Larry and Sergey were pressured by venture capitalists John Doerr and Michael Moritz to find a “grown-up” to run their company. After a lot of dilly-dallying on the picky founders part, Eric Schmidt was brought in as CEO to provide parental supervision. The founders had a long list of stringent requirements, including insisting that the CEO have a Ph.D in Computer Science. I’m sure that weeded out many would-be B-school CEO’s, but more importantly, I also do remember reading that Eric Schmidt was selected not because of his string of successes in bringing tech companies from zero to hero. In fact, he instead had a string of failures. Through his previous companies, he has fought many battles with Google’s then would-be competitors, and lost. That’s right, he is the hardened warrior that would know what to do, based on his previous experience, when faced off with Google’s enemies.

Before anyone can scream “culture of promoting failure”, I would like to point out that everybody fails, nobody’s perfect .. and if you haven’t failed, then you’re just too risk-averse and not trying hard enough in capitalizing on opportunities to maximize return. Also, I think that valuable lessons are learned in every mistake made. It’s only those who don’t learn from previous mistakes and repeat them, that are problematic :)

I’d like to conclude this post with a quote, on responding to adversity:

“The man who can drive himself further once the effort gets painful is the man who will win.”
– Sir Roger Bannister

And that, ladies and gentlemen, concludes my 1 year mark of blogging. Archives show I started blogging in March of 2006. Who knew it’d be this much fun. Blogging is tough for me due to time constrains, but when I first started, my goal was to write at least once a week, and I’ve stuck to that very closely. Looking back, I have learned not to underestimate the cumulative power of incremental work. Now, I can click on the monthly archives to step back in time and see what I was thinking at that time. Sweet! Let’s see if I’ve learned anything since last year..

And oh, .. Happy, April, Fool’s!