Archive for the ‘things to remind myself’ Category

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Do It Now

Friday, January 8th, 2010

A re-blog:

We procrastinate because we are afraid. We’re afraid it’s too much work and that it will drain us. We’re afraid we’ll screw it up and get in trouble. We’re afraid we don’t know how to do it. We’re afraid because, well, we’ve been putting it off forever and every time we put it off it seems a little more fearsome in our minds. That’s why not putting things off is so liberating. We’re forced to confront our fears, not let them grow bigger by repeatedly running away. And when we confront them, we find they’re not so scary after all.

Full post here.

Posted in execution, failure, fear, things to remind myself | Comments

Roll with uncertainty

Saturday, November 14th, 2009

A lot of time we spin our wheels going back and forth when faced with uncertainty in life. I know sometimes I tend to overanalyze and try to risk-assess something to death, and still get no closer to a decision. At the last Y Combinator Startup School in Berkeley, Mark Zuckerberg said (paraphrase),

“In a world where everything around you is constantly changing quickly, the most dangerous thing you can do is to not change”.

And that’s especially true in the technology business. As a technologist, if you don’t learn to love it, you won’t keep up. I’m a big fan of Tina Seelig and her famous talk at Stanford titled “What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20” (I can’t highly recommend it enough, please check it out and you can thank me later). That talk has received so much interest that it’s now a book.

Going back to uncertainty, it just never stops. If everyone had equal visibility and the exact equal amount of information for decision making, then everybody would be able to make the same sound decision. Now making decision, with incomplete information .. that’s how you win; how you get an edge on the competition. Also not easy, but you have to roll with it.

In a recent Q&A with Tina on BNET,

Q: Your latest book is entitled What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20: A Crash Course on Making Your Place in the World. So the inevitable question: if you could go back and give your 20-year-old self just one piece of advice, what would it be?

A: I would tell myself that the uncertainty of life never goes away. There are always choices in front of you, challenges to overcome, and failures from which you need to recover. If you embrace the challenges and view them through the lens of possibilities, then you will not only be happier, but will be much more likely to turn the inevitable obstacles into opportunities. The world is always changing, and it is up to you to be flexible and optimistic. With a positive attitude and creative thinking, most problems can be viewed as opportunities in disguise.

Yours truly is reading this book on my Kindle. I. highly. recommend. it.

What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20: A Crash Course on Making Your Place in the World



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Posted in entrepreneurship, ideas, innovation, problem-opportunity, quotes, things to ponder about, things to remind myself | Comments

Flame out or become a $1Bil business

Saturday, September 19th, 2009

VCs take a porfolio approach to managing risk; individual company is largely irrelevant because of diversification effects. In fact, one of my portfolio companies was once rejected by Sequoia because, “You’ll almost certainly build a nice $100 million business. But we’d rather have a riskier investment that either flames out or becomes a $1 billion business.” Thus the key metric is expected value.

Quotable quotes, from 21 Million Reasons For Mint To Sell via CloudAve.

I’ve blogged before about Vinod Khola’s video here (iinnovate’s interview), where in it he says one of the problems he notices in entrepreneurs is that they don’t dream big enough. Just recently Sarah Lacy wrote that the consensus of the recent TC50 panel is that nobody was “swinging for the fences“, everyone just playing it safe–basically dreaming small.

Sarah writes:

Here’s why this matters: Start-ups by definition don’t have the experience, market position, funding or resources to tackle obvious market opportunities. If what they’re trying to do makes clear business sense, a bigger, better-positioned company would do it. A start-up’s only edge is that it’s not built into legacy businesses and preconceived notions and can do something, well, crazy.

There are entrepreneurs somewhere building the next big companies. But it’s probably just a wonky side-project that no one—not even the entrepreneur himself—realizes is the next big thing. That’s who we need to drag on stage next year.

I agree, if it’s an obvious opportunity, someone’s already on it. We need more crazy people working on crazy ideas.

Vinod Khosla on problem solving: You don’t solve all problems before you jump into a new situation. You just believe in yourself, and say, “I’ll figure it out, one way or another”. Vinod had no idea how he was going to pay for fees and rent when he got accepted to the Stanford GSB. To me, this is the “leap of faith” advice entrepreneurs talk about. You just got to jump.

Posted in changing the world, entrepreneurship, passion, quotes, startup, things to ponder about, things to remind myself | Comments

Seth Godin: Quieting the Lizard Brain

Wednesday, August 19th, 2009

I haven’t been posting as regularly the past ~2 months or so—was out of the country for a month, and was busy with some things. Just to quickly add this gem I found today by Seth Godin. Coding, programming, developing, writing software, or whatever you want to call it, is creative work. And real artists ship. Ship it, damn it!

I think I found myself feeling guilty on at least 2 counts from watching this short video. Check it out!

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Posted in entrepreneurship, execution, failure, fear, goal setting, perseverance, self improvement, things to remind myself | Comments

Excerpt: Larry Page’s Commencement Speech

Sunday, May 10th, 2009

Full post can be found here.

You know what it’s like to wake up in the middle of the night with a vivid dream? And you know how, if you don’t have a pencil and pad by the bed to write it down, it will be completely gone the next morning?Well, I had one of those dreams when I was 23. When I suddenly woke up, I was thinking: what if we could download the whole web, and just keep the links and… I grabbed a pen and started writing! Sometimes it is important to wake up and stop dreaming.

I spent the middle of that night scribbling out the details and convincing myself it would work. Soon after, I told my advisor, Terry Winograd, it would take a couple of weeks to download the web — he nodded knowingly, fully aware it would take much longer but wise enough to not tell me. The optimism of youth is often underrated! Amazingly, I had no thought of building a search engine. The idea wasn’t even on the radar. But, much later we happened upon a better way of ranking webpages to make a really great search engine, and Google was born.When a really great dream shows up, grab it!

When I was here at Michigan, I had actually been taught how to make dreams real! I know it sounds funny, but that is what I learned in a summer camp converted into a training program called Leadershape. Their slogan is to have a “healthy disregard for the impossible”. That program encouraged me to pursue a crazy idea at the time: I wanted to build a personal rapid transit system on campus to replace the buses. It was a futuristic way of solving our transportation problem. I still think a lot about transportation — you never loose a dream, it just incubates as a hobby. Many things that people labor hard to do now, like cooking, cleaning, and driving will require much less human time in the future. That is, if we “have a healthy disregard for the impossible” and actually build new solutions.

I think it is often easier to make progress on mega-ambitious dreams. I know that sounds completely nuts. But, since no one else is crazy enough to do it, you have little competition. There are so few people this crazy that I feel like I know them all by first name. They all travel as if they are pack dogs and stick to each other like glue. The best people want to work the big challenges. That is what happened with Google. Our mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. How can that not get you excited? But we almost didn’t start Google because my co-founder Sergey and I were too worried about dropping out of our Ph.D. program. You are probably on the right track if you feel like a sidewalk worm during a rainstorm! That is about how we felt after we maxed out three credit cards buying hard disks off the back of a truck. That was the first hardware for Google. Parents and friends: more credit cards always help. What is the one sentence summary of how you change the world? Always work hard on something uncomfortably exciting!

As a Ph.D. student, I actually had three projects I wanted to work on. Thank goodness my advisor said, “why don’t you work on the web for a while”. He gave me some seriously good advice because the web was really growing with people and activity, even in 1995! Technology and especially the internet can really help you be lazy. Lazy? What I mean is a group of three people can write software that millions can use and enjoy. Can three people answer the phone a million times a day? Find the leverage in the world, so you can be more lazy!

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Posted in changing the world, passion, regular reads, startup, things to remind myself | Comments

The meaning of meaning

Sunday, April 26th, 2009

“Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the things you believe in, out of the things and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something. The ingredients are there. You are the only one who can put them together into that unique pattern that will be your life. Let it be a life that has dignity and meaning for you. If it does, then the particular balance of success or failure is of less account.”

From “Personal Renewal” by John Gardner, posted on PBS. It’s a long post, but full of gems:

“We tend to think of youth and the active middle years as the years of commitment. As you get a little older, you’re told you’ve earned the right to think about yourself. But that’s a deadly prescription! People of every age need commitments beyond the self, need the meaning that commitments provide. Self-preoccupation is a prison, as every self-absorbed person finally knows. Commitments to larger purposes can get you out of prison.

Another significant ingredient in motivation is one’s attitude toward the future. Optimism is unfashionable today, particularly among intellectuals. Everyone makes fun of it. Someone said “Pessimists got that way by financing optimists.” But I am not pessimistic and I advise you not to be. As the fellow said, “I’d be a pessimist but it would never work.”

I can tell you that for renewal, a tough-minded optimism is best. The future is not shaped by people who don’t really believe in the future. Men and women of vitality have always been prepared to bet their futures, even their lives, on ventures of unknown outcome. If they had all looked before they leaped, we would still be crouched in caves sketching animal pictures on the wall,”

“You’ve known such people — feeling secretly defeated, maybe somewhat sour and cynical, or perhaps just vaguely dispirited. Or maybe they just ran so hard for so long that somewhere along the line they forgot what it was they were running for [...] Life is hard. Just to keep on keeping on is sometimes an act of courage.”

“We learn by accepting the commitments of life, by playing the roles that life hands us (not necessarily the roles we would have chosen). We learn by growing older, by suffering, by loving, by bearing with the things we can’t change, by taking risks.” 

(more…)

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Posted in failure, fear, goal setting, mentoring, perseverance, quotes, regular reads, self improvement, things to ponder about, things to remind myself, values | Comments

‘Oh-Nine 9oals

Thursday, January 8th, 2009

It’s new year’s resolution season! But I don’t make “resolutions” because by and large, it’s mostly an excuse for people to make promises they don’t keep, just to give themselves the illusion that this new year would somehow be different than the last, better than the last.

More fat people and smokers are still fat or are still smoking, after the new year’s “resolution” effect wears out, usually before mid-year. There’s absolutely accountability, no follow-through’ing on the commitments. I really, really, need to know how and why and really how, my year is going to be different. Anyway, I’m calling mine “goals“. As in, S.M.A.R.T. goals.

I won’t share my entire list (some of it is private) but among my non-work list of goals -

  • Do at least 1 thing that scares me (if I don’t find something by Q4, I’ll default this one to sky diving)
  • Go for at least 1 conference (cloud computing/SaaS, mobile apps, entrepreneurship, startup, or product management)
  • Sleep less, work out more –> to be more productive (I have a schedule carved out, so this one is as quantifiable as it gets)
  • Get my motorcycle license

A few days ago I saw Om Malik’s list, and I’d like to share that here as the lessons learned are valuable. Om had a heart attack last year and made a promise to drastically change his lifestyle for the better. Folks, you don’t need to be at the brink of death to change your ways. Without further ado, here are Om’s lessons (and how I’m going to use it as a guidelines for myself)

Lesson #1: Set simple goals

When I came back from the hospital on Jan. 17th, I made a silent pledge to myself: I am going to do whatever it takes to make it to the first anniversary of my heart attack.
I am not a big advocate, however, of simply surviving. Rather I want to feel a sense of winning, on a daily basis. In order to do this, short-term goals had to supplant those focused on the long term. The result has been two good weblog posts a week, two great conversations a day, and more smiling, day and night.

Looking back last year .. I did sometimes feel demotivated because I found it difficult to stomach a steady diet of negative outcomes. This year, I need to celebrate even the small wins.

Lesson#2: Binary choices help make better decisions

When faced with a binary choice — live or die — I made the following upgrades:

1. After a 40-Dunhills-a-day-habit for nearly 20 years, I stopped smoking.
2. No more cigars, either.
3. No drinking.
4. No red meat.
5. Caffeine, sugar, salt and all unhealthy foods are now banished from my diet.
6. I go to the gym every single day.

Making such drastic changes wasn’t easy, but they offered me the best chance of staying alive — and 50 pounds and 12 months later, have clearly worked.

How bad do you want it? For Om, it’s “how bad do you want to live?” I just need to ask myself, how bad do I want <insert goal here>? If I treat it like life or death, then you betcha I will be ruthlessly brutal on execution.

This also means I will be saying “no” to a lot of things. I will be brutal on cutting down on activities that doesn’t in some way help me get to my goals. I don’t care what it is. If it’s not aligned with my goals, I won’t regret not doing it.

Lesson #3: Simplification through elimination

A culture that emphasizes success, like the one here in Silicon Valley, can make setting parameters especially hard. Lucky for me, my cardiologist, Dr. Eddie Rame, came right out and told me that unless I stopped working more than 10 hours a day I would be back in the hospital.

In doing so, he set parameters for my daily work schedule, leaving it up to me to be figure out how I would be most productive. Those parameters helped me make tough choices -– like cutting back on excessive public appearances, travel, frivolous RSS feeds and unnecessary company pitch meetings.

One year later, nearly 75 percent of my conversations are with people I love to converse with and nearly every topic on which I write (or focus) is something that I care deeply about.

Sometimes when I don’t limit and time-box an activity, I tend to end up spending more time on it than I initially would have wanted to. Sometimes because I’m a perfectionist, when “good enough” was all I needed. Sometimes going that extra mile cost me diminishing returns on my effort and time. So this year, I’m going to let myself be sloppy and “good enough” for non-core goals, so that I can focus my effort on my real core goals. (more…)

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