The End.
After about 11 months of putting time and energy behind the New New Thing, I have decided to shut it down. I was thinking about it till last week and now I am clear on what I want from my online presence.
Before what I would be, let me talk about what I would not be.
- I would not be a blog/website that pimps brands, businesses or people.
- I would not publish “exclusive” or “you read it here first”.
- I would not indulge in link baiting (except when I am specifically working on a project).
I rather want to
- create and contribute to original knowledge.
- meet, talk to, work with bright minds. There is one and only one way to get them. Be one.
- come up with ideas. More importantly execute them and see them to fruition.
What has changed?
Over the last one year, I read about the Internet, tried to understand the basics, talked to tons of people, made few very good friends, obviously blogged about all this and everything else, under the guise of New New Thing. I has been an awesome journey and a very rich learning experience.
Also, I have realized that I am not one of those superhumans who can juggle work, blog, life all at the same time and excel at it. Focus on one thing for me, means loss of focus on others. I have limited time and a peanut sized brain and thus there is only so much I can do. I will have to let go of few things and move on. Blogging on New New Thing is one such dispensable thing.
I now shall focus on doing. Rather than brainstorming about it. I would continue to share thoughts and lessons as and when I create things.May be I will do a new blog. Or a wiki. Or a mailing list. Lets see. One things for sure. The focus would shift from being a blogger to a doer. Please stay tuned for updates and announcements. Although I havent said anything about the nature of things I will indulge in, you still might want to contact me (here).
And like Steve Jobs once said,
2009 Feb 20
After about a year since I started this blog, I am having second thoughts about it. I think I need to re-consider my blogging endeavors. I have reasons, both grounded in facts and found in emotions.
Blogging is fun. It makes me think. It allows me to meet new and interesting people. It opens my eyes to a new world all together. It has been exciting to say the least. Its just that I have so much time to spend and so much to achieve. I need to do a serious cost vs benefit analysis on the same. And will do this over the weekend.
And that’s about it for this friday. Will update on Monday.
2009 Feb 13, Friday the 13th
Hope you are not suffering from paraskavedekatriaphobia when you are reading this blog post. Wikipedia tells me that paraskavedekatriaphobia is “fear of Friday the 13th”. The article tells me more about the supposedly superstitious date. The most interesting of the explanations is that number 13 represents irregularity. And it also tells me that in 2009, Friday the 13th would “occur” thrice. Feb, March and Nov.
And here is a list of interesting things I read, saw and did over the week.
Reading List
- Outliers – Malcolm Gladwell. I did a small blog post here.
- The Science behind Pepsi’s new logo on FastCompany. I dont know if this is for real but this sure is interesting and if Pepsi is actually planning to use this, they have earned my respect. Download this design brief for complete details. Do read. I would strongly recommend this.
- Why do People Buy Virtual Goods on WSJ. You might also want to subscribe to this team blog by Lightspeed Venture Partners.
Watching List
- Zappos.com CEO Tony Hsieh talks to Loic about Zappos and how to create a company that clocks a billion dollars in sales annually. All of it online.
- Vande Mataram, from the movie Jagriti.
Did
- MuMeLo.com: I co-founded mumelo.com with 7 other friends from MDI Gurgaon. Unlike the name, the idea and plans are very serious. I shall share more details in due course. Here and there.
Blog Revisits. Why and When?
A friend just asked – Do you revisit what you wrote a year back? And if you do, how often? And what is your reaction after reading it?
A very interesting question indeed. Here are my answers.
- Yes, I do revisit my blog. Most of the times I revisit my old posts if I want to check what I wrote, back then. I also go back to my old posts in case I want to link them up to the new ones.
- My reactions after reading most of the old posts is that how mundane, boring and commonsensical were they. This effectively mean two things. Either I am growing up as a person (and thus things that I wrote ages ago sounds common-sensical and a product from Captain Obvious) or my interests are changing (that I dont give as much importance to an event now that I gave, say a year back).
What about you? Do you revisit your blog? What is your reaction once you do that?
Thoughts on Outliers
Just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell‘s Outliers. According to Gladwell, an outlier
is a scientific term to describe things or phenomena that lie outside normal experience.
The big idea in the book is that you need at least 10, 000 hours of exposure (I will not call it experience) in a particular art/science/talent before you can make it big. The claim has been substantiated by citing examples from lives of Bill Joy, Bill Gates, Beatles etc.
The book also claims that success is a function of not only an individual’s brilliance or talent but host of other factors that might include opportunities, ethnicity, time when someone is born and even arbitrary reasons (not necessarily all of them, or in that order).
Here are the lines that I underlined while I was reading the book.
- Network effect plays an important role
- As WEB says, even ovarian lottery plays a critical role.
- Self fulfilling prophecy – a situation where a false definition in the beginning evokes a new behaviour which makes the original false conception come true.
- “teachers often confuse maturity with ability”
- “It is those who are successful, in other words, who are most likely to be given the kinds of special opportunities that lead to further success.”
- “Success is the result of what sociologists like to call ‘accumulative advantage’”
- “we are too much in awe of those who succeed and far too dismissive of those who fail”
- “(success is a) combination of ability, opportunity and utterly arbitrary advantage”
- “Achievement is talent plus preparation”
- “Successful people don’t do it alone. Where they come from matters. They’re products of particular places and environments”
- “…buried in that setback was a golden opportunity”
- “Those three things – autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward – are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying.”
- “success arises out of the steady accumulation of advantages”
- “success is a function of persistence and doggedness and the willingness to work hard …”
- “Outliers are those who have been given opportunities – and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them”
Lots of ideas and insights. And here are my thoughts on the book and the idea of 10, 000 hours and notion that sucess depends on multiple factors.
- I think with Internet, even if you lost the ovarian lottery and you can still offset a few disadvantages. Though you will still need to get those 10, 000 hours of “exposure”.
- You need to be able to connect with apparent “successes” if you have any hopes of offsetting those “accumulated disadvantages”.
- And finally I was wondering, what is that one thing that I have done for more than 10, 000 hours? 10, 000 mean 3 years of full time activity or 10 years of part time activity. I have been blogging PART TIME for 5 years, writing PART TIME for 6 years, gathering information FULL TIME for more than 10 years. Which of these can be a commercially viable activity?
I would recommend the book for sure. The Outliers is an easy to read book with lots of examples and interesting anecdotes (like the other two Gladwell books – The Tipping Point and Blink). And btw the book also says “the higher your (IQ) score, the more education you’ll get, the more money you’re like to make, and – believe it or not – the longer you’ll live”.
2009 Feb 06
Another Friday, another update. Without much ado,
Things I did
- Focus. My constant effort to stay on track and do only those things that might help me. As a part of the same, I removed Industrial Design feeds, Computer Security feeds from my long reading list. Thing with these things is that they are different, they are purple cows, they are interesting, they are conversation starters and that’s about it. They are more noise than signal. By a long margin. I think I will let them pass. Even if I lose an opportunity to know more about a building that twists as it rises (The Turning Torso Tower), I think I will not be affected. It will be a lost opportunity at max. And that is ok.
Reading List. Off all the things that I read over the week, I liked the following and would recommend
- How was Twitter Born. here.
- A youtube vid featuring Seth Godin @ TED 2009 and talking about his “tribes” and why he doesnt use twitter.
- Finished reading Snowball (yet another Warren Buffet biography) and apart from all things loved Warren Buffet’s thoughts on Ovarian Lottery. I am onto Investment Biker (Jim Rogers). And have ordered The Outliers (Malcolm Gladwell). Received the copy of Outliers and have finished half of it. Very readable book. Will do a book review soon. Reading plate is full for next few days.
Noteworthy. Off all the things that have happened around the world, the most noteworthy ones include
- Google Bus. ET reports that Google is piloting a project in AP where they are sending out a bus (READ “a Internet cafe”) to heartlands of AP and expose the audience to information, communication, entertainment and education. Apart from getting insights into the way people interact with technology and Internet, this could very well be a sustainable revenue stream for companies. A far better idea than actually setting up rural Internet kiosks (SREI is planning to setup these cafes). More details on the bus here.
And as Bugs Bunny would have said, That’s all folks.
P.S.: Focus still “leaves a lot to be desired for” ;P.
1v1: Experience vs Obsolescence
Am doing a 1v1 after a long time. Experience vs Obsolescence.
A typical dictionary would define experience as “have first hand knowledge of states, situations, emotions, or sensations” (link). A person would be called experienced if he has been there and done that. And done that over and over again for a long duration. In many cases, people spend their entire lives earning experience in their chosen field of work. Doctors, Engineers, Marketers to name a few. And then drivers, professional sportsmen, lift operators etc. Experience is respected, revered and often acts as a selling proposition. However, like all good things, it has its limitations. It blocks a person’s mind. Since an experienced person thinks that he is an authority on his subject, he starts discarding anything that might potentially change the very thing that he is expert at.
On the other hand, someone would call something obsolete when “loses value because the outside world has changed” (link). An object or a person becomes obsolete when by the fact that its environment changes, its no longer of use. Think of pagers, telegrams, post boxes, floppy disks, audio cassettes etc. They are were wonderful inventions but with time, better things were invented that (pretty much did what the obsolete things did) were faster, better, easier and cheaper. Often experienced people tend to become obsolete. And no, not everyone becomes one. The ones who refuse to listen and fail to identify the signals in time are the ones who would be experienced and obsolete. And that in my opinion is the worst place to be.
And like a lot of things, these two go hand in hand. More experienced you get, more ingrained the beliefs become, more difficult it becomes to accept the reality and more risk you run of obsolescence. The need of the hour is to learn with these rapidly changing times and adopt new realities as and when they emerge. And hopefully, stay just a little bit ahead of the curve.
Image you are a person who has spent 25 years of your life working with the postal department and suddenly there is something called email and there is no work for you. You cant work anywhere else because all you can do is stamp letters and all you know is pincodes of 400 districts in the country.
And, in the end, what would you want to be? Experienced? Obsolete? What would you push for? Experience? Obsolescence?
Other 1v1s
- 1v1: Thinking vs Meditating
- 1v1: Whether vs When
- Analyze vs Act
- 1v1: Excellence vs Mediocrity
- 1v1: Expert vs Employee
- 1v1: Popular vs Pertinent
