On one cold January evening in 2018, I wrote a blogpost on an impulse. I then chose a simple WordPress theme and published that post. The next day, I wrote another post. The day after that, I wrote another. 1000 posts later, I find myself here.
Growing up, I always thought of myself as a writer. I wrote my first poem in class 4, which was published out of kindness in the local newspaper. Throughout my schooling and university, I have been part of writing clubs. I wrote only when I found myself in the grip of an inspired moment. These moments had a will of their own, but they followed one pattern — whenever I put out a good post, the next one would take longer to arrive. …
We live in the 21st century — at the very pinnacle of human progress. Just 150 years back, average life expectancy in the world was 30 years, compared to 72 years today. Less than 10 percent of humanity lives in extreme poverty. Average income in the world, which stood at $2.80 in 1800 is around $40 today. We have never lived in a more peaceful and plentiful world. In the bargain we have abolished slavery and installed democratic governments in most parts of the world. Technology helps us achieve in a day what our predecessors did only through years of labour. …
In 1990, Elizabeth Newton conducted a simple experiment, which earned her a PhD in psychology from Stanford.
She organized volunteers into two groups — “tappers” and “listeners”. She gave each tapper one among 25 popular songs. The tapper had to communicate this song to the listener by tapping on a desk. The listener had to guess which song was being tapped. This is a great experiment to try if you have a generous volunteer. Just tap the most popular of songs that both of you know and ask them to guess it.
All right. Getting volunteers to perform bizarre Morse code rituals is all fun and games. But what made Newton’s experiment worthy of a Stanford PhD? …
Over the last twenty years, the software industry has transformed itself to innovate at lightning speed.
Amazon and Google refresh their websites several hundred times a day. Way back in 2011, Amazon’s mean time between refreshes, was 11.6 seconds. These tech giants operate like large organisms, constantly renewing and upgrading their hardware and software. Your body replaces 100 million blood cells every minute without you feeling a tickle. Similarly, Amazon’s constant upgrades under the hood will not disrupt your search for band-aids with Shakespearean insults or this Bojack horse mask.
This rate of innovation sets the software industry apart. Few other fields can work in this manner - I’d like to meet the mechanic who can remodel your car as it is being driven to work. But what has that got to do with creative writing? What can building innovative software teach us about writing? …
Do you feel that you do not write enough?
Peter Thiel’s popular interview question for hiring new entrepreneurs is “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?” I’ll take a shot at answering it shortly.
The act of writing has limitless potential. Adam Grant talks about how writing 15 minutes a day contributes to a 50% decrease in mental illness caused due to trauma. In another study, a group of engineers who had lost their jobs were taught to write everyday for 20 minutes. 52% of these engineers found new jobs in an eight month period. In comparison, the success rate in the control group was merely 19%. …
We live in a society that is obsessed with setting and achieving goals.
Our biggest corporations have quarterly and annual performance targets. Best-selling books advice us to begin with the end in mind - by defining a goal as clearly as possible and imagining how its outcomes would unfold. They tell us to picture ourselves working in our dream job, or imagine our names on best-seller lists for that novel we are writing.
All of this serves as great fuel for motivation. It encourages us to step in the direction of achieving our dream, consciously and unconsciously. …
I have been posting everyday for the last 50 days. What started off as an experiment has turned into a habit. Here are three lessons that I have learnt along the way:
1. There is no dearth of ideas — When I started off, I was anxious that I would run out of topics quite soon. Barely a couple of weeks in, I realized that there is an abundance of fascinating things to take note of. The practice of blogging everyday has implicitly made them easier to notice and write about. …
What does it mean to translate to another language? One year after moving to Germany and working in German, I can try and answer that.
In India, my learning happened mostly through reading or listening. I was learning German using its English translations in a remote setting. If I read a news article, I would decipher words like “attacker”, “arrested” and “shot” (since so much international news is about terrorism) and strengthen them through repetition.
In Germany, I registered the words I already knew by listening to people use them. But along with the sound of the word escaping their lips, my mind was bombarded by several other cues: the wrinkles on their foreheads, the movement of their eyebrows, the setting they used it in, the reaction of the people around them and so on. …
It is sheer joy to receive a well written personal email. I received one this week and thought about what goes into creating written communication that moves us. Among various reasons, the most important aspect of meaningful written communication is the effort involved in crafting it.
This effort could be physical. A hand written letter has to be drafted in rough and rewriting neatly and legibly. It has to be sealed in an envelope, addressed, stamped and posted. The explicit need for this physical effort has been all but eliminated in our digital world. …
There are often wide chasms between the engineers who understand the power of their technology and the businessmen who could use it profitably. This chasm was bridged by Bob Metcalfe when he was pitching the value of his invention.
Bob Metcalfe had invented the Ethernet and was marketing it using his new company, 3Com. These were early days of computer networking, and Metcalfe sold 3 connected computer terminals, which shared hardware resources such as a hard disk or a printer and were connected using Ethernet. This bunch sold for a hefty sum of $3000.
Nevertheless, there were some early adopters for this technology. They bought a few units and set it up in their offices. But they came back to Metcalfe with complaints — the units worked, but were not particularly useful. …
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