So what is the difference between a system and a goal. The goals are future states that we aspire mono-maniacally, while systems are our daily habits that we do to ensure that we are moving forward.

As pointed out by Scott Adams, one can easily confuse or interchange these two but the gist is that one should build a daily routine and stick to it. While goals are important to motivate but its more important to consistently work so as to move forward. The daily routine could be built around (not limited) to the following key factors.

• What makes me happy?
• What can I do on a repeat without being frustrated?
• What can help me learn more skills?
• What can give freedom to invest more into my family relationships and possibly contribute to society?

If one is able to build a system then it will be sustainable and progress is guaranteed. Also it comes with the fail safe mechanism of ability to pivot whenever needed.

Its been more than three decades since I gained the wisdom to take care of myself. This indeed has been a roller coaster ride and with its ups and downs. There were more ups than downs but we tend to remember the downs more than necessary.

In the years I have cultivated a plan to go about my daily chores so as to ensure that my goals are met and I am happy domain. It works most of the time but sometimes I falter in these habits. The side effects show up much faster than I anticipate and I have to set the sails again.

Control your mornings

Self help experts have a clear cut templates for suggesting morning routines. I would tell mine and encourage you to create your own morning routine based on experiments on what works well.

• First and foremost ensure you have a routine. This means that you should be able to do look forward to a set pattern. There is no constrain on the order of things but just that there should be a pattern for the body to look forward
• Secondly ensure you have around 1 to 2 hours before you start your daily routine (it could be the time you start off towards work). This makes the mornings hassle and urgency free. Everything looks normal hence having a positive impact on the body and mind.

Control your thoughts

This part is mostly either over simplified or over complicated. Thoughts cannot be control rather they could be channeled. So its important to have something to think about in case your thoughts wander towards negativity. Most successful people love to dream about their goals and how they would look when fulfilled. They even like to keep chalking plans for the goals all the time. This helps in channeling the thoughts. Key point is to give your mind something to think instead of forcing it not to think.

Control your body

Exercise is probably the biggest catalyst of procrastination. It took years to actually build an exercise regime. The whole time I was trying to follow some coach’s manual or trying to find a gym / schedule my time for gym. It always failed because it never works this way. Gym is for professionals whose work involves going to gym. People like me with taxing routines cannot fit it in the routine. The best way forward to just start some exercise and stick to it. It should be preferably one which does not need any equipment. My personal favorite is push ups. Its a full body exercise and needs no equipment and takes very little time.

Control your food

Body and mind need food to grow and remain active. Food plays a big role in how we respond to daily emotional, physical or psychological challenges we face. There is no recipe for what is best for your body. Here are some of the suggestions.

• Protein based diet like Keto Diet
• One Meal A Day (or intermittent fasting)
• Vegetarian or even better vegan diet
• Atkins Diet

Control your sleep

Sleep patterns determine how much activity you can perform. There is no magic number for hours of sleep. However one should ensure to sleep as much as required to wake up on your own and be fresh in the morning. Medical research has been saying 8 hours is a benchmark but I believe one needs to find one’s own mark.

Important note: This article is the result of years of reading the giants like Charles F Hannel, Napolean Hill, Benjamin Franklin, Alan Watts and many more classics and modern literature. In another article I would attempt list the sources of my knowledge in the area.

I am reading Scott Adam’s ‘How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life’. One of the most important messages in this book is ‘always use failures to reorient your life for success.

Its easier said than understood. Its easy to feign understanding it and its extremely difficult to implement it in your life. I believe the author has done a great job in explaining. I would like to break it down to the following steps.

When have you failed?

Most important part of the whole cycle is that you fail to understand when have you failed? Life is a continuous process and it never stops. So the clear signal of failure is never there. There are symptoms and indirect evidence. However its very late to realize that the we have failed. If something is failing the first attempt is to salvage and don’t allow it to fail. People who have anticipated failure early in the work and developed parameters / benchmarks to identify failure, are in a better position to cope with failure. So its important to understand both aspects what will success and what will failure mean in terms of benchmarks. Quantitative analysis come handy but should not be the sole criteria. Sometimes in businesses one can foresee the failure and change strategy well before the impending failure.

Once it has been determined that the project has failed, efforts should be made to minimize loss and move on.

How to get out of the victim mindset?

‘Stop digging’ is the best way of getting out of a hole. The victim mindset has the tendency to keep the person in a comfort zone, where one can blame everything and its soothing. There is no way anyone can really help except the person himself. Every kind of failure leads to victim mindset, it could be severe or mild or manageable but its always there.

Stop digging means to stop thinking about the failure all the time. It can be achieved by engaging in other healthy activities like sports, exercise or prayer/ meditation. Yes, binge watching Netflix does not help rather makes the situation worse by adding the guilt of wasting time.

What lessons to learn from failure?

Another aspect of failure is that it clouds judgement, especially when one has done a lot of effort not to allow failure. Even after the failure one is still under the impression that either it can be salvaged or rebuilt. There is no harm in rebuilding after a catastrophic failure but it should be done with a clear mind. Since its very hard to accept failure, learning from failures is a very complicated task. The easiest way to gauging the lessons is to write down a journal of how the endeavour panned out over the years / months and how it spiraled towards failure. The journal will not be perfect in the first attempt (because of victim mindset described above), however one has to continue re-reading the journal and continuously trying to make it objective. Once we have reason(s) of failure hammered out it becomes easier to convert them to learning outcomes. These outcomes can then be used to invigorate the process and help in rebuilding / starting afresh.

Learning from failures was originally published in HackerNoon.com on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I stumbled across the book ‘Psycho Cybernetics’ by Dr Maxwell Maltz. The following paragraph had me awestruck and I kept thinking about it for a long time.

When you habitually personalize every slight, every overheard conversation, even things you read or hear in media, you reveal a very thin-skinned self-image with the weakest of immunities.

Be bigger than such things. Have bigger fish to fry, as the saying goes. The person in hot pursuit of meaningful, rewarding goals and a calendar of important things to do has little time to obsess over trivial slights and offenses. Most dumb, insensitive remarks are dumb, insensitive remarks; they have no hidden meaning, and searching for it -- certainly being offended by it -- is an utter waste of time.

Its something I do (can’t say about everybody) and it looks like the author is talking about me. The thin-skinned self image destroys the whole body function and makes it really hard to focus on what matters.

As I discussed in another post, figuring out what matters is also not simple. However even without having any crisp goals to hunt one should stop destroying self-image and as a consequence setting goals would get much needed time slice.

There are many other techniques discussed in the book but this one caught my attention.

Tackling Thin Skinned Self Image was originally published in HackerNoon.com on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Will today’s emergency even be remembered? Will that thing you’re particularly anxious about have been hardly worth the time you put into it?

Better question: What could you do today that would matter a year from now?

So there are two parts of this message.

• What are you doing right now?
• What should be done?

What are you doing right now ?

Whatever we do at the current time should have a value attached to it. If one has determined goals, then the current task should be moving us closer to one of the goals or sub-goals. We should not consider something emergency just because it looks like one. We should evaluate every situation in light of our goals. If it helps our goal its an emergency if not then it might not be an emergency.

What should be done?

The evaluation criteria of some task should be determined by how much impact it would have after one year (this is just a rule of thumb in my opinion). The real impact of the task may not be evident after one year but it should be helping in achieving the goal.

So in a nutshell I agree with what Seth has to say but in my opinion our goals determine what is important and emergency, not the fact that it would impact something in a year’s time. If we have done a great job in identifying goals then the impact would be far more than one year.

Demystifying Seth Godin’s message on ‘ a year from now..’ was originally published in HackerNoon.com on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How I built a company where culture meant cultured

Backstory

My experience as the founder of a startup, web development services company was predated with 10+ years in academia and industry. In those years I experienced a lot of things which never felt great. Let me give an example inspite of working for a company over time and usually at night I was always expected to be either be present the next day at the usual ‘start time’. At one point in time I came back from an official trip carried out over the weekend (500 km from my residence). I reached back home at 4:30–5:00am and when I could not get up and reach at usual office hours I got a call and was asked to reach office. Similarly very dedicated teachers that I saw were given show cause notices for either not checking the examinations papers in time or not delivering quizzes in time. Please note the teachers were not assigned any Teaching Assistant or Grader given the class sizes were 50+ for each section ( each teacher teaching at least 3 sections per semester).

Culture

The above are just a sample (maybe a bit more similar) of when a company forces sincere employees to look for moving over to other opportunities. So when I got the opportunity to create a company culture I wanted it to be according to my vision based on my experiences. I won’t bore with the details but here are the salient features of some of the policies.

1. No attendance policy.
2. Every team member was allowed to come at any time and leave at any time. It was left to the discretion of the individual to ensure the work is completed no questions asked.
3. Every member was able to take as much vacations as needed. The salary was never deducted. The was again left on the discretion of the employee.
4. Every member was allowed to take lunch breaks or game breaks whenever they feel like. There was no set rules from the management about the timings or duration.

Some of these policies were changed especially number one later and there was an attendance register but it was never used for anything useful.

Results & Impact

While these policies were criticised by almost everybody at one point or another, but I was amazed at how the employees themselves critcised them and forced me to put an attendance register. Similarly the leave policy was always scrutinised by the management team as well as the employees. The curious case of the employees who wanted to know the total number of leaves but also the breakup like medical, casual and annual leaves. Maybe it was because of the rigid rules elsewhere that forced the employees to ask these questions.

I think the above rules were able to cultivate the following impact.

Positives

1. Employees never felt being in a cage and hence were for the most part happy to come to the office
2. It created a sense of ownership and self management which resulted in less tense environment
3. The employees were willing to put in more time voluntarily to complete the tasks since they knew they could complete them anytime they want.
4. General quality of work did not suffer since the team members knew what they had to deliver and how to test it.
5. The freedom enhanced the overall morale
6. Employee turnover was very much low.

Negatives

1. It took the teams a lot of time to come to terms of when they want to schedule a meeting especially scrums. This still was positive in a way that the teams managed to come up with a unanimous schedule as compared to a forced schedule.
2. Most of the employees were not very sure (rightly so because of their previous trainings as well as observing other companies) whether the company really stood by these rules. The often led to uncertainity and anxiety.

Finally the task of an human resource department is to help the employees become better human instead of robots working under instructions.

Bringing human back into HR was originally published in HackerNoon.com on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Dreams have been a subject of interpretations. Its actually a huge domain where people use symbols or signs from dreams and predict the future. Our interest in dreams is a bit different than forecasting the future. We are interested in living out dreams. Our favorite definitions of dream are ‘ a cherished aspiration’ or ‘a person or thing percieved as wonderful or perfect’.

Dreams can be realised. It must have been hard for some one in the middle ages to understand but in the second decade of 21st Century with so much changed in the last 40 years. Someone from the 1980s would be awed by the amazing leaps that have been made in the past decades and someone from the early 1900s would be totally shocked to see the advancements made in 100 years. So I firmly believe the dictum that ‘One can realize what one can dream’.

The only hinderance is to see how we can convert our dreams into realizable goals. I have touched this topic in my following podcast.

It might look naive on the surface that dreams become goals but a little algorithmic approach can do wonders. Even if it does not workout its a good idea to atleast try this with every dream. Who knows where we would be if we could live out all our dreams.

Dreams and Reality was originally published in HackerNoon.com on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Failure comes in different flavours (of course this is not a comprehensive list but I believe covers lots of scenarios)

• Failure to execute a plan and get desired results
• Failure to get attention in a market
• Failure to compete
• Failure to reach growth targets

The list of failures above shows the diversity and intensity of failures. Some failures are reversible others are not.

Step 1: Understand your brand of failure

The first step is to understand what kind of failure is it. Classifying the failure helps in marking whether a recovery is possible or not. Its imperative to know because the next step is governed by the ability to recover or not.

Step 2: To do or not to do root cause analysis

After it is determined that the recovery is possible or not. If its possible then do the root cause analysis and try to eliminate the cause of failure.

The following techniques are very useful for such a scenario

• Five Why Analysis for root cause
• Pareto Analysis

The above are the most simplistic however powerful analysis techniques. I am especially fond of Pareto Analysis which identifies lots of parameters e.g., it can be used to figure out failure points well ahead, also allow to identify what are the most important and should never fail.

Now lets turn to the situation where one figures out that a recovery is not possible. Then one should focus attention to alternatives and ensure they are fool proof instead of working out the cause analysis. This is something very counter intuitive but human mind is very much complicated and works in strange ways. It has wonderful ability to both ignore something very important and focus on something else called Cognitive Inhibition. So the idea is to forget about the failure and focus on something else which has better chances of success without being inhibited by the recent failure. This is a very strong trait and if developed can make a person very strong. Napoleon Hill, the renowned father of mentoring, aptly put it.

“Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.” — Napoleon Hill

Cognitive inhibition can provide a way to explore and nurture those seeds.

Step 3: Execute

Whatever is the result of the above analysis, the most important thing is to EXECUTE. If one executes one fails or succeeds. There is no other way to determine whether some hypothesis is correct or incorrect except execution. We can simulate or think no matter hundred times but once the plan sees the day light it has tendency to expose more parameters of interest. In that case the plan has to be immediately changed to incorporate new insights.

There are two aspects that need our attention.

1. One should be prepared for a failure while enjoying success
2. If one is experiencing failure one should be prepared to succeed.

These are extremely simplistic but very difficult.

“If Harvard were really the best education, if it makes that much of a difference, why not franchise it so more people can attend? Why not create 100 Harvard affiliates?” he says. “It’s something about the scarcity and the status. In education your value depends on other people failing. Whenever Darwinism is invoked it’s usually a justification for doing something mean. It’s a way to ignore that people are falling through the cracks, because you pretend that if they could just go to Harvard, they’d be fine. Maybe that’s not true.” [1]

It looks as if what Theil is refering to is something new. Well its not completely new. Here are some of the examples I could find.

1. IITs network in India : Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) need no introduction. They have provided one of the greatest talent pool in history of mankind. It would not have been possible had there been only one exclusive IIT. Currently after lots of additions recently there are 23 IITs. I believe this will only improve the talent pool and allow people of diverse regions get quality education.
2. UETs network in Pakistan : On last count there were five major University of Engineering & Technology (UET)s in Pakistan and countless campuses. This has been the powerhouse of Pakistan’s engineering talent. If in doubt have a look at the list of alumni from prestigious American Universities and you will find that most talent was groomed in these universities. The recent upsurge in campuses has also given job opportunities in remote regions but also given fresh talent from those areas who were not able to get seats just because of limited seats not lack of talent by any means.
3. COMSATs Campuses : Something great happened when COMSATS became the first university to make another campus in remote region Abbottabad. This started what people call ‘mushrooming’ of universities in Pakistan. I would rather say that these universities are in fact giving quality education to those who would not have been able to get any education at all. People point out the lack of teachers or quality education my response is something is definitely better than nothing at all. If something exists it can be improved. If there is nothing at all it will create a vacuum to be filed by whosoever is capable.

Now what about quality of education, each one of these networks has one or more institutes/ campuses which are considered to be very exclusive. This means that the exclusivity won’t simply vanish it would stay but not at the cost of denying others an option to pursue education. I have used only engineering institutions as an example here because I happen to be an engineer. We have our share of harvards in Pakistan.

• Lahore University of Management Sciences
• GIK Institute of Engineering Sciences & Technology

I am proud to have these two as my alma mater and really love them. However I still believe that the other institutions are having a much greater impact than these two because of their passion to replicate the success. IIT Kharagar would have been the most exclusive college of the world had there been no other IIT, similarly COMSATS Islamabad would have been great university without any other campuses but I am happy some people thought better and replicated the models for better future for lots of people.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2011/04/10/peter-thiel-were-in-a-bubble-and-its-not-the-internet-its-higher-education/

Franchising Harvard: What US needs to learn from India & Pakistan was originally published in HackerNoon.com on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Docker gives into inevitable and offers native Kubernetes support

If docker was a miracle where one could simply put a whole world inside a text file, Kubernetes is the proverbial genie in the bottle.

That docker has done it finally means a lot because docker already had a swarm to do exactly the same thing. However given the elegance of kubernetes , docker had to give in and provide native support. This is a brilliant news and a win-win for all parties especially open-source developers who rely heavily on such tools.

Recently kubernetes has seen a lot of names joining the band wagon. Most importantly the recent fall has been a spring with many big names joining.

Kubernetes gains momentum as big-name vendors flock to Cloud Native Computing Foundation

A look at the Platinum Members : Microsoft, AWS, CISCO, CoreOS, DellTechnologies, Fujitsu, Google, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Joyent, NEOSPHERE, ORACLE, Pivotal, Redhat, Samsung, SAP, VMWare and Finally Docker shows the steam that has been gained by Kubernetes in the recent past.

Members | Cloud Native Computing Foundation

Love it whenever such initiative make big and feeds the dream and passion of open source community.

Kubernetes Dockerized ! was originally published in HackerNoon.com on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.