Takes

I read a lot. I digest a lot.

And I try my best to apply a lot of what I consume in some fashion in my life.

What’s the point of learning if you can’t put it to use somehow?

Every now and then, I come across pieces that really makes me stop and think. They have certain ideas that I often reflect back on days later. Sometimes, even weeks and months. That’s when I know those reads were actually powerful.

I have been toying with the idea of starting a newsletter for a long time now. I have so many drafts of versions of what I thought could become the first installment of my newsletter. I love the format and tone of Cold Takes newsletter by M.G. Siegler. Inspired by it, I have decided to just push the first installment out and see how it goes.

It will be a collection of links that really made me think and gave me a new perspective. These links may not necessarily be very new. There will be no common theme. I will try my best to not make it a purely tech newsletter. My Twitter has enough of tech stuff.

I am calling this newsletter “Takes”. With each link, I will try my best to give my take on some ideas and sometimes link back to my tweets and blog posts when relevant.

Here we go –

Richard Feynman’s Letter on What Problems to Solve

The worthwhile problems are the ones you can really solve or help solve, the ones you can really contribute something to. A problem is grand in science if it lies before us unsolved and we see some way for us to make some headway into it. I would advise you to take even simpler, or as you say, humbler, problems until you find some you can really solve easily, no matter how trivial. You will get the pleasure of success, and of helping your fellow man, even if it is only to answer a question in the mind of a colleague less able than you. You must not take away from yourself these pleasures because you have some erroneous idea of what is worthwhile.

This take in what “worthwhile” means is very refreshing. Often times we associate the value of doing something with how complex it seems to be. Feynman tells us it need not be that. I agree with this take on what problems we should look to get ourselves involved with. Makes sense. In hindsight, of course.

Q&A With Jack Bogle: ‘We’re in the Middle of a Revolution’

This is a fantastic interview. While it’s all about the finance world, indexing specifically, there are a lot of nuggets throughout the piece that make it worthwhile even for those not interested in finance to read it.

A seemingly obvious concept that a lot of people ( including myself) have a difficulty in incorporating in our lives –

I glance at anything favorable to indexing; I pore over anything unfavorable. You don’t need people to tell you you’re right all the time. You need people to tell you that you’re wrong.

Yet another example of how most successful people had someone in their lives early on who mentored them. These lines show how what you do early on is less valuable than who you did it for –

You come out of college, you don’t really know very much. I did anything Mr. Morgan wanted me to do, including hanging pictures where he said to hang them. Later on I was able to decide where they went. We had a wonderful relationship. Not really all that close, but certainly mutual admiration and respect. He saw something in me that he liked. It’s kind of weird that I considered myself a totally normal person without a lot to bring to the table – probably above-average intelligence, but not a lot above average. And here I am in this funny position today of being this bomb-throwing Marxist revolutionary.

Disney’s Pixar Acquisition: Bob Iger’s Bold Move That Reanimated a Studio

I have always been fascinated by how Pixar has designed it’s “braintrust” and how that concept has contributed to its massive success. One of my goals is to design braintrust in a formal capacity at some organization.

An interesting insight on why Disney was struggling with its creative work for a while until the new heads were brought over from Pixar –

From the head of the studio to the development team, the “suits” felt compelled to offer notes on each project that the directors were obligated to incorporate. “No longer were they focused on trying to make the best movie. They were negotiating notes,” Lasseter says.

The Great Firewall Of Facebook

There has been a lot of debates around fake news, social media filter bubbles and role of Facebook in elections lately.

I like how some people are thinking of treating social networks as open protocols. It’s how emails work. Multiple clients exist by using same data. Maybe we will have a blockchain based social network go mainstream sometime in the future :

However, the blockchain and app coins might provide a better solution to ending censorship by algorithm and still incentivizing people to create open products.. Just as we have in email, we can use multiple clients to look at our email, and as well as incentivize creators of these protocols.

Some advice from Jeff Bezos

There is no denying that Bezos is one of the smartest minds we have. His thinking on forming opinions is very counter intuitive. Amidst all the election chaos, we often dismiss people who flip flop on their view points. Bezos thinks that actually a healthy way of thinking. Intent and the way of doing it matters, of course.

He said people who were right a lot of the time were people who often changed their minds. He doesn’t think consistency of thought is a particularly positive trait. It’s perfectly healthy – encouraged, even – to have an idea tomorrow that contradicted your idea today.

Persuasion vs Populism

I honestly wish I had started reading Scott Adam’s blog a year ago. Even if you are fed up of election stuff, it is worth reading his blog from a viewpoint of learning about psychological concepts like cognitive dissonance and persuasion. I have been reading it for past two weeks. It has really given me a whole new way of thinking through what is happening in the political landscape.

The Master Persuader filter says Trump didn’t identify and match the preferences of the people so much as cause them to think the way they are thinking. My filter on the election says that Trump’s skill for persuasion could have given him the victory with DIFFERENT policies than the ones he championed – such as Bernie Sanders policies. And Trump would look like a populist in that case too.

The Ramp Down to Real

This is such a powerful and simple idea –

Once the goal was specified in less abstract terms, it was easier to think of patterns to structure the design. If you started to design a house using doorknobs, roof beams and insulation, you wouldn’t get very far. Patterns like kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom give you a larger structure to hold all the little details.

I think it’s another way if saying “reverse engineer” a problem. Once you know what you want as an outcome, you figure out what big chunks or concepts or paths lead to that outcome or are needed to get that outcome. Only then, you jump to specifics of each identified piece. The visuals in this piece are fantastic.

3 Questions with a Tech Lady: Sabrina Majeed, Product Design Manager at BuzzFeed

There are certain tasks that might be easier for me to accomplish myself, and would probably make me look good, but it would be a disservice for me to not to recognize that as a learning opportunity for someone else on my team. Something I’m learning is how to balance being selfless with being selfish as a manager. It’s not good to be an extreme in either direction, and easy to burn out if you don’t practice self care and prioritize yourself from time to time.

I can relate a lot with this. Not from a manager’s point of view. But, from a person who has worked with managers that have done exactly what’s stated above.

Don’t Try to Get Rich Twice

There was a study performed earlier this year that took a look at the composition of the top 1% of incomes in the U.S. They found that 11% of Americans join the top 1% for at least a single year during their prime working years, but less than 6% are able to stay there for 2 years or more. So this group is constantly changing.

That study makes intuitive sense. It is always harder to stay up on the hill than climb the hill.

Don’t worry about what other people’s portfolios or investment holdings look like. There’s no need to worry about what your neighbors, friends or family members are invested in. Jealously and envy have no place in portfolio management.

The above point is in the context of investments. But, I apply the notion of portfolio to my career and the point about envy is applicable in that context text as well.

“I’m not sure if I like what I did here or not”

Love this observation –

It takes real confidence and self-awareness to talk to someone who’s considering hiring you and telling them that you aren’t sure you like what you did.

Jason Fried, the author of this piece, is one of the most thoughtful writers and product leaders I have come across. Worth reading everything you can on him.

The MacBook Pro’s Touchy Feely Thing

We all have used the words suggested by iOS keyboard while typing. I never thought of it this way though –

But then, I found that if I got into a mode of looking at the next word Apple suggested, I wound up making choices determined by the company’s machine learning algorithms as opposed to the supposedly clever original language I am paid to craft. (For instance, in the above paragraph, the word “powerful” popped up when I was mentally searching for the right adjective. Done!)