>Haste

>The problem with today’s world is haste. People find something useful and then they talk about it. When everybody is just talking about it, some people say, oh, we have been talking about it for so long, let’s talk about something else. Something at the next level.

Example: ajax. We have hardly seen enough applications for this technology and now InfoWorld wants to talk about what’s next. Come on. Let it settle down first.

This haste leads to a hype. Hype leads to bloated expectations. Those bloated expectations lead to a skewed perception that the ‘new kid in town’ didn’t deliver. This perception of failure leads to disillusionment. Those who talk start talking about something else. Those who do continue to build interesting stuff. After some time, when the hype and disillusionment is over, new fantastic applications get written and launched.

Now, the expectations match the reality. Reason? Whatever change the technology was to bring in has been brought in. Nobody is hasty now as there is nothing to be done and hence nothing to be talked about.

This reminds me of something that Tolstoy said in War and Peace. And Hugh Prather said in Notes To Myself. If I find myself arguing very patiently about something, I can be sure that I am not convinced. In other words, when you talk too much when you don’t have enough knowledge.

>Mind Trick #3: Obligatory Amusement

>There are some activities in your routine that are neccessary for life (e.g. eating, drinking water). You don’t have to make an effort to maintain them throughout your life. Then there are activities in your routine that are neccessary for a civilized life (e.g. brushing your teeth). These are also rather easy to maintain. And then there are some that are neccessary for keeping in harmony with your external environment (e.g. coming to office to work, having dinner with your wife, playing with your child). These are also very easy to maintain (though you may want to avoid them some times but they are easy to maintain anyway). Call them obligatory activities.

After these three types of activities, there are activities that you want to push into your routine for your amusement. For example, reading, jogging, listening to music (and by listening to music I don’t mean that you listen to music while doing something else like jogging/cooking; I mention listening to music as an activity by itself wherein you just spread yourself on your bean bag, close your eyes, let your head fall back a bit and listen to music). These activities are hard to maintain on a daily basis.

The for-amusement activities are hard to maintain for multiple reasons. The chief reason is time. 24 hours – (necessary activities + civilized activities + obligatory activities) == too little time to do any damn thing.

If you want to have an activity for amusement, there would be so many other activities that would compete for the same time slot. For instance, I go for jogging in the morning. So, I can’t browse in the morning as the same time is utilized for jogging. If for a day, I get a strong urge for browsing, I won’t go for jogging. Also, I can’t party in the night or watch movie till late night as I have to get up early in the morning and I prefer sleeping well on a daily basis. So, if someday a friend invites for dinner, next day, I am not going to jog.

So, as you can see, any activity that is for-amusement is hard to maintain. And that’s why sustaining them over long term means a lot of effort.

So, what happens if you don’t put in much effort to sustain them. Simple, you won’t be able to sustain them. If you go for jogging every mornning, soon a time will come when you’ll go out for a short vacation and your jogging is cancelled for 5 days. Then you’ll take 2 days to settle down in your house and work, your jogging is cancelled for 7 days. If you don’t go for jogging for 7 days, you’ll again need that extra push (i.e. inclination+energy) from your side to resume it. Which will not be there for some reason. And you’ll stop it altogether.

Now, even more interesting is when you put in the effort to sustain it. Let’s say you make sure that you continue to do it for 1 year. Great! 1 year is a long time. Now you have got used to jogging in the morning. You *must* jog everyday because if you don’t jog, whole day you’ll feel that something is missing. You won’t feel that fresh, that energetic, that normal. You would immediately resolve that tomorrow, you must go. In fact, you might jog in the evening itself to make your day normal.

You know what has happened? Your for-amusement activity has become obligatory. Your jogging is not something that you do everyday to amuse yourself. You do it to continue feeling normal. You have further reduced the time available for your amusement!!

>Blogging @ Multiple Places

>As I mentioned earlier, my wife has started FoodBuzz, a food company in Bangalore. And I write a blog there.

If you like reading this blog of mine, you would also like the one at FoodBuzz. Here is the RSS feed.

>I have been busy.

>If you were wondering where I have disappeared, well, the answer is nowhere. I am pretty much where I have been for a long time. Just that I have been quite busy.

Vaishali (my wife) is starting a food delivery outlet in C V Raman Nagar area. Her idea is to deliver food to office staff in Motorola, i-flex and TI in Bagmane Tech Park. She is starting with lunch hours and depending on the response, she’ll decide how to extend.

Anyway, I was talking about where I had disappeared. So, I have been helping her setting up the operations. And I do that by spending more time at home taking care of my daughter. I also developed a website for her so that people can place an order online. Check it out here.

Contrary to my initial impression, creating a not-very-bad website turned out to be a fairly decent amount of work. I was surprized to see that there are so many technologies involved in such a small work. At the same time, all these technologies provide so much power that it’s a pity we don’t see good web based applications. I have not even scratched the surface and I am already overwhelmed by the breadth and depth of these technologies. I hope we’ll see much better applications (along the lines of gmail) in the future.

Now, I’ll ask you for a favour. Go to FoodBuzz and try it out. I would appreciate any comments on:

• what’s wrong with the site so that I can change it.
• what’s right with the site so that I make sure I retain it.

Thank You.