Quitting, Comfort Zone and Progress

Today morning over tea, my colleague made an interesting observation about how we acquire skills. He is learning guitar these days (remember rock on?) and he made a remark to the effect that we are the biggest obstacles in our own progress.

How is it? He gave the example of swimming. When you begin to learn swimming, you tend to be quite sincere. So, you put in good amount of "sincere" effort with the "focus on learning". Then one fine day, you find that you are able to swim. May not be as good as you would eventually like to but good enough to give you an ego boost. And there your focus changes from learning to enjoying.

Now you stay at the same level for sometime. Not trying to learn anything new but just doing it the way you are able to do and feeling good about it. After a couple of days, you feel that others around you are far better swimmers and you need to put in more effort to be able to swim better. So, it’s time to go back to learning.

However, in this duration (which could be a couple of days or a couple of weeks), you have already developed a style and more importantly, you have got habitual to a specific ego-boost-level. Now, you must throw away the style that you have acquired, come down to ego-level-zero and "focus on learning". When you are changing your style and learning new things, you’ll not remain as good a swimmer as you were at least for sometime. This leads to some amount of disappointment (instead of getting better, it’s just getting worse!) and doubts (will I ever be able to swim like a fish? I am already losing the flow!!).

Here, you do one of the two things – 1) you quit because you lose interest (I don’t want to swim if I can’t swim like a fish), or 2) you get into a comfort zone and stay where you are (who wants to swim like a fish anyway? let me swim the way I can).

However, a little bit of persistence, a little bit of acceptance for that time-window when your skill turns south would eventually take you to a new height with new learnings.

So, the curve of skill acquisition is not a straight and upward line. It is rather a line that goes up, flat, down and up again over a period of time.

Then we realized that it’s not just about skill acquisition, it’s true about any progress whatever the field may be. Look at software development. There is a frequent need to re-architect the software systems to be able to do add some new extra-ordinary features. When a piece of software is re-architected, it may become worse for sometime because it will have new bugs that need to be found and fixed, it would not have carried forward some of the previous features because they won’t be relevant when the new features come in. But afterwards, the software product can reach new heights of functionality.

Let’s look at a person trying build a professional network. Intially, you don’t know anyone. Then you start moving around in one social community and you get to know all the people who are part of that community. Now, to know even more people, you must start visiting some other communities. Which means you wouldn’t be able to give as much time to the previous community where you already knew everyone. This will seem to take you a couple of steps backward where you are yet to establish contacts in the new community and are already losing touch with some people in the older community. However, if you persist, after some time-window, you’ll have more people in your network than you had previously.

If you are a professional blogger, you already have a steady stream of visitors to your site. If you want to get even more visitors, you’d have to change your coverage, you’d have to change the way you write, you’d have to spend time on marketing your blog which will give you less time to blog and affect the quality of your blog. Regardless of what you do, you’d lose some visitors to your site for sometime. But after a while, once you have got things stable again, you may actually have more visitors than you had previously.

For any progress to be made, some amount of destruction is necessary. The goal is to move forward. The key is to accept the time-window when progress curve heads south. It will not go north otherwise.

Circle of life

As a kid, you just want to grow up, as fast as you can, as much as you can.

As a grown up, you miss those childhood days (especially when you see your little ones having fun)…

Isn’t something wrong here?

History repeating itself?

During my school history lessons, I learnt that India was divided in small parts whose kings used to keep fighting with each other for more territory. That made the country so weak that invaders from outside could conquer the country.

I used to always think how stupid of those kings who were so busy fighting with each other and couldn’t see a big picture. Why didn’t people of that age resist this kind of foolishness?

And well, after all the stuff about Alexandar, Mahmood Gazhanavi, Moguls, Britishers and other European colonizers has happened, we still have small kings ruling small estates and fighting with each other to increase their territory.

And what are we people doing? Nothing.

अभ्यास

करत करत अभ्यास ते, जड़मति होत सुजान,
रसरि आत जात ते, सिल पर पड़त निशान|
 - रहीम

It roughly means -

By practising again and again, even a fool can become intelligent,
Because of the constant pressure of the movement of the rope, even the stone gets its impression.
(In old days, people used to draw water from the well. They would make a pulley of stone and put a rope over that pulley to drop the water. This pulley was made of stone. The second line is in that context).

In short, be persistent and you’d make a difference

ख्वाइशें

हजारों ख्वाइशें ऐसी की हर खवाइश पे दम निकले,
बहुत निकले मेरे अरमां, लेकिन फ़िर भी कम निकले.

- Galib

Anatomy of pressure in “corporate life”

All that I have written so far pales in front the this brilliance. Hats off!

Some gems -

While preparing for a challenge, there is a parallel mental game which we subject ourselves to. While we are engaged in the preparation we start developing the fear of failure syndrome.

Sometime we stretch ourselves, and consciously or unconsciously set the benchmark for us. Since life always do not let us operate in perfect conditions, but in general the expectations do not take into account all these factors. Thus we continuously engage into stretching ourselves.

Thus the some characters in the hierarchy in group, who are supposed to take decisions, starts building the fear failure mania and starts feeding this back to the whole group.

Don’t leave a path without concluding it, as situations created by the fickle minded jokers will ask to to dig hundred 10 inch holes to see if there water underground.

put forth your best and don’t think about the results too much, because come what may you cannot better your best. Thus you have already contributed for the worst case scenario.

Community powered applications

The webspace today is getting flooded with websites which are community powered. Everybody wants to build a community around their website. The website could be doing big things like building a better encylopedia, describing the whole world, or they could be doing social things like finding the interesting stories, finding the best deals, or they could be just a blog, a news/information website.

The reasons are very simple and very compelling.

First, all that you do is build a website and the real work is done by "others" ("others" being the "community"). You write and deploy Wiki software and others come and write the content. What’s more valuable? Wikipedia software or wikipedia content? Digg software or digg content? Wikimapia software or Wikimapia data? Thousands or millions of people working to make you rich! Isn’t it very nice?

Secondly, you build a website so that people come and use it. And if there is a community around your website, you have got the users as well. And it’s not just some random, curious visitor to your website. It’s a person who’ll keep coming back to your website. What does StumbleUpon do? People bring in the content and people keep coming in to see what content has come from others.

So, a lot of people (a lot of meaning millions of people) contributing to your website and then using the contributions that they have made as a community at the same time. And what are you doing? Isn’t it a dream thing?

I have talked to many people in last couple of years whose business idea is to build a community around "something". That something could be education, shopping, research, a specific city like Bangalore etc. And even I wouldn’t mind that since it sounds fascinating and the latest easy way to get rich Only glitch is that it’s not so easy to make something community powered. And it should be obvious from the number of failures in social networks.

So, what makes it work is a billion dollar question. Isn’t it? Considering that most of the websites going forward will need to have some kind of community power to be successful, it becomes very very important to understand how that community power comes. In my opinion, there are only two ways of bringing this community power to a website: 1) don’t do anything about it and rely on a bucketful of luck, 2) design your system for community power and rely on a cupful of luck.

Over next couple of days, I’ll put down some random thoughts on drawing community power and retaining it. Stay tuned…

Is science what the scientists do?

Is everything that a scientist does qualifies as science?

I have heard this argument so many times that if you are religious, you are not scientific. If you believe in God, you are not scientific. Is it true? Let’s look at some interesting things in history of science.

When Galileo contradicted Aristotle on the law of falling bodies, people laughed at him. You know why? Not because he was unscientific. He was considered unscientific because Aristotle was an established scientist and what he said was considered science.

You know what Einstien said about quantum physics? He dismissed it by saying, "God doesn’t play dice". Yes, that’s what he said. And we know he was wrong in dismissing quantum physics.

So, scientists can be pretty unscientific at times. Not everything that they say or do qualifies to be science.

Out of all the people I have talked to, their notion of science is anything and everything that has been "concluded by scientists".

Come on guys, grow up. Advancements in science were not made by those who relied on what was concluded. The advancements came from the people who challenged the established conclusions.

A long lost poem

Were you the first ray of sun
That kissed me good morning?

Or you were the breeze
That touched me deep inside?
So deep, that I felt a sensation
Even in my heart

Or you were the rain
That tempted me to dance?
Out in the open
And left me all drenched?

So many times I met you
Even before I saw you

Yes, you are my love.

[It was written 3 years back for yet-to-be-released-movie "You were not like this before"]