Here is another gem from Derek Sivers. To extend his point, all our opinions, beliefs (and the meaning we give to life) are subject to change. If our projected meaning or beliefs change, our outlook changes, and our actions change.

In that case, isn’t it only fair that we allow others the freedom to change as well? To give people a second chance? To not pass lasting judgement based on one-off incidents?

We know it’s 42, but what is the right question?

Here is some food for thought from Derek Sivers. Nice analysis, and I agree. He says,

“Life has no inherent meaning. Nothing has inherent meaning. Life is a blank slate. You’re free to project any meaning that serves you. You’re free to do with it, anything you want.”

The meaning of life, then is within you - not outside. There is no absolute / inherent meaning in life, only what you project onto it.

I recently read that, of the Big5 personality traits, the ones that distinguish an entrepreneur are

- “Openness” (to new ideas)
- “Conscientiousness” (ie. willingness to work hard towards a goal) and
- “Disagreeableness” (willingness to not conform, and be ridiculed)

It struck a chord with me. I think these are nice “rules of thumb” to evaluate a startup culture!

is directly proportional to the amount of work you do.

I just finished reading Malcom Gladwell’s random collection of stories*. It was an entertaining read and there were a few interesting take-aways.

1. Remote misses can be a big advantage.
   When we encounter hard times and survive, there are 2 possible outcomes:

• A near miss - we get hurt badly, are unable to get up, and are crushed. This is bad.
• A remote miss - we get hurt, but somehow manage to overcome the difficulty and develop a layer of immunization. We might also develop strong compensating skills enroute.

There are always remote-misses in a large-scale disaster that allow us to bounce back as a community.3. Change your pond, if it is too big
We usually evaluate ourselves based only on the local population we are part of. When we feel like a small fish in a big pond, perhaps we should change the pond such that we are a big fish in a small pond! 4. Too much can be as crippling as too little.
The law of diminishing returns is quite pervasive. This means that

Following up on my previous posts, one of the key points reinforced in the book is to pay attention to the decision making process, instead of the decision itself.

I was discussing this with my dad when he shared 2 anecdotes - 

1. When my uncle did really well in his high school, many elders / mentors suggested he move to a bigger city for better and greater opportunities. My grandfather wasn’t too keen (change is difficult - plus there were job perks associated with their current location), but grandmom forced the issue and it was to be Vellore or Chennai.

I just finished the fantastic book “Decisive” by Chip and Dan Heath. Here is my compressed cheat sheet. Do read the book - it is full of examples and useful nuggets on how we can build a better decision making process.

So, there are 4 main villains of decision making

1. Narrow framing
2. Confirmation Bias
3. Short term emotion
4. Overconfidence

So, how do you counter them?

Here is a list of questions to ask yourself when you are making a decision

“Why I Never Hire Brilliant Men” says the unconventional title of the article a friend shared.

That sounds wrong, with all the talk of hiring only A players to build an A team. I found the article (written almost a 100 years ago) quite interesting though, simply because it went against conventional wisdom and offered an analysis to support the view. But it looks like the author completely missed the concept of a “Cultural Fit”

I have been observing what affects the level of energy I have to work on something, and how to optimize it.
My first “Equation” was that, we had a long term base level formed by good / bad habits (health, inner peace etc). Our “state of mind” then acted as a multiplier on short term modifiers like level of sleep, hunger, coffee and so on influence the amount of energy we had at any point. But after some discussion with friends and observation, I realized that this is only our store of “potential energy”.

One of my thrusts this year is to understand myself better using data and objective analysis. 

The way I am going about this is to collect whatever data I can, look for patterns, form hypotheses, and then try to verify them.

Online activity, Phone calls, location are some relatively easy ones. RescueTime can help you track your computer activity, phone logs can be obtained (with difficulty) from phone companies, and location data from foursquare or a similar API. Fitbit tells you how active you were. These require little effort,  but might not give all the information you need to measure performance.