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.

I think there are 2 types of innovation - The pull, and the push.

Pull is more lean-startup. Look for the lowest hanging fruit, pluck it as fast as possible, and iterate. A consumer problem creates demand for a solution which pulls development of solution. Like Dropbox. And I think Amazon was pretty lean too.

Push, on the other hand is more like traditional research. Someone feels Solution X will benefit the world, builds it and pushes it into the market. Like Tesla, SpaceX.

I have written about the need to consolidate the crazy amount of information available at our disposal these days. In fact, companies like Google make their living from analysing and “understanding” the ridiculous amount of information they gather, and this has led to some pretty powerful techniques and tools being implemented.

On the other hand, there are also instances where there is not enough data to analyse. Or worse, there is partial or incomplete data. Two instances of this are the medical industry (we are working on this at Klinify). The other is personal information.  Sure, there is enough information to track a person (and have everyone screaming about privacy), but if I want to objectively understand myself using data, do I have enough information to do it? There is a lot of focus on this and we are making progress with the surge of wearable technology, but the data gathered isn’t really enough. I think it is something worth exploring!

We just raised our seed round at Klinify (http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/03/klinify-raises-600k-seed-round-to-build-an-evernote-for-doctors-in-south-asia/). It has been in the works for a while, nice to make it official now!

So what has changed?

1. I can stop freelancing / borrowing / begging to pay my bills and focus full time on Klinify. This happened a while ago, and it is very liberating to be able to put all your brain power into the 1 big thing you are building.

http://www.ted.com/talks/kelly_mcgonigal_how_to_make_stress_your_friend.html

This is very interesting. She says the effects of stress depend on how you think about it. I completely agree. I believe our mind has a way of controlling and influencing our body. A lot of these responses are unconscious but it is possible to reprogram it to our benefit. Stress is a beautiful example.

I am sure we have all had scenarios where a little bit of stress has increased our performance dramatically and also helped us feel better. At the same time stress has also crippled our ability. The difference is in our attitude and how we think about the stress - which is very  much in our control even if its seems difficult to tame at times.