Checkpoints

What are the points in my past where I'd go make changes if I were given the chance? I'm sure many of us think of this, some more than others. I've found myself completely lost in this kind of regret on a large number of occasions. Much more than I'd like. Nearly all of my regrets have come from one single source:

Not putting a 100% of myself in something I should have put it in. And the advice is fairly simple: If you already recognize your problem, all that is left to do is to give your 100%. Find ways of how to give your 100%. And if you still are unable to give your 100%, then re-evaluate yourself. Because, "You don't really want it. You just kinda want it..."

What they don't tell you is how big the cost of re-evaluation, re-consideration, change in life etc is. It's easy to not feel like this if one had more confidence to begin with. If one started early with the whole "making up your mind" thing that the world is enamored with.

The world eschews uncertainty. Statements like, "Well I'm not sure but, [...]" or "I think maybe that", or "Well I don't know exactly but " etc are just not as impacting as statements of surety, whether overall they be better than the unsure statements or not. And in this way, confidence feasts upon itself to actually make one a better person than if they didn't have the confidence. Lets look at both scenarios in detail.

On the one hand there we have A, who will not be quick to abstract, make simplifications, create a model, make quick simulation, judgments, move on, and come to quick decisions or conclusions. This leads to extremely broad search through the knowledge tree associated with the topic at hand. In the end, A gets a very broad and loose sense of a really really broad picture, which most of the times has nothing to do with the initial topic A started out with. A has no deliverables. A has such a wide scope of information that it's really hard to form interconnections in the data. Interconnections are important, because this is how our memory stores and remembers information.

On the other hand, there is B, who will not try to understand everything about the topic completely. B defers that process for later, trusts rote memorization for the time being (for the parts that B can't quickly comprehend), assumes some simplifications and forms an opinion. B now has the confidence to quickly make an impression upon whoever is depending on B for either this information directly or a product of this information. B also has a narrow enough scope of information that B can go deep into and make interconnections and remember everything. B now also has the memory of the knowledge gained, which will help B the next time they want to reiterate the knowledge search (wither wide or deep), without starting from the beginning.

Slowly, while A keeps being more and more unsure about everything at the same time, B starts becoming more and more sure about a subset of things. B has more confidence, more results, leading to more trust from other people, professionals who B depends on and slowly, who themselves will start depending on B.

Becoming someone others depend on is an ideal end goal. The reality of life is that due to its infinite complexity and our finite processing power, it's not wise to start swimming across the ocean, but rather master your backyard swimming pools first. Once you have certainty, you have confidence. Once you have confidence, you have conviction. Once you have conviction, you can better make and achieve goals in life. Once you achieve goals in life, you have less regrets that hold you back (unlike the regrets that don't hold you back). This is what is actually called giving your 100%. And the best thing is, once you have these above things, then even if you re-evaluate and make changes, you know that wherever you go, you'll be able to make it. Because you already have made it before.

Dear Diary

Well it's only been 3 days, but hey. I promised to write in you every day, but for now, is every weekday fine for you? Some people have dogs, some people have soulmates, some have relatives. Some don't need it. But some, like me have journal. You're my first/last resort I guess. The only place where I can be myself. You're my imaginary friend that has a tangible real life extension. You're the reservoir of all that, in my mind, is real. You're the lucid day dream that helps me organize my conscious brain; just like night dreams organize the subconscious. Is it because you don't judge me? Maybe not; you're an extension of my own mind, and I'm extremely judgmental of myself. But the difference maybe, is that I know that you only reflect my own judgments without proactively providing me any of your own. You're the intellectual version of me asking a flat mirror how I look.

You can tell I love you from the way I treat you just like my loved ones. There are days when I'm completely dependent on you. There are weeks when everyday I'm craving some moments with you. Then there are times where for many straight days I tend to just forget your existence (or so it seems) till I see your face again and feel so guilty for not paying attention before. You can tell I love you from the way I keep fidgeting with your customization settings so that I comfortably cocoon inside your warm personalization.

Yet every day, unlike the cliche, I struggle to tell you something. I always know I want to tell you something, I just am constantly unsure what, how, when, where to tell you. All the choices of words, of labels, of categories, of associated feelings, of timing and so on, confuse me. It's the paradox of choice. I choose to admonish myself, to carry my introspection, down all the various avenues. And suddenly, I'm so lost in creating the story that I forget the beginning and the end. I end up telling you something from the surface, rather than being honest with you, completely, like I should. I end up being dishonest with me.

I'm not making any promises. I have only casual intentions. I know recursion is key. I know every single broad and narrow aspect of personal improvement. You're not my avenue towards the goal. For now, you are the goal. For to find the world, one must first find oneself.

Communication Pt. 1

Since coming to my first corporate experience, I've learned massive amounts of common communication errors, both on the business and on the personal ends. Of the most desirable features are three razors:

1. Occam's Razor: Do not make unnecessary assumptions. If someone has told you one idea, do not generalize it across space and time. A particularly embarrassing instance of not following this rule occurred with me in my very first week. So there is this center table in my office and a co-worker said that usually the food kept there is, free for anyone to take. So I generalized this statement without making sure whether there were any boundary conditions, like people ordering food in a group. And that's exactly where I went wrong. There's also a system where people will start a discussion on a channel in Slack for ordering food together to save on delivery charges. This food is kept on the said table too, so that people can come pick it up when they want. And the idiot that I am, I picked up someone's order without thinking.

2. The distil-your-information-razor: Ruminate on what you want to say for a bit. Even if you instantly need to answer a question, quickly review in your head which aspects of the information are really essential to be communicated at the time. Verbosity is the worst when it comes to official communication. Even though they may say it multiple times, your boss and your senior colleagues are -NOT- your close friends. They have other people and their own social life to look at, so if you ramble on with unnecessary information, not just does it annoy them, it also dilutes the essence of your intention. When people think you're not trying to waste their time, it builds trust much quicker.

3. The compress-your-information-razor: Now this is more of a complex razor. For one, it relies on shared knowledge of language, terminology and jargon. If you try to express an elaborate idea by its niche title but the other person hasn't really heard of it then it's useless. If the language you're comfortable in is not the same they are, then compressing information is useless. However, even when introducing intentional errors and redundancy, one should keep in mind that its the necessary errors and redundancy that are brought in.

Why do you "need" errors?

Coming to work overseas (actually even before that), one can encounter people who aren't comfortable with some language, for instance English. So if you don't try to match your grammar and sentence structure with what they expect, even if their expected structure is incorrect, then communication becomes choppy and annoying. Better to do-as-the-romans-do.

Incremental Improvements

Innovation and Maintenance are two somewhat competing aspects of development. Investment in one requires compromise in the other. What then is the correct investment of time/resources in each?

Maintenance is about recognizing what you already have and maintaining it at a desirable level. But optimizing this requires at first recognizing what things are worth maintaining. Otherwise a lot of resources will be wasted. For example, if you have cultivated some relationships, are all of them worth maintaining? If not, then the unnecessary ones must be amortized.

Innovation, similarly is about recognizing the minimal set of the desirable qualities and behaviors one must have and then creating plans to achieve them.

There are many competing ideas in decisions we make for these aspects. On the one hand, as you grow, so do the things you need to maintain. Considering we usually have a fixed amount of time resource at hand, it would seem that the amount of investment in innovation would go down. And that is usually what happens too. Big old people are rarely the ones who come up with radical innovation. However, this doesn't eliminate incremental innovation.

There are two tools that can be used for help in this case:
--Subconscious automation: As you build more and more experience, it should take you less and less resources to do the same job as you did before. Especially for maintenance. This is similar to how we develop subconscious behaviors to handle some basic functions as humans (walking, driving, etc), or how athletes need to think less and less about the actions they've practiced for a long time.
--Delegation: As we develop more experience, we need to get better at thinking on an abstract scale. If we're able to do that, we're more suited to delegating (managing) things better. We can find the right people to take care of some things we would have had to personally take care of before.

Why are incremental gains important? Stagnation produces a loss of desire to become better. It's a vicious cycle. So escaping from stagnation even before we get into it is crucial. On the second hand, a crucial part of my philosophy is that as an atheistic individual, the worth of my life is equal to what I make of it. It is proportional to how much of what I do will have long lasting impressions. This ties in with the fact that I am a social animal, where community is an important player. Community built and produced resources, ideas etc are what have shaped me, helped define me and provided me basis for not just survival, but to thrive. Hence, people's happiness and respect is of importance in defining achievements.

Forming personal goals, then is a balance in finding the things we like within the subset of acceptable social achievements, behaviors and ideals. This set, generally is large. We're usually at the stage of having achieved some subset. Incremental gains is the most achievable algorithm to keep achieving more.

Excess

One of the starkest ironies of life is efficiency. xkcd I believe, has posted some comics on this issue, a prominent one being http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1445:_Efficiency

There is a cost to optimization. If we're trying to make one workflow efficient, optimize some measurable goal, then there's a whole plethora of costs that we willingly, unwillingly or unknowingly compromise on. Compromises in personal life vs professional life have been quite well explored in popular film media, but I think the less sexy issues aren't.


Lets take for example your personal computer. It's a popular meme that the PCs of today are far more powerful than the computers combined that helped send man to the moon. Lets think about it a little more. At my workplace we have 70 people, each using at least one Macbook Pro. This is a PC with 8 gigs of RAM, 500 GB memory many GHz (Or gflops if you like) of processing capability. Most of the time the processor remains at near idle rate. Most of the people are using the MacBook for Office applications like Text editing (which includes coding), making presentations, browsing, communicating and watching/reading stuff. Sometimes there's more processor intensive applications like rendering, video editing, designing and compiling code.

If you combine the requirements of everyone, you could maybe take 10 Macbooks, put them up as a cloud server, give everyone a simple terminal and even then you would not need more power even during high load times. What's a more striking number is that the total Hard disk storage used by everyone combined is not much more than these 10 PCs together.

Why then do we not have this system?

It's all about compromise. The jobs we perform are really complicated and require complicated machines which in turn means that there are a lot of avenues for failure. If there's some problem with the cluster, then suddenly most people's productivity dies. With distributed PCs, you have load capability at the same time as reducing risk.

But that is not to say that there are no avenues for cost minimization. If you have a big enough firm, one can still do a cost analysis to find the point at which a well setup cloud cluster, with enough backup capability and redundancy is more cost effective than personal laptops. There is still a tonne of avenues for innovation in the world. This is exciting.