The Importance of Time.

What you actively spend time on, and (far more difficult) what you choose not to do, who you choose not to spend time with, and who and what you decide to say no to — what you choose, then — is how you mark time. And that is all there is.

From Bobulate,

Time is the most valuable and finite commodity that any living thing has in this world. Think about it, everything – you, me, people, plants, animals, even the Earth itself – has a limited and set amount of time. Even our solar system is but a minute of time in the history of the universe. The average human lifespan does not even register on the clock. In many ways, time defines life itself.

Therefore, treat it as the most precious thing in existence, because it is. Don’t squander a single second. Perhaps, even more importantly, don’t waste time regretting the time you do squander. Instead, look to how you are going to use this very moment to do something… Anything. Make a mark. Don’t worry about the next until the next comes along. This moment is far too important.

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Someone has to hit me on the head with this.

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Simple things done well club.

I’m a firm believer in keeping things simple. This has never worked with emotions and women. But it’s fundamentally the principle by which I operate. We don’t need 65 new buttons on a remote control pad just because 15 do the job but look empty.

That doesn’t mean it has to be  stupid. It’s very important to make sure smart data’s presented well and in a way that’s easy to grasp irrespective of the audience’s age and education (when presenting a general concept, not your defence thesis). A master of simplifying complex data through visual representation is Hans Rosling. Here’s a post about his technique (if I may call it that). Another master is Edward Tufte. Here is Steve Jobs’ keynote being viewed with the simplicity angle.

Therefore I’m joining this club and marrying it into my family. Presenting the Simple Things Done Well Society. From them

I’m starting a club. It’s called the “Simple Things Done Well Society,” or STDWS, if you will. We believe that Vanilla is the best flavor of ice cream (so long as it is really good), Ringo Starr is wonderful drummer, and Hemingway’s sentences are perfect, thank you very much.

Above, a toothbrush by MUJI, because your toothbrush doesn’t need to look like some sort of a neon-laced, ribbed dog chew toy with grips.

You are a ship, you pick your destination port. Do so wisely.

I’m going to talk about a powerful idea I learned from a colleague. The Ideasliver. You take one slice of the pie we call the world. Cut one sliver but cut it very very deep. Take it out and own the sliver. Own the idea. This now becomes your breath and your obsession. You know it’s an obsession only when you indulge yourself in it completely. This means you do away with sleeping, walking, gaming, sex, eating and never feel wanting when you are with this ideasliver of yours.

About 1.5 years back the itch to find my ideasliver started. It has been a long time and I sought desperately to seek counsel to define it. But there was one very important, albeit extremely annoying, piece of advice that I constantly received.

Only you can decide what you want to do with your life. No one can tell you how you want to define yourself. They can acknowledge it or judge it, but can’t decide it for you.  You choose. And choose wisely.

Enjoy the journey.

Most people say Life’s in the journey. We shouldn’t worry about the destination. I take the example of a ship. All of us are ships on the sea. If you don’t choose a country to land in you’ll drift in the sea. If we left our journey to the universe and it’s winds, we won’t get anywhere. Winds blow in opposite directions over different points of time.  A lot of ships get wrecked. A lot of them drift mindlessly. A lot of them are forced to land. The best journeys are those that you decide the country you want to land in (country = industry, expertise). This will take you to one port (part of a country). You might not like this port or even stay there long enough BUT you must decide the country you wish to sail to. Especially like me, if you are nearing 30, which I consider two fifths of your life. Or your sailing in the ocean if you will.

Jack of all trades, master of some.

But what if like me, you have many interests?  Where do you get your ideasliver from? I’ll present to you an idea I had and one that I plan to test for the next 3 months. I believe to gain reasonable expertise in anything you should spend all of your waking/free time for atleast 3 months at tasks to know if you can stick on to it. I decided to split up my interests and skillsets into 2 buckets.

The first bucket I’ll call Personal. In this bucket you put in all your interests and passions. These are things you’ll do if never paid, if only for curiosity.

The second bucket is called Professional. Depending on your age, you have gained some skillsets but you wish to pick up some more that has a market value. This means you cannot be a nudist unless there was a market for it. There is, by the way, a market for almost every thing.

For the next 3 months, I plan to work solely on 2 professional and 2 personal interests and form my ideaslivers around them. I know at some point i’ll want to quit and I’ll note which activity makes me do that. But not without trying. Then I’ll keep what I have lasted with at the end of the three month period and see if I can grow that even more or squash that and pick up 2 more interests. At this rate, I can potentially learn 8 new skillsets over a period of a year. Or spend 3 months finding my ideasliver.

True happiness lies in finding the sweet spot between both of them. Steve jobs has found it, Picasso found it and so did Jimi Hendrix. It’s our turn now.
What are your personal and professional slivers?

Make wealth not money.

Everyone’s interested in money. No one denies it’s importance. But how many really understand it’s significance and replaceability? Or it’s origin?

Paul Graham, in his fantastic set of essays, talks about Creation of Wealth and not money. In it is a short history course on the significance that I’m highlighting here today.

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The definition of Wealth

The advantage of a medium of exchange is that it makes trade work. The disadvantage is that it tends to obscure what trade really means. People think that what a business does is make money. But money is just the intermediate stage– just a shorthand– for whatever people want. What most businesses really do is make wealth. They do something people want.

From Barter to two trade exchange

Money is a side effect of specialization. In a specialized society, most of the things you need, you can’t make for yourself. If you want a potato or a pencil or a place to live, you have to get it from someone else.

How do you get the person who grows the potatoes to give you some? By giving him something he wants in return. But you can’t get very far by trading things directly with the people who need them. If you make violins, and none of the local farmers wants one, how will you eat?

The solution societies find, as they get more specialized, is to make the trade into a two-step process. Instead of trading violins directly for potatoes, you trade violins for, say, silver, which you can then trade again for anything else you need. The intermediate stuff– the medium of exchange– can be anything that’s rare and portable.

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Metals are considered both rare and portable. Hence they became the medium of exchange. We have dollars now as the medium but it’s not a “physical” thing. It’s just another medium. Concentrate on the commodity not on the medium.

How do you become an expert?

For Bill Robertie, his success has a simple explanation: “I know how to practice. I know how to make myself better.”

Robertie bought a book on backgammon strategy, memorized a few opening moves, and then started to play. And play. And play. “You’ve got to get obsessed. You’ve got to reach the point where you’re having dreams about the game. I could just glance at a board and know what I should do.  The game started to become very much a matter of aesthetics. My decisions increasingly depended on the look of things, so that I could contemplate a move and then see right away if it made my position look better or worse.”

It’s not the quantity of practice, it’s the quality. The most effective way to get better is to focus on your mistakes. In other words, you need to consciously consider the errors being internalized. Searching for his errors, dissecting those decisions that could have been a little bit better. He knows that self-criticism is the secret to self-improvement; negative feedback is the best kind. An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.

- From Derek Sivers notes on the book How We Decide.

Sleeping is dying.

Sometimes I speak at universities, and I ask students why they sleep in on weekends. “Why would you sleep when that’s your time to live?” I ask them. Sleeping isn’t living. You sleep when you die. – Jordan Zimmerman.

On productivity.

Co Founder of Flickr on notes, tasks and meetings.

I always thought taking notes were important. I’m a overdrive note taker. I believe it reinforces your thought and drills down the basics when you read it. It also helps that you can often reflect back on the single most important point. Over the years I have gotten better at taking notes and I’m currently compiling a post to give you my best practices. Here Caterina Fake, the co founder of Flickr, gives some wisdom into her productivity and thinking.

On the importance of notes.

I think it’s a sickness in business to always try to do more things in less time. I try to spend more time. People read all this information and think they’ve accomplished something, but what have they really taken in? What can you take in that’s important in 140 characters? I read books and articles, and I take a lot of notes. I put stickies in passages I find interesting, and later I write them into my notes, because that reinforces them in my memory. And I’ll make a point of going back and rereading them. Otherwise it’s like cramming for a test in high school where you don’t retain any of the material.

On prioritizing tasks

I have a to-do list so I don’t forget things. But I don’t prioritize tasks. I just know what needs to be done, and I check tasks off in the order I do them. Sometimes I feel like checking off all the little things. Mail this letter. Respond to this e-mail. Sometimes I want to figure out the entire strategy for 2010. As long as everything gets done, it doesn’t matter in what order.

On innovative meetings.

Interaction should be constant, not crammed into meetings once a week. You just turn around in your chair and bounce an idea off one of the other 10 people in your office. Keep the floor plan open so people can talk to each other. As the company gets bigger, keep dividing it into smaller and smaller groups. Follow Jeff Bezos’ two-pizza rule: Project teams should be small enough to feed with two pizzas. At Hunch, we don’t have meetings unless absolutely necessary. When I used to have meetings, though, this is how I would do it: There would be an agenda distributed before the meeting. Everybody would stand. At the beginning of the meeting, everyone would drink 16 ounces of water. We would discuss everything on the agenda, make all the decisions that needed to be made, and the meeting would be over when the first person had to go to the bathroom.

Introducing the School for Geeks of Visual Arts.

“Don’t let your parents or school system try to force you into a future that you have no interest in… Find your passion and you will be on the road to being just as relevant to society as any other ‘professional’. Sure, we need doctors, engineers and scientists. But we also need movies, games, clothes, fine-art, music and cool looking buildings, websites and cars,” he writes. “Simple but true.”

How many times have we thought about the futility of the education we have received? I don’t know how many times the information I learnt in School or in college turned out to be useless. Because the industry I got into (and the one I’m currently in) didn’t have set rules in stones. They didn’t have the factory mindset that most people have been preparing for since the started of the 19th century. More insights are in this talk by Sir Ken Robinson.

For now, Ars Technica has an article about the Gnomon School of Visual Arts. I’m thinking I should apply.

Justin.tv’s founder talks productivity and being a CEO.

Inc. is fast becoming one of my favourite online magazines to read. I’m definitely going to subscribe to the US Edition soon. I find the Indian edition has a lot to work at. I would like to help them organise their content and bring in flavoured deliveries. The series I enjoy the most is their “How I work” series. This is a personal productivity take on the top CEO’s and founders. I had a similar run with Steve Rubel and MG Siegler at one point of time. I plan to revive that series as well.

This one is about Justin Kan of Justin.tv. He started live streaming his life about a couple of years ago. This yale graduate thought there was a business plan to it. Today his idea has about 50,000 live users streaming at a given time and many many many subscriptions. He doesn’t stream anymore. He leads a company of 27 members and he just turned 27. This is how he goes about his regular day.

Justin on Productivity (some of my personal notes collected).

• I try to work the hardest I can without burning myself out. It’s not that I think working all the time is the key to success. It’s just the way I was raised. I don’t feel productive if I’m not working a lot.
• I wake up every morning around 7. I check my e-mail first thing, just to make sure nothing happened overnight. Our business is live video, so the technology has to work 24/7.
• I have one of the crappiest desks in the office, but I don’t care about that. I’m more concerned with making sure other people have desks they like that help make them productive. My job is to help other people do their jobs well.
• At the end of the all monday meetings-  Mike, my co-founder and our CEO, gives everyone a quiz based on his notes from the meeting. It’s just a fun thing, to test yourself and see if you’re paying attention. Sometimes, I’ll get five out of five answers right; other times, I might get two out of five.
• When we’re starting a new project, I’ll first meet with one or two people. I try to keep the meetings small, especially when we’re doing product design. If you have eight people in the design meeting, it doesn’t work. Everybody has an opinion. Everyone wants to weigh in on what the font should look like. The end product becomes the average of eight opinions. You don’t get excellent work, just average.
• In the late afternoons, I usually take the notes from my meetings and write up specs for the engineers. Then, sometimes, I sneak off to nap. We have a lounge chair on the second floor. At least once a week, I’ll crash there for 15 minutes or more.
• I’m not very picky. What’s important to me is that everybody else is happy with it. I want to eat something and get back to work.
• I don’t do any of the complex programming. It’s usually just some of the easier features of the site. I’m certainly not the best programmer. If I were, then I would be programming full time and somebody else would be managing. But I like coding. It helps keep me sharp. Plus, I find it hard to manage somebody’s work unless I have an intimate knowledge of how to do it myself. Otherwise, how can you differentiate a good idea from a bad one or know how long something is going to take?

Read the fantastic article in it’s entirety here.

Jeff Bezos talks about Choices.

In a commencement address to the students of Princeton, Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, had some very interesting things to say. I have written about him before here, but I urge you to read the full transcript. Here are my takeaways.

1. What I want to talk to you about today is the difference between gifts and choices. Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy — they’re given after all. Choices can be hard. You can seduce yourself with your gifts if you’re not careful, and if you do, it’ll probably be to the detriment of your choices.

2. I got the idea to start Amazon 16 years ago. I came across the fact that Web usage was growing at 2,300 percent per year. I’d never seen or heard of anything that grew that fast, and the idea of building an online bookstore with millions of titles — something that simply couldn’t exist in the physical world — was very exciting to me. I had just turned 30 years old, and I’d been married for a year. I told my wife MacKenzie that I wanted to quit my job and go do this crazy thing that probably wouldn’t work since most startups don’t, and I wasn’t sure what would happen after that

3. I didn’t think I’d regret trying and failing. And I suspected I would always be haunted by a decision to not try at all. After much consideration, I took the less safe path to follow my passion, and I’m proud of that choice. Tomorrow, in a very real sense, your life — the life you author from scratch on your own — begins.

4. In the end, we are our choices. Build yourself a great story.