Meaning of Life for Men by Jordan Peterson

URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NX2ep5fCJZ8

This is technically Day 3 of the One TED Talk a Day initiative. I started this on  27th July 2018 and today is 29th July 2018.

The series in which the blogs have been published is a littled messed up but this will be on track from tomorrow.

Jordan Peterson is an incredibly knowledgable professor to follow if you have slightest of the flair for human psychology based topics. His lectures can easily be found on Youtube and I haven't used any other platform as yet to follow his lectures and ideas.

In this talk he explains about the meaning of life for men. He argues that women in a way, either biologically or psychologically are created in such a way that they don't dwell so much on the meaning of life question as much as men.

He finishes his talk by saying that meaning of life for men is responsibility. They find / would find happiness to be responsible for accomplishing something they care about.

This sends me down the memory lane and makes me re-connect the ideas I have read so far about the meaning and purpose of life. I have internalized that essentially there is no such holy or eternal purpose of life that you have to hunt for and live. It is in the simple thought of being useful to yourself and for others that you find the meaning of being alive.

May be that is why a lot of people find ton of happiness and contentment in dedicating their lives towards helping others and that becomes their life mission a.k.a. purpose of life. If you think about it and try to connect this with Jordan's talk, they are taking the responsibility, in this case not just their own and of their family but of a lot more people and that makes them happy.

So, may be what Jordan is saying is right that meaning of life is in finding a responsibility that you deeply care about and then simply working towards it.

Although I would differ from his idea that this is true only for men. I believe this is true for every human being irrespective of their gender.

If you want to achieve your goals don't focus on them

URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2PP3p4_4R8&t=141s


This is Day 2 of the One TED Talk a Day initiative. Today's TED Talk is by Reggie Rivers. The topic of his TED Talk is "If you want to achieve your goals don't focus on them".

• Goals require you to have participation of other people hence they are outside of your control. 
• Behaviors are something that are completely in our control so we should focus on our behaviors to achieve our goals.
• See and plan what you can do today, tomorrow and this week. 

The speaker in this TED talk has a simple message to convey with a very humorous talk to keep the audience engaged and interested. 

He emphasizes that if you want to achieve your goals you should not focus on them. Focusing on the goals makes us focus on everything that is not in our control. The end result or the outcome is not in our control. 

Hence, he suggests that we should rather focus on our actions and our behaviors. Having a short term focus as suggested helps us stay on track without getting overwhelmed.

It's a simple yet effective advice. I would certainly try to inculcate this.

Personality Types and Our Brain

I am starting off the One TED Talk a day again. I would watch at least one TED Talk everyday and would try to summarize it in my words.

The very first TED Talks of this series is on Personality Types and Our Brain by Scott Schwefel.

The central idea of this TED Talk is that every person has a different personality and his or her behavior is largely driven by that. It is of tremendous use for us to know what Personality Type we own. 

Knowing this can guide us as to which areas of our professional life and leadership we would be most comfortable with and hence would excel in. Knowing the personality type of people we interact with on a day to day basis also helps us engage with them better; this can either be in personal or professional setting.

The following are some of the pointers from the TED talk (and some slides that are useful glancing through).

• How we see (perceive) ourselves matters. 
• People do not perceive you the way you perceive yourself. You may want to put more effort on defining yourself when you are introducing yourself.
• "Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate." - Carl Jung
• "Everything that irritates us about others can lead to an understanding of ourselves" - Carl Jung

How I tried to create a system to manage my time better?

Consistency. One word which has a lot of meaning and strength. Those who know me would understand that I have an intense need to plan and organize everything. I am not much of an impromptu person. I am not a person who can think on his feet and come up with ideas. I take time to analyze and then conclude. In spite of all this one thing that I have been struggling with has been consistency, sounds very contradictory perhaps, let me explain. 

The fact is that if we do not assign priorities consciously to whatever we have in front of us, our true nature inherently does that for us. And let me tell you, our true nature does not do a good job at assigning priorities because we as humans never want to eat the bitter pills, even if they are for our own benefits.

So, we need to be conscious about the choices that we make everyday. Those tiny breaks of 5 or 7 minutes that we take to watch interesting Youtube videos, convert into hours before we know it. Or those incremental professional commitments may take a toll on your personal commitments (family time or self growth) or vice versa.  

I have already admitted that I myself am guilty of such behavior so I am not in a position to tell you how to fix this, but all I can tell is something that I tried and something that seemed to work a bit for me.

Two important methods that worked for me are as follows

1. Have clear visiblity (at all times) on what all needs to be done.

2. Have clear visibility (at all times) on where your time is going.

I will explain both of these in detail.

Let's begin with the first one. 

Have clear visiblity (at all times) on what all needs to be done.

I have always had a long Planner sheet at the beginning of the year which sort of has the list of areas (and categories) I would want to work on, the list of things I would want to improve, so on and so forth. I was using this like my North Star (not literally pulling task items from it but just picking the directions). 

But what was missing was that in the day to day life I tended to go autopilot every now and then and it used to be months before I looked at my Planner sheet and see that I have lost a ton of time and haven't done anything from the sheet.

To fix this what I have tried now is that I take up only a handful of items from the list that I think I can finish or cater to in say one month. This drastically reduces the items I need to spend my time looking at.

If you are from the Software Product Management  background, think of the Planner sheet as your Backlog and the shorter list as the Stories you pick up for the Sprint that is supposed to last one month. Towards the middle of the month or say third week if you see items you definitely would not be able to work on, just push them out, don't stress about it. If you push yourself very hard, you would not have enough energy to go on and you may end up breaking the system. Telling you by experience, if you break the system once, it is very tough to get back.

Now, I have better visibility on what needs to be done and if I am able to spend some time on it. So, this in a way was the first solution - having clear visibility (at all times) on what needs to be done.

Let's talk about the second one.

Have clear visibility (at all times) on where your time is going.

I have realized that if you have clear visiblity of where your time is going, you tend to spend your time in a better way.

I tried out a few apps and web based solutions and finally settled for aTimeLogger. I started tracking all of my time, not just professional working time but everything such as Sleeping, Reading, Transport, Entertainment, Housework etc.

I know this might sound extreme to a lot of you but trust me, once you get in the habit of using this and can clearly see the Pie Chart of your time spent, slowly and gradually you tend to get better at managing your time.

Here are some of the screens to give you a perspective on how this app looks like. 

You can also decide and create some time based goals for yourself and try to get better at achieving them. As you can see, some of the goals that I have created for myself are

1. Not sleeping more than 7 hours.

2. Reading for minimum 30 minutes everyday.

3. Keeping the Miscellaneous category time under 3 hours.

As and when you get a hang of this you can add more and more activities that you care about and try to patch it up in goals and try to monitor yourself on a monthly basis if you are improving in those areas.

To conclude, like any other system this system also is not a full proof solution but this is certainly something worth exploring. If you try this and it works for you even a little bit do let me know.

The Journey

So many choices. One life. If you think about it, perhaps, a very brief, almost negligible bleep on the canvas of life on Earth. Non-existent in the Earth’s lifetime. But this bleep, is our life. For most what we know, an opportunity, the only one that we have right now. The only one we are sure of. Then why are our choices mostly confined, constrained by factors such as our upbringing, our innate tendencies as humans (evolved from animals), why do we not realize these barriers being only in our minds, why are these shackles tough to break.

Because choosing an offbeat life is difficult, extreme, disagreeable to society or to the construct of society. But how do you choose, how do you define the offbeat life you may fantasize about. Should we give in to this whim to ultimately lose a lot of time, money, relationships and eventually long for coming back? How do you test the waters without disrupting your current life? How do you finally take the call and take the plunge?

This is about finding answers, about the process, of discovery. It may not look like it but perhaps this is a whole lot internal rather than external. Discovery of ourselves. Realizing what you truly enjoy. Designing a life, you enjoy. Making it sustainable. Prioritizing life over traditional way of living. Taking a leap of faith.

The journey eventually may make you experience immense bliss. You may experience life in its full glory. A tale to tell, a life truly lived. On the flip side, even if you don’t find what you longed for. It may take some precious resources, time away, but it would perhaps still be worth a shot. The traditional life would always be available, open to embrace. One may fall a step or two backwards in the traditional sense. But in the larger canvas, in the larger picture of one’s life, this perhaps would surely be worth. After all, finding oneself is a long pursuit, the journey like this is going to be the first step. A step in a direction with some hope of being right should definitely be worth.

Failing to Succeed - Book Summary/Review

Introduction

I was randomly browsing the new offers on the Kindle Store when I came across this book. The title of the book was quite apt and it did catch my eye.

Ever since I have started questioning the fundamentals of societal structure, one question that has always perplexed me has been the question of Success. What Success really is? I wrote a blog post about this titled, “Your Idea of Success. Is it really your Idea?”, way back in 2014. As you can see, it now has been almost 4 years and here we are, still exploring this concept of Success.

Anyway, coming back, so I found this book’s title interesting, read the brief on Goodreads and decided to buy.

The book is about the advent, success and shutdown of India’s first E-commerce start-up Fabmart/Indiaplaza. I am sure people from early days of Internet (90s) may have heard of those names. I had read some articles about Mr. Vaithee and hence had an overview about the venture.

Fabmart – India’s first E-commerce start-up begins

This book is narrated and authored by Mr. Vaithee himself which hence gives you a vivid experience (thanks to his writing style) of everything that happened. It begins with the author toying with the idea of starting up, leaving a well cushioned job at Wipro to venture into the world of entrepreneurship. He was mightily influenced by the experience of amazon.com which was, in those days, trying to pioneer the e-commerce world and perhaps was the only reference point.

Along with 5 other co-founders the first e-commerce site of India was born, named Fabmart.com selling audio cassettes and CDs. To give you a perspective, we are talking about creating an e-commerce company when internet penetration was extremely low, world-wide-web had recently entered India and getting connected to Internet was a painful process of using the Dial-up connection. A lot of us millennials may have never seen internet that slow, you could literally see the images / content load line by line on the screen in front of you!

The author then takes you through some first principles of starting up (most of which happen to be same for Product Management).

1. What problem are you solving?
2. Are you solving it for reasonably large set of customers?
3. Will these customers be willing to pay for your solution?
4. Are you the first one trying to solve or there have been others who have attempted?
5. If others have already solved, are you bringing something superior or unique?

The author then shares some really amazing learning about

• The concept of Better, Faster, Cheaper to evaluate start-ups
• Selecting your Co-founders
• Deciding Co-founders’ responsibilities and compensation
• Seed-funding 

Fabmart – So many firsts

As is there in any product, while taking the crucial decisions, the team at Fabmart needed some really important inputs and they used the concepts of Product Management really well. This just tells me that the first principles are just timeless. The way they executed in the absence of all the modern tools we have today is just exemplary.

• Stalking customers in offline stores to understand customer buying behavior.
• Deciding on whether to sell books or music online.
• Getting the meta-data of the Music labels was a challenge, then getting it online was another challenge, music companies didn’t have it in online format.

Anyway, so slowly and gradually things started moving and Fabmart started getting traction. It is not very well known but Fabmart team deserves the credit for a lot of innovative and first of its kind solutions executed in E-commerce world which now just seem to be a norm.

1. First PIN based Payment Gateway
2. First E-commerce client of Microsoft Azure in India
3. BlueDart’s first step in E-commerce logistics
4. First to execute Omnichannel retail
5. First to sign up a celebrity singer to launch a Single exclusively online
6. India’s first Electronic Gift Certificates
7. India’s first E-wallet
8. First Customer Loyalty Program
9. India’s first Online Grocery store
10. First time COD in India

Diversifying into Books, Jewellery

The book then takes us through some day to day challenges of deciding the KPIs when you don’t have any reference point, signing up more music labels, singers to get more traffic and all along sticking to the first principles of business to ensure that this is a self-sustainable business and not a VC money driven that now-a-days is.

Fabmart starts to expand beyond music and gets into books and jewellery. The author talks about the challenges faced and how they finally launch these online. In future, books become one of the bestselling categories for the business.

This was the time (around 2000) when the Dotcom bubble bust was happening in US and hence whenever Fabmart team was meeting the investors, they were interested in valuation more than anything else. The company was able to raise 25 Crores as Series A in this turbulent time.

Fabmart Goes in Offline Retail

The next part of the book is about how Fabmart goes in offline retail and builds the brand Fabmall. Most of you may not know this but Fabmall was acquired by Aditya Birla Group in 2006 and re-branded as More stores, fairly well known now.

In spite of the fact that Groceries as a category will be difficult and low margin venture, Fabmart went ahead and launched India’s first online grocery, along with selling it offline in Fabmall. Some really creative warehousing and supply chain strategies had to be executed by the team.

This was also the time when the team started off COD for groceries (in 2001) and then extended it to other products such as books, movies, music, watched etc. But because of all the challenges that COD brings with itself, the team decided to shut COD down in 2004.

Fast forward to Indiaplaza – Cash Crunch Begins – Investor Challenges

Author then talks about a lot of business challenges that were being faced because of which finally, the offline business and the online business were separated.  Because of the recent Dotcom bust, no investors would even want to listen to anything that had “.com” in it raising funds for the online business was becoming daunting.

I would try to fast forward the summary here. There onwards, author details about tonnes of challenges that were faced because of the Investors, Cash Crunch etc.

What is commendable to read in the book is that in spite of owning around 2% or so of the company Indiaplaza, the author somehow became responsible for all the troubles that the company faced. The challenges of ever changing business conditions can be navigated well if there is money available. The responsibilities of the current investors were not executed and hence Indiaplaza had to face severe situations.

I am highly impressed by the way author keeps his morals and integrity standing strong in spite of the tough, nerve wrecking situations around him with vendors, creditors, police etc. Reading about all the struggles that he went through is highly inspirational. It gives a perspective into how most of the investors focus perhaps on the wrong metrics and how it is extremely important to be highly selective when choosing where you are taking the money from.

Conclusion

Overall, the book is really delightful and refreshing to read. The writing style is simple yet engaging. It provides a lot of ground reality perspectives about the start-up world. Media selectively glamorizes the start-up world with less focus on failures and the dark sides. It gives you a perspective of what all can go wrong in a start-up and can prove to be a guidepost to learn from the mistakes detailed in the book. I highly recommend this book to anyone who has interest in start-ups and/or e-commerce in general.

Experiences, Experience and More

I used to think, this is not how I would spend my life. Running around, chasing something which I may or may not want, oppressing myself with day to day grinds, living almost the same day, almost the same place over and over again and calling it life.

Long back, when I was young and stupid, I used to think this life is not for me. But, reading a letter I perhaps wrote in 2012 when I started my career, I realize, I am already living the kind of life I was kind of trying to consciously avoid. 

Don't get me wrong, it is not that I am not happy. Perhaps I am. Perhaps I am supposed to be. I have a good job, pays well, I live in the IT capital of the country and I have some skills that can continue to fetch me fairly good life. 

But then, in spite of all that, when I look back at myself; what I used to be 6 years back, I feel this is not what I wanted. I don't know what I did want but I had told myself that I would do something different. I know I am way off. 

May be that guy at that age did not really understand what to expect from himself or may be I got it all wrong and haven't yet figured out and learnt how to live. Yes, it is possible. There was no lecture on how to live, in my school, college or even my post graduate certificate course. No one really told me because may be there is no single way. Even having a framework around it would have helped but nah, nothing. 

Anyway, let me put on my PM hat now. Yes, we have a problem, but if we really try to put this in the AIPMM new product development framework, we should be able to arrive at a product that should be able to help. I think I need to focus on the problem more. 

Why exactly people like me think that they wanted a different life. If I dig deeper I think I can say that because when one is young, the intensity of hopes and ambitions are high. What one can achieve in life is at Level 8 and one himself is sitting at Level 0. Sure, being at Level 8 sounds so much fun but reaching there has a different path.

The path that is difficult, full of rejections and failure and if you look at it, it never looks anything remotely like Level 8. Hence everyone gets deceived and thinks this cannot be it. This can never be the path to where I want to go. Everyone then looks at the path that looks amazing at the moment, we are unable to look ahead and see where this beautiful looking path is going to take us.

We start walking on that path and after a while perhaps, we realize, Oh, this is certianly not going to take me to Level 8. We panic, we try to look for other paths. The cycle repeats and then yet again we look for another path and so on.

Before you know it, you are done with 5-6 years and you are happy but you are nowhere near to Level 8. 

Now, you may ask yourself, do you still want to go to Level 8, because the path is still dirty and difficult or you would rather stay on the path that you currently are on, which by the way is very comfortable?

Everyone has these choices. And most people fantasize about Level 8 but do not prefer to go down that atrocious looking path, they would rather stay on their comfortable Levels.

What would I do? I don't know. I am scared of losing my current level in pursuit of Level 8 that I may or may not achieve.

I may change my mind. Well, we will see.