I’ve been reading a lot lately about the benefits of writing and blogging even in the absence of readers. These ideas resonate well, and I’d like describe the reasons that drives me to write¹:
I blog because it’s one of the best ways to crystallize ideas, short of brainstorming with other smart people.
I blog because it’s the best (and arguably the cheapest) way to gain practice in productizing nebulous concepts, turning them into products that people may actually want to consume.
I blog because it’s the best way to practice summarizing² long and winding thoughts into short, readable nuggets.
I blog because it forces me to capture the essence of an essay in a short and catchy title.
I blog because it gives me a chance to practice writing in a language other than my mother tongue.
¹ “Never before have so many people with so little to say said so much to so few” (Demotivators)
² “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead” (Mark Twain)
Science Olympiad is a competition for middle and high school students who get excited by math and science. These are the geeks and hackers of our future; the kids who are good at math and are not ashamed of it. Last Saturday I attended the Bay Area competition, where 500 or so kids competed in events like Science Crime Busters, Ornithology, and Mousetrap Vehicle. Plenty of excitement and love for math and science seen in broad daylight on a weekend; not a common sight.
The picture above is from the closing ceremony. What do we see here? the future of Silicon Valley. Look closely – who do you see in the picture? Happy kids and families from Asia, mainly China and India. This is a self selecting group of people who demonstrate their love for science and math through their deeds, not their words or good intentions. And where are the Caucasians and other ethnicities hiding? They aren’t hiding, they simply didn’t bother to show up. An event like this would interrupt their busy Saturday schedules, and besides, it’s so un-cool. The entire crowd had maybe 10 non Asians.
Why does it matter? It doesn’t, really, but isn’t it amazing that they amounted to about 2% of the crowd, an order of magnitude less than their makeup in the Bay Area population?
I risk sounding racist here, but nothing is farther from the truth. I’m writing this out of sheer admiration to the Asian parents who encourage their kids to participate in the Science Olympiad. Largely an immigrant generation, they made it to the US by virtue of their education, not through a birthright. These brave people arguably understand the value of education far better than the “natives”. Being enterprising newcomers, they leverage the excellent schools and the volunteer workforce to better their children’s future.
I’ve seen the future of Silicon Valley, and I’m happy to report that it’s multicultural, passionate, and hard working. I’m so glad that at least one group of people cares enough about science and math, as this is the greatest hope for this area and indeed the entire country.
The San Francisco Bay Area is ripe with intelligent people. Some of them choose to broadcast their personality through their car. I assembled this handy guide to let you instantly learn more about the owner by reading a few simple signs on their car:
Mystery Spot sticker: I’m a sucker to believe this tourist trap is a natural phenomenon. Not only that, I’m also stupid enough to promote this money-sucking operation while destroying my car’s paint coat. I’m going to end up taking a financial hit when selling the car, but I don’t know it yet.
Cryptic license plate: I’m oh-so-cool and witty. You guys don’t even know which side to start reading my license plate from, do you. In fact I’m so smart that I’m the only one who can figure out what it means, which kind of defeats the purpose. Heck, I had to spend 10 minutes explaining what GTK4DRK to my best buddy. But hey, I only pay the DMV 40 bucks a year for that so it’s totally worth it.
Jesus fish: I’m a believer, and I want to make sure everyone knows that. Jesus has a small problem - he is not famous enough, so I’m doing my part by advertising him using this cute little fish I stuck on my car’s buttocks.
Jesus fish with little feet: I’m a non believer, and I want everyone to know that. Jesus didn’t exist, but Darwin did and he said that my ancestors were fish with feet. You won’t understand that, so just keep thinking about your legless fish and let me keep cruising peacefully in my Prius (see below).
26.2 sticker: I ran a marathon, did you? you didn’t? wimp! I bet you didn’t even know that a marathon is 26.2 miles, did you. Oh wait, so what’s the point of putting this sticker on my back pane. Whatever.
Toyota Prius: I want you to think that I care about the environment. I drive my Prius to the steakhouse, ignoring the fact that eating meat contributes much more to global warming than driving any type of car. I also ignore the fact that it takes 10 years of driving a Prius to balance the greenhouse gas emissions caused by making its battery, and that the car’s extra cost could be put into much better use by buying carbon offsets.
Toyota Prius with a carpool lane sticker: I paid $3000 extra for this car just because it has this yellow sticker, so I can ride in the car pool lane. I’ll soon have to shell out a few more grands to replace the battery, but you didn’t hear it from me. Who cares, when I’m going to make it home 10 minutes before you. Keep sitting in traffic, sucker.
A Porsche: Boy, do I have a solution to this damn midlife crisis! I just bought myself this amazing car. So what if I can barely fit in the driver’s seat, maintenance is going to cost me a fortune, and I can’t really use third gear or higher because I already have 4 speeding tickets and I don’t want to get my license suspended. This makes me look so young and cool that I simply must have it.
Marking the return of Steve Jobs to Apple and in the spirit of 4th of July, here’s one of the best inspirational speeches of all times.
Full transcript:
The 2005 Jobs Stanford Commencement Address:
I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first six months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out okay. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned Coke bottles for the 5-cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But 10 years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards 10 years later.
Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something–your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky–I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation–the Macintosh–a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30, I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down–that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the Valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me–I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, “Toy Story,” and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.
My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything–all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure–these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up, so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying, because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.
This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma–which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called “The Whole Earth Catalog,” which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960’s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: It was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of “The Whole Earth Catalog,” and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
The magic of Twitter is in its ability to draw more and more people in with a vague promise of building their digital brand and having an audience. People are indeed drawn in en masse, and the snowball keeps rolling. This enables grand ideas like using the vast stream of Tweets for searching content on the web and zillions of other uses.
What’s the trick behind the Twitter’s success? it doesn’t really matter anymore, because it’s too late to compete with them anyway. Simplicity, celebrity founders, and luck definitely played a key role. What does matter, though, is understanding the psyche that leads people to participate. Here’s a feeble attempt at explaining that, following the Einstein Principle stating that a scientific theory should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.
One of the most elegant ways to explain complex systems is through cellular automata, and Twitter is turning us into a huge one indeed. As with any cellular automaton, each cell (=twitter user) acts according to a very simple set of rules. Here are the rules for the Twitter Cellular Automaton:
1) If you think you have something interesting to say, tweet.
2) If x minutes/hours passed since your last tweet (even if you don’t have anything to say), tweet.
3) If a followee tweets something that looks even remotely interesting, retweet.
4) If enough people follow somebody, follow them too.
5) If somebody follows you, follow them (or not, depending on how highly you think of yourself).
What does this say about us, the individual cells? does this degrade us to the basic animal-instinct level? I don’t think so, as you do have to be somewhat educated and eloquent to be able to use the service. Instead, it peels layers of shyness and fear and exposes our animalistic, reflexive communication skills on a grand scale - and that’s a good thing, or at least seems like one at this point.
Rivers of words have been poured on the subject of the midlife crisis. This “crisis” occurs at the intersection of two periods - the dawn of “living the future” and the rise of “living the past”. Until you reach the ripe age of the middle, you live the dream believing that anything is possible; the sky is the limit. But then it dawns on you that you haven’t even reached the treetops, never mind the sky. So you start thinking – hey, if I haven’t done it so far, I never will! I’m too old for that! It’s only downhill from here! And since the future doesn’t matter anymore, you start living - or rather re-living - the past.
This is really misfortunate. People waste their best years mourning the demise of their youth rather than planning the second half of their lives. This has a lot to do with the middle class syndrome, in which people are trained to serve some invisible tyrant by working their ass off all their lives. If they take a rest, dire straits will surely come upon them. Middle classers who are out of work for more than a few weeks are ridiculed and frowned upon for being lazy, stupid, or just plain weird. The constant pressure from their fellow class members is immense. It is this peer pressure, however, that keeps the middle class producing the goods and services the entire society relies on, so we can’t really do without it.
The midlife crisis is a direct result of the middle class syndrome. Unable to relieve the peer pressure completely, middle classers sooner or later rebel in the only way they know (and can afford to) – spending a sizeable chunk of money on some item they don’t need, which reminds them of their long gone youth. That’s actually not such a bad outlet, and can sometime lead to positive outcomes. In some cases, though, newly inducted members of the middle age fall into a pit of despair and can take a while before pulling themselves out of it. In the next post I’ll explore ways to prevent this from happening.
After who-knows-how-many years of collecting bolts, nuts, washers, nails, and other metal nicknacks, I finally decided to sort them all out and put them in nice little drawers. The task was formidable – I estimated the number of items at more than 10,000. Picking them all up one by one and placing each one in the right drawer would take forever, so I had to come up with a quicker strategy. As it turns out, the strategy came about after I already started, and this in fact is lesson one:
1.Start doing whatever it is you need to do, and sooner or later you’ll figure out how to do it better. Experience is your best guide.
2.Adopt a utilitarian approach. Ask yourself: how will you (or others) use the items? If you just need a few items once in a while, which items will it likely be?
3.It’s not going to be perfect.
4.Optimize the number of categories you’re going to use - the smaller the number of categories, the faster the sorting process will go. In the long run, however, it will be harder to find individual items if you only have a handful of drawers labeled “Nails”, “Screws”, “Nuts”, etc.
5.Sorting can take a while, and your categories will tend to drift and change. Be very clear and consistent on what goes into each drawer, or else you’ll end up with a greater mess and a lot of time wasted.
6.Dump the rusty nails and crooked screws. Don’t waste your energy on these, unless it takes less than 2 seconds to wipe off some dirt that just happens to look like rust. If a nail is rusty, it’s not going to get un-rusty. If it’s bent, you’ll spend a while banging on it and trying to straighten it up only to find out that it’s still not straight. If the threads on a screw are not even, you’ll regret using it when it actually comes in handy one day. The bottom line – with so many items at hand, you can always find a better one. Just dump the rejects.
7.Having said that, the smaller the number of items you have the more important each one is. If you believe the number of items is small enough to make each one count, choose one of these approaches:
a) If you already have it but it’s not up to snuff - fix, groom, and develop it, and eventually you’ll get your efforts’ worth.
b) Even though you already have it, if it’s crooked you’d be better off dumping it and getting another one instead. In other words – lesson #6 applies even for a small number of items.
8.You don’t have the resources to build the ultimate screw sorting machine, but wouldn’t it be great? Just imagine this big contraption - you simply show it a nut and it fetches the perfect screw in 2 seconds flat.
9.Some items won’t fit in any other drawer, and there’s no use in starting a drawer for each one-of item. Just put them all in a drawer marked “Misc.”
10.Sorting a big pile of items actually takes less time than you’d imagine. Just start, zero in on your strategy, and you’ll be over and done with before you know it.
“It’s not the technology that’s scary; it’s what it does to the relations between people that’s scary” - Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
I’ve been living in Silicon Valley for too long now to have first hand experience with people’s fear of technology. It’s important to look beyond this environment, and even beyond the western world, because the next big jump in technology usage will come from people who are not using much of it (if any) right now, in places like rural China and India. These people are slowly joining the ranks of the middle class, and so can gradually afford to buy mobile phones, iPods, TVs, and cars. Surprisingly enough, they learn how to use these products quickly and easily mainly because user experience design has made such amazing progress in the last few decades. Their fear of technology is masked by their eagerness to belong to the middle class. This pushes them to quickly adapt and become an indistinguishable part of it.
Pirsig was right about technology being ultimately not scary. He was also right about the human relationship part, although he didn’t anticipate the rise of the social networking and its effect on human interaction. All these new members of the middle class connect with each other through their computers and phones. Their usage patterns, much like ours, gives a new meaning to the word “friend”. While the world is getting flat, so does friendship. People whom I barely know are now connected to me on LinkedIn and Facebook. Maybe the best demonstration of flat friendships is Twitter, where people follow each other based on trends and activity levels rather than familiarity.
The notion of strangers having a peep hole into my life is odd. I obviously cannot rely on these “friends” for help in a time of need. Or maybe I can? Does the fact we’re “connected” have some merit beyond the few square nanometers of disk space that hold this information on Facebook’s database server? While this is an important question, a more interesting one is what will be the effect of flat friendships on tightly knit communities burgeoning into middle-classdom. These communities rely heavily on human interaction, which makes it fascinating to witness and understand how they embrace technology.
Brian Solis over at TechCrunch wrote a great article about roughly the same concept I wrote about here. Brian is much more eloquent than I am and drives the point home nicely. I particularly liked the part about keeping marketing and sales going full steam ahead; just like him, I’m also a little biased…
