Month: January 2024

Sunday, 7pm

Sheffield, U.K.

The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once. – Albert Einstein

We watched “Race across the world” recently and one of the scenes that stuck with me is where a participant helps a farmer get their oven ready and bake some bread – and is overwhelmed by the simplicity and purity of that life.

It might also be rather boring if you had to do it day in and day out.

A documentary on the increasing use of anti-anxiety medication remarks on how we spend more and more of our lives in our heads.

Well, in a sense, that’s all we do – everything we experience is really constructed our brains.

But more generally, our lives are not so much lived as spent watching screens.

We spend around 7 hours a day on screens – both for work and for entertainment.

The difficulty is that settling down and enjoying something on a screen – a game, a movie, a series – is almost always the easiest thing to do.

And therefore it’s perhaps the preferred thing to do.

It’s windy and cold out. Do you want to go for a walk? Or would you rather just watch something?

It’s always easier to do the easy thing.

That’s why water heads downhill.

This experience from our personal lives also happens in social and work situations.

It’s easier to go along with bad processes than to try and change them.

Sometimes things are the way they are because it was easier to do them this way than a different one – if things are hard to do you’ll find that people will just stop doing them.

Take commuting to work, for example.

It’s bad for you – we typically put on a couple of pounds – or a kilo or so a year for every year of a job with a long commute.

Staying at home isn’t perfect either.

Some of the mental health impacts include “less motivation, body image, depressing/negative content, vicarious living, mood swings, no social interaction, reclusiveness, dependency on screens, habitual use, arguing online, jealousy of others, feeling unproductive, guilt, toxic people online, socially anxious, hard to switch off, irritable, distracting, losing attention span.”

Trying to make all these variables work is a little like baking bread.

It’s actually quite simple to make bread – flour and water, knead for a while until it feels right, and give it some heat.

But of course, the kind of flour matters. Salt might help. Yeast makes a difference. The amount of time you spend stretching and kneading affects the quality of the loaf.

Knowing what I now know I think trying to figure out what to do with your time has to start with the basics.

Try and make a recipe that does three things.

First, optimise for health: get your food right and build movement into your day.

Second, optimise for relationships: make time for people because it’s easy to slip into a world of your own.

Third, optimise for peace of mind. You’ll know when you have that.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Saturday, 7.05pm

Sheffield, U.K.

For a lot of people, one of the reasons they don’t like to work for founders of startups is that they can be sensitive and protective around what they’ve built. You have an emotional attachment to the early marketing and technology materials, and you don’t want to hear that anything’s wrong with them. – Lynn Jurich

I watched Stutz again today – the documentary by actor Jonah Hill about the methods used by his psychotherapist Phil Stutz.

I’m most interested in the fact that Stutz draws models to help people work through situations – each model is a hand-drawn visual on an index card that captures a particular idea – that there’s a shadow that you are avoiding, a maze you might be stuck in and so on.

One of the ideas that jumped out at me this time around when watching was the idea of attachment.

Attachment is something that plays quite a big part in Eastern philosophy – we’re taught that it’s not a good thing.

Do your work without being attached to the results, for example.

If you take this idea to its logical conclusion you end up with an instruction to be attached to nothing – not material stuff, not relationships with friends, not even family.

Some people take this instruction literally, stories from the East are full of tales of wandering mendicants, travelling saints and gods who left everything, have nothing, who avoid any form of attachment altogether.

What do you make of this story, for example.

A boy bird and girl bird meet, fall in love, set up a nest together and have some baby birds.

One day when they’re out looking for food a hunter sees them and finds the nest, and sets a trap.

The parent birds, seeing their babies caught in the trap, try to rescue them and the mum gets caught as well.

The dad bird, desperate at all his family being caught, tries to rescue them and gets caught as well.

The hunter, having achieved his aims, goes home happy, has a nice meal and goes to bed.

The end.

Okay, so what’s the lesson here?

Are you slightly unhappy that the birds didn’t win – that the hunter got his way in the end?

Did you have chicken for dinner this evening?

Is it that the parent birds shouldn’t have gotten together because if they hadn’t been attached to family then they wouldn’t have had to suffer the loss of their children?

Would that have been a good outcome?

Sociology and biology suggest not.

Biologically, the only purpose living beings appear to have is to keep living – to create new beings in their image and pass on their genes.

Sociologically, we know how unhappy people get when they’re alone.

Perhaps the lesson is more subtle than that.

Being aware of how attached you are prepares you to think more clearly about your situation.

What would you do if it all went bad?

How would you feel if it all ended – if you were in the position of the birds?

What would you do differently if you acknowledged the possibility that the situation you have is temporary, that it could all end – would you treat the people in your life differently?

Would you make different choices knowing that what you have could vanish at any time?

Conversely, if you stare the fact that things can end in the face, would you be less attached to things than you are right now.

You might have created a thing – a new process, a technique – something that you really like but that is now not really as good as alternatives?

Can you let go?

When I was growing up the stories I was told was that attachment was literally a bad thing – you had to be unattached to be happy.

It’s something that people from my culture and background probably take for granted.

But maybe that’s not the real lesson.

The lesson is that we have to be able to visualise the outcomes – both good and bad – that we might encounter.

That’s where the tools come in – to help us do that.

And now knowing that – try and make better choices about what we do next.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Friday, 8.32pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing. – Warren Buffett

Do you have children? Do you despair that they’re spending all their time consuming mindless junk on YouTube? Do you worry they’re just wasting their time?

Have you considered the possibility that you might be wrong?

I learn by reading – I always have – and I am old enough to remember a time when some people knew stuff and other people didn’t – and the ones who knew stuff were the ones that read.

Times have changed.

If you watch the latest episode of anything on TV – say it’s the new Percy Jackson on Disney Plus – do you think you know what’s going on?

You don’t.

One of the small people in my house watches something and then goes on to YouTube to watch forensic dissections of the episode, analyses that highlight subtle clues and connect seemingly insignificant events to the wider story universe in which the episode just makes up a fragment.

He knows more about it than I do.

Admittedly, more than I want to, but more nonetheless.

And I see this with other people, where I’ve researched or studied or understood something to the point where it is only possible to discuss it with others that have a sufficient amount of shared background knowledge.

Blagging is less possible these days.

Easy access to information makes it possible for you to learn about anything and everything, from stock market investing strategies to movie theory.

So when you don’t know something but try to come across as if you do, it’s painfully obvious to the experts in the room – some of whom might be your grandchildren.

Or grandparents.

Expertise isn’t about age – it’s about the information you’ve consumed.

For example, I can tell if someone understands a particular commodity market and has a good trading strategy.

But I also remember when I talked about something in a different equity market that I didn’t understand with a friend who did.

I was given some polite advice that I didn’t listen to – that particular investment ended in a total loss when the company went into administration.

In that situation, not knowing what I didn’t know had a real financial cost – I lost real money on that decision.

I have learned, as a result, to be more conscious of my own limitations.

There are three situations to watch out for.

The first one is easy – if I don’t know something I say I don’t know.

The second is somewhat straightforward.

If I do know something I say that I’m pretty certain.

The third has to do with the vast quantity of stuff that I really don’t know whether I know anything about or not.

In that case I have to do two things: I have to be willing to learn; and I have to be willing to experiment, take risks and lose.

Not lose big. Lose small, ideally.

But learn big.

After all, in a knowledge economy your only edge is your ability to learn – and to be useful because of what you know.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Thursday, 8.47pm

Sheffield, U.K.

There are no shortcuts in evolution. – Louis D. Brandeis

Someone on LinkedIn said something today that was pretty insightful.

Why do people use AI to write stuff when they don’t read stuff written by AI?

Taking a step back, why do people write books when it’s clear they don’t read them?

We spend our time creating things for one of two reasons: we either want to; or we want something else that we think we will get if people think we have created something.

Let’s say you want to write a book.

Do you want to spend every spare moment creating words on paper or on the screen?

Do you think about what you’re going to write when you take a walk, when you have a spare moment?

Are you the kind of person who thinks about writing when you should really be paying attention to your family?

Then you’re probably the kind of person whose drive to write comes from inside – if you didn’t write you’d burst.

Others write books because they see it as a business card – a way to sell something or be able to say they’re a published author.

There’s a formula to writing these books – one that’s been refined ever since the days of the little blue books.

You can tell that a book is one of these in an instant.

I picked one up in the library the other day – a cover that had a hook, the required endorsements – then I looked inside and recoiled.

You could instantly see that it was full of bland and superficial advice – the kind of thing that sounds good but on a little thought is meaningless. The kind of advice where you could say the opposite and still be right.

I’m not saying that every book has to be complicated prose and great ideas – those are hard work too.

I’ve struggled to get through a few that seem to have good ideas but take too long to get around to the key points.

The thing about good writers is that they are readers and appreciate an author that makes it easy for them to read and understand interesting ideas.

We don’t want impenetrable prose.

We don’t want useless advice.

We want to be intrigued, to have our preconceptions challenged and learn something new.

A writer doesn’t get to do that overnight – not even by turning into a robot.

It takes time to grow into the person you are going to be – to find your voice and style and get comfortable being yourself.

There are no shortcuts.

And I think that that applies to learning a skill, creating software and anything else that requires you to put in the time to get good at something.

We need to learn to tell the difference between something that makes it easier to get something done – and the things that try to do what you want to do.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Wednesday, 8.30pm

Sheffield, U.K.

The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any. – Alice Walker

Next month I will be talking about some of the ways in which I use Action Research to address a variety of problematic situations.

I am always a little uncertain about whether I’m the right person to talk about stuff like this.

I learned when I was growing up that resources are limited and we can do much more with what we have than people might think.

We went to see people who lived in huts with floors made from cow dung.

It turns out that if you spread dung and get it flat, then let it dry and polish it you end up with a surface that works quite well.

It’s a sort of organic plaster, when you think about it.

Being dependent on certain resources may make you more effective but that dependence is also a problem.

Agriculture in the West is clearly not the kind of farming we think about when we imagine how farms work.

Farmers buy seeds that are designed to work for one harvest. We don’t get seeds from that that we can grow again – instead we have to buy more.

That kind of dependence on a supplier of an essential resource is also what computing has become for most people.

If you use platforms from one of the behemoths you have no option but to buy into the ongoing process of subscription and payment.

Without that you cannot function because they have captured the market.

There are several posts at the moment about the way in which these platforms use their dominant power over smaller companies that are now dependent on them to access customers.

And I have noticed a couple of things.

First, you have the company named after a fruit that controls its entire ecosystem – a strategy that is in its DNA from the start.

Then you have the boring company, the one that took over the desktop and is now trying to use AI everywhere.

When another firm starts up that has a unique idea – say it’s web conferencing or document sharing – the big firms go ahead and copy it.

And because they’re big they can get it out to their customer base faster.

So what they can now do is simply wait to see what’s getting traction in the market and then build that functionality into their own products.

I’ve seen this with online facilitation software – there are a couple out there that many people know about.

I don’t really use them – because I don’t like the SaaS model in that situation anyway – but I have tried them out.

I recently re-used the facilitation system from the major desktop provider.

And it now opens with templates and all kinds of things that are clearly designed to woo the market that uses these other platforms.

I think that competition from a big, hugely wealthy and powerful customer that already has dominance over the customer base will win.

But I don’t use any of their stuff.

So when I talk about what I do my tools aren’t the thing that most people will recognize or be willing to learn.

But people really want to know about tools – which pencil, which computer, which package, which app do you use?

And the think is that those don’t matter.

Well, they do a bit, the technology does dictate what you can do – it’s easier to draw certain things on a whiteboard and different things using a stylus.

But what really matters is the theory – the principles that underpin what works in practice.

But theory is boring.

So.. if what really matters is boring to most people, and what you’re interested in learning about is not what I’m there to teach – then what’s the point?

I suppose it doesn’t matter how many people you don’t reach.

It’s about putting the message into the world that you can take control of your systems – you can use Free and open source software to do your personal work, run your business, help your community, and spread learning to those who need it.

Show people that an alternative exists to the dual party – seemingly all-powerful system.

And that’s a good enough reason to have a go.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Tuesday, 8.26pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Like dogs in a wheel, birds in a cage, or squirrels in a chain, ambitious men still climb and climb, with great labor, and incessant anxiety, but never reach the top. – Robert Browning

If you have ever been under pressure to get involved in sales you will find that there are a great many myths about how sales works.

For a fee, many people will teach you their favourite ones.

This is something to guard against.

Think about it logically.

If someone has an edge, a source of competitive advantage, then why would they reveal their secrets to you?

After all, you want to exploit that advantage because it should make you money.

For example, let’s say you learn that there’s a foolproof way to trade currency futures – this is going to make you money.

Wouldn’t you keep that to yourself and trade the markets for as long as that worked for you – raking in the money?

Why would you stop trading to spend some time teaching others the techniques you’ve used?

Is it because you know it doesn’t work and your product is essentially a long con?

This is what I struggle with whenever I come across a situation where someone wants to teach their method rather than exploit their method.

Because the incentives are misaligned.

What works is usually simple. It’s a small tweak, or a straightforward process.

Common sense in practice. Or experience applied. That sort of thing.

But I can’t just sell you a few sentences – I have to create a complicated structure so it looks like you’re getting something of value.

So you end up with this universe of mushrooming courses and packages and content that are puffed up versions of something that’s usually quite simple.

A paragraph of insight turned into 40,000 words.

If you are really good at doing something then you should just do that – make a living from that thing.

If you decide that you want to teach others then you should do it because it’s something you are driven to do – it’s a public service, not a product or business.

Warren Buffet’s letters to shareholders are an amazing source to learn from – but they’re out there, free on the Internet for anyone to access.

Imagine if he had charged for his writing? Given his billions, it’s cost him to write down his thoughts for others to read.

The people I’ve learned the most from put their stuff out because they want to share, to explore, to learn more about what they do by expressing it to others – it’s a selfish thing really. They learn more by teaching than they would in any other way.

They’d teach for free quite happily.

And I think that’s the only way to really be happy – to feel like you aren’t on a treadmill to nowhere.

To work on things you would do anyway whether you were paid or not.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Monday, 9.55pm

Sheffield, U.K.

The art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery. – Mark Van Doren

There will be days when there just isn’t enough time to write.

Today is one of those days.

With no time at all then, what is the answer to the question “What have I learned today?”

1. Action research is a good way to figure out what works for you.
2. Make it simple. Complexity causes failure.
3. If you listen carefully, you will learn what needs to be done.
4. Choose the tools you use carefully.
5. Sometimes you just have to wade through the marshes before you find solid ground.
6. Eventually, you will find a solution if you work on it for long enough.
7. The time to test is when you think you’ve finished. And before. And after.
8. When you’re out of time, stop.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Sunday, 8.19pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Everyone should have a blog. It’s the most democratic thing ever. – Jessica Cutler

I have been introduced to Ted Lasso recently and it is very funny.

It’s also been written by someone who likes smuggling in references to how writers do their thing – from offhand comments about Bird By Bird and Calvin and Hobbes to a scene where a character is walking on a treadmill and reading which is the thing all writers aspire to do – combine what we love with somehow losing weight.

One of the episodes talks about curiosity.

Curiosity is an interesting thing – it must be what innovators and inventors and creators of all kinds share as a character trait.

How things work, what are the edges of things, how far can you push something before it breaks.

And you can’t learn this sort of thing by reading about it or talking about it or listening to others talk about how they did it.

You have to experience it yourself.

I started a blog because I wanted to know how to use this kind of technology.

I use tools like WordPress because it’s free software but its default interface is too slow for someone that wants to write quickly and often.

So you might be interested in supercharging your process with org2blog to write and post entirely from the command line.

This kind of thing happens with software all the time – you find a tool and then figure out where it works, where it doesn’t, and get a process working where you can get what you want done without screwing up too much of the time.

Now, having a 3d printer is making it possible to explore building in real life again rather than just software.

We got a Voxelab Aquila C2 last year but it took an entire 12 months before I had the time to unbox and play with it.

It’s a basic entry level printer that requires some assembly and a high level of manual setup before you get the printing working reliably.

You need help from YouTube, this video is long but excellent to walk you through the process.

Now here’s the thing – you could get the printer working, print off a test model, and then download loads of stuff from the internet or Thingiverse and get on with making stuff.

But where’s the fun in that?

I liked OpenScad the first time I saw it – it’s a 3d modelling software where you write code to create the bits and put them together to make an object.

Then you can slice it with Slic3r to create the file that the printer uses.

One tip – load the configuration from one of the test files before you create the export with a model that you’ve created.

Most people think of click and drag and modify when they think design but there is an obvious advantage to coding your design.

If you want to create something new you can just reuse your libraries and build your knowledge.

For example, the first few things we printed were simple shapes and containers.

Now I’m playing with boxes with notches so you can create a lid that slides and fits.

The first lid I made didn’t work and I thought it was a manufacturing problem – but actually I had some dimensions wrong.

I was off by 0.2mm in a line of code and that meant things hadn’t stuck together properly.

No problem – fix and reprint. There’s no need to go to the shop.

I suppose it’s just kind of exciting that the technology that powered … well everything since the industrial revolution is now literally in our hands.

The power of information, amplified through printing – with a printing press (or blog) available to everyone.

And a factory in your office capable of making quite a lot of interesting stuff.

We should be seeing a revolution in invention and creation and just all around amazing advancements with solutions to solve all kinds of problems.

But, of course, there are distractions.

Like worrying about whether you should share or post here or there, if your message is clear or not, on brand or not.

But all that slick finished stuff is what someone does at the end to put a shine on what has already happened.

The work in the middle is messy and muddled and you just have to work through it.

And it helps if you enjoy doing it.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

p.s. I stopped posting to LinkedIn a while back because I wasn’t focused and just wanted to explore topics rather than seeming professional and polished and stopped with Twitter because, well… you know.

I realised recently that I could post to Mastodon and think that’s where people who might be interested in similar areas might be anyway, so I’m going to try sharing there for a while.

You can find me here on Fosstodon.

Saturday, 11.04pm

Sheffield, U.K.

My only ritual is to just sit down and write, write every day. – Augusten Burroughs

There’s an exercise called the perfect day exercise.

Write down what you would like your perfect day to be, assuming you have no restrictions – you’re wealthy and unattached and have nothing stopping you from doing exactly what you want to do.

Start in the morning, from the moment you get up.

What you do, what you have for breakfast, how you spend your day, with whom, doing what.

Work through the entire day until you get to bedtime.

Then look at what you say you want to do with your life – what you want to achieve.

Say you want to be a writer.

How much of our perfect day is about writing?

If you want to help others.

How much of your day is spend doing outreach or social work or care?

The perfect day exercise tells you what you would do even if you didn’t have to do it.

It’s a glimpse into what you really want to spend time doing.

If you’re not doing the thing that you want to do it’s probably not because you don’t want to.

It’s because there are blocks in the way – systemic ones, structural ones.

If it’s hard to get started, hard to find the time, hard to find the resources you need – then before you can do anything you need to get those blocks out of the way.

Streamline, cut, remove – do everything you can to make it easy to do what you want to do.

It is, as you’ve discovered, the most important thing for you to do.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Friday, 9.56pm

Sheffield, U.K.

There’s a big tendency to gravitate toward a closed and proprietary approach too easily. – Jimmy Wales

Every once in a while I’ll see someone come out with a thing they’ve made.

That’s great.

Then they name the thing and tell us what it is.

And that always makes me wince a little – because it’s a slippery slope from there.

Giving something a name is often a sign that you OWN it.

Once upon a time, when people owned others, one of the ways they enforced their claim was by giving their property new names.

It’s a way of jostling for position, for using sharp elbows and strategic stomping to get a place on the floor.

And it’s a really tempting thing to do.

For example, I’ve lost count of the documents where I’ve seen the words “our proprietary method”.

Very few methods are truly proprietary.

Usually, they’re some half-arsed combination of stuff published in journals a while back that have been borrowed and changed a little to create a new “framework”, or “methodology”.

In the field that I’m interested in – visual thinking – this leads to a particular problem.

You have methods that everyone knows – like brainstorming and mind maps – with the latter in particular associated with Tony Buzan.

There are ones that fewer people have heard about – like cognitive maps or thinking maps – search Novak for the first one and Hyerle for the second.

What I see with methods that are created by practitioners is that they start of with something simple, usually inspired by something that has descended from a research practice.

Writing, after all, is a codified form of drawing, so we trace our methods back a few millenia – or a few hundreds of millenia if you include cave art.

So if you take something simple – like using words and pictures to make sense of a situation – and give it many names what happens next?

The meaning that underpins each name needs to be distinguished from other names – which often leads to complicating the simple thing that made sense in the first place so that it looks different enough.

Practically, it’s like taking an invention and then tacking on a few others things so it looks like something new enough to warrant a patent.

I don’t want to call out specific methods – a paper I’m working on will do this more thoroughly – but I have made a thing and called it something – and I’m hoping my reasoning is different.

In OR, Peter Checkland suggested that what we should do is try and understand situations so that we can figure out what action to take to improve them.

A way to do this is to draw pictures of the situation – represent it diagrammatically to help with the discussion and debate.

He called this thing a rich picture. A picture that helped you get a rich understanding.

Now, I created what I thought were rich pictures but I did a lot more writing and a lot less drawing so what it ended up looking like were notes rather than pictures.

It’s different enough that calling it the same thing confuses the issue, so I’m calling this thing a rich note. So what you’ll do if you do something the way I do it is take rich notes.

See – I named a thing and now I own it.

But here’s the difference – and what I hope will come out in the paper.

The reason why I’m using a new name is that existing names don’t describe what this thing is.

And that’s the only good reason, I think, to create a new name – to be more precise about something that exists and is different to other things.

It comes down to intention.

It’s brilliant that people create things.

It’s less brilliant that people try and create the illusion that they’ve created something so that they can try and sell it to you.

Or when they change the name because they want to claim ownership over it.

And it’s not always easy to tell the difference.

That’s why names matter.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh