Category: Innovation

Wednesday, 6.05am

Sheffield, U.K

If it can be solved, there’s no need to worry, and if it can’t be solved, worry is of no use. – Dalai Lama

I managed to screw up my computer yesterday. Quite creatively, by deleting half the operating system while trying to make a program work.

Anyway.

In these days when everything we do is backed up on Dropbox and emails are on services in the cloud that’s not the end of the world.

It did get me thinking, however, about what matters.

An opportunity to start again doesn’t come around that often.

We usually spend our time accumulating things. In fact, we don’t do it consciously. Things just gradually build up over time.

Take emails, for example. Once upon a time we probably had a computer that held our email and if we lost that machine we lost all our stuff.

Then Gmail came out with what seemed like endless storage. But after ten years or so I was surprised to find that I’m getting close to the limits.

Years of personal emails, attachments, newsletters, solicitations and junk over the years have built up to a data mountain – invisible but present.

At the other extreme I watched an animated programme the other day which had a monk in it who casually mentioned to his disciple that their job was begging.

Religious begging has been practised by many faiths. Zen calls it Takuhatsu and it has many purposes.

The acts of having nothing, going out with just a begging bowl and being dependent on others to survive is meant to help the monk develop humility, modesty and escape from ego.

Most of us are never going to do that, experience the feeling of having nothing and being totally dependent on the kindness of strangers.

But, is there anything we can learn from the possibility of that experience?

Can poverty be a good thing?

I heard recently the phrase resources versus resourcefulness.

This is the power that comes from having less.

Stuff can be lost, taken from you or destroyed in an accident.

How long would it take for you to get back up and running if that happened?

Probably less time than you think.

There’s a story about a store in Sheffield that was bombed during the Second World War.

Its accounting records were destroyed and so it could no longer bill customers. But almost everyone paid what they were supposed to and the store is still standing now.

I suppose the point of all this is that bad things happen sometimes.

The more things you have that matter to you then the more you have to replace.

If you had nothing, it wouldn’t matter.

Somewhere between those two extremes is where you want to be.

But, the harder you try to have less, to do more with less, the easier it is to be free from worry.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Monday, 5.54am

Sheffield, U.K.

To know and not to do is not yet to know. – Zen proverb

Change is hard.

If you you disagree with someone else’s beliefs what do you do?

Do you try and persuade them to change?

And, if you have tried that, how did it turn out?

In my experience, people attach themselves to views and find it very hard to loosen themselves without feeling like they are losing face.

Without feeling embarrassed.

And that makes sense, because that’s how many of us feel in the same position.

Making changes at a larger scale is even more difficult. Getting people to act and do something in a different way.

It comes down to something very basic.

Fear.

We’re afraid of what will happen if we do something different.

If we leave our job, will we ever find another one?

If we try and pursue what we think we love, will we find that we aren’t as good as we think?

What if no one comes to see what we do, or buy what we make?

So, what do you do with fear? That thing sitting in your way blocking your path, stopping you from moving forward?

And there is no right answer.

There is doing, and seeing, and learning, and doing again.

For example, many people are looking at developing portfolio careers.

This is when you do a number of jobs rather than one main one.

For many people, such portfolios of jobs are more flexible and rewarding and a better fit with their lifestyle and responsibilities.

So, if you want to move from where you are now to somewhere else, how do you start?

Slowly

You can’t do anything other than start slowly.

You’re slow because you don’t know everything yet, you don’t have the relationships and connections to help you get things done and you might not be sure what the right way is anyway.

Slow is ok. Slow is good.

Slow is better than stuck.

For example, with that fear blocking the road, what could you do to try and edge past it?

You might start by volunteering – helping out at an organisation that does the kinds of things you want to do.

Once you’ve readied yourself to do something new then you’ll start to see opportunities when they come in front of you.

Maybe you can take some of them.

You might be an analyst in your day job. But that doesn’t stop you doing some search engine optimisation consulting for small businesses near you.

You might take pictures on weekends – and could submit them to magazines.

Or perhaps the flexibility of being an Uber driver might work for you.

The last few drivers I’ve met have all chosen to drive – perhaps while starting their businesses, or winding down to retirement, or because it fits their lifestyle.

The idea is to try things – have a go at different options and see what happens.

If something works then you have validation – you have proof that your idea might work and you should put more effort into it.

Then again, being slow might simply be an excuse to not do anything.

In that case, do you jump?

Do you quit what you’re doing now and try and make it in a new career?

The advice would normally be no – but it really depends on what happens if things don’t go as planned.

If you have enough savings for a month’s worth of expenses then taking a leap is probably not a good idea.

If you assume that it will take between two and ten years of trying to get back to what you’re making now, then you need to be clear on whether you’re in a position to do that.

Can you go a year without income?

If you can – then jumping may be an option. And sometimes that’s the way to really do it – commit and leap.

To change you must first get past the fear of what might happen if you change.

You can try and sneak past it, trying experiments and side hustles and second jobs.

You can try and push past it, reducing your hours at your job and taking on other projects.

Or you can run straight through it.

But to change anything, you have to do something.

Anything.

In the end, what you’re defeating is yourself.

Your fear.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Thursday, 9.30pm

Sheffield, U.K.

There’s more than one way to do it. – Perl motto

I’ve been thinking a bit about where one really adds value.

The late Felix Dennis wrote a book called How To Get Rich where he said that there is one talent you must have.

And what is that?

The talent to spot talent in others. To recruit that talent and nurture it.

But what if you’re that talent… how are things going to work out for you? Or for your kids?

Felix has a lesson later on. As talent gets older, he says, it gets expensive. Young talent can be underpaid if the work is challenging. Then, it’s paid at the market rate. Finally, it’s paid for what it did in the past, and that’s when you part ways with it.

And really, that’s an important lesson. In a traditional career path we climb a ladder. The idea is that we get on the ladder because of what we do and then we climb it because of what we can get others to do.

Its the whole making versus managing thing.

But really, what is a manager other than an intermediary between an owner and the customer?

When you look around you at people and what they do you start to see that programming is increasingly at the heart of everything.

If you work in an office you probably spend a lot of time doing stuff using Excel. That’s programming.

If you’re creating music, or art, or architecture you’re still probably using a computer.

Even if you do something that is a craft, like designing and building wooden stools or jigsaws, you’re probably going to use a computer to help you.

Telling a computer what to do is programming.

Okay – so that’s obvious you say – clearly the world is heading that way. What’s the insight here?

Well, the point is that there is a period of transition.

A period of pain for those who don’t get it.

And a period when they have to make choices.

The kinds of jobs where we add value really fall into two areas.

Either we make something that people will buy.

Or we sell something that people will buy.

Anything else really is a cost – and costs are things that you really want to get rid of.

If you’re doing something that gets you labelled as a cost then you’re going to have a rather fear-filled working life.

I think kids need to get this straight.

Either they’re good with people and can build relationships with them.

That’s worth a lot.

Typically between 10 and 60% of the value of a product.

For example, wouldn’t any of us pay 20% of the price of our product if someone else brought in the customers?

The remaining 40-90% goes to the owners after they pay their staff – the ones that make stuff, and the other ones.

I’d tell my kids to make sure that they’re making something.

And that making is the same as programming – programming an app, automating something, creating music or creating a product.

And if they don’t like that then just go out and learn how to sell.

I suppose you might, at this point, point to the public sector.

Well… that’s where you need to ask how much value is being added by some of the things that happen over there…

Brexit anyone?

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Tuesday, 10.05pm

Sheffield, U.K.

No plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first contact with the main hostile force. – Field Marshal Helmuth Karl Bernhard Graf von Moltke

What should you do when trying to think about dealing with a difficult situation?

Say you’ve been asked to come up with a plan. Something in writing. Something that sets out how you’re going to go about things.

Well, that’s what I had to do recently. So, I started with what seemed like an obvious place.

I took out the textbooks.

That seemed reasonable. Surely, there must be something in there that would help me in the situation I was in right now?

But, something odd happened.

First, the textbooks set out the main possibilities, the main ways you can think about the situation.

For example, let’s say you have a question about organisation structure.

The textbooks will tell you that people in organisations tend to act along a continuum from task oriented to relationship oriented.

Task oriented people want to get things done. They’re interested in todo lists, responsibilities, due dates and specific actions.

Relationship oriented people want to get people working well together. They want to create a culture and shared vision of what is possible.

The books will tell you how organisations develop styles or personalities depending on which approaches are dominant in their leaders – from laid back approaches to micromanagement and time tracking in 6-minute increments.

You can also describe organisations in terms of how they are structured – from strict hierarchies and siloed operations to a loose network of independent professionals.

But here’s the thing.

All those descriptions of organisations are actually very little use.

They describe what is there but don’t tell you what is good or what you should use.

Is being task oriented better than being relationship oriented? Or is it the other way around?

The answer is that it depends. In some cases, one approach will work. In other cases it won’t.

It’s actually very hard to predict how things will pan out.

Take war-making, for example. The German battle plans of the second world war called for sending troops quickly to France through Belgium.

So quickly that any resisting forces would be overwhelmed and the war would be over very quickly.

Ironically, as a Prussian General observed, plans tend to fall apart once the fighting starts.

Which makes one wonder whether looking to a textbook for thoughts on what to do is akin to a military planner working out how to fight the last war.

The next war is probably going to be different with a whole bunch of things that just weren’t around for the textbook writers to write down.

What if thinking about organisations and their structure is actually irrelevant in a world where either everything is going to be done by a computer or by networks of creative professionals who come together and separate as and when needed.

To some extent the fact is that the more you try and control the more likely it is that you’ll fail.

Or get nothing done.

What you’ve got to do first is be ready, and then, be ready to adapt.

A plan then is more about getting in position than about doing something in a particular way.

As Woody Allen said, eighty percent of success is just showing up.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Good decisions come from experience, and experience comes from bad decisions. – Rita Mae Brown

Thursday, 10.06pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Sometimes it takes me a long time to get things.

A really long time.

For example, I always thought of “u” and “w” simply as letters in the alphabet.

You know – how it goes in the song you learn with your ABCs.

It was only when I did a poor attempt at learning french that I heard the sounds “ve” and “duble ve” and realised that a “w” was actually two “u”s – a double “u”.

Maybe it was just that my kindergarten focused more on rote learning and less on making sense of the origin of language symbols.

Which also makes sense when you consider that the teachers were dealing with four year olds who were struggling with the concept of staying in one place for more than two minutes.

Anyway…

I read something on Medium that is totally obvious when you read it but that, if you’re anything like me, you might have missed until now.

It’s by Ariel Camus and says “What makes senior developers senior is not that they know the syntax of a given language better, but that they have experience working with large and complex projects with real users and business goals.”

We all start at the bottom of a professional ladder and it’s easy to assume that those higher up are there because they are more skilled than us.

And that can sometimes be the case.

But it’s often not.

Take a lot of academic work, for example. It’s very easy to spend a lot of time carrying out research into a particular area.

The problem is that when you come out of school you find that you’re starting at the bottom in the world of work.

Having those degrees and smarts and skills doesn’t automatically propel you up the career ladder.

What gets you up is being able to show people with the power to make decisions that you’re the person they need to get a job done.

I suppose we should be careful not to confuse seniority with power.

Some people get to the top because they’re good with relationships or politics or power.

That’s not the kind of thing I’m talking about here.

What I’m talking about is the kind of knowledge that comes from trying to solve problems.

Preferably ones that real people have. And ideally ones that are expensive to leave unsolved.

It’s obvious really. It doesn’t matter how smart your work is if no one cares. If someone does care, that’s good but you’re not going to make a living unless they care enough to pay you. And they’ll only pay you based on what you save them so the more impact you can make the more you can make.

It really comes down to the old saying about years of experience.

Have you got ten years of experience?

Or do you really have one year’s experience repeated ten times?

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Monday, 9.19pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Do things that don’t scale. – Paul Graham (Y Combinator)

Why would you want to be bigger?

I suppose your size could be a measure of success?

I’ve read that some successful people say that they don’t really care about the money.

To them, it’s a way of keeping score.

So, if you were coming up with a goal for yourself or your business, should you aim to be big?

Should you want to be a millionaire? Or start a billion dollar company?

Or are these approaches looking at the wrong things altogether?

After all, money is presumably a byproduct of what you do.

This can be something that’s a little hard to talk about.

You tend to get very quickly into the differences between tails and dogs.

For example, if you’re looking for an education should you go for the one with the biggest salary prospects or the biggest probability of getting a job?

Many of us do.

So, one would assume, that the better your education the better the job you will get.

Although, why is it that the people who run companies are not usually the ones with the most degrees or letters after their names?

Why is it that so often in real life, as Robert Kiyosaki brutally puts it, A students work for C students, and B students work for the government?

Let’s look at another area that appears to be exploding.

Almost everyone has an idea for a killer app.

Something that, if they could only get it built, would take the market by storm.

The steps involved are pretty simple. Find a development shop, explain what you want, pay for their time and get your app.

How much would you bet that the shop would get things right?

If you’ve ever tried to get something like this done, you’ll know that at the end you now know exactly what you want and it isn’t what you’ve got.

Now, why did you go to the shop in the first place rather than making something yourself?

You could have picked up Excel or created something that worked in a paper planner?

But, by raising money and getting a team together you felt like you could get to scale faster.

It’s the rocketship model. Money is like fuel. If you can create customers before your money runs out you’ve achieved orbit. If not, you’re probably debris.

I was reading some advice on coding – procedural versus object oriented.

Use object oriented, an experienced programmer urged. It might mean you write more code but if you get successful it will be much easier to manage then.

All of these approaches say you should plan for what happens when you scale.

But, Paul Graham doesn’t.

And the experience of many others also suggests that scale can be a trap.

At the start of any process you need to do things manually.

Recruit customers one at a time. Serve them, like you would as a waiter at a table. Get to know what they like and ask them how the food is.

Because, when you’re bigger you won’t have the time to do things like that.

And if right now, when you can talk to each prospect, you don’t, you’ll never know what they really want.

If you want to build something, build something you want.

If you’re building for someone else, like that shop you hired earlier, they’re less interested in giving you what you want than not being blamed when you realise that what you said you wanted wasn’t what you needed.

Building what you want is more than just building a product. It’s the same approach to building everything else – relationships, careers, interests.

The place where we go wrong is when we try to predict what will succeed rather than just working on what interests us.

And when we’re engrossed in our work we don’t think about money or size or scale.

We think about the work and if we’re lucky, those other things will turn up as well.

But it really wouldn’t matter either way.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh