Notes from reading: Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan Watts

I was recommended reading “Wisdom of Insecurity” by Alan Watts from a friend of mine. She insisted that I should read other philosophers as well apart from J Krishnamurti.

These are some my notes from kindle.

  1. It should be clear that eternal life is the realization that the present is the only reality, and that past and future can be distinguished from it in a conventional sense alone.
  2. Nothing is really more inhuman than human relations based on morals.
  3. So long as there is the motive to become something, so long as the mind believes in the possibility of escape from what it is at this moment, there can be no freedom.
  4. The worst part of pain is expecting it and trying to get away from it when it has come.
  5. Choices are usually decisions motivated by pleasure and pain, and the divided mind acts with the sole purpose of getting “I” into pleasure and out of pain.
  6. Death is the epitome of the truth that in each moment we are thrust into the unknown.
  7. The feeling that we stand face-to-face with the world, cut off and set apart, has the greatest influence on thought and action.
  8. We learn nothing of very much importance when it can be explained entirely in terms of past experience.
  9. It is open to all of us in so far as “the mystery of life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.”
  10. Seeing that there is no escape from the pain, the mind yields to it, absorbs it, and becomes conscious of just pain without any “I” feeling it or resisting it.
  11. To remain stable is to refrain from trying to separate yourself from a pain because you know that you cannot.
  12. The mind has just the same powers, for it has give and can absorb shocks like water or a cushion.
  13. One has to make the experiment to understand that it brings into play altogether new powers of adaptation to life, of literally absorbing pain and insecurity.
  14. You see that calling it “fear” tells you little or nothing about it, for the comparison and the naming is based, not on past experience, but on memory.
  15. Memory never captures the essence, the present intensity, the concrete reality of an experience.
  16. Sorrow can only be compared with the memory of joy, which is not at all the same thing as joy itself.
  17. Had we never known joy, it would be impossible to identify sorrow as sorrow.
  18. To understand joy or fear, you must be wholly and undividedly aware of it.
  19. To understand that there is no security is far more than to agree with the theory that all things change, more even than to observe the transitoriness of life.
  20. The capacity of the brain to foresee the future has much to do with the fear of death.
  21. Human desire tends to be insatiable. We are so anxious for pleasure that we can never get enough of it.
  22. We have been taught to neglect, despise, and violate our bodies, and to put all faith in our brains.
  23. To be passing is to live; to remain and continue is to die.
  24. We fall in love with people and possessions only to be tortured by anxiety for them.
  25. We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.
  26. The present cannot be lived happily unless the past has been “cleared up” and the future is bright with promise.
  27. What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his soul?
  28. Human beings appear to be happy just so long as they have a future to which they can look forward—whether it be a “good time” tomorrow or an everlasting life beyond the grave.
  29. Tomorrow can have no significance at all unless you are in full contact with the reality of the present, since it is in the present and only in the present that you live.”

After reading this I realized Alan Watts saying all things what I have read in J Krishnamurti.

Notes from reading: On Love and Loneliness by J Krishnamurti

Continuing with my quest of reading more on J Krishnamurti  I picked up On Love and Loneliness.  It is his series of discourse recorded as a book.

These are some of my kindle notes:

  1. Love comes into being when the mind is naturally quiet, not made quiet, when it sees the false as false and the true as true.
  2. This process of usage, thinking, imagining, holding, enclosing, rejecting, is all smoke, and when the smoke is not, the flame of love is.
  3. Sensation is a process of thought, which is not love. When the mind is dominant and the thought process is important, there is no love.
  4. Sex is sensation which is created, pictured by the mind, and then the mind acts or does not act.
  5. Love that uses, exploits, and then feels sorry cannot be love, because love is not a thing of the mind.
  6. The very thought of getting away from loneliness is in itself a form of inward insufficiency.
  7. Love is not pleasure. Love is not the pursuit or the avoidance of fear. Love is not attachment. Love has no suffering.
  8. as long as a human mind is hurt and therefore insensitive, it will never know what beauty is —in the things man has made, in the line of a building, and in the mountain, in the beautiful tree.
  9. A gesture, a word, a look, is enough to hurt.
  10. Wisdom comes in the understanding of suffering and all the implications of suffering, not only the personal, but also the human suffering that man has created.
  11. ONE OF THE causes of suffering is attachment. In attachment there is fear, jealousy, anxiety, suffering.
  12. Psychologically, suffering comes through attachment—to an idea, to ideals, to opinions, to beliefs, to persons, to concepts.
  13. The world is the mirror in which you are looking that shows the operations of your own mind.
  14. Another cause of suffering is a great sense of loss, loss of prestige, loss of power, loss of so many things, and the loss of somebody whom you think you love—and there is death, the ultimate suffering.
  15. One of the major reasons for suffering is the sense of isolation, the feeling of total loneliness.
  16. To end sorrow completely is a most difficult thing to do, for sorrow is always with us in one form or another.
  17. Sorrow ends only when we face the fact of sorrow, when we understand and go beyond both the cause and the effect.
  18. Love has now almost become synonymous with sex & its expression & all that is involved in it—self-forgetfulness and so on.
  19. when the intense pleasure is sustained by thought, then there is the counteraction which is aggression, reprisal, anger, hate, born out of the feeling of not getting that pleasure which you are after, and therefore fear, which is again fairly obvious if you observe it.
  20. Love comes only when the mind is very quiet, disinterested, not self-centred.
  21. Where there is dependence, there is fear, and where there is fear, there is authority, there is no love.
  22. Self-expression and self-fulfilment is a form of pleasure; and when that pleasure is thwarted, blocked, there is fear, and out of that fear there is aggression.
  23. Most people are afraid to stand alone; they are afraid to think things out for themselves, afraid to feel deeply, to explore and discover the whole meaning of life.
  24. When there is love, there is beauty. Love and compassion with their intelligence is the endless truth.
  25. Compassion means passion for all. Compassion cannot exist, nor love, if you belong to any sect, any group, or to any organized religion.
  26. Without love, life is like a shallow pool.
  27. When there is the ending of suffering there is passion. And with the ending of suffering there is love.
  28. Anger is not different from me; I am anger. I am greed. I am frightened. I am all that. But thought says, ‘I must control, I must escape from fear’, so thought then creates the observer as different from the observed, and in that state there is conflict.
  29. The idea is not love. The idea, the word is not love. But only when you have seen the whole movement of desire, attachment, pleasure, then out of that depth of perception comes this strange flower with its extraordinary perfume.
  30. A person who is trying to eat money is always hungry.

Random Thoughts: What are we living for?

I am still reading J Krishnamurti discourse/book on Love and Loneliness. I will be posting notes soon, while reading though this book I had this question, “What are we living for?”

I sent a questionnaire to over 100 friends anonymously only 50 responded.  I have added graphs & code for same below.

Participant percentage.
Purpose for Living.     

Group A = [18 – 22 yr]
Group B = [23 – 25 yr]
Group C = [26 – 30 yr]
Group D = [30 – 35 yr]

I have no opinion on the participants with the response.

Code for these graphs with data and iPython Notebook can be found on: https://github.com/koolhead17/scripts/tree/001/what_are_we_living_for

On managing your team

Running a startup is not an easy job. You have to keep everyone happy from customer to team member. While some people fail at it others excel in building a successful company.

I recently read Inspired by Marty Cagan  and PPP was the take away for me from it.

People
If you will hire right set of people, it will result in building great culture which over all benefit the organization.  But as a Founder you need to constantly ask:

  1. Are you honest with your team?
  2. Are you giving them enough remuneration?
  3.  Are they equally excited with the vision?

If answer is yes, you are well on a successful path.

 Process
A lot many companies failed to attract right kind of talent and ended up shutting shop.  We humans crave for love and respect, nobody likes constant supervision or micro-management.  Define a simple process, be honest and let everyone in the team follow it. Keep in mind the empathy part, you as a founders are working with the team not sheep herding.

Product
Last part comes Product, you as a founder needs to ask some tough questions.

  1. Are you solving a problem?
  2. If it was pitched to you, would you have bought it?
  3. Ease of using.
  4. Are you creating a new habit?

If you have answers for these, you are good to go.

Business advice from Ashish [my friend]

I studied my 11-12th with Ashish & have known him for over decade. We grew up together, he got married and blessed with two kids and running a successful business in Delhi. I am  here in Bangalore, trying to figure out what is next.

Wire 2017-06-23 at 21.58.31

Last week I was in Delhi all for him, because we wanted to revisit our memory of  our past solo trips.  We ended up visiting, trip to Binsar in Uttrakhand. It was tiring but fun filled 10+ hour ride from Delhi included lots of food and fun filled conversation.

Wire 2017-06-23 at 17.39.57

Ashish is born and bought up in business family so he knows art of selling. We spoke in lengths on various topics starting from when will i get married to how he started and doing in his business.

In one of the evening while we were chatting in our hotel room, he gave me  some great advice. I had my notebook next to me & so I made note of same.

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I have added those here in much clearer form :

  1. Always keep selling.
  2. Sell cheap
  3. keep burn low
  4. try solving problem
  5. keep friction = 0, (users to product usage ability)
  6. give something which is dead simple to use and they don’t have to think.
  7. always look for being profitable
  8. spend money wisely
  9. price of product should be thought through well
  10. test product with close set of friends and iterate over it again and again. Once feedback loop is complete start selling.
  11. sell the basic version for cheap, start charging for advance features.
  12. customer is your cash cow, your  god so treat him with love/respect.
  13. Trust is very important, gaining it takes ages and breaking it takes few seconds. So ensure you work honestly and never loose trust.
  14. Money is money whether its coming from dad or a bank. Invest it wisely and treat it with care.

Bonus, tips while traveling for leisure on vacation.

  1. Always care about food, good food should get priority.
  2. Try finding great hotel, spend more. When you are out from your house ensure you get better level or equal comfort while being at home.

Ashish runs a hardware[home fitting & accessories] shop in Pahar Ganj, New Delhi.  If you happen to be around his shop, feel free to meet/talk to him.

 

Notes from reading: Inspired, How To Create Products Customers Love by Marty Cagan

inspired

After quitting Minio I have been spending my free time in reading & consuming lots of coffee. This book was recommended to me by Anurag Ramdasan  as I am still in process of figuring out what is next. This book is strongly recommended for product managers or folks building customer products. Do follow Marty Cagan’s official website for more of his wisdom.

These are some of my notes clipped via my Kindle :

  1. It doesn’t matter how good your engineering team is if they are not given something worthwhile to build.
  2. Do not build a product or waste your time on it if users, customers don’t need it.
  3. The job of the product manager is to discover a product that is valuable, usable, and feasible.
  4. Engineering is important and difficult, but user experience design is even more important, and usually more difficult.
  5. Everything starts with the people, but the process is what enables these people to consistently produce inspiring and successful products.
  6. New ideas can come from anywhere—company executives, discussions with customers, usability testing, your own product team, your sales or marketing staff, industry analysts, to name a few. But then someone needs to take a hard look at the idea and decide if it is something worth pursuing.
  7. Behind every great product you will find an individual who is responsible for the definition of that product.
  8. The root cause of wasted releases can most often be traced to poor definition of the role of the product manager in a company, and inadequate training of the people chosen for this role.
  9. The product manager has two key responsibilities: assessing product opportunities, and defining the product to be built.
  10. A good product requires a good user experience. And a good user experience requires the close collaboration of product management and user experience design.
  11. If you can’t manage to get the time to focus on those tasks which are truly important to your product, your product will fail.
  12. The product organization includes the design team, because the interaction between product management and user experience design absolutely needs to be as close as possible.
  13. Designers are most valuable very early in the process, when the product manager is working to understand the target market and come up with a solution.
  14. What problem a product is intended to solve should be the focus not the feature list and capabilities.
  15. Not every opportunity needs to be a billion-dollar market.
  16. Improving the product’s usability can significantly reduce the need for customer service staff.
  17. Software projects can be thought of as having two distinct stages: figuring out what to build (build the right product), and building it (building the product right). The first stage is dominated by product discovery, and the second stage is all about execution.
  18. If you’re more naturally the project manager type who loves getting things out the door, then you’ll need to work on your strategic thinking and discovery skills—remembering that what matters most is creating a product that your customers love.
  19. You need to identify your market and validate the opportunity with your customers.
  20. A good set of principles serves as the basis or foundation for inspiring product features.
  21. Everyone feels strongly about the product since—at some level—we all realize that companies need money to survive, money comes from customers, and customers come for the products.
  22. Constructive debate and argument is an essential ingredient to coming up with a great product.
  23. As product manager you can make a very significant impact on this process—minimizing churn and maximizing creativity and quality.
  24. Every member of the team should be able to see the goals and objectives you are using, their priority, and how you assess each option.
  25. You should be arguing about what’s most important to your target user: ease of use, speed, functionality, cost, security, privacy—this is the right argument.
  26. If you work at a company where you’re told you can’t talk to your users, my advice is to first try hard to change this policy. If that doesn’t work, dust off your resume and find a place where you can practice your craft and have a shot at creating successful products.
  27. Winning products come from the deep understanding of the user’s needs combined with an equally deep understanding of what’s just now possible.
  28. It is an extremely common mistake for a product to try to please everyone and end up pleasing no one.
  29. Testing your ideas with real users is probably the single most important activity in your job as product manager.
  30. One of the easiest ways I know of to innovate is to just watch (and listen) as actual users attempt to use your current product or a competitor’s product. Watch a few of these sessions and you’ll start to see patterns of frustration and expectation.
  31. Almost every consumer company out there today gives lip service to the user experience, but Apple means it. Usability, interaction design, visual design, industrial design, are all front and center in the company’s priorities—and it shows.

[BONUS] :A useful opportunity assessment for product managers.

  1. Exactly what problem will this solve? (value proposition)
  2. For whom do we solve that problem? (target market)
  3. How big is the opportunity? (market size)
  4. How will we measure success? (metrics/revenue strategy)
  5. What alternatives are out there now? (competitive landscape)
  6. Why are we best suited to pursue this? (our differentiator)
  7. Why now? (market window)
  8. How will we get this product to market? (go-to-market strategy)
  9. What factors are critical to success? (solution requirements)
  10. Given the above, what’s the recommendation? (go or no-go)

 

Notes from reading: The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch

last

This book is list of wisdom shared by Randy Pausch, he had cancer and few months to live.  I got this book from my sister’s bookshelf, it is one of the best read for me so far this year, extremely recommended.

These are some notes, some are titles of the book [self explanatory] :

  1. Dream big.
  2. Acquire leadership skills, it is important in every aspect of life.
  3. Not all fairy tales end smoothly.
  4. Automobiles are there to get you from point A to point B. They are utilitarian devices, not expressions of social status.
  5. The truth can set you free.
  6. Spend sometime with your loved ones, take vacation. Stay away from others/office works when in leisure.
  7. Spend your time wisely, it should be managed like money .
  8. You can always change your plan if you have another one.
  9. Ask yourself: Are you spending time on right things?
  10. Keep telephone away, do not make it integral part of life.
  11. Delegate, find smart people to take over your task & delver it quicker/better.
  12. Develop a real ability to assess yourself.
  13. Teamwork is one key reason of any organizations success.
  14. Be earnest person over a hip person every time.
  15. With the passage of time , and the deadlines that life imposes, surrendering become right thing to do.
  16. Don’t complain, just work harder.
  17. Treat the disease, not the symptom.
  18. Don’t obsess over what people think.
  19. Look for best in everybody.
  20. What what they do not what they say.
  21. Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.
  22. Whether you think you can or you can’t, you’re right.
  23. Dance with the one who brung you.
  24. Its not how hard you hit. It’s how hard you get hit … and keep moving forward. [Rocky] 
  25. Experince is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted. And experince is often the most valuable thing you have to offer.
  26. Failure is not just acceptable, it’s often essential. The person who failed often knows how to avoid future failures. The person who knows only success can be more oblivious to all the pitfalls.
  27.  Get people’s attention. That’s always the first step to solving an ignored problem.
  28. Say thank you, whenever needed.
  29. Loyalty is a two way street.
  30.  Show gratitude.
  31. When you go into wilderness, the only thing you can count on is what you take ith you.
  32. A bad apology is worst than no apology.
  33. Tell the truth.
  34. No job is a small job.
  35. Never give up.
  36. When we are connected to others, we become better people.
  37. All you have to do is to ask.
  38. Make a decision with life either live pessimistic or optimistic throughout.
  39. Do ask/get inputs from others.
  40. Life is not about how to achieve your dreams. It’s about how to lead your life. If you lead your life in right way, the karma will take care of itself.

Paris climate agreement, Donald & us.

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President Donald Trump announced that he is withdrawing the U.S. from a landmark, international climate agreement.

I understand the concern of whole world and who bad this comes on fellow american friends.

Is keeping climate clean is just Paris climate agreement? Are we doing our part?

  1. Switching off light for an hour in year & running AC for sake of using it does any justice?
  2. What about car pooling or instead using public transport? [umm, our government is not doing enough blehh blehhh…]
  3. Your eating habits are affecting climate as well, are you aware of it? [source]
  4. How are you utilizing water? Do you know washing car/bike everyday is equally sucking up our planet?
  5. Lastly your tweets are not helping either and nor your 24/7 internet consumption. [Don’t you know these data centers to store your tweets roll out extra server which requires electricity? ]

So instead to cribbing over everything how about taking action and fixing nature around us? [This does not mean am supporting decision of Mr. Trump]

/End Rant…

Notes from reading: On Fear by J Krishnamurti

Continuing with my quest of reading more on J Krishnamurti  I picked up On Fear. It is his series of discourse on our fear.

fear

These are some of my clipped notes from the book:

  1. We have so accepted the pattern of fear that we don’t want even to move away from it.
  2. When you compare yourself with another, ideologically, psychologically, or even physically, there is the striving to become that; and there is the fear that you may not.
  3. Where there is comparison there must be fear.
  4. Comparison, conformity, and imitation, are contributory causes of fear.
  5. Where there is any cause there is an ending.
  6. Society is so constructed that a citizen who has a position of respect is treated with great courtesy, whereas a man who has no position is kicked around.
  7. Until we are free from fear, we may climb the highest mountain, invent every kind of God, but we will remain in darkness.
  8. Fear is one of the greatest problems in life. A mind that is caught in fear lives in confusion, in conflict, and therefore must be violent, distorted, and aggressive. It dare not move away from its own patterns of thinking, and this breeds hypocrisy.
  9. The movement from certainty to uncertainty is fear.
  10.  When you are confronted with something immediately there is no fear. It is only when thought comes in that there is fear.
  11. When you see that you are a part of fear, not separate from it—that you are fear—then you cannot do anything about it; then fear comes totally to an end.
  12. Success and fame are psychologically the very essence of comparison, through which we constantly breed fear.
  13. In the action of intelligence there is no fear at all.
  14. The effects of fear and its actions based on past memories are destructive, contradictory, and paralysing.
  15. We can see what fear does to each one of us. It makes one tell lies, it corrupts one in various ways, it makes the mind empty, shallow.
  16. Religions throughout the world have used fear as a means of controlling man.
  17. Courage is not the opposite of fear.
  18. A man who is frightened has no love, has no sympathy.
  19. The greater the fear, the greater the tension, the greater the neuroticism, the greater is the urge to escape.
  20. We live throughout our lives with fear and die with fear.
  21. Fear is always in relation to something; it does not exist by itself.
  22. Thought breeds fear; thought also cultivates pleasure.
  23. The moment there is no fear, there is no ambition, but there is an action, which is for the love of the thing but not for recognition of the thing that you are doing.
  24. A mind that is frightened can never see what truth is.
  25. Thought, thinking about an incident, an experience, a state, in which there has been a disturbance, danger, grief or pain, brings about fear.
  26. Fear is a movement in time.
  27. When man is free of all fear he needs no comfort, he needs no reward, he doesn’t seek something that will help him.
  28. If there were no time and thought there would be no fear.
  29. thought and time are the central factors of fear.
  30. Where there is self-interest there must be fear, and all the consequences of fear.
  31. The true is not the opposite of the false; love is not the opposite of hate.
  32. Aloneness is not withdrawal from life; on the contrary it is the total freedom from conflict and sorrow, from fear and death.
  33. Fear arises only in the very act of running away from the fact.
  34. To live with the ashes of loneliness there must be great energy and this energy comes when there is no longer fear.

 

Falling in love, breakup up and moving on

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Falling in love

We have to fall in love, it is mandatory :

  1. You won’t get place to sit or meal if you are alone and visiting eateries or elsewhere.
  2. How will you share all those photos to your Facebook et all.
  3. Peer pressure and friend circle around us takes over this.

How do we find love these days?

  1. Mobile apps like tinder.
  2. College/Schools [most cases it does not last long]
  3. Social media [Twitter/Facebook/Quora]
  4. Common meetups, group activities [if you are lucky]
  5. Parties! Through common friends, through set ups arranged by friends

Why do you want to fall in love?

  1. Social symbol [me too]
  2. Sex, personal support
  3. Marriage [if both happen to cross the threshold]
  4. Our dire need to have a plus one always!

Breaking up

We had great time together but it’s not working out.

  1. You deserve better. [Realized after months/year tolerating you]
  2. You were cheating on me.
  3. Priorities, moving to US for masters.
  4. Parents will not let it approve further. [Time for me to get hatched].
  5. After 5 years courtship met parents but guess what out Kundli is not matching  so we should end it.

Moving On/ Letting go

The most difficult part of this journey is moving on.

  1. Cry, cry and cry.
  2. Go visit family [parents]
  3. Quit internet for sometime.
  4. Leave city/town where it all started.
  5. Quit job incase it was office affairs.
  6. Stop meeting people especially socializing women folks.
  7. Isolate yourself, travel [mostly solo]

Now that I am done sharing my piece, I have to honestly admit that some of it  resonates with my story as well. 🙂

I will mostly talk about moving on. It is very difficult to move on after the break up. I was very lucky that i had few great friends around me most of the time cheering me up [Hello Ashish, this line is for you].

Everything seems illogical & we blame ourselves  for everything. All our dreams and future plannings come to an end. Thanks to social media and chat applications, all  it takes is a pesky message to breakup [I don’t use Whatsapp anymore]

But of late I have realized all these things are temporary from day one.  I was the stupid person who was building future castles and fairy tales .  A relationship involves two human  beings  & it is extremely difficult to predict what is going on in the mind of the other. At the same time probability is that the situation might change, all of a sudden you might become  jobless or the other person  will tell you about career change or moving out of city/country for higher studies. 

So what should we do?

The only suggestion I give to everyone is to live in the present moment and make the best of it.  If we start living our present moment to best without wasting  time reminiscing about the past we will be happier.

I would say this probably because I started reading more about the subject. Some philosophy by J Krishnamurti and other authors like James Altucher and Kamal Ravikant have touched a cord. Currently, I am reading The Last Lecture and would highly recommend it to each one of us going through either of the stages mentioned above.