atul jha – Page 209

Notes from reading: The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch

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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] :

Dream big.
Acquire leadership skills, it is important in every aspect of life.
Not all fairy tales end smoothly.
Automobiles are there to get you from point A to point B. They are utilitarian devices, not expressions of social status.
The truth can set you free.
Spend sometime with your loved ones, take vacation. Stay away from others/office works when in leisure.
Spend your time wisely, it should be managed like money .
You can always change your plan if you have another one.
Ask yourself: Are you spending time on right things?
Keep telephone away, do not make it integral part of life.
Delegate, find smart people to take over your task & delver it quicker/better.
Develop a real ability to assess yourself.
Teamwork is one key reason of any organizations success.
Be earnest person over a hip person every time.
With the passage of time , and the deadlines that life imposes, surrendering become right thing to do.
Don’t complain, just work harder.
Treat the disease, not the symptom.
Don’t obsess over what people think.
Look for best in everybody.
What what they do not what they say.
Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.
Whether you think you can or you can’t, you’re right.
Dance with the one who brung you.
Its not how hard you hit. It’s how hard you get hit … and keep moving forward. [Rocky]
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.
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.
Get people’s attention. That’s always the first step to solving an ignored problem.
Say thank you, whenever needed.
Loyalty is a two way street.
Show gratitude.
When you go into wilderness, the only thing you can count on is what you take ith you.
A bad apology is worst than no apology.
Tell the truth.
No job is a small job.
Never give up.
When we are connected to others, we become better people.
All you have to do is to ask.
Make a decision with life either live pessimistic or optimistic throughout.
Do ask/get inputs from others.
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?

Switching off light for an hour in year & running AC for sake of using it does any justice?
What about car pooling or instead using public transport? [umm, our government is not doing enough blehh blehhh…]
Your eating habits are affecting climate as well, are you aware of it? [source]
How are you utilizing water? Do you know washing car/bike everyday is equally sucking up our planet?
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:

We have so accepted the pattern of fear that we don’t want even to move away from it.
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.
Where there is comparison there must be fear.
Comparison, conformity, and imitation, are contributory causes of fear.
Where there is any cause there is an ending.
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.
Until we are free from fear, we may climb the highest mountain, invent every kind of God, but we will remain in darkness.
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.
The movement from certainty to uncertainty is fear.
When you are confronted with something immediately there is no fear. It is only when thought comes in that there is fear.
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.
Success and fame are psychologically the very essence of comparison, through which we constantly breed fear.
In the action of intelligence there is no fear at all.
The effects of fear and its actions based on past memories are destructive, contradictory, and paralysing.
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.
Religions throughout the world have used fear as a means of controlling man.
Courage is not the opposite of fear.
A man who is frightened has no love, has no sympathy.
The greater the fear, the greater the tension, the greater the neuroticism, the greater is the urge to escape.
We live throughout our lives with fear and die with fear.
Fear is always in relation to something; it does not exist by itself.
Thought breeds fear; thought also cultivates pleasure.
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.
A mind that is frightened can never see what truth is.
Thought, thinking about an incident, an experience, a state, in which there has been a disturbance, danger, grief or pain, brings about fear.
Fear is a movement in time.
When man is free of all fear he needs no comfort, he needs no reward, he doesn’t seek something that will help him.
If there were no time and thought there would be no fear.
thought and time are the central factors of fear.
Where there is self-interest there must be fear, and all the consequences of fear.
The true is not the opposite of the false; love is not the opposite of hate.
Aloneness is not withdrawal from life; on the contrary it is the total freedom from conflict and sorrow, from fear and death.
Fear arises only in the very act of running away from the fact.
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 :

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

How do we find love these days?

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

Why do you want to fall in love?

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

Breaking up

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

You deserve better. [Realized after months/year tolerating you]
You were cheating on me.
Priorities, moving to US for masters.
Parents will not let it approve further. [Time for me to get hatched].
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.

Cry, cry and cry.
Go visit family [parents]
Quit internet for sometime.
Leave city/town where it all started.
Quit job incase it was office affairs.
Stop meeting people especially socializing women folks.
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.

Random Thoughts: society baggage

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Society has its own yardstick, from birth to death it wants you to follow a protocol. Stick to the rules or become a misfit.

I remember how my dad wanted me to do engineering in electronics & comm, because it was hot{he heard it from some relatives}. I don’t blame him, I am proud of what I am with his love/care/support.

You should join MNC after graduation not startup & all.

Get married because everyone at your age is happily married.

Buy house because it will save in taxes and you won’t have to shift for new house every few years.

Do not take risk with job, stick to it because market is bad.

We humans are different from each other & torch bearers of society should understand this.

Notes from reading: “One Click” Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.com

My curiosity to find out what runs Amazon, its philosophy, vision and roots resulted me in picking “One Click” Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.com. The book provided some interesting insights, rise/fall, good/bad part of early days of Amazon and particularly Jeff Bezos vision and leadership.

These are some notes from the book I found interesting/valuable:

The first step in building a company is to find good people.
Always put the customer first, even if it appears to require a decision that would decrease revenues. It’s a winning strategy in the long run. By late 1996 Amazon had 110 employees, fourteen of them dedicated to answering emails from customers.
Utilizing the power of word-2-mouth early days of business. In first hour Amazon, it had an order of one hundred books. Word kept spreading, despite the fact that the company did no advertising its first year—although Bezos did hire mobile billboards to cruise by Barnes & Noble stores.
Pick company name wisely. Amazon was always near the top of the lists because the lists were mostly alphabetical—exactly why Bezos chose a name that began with an A.
Pick right offer and be less greedy. Although Amazon might have gotten a better valuation from General Atlantic, Bezos felt that Doerr’s name was worth the extra $10 million he might have gotten in valuation.
Open for feedback from almost everyone. Enabling comments reviews was one such request which became integral part of Amazon from early on, it came from one of the buyers.
Discount was big reason for killing competitors and attracting customers in early days of Amazon book business.
Keen intellect, a drive to succeed, and an innate stubbornness to the point of absurdity helps. These are all signs of a born entrepreneur.
To get something new done you have to be stubborn and focused, to the point that others might find unreasonable.
One of the things [Jeff] learned is that there really aren’t any problems without solutions. Obstacles are only obstacles if you think they’re obstacles. Otherwise, they’re opportunities.
Life’s too short to hang out with people who aren’t resourceful.
Talent rather than experience [in-hiring], when trying to do something new, and experience with legacy software could be more of a hindrance than a help.
Do not re invent the wheel. Start-up executives often make the mistake of assuming no outsiders can build software as well as their own programmers. They end up wasting time and money building what they could have easily bought from a vendor that had already worked out the bugs and refined its programs.
In order to keep costs down, they[Amazon] relied heavily on open source software.
If you want to be successful in the short-to-medium term, you can only do things that offer incredibly strong value propositions to customers relative to the value of doing things in more traditional ways. [Bezos]
Bezos’s philosophy was to get to market quickly to get a lead on the competition, and fix problems and improve the site as people started using it. It was now a race: Whoever captured market share first would establish the pole position and would be difficult to pass. The mandate now was, “Get big fast.”
Keep burn rate low: The company was strictly a cut-rate operation. Any printing or copying was done at a Print Mart shop a few blocks away. Business meetings were held at a local coffee shop—ironically, one inside a Barnes & Noble bookstore.
Amazon’s Six Core Values: customer obsession, ownership, bias for action, frugality, high hiring bar and innovation.

Notes from reading: Freedom from the Known by J Krishnamurti

Continuing with my quest of reading more on J Krishnamurti I picked up Freedom from the Known. Its a series of discourse on various aspects of life.

These are some of my clipped notes from the book:

If one wants to see a thing very clearly, one’s mind must be very quiet, without all the prejudices, the chattering, the dialogue, the images, the pictures – all that must be put aside to look.
A living mind is a still mind, a living mind is a mind that has no centre and therefore no space and time. Such a mind is limitless and that is the only truth, that is the only reality.
Thought is crooked because it can invent anything and see things that are not there. It can perform the most extraordinary tricks, and therefore it cannot be depended upon.
Sorrow is self-created, sorrow is created by thought, sorrow is the outcome of time.
All our relationships are really imaginary – that is, based on an image formed by thought.
We have reduced the world to its present state of chaos by our self-centred activity, by our prejudices, our hatreds, our nationalism, and when we say we cannot do anything about it, we are accepting disorder in ourselves as inevitable.
You recognize an experience as being good, bad, beautiful, holy and so on according to your conditioning, and therefore the recognition of an experience must inevitably be old.
Meditation is the understanding of the totality of life in which every form of fragmentation has ceased.
Meditation is to be aware of every thought and of every feeling, never to say it is right or wrong but just to watch it and move with it.
Fear is not love, dependence is not love, jealousy is not love, possessiveness and domination are not love, responsibility and duty are not love, self-pity is not love, the agony of not being loved is not love, love is not the opposite of hate any more than humility is the opposite of vanity.
In this torn desert world there is no love because pleasure and desire play the greatest roles, yet without love your daily life has no meaning. And you cannot have love if there is no beauty.
For most people love means comfort, security, a guarantee for the rest of their lives of continuous emotional satisfaction.
Love is something that is new, fresh, alive. It has no yesterday and no tomorrow. It is beyond the turmoil of thought.
THE DEMAND TO be safe in relationship inevitably breeds sorrow and fear.
We have separated living from dying, and the interval between the living and the dying is fear.
To live completely, wholly, every day as if it were a new loveliness, there must be dying to everything of yesterday, otherwise you live mechanically, and a mechanical mind can never know what love is or what freedom is.
Most of us are frightened of dying because we don’t know what it means to live. We don’t know how to live, therefore we don’t know how to die.
To die is to have a mind that is completely empty of itself, empty of its daily longings, pleasures and agonies.
Time is a movement which man has divided into past, present and future, and as long as he divides it he will always be in conflict.
Measuring ourselves all the time against something or someone is one of the primary causes of conflict.
Man lives by time. Inventing the future has been his favourite game of escape.
A mind that is confused, whatever it does, at any level, will remain confused; any action born of confusion leads to further confusion.
The more we are confused and lost in life the more we chase around, searching, asking, demanding, begging.
When you are alone, totally alone, not belonging to any family, any nation, any culture, any particular continent, there is that sense of being an outsider. The man who is completely alone in this way is innocent and it is this innocency that frees the mind from sorrow.
Violence is not merely killing another. It is violence when we use a sharp word, when we make a gesture to brush away a person, when we obey because there is fear.
A mind which is not crippled by memory has real freedom.
If I am all the time measuring myself against you, struggling to be like you, then I am denying what I am myself. Therefore I am creating an illusion.

Tips for attracting contributors to Open Source project

Empathy

One of the first thing for getting new contributors is empathy. Existing members should be kind enough to answer all kinds of basic questions. The new comer might be new to the overall ecosystem and trying the tool for the first time.

Appreciation

We all like being appreciated. A thank you note, congratulation message helps for making first contribution. It can be small as fixing a spelling mistake in documentation. It boosts the mindset of newcomer and the feeling of I am all alone here goes away. This makes contributor more comfortable.

Feedback

Open Source is more than dumping code on Github repository. Having an open channel with contributors on adding new features, removing unwanted features etc helps.

Background: Motivation for this post came from Stormy’s Tweet .

Random Thoughts: Our insecurity

Our society and being part various different affiliations we are insecure. We are insecure about our job, relationship, future to mention a few.

Will I get appraisal this year?
My Gf/Bf loves me as much i do or not?
What if my competitor raise more funding than mine, will it kill my business?
Will I be able to buy a house or afford US trip next year

Is this present beautiful moment of our life worthy enough to be insecure? Will giving best to what we are doing or playing by our strength not help us in getting rid of our insecurity?

Random Thoughts: Playing by strength

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I am sure some of you have read about 10,000 hours rule. You can be an expert in almost anything if you can practice it for 10,000 hours. It comes out to be 7 hours of practice for almost 4 years [If my maths are still in place].

If you have read Scott Adams book How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life where is talks about goals vs system.

In this era of instant gratification where we want our satisfactions met over few minutes via a dating app to on-demand movie app to cab aggregator app. It is extremely difficult to keep/stay motivated for 4 years because of passionate to pursue interest. [It is not impossible either, you need to be super humans]

What have we done to ourselves?

I should get MBA degree after engineering, it will pay me well.
I should enroll to some kind of sports as well, admission to degree college will become easy.
Take online classes of machine learning because it will pay me well.

We are forcing ourself to fit in the box for our future. How about we play by our strength?

Will that not keep us happy in our present and we make best out of it in every arena?