#GoodRead 10% Happier

GoodRead,

10% Happier toes the line between being a memoir and self-help book. It focuses on self-help theories at different times within the book, but is less preachy in the way it uses knowledge gleaned from the author’s real-life experiences. The author uses his own personal story as an avenue for exploring religion, mindfulness, and meditation.

Quick Review

Book balance between humour and life lessons, and journey of one to embrace meditation as a lifelong practice

It’s interesting to see, his transformation from a sceptic to follower of a meditation practice. It’s also intriguing to see the challenge which he has faced, are so much same that I can relate to myself. And I think this is also applicable to others. The book is not about “ifs and buts” , it’s about what is it feel like to recognise the inner chatter, calm it down a bit and focus on now.

10 commandments, so to say, is real summary of why and what about meditation. Let me put this for you.

1. Don’t be a jerk

we feel, success needs competition, and it’s opposite to compassion. However, success is possible with compassion only.

2. Hide Zen

Sometimes you need to compete aggressively, plead your own case, or even have a sharp word with someone. It’s not easy, but it’s possible to do this calmly and without making the whole thing overly personal.

3. Meditate

Difficult, but do it 10-15 minute daily. It’s all about acknowledging without any judgement. Let environment tease you, you notice and acknowledge them, and keep breathing.

4. The Price of Security Is Insecurity—Until It’s Not Useful

Okie to have constructive anguish. There’s no point in being unhappy about things you can’t change, and no point being unhappy about things you can

5. Equanimity Is Not the Enemy of Creativity

Mindfulness make us more creative, it tames the mind, to make space for more useful thoughts.

6. Don’t Force It

Embrace ambiguity, take purposeful pause

7. Humility Prevents Humiliation

Put ego aside. Humility helps sanders the edges of ego. Make us more compassionate and approachable.

8. Go Easy with the Internal Cattle Prod

Don’t over do “self criticism”. Listen but don’t accept the inner chatter without a deliberate pause.

9. Nonattachment to Results

Nonattachment to results + self compassion = a supple relentlessness that is hard to match.

10. What Matters Most?

And that’s what we should able to answer. This is “what matter most” to feel anguish about any situation, where you want to react. Pause and ask

Summary in short

Asset on laravel and PWA

Programming Language,

Recently I was working on making one of my web app as PWA. I understand PWA is future, hence I try to make my website based solution into a web app. And I came across an issue with sharing the resources. Specifically icons, images and splash screens.

And I came across {{ asset( ) }} really powerful syntax to take care of such issue. Asset syntax takes public directory as default and whatever path we put in, get added to public path. So however you host, the path always remain constant.

Also, {{ secure_asset() }} generates URL with https while {{ asset( ) }} generates URL with http.

To make laravel based project a PWA, you have following GitHub repos.

https://github.com/silviolleite/laravel-pwa

And you can generate PWA assets with this free app. It’s a website help create assets as well as manifest.

two blue metal storage boxes

Cheat Sheet Chest 🧰

Programming Language, ,
Quick cheats 🙂

Got some nifty cheat sheets, which I regularly using during development phase.

Sharing few here

Python Flask : flask_cheatsheet.pdf

Python Pandas Cheat sheet : Pandas_Cheat_Sheet.pdf (pydata.org)

Python Data Science Cheat Sheet : datacamp-community-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/f04456d7-8e61-482f-9cc9-da6f7f25fc9b

PHP Cheat sheet (Book) : PHP-Cheat-Sheet.pdf (websitesetup.org)

Laravel Cheat Sheet : My beloved Laravel cheat sheet – DEV Community

React Cheat Sheet : React.js cheatsheet (devhints.io)

Javascript Cheat Sheet : JavaScript (JS) Cheat Sheet Online (htmlcheatsheet.com)

R Data visualization : Data visulaization

R Studio Forecast Cheat sheet : Forecast Package

Book Review : Four Thousand Weeks

GoodRead, ,

Nobody in the history of humanity has ever achieved “work-life balance”! That’s a powerful statement and validation of a feeling which I was carrying for many decades. I myself giving productivity seminars and coaching people to be productive and get the “work life balance”. Actually, I stopped suggesting people on “work life balance” long time, and was asking for “work life fit” , and I suppose that’s the crack in my belief in Getting Things Done.

Very recently I celebrated my 42nd Birthday, and one of my well wisher has sent me this. 🧐

And I came across this book, 4000 weeks! I lived 2200 weeks approx, and 4000 weeks is what typically a person leave at the age of 80! I just crossed my half life, And luckily this book got me into great revelation.

Master Your Time, Master Your Life

Brian Tracy (Time Management Guru)

This is what I believed, and striving so far to “manage the time”, This dream of somehow one day getting the upper hand in our relationship with time is the most forgivable of human delusions because this book made me understand the alternative, and it is so unsettling.

unfortunately, it’s the alternative that’s true: the struggle is doomed to fail. Because your quantity of time is so limited, you’ll never reach the commanding position of being able to handle every demand that might be thrown at you or pursue every ambition that feels important; you’ll be obliged to make tough choices instead. And because you can’t dictate, or even accurately predict, so much of what happens with the finite portion of time you do get, you’ll never feel that you’re securely in charge of events, immune from suffering, primed and ready for whatever comes down the pike… and that’s the “enlightening moment for me from this book”

Let’s talk about the book

By Oliver Burkeman,

lovely and short book on making us understand the concept of Finitude. The finite amount of time we have, and rather than spending this finite amount of time in struggling to manage it, how to be more effective by being in present and utilising it.

Key Take Aways

Patience become a form of power
In a world geared for hurry, the capacity to resist the urge to hurry—to allow things to take the time they take—is a way to gain purchase on the world, to do the work that counts, and to derive satisfaction from the doing itself, instead of deferring all your fulfillment to the future.

Hobbies have acquired this embarrassing reputation in an era so committed to using time instrumentally.
I’m also guilty of this feeling. Sometime hobbies become kind of mandate, pushing me to consume me time under hobby to help me be more productive. Hobbies on other hand should help me relax not make me more busy. Kind a oxymoron.

Be in present.
You’re so fixated on trying to make the best use of your time—in this case not for some later outcome, but for an enriching experience of life right now—that it obscures the experience itself. A more fruitful approach to the challenge of living more fully in the moment starts from noticing that you are, in fact, always already living in the moment anyway, whether you like it or not.

basic mistake—of treating our time as something to hoard, when it’s better approached as something to share.

What would it mean to spend the only time you ever get in a way that truly feels as though you are making it count? It’s never late to find yourself doubting the point of what you’re doing with your life, because it demonstrates that an inner shift has already occurred. we are no more preoccupied with the thoughts, ignoring the facts.

The real truth. that what you do with your life doesn’t matter all that much—and when it comes to how you’re using your finite time, the universe absolutely could not care less.

My mindmap

Book summary

Change, How Fast? How to predict?

Productivity, , , 
How to see the future without magical power...

Where is the car?

Photo clicked on Easter early morning in 1900, 5th Ave, New York

Where is the horse?

Photo clicked at same place on Easter Morning 1913

Assuming you can spot the car in first photo, it’s one single car moving along with all horse carts, and in the span of 13 year, can’t spot a single cart in this rush hours by cars (there is one, if you have good eyesight)

So what?

The change is fast, it’s consequential and it’s quintessential for life. And as Heraclitus said…

We can’t escape change, what will help reduce the anxiety for change is anticipating it. But without magical power or without magic ball, how to anticipate change or the future?

Anticipate future 🪄

Study Past

The past gives an ocean of information when it comes to understanding our behavior under a particular situation. If we are a good observer of the past, we can anticipate how we will behave with upcoming changes. As the changes are hardly drastic, unlike Pandemic like outlier events, the changes are typically subtle changes, what surprises us, is our ignorance. We ignore slight changes, which lead to big events. So, start studying the past, it could be as easy as just summarizing each day in your mind at the end of the day, week. (Can write diary, but I’m not good at it, hence not recommending it)

Trends in other domains will soon affect your domain

The future, as I said, is not always an outlier. We can’t prepare for outlier, and there is no point preparing for it, what we can do is connect the dots from past and help understand the upcoming future trends. Look for trends around, what’s happening in other industries will soon come to your domain. You need to be aware and forcefully look for changes happening in other industries.

Be an Entrepreneur

Whatever you do, think like an entrepreneur, what does that mean? When you are an entrepreneur, you have skin in the game. You are invested, and you will have strategies to minimize risk. Now that comes naturally to entrepreneurial person, as he will always strive to survive and succeed. This is a mindset switch. Just thinking of yourself as an owner of a product, department, or organization you are responsible for, you will start working toward sustaining it. Thinking you own your life itself brings lots of clarity and ownership. We will stop playing blame games if we own our life.

Formulate

The anticipation also forms the basis for the next two actionable, “explore” and “formulate”. How to formulate? Look for the following items to get some hints

  • What did last Year’s strategic plan say?
  • What does your boss or organization want?
  • What new you expect this year and why?

Formulate Strategy

  • Write your vision statement.
  • Write down the strategic plan to show how you will respond and flesh out the mission statement out of your vision.
  • Figure out ways to make sure your future comes out the way you want. 
The process is important, as important as the product 
BUT
The object of the plan is to change something so it must be IMPLEMENTED!

Hofstadter’s Law

Productivity

Any task you planning to tackle will always take longer than you expect, “even when you take into account Hofstadter’s law” in other word, even if you know that a given project is likely to overturn, and you adjust your schedule accordingly, it will overrun your new estimated finishing time too…

Whatever you plan, you gonna miss it!

I’m following productivity tools for past most than a decade, and teaching teams and people on productivity, time management and planning and prioritisation for past 10 years, and I came across this law!

It’s like I’m getting answers to my never ending grinding of brain to be “more productive” and get my inbox zero!

It never happens, even if it happens, it stays that way for short while to be more frustrated and more demanding on self to be more productive, it’s never ending quest to be more efficient.

So the crux of this law is, even if you give yourself a standard advice during planning to give yourself twice as much as time needed for activities that your think you needed, could actually make matter worst, I.e failing in meeting that too.

This law is everywhere. We are so used to it, we just ignore it. However great companies are, however they are full of “planners” and “project departments”, they all face the same ire and same sense of “falling behind schedule”. Whether it’s Airbus delaying and messing up with A380, or Boing messing up with its upcoming human space flight (I’m sure both companies pride themselves for best of the best talents on world for risk based planning of their project. But here we are. Whether it’s desi L&T, having one of the biggest project departments in India, messing with timelines on each and every projects (ahmm… sea link) or Reliance for that matter. Or take our daily failure of estimating in how much time it will take to pick up the groceries on the way home from work. I underestimate each time. It’s so evident, but it’s so hidden.

With much fanfare for this project, it’s what I understand 1/5th of whole scope, and not taking about cost escalations and timelines.

This is little unsettling, because the law seems true, certainly seems to be in my experience ~ it suggest something very strange : that the activities we try to plan for somehow actively resist our efforts to make them conform to our plans

🧐

Our effort to be come good planners, not only fails but causes things to take longer still. To be fair, specially during pandemic, whenever me and my partner tried to book some vacation in advance, eventually failed to execute due to last minute lock down announcements (planners are missing may be) or something at work didn’t stick to the plan.

Trouble with so emotionally invested in planning for future my whole life is though, while it occasionally prevent a catastrophe, the rest of the time it tend to exacerbate the very anxiety it was supposed to take care. Non stop reviews of plan, anxiety on probable delays and upcoming delays, so much so, small success of achieving a milestone was getting overwhelmed by upcoming doubts on future millstones and actions to avoid those future delays, misses the opportunity on applauding what went great with last achieved milestones.

No one is certain about future, specially you can never be truly certain about the future, when we don’t see present and appreciate it.

Timeseries Wrangling

Programming Language, , ,

By the way it should be Timeseries struggling.

Big data fight

It’s basically fight of tools. When you have plethora of tools available, you always get confused with which one to follow. In my case it’s R vs. Python

I like the ease of R to do data wrangling and get more insight but it’s Damm slow when it comes to running forecasts locally.

Python on other hand has huge ML libraries, and seems to be optimised for average PCs. Though the language itself is simple to learn, it’s not as nimble as R in RStudio

R also has many packages to do wonderful analytics specially forecasting, as that’s my interest. Python also has similar packages but mostly ML is it’s strength.

Now when I get data, I really spend time is weighing the tools to be used by using them, and it’s killing the time. I think in need to Jordon my workflow on what to use for what and stick with it.

In this journey, I think I’ll be sharing some nice shortcuts and some challenges those I’ll be facing and coming up with some solutions, optimised or not.

Let’s discuss this in future posts.

Productivity

Productivity, ,

Productivity Is More about Mind-Management than Time-Management

by Aytekin Tank

Came across a blog with above title. And it’s wonderful. It’s really mindset that.l needs to be fined tuned over what tools we use to make us more productive.

We have many tools and strategies as well as long list of self help books, what’s needed is a mindset to change once’s practice and become more productive.

What I have seen, including myself , we use and learn all these tools with Big Bang, but go back to original “productivity”, blaming either the tools, or being modest and blaming self discipline. Whatever those reasons are, the root cause is always “I’m not motivated” of being productive.

How counter productive is this? Oxymoron may be. But that’s the truth. The truth is, unless one has high Blood pressure or deep sickness, one doesn’t look for his health easily (I know, some of you reading this will be as fit as Rambo, but listen me out), similarly as ping the burn out is manageable and the underperformance is not impacting my routine I’m ok with my habit of loosing sight of my goals or procrastinate something.

But why to wait?

Look for opportunities and start now. Start now saving time and start now in investing future. I’ll talk about this in coming blog. Meanwhile do visit the blog which I came across. https://www.jotform.com/blog/productivity-is-more-about-mind-management-than-time-management/

See you soon

Long time no see!

Productivity
Thats for me 😅

long time no see

So that’s that, i started my first post way back in 2001, that time in blogpost. With an idea of sharing my know how and make all aware of current good practices.

My passion was welding and mostly all my early blogs are about them. Back then, 21 year old me learning lots of things, and it was fun.

last 22 years, has given me opportunities to diversIfy my knowledge. And I take pride in myself, of able to learn so many diverse items.

after a really long break, I tried to do some justice to my website, obviously moving to own domain was one, thought that will give some commitment to peruse this further.

Thinking got me here, and start with my 1st post. its mot technically first, but its first from my long lost love of writing and sharing.

Question is

  • What should I share?
  • What should be the frequency?
  • is it ok to share my other passions here?
  • will it be a good place, or is blogging right platform to share diverse information?
  • How to make this more relevant and vibrant.

So let me continue think I’ve it and post here whatever I think is relevant. May be after some time it will boil down to some categories. God knows. But let’s start

What I will be sharing?

Question is what I can share. Okie let me give a thought, what are my interest, as that will keep me driving.

#Welding and pressure vessel: this is long lost love. Past decade in away from this subject. May be I need to rekindle this, and start sharing what little I think it’s amusing to me.

Books I read #GoodReads : I read almost a book per month, and recently started making mind maps out of it, it’s interesting, and I think I should share this with you all

#Machine learning, Timeseries and Forecasting : New skill set. Want to share whatever amuses me or whatever I came across as challenges. Sometime it’s as small as syntax error or sometime it’s choosing the right platform. It’s all about R and Python, but it’s a hell of a world.

#Software : one of the biggest hobby, and a full time Garage project of mine. I got lots of insights and sleepless night while working on smithing as basic as creating my diary or as complex as creating calculations tools (hosted on this website). So lots of opportunities to share my know how here.

#Behavioural Science: This is a subject, I fallen in love with as I groomed as Manager and Leader. I work on #Productivity and # Planning as well as #skills to develop myself and my team members, I think it will be super cool to share my insights here

Let’s start, “The sooner I fall behind, the more time I have to catch up.”

Source unknown

So with those four five categories, let me work on next post.

See you soon

Book Review: Ringtone: Story of Nokia

GoodRead, ,

Ringtone: Exploring the Rise and Fall of Nokia in Mobile Phones

By Yves L. Doz and Keeley Wilson

Nokia, which easily can be termed as the most innovative company, helped bring the mobile revolution which currently we are in, adapting the need of being connected 24×7, and at its peak having more than 40% market share and a true leader. Though unnoticed many of us don’t know Nokia still exists and is the world’s largest 5G infra company and still innovating. But what touched us is the Nokia Mobile Company, and this book is about its rise and fall. Breaking general misconception and reasons behind its fall.

Against the general perception of failure due to not looking ahead or lack of innovation, the reason behind the fall of Nokia Mobile company is due to a change in business model to a matrix organisation 

That’s the summary of why Nokia mobile failed so miserably, it’s just because of poor execution of matrix organisation. And that’s what interests me, as a leader myself, justifying the use of matrix organisation for better productivity, it’s even important to understand the consequences of its poor execution. This book covers all those aspects with Nokia as a centrepiece. Whereat all the phases of it, we were touched as a consumer or as heartbroken engineers to see the fall of such a beautiful product company.

Small trivia

Before I begin the review of this book, let me share how mammoth the Nokia is. We always see it’s mobile and thinks Nokia started as a mobile company and ended as one. However, it’s surprising to know Nokia started as a Cable company in Finland in the 1800s, moved to Telecom infra in the 1900s, followed by infra for the first car telephone and diversified with the mobile decision in the late 1990s

What this book Is about

It tries to answer following questions, which generally we also want to know.

  • Could Nokia’s decline have been unavoidable—just an extreme case of Schumpeterian creative destruction?
  • Was it an instance of organizational evolution and adaptation gone astray down a dead end in the face of disruption and business model change?
  • Was this a failure of management volition—the wrong strategic decisions, poor choices of organization, inadequate management processes, weak leadership, and bad timing?

Some insights

Nokia always had the edge with its strong innovation. For example, although Sharp launched the first camera phone in 2001, it was Nokia’s camera phone released the following year which really changed the landscape, providing not only superior picture resolution but also picture-sharing applications that paved the way for multi-media communication. This product innovation came from fifteen labs around the world and a number of technical cooperation projects and partnerships.

Beyond product innovation, Nokia’s success was supported by an innovative and highly efficient supply chain system that had been built in the 1990s. Through this, Nokia was able to achieve much lower prices from suppliers than its competitors and ramp up new production lines to full capacity in a matter of days. In the 1990s it had also mastered lean production and Japanese quality processes and organized its integrated manufacturing around a few key regional hubs in Europe (Finland, Germany, Hungary), Asia (China), and North America (Mexico).

Just as success often results from many small positive steps, the roots of failure can usually be found in multiple small mistakes, which seem manageable when viewed in isolation. However following this book we can see small cracks, however, they are evident now, and could not be avoided in the actual scenario. For example communication gap between R&D and Sales and Marketing lead to ultimate failure with the Symbian operating system. Though a leader in OS development themselves, delay in adapting Android and working with Microsoft’s half-cooked mobile platform led to the last nail.

CORE principle

Author has evaluated the various ups and downs in Nokia with CORE dimensions .

  • C Cognition: this is what leader saw during that phase at Nokia, and strategise
  • O Organisation : it’s outing strategy to action
  • R Relationship : it’s about relationship with people.
  • E Emotions : Emotions are at play during various phases, this is what impacts the relatioy

My MindMap

Key Takeaway

  • Shifting from Symbian to Microsoft OS, Nokia overestimated brand loyalty and weren’t innovative enough
  • Decision made in 2001-05 made its impact in decline in 2013-15. Management need to be mindful of its long term impact.
  • Strategic foresight and intellectual leadership would have no value if not acted upon.
  • Poor management choices contributed to strategic stasis.
  • Successful past commitments leave a legacy
  • Outside parties, customers, major shareholders, strategic partners, industry pun- dits, and regulators can excessively and unduly influence one’s sense-making, particularly in adhering to a “being close to customers” logic.
  • Failure of cognition may not result from ignorance or lack of information, or even poor foresight, but from inadequate sense-making—i.e. not making effective sense of available information.
  • Management systems and processes have to acknowledge the irrepressible influ- ence of emotions, and thus leave some room for them to be legitimately expressed.

Where to buy. Available on Amazon as Kindle and Hard copy.