I spent my summers as a kid in Popcorn, Indiana (a real place, I know), where my grandmother had a sewing room with a magnet that said “She who dies with the most fabric wins.” She was a master creator, making me matching outfits with my Samantha American Girl doll and my brother, knitting quilts for all of her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, and inventing twists on potholders and potluck carriers and pot scrubbers.

One summer, she took me to Joann Fabric to pick out a pattern for a set of dresses she was making for our cousins. We sorted through bolts of fabric, laid out patterns, measured and remeasured patterns crisscrossing these huge tables. She taught me how to pinch in the pattern at the darts in the back to match my slim cousin’s waistline, how to let out the fabric for my pregnant cousin’s belly, how to adopt a pattern to be for a shirt instead of a dress. I watched her masterfully manipulate this single pattern ‘for people around 5’7”’ into the contours of each of our extremely different bodies. She took the component parts of a singular solution to extend it beyond its original intention.

My grandmother was a master at taking a framework and then fitting it to the present problem at hand. She taught me a million things, like how to knit, and the right amount of stale for Oreos so they’re perfect in a glass of milk, and I’m still practicing her ability to fit the right solution to the right problem at the right time. Part of practicing that art of creation for me is to see connectivity between attempts to fix issues I’ve faced growing businesses. As an executive at an exited startup and now COO of a software agency I co-founded, I often face similar problems again and again, some of my own doing, some that are shared with me by other founders. The solutions often echo one another, even if they don’t overlap entirely.

I am kicking off a project where I’ll be sharing the frameworks I have used to solve growing pains as the COO of two 7 figure businesses. My goal in sharing these learnings is that they can become patterns that you can nip, tuck, and apply to your own growing pains. There is no guidebook when you start a business, but I’d love to hand you a pattern.

My fixes worked for me and if you happened to have the exact same circumstances as me, the advice would probably be pretty applicable to you too. But, if you don’t live in a city, have a young child, have a “f**k off” fund, have a large team to support you, haven’t started/failed/succeed at multiple businesses, aren’t white or able bodied, my advice won’t copy + paste perfectly into your life. What works for you will be a product of your exact circumstances, many of which I won’t have good insight for. But, hopefully some of the patterns I’ve used can be useful, if laid over your circumstances and shifted to fit your needs.

I’ll break down my fixes into component parts, display those as a pattern you can see the foundation of, and give you an example of how they can be applied in other situations. I’ll try to showcase applicability to someone different from myself, so you can watch broader applicability in practice.

Like my grandmother, you can take my store-bought pattern, nip and tuck the darts to fit your own body, and create a custom build to match your life circumstances and your capacity.

I’ll be posting every week for the next couple months. I don’t want this to be a one-way street, so if you’re a founder who is looking for a community like this, I’d love to hear from you. Please send me a message if that’s you.

Yup, navigating the idea maze can often feel just like this … Image Source tl;dr:

In Mar-Apr 2022, Karen and I collaborated and ran the first cohort of The Meta Fellowship (no affiliation to the company fka Facebook), so named because we wanted to empower people with the meta skills we thought were important to help people navigate their careers, which is where they spend the vast majority of their time. We did know many people in the first cohort personally, but I’m still proud to say we ended up with 13 ICs (representing product 📱, design 🎨, data 📊 and engineering 👩‍💻) and 4 engineering managers across 5 countries in North America, South America and Africa 🇧🇷🇨🇴🇰🇪🇿🇼🇺🇸.

The mindset shifts that we triggered and frameworks/tools empowered people to have difficult conversations with managers, advocate for compensation increases, learn how to communicate/influence and survive in a tough environment, and some even made the transition to a great fit new role! It seemed like there was something there there worth doubling down on (at least on the IC track), so I’ve been hard at work recruiting and finalizing a second cohort for Fall 2022. 🚀🍁🤞🏼

You might be able to squeeze in if this sounds interesting before we shut off applications at the end of this week, application here: https://www.themetafellowship.org/apply.

1/ Navigating The Idea Maze 💡 A) Some Background Context 🖼 Karen and I had a history of collaboration across education projects, and I asked her if she might be open to collaborating on this back in 2021. At that time, we were curious about how we might demystify and empower more people career-wise: to understand tech, do what they found meaningful, challenging and also be compensated accordingly.

She came from a technical background and had worked as a founder and engineering manager in tech, mentoring/helping numerous people transition into tech and supporting her direct reports to grow in their abilities. She cared deeply about addressing what she called ‘last-mile’ gaps in education (including via a nonprofit she helped cofound in South Africa called Bona Ikamva that mentors high school students and helps them choose career paths and majors while applying for university and is powered by volunteers).

I had come from a nontechnical background but had been building a nonprofit school network in South Africa and also running experiences and experiments to empower people from various backgrounds. I was also shifting from K12 to adult learning and upskilling because:

I had discovered economic empowerment to be an important twin of educational empowerment. The feedback loop to know if what you’re building works is shorter in adult than K12. Frankly, it was more lucrative. B) Early Versions 🐣 Leading up to this, an early prototype actually began as an explainer series trying to demystify tech for non technical folks. We had drafted the first in what we planned to be a 10–12 email series.

Yes, this is an actual screenshot of the concept note in Google Docs, before we evolved and switched to Notion! But, we realized we were missing a few key things that held us back, and one which was going to be a big stumbling block in terms of impact: we did not have an audience. In my day job (scaling a developer training product/bootcamp for The African Leadership Group), I was writing a similar email series as part of an engagement drip email campaign (to keep users engaged between application acceptance and start of program). But a few months in, I could see neither of us had really spent time or felt super compelled by this form factor, which caused us to pivot …

This time we started dreaming up a course/fellowship in Notion (which we used to build and convert into a landing page using super.so).

We initially focused on this because we felt there many things that existed in the broader landscape and wanted to focus on (what we perceived of as) a gap, intentionally deprioritizing:

❌ We didn’t want to focus on complete beginners (whether in their discipline or new to work period) because there were lots of options for this, including increasingly aggregator and navigation tools like CareerKarma. ❌ We didn’t focus on helping people get into tech (though we did organically attract a couple people like this). ❌ We didn’t focus just on general management training because we felt like many other companies and books already covered some of the core techniques (e.g., LifeLabs Learning or 📕 Measure What Matters on OKRs by John Doerr). ✅ We focused on what we felt was unique or missing from the ecosystem, and thus what we thought would differentiate our experience. 🕳 We believed there was a gap, and not enough career navigation resources or training that used contemplation as a core tool/framework or really helped people deal with imposter syndrome. 2/ Testing and Validation 🧪 Sowe did what you’re supposed to do, we aligned on and crystallized a concept (fellowship experience with group facilitation/coaching to cover key themes/topics and individual 1:1 coaching to go deeper) and then began sharing it with folks in our network in August 2021 to gauge interest and run some customer validation interviews.

Through our first round of interviews, we further refined our user persona:

💼 Software engineers / developers with at least 3–4 years of experience, aka not beginners 👩‍💼 Looking for support moving from individual contributor to manager / managing teams of engineers 🤔 Self-aware 😊 Non-entrepreneurial seemed a better fit, but open to anyone generally aligned with the above if they feel they will get value! 🎒 ‘Courses’ were too limiting and had too many biases and preconceived notions against (even cohort-based ones), so we actually shifted toward framing it as a ‘Fellowship.’ Armed with a refined user persona and the Notion/Super landing page, we did a second wave of outreach.

We ultimately iterated twice more on the value proposition and target user, transitioning to a Webflow site and doing waves of outreach in

Sep 2021 (realizing people might not realize skills they lack here, we did a wave reaching out to managers asking about direct reports) and Nov 2021-Jan 2022 (positioning for and reaching out to individuals themselves again), when we were able to recruit a group of values aligned folks (mostly from our networks, past employers, and a tiny bit of sharing on LinkedIn) — all of whom were able and willing to pay something (and in some cases, with their companies agreeing to sponsor). 👤 The User Personas for each version:

v1: engineers with 5–10 years of experience who wanted to level up from IC to manager

v2: had a similar product user persona as v1, but a different marketing user persona, as we thought we might be able to have more success through engineering managers because we thought they might be more likely to identify their direct reports who could use this experience and upskilling

v3 we expanded beyond just engineers because product managers, designers, and data/product analysts (more broadly ‘people in tech’) were asking if they could participate → and we returned to aligning our product and marketing user persona

we had to decide if our experience could support this wider audience given we had been thinking the experience would a rough mix of: 50% self reflection & authentic leadership 5% communication 25% technical skills we decided that expanding our audience wouldn’t change the core offering too much. 3/ Launching and Results 🚀 What was great for both Karen and myself was that now that we had a group of values-aligned people who wanted to be a part of this experience (through our Nov-Jan outreach), we interviewed them and identified the top themes (listed in order of prominence):

How do I overcome lack of confidence, or deal with imposter syndrome? How do I clearly and firmly communicate my strengths to others? How do I know what is the right role for me? How do I identify the skills I need to learn and design a learning plan for myself? How do I transition into a traditional technical career path? How do I improve my connection and collaboration with other team members? How do I improve my productivity and efficacy? How do I become a better leader? Then we designed the content and experience specifically to respond to the above, with this group of committed individuals serving as a strong motivation and forcing function to create content/frameworks and synthesize insights from research and our own experience that we thought could help fellows unpack and address these top of mind themes.

To figure out logistics:

We asked/sent surveys confirming if people across 12 hours of time zones would be willing to jump on a call at the same time (it turns out they were, but some didn’t always have cameras on which we think hampered the community building experience!). We set 6 weekly group sessions for everyone and the specific dates. Everyone received a set number of individual 1:1 coaching sessions with Karn, myself or other mentors we brought in given the career domain and challenges fellows were wrestling with. There were three bonus group sessions for the 4 engineering managers. Our Weekly Group session topics ended up being: 🧐🦸‍♀️ Topic 1: Contemplation and Identifying Super Powers (along w Intros) 👤🦄 Topic 2: Imposter Syndrome and Contemplating Ideal You 📣👂 Topic 3: Improving Communication and Facilitation 🗺️💼 Topic 4: Planning Your Role and Career 🌱🎓 Topic 5: Becoming A Life Long Learner 🦁🏆 Topic 6: Leadership Styles Overview (and Close) What we experienced and learnt: We had nearly 100% attendance We built frameworks that were unique and powerful, especially for imposter syndrome, communication, contemplation and superpowers/ideal you. The planning your role and career, life-long learning and leadership frameworks we built are similar to others but we felt still useful (and hope to continue refining it over time). 13 of our fellows attended the final event (75%) and expressed some promising shifts in mindset (a few sample quotes): I learnt so much about communication in a way that was intriguing. I thought I was good at communication. I just took it for granted, but you can actually be deliberate about your audience, and the five pillars we talked about: presence, facilitation, content, delivery. I learnt about myself and the value of contemplation — from our first meeting. This is something I’ve been trying to do, which is hear my own voices and contemplate how I’m feeling and what I’m thinking. When I started this process, I had a knot — now I can see that I can untangle this knot [by giving me] a lot of tools for contemplation, helping me understand that I don’t need to be afraid to make some difficult decisions and how to draw up an action plan. I realized that I am the owner of my career and life. When talking about what we need and want, identifying what those things are for ourselves was helpful for me to articulate. I was feeling weird about some stuff at work and I wasn’t really sure what it was that I wanted to be able to articulate. Then I was able to immediately turn around and talk to my boss about it — and immediately get this problem resolved. The biggest mindset shift — I always had some avoidance of the management track. I think being able to participate has given me | I got to feel more what management means and I may like it. So I’m embracing it. The way I view imposter syndrome has really changed. It’s something I struggled with for a long time. Listening to everyone share their experience with imposter syndrome. That made everything a little bit ok. I remember something Karn shared during that session: sometimes imposter syndrome is not a bad thing, you are putting yourself on this level and you want to get to that level. Thinking of it that way made everything seem ok. It’s something I take into meetings when imposter syndrome starts to creep in — everyone else on this call is also experiencing IS, but it’s just that they’re wearing it well. It’s something I’ve taken with me and something I’ll implement for a very long time. These tools allow me to think, to get a scientific method to embrace the movement/change in life that is inevitable — to give a direction, to say “I want this.” To say, “I’m here” — talking to Mari also gave me deep confidence to look for a job with a scientific way to approach it. [During] the last session with Rudulfo , we learnt that there are different ways to learn, for example this space to learn from each other and each others’ experience. This was mind opening/blowing for me — I used to think about learning only in traditional ways. One learning goal for me is taking ownership of my skills — and let others know that my experience and my knowledge is valued. That is very important for me. And now, with the help of Karen and Mari, I was able to apply for a different job. Next week, I am going to a new company! It’s amazing

Photo by D K on Unsplash Things we wished had gone better or aim to improve in the future: 🎥 Requiring cameras on will be a pre-requisite for the future; it’s just so important to building trust and relationships in the short time we have together each week. 🌱 We did not do great at scaffolding and fostering community, and creating the space for deeper/lasting relationships across fellows. 📊 It’s one thing to hear anecdotally how people believe the changed, but actually measuring the impact of this change is something we’re dreaming up. 🤝 We did not ask for referrals or sharing to help recruit future fellows until much later (a few months) after the cohort ended, and thus we didn’t capitalize on the great experiences fellows had to build our next cohort. 🔀 We did have assignments/readings in between but they weren’t super well integrated and we didn’t otherwise have deeper asynchronous learning content. 4/ What’s Next? My cofounder Karen has gotten super busy and found other avenues to effect change and mentor others, but I felt like there was something here.

I started with a product spec and a hypothesis to better measure impact, and worked with a past participant on an initial redesign (though she paused to focus on her day job).

I continued speaking with folks (new and old relationships), and got a bump of applicants when I published my announcement about joining Reforge on LinkedIn.

In parallel, to really see if this had legs, I began to refine my user personas and also match the individuals against them. I also wanted to test if people would really want and be able to pay on two tiers (early career/emerging market at $250 and mid career/developed market at $500).

Three persona themes began to emerge and be validated against my hypotheses:

Culture Influencer / Upward Navigator (more than 5 years of experience)— these folks are trying to define the right role in my current company and expand/elevate strategic influence (sometimes it’s people just surviving in a tough environment, but other times it’s people figuring out how to thrive!) Career Navigator (early career, less than 5 years) — these folks are navigating potential career transition & pursuing new opportunities (and possibly new functional domains) actively because they have a hunch that the current function and/or environment is not the right fit (or they don’t want to be doing this forever) (an anti pattern is someone who is primarily focused on getting a better paying or more prestigious job) Domain Expander (early career, less than 5 years) — these folks are working toward skills expansion within their domain, and trying to continue to level up by finding the right environments, managers, projects and skills/expertise development For all of the right fit folks, they value and see how important it is to navigate and own their career with introspection & introspection.

So, I’m defining success metrics 🎯 this time:

👤 Team: Running a cohort solo (without Karen) 🍣 Cohort: Recruiting a cohort of 6–8 personas that seem to be struggling with issues others might face 💰 Revenue: Receiving a target amount on average per participant, implying a certain top line revenue (we experimented with different explicit pricing tiers this time, will likely continue to iterate/evolve this in the future | I’ve also gotten better at selling) 🔀 Asynch: Building and introducing asynchronous content 👍 Impact: Receiving an average rating of 8/10 on satisfaction and an NPS of 50+ along with better measurement of impact of the fellowship using a newly designed rubric and self assessment (we’ll be sharing this next week as we think it’s helpful to anyone trying to define/establish career product-market fit in their first 10 years) 🤝 Referrals: getting a referral of one-two good fit personas per person to fill a future cohort 📣 Content: Forcing mechanism to create and publish content on a weekly basis (I’ve published at least on LinkedIn/my website twice, Monday August 15th and Monday August 22nd — let’s see if I can keep this up) Fingers crossed I get to build this with Cohort 2, acceptance emails (with final cost) went out to 7 individuals last week. As of publishing this Monday August 29th, 2022 at 1:30 pm EST, 6 have accepted! 🎉

My hope is I’ll get to validate demand and find a way to repeatably, reliably , systematically grow this in a (business) sustainable way. We’ll see how it goes from here. Follow to stay updated on how this goes.

5

Don’t Say You Don’t Have Time

Everyone has 24 hours every day. Elon Musk has 24 hours. He is able to manage so many companies and has the time to play Elden Ring, as well as accomplish so many things such as sending rockets to outer space and developing full self-driving vehicles.

With so many people hustling and working hard each and every day, it seems that time is always not enough. You want to chill and watch Netflix, but also want to build on your side hustle. On the other hand, you want to play your favorite game of Pokemon too.

It’s not that you don’t have time. You spend it mostly on unproductive activities. How many times do you pick up your phone in a day? How many hours do you spend a day watching a video of a dog chasing its own tail by scrolling through Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and Tiktok?

To tackle this problem, plan out your day the previous night. Personally, I use of Google Calendar to plan out my day. Every night, I will plan out what I want to do the next day. Together with a to-do list (another good method that I will elaborate in the next sections), I plan out how long I will need to complete the task. By having a specific task to do at a certain time of the day, I reduce the chances of me procrastinating, as well as deciding on what to do.

Finding Your Peak Hours

Are you a morning person, an afternoon person, or a night person? Different people have different body clocks. That is the same as your peak hours. Do you find yourself concentrating better and able to do deep work at certain hours during the day? Knowing when your peak hours are can help you in the long run. You will experience increased productivity and efficiency by doing deep work during your peak hours.

Your environment plays a part too. Have a clean environment when you’re doing deep work. By having a clean environment, your mind will focus better on your task. Your peripheral vision affects your concentration more than you would expect. Just shifting things away from your direct sight is not as helpful as you would think.

Find a dedicated area to do your deep work. Train your brain that when you’re in this area, it’s time for deep work. Productivity and efficiency will increase as your brain automatically switches to work mode. If you can, invest in a good pair of noise-cancellation headphones. This way, you can multiply your concentration by shutting out the outside noise. You can try binaural beats where you change the state of your brainwave to help you achieve maximum focus.

To-Do List

Of course, the most important tip to improve productivity is to have a to-do list. I’m sure everyone including your parents and kids knows of this tip. You use this very often. From grocery shopping to completing your work tasks. Take a look at your most recent to-do list for your work. How many items are there on your list?

Do you find yourself adding more and more tasks to your to-do list? How many times do you really complete all the tasks on your to-do list? Do you feel suffocating and demoralized looking at your to-do list? It certainly feels great when you cross out items from your to-do list. It gives you a sense of achievement.

Having too many things on your to-do list will affect your efficiency. Having too much quantity affects the quality of your work. You will feel the pressure to finish certain tasks faster in order to finish subsequent tasks on your to-do list. Personally, I have a maximum of 5 tasks on my list at any one point in time. This makes my list less cluttered and I can focus on providing quality work. Having fewer items on your list also gives you a buffer for any urgent work that needs to be done. At the end of the day, if you have lesser tasks in your list, chances are you will be able to strike off all the tasks for the day. This keeps you motivated, satisfied, and fulfilled. This way, you will find fun and joy in clearing your to-do list, instead of dreading it every day when you look at your list.

Let me know what you plan to do and what resonates with you the most.

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The self-loathing that comes from not knowing enough is unbearable. To ease the pain, I am always in rush to find new information. Information of any kind. If I don’t know something and I know I don’t know this, I want to know now. Gave you a headache, right? I know!

The question still remains, do I actually need this information? Or do I just ‘think’ I need it?

The truth is, learning so many things hardly solves anything for you. Remember, I am not against knowing important things. I am just talking about useless information that is taking useful space in my brain.

Think of a small tribe living in the dense forest on the outskirts of a city. I am guessing they are happier than the majority of people living in that city. Why? Because they know exactly how much they need to know and they do the needful. We, the city dwellers, on the other hand, feel smart for knowing too much about this world. We do only a little about it.

However, the tribe knows that they have the information they need. It is passed down from generation to generation. They have an open mind to new information and they are kind. Hence, they are happy.

How do you know you have too much useless information in your brain? It’s simple. Ask yourself, are you utilizing it in your daily life? Is it going to be useful for your learning? If the answer is no. Then, welcome to the club.

There might be some information that you might not need right away but it will be useful at some point in your life. For example, first aid or sex education. This is the essential information and it is worth knowing. I am talking about knowing too much about the private lives of celebrities.

Let’s get back to our tribe of happy people. They are utilizing the information they have to the maximum extent. Information put to use is knowledge. And a knowledge repeated often becomes wisdom. It is the healthy balance of consumption and creation that makes you happy. Create maximum out of the information you have. Turn your information into action and you will be contented. And contentment is true happiness.

Now take a moment and think of how many things you know just because you wanted to feed your ego. But one might argue, What if we need it someday?

Wait! Who talks like that?

Our parents!

We, the so-called new generation, think that we are smarter than our predecessors. Because apparently, we are not doing all the stupid stuff they used to do. Like hoarding unnecessary stuff in our house hoping they might need it someday.

It is true, though. We are not doing stupid things they used to do. Because we do them differently. Only our domain of stupidity has changed, not stupidity. They used to clutter their house, but now we clutter our brains.

Therefore, ignorance is bliss.

Don’t take this advice in a literal sense. Learn everything you need and forget the rest.

A great way to start doing it is not clicking on the clickbait-y titles of Buzzfeed articles and YouTube videos. Know that you know enough. Practice mindfulness and be in the present. You will know what you need to learn to make your life easier. And learn that only. This way it will be convenient for you to put your information to use.

Diwali is coming, this time de-clutter your brain as well. The more you refine your brain the finer ideas it will produce.

Adios!

Annual Review Of Your Finance

What gets tracked, gets results. Being a person that is good and obsessive with data and numbers, I love to track my finances. From daily tracking of my expenses to allocating my income. I have a video on how to allocate your finances here.

By reviewing your finances regularly, you get to understand your money inflows and outflows. If you noticed your outflows increasing, you can have timely action in lowering your expenses the following month. Also, if you noticed your outflows decreasing, you are able to allocate them into investments. This way, all your money is put into good use and none is left idling around.

Having an annual review is the minimum, but I suggest doing it monthly. You might think it’s a hassle doing it monthly. It’s actually quite simple and you can finish reviewing it in 10 minutes if you actively track your expenditure throughout the month. I use a simple expense tracking app where I record how much money was spent immediately after I paid. At the end of the month when I’m reviewing my finance, I will simply transfer these numbers into my excel and it will tell me how am I doing. I have a free simple template, you can download it here.

Have a Comprehensive Insurance Coverage

Do you think that finance consists only of their money in their bank and retirement accounts? Having comprehensive insurance coverage is very important. Insurance is a hedge against illnesses, especially those that cost a bomb. Without insurance, any serious illnesses will set you many years back in life. Other than the loss of income during your treatment and recovery phase, you have to fork out money to pay for your necessities.

Some people suggest saving on insurance by investing directly in the stock market or the S&P500 index to compound their money. While mathematics works out in the long run, this method failed to consider what will happen if you get a serious illness within a few years of starting this comparison. If you get insurance, you will get a way massive payout (depending on your policy) compared to the gains you receive from your investment in the S&P500 index. Most of the time, the gains you receive will be way lesser than the lump sum payout from your insurance policy.

Of course, it will be good if you do not have any serious illness that makes you utilize your insurance policy. Hence, this is a good hedge against such scenarios that depletes your finances.

Have Specific Goals

Do you still remember the goals you set for yourself at the start of this year? Are you still on track? Or have you forgotten about them? Many people have big goals. Yes, it is important to aim big, but it must also be actionable. By breaking down your big goals into smaller actionable goals, it will be easier for you to keep track and follow your plan. Having big goals can be overwhelming to many people.

For example, if your goal is to complete your Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) qualification, set a timeline and cater for failures. You can set a timeline of 4 years, catering for surprising events that happen along the way. Within these 4 years, you can take 1 paper every year. Within the year, study for 1 hour every weekday and 5 hours every weekend. Plan out what you want to study for each session. By having these specific goals and plans, you do not need to spend time thinking about what should you study or do on any day.

This is the same for your finances. If you plan to retire by 40, what should you do every year, every month, and every day for you to reach that goal?

Let me know what you plan to do and what resonates with you the most.

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Focus, is the most important commodity in the modern world. Even though it is the most important commodity, you are giving most of it away for a false sense of reward. Our families and friends are giving up their focus on dopamine hits, they spend hours scrolling through Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube, losing their sense of self and becoming a slave to the system.

Photo by Maurício Mascaro from Pexels

If you are reading this during your commute, or in a public place, look around!! Everyone and their pets are glued to their screens, watching shitty sitcoms and overly dramatic news.

Isn’t that wonderful, we will slowly evolve into pods, like the ones in Matrix, lose all sense of self and become human batteries.

Future Human Batteries

Ewww, really disgusting, but it is happening all around us. Maybe not that extreme, but it does have detrimental effects on our mental health. We are losing focus.

Focus as I stated earlier is a commodity and if used properly could change lives.

The Russian quote

“If you chase two rabbits, you will not catch either one”. The ideology behind this statement is that you should only concentrate on one project at a time. There is much more nuance to this ideology, which we can apply to generally improve our lives.

The main takeaway is to not chase rabbits but to breed them, so you have a sustainable business.

Amazing Business Idea

I am kidding, though not a bad business idea :)

The main takeaway from the quote is to concentrate on one particular “thing” at a time.

Can this apply to the modern world?

It “kinda” does. We have so many different tasks to accomplish on any given day, that it is impossible to throw our to-do list in the trash and just have one main project or task. We are forced to take on many different tasks and it is much more enjoyable if we take them on our own accord.

If you want to improve your professional standings, you must spend some time out of your personal life to upskill. You have to do more than one project at any given time.

How many projects should you take on?

The general consensus in the productivity field is to take on any number of projects between 3 to 7. The number is totally subjective and requires experimentation. I land somewhere in between, I usually have 4 to 5 projects at any given time.

How do you allocate time and focus on all your projects? It is impossible to focus on all of them right?

Wrong.

The best example requires us to take a detour through history.

Napoleon Bonaparte

Napoleon Bonaparte is the closest historical figure with comparable daily life. He spent most of his time strategizing, writing letters (analogous to emails), and reforming cities. He was a legendary military strategist and had valiant victories throughout Europe.

Hiding his hands to reduce his power

He was also known for his astounding ability to juggle many projects simultaneously. When asked about this, he claimed he could compartmentalize his brain, focus on projects when needed, and forget about them.

This is our objective as we progress toward this self-improvement journey. We should learn to compartmentalize our brain, to call upon focus whenever we need it, and leverage it to improve ourselves.

Practical Step

Our focus is being shattered by these social media sites and our phones. The only practical step to improving your focus is to put your phone on airplane mode, during the time you work on your projects. Step away from your phone and start building the “thing” you have always wanted to build. Mine was to build a personal website and I am building it right now.

There we go, the secret is simple. Keep focusing on whatever is vital and improve at it.

Hopefully, you are motivated to push yourselves.

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Sam graduated from a top university with a 1st honours Masters degree. He and his family had high hopes for his future. Yet, 18 months after graduation, he was still jobless and was brought to see me for treatment of depression.

It so happened Sam never managed to properly start looking for work. He struggled over 2 issues.

After graduation, he could not figure out what he really wanted to do. He did not want to start with a job he dislike but he just could not decide on a career he prefers.

More importantly, he was overwhelmed by procrastination and simply failed to get started with job-hunting. He set tasks daily to look for work, but invariably could not get them done. By the end of the day, most of these seemingly simple tasks on his to-do list were still undone. He was getting nowhere after a few months.

Time flew by quickly. As he faced daily defeats due to procrastination, his self-esteem plummeted. After a year of inner struggle, his feelings of worthlessness evolved into a full blown episode of depression.

Procrastination is the destroyer of dreams.

Most of us have goals in life we want to achieve. Yet, few of us could carry them out to the fullest. The main obstacle to success is our tendency to procrastinate. The harder a task is, the likelier we will procrastinate over it.

Although there are numerous books and blog articles written on the topic, people still suffer from procrastination regardless. This is despite procrastination could be contained if you have the know-how.

What is Procrastination?

Procrastination is the act of delay doing tasks you set out to do. There are always tasks we know we should be done and these could be related to work, study or self improvement. Quite often, the crucial tasks that could make a difference to the outcome are unpleasant and hard to begin. Therefore, instead of doing those important but unpleasant tasks, we tend to be distracted and spend time of irrelevant but pleasurable activities. So, instead of writing an essay due soon, one choses to get distracted and browse the internet instead.

How to diagnose Procrastination ?

To diagnose Procrastination, there are 5 key features that need to be met.

• I. There is a persistent failure in getting crucial tasks done.

• II. Instead of pursuing tasks that need to be done, time is wasted on irrelevant and often pleasurable activities. This is associated with a preference for short-term pleasure, rather than enduring hardship and attaining long-term goals.

• III. In the end, only a small fraction of the goals set for a certain period are achieved. The procrastination will cope by thinking of an excuse and postponing the task to another day.

• IV. Even if some of the tasks are completed, they are rushed through just before the deadline and with suboptimal quality.

• V. Feelings of uselessness, regret and frustration will arise eventually after the failure in attaining the goal becomes apparent.

I will talk more about why we procrastinate in the next blog.

There comes a time in ones life when taking risk becomes inevitable. We generally tend to be risk averse as risk is associated with danger and not taking risk is perceived to be a sign of security.

The problem with risk is the possible downsides that comes with taking the risk which lead to a terrible outcome but we forget that risk does come with its own rewards or the upsides.

Not taking risks in a way becomes risky as we are limiting ourselves from the potential gains which could drastically improve our life, sort of like iatrogenic where an easy fix to a problem leads to a bigger problem.

Photo by Loic Leray on Unsplash

Iatrogenics

The problem with Iatrogenics is that by denying ourselves of exposure to stress, risk or volatility in a cozy environment can actually backfire and lead to a suboptimal life full of worries, fears and mediocrity, which can stand in the way to achieve self actualization which is the top most need in the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

The way ahead would be to avoid Iatrogenic and learn to manage risk so that it ends up benefiting us instead of us being fragile.

Seneca’s Barbell

Seneca’s barbell strategy is one of the interesting strategies that can be considered for managing risk in an antifragile manner. The idea is mainly about how one can clip the downside from a situation and maximize the upside with infinite rewards. This is done by taking very low risk most of the time and rarely getting involved with something very risky with a very high reward. This way, risk of ruin which could have terrible consequences is prevented and yet, one is exposed to a possibility of high reward.

Finance and Barbells

In financial terms, this would mean to have lets say 90% investments in low risk portfolios likes cash, fixed deposits and allocating the rest 10% in very high risk, high reward investments. This way, one would limit the losses and yet be exposed to a possibility of very high reward.

Applying Barbell to Work

In terms of profession , it would be similar to having a stable day job and yet occasionally spending time on personal aspirations which could help in advancing one’s profession in a different direction thus clipping the downside and being exposed to maximum gain.

In terms of mastering a skill, this could mean practicing deep work with uninterrupted chunks of time and then not doing anything after that. This is important because rewards or returns are usually non linear and one can reap crazy rewards by dedicating a huge chunk of time and effort in a controlled manner. But of course, doing this every day, neglecting work life balance would not be sustainable and perhaps one should do the same when it comes to leisure as well.

Applying Barbell to Life

In terms of trying something new, like lets say solo travel or an adventure sport, it would be good to have a backup like a stash of money or some trusted contact within arms reach which clips the down side and yet take bold and risky actions which could potentially provide an experience that could help one grow as a person.

Conclusion

In the end, the greatest pioneers were once risk takers and we owe our civilization and technology to them. So the more we take calculated risk, the more we prosper.

Reading traditional sheet music can be difficult. Many people, like professional musicians and dedicated hobbyists, put in considerable time and effort to learn how to read it. Most people don’t.

About This Project

This is a personal project where I’m trying to A) solve a problem, B) get a conversation started, and C) have fun thinking about a hobby I love. I’m addressing the casual piano player, one who wants to learn how to play songs well, but doesn’t have the time or attention to learn from traditional sheet music. This target user is probably learning easy, contemporary songs, and already knows what they sound like before they learn them. Maybe they’d even like to sing over the music!

What this project is not:

• A professional project: There’s no “real user research” here, just a designer, some crayons, and friends willing to give feedback.

• Exact visual forms and shapes: I’ve used basic shapes and formats. These are simply mockups intended to demonstrate a concept.

• (thanks, Wikipedia), and it’s amazing! A professional instrumentalist can sit down in front of any piece of sheet music and play it, even if they’d never heard it before. That notation is flexible, precise, and has stood the test of time. But, as I mentioned, there’s a hefty learning curve. My new notation is for new audiences, not for those already proficient with traditional sheet music.

So here’s what I came up with…Overall Form

It looks like a keyboard: doesn’t it? Recognizability is critical here, that the student sees a note on the sheet and can associate that with a physical location (a key). The challenge with this approach minimizing the amount of visual noise, so I chose to use thin lines to represent black keys, and the adjacent negative space represent white keys.

The reality is only some of your money is paid to the artists you listen to. The rest of your money (and it’s probably most of your money) goes somewhere else. That “somewhere else” is decided by a small group of subscribers who have gained control over your money thanks to a mathematical flaw in how artist royalties are calculated. This flaw cheats real artists with real fans, rewards fake artists with no fans, and perhaps worst of all communicates to most streaming music subscribers a simple, awful, message: Your choices don’t count, and you don’t matter.

If you love music and want your money to go to the artists that you listen to, consider this simple hack. It’s easy to do, breaks no laws, does not violate any terms of service, directs more money to your favorite artists, but doesn’t actually require you to listen to any music, and best of all, it could force the music industry to make streaming royalties fair(er) for everyone. Sounds good, right?

So let’s cut to the chase. Here’s the hack: This September, when you aren’t listening to music, put your favorite indie artists on repeat, and turn the sound down low.

You might be saying “Wait a second, turn the sound down? How the heck does that do anything?”

Good question, let me explain.

The Flaw in the Big Pool

Streaming services (Spotify, Apple, etc.) calculate royalties for artists by putting all of the subscription revenue in one big pool. The services then take out 30% for themselves. The remaining 70% is set aside for royalties.

This giant bag of royalties is then divided by the overall number of streams (aka “plays” or “listens”). The result is called the “per-stream royalty rate”.

The problem lies in the fact that this “Big Pool method” only cares about one thing, and one thing only: the overall number of streams. It does not care even a tiny little bit about how many subscribers generated those streams.

So why is this bad?

You Are Worthless

Imagine a hypothetical artist on a streaming service. Which do you think that artist would rather have: 10,000 fans who stream a song once, or one fan who streams it 10,001 times? Seems obvious, right? 10,000 fans is much better than one fan! But the Big Pool method, which only cares about the number of clicks, says the single person is worth more!

So this guy…

Ass-Backwards

This is bad for the artist, but astoundingly it’s even worse for streaming services: if each subscriber is paying $10 a month then those 10,000 subscribers would generate $1.2M in annual revenue, while the single user only generates a measly $120. Clearly the services benefit from getting more subscribers, not more streams, so why are they incentivizing streams and ignoring subscribers?

Even more backwards, the Big Pool method encourages the acquisition of heavy-usage subscribers, who are the easiest customers to get and retain (in fact most “music aficionados” are already subscribers), but offers little for light-usage subscribers, who are not only the hardest customers to get and retain, but are more profitable (by not requiring as much bandwidth) and most importantly dramatically greater in number.

It’s as if a car dealership paid the biggest commissions to the employees who sold the fewest number of cheap cars, and completely stiffed the employees who sold lots of expensive ones!