Cultivating and Weeding Relationships

I don't mean the romantic variety(even though what I am about to say is probably applicable there as well).

I am talking about great friends, family members, mentors and people who you have a working relation with.

Many relationships exist purely out of convenience, however to cultivate the truly meaningful relationships with the above people, we must work to maintain those relationships precisely when it is most inconvenient.

This past weekend, I was in my great friend's(almost like a brother) wedding... on a few day notice... and it was 2 states away. Did I also mention I am currently jobless? I didn't even have the right color suit. Would any reasonable person hold me in the wrong for not going? Nope. However, it is a relationship that I wish to cultivate, so I bit the bullet, purchased all the clothing necessities and a last minute ticket and off I was to the wedding.

On the flip side, some relationships exist out of convenience, and are more convenient to keep going than to finish, even though they are not correct for either party.

My first job coming out of college was with Qualcomm, which was an awesome company, it just wasn't awesome for me. I realized about 3 months in that I just wasn't fired up about working there, but continued for another 9 months because it was a comfortable relationship, and, frankly, quitting is far from comfortable. Even with as uncomfortable as it was, the weight off of my shoulders made up for it a hundred times over.

You have to know when you need to go the extra distance for your relationships; sometimes it will be to fetch water for them to grow, sometimes it will be for a lighter to watch them burn.

Readings of 2014, February Edition, Part 1

Well, February was quite the doozy for me in terms of number of books read. My grand total for the month was 7, which brought me up to 8 for the year(just managed to get through Walden in January).

To be fair, some of those reads were a little on the fluffy side, but I viewed my first 2 books as palette cleansers of sorts, analogous to the pickled ginger you eat in between different sushi rolls.

Who Moved My Cheese by Spencer Johnson:

If you're looking for an incredibly easy read, that still has a bit of substance to it, I would look no further than this book. It is far from mind-blowing, but the ideas are presented in an easy to grasp way.

If you don't feel the need to but the book, you're in luck, because my cliff notes version will be rather sufficient. 2 mice and 2 little people(people who are the size of mice) live in a maze and need to eat cheese to survive. They don't know how the cheese gets to the various cheese stations, but it just does. The story starts off with the 2 mice and 2 little people having found a vast amount of cheese at a cheese station, so the 2 little people decide to hang up their running shoes and move their homes closer to the cheese; while the mice always keep their shoes around their neck and commute back to their original home. The mice and the little people are enjoying the comforts of the cheese for a long time, until one day the cheese runs out. The mice then move on to look for cheese, while the little people stick around angry that the cheese is gone and hoping that it comes back. This persists almost until the point of starvation, when one of the little people decides to go venture out in the maze in search of cheese while the other stays back. Eventually, he finds the mice at a cheese station and has his fill, while the fate of the other little person is left a mystery.

Moral of the story: Don't get too comfortable in your current situation and embrace change, otherwise you may starve to death.

F*ck! I'm in My Twenties by Emma Koenig:

This is another easy read... not sure if I can even call it that though, seeing as it is just a compilation of various sketches that depict the struggles of post-college twenty-somethings. However, seeing as I am also a post-college twenty-something, I was able very easily able to relate.

Where as "Who Moved My Cheese" had some substance to it, this book is thoroughly devoid of substance, it is simply a series of (pretty funny)rants.

I wouldn't recommend buying it, but what I would recommend is going to your nearest bookstore with a coffee shop, grabbing it from the shelf and reading it while waiting for your coffee, because that is precisely the time it will take to finish.

The Worst Interview Question

Where do you see yourself in 5-10 years?

And expecting a concrete answer.

If you are able to give a tangible answer to that question, chances are you aren't stretching yourself.

The only good answer to that question is doing something you're passionate about, making a legitimate impact on the world and absolutely crushing it. However, it is impossible to know what your passions will be that far down the road, and with the way things are going, chances are that it doesn't even exist today.

Just think about 10 years ago... what a funny idea this Mark Zuckerberg guy has with this little thing called The Facebook, Blackberry is crushing it but what the hell is this Android and iPhone thing you speak of, and this is me looking like someone who will never diet, pick up a weight or do cardio of any sorts.

So if you hear that question, go ahead and give them the old jedi hand wave and a "This is not the question you are looking for."

Success: is it in the Middle or the Extremes?

What separates a great wait staff from a great menu?

A great wait staff should consistently execute at a very high level, but there should be no surprises. An amazing customer experience is defined more by the lack of things going wrong than by anything truly exceptional happening; get my order right, be knowledgable, be on top of the drinks, smile a little bit and don't spill on my lap and we will be all good.

While the execution of a great menu should be very consistent, the items themselves are an entirely different story. In order for a menu to be truly exceptional, you better accept the fact that some people will thoroughly hate it... everybody leaves McDonalds content with the food.

The secret to success in the weightroom? Get there consistently and make yourself a little bit better than you were last time... it's not about getting there once a month and destroying yourself that one time.

How do people look pretty damn good all year round? They have a great idea of how much they are eating and don't sweat a little chocolate or beer... they don't alternate super strict(depending on your goals, some periods of super strictness may be called for) and binging days.

The mark of a truly shitty live band? Everybody leaving saying it was pretty good. I want to see a band lay everything on the line, that means I should leave with my jaw on the floor... either because it is the most epic thing I have ever seen or because it was utterly attrocious.

In a presidential race among a unanimously liked candidate and 2 candidates despised by half the country and adored by the other half, the unanimously liked candidate will lose every time.

Finding where success exists in a situation doesn't guarantee success, but missing where it exists guarantees failure.

Hustle

The internet is a wonderful thing, particularly in its ability to lower the barrier of entry for many things, particularly retail and education.

Just over a decade ago,  if someone wanted to start a retail clothing business, they would need money for the physical space of the store, inventory, and potentially a warehouse. Now, they can get up and running with Shopify in a matter of minutes and start with minimal(if any) inventory.

Higher education is another thing that the internet is beginning to revolutionize(but still has an insane amount of room for growth). While I thoroughly enjoyed my time at the University of Illinois, I felt like most of the truly meaningful learning I did was done outside the classroom. Many online(some are physical as well, but the internet as allowed them to reach their potential students) micro-colleges and trade schools are popping up such as Designation(started by my good friend, Kevin), Bloc and G-school to remove all of the fluff from the university experience, at a greatly reduced cost.

However, now that money is removed as a barrier of entry, the winners in society are no longer going to come from affluent families... your ability to out-hustle is going to be the determining factor in success in life.

While I know it may sound hypocritical posting about ass-in-chair syndrome and then today posting about the hustlers coming out on top in life, what I am trying to point out is that it is not just the quantity of time put into hustling, but the quality; when I said I just put in 3-5 hours, that is just time put into uninterrupted development related tasks, that doesn't include time put into design work, reading(for the sake of intellectual stimulation, not for the facade of doing), writing, cooking and training, all of which are skills I am also working on bettering.

If you don't have the life you want, you can no longer blame it on your upbringing, as anyone has the ability to hustle.

Read Things You Disagree With

Many of us are guilty of reading things which only confirm biases that we previously held. It is very easy to do so because knowing that others agree with what you think is a rather uplifting experience.

However, just living in Boulder, Colorado is uplifting enough; so I expect (some of) the books I read to provide more than just a fuzzy feeling, I want them to push me intellectually.

The best way to do that is to start reading things that disagree with ideas that I currently believe to be true, both things I have good reason to believe as well as things I hold as dogma.

The 4-Hour Workweek and Walden were the first 2 books I read that challenged the beliefs of what I held as societal dogma: buy insanely large homes and materialistic possessions that we don't really need, work insanely long hours to pay for those things, and then buy even more shit that we don't need to compensate for the depression of working long hours.

In contrast, Nassim Nicolas Taleb's The Black Swan is a very heavy read(well so is Walden) that challenges many deeply seated scientific beliefs, all of which have plenty of evidence in their favor, or,  in some cases, simply lack of evidence against(which Taleb repeatedly points out is not evidence for).

One argument in particular really challenged my beliefs(and one which I had plenty of evidence to support) is his disagreement with the globalization of economies, large size of banks and the internet. As an engineer, efficiency is usually what I am trying to optimize, and there is no arguing against the massive efficiency and price reduction that can be gained through globalization of the economy. However, Taleb points out that when it fails, the massive coupling will ripple through the entire system, as opposed to being isolated in the location that it originated.

Do I still think the internet and global economy are amazing? Yes.

I just hope they don't fail in my lifetime. 

Ass-In-Chair Syndrome

I hava a confession... I used to consider myself a workaholic, and wear it around like a badge of honor.

In college, you could frequently find me in the lab or the library on a Friday night.

The weirdest part was that I actually enjoyed being on my high horse of feeling like I was doing things that others weren't.

Slowly though, I started noticing a few people here and there were getting the same output as me, while spending significantly less time doing so.

So, I decided to fire myself.

Now, instead of pulling marathon working sessions. I typically put in a daily 3-5 hour sprint, or however long I feel like I can fully immerse myself in a topic without letting my mind wander off.

And I am getting just as much, if not more, accomplished.

Now that I think about it, I wasn't really a workaholic, I just suffered from a giant case of ass-in-chair-syndrome.