The entrepreneur shifts economic resources out of an area of lower and into an area of higher productivity and greater yield. Jean-Baptiste Say Welcome to part 10 of the series on “How to be a game changer”. You can find the previous posts here 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 . Mountains, rivers, borders, gatekeepers, regulations, fees - obstacles are a part of life. Obstacles create a border…
…distraction is just another way our brains attempt to deal with pain. Nir Eyal, Indistractable Welcome to part 9 of the series on “How to be a game changer”. You can find the previous posts here 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 . There are games which can be win-win when played a limited amount, but become overall negative if you play them excessively. For example, unhealthy addictions can feel like…
A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing. Oscar Wilde Welcome to part 8 of the series on “How to be a game changer”. You can find the previous posts here 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 . Growing up in post-socialist-turned-cowboy-capitalist Bulgaria, I grew up around a lot of cynical behavior and absorbed it deep into me. It was the water I was swimming in, and I…
Always be closing. Always be closing. Alec Baldwin’s character in Glengarry Glen Ross Welcome to part 7 of the series on “How to be a game changer”. You can find the previous posts here 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 . As an engineer, I’ve had an aversion to sales for a long time. It seemed like something which doesn’t add value in the grand scheme of things, but instead it just shuffles it around. I had…
The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; … and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. Teddy Roosevelt Welcome to part 6 of the series on “How to be a game changer”. You can find…
He who controls the spice, controls the universe Baron Harkonnen, character in “Dune” This is part 5 of the series on “How to be a game changer”. You can find the last four here: 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 . Today we continue with examples of negative games you don’t want to play - and we’ll discuss artificial scarcity. Let’s start with my dog, Euler. Originally he didn’t always want to eat his dog food…
He who has learned to disagree without being disagreeable has discovered the most valuable secret of negotiation. Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference This is the fourth post in a series. You can find the last three here: 1 , 2 , 3 . There we set the basics of opting out of negative games, and now we can start diving into examples. A classic example of a negative game is the adversarial…
Life is too short to drink cheap whiskey unknown This is the third post in a series of 13 posts about how to be a game changer. In the previous two posts, we defined the concept and started looking at which games to change . Today we’ll look at the main way to be a game changer - to opt out. According to Merriam-Webster dictionary a game changer is “a newly introduced element or factor that…
Show me a gambler and I’ll show you a loser, show me a hero, and I’ll show you a corpse. Mario Puzo, author of The Godfather Last week we began the “ How to be a game changer ” series. Today, we’ll start answering the question - “Which games to change”, by defining the two main types of games we don’t want to play - zero-sum games and win-lose games. Zero sum games One way to simplify looking at…
In battle, do not think you have to win. Think rather that you do not have to lose. Ginchin Funakoshi, founder of Shotokan karate-do We may be rarely if at all involved in battles today, but “games” are all around us, and every interaction we participate in can be thought of as a game, with its own rules, frameworks, and expectations about the participants. Such games exist in negotiations,…
The myth of one-man orchestra I think I finally understand how multiplayer creation works. My college dorm had a music room in the basement, and while I couldn’t play any instruments I loved hanging out with friends when they organized jam-sessions. Friends would invite their musician friends over to jam, and I would have the best time seeing how they pick up a tune, and the room filled with sound…
When you sigh, where all that extra air come from? Have you ever realized you’re holding your breath unconsciously only for it to end with a deep exhale? Happened to me a couple weeks ago. I was driving and I noticed that from time to time I would be thinking about the other cars and the more I thought the shallower I breathed. Then, the driving situation would simplify and I would switch to…
According to a famous study, the most common regret of old people on their deathbed was “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me”. Well, I’d like to dissect a little bit what “true to self” might mean. How do we know which of our thoughts are coming from our true self, and which of them are coming from outside. I am not going to claim that…
I recently learned about the concept of a “shadow” that Carl Jung defined. According to it, each of us has a psychological shadow - the part of us that we suppress unconsciously. It’s usually a darker side which society makes us hide, such as a side of violence, but it doesn’t have to be negative. It can be different sexuality, or creativity. It is there, even if we aren’t aware if. For me…
The downhill started with a challenge. A year ago, I wanted to do more experiments with my writing. After a change of occupation, I was looking for a change in writing too. I didn’t feel much like writing in the old format I’ve been using - pondering on interesting phenomena. A lot of it didn’t have a direct impact on my life and I felt bored of writing. I turned to cooking for inspiration. Those…
Having written a year in review last year, I found the practice of reflection rewarding. So I decided to do another one this year. 2018 felt like play. 2019 felt like playful work. I learned a bunch of lessons about doing startups. I’m sharing some of them here, in writing, but I cannot fully share how they feel. And I think unless felt and internalized deeply, these lessons are hard or impossible…
Yesterday, me and my partner went cycling. At some point the path was going by a rural road. I was in playful mood so I joked with her how a road sign looked like a penguin. Doesn’t it really? Well, our mood soon turned to horror. Just a mile further I heard an animal in the bushes. I turned my head and saw a deer, hiding in the ditch by the side of the road. “Look, a deer,” I stopped and waved at…
Can you imagine if Karma was real? You do good, and you get rewarded. Someone does you bad, and they get punished. Oh, life would be a dream… I’m sad to admit that, but Karma is not a practical concept today. It implies that good deeds result in good karma, and good consequences for the individual, and bad deeds result in bad consequences. It’s way too abstract. Us skeptics would wonder what…
A zero. A failure. That was the result of my first pilot run. The launch of my company. After spending few months building an “order on your phone” solution and closing a customer, we had our big day, of getting the product in front of customers. On the first day where our product would be in front users, we got a grand total of zero orders. When the day was over, I had this sinking feeling, of a…
“It’s like being able to write Scala in Javascript, but faster to compile.” That’s the first description of TypeScript that really piqued my interest, by a friend , with whom we used to write a lot of Scala at Twitter. I enjoyed the ergonomics of Scala collections, case classes, Options and Futures, and types and generics. Later, after I left Twitter, I was building another project and chose…
Do you remember the last time you saw a before-and-after photo of a an overweight person losing more than a hundred pounds? On the left, they look bloated, and their facial expression often betrays sadness. On the right, they’ve slimmed down, posing with their old clothes for comparison. And inevitably their face glows and they radiate confidence and positive outlook. I’m really fascinated and in…
Looking back at 2018, I’m stunned how much it had to offer. I spent most of it on a sabbatical, and working on startup projects. Here are some highlights. This might seem like bragging. I realize it’s rare to have it so good, and for many people it’s not the case. I’d like to look at everything I got and experienced this year through the lens of gratefulness. I’ve worked a lot in the preceding…
When I was a student in MIT, I took a walk on Massachusetts Avenue, across the Harvard bridge. It’s a long bridge which separates Boston from Cambridge, Massachusetts. As I crossed into Boston and I walked about a mile further, I noticed the Christian Science Plaza. It was beautiful. A large ornate church next to reflection pool. A little pocket of spaciousness in crowded Boston. It looked…
When we hear the word negotiation, we often think of haggling. A series of one-upping offers. “This couch costs $300” “I’ll pay $50 for it” “No way, that’s too low” “OK, I’ll go to $70”, “Nah, at least 250”, “100”, “200” “120” “200”, “127 is my final offer” “…” “….” “Okay”, sighing. It looks like a battle. It feels like two people arm wresting, comparing who has the largest biceps and shoulders.…
The same year I was born, the president of USA, Ronald Reagan, was giving a speech in Germany. I learned about it 31 years later when I saw it on Reddit. As he keeps talking “presidentially,” we can all hear a bang. Unfazed, Reagan comments “Missed me” and tries to continue with the speech. Indeed, it missed him. It wasn’t a gun shot at all, it was a balloon popping. Reagan was shot with a gun six…
Did you know that it is mathematically impossible to predict the weather 30 days in the future. Not just “its really hard and we don’t know how to do it yet”, but rather “nobody will ever, EVER, be able to do this no matter how advanced they are”. Chaos theory proves it. Even if we know physics laws perfectly, even if they are completely deterministic, and we have nearly perfect knowledge of where…
Success goes hand in hand with confidence. But which causes which? Does success cause confidence, or is it the other way around? One way to look at it is to say that successful people gain confidence through their “wins” and display it. We observe their confidence and associate it with success. Another way is to note, that when we see someone confident, we assume they are successful, they are…
I was talking to someone who used to work in finance in New York. They told me they left to write fiction. I thought it’s their dream to be a writer. Then they also told me they don’t enjoy writing that much, with all the editing and revising. Yet, they feel a strong compulsion to write, to discover the characters. I thought I know what they were talking about. Years ago, I had became a compulsive…
Do aliens play video games? If we meet an alien, from a different planet, and are able to talk with them, how relate-able would they be? Would they feel pride for their nation, town or sports team? Would they feel ambition, after being rewarded for achievements? Would they keep playing video games once they start it, or binge-watch TV shows? Would they be content to sit down and do nothing? We…
Hundred years are nothing. Nada. Yes… I know. A lot can happen during a hundred years. Take a look the twentieth century with the two world wars, and the growth of computers and the Internet and the enormous leaps in biology. And the twentieth century is not the only one with drastic changes. Major changes have been happening every century all throughout the last few thousand years. And that’s my…
Einstein’s had a lot of witty and profound sayings, but “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result” is not one of them . And yet, these words had often been misattributed to him. It is not exactly clear who came up with the phrase, but it is a fact that a lot of people got convinced that originated behind the famous mustache of…
There I was some library in DC, checking out binder folders of reference material about hydrants. That’s where I felt lost in precisely the same way. Browsing through and not finding anything to bite on. Why was I searching? I was convicted by the judge, who was a friend of mine because I used a fire extinguisher to extinguish a fire even though there was a hydrant nearby. The law apparently said…
Ten years ago, the iPhone 3G was just announced, the second version of the iPhone ever. A lot has changed since in tech to the point where it is hard even to imagine how we lived before. Ten years into the future… who knows where tech would be? I don’t know for sure, but this doesn’t stop me from making educated guesses. It is also hard to know “exactly” ten years in the future where technology…
It’s quite a challenge to climb Mount Shasta. It’s an active volcano and as a result, it’s high and steep. At 14180 feet it is the fifth highest peak in California. With 3000 meters of vertical prominence over the nearby town of the same name, it stands like an Eiffel Tower over the surrounding area, except that the Shasta tower is ten times higher. According to Wikipedia, it is one of the one…
This post is about a mental leap. I might not be an experienced and successful entrepreneur, but I am humbly trying to figure it out, to make a positive improvement in the world. I’ve been a critical thinker throughout my life and I am trying to combine sharp mathematical thinking with the humility of realizing I am a beginner at entrepreneurship. Most of my life I’ve been given problems to solve.…
In my time at as a software engineer I’ve seen teams and groups succeed and fail, grow or be re-organized. One of the things that team durable and stable over time, and helped them execute and deliver was have a clear set of metrics to optimize. Optimizing metrics is easy. No, really, it is. I believe that having clear, well defined metrics is the single largest driver of progress within a…
When a team of engineers has 50% female members but they speak 10% of the time during meetings, or during lunch breaks, is that team diverse? What is the gender diversity score - 50% or 10%? Is this better or worse than a team that has 20% women who speak 20% of the time? I’m going to share how I think about some these issues. Before I dive deeper, here are some of my assumptions. I assume that a…
I’ve heard the phrase “hungry artist”. It describes people, who’s goal in life is to produce art, but don’t make enough money out of selling their art to sustain comfortable lifestyle. Now, there are a spectrum of reasons why someone would make art. I’d bet most artists, deep down want to be commercially successful. They want their art to be number one on the charts, to be in museum exhibits, and…
Cell phone addiction. Sugar addiction. Alcohol addiction. Social media. Cigarettes. Marijuana. Email. Drugs. Social media. Caffeine. I think these are bad when taken to the excessive. But when consumed in reasonable amounts all of the above can be beneficial. Hospitals use morphine as a pain killer in extreme situations. Alcohol, with all its toxic effects on the body, can still serve as a “social…
“We all pretend we are here forever” Damn. This was pretty spot on. A colleague jokingly told me this me after I’ve announced that I’m leaving my job. But the phrase really itched in my mind. It’s because I intuitively understood it was true, but have never verbalized it before. Why do we have to put an act to save face, instead of being free to discuss our plans and intentions. There are “good”…
We know how to learn, but we don’t know how to un-learn, and how to forget . If you’ve seen the movie Borat, and seen him wrestle with Azhamat Bagatov, it becomes an image that you’d rather not remember. You might have forgotten, but simply reading about it might bring back the grotesque images in your mind. You’re welcome. If you haven’t seen this, and I don’t recommend seeing it, be forewarned…
As the year is almost over, more and more people start reflecting on everything that happened through the year, and start making plans for the new year. But the last day of the calendar year is just an arbitrary day. There is nothing special about it. It’s all in our heads. We assign that day importance, but it’s arbitrary. The earth rotates around the sun, and there is nothing special about its…
Diving deeper and deeper into machine learning and neural networks I can’t help but notice how some of the techniques there are metaphors for what happens in our brains. After all, our brains a just a lot more sophisticated and larger versions of the deep computer networks that do computer vision, or predict clicks on ads. When I first grokked backpropagation, I was in awe about how elegant it is.…
A month ago I left a job as a software engineer and data scientist at Twitter. I was there 4.4 years and I learned a great deal out of it. I not only got significantly better at the job-description part of my job - contributing to code and data analysis - but I also picked up a few bits about what makes larger efforts and collaboration successful. So… without pretense of completeness or…
Imagine doing a lot of fun things, a lot of travel, and a lot of pleasure. Imagine laying down on the beach, sipping a Margarita. The salty rim of the glass. A feeling of being refreshed and cheered. Getting up from a beach bed and laying down on a massage table, relaxing and drifting off to sleep. Later on, a tasty dinner with the partner, dancing the calories away in the night club, and having…
How informative is media really. The incentives on any media organization are like the incentives on any other company - to make profits. Media also aims to make people informed on important facts. That’s how people perceive the value of media. That, and entertainment. All media wants people to consume it, in order to get revenue from subscriptions, or from advertisement. Let’s temporary make a…
photo credit (pirinmountain.wordpress.com)[https://pirinmountain.wordpress.com/2013/04/18/%D0%BC%D0%B0%D1%80%D1%88%D1%80%D1%83%D1%82%D0%B8-%D0%B8-%D0%BA%D0%B0%D1%80%D1%82%D0%B8/] I was talking to a friend of mine, catching up on what each of us has been doing, and we had an interesting observation about the role of crossroads in life. My friend went on a multi-day hike, but as luck would have it,…
Every day we wake up from sleep, but we aren’t really awake. We are only awake enough to drive our cars, do our work and cook our food. And when we take a break, and we’re awake, we’re still asleep. We blink, but we don’t think. And time tic-tocs away. Coffee doesn’t wake us up. It helps up sleep walk. Yet, it can help us think, and mindful thought is the only thing that wakes us up. I’m talking…
I have some thoughts about regret in life, which might be counterintuitive. You might have heard of Jeff Bezos making the decision to start Amazon as a part of regret-minimization decision making. For him, there would’ve been a certain regret of not attempting Amazon, but there wouldn’t be as much regret if he tried and it didn’t work out. From his point of view, minimizing the regret is to…
The really awesome book don’t go bad if you know what happens. That’s because they are intricate enough that there is still a lot to be experienced on a second, third and fourth read. Just like poetry, great prose keeps on giving the more you read it. And great movies keep on giving the more you watch them. I recently re-read Hemingway’s “The old man and the sea.” I already knew what happens. Let…