Living The Dream

Travelog: Vietnam, Phu Quoc, 2025

Wed, 10 Jun 2026 17:14:00 -0600

Phu Quoc is a beautiful island in Vietnam, known for its stunning beaches, clear waters, and vibrant culture. I had the opportunity to visit Phu Quoc in 2024 and 2025, and it was a pleasant experience. The island is near Cambodia and Thailand, so in November and December, the weather is better here.

I really liked the convenience of the resort where I stayed. It has a large area, villas with private pools, and a beautiful beach. The resort is located on the western side of the island, close to Vinpearl Wonderworld amusement and water park, a safari/zoo park, and the touristy area called Vin Grand World. The latter has European-style houses, a water canal with gondolas, lots of restaurants, shops, massage places, the Teddy Bear Museum, and a night fire-and-water show.

Taxis are nice, and most of them are electric VinFast cars. They can wait for you while you shop or dine, because I guess it is better for them than driving back empty and waiting for new clients. Tuk-tuks are also popular there, but they are better for short distances, not for going from the north of the island to the south.

The food in Phu Quoc was meh — for a carnivore like me — so I frequented the only supermarket on the island, King Kong, and cooked my own meals. The supermarket had a good selection of Australian beef, which was great for me. Local markets don’t have beef at all, only pork. They keep it on tables in the streets at around 25°C, so I decided not to risk trying it. The funny thing is that a lot of Phu Quoc resorts have full kitchens but prohibit cooking or charge extra for pots, knives, and other necessities.

The massages are good, and in the shops, they even give you some sweet drinks, like mango drinks.

The scuba diving was meh. The water was too muddy in December.

The most terrible excursion was deep-sea fishing. It was extremely boring, as there was not much to do in terms of actually fishing.

In the south of the island, there is another tourist cluster: Sun World water park, a long cable car, hotels, and restaurants.

Interestingly, a lot of commercial spaces on the first floors and apartments on the second floors and above are empty in these clusters, both on the north and south sides. They are still filling up after the downturn caused by the pandemic.

Travelog: Seoul and Busan, South Korea, 2024

Sat, 29 Jun 2024 19:23:00 -0600

No one checks tickets on trains and people leave laptops and phones on the tables in the cafes if they want to take a stroll. At the same time, there are a lot of prohibition signs and rules on the streets and in the buildings.
Airport is very efficient and even has a storage for food items that are prohibited to bring into the country so that people can pick them up on their return. Lockers are also available for at subway station and in the offices which is extremely convenient.
Koreans love sugar and carbs in any form: fruits, drinks and desserts. Things like watermelon juice, strawberry juice, all kinds of smoothies and tapioca teas. At the same time, there are fewer obese people than in North America.
Dental clinics are modern and even water dispensers are automatic (for rinsing). The prices for X-Rays, CT scans or diagnostics are a fraction of the cost in the USA.
Meat is mostly imported from Australia. There’s even Australian Wagyu. Aussie lamb is very good and affordable. Korean beef is Hanwoo and it’s their attempt at fatty marbled beef like Kobe.
At BBQ restaurants they sell meat by 100-150 grams unlike all you can eat in the USA. Also, they don’t use any marinades but mostly marbled and fatty cuts. In the USA k-bbqs use a lot of marinades (probably to mask poor quality of the meat).
Climate in summer is great. Not too hot and not too cold. In Seoul it’s not humid despite being close to the sea.
Some restaurants have tables with menus with photos which is great. Other cafes have self ordered touch screen computers which is also great. No need to speak with anyone, especially since they would probably not speak English well. Two restaurants had robots carrying orders to customers or carrying dirty plates to the back.
It’s hard to tell if kimchi soup is hot because of the spice or because of the temperature.
Taxi drivers are mostly old men and often like to drive like crazy. They accelerate and break with another foot (should be the same foot). Or they pulsate with acceleration to the point that passengers want to vomit.
Koreans pick English/Western names and relatively many speak English compared to Japan.
Koreans like ice in everything, even in their soups or just straight in the form of shaven ice dessert. The love for ice is probably influenced by the USA. Also, baseball is very popular here.
The cities are very efficient with good public transport and walking-distance convenience. The buildings are not boring at all, many of them are interesting. There’s a good balance with large screens and signs.
In some areas there are still old apartment buildings (that still probably cost over $1M USD). During the construction they cover the unfinished buildings and make them pretty.
Buildings often have underground shops or restaurants which are very convenient. There are canopies on the intersections for people to wait in the shadows instead of under rain or sun.
The parks, bike and walking trails along the Han river are amazing. There’s little to no trash on the streets and not even along the highways (which is the norm in the Americas).
Seoul has the sixth tallest building in the world.

Seoul is a great city to live in. It’s very modern and efficient. It offers nice conveniences for regular people and luxury for those who want it. The food is great and especially the meats. The downsides is the traffic. Language barrier is almost non-existent with a big population understanding basic English and the prevalence of translation apps. Busan is also a great city to visit. It’s a little more laid back than Seoul, but still has a lot to offer especially the beaches that are beautiful. If you’re looking for a fun and relaxing vacation, Busan is the place to go.

Travelog: Dubai, United Arab Emirates 2024

Sat, 29 Jun 2024 18:23:00 -0600

Here are my key impression from 2024 trip to Dubai where we got flooded by unexpected and unprecedented precipitation:

The Dubai city is roughly two cities: downtown to the north and Jumeirah to the south, with a highway connecting them.
The food options consist of a lot of American chains and brands. Also, Turkish restaurants and ice cream stands are popular. There are some Russian and Georgian restaurants but they are not good.
Overall, restaurants are more pricey than in LatAm but less than in the USA. The quality of service and food is way way below Mexican and Colombian restaurants.
The meat is mostly imported from South Africa, Australia and even Pakistan but unfortunately not Argentina. There are good butcher shops that sometimes also have restaurants (or restaurants with butcher shops?).
There are a lot of Indian and Bangladeshi workers almost everywhere.
In Jumeirah Beach Residence, the beach is full of people and cigaret butts and lacks showers or places to dust off sand off the feet.
Traffic is bad. Places (like malls) are crowded to the extreme especially if you have to wait for an elevator.
Buildings in Jumeirah Beach Residence are old and reminiscent of Las Vegas - yellow color and bridges between them. They even have a Heart Attack restaurant just like in Vegas.
At Burj Khalifa, it was nice to have a fast pass with lounge access (and unlimited dates!).
The airport is terrible: very large and you have to walk 30+ minutes to get to the gate where there are no seats to wait. Of course the flip side is that you can fly almost anywhere in the world directly.
Taxi, airport porter, hotel staff service is great. There are shops and pharmacies in almost every building which is super convenient. They even offer to bring groceries to your hotel room.
Uber taxis are new and the drivers are not intrusive with the talks (which I always hate in the USA). And the waiters in the restaurants are not obnoxious about demanding the tips (unlike in the USA).
Etihad Museum which is about the founding of the country, was less interesting to me than the Masmak Fortress in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. And The Museum of the Future is more interesting on the outside due to its architecture than inside.
No drainage on the streets so during the unprecedented rains, all the water had to stay on the streets.

Despite some inconveniences of a large cosmopolitan city and being overpriced, Dubai is very livable. There are a lot of things to do if you don’t mind the traffic and summer heat. Most people travel to Europe during summer months. Dubai could be a good home city for someone who is doing business in the Middle East or Europe.

Carnivore Superpowers

Sat, 06 Jan 2024 15:00:00 -0600

It’s been ten years since my paleo superpowers post. And while paleo is good, carnivore is even better. It’s like having double the amount of superpowers, including but not limited to the following:

More mental power, clarity and better problem solving because ketones are better fuel for the brain.
More time to play and live while less sleep is needed because the body doesn’t have to process all the plant toxins.
Fewer sports injuries because the body just heals better.
Faster recovery from flu/cold, sickness, if I ever get it (typically not).
Ability to skip meals and do multi-day water-only fasting.
Longevity because of low body fat, more muscle mass and ability to fast.
More energy, no sluggishness after meals.
Calmer mood and better handling of stressful situations.
Less time for meal/meat preparation because plans and veggies require most of the time to unpoison, peel, slice and cook.
Easier to live, because grocery shopping and restaurant menus choosing are much, much faster (less is more).
Not being a slave to the hangry (angry and hungry) state and sugar cravings.

Carnivore diet and their variations (Lion Diet) are probably the best life hack out there. The facts are obvious:

Carnivore is the evolutionary diet, that’s how our ancestors ate and how humans evolved to eat.
Animal food (i.e., meat) is the most nutrient and bioavailable food.
Carnivore is the ultimate elimination diet for autoimmune conditions.

It’s been already proven to be the original human diet but sadly most doctors and people don’t know about it. And even if they have heard about it, they dismiss it as dangerous or a fad. It’ll be funny to look back in 20-40 years when the popular opinion will change to favor carnivore-like diets.

Travel Log: Bogota and Medellin, Colombia 2023

Mon, 10 Jul 2023 05:23:00 -0600

Here are my key impressions from a recent trip to Colombia, to the cities of Bogota and Medellin.

Nicer parts of cites like Park 93, Verrey or El Poblado are very walkable and very European and less “American” (i.e., big roads, must have cars, not walkable).
In Colombia, the food is more European with less salsas and spices than Mexican food.
Bogota was fresh and cool in summer, but again it reminded me of European cloudy skies in Scandinavia, London or Russia.
There are a lot of hookah places in El Poblado and in Bogota they have small shops with tables on the streets to smoke
There are a lot of peddlers and beggars on the street that are very persistent and annoying.
People love bicycles, running and their dogs.
There are a lot of greens (trees, bushes, grass).
Meat is superb and has a very natural grass-fed flavor.
Avianca tries to be a low-cost airline charging for everything extra (seat selection, soda, juice, small roller suitcase).
Roads are good and tunnels are moderns but traffic in rush hours suck. Even Pico y Placa doesn’t help. It’s better to walk or take a bike, or ride motorbike if you’re local.
Bogota restaurants are better than Medellin restaurants. It’s hard to break the $100 USD mark for two people in Bogota, but in Medellin, it’s easy while also getting burned steaks or meh food.
Bogota hotels are cheaper than Medellin hotels.
Uber can call a regular taxi.
Cash is not needed for a week-long trip except to buy fruits from street vendors who are too lazy to get a card terminal.

Big Fish in a Small Pound 🐟

Sat, 10 Jun 2023 04:55:00 -0600

It’s good to be a big fish in a small pond. It gives more visibility, uniqueness and influence that bring more opportunities. Also, it’s easier to migrate to a larger pond when you grow to a big fish in a small pond. So first, we all should focus on becoming a big fish in our current (probably small) pond. Stories of success of growing to a big fish in a large pond are mostly survivor bias type stories or overnight success stories that took 10 years in the making… and a lot of jumps from small pond to bigger pond and then eventually to open ocean!

If the pond is too small, if you think that it’s not thrilling, motivating nor exciting to grow into a big fish there, then please take a second look. Probably, the pond is still big enough to be a stepping stone. A lot of startups try to launch straightway in the US or at least Europe while being from developing countries. That’s a big mistake because they are far from their customers and have all sorts of disadvantages of not playing on their home-field.

My Favorite Video Games

Tue, 19 Apr 2022 22:00:00 -0500

Civilization II
Transport Tycoon
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
Fallout and Fallout 2
Dragon Age: Origins
Mass Effect 2
XCOM: Enemy Unknown
Jagged Alliance
Europa Universalis
Command&Conquer
Hitman: Codename 47
Heroes of Might and Magic III
Tropico: Paradise Island
Max Payne
GoldenLand 2 (Златогорье 2)

My HEC Paris Journey, Part IX: The Diploma and Final Thoughts

Wed, 07 Jul 2021 13:50:00 -0500

This is the summary of my 2 years doing the master’s program. I received my paper diploma last week. I was awarded Master of Science with honors (only 10% of students get this high recognition). A few weeks ago, we had a virtual graduation ceremony. I hope to visit the campus next year to reunite in person with my classmates.

While waiting for the diploma, I had a privilege to host a webinar with one of our professors, Prof. Etienne KRIEGER — MSIE Webinar : How to Overcome Conflicts Between Associates. I shared my tips on forming a team and working out conflicts between startup founders.

To conclude, the program gave me

Refresher on the knowledge I already knew but haven’t used extensively. This probably constituted 70% of the material.
New knowledge in a well structured format.
Confidence to apply the knowledge due to the peer review and feedback from the university team.
Inspiring examples of other alumni and my peers from diverse industries and places.
Prestigious brand (HEC Paris) to quantify my experience and knowledge and to add to the social proof of my professional personal brand.

What is next? With this degree, the doors are more open for me to teach at a university or pursue a PhD. And of course, open another venture be it a startup or just a business. But first, I’ll take a short break to catch up on my reading and reclaim my Sundays which are now free from exams and team project meetings. :-)

As this is the last post in this series, here are all of the posts about my HEC Paris learning journey (from the most recent to the earliest):

My HEC Paris Journey, Part VIII: The Team Project

Wed, 07 Jul 2021 13:42:00 -0500

The team project for my master’s degree in Innovation and Entrepreneurship from HEC Paris took about a year. First, we were a team of four people. Then one person dropped out of the program and we were left just three of us: two guys from Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area and one guy from France.

Anyone could have pitched their own idea to the whole cohort so that the most popular ideas would attract teammates to collaborate. Some teams had as many as six people!

We started to work on the idea of a network of smart air purifiers but then pivoted to an idea of a smart air quality meter. The reason was that the market for air purifiers is saturated and margins are low, while the smart air quality meter market is a blue ocean with high margins (albeit a lower price point than the purifiers). It still boggles my mind why giants like HoneyWell, Germguardian and Dyson won’t provide a WiFi connected air quality meter with their purifiers. In other words, our project was more like a feature than an entirely new product. But that was okay since we just wanted to practice and we didn’t want to make it a real business because we already had full time jobs and/or our own existing businesses.

Each month, we had a milestone like the creation of a business plan, financial projection, or marketing plan. We met every week to discuss the assignments and to coordinate our work. Then we worked asynchronously throughout the week on the assignment, usually each of us worked on a separate part that we agreed on before.

We had a coach with whom we met a lot initially but then stopped meeting closer to the end of the program because we gelled well together and only needed the input on the final pitch.

The final pitch was pre-recorded and limited to 3 minutes to avoid abusing judges. By the way, 3 minutes is 10x-20x less than a typical startup would get at a VC meeting (that is 30-60 minutes). We each recorded about a minute, I edited the videos to remove ums and ahs and to insert slides. I then sent the uploaded video to HEC. On the day of the presentation, we joined the call and watched our pre-recorded video. Then, we answered a few questions from the judges, who in turn provided scoring for our team project which is a heavy 50% of the degree score.

Our final project was well received. The pitch deck looked very polished thanks to a designer of one of our teammates. I created a website and a signup form to attract early buyers of our product. So we had early validation of our idea. We’ve contacted overseas manufacturers to get the specs, terms and cost right.

It’s hard to simulate a real startup in the format and with the limitations of a degree. However, this team project allowed us to come as close as possible to a creation of a new product and maybe a new business. We got another “badge” in our portfolio to build the skills and confidence to act in the real world.

My HEC Paris Journey, Part VII: The Last Courses

Sun, 15 Nov 2020 11:59:00 -0600

Today, I just finished the last (20th) course for the MSIE program. The course was on Venture Capital and Private Equity and it concludes the academic part of the masters program. I wrote academic because the courses weren’t just theoretical. We did have a lot of practice preparing our assignments and working on business cases.

Now, the only thing left is to finish the team project that my team of three worked on for pretty much the entire year. My team and I have to present the pitch deck for our product to the jury in a similar way to how startups pitch investors. We’ll get our grades and finish our Master of Science degree.

So it’s a bitter sweet moment. On one side, I’m happy that I can claim back my weekends and nights, and do some leisurely activities. On the other side, it’s been almost two years that I was taking the HEC Paris courses following strict deadlines, milestones, taking graded quizzes and proctored final exams. I had and I was following a structure. This gave me a constant map of my progress and gave me clear goals to strive for. Having a goal, being on a mission and seeing progress are all very satisfying. I’ll be missing that.

Then, there’s also the social aspect of talking to and learning from smart people (my peers). We saw and reviewed each other’s assignments. Chatted on forums, chats and video calls. I’ll be missing that too.

In order to summarize my learnings, here’s a quick recap of the last several courses:

Developing Customer Centric Strategy Through Marketing: The course covers introductory marketing topics such as branding, segmentations, channels, pricing and so on; and the course was taught by three professors which was unusual and interesting.
Managing Performance of a Growing Enterprise: The course is about using mostly financial metrics to manage a relatively large company, e.g., setting up cost centers; and this was the hardest most quantitative course in all of the program (but still very A passable for me).
Odyssey 3.14 Business Model Innovation: The course introduces a simple business model concept of three areas and 14 directions that somewhat a different perspective on BCG canvas and IDEO business models; and the key takeaway is that the business model itself can and should be iterated and innovated upon.
Intellectual Property Law for New Businesses: The course covered some theoretical as well as practical aspects of IP and how it applies to startups; and we did a lot of very useful and practical patent searches that any innovator should know how to perform and use.
Entrepreneurial Finance: This course had a lot of overlaps with other courses in terms of finance topics and formulas but with an emphasis on the founder’s dilemma which can be summed up as raise funds and grow & dilute vs. bootstrap/no raise funds and grow slower & keep equity. The professor did a series of webinars on intrapreneurship which is useful as most of the students won’t (and shouldn’t) start a startup.
Asymmetric Information, Trade and the Internet: The course covered probability of decisions, wisdom of crowds, platforms and provided spreadsheets with complex formulas that can be used during the exam and hopefully in real life.
Private Equity and Venture Capital: The course was very basic for someone who already worked in Venture Capital or read a couple books on startups; but the live sessions were really engaging and interesting because the professor shared his experience and anecdotes of working in the PE/VC world.

Overall, the 20 courses gave a great overview of main topics with some of them being familiar while others were completely new to me. For example, I knew about the CAC and COGS but not the Bayes’ theorem. Even for the familiar topics and concepts, HEC Paris did a great job of packaging and formatting the material so it’s compact yet clear. There’s a great value in the right presentation. Searching online can be a real time waster.

Moreover, the courses opened up my mind to new ideas with the business cases and examples. In the Silicon Valley San Francisco world of software, a restaurant or a cookie business is not a startup. However, HEC Paris presented them as successful business cases. I’m sure they are relatively good businesses for a lot of people to start, own and run. Not everyone should be building SaaS.

The courses taught by practice through the assignments. It was great to use the acquired skills right away to build a business model for a new venture, do a patent search, create café without coffee, etc. The number of courses and topics were very diverse and well suited for both startup founders and employees of established (often large) companies as consultants, innovators, intrapreneurs and change agents. In the end, the courses gave a really wide toolset and provided a strong foundation.

Why Maslow's Pyramid is Wrong

Wed, 07 Oct 2020 16:17:00 -0500

Many of you know Maslow’s pyramid of needs. Actually, Maslow never came up with a pyramid. He had a ladder. Other people took his ladder and created a pyramid that is now used in management books.

The gist is that the pyramid consists of five needs (from bottom to top): physiological (bottom), safety, love and belonging, esteem, and self-actualization (top). The pyramid says a person needs to fulfill the bottom level first before attempting to fulfill the higher levels. For example, a person who is not safe or who is not fed would not pursue his/her passion nor higher purpose (self-actualization). This theory is neat and widely known and accepted. Even famous lifestyle guru Tony Robbins uses this pyramid in his seminars. The problem is that this pyramid is wrong.

Maslow’s pyramid is wrong because it says a person needs to fulfill the bottom level first before attempting to fulfill the higher levels. All of you know a starting artist trying to make great art. Or a musician who can’t provide for his family (or even provide a safe place or good food for himself) but writes songs out of esteem (self-respect) and self-actualization. Then, there are military people who risk their lives (safety) and undergo tremendous lack in physiological needs (water, food) during times of war to achieve higher self-actualization, esteem and to protect loved ones and their society, city or country. These examples show that the pyramid is wrong. But don’t despair. I came up with a better system.

It’s Maslow’s Circles of Needs that has physiological needs right in the center and other four needs placed on a circle around the center. The reasoning is that all needs feed the physiological needs for survival. Humans are wired evolutionarily to survive. Recent (100,000 of years) development of pre-frontal cortex led to more complex behaviors. But in the end, they all can support and fulfill the physiological needs.

Indeed, a starving artist wants to become famous which in turn will lead to better living conditions and food. A programmer loves coding open source software as a hobby (in his spare time) because he’s good at it. He is better at coding than selling used cars or digging ditches. The programmer understands (mostly unconsciously) that by being most effective and efficient, he can obtain more money than by doing other jobs. In fact, open source contributors can be hired by a big company for a big paycheck to maintain their projects. Prestige helps with getting jobs too. In the end, he is increasing his potential to fulfill physiological needs.

By turning the pyramid around in a circle, we are parting away from the limiting belief, that is the notion that the bottom levels must be fulfilled before the higher levels and the top. A circle offers a better system for understanding and motivating your team. Everything boils down to or has the potential to improve the physiological needs (albeit at the unconscious level for some people). People vary in their approach and preferences between all four other needs. It might sound like an oversimplification but why overcomplicate and impose a limiting belief (which is not even true) in the first place? Sometimes the correct solution is the simplest one too.

Disadvantages of Rich People

Wed, 07 Oct 2020 16:00:00 -0500

Rich people can and do risk more than ordinary people. And they do so intentionally. This puts them at a disadvantage. Ironically, these risks and dangers are rarely experienced by middle class or poor people, because these risky activities require expensive equipment, machines or gear.

For example, the following activities present increased dangers:

Driving sports/fast cars
Riding motorcycles
SCUBA diving
Skiing and snowboarding
Skydiving
Piloting planes or helicopters
Traveling to exotic locations (full of diseases)
Overeating
Overindulgence in alcoholic drinks (or other addictive substances)
Partying
Experimental medical and health procedures
Using dubious biohacking gadgets
Attending cult-like gurus and seminars

Other activities are huge time sucks that require mental energy (headspace) on maintenance and increased worries:

Partaking in difficult hobbies, e.g., golfing, surfing
Buying cars
Buying large houses and buying extra homes
Buying gadgets, e.g., yachts, RVs
Participating in fame events (TV interviews, conference keynotes, etc.)
Chasing fashion and brands

The mentioned activities cost a lot of money and take up a lot of time. Yet statistically these activities often lead to increased risk of serious injuries and fatalities. In a way, rich people are more at risk and have less time than ordinary people. They are also more worried and distracted by having to think about all those items (i.e., lack of headspace).

Of course, some hobbies help to escape or add joy. The tricky part is the balance. And of course, reading a book or watching a TV which is super cheap or free is less dangerous than riding a motorcycle.

Paradoxically, people get rich because they are lucky and spend time working. But then they get unlucky (die early or injure themselves) or just don’t have enough time or headspace. It’s funny how a lot of people want to get rich to partake in some of the aforementioned activities. But they don’t realize that they would be at a disadvantage. If you are a rich person, try to avoid these disadvantages.

My HEC Paris Journey, Part VI: Thoughts 3/4 Into the MSIE Program

Tue, 02 Jun 2020 12:30:00 -0500

I’m 3/4 into the Master of Science in Innovation and Entrepreneurship (MSIE) degree program at HEC Paris, and it is time to write a reflection on my experience. I’ll think about whether it was worth the time and effort, and of course if I’m getting what I expected.

It’s worth mentioning that a lot of universities and colleges moved to virtual classes. We, at MSIE, had a 100% virtual/online program from the beginning. Our cohort is number four which means HEC and Coursera figured out a lot of issues that they might have had before, like in any version 1.0 product. My cohort started in Jun 2019 so this post marks a year into the program.

Thoughts on MSIE HEC Paris courses

So far I’ve taken and passed 15 out of 20 courses. Several courses came very handy in my work and business. I would say about 20% of material was completely new and useful. The rest was either something I already knew or something very theoretical that I don’t need right now.

When it comes to things I already knew, like how to start a company, create financial documents and raise venture capital for example, I didn’t use the skills and knowledge recently or forgot about some aspects. Thus, it was good to have a refresher. I would pick up a new concept or idea here and there even if I knew the topic at large.

On the theoretical things like numerous abbreviated frameworks (e.g., SWOT), I might use them in the future or at least I will know their names, what they do and where to find more information on them.

Some of the assignments were very easy for me because of my work, prior business education and reading experiences. Assignments in general are very soft skills oriented. It’s because I came from a hard science background where I had a lot of quantitative assignments. Here the assignments are very open ended and often times there are multiple right answers. This is a great exercise in story telling, interpreting and communicating your perspective.

Thoughts of the MSIE program

I can definitely attest that MSIE is a great investment of time and money. And it’s not just a sunk cost bias. I would sum up the advantages as follows:

Good curation, formatting and packaging of content. In our distracted world, the last thing we need is to sift through Internet to find the best material.
Reinforcement of the terminology and instillment of the lingo: You won’t be a fool if someone mentions Design Thinking, Five Forces analysis or Balanced Score Card
Practical exercises that improve communication skills
Automatization of skills: You’ll be slinging a new Business Canvas Model every time you think of a new business idea.
Confidence build up: It’s like Toast Masters. Every time you do seemingly easy (but hard because it’s open ended) assignment, your confidence at work, life and business goes up.
Networking and a global perspective: I met people who work in Africa, France, Asia, US, and Middle East. One connection already helped me in my business.
New ideas for innovation in a large company or for starting your own company: Every week I learn about new cool ideas that spark my imagination and might help in my work someday.
It’s all remote so you spend more time learning that would have been wasted on commuting, and you don’t have an opportunity cost of having to stop to work for 1-2 years while getting your education.
Vast reading list: if you like reading like I do, then you’ll not run out of recommended business reading in the next 5-10 years, guaranteed. (I’ve read over 400 books in the last several years.)
Diverse global peer-reviewed assignments and case studies: It’s interesting to read about a launch of an apple cider in Kenya, or a prospering cookie business. We here in Silicon Valley and San Francisco are sometimes stuck in a bubble thinking of only tech and software businesses.
Large toolkit: I’m sure whatever problem I may face in the next 5-15 years in my career and of being an executive, I have a large arsenal of tools to pick from and to avoid re-inventing the wheel. I already had a few moments at work when I said to myself, wait that’s exactly a situation in a case study or I can apply the XYZ framework here.
Structure and short-term progress: It’s nice to have short-term progress from module to module and from one quiz to another. This gives me peace of mind in otherwise chaotic and more long-term work life.
The MSIE team at HEC Paris is responsive and accommodating to needs and requests. You don’t feel like you’re left alone even when they are many miles and 9 hours ahead of you.

Now about things that I don’t like so much. There are not that many of them:

The Coursera platform doesn’t have a great User Experience (as of Jun 2019 to Jun 2020). The fonts for questions and answers are the same color, pages load slowly, actions require too many clicks. As far as other learning platforms (LMS) like Canvas or edX, Coursera is the best. (I’ve taken courses at Harvard that use Canvas and authored a course myself on edX).
There are occasional typos and weirdly worded sentences in the quizzes. I flag typos for TAs to fix and they respond and fix them quickly.
One case study was extremely old. It was a good and thorough document but for me and other students it was hard to focus and work on it because it was a 10-20 year old company. There were a couple of other studies about 2-3 years back which is not that bad but you know how the product turned out if you do an Internet search.
Some very small percentage of courses and professors are very theoretical and don’t have industry experience which makes it harder to apply the knowledge.
You might feel like you are not doing enough. This is especially hard for perfectionists and overachievers. There are always more forum discussions to participate in, more articles to read, more books to skim, more community messages to read and answer. And there’s no one to stop you when it’s just good enough. :)

It’s a final stretch to finish the program by Nov 2020. There are five more courses and a year-long team project. The HEC Paris motto is knowledge to dare. That’s true with MSIE. The program exceeded my expectations, and I can’t wait to take the rest of the courses and write about my experience here.

My HEC Paris Journey, Part V: Negotiate Like Your Life Depends on It

Sun, 29 Mar 2020 02:41:00 -0600

Time flies. I’m already about two-thirds into the MSc Innovation and Entrepreneurship program at HEC Paris. The previous post I wrote was My HEC Paris Journey, Part IV: Organize and Incentivize. From the time I published it, I’ve taken these seven courses:

Design Thinking,
Social Entrepreneurship & Changemaking,
Scaling Up Operations,
Marketing through Social Media,
Team Working,
How to Create a Business Plan and
Fundamentals of Negotiation.

That’s a lot of courses in a span of several months. There were a lot of useful tidbits, insights and tips. Too many to write about right now. Ergo, I’ll talk in more details about the latest course which I finished today—Fundamentals of Negotiation.

Fundamentals of Negotiation

Fundamentals of Negotiation is a great course. It’s probably my favorite course in this entire Master of Science program. That’s because I’ve started to apply it right away for negotiations in my business, at my job, during negotiating my consultancy engagements, book deals and my other entrepreneurial/business projects.

The course was very practical and unusual because it required six negotiation exercises with my classmates. They were conducted over video calls and emails from different parts of the world: Paris, Boston, Tokyo, Switzerland, Manila and me being in San Francisco. I liked these negotiations with partners a lot because they had very realistic and sometimes very detailed (10-page) scenarios or required negotiating over 6 main items.

The results of my negotiation exercises were 5 out of 6 deals as a win-win for everyone with my net profit above average. The one negotiation didn’t happen partially because I felt that having no deal is better than having it and partially because we didn’t have time left.

Each negotiation exercise was followed up by a live video call and debrief with the professor and all students (who were able to join). Then, there was a series of recorded lectures that gave detailed tactics for the past week’s exercises. The lecture slides were fantastic and their graphics were superbly made. The slides changed a lot to keep all of us engaged and focused, and at times the course slides were hilarious.

My major takeaways from this course are: start first to anchor the price, be more likable and listen for interests of other parties even if you don’t like (it’ll pay off in 1000s, 10,000s or even 100,000s saved on the deals later) and approach all items all at once when negotiating a complex deal with multiple things.

Let’s dive into each of them one by one. Anchoring of the price is something I like to do. I might be giving away my secrets here but I’ve heard very often a contrary suggestion that you must never go first. My experience shows it’s better to go first with a high number. Of course, to do that someone must know what is an okay and what is a high number. Thus, my rule of thumb is to find out as much as I can about the other party and the true value of things we’re negotiating about. Then, I can anchor a high price by making the first offer. Otherwise, I can wait for their first offer and while I’m waiting I’d be gathering more information.

Second, listening and being likable is really important. The numbers can be exactly the same, but in one case you can have no deal and in the other you can have a deal. The only difference is that when you have a deal that was the result of one or both parties listening to each other in a therapy-like session. Why not go thru the trouble of playing a physiologist for 60-minute if you can get a nice or nicer deal in the end.

Third, when you have multiple things to negotiate, it’s better to lay them out at once. This way you will avoid re-negotiating and back and forth on already agreed items.

I also liked the suggestions (or ideas) to frame the fairness into what’s more favorable to you (labs exercise), play on stereotypes (act aggressively if the other party expects you), and the on-purpose made typos in email negotiation (HarpersCollins and Apple exchange example).

Team Project

In addition to taking business, marketing and innovation courses, we started a team project at the start of 2020. This project will last almost one year. We had four team members but one dropped out. Every week we work on milestones on our team call and asynchronously in shared documents. We have a coach assigned to us who helps us with team dynamics. Coaches are not supposed to grade or provide information on academia, i.e., the assignments or milestones.

Our project has an idea with potential in the world. Meaning, maybe we (or someone else) can take it to the market to make a real business. Of course, ideas are plenty and abundant but what truly matters is the execution. For this reason and to follow the program’s milestones, we are slowly but surely executing on our idea and already created a few artifacts such as pitch deck, strategy, vision, marketing strategy, pricing, competitive analysis. Some of these paper artifacts might seem outdated or not needed. In a real business I would try to find customers first before creating a business plan. However, all these exercises at MSc Innovation and Entrepreneurship HEC Paris are good exercises to acquire skills and get practice for future projects. The reason is that in a real project you won’t have a lot of time to practice or research. Instead if you’re prepared and know what methodology to use, you’ll be more confident and achieve your goals faster.

MMAT: My Learning Approach

Sun, 26 Jan 2020 06:31:00 -0600

In our day and age, learning is more important than ever because things change so rapidly. I learned and taught a lot of things during my career which led me to discover that the best and the most effective learning method is to use MMAT: Motivation, Methodology, Action and Time.

Motivation is number one. It’s the answer to a “why?” question. Without it, we won’t do anything else. People who constantly remind themselves of their WHYs are more motivated and can overcome any other difficulties like finding the best methodology.

A good methodology (or learning structure and material) is important because without a good strategy and know-how we will drown in a sea of ubiquitous information. We simply will never accomplish our learning goals due to analysis paralysis. And yes, sometimes it takes a lot of time to find the best methodology. Don’t get caught up in a never ending search. Perfect is the enemy of done so just pick something good enough and stick with it for a while.

Next is the action. Action is what separates theory from the real results. Action clarifies. It shows what’s working and what’s not, what’s important and what’s not. Action brings up new questions. Action turns new learning into habits and then into identity (which makes things automatic — a second nature).

There are so many fake teachers who never worked in the industry and yet teach people business, marketing, finance, computer science, literature. A lot of their teaching is plain BS that’s better to ignore because it can actually harm the real doers.

Lastly, time. Time is needed to soak up the skills, to ruminate, to muse on them to come up with novel ways to think and work. Sometimes it’s more practice and action. Sometimes it’s stepping away and then coming back to the new skill after a short break (e.g., space repetition).

The bottom line is that once we’ve acquired the methodology, we should aim to take a lot of action. A lot! And we ought to be prepared to wait, be patient and give time for our new skills to sharpen. It can take years. The luckiest will master the skills and they’ll become second nature. We can remind ourselves of our motivation to keep going.

Wishing a Nice Meal (in Five Languages)

Sun, 12 Jan 2020 11:51:00 -0600

In English, to wish someone a nice and tasty meal is said with “enjoy your meal”. I never liked this phrase because it sounds like a command—enjoy! And if you don’t obey my command then there will be repercussions. Of course, it’s silly to think of this phrase this way but still the “enjoy your meal” phrase sounds too harsh and not elegant. Maybe people try to remind each other that they should enjoy their food instead of gulping fast food on the go or chowing down a salad while browsing Facebook and answering emails?

Maybe that’s why a lot of English-speaking Americans prefer the French “bon appétit”. It literally means good appetite but implies I wish you a nice appetite. I use it sometimes but if I think about it more then why would I want to wish someone a good appetite? Maybe they are on a diet of some sort and actually try to eat less, not more? Maybe I should wish them that they have a less of an appetite?

The Russian phrase “приятного аппетита” just mimics the French phrase so nothings new here. French and Russian cultures often share a lot of similarities.

I really like the Spanish phrase “buen provecho”. It literally translates into make sure you’re taking a good benefit (of the food). The translation is clumsy because there’s no direct analog in English to the Spanish verb provechar. I really like this verb. It means take advantage or take benefit. In English it’s a phrase of at least two words but in Spanish you can say in one word. Usually Spanish is more compact than English.

Funny enough, ever time I hear buen provecho I remember a car sale commercial ad on radio that talked about taking advantage of some sale. :) So sometimes, in the USA I say buen provecho to English speaking Americans. If the French phrase is common in the USA, why not make the Spanish phrase popular too. Maybe we can even import the verb provechar into English language?!

Lastly, in Tatar one of the phrases “ашыгыз тәмле булсын” or just “тәмле булсын” which means wishing that your food will be tasty. I think that’s the best phrase. The bonus that it won’t lead to over eating either. You can enjoy the tasty food but stop when you’re full (no need for a big appetite).

PS: Next time you wish “enjoy my meal” or “have a safe travel” just think about it. It sounds like I typically don’t enjoy my food or try to go on adventures and put myself in danger but this time I’ll have to be extra joyful and safe.

My HEC Paris Journey, Part IV: Organize and Incentivize

Mon, 25 Nov 2019 17:32:00 -0600

We’re halfway done with the phase one of the Master of Science in Innovation and Entrepreneurship program at HEC Paris. This post will summarize two new courses that I’ve taken and passed: New Product Development and Organizational Design and Management. The common theme of these two courses is organizing teams and incentivizing them, hence the name of the post.

New Product Development

The New Product Development course is, as you can get from the name, about developing new products, but those new products don’t have to be completely new products. In fact, most of the times when companies develop new products, they are extending their current lines of products, or enhancing existing products.

In the course we’ve learned to ask three main questions: Is it real? Can we win it? Is it worth doing? We’ve learned how to apply the net perceived value or NPV. We’ve learned about the Stage Gate process, concurrent engineering, the Agile process, the selectionism and parallel trials methods, learning and iteration methods and many more techniques. As you can already see from all the names of the methods, the course has a lot of references and gives students a good understanding of what is out there and the next steps on where to find them.

When developing new products, there are various types of uncertainties: variation, known risks and unforeseeable uncertainty. In the end, there is no right or wrong solution. It’s all about the strategy at a particular company, at a particular time, for a particular line of products and services. Most often, you will not bet on one innovation but work with a portfolio of products and services. Some of them will be short term and some of them long term. This is done to mitigate any risks (just like in a portfolio of stock investments), and to balance between increasing short-term profits and winning big long-term with a disrupting new product or service.

And then of course, we’ve learned how to organize different teams according to different types of new product developments. For example, using colocation of teams, matrix structure or using functional teams. The main takeaway of this course is not all new products are worth developing and not all new products are equally exciting and beneficial to the company and the business.

Organizational Design and Management

Although, the organizational design and management is a long (and somewhat hard to understand) name for a course, it was fun to watch. This is in part due to the fact that two HEC Paris professors that authored the course were moving from location to location and interviewing different people and they went role playing (e.g., the case of the onion chopping in a restaurant in Paris for close).

As far as the content, the course contained a lot of references to methods and techniques. Also, there were a lot of insights and ideas in this course, including how to identify your competitive advantage or value created, using the business model canvas, or creating an incentive plan for your employees’ intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.

We looked at Superamas who have a lot of intrinsic motivation for their art projects. We looked at different org structures such as divisional and functional. And lastly, we looked at vertical, horizontal and geographical scaling.

The main takeaway of this course could be summed up as you don’t have to reinvent the wheel, when you’re designing your organization and management. Instead, you can tap into existing patterns, experiences, frameworks and knowledge.

HEC Paris Entrepreneurs Panel and Alumni Gathering

I visited a live event in San Francisco, organized by the executive HEC Paris organization. They brought Executive MBA students from Europe (HEC EMBA Entrepreneurship Major Class of 2020), and also they organized an entrepreneurship panel of speakers: Danny Hamady, Sheryle Bolton, and Carlos Diaz. The event was in an old building next to the famous Fairmont Hotel, where typically USA presidents stay when they visit San Francisco.

We enjoyed networking and splendid city views. Then, we listened to the speakers and had some wine&cheese and more networking. It was interesting to meet with the fellow students from my Master of Science in Innovation and Entrepreneurship program. Also it was insightful to meet with several full-time MBA and Executive MBA students. A lot of the people want to move into the product management roles or start their own companies. That’s understandable because typically those are the riskier, and more challenging problems to solve, for which you can also achieve more impact and receive more rewards.

The HEC Paris community is very strong internationally. There are 300 alumni in the Bay Area, but tens of thousands in Europe and Asia.

I offered Vincent Murezlle (Executive Director of the HEC USA Representative Office) to host the next visiting class of HEC Paris at my company Indeed in San Francisco and for me to teach a lecture to them. We’ll see how it goes.

Here are some pics from the event.

My HEC Paris Journey, Part III: It's All About Strategy

Fri, 18 Oct 2019 05:50:00 -0500

It’s time to write a new blog post about my experience in the HEC Paris Master of Science program. I’ve taken two new courses: Business strategy and Strategic Management of Innovation. They were somewhat related which was good for building a broad knowledge, because several concepts and topics were used and discussed from different angles in both courses. When I was a schoolboy, I liked strategy games like chess, Civilization and Command & Conquer. I had to balance building roads and factories with investment in defense and military troops. As with these games, in business it’s all about the strategy.

Let me first tell you about the Business Strategy course.

Business Strategy

The Business Strategy course was a great overview of how management consultancy works, that is, identifying competitive advantage and picking the right strategy for the company. The strategy is all the choices that the company and its employees must make. Often times there is no right or wrong answer in a vacuum (without considering the industry and competitors) for things like pricing, choosing the target audience, accounting for learning curve, growing organically or going big fast. The external forces in the industry must be considered. For some companies offering a low price product can provide competitive advantage via economy of scale (Walmart). While for other companies, offering the high-priced product can provide competitive advantage via differentiation (Whole Foods).

We covered several frameworks like SWOT, 5 Force model, BCG model, VRIST. The key take away is the industries are not equally profitable. In other words, some industries are highly profitable such as soda and pharmaceuticals while others are less profitable such as the airline industry. You might think of these courses more for bigger established companies or conglomerates, but you can apply a lot of the thinking to a start up to choose a better, more competitive strategy (like Southwest did).

The professor had a management consultancy background. The course was straight to the point without wasting any time on unnecessary information. The live session had an interesting real life case study. Throughout the course, I was remembering two books about management consulting that I’ve read. First is The Firm: The Story of McKinsey and Its Secret Influence on American Business which gives a good history of the biggest and most respectable consultancy firm, the main service of which is business strategy. The second book is The Management Myth: Debunking Modern Business Philosophy in which the author debunks some of the management theories including Taylorism and In Search of Excellence. You would never think about management consultancy in the same way after reading this book.

Strategic Management of Innovation

The Strategic Management of Innovation course is about how to innovate strategically. We covered topics such as buying patents from universities, incentives, Technology S-curve, competence destroying innovation, segment zero competition, dominant design, standardization, platforms, opened versus closed, networks, and the dangers of going first to the market. The main takeaway of this course is that certain things that the mainstream perceives as undeniably good that is being the first mover and growing big fast would not guarantee the success just by themselves.

There were a few tips applicable to startups such as picking the right location for your new venture. Also, the course is applicable to executives and consultants at big or more established companies.

And as far as choosing the location for the startup, it’s better not to be located in a hub of companies in your similar niche, so called agglomerate areas. Are your chances to start a tech company in San Francisco and Silicon Valley lower than in Milwaukee, WI or Dallas, TX? Maybe yes considering that R&D costs would be lower, employee loyalty would be higher and you would not be biased or demotivated by the bubble think of The Silicon Valley. In the book The San Francisco Fallacy: The Ten Fallacies That Make Founders Fail author and serial entrepreneur shares that he would have never started his company RightSignature if he were in San Francisco and knew about the major established competitor DocuSign. Instead, the author just built tool in Europe, made it a successful company and sold it a few years later.

Both of these courses were supplemented with two live sessions with the professors.

Live Sessions

The live sessions are optional and there are recordings to watch later. However, I attended all four sessions and greatly enjoyed the interactive communication with 30-40 of my classmates and the professors who gave us additional insights, answers and materials not covered in the self-paced prerecorded videos. The students joined from the USA, Europe, Africa and Asia.

The live sessions along with the Slack community, forum discussions, and peer-reviewed assignments give the feeling that you are really connected to the classmates because you see their work, challenges, and learn from years of their experience in various industries, companies and countries. It will be close to impossible to achieve the same level of productivity, effectiveness and convenience with the traditional physical approach to the study.

I’m looking forward to the next courses, projects and assignments!

My HEC Paris Journey, Part II: First Two Months

Sun, 08 Sep 2019 11:27:00 -0500

It’s already been two months since I was accepted into and joined the MSIE program at HEC Paris (Master of Science in Innovation and Entrepreneurship). Right away, there were two courses that I needed to pass within a month of July 2019. Luckily, there was a summer break in August. So the deadlines for the final exams were extended one month (into the second month of the program). The first two courses were Entrepreneurial Strategy and Boosting Creativity. Let me share a little bit about the courses and the final exams.

Entrepreneurial Strategy

The Entrepreneurial Strategy: From Ideal to Exit course is led by an experienced entrepreneur who founded and sold multiple companies. Just as the name of the course suggests, we’ve covered everything starting from an idea for a startup/business to an exit (sale) of it. In between, we’ve covered sales, management, and other topics. The scope of starting, running and selling a business is vast so unsurprisingly the course lacked depth. However, for someone absolutely new to startups or someone starting a traditional business, this course can be good. It offers a high-level overview of what it takes to have a successful exit (or two).

The main take away is that as an entrepreneur you should start small with as little money as possible, then focus on sales and only then on the team, international expansion and scaling up. The two aspects are the most important: starting fast and doing sales yourself first. I agree. A lot of people don’t start and those who start are at a risk of never making it, because they never have enough money coming in from sales. Or their product is not needed, because they didn’t do sales to test the market and the product.

For me this course was a good refresher of some of the tools and techniques. I was surprised at the end that the only option was an exit by an acquisition. About a decade ago, I would have imagined someone building a business that can be kept running for years or the one that can go to an IPO. It might be a sign of a winner-takes-all economy where small startups can’t compete with giants long term and can’t continue to survive by themselves either. Startups just have to sell out or die. Even the most successful like Twitter and Snapchat struggle with becoming profitable for many years. So maybe founders of Instagram and WhatsApp did the right thing that they sold to Facebook which had sales and ads but lacked the new audience.

Boosting Creativity

The Boosting Creativity course was a very unusual one. We had to draw aliens, coffeeshops and learn about scarf knitter. I liked that my creative limits were pushed. We used different techniques and templates to be more creative. I even liked some of my coffeeshop ideas and think they could be a real business (one of them is teashop — a coffeeshop without coffee).

The main take away is that happiness and the positive attitude help creativity. The more positive emotions someone has the better the chances of being creative. Also, creativity is about using normal objects in a new way. The last take away is that restraining the number of options (less choices) makes experienced creators more creative while it has no effect on novice creators. It’s counterintuitive because everyone thinks that having more options leads to more freedom and creativity. Not so much… and my personal experience proves it. When I write and turn off internet I can be more creative than when I have various websites within easy reach just for inspiration (often just a distraction).

Final Exams

For this masters degree, HEC Paris requires a final exam for each course. These exams are conducted via Coursera and Examify (another separate company from HEC Paris and Coursera). I was surprised with this format but the exams turned out to be pleasant and convenient. The exams give more credibility to the degree because they make it very hard to cheat.

The convenience is in the fact that I didn’t need to drive to a test location like Prometric or use antique PC computer with a QUERTY layout. I like my MacBook keyboards and use the Colemak layout. The exam is done with the camera and mic on. Also, I shared my screen and showed that my table is clean and there’s no one else in the room. These things are required to prevent looking at notes (these are closed book exams) or any cheating.

The time slots are abundant. The proctors sit somewhere in India but they are very polite and helpful (when it comes to rules but not the questions themselves, of course).

Wrap up

Overall, I’m very satisfied with this MSc from HEC Paris so far. I love, love, love the self-paced aspect, the practicality of the courses, the peer-reviewed assignments and the proctored final exams. I just don’t like to sit in traffic trying to get to the classroom. I prefer video lectures to live tutors.

As far as practicality, I already started to apply some of the skills I learned in Boosting Creativity in my life and work. But there’s no time to rest. There are two more new exciting, interesting and useful courses in September 2019: Business Strategy and Strategic Management of Innovation. I even ordered a text book. Onward!

Why I'm Getting a Second Master's Degree from HEC Paris

Sun, 11 Aug 2019 10:58:00 -0500

Two months ago, I applied and was accepted to a master’s program at a prestigious business school (ranked #2), HEC Paris. The degree is titled Master of Science in Innovation and Entrepreneurship (MSIE). It has 10 normal courses, 10 practical project-based courses and one large team project. The master’s program lasts about one year and a half. Thus the program ends in 2020. However the graduation will be in 2021, because HEC has only one graduation ceremony which is held in its beautiful Paris campus.

I finished my first Master’s degree in 2007. It was Master of Science in Information Systems Technology from the University of Northern Virginia. I don’t like traditional universities and degrees. I’m a strong proponent of modern online education like Node University or Udacity. I taught at the Hack Reactor coding academy and I’m a huge fan of vocational schools that teach practical trades as opposed to abstract and theoretical knowledge unnecessary for real-world jobs. Needless to say, that there are a lot of materials available online via YouTube and blogs. So it might come as a surprise that I’m getting a second master’s degree. However, I decided to commit to getting a second Master of Science degree for the following reasons:

Motivation: When you pay 10s of thousands of dollars or euros you are more motivated to continue and finish the studies
Focus and pre-filter: Someone with a good reputation already did the selection for me. I avoid ads or possible distractions from web surfing when I’m on Coursera.
European perspective: Living in San Francisco and Silicon Valley area for the last seven years I understand that we live in a bubble here. SF is not the entire world which has other, bigger and more real, problems. It’s nice to hear and learn another perspective on business and innovation.
Content: Things change fast and after 12 years, it’ll be nice to become a student again and get a nice broad overview of current methods and techniques in entrepreneurship in a nice distraction-free format (reading blogs or watching YouTube is a pain!).
Experience: the MSIE program is mostly (50%+) project based which gives actual experience instead of just abstract lectures.
Brand and Network: HEC Paris is the number 2 business school in Europe with a large and global presence, brand and alumni network. Brand is great because it attracts the best students (for peer learning), best coaches (for projects) and best faculty (for lectures).
Convenience: The MSIE program is 100% online with weekly live calls, chat rooms, forums and online proctored exams. I don’t like the idea of being confined to one location and a set time for lectures for the next two years. With this format, I can travel often or even move to a new place altogether.
Relatively cheap: The MSIE, HEC Paris program costs only 20,000 euros compared to ~$30-40,000 USD for master’s from Harvard Extension or $150,000 USD for Wharton EMBA.

I looked at other Master’s programs. In particular, I researched Wharton Executive MBA (WEMBA) in San Francisco. They fly all the faculty from Pennsylvania every other week. I even took a few courses from the same program. The requirement of being tied and having to come to SF every other week for two years is too limiting for me. The price is very steep.

I looked at master’s degrees from Harvard Extension and even took a course from them. I didn’t like their approach. It’s too rigid with the focus on minute details, facts and rote memorization. The requirements for home assignments for some courses are too arcane (must be only in MS Word with certain font size and margins). The fact that they require students to come to every live webinar every week (missing even a single webinar is not allowed) is very depressing and limiting. The platform is clunky (can’t download videos for online viewing).

I like that HEC Paris uses Coursera which is one of the best platforms for online courses. The MSIE content is relatively new and the approach is more practical. I’m in cohort 4 which means that it’s only the fourth batch of students. If I’m not mistaken, cohorts 2 and 3 are still studying and haven’t graduated. Being in the 4th cohort means that university and Coursera ironed out all the kinks and perfected the program.

The application process was lengthy but totally doable: a few essays, video cover letter, bio, experience and two references (done by email). The Coursera and HEC Paris staff are responsive and all the logistics ran smoothly so far. The students have incredible backgrounds and I’m sure we’ll learn a great deal from each other in addition to the lectures and projects.

I’ll try to keep writing about my journey through this innovative and practical Master of Science program.

Keep It Simple Stupid

Mon, 09 Jul 2018 09:48:00 -0500

I truly believe that human brains didn’t evolve to process complex data. Human conscious mind can only hold three, maybe five, seven max for some geniuses, items at a time. Because of that, I have a very optimistic belief when I’m faced with something complex and overwhelming: nothing complex is possible to build or comprehend. It’s optimistic because I know that everything can be broken down into small components.

For example, a large corporation or huge country are run by small hierarchical groups of three to seven people. Any large computer system can be broken down to modules, submodules and procedures inside of these submodules. When faced with a new undertaking, a study or a seemingly complex system, I remind myself to keep things simple stupid, or to keep them simple, stupid.

Work and Rest

Sat, 21 Oct 2017 08:31:00 -0500

Working is important. It not only provides material means, social status and pride in a job well done, but also meaning and motivation which in turn extend a person’s life. According to some studies, people who retire and don’t find another activity, die fast. Or that tech millionaires are unhappy once they are let go or fired, or that lottery winners miss working.

However, resting is important too and helps to avoid burn-out and all kinds of nasty nervous diseases which tend to decrease one’s life. Working productively while having rest once in a while is the best approach. 👨‍💻🔄🛌 What’s crazy is that many people do things which they think is resting but in fact they are draining their energy even more. Here are some of these things. Some of them might shock you!

Going out on the weekend: Breaking your sleep cycle with loud noise, excessive drinking or eating - not good.
Traveling, especially stressful traveling: Being in a nice place taken care of by the hotel staff and restaurants is nice but the traveling itself is almost always a stress (airport, planes, traffic). Trying new food and changing time zones are bad stressors too.
Watching sports, TV shows or news: they all drain your energy because your body is passive yet emotions and adrenaline glands are not.
Being on social media: More people feel depressed after using social media due to “success theatre” and the addiction mechanism of novelty.
Multitasking: Not being in the present and flow state, e.g., when you’re at your kid’s soccer game, don’t text with work. That’s a disservice to you, work and your family. Be present whatever you do. Put your phone on airplane mode. Most likely you are not a firefighter or a brain surgeon. Your work can wait until the weekend is over.
Not sleeping enough or waking up on the weekend at different hours.
Eating refined carbs (pizza, pasta, juices, smoothies): Sugar is easily digestible, spikes insulin and is very toxic for your body.
Not getting resistance training and doing too much chronic cardio: Chronic cardio is a huge stressor, tough on joints and ages people fast.
Smoking weed: If smoking tobacco causes cancer due to the burned stuff that people inhale, then why burning weed and smoking it wouldn’t cause cancer too?
Hanging out with “friends”: Wrong type of friends can bring drama and having too much drama in your life is not good for mental health.
Postponing important things, i.e., procrastination: It might feel good short-term to postpone an important project or a decision but it’ll snowball stress in the long-term.

There are probably more things which are misleading to people. They mask as rest but actually suck up your energy. I would say not watching news or TV shows and having enough sleep are two most important which will give the majority the most bang for their buck. Focus on that if you feel tired!

Snowball Change ❄️❄️❄️

Tue, 10 Oct 2017 06:02:00 -0500

This year I had a lot of changes. And I’ll have more until the end of the year! It started with a small one. I upgraded my laptop. The tool which I use 8-10 hours every day. Then I changed the place of living… and did other really big life changes. Small things lead to big changes. It’s a snowball. I remember something about cognitive dissonance. Probably that’s it. If you are decisive and not afraid of changes for good, then it translates to other areas of life and work…

What’s funny is that every big change which I did was perceived as bigger before but in fact was 10x easier. The lesson: don’t think changing is hard. Stop your mind when it starts to envision any problems or hurdles which might not even materialize. Of course, account for the worse scenario but don’t paralyze yourself with excessive analysis. Avoid analysis paralysis by taking action even if it’s a small action at first.

How to Get More Motivation

Sun, 20 Aug 2017 02:16:00 -0500

A lot of people think they lack motivation. They feel lazy. They listen to Gary Vaynerchuk or Tony Robinns. It might help for a while but why not solve the problem at the root cause? What these people really lack is a big enough “why”. They become complacent because most of their needs are met. Simply take on more and larger responsibilities and you’ll be motivated. Get new bigger problems to solve. Find a new job, get married, start a family, have kids, sign a book contract, start or buy a business. You’ll see your motivation will skyrocket, and the complacency will decrease!

How to Live a Stress-Free Life

Sat, 12 Aug 2017 10:44:00 -0500

The title of this post is really a misnomer because a stress-free life is nothing good. Stress helps us grow and it’s usually a good thing when there’s enough time to recover, recuperate and heal. Think going to a gym. You exercise, which is a form of stress, but after a recovery period you become stronger. Humans evolutionarily evolved to thrive under this type of acute stress followed by recovery (catabolic and anabolic processes).

However there’s another type of stress which is called prolonged or chronic stress. This type of stress is detrimental because it does NOT allow for a recovery period. For example, thinking about an upcoming test for your final exam, a job interview or not being able to pay your mortgage because you got fired.

The best way to avoid this bad chronic stress is just to avoid thinking about it. Most problems are not even real. They are products of our imagination. The longer you procrastinate and overanalyze, the worse the overwhelm, fear and stress become.

What makes it worse is that our brains can’t handle more than 4-5 items in our conscious minds. When you daydream or analyze in your mind (like in a shower or before going to bed), most likely later you’ll forget whatever ideas, steps or details you thought about. This will add to stress.

Have a dedicated time to think. Mark it in your calendar. Write the steps, details and questions in a notebook or in an application. Looking at a todo list or a high-level outline will bring you calmness and clarity.

In addition, you can take action which will clear and dispel the fears and imagined problems. All you need to complete a big task is just to know what are the next actionable steps, and take them.

One of the best ways to deal with procrastination is to tell yourself that you’ll just start on a task or see how to write the first page (for a book) or create the first file (for a program). The mind will want to continue by inertia once you get into the flow and pick up momentum by seeing results. So you can trick it by just starting.

Pomodoro technique uses 25 minute chunks to trick the brain into starting by limiting to “exposure” to a task to 25 minutes which will typically turn into another 25 minutes and then to another 25 minutes until you get to some milestone on a project.

The last tip, don’t load your mind with tasks or problems unless you can either solve them right away or make a note to work on them later. Doing so will occupy your mind but you can’t accomplish the task right away. Remember, your brain can hold only several items in the conscious mind at the same time.

For example, don’t check your email on your phone in a metro, because there will be emails which will require you to use a computer. It’s easier to read an email and do the task right away, than to read it, mark as “todo later” or unread, then come back to it, read again and do the task.

To sum up, avoid chronic stress by taking action and avoiding over thinking especially thinking without taking notes. Planning and taking action beat any overwhelm and procrastination. At the same time, indulge in acute stress once in a while to continue to grow.

About Efficiency, Digital and Remote Work

Sat, 29 Jul 2017 09:22:00 -0500

Needless to say that cafes, open offices, commute and slow internet all impede productivity. To increase efficiency, distraction-free flow and productivity, I stayed home for a few days over the weekend to work on a project.

I finished the project and made some money all digitally and remotely via the Internet and phone. I ordered food (groceries) using food delivery services. I worked out in a gym in my building and got fresh air on my patio.

The result was a weird feeling that I don’t need to leave my home at all. It’s almost magical to realize the digital inflow of money (salary and book royalties) and digital outflow (to pay for food). Also, I was healthier because I cooked at home instead of eating out, and I didn’t listen to gossip or read/watch news even in passing on a gym’s TV or in metro.

It’s fascinating that all can be done digitally without leaving one’s home and it’s peculiar how little humans need sometimes for productive, satisfactory and healthy lives.

The Right and Wrong Ways to Delegate

Sun, 16 Jul 2017 16:22:00 -0500

My main jobs are software engineering and writing. They are crafts and as with many crafts they are harder to delegate. Think mass produced car vs. designing a car and the factory to mass produce it. Software and books are scalable because they can be replicated infinitely without any loss, but the actual act of writing them is a creative hard-to-scale process.

Over the years of writing software and books, I’ve been learning to identify and delegate some repeatable tasks. I learned that the right way to delegate is to find a repeatable task which you know a) cannot be easily automated b) needs to be performed 100+ times or 2+ hours, and c) straightforward to document and explain.

There’s a cost of review. Do not skip reviewing the end work and either fixing mistakes yourself or sending it back for a re-work (in this case always review again). Reviewing helps not only to make a better product but it’ll give you the confidence in your product and your team (or not but then you at least know and can fix issues later).

Some leaders say, never delegate things you are not willing to do yourself. It’s B.S. Everything is situational. I delegated things I dreaded doing and they got done. If I didn’t delegate them, they could have taken longer (procrastination) or would have never materialized at all. Done is better than perfect in this case. However, running at least the first 3-4 times through the routine will help you greatly in writing instructions and standard operation procedures (SOPs).

Do not delegate to perform things which do not make sense financially and don’t be cheap on things which will generate revenue.

Delegate things you think you are okay or good (even worse), but in reality you suck at. For example, a lot of programmers think they are good at design and their confidence leads to terrible websites, book covers and software which prevents them from making more sales.

To summarize this post, do:

Delegate to get better supplemental skill to your own and don’t be cheap, e.g., design
Change process to eliminate or automate, e.g., create a self-service instead of customer support or use AWS RDS instead of maintaining a database
Delegate repeatable tasks by having detailed easy to follow instructions
Always review before the final step
Delegate scary for you tasks but only after you’ve done them a few times and they’ve stopped being scary
Constantly re-evaluate, i.e., look for opportunities to change to a cheaper provider or simplify the process
Delegate to get a second opinion, e.g., tech review, copy editing

Example of things you probably shouldn’t be doing yourself:

Design (for programmers or writers)
Scheduling appointments by phone
Fixing formatting, links, code, fonts, etc. in MS Word, Markdown, and other formats
First pass at creating captions and transcriptions
First pass at video editing
Spinning up and maintaining your own database instead of using BaaS
Spinning up and maintaining your own servers (virtual machines) instead of using PaaS
Importing, exporting, enrolling instead of automating
Submitting to any forms: job boards, conferences (request for proposals), clients, etc.
Posting to social media
Deploying code instead of having CD
Testing code instead of having CI

Do not delegate (or automate) things when one or more applies:

It will faster for you to do it and it’s not a repeatable task then to train and review (review can take a long time)
It’s a last step review
It’s hard to describe (means creative)
It’s a core function for you
It requires extremely high standards which will cost you too much or hard to find people to do
It’s marketing/sales

Changing Unconscious

Wed, 05 Jul 2017 12:24:00 -0500

As I was reviewing transcripts for one of my Node University courses, I was surprised to see so many “so”, “um”, and “ah” filler words. It was a very painful experience to realize that your speech is far from perfect. Of course, with training most people can improve their speech: avoid filler words, accents and improve intonation. This is what professional voice actors, news anchors and movie stars did. And they are in high demand and popular!

Think of it, a lot of improvements to the unconscious actions such as speech, language, writing, personal finance (it’s defined by habits not logic), eating and fitness are the hardest, but they bring the most rewards once you make the changes. Unconscious changes are the hardest, but at the same time they are the easiest to maintain once acquired. The reason is that there’s an autopilot effect. The reward part comes from the fact that there are fewer people who can change those unconscious things in or around them.

For example, if you train yourself to speak well, you can become a Pluralsight course author or a paid public speaker. If you invest time and effort in Spanish, you can speak it without translating from English to Spanish. Not many people can do either of them.

Unconscious autopilots are great, but tweaking them takes time and efforts. Ego is crushed which makes for less competition. There are no traffic jams on the extra mile. The good thing is that once you applied the change, everything can go back to the autopilot: now you eat healthy without thinking about it, focus quicker and read more of good books.

It’s funny how things work but knowing that there’s a big reward ahead if you can tweak a bad unconscious habit into a good one creates a good motivation.

A Man of All Markets

Sun, 18 Jun 2017 12:07:00 -0500

I’m almost done listening to an audiobook A Man for All Markets read by its author and I’m fascinated by two things. First, the parallels between risk, casino, gambling and the stock market. Second, the fact that the author was innovating and constantly moving forward into areas which are still not saturated and still unproven away from techniques and areas which became more competitive and mainstream. Natural curiosity and data-driven non-emotional approach helped the author a lot! These are my notes about the book which I highly recommend reading, so if next time someone tells you that the casino always wins, you can refer them to this book which proved otherwise.

10 Easy Tips to Create More Time in Your Life

Sat, 03 Jun 2017 11:26:00 -0500

Being busy has became a badge of honor. For me, it’s just plain stupid. I do a lot of things but I’m not busy. In fact, one of the questions people ask me a lot is “How do you find time?”

First of all, you cannot find it. It’s not a pair of sun glasses which you left at a beach. You can’t find time or lose it… but you can spend it on stupid things or lasting valuable good things.

Let me give some examples of stupid thing that I generally avoid doing and some time tips:

Avoid texting with friends - just freaking call or talk in person when you want talk, and use text is only for scheduling hangouts
Use activities which do not require focus like folding laundry, washing dishes or writing HTML to listen to audio books and good podcasts. That’s how I was able to consume over 200 books in the last three years.
Avoid reading Facebook timeline or looking at Instagram news feed. Only post, don’t consume.
Avoid checking Twitter feed and when you do only subscribe to a handful of people, no more than 200 people and look into “In case you missed it”
Watch movie traiglers instead of full movies. I only watch movies trailers in planes that’s enough to see all the good scenes and in 80% of the cases understand the plot… but even that makes me want to puke either because modern movies are so brain-dead or full of loser-oriented propaganda (e.g., Hangover)
Pretend TV and cable do not exist and skip commercials by getting Netflix or Amazon Prime if you want some dumb entertainment
Ignore surveys or providing feedback beyond stars or thumbs on hotels, flights, books, apps, services
Avoid writing reviews unless I really want for my own notes/thinking as I did with Managing Humans or Antifragile
Avoid being tired because when you are tired you want to take a break, a long weekend or a vacation. Don’t get tired in the first place! To do so, eat property, exercise and have a good sleep every night.
Avoid reading popular magazines, Medium, blog posts, news—ignorance is a bliss in these cases

Don’t confuse activity with results. Being busy is not equates with achieving a lot. Observe what things are wasteful and not productive. Just the act of observing will help you to gain more time to be more productive while spending less time and being less busy and tired!

Success Formula

Sat, 27 May 2017 11:00:00 -0500

Before I wrote that success is boring. It still sounds true to me now, but I noticed a simple yet powerful formula for success. It works in almost all cases as far as I know based on dozens of biographies and autobiographies I’ve read and heard.

Success is talent plus hard work plus luck.

Talent is about upbringing and genes. It’s related to luck but the luck formula component itself is more about present and future than predetermined past of early childhood, country of origin, language or culture.

The luck in the formula could be generated by more hard work (more activity leads to more opportunity), but it’s not a guaranteed linear relationship because statistically numbers could be low for the cause and effect to play out.

Hard work is self-explanatory. More talent can require less hard work and vice versa if you are less talented you could compensate to a certain degree with hard work.

So three components are related and might affect one another but as a general direction this formula is clear and universal. It makes going for success in any area straightforward.

How to Use Social Media Right for Much Benefit and to Stay Sane and Productive

Sat, 08 Apr 2017 12:00:00 -0500

Most people use social media wrong. They scroll through what seems to be a never ending timeline…down, down, down. They come back in half an hour and scroll again to see something new. Down, down, down… and when they see the posts they’ve already seen earlier in the day, they switch to another app: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google +, Vine, Snapchat, WeChat, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger or Skype. When they’ve checked everything they have installed and signed up for… it’s time to repeat the cycle.

People check social media on their phone, but then they are on their laptops or desktop computers. It’s time to check everything again because, you know, something new might have happened or after all, Facebook website and Facebook mobile app are so different from each other! 😏

Wrong, wrong, wrong. You are just consuming low quality content for a thrill of dopamine released by your novelty seeking lizard brain (Amygdala) 🐲. You are a gambling addict, a slot machine junking pulling the lever down, down, down. You are wasting time, getting full of ads, and losing your brain cycles (where the focus goes energy flows).

The right usage of media about harnessing the power of social media to your benefit, here are some of the examples:

Message, video, chat with friends and organize in-person meetings. Connecting has never been so cheap and easy.
It’s not what you know, it’s whom you know so keep your contacts saved for future interactions (your rolodex), both business (Twitter, LinkedIn) and personal (Facebook, WhatsApp)
Post valuable, useful and interesting updates. Sorry but what you ate for breakfast or what is the view form of your window does NOT count unless you are a celebrity (they are forgiven).

I check my social media accounts just once a week. I almost never look at the timeline and never for a long period of time. I proactively reach out to people, search topics and hashtags, and then message and comment. I check my notifications and reply to the ones that need replies. I deleted all the social media apps from my phone and don’t miss them. It helps me to focus on important matters and act instead of reacting. 😇

Use social media to your advantage and don’t let social media consume you!

How to Create an Online Course in Five Simple Steps

Sat, 01 Apr 2017 03:08:00 -0600

Create an online course to learn something yourself, to promote one of your other products, to help others and to make millions. Here are the five simple steps.

First, pick a topic. To create an online course, you are NOT required to have expertise in a topic. Although having it will speed up the process from a few weeks, or even months, to a few days, or even hours. Seriously. It took me 0 time to create my first online course on Node. I just invited a friend to record my workshop. I already knew the material. The course has close to 20,000 students now.

Then, create an outline. Give it to someone who is not your lover or close friend because they are NOT likely to give you honest feedback. Even better, ask someone to pay you for the course based on the outline. It’s called MVP and pre-sales. It’s the best way to test an idea.

Third, create slides. I use Deckset but you can use Powerpoint or Keynotes. Whatever you already know or the fastest to learn. Google presentation is the best choice after Markdown.

Fourth, find a quiet place, and then record voice overs. If you’re on macOS, then you can just use QuickTime. I use Screenflow which is just $100. You might need to re-record a few times before you get it right. It’s normal. No pressure. No one will see your failures.

Fifth, upload videos somewhere. You can use simplistic YouTube or Vimeo, or more advanced Teachable or Thinkific. It doesn’t matter at this point too much, so don’t spend hour upon hour on research. The goal is to find at least 10 customers for your course and get their feedback. After that you can always update slides, re-record videos or change platforms.

To summarize,

Pick a topic
Create an outline
Create slides
Record voice over videos (slides + audio)
Upload videos

What are you waiting for? Your students need you. Go and create a course!

PS: If you are interested in hearing my full story on how I transitioned from writing coding books to being an online course creator, then I wrote a book about it. Check it out. It’s called ProgWriter 2.

Idiocy of Open Offices

Sat, 11 Mar 2017 11:55:00 -0600

I’ve been doing software engineering for over 15 years now, and I always had to sit in an open office space. Sometimes like at FDIC or NIH, I had a short wall to form a noise barrier- sort of a cubicle. The walls are only shoulder length so they are still a galaxy away from being soundproof. Especially when the desk is in the hallway like how mine was at FDIC, or near a chatty NIH colleague who spends hours every day talking with someone on the phone in loud Cantonese. Argh. Human voice is very distracting even when you don’t understand it.

However, that set up is luxury compared to the idiocy of open offices practiced by startups and large corporations on the West Coast. There are rows upon rows of narrow tables with 50 or 100+ people in giant rooms. Tables to tables. Rows and rows. This is a 21st-century analog of an industrial age factory.

But in this information age, the metrics are not tangible goods. They are harder to measure, and this is what fools senior leadership, office designers, founders and CEOs/COOs. Activity is not “result”. Do they put everyone in the open to reduce slacking because they can’t effectively measure results? (Slack and IM are constant distractions too but that’s a different story. At least you can turn them off!)

In fancy San Francisco unicorn “startups” or giant Silicon Valley corporations, you can be next to a ping pong, foosball or a product manager. With all this noise and distractions, people can’t work. They tire quickly because they go to chat with co-workers, laugh, and play another stupid game which should be banned from any office, which only adds to the noise even more. Catch 22.

Since there’s little work that can be done between 9-5pm, people come early or stay late… or work from home to get at least something done. When they are in the office from 9 to 5, only shallow work gets done. Deep work is almost impossible in an open office. That, and distractions in the form of useless meetings, social media, email arguments, long lunch breaks sprinkled with lots of coffee breaks and gossiping- just anything to kill the time.

And no, noise cancelling headphones are not a solution because the music is a distraction itself and none of it will help from a nerf dart being shot at you (as often happened at DocuSign and was source of constant(something is missing here)).

The bottom line is that open office employees become dumber because all they can do is shallow work. Also some of them will become:

More negative: Social media, procrastination and late night work at home to catch up
Dissatisfied: Deep work is very rewarding
Fatter: All the stress, and the extra snack (typically free), and coffee breaks will increase your chances of survival if you ever will be marooned on a deserted island

Companies waste money because they are paying for unproductive time. Yes. Companies save on real estate, but if there are more remote workers there would be virtually zero demand for office space for them.

I’ve noticed, most of my best work happens in early mornings or late evenings when I’m alone at the office or at home and the neighbors’ twin toddlers are not crying. I hate open offices. They are just a bit better than working from a cafe or an airplane. At least in a cafe you are surrounded by strangers and not obligated to talk to them.

People are in the open office trap. Some escaped it by working only remotely. Good for them, but for the rest of us it’s a vicious circle of frustration, stress, dissatisfaction and becoming dumber due to inability to perform at peak level and do deep work.

Let’s come up with a solution. How about having a library rule in an office like what BaseCamp has? No games, no nerf guns, no talking on the freaking phone (even if you’re a product manager). And the community areas and kitchens can have all the collaboration, chat and noise they want. :)

PS: Michael Lopp in his top-seller book Managing Humans, which I highly recommend reading, refers to collaboration as “a word used to convince you to work with people you’d rather avoid.”

Why Goals Are for Losers, How to Generate Luck and to be Promoted for Being Unqualified

Sat, 04 Mar 2017 13:00:00 -0600

Last week, I finished reading Scott Adam’s How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life. Scott is the creator of the Dilbert cartoon series. He is also a hypnotist and a master of the mindset. I highly recommend his book. Here are the three nuggets:

Goals are for losers. Use routines instead. Routines will make you have progress without constantly focusing on how far your goal is. So keep your goals but don’t obsess over them being too far. Instead build routines and system to make progress towards your goals daily or at least weekly.

Luck can be generated. It’s a product of your skills. The more relevant skills you have, the better. Learning skills like public speaking, hypnosis, writing, programming, or second language (or third like I am doing right now) - all will increase your chances and luck.

Promotion could be given for being unqualified. This is how Scott was promoted in not one but two big companies. His job wasn’t what he was supposed to do but finding and interviewing for the next job. Think about it. Interviewing and day job are often two very separate things and skill sets. This is very true in tech and IT field! My own experience of frustration over tech interviewing is described in I will puke if I hear array search interview question again.

Scott has many other gems in his book. He is also funny, but not too funny since the book is actually on a serious topic of success, career and the proper mindset. Get your own copy and read it!

How to Find Time: Stop Finding and Start Creating It

Sat, 04 Feb 2017 13:00:00 -0600

When people hear that I published 14 books and several online courses while speaking at 17 conferences in 2016 and working full time at Capital One on hands-on projects, they ask one question: “How do you find time?”. Simple answer is I don’t.

I never lost time to find it. Every day each of us gets 24 hour. Not more and not less. Generally it’s not a lack of time but a lack of energy. Have you ever come from work and felt tired, then had dinner and vegetated on a sofa watching yet another TV show? I use this time to write books, blogs, and courses.

I also create time. People like to watch movies while flying. I write this blog post right now as I’m 10000s feet up in the air. People like to play games on their iPhones and Android while in a subway commuting to work (I hope not while driving!). I listen to books and podcasts to educate myself and stay on top of current technologies and events. People spend time looking at social media to become negative because they can’t keep up with the Jones. I get my relevant news from digests and newsletters while automating social media postings.

In the end, time is not the problem and often times you can create more time. Having enough energy is more important, and flow and paleo helps me with that.

Flow

Sun, 22 Jan 2017 12:53:00 -0600

Flow is a blissful state of activity in which time is distorted and reality is ignored. Programming, writing, painting are all examples of a flow.

Distractions kill flow. Emails, IMs, noise are examples of such flow killers. Each distraction not only robs you of your amazing flow time, but it also taxes the mental capacity to get back into the flow. So a 5-minute detour typically costs 15-20 minutes because it takes time to remember the last step, focus and remove residual thinking. That 30-minute call actually ate 1-1.5 hours because you stopped the flow 15 minutes prior to the call at a stopping point so you are not in the middle and have plenty of time to dial in. Then you had to get back into the flow after the call which took at least 15 minutes more. That’s a 3-4x increase which don’t account for. But that’s not the only problem with work fragmentation.

It is more exhaustive to multitask (which is a form of constant switching) than to be in the flow. Most of us had a tiresome day when we can’t name a thing we accomplished because there were meetings, calls, conversations, urgent things, emails and IMs. I feel more tired when I try (and fail) to multitask in a meeting by checking emails or taking notes.

So flow feels good, it’s more productive and produces higher quality results (Deep Work). Good. Then why is the multitasking habit so prevalent in our day and age? I’ll blame the internet.

You see, the Internet is a network built on server client architecture. Clients, a.k.a. as browsers, make requests to remote servers to fetch information or to send it. There’s delay. The delay was way worse a decade ago. That’s why there are tabs in a browser. I noticed that I tend to open multiple webpages using “Open in a New Tab”, then start with the first while others are loading. It was saving me minutes a decade ago but now the time saved is negligible. However, I’m distracted by jumping from the content of one task to another.

For programmers, compilation time is something they utilize by multitasking. So tempting to check an IM messenger while my Webpack is transpiling JavaScript! Or Maven and Java for you, Java devs. Engineers are great at optimizing after all. They try to optimize their time too… at a cost of breaking the flow. They are also very curious (as noted in Managing Humans) which makes them good at learning but prone to losing focus.

The solution is to resist optimizing the waiting time. Use the waiting time to continue to work on the same task… or just sit and stare at that rotating loading icon. I despise SMS/text messages for this because you can drag a 5-minute call into a multi-day correspondence. If you send me anything other than an address, phone number, price or your SSN, I’ll ignore you.

To add to the habit of optimizing the waiting time, there’s over-reliance on external resources like online search, documentation, colleagues and forums. Every time you need to look up something, you risk going down the rabbit hole, getting distracted by unrelated content. If I can write a book without research, I can do it in a few days. (In fact, I wrote ProgWriter in a day while on an internet-less train ride from Portland, Oregon to Oakland, California.)

The solution is to get all you need offline. Some email clients like Outlook allow you to switch to offline mode. The programming library APIs can be remembered after you use them a few times. Offline docs like man command, reading source code in node_modules, or Dash app are other options. If not feasible to remember something, then just leave a TK or TODO and batch up the search for a later time.

Finally, the third type of distraction is the distractions are the easiest to eliminate because they are external. Things like noise, email notifications, etc. Sitting near a ping pong table, foosball or sales team is the worst! Solution: turn do not disturb mode ON, stop working in cafes and/or office, download music without words (Spotify has music from video games), process emails instead of checking them, and let people know that you respond only once a day or even better once a week.

It might be hard to adjust at first. You might feel good about being in the flow for an hour or two. Maybe three. But then feel an urge to peek into email or news or social media. What if someone needs you? What if something important happened? Resist. It’ll go away. Take a walk in the park or around the office if needed, and get back into the flow of your task. I read somewhere that humans can only spend two to four (2-4) hours per day in an intense focus. You are a human, right? Then do the important things first while your brain is still fresh and willpower is strongest.

PS: I remember I was able to have a TV in the background and still work (and play) on my computer when I was younger. I am sure that I wasn’t doing as much focused and advanced work back then. My guess is that over the years of programming and meditation practice, I developed the ability to focus deeper on my work by using flow. Conclusion? The deeper your work (which requires flow) the more sensitive and damaging the distractions are.

I Don't Need Your Feedback

Wed, 04 Jan 2017 07:54:00 -0600

I was at a conference and some guy told me after a quick chat “I’ll give you my feedback on Node University”. No, I don’t need your feedback. I don’t even know if you are my target audience. 👊

Sometimes we assume all feedback is good. The more the better. Bring it on! This is especially true if you’ve been feedback starved which usually means you didn’t have enough users or no one really cared. Ugh.

Let’s put aside Lean Startup, most feedback is garbage because the person who is giving it:

Not a customer 💰: They are NOT paying you money and most likely never will, therefore they are NOT your target audience. Of course, first you must have a paid product or a service. You can replace paying with actively engaging.
Not a majority 💯: Minority which means you should NOT cater to their needs — use 80/20 rule.
Not an expert 🎓: They don’t know what’s best. It’s your job to be on the cutting-edge of innovation and bring the goodies to the user. It’s not the user’s job to know about the new stuff. (Think Ford and horses.)

The downsides of listening to too much wrong feedback are feature creep, fashion-driven development and lack of innovation. For example, most of my negative reviews on Amazon are written by people who never read the books’ introductions and most of them never finished reading the books either. Ignore.

Feedback is proliferating. Uber ride? Leave your feedback. Hotel stay? Fill out a survey. Meal in a restaurant? Comment on Yelp. Listened to a conference talk? Fill out a survey. Watched an online course? Leave stars. Read a book? Write a review… But we know so little about the background of those reviewers! Be careful who you are listening to, because you are missing out on other opportunities… use some feedback filter like the one I listed above.

Shaming is Good

Sun, 01 Jan 2017 11:44:00 -0600

Shaming is good because it’s a strong motivator to change. If you have trouble with the word itself due to negative bias, then substitute it with peer pressure or environment.

Humans as tribal creatures evolved to conform, for the most part, to our environment. It’s done via shaming. Let’s take an accent for example. Most people will adapt to the accent of their region to fit in. They do it automatically, both adults and children. Children do it faster, because there’s more shaming from other children. Thus, there’s a stronger motivator.

To expand on accents, when I worked on the East Coast in the IT industry as an app developer, I was surrounded by other foreigners and native English speakers. But neither of them would correct pronunciation or point it out. The foreigners didn’t care or know and native speakers were too polite to correct such trivialities (which are not trivial at all). As a result, there was very little motivation and even awareness to not just change an accent, but even to pronounce words correctly. It seemed like no one cared… and of course adults and professionals are just more tolerant and mature to laugh (form of shaming) at other adults’ pronunciation.

Lack of shaming could be one of the reasons why despite being dumber kids learn accents faster than adults do. The latter just coast in their blissful ignorance once they acquire the minimum functional level. I’m sure you can find other examples of good shaming like switching to macOS from Windows, picking up a new programming language because PHP is not cool anymore, finding a better job or dumping that crazy girlfriend. :)

Shaming is an important fail check that prevents individuals from falling below a certain level. Of course, too much shaming like too much of almost anything is bad… however, no shaming at all can lead to no personal or career growth at all.

What I Learned Reading 200 Books 📚

Wed, 28 Dec 2016 01:08:00 -0600

I’m not a huge fan of reading. In fact, I don’t like reading. But I love getting better, finding out something new and useful.

You can talk only to few interesting people in-person. The limit is in time, location or just that they won’t talk with you. Books are a transferable information. Good info can change career, life, relationships… everything!

So three years ago I start reading and logging books I read or listened to in a spreadsheet. Also, I was writing number of page or hours along with brief book summaries. I reached 200 with this breakdown:

2014: 33 books
2015: 67 books with 26 audio and 41 digital or print
2016: 101 books with 75 audio and 26 in digital or print

Just the audio books for 2016 amount to over 400 hours of content. That’s 50 days of 8-hour listening per day. Almost all of the books were non-fiction. So here’s what I learned:

Books are not created equal: So books are junk or should be 50 not 350 pages because they don’t have than much substance. Most modern non-fiction books are junk.
Listening on 1.5x and speed reading rocks.
I really don’t like printed books. Kindle is a way to go!
Successful people have different rules, habits, approaches which often contradict other successful people. Thus, don’t listen to their advices. It’s not what brought them success. (Icons and Idiots by Bob Lutz).
History and biographies (especially auto biographies) tend to be the better books.
Eat my frogs first to get things done.
Black Swans can be good and bad. To benefit from good black swans, you have to take risk and action.
Writing books is more fun than reading books. I should write a non-technical book next.
Monopoly is good if you are the monopoly (Zero to One)
Wheat, bread, and GMO are evil. I knew it before but it’s good to be reminded.
Why steak houses make you eat in darkness (Mindless Eating).
Less is more (The Paradox of Choice).

That’s more or less all. It’s extremely hard to summarize books. The way they work, is that they take you on a journey and influence your subconscious. In the end you might have new ideas or perspective without realizing it’s from a book.

Bonus! My top 5 list:

Antifragile
Deep Work
The Next 100 Years
Made in America
Grain Brain

Check vs. Process Emails

Fri, 23 Dec 2016 08:32:00 -0600

I stopped saying “I’m checking my email”, because I almost never check them. That’s true. I stopped checking my emails a few years ago, and it brought more focus, fun and productivity to my life.

Instead of checking my emails, I process them. What is the difference? Checking is looking at the inbox, fishing for urgent, filtering non-urgent and plain spam but answering only to urgent. This will make you seem like a very responsive person to senders, but most of the times they can wait a few hours or even a few days. If they are your clients or employees, then they’ll learn to batch items and not treat email like an IM, or write only as the last resort after they took a stub at or googled a question they want to ask.

Processing on the other hand is dealing with all emails from first to last. It’s inbox 0, but I take it to extreme. In the productivity method called Get Things Done (GTD), the author of the method recommends to respond to an email if it’s less than 2 minutes. I process an email which I estimate would take under 30 minutes right away. The reason is that I don’t want to star an email or move it to my todo list. It’ll be harder to come back to it. I’m already in the context by reading it, so I will benefit from not having a context switch. I take care of the email and the task right there.

A few words about mobile email processing. Sorry, but it’s not possible in most cases. Okay, maybe your work and life is different. Maybe all you need is your brain and a few sentences of reply in most of the cases. My work and life require me to have at my disposal developer tools, writing and publishing apps, calendar, word processor, etc. Therefore, I never process emails on my phone. Yes, I still do have the app to get some useful information like a travel itinerary but that’s it. Whatever time is gained by me filtering out quick responses and dealing with them at a Starbucks line is lost by the cognitive load of task switching and open loops of myriads of unfinished tasks marked by stars, flags and (worse) unread to move it back to inbox.

Human brains are wired for novelty so we see the thrill of new urgent emails and avoid non-urgent or boring. Casinos exploit this trait in their slot machines. Email apps and slot machines even have the same motion downwards: scroll down the inbox and pull down a lever.

It takes longer to process emails than to check them once. However, processing is faster than checking emails over and over, and then one more time when you are doing the task asked in the email. That’s what usually happens. All those unclosed loops overwhelm us. Argh.

Liberate yourself. Start processing instead of checking. I process my personal emails only once a day or even every other day when I’m traveling. I love it.

Barbel Theory Applied to a Career in Tech

Fri, 16 Dec 2016 12:00:00 -0600

After reading Nassim Taleb’s great book Antifragile, I saw how one can apply the barbell theory, which he described in the book, to building a career in tech:

Focus 80-90% of fundamentals like algorithms, data structures, specifications (W3C), standards (ECMAScript), etc.: These concepts are less prone to changes.
Focus 10-20% on riskier but more promising new things which haven’t even been discovered by early adopters let alone the early majority.
Focus 0 on stuff in the middle

If your bet on 20% of the riskier stuff is correct, you’ll be ahead of the Rogers’ bell curve. If not, then you are still safe with your 80% in the fundamentals. Maybe you even learned something like a special pattern which can be applied to another concept or language in the future. For example, functional programming.

In my career, I followed the Barbell Theory without knowing about it. I got bachelors and masters degrees, the safest bet one can make. Then I focused on web development which is NOT very exciting but very ubiquitous and always in demand. That’s my 80%.

Then, I branched out into Node.js which was very controversial in 2011-2012. Node.js is mainstream now. Also, I started writing books which is one of the most riskier activities to do (high chance of failure).

In his book Quitter, Jon Acuff starts the narrative with advice NOT to quit a job. I agree with him 150%. It’s way better and easier to take long-term riskier and more impactful bets when you have your steady base. Your 80%. I did my writing while still holding a full-time job. That’s barbell again. Moreover, teaching in-person and online, working full-time job, and writing fed one of another. Writing and teaching made me a better developer and vice versa.

So start a project on a weekend. Pick up a new language and read learn it over the holidays. If there’s a book on the language or framework—it’s too late. IGNORE the stuff in the middle. Ignore the noise, but know about the trends, and see a big one you can jump on while still standing on a solid ground. That’s the barbell theory in action.

Escapism: Stop Wasting Time and Distracting Yourself with Traveling

Mon, 12 Dec 2016 19:32:00 -0600

A lot of people are brainwashed into spending their hard-earned money into enduring stresses of traveling and adjusting to new places for subpar experiences. They even say: Work hard, play hard. Why?! Because resorts need to make money. Seriously, most people prefer the escapism and procrastination. Is it really worth it?

Let’s be honest, if you are a tourist, it’s harder to find good (price/value) food, gym, entertainment compared to when you are local. There are even guides on how to travel like a local because traveling like a tourist gives people subpar and overpriced experiences. Also, traveling is a dangerous, time-consuming, stressful hassle.

To sum up:

You waste time waiting in lines and for transportation (procrastination!)
You risk germs, terrorist attacks, malfunctions, criminals
You spend more on worst food/lodging/etc.
You have to use slower internet
You risk comparing and keeping up with the Joneses (distractions!)

Travel for business is okay, but only if any other means like Skype won’t cut it. Most of the time, video and voice calls will do it! Think clearly if this urge is an urge to escape the difficulties instead of facing them. Procrastinating instead of solving problems. If you need some rest, then consider a staycation—you won’t need to pay extra and risk a bad experience. You can find more peace and calm closer to you. Maybe go to a spa or on a hike. No need to fly to Cancun or Las Vegas and end up even more tired.

Why Liking to Travel and Enjoying the Journey is Stupid

Mon, 12 Dec 2016 19:00:00 -0600

Every time someone says: “I like traveling”, I know they are lying. Typically these people don’t travel much, or they foolishly think living in a foreign country for more than few weeks is traveling (hint: it’s called living in a country, if you stay there more than 3-4 weeks)… or they are plain simple masochists.

“Enjoy the journey, not the destination” is a bunch of crap. People who say enjoy the journey and the destination are CONFUSED. I want the destination. I like the destination. I need the destination. I like to have a walk the streets of Paris, or a cup of coffee in Plaza Vieja in Habana, or soak in blue lagoon in Reykjavik or eat pig knuckle in Prague. Why should I enjoy the commute to the airport, going thru security lines, sitting in closed spaced with stranger and all other troubles of traveling?

Let’s call things properly. Traveling is not being at a place and experiencing good things. Screw the journey. Enjoy the destination!

Small Stuff

Fri, 02 Dec 2016 11:42:00 -0600

Are you worried about small stuff and losing the big picture? Some people worry about whether they should cut down on coffee, walk more, eat less carbs, get more Starbucks reward and credit card miles, watch the latest TV show, or who said what on social media. All this B.S. Just thinking about these things makes me tired. Most of the time they worry about small stuff. That’s a great way to lose focus.

Why do they do it? To stay in the comfortable, but average mediocrity. To procrastinate. To avoid doing the big scary stuff.

Keep your eyes on the big goal. Put reminders everywhere. Stay laser focused. Do the most important scary thing first in the day, and the small stuff won’t matter that much.

How to Fight Perfectionism

Tue, 08 Nov 2016 13:00:00 -0600

Most of us intuitively understand that better products and services are better for you as an employee or business owner. They can attract more customers and propel you to success, whatever that is for you. Some of us know the inspiring stories of obsessed entrepreneurs who drove the product to perfection amidst delays and budget overruns (e.g., Steve Jobs). Common sense tells us that the fewer flaws there are, the better. It could be due to our experience as a consumer of goods. It could be because we learned it in schools where we avoided errors in our homework and tests.

However, things are not as easy in life and business as in school. On the other side of the spectrum are analysis paralysis and procrastination, never published manuscripts and never deployed code. Sometimes it pays off to do half-baked experiments and fail once in a while. There’s a whole methodology around it called Lean Startups. Unfortunately, almost none of us hear about myriads of other entrepreneurs who didn’t make it.

There’s time to polish and improve, and there’s time to call it’s done even when it’s not perfect. After all, done is better than perfect undone. Here’s a quick list of things you can do to fight perfectionism:

Take more projects: This will force you to finish the current projects faster. Commit and then decide how to deliver!
Set deadlines and share them with important people like clients, bosses, co-workers
Don’t sleep enough for three nights or work at night: I noticed that my perfectionism goes down when I am tired and just want to finish a project
Outsource: Hiring is like buying time. It’s like cheat codes in video games only it’s better for everyone (you, your client and the person you are hiring)
Remember your WHYs: Why are you doing this?
Divide products and features into two categories: incremental improvement (perfectionism is the key) and ground-breaking (first-to-release is the key).

Making a better widget is fulfilling which in turn is important. But when you do so beyond a reason, ask yourself a question: Am I afraid of success? Is this a self-sabotage? Procrastination? If yes, then kill the perfectionism excuse and finish the project. In this case, perfection is a burden and an obstacle.

Ego is the Friend: Review on Ego Is the Enemy

Sat, 15 Oct 2016 13:30:00 -0500

Recent Ryan’s book is another popular junk-read which have 0 substance and not only waste time but actually distract.

Contrary to the title of another popular junk-read Ego Is the Enemy, I should say that ego is the friend if you want to change or achieve anything in life. Every time you think I’m a good software developer you will have to back it up with action. If you decide to lose weight, it’s far more useful to say to yourself “every day in every way, I’m getting leaner and healthier” than to stick to your old ego of a person who has bad genes, heavy bones or stress full life.

The examples in the book are terrible. They are not accurate and distorted to support the author’s point of view. His choice to consider two Union generals and 0 Confederate generals while most historians agree that Confederates had better generals is biased.

Most of all, the author never proves that ego is bad or is the enemy. He tell anecdotes without any studies. Why a person became successful? It could be because he identified himself with success and had big ego. Yes, maybe he failed later because he stopped delivering great results but that doesn’t support the hypothesis that ego is bad. Correlation does not equal causation.

Bottom line: avoid this book.. and maybe this one as well and all other Tim Ferriss related junk-reads.

Bad Long Weekends: 6-Day Workweek Manifesto

Thu, 13 Oct 2016 03:00:00 -0500

Weekends are too long… waaaay too loooong. Two full days! We should switch to 6-day workweeks.

You might think I’m crazy, because recently some companies started to experiment with 4-day workweeks instead of normal 5, not 6. Even some countries toyed with the idea to make it a law. Also, books like 4-hour Workweek became the best seller because people want to work less.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Believe me. I thought it all through. People need to work more, not less to achieve satisfaction. We need more workdays. Here are my reasons to work 6 days (if not for the entire country then just for you):

Same total number of hours: People can spend in deep work only up to 4 hours per day. So leave earlier than typical 5pm during the week, hit the gym, and come to work on Saturday. And according to studies, people on average actually work only 4 hours anyway. The rest is Facebook, chatting with co-workers and breaks.
Increased productivity: Open office is a detriment to productivity. You are less distracted on Saturdays so you can get more done.
Increased income: If you don’t work then you are more likely to spend money on “relaxing” or entertainment such as eating out, trips, shopping, etc. This is a double whammy because you are not just spending more but you are earning less. For example, your weekend getaway didn’t cost $400 for hotel and $200 for food, but $1,400 ($600 PLUS $800 which you could have made during the leisure time).
Increased satisfaction: You can get ahead on your projects faster be it for work or side gigs. It will create momentum, motivation and move you ahead even faster.
Increased learning: After two days of not working on a thing I often forget what I needed to do. Loss of context is waste. By working on a project every day I can stay focused.
Bible says so: Even if you are not a religious person, you can learn a thing or two from a 2000-year best seller which says to rest only ONE day.
Litmus test for a job change: If you can’t make yourself think of working on your primary job for one extra day per week. If just thinking about it makes you wanna puke back your organic smoothie, then maybe it’s time to find yourself a better one.

I’ve been working 6 days per week on either my main full time job, side-projects or taking classes for more than a decade. I feel weird if I have to take two days off in a week. There’s nothing to do by the second day. All the rest is done. All the errands are done. You start coming up with stupid activities like “Oh, let’s go to the beach!” or “I should buy a motorcycle!”… which most of the time only makes you exhausted by Monday instead of helping you to recharge.

Research proved that human brains relax when they switch tasks not when they have nothing to do. Replenish your energy by switching tasks and picking a creative side-project in which you have a lot of control like building your own app or contributing to open source. My thing is writing books and recording video courses. Also, Saturdays are great for reading, learning, thinking, reflecting, goal setting and budgeting.

With so many benefits, working 6 days per week is a no-brainer. Be smart and work hard at the same time!

Email Filter

Wed, 14 Sep 2016 22:30:00 -0500

After reading Deep Work, I was sold on removing distractions. One of the concepts is to have an email filter. Not an automatic one but some set of criteria which will force the sender to think and put more work into their emails. Here’s what I came up with.

Filters which your email must adhere to increase chances of my reply:

No questions which you can find on Google/Bing/GoGoDuck under 10 min. If you still have a question, post it in a public forum and include a link so others can benefit from the answer too
No offers for phone calls, just be friends, or coffee meetings
Have an interesting offer for me to collaborate, do business or work on a project
No promotion of your company, product or service
Have precise amount of time required from me and the list of benefits for me
Have fewer than 3 paragraphs and preferably a one-sentence TL;DR with one actionable step at the bottom

Meeting criteria won’t guarantee a reply. Not meeting criteria will guarantee deletion or blocking. :) And yes, don’t think that if you send me an email (or anyone), they are obligated to reply.

Don't Move to San Francisco or 7 Reasons Why You Should Avoid Living in the Bay Area

Fri, 09 Sep 2016 15:00:00 -0500

I lived for 5 years in the Bay Area which is San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose, and everything in between them (a.k.a. Silicon Valley). Before that I lived in Washington DC for 6 years.

Don’t confuse tourism with immigration if you’ve been in the Bay Area on a brief vacation and liked it. Despite what you’ve seen in movies, San Francisco and Silicon Valley are terrible places to live.

Seriously. Avoid moving to San Francisco and Silicon Valley because:

You will never be able to afford your own place: Forget about owning your own house unless you’re a super rich tech millionaire (which you won’t become); and a large chunk of your pay check will go to the landlord because of the ridiculous laws prohibiting more housing and scaring off owners from renting out.
You will have to work insane hours in an open-space office filled with extremely loud co-workers and stupid super noisy toys while being assaulted by dogs 🐕 and shot at with nerf guns… needless to say your productivity will be close to 0, and you’ll have to catch up after hours and come to work early. Startups had to use the open-office layout because they wanted to save money. Big companies blindly copied it without thinking to “foster” communication and create innovation.
You won’t become a millionaire creating a startup, because your startup will burn through VC money faster than in any other place: Raising money is easy, but spending it on expensive engineers and an office is easier. If you manage to partner or hire someone, expect them to leave for greener pastures in 1 year max.
You will be SINGLE and lack in true friendship: Friendship and dating are not just hard, they are almost impossible, because you are surrounded with smart ambitious driven overachiever transplants who can’t find time to FaceTime let alone meet (because they are overworked due to poor office environment?); and if you’re already married holding on to your spouse will be hard (see 2 and 6)
You will get hot a lot, because typically there is NO air conditioning in buildings. Yes. it’s 2016 and no A/Cs. ☀️ Also, the all-year-round climate with drought will bore and make you long for winter or rain.
You will feel inferior most of the time: You will always be surrounded with people smarter, luckier, more hard-working and more successful people than yourself: If you have a bit of an inferiority complex from time to time, here it will be multiplied by 10
You will start hating driving because why bother? Streets of San Francisco, 101, I-80, Bay Bridge, any bridge… everything is backed up pretty much all the time. 🚦 Public transportation sucks. It’s filthy, slow and full of crazies. This leads to problem number 4 because keeping up with people will be harder.

So given all these points, any reasonable human being who wants to remain sane and productive should avoid San Francisco and the Bay Area and live somewhere else.

PS: This post has sarcasm, but also has some true points.

Why Text is Awesome 📝

Sat, 27 Aug 2016 11:00:00 -0500

Despite voice and video communication becoming cheap, ubiquitous and more popular (VoIP, Skype, FaceTime, WhatsApp, Viber, etc.), this increase creates only more and more text communication. Text is so inferior in terms of conveying emotions, intonation, and body language to video or even voice. Right? Then why not drop it or at least use less and call, FaceTime, Skype each other? Asynchronicity is one thing, but you can do voice and video asynchronously too, just record and send it.

I think text is awesome and will become even more popular exactly because of the thing that makes it terrible, that’s desensitization—stripping emotions, body language, character, accent, mood, and other things humans grasp on conscious and subconscious levels. In other words, the same things which are beneficial for better understanding could also be distractions. What?

To illustrate my point, when someone is reading a book on React they don’t want to be distracted away from an already comprehensive material. Also, text is more precise meaning if it says “221 Main St”, “createElement()” or “8pm” you know that for sure. Moreover, text is easier to go back and refer to than video or voice with their tiny imprecise sliders.

In addition, you can hide a bad mood, a dislike or a passive-aggressive behavior behind text. (I’m not saying that passive-aggressive behavior is good though.) Thus, text leaves more to imagination of a reader which makes the experience more customized and more personal. For example, I hated listening to a fake-accented For Whom the Bell Tolls; I just despise when narrators think they must mimic all the accents and change pronunciation—just get out of the way a narrator, please get lost… become invisible. I don’t want anything between my experience and the book. Same things happen if I watch YouTube videos where I start noticing the quality, background, hair style, lighting and many other things which distract me from comprehending the message.

As far as messengers, I’ve noticed that when you just text with someone and never talk, you have a different mental image of that person. If you ever meet or talk with that person it can feel like being with a stranger. :) Or maybe a lot of people are self-conscious and camera-shy while others don’t like the sound of their own voice?

As far as creation, an added benefit of writing is that it forces you to think better. You see, when I started writing this post, I had only an idea, but now there are a few arguments and a better formed opinion. You can go back, edit, review and edit again while with voice and video you’d have to re-record the entire clip.

The bottom line, text is not going away. In fact it’s becoming a more popular way of communicating despite the fact that internet speed and data plans allow for video and voice messages. Knowing that, it’s crucial to be as effective as possible (and then some more) at your written communication: emails, social media, messengers, blogging, books, and reports. For these reasons, it’s true to say that writing is probably the most important skill in life and career. Learn how to communicate better via text, practice and use text medium to your advantage.

Stop Reading Biographies

Sat, 27 Aug 2016 08:00:00 -0500

I recently finished listening to another biography. It was one of those 30-hour monsters! A typical audio book is 6-8 hours. Why do these authors think more is better? No, no and no. In most cases they are wrong, because they end up filling the pages with unnecessary facts and speculations. For example, in Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination, the author quotes his sources like it’s a freaking science book: with page numbers! Do I really care in exactly what month each Disney movie was released and all the details of its production? NO! 🚫

So far I listened to three of them and all three of them despite high reviews (herd mentality?) are terrible, boring (even at 1.5x) and full of uncertainties:

About uncertainties—that’s my other beef with biographies. Why do authors have a need to psychoanalyze the hero? Just list the facts and move on. Why do they feel the urge to present multiple accounts? Pick one side and tell a story. Humans love stories.

Also, they try to stay neutral. Authors need to have an opinion. It’s like talking to someone. That someone needs to have an opinion. Without authors having filters, it’s just a boring text book. Well, judging by the length they are textbooks! 📚

Note to myself: stop “reading” biographies. They are a waste of time! Start reading and listening more to autobiographies instead. They are livelier, full of opinions which makes them congruent and just overall have better story lines sans boring facts… and they are shorter because interesting successful people understand that they shouldn’t waste other people’s time!

PS: I’m getting close to my new goal of 100 books per year with just 35 to go.

Why Pay a Full Price

Wed, 10 Aug 2016 11:23:00 -0500

Let me share a little secret. 😉 While it’s nice to get a discount and save a few bucks, especially when you’re going to buy a thing anyway, there is something magical in paying a full price. You’ll tend to enjoy the thing more, feel better about yourself and use the thing more often.

Studies show that this phenomenon of getting benefits of paying the full price (or a premium) is even more applicable to buying something special, something experiential such as an online course, a music CD (which I see only at Whole Foods and Starbucks checkout lines), or an event like a seminar or a conference. How many online courses or books did you buy at a discount and never finished them? 📖 I bet way, way more than the ones for which you’ve paid a full price (and a high one)!

Human brains are wired to appreciate according to the price you’ve paid so by torrenting a book or a movie or by looking for coupons to your favorite artists’ or speaker’s performance—you are robbing yourself from pleasure. It took me a while to realize it, but once I did 💡, I started buying music on iTunes and now subscribe to Spotify as a way to appreciate and give back to my favorite artists.

With commodities, which are all the same, you can get the same sweet potato chips from any website which sells them, so buying the cheapest and most convenient is less damaging to the pleasure (but still is).

That’s why luxury industry exists. The quality of a Gucci bag is not 100 times better. It’s roughly the same. The bonus is in the enjoyment. This principle applies to non-monetary payment, for example when working on a book or a PhD—that’s hard and painful sometimes. However, most people treasure the results and outcomes more after a tougher journey.

So either pay full price or pretend that you did (and then forget that you pretended), because you’ll get more usage of whatever that thing is.

Paradoxes

Sat, 23 Jul 2016 11:00:00 -0500

I’ve noticed that there are a lot of paradoxes when it comes to attitudes and life which you can’t easily solve:

Focus on doing vs. learning and expanding your horizons: You need to keep up with the latest stuff, meet new people and generate new ideas by exploring new things but you need to focus on the tasks at hand to see them through.
Patience vs. obsession (hard work): You need to give enough time for something great to materialize (10,000 hours, over night success which takes 10 years, etc.), but at the same time when you work hard and obsess, that’s when you see more short-term results and build momentum. Marathon or a sprint?
Confidence vs. humility (being open to being wrong and feedback): You must be confident to overcome obstacles, yet at the same time it’s important to be receptive to feedback and improve on/learn from on your mistakes.
Saying “no” to opportunities vs. saying “yes to them
Changing vs. adapting: Sometimes it’s good to change your provider, environment, equipment, etc., while other times, you just have to suck it up and not worry about mundane things which might annoy you otherwise.
Work on weekends and have no vacations vs. taking time off
Stay in one place vs. living a digital nomad life: Staying in one place are more comfortable and allows to establish connections and network (it’s who you know, not what you know most of the times even in tech); while traveling allows to expand horizon, and explore new opportunities.
Being analytics vs. artistic
Being good with tech&numbers vs. being good with people

The best thing is to be doing both of these extremes, but they are extremes for a reason. How to be humble yet confident? Or how to stay and build connections and reputation in one area but bring new ideas from other spheres of life?

The million dollar question is how do you tell the difference when to pick what option? Maybe you need to take it to extremes to know your limit and that will eventually allow you to find balances easier? To put it differently, wisdom to remove paradoxes or act on both of their extremes harmoniously comes with practice and time. Or is there a magic formula with criteria to follow?

Consistency over Peaks

Mon, 04 Jul 2016 08:00:00 -0500

A few years ago I would consider myself a person who likes to do things in a batch by focusing on one thing and seeing it through completion. For example, implementing a feature in an app.

However, there are certain tasks which you simply cannot finish in a few days, like writing a book, building strength in your body or learning a new language. It’s better to turn the work on those things into habits. Just do a little bit every day.

I found that instead of results which often fluctuate in time (e.g., writing 500 words every day), it’s better to block time, let’s say one hour on my new book and 30 minutes on learning Spanish every day, even weekends and vacations. After a few days those activities become not very dissimilar to brushing your teeth.

You can accomplish a lot by doing small and simple things every day. I started with doing 10 push-ups and 20 sit ups every morning a year ago. Now, I’m on to doing 100 sit ups and 50 push ups effortlessly. Chunk down your large projects and be consistent in the execution!

Listening to Customers is Bad?

Mon, 04 Jul 2016 08:00:00 -0500

We often hear that we need to listen to our customers/users from business, marketing and product development gurus. A popular Lean Startup methodology teaches to make as many experiments to learn about customers, their needs and wants. Zig Ziglar, Jim Rohn and Tony Robbins said something along the lines of: if you help enough people, you can achieve anything. Everyone seems to be crazy about customer satisfaction. Do we live in a tyranny of a customer?

As I’m re-writing my new book React Quickly, there are some concepts I don’t agree with. However, the book reviewers told me they want the book to cover certain things, so here I am, catering to my customer. What is the majority is not right? What if there’s something morally or ethically wrong with the thing that the majority of customers want?

Historically, there are plenty examples when majority, and democracy in particular, made wrong decisions. So does it make people who like to create a great product, company or business also morally or ethically wrong in the long run, just because they listened to their customers with their wrong ideas and they knew the ideas were wrong? Something to think about. Maybe the perfect approach is to know what your customers want, but give them what they need (and what’s right).

Newbie Forever

Mon, 27 Jun 2016 18:00:00 -0500

This is a note to myself: the more I can be comfortable being a newbie the more I can keep up the pace with current events, tech and apps. The reason being, it’s not enough to master one tech or app and assume it won’t change.

With the popularity of SaaS and web apps, they are constantly updated without us even asking! You can forget about an app and come back to it six months later—it could be a completely new app. You’ll have to learn where all the menus and buttons are all over again. Learn to love it. Future apps will update even faster. Same happens with open source and programming languages.

Generally, the more you stay behind the worse the pain of an upgrade later. There is no way around it. Just embrace being a newbie forever, because the faster you learn the more comfortable you’ll be in using the recent tech. Learning fast is your competitive advantage.

Obviously, you can’t keep re-learning all the things continuously, that’s why focusing on a specific area is paramount. Therefore, focus, learn, re-learn and don’t be afraid to be a newbie because being a newbie is and will be our normal state. Being a newbie is forever.

Not Shy

Sat, 18 Jun 2016 16:00:00 -0500

People tend to think that someone is shy just because he/she is not talking to anyone or not going to social events… Although this might be true, I came to the conclusion that there is another reason.

I just want to do things instead of talking. While some conversations are insightful. For example, talking with your colleagues or customers is paramount for maintaining good communication. Other social chat is not just boring but mostly a waste of time.

With this in mind, I’m not shy. I’m just biased towards taking action instead of useless talking.

PaleoFX 2016

Sat, 04 Jun 2016 11:00:00 -0500

I wrote before about how being on a paleo lifestyle is like having superpowers. Last week, I was lucky to attend PaleoFX, the biggest Paleo conference. It was kind of surreal to be around thousands of like-minded people, to see in-person almost all famous New York Times #1 Best-Sellers paleolebrities, and to be surrounded with all kinds of safe paleo-friendly food&drinks. Here are some of the highlights:

Paleo business is growing: There were all kind of paleo flours, sweets, bars, powders, broths, fats and coffee infused with just about anything (butter, coconut, even mushrooms!).
Paleolebrities are regular people: most of them hang out at the expo or after giving their presentations to answer questions. I took a picture with Robb Wolf with who’s book my paleo journey started 6 years ago.
There were insane number of healthy and fit looking people doing workout workshops (inspiring) as well as average looking people (making it less intimidating).
Bone broth is liquid gold: I knew that broth is healing but after listening to Dr. Kellyann I decided to become disciplined about drinking 2 cups of bone broth. Her protocol is bone broth for 21 days and fast 1-2 days per week.
Ben Greenfield’s presentation was full of bio hacks to increase cognitive performance like jaw realignment, morning brain flush, infra-red saunas, yoga, low intensity PEMF and others.
Our gut bacteria has more DNA material than we: Dr. Perlmutter gave a great presentation reinforcing the importance of our gut biome. One of the analogies stuck with me: we uploaded our DNA/genes to the cloud which is our gut bacteria.
Lack of sleep is aging and killing you faster: Just one night of sleep deprivation increases aging 10-15 years (temporarily) and decreases cognitive functions.
It’s harder to legally sell raw milk than marijuana (in some cases).
A lot of science is not reliable, because studies to replicate findings and peer reviews are disincentivized.

Overall, it was a great event to reinforce familiar, and learn new things about paleo lifestyle. I also got a lot of contacts for paleo-friendly web stores, products and services which will make my life on the paleo lifestyle even easier than before!

The Fisherman and the Businessman B.S.

Fri, 29 Apr 2016 08:00:00 -0500

Have you heard the preamble about the fisherman and the businessman? It’s often told in feel-good blogs and talks. The fisherman’s nationality varies from Brazilian to Mexican, but the gist is that you don’t have to strive for success and achievement. If all you want to do is to fish and go home early, then you can start doing it now (fisherman). In other words, if your goal is to relax after you’ve made money (businessman), then why not skip the money-making part and relax now?

I think it’s utterly bullshit—and potentially dangerous for those who take its advice seriously—for three reasons. The first is simple: the story doesn’t take into consideration risks. Let’s say your family member gets sick. If you have the money, you can send him/her to a good hospital. This is not an option for a poor fisherman.

Another reason is the experience, adventure, the thrill and satisfaction of making money, doing well in your craft (fishing and business management), career or business. This is the reward in itself for most people in the world of business. Think of it as the journey which will make you a better person. If all you do is fish, go home early and relax, then you are not challenging yourself enough. You’re not growing in your craft or skills.

The last reason is that if you just fish for your family, then you deprive others of the fruits of your labor. If you’re any good (and with practice and time you should become good at pretty much any trade), then you’ll be depriving others, e.g., people in a seafood market, of your fish. So staying at your current level and not taking it bigger is stealing from society. It’s selfish.

Don’t believe all the stupid stories you read or hear from the so called gurus of life. Think for yourself!

Success is Boring

Tue, 24 Nov 2015 11:00:00 -0600

Success is what we crave. Parents, peers and culture push success down our throats as it’s the best thing ever. Yet not many people claim success in their lives. They jump from one hot opportunity to another.

One day they are building SaaS, the next month consulting, and then selling cheap privately labeled and growth-hacked shit on Amazon.com. It’s like an addiction. Starting a business is easy. Starting micro businesses like SaaS, info product or private label is extremely easier than managing brick and mortar. Entrepreneurs become parallel entrepreneurs. They juggle multiple things. Each is moderately successful, but nothing great… why? Because success is boring.

Some people like the thrill more than success. Like many thrill seekers they deny this fact. They sabotage their success. They are like gamblers who hit the slot machines and are frustrated by the interrupted flow of their trance when they actually do win. The adrenaline junkies, those people love to start new ventures and see them succeed from 0 to 60, but they never stay long enough to see any really great fruits.

Some people like the inviting adventure of new projects more than the steady long-term progress of established ones. If you need some serendipity, then go pick up a new sport (surfing, rock climbing, Krav Maga) or learn how to ride a motorcycle, but don’t bet your career on a risky proposition.

I wrote this post mostly for myself to stay focused and as a reminder that real success is boring. Find the thing you’re great at and which is in demand and valued by others. Then, you stick with it unless you fully get its potential. It might be 5, 10 or 15 years. Give it time. Everything great takes time; otherwise we won’t treasure it much. Boring is good. You have my permission to be boring… and achieve the success you want be it personal life, health or business.

Pursuit of Happiness as The Major Source of Unhappiness or Why Happiness is Overrated

Sat, 18 Jul 2015 12:05:00 -0500

The more I think about happiness, the more I come to the conclusion that it’s overrated. Maybe it’s even detrimental to actually living a productive and healthy live. You see, evolutionary humans weren’t designed to be happy all the time. For example, you’re having a great day, maybe you made progress on a project, then you have think what would make you happy and boom—the mood goes down if you don’t get it.

Happiness is simply not wired into our brains and nervous system by millions of years of evolution. Humans were designed to survive, and survival doesn’t mean happiness. Survival is at the bottom of the Maslow’s pyramid, and it’s what our oldest brain is doing perfectly. Why work hard trying to achieve something you’re doing sub-optimally?

Lower expectations bring more satisfaction, right? Once I realized that we weren’t born to be happy, I had an epiphany which liberated me:

Forget about this illusive happiness. In the never-ending pursuit of it, you’ll remain miserable.
Stop thinking that you’re supposed to be happy all the time. Banish the entitled to feel good or thoughts on how to achieve it.
Just live in the moment, survive and be productive, instead of worrying about illusive feeling.

Stop pursuing happiness; search meaning in your life instead.

YOLO

Fri, 15 May 2015 15:00:00 -0500

You only live once, but not in the context of how most people think about this phrase such as: party, drink, reward or entertain yourself. In other words, they justify some epicurean activities.

On the contrary, I use YOLO when I’m deciding to take on new projects, work, or tasks. My mindset is to create as many useful things as possible. Time is the only finite resource that we, humans, have.

Don’t postpone any longer something you wanted to do yesterday or last year. Time will pass anyway… So don’t spend your time on frivolous activities. Make your time count big time.

Ignorance is a Bliss

Thu, 07 May 2015 15:00:00 -0500

Be ignorant about everything except two or three things you are really interested about. Those things are your priorities and dream goals. Everything else is a distraction.

The myth that we can do everything, should know about a variety of subjects and accomplish everything is just a myth. You cannot be everywhere and do everything… If you try, the outcome is mediocrity.

Free&Easy Hosting

Thu, 22 Jan 2015 15:00:00 -0600

Tech advice: if you need a simple website for your project, then use GitHub pages. It’s free and better than cheap $4.99/mo hosting, which can be easily hacked, is slow and requires you to use cPanel.

Here’s what you’ll need to get your website up and running:

Create account on GitHub (do it once).
Create a new repository.
Send your developer a link to that repository, and a Twitter Bootstrap theme of your choice (Google it if you don’t know where to get a beatiful theme).
Point your CNAME records in Godaddy, or whatever you’re using, to GitHub IPs (192.30.252.153 and 192.30.252.154).
Merge pull request from you developer on GitHub.com.
Boom! You’ve got your website.

I use this technique for my 10+ websites, some of them quite fancy:

There’s no need for WordPress or PHP. GitHub Pages is free and it is faster than BlueHost.

The site must be static only without any PHP, Node.js or any other server-side logic. You can use foxyform or EmailMeForm for contact forms, and Gumroad for sales. For blogs, you can use Wintersmith or Jekyll.

Man vs. BBQ

Thu, 14 Aug 2014 15:00:00 -0500

Inspired by the famous TV show Man vs. Food, I went on a 7-day BBQ challenge. Please don’t try this at home.

Just kidding! I lasted only three days, because apparently cole slaw and sweet potato fries weren’t enough veggie for me. ;-)

All Restaurants Are Bad

Tue, 05 Aug 2014 15:00:00 -0500

We love to go out and treat ourselves to nice meals! But it’s unhealty, because almost all US restaurants are bad for you in the long run. Why? This is a common sense and it has to do with us when we favor cheaper places.

In order for restaurants to stay in business they need to generate profits and cut costs:

Would a restaurant use more expensive extra virgin olive or coconut oil instead of cheap vegetable (mutant) oils like Canola? No.
Would they use more expensive wild caught fish (especially salmon in sushi places) instead of antibiotic-filled farm-raised one? No.
Would they use more expensive organic vegetables and fruits instead of conventional ones? No.
Would they use more expensive organic grass-fed meat and poultry instead of conventional grain-fed one? No.

Therefore, when we vote with our dollars, we shouldn’t just choose cheaper places. If we continue doing it, organic good food will never become mainstream and cheap. Same thing happened with high-speed airlines: Concorde became extinct because passengers preferred cheaper but slower flying options.

What if it’s too expensive to eat at a good place like Laughing Planet? Just cook at home! :-)

Paleo Superpowers

Wed, 16 Jul 2014 11:00:00 -0500

Over the years of being on a paleo lifestyle, I’ve noticed that I don’t want to go back to the S.A.D (Standard American Diet), for the reason that living on paleo feel is akin to having superpowers. I just don’t want to give up these perks:

I don’t get food coma
I don’t crave sugary treats
I don’t get cold or flu as often (this year I took zero sick days!)
I have more energy
I can skip meals (when I travel or for fasting) and don’t feel bad, exhausted or anxious
I spend less time shopping because a lot of food options eliminated (cereals, breads, cakes, etc.)
I have more free time

Why someone wouldn’t want to be a real-life action hero?

Fast Food Paleo Style

Wed, 04 Jun 2014 15:00:00 -0500

Oftentimes, we are on the go, have to travel or just want to indulge in the staple of the standard American diet (SAD) — fast food. Personally, I find most fast food restaurants convenient. They are quick, offer a good value and have predictable quality.

Here is what I order:

Salad with proteins (chicken or beef) and without croutons/bread/corn/grains
Burgers without buns, some places call them “wrapped in lettuces”

There’s nothing wrong with treating yourself once in a while to a small side of french fries (with garlic, yum!) or a smoothie/milk shake. Even Mark Sisson says that we should’t be hard on ourselves all the time (80/20 rule). Just be careful not to make it a daily (or for some even a weekly trip can be dangerous) meal!

My favorite joints are:

SuperDuper Burgers
Chipotle
Panera
Mixt Greens / Chop’t
McDonald’s

The Road to Ensenada

Thu, 29 May 2014 09:00:00 -0500

Ensenada, Baja California, Mexico is only 9-11 hours driving from the Bay Area. It’s a relatively large port city that serves as tourist cruises port of call. It has nice Pacific Ocean views and great seafood. The commerce is thriving on the US border with street vendors, acrobats and windshield window washers.

Hard not to love this place.

Much aho — extra garlic.

Extremely fresh and meaty oysters at the marina cafe.

An hour spent manivering between hustling people.

The Road to Ensenada by Lyle Lovett

The Crimean War

Wed, 07 May 2014 14:00:00 -0500

In lieu of events that started in December 2013 and still are happening in Ukraine (originally part of the Russian Empire and then the USSR), events that resulted in Crimea becoming a part of Russian Federation, I picked up a book about the Crimean War of 1853-56. The book turned out to be a longer than I expected, about 600 pages, but I enjoyed every single page of it because the author gives such a good geopolitical picture of what was going on before and after the war, as well as the atmosphere and trends of the major part of the 19th century. The book is called The Crimean War: A History by Orlando Figes and it’s available in Kindle on Amazon.com.

I vaguely remember the very brief coverage of the Crimean War during my high school history class: something about the heroism of soldiers and Russian backwards technologies. It was good to look at the events from the British author’s point of view. Here are the things the surprised and impressed me the most:

The Crimean War was the first modern war which involved heavy industrialized manufacturing — at least on the side of France and the British Empire — and the attrition warfare closely resembled World War I.
The public opinion was the major factor influencing French, British and Russian rulers in entering and ending the conflict — just like now!
The war started for many geopolitical (weakening of the Ottoman Empire), populist (the British press was very anti-Russian) and personal agendas (Nicholas I believed in the holy mission and the third Rome idea, and Napoleon III needed a victory to increase his influence).
Nobody liked the poor Turks, not even their French and British allies.
There were highly effective and flamboyant French Zouave troops after which the American Civil War Zouaves were modeled just a few years later.

Interestingly enough, not many things have changed over 160 years in terms of the influence of public opinion and attempts at controlling it. Back then, the British Empire had free press, but there was some censorship of photography and in the army, e.g., the officers writing about the horrors of the first winter were considered traitors by their commanders. Orlando writes that the French emperor Napoleon III had spies everywhere and a tight grip on the press with censorship. The same things were true for the Russian Tsar Nicholas I.

One thing that changed dramatically was the speed of communication. The news traveled very slowly during the Crimean War — it took a few days in the beginning of the conflict for the news to reach its destination until the telegraph line was laid under the Black Sea (for the allies). Now, we can just sit in the comfort of our homes, scanning Twitter with the #Ukraine hashtag, and getting real-time updates, photos and even live streams of events miles away!

PS: Twitter stops indexing search results after a couple of days, so you might want to try Storify for historical searches, e.g., https://storify.com/search?q=ukraine.

Pioneer Nation 2014, D.I.Y. Revolution and Oregon Adventure

Wed, 30 Apr 2014 23:00:00 -0500

The Pioneer Nation conference was all about living your dream. It was held in Portland, Oregon. I was due for a vacation after DocuSign Momentum and always wanted to visit this city, so the excuse was perfect. It turned out to be a perfect rainy getaway from the tiresome dry, sunny, and hot Bay area winter!

I was headed to the inaugural Pioneer Nation 2014 conference. I found out about this event almost by accident. Firstly, a few people whose opinions I respect suggested the World Domination Summit which is another conference in Portland organized by Chris Guillebeau et al. Chris is the author of inspirational The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future . I signed up for the sale notification to WDS, but missed the second ticket sale wave by only a few hours. I checked my email at night and 500 tickets were sold, with the email blast having just gone out that morning. What a high demand; good job, Chris! That’s how I learned about Pioneer Nation.

The theme of PN is simple: create your dream job, escape 9-5, and be an entrepreneur. This is more in line with my mood than WDS, which is more general and not all about business. Also PN is smaller in attendance than WDS, which was held three times already (or something like that). Because of that, not getting a ticket to the World Domination Summit allowed me to come to Pioneer Nation, so the outcome was to my benefit. I’m happy about the fortuna despite the former being a better cocktail party conversation starter than the latter.

At the Pioneer Nation, about 400 of us socialized, listened to talks, and applied what we learned right away at workshops. For those of you who have read/listened to The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future , it’s a very good book with a lot of case studies and inspirational stories (We all love stories, right?).

I stayed at a wonderful place in Kenton, which I later discovered belongs to and is run by entrepreneurs and Pioneer Nation volunteers! The Kenton neighborhood is famous for its statue of a lumberjack.

Before committing to the trip, I lowered my expectations, and the plan was to enjoy my vacation, visit Portland and take the train (Coast Starlight) back to the Bay Area. But the event turned out really well. I learned quite a few cool new things, met with interesting and inspiring people and came back for tons of new ideas. My main take aways—besides the nice swag that they gave us, including a book(thank you Nathan Barry!), hoodie, mug and compass—are:

Have a marketing plan and calendar, and be disciplined and strategic about them
Video courses are huge right now. I rejected the PacktPub offer to do the Express.js video course in order to produce mine independently
Chris Brogan’s quote: “Usually it’s not the book-smartest who succeed, because those people never start, but the other people: they don’t know stuff, but they start anyway”
Just a side note: Portland has good coffee and lots and lots of organic juice bars
The path to new age entrepreneurship is doable and doesn’t take long: most of the speakers been doing this entrepreneurial thing only for about 2-4 years. In some of the break-out sessions, speakers were sitting in on the other sessions and learning something themselves!

Now I’m full of motivation and have a new mini-community of creative risk-takers. Go pioneers!

On my way back, I took the Coast Starlight train for the sake of adventure, scenic views and ability to get started on my new book ProgWriter. The lack of WiFi internet didn’t bother me because I had MoFi (but never needed to use it). I actually found it better not to be interrupted by the Internet research when I was writing. Needless to say, the ride was spectacular and surprisingly convenient: there was more legroom in coach than in a business class airplane seat. The conversations and people who travel on trains were amazing. I met with a city counsel of Bend, OR (a town near Mount Bachelor ski resort in the middle of Oregon), and she told me about their BYOJ (bring your own job) and startup initiatives. By dusk when we were crossing the Cascades, there was snow and scenic views. Maybe I should travel with Amtrak more often?

My First Post

Tue, 22 Apr 2014 15:00:00 -0500

I’m starting my personal blog and this is its first post. This blog unlike webapplog will contain zero coding, and lots of musings, instagrams and rants.

As you might guess that blog is built with Node.js-powered Wintersmith static site generator. The Ghost just can’t compete with the simplier set up that Wintersmith has.