How to be a genius .. hmmm

An excellent article from New Scientist about how great people actually become great. The nice thing about it is that its not just opinion. It quotes various research studies and analysis of various super-achievers in arts, athletics, science, thus being more of an investigative piece than huff puff.

• It highlights the common dilemma many people face when they enter their twenties: they do very well in school, get great marks, teachers pamper them and they get the mindset that rising to the top is a buoyant process. Indeed in school and college, that much effort may not be required to rise to the top, if you do have exceptional IQ or the genes. However later on in life, things suddenly seem no longer so easy…ppl who one might not have exceptional IQs or innate talents rise to amazing heights whereas those with buoyant mindset are left wonderin why they aren’t going up anymore. This article does a great job of distinguishing this mindet from the mindset of the genius: reasonably smart, conducive environment, great mentors, and persistent doggone practice.
• A new quote for the geniuses: “1 per cent inspiration, 29 per cent good instruction and encouragement, and 70 per cent perspiration.”

Living life like a call option

One thing I have sort of contemplated about after recently joining finance and learning about Options (a derivative financial instrument) is how lot of our decisions in life, esp. the more difficult and “riskier” ones, can be modeled by options calls and puts, or a combination of both.

Why is this important ? Understanding  this can actually lead to a very different kind of decision making process in our lives, and a way that can help us prevent those self-defeating attitudes that ruin lot of great stuff people want to do in life but don’t muster the courage or are too afraid of getting into.

Creating your own challenges

I was talking to a good friend of mine in India and we had this conversation about seeking comfort in life vs pushing yourself towards challenging situations…not troublesome but challenging. Situations and roles that demand more of you than you can initially muster, making you grow and stretch.

So the thought that kinda struck me is that we are responsible for laying our challenges in life…challenges that make us grow in ways we want. If we don’t we will end up following others’ plans for us ….which is not much. And regardless if we don’t seek our own challenges and then try to grow into them, we eventually get hit by challenges that life throws at us and we are unable to cope up because we  never put the effort into growing and be able to cope up effectively.

If someone invests poorly in education in their life and doesn’t push himself to be really good in their field of choice, you get hit by challenges posed by a difficult career, lack of opportunity and general lack of incompetency in whatever you get assigned. It just compounds. That is a unwanted challenge for sure. The other option is to challenge yourself in advance to be really good in directions you want and then you don’t get into messy challenges in the first place. The choice lies with us. And it comes down to: “You have to create your own challenges. Take the time to lay them out and work on them”

Salon.com Books | Why can’t we concentrate?

Just today I was thinking about the qualities of focus and attention while traveling in the train. Attention seems to have become our most important resource. Managing it is becoming as important if not more as managing our money or relationships.  Read this interesting article today at Salon.com. The following quote from the author of  a new book is quite interesting.

Winifred Gallagher’s new book, “Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life” argues that it’s high time we take more deliberate control of this stuff. “The skillful management of attention,” she writes, “is the sine qua non of the good life and the key to improving virtually every aspect of your experience, from mood to productivity to relationships.” Because we can only attend to a tiny portion of the sensory cacophony around us, the elements we choose to focus on — the very stuff of our reality — is a creation, adeptly edited, providing us with a workable but highly selective version of the world and our own existence. Your very self, “stored in your memory,” is the product of what you pay attention to, since you can’t remember what you never noticed to begin with.

Gallagher came to appreciate this while fighting “a particularly nasty, fairly advanced” form of cancer. Determined not to let her illness “monopolize” her attention, she made a conscious choice to look “toward whatever seemed meaningful, productive, or energizing and away from the destructive, or dispiriting.” Her experience of the world was transformed. This revelation naturally led her to wonder why she’d had to exert herself to do what made her feel better. Why didn’t she turn to it as naturally as a thirsty woman turns to a glass of ice water? Why do we reflexively award more attention to negative or toxic phenomena like disasters and insults, while neglecting to credit small pleasures and compliments with the significance they deserve?

As long as we remain only dimly aware of the dueling attention systems within us, the reactive will continue to win out over the reflective. We’ll focus on discussion-board trolls, dancing refinancing ads, Hollywood gossip and tweets rather than on that enlightening but lengthy article about the economy or the novel or film that has the potential to ravish our souls. Tracking the shiny is so much easier than digging for gold! Over time, our brains will adapt themselves to these activities and find it more and more difficult to switch gears. Gallagher’s exhortations to scrutinize and redirect our attention could not be more timely, but actually accomplishing such a feat increasingly feels beyond our control. I can’t speak personally to the effectiveness of meditation, Gallagher’s recommended remedy for chronic distraction, but the effectiveness of meditative practices (religious or secular) in reshaping the brain have also been abundantly demonstrated.

via Salon.com Books | Why can’t we concentrate?.

Cursing the rain: a signal ?

I really like rain. It’s somehow embedded in my psyche in conjunction with some great times spent with family, at home, having a great time together while watching the rain falling outside. Rain used to be an excuse for mom to make some great snacks at home and enjoy them while chatting around the table. Perhaps it’s also got to do something with what I was told about it early on. I think I was 3 or 4 when I asked why does rain occur. The answer that was provided to me was “God is taking a shower”. That attached a spiritual perspective to the whole ambiance. And the resulting mud scent, clean air and the general sense of freshness that comes up always gladdens my heart as well.

So I was a bit surprised recently when I found myself cursing it when I was running towards an appointment and as usual forgot my umbrella. I was getting late and standing someplace doing nothing, which I find very hard to do. It wasn’t the first time either. That made me think…perhaps its a sign. Life shifts between different phases. Sometimes you tend to have time to enjoy or appreciate whatever comes your way. And then in yet another phase of life you start cursing whatever comes IN your way towards what you want to do. Living in Manhattan has perhaps shifted life more towards the latter for me. There are always a ton of things to do (partially my own fault). But it was a sign and useful one at that.

Bob Sutton: The Cult of Done Manifesto

A very practical manifesto for getting things done, something I bumped into yesterday from Hacker News. The notion of avoiding perfectionism and focusing on change however basic is very well put.

• Dear Members of the Cult of Done.

  • I present to you a manifesto of done. This was written in collaboration with Kio Stark in 20 minutes because we only had 20 minutes to get it done.

    The Cult of Done Manifesto

    1. There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
    2. Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
    3. There is no editing stage.
    4. Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.
    5. Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
    6. The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
    7. Once you’re done you can throw it away.
    8. Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.
    9. People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
    10. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
    11. Destruction is a variant of done.
    12. If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.
    13. Done is the engine of more.

Programming Sucks! Or At Least, It Ought To – The Daily WTF

Rethinking Software Development.

As frustrating as it can be to work with the uninspired, sloppy developer, the contrary – the inspired-yet-misguided one – is several magnitudes worse. A few bugs and painful-to-maintain code pale in comparison to the disastrous results an improperly motivated developer can deliver.

Everything from the platform (“let’s try out Ruby!”) to the architecture (“can’t just have two tiers”) to the techniques used in the code itself (“we need an aspect-oriented framework”) can be – and often are – influenced more by the desire to learn the technology than to serve the actual business need. Pick the wrong platform or invent the wrong technique, and the project is inevitably doomed.

Having doomed more than one project as a result of my desire to challenge myself, I’ve come to learn that there are some essential rules that must be followed when developing business information systems.

1. Learn the Business. It’s preposterous to believe that you don’t need to understand the business in order to develop software for the business. Without understanding what their actual needs are, it’s impossible to give stakeholders what they actually need. That’s right: when they say they want a “new database for every day”, they don’t actually mean a new database for every day.

via Programming Sucks! Or At Least, It Ought To – The Daily WTF.

complicated (sorry “elegant”) code

The section about programmers creating complicated (sorry “elegant”) code just to keep them interested in a project reminds me of one of the best lessons I learned in Software U.

It was in the Advanced Fortran class one evening, and our teacher, George, enters the room. His 35 students await the wisdom he has for us. Without saying anything, George turns on the overhead projector and slaps a transparency on it with a code fragment. He asked simply “what does this do?”, then waited. Our young minds couldn’t quite penetrate this problem, something to do with matrices is about all we could figure out. Finally, George shattered the silence and stated that that routine merely zeroed out a matrix. Nothing more. He then walked us through the code. It was elegant, and beautiful and fast! I glanced around, and noticed everyone else doing the same, smiling and nodding, all thinking “wow, that’s really clever!” all hoping they could be as clever as the code’s author. After a short pause, George said “I bet you think this was clever code, don’t you”. The young skulls full of mush nodded in unison and smiled. “You’re right, it is clever….it is also bad coding.” He went on to explain that while it was clever and fast and efficient, it was also bad code because we couldn’t understand it! It would have taken only a few extra lines of code to do a more traditional and slightly slower approach, but it would have been much easier to support. Rare is the routine that really needs to be optimized, he said. “Choose clarity over speed, if speed is not absolutely needed.”

via Programming Sucks! Or At Least, It Ought To – The Daily WTF.

Programming Sucks! Or At Least, It Ought To – The Daily WTF

hilarious quote: (btw a great article for every software engineer working in the industry)

A UI generated from the database is just as bad as the database that’s generated from the UI.

via Programming Sucks! Or At Least, It Ought To – The Daily WTF.

Gabor hits Send: “I Reject Your Rejection”

I was determined to go to Williams College, one of the world’s most selective institutions of higher learning. [...] I didn’t have a prayer of getting accepted. I was, after all, a B-student.

And sure enough, I got the thin envelope: the one with no information about when the school starts, or what dorm you’re in, or who your roommate will be. Instead, it just contains that nicely worded letter, the one that when you cut through all the flowery language simply says “no”.

I needed a plan. The customer had said “no,” and the sales process was just beginning. Figuring that the admissions committee of this elite school had probably seen and heard just about everything, I decided to take a bold, direct, and unorthodox approach. I got the telephone number of the assistant director of admissions, a man named Cornelius (Corny) Raiford. I called Corny up and told him:

“Hi, my name is Bo Peabody, and I reject your rejection.”

There was a long silence. “Excuse me?” he said.

“I want to go to Williams College,” I continued. “And with all due respect, I think the admissions committee has made a mistake. And I’d like to work with you to correct it. I am formally rejecting your rejection. I’m coming to Williams. Not next year perhaps, but at some point. I’m in no rush. I have all the time in the world, and I plan to send an application in to Williams every year until I’m accepted.”

There was another long silence. At this point, I figure Corny is either going to play ball with me or transfer my call to the police. Corny cleared his throat and said, “I appreciate your desire to attend Williams. I’m not sure I’ve ever received a call like this, so let’s see what we can do.” For the next few months, I worked with Corny to build a yearlong program during which I’d remedy several of the deficiencies (read: B’s) he saw in my application. That next year, I re-applied to Williams, and was granted early admission to the class of 1994.

via Gabor hits Send: “I Reject Your Rejection”.

President Obama throwing a snowball

presidential-snowball.jpg (JPEG Image, 421×1100 pixels) – Scaled (52%).

A 2002 Dilbert strip strangely relevant to current crisis!

I don’t remember in what context the original strip was published but it’s amazing in its accuracy today!

via Dilbert.com – The Official Dilbert Website with Scott Adams’ color strips, Dilbert animation, mashups and more!