Essentialism – by Greg McKeown

Essentialism Book CoverRomania, where I’m from, is peculiar in a lot of ways. Interesting fact about Romanians: most of them are hoarders (well, more or less). There are even jokes about this: “You know you are a Romanian if you have a plastic bag in which you keep plastic bags”. Indeed, the Romanians keep everything. They extend their houses, build balconies, garages or sheds to store more and more stuff. I recently learnt that this is called “deprivation hoarding”. According to http://www.ocduk.org/hoarding , this hoarding is due to a previous experience of deprivation, which indeed happened during the communist era. As expected, it’s more observable in old people.

In this context, essentialism was always complicated to apply. I’ve always admired simplicity. I am focusing on simplicity right now. I am decluttering everything. Not accidentally, I’ve recently read Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown.

Side note: the book is not an example of minimalism, but the advice is sound.

Essentialism checklist:

  1. Do not default to yes. Stop committing to every opportunity you stumble upon. Being busy is not a badge of honour (or a desired state).
  2. Stop being busy and not productive. Don’t do more. Do more of the right thing.
  3. Declutter your closet. Do you wear it, do you love it and do you look good in it? Yes? Keep it. No? Throw it out. Apply this principle outside the closet as well.
  4. Distinguish between a lot of good and very few great. It’s either HELL YEAH! or NO. Does it inspire you, are you good at it and does it do good? Then it is worth your time. To an essentialist, almost everything is non-essential.
  5. Explore more, execute less. Spend more time analysing and exploring new opportunities. Spend less time exploiting every opportunity. (Exploration vs Exploitation paradigm)
  6. Decision by design vs. decision by default. Create systems that make decisions easy. Create systems that make other decisions irrelevant.
  7. Play more. It is the most effective stimulant for creativity. “Play” is instinctual. Create time for it. Being serious 100% of the time is boring 100% of the time.
  8. Set limits and boundaries. This doesn’t make you inflexible or limited. It just creates space for thinking. Examples: Don’t work more than 6 hours a day, do not do business meetings on the weekends, do not attend meetings without agendas.

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Blink – Malcolm Gladwell

blink-malcolm-gladwellI’ve recently been cultivating an interest in the area of instincts. Some people call them gut feelings. They don’t originate in the gut, but rather in the reptilian brain or the amygdala, part of the limbic system. It has such a great influence in our lives, and yet we understand it so little. We train almost any other aspect of our being, but we totally ignore our instincts. It is said that our brain is not rational, but rather it rationalises. We come to a decision in the first 2 seconds after we are exposed to something, and we can spend a few hours coming up with rational reasons for why made a decision.

The amygdala is a primitive and very simple mechanism. It’s responsible for our freeze/flight/fight response. It’s what helps to make split second decisions and it’s what kept us alive as a species for such a long time.

The book blink by Malcolm Gladwell is about these gut feelings. While reading the book, I couldn’t help not associating the process with a neural network, the machine learning instrument. A mathematical model that self-adjusts to comply with the training. A neural network can’t offer reasons for its outcomes. An outcome is a result of mixing some numbers in some mathematical expressions. The good part is that it’s really quick. After it’s been trained, the decision is just a few basic operations away.

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Move your DNA – Katy Bowman

move_your_DNAKaty Bowman in “Move your DNA” aims to shift the paradigm we use when we think about physical fitness. She’s a supporter of the Paleo movement. She agrees with the fact that something changed so abruptly(in our day-to-day environment) during our evolution, that our bodies didn’t quite catch up. Here is some evidence to support that:

  • Our bodies are still designed to conserve as much energy as possible. Food (energy) is very easily obtained nowadays.
  • Our mind tries to avoid work as much as possible (think of all the productivity hacks we come up with). It’s normal to avoid doing work if the absence of work doesn’t entail hunger, thirst or danger.
  • Our environment makes us prone to routine. You will live in the same house for many years, work in the same office for many years, have the same commute, shop in the same place on the same day of the week, at approximately the same time. This wasn’t the case a some time ago. Daily movement varied a lot in quantity and form. Some days people would hunt or gathered food while in others they would work on building a home, or maybe even just resting (and doing nothing all day).

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On Inefficient Product Development

Do you find yourself in social situations where people are talking politics like their experts? “They should totally give more money to public education!”, “They should definitely invest more in infrastructure!”. Sometimes I wonder if people debating this kind of stuff have at least a basic understanding of the complexities behind such actions. How much of the picture are they seeing and how much of the picture are they believing they are seeing? What compromises have to be made to take certain actions? This is not a pledge for not taking action. It’s a pledge for testing theories and for being flexible and not forming unmovable beliefs. Oh, and TALK IS CHEAP.

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Outliers – Malcolm Gladwell

From the bestselling author of Blink and The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success overturns conventional wisdom about genius to show us what makes an ordinary person an extreme overachiever.

My notes:

OutliersThe book is a great read for understanding how normal people end up doing incredible things. In the era of social media, everybody tries to attract attention and constantly brag about their achievements. There’s a constant competition going on. We forget to mention the long road travelled to our greatness or to our achievements. We want to make it look easy and make sure that we are the only ones “to blame” for our successes. Outliers tries to demolish that myth. A person at one point in time is the result of complex interactions between him/her and all the other people in their life and all the opportunities they have stumbled upon.

The book starts with dissecting the case of a small town of Italians living in the U.S. who didn’t experience the classic nutritional diseases but rather just died of old age. After analysing their nutrition, their environment and their genetics nothing that explains their longevity can be observed. The only explanation can be found in their social interactions. Strong family values and close ties with friends, typical to Italians, seems to be the only viable explanation for why those people were outliers.

I don’t want to give away more exciting details from the book, but some of the analysed cases include:

  • Why being born in a certain part of the year can make or break your career as a professional athlete
  • How being in the right place at the right time can make you a genius
  • Why eastern cultures are so good at math
  • How planes can crash due to cultural heritage
  • Why are some parent better than others

One of the central principles on which many of the theories in the book lean on, is the Mathew Principle:

For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken even that which he hath.

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How overthinking is making you fail

You might have noticed how ideas work. You’re walking down the street, minding your own business. You see something that inspired you, something that’s pretty subtle for most people (or so you think) but it caught your attention. You realise you have a solution to the problem, you notice you can solve it or maybe a better way of doing it! You’re proud as a peacock. You get out your pen and write the idea in your hipster moleskin or maybe you make a note on Evernote. You rush through the day wanting to get home quicker so that you can get your hands dirty and start working on your idea that will surely make a mark on the world.

You eventually get home. You start preparing a cup of tea to have handy while working. While the tea is brewing you try to look at the idea from different angles. You realise that:

  • It can actually be much more than what you initially thought. With a few small tweaks and a great vision you can not only solve problem X for the Y type of people, but you can help Y1 and Y2 with problems X1, X2, X3. Awesome! Your idea is even greater that you initially thought.
  • You are so lucky. There are so many tools available in the world. Most of them are free. We’re so fortunate to live in this age, when the world is so open. There are 12 awesome web frameworks that you can use. And 5 CMS software for the blog you’re going to write. 3 form solutions for your contact page. People will want to contact you to congratulate you. Of course, not all people will be grateful for your work and some might even want to spam you. So you’ll have to look at some spam detection solutions as well.
  • You’re time is precious. Better go online and look first at some pre-existing themes. You don’t want to waste your time designing everything from scratch. Good thing there 12.000 such themes on the online marketplace. You have where to choose from.
  • If you’re going to work on this every night after work, you’re going to be exhausted. You might need to declutter your life a bit. Maybe hire one of those VAs to take care of your emails so you can concentrate on the project.
  • The idea is awesome. But let’s start validating it. Let’s spread the word. It’s great if when you actually launch, people have already heard about your brand. Talking about my brand … I should really pick an easy to remember name, think of a logo and buy that domain. What social media channels would work best for this project? The idea is pretty out there. Instagram is perfect. I don’t really have a following on Instagram. I should really start building one!
  • You’ve just read an awesome blog post. It’s never too early to understand your customers. So you’d better install some analytics software. Start measuring conversion rates and building those funnels is essential.
  • The landing page should really stand out. There’s one headline that you can use and that can explain your great idea. People nowadays have a really short attention span so you have to come up with some really awesome copywriting to get in their heads.

Damn it! The tea got bitter and I now realise that this is not going to be easy.

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Digital Nomad in Barcelona – what you need to know

I know Barcelona pretty well. I lived here for about half a year on an Erasmus scholarship and visited a few times after. It is one of my favourite places. It’s fun and relaxing. This week I traveled to Barcelona and faced the challenge of combining work and pleasure. Here’s how I did it and some advice here and there.

Where to work from

I don’t usually like working from home but I did it this time pretty successfully. I stayed in an AirBnb in Poble Sec. It had a balcony and a very comfortable chair. The white noise coming from the busy street was enjoyable. I made it work. If you’re not that fortunate here is some advice:

  • Find a co-working space. I tried Pipoca for a day and it was pretty awesome. They offer the option to pay per day (20€). Pretty cool facilities included: inner terrace, hammock, coffee, popcorn.
  • If you try working from a coffee shop, avoid Starbucks. In Spain, Starbucks doesn’t offer unlimited Wifi to their customers but rather a code that’s good for a few MB of data. A few times the data wasn’t enough for me to read my email. I’m in a Starbucks right now and it’s pretty frustrating.
  • Find a Hot Desk using ShareDesk

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MSVA Demo Day

MSVA Cohort
MSVA Cohort

We’re very close to cross the MSVA finish line! You can watch us crossing it live on TechCrunch: TC Livestream

Stay close and maybe have a look!

Wish us luck!

Beagle rocked LegalX

Cian(CEO, Beagle) just had a talk at LegalX, a recent industry cluster from Toronto, created for helping companies disrupt the legal technology sector. You can read more about the launch of LegalX here, and about the first edition here. We got some pretty awesome tweets (these are my retweets):

 

 

 

By the way, Beagle is having a booth at TechCrunch Seattle 2015 (June 25, 2015), so stop by and say hi!