No Water, No Moon

Arman Suleimenov: daily thoughts on mastery, creativity and happiness.

[nowaternomoon]

Going from ‘YES’ to ‘NO’

When you’re just starting out career-wise, it seems that you have to say ‘Yes’ to a lot of things just to be out there, get recognized, have more inbound interest in your work, etc. But once that first orbit of success is reached, you’re still the same nice guy jumping on every opportunity to help. With important distinction, however: you no longer have the bandwidth to help everyone on individual basis. You have to look for more scalable mechanisms of achieving the same results.

You’re bombarded by constant phone calls, Facebook Messenger/WhatsApp messages and emails. Everyone wants a piece of you:

Can you give the interview to our magazine?

Could you reply to our 10 questions over text so we can write an article about mobile technologies?

Can you help us host & interview the renowned guest?

Can you fly out to city X and speak at the event we’re putting together?

All the students at our university wants you to speak at our local TEDx, how does your November look like?

I  have an idea for an app. Can we meet this week?

X told me that you should know many iOS developers and designers. Can you recommend us the best ones?

We want to spread the word about the competition/public lecture/loyalty card, can you repost our recent Facebook post / write an original story about us?

Can you review my college essay / solve the problem # 2 in my physics problemset (i’m totally serious here)?

Can you give me advice on how to apply for grad school?

Can you give me advice on what to do with my life?

Can you drop everything so we can meet over coffee and I’ll pick your brain for an hour?

And so on, and so on, and so forth.

Ultimately we’re here on this planet to realize our full potential while serving others. But at some point you just don’t have enough hours in the day. That’s the time when you have to aggressively turn down all the requests of your time with the lowest potential impact. You have to switch from YES to NO. You have to say ‘No’ to hundreds of things to get comfortable. You have to put your head down and focus on perfecting your craft. That’s what differentiates people who realized their full potential and those who didn’t. 

[nowaternomoon]

Thank the naysayers

People who are pessimistic / discouraging about your idea are actually doing you a great service. Their indifference / arrogance is often such a turn off that you’ll work 10x harder to prove them wrong.

[nowaternomoon]

The problem with interviews

I’m thinking of declining the interview requests from the media from now on unless they’re shot on audio or video. Proof-reading the journalist’s draft, changing the numerous misinterpretations, giving the right context, adding missing important points which I definitely mentioned during the interview takes about 2-3 hours per article.

So much meaning and context is lost in the final piece. And what’s more frustrating is that the journalists have the final say on how the published article would look like. So it’s very likely that they are going to dismiss your editions (despite explicitly asking for them) and stick to what they wrote.

It’s more efficient if I just find time to sit down and write what I think, and let everyone see my perspective first hand.

[nowaternomoon]

Boom!

You don’t need apps to block distracting websites if you found your true calling & the labor of love.

[nowaternomoon]

Romantic pragmatism when coming up with startup ideas

Here’s one problem with the otherwise perfectly sounded problem-oriented approach to coming up with startup ideas. If all you think are the problems you experience in your life, all the itches that remain to be scratched, then unless you’re somehow weirdly unique - most of the problems you come up with will be the same problems everyone else thought of. As a result, most likely your solutions won’t be unique and mimic the ones which already exist.

To think of products people never thought they needed, you need to have unique experiences in life (e.g. crazy adventures in rural Iceland, one month of silence, etc.) as well as the freedom to explore the idea space without the fear to be ridiculed for coming up with lots of really bad ideas.  

[nowaternomoon]

Zero Drive

If you’re constantly talking to a lot of people during the day, you have zero drive to write.

[nowaternomoon]

The wrong lesson people learn at school

Quite a few people learn the following (wrong) lesson during their years at school, ‘You can succeed by being out there and constantly asking lots of questions’.

This approach later can work at quite a few traditional corporate jobs where you can get promoted by sweet talking to executives during lunch breaks, being visible, showing your work, and asking questions whenever there’s a glimpse of a doubt. But when you actually have to produce something at the end, when your only measure of success is the end product, you’ll fail if you’re too active in public. You have to put your headphones on, focus and be boring to the outside world.

[nowaternomoon]

Customers waiting

Customers/users waiting for you. That's the best way to fight procrastination if you're self-employed.

[nowaternomoon]

Remembering John Nash

It was an afternoon of Monday, May 9 2011 (the so-called ‘Victory Day’ in post-Soviet Union countries - that’s how I remember). For the previous 2 weeks, I was busy working on my final project for the Information Retrieval course - Natural Language Processing project which aimed to teach Japanese grammar with example sentences.  The Spring semester was about to end, and I was struggling with my New Jersey pollen allergies while having a lunch with a friend at the Frist Campus Center.

We were sitting at the table right next to the tray return conveyors, so when I spotted a familiar figure returning his tray, I decided to approach him. That was indeed Prof. Nash. The topic for the conversation was not hard to find, as just a couple of days before on the Kazakh news sites, I saw that he was one of 6 Nobel Laureates who attended the annual Astana Economic Forum in my hometown. Apparently, he just got back from the forum past Friday. We talked about his meeting with the Prime Minister, the fact that the meeting with the President was cancelled on the last minute. He said it was his first time in Kazakhstan and his second time in the former Soviet Union country (he's been to Saint Petersburg a couple of times) and one thing that surprised him was the fact that all the signs in the Central Asian country were in Cyrillic (not Chinese). We chatted for about 5-10 minutes. I guess, that’s how you blow an opportunity to talk mathematics with the legendary mathematician.

Next year in May 2012 he attended the Astana Economic Forum once again. It just so happened that he flew back on the same Lufthansa Astana -> Frankfurt flight with my family who were traveling to the US for my graduation. My mom told me how over the course of the flight a few times on his way back from the restroom he stopped by my younger brother Nurym and in complete silence watched him time his 4x4x4 Rubik’s cube solves.

One year later in May 2013 while browsing the shelves of The Labyrinth Bookstore in downtown Princeton I stumbled upon the book “The Essential John Nash” which with plain and informal style attempts to explain the Nash’s diverse contributions to game theory as well as pure mathematics. It was so good that I finished one chapter right at the store and took the book home.

The world lost a beautiful mind. Rest in peace, Prof. Nash. The Phantom of Fine Hall.

[nowaternomoon]

How do you effectively price a product?

If you were making something you wanted to see exist in the world under market conditions, you might have asked yourself, ‘How do you effectively price a product?’ The option most people pick is they look at competing or related products and try to price their offering based on the existing ones - by making it either a bit cheaper or a bit more expensive.

I think the more effective strategy is to reverse the whole process. You start from your end goal, ‘How much am I aiming to earn with this?’ Then you see how many products you can realistically offer. Then the desired price = the target earnings / # of products. Now to justify the price (if it seems high to you), you have to think of all the ways to improve the product so that deserves its price tag. That’s where the real work lies in. 

[nowaternomoon]

My 5 cents

Advice for people who think ideas are everything: ideas are nothing. Advice for those who think that execution is everything: execution is nothing.

[nowaternomoon]

One output a day

The productivity technique I’m practicing recently. Before going to bed I write down one thing I’m planning to finish tomorrow. Not two, not three, exactly one. If needed, I write down all the subtasks involved in achieving this one output.

Ask yourself: what’s one output you can measure yourself against at the end of the day?

[nowaternomoon]

Back to 134 characters

It’s easier to maintain imbalance. Striving for work-life balance often leads to idleness and is the sign that you’re not committed to win.

[nowaternomoon]

1% nature + 99% nurture?

On the photo: first row, two rightmost seats - Stephen Wolfram’s children during their dad’s live presentation of the Wolfram Language.

The old as the world question, ’Nurture vs Nature’. How much of one’s success can be attributed to genes and how much of it can be attributed to the environment? After hanging out with the legendary Stephen Wolfram and his 2 kids for two days during their visit to Almaty, I made the following (rather trivial, one might argue) observation.

It doesn’t contradict the famous Edison’s formula, ‘1% of inspiration and 99% of perspiration’. It just extends it. 1% can be genes, 99% can be environment, but most importantly - those genes manifest themselves beyond 1% as your brilliant parents have the power to create the right environment. Think dinner conversations, trail of books read they leave behind, business/science partners they are introducing you to, talks/presentations they take you, etc.. That surely accelerates your growth as a child. Children should see both sides: hanging out with both kids of their age on one side not to miss out on the childhood, and with successful grown-ups not to miss on the accelerated maturity.

[nowaternomoon]

If you don’t have the deadlines at your startup, you’re doing it wrong

When you’re working on your own startup, especially in the early days most of the time you’re the one who decides what the deadline is. And if you don’t, nothing is going to get done. Deadlines are wonderful in the sense that they focus the entire team’s efforts on a single task at hand.

Working on a startup means you decide your own schedule. That doesn’t come without the price though. If you’re sloppy and used to operate only under an external pressure, then you’ll be stuck in indecision and indolence.

So to be productive in a startup, set the deadlines, meet them. Have the consequences in the physical world if you don’t. Leverage the external deadlines such as those of startup accelerators or tech conferences [0] to your advantage. Apply the peer pressure and make sure to do at least one thing which improves your product every single day.

Notes

[0] Dennis and Naveen made mid-March of 2009 their deadline to launch Foursquare at SXSW. 

[nowaternomoon]

Not thinking like the majority of people can lead to building products no one wants

Photo credit: 500px.com

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect”. -Mark Twain [0]

The day before yesterday a non-technical friend of mine showed me the iOS app he built with no programming whatsoever using one of the visual mobile app builders, Appery.io. It’s a simple app which lets you browse through the list of restaurants, bars, theaters, etc. in Astana, Kazakhstan. Essentially, it’s the localized mini subset of Yelp. You can quickly brush off this idea as nothing special, but they already have 16,000 downloads on iOS alone in just a few months. Remarkable given (or rather thanks to) the niche nature of the idea.

So this got me thinking. To build something popular while still scratching your own itch, you have to experience life like the majority of people. If you are not thinking like most people, the odds are that you’ll build something no one needs or wants. I would have never built local Yelp clone, it’s just not who I’m, and the products should be extensions of who we are, shouldn't they [1]? This reminded me of my high school days when four of my sites were consistently making 300,000 hits a month. I was my own audience, thought like them and had easy time building things for the Russian speaking part of the Internet, quite nascent back in 2002-2003.

Things have changed today. I unfortunately don’t speak the same language (metaphorically and literally) with the majority of my audience, I feel. So the products I want to see exist in the world have little appeal to them. One can argue that I should consider building apps where I’m not the target audience. But today my natural curiosity wouldn’t be satisfied if I was building a boring painkiller for someone else.

Notes

[0] I’m taking the inverse of that and pausing to reflect having found myself on the opposite side of the majority. 

[1] Creative process over business needs. 

[nowaternomoon]

How do I execute on essay ideas?

Photo credit: 500px.com

On Friday during my talk at KBTU one of the students in the audience asked me, ‘You said that you usually write your essays in the morning. But my ideas come to me on different times during the day. How do you come up with ideas on demand?’.

Here’s my response. I execute on essay ideas in the morning, but the ideas themselves come to me on absolutely unpredictable times during the day: during the jog, engaging conversation, when reading a book, listening to a podcast [0]. I write down those ideas in Notes app on my iPhone. By far the most convenient way to quickly save the unstructured thoughts. Then in evening, I organize those thoughts into appropriate notes in Evernote. At the moment, I have a few idea lists [1] in Evernote (from the most  frequently updated one to the least): ’Short essay ideas’, ‘Long-form essay ideas’, ’Startup ideas’, ‘Quote ideas’, ‘Mobile app ideas’, ’Book ideas’, ’Movie script ideas’. They contain a few hundred ideas which still haven’t found its show time.

Here’s what I mean by executing on an essay idea in the morning. I look at the top 3-5 ideas and pick the one I feel like writing the most. Usually I pick the top one - the recency means the idea is still fresh and relevant in my mind. I then delete that idea from the list, make a quick outline of 6-7 bullet points and storm through the outline by expanding it into a full essay. I like to keep it short (3-4 paragraphs) and am usually done in about 15-20 minutes.

Notes

[0] On the related note, here’s my answer on how to come up with startup ideas.

[1] James Altucher, on the other hand, advocates for making the list of 10 ideas every single day to keep your idea muscle in shape.