srngv

ths is eml srngv's journl. i'm an entrprnr, invstr, husbnd, fathr, musicn. zr fcks givn.

[srngv]

Opinions

I’m not informed enough to have a strong opinion on this – how often do you hear that?

How different would our society be if people were not trying to fend off uncertainty with the illusion of knowledge?

How would state propaganda work? What will social media influencers talk about? How do politicians get elected now? Would Twitter collapse? Do we embrace the responsibility of making decisions with insufficient data? Or do we search for some other escape?

When you think of it, borrowing opinions is both an ancient survival mechanism and one of the biggest hurdles for human society now. Instead of fighting symptoms with counter-opinions, we must attack the very culture of easy opining.

I start with telling my kids “I don’t know” more often. I try to get words like “assumption”, “fact-checking”, “bias” into their vocabulary.

How do you do it?

[srngv]

Harry Potter and The Dreaded Todo List

A book nobody wants to read.

Teacher: Kids, who do you want to become? Kid 1: An austronaut! Kid 2: A rock star! Kid 3: I just want to go to the grocery 5,000 times, wash dishes 12,000 times, barely meet 600 deadlines, and spend my life wondering where it all went wrong.``

If movies/books/stories/gossip were like real life, who would want to spend money on that? We are suckers for good stories because they allow us to temporarily escape our cages we slowly build by negligence. A path to a lesser goal is so clear, our legs walk it on their own. All while our heads are happily constructing complex dreams, narratives, and unlikely situations we want to find ourselves in.

The world doesn't care about narratives. It debunks them one by one. Your life doesn't want to be a story. You miss its essense while anxiously searching for one after another.

Happiness isn't something Hollywood can show you. You don't get to discover it until your 10th try. And then it turns out to be in the place you neglected all along -- yourself.

Do I have a point? I don't know. This doesn't have to be a story.

[srngv]

Stop

Starting up is praised. Everybody encourages you to start something new -- a business, a hobby, a relationship.

Rarely does it even get acknowledged that for a new start you usually have to stop something first: quit the job you hate, break up with a negative person, let go of life-long fears. The most difficult part thus gets little attention.

Stopping is important and tricky, because most starts in life are unconscious. Picking up bad habits is easy; little compromises are invisible; urgent over important feels natural. Stopping, on the other hand, requires alert and going against the flow. When you need to stop something and it's hard, it may mean there was an easy start in the past.

Finally, you don't only stop to start something again. Stopping is a practice; it's a cure. Getting rid of something to make room is a good deal in itself. Removing things that no longer make sense brings clarity and insights you don't get otherwise.

Starting is about dreams, enthusiasm, impatience, pivots, impulse.

Stopping is about reality, reflection, acknowledgement, analysis, conscience.

Stop more often than you start.

[srngv]

Bad ideas

Great ideas are born out of many bad ideas.

You have to pick up 10 ideas that all seem awful, and one of them might just be great.

The problem is that best ideas often come in disguise. Instead of realizing that you've come up with 1 ok idea, 8 bad ideas, and 1 great idea, you think you have 1 ok idea + 9 bad ones.

Thus the trickiest part about bad ideas is self-censorship. It's not easy to even write them down, let alone show/discuss/implement.

The most difficult part of brainstorming is pretending there are no stupid ideas.

-- overheard on Twitter

The reason for that is we are taught to judge and to be afraid of judgement from the earliest years. Combine that with the human inclination to save effort, and you have a recipe for not doing anything interesting ever.

A remedy for that is practice and attitude. Make it a habit to come up with lots of ideas and don't label them as "bad". Resourcefulness is a muscle, it builds up over time.

Just have many ideas.

[srngv]

Serene

Serene places are revealing. They remove stress, so you can escape stupid things. But they also remove excuses, so you can't escape yourself.

A serene place is not only a new big house. It could be a big goal achievement, a major milestone, a long-awaited relief.

When the smell of a new car wanes off, you are left with yourself wondering what to do. You are still the same, your habits are the same, and you have the added confusion having found out that your problems were nothing you imagined.

Everybody deserves to live in some serene place to get rid of the daily stress. First, because that's what all people fundamentally deserve; second, because it would demonstrate how much we are lying to ourselves.

The extent to which you are surprised reveals how delusional you have been.

At the highest mountain you will only find the silence you bring with you.

[srngv]

Bitcoin surged past $6,400 for the first time yesterday as an American derivatives exchange announced plans to sell futures contracts for the digital currency. The plans, announced by CME Group...

Bitcoin’s greatest value is unseizable store of value that no single entity can singlehandedly disrupt or even change. Think of all the gold market, think of government bonds, think of real estate investment market, and you will get the potential of sound money in the form of Bitcoin.

Bitcoin success is the measure of the fiat monetary system failure. It’s becoming more and more evident as we speak. Next decade is going to unfold the transition in full force.

Fiat money is the last bastion of nation states. This little cryptographic experiment started in 2008 is going to engage the world into an unfathomably complex and dramatic change.

[srngv]

Confusion

Our problem may be is that we don’t notice when we are genuinely confused.

Parents taught us to be fearless but never admitted that nobody in their right mind was fearless. They were setting us up for failure. Thus, instead of not fearing anything, we learned to hide fears.

Somehow, hiding fear from others became hiding it from ourselves. Through the practice of hiding fear we stopped noticing it.

We prefer knee-jerk reactions to confusion: keeping poker face or smiling, nodding and jabbing at the next obvious thing without stopping for a second. It became a habit to the extent that self-help writers teach us to “schedule time for strategic thinking“. This is sad because it reveals the autopilot mode that we have to learn to turn off.

So, to practice confusion awareness I started saying things like “I’m confused”, “I have no idea what’s going on”, “I’m lost” out loud to myself. I figured I first need to be more aware of how I react to the reality not meeting my expectations.

You can’t defeat wrong reactions to confusion before you defeat the control freak in you. It’s ok to have goals and plans but that requires equal understanding that the world doesn’t work that way.

Every once in a while, just watch how the world unfolds before you. It’s less painful than insisting that it obeys your batch of orders, aka todo list.

[srngv]

Intuition or data?

Intuition without data is whatever cognitive bias fits the situation – it feels like a hunch that shouldn’t be ignored. If I don’t understand the gibberish presidential candidates say, I’ll just choose the one who looks less crooked.

Data without vision is myopia – making sure you’ll only get to a local maximum. You know what to do to climb that tree, but is it the right tree at all?

So, intuition or data is a false choice. You need both to make good decisions. Isolating one component is an easy shortcut, while having a holistic vision that is being constantly tested and modified by accurate data feels like hard work.

[srngv]

The post-reality paradox

Reality and rational thought have paid more dividends in the last century than ever before. Science-based medicine has dramatically increased the lifespan and health of people around the world. Vac…

The irony, then, is that people who have been cut off from clean water, from things that actually work, from the fruits of a reality-based system that changed everything — these people are hungering for it, want it for their children. But for those that have taken it for granted, who have the luxury of using it without understanding it, the pendulum swings in the other direction, seeking an emotional response to economic and technical disconnects.

[srngv]

Alice

[srngv]

To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities — I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not — that one endures.

— Nietzsche, The Will to Power

[srngv]

Guitar

When you start out, you struggle to play correctly your own badly written tunes. When you get better, you are finally catching up with technique to perform your increasingly better, more interesting, richer in harmony music pieces.

Somewhere along the road to a better product we become better at making it. This is a self-fulfilling prophecy, which in the beginning has the opposite effect. What will bring you to the unimaginable (now) heights will daunt you at the start line.

Don’t give in. This very mechanism will become your friend when it tests you by first pretending to be your enemy.

[srngv]

My most desired superhuman ability

10 years ago I walked in the kitchen where my team was having a lunch. They had a casual discussion of superhuman abilities as I joined them.

Somebody asked what was my most desired ability. Without missing a heartbeat I said “learn 10 times faster”. My job as CEO required me to never stop learning, I explained.

When I bootstrapped my software product company a few years before that, the word “startup” was not even there in our part of the world. Websites were still best built from scratch using HTML templates and PHP, best sources of knowledge were bloated paper books, and sure as hell I couldn’t hire professionals for any role.

My strategy was to find promising novices, figure out what their job was and hope they’ll grow to take control. So, before I could teach anyone anything, I had to half-decently know how to do it myself.

Suddenly I found myself learning a myriad of things from leading a team of developers to web-design to UI to copywriting and marketing to SEO to sales. All while drawing shitty product logo images using a pirated copy of Adobe Photoshop.

Not a small task for a recent computer science graduate. No wonder it always felt like disaster and I thought I’d never figure out all the bells and whistles of running a small software company. Turned out, it was only 10% about software.

Somehow we pulled through. Those first few years cemented one thing in my mind: there was always something to learn. I was determined to learn whatever it takes, even though giving it 12 hours a day, 6 days a week never seemed remotely enough.

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But then things started shifting. Technology change was ever accelerating, strong competition was emerging and customer needs were becoming more and more sophisticated. One envisioned path arrived at a crossroads of a hundred paths.

Before, I knew exactly what to learn, but now I was puzzled. Which way to go? What stack of critical knowledge to pursue? Eventually, paths were taken, opportunities chosen, mistakes made, and lessons learned. Nonetheless, the need to choose never went away since then.

So, if I was asked the same question today, my answer would be “Know what to learn”. I can live with the same, “human” pace of learning if I have the superhuman ability to know what’s important.

[srngv]

The role of a professional

Seth Godin brilliantly nails the changing role of a professional in today’s increasingly DIY environment:

In each case, the professional has something to add, something significant, but she has to change her posture from scarce bottleneck to extraordinary contributor.

You do read Seth’s blog, right?

[srngv]

Signal vs Noise

Yesterday it was unusually windy and hot here in Prague. I was driving and didn’t want to turn on A/C, so I just opened the side windows. The wind instantly made it impossible to hear the music on the radio.

I barely stomach noisy environments. My best work tool is a pair of noise-cancelling headphones which I use at home, in the office and in public places while working. So, whenever my environment becomes uncomfortable, the first thing I do is seek to reduce the noise.

So I stretched my arm and… turned off the radio. Now there was only me and the wind outside. It was unusually relieving because how often do you turn off the radio to listen to the wind?

How often do we notice when the signal becomes the noise? What do we miss when we keep carried by conditions that once helped but now impede our growth? Why do you read blogs instead of doing something productive?

[srngv]

Spray it

Even if you are not a teacher, be a teacher. Share your ideas. Rejoice in what you learn and spray it.

— Tim Minchin

This.

I was not a very good natural teacher but I managed to vastly improve just because I took pleasure in teaching. It was unexpected but played major role in building my team.

[srngv]

I suggest you try it again, Luke. Only this time, let go your conscious self and act on instinct.

Obi-Wan Kenobi