Monthly Archives: June 2012

Don’t be Poor

The God honest truth is, don’t be poor. Or if you’re poor its sometimes easier to be less ambitious. It sucks knowing your every move is limited to lack of funding and when your age timer just keeps moving on and on and on and one day you wake up and you realize, I’m 27 and I haven’t achieved anything yet and still there’s others out there that have done much more at a younger age.

It sucks to know that you have little to no time to soul search. It sucks to know that soul searching becomes an activity only the rich can afford. It sucks to know that you have dependants like your family that have planned and rely on your every move to ensure that everyone wins and not just you. It sucks to know all that.

Perhaps all those things they thought in college was a fantasy. All those things I read in books, not a reality. Who says you can just pack your bags and leave. Who says your allowed to just take some days off for yourself to ponder and wonder the marvels of the universe and comteplate on how that factors into your tiny insignificant life. Who says people are merciful and tolerable and will agree to help.

The funny part is, no one will stand up to admit these very things they so easily dole out. Suddenly, they all have clauses. Suddenly, it doesn’t apply to everyone. Suddenly, a magic word called responsibility appears. Suddenly they retract their words and you realize you’re alone in your decision and you’re made to look like a fool, an idiot who decided somehow, by himself, with no external advice at all, that he can pack up and leave. Don’t you find today’s world hillarious. No one lives up to their word anymore.

There is not enough honor to go around so everyone out there has only about an ounce of it left in their veins. Suddenly, you realize, oh shit, it’s just me, right here, in this lonely alley being bombarded with questions, being laughed at, being called upon to make everyone else’s dream a reality except yours. So where do you fit into all of this. The answer is simple – No where. You don’t exist or to better clarify, you only exist as a means to enable other people’s existence.

Gosh, now there’s a perspective ain’t it. There’s a once in a lifetime perspective that perhaps is the reason why people run away, only to be proudly adorned with the society label of ‘Coward’. Gotta love it. They have an answer for everything. If you stay, you need to enable their dreams, and if you run and try to realize yur own dream, you’re a coward who shrugs away responsibility. If you stay, decide to enable yours, you’re selfish.

My teacher once told me, being an adult is being the biggest hypocrite of it all simply because we choose to supress so many things we think and know from the open in an effort to blend in and be normal. We mould our behaviour to fit the acceptable standards of the society round us, and those who perceive themselves as unique, those who try so hard to differentiate themselves, simply push this boundaries by a little and suddenly, they are the most original personality in the room.

Its just a scam. All of it and it just plain sucks. It horrible to think that we have degenerated to such life-sucking vampires, such horrible creatures that we do this so willingly to one another. No this is not because of capitalism or some political reform. What this is, is simple human behaviour masked in the veil of that treacherous bride we so happily embrace – Civilization.

Isn’t that what its all about. If you are here in this earth, you’re suppose to embrace thy neighbour which also translates to be nice and help them our once in a while. Even then, we have negotiated this arbitary number of times we should and should not help someone. And we have it in our heads that if someone helps us alot, they are a push over, if a guy is too nice to a girl, she’s suppose to push him away and place him in the Friend zone and go for the badass jackass who has an attitude. Apparently that’s how we as humans make decisions. Apparently that’s what holds true, deep inside our hearts. Schadenfraude. We all have an inherent need to damage ourselves, constantly. If these were the pillars of society, where the so called jackasses get to breed and the nice guys were always pushed aside, then I wonder, what does that say about the morals of society around us. What does it say about the pillars of civilization that we work so hard to protect.

Is the entire thing a sham built by idiots to protect themselves for being phased out ? Either way, just dont be poor. It just plain sucks.

Why I Disabled Facebook Chat

I love being connected. It gives me a calm feeling knowing that I am able to reach anyone anytime, and vice versa for those wanting to reach me. This is one of the reasons why I always ensure a 3G connection is available when travelling.

However, having recently discovered that I have a very low tolerance for bullshit and time wasters, I realized that there’s an inherent need for me to control incoming messages to a time range so my thought flow and process is not interrupted. Facebook Chat however seems to work counter clockwise.

I don’t just get notifications at the top but an annoying sound and popup chat window that invades my viewing space at the bottom right hand corner that makes it very hard to ignore and move on. While I think real-time communication is great, having features that will enable me to control how I am notified when a Chat Message comes in is crucial towards my experience as a user.

Facebook Chat Settings

Facebook Chat Settings

For this reason among others, I absolutely love the way Twitter promotes communication among people. Twitter somehow understands that there are multiple forms of communications and it is often up to the individual user to decide how he or she wants to communicate with one another.

Google+ on the other hand enables this through its GTalk chat component which functions pretty much like Facebook’s Chat, except with the ability to control your status intuitively. Facebook seems to do this weirdly with the adoption of the whitelist and blacklist method where, your offline except to a select few, your online except to a select few or your completely offline. Maintaining and curating these lists isn’t optimal simply because sometimes its just about being available for one person and not everyone else.

This got me thinking of how important the way we think of communication is. Communication despite it being something we practice everyday in some form or capacity even if its abstinence from it completely is absolutely crucial and very very private. The way we perceive it mutates and morphs constantly and changes in split seconds during mood swings or other real life states of mind such boredom, sadness or ‘Happy Hour’.

Communication is and always will be one of the important pillars of civilization as we know it and will help shape the way we think, behave, learn and do anything. Having to work on something as important as that is a monumental task for any one organization and for that, Facebook does deserve a pat in the back especially since they also have to tolerate rants of raving madmen such as myself who decided to write down my flow of thoughts around 4.30am in a foreign city.

Facebook as a company deserves accolades for changing the way we think of privacy permanently, but their innovation with Chat and Real-Time Messaging is yet to have taken that momentous leap. Perhaps they will find a way and that’s still to be determined but as of right now, Google+ and Twitter seems to have gotten it right or at least better than Facebook.

So until such that that they have figure it out, I have opted to disable my Facebook Chat and remain completely offline while seeking to rely on the notifications at the top of Facebook for messages that come in. It seems to be the cop out way of dealing with the situation instead of suggesting a solution for them to consider, and as they say its always easier to talk rather than do, but as of right now, it seems to be the approach I’d rather take. Of course it could simple be that I am lazy and have not figured out a solution myself, but at this point, it seems more like the aforementioned issue where its a monumental task to try and figure out an innovative, simple and easy way to tackle the problem and I am not there yet. ;-)

Think Stability before Growth

Most people consider growth to be the most important metric in a startup. Lets face it, running experiments and seeing the graph react gives us a certain kick and brings out that inner scientist. Despite that, what most companies fail to realize is, in Operations, growth isn’t the only metric that counts.

Quantifying stability equates to very basic metrics that current everyday companies use but tends to get ignored as time goes by. Examples include capacity (normal and at max), efficiency, cost of current operations which includes infrastructure and how much does it take to scale, production costs which includes manhours, any physical costs eg: ink for a print startup and so on. Grouping these metrics into a few key areas and monitoring their key numbers is important to Management as it helps them make decisions that drive growth based on all-things-equal and if-then-so scenarios.

Stability and full realization of your current business operations always comes first, without which, all experiements moving forward become null and void, because all other control variables are not constant. Running growth experiments is crucial towards the success of the company, there’s no denying that, but, without knowing the current operations and ensuring stability, your growth experiments will not be able to deliver accurate results thus resulting in a failed strategy.