In a previous post, I wrote about what matters in life and what doesn’t. What I proposed was that these things don’t matter at all:

• Ego
• Material possessions

What matters instead is:

• New experiences
• Relationships

What if you have to choose between an experience or a relationship?

Such situations are always extremely hard. Imagine you need to go travel the world for a year but that means giving up (not fully investing) in a relationship (with friends, colleagues, spouse or parents). What would you do? Of course, there are many variables there but if you are really stuck at a decision, my recommendation is to pick a new experience over a relationship.

This may sound controversial to many but my reason for choosing a new experience over relationship is that experience is something which is entirely under your control. With relationship, there’s a second person involved whose behavior is something you cannot (and shouldn’t) predict and control. I’m playing Devil’s advocate here, and I understand that in many cases relationships indeed create richer lives. However, many relationships also go sour with or without any reason at all and there is little you can do about it. With new experiences, improving your life is completely up to you. You can choose to have new experiences on a regular basis and nobody would object to it. Level of control you have on new experiences is much more than that you have on relationships.

Ideal situation, of course, is to have both meaningful relationships and new, interesting experiences. However, in dire circumstances, if you have to pick just one, pick an experience since it is a more predictable (and easier) way to have a meaningful life.

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All of us chase after success. For majority of us, success means achieving more in life. A better car, a bigger house, a promotion at job or a fancy watch. This particular definition of success pertains to what I call as professional success. Most of the stars, sports people, top shot CEOs and other celebrities that you know are at pinnacle of their professional success. They probably worked very hard to achieve what they have today and are also probably very proud of it. So far, so good.

But, there is another aspect of success. I call it personal success. If you compare two people: one movie star and another middle class office goer, do you really think movie star is more happy than the office goer? Deep inside they both have same happiness scale. In fact, for all the possessions and fame that a movie star has got, he may be actually not as happy as the regular office goer who gets to see his family every day and spend quality time with them. Regular Joe is happy as hell, why should he be ashamed of not being a movie star?

So, personal success is a different ball game altogether. It is completely independent of professional success you have got. In fact, I value personal success much more as compared to professional success. Reason for that is because personal success is much easily achievable. You all have a choice to spend quality time with your friends and family and live a rich and happy life. But, sadly, many of choose to chase professional success like mad people (rats). We work endlessly to achieve the elusive “professional success”, odds of achieving which is very less (just compare number of celebrities out there v/s total population on Earth).

So, given you can be happy with your personal life right now, why would you work non-stop and sacrifice personal life for some professional success. Why should it even matter that you could not become Sachin Tendulkar, Bill Gates, Lady Gaga or Tom Cruise? Just because they are at pinnacle of their professional careers, do you think they more happy than you? I doubt and I am pretty convinced.

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I’m probably too young to be writing on this topic but observing countless souls distressed by daily life made me think hard on what is that really matters in life. Undoubtedly, there are happy and sad phases and that’s part-and-parcel of life. But what I’m really bothered about is general, daily bitching about how miserable one’s life has become. You find people complaining about work, commute, relationships, other people’s attitudes & personalities, neighbor’s barking dog, lack of parking space, and, heck, some people also feel stressed about how they are unable to install latest iPhone update. Yes, I’m concerned about those people. Are these things really worth stressing about? Allow me to analyze.

What doesn’t matter in life

Let’s start off by observing what doesn’t matter in life and why. Life would be much better and satisfying if everyone could do away with (or at least de-prioritizes following) two aspects:

• Material possessions: countless sages have professed it and I completely with them that material possessions are source of most of the stress we face in our daily lives. Modern technology (and compulsion to keep up with it) only makes it much worse. Your car radiator broke down, your phone screen got a crack, you are unable to install USB drivers, or your expensive massage chair needs maintenance. Possessions end up taking over your daily life and you don’t even realize that. Wouldn’t you be much happier and free if you need not bother about constant purchasing, maintaining and discarding of possessions? I’m not advocating complete asceticism but my point here is that it is OK to be still using Windows 98. It is OK to travel by bus or taxi, and not having that fancy car. It is even OK if you don’t posses a phone (or if you have poor network provider, like mine — MTNL). It is OK to be like a free bird without any heavy baggage of material possessions.
• Ego: the number 1 stress factor you have in your life is no-one but you. The compulsive drive to prove yourself right (and others wrong), the obsession with (financially) outdoing your peers, neighbors & friends, the depression about how you couldn’t score 100% in math exam, the fights over how the wall is painted with the wrong shade of blue, and anger over how a friend misplaced your favorite book. Source of tension and stress in all these situations is not society or the other person you are fighting with, but it is you. In long run, do these little ego fights really matter? Are you enriching your life by these ego fights where either you or someone else ends up feeling bad? Wouldn’t it be much better for all if you started giving less importance to yourself? Maybe it is hard, but just try living a day making yourself unimportant and your life will be much more satisfying (as you can kick your ego aside and you can focus on what really matters in life — see below).

What matters in life

I have observed that following two aspects enrich one’s life and makes it worth living. What are these two things that matter in life?

• Experiences: seeking out new experiences in life is one of the best ways to be alive. Experiences excite, teach and rejuvenate you. Unlike material possessions, the memories, stories and photographs of these experiences will never fade away and certainly don’t require an upkeep. Have you ever thought of travelling the world? If not, do it! (Budget’s not a constraint). Learn a new language. Go bungee jumping. Do hitch-hiking. Start a new charity organization. Try new, exotic cuisines. There are literally millions of different types of experiences that you can seep in and most don’t take bagful of money. Usually, under false pretense of being busy in daily humdrum, it is your ego that prevents you from exposing yourself to different types of experiences, and hence doesn’t let you mature you as a person and live life to its fullest. The best part about these experiences is that you get to meet many interesting people, some of whom can also become lifelong friends and partners. This brings us to next point.
• Relationships: treasuring and maintaing relationships you have with your parents, friends, siblings, spouses, children and even neighbours is one of the most satisfying aspects of life. Humans need other humans in order to stay sane and to derive joy out of life. A loner can easily drive himself crazy. But, unfortunately, due to ego, sometimes we are rash with these relationships and end up hurting people. Even ignoring people can lead to isolation or broken relationships and that’s why it is important to realize that the relationships you have with other people are much more important than yourself (this realization is for your own sake and happiness, since you depend on other people. Try living completely alone!). Doesn’t joy and happiness become real only if you have other people to share it with? Can you be happy all by yourself? Nope! So, leave your ego aside and try to strengthen the relationships you have. When you come back from a trip to Caribbean, make sure you have someone to share your experiences with (and no, I don’t mean your Facebook friends)!

As usual, comments welcome!

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Note: if meaning of life and startups don’t excite you, it is recommended that you skip this post. You will find it boring.

I know this is a weird title. But I have finally convinced myself that you cannot afford to be too philosophical if you are doing a startup. Doing a startup could turn out to be a terrible experience for those who especially adhere to philosophy of Nihilism. For those who aren’t aware of Nihilism, it says that life has no meaning or purpose and is in fact pointless. This philosophy was popularized by the German philosopher Nietzsche and became popular with atheists. After all, if there is no God, what’s the point of life?

Back to startups. Working on a new venture takes an incredible amount of hard work and things go wrong time to time. If you want to make your startup successful, you will need to focus relentlessly for years and show a great deal of perseverance. Now if you are a kind of person who thinks too much about meaning of life and purpose of all that effort (especially during the bad times), you cannot be successful with your startup. How can you possibly justify all the hard work you are putting 24×7 into your baby when you are questioning the purpose of all this in back of your mind?

Unlike religions, Nihilism provides no inherent meaning of life. In fact, it says life is pointless and futile. This is a direct punch-in-the-face on your startup philosophy where you are required a wake up every single day full of energy and enthusiasm to work on yet another 18 hour marathon. If you believe in Nihilism and are doing a startup, you have to answer this question: why are you doing this? Is it to change the world or to make more money? Even when you achieve the goals (hello, million dollar exit) what’s the point of all that money when you are not even sure what’s the point of life?

In nutshell, you can’t afford to start questioning purpose of life when you are doing a startup. Those two are simply not compatible concepts which can co-exist in a single, worry-free brain. So, drop either Nihilism or your startup. (I recommend the former. See below).

PS: In case you are wondering which school of Philosophy I adhere to, it is Absurdism. Like Nihilism it says that there is no meaning of life, but it also further states that the purposelessness of life is what makes it exciting and that one has to keep doing things one feels like doing (hey, startups!) precisely because there is no grand purpose you should be working towards. Makes sense?

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I don’t know if it has been proposed earlier, but the other day I had an interesting idea about creating a variant of Turing Test and mashing it up in a Chataroulette kind of environment. As you may be aware, Turing test comprises of a game where a human chats with an unknown entity (which may be a computer or another human). The job of a human is to figure out whether the entity is human or a computer. It is proposed that if a computer passes Turing test (that is, if it manages to fool the human into thinking that it is a human), then we may call that computer “intelligent”. Unrelated to Turing test, Chataroulette is an online site where random strangers are paired up for chatting.

What if we mix Turing test and Chataroulette and then turn the whole concept upside down? Well, I think the consequences will be pretty interesting. Read on.

THE SETTING: An environment with multiple human and computer (chatbots) participants. A human participant is randomly paired with either a human or a computer.

THE RULES: Human has to convince during the chat that s/he is indeed a computer (chatbot)! After the chat is over (or during it), human can decide whether the other entity is human (who also makes a similar decision) or is a computer (which doesn’t make any decision). For a human, if the other entity decides that s/he is a chatbot, he wins 10 points and other entity loses 10 points. On the other hand, if a human makes a decision the other entity is a chatbot (and it is indeed true), s/he wins 10 points and chatbot (creator) loses 10 points. And if a human decides that chatbot is indeed a human, s/he loses 10 points while chatbot (creator) gains 10 points. In the end, the human or chatbot with most points wins the game (and a prize money?).

THE ESSENCE: So, every human in the game has to act like a chatbot while at the same time discern whether his chatting partner is an actual human (disguising as chatbot) or a chatbot (disguising as human). And every chatbot has to act like a human.

What makes this game interesting is the dynamics of chat and element of suspense. Imagine if you were in this game, you will suddenly start chatting in a goofy fashion (because you are emulating a chatbot). You won’t try to be too-smart (so that you are detected as a human) and you won’t try to be too-dumb (because you will be caught as an obvious deception). As a chat bot creator, you are not just relying on intelligence of your program to win the game. You’d also like to exploit the fact that a human will be over-cautious while declaring the program as chatbot (because humans also disguise as chatbot). So, the actual chatbot need not be a perfect chatting machine!

THE QUESTION: As a human, how do you win the game? What sort of conversation would you hold in this game to disguise yourself as chatbot? And what clues during the chat will tell you that the other entity is a chatbot?

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1. Having an idea is easy (not a problem at all)
2. Creating a product is hard (development problem)
3. Creating an awesome product is even harder (execution problem)
4. Having people notice it is real hard (marketing problem)
5. Making people use it is very, very difficult (credibility problem)
6. Generating cash out of it is simply not doable (sales problem)
7. Generating money and being profitable consistently is impossible (business creation problem)
8. Having successful multiple product lines is you-must-be-out-of-your-mind (successful business creation problem)
9. Rejecting acquisition offers is way, way harder (because it is tempting and odds are that you will never reach till that stage)
10. Doing an IPO is the ultimate hardest but simply awesome

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What do you do if you feel you are born unlucky? What do you do if you feel that the whole world is conspiring against you to make you not succeed? And, what do you do if you feel you have less intellect, less resources and less everything to succeed?

The short and sweet answer is to work harder. You cannot control luck. You cannot control amount of financial resources you have. But what you can definitely control is the amount of effort. Your competitior or neighbour might be advantaged in all respects but you can compensate all that just by working harder.

Really, putting in a lot of effort gives you a lot of chances to make mistakes, try out things and fail. What you have to loose here is your effort, which of course you must have unlimited supply of.

If your nearest competitor or neighbour works X hours, you must work for X+1 hours. If he pitches to Y bloggers, you must pitch to Y+1 bloggers. Of course, you cannot match him in his $5 million funding and a huge team of sales guys. But what you can match (and even exceed) is your persistence and sheer drive to succeed.

Yep, I know it is sounding a bit like self-help bookish type, but I have observed and realized that success is an equation with a lot of variables. Most of the variables you have little or no control on but one variable which has a lot of influence on the result is effort and persistence. Controlling the value of this variable is entirely upto you and hence affecting chances of being successful is your will.

What are your thoughts on this? Does hard work really increases the probability of success?

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I’ve been literally forced to write this post. My hands have been dragged to the keyboard and my mind has been controlled. Never would a person who claims to be rational, scientific and no-nonsense would write on something as unscientific as why number 23 is special. For the uninformed, there is something deeply mysterious, extremely special and wonderfully interesting about 23. The phenomenon is called as 23 Enigma.

When I first heard about it, it was yet another overhyped meme for me. But slowly, and definitely steadily, I started identifying 23 in everyday phenomenon around me. Now, not a day passes without me seeing 23 somewhere around me. And it is not just me, by showing examples, I have convinced several of my friends about this odd belief of mine.

That said, internally, I debate endlessly with myself whether what I observe is just an artifact of confirmation bias where what one observes is typically due to what one wants to observe. Soon I plan to start a journal where I would try to statistically see if observation of 23 is more frequent than what is expected by random chance.

Do you observe 23 as well? I would be really interested in listening to your story.

BTW: Would you be shocked if I predict that within next two days you are certain to observe number 23 somewhere around you

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Suppose you win a lottery or get a successful exit for your startup. You suddenly find yourself with a million dollars to play with. It is like what you always dreamt for has become a reality. At this point, what would you do? What would your future look like?

It is hard to imagine not having fun with a million dollars in bank. But that is precisely what I (sadly) concluded after thinking deeply over this issue. There are multiple reasons why I think a million dollars won’t bring me the freedom, happiness and euphoria that I had thought were main motivators for me.

One of most the reasons concern with the social circle. Even if you get lots of money to spend, with whom would you go shopping? Who would be able to afford accompanying you to your always-dreamt-of-visiting Morocco? Is your friend equally fond of I-would-go-bungee-jumping-one-day? Chances are that most of your friends or relative would not have time to be there with you all the time, would not be able to afford hanging out with you while you are indulging, and would politely decline your sponsorship. So, my friend, what would you do with your million dollars?

How many movies per week can you watch? How many books can you read? Can you eat at fine-dine restaurants three times a day for a whole month? To be realistic, I find it hard having a tremendous amount of joy from a million dollars. I don’t think I would be more happy then than I am at this moment. Maybe the kick of having money far more strong than the actual pleasure in it.

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Is success random? How important do you think luck is for achieving success? Now, you may be a self-hero, a believer in hard-work-brings-success philosophy; every morning you may look forward to reading stories of successful people who were certain of their successes from the start. To achieve success, you may even be sufficiently motivated to learn new skills, network madly, and work endlessly. After all, if you do all the things right, success will kiss you. See, you are feeling great already! Now that you are all set to achieve success, let us sit in a time machine and head forward three years in future.

You have grown a little older. But, sadly, nothing really has changed. All what has changed is that your book shelf has ten more books of successful people and twenty more of self-help books. Looking back you deeply regret working like hell for the last three years. You feel pangs of guilt whose source cannot be traced. You feel cheated. You feel like burning all the fake books your book shelf is having.

Whoa! Wait, we almost forgot about your twin brother. Let us ask how he feels now on recently selling his company for $25 MM. He tells you that he feels great and because he did yada-yada in life, he was able to get a profitable exit. You know deep in your heart that you are way smarter than him, had more connections, worked twice as hard. But he is successful, you are not. So, his success must be a fluke. Right?

Right. Repeat after me what you just said. Success is a fluke. Success is a fluke.

So, why obsess over it? Why loathe success of your brother? Why read self-help and startup stories books? Why burn your soul daily for not achieving success? Why regret being so smart?

Today, you have still three years before realizing success is a fluke, so make most of it.

But then you ask, why does success look so methodical. Why do successful people say that what they learnt, where they went for studies, whom they met at a party, etc. played a major role in their success. Why do the dots look connected as if there is indeed a recipe for success? This is because dots are in fact connected. Even for great failures, dots look connected. Heck, even for normal lives, dots look connected. Dots are made to be connected.

Apart from the usual stuff, there are a million other things which influence success. After a minimum quantity of basic ingredients: networking, hard work, skills, you should leave it on randomness to get you success. Don’t obsess over it. Just be ready with basic ingredients and expose yourself to randomness. Given enough time, success should follow.

And don’t fret over your twin brother’s success, after all he is your brother. Moreover, if he got lucky in three years, you may also get lucky in another two, ten or maybe thirty years. if you never get success, don’t blame it on you, blame it on lady luck!

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