Category: personal dev

Great presenters spar

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(Pic courtesy: screenshotted from youtube video)

This reminds me of scenes in old tamil movies like Thiruvilayadal, where two learned scholars quiz each other on philosophy. Each pulavar (or learner scholar) tries to one-up the other.

Guy Kawasaki, a very good writer of personal finance books, and a good presenter himself, asks a few questions to Garr Reynolds (of presentationzen fame), one of my favorite presenters. Garr just released a book by the same name Presentation Zen. Makes very interesting reading.

Read the full article here.

Stress free driving

I recently realized that I felt very tired after driving to and from work. Traffic in Bangalore can be maddening at times, and can invoke inordinate amounts of stress in the body. The result of this stress is extreme tiredness, general sluggishness, and general unhappiness
from R.

For the last 2-3 days, I have been trying out something, that has worked (atleast until now), that has reduced my stress multiple fold.

Imagine you are the driver of one of those super luxury volvo buses. These guys, if you notice, never are in a hurry. And if you have been inside one, you would realize, it is one of the smoothest drives you have ever taken. I am not talking about not feeling the bumps (Good Volvo suspension takes the credit for that). I am talking about, not feeling any surges in power, to get the bus between those 2 cars, or, suddenly decelerating from 60kmph to 0kmph, to avoid that dog/child/oldlady/vegetable cart/cycle that just crossed the road. You do not feel it, because the driver does not do these things.

– He never is above 40-45kmph.
– He never is weaving in and out of traffic
– He never needs to accelerate or decelerate suddenly
– He is never in a hurry

I thought let me follow this. And hey, it works. I do not overspeed these days. I do not weave in traffic. I am always in the lookout for pedestrians/traffic stoppers, and speed bumps. I imagine, I am driving the world’s best super luxury bus.

Here’s to stress-free driving!

Marc starts blogging …

Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape, has started his own blog. His posts are a wee bit long, but filled with information, and punctuated occasionally by wit. All in all, makes very good reading. Of course, being who he is, he has super duper traffic on his site.

Two of his posts, that I am cross-linking here, are defenitely worth reading. Very insightful.

In the post titled ‘Pmarca’s guide to personal productivity, he admits, that he does drool over personal productivity websites, like lifehacker, lifehack.org, David Allen etc. Wow. Nice. He goes on to share what has worked for him. [read the full article]

In another post titled, “How to hire the best people ..”, he outlines, what a hiring manager should focus on, while hiring people. Brilliant. This has got to be one of the best posts in this category. [read the full article]

Some Brilliant Presentations

I have always been a sucker for good presentations. I am most often than not, left slack-jawed. It comes as no surprise sites like Garr Reynolds’ presentationzen.com, and Seth Godins sethgodin.typedpad.com are in my bookmark list.

Today, in my routine browsing, I found this link to the worlds best presentation contest. Ofcourse, I was more than slack-jawed when I saw the slides on slide-share. Awesome. Brilliant. Amazing.

[link]

My favourite is ‘Meet Henry’.

13 Nuggets about Problem Solving

Productivity blogger Dave Cheong has an excellent line up of nuggets on problem solving. It is comprehensive. Some of the nuggets I liked were: 

      • start with a positive outlook
      • look at the problem with a helicopter view
      • dissect problem into bite-sized chunks
      • focus on end-state
      • take notes and record progress
      • check answers and challenge your assumptions

I think the last two are particularly very important. I am looking at this in a software engineering point of view. Taking down notes on your assumptions and progress, gives you a good sense of satisfaction, improving on your positive outlook. And the last point, checking answer, in the software world probably translates to testing out the code. The second part is however more important. Challenging your assumptions make your code more complete and robust. Product validation teams usually call this negative testing. They go and challenge all the possible assumptions. If they are indeed valid assumptions, then the code should give out valid error/warning messages. If they are not valid assumptions, the code should be enhanced to take care of these cases.

Check out Dave’s 13 nuggets here.

Dont pave the cowpaths

Mike-o-matic has a great piece called “Dont pave the cowpaths”. A very well written piece illustrating why, we should not be doing things a certain way, just because it has been done like that for a long time.

I have seen this happen a lot of times in my job and in my personal life. It is especially true of beurocratic government organizations. I have heard of several trivia (I cant recall even one now !) where a certain law/application was created when the British were in India, and the same application is followed even now. Several fields in the application are just plain irrelevant now.

The cowpaths analogy is from Dallas-Fortworth, which used to be a cattle town. Mike says that he attended a seminar where the author claimed that the current roads in and out of DFW used to be the cow paths of yesteryear, which have been paved now. The roads meander their way into town crossing creeks at shallow areas etc. What used to be good for the cows need not necessarily be good for us, as in this case.

Mike makes his case in point with the IT industry, but I think is relevant to any industry, and infact to anyones life.

Read the full entry here.

Cubicle to Couch

 

Wendy Boswell of Lifehacker has done it ! The Boswell family has apparently been planning this for a while. They both had side business which were making money. They had decided on a threshold, when reached, they would quit their daily jobs and get full time on their side businesses.

Wendy has documented the stuff that they have been thinking about, and what anyone should think about, when making a change (or thinking about a change).

Check the post here.

Steve Pavlina Reloaded

Sunday personal development madness. Here are three awesome articles from the personal development guru, Steve Pavlina. Very nicely written.

  • How to have a more focussed day [link]
  • Feeble excudes [link] : This article is awesome. Three of the most feeblest excuses – “I dont have time”, “I dont know how”, and “I dont have enough money for it”
  • Time Management [link] : A slightly long article, but well written. It says that “using time management systems like GTD is only half the problem solved”. You should follow the age old way of “plan it, do it”.