Annual letter to peers, mentors and benefactors — 2018
Letter 1 of 25
It is said that it takes a village to raise a child.
I too owe my personal development to the people around me.
I am starting this new practice of writing an annual letter and publishing it online to share my growth in the year and the challenges that lie ahead, along with a general sense of direction in which I am heading.
These letters will serve as a nice way of calculating my own progress years down the line. Things I did correctly, where I was wrong, and overall what I made of myself.
2017 was the beginning of a new journey. I finally found a profession that interested me. 2018 was the follow-up and it has been great so far. Some of the highlights of this year were:
- Challenged myself to go beyond my current abilities: Trekked to Everest base camp at 5,380 m (17,600 ft), and then to Goecha La pass at 4,602m (15,100 ft). I ran 16.5 kms non-stop without pausing for a breath, while preparing for a half-marathon and I can now easily finish a 1km sprint in under 6 mins. I am trying to take it to less than 4.5 minutes in 2019
- Got better at building products: Built SlicePay card and SlicePay cash, the two primary product for SlicePay. Also won Product Hunt Makers festival 2018 with an Alexa skill. It was just a side project that I did with a colleague.
- Learnt new skills: I can design and code the frontend of a website now. I will be learning backend this year. The idea is to get more humility for developers as a PM, while also making me self-dependent for personal side projects.
- Got a better understanding of what motivates me in life and what makes it a drag
The last one is the real achievement, actually. For me, the year 2018 can be summarised in 2 words: retrospection and introspection.
Finding meaning
This year I had an important conversation with someone about awareness and intelligence. He said that while we are not much different from each other in terms of intelligence (probably a normal distribution bulked in the middle), people are very different when it comes to awareness (probably a power-law distribution). For a very long time I thought that if you don’t leave a legacy behind, then there is no point in living. But the fact is that nobody cares. And this is a very good way to die unsatisfied in life. After that conversation, I spent some time redefining my life in a way that leads to a regret-free life.
On some introspection, life looks closer to a limited time entry ticket to an amusement park. There are 100s of swings and plays already built by those who came before us and we can enjoy any of it. But we can also go on and build more swings for ourselves, depending on what we want. There are no set rules other than the fact that your entry ticket will expire at some point. And hence the only “purpose” of this experience is to “experience” it to the maximum. Of course it is not all crayons and rainbows, because there are billions of other visitors with similar limited time entry ticket and hence it looks chaotic and resource constraint. We fight among ourselves about who should get to sit on which swing first and we don’t want to give away the good swings to other visitors. This all leads to a whole debate about who is “better” and who “deserves” what, but that conflict is also part of the overall experience.
Because there is an overall time constraint, physical energy constraint (entropy acting up) and then this resource constraint, we need to figure out what games we want to play with the single goal of not having any regrets when our time actually ends.
From that lens, there are 2 types of games we can play here: the single player games and the multi player games.
- Single player includes taking care of the physical, mental and spiritual aspects of our being. Something that is more existential
- Multi player includes everything that requires relationships with others
While the single player aspects are sufficient in themselves to lead to “happiness” (as proven by monks and ascetics), the “fun” seems to be in the multi player aspects of life (and hence the pain too).
The crazy thing is that there is no hard definition of “success” in multi player games, and every participant is trying to define it for themselves. And while we are forced to play the single player games for survival, participating in multi player games is optional and hence can be limited to only scraping together what is required for each one of us to play our single player games separately. It is our choice to see multiplayer games as a drag (spending 5 days in office, preparing for exams, etc) or to see them as an opportunity to experience more.
Since success can be defined here by the participants themselves, and since the multi player games are almost optional, finding a multi player game that you would enjoy playing has a huge impact on your quality of life. 2017 was a marquee year because I found the games I would enjoy playing.
Defining my own multiplayer game
Since most multi player games look resource constrained, the natural instinct seems to be competition. This is what I was doing all this time. But now that I understand that everybody is trying to have fun, the best way to get enough resources for yourself and have more fun seems to be to build something that makes other people’s life more fun. Unlike status, which people can’t share, the whole purpose of collecting wealth is to trade it for something else that leads to a better experience for yourself and your dear ones. Hence, you can have fun while also taking care of yourself, by helping others have fun. Although you have to protect yourself from status seekers who will try to demonise everything you do to gain more status for themselves.
Creating value for other people is not easy though. Building something valuable requires capability, capital and credibility. So to play this multi-player game well, time spent not building something valuable should be spent strictly on getting more capability, capital and credibility. I define credibility here as the history of your capability and capital — what you did in the past with whatever capability and capital you had. Attracting more capital and other capable people is very tough without credibility.
Since these are the early days of my career, setting up a proper foundation is important. Jim Collin’s flywheel definition is a good starting point to identify a few key initiatives which feed into each other like a self-reinforcing loop. Initially it takes a lot of effort to push a flywheel, but once the momentum generates the wheel keeps pushing itself and generates its own momentum.
This is how I define my personal flywheel to play this multiplayer game:
- Identify a market need
- Build a product that solves that market need
- Build a sustainable company around that product
- Get access to more resources
Kickstarting this wheel is going to be tough, but once the credibility builds in, every next iteration becomes just slightly easier.
Looking at the horizon
I spent 2017 and 2018 gathering some basic capabilities. Now I want to take out some time to just do interesting things and see where it takes me.
My core interest lies at the centre of education, entertainment and employment. As the world becomes more connected and automated, the fat middle of the job market is disappearing. There will always be jobs for highly skilled people and there might be some jobs left that require manual effort which can’t be automated yet. But the bulk of the jobs in the middle are going through a shift. They might not disappear completely, but they are definitely being transformed into something that existing workforce can’t immediately adapt to. Enabling people to unleash their creativity to earn a living seems like the obvious thing to do. I am not sure yet about where to start, but this thing remains on my mind.
Currently I am planning to experiment more with 2 specific technologies — cryptocurrency and voice-as-UI. Let’s see how that goes.
Feel free to join me in my side projects or suggest projects for me to join. Connect me with someone you think will benefit both parties or ask me to connect you to someone I know well. Let your creativity run wild to think of more ways in which we can help each other.
Wishing a prosperous new year to all of you.
Pranay Bhardwaj
