Jack of All Trades > Master of One

Scott Adams describe two kinds of people -- those who get better by practice, and those who get better with experience.

Those in the former category must do a task repeatedly. Ideally this task would have some productive output (shoot a basketball for an NBA player, play the piano for a concert pianist, etc.). Not everyone is made for practice and view a repetitive task with no short-term gains as a form of torture. These people learn best from an ever-changing set of tasks.

I definitely fall into the experience-focused category. I force myself to practice the piano, but have never been stable. I even once fell asleep while practicing Fantasie Impromptu Opus 66. I don't have the attention span for repetitive tasks.

Okay, so I'm an experiential learner. Now what.

Scott Adams also said that as a soft rule to achieving success, every skill you acquire doubles your odds of success. The idea is that you can raise your market value by being merely good--not extraordinary--at more than one skill.

"Doubling your odds" isn't an accurate way to think of skill building; rather, its more of a guideline that steers behavior in the right direction.

In Silicon Valley, everyone says to do one thing well. If you are pro at machine learning, you can go work on some algorithms at Google. If you build a product that does its task flawlessly, you might have a winning company. We are trained to think that following a path of doing one thing better than 99% of people is the winning path.

However, sometimes quantity beats quality. Most successful people aren't where they are because they excelled at one thing. They usually had a strength or two, and several okay skills. Maybe they were a great coder, but also an okay presenter to woo those early investors. Maybe they are a great salesman, but with an eye for product and can reimagine what solution might be better for a customer instead of pushing an existing item.

People offer me jobs all the time, and often ask me what are the skills I'm best at. I usually reply, to their disappointment, with "Nothing." I'm not great at anything. But I can design apps that don't suck. I can hack together pretty much anything without too many fatal bugs. I can pitch to investors without sounding like a complete idiot. I can run 5-6 miles, but I can't run a marathon. I can socialize with people well enough, but am definitely not the most interesting guy in the room. I can go door to door and sell an idea, but I may not give the best pitch in the world. I know a little about a lot of industries, but a lot about none.  For an entrepreneurial career, I think I'm on the right track.

I'm not looking to make a resume that'd land me a textbook high-paying engineering job. I'm not looking for mastery. I want a little bit of everything.

2014 Non Professional Goals

1. Research one stock a day. I have no steady income right now, but am still profitable. I'd probably run out of stocks in a few weeks, but investing is a life skill that takes time to develop.

2. Read 30 min a day. Books are the fastest way to learn about someone else's life. I have a list of a dozen books I am going to read, but here are my recent ones:
Without Their Permission by Alexis Ohanian (Finished)
The One World School House by Salman Khan (Finished)
How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big by Scott Adams (Half way)
Delivering Happiness - (Next in line)

3. Make friends with more people and keep in touch. If I have a problem, the first thing I do is ask friends smarter than me for advice. I hope they can do the same for me too. You can never know too many people. Goal: 1 meaningful relationship/week

4. Exercise Better. I already jog, stretch, or weightlift for about 1.5 hours every day, plus I already eat pretty healthy. I think I can challenge myself a little more though. I think I'll try cardio lifting next.

5. Not care about waking up early. I like my nights. No meetings before noon.

6. Travel More. Goal is at least two new countries. I'll probably hit up India and England again this year to see family, but I'm guessing an Australia and Brazil Trip

7. Focus on Personal Energy. Do things that keep me going. Don't do things that hold me back. Everything in my life is a function of my energy

8. Go to the Dentist. I'm cavity prone despite brushing/flossing daily. I've had over 10 cavities so far. My teeth have been hurting on and off for a year now. I have dental insurance too, but I don't know under what plan or which dentist.

This list will be edited as I come up with more things. 

Have Accessible Customers Or Die.

I've learned one important lesson from all my customer development and ideating-- have accessible customers.

You got a brilliant idea that can revolutionize farming but live in the bay area and all your friends are techies? You should probably not do it, unless you're willing to drive out and physically meet dozens of farmers.

You want to make enterprise software, but never worked at a big co and have no strong leads? You probably should not do it.

This is not to say that it can't be done. However, having access to customers is the lifeblood of your company. Every new feature, every feedback, every push, every marketing campaign, every email, every meeting, every phone call revolves around them. If there is too much resistance between you and your customer -- they live in a different geography, they don't use tech very much and are industry laggards, getting in touch with them is extremely difficult -- you should probably try something else.

Yes, this is a wuss' attitude. Yes, with enough time and aggressive networking, you can meet anyone. But I think that strategy should be reserved to filling in holes in your network-- finding that one adviser, business partner, investor, etc. If it is a pain to reach every customer, will you still have the same resolve 6 months from now? Will you subconsciously look at what you can easily control and build product in the dark instead of reaching out to customers? Not having access to customers introduces a very very large risk.

There are many ways around this -- cold calls/emails x 1000. Or build a product tailored to a stranger's needs and have them tell his buddies in the same industry to use it if its solid. These, among other strategies, can work. But if you're not willing to reach out to these distant customers early in your startup, then you're giving up on the foundation of your business.

So either hustle like mad in unfamiliar waters, or do something within your grasps. There is no in-between.

Time to write this: 7 min. Success! (See previous blog posts on why).

Passion is Bullshit, Do Something That Works

In the Spring of 2011 at UC Berkeley, a friend and I started an augmented reality company designed to help tourists learn more about the environment directly around them. It would revolutionize hyperlocal search--just point your phone at any point of interest around you, say, the Transamerica Pyramid, and immediately get historical information, tour times, and photos from the top. Augmented reality would be the next intuitive UI for relevant place search and quickly replace the list view response as the defacto standard. Armed with brilliant technology and an eye for the future, nothing, not even my college student naivety, could get in my way.

During the summer after graduation, I joined an incubator on campus, where I was pressured to pitch to as many investors as possible. I was told to sound as excited as possible because passion sells when you don't have traction. I went to VC after VC pitching with a genuine belief that my product would change the face of tourism.

But we failed to raise. Augmented realty, they said, is a dead space riddled with failed startups with clumsy UIs. In retrospect, we shouldn't have wasted time pitching, and there are a dozen other reasons why we didn't raise that I won't go into here. But with nothing to show after a few months of effort, our enthusiasm was at an all-time low.

We pushed for a big launch, promoting the product to strangers in Union Square, sending emails to bloggers and press, instant messaging all our friends, and getting the school to promote us. The results were quite dismal--a few hundred installs, and lots of confusion on how to use the product. After a couple more weeks of ineffective product refinement and pushes, we gave up.

It's been almost two years now, and I still hate AR. I have no faith in Glass, despite how cool it is (plus, wearables > smartphone for AR). Hell, I won't even touch mobile tourism again for a long while. Regardless of the reasons of failure, my passion was gone, shattered like the glass all over the streets in Berkeley.

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Continuous negative feedback chips away at passion. If day after day nothing you do works, you lose confidence. Sure, you might've learned important life lessons or developed useful skills, but if none of that can save you from the downward slope of failure you're in, then there's no immediate benefit of learning. There's only so much abuse your passion can take if you have nothing to refuel it.

The thing I found works best to refuel passion is progress, whatever form it may be in. It might be learning a new API. It might be getting a first customer. It might even be something as hollow and meaningless as someone saying they like your product.

So F passion. It's too unreliable to bet my startup on it. Give me something that works. Let me do something people want and I will be happy.

Why My Blog Posts are Horribly Written

Hint: It's not because I can't write.

Tl;dr - Quantity with minor edits would make me a better writer than perfecting posts.
Efficiency = Quality / Speed

I've been self-teaching myself the piano for the past 7 years to a mixed degree of success. I can play a couple tough songs (by tough, I mean it sounds challenging enough that I wouldn't mind playing in front of guests), but I can barely sight read and have very little understanding of theory. My musical abilities rely on brute repetitive practice and muscle memory, which obviously are not characteristic of a talented pianist.

However recently, I've went down a few notches and started playing simpler songs that I can sight read almost flawlessly within 2-3 attempts. I must've been through a few dozen of these songs, and I can already notice that my ability to play an unfamiliar piece has significantly improved.

The reasoning is quite obvious--if one of my weaknesses is sight reading, then I should sight read a lot. Mastering a beautiful song over a few months quickly becomes tedious, and any benefit to sight reading disappears after a few playthroughs.

I view blog writing the same way. I want to organize and structure my thoughts in my head quickly and be able to freewrite them down without outlining. The only way I can do that is practice organizing my thoughts as I freewrite.

A quick readthrough can help identify flaws, and peer review can give an outside perspective. But perfection is not a priority right now. I want efficiency (quality/speed) and would rather not waste 80% of my time in the editing stage.

The Risk of Innovation to Startups

Several of my tech entrepreneur friends are at a point in their company where they need to decide whether or not to continue. These are brilliant guys in nascent industries that have been hyped by the media in the past 3-4 years, and they all struggle with the same question -- do people really care about my product.

This concern, in their mind, is often phrased as -- how do I change people's innate behavior to use these products?

Now I'm not going to go into another post about the need for customer development and validating demand for a product--I have done so already and will continue to in the future. Rather, I want to muse about a reason why choosing a nascent market is (too) often a losing strategy.

The repeated conclusion I hear from these struggling founders is early adopters are your only customers, and you can only push your product so far before nobody else is willing to pay. Silicon Valley tends to over estimate how quickly tech gets adopted -- new industries with unproven demand takes too long to develop for most venture backed companies to depend on.

For example, 3D printing has been buzzing around in the press for the past ~3 years. However, it seems that the vast majority of dollars go to either the companies that make the printers, or a few successful printer farms. They is a long tail of 3D printed consumer goods companies that might be sustainable and growing, but nothing at a scale to match even a tenth the hype of how 3D printing will revolutionize manufacturing.

News of quadcopters, as another example, has been circulating the interwebs for a year or two now. Ignoring military research, I imagine that the vast majority of dollars flowing in this space are to the few companies that manufacture parts and quadcopter kits, not futuristic delivery services.

Or many payment companies idealize how in the old days, store owners knew who you were as you entered, and automatically placed your order. They paint a picture of the future where your face would pop up in the POS system, or the barista would prepare your drink as you enter the driveway. Personalized coupons based on your shopping habits would be pushed to your phone as you walk around a geo-fenced store. But does anyone truly want this? How often have you heard people complaining that they want a deal on Corn Flakes as they walk down the cereal isle? Yes, your preferences might be more integrated into shopping. Yes, the store owner or cashier might address you by your name. But you'd never get to personally know the people serving you anyway. People are shopping right now -- would adding all these services (and introducing massive privacy concerns) increase the amount of money people are already spending?

I don't have data for any of these claims and am very open to being told I'm wrong. I am simply regurgitating what other founders I've spoken to have been saying. Like everything in SV, there are exceptions all over the place. But as someone starting a tech company with no prior wins -- to what extent do I want to bank my future company on nascent markets? 

Why the Fukushima radiation leak matters

There have been several articles about the ecological devastation caused from Fukushima's nuclear plant that was damaged in the 2011 Earthquake. Here's an example: http://www.theinertia.com/environment/mother-fukushima/

The gist of these articles is:
1) Hundreds of tons of radiation waste is leaking into the ocean every day since the earthquake.
2) Ocean currents have been transporting that radiation everywhere in the world, most recently to the west coast
3) Many animals species, including some land animals, are dying from unknown causes
4) The seafood we eat has been poisoned.

And each and every of these articles have their doubters arguing:
1) Hundreds of tons of radiation is nothing compared to the vastness of the ocean
2) The radiation content in ocean water, even if increased 10-50x, is still below harmful levels
3) There is no concrete science backing these claims
4) The author is using scare tactics by stringing together random events to get views

First, when it comes human health and the environment, science and the media takes decades to come to conclusions--usually after the damage is done. The majority denied human involvement in global warming until what, 10 years ago? Let's not forget the ecological damage DDT caused that went unnoticed during WWII to the 70's. Or how in the 50's, everyone thought smoking was harmless until people starting getting lung cancer years later. 

Secondly, I don't think the masses realize how sensitive ocean life is. Small fluctuations in ocean acidity, or a temperature increase of just 1C can cause coral bleaching and kill 90% of all life in a region. Maybe 10-30x radiation levels is harmless to humans, but we don't understand how it will affect sea life. 

Thirdly, most of us don't give a rat's ass about ocean life and view this as a localized human-problem that killed a dozen people. Personally, I think this disconnect is due the majority of us never seeing or interacting with underwater life on a routine basis, nor realizing that billions of people rely on seafood as a primary staple in their diet.

So yeah, there's no concrete science indicating the magnitude of the damage caused. It might turn out to be a non-problem. But when it comes to environment or health, I don't think its a risk we can ignore until the data pours in years later.