What is BRAVING ?

I want to make a quick note for myself about this idea on this concept “Braving” from this Book “Dare To Lead”. Couple of things stand out for me in here. Change starts from us. Another thought is Leader needs to get comfortable saying NO and have a long term thinking. It starts from doing the right thing over easy. All the more, we can lead others only by knowing oneself well.

Keeping Things Simple

Simple means focusing on essentials. It’s hard to keep our focus on main things. To let main things be main things. Focusing on few things at a given point in time is important. Simple things when done consistently yield results in long term. Similar to how you start your meditation practice, by focusing on your breath or When you start your training in gym, by doing focusing on basics. Before we dive deep into anything, it is important to focus and train hard on basics.

Working with People

Life is short to get stuck in a rut, learning is the only way out. When you go to work, you are working with bunch of people. Every one of them have their own aspirations and style of working. Work in today’s world is not done by force but by mutual support and coordination. In a Corporate setup, we all work towards the same goal by contributing in our respective roles.

Best of 2020

I read articles, blogs, podcast, follow people I respect and like. In year 2020 it was bit more consumption as I was home most of the time. I like to read up something outside of what my profession is to help me connect dots. I am not including any Covid-19 articles, as I believe everyone would have read so much about it in the past year. Some of best articles I read in the past year for me to revisit and share.

Why Mindsets Matter ?

What we believe is who we are. Mind is constrained by our beliefs. When we are born into this world we don’t have belief. We are born with only fear of falling. Child lacks fear and does not believe in anything. As we grow up, we start forming our belief system based on our experiences. Should our past experience define us ? Self-Comforting State Humans generally avoid risks when possible. We don’t see further down the road how a particular action can have a damaging effect.

Modern Leadership from Art of War

Art of War - a work of 5th century BC by Sun Tzu, having 13 chapters. Every chapter is about warfare strategy and tactics. It explains general’s tactics and has influenced east-asian military warfare. Many generals have drawn inspiration from this book. More you absorb this book, you can see through the text and you realize the text can be applied to modern leadership even in this industrial age. So my idea with this post is to my interpret and apply to current context of leadership and management of a team.

Multi Disciplinary Links

Awesome Falsehood - a curated list of Links How to Estimate UseNet Archive How to Ask Questions - Etsy Debriefing CDNs are not only for Caching How to answer well to a question Managing Technical Quality Mathematics Better Explained Linear Algebra-4th edition Distributed Systems Distributed Systems Patterns Random Architect Notes

Howard Schultz - Teaching Business

Howard Schultz Being Entrepreneur Cost to starting business today is lot easier due to technology Have a great discipline and thoughtfulness Balancing responsibility for customer and investors. Self-Doubt All people have some insecurity. Self-Doubt is common. Personal decision—are you willing to sacrifice for this endeavor. Have courage and conviction Ability to look back and live your life to the fullest. If you know you have it, just jump into the pool.

Bob Iger on Leadership

My notes don’t do justice for the videos I watched. Clarity in his words and their crispness, careful selection of insights of his time as CEO. No nonsense beating around the bush kind of lessons. I personally believe leader needs to have clarity, eye for details and empathy for people. But there are other facets of being leader, which is: Good Negotiation skills Risk Taking Ability Oozing Optimism Fairness But what I believe is being reinforced and opening new set of skills into the toolbox, these lessons are priceless.

Ideas we can think about

Your time is limited. Have courage to follow your heart and gain experience. Live your life and not anyone else’s. Avoid stupidity. Find the points that’s hurting the most and fix it. Basically figure out the low hanging fruits Always focus on bottlenecks. read this wiki Humans desire what others desire. Its called Herd mentality. Develop your own desire and specialize Only way to do a great work, is to enjoy while you do it Closer you are with people, who share the same equality , will tend to fight more Avoid competition.

Way You Communicate Matters

Communication is a secret sauce for success in any field. Communicate an idea in a concise,simple way. We are social creatures, who interact on constant basis for various needs. Words matter a lot. It can show others if you are empathetic or arrogant. It can connect, blossom new friendship, or break it. Let me tell you about my experience a bit I spoke for the first time on stage while I was in my school.

Pitch your Idea

Pitch your Idea Negative/Self-Critical “WhatIf” Scenarios Overcome Fear of failure Present the Big Picture. Sell your Idea Kindle their imagination Timing Follow up Promiseland Let me tell you a story from my little experience I had Help them make the Decision Black & White Be the messiah What happens next … ? One more thing.. Everyone has Ideas. Converting an idea to real life thing is hard.

Books you can read for free

Library Explorer Eloquent Javascript Modern Javascript Info Regex for Beginners - Visual Guide How Browsers work Deep Javascript Practical Python Programming Teach yourself CS Math basics for Deep Learning Robust Client-Side Javascript BEAM Book Intense Intro to Cryptography Emergency Remote Book on WebRTC ML from Scratch Architecture of Open Source Linux from scratch Shape Up - Product Management from Basecamp

Notes from some favorite episodes of How I Built this.

My take away From CEO of Shopify and 5-hour energy drink. Need a good product Need bit of luck You can do everything right, but without a good product you will still fail Need to figure out who your audience or target customers are. There are different kind of normal people with different background. Identifying and focusing on them is very important. On parenting, from Manoj Bhargava if you raised your son bad, why give him money.

Naval - On Business, Wealth, Life and Meditation

One of a prominent person I follow on Twitter. Some of his tweets are really profound and to the point. If you don’t know who is he here is the wiki link His Twitter handle here and some of my good reads have been in his blog post His tweets and blog are wealth of knowledge if you looking for advice on enterpreneurship, wealth and life in general. So I try to put together some of his words here which I have read over a period of time.