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Your report should never be left wondering: What does my manager think of me? If you think she is the epitome of awesome, tell her. If you don’t think she is operating at the level you’d like to see, she should know that too, and precisely why you feel that way. This hit me hard because I felt restless wondering about the same question frequently a few years back. I'm now consciously bringing this up in my weekly 1:1s. Other learnings were around delegation and caring for your team. Your job as a manager isn’t to dole out advice or “save the day”—it’s to empower your report to find the answer herself.

Here are my notes from The Making of a Manager:

1. This is the crux of management: It is the belief that a team of people can achieve more than a single person going it alone. It is the realization that you don’t have to do everything yourself, be the best at everything yourself, or even know how to do everything yourself.

Your job, as a manager, is to get better outcomes from a group of people working together.

This is a follow-up to ⚔️ A Personal Assistant to Maximize your Productivity.

I recently switched my task management workflow from Todoist to Things 3. It was probably my nerdiest purchase of 2021 (I’ve never paid $50 for an app before!).

1. The main reason for switching is its clean interface. I’m a sucker for nice UI. Also, switching forced me to review all of my pending tasks and do a Marie Kondo after almost 3 years. I had a lot of projects going on before - now I have started optimizing for outcomes instead.

2. The latest 3.14 update brought Markdown support and you know I love Markdown.

3. It also changes how I see my calendar events now. Todoist made events as tasks in my day which I need to check off. Things 3 shows them at the top together for a quick review of the day so I know what my non-negotiables are (calendar is sacred territory for me) and then I can look at my daily list.

4. It gives me a logbook! Seeing what I spent my day on is oddly satisfying.

5. Another nifty little feature is that it shows a ring next to the project indicating its progress, calculated by the completion rate of tasks.

6. You can schedule a task for the evening which is shown in a separate section, which is pretty handy to plan out your evenings / take a quick glance.

7. It gives better control for repeating tasks.

8. You can set both a reminder and a deadline for a task. Todoist allows for only one time set to a task, whereas Things 3 allows for setting a reminder for today while noting that the deadline is 2 days away. I can’t go back now. The design choices are quite thoughtful.

Overall, it’s pretty neat and new things are exciting. See what I did there?

You need to experience a lot to achieve inner peace. Knowledge can be transferred via words, but wisdom must be earned on your own.

Here are my notes from Siddhartha:

1. Siddhartha laughed in such a way that his voice expressed a shade of sorrow and a shade of mockery and he said: ‘You have spoken well, Govinda, you have remembered well, but you must also remember what else I told you — that I have become distrustful of teachings and learning and that I have little faith in words that come to us from teachers. But, very well, my friend, I am ready to hear that new teaching, although I believe in my heart that we have already tasted the best fruit of it.’

Govinda replied: ‘I am delighted that you are agreed. But tell me, how can the teachings of the Gotama disclose to us its most precious fruit before we have even heard him?’

I have been using Notion for more than 2 years now. With time, I’ve realized that it doesn’t allow cross-pollination of ideas. That’s where Roam Research comes into play.

One thing that was a deal-maker for me is that it also acts as a personal CRM. You can tag notes with any person’s name and clicking on that name gives the entire history of all previous interactions.

I have started using it now to put down my raw thoughts whenever they come up. To be honest, I still haven’t got the hang of it. But I have a good feeling that this is the future, especially as my notes will only keep increasing.

P.S. I might switch to Obsidian once it moves to version 1. Right now, it’s 0.12.15 which doesn’t give me a lot of confidence in its stability. I’ll continue using Day One for journaling as it provides password protection and prompts.

Loved this business novel. It hit me that the sole aim of a small business owner should be to create playbooks that anyone can execute.

Here are my notes from The E-Myth Revisited:

We forget most of what we consume in a few days or weeks. The forgetting curve of newly-learned knowledge depends on various factors like how meaningful it is to you, the difficulty level of the information, your stress levels, the kind of sleep you get after it, etc. A couple of ways to combat this are using mnemonic techniques for better memory representation and spaced repetition based on active recall.

Here is my current retention system:

1. While reading, I highlight anything that made me reread it or taught me something new. After completing the book, I put all and go through them once.

This is the first book I have left halfway. Life’s too short to spend time on things I know I’m not enjoying.

Here are my notes from Meditations:

Read to collect the dots, write to connect them. - David Perell

I have a bunch of dots collected already from reading a lot of books and writing a decent number of short-form articles. I’m now moving to the connection phase where I’m finding related ideas and building on them. Otter helps me connect those seamlessly.

Talking is a great way to overcome writer’s block. In just a few minutes, magic happens - I get a lot of clarity about a topic by talking into the Otter app.

This book provides good frameworks to pursue differentiation at low-cost with lots of case studies.

Here are my notes from Blue Ocean Strategy:

Imagine a game where there are no rules and you can do anything. That would be such a boring game, isn’t it? Life is no different from MMORPGs. You can choose your missions. Or simply enjoy side-quests.

The core is your skill tree. You can unlock new skills and upgrade/master existing ones using your experiences. But experiences are limited as they cost time and energy. This is your real constraint which makes the skill tree unique to you.

When we die, there are two things we can leave behind us: genes and memes. I enjoyed the rich examples. You should definitely pick this up if you liked Sapiens.

Here are my notes from The Selfish Gene:

Alfred Adler’s thoughts have had a big impact on my thinking. They reinforced my belief that you are who you choose to be and are not bound by your past.

Let’s talk about Sam. He wants to become a novelist, but he never seems to progress. His job keeps him too busy. Freudian etiology will reason that he doesn’t have the proper environment or the talent for it.

But is that the real reason? No! It’s actually that he wants to leave the possibility of “I can do it if I try” open, by not committing to anything. Let it sink in. His actual goal is to live inside that realm of possibilities, where he can say that he could do it if only he had the time. When you see this from the lens of Adler’s teleology, Sam’s actions become coherent. In another five or ten years, he will probably start using other excuses like “I’m not young anymore” or “I’ve got a family to think about now.” Sam had a subconscious goal of not writing beforehand and he’s been manufacturing reasons to achieve that goal.

When one adopts the point of view of Freudian etiology, one sees life as a kind of great big story based on cause and effect. So then it’s all about where and when I was born, what my childhood was like, the school I attended and the company where I got a job. And that decides who I am now and who I will become. To be sure, likening one’s life to a story is probably an entertaining job. The problem is, one can see the dimness that lies ahead at the end of the story. Moreover, one will try to lead a life that is in line with that story. And then one says, “My life is such-and-such, so I have no choice but to live this way, and it’s not because of me—it’s my past, it’s the environment,” and so on. If we focus only on past causes and try to explain things solely through cause and effect, we end up with “determinism.” Because what this says is that our present and our future have already been decided by past occurrences, and are unalterable. In Adlerian psychology, we do not think about past “causes” but rather about present “goals”.

My key takeaway was that all successful strategies fall into two buckets: you can provide a commodity at the lowest price or you can differentiate your offering to charge a premium. Not worth reading the whole book.

Here are my notes from Playing to Win:

What would you do once you hit your FIRE goals?

This question came up in one of the 100+ communities I’m a part of, and it forced me to reflect. Here’s my current answer: I want to open a Read & Dine Cafe in my hometown. Travel and teaching were close contenders.

Why read? I can’t imagine myself not reading. So this has to be a part of anything I do down the line.
Why dine? I like food, duh. Why cafe? There’s a lot of scope for creating good vibes here. You’d want to spend more time by design and have a good time. Why hometown? I like metros for the exposure it brings, but I like small towns more.

One of those rare sequels that make you want to read more. I found a lot of parallels with religious texts. Everyone should read this.

Here are my notes from The Courage to be Happy:

Reframing is changing the way you look at something. It is infinitely powerful. Here are some examples from my life:

1. Imposter syndrome is real. It's a phase; it comes and goes every now and then. Using reframing, it has become a bit easier for me to handle it. I now remind myself that if I start feeling like an imposter, that means I'm not the smartest person in the room and this is a state I like being in. This subtle mindset change is working for me now.

It helps you understand what a good strategy looks like, in an unnecessary long text.

Here are my notes from Good Strategy Bad Strategy:

Some of you asked for the prompts we used in our app. Here you go!

1. Try and remember any moment from your past and write down as many details as you can.

It’s the most powerful book I’ve ever read. The book provides a nice introduction to Adlerian psychology with a unique conversational format between the philosopher and youth, which grew on me. I had a lot of aha moments and will be picking this again soon.

Here are my notes from The Courage to be Disliked:

I’ve been journaling for the last 6 years and it has been life-changing.

I keep getting DMs on how to get started, so I pinged one of my iOS wizard friends to brainstorm. We outlined the problem statement as “newbies get overwhelmed while starting journaling”. Our aim was to create a frictionless experience (we are both fans of minimalism).

There were two things we spent a lot of time on:

Jeff is an embodiment of long-term thinking. He emphasizes doing what’s best for the customer, even if it translates to huge losses in the short term. However, I feel that this is not the definitive story of Amazon. It has cherry-picked bits and pieces, unlike Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs.

Here are my notes from The Everything Store:

Here’s my problem: People book 30min meetings with me via Calendly but they are scattered (say one at 4pm, then one at 5pm, another at 6:30pm). I want a solution that can schedule these meetings in a continuous stretch of time.

The available slots should be prioritized dynamically using multiple customizable rules. The first meeting of the day can be scheduled anytime. However, while scheduling more meetings, they should only see the slots adjacent to my current meeting slot(s). Other slots should be opened only when they explicitly mention that they aren’t available in any of the adjacent slot(s). Other rules should limit the number of total meetings and the number of continuous meetings.

Let’s say I have slots open from 11am-1pm and 4pm-6pm. The first person to book can pick any time, say they choose 4pm. Now the ideal solution should make the second person choose 4:30pm preferentially.

If you are interested in building this, hit reply.

The content is really good and crisp - it’s just that I had read most of it in bits and pieces already.

Here are my notes from The Almanack of Naval Ravikant:

I see a lot of parallels in Jobs and Musk, combining great technology and aesthetic design with a team of A-players.

Here are my notes from Steve Jobs:

This is a follow-up post to this.

Year-3 Updates

This book combined my favorite topic psychology with finance, which I’ve been subconsciously avoiding for a long time. I got a good definition of freedom - being able to wake up one morning and change what I’m doing on my own terms. In other words, do the work you like with people you like at the times you want for as long as you want.

Here are my notes from The Psychology of Money:

I recently switched phones. Here’s how my habits changed:

1. My media consumption on phone has practically dropped to zero, as it has a smaller screen size (5.4 inches compared to the previous 6.55). I do it on my tablet now.
2. I used to play a lot of idle clicker games on my phone. Smaller phone came with a smaller battery as well, so it had an unintended consequence of breaking this habit. I miss this - eagerly waiting to get my hands on PS5.

By all accounts, Airbnb should not have become this big! The very idea of letting strangers into your home raises eyebrows, but the way they executed it with belongingness at the core is amazing.

Here are my notes from The Airbnb Story:

I recently completed my 100th book. Here’s a quick reflection:

I started with self-help, but it gets repetitive real fast. Once you have read 10 or so books, the 11th book simply fails to hold interest. I had to quickly start exploring other genres. Self-help is what you see advertised or shared via word of mouth - it sounds smart. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

There’s a right time to pick a particular book. Mastering this (picking the right book at the right time) is the key. Start with a short gripping fiction to get some momentum going (like The Alchemist or The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy). Then move on to longer but readable ones (The Martian, Dark Matter, etc.) and finally non-fiction (Factfulness). The trick is to fall in love with reading itself rather than a particular book.

After reading 100 books, I now put more time into selecting books, sometimes hours at a stretch. I have reduced my non-fiction consumption to half of last year and added fiction (And Then There Were None, The Little Prince, etc.). I’ve realized that you can’t really conquer your to-read list. Each book references other books. The pile keeps growing. Hail Hydra.

I now have a solid understanding of the science behind modifying habits. I’d recommend this more than Atomic Habits.

Here are my notes from The Power of Habit:

People are different. Their goals are different. The way they do things is different.

If at any point you have tried to guess why someone does something in a particular way, you might want to take a deeper look at yourself. I first took the MBTI personality test long back and I tested as an INTP (logician). It was pretty spot on. A few years back, I was going through some changes so I took it again. I tested as an this time. The description blew my mind. For the first time, I felt like someone had finally understood me.

2020 was the first year in a long time where I didn’t burn out. I want to keep this sustainability for the long run.

My yearly theme serves as a conscious reminder of what’s important to me right now, and that’s enjoyment. So yeah, I want to have fun. There, I said it. It took me some time to internalize this.

Everyone has a different definition of fun. Here’s mine: being able to wake up one morning and change what I’m doing on my own terms. In other words, fun is freedom for me. Freedom to do things I like. When I like. With people I like. For however long I like.

Does it mean I’ll slack off? Not really. I’ve already built good habits in the last few years. This year, I want to balance it right. I want to design life for fun. I want to stop and smell the roses. Have a good time. I want to do more of what I like right now ( anyway).

2020 has been a really shitty year. But it has also taught me what I need to be happy. Just the right people around. I’m grateful I got to spend a long time with my family after 10 years. The pandemic brought things into a new perspective. Why defer living if you don’t know whether the world or you will be alive tomorrow to experience it?

Two things have stood out for me. One is the fact that if 2020 can happen, then anything can happen. Don’t take things for granted! The other being that since we got through 2020, we can get through anything.

What went well?

I experimented with a small group in Dec 2020 on how to go about executing goals. Someone suggested the book “The 4 Disciplines of Execution”. The author, Chris McChesney, defines the disciplines as:

1. Focus on the Wildly Important Goal (WIG)

I read 50+ books in 2020. There were days where I just read continuously for hours and hours. I’ve realized that this pace isn’t sustainable for me. I’m aiming for a lower number in 2021.

To get more out of my previously read books, I want to go through my old book notes again and reflect regularly. It has a very good RoI for me. So here’s what I have come up with:
I’ve started a Telegram channel where every day, I share one bite-sized excerpt from my old books. As a reader, you can think of these as actionable ideas to spark your thoughts or simply prompts for serendipity. Every post has a dedicated comment section where you can start a discussion with other subscribers. You can share things that worked for you and things that didn’t. Feel free to build on top of these ideas / sparks as well.

Marketing has to be built into the product. A new-age marketer has to understand product design and be involved in it from the very start.

Here are my notes from Purple Cow:

GitPitch is a perfect example of a product by developers and for developers. I found it while preparing for my first conference talk. It lets you create slide decks in Markdown. As a developer, I love Markdown’s declarative format. It allows a separation of concerns between my intent and the actual design. For example, I can choose to style my H2 headings from a Markdown document differently for a presentation vs a blog post.

Fast forward to today, GitPitch is shutting down! The developer tools market is hard.

I’m in love with this newfound genre of business novel. It’s non-fiction so it teaches you something while it’s written like fiction so it’s quite easy to read. The Goal serves as a good introduction to operations, the theory of constraints, and managing an enterprise, with practical examples.

Here are my notes from The Goal:

I watched one of Ankur Warikoo’s sessions where he dropped some hard-hitting truth bombs. Here are some interesting tidbits:

1. We all know when something’s missing in life. We may not want to admit it, we may not want to come to terms with it. But we all know when something is missing.
2. What you’re good at and what makes you happy needn’t be the same things.

Daniel does a great job at explaining why we are so bad at predicting what will make us happy in the first place.

Here are my notes from Stumbling on Happiness:

I recently sent out the 100th issue of this newsletter. Two years ago, I had started reading books again and I wanted to build a writing habit as well. And that’s when I came up with this newsletter structure. I kept a deadline of reading one book every 2 weeks and sending out my book notes. In the other week, I would share whatever is on my mind in that time frame.

Time for a quick recap. Here are the ones that I enjoyed writing the most:

I didn’t learn much but it was a good refresher of my school days. It’s worth noticing that the majority of people who did advance technology had the freedom to do it. Also, many of the discoveries were made by people who dabbled in multiple fields or simply serendipity. This book reminded me that science is experimentation. Advancements are not necessarily made by the smartest of people but by people willing to do a lot of experiments and observations.

Here are my notes from A Short History of Nearly Everything:

A frog is that one thing you have on your to-do list that you have absolutely no motivation to do and that you’re most likely to procrastinate on. In the Eisenhower matrix, the frog mostly lies in the important but not urgent quadrant. You don’t want to do it, but you need to. Eating the frog means to just do it first thing in the morning, otherwise the frog will eat you i.e. you’ll end up procrastinating it the whole day.

The idea behing the frog-eating theory is that once that one task is done, the rest of the day will be an easier ride and you will get both momentum and a sense of accomplishment at the beginning of your day.

It used to work for me before but now it doesn’t. Now I start my day by eating cake - a very easy task that I can do within minutes and I can’t say no to! Once I get some momentum going, then I tackle the frog next.

This requires a bit of delayed gratification. Sometimes, I’ll have a super easy task towards the end of the day. And I want to check it off to feel good. But now I put it off for the next morning. Say I’ll write a blog post in the evening but stop before hitting the publish button - I’ll do that first thing next day. Or I’ll write code but put off committing it. Or I’ll stop on the last page of a chapter. You get the point. Cake is a good way to start a new day. And get some momentum going!

My key takeaway is that parents’ praise molds their children’s mindsets. It’s a very slippery slope - focusing on outcomes vs efforts can result in quite different mindsets. Growth mindset has compound effects in life so the earlier someone has it, the better.

Here are my notes from Mindset:

I’ve dipped into fitness at surface level multiple times. I started working out but couldn’t sustain it. I even tried Intermittent Fasting for a couple of months but it didn’t work for me.

As a vegetarian, it’s definitely hard. Then I came across Divjot’s journey. As a vegan, he lost weight by a calorie deficit and walking 10k steps. This looked sustainable. I got motivated again.

I decided to dive deeper into fitness and understand it once and for all. Here are the things that helped:

The best part about this book is the long-form stories of 10+ people instead of cherry-picked anecdotes.

Here are my notes from Mastery:

If you want to go fast, go alone.
If you want to go far, go together.

Attending meetup events has been a good way for me to find like-minded people. But after the pandemic forced everything to go online, it created a void for me which the virtual events simply couldn’t fill. That’s when I came across mastermind groups.

Have you noticed that the construction and aviation industries have very low error rates? Well, it might sound boring but they use checklists! Loaded with stories, Atul takes us on a journey to create a 90-second checklist in the world of surgery that ended up reducing the fatality rate by a third.

Here are my notes from The Checklist Manifesto:

Pronoia is the feeling that the Universe is conspiring to help you.

It’s a prevalent theme in one of my favorite novels, The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho. In it, the protagonist, a young boy, is told by an older man to pursue his dreams. He tells the boy, “When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.” The book also deals with omens, signs that the universe wants the boy to follow a specific path, which leads to his goal of fulfilling a dream.

There’s a saying in the startup world, that if you’re willing to do whatever it takes to make your idea work, you might as well pick a bigger market rather than a smaller one. The same can be extended to mindsets - if you’re willing to put in the work to become the best version of yourself, you might as well pick pronoia over paranoia.