Personal growth

Becoming kinder

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Yesterday, I was walking along Passeig de Gràcia with a new acquaintance. And all of a sudden, she asked me if we could stop and ask the homeless man on the street how he was doing. She said that she had seen him many times in the past and that he looked worse today. And that she was too shy to do it alone. So, I said yes and we spent the next half hour or so just chatting with the old man.

This small event really touched me and together with all the other encounters this week, it made me reflect on kindness. Years ago, my default assumption was that, until proven wrong, people are only kind because they have something to get out of you. It was not hard to develop that mindset, coming from a background where there is so much poverty and crime. I’ve had my laptop and phone stolen in the past. There were many times that people would try to help me (like helping me look for an item in a shopping district, helping me find a place when I was lost) but actually had other intentions. Due to all these experiences and all those I’ve heard from my other friends, it was just difficult to trust other people by default. If somebody is overly kind, you have to start suspecting. My instinct is to check my pocket if that stranger is taking my wallet already.

But, over the years, I’ve really changed. I’ve become kinder and more trustful of people. It has even surprised me that some colleagues comment how nice I have been to them.

Reflecting on it, one of the early reasons for this transformation was having met my girlfriend, who has been the kindest person I’ve met. But, more than her, I’ve been lucky to have experienced a lot of kindness from strangers since moving to Europe. Throughout my travels, there have been countless times that people helped me without asking for anything in return.

These days, I’ve been interviewing venture capitalists, accelerators, managers and CEOs. It still surprises me how generous they can be with their time and insights despite not receiving anything in return. I’m just a random stranger contacting them anyway. Similarly, I’ve met many academics who are just so kind in sharing their expertise and giving advice.

Not really sure how to end this piece. But, it just made me reflect also on the relation between nice-ness and success. It seems like they are not really independent. So far, the most successful people I’ve met have also been some of the nicest. There’s probably some study there that explains what causes what. Is it that richer countries / people can afford to be nicer since they don’t have to worry to much about certain things? Or is it that to be successful you have to be nice?

Ask me anything at Embiggen

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I have been the head of research at Embiggen, a corporate innovation and foresight consulting startup. It has been so exciting with our team growing and with us, getting our first clients. One cool initiative we had within the firm was to have an ask-me-anything and I was the first to take the stage. Let me share my answers to two questions that were fascinating:

What three insights in innovation can you apply to your personal life?

  • Organizational Ambidexterity – A fancy term to explain how successful organizations are able to manage both exploration and exploitation activities. Explore means knowing what options are out there and exploitation means capitalizing on opportunities when they emerge. For personal success, it’s also crucial to do these two activities. If you don’t explore enough, then you don’t know what you are missing. If you don’t exploit enough, then you are letting opportunities go to waste.
  • Path dependence – Organizations tend to get locked in a certain path, based on their previous decisions. A company manufacturing one product would find it hard to do something else, given that they have invested everything to make these operations efficient. Yet, this fixation can then be the cause of their future failure. Similarly, people tend to get locked in their routines, just doing what they are used to doing. It’s important to take note when one is getting stuck in one of these paths.
  • Legitimation – Technologies, no matter how novel and impactful they are, can still fail if they are not validated or perceived legitimate by important stakeholders. Similarly, no matter how good a person’s skills are, the market may not properly value their skills if they cannot get others to notice them. So, instead of just building on your skills, it’s important to find a way to demonstrate these skills.

What life advice can you give to university students?

I listed a couple of things I wish I had known earlier:

  • Reach out to people – The best way to find out about a career opportunity is to just message people who are in the positions you’d like to have. Don’t be afraid to send emails or Linkedin connections to people. Obviously, just don’t be too bothersome and try to provide some value in your message. It’s very low risk in general; the worst case is that they do not respond.
  • Learn by doing – Don’t spend months reading books and listening to lectures just to learn a new skill. Don’t expect to be an expert after all those efforts. Instead, the best way to learn something is by doing. Think of what you plan to do with the new skill and then work backwards from there. For instance, if you want to learn programming, start from the idea of the app you want to create and then figure out what modules you need to learn to get there.
  • CBT Basics – If there’s one topic I wish was thought in school, it would be the basics of cognitive behavioral therapy. People tend to have various distortions that impede them from reaching their potential. Just knowing the basic distortions can really help a lot of people deal with various anxieties they have.
  • Be more strategic – There’s always an easier path to any goal. You don’t have to give 100% to everything you do to get there. In many cases, it would be best to just focus on a few important tasks and just give the bare minimum to things that are not too critical.

Networking experiment

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As an extremely introverted person, I really find it difficult to network. Connecting with strangers really drains me. I do not like its transactional nature. And the truth is I am too much of a mess during small talk. I always feel awkward, afraid of running out of things to say. Networking cocktails still do not feel natural to me. I’m still trying to understand how to enter and exit conversations.

However, once I’ve connected with somebody, that’s the easy part. I can easily handle one-on-one coffees and just random chats. I like listening to people and trying to help them however I can.

This year, to force myself to “go out” more and create new relationships, I pushed myself to conduct an experiment. This experiment started from October, so about 3 months now. It was simple:

Every weekday, I would connect with one interesting stranger on Linkedin.

That’s it. Either I come across their profiles when they liked a post of a current contact or I come across one of their work that I found interesting. I tried to do it everyday but there were just some days when I just could not think of whom to connect with. I then connect with them with a personal note on why I would like to be their contact.

Since the experiment started, I’ve sent out invites to 56 people. Out of these, 47 have connected with me. Out of these 47, 8 sent a personalized response, typically thanking for connecting. Out of these 8, I’ve chatted with 3 people.

I think it’s been a successful experiment so far. For someone who barely used Linkedin to now connecting with one person every day, I think it’s a good achievement already. However, I had not been too deliberate about scheduling conversations with these people to get to know them better. For next year, my goal then is to increase my rate of personally connecting with newly formed connections.

Top-down and bottom-up learning

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In any skill you want to learn, it’s always useful to explore it from two views: bottom-up and top-down. The bottom-up approach starts breaking down the problem into components and then trying to understand how each of these building blocks fit. In contrast, the top-down approach starts from the big picture to get a good survey of the landscape and working down from there. It is advantageous to use these two lenses iteratively to ensure that you do not miss important considerations in decision making. Iterating through the two can help you converge to a better understanding of the field.

Let’s say that you are trying to learn a skill like programming. You can start by working top-down. This means that you try to get a general idea of what the skill entails. Perhaps, it is about trying to create a website. From day one, you then start creating the website. You learn the different skills involved in creating the site as you go along. If you want to put a yellow bar on top of the page, you google just to find how to do that. You look at the code of other websites to see how they implemented these features.

On the other hand, the bottom-up approach starts from learning how to code itself. You learn about the different functions, typically from a book or a guided lecture. After learning these building blocks, you then integrate them to larger components.

The challenge with the top down approach is that the learning process may seem too scattered that you may have some important gaps in your knowledge. While you may end up producing an output that “works,” it may all be based on bad foundations. In the end, the output you get may be in such a bad architecture that it may have to be redone again with experts who are well versed with the bottom up. However, the good thing about the approach is that you get something out of it quickly. You then get a mental picture of what you need to work on next. You create your own map of the learning journey you need to take.

On the other hand, the challenge with the bottom-up approach is the difficulty to motivate yourself to continue along. If you don’t see any product for a long time, you might just give up and see no point to studying the details. However, the bottom-up approach can be rewarding as you have a great understanding of each component. You do not see the field merely as a black box.

The two approaches require balance. You need to work top down to see how each component fits together. You also have to go bottom up to ensure that you know each component well enough.

Procrastination cycle

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I am prone to having periods where I am extremely productive and periods where I have to push myself to start working. It seems like I am always in one of those two modes, never just right.

While this has been an ongoing struggle, I have found ways to better cope with my tendency to procrastinate. The one that has made all the difference for me was learning more about the research on procrastination by the researcher Tim Pychyl. Instead of being a problem of time management or lack of discipline, his group’s research explains that procrastination is a problem with emotional regulation. Procrastination is due to some discomfort associated with a task. This framework  by the Centre for Clinical Interventions explains this best.

In their framework, they show that procrastination begins with a task or goal such as those related to work, family, health or self-development. However, even before we begin doing these tasks, we might have already made some assumptions, both correct and incorrect, about the task. These unhelpful rules include the fear of failure, the fear of catastrophe, having low self-confidence, wanting to seek pleasure, needing to be in charge and feeling depleted energy.  These assumptions then drive discomfort. Wanting to avoid these discomforts, we then think of excuses for delaying the task. We resort to doing something else more comfortable. The problem is that this creates both positive and negative feedback loops. On one hand, working on the unrelated task makes us feel better. On the other hand, avoiding the actual task gives us more discomfort and further reinforces our wrong assumptions. At some point, the actual negative feeling of the task is replaced by our associated negative feeling with the task. This then restarts the cycle of procrastination.

Document your journey

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One insight that I just thought of recently, that I should have probably done even before, is to document whatever grand, a long-term endeavor that I am currently pursuing. For instance, if you are writing a book, instead of just publishing everything in the end, it is better to just post parts of it online as you go through it. If you cut your book into parts and talk about it along the way, you can test in advance whether the idea you have makes sense. Perhaps, through comments by strangers online, you can already have a quick idea if the big goal that you are pursuing even makes sense. This is similar to the idea of the “minimum viable product”, where you try to create the smallest possible prototype of your product so that you can get feedback as soon as possible.

Especially, now that publishers are too risk-averse that they only want to bet on writers with already a following online, publishing parts of your book through a blog or talking about its parts through a podcast would be helpful as a way to gain an early following.

Another example are people who want to learn a new language. Many people make the mistake of spending all of their time just learning through apps or signing up in structured classes. Perhaps, they will even complete the entire track on Duolingo. However, by the end of it, many will realize that they did not really learn how to communicate. Completing these puzzles in an artificial environment is a completely different task compared to actually talking with a person, who speaks the language as their native one. Learners are probably better off to shift into “production mode” as early as they can. They can write blog posts in their language of interest. They can record videos and upload them to Youtube. They can even try to commit to giving speeches in their foreign language.

I remember when I was in Amsterdam, I was a member of the Toastmaster’s club. It is a club that helps to improve communication skills by letting its members give TED-like talks in front of others. My club was in English and it was filled with ex-pats. There was one member who wanted to improve her Dutch. She then joined another Toastmaster’s club but in Dutch. She gave speeches in Dutch to practice. By the end, she had improved so much that she even competed in the interclub competition in Dutch. If you know how ex-pats are like in the Netherlands, you would know that just a small amount of people actually end up learning Dutch.

So, celebrate the small wins. Document your learning journey. Even if you are a beginner, others who are a step or two behind you still can always learn from you.

Planning as a Hobby

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Browsing through productivity posts in Hacker News and productivity subreddits, it seems like planning has become a hobby for many people. Admittedly, this has also been a thing for me. I love conceptualizing grand plans for myself. I love reading strategies on the most efficient ways to achieve some goal. I love learning for others how they plan. I love designing dashboards to track my objectives.

For instance, I am pushing myself to write 300 words per day on two books that I wish to have finished. I’ve created a tracker on Excel. I track the number of words I write per day:

By tracking this, I can do some data analysis. I can track what is my actual rate of writing. I can track how many days will I finish given the projected number of words the books will have (my current estimate for the two is around 109,500). Finally, if I slack, how many words do I need to write for the current day to catch up.

The problem with me in general though is that planning has become a hobby to the point that sometimes I spend more time designing these trackers, instead of actually doing the actual work. Planning has been my way of procrastinating, of convincing myself that I am doing actual work instead of distracting myself.

I don’t really know how to end this post. But, I’m writing just to reflect on my tendency to fall into these habits.

YNAB

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While I did not come from a privileged background, I have been lucky enough to be born in a family where all my basic needs are met. My family supported me as much as they can so that I can pursue my interests. Every now and then, they would buy me luxuries like the Playstation or a Nokia phone. Beyond this however, my family was always conscious of how much we were spending. We did not eat out often. We never really travelled outside of our city. We never really bought clothes often. The only reason I would attend an elite school from the Philippines is that I received a full scholarship with stipend. The only reason I would go to graduate school in Europe is that I was granted a scholarship from the EU.

Not coming from a rich family, I always have to budget what I spend my money on. Even now that I am working in a top business school, I still have to save and plan so that I can buy a house in the future.

To help me with this, I have been using the app You Need A Budget (YNAB) for the last 5 years. It is a personal finance app that lets you track where you spend your money so that you can save and invest more. It’s based on this philosophy that you have to always dedicate every penny to something. For example, if you end up spending on restaurant, you have to divert that money away from your clothing budget.

Expenses in the last 3 months

I’ve stopped taking down notes

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I’ve been taking down notes for the longest time using physical notebooks and OneNote. In college, I used to have a large notebook divided into sections for each class. During graduate school, I just printed the relevant papers and organized them into different folders. If I ever needed to, I just wrote my thoughts directly on these papers.

Reflecting back on this approach, I realize that I am prone to never looking at them ever again. In college, after I’ve taken the final exam for a course, I just typically just keep the notebook somewhere, forgetting that it even existed. In graduate school, once I’ve finished writing a paper, I just keep the relevant papers somewhere, never to be seen again. My rationale was that I was not going to use my knowledge in that specific class again. At the same time, my thinking was that I can easily find things when I need it through Google anyway. I have not been able to get much return from taking down notes. That is why I have stopped taking down notes.

Recently, there has been a lot of talk about the potential of spaced-repetition systems (SRS) in augmenting learning. Michael Nielsen from Y Combinator wrote a great article of how he used it to dig deeper into machine learning. SRS is just a fancy word for flashcards. A famous app that facilitates this is Anki. You can create your cards in this app based on whatever information you come across. Dates, names, equations, pictures, mental models, frameworks… whatever information that you think will be important down the line. Everyday then, you review your cards, marking them as easy or difficult to remember. Anki facilitates what cards to show you based on how easy it was for you to remember the card in the past.

Since the start of the pandemic, I’ve been using Anki to learn different fields. I’ve made cards from data science, pharmaceutical sciences, econometrics, sociology, history of management and decision sciences. I’ve written down interesting quotes from speeches, insights from videos and fascinating stories from podcasts.

Since I’ve started, I have added 3,047 cards. It’s become a habit at this point. I spend around 30 minutes per day, reviewing around 80 cards. In my opinion, Anki has really augmented my process of learning new things. It helped me prepare for my PhD defense. Now, it is helping me in my knowledge journey.

Anki stats

Boss as a service

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In a famous story in Homer’s Odyssey, Ulysses and his crew had to sail past an island where the Sirens lived. These sirens were known to sing so beautifully that listeners would lose control of themselves, ultimately luring them to their deaths. Ulysses wanted to hear how the Sirens’ sounded like. However, he knew that he would not be capable of thinking clearly once he was bewitched by their beautiful voice. Thus, he instructed his crew to block their ears with wax. Ulysses also asked his crew to tie him to the ship’s mast so that he would not be able to do anything stupid, once he is under the Sirens’s charm. He also told them to not change the course of the ship whatever happens and even, to attack him in the worst case that he escapes.

This tale is instructive on how we can pursue habits that are just too difficult to achieve with our limited willpower. It’s easy to plan that we will stop eating sweets and start exercising. However, when we are already in the moment, when the temptation is already in front of us, it may just be too difficult to resist.

Thus, we need to find a way to tie ourselves to the mast. In my case, I have resorted to this app Beeminder. It allows you to track your goals for free. The catch is if you do not reach your goal, that is when you have to pay them. The first time you break your pact, you pay $5. The next time, it then becomes $10 and so on.

Three years ago, I was able to lose a lot of weight from the service. However, I’ve regained it since them. I’ve restarted my journey again.

Beeminder weight loss (Oct 2020)

As seen by the plot, I’ve lost weight since I started in the beginning of August. I started at 81.3 kg and now am at 77.3 kg. On my way, I’ve broken my promised rate of losing 0.7 kg per week, two times. I’ll periodically update my blog how it is going.