Thinking Archives - Page 3 of 3

Recently I have read Eric Ries’ The Lean Startup, and it got me thinking on multiple levels. It had so many interesting insights and counter-intuitive results, that it really inspired me to take a good look at so many things I’ve been doing. I’m not running a startup (yet) by the common definition as in running a company, but take a look at his definition:

A startup is a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.

First, this pretty much applies to the physics lab I’m working in as a post-doc at the moment: team, uncertainty, novelty. Most definitely have to take a big look how can I that group better using the lean lessons (in another post).

On the other hand, could this definition apply to quite different but just as important thing: myself? I do aim at creating something new, making a person like no-one else in the history; I am extremely uncertain; and I’m a human as well (though not sure how many humans one needs for an “institution”).

Could these lessons somehow adapted to one’s own development as a person? Can the observations be far-fetching enough to encompass this much?

Startup lessions applied to a person

Here I’ll be picking out some points that stood out for me, and see if I can use them to be more successful – whatever that means (getting there in a minute).

Stop wasting people’s time

This is probably the number one thing he brought up. Stop wasting people’s – and your own – precious time. Don’t build a product that nobody wants (if you are a company), don’t make things unnecessarily troublesome for others. If discussing something, get to the point. If want something, use your voice. Don’t promise something then underdeliver. Make things transparent, whether it’s about good or bad things, since then others can make up their own mind with complete information and minimal distortion.

Make it clear to others that you expect the same from them as well.

When it is about myself, I should really figure out what is wasting time, and what is valuable. It is not always obvious, playing games, reading, watching a movie, checking things on the ‘net, writing emails can be just as much be a growing experience as total, utter timesink. I know already I have a lot of timesinks, now have to eliminate them so I can spend more time with the things I value. But it’s only me who can decide it, since everyone’s values are different.

I do feel that if there’s only one advice from the book to take, this would be it.

Learning

The second major thing that got to me, that the aim of the startup is actually learning. One has to learn what are the good things to do, how to handle different situations, what do people react positively, or even just how people react to different changes one makes in the startup setting. Success is then the amount of validated learning.

But this is the same thing for people: I should set up hypotheses, and learn about them, try to prove and disprove the fastest way possible, so I can improve my attitude and behaviour towards the world. By gaining more understanding, success is then now all that knowledge that I can put to use to achieve the goals I’ve set out to reach.

This learning for myself can be very many, all different kinds of stuff:

Could waking up earlier make me more productive during the day?
How can I make myself wake up ealier if I constantly oversleep 5 alarm clocks?
How to work together with people with the least amount of effort?
What is the setting I can enjoy my books the most?
What steps to take to become a better writer?
Would I improve my work environment if I applied some lean principles to our lab?
What’s the best way to start new projects?
Would delegating in some important side projects make them work better?
What techniques work best for me to learn new languages?
Would running, swimming, cycling, hiking or something else make me feel (and be) healthier?

These are not all good questions, not all actionable ones. Just all the things that I have brainstormed here, but it’s a start. Would have to take actual things to try and learn from. There are plenty of questions. Now just take the time to formulate plans and learning goals.

How to measure success

This is connected to the learning goals, in a way, that I would have to have some meaningful metrics whether I’m getting closer or not. The idea of “vanity metrics” and “actionable metrics” from the book are really fundamental things as well – way too easy to get useless (and even worse: misleading) vanity metrics of a process (such as total visitor count for a website) instead of actionable metrics (like income from products that didn’t exist in the company X years ago).

This is much harder to apply to people, as a person’s learning goals are probably more qualitative than quantitative, and quantitative things could feel quite awkward or unusual. But still:

How big part of income is from projects that I have started in the last X years?
What fraction of my projects are still alive (even if not managed by me) after X years?
What fraction of people I worked together with started their projects on their own?
How big part of my communication is with my important long term friends? How many is with new friends? How big portion of my new friends are dropping out of touch within a year?
What fraction of books I’ve read inspired me in one way or another?
What fraction of new places I’ve visited, within the country or abroad, are such that I’ve haven’t heard about them X years ago?
How many new techniques, tools, languages I know and could use / use regularly that I couldn’t X years ago?
What fraction of ideas I come up with I could turn into working projects?
What fraction of my expenses I consider “well spent”?

This X years ago seems to be a convenient shortcut (also taken from the book), and there might be a better way of looking at things, though since we are talking about temporal change (getting better over time), it might be a good one.

5 Whys

The 5 whys is a very powerful management technique to figure out the root causes of things: whenever something bad happens, ask (and figure out) what was the immediate cause (the first why), then figure out the cause of that (the second), and go back at least 5 layers until you get to the root cause. Here’s an explanation video by Eric Ries how to use that in the startup setting.

It is useful to see beyond the obvious and fix the real issues. Can guide what should one put effort into, and how much. This technique would work right away with myself:

“I’ve broken an expensive PC card in the lab” (true story)
Why? – I connected the power supply wrong
Why? – I had a fleeting thought that it might not work, but didn’t pay enough attention
Why? – I was too sleepy that day
Why? – Stayed up too late for too many days in a row
Why? – Been on Facebook, checking things out

Here you go: cut down on Facebook, sleep better, don’t do anything critical when tired, do stop to think even if I know what should be done, and finally get my electronics knowledge in shape (and check out that power supply).

Outlook

Of course I wasn’t the only one coming up with similar ideas, there’s also for example The Startup of You, that seem to be a bit more focused how you achieve a startup, instead of the things I mentioned here of how to be a better/more successful person using the lean startup principles. Still there might be plenty to learn there. And here’s an infographic about that from Imagethink (picture #2 on their site).

Infographics — The Start-up of You from http://imagethink.net

All in all, I want to see how this works out in the long run. Will definitely be a lot of work, but there’s so much to gain, that it worth it. One doesn’t become an Elon Musk, a Salman Khan, Richard Branson or Richard Feynman by sitting around.

And to get there, you can leave me some useful or useless advice in the comments.

Yesterday I’ve read an article that about every topic, one has to know only Two Things.

For every subject, there are really only two things you really need to know. Everything else is the application of those two things, or just not important.

Of course it is a fascinating idea, and I started to think about my profession, physics. If I simplify my experience and knowledge down to this minimal level, what would be the two things I get to? I do think it is not a straightforward stuff, and one can only get to the bottom of this, can find the hidden truth below, if one spends a lot of time with the subject, gets to know it inside and out. I feel that I’m still just scratching the surface of the wast knowledge of the universe (even after being a physicist for about 12 years now). Still this doesn’t stop me from trying.

Drawing in my Wreck This Journal — At Geek Dinner Taipei someone contributed this drawing of the Einstein Field Equations to my Wreck This Journal. Of course, this is ignoring a possible non-zero cosmological constant.

I’m an experimental physicist, worked in Solid State Physics first, now mostly in Atomic & Laser Physics – all kind of fun stuff. I had very good professors, great inspiration and I have learnt a lot from them. If I think back all the things I’ve learned there are still things that come to me as my first thoughts, and usually those are the right guesses, for whatever intuition I have.

My Two Things about Physics:

Pure math can take you very far along the way, though in the end still need experiment to see whether the results describe something real.
Everything is an approximation, but that’s fine. Just pick your approximations carefully.

Maybe it is worth expanding a little bit on that these:

Pure math can be used to describe things extremely well. It’s maybe even too good at that, which got other, much cleverer people to think as well, like a fellow Hungarian physicist, Wigner Jenő (or Eugen Wigner), writing about The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences. I frequently got myself really excited when after doing some complicated calculation to predict the behaviour of a physical system, the experiment matches up to all of its nuances. Let it be atomic spectroscopy, polarization of light reflected from metallic mirrors, magnetic field of a Zeeman-slower, I had a lot of fun figuring out the physical theories of different phenomena then matching it up with what happens in the lab. Of course, there were loads of times when they didn’t match, but it turns out my math was off. Really, if I want to understand the world, math is one of the most useful and versatile tool to have.

Having that tool is of course not enough. When people come up with new and interesting math trick, it often turns out (to many people’s amusement) that those tricks have some physical meaning, they often also give some insight into the world around us. It’s often, but not always. Mathematics can really easy take one to very strange places and give a result, which is completely aphysical. To complicate things even further, those aphysical results sometimes turn out to be actually correct and predicting real but insofar unobserved things. An example of this is the Dirac equation which gives two solution, one for electron, and one particle with negative mass that first people dismissed, but later it was understood as the representation of positron. How to distinguish between really wrong solution and “wrong as current understanding”, that’s a whole different level of problems.

The second point was really a revelation for me. Whatever equations we have, they all just describe things to a certain level. If we can look closer, we often find differences from the theory, that are harder and harder to explain as we get closer. On the other hand, using intuition and physical understanding, people often choose to ignore certain parts of the situation, or certain features of the problem since it cannot affect the results to a level that would be observed in the given experiment. This makes everything solvable, and once solved, one can advance on top of the new understanding even deeper into the problem. Finding the good approximations is almost as valuable as finding the right theory, that’s why often these approximations are named after the people who came up with them, or given other shorthand names so everyone can quickly recall and use them.

There’s a whole methodology built to help come up with approximations and handle them, called perturbation theory: if the given problem is very similar to a simpler, already solved problem, then treat it as the simple one plus some small effect that changes relatively little on the behaviour of the system. Not everything can be handled like this, but surprisingly many problems fit very well.

Others’ Two Things about Physics

On the original site there were other people’s Two Things as well:

1. Energy is conserved.
2. Photons (and everything else) behave like both waves and particles.
-Tim Lee
1. Draw a diagram.
2. Get the dimensions straight.
-Eric Schafer

I personally don’t like these that much. The first one is just stating two theories that can be superseded in the future, and right now they kind of limit instead of enable. The second one is good advice, but can’t say that’s the only thing there about physics. Having said that, I have more adventures with incorrect dimensions and units than I’d prefer to have.

What other Two Things choices one can make, in physics or in other sciences, other topics?