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Application of binary search within the desert of Wadi rum

What was once misplaced need not necessary be forever lost

When distracted by food, things sometimes go missing.

 

The desert might be vast, but the area of search could be drastically reduced when searching for a lost item methodically.

Prior to the start of the search it is important to figure out the bearings of the camp so that you yourself become the misplaced item. Do so by identifying 3 distinct landmarks that are visible all around the desert.

Start your trace by cutting the traversed path in half and doing search along the section of the path in which item was most likely misplaced. Check for wind direct to determine maximum potential distance fallen misplaced item could have drifted away from path traversed.

To trace the route of traversal accurately, identify footprint/paw signature that you will track through the sands. With each step scan within area misplaced object will most likely fall footprint/paw signature.

Bring lots of water while conducting this exercise to ensure against other complications like dehydration during operations.

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Reflections on constructing virtuous cycles applications with higher order heuristics

When explaining to Jan at the overstay hostel on the application of meditation this morning, it occurries to me the possibility of applying higher order heuristics to form virtuous chains which can be latter form into cycles.

Below is an example of a simple virtuous cycle constructed based on 3 higher order heuristics I have across and am familiar with.

  1. Mindfulness
  2. Reasoning from first principles
  3. Application of the 80/20 rule
  4. Application of small wins to build new habit cycles

Heuristic 1 brings to awareness background processes running in the head that are currently hogging on to CPU cycles.

Heuristics 2 allows for critical examination and possible termination of identified background process.

Heuristics 3 states that attaining fluency in a domain requires only 20% of the effort while attaining mastery in the domain takes up 80%.

Heuristics 4 states that it is possible to construct exercises to train the mind towards fluency in a new domain with the spare CPU capacity freed up by heuristic 2.

Thereafter one goes back to heuristics 1 to repeat the reprogramming iteration.

Related references

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Reflections for the evening on learning

Listening as a discipline

The phrase “when the student is ready the teacher appears” stems not from the pseudo “law of attraction” but from the fact that having an available teacher sitting in front of the student is pretty useless unless the student himself is ready to start listening and start the lesson. It can be attributed to the fact active listening is not a commonly practiced skill-set since most are too pre-occupied with their own self-esteem due to deep rooted insecurities.

Applicable Chinese idiom: the best medicine taste really bitter, the most helpful words are often unpleasant to hear.

Operating from first principles

As a heuristic, it can be readily applied in multiple domains. A few critical ones identified thus far:

Lifestyle as a configuration

The concept of a home when examined critically can be decomposed into multiple different functions. When the concept is unpacked, it is possible to discard functions that are not utilized and paid for to remove redundant resource deployment.

Identify as a figment of imagination

The notion of self is a figment of imagination. When examined critically, what objectively exists is but a steady stream of sensation that comes into the field of consciousness through one of the senses. It is mistaken to believe the sum of these sensations would at any point culminate into a tangible fixed identity. Culture, beliefs, values, norms and meaning; second order abstractions built onto of this shaky foundation should be critically examined.

Consciousness is the only phenomena that is indisputable.

Emotions

Labelled feelings like any of the eight below are abstractions one step removed from what has actually occurred.

  • Fear
  • Anger
  • Sadness
  • Joy
  • Disgust
  • Surprise
  • Trust
  • Anticipation

Examined objectively what occurred are patterns of sensations that came into the field of consciousness.

Further references

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Book summary – what got you here won’t get you there

What got you here won’t get you there

Habits we acquired in our previous success often prevents us from achieving success when required to execute at a higher order of magnitude. Cultivate the habit of dropping priorly acquired habits when they no longer helpful for what is required.

Categories of bad habits to be dropped

  1. Putting personal ego gratification above all else
    • always need to win
    • trying to add to much value
    • telling the world how smart we are
    • Withholding information
    • Failing to give proper recognition
    • Claiming credit that we don’t deserve
    • making excuses
    • Clinging to the past and shifting blame to past events
    • refusing to express regret
    • not listening
    • failing to express gratitude
    • Passing the buck, shifting blame to someone else instead of accepting responsibility
    • An excessive need to be me
  2. Improper management of unpleasant physical sensations
    • Passing judgement
    • making destructive comments
    • speaking when angry
    • playing favorites
    • Punishing the messenger
  3. Not giving space to others
    • Negating suggestions provided by colleagues. Not giving ample space for colleagues to execute on their idea
    • Being anal about explaining why that won’t work
  4. Lack of self-awareness
    1. Verbalizing any internal monologue. The higher up you go the more your suggestions become orders

Change management

  • Get feedback. Practice the discipline of active listening even when what you hear does not sound pleasant.
  • constant follow up
  • expressing gratitude for feedbacks
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Book summary – The Choice

 

The Choice

The choice is to invest in overcoming obstacles presented by reality (a.k.a. exercise freedom of choice)

Mindset

  • Acknowledge you might not know the inner workings of most things
  • Be confident that you are capable of figuring out how things work
  • Bad luck = reality meets lack of preparation. Approach reality like a scientist provides the needed preparation

Heuristics

  • Reality is inherently simple. Complicated patterns made up of simple patterns combined together.
    • The more complicated the situation seems to be the simpler the solution must be – fractals
    • Dive deeply into the heart of the issue and seek simpler solutions over complicated ones (with less components).
    • Be wary of admiration of sophistication
    • When solving complex tangled problems, tackle the most important one head on (root cause) and the rest will take care of themselves (symptoms).
  • On conflicts
    • When there is conflict determine if the underlying root cause of a conflict is due to faulty assumption or an actual contradiction.
    • If reality is inherently simple, then naturally occurring contradictions are unlikely.
    • blaming someone else shifts precious attention away from removing the obstacle
    • harmony is the natural state of things in reality when wrongful assumptions have been removed
  • Never stop improving on a existing situation however good it is
    • List all key assumptions and challenge everyone of them
    • develop stamina to overcome failures ( opportunities to further calibrate my neural network)
    • develop stamina to think clearly consistently

Insights

  • Intuition stems from emotions. Things we have repeatedly trained our own personal neural network with.
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Book summary – the goal

The Goal

Productivity is the act of bringing a company closer to its goal.

The goal of any company is to make money through the fulfillment of its mission

Key parameters to monitor for meeting the goal

  • Increase net profit
  • Increase return on investment
  • Increase cashflow
  • Increase system throughput while reducing operating expense and inventory

Inventory stuck in WIP can be reduced by reducing parts that piling up in front of the bottleneck waiting for other missing parts

Algorithm

  1. find the most critical bottleneck in the system right now
  2. increase capacity at current most critical bottleneck until it is no longer the bottleneck
  3. repeat step one until we have built enough capacity to more than fulfill market demand

 

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Reflections for the evening on return on capital

Having ample resources and financing at the onset of a project promotes wastefulness financial habits which quickly becomes part of the culture if not managed properly. Being under-resourced during the initial onset of a project forces project leaders to be scrappy and judicious in the use of resources that are made available to them. This promotes thriftiness which quickly becomes part of the culture. Such a culture has the by-product of maximizing return on capital when more becomes available.

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Practical advise from mum on how to grow your business

General advice

  • never take criticism from customers/users personal
  • honest and critical criticism from customers/users are the best way to improve the quality of your product
  • decipher between honest criticism and useless remarks made out of envy
  • Focus on listening as opposed to defending how good your product is
  • be prepared to be ok feeling stupid and incompetent when you are starting out on something new initially
  • practice keen observation. Observe how experts handle various tasks and suss out the in-depth nuances to learn the ropes of the trade
  • spend time studying and using competitors’ products to calibrate your taste.
  • be persistent, be diligent, be hardworking
  • be patient. Don’t expect success from day one

Successful cycles

  • The sewing business
  • The roasted poultry business
  • The hair dressing business
  • The foray into Singapore Real Estate
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Reflections for the morning

At the core of every startup is a model based on a set of assumptions of the way the world could operate towards furthering specific human endeavors. The goal of each startup is thus to systematically prove or disprove that the underlying assumptions hold true empirically, and the model itself viable and self sustaining at scale.

The discipline of the executor is to first sort the sets of hypothesis from most to least critical and thereafter consistently maintain focused deployment of resources to validating this list and nothing else.

It is important to note that patterns of recursion might be observed during the exercise where a hypothesis itself when acted upon yields its own subset of hypothesis that needs to be validated.

Startups are like an exercise in applied philosophy to satisfy the curiosity.