One of the first interesting experiences I had in this project at Princeton was meeting great men. I had never met very many great men before. But there was an evaluation committee that had to try to help us along, and help us ultimately decide which way we were going to separate the uranium. This committee had men like Compton and Tolman and Smyth and Urey and Rabi and Oppenheimer on it. I would sit in because I understood the theory of how our process of separating isotopes worked, and so they’d ask me questions and talk about it. In these discussions one man would make a point. Then Compton, for example, would explain a different point of view. He would say it should be this way, and he was perfectly right. Another guy would say, well, maybe, but there’s this other possibility we have to consider against it.
So everybody is disagreeing, all around the table. I am surprised and disturbed that Compton doesn’t repeat and emphasize his point. Finally at the end, Tolman, who’s the chairman, would say, “Well, having heard all these arguments, I guess it’s true that Compton’s argument is t he best of all, and now we have to go ahead.”
It was such a shock to me to see that a committee of men could present a whole lot of ideas, each one thinking of a new facet, while remembering what the other fella said, so that, at the end, the decision is made as to which idea was the best - summing it all up - without having to say it three times. These were very great men indeed.
Toastmasters International is an organization of clubs around the world which help members in public speaking. The clubs tend to be small in size to ensure everyone gets a chance to speak.
Late Jan 2008, I went ahead and attended the Yahoo ToastMasters club in Sunnyvale, called Yapsters as guest. It was definitely worthwhile and I became a member and have delivered my first speech.
It is obviously about public speaking, however it is useful in many ways:
The core approach is to do a series of 10 speeches with each focusing on a certain aspect of speaking (Speech organization, Body language including eye contact, Vocal variety)
You will automatically find your own areas which need focus, be it planning for a speech, english language, fear of being in front of an audience.
There are stories to hear and things to learn from other’s speeches. I enjoyed one about the Mexico desert where the stars touch the ground at the horizon and look forward to others.
You become part of a highly motivated and ambitious group.
There is a leadership track with 10 activities, which you choose to go on that instead of or in addition to the public speaking track.
Here are two methods to keep learning Maths and keep in focus.
Maths Calendar
Thanks to someone at work, I found out about excellent Math Calendar, every month has a writeup and every day a short Maths problem. The link at Amazon:
There is a wikipedia section and two dedicated websites which cover this and both are pretty good and sometimes cover different aspects of the same episode.
I have added a small widget to the left of this blog which contains links I recommend worth reading and is under the section, Articles worth reading. Most tend to be technology or personal development.
You can also directly read these in a single page or subscribe to the feed as they are shared from Google Reader using this link: Amit’s Link Blog.
I noticed a trend among Colleagues and Friends who have been or are doing Part-time aka Executive MBAs, after working as an engineer for a number of years. Atleast one I know, who left work for a fulltime MBA course which costs more, directly in fees ($100,000 is typical.) and in loss of income.
The whole path should take 3-5 years including the GMAT preparation and the courses typically cost U$50,000-80,000 in fees, plus maybe U$10,000 in expenses and lots of study and hardwork in the middle.
I tried a reverse path to see if some current CEO have reached through that path and I found one, interestingly, he runs a people search company.
Engineer & Manager at WindRiver systems for around 8 years, from 1994 to 2002
Did his MBA at Wharton (I would guess the program they have in San Francisco, see link below) from 2000-2002.
Changed to Product Management and Business Development at WindRiver from 2002 to 2006 as well as consulted with Clearstone Venture Partners as Investment Professional
Did a stint as EIR(Entrepreneur In Residence) for six months from late 2005, again at Clearstone Venture Partners
Definitely a pretty good career path so far. I would calculate, nine years from decision (say 1997 to 2006) to CEO.
If you are in the San Jose aka San Francisco Bay Area aka Silicon Valley, some Executive MBA options are
Benjamin Franklin in The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, mentions the Socratic Method as a method of Inquiry and to use in Dialog (Highlighting is my own.)
While I was intent on improving my language, I met with an English grammar (I think it was Greenwood’s), at the end of which there were two little sketches of the arts of rhetoric and logic, the latter finishing with a specimen of a dispute in the Socratic method; and soon after I procur’d Xenophon’s Memorable Things of Socrates, wherein there are many instances of the same method. I was charm’d with it, adopted it, dropt my abrupt contradiction and positive argumentation, and put on the humble inquirer and doubter.
And being then, from reading Shaftesbury and Collins, become a real doubter in many points of our religious doctrine, I found this method safest for myself and very embarrassing to those against whom I used it; therefore I took a delight in it, practis’d it continually, and grew very artful and expert in drawing people, even of superior knowledge, into concessions, the consequences of which they did not foresee, entangling them in difficulties out of which they could not extricate themselves, and so obtaining victories that neither myself nor my cause always deserved.
I continu’d this method some few years, but gradually left it, retaining only the habit of expressing myself in terms of modest diffidence; never using, when I advanced any thing that may possibly be disputed
Nothing is ordinary or not useful, we just do not see it yet. Probably because it does not apply to ourselves yet.
Quotes create a small ripple of good thoughts which in turn stay and many times increase in our day. This is no different than meeting a cheerful or upbeat person in the morning.
Yes, there are things better than Quotes. Quotes are not doing, for example, Reading about clearing your mind does not clear your mind. After ways and methods which tell you “what”, come ways and methods which tell us “how”.
I knew the Math basics needed for choosing algorithms when programming, this is the simple stuff, mostly Big-O notation and comparision of O(N logN), O(N), O(N*N), etc. Two events in late 2006, early 2007 gave Maths more prominence for me.
One was reading the convincing argument by Steve Yegge I consider to be Uberdev. Steve Yegge’s Math Every Day, Written in November 15th, 2004 when he was at Amazon.com
I just read a book called John von Neumann and the Origins of Modern Computing. Every few years I read a book that causes a discontinuity in my thinking — a step function that’s a lot larger than the little insights that most books or articles produce. For me, this was one of them.
Math is a funny thing; it’s not the way most people think of it — it’s an ever-expanding set of tools for modeling and solving problems. It’s very much driven by practical considerations; if a new problem comes up, and it’s not tractable to existing mathematical methods, then you work to make up new ones.
My new motto is “Math every day.” I’m giving myself one year to master all the math I was supposed to have learned in high school and college: algebra, geometry, trigonometry, limits and conic sections, differential calculus, integral calculus, multivariate calculus, simple differential equations, linear algebra and eigenvectors/eigenvalues, discrete math and logic, probability and statistics. I “knew” it all at one time or another, without really understanding what the heck it was for, so I should be able to put it all together again fairly quickly, if I put my mind to it.
Although I have not yet taken it to his level, I started keeping an open eye and learning approach to any Math I encounter.
Second was Google interviewers asking Math (Probability puzzles among others), See the birthday wager question at Shmula’s Google interview article. I have since realized that Discrete Mathematics is a prerequisite for some fields such as Data Mining and Machine Learning which matter for Internet companies such as Google, MSN, Yahoo & Amazon.
Interestingly, soon I started noticing more math in my day to day life, typical it tends to be Combinatorics (Permutation & Combination) and Probability. Here are a few actual life examples from the last 6-9 months:
Dilemma of the Garage door repairman
Our Garage door stopped working (would not open or close), so we get the Garage door repairman. He installs a new opener, but forgets the combination. He says their are millions of combinations and he will never get it even if it tried.
He shows it to me and if you look inside the Garage door opener (which one typically uses from their car), there are nine pins with each having two positions. Soon enough, it clicked to me, it maps neatly to a 9-bit integer value. The total possible values is 512 (2^9) which though a lot, is much less than millions.
A Bet against real estate median price rise
I rarely bet, but earlier in 2007 I took a bet against Seattle area (King County SFH, Single Family Home, to be precise) rising more than a certain percentage (one percent) in year 2007. I am now on track to probably lose this bet.
It seems logical during that time including the fact that real estate sales were falling and so on. So what happened? Primarily, I was just wrong in my understanding of the issues. However, also affecting it was the fact that the weightage changed. Median as you probably know implies half of the quantity is above that number and half are below. In recent months, sales for lower priced cities in King County have been dropped as a percentage of the county. This skews the balance, making it a much higher probability bet, now most cities SFH would now need to drop.
A Bet against India not winning the Cricket World Cup
Later on, a friend of mine to bet that India (the country where I was born and whose Cricket team I sometime follow) will win the Cricket World Cup. The weightage in this bet was the capability of the team, however the Indian Cricket team unlike, say the Australian is not head and shoulders over the rest. So with a no weightage scenario, this was a one team out of sixteen making it, I was getting 1:1 odds for a probability event of 15/16. I took it. And won. A good resource on making sense of odds: Figuring the Odds, Probability Puzzles.
How many confirmation numbers can Southwest airlines really give out
I noticed that all Southwest airline tickets are uniquely identified by a confirmation number which has six characters and contains numbers and alphabets. An example is CZ6H55. I was wondering how big is this space or rather how many confirmation numbers can Southwest airlines really give out, considering it is one of bigger domestic airline?
This is a case of permutations (changing positions of same numbers results in different confirmation numbers), each position can have 36 (26 alphabets + 10 digits) values and repetitions are allowed (DDDDDD should be valid.) The formula for this is 36 * 36 *…6 times = approx 2 billion.
The result of math behind finding people with same birthday (See below) still surprises me as does the infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type or create a particular chosen text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare. Interestingly, as the wikipedia entry says. The probability of a monkey typing a given string of text as long as, say, Hamlet is so infinitesimally tiny that, were the experiment conducted, the chance of it actually occurring during a span of time of the order of the age of the universe is minuscule but not zero.
If you are interested in the probability question that Shmula was asked at Google and the response, my take is below:
Question:
you are at a party with a friend and 10 people are present including you and the friend. your friend makes you a wager that for every person you find that has the same birthday as you, you get $1; for every person he finds that does not have the same birthday as you, he gets $2. would you accept the wager?
My answer with explaination:
One way to look at it, for me to make money, out of 8 people, 6 or more would need to have birthday on same day as me, and 2 would need to be different.
or it is giving me odds of 2-to-1 (Odds =, if T is total, t1-to-t2, here t1+t2 = T, see dice case below for example)
Using above logical possibility #2
The odds that six people have their birthday on same date as me is
=1 - (364/365 * 364/365 * 364/365 * 364/365 * 364/365 * 364/365 )
Summary: 1. Expect it to take 10 years.
2. Be ready to work with focus on measured improvement, regularly and harder than all,
3. Visualize or create a mental model of Goal\Success.
Excerpt:
1. Ten years to become world-class
Reinforcing that no-free-lunch finding is vast evidence that even the most accomplished people need around ten years of hard work before becoming world-class, a pattern so well established researchers call it the ten-year rule.
2. On Deliberate Practice
The best people in any field are those who devote the most hours to what the researchers call “deliberate practice.” It’s activity that’s explicitly intended to improve performance, that reaches for objectives just beyond one’s level of competence, provides feedback on results and involves high levels of repetition.
For example: Simply hitting a bucket of balls is not deliberate practice, which is why most golfers don’t get better. Hitting an eight-iron 300 times with a goal of leaving the ball within 20 feet of the pin 80 percent of the time, continually observing results and making appropriate adjustments, and doing that for hours every day - that’s deliberate practice.
3. Consistency is crucial
As Ericsson notes, “Elite performers in many diverse domains have been found to practice, on the average, roughly the same amount every day, including weekends.”
That’s a lot to focus on for the benefits of deliberate practice - and worthless without one more requirement: Do it regularly, not sporadically.
For most people, work is hard enough without pushing even harder. Those extra steps are so difficult and painful they almost never get done. That’s the way it must be. If great performance were easy, it wouldn’t be rare.
4. Adopting a new mindset
Armed with the improving mindset, people go at a job in a new way. Research shows they process information more deeply and retain it longer. This difference in mental approach is vital. For example, when amateur singers take a singing lesson, they experience it as fun, a release of tension. But for professional singers, it’s the opposite: They increase their concentration and focus on improving their performance during the lesson. Same activity, different mindset.
5. Mental models of your business aka creative visualization
Andy Grove could keep a model of a whole world-changing technology industry in his head and adapt Intel (Charts) as needed. Bill Gates, Microsoft’s (Charts) founder, had the same knack: He could see at the dawn of the PC that his goal of a computer on every desk was realistic and would create an unimaginably large market. John D. Rockefeller, too, saw ahead when the world-changing new industry was oil. Napoleon was perhaps the greatest ever. He could not only hold all the elements of a vast battle in his mind but, more important, could also respond quickly when they shifted in unexpected ways.
I looked up Golden Verses of Pythagoras after reading a reference about them in the The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin. Pythagoras was a Greek Philosopher who lived roughly during 500 BC.
These are guidelines on how to live one’s life and are full of wisdom.
Many of the Verses are relevant for Personal Development including the one about “Reviewing each day of your life”. Some of the other concepts are similar to those in Yoga texts.
Here are a few selected Golden Verses of Pythagoras:
Do not neglect the health of your body. Give to the body food, drink and exercise in measure — so that it strengthen and know not surfeit and slumber.
Before sleep closes your eyes remember thrice your deeds of the day. Consider them as an impartial judge and ask yourself: “What good did I do? What did I fail to do that I should have done?” Thus review everything you did throughout the day. Reproach yourself severely for all wrong deeds and be glad about the good ones.
Remember about the law of cause and effect in your life.
You are given the ability to overcome your passions: greed, laziness, lust, and anger; use it and restrain yourself.
As for the misfortunes that are sent to people according to their destinies, you have to endure them patiently. Strive nevertheless to alleviate the pain as much as you can. And remember that the Immortal Gods never send to people trials which are above their strengths.
Choose for yourself a wise friend; heed his advice and learn from his example; do not quarrel with him for trifle reasons.
Listen to others’ advice and deliberate yourself. Only fools acts thoughtlessly, without consideration.
And abstain from eating flesh: this is contrary to your nature and will prevent you from purifying yourself.
For the complete Verses, here are two translations of Golden Verses of Pythagoras:
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