There's enough time for what you love

Over the past hundred years, we have been conditioned to think of ourselves as responsible industrious citizens when we make time for all things official.  We easily take time from family for important meetings, urgent conference calls, networking events and so on.  But we find it more difficult to take time from work for interesting movies, going to the museum, walking by the beach, meditation and so on.  This oddly dichotomous behavior is so ingrained in our consciousness that we don't even realize it.  We divide life into compartments such as personal and professional lives when it's really referring to the same person.

A field guide to happiness

Happiness has a real simple formula.  It's got nothing to do with what we possess but everything to do with what we experience (sometimes with what we possess).  When we get over our mental hang-ups, we eventually gravitate towards doing things versus owning things.  Desmond Morris who studies animal behavior puts it well in his 1977 classic, Manwatching: A Field Guide to Human Behavior.  If we could return, by time machine, to an early cave-dwelling, we would no doubt hear the same kind of laughter, see the same kind of facial expressions, and witness the same sorts of quarrels, love affairs, acts of parental devotion and friendly co-operation as we do today.  We may have advanced with abstraction and artifaction, but our urges and our actions are probably much the same.  When examined closely, technology can usually be found to be serving one or other of our ancient action-patterns.  The television set, for example, is a miracle of artifaction, but what do we see on it?  Mostly we watch simulations of the quarrels, love affairs, parental devotion, and other age-old action patterns.  Even in our TV armchairs we are still men of action, if only at second hand.

Regardless of our advances as a society, we love to do the same things that we used to do as neanderthals.  We dance, run, swim, have sex, eat, talk, fight and laugh.  These things make us happy.

A really simple exercise 

When you distill your experiences to the essentials (whether it's during a single day or a period of time), you'll come up with the same 4 or 5 things that excite you.  Things that engage you and make you lose track of time...make you happy.  I've conducted a simple exercise with several people to help them discover what they LOVE.  I simply have them ask themselves: What do I really love?  People love the most random things when not under self-created pressure: to listen to people, to trek, to share knowledge, to play table-tennis, to negotiate, to create, to read and so on.  It ALWAYS ties to their natural talents and is invariably action-oriented.  In fact, people are so sure about what they love (when asked) that they can easily prioritize amongst what they love more and what they love less.  

Now the problem

The problem is people never ask themselves what they love.  Even if they ask, they are too afraid to listen to the answers.  Even if they listen, they hesitate to act on it.  Even if they do act, they worry about extracting commercial value soon.  Finally, they focus on creating material goods that they exchange for time. Then they exchange time to do what they love.  It's funny but this is how the cycle goes.

When we actively don't create space in our days for what we love, we resort to distractions that we well know are purposeless but do them anyways.  Think smoking, Facebook, TV, the regular drink, checking news websites, coffee, more coffee, LinkedIn updates, phone-a-friend, BBM, Skype, idle office banter, stock prices and several other fillers that help us getaway.  How come everything else seems to get our time except what we love?

Eventually, we change our work but end up in the same cycle again until we finally finish up.  The problem isn't the work, it's us.

There's time for love

Here's a simple way out.  It's so simple that you'll feel silly reading it.  Make a short list of things that make you happy.  Do them.  That's it.

In fact, do them everyday - at least one or more of these.  When you act on them, you are happy and your days are more fulfilled.  Don't question them.  Act in spite of the seeming loss of everything else.  There are two ways this would go.  You know what you love but don't act and splurge your time on everything else.  You know what you love and act on it at the cost of other things.  The former will give you momentary practical satisfaction but long-term hell through mediocrity.  The latter will give you short-term angst but long-term bliss in having spent your time usefully.

Making space

A friend recently asked me how I compartmentalize my activities (prompting this article).  The reality is I don't.  All I do is trade every hour carefully with something that I love doing.  And when I'm doing that I subtract everything else and create a lot of space around that activity.  Whether it's a client phone call or playing with my son or painting or scoping a new market - it's the same for me.  I love them all and I create space around it.  I don't let my phone, email, Skype, people, Internet dilute this precious space.  It's very difficult with our modern day distractions but I constantly try.  Creating space around an activity brings greater joy.  You are truly respecting the activity or the people associated with it by being fully there.  In its own way, it helps you move forward with ease.

*

When you ask most people what they want out of life, they say they want to be happy.  That's really simple.  Find what you love, do it and make space.

Print me a liver, darling

I recently ran into a computer programmer who was tinkering with what looked like a stripped down printer with a whitish blob that looked like hardened you-know-what.  Curious, I asked him what he was up to.  He was printing what would be or could be biological tissue.  Here's a suboptimal explanation of what I saw.

On one side of this bio hackerspace was an area to cultivate cells.  The interesting thing about cells is you just need one.  If it's a bacterium like E. Coli there's so much love going around that they multiply rapidly...1 becomes 2 becomes 4 becomes 8 becomes 16, 32, 64, 128, 248...you get the idea.  f(x) = 1 + 2x + 4x^2 + 8x^3....something...who cares, just fit any exponential equation you jive with but know that you can culture blobs of love.  They are usually found in our gut and smell like poop (don't try).  I also saw white-pink stem cells on a carrot that looked like the unshaven face of a friend I won't name.

Back to the printer.  What I saw was a combination of an undressed laser-jet printer with a cartridge full of cells, an Arduino micro-controller, a CD-disk drive with a slider and a petri dish to catch the droppings.  The micro-controller was programmed to control the print head and spit out cells on an array.  That's basically a printer printing cells according to design.  See it in action.

These are very early days.  So let's fast forward this a bit and imagine what could be printed.  If you print layer upon layer, you could be building a 3-D organic structure.  That structure could be skin or even a part of a much ethanol-laced liver.  That's what Organovo does and I learnt that Autodesk is developing CAD tools to help us print body parts.  Now the good news is unlike ink you don't need to waste much cell to print.  Print a bit and allow the rest to multiply.  Wonder what Mrs. Bobbit would do now.  Ahem.

Travails of Mister and Miss Furrow Face

Try this experiment.  Take a fresh trash bag, squish it and let it go.  It immediately displays a series of lines that didn't exist before.  These lines simply won't leave whatever you try.  It seems to have memory.  If you think about it, our face behaves much like a trash bag.  A thin layer of skin packing physical and emotional baggage.  Just like the bag, a face develops and maintains lines based on memory.  

About 43 muscles and 14 bones interplay to make the face express a variety of emotions: sadness, anger, disgust, fear, surprise and happiness.  Here's an easy tutorial of what goes into a face: bone, muscle, fat, and skin.  Muscle is indeed like rubber.  I learnt that people have been comparing biological tissues and rubber since 1880.  Skim through this amusing scientific paper comparing the two on a variety of physical properties such as nonlinearity, anisotropy, inelasticity, thermoelasticity and age-dependency.  Simply put, know that muscles stay flexible when used and stiffen when not.  As a tissue gets older, it tends to harden more easily.  And when a tissue dies, the muscle pretty much hardens up.  Think rubber tires.

Try another experiment.  Watch people on a street (zoologist Desmond Morris has the most interesting views on the topic).  You'll see people with singular facial expressions even when they are doing nothing.  The older people get, the more set are these expressions.  This is basically muscles and memory in action.  Every time you scowl/ twitch/ smile/ laugh, you are flexing your muscles well and creating memories for your face.  The longer the dominant expression, the longer its physical manifestation.  

So what do you do?  The next time you have an urge to create a line (unknowingly of course), take one slow breath (knowingly of course) and reset the expression.  Try it and you'll also notice that a physical reset actually causes an emotional reset - providing your system with a reboot.

*

Screw all this.  Just dab some skin cream and pump a memory-erasing toxin called Botulinum when needed.  That's what Cameron seems to do.

Blur your vision to get clarity

There's a simple tool I use while painting.  I blur my vision.  Try it.  Yes, that.  When you blur your vision, you can only see the essentials.  You see forms of objects, primary tones of colors, simple light and shadows.  You can't see details.  In a face for example, you can see the smudge of eyes, bridge of the nose, shape of the mouth, contours of the face, a hint of ears, and tufts of hair but not details such as the color and shape of eyes.  If you get these essentials wrong then whatever else you may try will not allow your painting to achieve its moment of truth.  I see several works of art that focus on details but get the form wrong including some very famous ones.  See this painting by Travancore artist Raja Ravi Varma - the detail is exquisite but the perspective of hands is simply wrong (why are both hands the same size when one is closer than the other?).  

I also see several businesses and products do the same.  For the longest time, I made the same mistakes in both art and business.  I was in a hurry to complete and therefore rushed to add detail.  More clients, more employees, more sales...just more without meaning.  Adding detail keeps you busy and creates a notion of success because you seem to be working hard.  However, if you introspect it slowly becomes clear that that success has no meaning.  Of course, someone out there will say good things about your painting but so what?  Your business will have growth but no meaning.

The benefit of getting the form right is that you create something that has a genuine shot at disrupting the norm.  Adding detail at that point pushes the model further and differentiates it strongly creating competitive advantage.  But this is hard, not just hard work.  It sometimes takes forever.  The exercise itself may appear futile and purpose-less because incomplete work is well...incomplete.

And then every so often we come across creations that get both the form and detail right to a surreal level - from Bang & Olufsen to the Seed Cathedral.  They are eons beyond the norm, super-achieving on both functionality and design.  Each element of detail brings out more meaning.  Overall, it creates a Hallelujah effect.  Its every experience makes you realize that it's all been worth it.

*

Blur away and get clarity.  Again and again.

Beginning of the end of MBA education

It'll be interesting to see if I'll get a black eye or a grin from fellow alumni board of governors for what am about to write.  Business Week says that the number of MBA applicants in 2012 were flat or down at top schools.  So why is demand for MBA education flat when there's an ever greater need of better management?  Let's explore.

MBA education is more than a 100 years old.  Tuck was the first school to offer a graduate management degree in 1900.  This was a time when the industrial age was in full swing - teddy bears were mass produced and there was massive job growth for typewriter secretaries.  The original MBA constituted a two year program covering accounting, statistics, banking and languages.  Other parts of the world followed quickly after World War II to be as industrialized as America.  A curriculum of core courses with electives became the norm during the second half of the century and since then we've mass produced MBAs (we manufacture about 100K MBAs a year) for humanity to consume.  

Today, differentiation among MBA schools is blurred.  Everyone talks much of the same thing - globalization, China, ethics, outsourcing, technology and so on.  Everyone offers similar outcomes - higher paying jobs in consulting, investment banking and other industries (for the rest of us).  If you don't believe me, do this experiment.  Go to the websites of top 10 schools and ask a 12 year old to spot easy differences other than colors.  Each business school tracks the other based on the hierarchy that Business Week buckets them in and tries to out-do the other.  I'm somehow reminded of toothpastes in a grocery aisle - there are more and more nuanced toothpastes but all I do with it is brush my teeth.  On why I think of toothpastes - read Different, an excellent book by Youngme Moon (an MBA professor who gently stepped out of the herd).

[STOP READING HERE if what am saying is offensive because I'm now planning to sound really stupid]

Spending time at NY Studio School and Singularity, made me wonder what I was doing there and eventually reflect on the future of MBA education.  Grounding in management fundamentals is important but I think it's time look ahead.

Diversity of disciplines

Managers of the future will need to be interdisciplinary to the point that they are as comfortable with grasping biology as they are with computer security.  This means that business schools will need to intersperse engineering, medicine, humanities and other disciplines into the curriculum - not as core courses but as points of departure to expose MBA students to real life.  Exposure to robotics will change perspective on inventory management.  Exposure to 3D printing will change perspective on China.  Exposure to synthetic biology will change perspective on disease management.  Exposure to sculpture will change perspective on business models.  Exposure to poetry will change perspective on human resources.  Aren't we supposed to learn all this at school?

I know what you are saying.  People go to business school to study business.  My only response is - then why do we end up doing all the other stuff after school?

A lot more in a lot less

Life used to change every 20-25 years.  Most of the stuff that our lives depend on today (smart phones that talk to you, tablets that you don't eat, intelligent learning thermostats, Star Trek-like video calls and so on) didn't exist 10 years ago.  Given the exponential growth of technologies, I foresee that life will now change every 5 years.  

In this context, think about what we do in business schools.  We teach case studies that can't really compete with a live wiki on the topic, leave alone a Bing search.  Can't we talk about Boeing's Dreamliner mess versus Southwest Airlines happy employees all the time?  When MBAs complete their education, they are already not relevant.  Plus they expect high salaries to pay off their high student loans.

This university condenses 300 lectures into an intense 10 week program.  Their executive programs have 25% new information every few months.  The programs are run by 5 core people (not a typo).  At business schools, we need to be able to provide a lot more in a lot less time to stay relevant.  While the case study method is fine for teaching fundamentals, I think it's time to move on. 

ExOs

I first heard the term Exponential Organizations (ExOs) from Salim Ismail.  He showed several examples of organizations run by a small groups of multi-skilled people managing enormous scale with the help of technology.  What if there's no role of a CEO or CFO in the future?  What if there is a small group of people executing diverse tasks?  What if micro-tasking tools like CrowdFlower help managers engage millions of workers globally on demand?  What if organizations don't have a mass of employees but become smaller, agile groups of individuals with real names?  Will MBAs be equipped to swallow their egos and handle ExOs?  

Doing and failing

I visited TechShop where regular people were building extraordinary things by tinkering - the world's fastest electric motorcycle and a flying jet-pack are indeed extraordinarily ripe for business.  At Biocurious, I met a computer programmer who used a laser-jet printer, a CD disk drive and an Arduino processor to print cells on an array.  The teachers in both these environments allowed students to constantly tinker and fail.  This allowed people to fearlessly build interesting things without a business objective.  We don't let students fail in business school - we give them a Low Pass.  

Managers of the future need "doing and failing" experience earlier on because a lot more has to be done with a lot less.  Business schools will need a lab of sorts that let people "do" things versus sit and learn.  I see a lot of managers who are scared to get their hands dirty.  They can run analyze numbers, conduct meetings and provide insight but can they "do-and-fail" directly?  Would they think of prototyping differently by using 3D printers?  Would they balk at printing skin?

Invest in the right brain

I met Jeremy Howard who built this ultra-cool company called Kaggle that hosts competitions for data scientists.  The gods of algorithms are pushing heavy weight out there to solve complex business problems.  It'll become more important for managers to ask analytically interesting questions than being able to run numbers themselves.  Artificial Intelligence is advancing at such a rapid pace that machines will soon do whatever we want them to do.  MBAs need to know what they want done.  To get those ideas, their creative brains need to be nurtured.  We've done an excellent job churning out reams of analytically-oriented people during the last 100 years.  What we now need are also right-brained people who can tame AI beasts.

*

[ARE YOU STILL THERE?]

Before an evil spreadsheet comes calling, feed your brain with something vague and interesting.

What my DNA tasted like?

One day back at Singularity U, we had a visit from the wonderful folks at Biocurious (a bio hackerspace) to help us extract our own DNA.  Ever since I read a note by Richard Preston (who also climbs redwood trees) on how his DNA tasted several years ago, I've been oddly curious to slurp my own gooey.

The process of extraction is simple.  You lyse the cells in your cheeks and degrade the protein with protease (a salty mixture).  Pour the now cell-adulterated mixture into a test tube and invert it a few times.  Baby-it by warming the tube with your hand for a few minutes, which breaks down proteins.  Add ethanol to the mixture and sit still for 5 minutes.  Your DNA will begin to precipitate.  Inverting the tube again will help DNA blobs get together.  You can then use a pipette to suck your white gooey out.

So how does it taste anyways?
Insipid but on the side of salty.  Vaguely sharp.  I felt a bit shy putting it in my mouth publicly.  So I found a quiet spot where no one was looking, extracted some gooey with a pipette and put the stuff in my mouth.  It was slippery and moved around and disappeared before I knew it.

More than the taste, it was screwy to think that my DNA - genetic instructions passed down to me by who-knows-who from eons ago were sucked out and put back in.  And where did it finally go, I wonder?  My gut of course.  

*

Here's a wonderful document on how to extract your DNA.  You can buy a Genes in a Bottle kit here and play with your kid or yourself.  Just don't leave the stuff lying around...unless you'd love to see a Mini-Me somewhere in the future.  Of course, you can put it in your mouth.

A litmus test to find what you love

Often there are more questions about what we love than what we don't.  We seem to be very sure of what we dislike - things, people, habits, situations and so on.  But we are less sure about what we like.  

Here's the simple litmus test to know whether something has any hope of your love.  It has the innate ability to pause all your other thoughts.  That's it.  Even for a few moments, if you are able to get into a zone where nothing else exists then you've just met what you love.  

There are two main variables that skew this: time and space.  Time affects all things.  What we used to love, we now don't and what we now love, we didn't before.  Similarly, how close or how far impacts your interest.

Things that pause you

There are certain things that have the power to overcome all variables and simply bring the chatterbox inside to a halt.  

These experiences engage you and draw you in more and more.  You can't stop yourself.  You never have to justify to yourself why you are doing it.  You almost never think about time.  For me, it's usually when am creating something.  It doesn't matter what am creating or where - a product, a team, a painting, a write-up.  I almost never know the time - it flows like water.  I get restless when someone interrupts me.  I want to get back to it again and again.  The days I create sincerely are my happiest and I sleep very well at night.  Everything feels a little light.  You know exactly what am talking about because we all have those days.  

The funny thing is these things happen every other day but our mind tends to overlook them.  When we do notice them, we constantly question them.  We even educate ourselves to be a little practical because it doesn't exactly fit into our grand plan.  Others tell us that we are irrational because it doesn't fit into our plan.  Moreover, if you did the impractical stuff then other people would feel very lonely out there.  Very rarely do we question the grand plan itself because most of the time the plan has borrowed ideas of other people.  It would be too silly to admit to ourselves but inside we know this. (How many of us (leave alone countries) realize when it comes to measuring money that the concept of GDP - a whole country's money - is only 75 years old?) And when it does happen - the grand plan that is - it's not exactly what we want.  So what's the problem?  If this were a mathematical equation, now's the time to say hence proved - your little grand plan didn't include what you love.

*

So the next time you pause just become aware without questioning it.  Because these are exactly what you are searching for whether in a job or in people or even in a book.  Often people change situations to find things when all they have to do is conduct this litmus test.  However, even the pH balance of a litmus paper has to be first neutral before using it to test for acidity.  Therefore, neutrality must apply to our brains before we try pouring something on it.  Meditation is an interesting start and at another level it can pretty much pause all variables making you find love in the most mundane.  Ok, at least go for a run.  If all else fails simply do the activity that you think paused you.  You'll be surprised, it'll pause you again and perhaps you'll smile uncomfortably now because one little part of you will tell you, you are stupid.  Bingo.  You've found what you need.

Relax.  For now, just know that there's an easy way to find what you love.

Why Facebook will be the new Yahoo! unless...

I got off Facebook permanently this week.  Ahem.  I thought it'll be fun to disconnect with some flare and therefore, I created an event inviting people to delete their accounts along with me on a given day.  About 4% said yes and another 2% said may be.  I don't know who finally did but it was an interesting experiment that demoed that there were people who had had enough.

Back in 2007 with a prod from my chaddi dost Ram Papatla, I envisioned a world of mega platforms - such as Google, Amazon, Yahoo! and Microsoft - converging Social and Business Collaboration, Telecom and Internet Connectivity and Do-It-Yourself and Architecture Computing.  This model was published in the book New Age of Innovation (by C.K. Prahalad and M.S. Krishnan) in 2008.  Today, everyone has entered everyone else's bedrooms and Google, Apple, Amazon have become these mega platforms.  Yahoo! is busy fixing household issues and Microsoft seems to be figuring things out now.  

Today, I see a different world where Facebook will be the new Yahoo! and or even AOL (which has more interesting acquired businesses such as The Huffington Post and Moviefone than a core business) unless it does things differently.  Let's see what this means.

Around but with no meaning

People may not get off Facebook like I did but they will use it more as a login tool, an address book and a photo log - exactly the way they use Yahoo! now.  AOL makes $2B in revenues and Yahoo! makes $5B but we can't say that these companies really have sustained impact.  (Just fyi, FB makes $3.7B).

Think of the time that we first had a phone connection, an email, a cell phone.  What did we do?  We got in touch with everybody we knew because we could.  My parents still have a brown leather diary that has everyone's phone numbers in it with a few addresses.  It's fat with all kinds of other papers and notes in between.  It reminds me of FB and its friendly apps.

Social media is for your grandpa

I don't know any of my teenage cousins who use Facebook like they used to.  Why?  Because all their grandpas are in there (no offense grandpas - my dad is one).  When we were kids we used to have our own hangouts that other people never frequented.  When they finally did, it became uncool and we eventually found a new dig.

More importantly, the world has changed in the last five years.  There has been a grotesque amount of useless content that's been created just because we could.  90% of it makes you barf.  What people want is less and less.  And once the early adopters who actually make life so cool have moved on, the rest of us will follow.

See Path - a new kind of social/ location mobile network that helps you remember life in a more close-knit way.  Or see Pair for just the two of you (you can even thumbkiss - whatever that is).  If you want to hangout with a small group of friends then perhaps there's Ourspot.  All these are early experiments but it's clear that the shift has occurred.

Design is a niche.  Ya, right.

Ok sorry FB - your design is blue.  I appreciate all the neat little features like hitting enter to post something but the overall design - it's not Fab.  And Fab, Tumblr and Airbnb is where the world has moved on to and global aesthetics have shifted to better design expectations.

Yes I know you'll say you bought Instagram - it's nice but it's like doing what AOL did by buying The Huffington Post.  When Huffington became the first online-only daily to win a Pulitzer - they did, really not AOL.  If people know that AOL owned Huffington Post, they would read it less.  AOL knows this and therefore you don't see it on the home page.

*

So what should Facebook do now?

Thank its stars for the mega database of people and their lives while it has it and make a dramatic shift in a new direction.  Inorganically, it must continue to buy other interesting companies with the money it has and while it has it.  These don't need to be in social media.  If it buys Whatsapp, which all Blackberry grandpas (again, no offense to grandpas or Blackberry users or both) got on to when they realized that no one's really on BBM anymore.  What do you think will happen when FB buys Whatsapp?  Exactly what happens when everybody and their cousin shows up at your pool party.  FB must buy companies in disconnected areas.  While investors would cry hoarse saying it lacks a unified strategy, it would create assets that will keep it safe and less desperate.  

FB needs to accept that social media has changed forever and it will never have the run that it has had thus far.  It's like being excited that everyone's now got a phone.  Ok, get over it - they do and that's that, life moves on.  It must stop coercing others to write apps and games on it.  They won't.  Not so much because, I mean...c'mon, who wants to play Farmville.

Facebook needs to also move in other directions that are different but aligned with its technical and cultural strengths.  For example, FB must build augmented intelligence tools to make things more intelligent and connected - a social network of things versus a social network of people.  It has the DNA - all it needs is the balls.

*

So what am I using to poke friends now?  Email.

What sculpture taught me about business

My thoughts stem from a sculpture atelier program that I attended with Bruce at the NY Studio School a few years ago.  I used those ideas in business and subsequently in product design with interesting outcomes.

Before getting started, we need to understand what it means for an object to be plastic in art.

What is plastic consciousness?

Plastic consciousness in art is the ability to see things with depth and perspective - as they are and not as flattened images that we think they should be.  For example, when we see a table - our eyes don't actually see a rectangular structure that our mind keeps saying that it is.  Therefore when we draw a table, we tend to draw rectangular structures versus drawing truthfully (with elongated disproportionate edges).  Study Van Gogh's Bedroom in Arles - one side of the bed looks monstrously bigger than the other side and the chair looks much smaller than it should be.  Our mind tells us that this is stupid.  But it's not.  It's the truth and how our eyes actually do see things.

The damage of education

Plastic consciousness is a very primitive inborn skill.  Our eyes see with depth.  Our ears hear distance.  Our mind is where the problem is.  It tells us that we should be seeing something in a certain way.  It's our education that's at fault because it constantly damages our consciousness making us more analytically intelligent but less truthful.

This damage extends to business or product design.  We hesitate to apply what we know is the truth because our mind interferes with what we are actually seeing or hearing.  It applies its lovely left-brained thinking to what is staring at us in the face.  For example, you may know inside that it's time to change an aspect of work but the mind steps in to explain why not doing so is beneficial.  

The idea is therefore to ignore the mind for awhile and listen closely to what is in front of us without judging based on past damage.

Space is a dialogue

In painting, an object is formed not just by itself but by the space around it.  Space is the dialogue between two objects.  The environment pushes and shapes the object and the object changes the environment forever.  Sometimes when I know I'm screwing up, I take the brush and work on the space around the object and quite magically the object emerges in the painting.  

In business, you can work all you want to sell the hard way.  But you can also pause and change the environment surrounding the sale.  Simply making the space around the object more conducive to buying will change the perspective of the object that's itching to be sold.  Try it.

Change your clay if you have to

I worked for hours one day on a bust of clay.  Bruce quietly came from behind and crushed it with a plank of wood.  I got irritated though I suppressed it (you can't get upset with Bruce - he's always right).  He said, you can't build a sculpture with this kind of clay for how many ever hours you try.  Change your clay.

We sometimes struggle with the wrong clay in business.  Sometimes, it's best to accept that your clay is either too soft or too hard and simply change it.

Don't fake it

There was this other time when I vigorously squeezed my clay around creating what - I really don't know.  Bruce walked with hands behind his back and said, don't fake it.  Then he continued, do it for the right reasons - the art itself is what matters, the rest is BS.

When I see people struggling for a certain position, a certain salary, a certain political comfort, a certain smartphone...a certain whatever.  None of that is really work.  Don't fake it...do it for the right reasons.

Always be in sketch mode

We are always in a hurry to finish up.  When we finish something that's what it is - finished.  In Regenesis, the authors write that our genome is older than our oldest ancestor and yet fresher than a newborn baby and has covered the planet with descendants a billion times a billion times a billion over (10^27).  Nature never finishes up - it's always in sketch mode.  Cells routinely die everyday to create new cells.

The only work I did that Bruce ever liked was what I thought was completely incomplete.  He said, always be in sketch mode.  In product development, we always aim for completion.  We want to ship.  We are interested in the other things that come after shipping.  But sketch-mode allows you to get the fundamental form right.  And when you know that you'll never finish, you'll be a little humble about what your product can do because there will always be more to do.

There are no morals

There are are no morals in art.  There's no right or wrong.  What's right for someone is wrong for another.  It's the same with product design.  If you ignore everyone else's morals and simply focus on your own then you have some chance of creating something unique that will achieve its moment of truth.  Not from someone else's point of view and not even from your rational brain's point of view but something deeper for which you require no justification.

When you build things this way, it's more truthful, more correct and it creates harmony inside and some how others will also perceive this congruity.

*

There are only two states of matter: interesting and boring.  There's no third state.  What you develop whether it's a business or a product or a work of art can either be interesting to you or boring.  Anything interesting has some chance of a truthful existence.  Everything else is compromise.  Create something interesting.

Augmented medical intelligence and other stories

The following message was initially sent as part of my new year greeting to friends and colleagues prompting requests that I keep them posted on my thoughts. I owe credit to the many people (instructors and attendees) I conversed with at Singularity U for the synthesis of this message.

*

Wanted to wish you a wonderful 2013 and use the opportunity to share a few thoughts.

Q) In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half of the lake? (answer below)

*

This past quarter, I attended an executive program at Singularity University (SU) and experienced a future that is not yet evenly distributed - but it soon will. SU has the objective of generating ideas that will impact a billion people or more over the next decade. Here are 8 developments that I experienced as it relates to accessing or giving medical care in the very near future.

1) Prescribing an app:

With 5.3B mobile users, doctors are soon expected to prescribe not just drugs but apps. For example, if a patient has to follow a certain diet regimen - it would be prescribed as an app that tracks patient compliance daily and uploads into the medical record. Not just that, dropping cost of sensors is spurring a slew of medical applications. See FDA approved Proteus ingestible sensors that tracks and informs doctors whether a pill has been taken. It uses digestive juices to produce voltage and therefore needs no batteries. SkinVision mobile app detects early changes in skin and helps patients send a photo and receive instant dermatology analysis.

2) DNA sequencing will drop to less than $1,000 by next year:

Over the next five years, it's expected that patients will routinely have their DNA sequenced and therefore will include it as part of their health record. This might mean that patients will expect their doctors to read, understand, explain and act on the implications of their sequenced DNA. I met programmers who were tinkering with ATCG and writing higher-level gene-programming languages just as they did a few decades ago with computer programming. This would take us into the bizarre world of gene synthesis (imagine we could program DNA and get a lab to ship it back). This recent book Regenesis was written in DNA (yes, in DNA).

3) 3D printing of drugs:

At NextServices, we recently printed a green shoe using a $1,200 3D printer called Cubify. Autodesk and Organovo are printing artificial limbs. Modern Meadow is printing meat and leather. Soon, a physician would eRx a prescription and patients would print their drugs at home.

4) Ubiquity of monitoring devices:

Using devices such as Fitbit to Basis to Jawbone, more and more patients are tracking foot steps to heart rate to BP to insulin readings often and sometimes continuously (this is now called the Quantified Self movement). iBGStar is a Glucose meter integrated with the iPhone. Withings measures BP and weight and integrates with the iPad. AliveCor connects to the iPhone and provides an EKG. Zio is a cardiac rhythm monitor that tracks for 14 days continuously. Zeo is a sleep monitor. Internet of things is allowing these devices to upload data continuously to the cloud. This in turn, creates a dynamic health record (v/s static) and changing care from episodic and periodic to continuous and proactive.

5) Medical data explosion:

If yesterday, a patient had 50MB of imaging data (or 50 books), tomorrow she would have 1 terrabyte data (or 800,000 books). This would impact procedures such as colonoscopy where virtual colonoscopy aided with artificial intelligence readers will provide much more reliable analysis than traditional colonoscopy.

6) Robots and Robotic surgery:

I operated the da Vinci unit at Intuitive Surgical's headquarters. It was a shocker to find the ease and clarity with which a lay person could operate the unit for the first time. It combines augmented reality, decision support, remote mentoring and performs a scarless surgery. Separately, it's expected that every household will soon have 10-20 robots (big and small). I was at a gathering where one of the panelists virtually partied via a Beam telepresence robot. Think if you would make hospital calls using telepresence. My ultimate mobile experience was when I sat in Google's self-driving car that's legal in the states of California and Nevada. See its first customer Steve Mahan. Would this change how we think about ambulance?

7) X-Prize and the medical tricorder:

The Qualcomm Tricorder X Prize is a $10M prize for a team that creates a 5 pound portable medical device that can diagnose 15 medical conditions better than a group of board certified physicians by 2015-16. If this were to become a reality, patients will not approach doctors for basic diagnoses (it's a different question whether that would be the right thing to do). I met people from Scanadu, the company that is developing a tricorder. Lab-on-a-chip technology that enables remote testing is becoming more and more a reality (see Cellscope). Over the decade, in-person visits are expected to drop by 50% due acceleration of these developments.

8) Augmented Medical Intelligence:

We have more computing power in an iPhone than the Apollo guidance computer that put a man on the moon. Recently, IBM's Watson won Jeopardy. It can read 200million papers in 3 seconds, monitor real-time articles and access a variety of information from electronic records to genomics to peer-reviewed publications. Watson is even going to Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine. Potentially, this knowledge can be converted to a specific diagnosis accessible by a smartphone search. A physician in the near future would need augmented intelligence to perform daily tasks just as we need glasses today to see better.

More?

I'm happy to share additional and detailed information if you are interested in one or more of these developments.

*

A) By the way, it takes 47 days to cover half the lake. By the next day, the patch would cover the entire lake.

The overarching message is the impact of how quickly these exponential developments could become a reality. If on the 47th day, we think linearly that we still have half the amount of time - we would be dead wrong. The game ends tomorrow.