Raahul Seshadri

Society prescribes what you "must" and "must not" do in many ways: schools, companies, social groups, etc. It also indoctrinates that your opinion, dreams, ambitions, and hopes don't matter. As I've stated before, posing problems is at a higher level of creativity than merely solving problems posed by others. Cars,

We like categorizing things: 3 types of innovations, 5 types of methodologies, 10 types of styles, ad infinitum. Most of them waste time that's better spent on meaningful goals. Consider a kid who wants to play soccer. "You first need to understand the different types of games, and where soccer

Is the wheel an invention? What about fire, airplanes, and chemicals? How can you tell whether something's an invention or a discovery? Well, you don't have to. Discovery seems like passive observation, but to discover beyond the obvious, you have to actively examine. And methods of examination–microscopes, wind tunnels,

The conventional wisdom says, "create something valuable." But good ideas still remain difficult to find. Let's try creating something worthless instead. What do you think will happen? If you create something and it's valuable to you, you might not exchange it for something else. We see this in trade secrets,

"We missed the deadline because we chose Java instead of Python. I warned management repeatedly about this." This familiar argument sounds logical, but its premise is deeply flawed, if you can see it. What the person is claiming to prove is a double implication: "a project can miss a deadline

Direction matters more than mere destination. The primary purpose of scientific and technological research is advancement. Advancement is a direction, not a destination, for every discovery and invention is a building block.

A team's success depends on its coherence, sometimes regardless of what they're coherent on. Coherence means that a team agrees on a choice: be it about which version control or programming language to use. The actual choice might not even be that important. For example, it's important for soccer players

"It doesn't sound simple" is often used to discard good ideas; the real reason being the unwillingness to put the effort to understand. Easy and difficult are about your effort and convenience. Simple and complex are about your degree of understanding. The reality is, understanding the simplicity of something can

"Never be the smartest person in the room," is an advice meant to keep you on your toes. As with all popular advices, this one's also flawed. The logic behind that advice is: if you're smarter than everyone, then there's no one to challenge you with new ideas. However, wouldn't

Is continuous learning reading blog posts, watching videos, and collecting certificates? There's one more way. Focusing on a single subject eventually leads to a lot of talking instead of creating something. Reading Wikipedia (or any other encyclopaedia) helps widen your gaze: jumping around a lot of topics rather than being

Simplicity is desirable, yet you've often seen people taking simplicity too far. What's really happening there? Simplicity involves finding the best explanation with the fewest assumptions. Complexity involves assuming unimportant things are important; naivety embraces ignoring important details. The way to aim for simplicity is to move away from unwarranted

Real wealth is what you can buy using currency; not currency itself. One must aim to provide 10x the value for every dollar earned. But why do something seemingly preposterous? Consider a town with 100 units of currency backed by one book, one machine, and a farm. These assets are

Finding and solving problems is one half of the coin. If you're bored or unchallenged at work, you should embrace the other half: creating problems. Innovations happen every day: web frameworks, social networks, etc. A person formulates a problem and creates a solution. If others to agree with the problem

People avoid taking "big actions" for fear of "big failures." But what makes a failure big or small? Truthfully, it doesn't matter. When people talk about a "big" or "small" failure, they refer to the magnitude of effort, not the severeness of the consequences. Minor actions too can cause catastrophic

Hard work is preached, but it alone does not lead to success. That's because people tend to play the "effort game" despite an abundance of "thinking games." An effort game has a well-defined public plan. People then compete for "who can put the most effort?" Examples could be completing all

Let's say one's goal is a "successful book." But getting featured in a "prominent journal" is a vanity goal: it could be a different journal representing success tomorrow. The process behind a successful book remains similar. But it's output format, the "success event," the topic, can all change with time.

"Be so good that companies compete to hire you," said the principal during our undergraduate orientation. Unfortunately, that's a very average result. If you lack skills, you don't get hired. However, if you're employable everywhere, then you probably have "the most agreeable skills." Skills that almost all companies can understand:

Do you get anxious playing "catch-up with all that knowledge?" It seems that if you're not attentive, you'll be left behind. But that's not true. First principles don't change: they help interpet information. Day-to-day information, however, have a short shelf-life. Even if you miss them today, there's going to be

Once upon a time, everything fit in one machine. To scale, we then divided tasks by function: databases and applications. Today, we're moving away from the client-server model to semantic units of co-located data/compute. As Conway predicted, we see the same change in organizational structures. Startups are initially amorphous:

We celebrate efforts: either the amount of calories burned, or the amount of unpleasantness dealth with. No one really looks at "the plan." The most myopic view is fixating on events; companies becoming unicorns, or the launch of a big product, etc. An entrepreneur, however, discerns the long timeline of

Jobs become boring because they allow you to do only what's convenient, regardless of whether it's valuable or useful. A different approach can give new life to work. Instead of asking, "what can I easily do?," one can ask, "what is a valuable result to achieve?" It doesn't matter whether

What's played is a guitar, yet what's heard is music. What's written is code, yet what's used is software. What's given is a speech, yet what's received is inspiration. The bridge from guitar to music, code to software, speech to inspiration, is imagination. Yet we tend to fixate on technical

Programmers like solving real-world problems as opposed to made-up ones. A useful 10-line bash script is more fun to write than the most complex Leet code challenge. Why is that? Real-world problems have lots of participants in different roles, thus allowing us to make a bigger impact. We innately feel

Meetings seem excessive when everything is going well, but when things go south, silence becomes the norm. What's then the right amount of meetings? Communicating with people is also work. One cannot create software without communicating with a computer, for example. Good communication brings coordination and coherence. Bad communication is

Strategy is often defined as the "long-term" while tactic as the "short-term," especially in chess circles. But that definition is incorrect. Tactics are not always short-term. In chess, it is possible to have a 20-move tactic– especially in an end-game. That's not "short" in terms of moves. Strategies are not