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niranting

Diwali 2019: Annual Letter

I wanted to drop by and wish you a very Happy Diwali!

This is an annual email that I write to say thanks to mentors, friends, allies - everyone who has chipped in sculpt a better me.

So that is what I'll begin with: Thanks a ton for being there for me!

Also, checkout the 2018 edition of the annual email in attachment if you're curious :)

Moving onto the least comfortable piece, talking about myself:

Health

This has been a year of regression. For instance:

  • My BMI has slipped from 30 to 33 (higher is worse), gained about 7 kgs
  • Have worked out less than 2000 minutes (was 5000 minutes last year)
  • Have made tremendous unmeasured progress in managing my long term asthma, now I can frequently run up 2 floors without noticing that I did

Wealth

  • I was trying to invest in things other than mutual funds. Well, I've lost 25% of whatever I’ve invested in stocks (via smallcase) since then
  • I hired a financial advisor, which was a net loss making deal due to the fees, but helped me form better habits. Financial advisor in that sense are like gym trainers, more than the exercise - their main value addition is in following up
  • I’ve reduced my Fixed Deposit and Recurring Deposit investments to 0% of my savings
  • I’m diversifying my folio to a mix of index and bond funds now - this is still work in progress

Learning and Reading

Last year, I wrote how I was trying to think and dream better. Well, that has been a bust. The intent was to form a mental model, a scaffold of habits and information on which I could add new information and refine the scaffold itself.

This has been slower than I’d have guessed.

Intentionally, I read less books this year. I did read a lot more modern essays (blogs?) ranging from Peter Drucker, Marc Andressen, Naval Ravikant, and surprisingly boring, a former Coal India Chairman. I also re-read a couple of books like Courage to Be Disliked and Effective Engineer.

I also spent an unhealthy time reading beginner content on seemingly irrelevant topics like Policy making and Human Capital. Here is my favourite cross-topic discovery so far: Talent vs Luck: The role of randomness in success and failure.

Work

Since last Diwali, I quit Soroco and moved to Verloop.io - a really small, pre-Product Market Fit, loss-making business. I strongly considered a very enticing data science role at an investment bank. I finally leaned away from it, making a financially very expensive gut call.

The role here is challenging in two very important ways:

  • Autonomy: There is a much higher degree of autonomy on how I prioritize tasks and that has been scarier than I’d thought
  • Leading: I also hired 3 Machine Learning engineers who now work with me

The thing that could unlock 10x value? Technical and Learning-to-Manage Mentorship: Something I could really use a lot of help on, is critically missing.

The other welcome change is in how anxious I am about work: I am not! I am almost always excited to go work.

Work Adjacent

  • Public Speaking: I was invited to speak at PyCon India 2019 - India’s top conference on the Python programming language
  • Open Source: I’ve continued to maintain Awesome-NLP for years now. It now has over 9 thousand stars and 80+ contributors now. It’s officially recommended by Stanford to their Deep Learning students now.

What's Next?

  1. Writing and Tact

I suspect more knowledge workers in 20s should invest in learning how to communicate via either public speaking or writing. My chosen medium will probably be writing. I intend to write about a select list of topics: technology and how it has shaped our choices.

Owing partly to how I grew up, my default communication style has been confrontational. I'll incorporate a lot more tact, grace and consideration in the years ahead. Be more Kabira.

  1. Chase external validation

My professional and personal framework so far been focused internally. I did not value traditional credentials like degrees, grades, that exclusive college club and so on very highly. In hindsight, this was a bad career decision.

External validation is what sets apart sustainable, long term careers from short one-trick wonders. This mindset shift will be hard. And will probably be a long 5-15 year journey, and I’ll keep you posted - unless you want me to stop. Just let me know 🙂

Till then, Happy Diwali and a Happy New Year!

Best, Nirant

Strong Beliefs, Loosely Held

On Death

  • Is usually better the sooner it happens. Just like it’s best to retire from your cricket career at your peak for your own sake, it’s best to die when you are at your peak. You just might become Father of the Nation.

  • No one wishes that they’d accomplished less on their death beds. You might hear that no one wishes that they’d worked more. That’s right too. And there in lies the great human stupidity. You can’t hope to accomplish without working more. You might accomplish less despite working more.

This is also my answer for what I think is true, but almost no one agrees with me (from Peter Thiel’s Zero to One)

  • No one (with as many safety nets as me) would wish that they’d take less risks in their 20s. Cool people (like cool companies) are polite, go against less empathetic institutions and take risks (h/t Jeff Bezos)

On Purpose of Life

  • There is no higher purpose. Why would a microscopic life from a floating blue speck in the dark cold space have a higher purpose? It’s arrogant to assume otherwise

  • Serve the man next to you, then the one next to him and so on

  • Follow the Paradoxical Commandments, not because they help, but follow them anyway.

On Philosophy of Life

  • Options, choices are net bad. Decisions are good. Defaults are better. Burn your bridges. All-you-can eat buffets are scams. Having good looks or being visibly rich is a dating disadvantage because it creates options.

  • When in doubt, look for answers from the dead: Sufis, Stoics, Mystics, and Buddhists.

  • Eastern philosophy is more tolerable than Western philosophy. Here is how they contrast

  • Simple systems that fail at edges beat complicated systems that can handle edge cases. As in engineering, so in life. Regret minimization framework (h/t Jeff Bezos) seems like the best candidate and I am testing it as I write this uncomfortably honest piece

On Money

  • Time value of money is underrated

  • Money is like sex. It’s good to have a lot of it when you are young. That still won’t fill the hole left in your heart by not having a philosophy

  • If you’ve money, invest in your learning by paying for coffees with smarter people. Books, blogs, and those Coursera courses are a slow learning curve

On Work-Life Balance

An older version of this lives on Medium

Diwali 2018: Annual Letter

How are you?

I send these letters every year. This is a way for me to send thanks to all the mentors and friends who've been part of my journey so far. And I wanted to drop by and say

Happy Diwali :)

What is up with you? Is there something I can do for you?

For what is up with me?

Health & Wealth

Health

Since the beginning of this year, I have tried 'building better healthy habits'. Progress so far:

  1. Have spent 5000+ minutes working out
  2. Improved my BMI from 32.4 to 30.1 (lost 7 kg)

I am going to spend the next 12-24 months on health. Particularly learning to manage my allergy and asthmatic conditions better. This will be my top non-work priority.

Work

A Year with Soroco I completed a year with Soroco. I have a sense that my strengths are probably not in core AI/software. Yet to figure out where they are. What do you think?

Reading (Learning?)

Last year, I wrote how When Breath Becomes Air has been very influential to me. This year, I've been into online blogs such as:

  • Thinking Better: Farnam Street (mental models), Morgan Housel (Different Kinds of Smart), Ribbon Farm (Premium Mediocre), Derek Sivers (Obvious to You, Amazing to Others) - which resulted in me contributing to open source
  • Dreaming Better: I binge-read through a few books by author's like Dushka Zapata, and Javed Akhtar. Reading Hindi, specially poetry - strung a new chord with me. It instantly brought black flashes of memory fro my early teens which I had all but forgotten. If you have any scifi recommendations - I'd love to read 1-2 this year.

The other essay which I mentioned last year was The Case Against Work Life Balance. The core idea? As long as you're fit, it's better to strive to improve work to the point where it fills your life with contentment. An year of experimentation later - I have a better handle of when this may or may not apply. It seems to be mostly true, except when it's not.

Outside Work

Owing to about 2% better mental discipline and focus, I had a lot more free cycles since March. This resulted in me spending less time with my phone (and laptop) but mostly thinking deeply and creating something:

  • Economics Nobel Laureate, Dr. Paul M Romer (2018) found my notes on programming tools helpful (link to his Tweet)
  • Writing a book on Natural Language Processing, for software engineers - and comes out before Christmas on Amazon!
  • Won an International Fellowship with Fast AI for their advanced AI (deep learning) course

Few more small wins slightly more technical:

  • Won the first ever Natural Language Processing themed Kaggle Kernel award - that's about $500 in cash, $390 in software (Twitter link)
  • State of the Art results on Language Modeling for Hindi: Github Repo
  • Finished in Top 10 at the Global AI for Education Hackathon (link)
  • Lead Maintainer to the Github's Official Natural Language Processing Repo, featured in their ML Collection too (NLP Repo link, ML Collection link)

What's Next?

I'm still working out the chinks, on the wetware that I am - and I'm eager to hear any feedback that you might've.

Cheers, Nirant