We are taught from childhood that “no pain, no gain”, emphasizing the importance of spending time and effort to achieve results. Once we grow up, we encounter self-help books that teach us to pivot towards working “smart”, not just “hard” and present their own theories and practices to make their point. All of them are based on the author’s personal experiences and beliefs, and we can benefit by learning from them and customizing for ourselves. One such book that stuck a chord with me is “Deep Work” by Cal Newport. Just as I finished the chapter on Rule #1 – Work Deeply, I was able to connect my learnings to a challenge my son wanted help with and immediately wrote this blog post with my thoughts.

Let me start with references from the book, followed by my inferences that will explain the picture above.

• Roy Baumeister on willpower: You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it.
• Ritualize: To make the most out of your deep work sessions, build rituals of the same level of strictness and idiosyncrasy. These rituals will minimize the friction in transition to depth, allowing us to go deep more easily and stay in that state longer.
• 4DX: The 4 disciplines of execution (abbreviated 4DX) is based on the fundamental premise that execution is more difficult than strategizing. It helps address the gap between what needs to be done (strategy) and how to do it (execution):
  • Discipline #1: Focus on the Wildly Important – Ironically, the more you try to do by pushing too hard, the less you accomplish. So, execution should be aimed at a small number of “wildly important goals”.
  • Discipline #2: Act on the Lead Measures – There are two types of measures for success – lag measures and lead measures. Lag measures describe the thing you are ultimately trying to improve while lead measures focus on the new behaviors that will drive success on the lag measures. The problem with lag measures is that they come too late to change your behavior. So, start with acting on lead measures.
  • Discipline #3: Keep a Compelling Scoreboard – An always visible scoreboard creates a sense of competition that drives us to focus on these measures, even when other demands vie for our attention. It also provides a reinforcing source of motivation. Finally, it allows us to recalibrate expectations as required to achieve what is wildly important (like an agile burndown chart will help the team recalibrate efforts required to meet sprint goals).
  • Discipline #4: Create a Cadence of Accountability – A periodic review of scoreboard helps us to review progress towards lag measures and pivot as required in case the progress does not really converge towards producing the ultimate results expected.
• Be Lazy: Tim Kreider in his “The Busy Trap” blog says – “I am not busy. I am the laziest ambitious person I know” and goes on to explain “Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration — it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done“. So, periodic shutdown from work will enhance our ability to produce valuable output due to the following reasons:
  • Reason #1: Downtime aids insight – Unconscious Thought Theory (UTT) posits that the unconscious mind is capable of performing tasks outside of one’s awareness, and that unconscious thought (UT) is better at solving complex tasks. The implication of this line of research is that providing your conscious brain time to rest enables your unconscious mind to take a shift sorting through your most complex professional challenges.
  • Reason #2: Downtime helps recharge the energy needed to work deeply – Attention Restoration Theory (ART) asserts that people can concentrate better after spending time in nature, or even looking at scenes of nature. The core mechanism of this theory is the idea that you can restore your ability to direct your attention if you give this activity a rest.
  • Reason #3: The work that regular downtime replaces is usually not that important – Working in information technology field for US multinationals from India means ones evening is core work time, attending meetings and discussions during the limited time zone “overlap” available. So, I replaced “evening downtime” with “regular downtime”, which for me is typically a few hours every morning when I go for my morning run and spend time with family. The point is that your capacity for deep work in a given day is limited and by setting aside some time for yourself to relax and reenergize, you are missing out on much of importance.

Putting it all together: Going back to my son’s challenge, he got an unexpected one week holiday as his school had to reschedule classes due to second covid-19 wave. He was initially happy with this change as he could spend time as he wished (usually video games) for an extra week but the willpower he had originally corralled to excel academically had gone unutilized resulting in his initial euphoria eventually turning into guilt.

As humans, we are usually tempted to engage in shallow activities that are easily enjoyable (like playing video games or watching our favorite TV show) instead of deep work (like studying or writing this blog). But we are also ambitious and aspirational with a need for achievement to make our life purposeful. Willpower helps us handle this conflict by motivating us to engage in deep work required for purposeful activities that are usually difficult. But our willpower is finite that depletes with use and needs to be recharged for sustenance. Overutilizing willpower will lead to exhaustion, underutilizing it will lead to guilt and smartly utilizing will produce great results for our wildly important goals. Smartly utilizing our willpower means:

• Using rituals to minimize the friction in transition to deep work and amplifying the benefits of finite willpower
• Using the 4 disciplines of execution to measure and progress towards our vision and goals
• Provide ourselves sufficient rest to recharge the energy needed to work deeply

With years of trial and error, I was already practicing some of these disciplines and this book provides additional structure that should make me more effective!

Information and Communication Technology has been the primary driver of innovation and engineering advances during the last four decades. The dominance is to such an extent that the term technology today refers to these fields, though there are several other engineering disciplines that continue to exist! I am fortunate to have started my professional career in information technology and am enjoying being part of it for more than twenty years. Unlike any other technology domain that emerged as new hotspot since the industrial revolution 200 years back, the entry barrier for information technology is extremely low that allowed passionate technologists to launch their enterprises from garages. And combine this with the success of venture capital industry from 1970s, start-ups have been the primary source of innovation in the technology industry since the advent of personal computing with Intel 8080 processor.

While I have not worked for start-ups so far, I strongly believe that start-up lessons can help enterprises improve their ability to succeed while creating new products. In this blog, I will share my notes from “Zero to One”, one of the best books on start-up philosophy written by Peter Thiel, a successful entrepreneur himself.

“Zero to One” has an explanation for most of the new technology trends during the last twenty years coming from start-ups. From the Founding Fathers in politics to the Royal Society in science to Fairchild Semiconductor’s “traitorous eight” in business, small groups of people bound together by a sense of mission have changed the world for the better. The easiest explanation for this is negative: it’s hard to develop new things in big organizations, and it’s even harder to do it by yourself. Bureaucratic hierarchies move slowly, and entrenched interests shy away from risk. In the most dysfunctional organizations, signaling that work is being done becomes a better strategy for career advancement than actually doing work. At the other extreme, a lone genius might create a classic work of art or literature, but could never create an entire industry. Startups operate on the principle that you need to work with other people to get stuff done, but you also need to stay small enough so that you actually can. Clayton Christensen has provided similar explanation in his book “The Innovator’s Dilemma” through the concept of “disruptive innovation” and how most companies miss out on new waves of innovation. Does it mean big companies cannot develop new things? They can, as long as they enable the teams focused on building new things to operate like a start-up without burdening them with bureaucracy and creativity sapping processes.

Peter Thiel suggests that we must abandon the following four dogmas created after dot-com crash that still guide start-up business thinking today:

1. Make incremental advances: Small increments using agile methods has far better chances of success today than waterfall world.
2. Stay lean and flexible: Avoid massive plan and execute model. Instead, iterative development helps stay nimble and deliver through meaningful experimentation.
3. Improve on competition: New things are invariably improvements on recognizable products already offered by successful competitors.
4. Focus on product, not sales: Technology is primarily about product development, not distribution.

But having seen a number of projects in large enterprises, I would say that sticking to these principles by default and making exceptions only for compelling reasons is better.

When it comes to creating new software products for a market, don’t build an undifferentiated commodity business but one that’s so good at what it does that no other product can offer a close substitute. Google is a good example of a company that went from zero to one, after distancing from Microsoft and Yahoo almost 20 years back and became a monopoly. While monopolies sound draconian, the companies that get to the top create monopoly based on a unique value proposition they offer in their markets. So, don’t build new things unless there is a desire and plan to capture significant market share, if not monopoly. Every monopoly is unique, but they usually share some combination of the following characteristics:

• Proprietary technology
• Network effects
• Economies of scale
• Branding

Another interesting observation is around secrets: most people act as if there were no secrets left behind. With advances in Maths, Science and Technology, we know a lot more about the universe than previous generations but there are still numerous unknowns yet to be conquered. It helps to be conscious of the four social trends that have conspired to root out beliefs in secrets:

1. Incrementalism: From an early age, we are taught that the right way to do things is to proceed one very small step at a time, day by day, grade by grade. However, unlocking secrets requires us to be brutally focused on the ultimate goal rather than staying satisfied with interim milestones.
2. Risk Aversion: People are scared of secrets because they are scared of being wrong. If your goal is to never make a mistake in life, you shouldn’t look for secrets. And remember, you can’t create something new and impactful without making mistakes.
3. Complacency: Getting into a top institute or corporation is viewed as an achievement in itself with nothing more to worry and you are set for life. This leads to complacency and no more fire to unlock secrets.
4. Flatness: As globalization advances, people perceive the world as one homogenous, highly competitive marketplace and an assumption that someone else would have already found out secrets.

To summarise, when a start-up or an enterprise decides to create a new product, it should resist the temptation to go for a commodity one. It should be a product with clear differentiation that will help create a monopoly or significant market share at a minimum. This can happen only through hard work and dedication to unlock some secrets.

There is a lot more learnings from the book but I have only mentioned the key ones that can help us introspect and stay focused on our goals to create new products.