Long before I started reading Mr Sanderson’s books, I felt excited about reading Mr Sanderson’s books. As I got sucked into Mistborn’s universe, the line between reality and Luthadel blurred. Mr Sanderson must be appreciated for holding the reader’s attention for extended periods. Then suddenly in The Well Of Ascension, it hit me that the relationship between all of the Kelsier Crew along with Elend was built with trust. Even though the Trust factor was emphasised in The Final Empire (Vin kept referencing Trust being the differentiating factor that drew her towards Kelsier’s crew and the Job). But in part 2 the whole Trust thing gets elevated to the next level when Sazed advises Vin on how to approach their relationship(Vin was in great turmoil then, remember that she was not sure of herself, Zane distracting her, feeling unworthy of Elend). Sazed tells her that to love Elend means to trust him, no matter what. The decision to trust Elend pays off in The Hero of Ages, as Elend realises the same and relies on Vin to take down Ruin. ...

Many people mistake knowing a bunch of jargon as competence. In some cases, it might even suggest otherwise. It doesn’t matter if you know the most esoteric programming language in the world if you can’t get the damn job done. People usually look down upon Mercenaries(who get the job done). Though Visionaries are tainted as the Hero of Ages and hailed for their Visions(obviously), most of them fall into the con-artist category. There are good odds that you’ll be rich(not filthily) by being a Mercenary. ...

There is a lot of dispersion between the skills one needs to be good at interviewing and the ones that are required to get the damn job done. The former requires math problem-solving abilities which essentially boils down to playing the game and gaming the system. It’s that classic human construct to which everybody adheres to establish a standard. You can observe this pattern whenever the demand side of things gets exploded. An objective filter gets developed and is used as a metric to screen the best. In the software industry, most of the big tech, where the pool of applicants is high, resorted to interviewing the applications using algorithmic tests. It makes sense for them to do this. But the repercussions may not be immediate. ...

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Tech has been the poster child of this culture where the Davids win against the goliaths. Apple, Google, Facebook, Netflix, Amazon earned most of their wealth by displacing the incumbents in their respective fields. This all happened in the last 2 decades. And like every party this had to end. Google has a pipeline right from the demand to the supply. There are no middlemen and, other companies like Apple and Netflix have the same strategy, though Netflix moat is hard to defend though. The powers at the top have consolidated the power and it is just to beat at their own game. As a result of this, you can’t have stories titled “Burgeoning Facebook trumps Google” anymore. The only stories that get played on from now will be something like “X company got acquired by Big Tech”. Chip companies have hit Moore’s wall and the data harvesting party is also about to end. ...

Blogs have been the avenues that amateurs flock to when they crave lighter opinions. There are no serious incentives for bloggers to write a 3000-word post that is deeply researched. Even though the masses don’t yearn for these deep posts, humanity as a whole needs them. These are the posts that document human civilization’s behaviour as a whole or write well balanced opinionated posts. And to write these posts is no mean feat. You can only find these breeds in New York Times, New Yorker or Washington Post and they attracted all these talents by providing a platform(already established audience) and lucrative career options. But the underlying thing of these entities is that they had a distribution moat. Not anymore. ...

Believe it or not, you’re getting validated by someone (or by yourself) all the time. Consciousness and Validations are intertwined in many ways that your brain can’t comprehend. Validations in some way shape your behaviour and important characteristics of your life. For example, longing for your parent’s validations can turn you into a conventional, orthodox person and your risk-taking abilities, perceptions are capped not by your ambitions but by your parents. ...

There is a lot of buzz around to network like hell with all the people around you and this is based on the premise that networking yields better opportunities in the future. And as a matter of fact, it is true. India’s ascension to the space program is simply the by-product of networking. If it isn’t for Vikram Sarabhai’s network, India Space Program wouldn’t be in its current form. It was Sarabhai’s contacts around the world who helped India in the nascent stages of its space program. ...

Nothing is more important in your material life than optics. The stories you tell yourself to live. The narratives that are woven in your subconscious mind get propagated through different filters and biases, and finally manifest in your future self. People advise you to think positively precisely for the same reason. The way you portray yourself in your mind weighs something in the path forward. Since I got into college, I primarily interpreted my current standings in a glass half empty way. There was always something incomplete in the way I saw myself which resulted in dystopian dreams and prophecies of my future. To this day, I can’t get enough of these half-empty views and takes of myself. Let’s take an example to dig deep into what I mean. Imagine you worked on a project where your effort moves the needle by 5 degrees. At the end of the day when you measure your progress, it isn’t much compared to your friend who just delivered a banger project and reduced their team’s engineering budget by 10 percent. Without you knowing, a narrative keeps popping in your mind, “man, I haven’t contributed anything significant to my project and I haven’t learned anything new” even when the reality is a bit different. This sort of narrative sucks the joy out of you and knocks you into a downward spiral w.r.t your professional career. This doesn’t mean that you should just inflate your contributions like that friend of yours in your college final semester project. Rather it should be that something along these lines, “I wrote some code, made some decisions, learned something”. Now that you can objectively measure these things you can evaluate yourself much better than that negative critique whom you’ve been using till now. This effectively helps you to answer everyone’s favourite question, “what did you do till now ?”. ...

After having worked with Jira and Todoist in professional and personal contexts respectively, I have come to a conclusion that if you can code then you ought to create your own productivity tracking app. This conclusion has been made after seeing a high-performing senior member in my org dogfood his own to-do list app and achieve high levels of productivity. Though Jira is good for conducting sprints in a collaborative environment it doesn’t kill to have a to-do list for yourself with bare minimums. I know this sounds crazy because you gotta develop and maintain it, but if you take the exponential outcomes into consideration, it’s one of those low effort and high impact projects where the project itself gets better along with time. It’s not like you’re conceiving a startup idea, cause it has no commercial viability. It’s just that it helps you organize your shit better in a more customizable manner which can yield better productivity. ...