If you haven’t read my thread on excellence, then please do so. Everyone had to start somewhere right. I have often marvelled at geniuses like Johnathan Ive, VP – Industrial Design at Apple, and how they seem to find these bouts of inspiration to create something as iconic as the ipod and casings of the Mac that we have come to love.

Turns out, thanks to Kevin Rose pointing it out, even he has an inspiration that looks wildly familiar.

That man pictured above is Dieter Rams, who was the head of Braun Design.

Does this send you raging? If anything it should open up your eyes to wonder and think we all borrow from each other. No mans an island. Most important. Perhaps that thing called Genius is really observing closely and working hard and not a divine gift bestowed on a few?

Here are Ram’s fundamental principles of design.

Rams’ ten principales to “good design”.

1. is innovative
2. makes a product useful
3. is aesthetic
4. makes a product understandable
5. is unobtrusive
6. is honest
7. is long-lasting
8. is thorough down to the last detail
9. is environmentally friendly
10. is as little design as possible

Because the people who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world are often the ones that do – Jack Kerouac.

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. – Aristotle

What is excellence? How does one measure it? What does it take be excellent? Who are masters of excellence? These are questions that I spend a lot of time reading up on. A key part of being excellent is to be efficient in anything you do. The second most important part, and also the hardest, is to be a hard worker.

I used to play Quake 3 a game at the highest levels in India at one point of time and reflecting back , I see that the points mentioned in the article all fit into what I had done then. I wasn’t conscious and if I was I’d probably be better than what I was I guess.

1. Pursue what you love – This is often underrated. People in India do anything and mostly everything for money. It’s important to love or atleast like to a very large extent what you like. You’ll hit a dip almost ALWAYS in your path. Quake 3 for me largely was a smooth ride, but when I started it was so hard to get past a stage to evolve in the game. I kept at it. There’s a particular jump you make in a map that most of the professionals did. No one in India could make it. I spent 1 week and 4 hours a day just trying to make the jump. JUST doing that and nothing else. I ended up teaching it to everyone and being one of the first to achieve it. All because it was for the love. And hard work which is my second point.

2.a) Do the hardest work first – The easy comes easy. So you have to work on the hard part. Like that jump, the exam for you, the project at work, the meeting with the boss to lay out a roadmap or ask for a raise. Whatever it might be. That’s your first area of target. Brian Tracy calls it eating the frog first. The cake’s tastier but the frog needs to be eaten first.

2. b) Practice intensely - Nothing comes without practice. Nothing. And it’s very gruelling. My dad who was a state level tennis player told me that he had to do this thing called wall practice to steady his forehand and backhand rythms first thing in the morning. While everyone was watching videos, he was hitting against the wall for an hour. Little wonder that he always commanded where he wanted the ball to go against his peers who he ended up beating.

3. Seek expert feedback – This is probably the most important thing. No man is an island. You can’t do things on your own. At some point of time you’ll hit a ceiling, you’ll need to consult, observe, watch, talk to someone better than you. We Indians call it a Guru. That’s probably taking it a little too far but the idea is someone to critique you and teach you what you don’t know. Make sure he’s someone you trust and not someone you compete always against.

4. Keep a peer set that is involved in what you do. – If you are a guitarist and you are in a band of swimmers then you can’t find someone to relate your trials and tribulations to. It’s great if you have a fellow guitarist. It’s better if there’s a pianist because then you can discuss different ways of thinking.  Napolean, it is said, had an uneducated man with a general in his army to seek 2 view points. Both men were intelligent with radically free different thinking. Alexander is said to have done something similar.

5. Keep a goal – How do you measure your progress? You keep a goal. That could be a song you want to sing in the tone, a lick on the guitar or a win/loss ratio in a game.  If you want to play the guitar, I wouldn’t say you start with Eric Clapton.  Unless you are strong willed that will almost always work in the adverse. Pick up someone on youtube like Marty who teaches and plays well. Learn to be him. When you are so involved, you’ll end up beating him.

6. Know that you’ll fail but then you’ll succeed - Everyone starts as a failure. We learn how to fall many many times before we start finding the balance. It’s often hard work but it’s important to have a plan. Think what you want to do. Then work on getting there but getting there smoothly. We can kick the ball in tennis to take it the other court. We can hit a smooth forehand, we can hit a slicer like Roger Federer. All achieve the same purpose but it’s the last of the three that gives you the highest satisfaction.

There is satisfaction in sophistication.

I suggest you read the article on HBR.org that talks about this and adds other points. I’d love to hear your own experience about this as well in the comments!

Mark Cuban doesn’t require an introduction to most people and definitely not to Basketball fans. I had written an article about how he inspired me here.

In this series called the unabashed talks with a consulting company, ABSDeerfield,  he gives a lot of insights into his philosophy and thinking. I’m highlighting some of the lessons learned here that are applicable to business.

A key message that runs through is his tenacity to try, his acceptance of failure and his passion for business.  I am paraphrasing a lot below, it’s not a transcript but it has all the points in his talk.

How do you become a billionaire?

You can’t think of it that way you know. If you set out to be one in your mind it never works that way. I think I’m one of the first to agree that luck had a part to play with it. You really have to set goals. Everything that happened with me happened at the right time. I knew we had something special at that time and I remember talking to my company and telling them that it could be a billion dollar company or it could be nothing. I knew we were special we had a good thing going on but it wasn’t about thinking you are going to be a billionaire and nothing else.

It was a question of working hard. For some one aspiring to take it to the next level there has to be a certain amount of luck but I believe that more important is putting yourself in a business that can be ubiquitous that doesn’t have any limits. There’s always a grind to it, if it can’t be something you visualize every business using or consumer using you can’t scale it enough to join the billionaire club.

Does passion play a part into the way you approach business?

I think it’s the other way around I think the passion I have had for business and being an entreprenuer translates into the Mavericks (he is the owner for a team). When I was in the stamp business, I would stay up till 4 am reading stamp journals and publications on stamps so that I could give myself an edge. Even when I was in college I was always reading business books and reading about business biographies. When I had my company and I had no money, I would pull all nighters on borrowed computers learning how to program. I have always enjoyed the competition.

The ultimate sport is business. You have to compete with everyone. You have to compete 24/7 and 365 days a year and you have to compete with people who come up and say that they can take you down. It’s the competitive side that drives you and I think that carries over.

What advice would you give to small business to learn?

Love what you do, too many people think you need to find the one right idea. There’s nothing wrong with failing. It doesn’t matter how many times you fail if you get it right you are an overnight success. You have to get it right one time that’s all. I got fired, I got busted many times but it didn’t matter I kept on going and going and going. Sometimes its not the idea its not who you know or how much money you have access to, its about finding something you love to do . I had no idea I loved computers and technology.

I always put my self in the customers shoes and I always put in the time to excel at what our companies did and that’s just rewarding.

Given everything you do whats the most important thing for you?

I think its knowing your strengths and weaknesses and really finding out what you love doing. If you look at it as a job then you have already lost. It’s not going to be your passion. You will start counting the hours and if you know what your strengths are then you can leverage those strengths into your business by helping others and when you know your weakness you can work with others to compliment you.

My attitude has also been that if everyones looking somewhere then thats not where the real solutions are. You have to look at another area. The attitude has always been if you want it then get off your butt and go do it. Nothing comes to you in your hand.

I highly recommend the series. Watch it.

This game is worshipped in Korea (well that’s technically Starcraft 1) and therefore the most ardent devotees often have the best ways of going about the game or the path to enlightenment. From now on, I’ll talk about interesting snippets of information on how people go about training what are the insights they gain to help both me and you understand the paths to greatness and success. Cause you know I love it and you love it too.

Here’s what Spunky, the head coach of oGs, in Korea had to say about training.

Given that you’re an ex Broodwar progamer, why not tell us a bit about the similarities and differences between how training was for SCBW back then and how it is now as oGs prepares for the first big SC2 tourney in Korea? What has changed? What has remained the same?

There are a lot of similarities and differences between SC1 and SC2. After early midgame, the game becomes much more similar to SC1 because it comes down to a lot of macro with multi tasking. There is a lot of psycological warfare between two high level players for both SC1 and SC2. Since the game is much easier to play in SC2 (hotkeys, macro, micro) it’s more important that you think ahead of your opponent and consistently trick him into making mistakes. The way we train is very similar to SC1, however, we talk about strategies and think a lot more compared to SC1. Since micro, macro is much easier, it seems like timings and strategy is becoming a lot more important.

So in terms of strategy and timings, is Research and Development a strong focus at oGs these days? Could you tell us a little bit about how you guys approach the development of builds?

We spend most of our time discussing about new timings and using units that are not used as often. Early game is very important and you really need to use a different build on almost every map to find a small edge over your opponent. We time check and practice so we find the best build orders and strategies vs each race on each map all the time. Another way of thinking of it is:

In Protoss vs Terran if protoss succeeds in getting 5 collosus/20 stalkers/10zealots/10 pheonix by midgame without getting in much trouble, it’s very very hard for Protoss to lose in any fight vs Terran at this timing. So we think of how we can get these units and then in how many minutes we can get them into the game safely and play on from there.

#

How does this translate to success in life? In order to get something going on, you make sure you have an end goal in mind. You visualise and debate on the best path to get to that goal. This could be a millioniare (visualise the best ways to get the money) and more importantly, give yourself a hard regime and schedule to follow to achieve that goal. This doesn’t mean you do the same thing again and again without changing and constantly evolving. More on this in a while.

Division of space is to block out time of the day without interruptions. That means no twitter, no bullshit, just you. Division of time is saying when you’ll start and finish that space you have blocked out for yourself to get creative.

Then just play.

To know how good you are at something requires the same skills as it does to be good at those things. Which means if you’re absolutely hopeless at something, you lack exactly the skills to know that you’re absolutely hopeless at it. This is a profound discovery. that most people who have absolutely no idea what they’re doing, have absolutely no idea that they have no idea of what they’re doing. It explains a great deal of life.

Watch the quick summarised talk on Youtube here.

and here’s a second one.

Phil Ivey was going around the room, encouraging people to bet with him and good-naturedly chastising him when they wouldn’t. When someone turned him down by saying, “I don’t gamble,” Phil was dumbfounded.

“What’s the point of life if you don’t gamble?”

You could argue that it’s wrong to express any admiration for a gambler and you might have a point. Gambling – the type that Phil Ivey and everyone else here is involved in – is an utterly selfish activity. Nothing is being produced. It’s a zero-sum game. A mediocre school teacher is at least trying to contribute to the education of children. An options trader is gambling, but his gambling contributes to the liquidity of the financial markets, which makes it possible for companies to raise money and the rest of us to invest for our children, for retirement, etc.

But Phil Ivey has it exactly right. What you produce for the world is obviously important. But what you contribute to yourself is what keeps you going as a human being. That period of uncertainty, between when you commit to something – representing a legal client, teaching a child, betting on a baseball game – and the outcome is where life’s excitement is. What’s the point of life if you don’t gamble?

Phil was going around the room, encouraging people to bet with him and good-naturedly chastising him when they wouldn’t. When someone turned him down by saying, “I don’t gamble,” Phil was dumbfounded.

“What’s the point of life if you don’t gamble?”

You could argue that it’s wrong to express any admiration for a gambler and you might have a point. Gambling – the type that Phil Ivey and everyone else here is involved in – is an utterly selfish activity. Nothing is being produced. It’s a zero-sum game. A mediocre school teacher is at least trying to contribute to the education of children. An options trader is gambling, but his gambling contributes to the liquidity of the financial markets, which makes it possible for companies to raise money and the rest of us to invest for our children, for retirement, etc.

But Phil Ivey has it exactly right. What you produce for the world is obviously important. But what you contribute to yourself is what keeps you going as a human being. That period of uncertainty, between when you commit to something – representing a legal client, teaching a child, betting on a baseball game – and the outcome is where life’s excitement is. What’s the point of life if you don’t gamble?

#from Full Tilt poker

“Money is like gasoline during a road trip,” he says. “You don’t want to run out of gas on your trip, but you’re not doing a tour of gas stations. You have to pay attention to money, but it shouldn’t be about the money.”

On Running a successful business.

“You don’t fish with strawberries,” the banker says. “Even if that’s what you like, fish like worms, so that’s what you use.”

Great read on Tim O’Reilly by Inc. Magazine.

If you are going to try. Go all the way. Otherwise don’t even start.

This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives, jobs and maybe your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench, it could mean jail, it could mean derision. It could mean mockery, isolation.

Isolation is the gift. All the rest are tests of endurance of how much you really want to do it. And you’ll do it. Despite rejection and the worst odds and it will be better than anything else you could have ever imagined. If you are going to try, go all the way. There is no feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods. And the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It’s the only good fight there is..

do it, do it, do it. do it. all the way, all the way.

- From Charles Bukowski‘s roll the dice poem.