The idea was to go on “tandem flights” where a qualified instructor will take you as a passenger in one of these parachute gliders:

When I experienced my turn, I realized that taking off was way more difficult than landing because the winds were strong and getting the takeoff right was difficult keeping safety in mind. Also, *evil grin*, finally a sport where being heavier is an advantage – you get to go first!

There were solo flights by student pilots going on as well. Interestingly, I bumped into an old friend whom I had met in a trek in Himachal pradesh several years ago. Amazing what a small world it is.

We went through Temple Pilots, but I would NOT recommend them because (1) they took on too many people for a Sunday even though they knew that they couldn’t possibly take all of them for the ride, (2) they put up a farce that they will be taking passengers in order of decreasing weight, but that’s just an excuse for them to pick people from groups because they make more money that way. I would recommend trying other groups such as Nirvana and Indus who were more efficient and had invited lesser number of people so that they could manage everyone in a single day.

I definitely want to visit this place in the rainy season again to admire the beauty of Pavana Dam in a different setting.

Let’s take an example, this is my default “New Expense” screen:

Notice the entries – default vendor is “Shop”, default category is “Household” and default subcategory is “Supplies.” (my preferences).

Let’s say I had gone out for a Saturday afternoon lunch and I want to quickly enter the food bill. I type ‘Re’ and it quickly shows the best auto-complete option from the list of vendors:

When I tap the ‘Restaurant’ pop-over, a small neat thing happens – it shows me the frequent categories I used for this particular vendor:

So I tap on the second option and voila, the correct category and subcategory is chosen. The funny thing is that this simple “most frequently used” gimmick is the sole reason that I’m still using this expense tracking app (after all these days of trying so many of them) because my time to add a new entry goes down 3-5x times over time!

Another example  – consider my favorite note taking application Evernote – when I go to the ‘Add New Note’ option and the clock happens to be in the middle of a calendar event, the default title of the new note will be “Note from Event Name”:

Why is this useful? Because that is the most likely thing I’ll be doing – adding a note from the event that I’m attending, and this speeds up the process of me writing the new note.

I wish more applications would do this, for example:

• I’m currently in Pune where Airtel does not have a 3G circle permission, so I am told to switch to Idea network or Vodafone network to get 3G access, but the hitch is that there are areas where Idea network signal strength is low and I have to manually change the network back to Airtel which has full signal strength. I really wish my smartphone could remember which network I use in each of my frequented locations and automatically switch based on that.
• I wish my Email application would show frequently emailed contacts when I click on “Mail this link” in my browser.  Apple has a new VIP feature in Mountain Lion but I just wish it could show my “top 5 most emailed contacts in the past month” immediately next to the “To” entry field that I could just click on! (I couldn’t figure out how to use the built-in Mac OS X Automator software to simulate this)

Similar to these examples, what customizations / simple statistics / information usage would you like to see in the apps that you frequently use?

^[1] I don’t intend to use it for more than a few months, it’s just to get a handle on expenses when living in a new city.

This stupidly simple idea has often been miraculous in helping me clear my mind and think of ideas or options that I was unable to just “think in my head.”

And I observed many others felt this way as well, for example:

Writing is a miraculous process. You find things you never knew were inside your own head.

– @littlecalculist

and:

I write with my hands on paper as much as I can to get my eyes off of the monitor and my hands off the keyboard. Yes taking notes on something like evernote is more useful down the road, but for me there is something more free about jotting notes on paper. It gives me a mental break, a physical break, and if I come up with something really useful, I’ll type it in a note program. As an added bonus, the retyping of it usually lets me come up with something new to add.

– http://gorban.org/post/14162629940/thinking-time

When I was going through the PersonalMBA Reading List, I came across a book called Accidental Genius by Mark Levy, and I immediately wanted to read the book because it talked about a concept called freewriting which sounded eerily similar to what I used to call “paper therapy”. So I bought the book from the Kindle store and read the entire book on my iPhone with the Kindle app.

One of the revelations as I was reading the book was that freewriting has been used as a technique for ages, especially by prose writers.

So what is freewriting? As Mark Levy says:

As expansive and impressive as the mind is, it’s also lazy. Left to its own devices, it recycles tired thoughts, takes rutted paths, and steers clear of unfamiliar and  uncomfortable territory. You could say that one of its primary jobs is to shut off, even when there’s important thinking to be done.

Freewriting prevents that from happening. It pushes the brain to think longer, deeper, and more unconventionally than it normally would. By giving yourself a handful of liberating freewriting rules to follow, you back your mind into a corner where it can’t help but come up with new thoughts. You could call freewriting a form of forced creativity.

Freewriting is a fast method of thinking onto paper that enables you to reach a level of thinking that’s often difficult to attain during the course of a normal business day.

As I mentioned earlier, freewriting is nothing but writing profusely on paper. It doesn’t matter what grammar you use, it doesn’t matter what you write because nobody else is going to read it, it doesn’t even matter whether you even read what you wrote! What’s important is to get the thoughts flowing and externalizing it by doing the physical action of writing fast on paper. If you can’t think of what to write, write gibberish. If you get distracted by other thoughts, write down those thoughts! The idea is to not filter anything out, these are your real thoughts and you need to externalize them.

The point is to extrapolate to write continuously. If you wrote about a problem, what are the causes and possible solutions? If you wrote about a dream, write about how and whether you are following those dreams. If you had a nightmare, write about the possible subconscious meanings of the nightmare. If you suddenly remembered some random quote from a book you read ages ago and forgotten about it, then write about that and what it means to you. If you had an altercation, write about whether it occurs frequently or whether there is a pattern. Try to explore your mind and try to explore the facts as much as possible.

The result of this exercise can only be felt, it’s hard to explain. The liberation you feel and the sudden “lightness” you feel is amazing.

Mark goes on to explain six secrets of freewriting:

1. Try Easy

Trying easy will help you in any area of your life. Conventional Wisdom tells us that we have to give no less than 110 percent to keep ahread. Yet conversely, I have found that giving 90 percent is usually more effective.

It’s like the first day of gym – they make you do so much exercise and you’re so sore the next day that you never go back. Don’t do that! Instead work till you reach the edge of your current capacity and then stop. Repeat it the next day, and so on. So, if you feel you can only write 500 words, do only that much, don’t push yourself beyond that. If someday, you feel you can write more, go right ahead.

2. Write Fast and Continuously

By writing fast, you invite your mind to operate at a pace that’s closer to its normal rate of thought, rather than the lethargic crawl you usually subject it to when you write sluggishly.

Imagine you’re attending a talk and the speaker talks very slowly. Your mind races ahead and you tune out eventually in a few minutes and either doze off or walk out. Same thing applies here, if you write slowly, your mind races ahead. Instead, write as fast as your brain thinks. Remember, nobody is going to read this but you. So it’s perfectly okay to WRITE SLOPPY. Use bad handwriting, use shortcuts, use phrases that only you understand, do whatever it takes to keep your writing at the pace of your thoughts. That’s when the magic happens.

By writing continuously, you force the edit-crazy part of your mind into a subordinate position, so the idea-producing part can keep spitting out words.

If you don’t write continuously, it’ll break your flow of thoughts as well as you start to “edit” what you wrote in your head. That’s not good. So write non-stop and keep the pen moving.

The plan is to move fast and don’t stop writing, with the understanding that the more words you pile onto the page, even if they’re lousy words, the better your chance at finding a usable idea. In the freewriting game, think quantity before quality.

3. Work Against a Limit

Use a time limit, say 10 min, to practice non-stop, fast and easy freewriting. And then take a break. The reasons for this are obvious if you have read my review of the Pomodoro Technique book.

4. Write the Way You Think

Freewriting isn’t writing, per se; it’s a means of watching yourself think. Since you’re writing for yourself, you don’t need to polish your raw thoughts to please others. All that matters is that you yourself understand your logic, references, word choices, and idiosyncratic ideas.

If you really do end up showing your freewriting to someone else (without polishing it), they probably can’t make sense of it! Because you are free to use your own idioms, your own phrases, your own language, basically, the way YOU think. That’s probably a sign of “good” freewriting.

5. Go with the Thought

The whole time I was scribbling, I would say to myself something like “Go with the thought. Agree with what you just wrote, and logically extend it… Be whimsical if you like, but make sure the whimsy naturally follows what preceded it… Based on this new thought that just appeared on the page, what might happen next?

This intoxicating game of “agreeing and extending,” during which I effortlessly fleshed out scenarios, took up pages of my writing until my hand grew tired, my timer went off, or even more important, I had discovered some provisional methods for tackling a problem.

The whole point of freewriting is to extend your thoughts beyond what your mind usually is used to. Even if you have a recurring thought in your mind, you usually stop thinking about it at the same logical point, either you give up, or your brain just shuts down and doesn’t want to think about something so uncomfortable. That’s exactly where freewriting helps you to keep flowing and “free”ly continue thinking about the same topic and externalize the thoughts, and hopefully have a breakthrough on that topic.

6. Redirect Your Attention

Whatever the situation, you’re on the freewriting bus, motoring along, when suddenly you hit the brakes. The road ahead is washed out, and you don’t know how to proceed.

Quickly, you consult your checklist of freewriting rules: Try easy, check. Writing fast and continuously, check. Inoffensive kitchen timer counting down ten-minute intervals, check. Now you’ve run out of ideas. You’ve reached the end of your thoughts, or so you believe.

Time to use a focus-changer.

Focus-changers are questions like:

• What was I thinking there?
• How else can I say that?

Those are two of my favorites. They push me to see again what I’ve done and think I already know. They also challenge me into generating fresh thought, even after I believe I’ve run out of road. But those aren’t the only focus-changers you can use.

Focus-challengers have endless numbers or forms. Here’s a partial list of some helpful ones:

• How can I make this exciting?
• How can I add value?
• What else can I say about this subject?
• Why am I stuck at this particular point?
• How can I get unstuck?
• What am I missing here?
• What am I wrong about here?
• Why?
• How can I prove that?
• How can I disprove that?
• What do I think about that?
• If I continue to think that way, what might happen?
• What solutions can I borrow from past problems that can be applied to this current one?
• What does this remind me of?
• What’s the best-case scenario?
• What’s the worst-case scenario?
• What am I doing right?
• What am I doing brilliantly?
• How can I jump the track?
• What strengths of mine (or my company’s) can I apply?
• What weaknesses need to be compensated for?
• What’s the proof that that statement is true?
• How am I the wrong person for this project?
• How am I the right person for this project?
• How would an arbitrator judge that?
• If I wanted to make a big mistake here, what would I do?
• What data do I need that I don’t yet have?
• How would I describe the situation to the CEO?
• How would I describe it to my mother?
• How would I describe it to my most supportive friend?
• How would I describe it to a disinterested stranger?

Focus-changers are simple questions to ask yourself, in writing, that help you redirect your mind toward the unexplored parts of a situation.

A good sword for Freewriting

It’s because of my indulgence of freewriting why I was asking tweeps about a good pen to write with, I got suggestions for:

• Luxor Hi-Tecpoint
• Luxor Pilot and Uniball
• William Penn
• Reynolds Trimax Gel
• Pelikan cartridge ink pen, Stabilo gel pen
• Camlin and Reynolds
• Uniball

I’m grateful for the suggestions by my twitter followers, and quite surprised that I’m not the only one who’s holding on to pen and paper! I’m yet to go out to a store and buy any of them, but it’s great to know the recommendations so that I don’t have to do the trial and error

I finally bought the Pelikan cartridge ink pen and loving it! Having such a good pen makes me more indulgent in the freewriting process.

One of the tweeps, Fayad Fami, also pointed to this ad that I agree with – “The more you write, the better you remember”:

Final Thoughts

The book goes on to explain many different aspects of freewriting – why it is useful to write, how to prompt it, using facts, letting loose, substituting concepts from other areas to solve problems, importance of quantity in freewriting, importance of lying about a situation to widen your view of a situation, holding a paper conversation with yourself or someone else, concept of sometimes doing a marathon rather than a sprint of writing, importance of being honest, importance of detailing, how to extract usefulness from a business book (like I do with my blogging about what I learned from each book!), how to use freewriting to keep your focus on what you want to make of your life, how to use freewriting to write for a public audience (a colleague, a boss, a blog, a book, etc.), helping others to freewriting, noticing things around you, and so on. It is best to learn about these by reading the book.

To sum up, as Josh Kaufman says in his review of the book:

Daily externalization and self-elicitation are heavy-duty creativity tools that will do wonders for your productivity. Give it a try: the results will surprise you.

Why? Because I was tired of my server randomly going to 100% CPU usage and the only way to revive it was to reboot the server! For a long time, I thought the problem was maybe MongoDB which I was using for isbn.net.in which was running on the same server as the blog. But surprisingly, it was most likely WordPress at fault.

On the same point, it has been quite embarrassing when I get tweets and emails that my blog is down, because of this. Especially embarrassing because I’m supposed to be a developer and I can’t even keep a simple website up? Something had to be done.

When I read patio11′s story of how and why he moved to WPEngine, I found myself nodding and agreeing with him throughout the article, especially the part about WordPress, PHP, Apache being very finicky software.

And I found other people who felt the same way as well. I also liked what I read on the WPEngine company website. And knowing that the guy who blogs at asmartbear.com is the same guy who started the WPEngine company gave me even more confidence in moving to WPEngine.

Since companies and projects are moving on to platforms like AWS (to get rid of hardware headaches) and Heroku (to get rid of deployment, operations and scaling headaches), I didn’t see why I shouldn’t move my personal website to a managed WordPress hosting.

That was when I chalked out a plan to move to WPEngine, and moved it wholesale on a weekend.

I’m glad to be no longer doing the constant monitoring of the server and monitoring of the security and upgrades of wordpress, security of plugins, daily backup, etc. WPEngine does that for me. And it even gives me a staging server if I just want to try out stuff. I can’t wait to try out their upcoming Heroku-style git repository feature.

The most surprising and positive upgrade in moving to WPEngine has been the speed. The blog opens up way way faster than before.

No, they haven’t paid me to write this article, I’m just a satisfied customer (so far).

My old superb theme by Divya Manian (Nimbupani) was beginning to show its software rot – it didn’t have support for widgets or the latest options and so on. So I took the major pieces of that theme and converted the default Twenty Eleven theme to use the same branding. Let me know whether it looks decent.

All in all, I’m happy with the move. And as you may have noticed, my frequency of publishing is starting to pick up, thanks to the having no headaches about the website.

While I’ve still not recovered and still reeling from the effects, I’m recording these memoirs now precisely because the experience and memory is fresh.

The first thing that comes to my mind is just how much of our life depends on having a good supply of energy first thing in the morning.

Having had no exercise for so long has made my knees feel rubbery and have started complaining to me. At the same time, my stomach feels bloated than usual. And then there is the shoulder pain, back pain, etc. because of too much (albeit needed) resting and not enough physical movement.

Work has been a disaster since I’ve not been able to concentrate or have the energy to focus on the laptop in-between the trips to the wash room. The guilt of not contributing to the project’s timeline only makes me feel worser. And sick days can mean loss of pay which compounds the problems.

Sometimes I feel these past few weeks have been a glimpse of old age. I shudder at that thought.

Personal life has taken it’s toll as well, since I’ve been so obsessed with surviving and getting through the day, that I’ve been unable to recognize situations and compliment my wife when she was deserving. And that invariably has repercussions (married men know what I’m talking about).

I haven’t returned calls from friends because I keep coughing every few sentences and then I don’t want to talk about my sad change in health. It’s not manly to talk about illnesses, I feel sometimes. And generally people give lot of, possibly well-meaning, advice that they won’t even listen that it may not apply to your situation. And at the same time, you’re glad that they are concerned about you and you’ll be missed when you disappear from the planet someday.

Steve Pavlina once said:

Most people’s problems fall into one of four basic categories:

1. Career problems – Lack of fulfilling work (not doing what they love, not contributing)
2. Financial problems – Financial scarcity (too much debt, not earning enough money, not creating enough value, not experiencing financial flow)
3. Relationship problems – Lack of loving relationships (unsupportive, disempowering, or apathetic social circle; no one to love and be loved by)
4. Health problems – Poor health (lack of energy and vitality, feeling tired, feeling sick)

These are the most common spark killers.
There are other categories too like emotional problems and mental problems, but the four categories above probably cover about 95% of the issues people have.

And when all four of these combine, it is a living hell. Because you’re not well.

Moral of the story: Take care of your health! It’s the thing we sacrifice the first as soon as we have a hint of busy-ness.

(Image courtesy of Kate Ter Haar under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license)

Instead of Canonical trying to tinker with the UI of Ubuntu Desktop Linux, I really wish they thought differently™ instead.

I find iPhone incredibly easy to use because of iTunes. Regardless of your feelings about iTunes, I find it an indispensable software and have been constantly wishing there was something similar for Android.

That’s my wish for Ubuntu’s direction – instead of trying to reinvent the UI, simply focus on integrating Android with Ubuntu, so much so that if you’re an Android user, you’ll be tempted to switch to Ubuntu because it makes life so easy.

For example:

• iCloud equivalent that would sync Ubuntu and Android Address Book, Calendar, Notes, etc.
  • Yes, there is Ubuntu One but that only talks about the Dropbox aspect of things, not the integration into the specific data apps such as Address Book, Calendar, Notes, etc.
    • Maybe even combine forces with the CyanogenMod folks if it requires a custom Android build!
    • Possibly just use Dropbox as a backing store and maybe cut a deal with Dropbox to highlight Ubuntu, just like iOS integrates Twitter for mutual benefits, for example, Dropbox can be bookmarked in the “File -> Open With” window by default in Ubuntu, and so on. This is a marketing angle that will probably inform most Dropbox users, out of which a large segment will very likely have Android phones, about the possibility of considering Ubuntu.
  • This “uCloud for data” assures me that my data is always safe which is what I’m never comfortable with every new breaking version as well as changing apps in Linux/Ubuntu – “The new default photo app is Shotwell? What happened to F-Spot?” and other situations.
• Connect your Android phone and auto-sync photos, music, etc.
  • Especially the facility of copying over new photos to the desktop and giving good organizational functionality such as deciding which photos to keep and which ones to delete.
• Assist with making it easy to read EPUB and PDF both on the desktop and the phone like saving “last read location”, etc. just like the Kindle app
• Other possibilities such as a IFTTT that involves the desktop, the phone and the cloud (an alternative to the Automator in OS X)

If a high build-quality laptop came supported with Ubuntu (there is a list of crowdsourced recommendations but none that you could depend on, it’s your guess and fate on whether all the hardware works well with Ubuntu) + an Ubuntu that works super-well with Android, then I would love to eventually switch away from Mac and iPhone to an open source Ubuntu and Android combination.

Benefits include:

1. Open source benefits, as well as makes future of open source platforms more brighter rather than next generation assuming closed platforms where you can run apps is how it always has been as opposed to having a fully hackable environment
2. To protect myself against future lockdowns – when I heard of Cory Doctorow talk about the coming war on general purpose computation, I thought he was being too negative and then Apple announced a lockdown of apps for OS X Mountain Lion amongst other AppStore sandboxing issues. Sigh.
3. As a developer, I’m already highly dependent on Ubuntu server edition, would make it neat to use it on the desktop as well.
4. This makes it super-easy to transition someone to Ubuntu since it works well with their phone which they rely so much on already, and since the data is suddenly available on the desktop as well, the fear of the unknown reduces and they become more open to trying out a new OS.
5. I can finally have a usable Android phone.

P.S. Another random thought – An Ubuntu laptop that comes with a SIM card slot built-in so that I can put in a SIM card and will have internet always-on, just like an iPad.

Update : Submitted as Brainstorm Idea #29231.

The whole book boils down to few things for me:

• Shut down or shut out all distractions, including email, twitter, phones, internet access, noise from outside, etc.
• Start with one thing that is important today and do only that, which is called the MIT (Most Important Task for today)
• Follow the Pomodoro technique, at least in concept – focus in a mindful manner in intense periods with short breaks in between

Nice and simple. And very hard to do. But it was surprisingly easy to do today after I read the book last night and today morning and was strongly reminded about the basics. Sometimes, all you need is to step back and revise the basics.

In particular, I am intrigued by the “Disconnect and Connect Working Routine”:

Consider a routine such as the following:

1. Disconnect for a day (or two). No Internet connection — perhaps no computer at all if using your computer is too much of a temptation to connect. Use an actual paper notepad and pen, writing and brainstorming and making pages of notes or sketches. Make phone calls instead of connecting via email or IM. Meet with people in real life, and get outside. Get a ton of important work done. No mobile devices except for actual phone calls.
2. Then connect for a day (or two). Take all the notes and work you did during your disconnect, and type them up and email them and post them online and so forth. Answer emails and get other routine tasks done, and then prepare for your next day of disconnect.
3. Repeat. You can vary the number of days you’re disconnected or connected, finding the balance that works for you.

While some may feel this will limit the work they can do, I think it’ll actually do the opposite: you’ll get more done, or at least more important tasks done, because you won’t be distracted.

You’ll also find it a calming change from the always-connected. It’s a peaceful routine.

What I find interesting is a “mostly offline” mindset as opposed to a “mostly online” mindset I had – I (mostly) used to switch off WiFi for the first two hours of the day. Come to think of it, maybe that’s why I was more productive in Goa where I had severe Internet connectivity issues. Hmmm.

So I just wanted to mention here about the updates to these repositories so far since the last time I wrote about them.

dotvim

The biggest change to my Vim environment is that I switched from vim-addon-manager with vim-scripts.org to Vundle, thanks to Anirudh’s comment on my previous post.

The second major change was the discovery of Solarized which was an amazing color scheme that I just have not been able to live without ever since I first saw it seven months ago.

A great side effect of this was discovering iTerm2 for Mac. I now use iTerm2 solarized dark theme + vim solarized theme with dark background for the console version and vim solarized theme with light background for the GUI MacVim version. I’m absolutely adoring it and I find it very pleasing and easy on the eyes.

Other changes in dotvim include incorporating stuff related to CoffeeScript, Ubuntu Upstart, nginx, etc. whose syntax files are not part of the default Vimfiles, not in a git repo, etc.

dotvim is at https://github.com/swaroopch/dotvim.

dotbash

After realizing that people have tried using dotbash and found the installation process cumbersome because the bash-it, by default, asks the user to approve every plugin that they want installed and they found it annoying. I replaced the default install script to install all the plugins (except recent buggy ones) and made installation much more simpler.

Again, after realizing that people are using dotbash and subsequently they were surprised that it overwrote ~/.gitconfig and other files by default which basically nuked their git email addreses and added mine and ended up me being listed as a “guest” committer on their repositories, I got rid of the username-specific stuff in the repository.

And also it is merged and keeping up with the master branch of the bash-it repository.

dotbash is at https://github.com/swaroopch/dotbash.

As always, looking forward to feedback on whether others find this tweaking of the development environment useful and feedback on how to improve it further.

Two favorite nuggets of mine so far are from JWZ and Brad Fitzpatrick who are definitely two of my programming heroes:

About taking things apart

Seibel:

Is there a key skill programmers must have?

Zawinski:

Well, curiosity – taking things apart. Wanting to know what’s going on under the hood. I think that’s really the basis of it. Without that I don’t think you get very far. That’s your primary way of acquiring knowledge. Taking something apart and looking at it is how you learn to build your own. At least for me. I’ve ready very few books about computers. My experience has been digging through source code or reference manuals. I’ve got a goal and, alright, to do this I need to know what this thing does and what this thing does. And I’ll just sort of random-walk through that until I find where I’m going.

How to improve oneself

Seibel:

Do you have any advice for self-taught programmers?

Fitzpatrick:

Always try to do something a little harder, that’s outside your reach. Read code. I heard this a lot, but it didn’t really sink in until later. There were a number of years when I wrote a lot of code and never read anyone else’s. Then I get on the Internet and there’s all this open source code I could contribute to but I was just scared shitless that if it wasn’t my code and the whole design wasn’t in my head, that I couldn’t dive in and understand it.

Then, I was sending in patches to Gaim, the GTK instant-messenger thing, and I was digging around that code and I just saw the whole design. Just seeing parts of it, I understood. I realized, after looking at other people’s code, that it wasn’t that I memorized all my own code; I was starting to see patterns. I would see their code and I was like, “Oh, OK. I understand the structure that they’re going with.”

Then I really enjoyed reading code, because whenever I didn’t understand some pattern, I was like, “Wait, why the fuck did they do it like this?” and I would look around more, and I’d be like, “Wow, that is a really clever way to do this. I see how that pays off.” I would’ve done that earlier but I was afraid to do it because I was thinking that if it wasn’t my code, I wouldn’t understand it.

After reading this book, I started seeing the patterns about Israel being high tech hotspot, for example consider just two pieces of news in the last 3-4 days: Apple buying Anobit, an Israeli company, for $500 million as well as building a research center in Israel and Cornell won the bid to build a university in New York city… in collaboration with Technion university of Israel.

What is important

This book taught me the importance and inter-play of:

• Entrepreneurism
• Venture capital
• Being committed to own business and country at same time
• When people are pushed for survival, only then do they show the zeal for entrepreneurism and trade – otherwise nation becomes lazy
• Size of country does matter
• Government policies
  • For example, the world’s richest man has to go to a different country to develop new nuclear energy technology.
• Immigration
• Technology as future growth
• Multiple fields learning
• Defense Forces
• Liberalization and freedom of speech

To highlight in a bit more detail, I have picked a few quotes and insights from each chapter:

0. Introduction

• Story of Shimon Peres and Shai Agassi pitching Better Place to auto manufacturers – Better Place is re-thinking electric vehicles by making fuel stations swap out your battery with a charged one instead of pumping petrol or diesel into the car, highly ambitious, executed first in Israel, now in China, etc.

1. Persistence

• Story of "Fraud Sciences" company pitching to Paypal to use their fraud detection service – Paypal ended up buying them so that the competition doesn’t get them – idea came from founders who were soldiers in the Israeli army hunting down terrorists – they found hunting frauds easier.
• Chutzpah
• Israeli attitude and informality flow also from a cultural tolerance for what some Israelis call "constructive failure" or "intelligent failures." Most local investors believe that without tolerating a large number of failures, it is impossible to achieve true innovation. In the Israeli military, there is a tendency to treat all performance – both successful and unsuccessful – in training and simulations, and sometimes even in battle, as value-neutral. So long as the risk was taken intelligently, and not recklessly, there is something to be learned.
• Story of how Intel’s chip design vision changed purely because of doggedness of the Israeli Intel office to convince higher-ups and how that eventually saved the company

2. Battlefield Entrepreneurs

• As usual in the Israeli military, the tactical innovation came from bottom up – from individual tank commanders and their officers. It probably never occurred to these soldiers that they should ask their higher-ups to solve the problem, or that they might not have the authority to act on their own. Nor did they see anything strange in their taking responsibility for inventing, adopting, and disseminating new tactics in real time, on the fly. Yet what these soldiers were doing was strange. If they had been working in a multinational company…
• Company commander is also the lowest rank that must take responsibility for a territory. As Farhi puts it, "If a terrorist infiltrates that area, there’s a company commander whose name is on it. Tell me how many twenty-three-year-olds elsewhere in the world live with that kind of pressure… How many of their peers in their junior colleges have been tested in such a way? How do you train and mature a twenty-year-old to shoulder such responsibility?
• In the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), there are even extremely unconventional ways to challenge senior officers. "I was in Israeli army units where we threw out the officers," Oren told us, "where people just got together and voted them out. I witnessed this twice personally. I actually liked the guy, but I was outvoted. They voted out a colonel." When we asked Oren in disbelief how this worked, he explained, "You go and say, ‘We don’t want you. You’re not good.’ I mean, everyone’s ona first-name basis… You go to the person above him and say, ‘That guy’s got to go.’… It’s much more performance-oriented than it is about rank.

3. The People of The Book

• Almost every Israeli trekker in Bolivia is likely to come through El Lobo (restaurant), but not just to get food that tastes like it’s from home, to speak Hebrew, and to meet other Israelis. They know they will find something else there, something even more valuable: the Book. Though spoken of in singular, the Book is not one book but an amorphous and evolving collection of journals, dispersed throughout some of the most remote locations in the world. Each journal is a handwritten "Bible" of advice from one traveler to another. And while the Book is no longer exclusively Israeli, its authors and readers tend to be from Israel.
• Israeli wanderlust is not only about seeing the world; its sources are deeper… there is another psychological factor at work – a reaction to the physical and diplomatic isolation. Until recently, Israelis could not travel to a single neighbouring country…
• For the same reason, it was natural for Israelis to embrace the Internet, software, computer, and telecommunications arenas. In these industries, borders, distances, and shipping costs are practically irrelevant. As Israeli venture capitalist Orna Berry told us, "High-tech telecommunications became a national sport to help us defend against the claustrophobia that is life in a small country surrounded by enemies." … "Today, Israeli companies are firmly integrated into the economies of China, India, and Latin America. Because, as Orna Berry says, telecommunications became an early priority for Israel, every major telephone company in China relies on Israeli telecom equipment and software…

4. Harvard, Princeton and Yale

• Innovation often depends on having a different perspective. Perspective comes from experience. Real experience also typically comes with age or maturity. But in Israel, you get experience, perspective, and maturity at a younger age, because the society jams so many transformative experiences into Israelis when they’re barely out of high school. By the time they get to college, their heads are in a different place than those of their American counterparts… In the military, you’re in an environment when you have to think on your feet. You have to make life-and-death decisions. You learn about discipline. You learn about training your mind to do things, especially if you’re frontline or you’re doing something operational. And that can only be good and useful in the business world… This maturity is especially powerful when mixed with an almost childish impatience.
• When an Israeli man wants to date a woman, he asks her out that night. When an Israeli entrepreneur has a business idea, he will start it that week. The notion that one should accumulate credentials before launching a venture simply does not exist. This is actually good in business. Too much time can only teach you what can go wrong, not what could be transformative.
• The military gets you at a young age and teaches you that when you are in charge of something, you are responsible for everything that happens… and everything that does not happen," Lowry told us. "The phrase ‘It was not my fault’ does not exist in the military culture.

5. Where Order Meets Chaos

• Although Singapore’s military is modeled after the IDF – the testing ground for many of Israel’s entrepreneurs – the "Asian Tiger" has failed to incubate start-ups. Why?
• There is a can-do, responsible attitude that Israelis refer to as rosh gadol. In the Israeli army, soldiers are divided into those who think with a "rosh gadol" – literally, a "big head" – and those who operate with a rosh katan, or "little head." Rosh katan behavior , which is shunned, means interpreting orders as narrowly as possible to avoid taking on responsibility or extra work. Rosh gadol thinking means following orders but doing so in the best possible way, using judgment, and investing whatever effort is necessary. It emphasizes improvisation over discipline, and challenging the chief over respect for hierarchy. Indeed, "challenge the chief" is an injunction issued to junior Israeli soldiers, one that comes directly from a postwar military commission that we’ll look at later. But everything about Singapore runs counter to a rosh gadol mentality.
• In Israeli’s elite military units, each day is an experiment. And each day ends with a grueling session whereby everyone in the unit – of all ranks – sits down to deconstruct the day, no matter what else is happening on the battlefield or around the world. "The debrief is important as the drill or live battle," he told us. Each flight exercise, simulation, and real operation is treated like laboratory work "to be examined and reexamined, and reexamined again, open to new information, and subjected to rich – and heated debate. That’s how we are trained." In these group debriefs, emphasis is put not only on unrestrained candor but on self-criticism as a means of having everyone – peers, subordinates, and superiors – learn from every mistake. "It’s usually ninety minutes. It’s with everybody. It’s very personal. It’s a very tough experience," Dotan said, recalling the most sweat-inducing debriefings of his military career. "The guys that got ‘killed’ [in the simulations], for them it’s very tough. But for those who survive a battle – even a daily training exercise – the next-toughest part is the debriefing." …
• Finally, Eiland leveled a criticism that is perhaps quintessentially Israeli and hardly imaginable within any other military apparatus: "One of the problems of the Second Lebanon War was the exaggerated adherence of senior officers to the chief of staff’s decisions. There is no question that the final word rests with the chief of staff, and once decisions have been made, all must demonstrate cmplete commitment to their implementation. However, it is the senior officer’s job to argue with the chief of staff when they feel he is wrong, and this should be done assertively on the basis of professional truth as they see it.
• Large organizations, whether military or corporate, must be constantly wary of kowtowing and groupthink, or the entire apparatus can rush headlong into terrible mistakes. Yet most militaries, and many corporations, seem willing to sacrifice flexibility for discipline, initiative for organization, and innovation for predictability. This, at least in principle, is not the Israeli way.

6. An Industrial Policy That Worked

• The history of Israel’s economy is one of two great leaps, separated by a period of stagnation and hyperflation. The government’s macroeconomic policies have played an important role in speeding the country’s growth, then reversing it, and then unleashing it in ways that even the government never expected.

7. Immigration

• Israel’s economic miracle is due as much to immigration as to anything. At Israel’s founding in 1948, its population was 806,000. Today numbering 7.1 million people, the country has grown almost ninefold in sixty years. The population doubled in the first three years alone, completely overwhelming the new government. As one parliament member said at the time, if they had been working with a plan, they never would have absorbed so many people. Foreign-born citizens of Israel currently account for over one-third of the nation’s population, almost three times the ratio of foreigners to natives inthe United States… Israel is now home to more than seventy different nationalities and cultures.
• Ask yourself, why is it happening here?" he said of the Israeli tech boom. We were sitting in a trendy Jerusalem restaurant he owns, next to a complex he built that houses his venture fund and a stable of start-ups. "Why is it happening on the East Coast or the West Coast of the United States?" A lot of it has to do with immigrant societies. In France, if you are from a very established family, and you work in an established pharmaceutical company, for example, and you have a big office and perks and a secretary and all that, would you get up and leave and risk everything to create something new? You wouldn’t. You’re too comfortable. But if you’re an immigrant in a new place, and you’re poor," Margalit continued, "or you were once rich and your family was stripped of its wealth – then you have drive. You don’t see what you’ve got to lose; you see what you could win. That’s the attitude we have here – across the entire population.
• Crucially, Israel maybe the only country that seeks to increase immigration, not just of people of narrowly defined origins or economic status… the job of welcoming and encouraging immigration is a cabinet position with a dedicated ministry behind it. Unlike the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service, which maintains as one of its primary responsibilities keeping immigrants out, the Israeli Immigration and Absorption Ministry is solely focused on bringing them in.
• In the beginning of the 1960s, Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu demanded hard cash to allow Jews to leave the country. Between 1968 and 1989, the Israeli government paid Ceausescu $112,498,800 for the freedom of 40,577 Jews. That comes out to $2,772 per person.

8. The Diaspora

• AnnaLee Saxenian is an economic geographer at U.C.Berkeley and author of The New Argonauts. "Like the Greeks who sailed with Jason in search of the Golden Fleece," Saxenian writes, "the new Argonauts [are] foreign-born, technically skilled entrepreneurs who travel back and forth between Silicon Valley and their home countries." She points out that the growing tech sectors in China, India, Taiwan, and Israel – particularly the last two countries – have emerged as "important global centers of innovation" whose output "exceeded that of larger and wealthier nations like Germany and France." She contends that the pioneers of these profound transformations are people who "marinated in the Silicon Valley culture and learned it. This really begain in the late ’80s for the Israelis and Taiwanese, and not unil the late ’90s or even the beginning of the ’00s for the Indians and Chinese.
• The new Argonaut, or "brain circulation," model of Israelis going abroad and returning to Israel is one important part of the innovation ecosystem linking Israel and the Diaspora.
• Peres (in the Israeli Defense Ministry) had tried to buy thirty surplus Mustang aircraft for the Israeli Air Force, but the United States had decided to destroy the planes instead. Their wings were sliced off and their fuselages cut in two. So Schwimmer (one of the non-Israeli Jewish Diaspora)’s team bought the cut-up planes at cost from a Texas junk dealer, reconstructed them, and made sure they had all their parts and were operational. Then the team disassembled the planes again, packed them in crates marked "Irrigation Equipment," and shipped them to Israel.

9. The Buffett Test

• No sooner did the richest man in the world leave Israel than the second-richest, Warren Buffett, showed up. The most revered investor in America had arrived to visit the first company he’d bought outside the United States… Iscar, the Israeli company Buffett bought, has its main factory and R&D facilities in the northern part of Israel and was twice threatened by missile attacks – in 1991, when the whole country was targeted by Iraq’s Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War, and during the 2006 Lebanon War, when Hezbollah fired thousands of missiles at Israel’s northern towns. "Doesn’t this constitute catastrophic risk?" we asked Alice Schroeder, the only authorized biographer of Warren Buffett. Buffett’s view, she told us, is that if Iscar’s facilities are bombed, it can go build another plant. The plant does not represent the value of the company. It is the talent of the employees and management, the international base of loyal customers, and the brand that constitute Iscar’s value. So missiles, even if they can destroy factories, do not, in Buffett’s eyes, represent catastrophic risk.
• During the 2006 Lebanon War, just two months after Buffett acquired Iscar, 4228 miles landed in Israel’s north. Located less than eight miles from the Lebanese border, Iscar was a prime target for rocket fire… One rocket did slam into Tefen Industrial Park and a slew of rockets landed nearby. And though, during the war, many workers did temporarily relocate, with their families, to the southern part of the country, Iscar’s customers would never have known it. "It took us a brief time to adjust, but we didn’t miss a single shipment," Wertheimer said. "For our customers around the world, there was no war.

10. Yozma

• Every year when I tried to review the success of these small companies, it was disappointing," said Erlich. "While they may have succeeded in R&D, we didn’t see them succeed in growing companies." He became convinced that a private venture capital industry was the only antidote. But he also knew that in order to succeed, an Israeli VC industry would need strong ties with foreign financial markets. The international connections were not just about raising funds; aspiring Israeli VCs needed to be mentored in the art of business mentoring. There were thousands of venture capital firms in the United States that were involved in the nuts and bolts of successful tech start-ups in Silicon Valley. They had experience building companies, understood the technology and the funding process, and could guide first-time entrepreneurs. That’s what Erlich wanted to bring to Israel.
• That’s when a band of young bureaucrats at the Ministry of Finance came up with the idea for a program they called Yozma, which in Hebrew means "initiative." The idea was for the government to invest $100 million to create ten new venture capital funds. Each fund had to be represented by three parties: Israeli venture capitalists in training, a foreign venture capital firm, and an Israeli investment company or bank.
• The real allure for foreign VCs, however, was the potential upside built into this program. The government would retain a 40 percent equity stake in the new fund but would offer the partners the option to cheaply buy out the quity stake – plus annual interest – after five years, if the fund was successful. This meant that while the government shared the risk, it offered investors all of the reward. From an investor’s perspective, it was an unusually good deal.
• The ten Yozma funds created between 1992 and 1997 raised just over $200 million with the help of government funding. Those funds were bought out or privatized within five years, and today they manage nearly $3 billion of capital and support hundreds of new Israeli companies. The results were clear. AS Erel Margalit put it, "Venture capital was the match that sparked the fire."

11. Betrayal and Opportunity

• Like many small states, Israel preferred to buy large weapon systems from other countries, rather than devote the tremendous resources needed to produce them. [Especially from France. In 1969, France changed loyalties opting for rapprochement with the Arab world.] The Israelis quickly pursued stopgap measures. Israel decided that it must move quickly to produce major weapons systems, such as tanks and fighter aircraft, even though no other small country had successfully done so.
• The most ambitious project of all was the Lavi fighter jet, using American-made engines. [Even though the project was eventually cancelled], the Israelis had made an important psychological breakthrough: they had demonstrated to themselves, their allies and their adversaries that they were not dependent on anyone else to provide one of the most basic elements for national survival – an advanced fighter aircraft program. Second, in 1988 Israel joined a club of only about a dozen nations that had launched satellites into space – an achievement that would have been unlikely without the technological know-how accumulated during the Lavi’s development. And third, it helped jump-start the high-tech boom to come. Yossi Gross, one of the Lavi’s engineers, went on to found seventeen start-ups and develop over three hundred patents.

12. From Nose Cones to Geysers

• The companies where mashups are most common in Israel are in the medical-device and biotech sectors, where you find wind tunnel engineers and doctors collaborating on a credit card-sized device that may make injections obsolete. Or you find a company that has created an implantable artificial pancreas to treat diabetes. And then there’s a start-up that’s built around a pill that can transmit images from inside your intestines using optics technology taken from a missile’s nose cone.
• Some of Gross’s companies combine such wildly diverse technologies that they border on science fiction. Beta-O₂, for example, is a startup working on implantable "bioreactor" to replace the defective pancreas in diabetes patients. Diabetics suffer from a disorder that causes their beta cells to cease producing insulin. Transplanted beta cells could do the trick, but even if the body didn’t reject them, they cannot survive without a supply of oxygen. Gross’s solution was to create a self-contained micro-environment that includes oxygen-producing algae from the geysers of Yellowstone Park. Since the algae need light to survive, a fiber-optic light source is included in the pacemaker-sized device. The beta cells consume oxygen and produce carbon dioxide; the algae does just the opposite, created a self-contained miniature ecosystem. The whole bioreactor is designed to be implanted under the skin in a fifteen-minute outpatient procedure and replaced once a year.

13. The Sheikh’s Dilemma

• Cultural commitment can be central to the success of economic clusters, of which Israel’s high-tech industry is a case in point. A cluster, as described by the author of the concept, Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter, is a unique model for economic development because it’s based on "geographic concentrations" of interconnected institutions – businesses, government agencies, universities – in a specific field. Clusters produce exponential growth for their communities because people living and working within the cluster are in some way connected to each other. As Porter says, the "social glue" that binds a cluster together also facilitates access to critical information. A cluster, he notes, must be built around "personal relationships, face-to-face contact, a sense of common interest and ‘inside’ status." Margalit would point out that Israel has just the right mix of conditions to produce a cluster of this kind – and that’s rare. After all, attempts to create clusters don’t always succeed. Take, for example, Dubai.
• Attracting new members to a cluster by offering a less expensive way to do business might be sufficient to create a cluster, but not to sustain it. If price is a cluster’s only competitive edge, some other country will always come along to do it more cheaply. The other qualitative elements – such as tight-knit communities whose members are committed to living and working and raising families in the cluster – are what contribute to sustainable growth. Crucially, a cluster’s sense of shared commitment and destiny, which transcends day-to-day business rivalries, is not easy to manufacture.

14. Threats to the Economic Miracle

• What if Israel’s economic miracle were simply built on a rare confluence of events and would disappear under less favorable circumstances? Even if Israel’s new economy is not just the product of happenstance, what are the real threats to Israel’s long-term economic success?
• A diminished supply of venture capital dollars [in view of the worldwide economic crisis] could mean less "innovation finance" for Israel’s economy.
• The problem according to Ben-David, is that while the tech sector has been surging ahead, and becoming more productive, the rest of the economy has not been keeping up.
• As the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman put it, "I would much rather have Israel’s problems, which are mostly financial, mostly about governance, and mostly about infrastructure, rather than Singapore’s problem because Singapore’s problem is culture-bound.

15. Conclusion

• In twenty-five years, Israel increased its agricultural yields seventeen times. This is amazing," Peres told us. "People don’t realize this," Peres said, "but agriculture is ninety-five percent science, five percent work."
• Peres seemed to see technology everywhere, and long before Israelis themselves thought in such terms. This may have beeno ne of the reasons Ben-Gurion backed Peres so strongly; the "Old Man" was also fascinated by technology, he told us. "Ben-Gurion thought the future was science. He would always say that in the army it’s not enough to be up to date; you have to be up to tomorrow," Peres recalled.
• What makes the current Israeli blend so powerful is that it is a mashup of the founders’ patriotism, drive and constant consciousness of scarcity and adversity and the curiosity and restlessness that have deep roots in Israeli and Jewish history. "The greatest contribution of the Jewish people in history is dissatisfaction," Peres explained. "That’s poor for politics but good for science."
• This theme can be traced to the very idea of Israel’s founding. The modern state’s founders – or national entrepreneurs – were building what might be called the first "start-up nation" in history.
• At eighty-five, Peres still has the chutzpah to think up and advocate new industries. As they do in Israeli society, the pioneering and innovative impulses merge into one. At the heart of this combined impulse is an instinctive understanding that the challenge facing every developed country in the twenty-first century is to become an idea factory, which includes both generating ideas at home and taking advantage of ideas generated elsewhere. Israel is one of the world’s foremost idea factories, and provides clues for the meta-ideas of the future. The most careful thing, as Peres told us, is to dare.

Summary

This book has been instrumental in illuminating my mind about nation-building, about why startups are essential to a nation’s survival going forward and how much of a role the ecosystem plays.

I have been liberal in taking quotes from the book, but believe me, I haven’t even covered half the book in these quotes, so please do go read the book now!

I have to mention a special thanks to Sameer Guglani for recommending this book to me. I can already see that the "Morpheus gang" has the seeds of a cluster.

Update on 29-Dec-2011: See this article on why one VC has the opinion that Chile is not a great startup place – the interesting part is how culture of the country plays a big role in the entrepreneurialism of its residents.

Update on 12-Jan-2012: Many more hubs being kickstarted and hope to thrive : Las Vegas ‘Downtown Project’, Startup Chile, Tech City in East London.

Update on 22-Jan-2012: A very interested article by New York Times titled “How U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work – Apple, America and a Squeezed Middle Class”.