Last night, I watched a TEDGlobal talk by Sheena Iyengar, a Professor of Business at Columbia Business School, about her research on “choice”. Yes, choice, or choices – depending on how you interpret modern dilemmas. It’s a really insightful talk about the gullible nature of choices:

The [second] assumption which informs the American view of choice goes something like this. The more choices you have, the more likely you are to make the best choice. So bring it on Walmart with 100,000 different products, Amazon with 27 million books and Match.com with — what is it? — 15 million date possibilities now. You will surely find the perfect match. Let’s test this assumption by heading over to Eastern Europe. Here, I interviewed people who were residents of formerly communist countries, who had all faced the challenge of transitioning to a more democratic and capitalistic society. One of the most interesting revelations came not from an answer to a question, but from a simple gesture of hospitality. When the participants arrived for their interview I offered them a set of drinks, Coke, Diet Coke, Sprite — seven, to be exact.

During the very first session, which was run in Russia, one of the participants made a comment that really caught me off guard. “Oh, but it doesn’t matter. It’s all just soda. That’s just one choice.” (Murmuring) I was so struck by this comment that from then on I started to offer all the participants those seven sodas. And I asked them, “How many choices are these?” Again and again, they perceived these seven different sodas, not as seven choices, but as one choice: soda or no soda. When I put out juice and water in addition to these seven sodas, now they perceived it as only three choices — juice, water and soda. Compare this to the die-hard devotion of many Americans, not just to a particular flavor of soda, but to a particular brand. You know, research shows repeatedly that we can’t actually tell the difference between Coke and Pepsi.

…In reality, many choices are between things that are not that much different.

While this phenomenon may be cultural, some of it also has to do with the notion of individualism in many societies. “We are what we choose”, remarked Jeff Bezos in his speech to the Class of 2010 at Princeton University. But thinking too hard can often lead to poor choices.

What if most, if not all, of the choices could be simplified with something simple — a default option.

A default option, provisioned through careful analysis, can have an immense impact on us, specially in the social and economic landscape. What if the default option for the delivery of your utility bills or bank statements is email instead of paper mail? What if the default option for the enrollent in a retirement plan is inclusive instead of exclusive? What if a school cafeteria displayed the healthiest foods at the front? What if a $1 donation is a pre-selected option in a magazine renewal form? The simplest way to get more organ donors is to make the system “opt-out” instead of “opt-in”. People use the default choice most of the time, since they believe it is default for a reason.

Changing the defaults can be a powerful incentive to changing behavior. Having said that, choosing a good default is equally important. A wrong default for an array of choices can be counter-productive. Facebook’s privacy settings are a good example of poor defaults.

In the book “Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness”, Prof. Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler talk about the science of choices and defaults:

The human brain is amazing, but it evolved for specific purposes, such as avoiding predators and finding food. Those purposes do not include choosing good credit card plans, reducing harmful pollution, avoiding fatty foods, and planning for a decade or so from now. Fortunately, a few nudges can help a lot.

In present day and time, we often forget that when we have to make a choice and don’t make it, that is in itself a choice.

Execution is more important than ideas.

Good ideas are only so good in the mind of the beholder, unless proven to be useful or effective through execution. Ideas matter. The execution of those ideas matters more. But, what is execution?

Execution may mean different things to different people. In it’s basic form, execution means:

a carrying into effect or to completion

I believe that execution fundamentally derives from two inter-related facets: achievement and focus.

Achievement comes from continually completing a thing, more than repeatedly starting many things. Initiation is important, but without completion it’s worthless. Having said that, it’s practically impossible for one person to start many things and complete all of them. So, basically, the secret to achievement is to start fewer tasks or projects, and focusing on completing them before starting anything new.

Focus, and more precisely – uni-focus, is related to achievement. It’s an equally important factor in execution.

Let’s look at an example of a toaster. It’s a common gadget in many households, available in many shapes and sizes. Its primary function is to toast bread.

The ‘Back to Basics Egg & Muffin Toaster’ does it all. It has a 4 slice toaster, 2 egg cooker, slots for toasting muffins & bagels and a host of device controls.

On the other hand, the ‘Transparent Toaster’ has a radical design. It’s a novel idea, but it only does one thing. It toasts bread. And it is transparent, so you can see it all happening, thus avoiding the dreaded burned toast. The sad part is that it’s only a concept design. It couldn’t be mass produced due to a lack of heated glass panel technology.

Then there’s the ‘Magimix Vision Toaster’, which is similar to the ‘Transparent Toaster’ concept, only that it is an actual product. It toasts any kind of bread. It has minimal controls, and it is a classic example of uni-focus execution. It does less, yet its streamlined design overshadows the lack of bloat. Most importantly, it’s a finished product with paying customers.

If you look at some of the most popular and widely used Web applications today like Google Search, Facebook, Twitter or even the Google Chrome Web browser, you’ll find a common theme. They are all uni-focused. Their primary function is based on a single point of operation. The Google Search box is where the world starts their search. The Twitter status update box is the epicentre of real-time micro-messaging. The Facebook status update box helps millions of users to express themselves. The Google Chrome Omnibox is another brilliant example of a uni-focused control where you can search and navigate from the same textbox. All of these applications do much more, but 80% of the users only use the primary function on a daily basis.

Execution is about finding the right balance between achievement (the ability to do less, but get more done) and focus (the ability to concentrate and streamline).

A recent article in the New York Magazine, titled “All Joy and No Fun: Why parents hate parenting“, contemplates on the bewilderment around parenting. It’s a much debatable subject, that can get quiet sensitive for a lot of people.

Going through some of the reader comments at HN on the article, two candid comments struck me as something to remember. Rather than elaborating on the comments, I think it’s best to just preserve them in original as a source of insight:

Like everything in life, the thought of doing it, trumps the actual doing it. Finishing the basement, writing a novel, building the next great web app, raising kids all seem like great projects to embark on. But it’s the dark night of the soul, when you’re up for the 10 night in a row (or you have writer’s block or you realize you shouldn’t have cut that pipe, etc, etc).

Life isn’t all rainbows and unicorns. Speaking as a member of GenX, our lives are so damn easy most of the time, when we run into problems, we don’t know how to handle it. However, we adjust.

I just can’t imagine how grandma raised 9 kids with no ER or acute care and little money. Wars, the great depression, death of a child, she went through it all. And they did hard physical labor every day.

The thing is we adjust, it’s hard at first, but we persevere.

When you watch your kid doing something you taught him/her, that’s just not a feeling you get from purchasing a new iPad. When you sit in structure you built or use a product you built you’ll know the feeling. It’s hard to explain but in the end, it’s worth it.

In all honesty, at times I too succumb to the mounting pressure of parenting. And I wonder, like millions of baffled parents, why is parenting hard? Humans have been having babies for thousands of years under much more difficult situations, so why is it now that parenting has suddenly emerged as a stressful chore?

The lens through which parenting is viewed here is too narrow. Parenting isn’t about being happier. It is about being a bigger and better person. Children make your life BIGGER. You feel moments of happiness like you’ve never felt before. You also feel moments of anger like you’ve never felt before.

It really is indescribable and not for the faint of heart or the selfish. The beautiful thing about parenting is that it shows you who you really are (not who you think you are), and gives you chances every day to grow.

It makes you see what really matters in life, assuming you actually come to this realization. I’ve seen plenty of people not realize this and fight to keep their identity, their original idea of what they wanted for themselves while also trying to be a parent. That doesn’t work.

Part of parenting is a certain amount of ego destruction. You have to go through that if you want to genuinely care for another human being.

This is what makes the experience of parenting so great. It is a kind of Zen experience of making yourself better by destroying your concept of self (and putting another ‘self’ first more than your own self would like).

Patience is an important catalyst in parenting, just as it is in learning to play the piano or doing anything meaningful in life. Happiness, is just a by-product. I feel that parenting is not just about loving your kid, spending quality time with them, being there when they need you and providing for them. Parenting is also about letting go of self-obsession.

It’s a tough question, but an important one for any entrepreneur (aspiring or established) to address early on. Most startups fail because they build something people never wanted in the first place (i.e. it doesn’t really solve a real-life problem or doesn’t add any value to an existing process), or they take too long (often over-engineering) to build something and hence fail to gain early feedback.

Over the past few months, I have observed that a successful (viz. revenue generating at the very least) product should be able to satisfy one (or more) of these four broad scenarios:

1. It directly helps people make money. Such a product would allow the users to monetize their own creations or digital assets. A few good examples of this product category are Google AdSense, Square, Etsy and oDesk.

2. It directly helps people save money. Such a product would allow the users to save money on their current expenditure (personal or business), or at-least help them manage their money better to start with. A few good examples of this product category are Mint and Google Apps.

3. It helps people to collaborate easily. People like to share stuff and stay in sync (across devices), while saving time and effort. That makes collaboration really effective and lucrative. It also makes this the most crowded category of all. Everything from Project Management apps to Social Networking apps to iPhone/iPad apps try to fit in this broad segment. But only a few genuine products survive due to two factors: most products are too bloated to be used efficiently, and secondly the sheer volume of this segment requires ingenuity. A few good examples of this product category are Dropbox, Evernote, Posterous and Basecamp.

4. It helps people customize a physical good or object. People like to stand-out in the physical world, by looking unique or by creating unique things. A few good examples of this product category are Shoes of Prey, Arduino and Blank Label.

These scenarios can be interpreted as statistical buckets. I’m not suggesting that all products follow (or must follow) these scenarios or that these are magical in any way.

On the contrary, I believe that a successful product is ingenious and simple. It should do less, but it should do that better than the rest. It’s not a novel idea, but first and foremost – you should consider building what you want. Keep it small. Build something that you would want to use everyday. Keep it simple. Build something that solves your own problem.

If you enjoy eating your own dog-food, you’ll eventually find others willing to pay you to share your dog-food with them.

1. Car Pooling – Sometime back I took a taxi cab to work. I got talking to the driver, a friendly guy with crude English. He mentioned something so simple that it made me think on several interrelated issues (environmental, social, economical) for days. “Only one person in each vehicle. That’s what’s wrong with this f**king world.”, he said. As I looked around in the sluggish traffic, I could really see only one person in each vehicle, for miles. It made me jot down a note to think about promoting car pooling and maybe improve the experience somehow. Eventually, a bit of brain-storming brought a question – what’s a good model for online coordination of car pooling, so that more and more people can easily get on-board and the mechanism is effective?

2. Comments Aggregation – Most of the decent user-generated content is built around niche online communities, where users often post some great comments on various topics. Most of these comments (however small or big) go unnoticed and get buried over time. If these comments were available for reading on a wider platform (a dedicated website) to a larger audience, then it can add more value. Each deserving comment becomes an independent post/article, linked back to the original post/article. The app can simply be a bookmarklet to clip thoughtful well-deserving comments and a website to aggregate the clipped comments with a clean uncluttered reader-friendly UI to go with it.

3. Social Goals – An application (probably a Facebook app) where anyone can set one or more goals (e.g. lose x amount weight in y days) for themselves or their friends. The user (person who has to achieve the goal) can then post regular updates on their progress. Their network of friends rank their effort on each update posted. Their network of friends can also send them a gift (virtual or real) at each milestone or when the goal is accomplished. The idea is loosely based on Game theory, as it aims to promote action and behaviour change through group motivation.

4. Feedback for Startups – Startups need early feedback as part of customer development. The idea is to create a website for startups to put-up a survey (small or big) and a special offer (e.g. discounts, coupons, gifts, gift certificate, books etc.) to go with it as an incentive to complete the survey. The longer the survey, the bigger the offer to the user. Users (who meet a set criteria) can then choose to participate in a survey and receive the special offer. Startups on the other hand can get the relevant feedback.

5. Food Photos – More and more people are sharing photos of their food. And there’s something about looking at other peoples (real) food. It’s somehow aesthetically pleasing to the eye. New York Times wrote about the phenomenon – People Who Photograph Food and Display the Pictures Online. The idea is to create a website and curate/aggregate food pictures in real-time from various photo sharing sites and social networks (Twitpic, TweetPhoto, Flickr, Posterous, Blogs). Add a bit of social voting and make it elegant for ‘food porn‘.

6. Integrated Blogging Environment (IBE) – Blogging is more common than ever before. From a bloggers perspective, I find that it still lacks a simple integrated tool to write rich articles quickly. Here’s my wish-list for a blogging tool: Web-based, simple WYSIWYG text editor, inbuilt support for dictionary & spelling suggestions, quicker reference to Wikipedia, inbuilt support for search and embedding of images (Creative Commons licensed) from Google Images and Flickr, auto-post to multiple blogs, auto-post to Twitter & Facebook. How about it?

Most of these abstract ideas have emerged from my own needs and observations. These ideas are open for anyone to use, so feel free to go for it. Drop me a message if you make any progress. Good luck.

Apparently, 25271 people want to “Fall in love” and on average it takes them 9 years to complete this goal. Not too far down the list, 19421 people want to “get married” and on average it takes them 8 years to complete this goal. And there is the fundamental flaw with the typical perception of statistical averaging.

The dictionary defines an average as:

central tendency around the middle of a scale of evaluation.

Averaging has long been an important methodological “assumption” in data-driven understanding. A lot of analysis and decision-making around the world is based on taking the averages of various quantitative measurements. But, is it really a reliable way of result representation?

An average is a single value that is meant to typify a list of values. This can be misleading if misused. I think the problem with averaging is largely related to transparent distribution. For example, on average every person has one testicle and one breast. Misleading, but true. Without valid segmentation, an average doesn’t accurately classify the data set and the inference becomes biased.

In most cases, an average ends up sounding like a generalized fact, mainly to justify a marketing strategy. If a company promotes a product by stating that its been proven to be effective for “75% of people on average”, it leaves a lot unsaid. What age groups, gender, income levels etc. were these people segmented in while deriving an average? The chances of this product being effective, and the chances of anyone buying the product, should marginally diminish with an increasing lack of segmentation made available. However, marketeers know well that it’s this very lack of segmentation that impairs the judgement of people. We buy what others buy, as Game theory comes into action.

On the other side, many market researchers overuse averaging and reach invalid conclusions. Organizations misapply these conclusions, all to their own demise. Most organizations produce stuff that may never be widely adopted, but since their market research was based on generic averaging to start with, they think otherwise.

Averaging of data without clear information around the segmentation of that data is a vague and pointless exercise, which can have grave consequences through cognitive bias. Unfortunately, it’s also the most popular way of drawing abstract conclusions.

Writing software is most similar to writing fiction novels. Writing novels is also an act of creation in an unconstrained and ethereal medium with few well-established construction rules.

I find this notion to be a fallacy, because writing software can be looked as a form of art, but it is largely driven by engineering. Programming can be called a craft or an art-form, but the software itself is not. My biggest argument in this context is regarding automation. Engineering primarily promotes automation of tasks. Most software is written to automate manual or semi-manual processes and enforce computational validations. However, we cannot automate art. A painting won’t automatically self-render itself into a 3D landscape. Nor would the premise of a fiction novel evolve or extend on its own, like refactored source code or OOP libraries can allow for in software.

It has become quite clear in the software world that a big design up-front doesn’t work. Engineering can solve this problem through iterative design and development. Art, on the other hand, cannot be progressive by its very nature. The final result of art is static, albeit beautiful or enjoyable.

Recently I heard Neal Ford talk about Emergent Design during a brown bag session at work. Neal is an author, a speaker and a Software Architect at ThoughtWorks. In his talk, Neal questioned the nature of code? What is software code? I think it’s a subtle yet very important construct in the understanding of software engineering.

A conventional engineer’s output, be it mechanical, aeronautical or any other branch, is the design or the blueprint. The engineer provides the very basis of objects architecture and its inner-workings. But what is the output of a software engineer? Yes, our lot designs architectures too and we also document the inner-workings (as much as some of us hate to). But the primary output of a software engineer is — the code. Hence, software code is the core output of a type of engineering, not a type of art.

To further draw the “art of engineering”, I’ll leave you with an interesting anecdote to ponder on:

Warning! If you still enjoy playing PacMan, don’t read the next paragraphs—they will ruin it forever for you. Sometimes knowledge comes with a price.

Consider the PacMan console game. When it came out in the 1970s, it had less computational ability than a cheap cell phone of today. Yet, it had to solve a really difficult math problem: how do you get the ghosts to chase PacMan through the maze? That is to say: what is the shortest distance to a moving target through a maze? That’s a big problem, especially if you have very little memory or processor power to work with. So the developers of PacMan didn’t solve that problem, they used the anti-object approach and built the intelligence into the maze itself.

The maze in PacMan acts like an automata (like in Conway’s Game of Life). Each cell has simple rules associated with it, and the cells executed one at a time, starting at the upper left and proceeding to the lower right. Each cell remembers a value of “PacMan smell.” When PacMan sits on a cell, it has maximum PacMan smell. If he had just vacated the cell, it has maximum PacMan smell –1. The smell degrades for a few more turns, then disappears. The ghosts can then be dumb: they just sniff for PacMan smell, and any time they encounter it, they go to the cell that has a stronger smell.

The “obvious” solution to the problem builds intelligence into the ghosts. Yet, the much simpler solution builds the intelligence into the maze. That is the anti-object approach: flip the computational foreground and background. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that “traditional” modeling is always the correct solution. Perhaps a particular problem is more easily solved in another language entirely.

Excerpt from the The Productive Programmer by Neal Ford. Art titled ‘Pacman Apocalypse‘ by Lawrence Yang.

I found it interesting that the same thought can be applied in the context of technology startups. Pre-release expressions of interest can immensely help Lean Startups gauge interest in the (yet unbuilt) product and what features consumers may find most appealing. It can also help startups ascertain the actual scope, perspective demand and real-world audience of the product, all of which are very important factors for effective monetization. After all, the first goal of a startup is to find those first 50 paying customers.

A big part of the problem is that no one knows what will work with the consumers and what won’t. No amount of market research, case studies or investment will ever substitute a real-world trial. So you start with a bare bones product that requires minimum efforts to build & release for a “preview product”, and hence reduce the time to market.

Building this “preview product”, or a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) as Eric Ries likes to call it, is essentially based on minimizing total time through the Lean Startup feedback loop:

Bootstrapping, rapid prototyping, customer driven development, iterative improvement, eliminating waste (muda), unit testing and continuous deployment are all essential components for building a MVP. Much of this paradigm is also derived from the Toyota Production System.

For example, having a paid account availability notification in your application is a tiny yet nifty approach to a MVP. You build a smaller product, or rather, you build a single feature. You incrementally improve it based on early feedback from interested users. And during this lean startup loop, you measure the actual value of the product by inviting users to pre-order your lean product.

In the field of human-computer interaction, a Wizard of Oz experiment is a research experiment in which subjects interact with a computer system that subjects believe to be autonomous, but which is actually being operated or partially operated by an unseen human being. A related true story I read about an ad-hoc approach, similar to what an MVP can often employ, goes like this:

There was a guy who wanted to sell cars online. But it was a huge system to write from end-to-end, and moreover he didn’t know if it would work or not. So he made a simple website with basic content and forms etc., but he processed the entire back-end work by hand. There was no real automated backend, but the customers got the impression that the entire thing is pretty much automated. This experiment provided him the feedback he needed for expanding his business processes and automating only the essential components.

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

What’s also amazing is how much we can learn about ourself in time just by paying a little more attention to that sound in our head. After a year of pondering and progress, mistakes and accomplishments, I felt that I should share what I really learnt this year:

1. Just do it, and more importantly, do it fucking now! Create stuff that excites you. Do stuff that scares you. And, if you think you haven’t found your passion…

2. …Procrastinate. It ain’t that bad, as long as you have a desire to start somewhere. Most people never follow their dreams because they are shit scared to open their eyes. Start small, grow organically. The key is to start. Start!

3. Never argue with a fool. They will drag you down to their level, and then beat you with experience. Same goes for pseudo-intellects and pedants.

4. Health is wealth. I quit smoking for good this year. Took up swimming instead (after a halt of around 10 years). I’m nearing a kilometer of a swim daily, but what’s significant is that mentally and physically I feel rejuvenated.

5. Have positive people around you. I don’t think that people are inherently “bad”, but some people have a tendency to measuredly create naive obstacles to restrain you from doing what they couldn’t or can’t do. If you fail in your repeated efforts to make such people understand the reality, then at-least don’t react negatively yourself. One persons oasis is another persons reality.

6. Wife is always right. But that doesn’t stop me from doing what I want anyway, or so says the wifey.

7. If you are wrong, say sorry. If you are right, shut up.

8. Never do anything for money alone. Do it for a reason you believe in. Do it for your passion. Relatively, don’t be a miser but be frugal.

9. If something doesn’t excite you (makes you say HELL YEAH), then don’t do it. Family commitments are exempted.

10. The most important things in life are not things. An African saying suggests: “If you want to walk quick, walk alone. But if you want to walk far, walk together.”

11. Let bygones be bygones. The only way is forward, so move on. If others want to constantly whine on past grievances, then let them do so. Eventually, they’ll see the bigger picture.

12. The most effective productivity technique that works for me is to just have one goal in a day. If you happen to complete it, then have a second smaller goal, but never have more than one goal a day to start with and more than two goals to end with.

13. Make the World a better place. Again, this doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Don’t expect to change the World over-night. Reduce wastage. Help begins at home and neighbourhood. Start small with Kiva and World Vision. Giving is a good criterion of a person’s mental health. Generous people are rarely mentally-ill.

14. Not everybody agrees to the same things as you do. One must always respect other opinions (so please excuse my rant if you don’t really relate to much of it). Great things happen when people share their opinions, discuss them rationally keeping the larger goal in mind, and reach a simple solution. An interesting thing I took from one of my company meetings was that to make things happen (in an organization or with-in a group of people in general) you need 100% commitment but only 80% agreement.

15. Thank people.

Kudos to some really smart people like Paul Graham, Derek Sivers and many TED speakers who inspired me to prune and spruce my thoughts, and put it all to action in my everyday life.

May the New Year 2010 bring you happiness and good health. Merry Christmas.

While doing some coding in my spare time lately, I’ve had a strong craving for listening to some new music. So, I took some time out to basically mix and record my own tracks, mainly electronic rock stuff composed using digital synthesizer software.

I’m sharing a few tracks below. All mp3′s are downloadable under the Creative Commons license. Some are also featured at Opsound:

Racket In the Rain (Extended)

Landing on Queepa 76

Avatar From Copenhagen

End Game Republic

Enjoy.