July 27, 2025 RandomThoughts No comments
Using Back-of-the-Envelope Math to Pressure-Test Ideas
This post is a bit of an experimental thought exercise, but I hope you will find it interesting. You might have run into the term “back-of-the-envelope calculations” in the context of system design at work, quickly checking if an idea makes sense, you might have heard about this term as ‘back of a napkin’. In this post I would like to explore a few applications of using this. Let’s look at some made-up examples, starting with a broken tool and ending with a mathematical formula for success.
Case 1: Broken Tool
Problem: Let’s say some kind of a validation tool at your big enterprise company is running into timeouts. Annoying, but after retry it goes away, so engineers don’t report the annoyance that much. You’ve had enough of it and complained to the owners by creating some bug reports but there is no traction whatsoever. Things continue like that for a while.
Solution: Spend just mere 10-20 min to do back-of-the-envelope calculation to estimate the implication of this. No need for precise data – just something that makes sense to get the point across. E.g. this tool slows down X engineers on daily basis and they spend Yh of time waiting for the job to complete, then assume some reasonable coefficient k (0<k<1) of waiting async time to sync time and you get something of E = (k*Y*X) of ENG time per day. k, Y, X could come from data if you have it right away, or reasonable assumptions (org size, anecdotal data). If E number is 8h then the cost of things continuing is one engineer full time. Probably this is worth fixing and gives you a good argument for quickly justifying ROI.
Case 2: Validating compatibility of statements
Let’s look at a more complicated and borrowed example from the book “The Art of Doing Science and Engineering” (great read, btw). There are two statements in the book and the author validates their compatibility, based on the premise that amount of knowledge is somewhat proportional (k) to number of scientists:
- Statement 1: knowledge doubles every 17 years;
- Statement 2: 90% of the scientists who ever lived are now alive.
Now, the author starts with the formulas: 
But hold on! By now this all might sound very convincing, but the above seemed to make sense in the post-WWII world, but current data no longer strongly supports the two statements, UNESCO suggests 8.8M researchers in 2018, but the projections are pointing to plateauing of this because most of the growth in 00’ and 10’ was coming from China’s growth, which no longer continues at that rate and at the same time EU, US has already reached plateauing (other findings on this). Also the original doubling of the knowledge statement is questionable. Potentially doubling of information is still happening fairly frequently if we consider material that is being generated by AI.
My mini-conclusion for this example is that you can arrive at reasonable confirmation if what someone is saying makes sense generally, but it may not hold true for a long period of time.
Case 3: System Design
Let’s say you are sketching an idea for your startup for which latency of processing data is critical, without going into too many details you can get a sense of how much time it takes to process your data at different stages and whether your solution is worth exploring further or not or if you need to find a different solution.
Some typical numbers:
- Transatlantic network roundtrip: ~80–120 milliseconds
- Reading 1MB from network (LAN): ~0.5–3 milliseconds
- Reading 1MB from disk:
- HDD: ~5–15 milliseconds
- NVMe SSD: ~0.1–1 milliseconds
- Reading 1MB from memory (DRAM): ~150–300 microseconds
- Processor thread synchronization (mutex): ~20–300 nanoseconds
- L1 cache access: ~0.5 nanoseconds
Case 4: Formula for success
Switching gears. Let me run a silly thought experiment: you want to model what it takes to succeed as a mathematical formula. Maybe, you want to increase chances of your kids succeeding and being happy. You can come up with some parameters of what you believe have influence on success and then think about possible relationships between them that would determine success at time t based on past success at time t’:
- B(t0): Birth conditions (location, socioeconomic status at birth).
- E(t′): Quality and quantity of education at age t′, where t′<t.
- R(t′): Availability and utilization of resources (money, time, social capital) at age t′.
- H(t′): Individual’s health (physical & mental) at age t′.
- N(t′): Personal and professional social network strength at age t′,
- D(t′): Individual’s level of determination and perseverance at age t′.
- L(t′): Luck or random positive/negative events at age t′.
Then, you might arrive at a generalized mathematical formula for success at age t:
where:
- α,β,γ,δ,ϵ,ζ,η are weighting factors, representing the relative impact of each component (these could be determined empirically or statistically).
is a discounting or decay function indicating that recent events often influence current success more than distant past events (λ is a decay parameter).
You might conclude that an individual’s level of determination has the greatest impact, and decide to focus on developing that trait in your children.
Conclusion
You don’t always need precise data to move forward even for something that may seem overly complex and even abstract. Quick estimates let you sanity-check assumptions, challenge vague claims, pressure-check ideas, and decide if something is even worth exploring. Quick estimates help you move fast and avoid getting lost in BS and even rough mathematical formulas might help you structure your thinking about complex matters before you dive all the way into it. Anyway, just some random thoughts from my side — curious what you think.
From Google to Meta: A Mid-Career Leap
July 20, 2025 Career, Personal, Success No comments
Disclaimer: opinions in this post are my own and do not represent opinions of my current employer or any of my past employers or any of my or their clients.
I’ve been so busy I forgot to mention some important career changes. In fact, I’ve been so busy it has already been half a year since I started working for META. Not only that – I’ve moved countries again and now live in the Seattle area.
I’ve spent 4.5 years at Google working on the experimentation platform within Ads. It is flattering to think that traffic for billions of people has been supported by the code I touched, however limited my contribution might have been.
Google is an incredible company, great culture, great and bright people. I worked for Google remotely as I joined during the pandemic and then switched to permanent remote when the offices started to open. I wish there was an office in Vancouver, Canada, in which case I might have decided to stay at the company. It did feel that being remote long term is disadvantageous to my career and at times it felt unfair that south of the border the pay is much more for the same job at the same company.
My ride at Google was great- I joined as Sr. Eng, but then got to Staff quickly for someone new. It could have been due to cross-org visibility of the project I worked on, and some luck as well, or, maybe, I’ve done a good job. Whatever it was getting that next level didn’t feel as gruelling as the promo I worked for at Amazon. Good ride and I definitely see Google as a place I might want to come back to.
Meta
Meta is a company with a strong culture, great ambitious vision, and isn’t afraid to make big risky bets. It is quite intense from inside but also very rewarding at the same time and this matches my expectations of what I thought I will get into. Paycheck is also nice, my FIRE goals are closer now.
I joined Meta, because I wanted to further expand my toolset, learn new ways of building things fast (and sometimes breaking them), as well as be back to closer interactions with people (but that was mostly because of my remote situation). If I were to compare: at Google, I found stability and polish; at Meta, I find speed and higher ambiguity. Both cultures are fostering innovation and are great places for engineers.
My first half of the year at work passed blazingly quickly. I wasn’t even able to blink from Jan to Jul. There is so much to work on every day, that there is no way around it other than finding ways to prioritize, be productive and focused, always making sure there is impact in the end. I’ve come up with new and stable work routines that keep me effective, like starting very early with few hours of deep work, and staying productive throughout the day, but also so that my work-life balance isn’t hurt and so that I can continue my kickboxing classes, rock climbing, running, and having proper weekends with my kids.
What’s next?
In an odd way, having a more intense workload also stimulates me to explore more ways to learn and grow outside. I think we’re more adaptable than we give ourselves credit for. When life asks more of us, we often rise to meet it—and that includes finding new ways to learn, improve, and move toward what really matters.
Personally I am approaching a point where it makes sense to think about life more holistically – not just the next promotion or goal. What do I still want to experience? What kind of life am I building? A meaningful career is part of it, and a big foundational support, but it’s only one piece of a much larger puzzle.
AI: From Skeptic to Power User to (Re) learner
July 13, 2025 AI No comments
I, mistakenly, have never given the entire AI trends that much consideration and even at one point suggested that it might be one of those overhyped technology trends that will fade away with time (like AR, Bitcoin, etc), . This post is about some of my personal experiences that made me reconsider this. This post is NOT written with LLM, though, lol.
University Years
My first ever experience actually doing something AI related, was during my studies around 2007-8, in fact, I did have quite a few AI courses at the university, including building a simple NN framework and even visualizing its internal layers structure and learning process with backpropagation. I didn’t give it much thought back then. It seemed to be quite a niche technology and just part of studies. I could see it classified some data I fed it with and saw how my classmate used it to recognize numbers from car number plates.
First Jobs
After that, for quite a long time, it hasn’t really shown on my radar that much. I guess I might have inadvertently used some tools that were utilizing some ML algorithms, like I remember using some open source library for a prototype project to match images. At Amazon I knew some teams that were working on AI related things, such as brand protection, recommendations, but never really worked on anything AI myself. Google is known to have been on the forefront of using AI long before anyone else. Advertising at Google has been running ML models for a very long time and I had to support their efforts by working on an experimentation platform that allowed those teams to verify their hypothesis and slowly roll out new models to the world.
Rasing Trend
During my years at Google, AI has risen in its popularity. Big tech companies started to invest extremely heavily into AI (Pichai-AI meme), oftentimes pushing for efficiency and cost cutting at one end, and at the same time expanding operations on the other end. I think it was also the time when I started making use of GenAI a lot more. More and more tools started to be available, coding has become somewhat easier, doing some summarizations has become easier and so on. Since I moved to META early 2025, the entire AI trend continues, and it’s clear that META is very aggressive in hiring top AI talent (media coverage). There is more and more interaction with ML at work, some of the projects my team is driving are to integrate with ML platforms, etc.
Crossing Personal Mental Threshold of Usefulness
My main reservation with using LLMs was that I usually felt the quality of results it produced did not justify the effort I put into prompting it. Especially given I always had to correct the result. Though, I believe this changed.
Last week I had to write a few new classes in C++, that would evaluate some expressions from configs, so instead of adding files manually, I just talked to AI, “hey, create me this and that and make sure interface has this signature”, “hey, add a UT class”, “hey, update dependencies”, and then it actually did a very fairly good job at all of that, not perfect, but really good enough to save me time. This is when realization came to me, this is now crossing that personal threshold I had in mind. It is more useful and worth a bit of effort fighting with it.
On a more personal front, recently, I wanted to replan some of my life goals, learning strategies, so I made heavy use of GPT and it’s just astonishing how good it has become at reasoning, structuring things, and actually producing what I want. I’m now a paid subscriber of GPT and am trying to use it more like a true personal assistant. I did use it before for financial advise, travel planning, summarization, etc, etc.
Last night, I was like, how about I ask GPT to learn something together, so I asked, “let’s create an AI learning plan, here is my background: …., make it personalized”. “AI refresher” was on the first week with suggested deliverables of building a small convolutional neural network on the CIFAR-10 data set. So… drum-roll, I asked it to build a notebook with code for all of it and it produced a bunch of code, which I followed up pasting into Colab, training the model and verifying its accuracy. It is just mind boggling how in just 20 minutes or so, I can build some stuff that would have taken weeks not too long ago, plus if there were things I didn’t understand I could clarify and it gave me really good answers.
One other thing, everybody knows, LLMs are good at travel planning. I usually prefer to plan everything myself and just get starting point from GPT, but this time we wanted to go camping spontaneously, so I asked LLM, “Lookup campgrounds within 2 hours drive from Seattle, that have plenty of first come first serve spots, access to lake, with activities including paddleboarding and biking. Create a list of 5 campgrounds with a short description.” – so it basically did all of the Googling for me based on that prompt, provided pointers to sources, etc, etc. Mindboggling.
One other thing I asked a specialized AI tool to do was to generate a 3D model to print. It did fairly good job – that’s it – giving in.
Where I think it can still be much better
There are still a few things that I want it to be better at. For example, being less of a “yes man”. Contradicting what LLMs say makes them change their mind and say “yes, you are absolutely correct, let me update the answer”. Other things are: better reasoning, understanding context even better, etc. Arguably, this would be a very tricky challenge for LLMs to be like true humans, but it appears we are definitely on that direction.
Conclusion
For me personally, LLMs and AI have now clearly crossed the threshold of being not just good enough—but genuinely useful. The time and effort it takes to engage with them are now well worth the return. Whether it’s writing code faster, mapping out life goals, or planning a camping trip, the tools have become practical enough to build into daily routines.
Having finally “given in” to their usefulness, I’m also embracing AI: having fresh curiosity and investing time to study it deliberately. It feels like the right moment to not just use the technology—but to understand it, shape how I interact with it, and grow with it.
On a Journey to Financial Independence: Lessons, Mistakes, and Thoughts on FIRE
December 29, 2024 Investing 7 comments
I have always been fascinated with financial independence and have made financial goals for myself throughout the years. Here are some of my history with money and thoughts on FIRE.
I want to tell my own story so you don’t have to repeat my mistakes. As a disclaimer, I’m not a multi-millionaire and this is not professional financial advice. I bear no responsibility for your actions. Seek professional advice if needed (though beware that advisors have their own interests and may see you as a target to sell you something).
What’s FIRE?
FIRE stands for Financial Independence, Retire Early. Idea is fairly simple: accumulate x25 of your intended annual spending and go retire early. I wouldn’t know the origin of the term FIRE but the idea isn’t that new and I’ve always followed MMM (Mr. Money Mustache) blog which in my opinion is one of the top voices on FIRE, though with higher emphasis on frugality. I highly recommend you read some of the articles there. I will get back to FIRE after giving a brief history of my dealing with money.
Ukraine
I was raised in a working class family in Ukraine, we didn’t have money, basically we were poor. Luckily having no money didn’t stop me from getting a good education. I made my first money in a local software engineering company. At that time I’d already read some books on financial independence and wanted to invest, but tools available back then in Ukraine were limited and I mostly made guaranteed security deposits, which didn’t make too much of a difference. At very least I was smart enough to know that keeping money under the mattress was a mistake, but even banks were not reliable so I had to juggle between different banks to diversify. Most people saw value in buying real estate and who could afford would buy an apartment in the city. There was a cold awakening in 2008 when home prices dropped, yet real estate is still seen as a tangible investment you can see and touch. There is some merit to it, again will get back to it.
Austria
As I moved to Austria in 2012, I had access to more investment tools and ways of buying my first stocks. I could finally practice at least some of what I read in books on investing. Since I didn’t have much money and banks in Europe are greedy on fees, any active investing approaches were only making money for brokers. I clearly remember how I had a small amount of MSFT stock and at dividend distribution out of 14EUR I would get 0.01 after all of the fees and taxes (what a joke). For the record, those 5k in MSFT invested then would have been 46k today, but I did sell with some small profit. Lesson here is that time in the market beats timing the market. Other than spx500 and a few other stocks, at that time, I also had money invested in some mutual funds of real estate in Austria, which probably was some of my worst investments because of ridiculous management annual fees >1% and growth that didn’t even catch up with inflation (what a joke). Lessons here are to never blindly trust bank/financial advisors as they have something to sell to you and also: fees are evil. For about 4 years I was a self-employed contractor software engineer to the IAEA via another company and had a chance to understand the taxation system a bit better. I had a tax advisor, and was claiming some business expenses (like laptop, internet bill, etc) to reduce my gross income. My last year in Austria was as a staff member of the IAEA so I didn’t have to pay taxes (yes, legally) and also since I was leaving Austria I was able to withdraw all of my retirement money and I did put most of it into real estate, if invested in early 2018 into s&p 500 that would have been 2x.
Canada
Canada finally made it possible to have proper investing tooling at my disposal. Other than directly receiving AMZN/GOOG shares from my employers I invested as much as I can into low fee index tracking funds (e.g. Vanguard S&P 500, or Canada companies), of course, after maximizing my RRSP and TFSA. For US readers, RRSP is an equivalent of 401(k) plan and TFSA is a unique Canadian vehicle which is a fully tax free investment account (even on withdrawal). Being a Vancouverite, I’m obliged to bring up the topic of real estate. Vancouver is one of the most unaffordable cities in the world. I have no idea how people with regular <100k incomes can make their ends meet here. I did buy a 1.2M$ townhouse here in 2022 and I regret doing so. It may eventually prove to be a good investment if there is another crazy growth as in 2021 but so far I don’t see a way to sell the place for the price I bought it for and if I had all the money I put into it invested I would have made an extra 200k. If I had to sell it now I would lose money. Though if I was lucky to buy a place with the same money just two years earlier I could have potentially made 800k all with borrowed money. You probably know of people who preach using borrowed money to make money, like Robert Kiyosaki. I have multiple friends who rode the wave.
Now
As of 2024, I am not a multi-millionaire even though I worked for two of the FAANG companies in the past 7 years. I see this as a mistake of my own for not pushing to work for these big companies earlier in my career and not moving to the USA, even temporarily. Yes, yes, Canada pays peanuts even if you work for the big boys. Well, to be objective, compared to average Canada salaries I get paid crazy money. Yet, it often feels unfair to work on the same projects and same/similar teams as people just across the border and getting paid an entire pay grade lower. I love Canada and wish we can do better.
To recap the above history, here is a timeline of my net worth (sorry for no Y-axis):
I’ve been obsessively tracking my money since 2012. Every month I would add a record to my google spreadsheet with all of my accounts, it would give me a picture of what is happening to my net worth, what’s the distribution of investments, etc. For example, this is how the overall distribution currently looks like. I’m not proud of a huge portion of real estate and even those 4.6% of cash seems a bit too excessive to my taste, so it’s something to work on.
Back to FIRE
Ask yourself a question: when you retire will you have enough money to last for as long as you need? Would you run out of money? Would you die with too much money in your bank accounts?
Personally I don’t want to die with tens of millions in my bank accounts, I would help my kids to stand on their own feet but they have to make their own money. I’m also happy to donate my money at the time of my death, but I also want to have life while I still can enjoy it. Running out of money at old age sounds like a nightmare.
Let’s say, I want to semi-retire at age 41 with 1.5M$ in bank and then fully retire at age 50. Semi-retirement means moving to low effort gigs with ~150k income but still funding kids education 40k/y till I’m 50 years old. If I’m healthy and want to have a comfortable life with 120k/y spend, then my probability of running out of money at age 65 is 11% or being dead is 7%. Play with this Rich, Broke, or Dead calculator. It is fun:
It does seem like 1.5M$ doesn’t cut it to retire at 41 if I would want to eliminate probability of running out of money. By now, you should be asking why 41. It’s fairly simple: when I was in my early 20s I had this idea of becoming a millionaire by the age of 41 and moving to a cheaper seaside European country, like Croatia or Spain. It is now clear that 1M$ doesn’t cut it if you are raising 2 kids in North America and want to retire that early, at the very least for me.
What would be your number? The simplest way is to take your annual spending and multiply it by 25, theoretically once you reach that number you should never run out of money. Here is a more detailed calculator for your numbers: https://engaging-data.com/fire-calculator/
Conclusion
It is hard to predict the future but you can take the best educated guess, check your odds and plan for the best outcomes. I understand that for some of you talking about millions in bank accounts may sound like a lot of money and for some it may sound like peanuts (NVIDIA guys?). Do not compare yourself to others – everyone has their own path, fights their own battles and demons, you just don’t know. I’m guilty of comparing myself to others – a sure way to feel miserable. The best thing we can do is to improve our chances of winning our own battles and it’s fair to learn from others but not to envy them or to be condescending to them. If there’s one thing I hope you take away from my story, it’s to take control of your financial future.
Design Your Path: Ditch Generic Advice and Think for Yourself
December 27, 2024 Career, Success No comments
Are you tired of all of the online advice? All of these LinkedIn and other social media stories and posts where there are only 10 steps formulas for the ultimate success and happiness. I’m certainly tired. I’m not saying it’s all bad advice out there, it’s just overwhelming, repetitive, often one-sided, half-baked, naive, and unactionable. It’s the most frustrating to see advice that is not original, copied from somewhere, and just posted to grab your attention. Arguably, some people might benefit from specific posts (hopefully you can benefit from this one), but this constant fight for your attention makes it difficult to sift through the influx of information and do anything about it.
I came to the conclusion that at a certain point saturation with this online advice is such that spending more time on it has diminishing returns. At that point it is much better to put YOUR own thinking into it and create your own self-advise. You already know what is missing in your career or life, you already know your shortcomings and desires. You might not be able to spell it out right away, that’s why instead of scrolling through hundreds of stories that may or may not be applicable to you, you would benefit much more if you spend that time on thinking for yourself and trying to understand what is going to work for you, realistically and with all the context of your situation.
For example, for your career, you might want to create a strategy document (yes, an actual document with structure and everything). I rarely see people taking active career planning other than “I want to get promoted”, but there is so much more that goes into it. When I wrote my career strategy document I assessed my current situation and created a vision for the future by asking lots of simple questions and doing pros/cons of “Do I want to continue to be remote?”, “Do I want to convert to a manager?”, “How about another industry?”, “What are the new skills I want to learn?”, “Am I stimulated and challenged enough in my current environment?”, etc. (LLMs can generate a good starting list of questions).
The end of the year is a good time for self-reflection and strategizing about your own life and career. I think that everyone has to have their own approach based on what has and hasn’t worked for them. Over the years I came up with an approach that mostly works for me. Specifically, I create new year resolutions (since 2010) and then track them (mostly publicly). In order to be accountable and consistent I run weekly challenges and email exchanges with friends who would agree.
Instead of relying on the overwhelming and often repetitive flood of online advice (including this one), take this post as an encouragement to create your own personalized strategy for life and career growth by taking time at the end of this year to self-reflect, think deeply about your current situation, and then come up with approach that truly works for you, not a formula borrowed from someone else online.
You have to be a psychopath not to worry about uncertainty
November 30, 2024 Opinion No comments
The other day I was asked if I was worried about uncertainty. This was asked in the context of some ambiguity in our 2025 plans at work. Here I just want to share some of the thoughts on the topic.
My answer was: “A person has to be a psychopath to not worry about uncertainty at all. We, as humans, seek safety and security. At the same time, the biggest of our successes come from uncertainty and taking risks.” (*)
Not knowing what to choose is one big source of uncertainty and anxiety, the drain of indecision takes out your energy and you get stuck in dreaded “analysis-paralysis” . The reason for this seems to be our nature of being afraid to lose something, even if it is a prospect of future opportunity. For instance, you might have a possibility to get promoted in the current team, which you will lose if you switch to another team.
Do you know the origin of the word “DECIDE” ? It’s from Latin decidere which combines two words: de- ‘off’ + caedere ‘cut’. Yeah, to decide, we have to cut off something.
I took some risks (changing jobs, moving countries) in the past and believe I was rewarded for taking them and had some failures in other cases (financial setback on home purchase). I was wondering if there is a sure way to deal with the feeling of uncertainty and that grueling waiting time between making a decision and knowing the outcome of that decision.
Taking inspiration by thinking about people who dealt with risks and uncertainties isn’t always helpful. Popular culture is overhyping people who succeeded by taking risks – please know that for every single billionaire out there who miraculously made their startup successful there is an ocean of people who failed. Survivorship bias in play (**).
Thinking about people who have to deal with major uncertainties right now doesn’t help either. For instance, many of my fellow Ukrainians face uncertainties of the unthinkable levels, they lose homes, jobs, loved ones, and the future is unclear. Objectively my uncertainties compared to theirs are negligible.
Rolling up the sleeves and just getting into the flow of work and just being in that mode of constantly solving problems and mitigating risks helps as long as you can maintain that state. I see this as a mode of “fight” in a survivorship physiology (***) – fighting is cool and can get you far, it’s just that sustainability is difficult.
It appears that the easiest to deal with uncertainty is multi-fold: having a very solid safety net, having a streak of risk-reward successes that gives you confidence boost (think of emboldened territorial lobsters (****)), and actually enjoying the process itself. But all in all, you just have to embrace the uncertainty as something natural and impossible to avoid. Absolute 0 uncertainty means you are dead – I will get to it.
There is this concept of the cone of uncertainty often used in risk management. The idea is fairly simple – as the time passes more and more risks are either realized or mitigated and eventually residual risk reaches near 0. In the context of project management this happens closer to the project end. I have joined many projects where it was absolutely unclear what I had to do and how the things will evolve, few months in and it gained some structure in my head, few more months and there is a feeling of being on top of the things, and eventually few more months in it is all done and ready and you are on the outlook for the next big thing. So, my friend, don’t worry, embrace the uncertainty and deal with ambiguity, as they say.
In our lives the moment we are born the uncertainty of what will come of us is the highest and as the time passes we become who we are today with the uncertainties of today. Now to sound overly morbid, we reach a personal level of 0 risk at the time of our death! So enjoy non-0 risk and uncertainty!
There is more to come ;)
What are your thoughts on risk, decision making, and uncertainty?
Footnotes
(*)To be fair, taking risks presumes that there is a possibility of failure, which does happen, otherwise it wouldn’t be a risk.
(**) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
(***) Look at the middle section from this diagram of transitioning from Polyvagal theory: https://equusoma.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/The-Polyvagal-Defense-Hierarchy-2021.pdf
(****) This is a bit silly but every time I think about repeated successes or failures I imagine territorial lobsters analogy by Jordan Peterson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZOkxuNbsXU
Building a Learning System
November 18, 2024 Opinion No comments
In the past I wrote a few posts on learning, specifically this one, where I talk about the learning pyramid in which teaching someone has the highest retention rate followed by practicing what was learned, followed by other methods of learning (visual, audio, reading). I also have a quick overview of a book “Learn Better” in which the key premise is that learning is a skill you can teach yourself to be better at.
Not long ago I was also asked if I have a learning system. I don’t. In fact, I clearly remember how inefficient I was at learning in university by trying to memorize some mathematical proofs instead of properly understanding them and recreating when needed.
So what a good “learning system” could look like?
Purpose and Value
I think a key to good learning is genuine interest in the topic you are trying to learn. Interest could be internal curiosity or simply seeing value in learning something specific. To give few specific examples:
- I rock climb as a hobby. As such, taking outdoor courses, reading books on climbing just comes naturally for me and I don’t have to force myself to.
- After joining Google I had to refresh my rusty C++ knowledge, so I had somewhat practical motivation to learn/refresh knowledge, but it went well.
- When I moved to Austria I had to learn some German, but it really was forced on me and I didn’t make much progress, but did minimum for required paperwork.
What to Learn
Now, if you are intentional about learning, say for your career, probably the first question you have to ask yourself is “What should I learn?”. These days the amount of information and resources available is just incomprehensible to our brains. As such, being selective and strategic is important. Think what would make most sense to learn in your specific situation so that there is purpose and value for you.
Deliberate Practice
The highest retention of knowledge is when you teach someone or immediately practice what you have learned. I always like to think about learning as neural pathways in your brain, when you consume new information you stimulate only one direction of storing the information, but when you practice something or try to teach someone you stimulate and reinforce the retrieval direction from the storage.
If I had to create a learning system, I would prioritize practicing as much as possible. The fastest way to learn might be to learn “on the job”, but if this is not possible, the next best thing might be to set SMART goals (you know the drill).
Consistency
One issue that comes up with learning something is sticking to the plan. Consistency is hard, it really is. For myself, I found that accountability, periodization, and re-inspiration are the best ways to stay on course. This weekly blog post writing is part of accountability I have. I try to re-remind myself why I’m learning something and also trying to get inspired by other folks.
Summary
So what does my learning system look like?
- Purpose: Genuine interest or practical need.
- Focus: Be selective and strategic in what to learn.
- Practice: Teach or apply knowledge to retain it.
- Consistency: Use accountability and inspiration to stay on track.
What would your learning system look like?
What Kind of Plant Are You? Reflecting on Career Growth and Transplanting Yourself
November 11, 2024 Career No comments
Recently I have been asked what career growth means to be? Without hesitation I shared that it’s two things: first, expanding the skill set, and second, advancement in position (at least in the corporate world). In this post, I want to expand my answer and also share a story or two.
In my opinion, skill development is the foundation for other types of growth. Skills make you more capable, adaptable and valuable in your role and industry. Almost all of the soft skills are transferable to new environments. As for technical skills, the majority are also transferable unless they are very specific to the company you work for (*). Something that might not transfer very well could be team- or org-specific knowledge.
Your skills, knowledge, and hard work is something that allows you to increase the scope of responsibility, gain professional recognition, trust, and as a natural consequence you advance in position, make financial progress and hopefully achieve personal fulfillment.
After answering the question, the person I was talking to shared a Chinese Bamboo Tree story (**), where we can compare someone’s growth to how bamboo grows. There is no visible growth for the first 4-5 years, which is because bamboo is expanding its root system and then in one season bamboo grows very rapidly. This is a very strong parable and I have successfully used it at work when a colleague of mine was seeking career advice.
If you stay at the same role, level, or team for quite some time it doesn’t necessarily mean you are not growing, you could be expanding your root system before you get promoted to that next level. As long as you feel you are learning new things, becoming stronger in your skills, expanding your work network, delivering some things you are definitely growing.
To extend on this analogy of plant growth, I was thinking about uprooting: you work for 2-4 years in a company, you made sizable contributions, got your promo, and slowly started to become more and more valuable and then you transplant yourself to another company. What happens to your roots? Do they survive?
I have seen people who were the first “plant” to a field and were able to grow to be the biggest of the plants, I have also seen people who had good roots but stayed in shadows for too long and stagnated, and others who transplanted themselves so often they could not grow enough on each iteration.
I was asking myself, what kind of plant am I? Google is my 5th workplace and I cannot stop wondering what I would have become if I stayed in any of the companies or countries I left behind. Looking back it seems I made the right decisions as I was able to grow to a bigger and well rewarded plant with a very diverse root system, but I have never become a really big one. Maybe I’m yet to see my real growth, who knows.
What kind of plant are you? What are your thoughts?
(*) Some of my fellow Googlers sometimes joke that we become unhirable outside because of the uniqueness of tools we use and the scale of problems we are solving.
(**) Technically bamboo isn’t a tree and belongs to the grass family. Some species of Bamboo might indeed take 5 years to grow underground before emerging above ground but this isn’t universal or common to all species. Additionally I searched for the origins of this story and it doesn’t appear like it exists in Chinese folklore. It appears this parable was popularized by western culture in modern motivational literature.
Intimidated to try something new? How discomfort opens doors
November 2, 2024 Opinion, Success No comments
Everything in life happens for the first time (and last time for that matter), but some things don’t happen at all. First kiss, first job, first home, first kid, first gray hair. Success isn’t guaranteed and failure isn’t unavoidable.
There is this martial arts dojo next to where I live. I used to walk past it and see people practice. I never did any martial arts so it was very intimidating and uncomfortable to sign up there. Everyone appeared many levels above me, and true I would get punched in the face during sparrings. Year and a half past that I have fun and feel super comfortable during our light fights. Outside of the gym this gives a psychological sense of security (it is a false sense to some degree, though, but the effect is there).
I have never been to any sauna until maybe 30 years old. I always thought of saunas as some weird place where completely naked people sweat, so it was very uncomfortable to go to sauna at first. Now I can easily outsit many people there. I love saunas.
On one of my recent work trips there was a junior engineer on our team who would strike up a conversation with everyone, literary. It was amazing for me to observe this person: while buying coffee he would chat with a barista, he would join a random group of colleagues to chat about whatever. I mean, I have seen many extraverted people, but this was another level, so I followed his example and pushed myself to talk to strangers. On the flight back I started talking to a person next to me and had a great pleasurable chat that killed the entire flight’s time. This is because I pushed myself into discomfort, not because it was natural to me.
Being in a senior position at work requires stepping outside of comfort and talking to a lot of people I see for the first time. I have been observing how other leaders are doing this. I found that for myself I need to imitate what they are doing. The behavior appears to have common and fairly simple patterns: being respectful, thanking people for what they do, catching the essence of the message, speaking but also giving others opportunity to talk, etc. Topic for another discussion, but pushing yourself to be more like a leader makes you a leader.
You need to sign-up to give that presentation at work, you need to have that uncomfortable discussion, you need to pick that daunting project, you need to step outside of your comfort zone and embrace the challenge. Growth only happens when you stretch beyond what you already know or what feels safe. Biggest successes in life come from risk taking and discomfort! (yes, there is a chance you will fail, otherwise it won’t be a risk).
This blog post is mainly a short self-reminder about the importance of embracing uncertainty and intentionally stepping into the discomfort territory. Do it – you will emerge stronger on the way out.
I signed up to showcase my rock climbing hobby at work during DEI&B fair next week. This is a bit uncomfortable, let’s see how it goes. More to come…
Reflections on Productivity, Focus, and Athletic Performance: Key Takeaways from Three Books
October 27, 2024 Book Reviews No comments
This blog post is just my quick notes and takeaways on three books I finished listening to or reading in the last month or two. There is no other reason for these thee books to be bundled into single post other than my convinience and trying to make this relatively short.
Four thousand weeks
The book’s title itself is a reminder: we have roughly 4,000 weeks to live, a limited and precious resource. Some quick notes:
- We have only 4k weeks to live.
- Many people try to structure their lives around optimizing time and increasing efficiency, but this often leads to stress and dissatisfaction. Rather than overcommitting to work, obligations, or superficial tasks, we should focus on meaningful experiences and relationships.
- Focus on the present: Moments! Moments!
- Since time is limited, aiming for perfection is a waste of energy.
Deep Work
I’m glad I did an exercise of writing about deep work on my blog before finishing the book as it game me an opportunity to compare my thoughts before and after. I always used read/listen to books from beginning till the end; this time around I skipped first half, which explained why deep work is important and intentionally went to second part on how to achieve deep work; this is kind of stepping over myself but also because I’m convinced that deep work is key to performance. I’ve been intentionally applying what I learned from the book – this is often hard, as I need to push myself to wake early, but those 3 hours I get early in the morning are really-really super productive.
Some key learnings, recommendations from the book, not mandatorily applicable to everyone, and not in any particular order:
- Deep Work is a skill and we can improve it
- Quit social media or evaluate if it benefits you.
- Embrace boredom – this one is really funny, basically the author argues that once we have time for rest we should not fill it with distractions like scrolling on phone or watching TV, we should give our brain time to relax properly and not have habits to entertain ourselves.
- Brain focused work capacity is limited, thus we need to work on most important things early and without distractions.
- Have big blocks of focused work in the morning and for the rest of day plan each day in 30min intervals, this is not to prescribe what to work on, but to create micro deadlines.
PEAK: The new science of Athletic Performance
This is a book on athletic performance targeting sport coaches I picked from a library. I consider myself a recreational athlete (running, rock climbing, kickboxing, gym) and wanted to learn a bit of theory behing athletic performance. Some the the points below are just things I noted for myself and might be personal takeaways:
- Sleep is fundamental to both physical and mental well-being. Sleep well and enough.
- Gut Health: A diverse gut microbiome supports overall health. Strive to each veriety of foods.
- Blood Sugar and Mood: High blood sugar correlates with mood fluctuations, so stable blood sugar levels are ideal. Watch sugar consumption.
- Creatine is a safe, extensively studied supplement shown to benefit both power and endurance performance. Ok and benefitial to consume creatine.
- Optimization Choices: We can only optimize on one of the three—health, body composition, or performance. A balanced approach might be best for recreational athletes.
- Saunas: Limited impact on performance improvement. Fine to like sauna, but not really a perfomance booster.
- Recovery should be periodized to support long-term training. Rest well and enough before next trainign which should be harder (longer & intense).
- Athletic Health: Athletes fall ill more often than expected due to physical stress, though elite athletes may experience this slightly less. Listen to the body.
- Heart Rate Variability (HRV): Healthier individuals generally show slightly higher HRV. My HRV currently measures between 40-50, on the lower end for my age, likely impacted by stress. Active individuals of my age often see HRV closer to 70. Watch how this changes over time.
- Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE): A risk associated with repetitive micro-concussions, particularly in contact sports like MMA. Take extra precautions to avoid head injuries in kickboxing.
- Mental Resilience: Elite athletes frequently employ self-talk such as “You will move up” and “You are #1” to boost performance. Experiment with positive self-talk. Maybe read book “Unf*ck youself”.
