Brian’s Corner: Guiding Principles for 2021
I hope the new year is going well for everyone so far! Now that we’re entering the second month of the year, it might be a good time to check in on your New Years’ Resolutions. One of mine was to read one interesting book every two weeks (outside of school). In January, I read Ray Dalio’s Principles and James Clear’s Atomic Habits, and wanted to go through this year with my guiding principles for 2021:
Growing 1% Better Every Day 🧠📈
As James Clear puts it, “habits are the compound interest of self-improvement”. It is usually difficult for us to form new habits because as humans we seek immediate reward, but what this graph shows us is that the award is not immediate. The reward comes as the results compound, as the habits become more natural over time — we must notice the cues to change our behavior at first, consciously change the behavior, and eventually the errand will fit into our lives so naturally that we no longer need to point it out — it is now part of our identity.
If you get 1% better every day, you’ll end up with results that are 37x better after 1 year. 😃
If you get 1% worse every day, you’ll end up with results that are close to 0. Not good. ☹️
🔑 Some Key Learnings about Growing 1% Better Every Day 🧠📈:
- The Four Laws of Behavior Change, to create better habits — (1) make it obvious, (2) make it attractive, (3) make it easy, (4) make it satisfying.
- The Difficulty of Changing Our Identity — “It’s like the brain of each animal is preloaded with certain rules for behavior, and when it comes across an exaggerated version of that rule, it lights up like a Christmas tree” 🎄(102).
- 🔁 Habits are behaviors that have been repeated enough times to become automatic. It requires conscious thinking at first, but once it changes our identity, it becomes a natural part of us. — “Behind every system of actions are a system of beliefs…there are a set of beliefs and assumptions that shape the system, an identity behind the habits” (32). Becoming the best version of yourself requires you to continuously edit your beliefs, and to upgrade and expand your identity” (41).
“All habits follow a similar trajectory from effortful practice to automatic behavior, a process known as automaticity. Automaticity is the ability to perform a behavior without thinking about each step, which occurs when the nonconscious mind takes over” (144–145). - Why Context Matters — There are 11 million sensory receptors in the sensory nervous system for human perception, with 10 million of them dedicated to sight. This is why our environment matters, and why it is so difficult for us to change our habits if our sight sensory receptors pick up on the cue-induced wanting that naturally occurs in a familiar environment.
- Eliminating Unwanted Friction, and Creating Wanted Friction — By priming your environment, you’re getting rid of friction to allow for wanted behavior, and getting friction to avoid unwanted behavior. — “Like a Japanese television manufacturer redesigning their workspace to reduce wasted motion, successful companies design their process to automate, eliminate, or simplify as many steps as possible” (155).
Pain + Reflection = Progress (following Ray Dalio’s five-step cycle)
The truth is, when we’re reinforcing a new habit or even just completing another project in our daily lives, it’s not all a positive experience. There are setbacks and unforeseeable problems. So instead of turning back when facing a difficult situation, you need to ask yourself why you encountered the problem, create a solution, and take action to reach your goal and end up much higher than where you started.
🔑 Some Key Learnings about Pain + Reflection = Progress:
- REALITY = a gorgeous perpetual motion machine in which cases become effects that become cases of new effects, and so on
- Painful moments — PAIN is nature’s reminder that there is something IMPORTANT for me to LEARN >> it’s about the process of reflecting, developing a set of principles, & getting rewards for using these principles
- Diagnose problems to get at their root problems — “It is a common mistake to move in a nanosecond from identifying a tough problem to proposing a solution for it. Strategic thinking requires both diagnosis and design” (175). “Life principles, root causes manifest themselves over and over again in seemingly different situations. Finding them and dealing with them pays dividends again and again” (175–176).
- As James Clear also mentioned in Atomic Habits, the feedback loop behind all human behavior when exponential learning takes place is as follows: Try, fail, learn, try differently.
Embracing Radical Open-Mindedness 🤯
I think as we enter into a new year, and a new presidential term, many are taking this moment to reset, reflect, and think about how we will move forward. I hope that this year, I will be able to embrace what Ray Dalio calls “radical open-mindedness,” which again forces you to not take the easy route, but instead open the door so other ideas can come in. And this is MUCH EASIER DONE THAN SAID.
As mentioned in section three, higher-level consciousness in the prefrontal cortex is distinct to the human brain — it’s larger in humans than most other species. Yet we are still animals. We still seek to go after immediate rewards, and we still live under the laws of nature. What’s unique is that we’ve been built to have “two you’s” — a lower level state and a higher-level consciousness. These two “you’s” fight for control over you — while the lower-level contains primitive parts of your brain like amygdala, which instinctively reacts in a defensive way whenever you are losing ground, higher-level executive functions which are unique to us as humans can let us see past this.
This requires seeing past immediate results — what are not just the first-order consequences, but also the second- and third-order consequences as well? Am I really going in the direction that I’m aiming for?
🔑 Some Key Learnings about embracing radical open-mindedness 🤯:
- More about the amygdala — When you’re overly attached to an idea, you feel mental pain. “You will probably feel your amygdala kicking in through a tightening in your head, tension in your body, or an emerging sense of annoyance, anger, or irritability”. Yet we can use such signals of closed-mindedness as cues to control behavior; doing this regularly will strengthen the ability to have a “higher level you” in control.
- We all have our blind spots. We’ve all heard “think outside of the box” and “see it in the other person’s shoes.” Why? Because we’re very limited in what we can see, and should understand that people seeing patterns & synthesizing them differently doesn’t lead to inferior decisions, it just leads to different viewpoints.
- A quote I think is important — “Being able to thoughtfully disagree would so easily lead to radically improved decision making in all areas — — public policy, politics, medicine, science, philanthropy, personal relationships, and more” (198).
Moving forward, I’m hoping to use the ideas of growing 1% better every day, understanding pain + reflection is progress & part of the cycle, and embracing radical open-mindedness is key to guide me through the next year. I’m actively keeping track of my goals, reflecting on them, understanding why they’re not being met or how I can improve further, and setting a path forward each week. When someone comes up to me with different ideas, perhaps on why I’m not reaching my goals as efficiently as I could be, I need to make sure my lower-level me isn’t taking over.
What I Accomplished This Month
Okay, so enough about guiding principles. What did I actually do this month? Well, I spent the first half preparing for TeenTechSF’s participation in the Martin Luther King Jr. National Day of Service, which took place on January 18th, 2021.
TeenTechSF PPE Initiative
In November of 2020, a team of TTSF student leaders (including myself!) pitched in front of the San Francisco Youth Empowerment Fund, with some of our proposed expenses going towards making face shields and sewing masks for frontline workers and community members during COVID-19. On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, after weeks of meeting with our friends at Masks for All CA and Kuriosity Robotics, I created these two slide decks and was ready to go:
TTSF DOS 2021–3D Printing Face Shields
TTSF DOS 2021 — Sewing Face Masks
During our Day of Service Session, I presented the slides and shared insights into how both processes work and how we would go about them. For both 3D printing face shields and sewing masks, we’re having a Person A cut out material (whether it’s chemical-grade plastic for the face shields or KONA cotton fabric for the masks), Person B does the “mechanical work” (3D printing or sewing), and eventually, Person C, to pick up all of the materials and send them over to organizations and people in need.
After presenting the slide decks, we assigned roles for who would do what. Since then, I’ve been working with TTSF team to get agreement forms signed, budget allocated, and materials sent out to get our PPE Initiative going.
MLK Dream Symposium & Neurodiversity
Next, I attended my school’s Martin Luther King Jr. Dream Symposium (well, part of it). I joined over 100 other students and faculty members to hear Vince Greer, Associate Dean of Students for Diversity, Inclusion & Residential Life at Claremont McKenna College, talk about his own experiences in college and in the DEI field. After this came breakout workshops. I was interested in attending a workshop about Neurodiversity and its impact on the classroom, although after the students in the room were told that it was only for teachers, I decided to do research on the topic myself. Neurodiversity is a relatively new concept, with the basic premise being that if almost 50% of our world has an “atypical” mental condition, doesn’t that make it a normal part of society? We’re just beginning to understand mental conditions that make someone “neurodiverse” as opposed to what’s considered neurotypical, and neurodiversity argues that we need to understand these people for who they are, understand they can bring in different perspectives, and maybe we don’t want to “heal” people so they become just like a neurotypical person. I’ll put some links to resources below if you want to learn more about Neurodiversity.
Huberman Lab Podcast
While looking more into neuroscience, I stumbled across the Huberman Lab Podcast, hosted by Dr. Andrew Huberman, a Professor of Ophthalmology & Neurobiology at the Stanford School of Medicine. I enjoyed the first episode I listened to, called “How Your Nervous System Works & Changes”, where he detailed the history of neurons, how the nervous system works, and the five components of the nervous system — Sensation, Perception, Feelings/Emotions, Thoughts, and Actions. I now listen to the podcast on a regular basis! Plus, this has helped me expand upon my research in understanding neuroscience. More recently, the podcast has focused on sleep. Here’s a link to the podcast on YouTube.
Talks and Lectures
Now, I already talked about the books I read this past month. So this section is dedicated just to the talks I’ve listened so within the past month, and meaningful insights I’ve taken away from them:
Rose Marcario, former President & CEO of Patagonia — My main takeaway from this is how if you’re not enjoying the work that you do, it’s time to move on. There’s always another path that you can take, and it can combine the skills you obtained in the position you’re leaving behind with something else you enjoy. This was certainly the case for Rose, who believed strongly that there needs to be more care about the environment “because environmental issues don’t go away”. Although she considered herself to be successful as an EVP of a private equity firm, she “walked away from it all” in 2006 and started work at Patagonia, working on the “innovation” happening at that company — changing the business model, building new (sustainable) supply chains, and getting public backing. This brings me to another takeaway — if people like your brand, trust your brand, believe in your brand, that makes your business strong. In the 1990’s the founders of Patagonia had an epiphany about commercial cotton — it uses 10x pesticides of normal crops & synthetic fertilizers, making it damaging for the environment, yet there were no alternatives which came even close in cost. Patagonia ultimately decided to back their mission, “to save the home planet”, which Rose argues is the reason that people came to their company and continue to even today. When people believe in your brand and its values, regardless of if it’s a new CEO or a customer, they will come and support it.
Sequoia Capital’s Doug Leone on Luck & Taking Risks — Doug Leon came to the US as an 11-year old immigrant, working blue collar jobs and vowing to succeed in business. Looking back, he mentioned that he realized little things at that time profoundly changed his outlook and view of the world, and on life, which brings me to this takeaway: Little cues that stand out to us matter. Because not everyone can see them. Going back to Atomic Habits — if you notice that you’re going down the rabbithole of cue-induced wanting, and (unlike everyone else with similar bad habits) you’re able to notice it, it matters. The reason society improves is that people notice cues and change their behavior, their outlook, which allows for a different outlook and eventually a discovery. On another note, Doug emphasized a few other key points:
- Crystal clear thinking is the most important part of a pitch (at least to Sequoia Capital).
- We live in cycles. Take as many people along the ride if possible.
- And most importantly, bring it every day.
Hank Paulson, 74th US Secretary of the Treasury — Now most of what I took away from this talk is similar to what I’ve taken away from many lessons on entrepreneurship before, although it’s interesting to see a different perspective, from someone who has actually worked in the U.S. Capitol. Many of the world’s most impactful leaders will never be fully recognized. When a financial system is in crisis, it takes the work of policy makers, economists & analysts, and others working in the banking system to get us out. “People don’t get credit for avoiding disaster that people don’t see”. Hank talked about his experience in the US banks leading up to 2008, saying that he chose stability over doing what would have been politically popular, a decision which he believes avoided greater disaster, which would have caused an endless, dangerous cycle of bailouts that he says other governments are still facing. He argues that we should not put the blame when something goes wrong on just “the banks”, which are working to create a more stable situation. Instead of conforming to beliefs of the group, let us think unconventionally, let us think in different ways and be open to new perspectives, which enables us to focus on the fundamental problems & root causes, or to make a new discovery.
Stuart Butterfield, Co-Founder and CEO of Slack — Now, I’ve talked about working at the intersections of different fields to create new discoveries (in this article and in previous ones), but what about working at the intersections of different industries? That’s exactly what Stuart Butterfield, Co-Founder and CEO of Slack, talked about in his lecture at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business (this is starting to sound like a cool idea for a future article). Think about it — is Stripe a technology company? Is PayPal a financial services or tech company? Is Airbnb in tech or hospitality? When analyzing companies like Stripe, PayPal, and Airbnb, Stewart came up with the idea of developing a system “which was really the foundation of all of the ways [of] company communication, until [they] realized that none of [their team was] ever going to work without something like [the system they developed] ever again”. After tons of experience in creating several games and strong gaming communities, selling some companies and shutting down others, he was able to take his experience to create a tool that would allow companies to communicate efficiently, creating a company which reached a $1M valuation in a record-breaking less than eight months. Eight months!
Also, now that we’re only living in 2021, I think it’s important to remind ourselves of this quote:
“I think people forget 2002 was the first year that any country that had more than 50% internet penetration at home and that was the Netherlands…So most Americans didn’t have internet access. If they did, it wasn’t working.”
That’s INSANE to think about! Most homes didn’t have internet access just 19 years ago?
Next, I listened to TKS Talk, The Future of Engineering at Netflix with Amy Smidutz, Director of Delivery Engineering at Netflix — Basically, she’s in charge of ensuring that a program used by over 200 million won’t crash. This talk allowed me to get a glimpse into the different fields within engineering; before I wasn’t aware of all the different roles they can serve in a company. Not only does her story of going from rural Vermont to university in Arizona to quitting university to work at a call center full-time to working at Amazon in Seattle to arriving in the Bay Area at Netflix reinforce Rose Marcario’s idea that there’s always another path, but also life is about adventure. You don’t have to stay in one place, in one job, if you don’t want to if another is calling you. As Amy shared as some of her “top advice”, “find your people, be curious, and lean in to adventure”.
That pretty much sums it up! I’ll leave some links below on articles, talks, slide decks I mentioned in this monthly update.
