– By Will Allen D

An old man, going a lone highway, Came, at the evening, cold and gray,
To a chasm, vast, and deep, and wide, Through which was flowing a sullen tide.

The old man crossed in the twilight dim; The sullen stream had no fears for him;
But he turned, when safe on the other side, And built a bridge to span the tide.

“Old man,” said a fellow pilgrim, near, “You are wasting strength with building here;
Your journey will end with the ending day; You never again must pass this way;
You have crossed the chasm, deep and wide — Why build you the bridge at the eventide?”

The builder lifted his old gray head: “Good friend, in the path I have come,” he said,
“There followeth after me today A youth, whose feet must pass this way.
This chasm, that has been naught to me, To that fair-haired youth may a pitfall be.
He, too, must cross in the twilight dim; Good friend, I am building the bridge for him.“

From a commencement address by Charlie Munger

I have what I call an “iron prescription” that helps me keep sane when I naturally drift toward preferring one ideology over another. And that is I say, “I’m not entitled to have an opinion on this subject unless I can state the arguments against my position better than the people do who are supporting it.” I think only when I reach that stage am I qualified to speak.

I sometimes play the card game Rummy with my kids, we mostly have great time, but not always. Last weekend, I was a by-standing observer of such a game, played by 6th graders

After a initial few rounds of Pick-up and discards with enthusiasm, there was a sense of gloom on their faces. The game was almost struck, every player ended up holding on to a set or an in-complete sequence in anticipation of getting the right card from the Lot. The cards that were drawn from the Lot were of little use.

As a result the game was becoming boring. most of them had thought of quitting the game and play something else

Luckily, This did not last too long though, One of the Players decided to Break her well formed set. She discarded each of the 3 cards of that set in every round and picked up 3 new ones. Others followed suit and soon everyone of them were drawing cards that were of use. The pace of the game was restored. the game ended soon as they were able to create the new sets soon enough. There was a sense of satisfaction and they Re-started another game of Rummy with more enthusiasm

Often we encounter such scenarios in our office environs, We hold on to cards, unwilling to let go, It slows down the execution and hinders progress. Other team members who would have benefited are inadvertently deprived of it. The Morale of the team is adversely effected

By willing to discard some cards to support your team members, you make way for new opportunities for yourself.

Is this not what Win-Win is all about ?

…

"Some people are so busy learning the tricks of the trade that 
they never learn the trade" - Vernon Law

This aptly describes today’s IT industry. The extent of competition and the increasing need to learn new tools and technologies just to stay in the game, has resulted in this phenomenon

The need for speed, means that we are in a hurry to learn the tricks that will enable us to talk our way to the top. yes seriously there are best selling book that teaches just that.

This has a detrimental effect both for the industry and the individuals. The industry will leave you behind, if you do not learn the tricks quickly and use them. You never get a chance to master any subject or tool.

The Industry get quickly filled up with folks who only know the glossary of terms. As a result, their effectiveness suffers. Organizations make grand plans to grow, but are are unable to execute them effectively due to lack of depth of ability.

Quality of the deliverable suffers … but who cares we are agile, we will address it in next sprint … 🙂

Image Courtesy – web

The Power of Compounding

James Clear in Atomic Habits,  Writes …

Here’s how the math works out: if you can get 1 percent better each day for one year, you’ll end up thirty-seven times better by the time you’re done. Conversely, if you get 1 percent worse each day for one year, you’ll decline nearly down to zero. What starts as a small win or a minor setback accumulates into something much more.

Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement. The same way that money multiplies through compound interest, the effects of your habits multiply as you repeat them. They seem to make little difference on any given day and yet the impact they deliver over the months and years can be enormous. It is only when looking back two, five, or perhaps ten years later that the value of good habits and the cost of bad ones becomes strikingly apparent.

Excerpts from The Analysis of Mind by Bertrand Russell

The process of learning, which consists in the acquisition of habits, has been much studied in various animals.* For example: you put a hungry animal, say a cat, in a cage which has a door that can be opened by lifting a latch; outside the cage you put food. The cat at first dashes all round the cage, making frantic efforts to force a way out. At last, by accident, the latch is lifted. and the cat pounces on the food. Next day you repeat the experiment, and you find that the cat gets out much more quickly than the first time, although it still makes some random movements. The third day it gets out still more quickly, and before long it goes straight to the latch and lifts it at once. Or you make a model of the Hampton Court maze, and put a rat in the middle, assaulted by the smell of food on the outside. The rat starts running down the passages, and is constantly stopped by blind alleys, but at last, by persistent attempts, it gets out. You repeat this experiment day after day; you measure the time taken by the rat in reaching the food; you find that the time rapidly diminishes, and that after a while the rat ceases to make any wrong turnings. It is by essentially similar processes that we learn speaking, writing, mathematics, or the government of an empire.

In Farnam Street, one of my favorite blogs there is a comprehensive description of Butterfly Effect  the-butterfly-effect 

Below is a brief Extract of the last section of the same, which cites a few examples & Concludes 

Many examples exist of instances where a tiny detail led to a dramatic change. In each case, the world we live in could be different if the situation had been reversed. Here are some examples of how the butterfly effect has shaped our lives.

• The bombing of Nagasaki. The US initially intended to bomb the Japanese city of Kuroko, with the munitions factory as a target. On the day the US planned to attack, cloudy weather conditions prevented the factory from being seen by military personnel as they flew overhead. The airplane passed over the city three times before the pilots gave up. Locals huddled in shelters heard the hum of the airplane preparing to drop the nuclear bomb and prepared for their destruction. Except Kuroko was never bombed. Military personnel decided on Nagasaki as the target due to improved visibility. The implications of that split-second decision were monumental. We cannot even begin to comprehend how different history might have been if that day had not been cloudy. Kuroko is sometimes referred to as the luckiest city in Japan, and those who lived there during the war are still shaken by the near miss.
• The Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna rejecting Adolf Hitler’s application, twice. In the early 1900s, a young Hitler applied for art school and was rejected, possibly by a Jewish professor. By his own estimation and that of scholars, this rejection went on to shape his metamorphosis from a bohemian aspiring artist into the human manifestation of evil. We can only speculate as to how history would have been different. But it is safe to assume that a great deal of tragedy could have been avoided if Hitler had applied himself to watercolors, not to genocide.
• The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. A little-known fact about the event considered to be the catalyst for both world wars is that it almost didn’t happen. On the 28th of June, 1914, a teenage Bosnian-Serb named Gavrilo Princip went to Sarajevo with two other nationalists in order to assassinate the Archduke. The initial assassination attempt failed; a bomb or grenade exploded beneath the car behind the Archduke’s and wounded its occupants. The route was supposed to have been changed after that, but the Archduke’s driver didn’t get the message. Had he actually taken the alternate route, Princip would not have been on the same street as the car and would not have had the chance to shoot the Archduke and his wife that day. Were it not for a failure of communication, both world wars might never have happened.
• The Chernobyl disaster. In 1986, a test at the Chernobyl nuclear plant went awry and released 400 times the radiation produced by the bombing of Hiroshima. One hundred fifteen thousand people were evacuated from the area, with many deaths and birth defects resulting from the radiation. Even today, some areas remain too dangerous to visit. However, it could have been much worse. After the initial explosion, three plant workers volunteered to turn off the underwater valves to prevent a second explosion. It has long been believed that the trio died as a result, although there is now some evidence this may not have been the case. Regardless, diving into a dark basement flooded with radioactive water was a heroic act. Had they failed to turn off the valve, half of Europe would have been destroyed and rendered uninhabitable for half a million years. Russia, Ukraine, and Kiev also would have become unfit for human habitation. Whether they lived or not, the three men—Alexei Ananenko, Valeri Bezpalov and Boris Baranov—stilled the wings of a deadly butterfly. Indeed, the entire Chernobyl disaster was the result of poor design and the ineptitude of staff. The long-term result (in addition to the impact on residents of the area) was a widespread anxiety towards nuclear plants and bias against nuclear power, leading to a preference for fossil fuels. Some people have speculated that Chernobyl is responsible for the acceleration of global warming, as countries became unduly slow to adopt nuclear power.
• The Cuban Missile Crisis. We all may owe our lives to a single Russian Navy officer named Vasili Arkhipov, who has been called “the man who saved the world.” During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Arkhipov was stationed on a nuclear-armed submarine near Cuba. American aircraft and ships began using depth charges to signal the submarine that it should surface so it could be identified. With the submarine submerged too deep to monitor radio signals, the crew had no idea what was going on in the world above. The captain, Savitsky, decided the signal meant that war had broken out and he prepared to launch a nuclear torpedo. Everyone agreed with him—except Arkhipov. Had the torpedo launched, nuclear clouds would have hit Moscow, London, East Anglia and Germany, before wiping out half of the British population. The result could have been a worldwide nuclear holocaust, as countries retaliated and the conflict spread. Yet within an overheated underwater room, Arkhipov exercised his veto power and prevented a launch. Without the courage of one man, our world could be unimaginably different.

From these handful of examples, it is clear how fragile the world is, and how dire the effects of tiny events can be on starting conditions.

We like to think we can predict the future and exercise a degree of control over powerful systems such as the weather and the economy. Yet the butterfly effect shows that we cannot. The systems around us are chaotic and entropic, prone to sudden change. For some kinds of systems, we can try to create favorable starting conditions and be mindful of the kinds of catalysts that might act on those conditions – but that’s as far as our power extends. If we think that we can identify every catalyst and control or predict outcomes, we are only setting ourselves up for a fall.