It has been 152 days since I published anything here. Not because of lack of subject matter, but life just moved too fast. A lot of major and minor things happened, so let’s first get the recap out of the way.

We are in a new year. Happy 2024. 2023 was transformative beyond expectation. Hope 2024 is more exciting.

September made me 27. A big number. But for the generation who has lived through covid, the world should collectively deduct 2 years from the age math. I definitely am living my life in that timeline. Distorting reality is easier than you would think.

Stoic AI Private Limited got incorporated in October. Its a lot of pain incorporating in our country, but the steps are really straightforward. Hope it becomes as easy as opening a Demat account soon.

November, I made a trip to Nepal. Everest base camp. It was one hell of an experience. The things I thought, would challenge me didn’t. We do suffer more in imagination than in reality. Made friends with people from France, Kosovo, Belgium, USA, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Iran and of course Nepal. Australians are the most fun bunch, Europeans very reserved and civil and Americans just randomly proud. At the end of the day, homo sapiens are pretty much the same. They like things in order, all of them are looking for meaning, have attachment to personal belongings, can quickly form herds based on some very small similarities, interests or motivations. All of them have some non negotiables, some have less of them than others and hence appear more carefree, ones who have more appear more disciplined. And if you try to figure which ones are objectively happier, you wouldn’t be able to. The mountains are big. They are just there. They again don’t care about you. You can call yourself lucky if they allow you to tread on them. The terrain as you get closer to Everest is something out of space. Oxygen is less. It get subsequently more beautiful. Each breath gets you dopamine. Pretty stunning overall. Bottomline, I want to do it again and for longer.

In December, it was all work. AI is moving fast. Its like watching a newborn learn a lot of skills. You are amazed by every new thing it learns to do, but it doesn’t do it like a professional (as you’d expect a 4-5 year old). I believe as 10,000 hours for AI get completed, it will get more competent. We are witnessing something fundamentally transformative. Exciting times to live and build. PS: Building a business is tough. Selling even tougher.

Now that we have caught up, lets get back to theme.

“come as YOU are”, as a lot of you would know is a generational song by Nirvana. The song really hits a lot of right chords, but I only want to talk about the YOU. How much do you know You? Is there a need to know You?

Do you know who you are when the lights go out, when there is no one around, when there is no metric to measure, when there is no weight of expectations, when you strip yourself of responsibilities? Why do you change yourself, when you go out? If you have to, then are you actually doing the stuff you should be doing?

In the era of podcasts and reels, what to do, which industry to be in, what picture to paint, what to think is pretty much handed to you. It prunes some wayward shoots of neurons that would have grown organically based on real life experiences, and sometimes they would be opposite to what the gyan is being purported around. And if you internalise the gyan, it clips the shoot, before the root gets deep enough. So it really becomes tough to figure, if you are You? Or if you are a copy of attributes that have been handed down from the influences.

Raw evolution of humans is getting tougher and tougher (with everything connected and the top hit getting most views) and so everything feels very standardised. Experiences, to conversations to activities to food to jobs. The crisis of today, is a crisis of originality. Crisis of original thoughts, crisis of original experiences, crisis of original emotions. Crisis of abundance of the same thing packaged and paraphrased into new boxes. The pamphlet of how to feel about a topic, how to react to it and how to communicate about it gets handed before it becomes a news.

So the question that I am trying to answer these days is, how to find out who YOU are? Its a tough thing to answer, but it is worth exploring.

“An unexamined life is not worth living”

Socrates

I don’t really agree to this. All life is worth living. An unexamined life, feels to be more fun. But an examined life is definitely a challenge to take and think about.

Originality takes a lot of effort. It takes depth. But also, there is no point questioning the things that a lot of great people have thought about, penned down.

Only a fool learns from his own mistakes. The wise man learns from the mistakes of others.

Otto von Bismarck

I would go ahead and add, only a fool learns from his own experiences. There are roads and opportunities which you would never be able to tread and undertake, for the lack of time. So you have to believe the matter experts in those things. But for the passion of your heart and mission of your life, is it not worth making your own playbook?

In an age of seeking feedback, it is also important to make the algorithm learn only from the right kind of feedback. You don’t really want to be in the race like a Bard, or GPT-4 or Claude, ranking higher on an random eval scale, when in fact, if someone interacts with any of them, they can’t really figure out why there was a need of 3 of them.

The only man who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew every time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them

George Bernard Shaw

The Song, Come as You are. By Nirvana (Slowed+reverb)

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