Sunday, January 30, 2011

Success is the result of doing worth while things for people

I throw a large events a few times a year, something sort of a reason to get friends together to hang out. Yesterday, I threw a late post new year's party for friends that haven't gotten together for a while and invited out a few more friends to the party. The event was fun as I had about 30 people attending.

One thing I miss about living back home is the proximity of friends and the ease at which everyone can get together at a moment's notice. One point my old friends and I used to pride ourselves upon, was our ability to get together and do something in a very ad-hoc manner. When living in Tokyo, things are a little different.

I probably mentioned this a few times before, how much of a pain it is to get people in Tokyo together to do something. For a meet up to actually occur, people have to make time usually a week in advance else things either get filled up or people aren't prepared to make the time investment to come out to meet meet up. When a one way commute is only 10~15 minutes to meet up, the time investment is trivial. However, when a one way commute takes from 45~60 minutes, things aren't as trivial anymore. I balk at the idea of an impromptu meet up sometimes because the time investment is quite expensive. The dynamics change when you live closer to the city, of course, but most people are surprised at my ability to coordinate events while living far from the city. It's one of those things that I just have to deal with.

The other idea I was pondering today was "what is the primary factor which allows a person to be able to gather people to events?" I have several friends here that are event promoters, either for clubbing events or musical events. I feel for these guys as they are either mailing through their cell phones, on Facebook or through twitter to encourage friends to come out. I know how tough it can be when it comes to putting an event together. A place needs to be booked, friends need to be contacted, schedules need to be checked and there are questions that need to be responded to. Sometimes the most annoying thing is when you contact everyone and no one gets back to you and you end up scurrying to contact everyone directly to double check if they are coming out or not, or managed to forget about the invitation. Organizing events can be a real pain honestly, it's like doing a PhD-- you really have to like being a host to go through with the issues that comes with the territory. I for one, am happy when people get together.

I mentioned earlier that I have friends that are event coordinators/promoters by profession. The interesting thing I learned through Facebook was about event coordination-- the impact of mass mailing friends about an upcoming event. The general response to a mass invite of people on a friend list is abysmal, I wager that maybe 10% people confirm in advance if you're lucky. Other people are wishy-washy about committing to the event and list themselves as "maybe" and the people that say "no I can't attend" are usually fast to say so because they have prior commitments. Getting people to commit time to an event or anything is a challenging problem. And personally to me, a 10% confirmation percentage is really depressing. Unless you're really popular or have a very big pool of friends, avoid using large group invites.

I've noticed over the years that I am most successful at getting friends together to something was when I contacted small groups of them at a time. My friends generally divided into different circles so I end up contacting each circle directly or even people directly to invite them out. Response rates when you contact people directly are much higher and since they are actually responding to a direct contact from you, the probability of them saying that they'll come is also higher. After switching to this technique of inviting people out, I've felt much more comfortable running events as people are responding to me timely and I have a better idea of the general number of people coming out in advance so I can make things run smoothly.

Another important factor about hosting a successful event is the reason why you're running it. I am quite certain that there are people that we know are promoters of themselves. There have been friends that have sent out mails to invite friends to their musical performances and people in the real estate world that have ran events to promote themselves and spammed their friends to attend. My knee-jerk reaction to these invitations is one of disgust, in the sense that these promoters see me simply as a source of potential revenue and that I value myself more then that.

So I started thinking about what is it that makes my friends want to come out to my events and I've come to the conclusion that my friends want to attend my events because my intentions are different-- I am hosting the event not for myself, but as something for them to enjoy. I also like inviting new friends out to these gatherings so they have opportunities to meet new people and hopefully make new friends. In a sense, I have created a brand for the events that I run which makes my friends want to come out to the events that I host, in that these events are for them, more so than it is for me.

Oddly enough, thinking back at some of my earlier business successes that I've had directly correlated to a desire of me wanting to do things for other people. One of my fondest memories of an event was a donation drive salsa night between the Nursing and Engineering Department. I told the nurses to market the event as a good cause and I told the engineers that the nurses were coming. Suffice to say, that event was a resounding success as we made good money in a single night.

I would go on to start my own exam preparation series that turned out to a resounding hit that made the Engineering Physics student society the richest student society on campus. A story that I look back as one of my biggest successes while in university. I've probably recounted this story more than I should, but my dream was to run my own successful exam preparation business, more than making money. I ended up talking to my physics professors to get old final exams and told other students in my graduating class of my vision and I ended up recruiting a team of 8 people (including myself) to run the thing together.

Putting this event together was a passion for me, I wanted to make the lecture series as cheap as possible so I charged only $15/seminar session. I ended up making $4500 in profits in 2 weeks. I donated the money away and passed on the program to the student group, which resulted in a good recommendation letter from the head of the physics department which helped me get a scholarship to Japan and also would help me through an interview process that would also help me get my current job. What I gave away, came back to me in multiples and in ways that I could never imagine.

I have started reading books about human dynamics recently and about the rise of powerful people. The idea of having power has been defined in a variety of different ways. One definition is the ability to control people to get them to do what you want; another and more subtle version is the ability to have people depend on you. Neither of these 2 definitions sit well with me because they seem very Machiavellian, so I propose a third definition, the impact and the ability of what a person is able to give to others. The framing the concept of power like this make sense to me as it characterizes many of the most influential people I know and even some of the most successful and respected companies in technology that I can think of.

My train of thought stops here, but I feel that this is a strong idea.

Friday, January 28, 2011

Stand close to the edge to prepare for change

There has to be one point in your life where you are willing to put your self on the line and be ready to accept failure as a path to success. To be honest, there are many more things I want now than I have the means to have. I want to be young and successful, (possibly even rich), I want to live in a nice fancy apartment for a while and have the drive and freedom to create a successful venture.

I have looked at my financial numbers for the last few years. They are pretty good, better than most for people in Japan at least, but it isn't sufficient for me. I can do better. Nearly all the successful people I know, the routes to their rise have never been through the traditional paths, there is something different about them. I used to be like that at one point when I was younger, but I fear, that the edge that I once had has become somewhat dull.

I can't say that I blame the system for that, the system is what it is and it really is my choice to go with it or not. To be honest, I've stopped caring about what it is about. It's not a Japanese thing, it's not a North American thing or a corporate thing, the system is simply what everyone else does, which to me is the most eloquent way for me to describe it.

I have to move out of the company dorms within the next few months and from there I can expect my savings rate to decrease, meaning that raising capital for me to do things will be harder in the future... which also reminds me that I still have to look through my data from last year. I've gone through most of it but haven't finished putting a sort of report together.

I also have the issue of time to deal with; where I want to be allocating my time. I do want to get back into investing, but don't have the time to look deeply as I would like to in the market. I also want to pick up on my programming skills to get into the foray into the world of online services, eventually going independent. I also want to take the level 1 Japanese Language Proficiency Test, the highest level Japanese test so I have the piece of paper certifying that I am proficient with my Japanese. At the same time, I do also want to balance my social life, work out and spend time reading too.

I've starting reading a Japanese book about life past 35 in conjunction about the economic conditions in Japan, some ideas of marriage, family, preparation for the future and the state of social security. It's a challenging read, but I am happy that I am actually able to grasp most of what they say. But I think all of the advice is the same though, mainly that you should be prepared to depend on your self as depending on social programs is dubious. One comment the author made in the book is that one's 30's is probably best defined by sacrifices. I turn 30 this year and I can already tell that I just don't have time to do everything and that my time now is incredibly important. More so than I was in my early-mid 20's.

Maybe I never tasted the sweet taste of success the right way when I was younger to push myself like the young entrepreneurs of some of the hot start up companies that are out there right now. But having that hunger now, is terribly important, the sooner that I make time now, the more dividends it pays off in the future.

Time is of the essence.

Saturday, January 22, 2011

Dealing with older people and creativity

I've been mulling a thought recently, the company I work is internally looking for people with fresh ideas and that can execute them. I have to be honest, though, there aren't a lot of people where I work that can do that. I don't feel the creative vibe or the fire to get something done. Upper management is preaching that we need more "creative people" that we need to make more "innovative products" and etc etc. Their ideals and the reality of the working environment speak is a world of difference.

I've been reading a lot about start up culture and the most important thing is to hire people that creates the right culture that sets the course of a company, the attitude of people and the things they can do and think about. At one point, when you start hiring and working with mediocre people, the cultural assets of a company is diluted causing trouble for the future. Things that can't be quantified with numbers are often hard to measure, but one does feel it.

The one thing I've realized, recently is how adverse older people are to new ideas, not that they are against them but being able to come up with new ideas or being able to accept them. Once they get used to doing things a certain way, it's all they know. The worst thing for young people is to be infected with that way of thinking. In hierarchical cultures (both social and working) I think this is sort of an infectious poison and the people that end up coming up with and executing revolutionizing ideas are people that aren't cast from the usual social mold.

I've had the some interesting opportunities to talk with HR people within the company to find that the average age of the company is starting to rise quickly, it's probably the result of the Japanese "baby boomers" getting older. In some departments, the average age is hitting close to the 40 year old mark. When you have so many old people at the top, I think it is hard for young people to find other young people with similar ideas to work with. The other thing is social politics and when you are around people with more authority than you, it becomes harder to do your own thing. Which brings me back to the fast paced change I've been seeing in the software industry recently, fueled by youthful people going their own way and creating startups. I am an avid reader of what the people at Y Combinator have been doing and the programming languages they've been using. Most of these guys that build web applications are young, using new languages and software platforms that large corporations have not even come to touching on a large scale. In the programming world, you can pretty much learn a lot about the culture of the company by the programming languages they use, thus looking at job postings is an interesting way of learning about your competitors.

Many of the biggest corporations now have been started up by young people at one point and the question is if the company culture ages well with passing time. The companies that are hot, are generally the relatively young ones, the ones like Facebook, Google, and Twitter as "hot," and we hardly think of companies like Microsoft, Oracle or IBM in the same way.

I've been working for older people for too long with their own ideas for too long and I think it's time for me to cut and move on. What they think isn't the end all and be all, but there are things that you can learn from them. It's just that you have to be good at seeing through some of their out dated thoughts. It's a tricky position to be in politically as a young person, but I've come to appreciate the need to become politically adept in dealing with people.

I've also been watching a lot of youtube recently and have been really amazed with some of the quality work that is being put out there by young people interested in music and video editing. It is a place where hardly older people create good content for. I miss that vibe and I realize more and more that it's time for me to get out of where I work.

Sunday, January 16, 2011

Live Deliberately

I made a post earlier about avoiding distractions to improve productivity. Things like youtube and social bookmarking sites can be a total time sink as it is easy to bounce from video to video or link to link. For the most part, not all articles are all that mentally nurturing, but there is a strange addiction to wanting to see or read more. Some call this a sort of "information addiction," others call this a resistance of the mind to change context and do other things, whatever the problem is called, I would be more happy to be rid of this issue.

Of the times that I have been most productive, I've noticed that I had concrete deadlines and my actions were exceptionally deliberate at getting the the tasks to get whatever I needed done. Without that level of focus, it is too easy for the mind to wander around and randomly do unproductive things.

I've started a new habit of shutting down the computer while not using it as it was too easy for me to find myself clicking on firefox and browsing around the internet aimlessly. By shutting down the computer, I am forcing myself to think and define exactly what I want to do before powering the system up. Without a concrete task defined, it is too easy to just start goofing off. So far, I have found that this is effective, though I hope my mind doesn't decide to find work arounds to this habit. I have noticed that I have been turning to my iPhone for some light browsing, but the magnitude of what I can look at is a little more limited compared to reading things on the computer (though the iPhone still does a pretty good job in it self).

By forcing my mind to think about what I want to do before doing something, it has made me realize that many things that I used to do was simply a result of me following random urges to use the computer or do things to kill time. A lot of the bad habits I have gone unnoticed and being more deliberate about my actions is helping me pick up on these habits.

I am also trying to keep track of what I've been spending time on to help me identify on what I am spending my time on to determine if there are more optimal ways of allocating my time. If I can do this with my annual expenditures (of which I still need to publish) then I should be able to track my time as well. As the saying goes, "time is money," thus I should treat is as a valuable resource.

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

The US's Trusted Identity system?

The US's trusted identity program is picking up some steam recently. Arstechnica has a short article about it, where the gist of it is that you have certain entities that exists to verify your identity using digital authentication. The example they give is of a person using their cell phone as their ID device to get access to medical records, when it some how gets confirmed through some kind of network.

Obviously there are security issues if the cell phone you carry gets stolen, which probably means that you probably should password it... which ironically is sometimes dealt with when the people with access to your medical profile could simply ask about your medical history to verify who you are. What does this additional layer of "security" add? I have no clue.

One other point of contention is that of having a "single point failure" system, where in fact, you could be locked out of society if the network refuses to verify who you are.

Monday, January 03, 2011

A cursory look at web hosting prices

I've been looking at getting my own domain + server space for some tinkering around as I am interested in doing some web based programming work. There are lots of interesting data mining applications out there and one that just caught my attention was Spokeo, which is an online directory of people with information scraped from all sorts of locations. Consider it like a public version of a CIA database of people, which has personal information including you address, phone number and home value. Obviously, there are some privacy concerns by having this kind of information available, but none the less, an interesting application of data mining.

I am quite interested in learning how to create web services, at least for myself and perhaps expand that to other people if there is time for that in the future. One of my favorite cloud services I use is Dropbox, where I have several computer synced to my dropbox account and have file synced between all of them. Integration is seemless and all operations happen as if you were normally manipulating files through your usual file manager.

I am still on their free account (2 GB limit) and they charge you $9.99/month for 10 GB of storage and then $19.99 for 50 GB/month of space. I think that it is a little on the steep side, but they are running on Amazon's servers which is probably driving costs up. For more space and the ability to share files with myself, I decided that it might be a good idea to look at your standard vanilla web hosts to see what were the prices were like. What I found was that using a web hosting solution (those that were based in North America) were vastly cheaper compared to Dropbox and Japanese web hosts.

I've tabulated the results of what I looked at (from sites that had information that was easily accessible):

Table of web hosts

Interestingly, dropbox when compared with other web hosting services is expensive. Japanese web hosts in general, tend to use tiered pricing for their services and don't provide any unlimited plans which seem to have become popular with North American hosting providers (well, the 2 that I listed, there were more but I didn't bother to list them). With this result, I will want to go with a non-Japanese host as I will get the most bang for my buck. Interestingly, these hosts look ideal as an offsite backup of data, in the case of catastrophic damage, which is a good thing if you want to keep data safe.

Pictures of people between 0-100

Found this site just recently, looks like a photo project of pictures of people between 0-100. An interesting look at the progression of aging in people. It is a good reminder of one's own mortality and the value of time.