JustinIdea - Justin Ricaurte's Personal Blog

Constructive Complaining

It can get pretty frustrating when people complain non-stop. Most of the time it's because they’re whiny and can seem to do anything but look at the negatives. It can also be pretty depressing talking to one of these people. Do they think you really want to hear about how they can’t stand the person down the hall talking all the time, or that they don’t think they’re smart enough to do anything productive? It might be good to ask them sometime.

While these people can be quite a drag on a day, there is a way to take what they do best and turn it into a great opportunity – constructive complaining. During the normal course of a day, I tend to complain a lot, but you’ll also find me doing a lot of writing. Why? Are these two correlated? Yes. Whenever I find something worthy of complaining about, the first thing I ask myself is how could I make it better. From just this simple question, ideas are incredibly easy to generate.

Here’s an example. I tend to focus in on the lyrics of the songs I listen to, so I work on weeding out songs with messages I don’t want to penetrate my subconscious. This process can be a pain when trying to keep track of all of the songs I listen and wanting to generate a playlist for a specific mood. So, I asked how could this be made better? One way I’ve thought of to fix it is to make tagging and labeling of songs much easier for someone. To allow a person to base it on their emotions if need be and then to be able to mix and remix songs that they associate with the emotions into playlists, because a song can be attached to multiple meanings for a person. This would make setting the mood much easier for an occasion or for helping you get pumped up or excited about something. Have a sad day and need to mope for a while? Just play some sad music until you get sick of it and want to be happy again.

Now implementation and execution is the only bottleneck to this method. You’ll generate so many ideas you just won’t have the time to work on them all at once. But in the end, is it better to have too many ideas with a few gems or too few and less of a chance of a gem emerging?

Holding true to constructive complaining, here’s something to keep in mind. When you hear one person complain, think business opportunity. When you hear many people complaining, think BIG business opportunity! Happy complaining! :D

A Philosophy of Gray

I know in many instances it is more efficient and effective to place all of your bets on one strategy, especially when working on a start-up company with limited cash.  Although when going about life, I find it interesting how people like to be one thing instead of adopting a bi-pole philosophy.  If you approach life from only one angle, then you will surely be able to capitalize on all of the opportunities that present themselves along that angle, and you will become more specialized at that view.  But at a point, the amount that you gain from that angle no longer matches the energy and effort you put into it.  You will also miss other opportunities that present themselves and it will be harder to make yourself flexible to meet new situations.

I've adopted a philosophy of gray, where I work on using both poles at the same time to maintain my flexibility to react to new situations as they present themselves.  I work on keeping these poles in constant competition and cooperation, so that I can mix and match them as necessary.  For example when solving a problem, I work on deducing the core problem that everything else seems to hinge on, then finding through induction how changing this bit many different ways may alter the system.  This is both an art and science as the questions you need to ask for a given situation are not set in stone and the path to exploring it zig-zags a lot.  There are also many dependencies that you need to account for when solving these problems.  Granted, sometimes this strategy does not work as there might not be a core problem, and in those situations I work on finding a tool set that does.

An analogy for a philosophy of gray is to view everything that you are and can do as a tool.  For example, I'm an ENTJ, the field marshal.  This doesn't mean that I always act like all of these traits.  Sometimes I seclude myself into a cave, other times something I see sends a feeling of passion through me, or I might sit back and watch what is going on in the world.  Instead of saying this is all I am, why not view each letter as a tool?  Sometimes being surrounded by people is the best way to regain my energy, other times a good book will do.  Sometimes I need to judge quickly, other times I need to take a step back and smell the flowers. 

This entire thought process came to me, because of how many self-help books there are proclaiming how you should lead your life a certain way - granted if I wrote a book about this I'd be in the same league, haha.  A friend of mine has been reading a lot of these books and is convinced that

1. that the world is moving in a direction where it will require you to be right-brain dominant to lead.
2. and conversly, being left-brain dominant will not allow you to become a leader in the world of the future. 

I argued that he'd be most valuable if he was both right and left-brain dominant and knew when to use each of them to his advantage.  Without a combination of logic and creativity, it's more difficult to ask the tough questions and generate spontaneous ideas that you can back-up with documented research.

I personally enjoy the flexibility that being gray allows. :)

The Ultimate Convergence in Computing

I won't deny that I became extremely excited when I saw Microsoft announce the Surface computer.  But my mind couldn't help but wander and see if there was a way to improve upon the concept and the entire idea of how humans should be able to interact with computers.  Is playing around on walls, floors, and tables the best way to interact with computers, or is there an even better way?  I personally don't think it will be the end all, even with an OLED covered house with walls that are as dynamic as those in Disney's Smart House movie.

Why limit yourself to a surface to do computing at all?  Even better, why make the internet a separate space where things are done?  The internet in the end, as my friend Anders says, is merely another way for humans to communicate.  So what could the ultimate convergence become?  In science fiction movies like The Matrix, humans have to plug into a machine to be able to connect to a "virtual reality".  Why should virtual reality be any different from reality?

Device convergence is great and everything, but I believe the ultimate convergence in computing will be when virtual reality and the internet are completely integrated into reality.  When you are walking down the street, you won't pull out your cell phone to find a place to go.  You will see the possibilities appear before you.  You won't even need a cell phone to carry on a conversation.  Instead of having a character in SecondLife as an avatar to interact with others, you will see other people, who are not physically there, walking around and will be able to interact with them.  You might not even be "there".  (Of course, teleportation would make getting there a lot easier. :-) ) 

With virtual reality and the internet completely integrated into reality, the possibilities are truly infinite.

HBR - Globalization and Summit Syndrome

I've been trying to catch up on the stack of magazines I've accumulated recently.  Here are summaries for two of the articles I enjoyed from March's Harvard Business Review. 

The first was on "Managing Difference: The Central Challenge of Global Strategy".  Ghemawat proposed the AAA Triangle framework to tackle global challenges: adaptation, aggregation, and arbitrage.  With adaptation, companies seek to boost revenues and market share by maximizing local relevance.  With aggregation, they focus on building economies of scale by creating regional/global operations.  And with arbitrage, they exploit differences in national or regional markets by locating different parts of their supply chain in different places.  Although all companies use all three A's to some extent, the A's can be used to create further global differentiation and to exploit competitor weaknesses. 

The second was on the crises gifted performers have at each peak of their success.  This article resonated with me, because I thrive on encountering new challenges and get bored when I no longer seemed to be challenged as much.  Summit syndrome, when gifted performers become dissatisfied at the peak of their success, has three phases.  In the approach phase, the person puts in a lot more effort with marginal gains in improvement, trying to recreate the adrenaline rush of the climb.  Plateauing then occurs when virtually all of the challenges have been conquered.  These individuals continue to produce stellar results but become much more dissatisfied with the work they're doing.  The final phase is descent.  In this phase, performance will slip noticeably and sometimes wrecks havoc on relationships and personal morale. 

To be able to keep this syndrome at bay, it needs to be recognized early on, which can be difficult to do for both an on-looker and the individual.  When it is recognized though, these four steps can be taken to dispel the confusion and set the stage for the next stage of productive growth:

1. Understand your "winning formula" and the vital part it plays in feeling stale or losing your edge.
2. Reconnect with your core purpose in life.
3. Recast your current, or future, job to better align your internal aspirations with external requirements.
4. Create a developmental path by honing a handful of core leadership competencies.

I'm going to keep this in mind the next time I start to feel bored over an extended period of time. :)

2-Day Trip to the Bay Area

I went to the bay area the last two days, and it was a blast!  On Thursday, I met everyone from NUSEA (National University of Singapore Entrepreneurs Association) at their Rainmakers Live! event.  Shao Rong and Eugene were great hosts and introduced me to everyone there.  The challenge Mint put on was a bit intense.  We had 30 minutes to solve a hypothetical problem for the company.  The thirty minutes flew by.  I'm used to 5-hour meetings and 42-hour case competitions, haha.  At the end of the night I was finally able to meet Noah and Aaron of Mint.  They're a couple of great guys and love what they do.  I can't wait until they allow members of the public to try their service!

Yesterday morning, I went back to up to Berkeley and met Yuki from the Lunar Society for bubble tea.  He's also really passionate about being able to make flying to space (and especially the moon) more economical.  Its awesome to meet people that are really passionate about what they do.  Yuki and I are now working on putting together a national team to find a way to make going to space more economical.  If you're interested, shoot me an email at justin [at] justinricaurte.com.  We need both engineers and business people.

After meeting with Yuki, my friend Brenda showed me around Berkeley.  They have some great architecture there.  My favorite building by far was the Haas School of Business building.  It's beautiful!  I forgot to take my camera, but here are a couple pictures I found online, here and here.  There is also a great view from the big C behind the campus, photo found here (San Francisco is in the distance and the Golden Gate bridge is to the right). 

That was my trip in a nutshell.  I didn't want to make you read a novel. :)

Entrepreneurs as Idealists

Wednesday in my entrepreneurship class, my professor asked the class what they thought drove entrepreneurs to start their own businesses.  I was surprised when half of the people who spoke-up said it was purely for profit.  Now why does this surprise me?  Because entrepreneurs (or at least the most successful ones) tend to have an ideal/vision of what they want the world to be like and use business to change the world to fit the vision.  Gates wanting every desk to have a computer; Walton wanting to save low-income, American consumers money; Dell wanting to drive down the cost of computers; and Brin+Page wanting to make an algorithm that is more efficient at finding things on the Internet.

Personally, I want to use business as a vehicle to help improve their places in the world, whether it's through education, finance, or an industry yet to be created.  I want everyone in the world to have the opportunity to enjoy an American standard of living.  Why not teach a person to fish and get paid for it?  Both are better off, and the more people you teach to fish, the more money you make in the end.

Democratized Design

David Armano found an awesome article by Bruce Nussbaum of BusinessWeek asking the question - Are Designers The Enemy Of Design?  It looks long, but is a very fast read and has a lot of great content.

I think Bruce nailed it on the head when he talked about how design is being and will continue to be democratized. I believe everything will eventually go this way, and the profits will then being to help other people with what they need done, through continued conversations as both David and Bruce mentioned.  To get an even closer look at the democratization in business movement, check out this article from The Economist a year ago titled "The New Organization" [*note* it now requires a subscription], and also this article on self-replicating 3D printers for the future of democratized manufacturing.

For example even though its easy to argue that the vast majority of Myspace pages and websites are ugly, more people can put information online in a easier-to-read format, because they have been given simple design tools.  Would as many websites have sprung up if it required a Bachelors in Fine Arts to design a webpage?  Probably not.  The tools that grease the democratization process will further continue to upend the design industry.  And it would be even better if those tools helped the average person create good (if not great) design!  This is a great tool I have been using at Adobe Labs when trying to come up with color schemes for websites or other materials.

Another piece I really enjoyed Bruce touching on was the sustainable industry movement.  There is so much money to be saved (and made!) from cutting pollution and waste from the manufacturing process and in turn making all of our products more environmentally friendly, it's almost mind boggling.

As a last note, I thought one of the lines David bolded from the essay "We live a life in beta" is something people (who haven't) should take to heart.  You shouldn't be done learning or improving yourself after some set milestone, such as graduating from high school, technical school, or college.  You should strive for continuous improvement in what you do and who you are.  Constantly work on improving your relationships, business, health, and life.  Often improving one will help to improve all.