Albert Einstein’s famous quote. “If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask… for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.” Simple, yet lost on most or all of us. Defining ones life, work & relationships "exam question" is key to solving and simplifying life's choices. How Well You Define a Problem Determines How Well You Solve It. Think about it before you jump in to problem solving mode. Ask your self "do I really know what I am solving for?" I have practiced 55 mins of Focus every time I have had complex issues to deal with. It makes life very uncomplicated once you get the hang of it.

Outcomes

The human mind is a wonderful machine that is a problem solver. When you pose a question, it works tirelessly to seek the answer. The key to solving the right problem is to ask the right question. Sadly, our educational industrial complex or the lack their of, teaches no one to ask questions. Let alone the right questions. What that does to us, is evident in our 70+ year national regression at every level. We don't build opinion or thought leaders, we only feed force and create the Liver Pâté equivalent of kids, professionals, leaders who don't have a functioning brain. That recognise the value of challenger questions and frame things in and out of context to arrive at better outcomes. We should go back to our childhood. A child can teach you three things: To be happy for no reason.To always be curious and to fight tirelessly for something. All these add to better outcomes but we steal it from our children and have done so for generations. Let’s teach kids/Young Adults to be curious again! Let’s show them learning is fun! Drilling “skills” is only doing one thing— making adults feel better about their kids schools’ test scores. Later on in life you will destroy their outcomes by force-feeding them garbage and expecting them to be self reliant, innovative, determined or curious.

A host of people asked me, what are you going to do this summer with your kids for the Covid related disturbances in their academic year? My response, "hug their nana/nani/dada/dadi, play outside, play with friends, breathe in fresh air, this is the re calibration they need, not more online courses or education". Let them do this and their outcomes have a solid chance of recovery, let them be curious this summer and ask questions!

Read this for some inspiration.

One New Thing(to focus on)

Do you classify your self as a Maker? Do you get side tracked with buying domains around and idea you will build. But really havent done any thing? Do you have a mental model or a frame work.

One thing I learnt today. There are so many opportunities. Some will surely pass you by. No need stressing yourself chasing the ones you've missed out on already(bitcoin, a stock tip, an idea for a startup, a home business), instead, prepare yourself just in case a new one crosses your path and be ready to capitalise on opportunities instead. Time waits for no one and time doesn't rewind for you; to perfect your idea, to start, or do some thing you didnt before. Being prepared does. Heres a mental model for you to keep close.

That thing you're planning to do...

Are you waiting till you're ready?

Take it from me that 'ready' is the wrong state to look for. We over index on ready.

What if you skip 'ready', and launch based on being prepared?

Heres a story I read that breaks this down and makes it so simple. A fan asked Jay Z to sign something for him and Jay asked if he had a pen. The fan did not. Jay was surprised and asked him how he had gone about asking for his autograph and not have a pen? Then he told him that he's gotta be prepared. This is advice to all when shooting your shot. So many of us just shoot. We don't expect to actually bank the shot. But on the off chance that you do, are you prepared?

Boring stuff that scales

A model to scaling the unscalable + some life lessons.

Do you classify your self as a Maker? Do you get side tracked with buying domains around an idea you will build----later. But really haven't done any thing? Do you have a mental model or a frame work to help you with trying to solve the seemingly complex? DTTDS..What in gods in name is that you ask? Doing Things That Don't Scale..

1) Do you start with mentally envisioning a problem any problem or even your solution, your end state or why you are even thinking about it? What do you really want to build?

2)Wouldn’t it be fun if this existed? Would you pay to use it? What is your goal at the end of the making phase?

3)Can you scale customer happiness even if the solution doesn't scale?

4)Has "normalisation" fd you up, hurt you, damaged you? Can you get past that? or are you doing things just to make a point?

5)When you close your eyes and think about a car's license plate could you touch it in your minds eye? Meaning do you have the right experiences for your making phase?

When we are younger we don't understand how a lot of things work, so adults must stop expecting young people to understand everything, just because some one else's kid understood them. People and ideas develop at a different time scale, if you understand these constructs you have it in you to DTTDS. If you cant get past societies classifications and prejudices I'd suggest you try your hand at other things vs finding and scaling boring and un-sexy ideas.

You heard(read) it here first ...

I have been very vocal on bad HR practices and exploitive culture of firms run/owned by Saiths. Its near Toxic. This one is for Saiths, HR professionals and of course the rest of you too.

Company culture is how business gets done. It’s the organisations personality and is created from the behaviours one is willing to tolerate, especially the saith + HR combo. When it sparkles, we all want to be associated with a company and everyone thrives.The ideal scenario.

When it becomes toxic, or the “brilliant a$$h*le” is allowed to operate without consequences, unhealthy behaviours become a cancer that spreads quickly. The whole organisation can become infected and a place we all want to avoid. But then why are most companies in Pakistan really bad places to work? It is because of generational power dynamics and an abusive mind set due to lack of options.(For the employees)

The Employees Check list(yours) to see if your culture is toxic:

In the last seven days, have you?

1. Been surprised or blindsided by the words or actions of a colleague? 

2. Hesitated to make a decision for fear of others’ reactions? 

3. Been guarded with your opinion or avoided sharing feedback with a colleague so as not to rock the boat? 

The Saiths Check list that demonstrate a clear HR failing leading to organisational toxicity:

Do you see this happening in your organisation?

1. The first symptom of a toxic culture is the lack of interaction and communication among the employees. Do your HR or Senior employees gate all conversations?

2. To employees working in a toxic environment, power, title, and levels is their major concern. They divert their energy from focusing on the company’s vision and mission to pursuing status and titles. Do people throw their weight around based on layers of power in your organisation? Do you only engage with the "bosses"?

3. A wrong culture creates fear in the mind of the employees. They are afraid of getting into trouble so they keep their heads low. A toxic culture does not allow its employees to create and implement new ideas. If your employees seldom share things, you have a problem. When was the last time you met an employee in a meeting or one that sent you an excited email about some thing amazing they came up with?

If any of this rings true(fix it as a saith or HR leader). Get out(if you are an employee). Hunger can be cured by a non five star meal but mental abuse takes years to get over. No one deserves this trauma, there is a long term cost that you must not be prepared to accept, for the short term gain of a 5 star meal. Trade it in. You must also fully start believing that the highest paid persons opinions(HIPPOs) typically don't matter so break free.

What you should be reading

So this is an interesting one. It took me a while to read it. Deep Learning Isn't Deep Enough Unless It Copies From the Brain.Jeff Hawkins, the Palm Pilot's creator, thinks AI needs much more neuroscience in the mix. This is the review that led me to this book "Honestly, I'd never thought much about how my brain works, but after reading this book, I'll never think of my brain - or myself - the same way again."

The book is divided into three parts.

• The first part is devoted to explaining the neuroscience details behind his new theory of intelligence.

• The second part focuses on machine intelligence

• The last part focuses on the core issues of human intelligence

It was the third part of the book that caught me off guard in a positive sense. It was full of mind bending ideas. They were enticing perhaps off the beaten path too, but them Im no scientist. The explanation of how we create false beliefs couldn't be more timely especially in the era of lock downs, fading memories and limited social interactions. The possibilities for addressing our ongoing struggle between genes and knowledge were a fascinating read. One for the ages.

Monetise your time (by not doing an MBA )

Especially If you are a saith-a-preneur or worse their VC/PE offspring because this is where you will likely end up....(A short story based on other peoples content)

You ask the waiter what the restaurant’s core competencies are.

But you forget the pleasure of a good meal

You decide to re-org your family into a ‘team- based organization.’

But forget to take their real (lack of ) skills in to account

You can spell ‘paradigm.’

But dont know the value of a dime, because you haven't worked for much.

You understand an airline’s fare structure based on a case study

But don't understand the structure or fabric of relationships or human emotions

You believe you never have any problems in your life, just ‘issues’ and ‘improvement opportunities.’

Because you have never dealt with messy problems face to face

You refer to your previous life as ‘my sunk costs.’

But don't have an appreciation for the sunk costs of the people who have no choice but to work for your saith corp

You refer to divorce as ‘divestiture.’

But refer to happiness as function of money

You account for your tuition as a capital expenditure instead of an expense.

But cant capitalise on being a nice guy/gal

At your last family reunion, you wanted to have an emergency meeting about their brand equity.

But don't value the equity free commitment and dreams that built your saith co

Your ‘deliverable’ for Sunday evening is pilates and paid bills.

But you expect your employees to make time to do things that you are too stupid to understand or do during the work week because you are in "meetings"

You use the term ‘value-added’ without falling down laughing.

But the only value you add to some ones day is help them reconsider their life choices that some day they leave to launch a startup instead of dealing with you

Made(cooked) in Pakistan

We are going through a gastronomic revolution. Home cooks have evolved to home chefs and chefs have migrated to mini-enterprises. From artisanal cheese makers to people making beef jerky, to folks making keto cookies and every thing in between. The smart ones have scaled, the lucky ones have given up their day jobs and converted their side hustles to commercially viable businesses. They have grown and they have scaled in the face of extreme competition from restaurants who due to corona went delivery only.

But the restaurants had an insane delivery related challenge, the delivery services break bank 30% commissions on order value. Not every one can build their own delivery infrastructure if you planned on being a sit down restaurant but weren't setup for digital order taking and or didn't have the right overheads to manage for a create-package-deliver model you dont have much real choice. If you ain't got your CPD figured out you are toast. The ones who grew up or out of the Facebook, Instagram home delivery model had little to no over head, an oversized passion to make it work and were typically more digitally savvy with managing both production batches, order taking and thus making delivery work with out paying 30% service charges. What Pakistan needed was an equaliser that took out the foreign led middle man but allowed to grow the rider infrastructure jobs, the e-commerce infrastructure for the "chefs" and reduced the total cost of ownership by delivering an instant sales platform for supporting the Made in Pakistan idea. My dear friend Raza Matin and the founder of Chikoo, has solved for all this. I wish these were paid posts, but they aren't. I am blessed to have some amazing friends and access to some insanely smart founders.

The premise, they bring the tech, you bring the food. You launch in 3 mins, you keep your data, you lists, you customer info and you pay a flat fee I think of 15 PKR for every order you process on the system, that too, next year:). I love a great made in Pakistan Story. This is the best one that came out of Corona. Having enabled 1000s of small medium enterprises, the company behind Chikoo has truly empowered Jawans to be Kamyab and created an alternate source of income for Pakistanis without being beholden to Facebook, Shopify, Instagram or those various other foreign delivery players who btw are all an FX drain. Also this works for any retail based business just not food alone. Food I think is the ++ use case.

A must watch video, courtesy of Chikoo — twitter.com

One Last thing..(to break even)

For those who have fixed over heads and sunk-in costs of retail space, especially in the restaurant business. You need to club together and launch a co-operative of co-working spaces. Build a model where a member pays a flat fee to use X locations.(Cleary you will have to do the Math & Biz model).

All the restaurant owners pool in their available space, day time and or night time with SOPs intact. Offices can still have 50% staff. Classify it as an office, be mindful of protocols and convert your dead space, that is not being used by patrons to be used by all those free lancers who do not have core-tech infra at home, internet, a generator and coffee to pound out the best in class code in the middle of the night or day. Summers are here, as are power break downs. You need some one to help you pay the rent, they need some where safe to work with un-interrupted power. Perhaps some thing to explore. Heres to breaking even.