Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The essence of this book is "Prioritize the activities that you are planning to do, do the most important ones properly.". By spreading thin, we waste our time, energy and don't complete activities to our satisfaction too. This message is drilled down the reader using multiple examples and anecdotes from successful businesses and business leaders. Excellent message, I admire it. The book was long for this simple message. I would have loved it more if the book was cut-down to 1/10 of its size.

Every number can be expressed as product of prime numbers.

Here is Daniel Finkel’s 100-square in primes. Just stare at it for few minutes to realize it's beauty.

The Financial Expert by R.K. Narayan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The story of Margayya will remain etched in mind forever. For that story reminded me of a paternal grandfather's elder brother, who was an accountant and a businessman and my maternal grandfather who was a very successful businessman, and who overcame odds multiple times.

One particular incident narrated in this story made me recollect my childhood in Madurai. Narayan narrates that during summer, the school children would sometimes come and ask for water at Margayya's house. That used to happen at my grandma's house at Madurai too. We had a "Copper Sombu", a form of crockery, to fetch water from inside for the thirsty and sometimes when the passerby asked for more water, we used go inside, fetch another full sombu and share with them. Those passerby's had not relation to us, and they would simply drop by when thirsty.

When Narayan shares these small incidents in the storybook, a reader who is grown up in India is sure to become nostalgic and appreciate many nuances of Indian life.

I loved reading this book.

On the topic of learning, it is widely recognized that "mastery orientation" is more effective than "performance orientation." Mastery orientation involves doing something because you genuinely want to learn or improve, rather than to prove your abilities to others. The focus is on personal growth and self-improvement. This is the essence of mastery-based learning.

A memorable example of this concept can be found in the final dialogue from the movie The Karate Kid:

Mr. Han: Just tell me, Xiao Dre, why? Why do you need to go back out there so badly?

Dre Parker: Because I'm still scared. And no matter what happens tonight, when I leave, I don't want to be scared anymore.

This dialogue highlights the importance of overcoming personal fears and challenges for self-growth, rather than seeking external validation.

I also came across an insightful article titled ["Awesome By Proxy: Addicted to Fake Achievement"](http://www.pixelpoppers.com/2009/11/awesome-by-proxy-addicted-to-fake.html). The author reflects on how they were choosing games that provided a false sense of achievement and how they decided to change their approach after introspection.

> We humans are remarkably adept at finding ways to lie to ourselves, and ways to be self-destructive.

This quote serves as a reminder to critically evaluate our actions and motivations, ensuring they align with genuine growth and learning.

Mastery orientation encourages us to focus on the journey of learning and self-improvement, rather than being fixated on external rewards or recognition.

https://aiexperiments.withgoogle.com/autodraw - I really liked this experiment. You can doodle something and it will pick your doodle and give you a proper picture. For e.g. below I drew a flower and than could get a neat version.

If you are web-developer, no more struggling with creation for favicons. :) outsource it to AI.

My drawing:

Computer Output:

This is a short documentary on Steve Jobs, trying to start again with the NeXT computers. It captures him as a individual working with his team, using his experience, build and sell a computer for education market.

Given the team he had, the approach he took, it seems that the result was a successful one.

BYTE in 1989 listed the NeXT Computer as among the "Excellence" winners of the BYTE Awards, stating that
it "shows what can be done when a personal computer is designed as a system, and not a collection of
hardware elements". Citing as "truly innovative" the optical drive, DSP, and object-oriented programming
environment, the magazine concluded that "the NeXT Computer is worth every penny of its $6500 market price".

• NeXT_Computer

Listened to this guest lecture by Mark Zuckerberg in 2005. He was not world famous then yet, so the audience size is small and they ask pointed questions about facebook. This was supposed to be a computer science class, and Mark chides multiple times at the crowd that they are not asking CS questions yet.

Mark Zuckerberg's personality comes out well in this lecture. The interesting things that a computer science engineer can pick up is, Mark suggests, knowing "C" you could jump to "PHP". The idea about scalable architecture, performance optimization early in the game etc.

His thoughts on running a business in a competitive environment were interesting too.

This is a short non-technical book consisting of compiled speeches of Richard Feynman. It does not into physics, but covers a lot of topics like religion, politics, society, ethical questions in science, atom bombs and scientist motivations. Richard feynman has lot of context to explore all these areas. Plus, his communication style is very pleasant.

I usually avoid reading general books like this. But I happen to pick this up, and on a day, when I was about to give some leeway into an astrology (it's not a science) shared by my close ones, having just reading a topic in this book gave me excellent points to bring my thinking back into track. Contrary to my assumption when starting to read this book, I found it extremely useful!

Received this motivational quote from Khan Academy today.

Recent research shows that students learn more when they are taught that intelligence is malleable and can be grown through hard work. Students do worse if they believe that intelligence is fixed, and so are afraid to make mistakes or ask questions because they will look like they aren't smart. Let your students know that they're getting smarter every minute they spend practicing and tackling tough problems!

I added these git clean short-cut aliases to my config.

[alias]
   cls = clean -x -n -e *.iml -e .idea
   cl = clean -x -f -e *.iml -e .idea

Often, I would mistakenly delete my IntelliJ idea files and I will loose the various customizations I had done. This setup will prevent the mishap from happening again.