Nowadays, I intentionally try my level best not to use my mobile phone. Digital de-addiction and all that.
It also means, lot of time, I am introspecting about past, future. Sometimes, I also worry and may be a little bit scared that Doom scrolling is better than these kind of thinking :) Just Kidding!
The reflections led me down this rabbit hole!
what is my weakness? what is the thing that is so stupid about me?
"I have access to really smart people and am not acting upon their recommendations!!!"
Long Long ago, I once hosted someone from Valley for a bunch of folks. Someone who has written an academic book on Machine learning which is recommended text book in Stanford and all. Post the meetup, I felt the conversation and discussion was sub par and I wasted his time. A year later, he reached out and asked can I set up a similar meet up. I was puzzled and asked him, why is he keen. He said, "Last time we spoke about X and Y. I was not at all aware of them, though they are right in my backyard. I made a note, I should reach out to them but totally missed it and now as you know they are such a big deal. I really feel that I missed out and probably this meet up again would help me to unearth some big bang opportunity.
Too many takeaways to me like, how the valley folks could live in a bubble, how even valley folks miss out on the trends and so on. Most important was the pattern matching and how he thought about how to look for opportunities.
Now coming back to my life
I have a mentor, who has advised me on my career choices, whenever I am at the cross roads. Each and every time, I have taken a detour from his recommendation, only to reach at the destination he recommended. If only, I had listen to him, it would have saved me a lot of time and considering the detours, they all would have compounded well.
I have another friend, who is really darn good at looking in to the future, in to the edge/curve and all that. Sometimes, I think I am not sure, even he knows how good he is at that.
Circa mid 2016-17 time frame, when all the VCs were chasing the shared rides, quick commerce and all that, he was asking about blockchain startups and how they are looking at it and so on. I should have bought bit coin and held on to them. It was below $500
Fast forward the post-covid crash, I was holding a stock, which had fallen more than 50% in value. He was strongly recommending me to sell it and I would still be better off the stock and would come on top and all that. I didn't listen to it. Now it has fallen further 50% and today it is less than 1/5 of what it was. Even if I had sold the entire portfolio then and invested in a index, I would have made more than for all the loss incurred earlier
2 years back, around 2023, he said, "AI will disrupt software engineering in ways we could never imagine" He said that in 2023, before 2 years. He was managing a sizable team and delivering AI assisted/generated code at enterprise level for mission critical customer facing applications. He said, development time and roadmaps will get compressed by factor of years with half the team sizes. How much I wish I had started learning AI and had a head start in the AI learning.
So,
One, go and find such good and smart folks in your life, if you don't have them
Two, if you already have them, count your blessings and listen to them!
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