who are you and where are you?

 I wrote about the power of peers and that led to me to further thinking...

There is more nuance than to just saying peers. It is about the ecosystem, the environment and all that it encompasses.

Think about the following:

Can Cheetah win a swimming competition?

Can a fish survive in land?

Can crops grow in seasons and environments that are not conducive to them?

Can a seed grow on a rock or when the conditions are not favorable?

So when you succeed, it is not just your effort, your capabilities, your smartness, it is also about lot of factors and the environment you are in that helps you to execute, that helps you to deliver, that nurtures you

Similarly, when you are not firing on all your cylinders, probably, may be it is not about you. Probably, you are a polar bear suffering in the sub-saharan african desert.

Just make sure you are in the right place!! 

Power of peer groups

 One of my friend would often quote the Roger Bannister Phenomenon. Basically until Roger broke the 4 min mile record, people thought it was an unachievable feat. Once he broke, it was like floodgates opened and people started running the mile under less than 4 minutes.

You basically need someone else to show that can be done and everyone thinks it is doable.

It plays out more than ever we could ever imagine or observe.

Think about the following

In certain ecosytems, you would do see a lot of people doing the similar or same thing. Going to the same foreign country for job prospects. Schools sending the kids to a particular college, people from the same college starting successful firms and so on.

As they say, you are an average of 5 people whom you spend time with. 

Though I have heard and have seen this behavior (For e.g I have seen people preparing for Masters in US or applying for specific companies or doing MBA cause their peers were doing) Yet, I was pleasantly surprised to realize I haven't internalized it as much as I should have and was genuinely surprised to see it in action.

For e.g I meet my writing mentor occasionally like once in a blue moon and every time I see him, he would be like you would not continue to write as you are not moving in a circles and as a result you would not be motivated to write. No drive no inspiration and all that, I used to think, he is little upset I am not in touch with him.

However, in recent times, (well not so recent) I started playing wordle. Well, I started playing cause most of people I knew were playing it. Once I started playing other games in NY times app,  others too started playing and it was becoming like a friendly competition. The most interesting thing was, when i played strands, i would use hints and when I saw others not using and solving it, I also started doing the same. I was terrible in connections (I am still) but when i started seeing others solving at ease, even my solve rate has increased before that. 

It is just games in an app yet there is a powerful lesson in human behavior. 

If we see others doing things, we think and believe we too could do the same. 

So it all depends where you are, what you see and what you end up imbibing. 

If you are in a high achievers group, you too are motivated the same way. The irony is, let us say if you are not in high achiever group, the odds of you falling down to the group level than you raising the level of the group is very less.

beware of your peer group. beware of whom you spend your time with and interact with. Talent density matters.

As the cliched saying goes, if you are the smartest in the room, then you are in the wrong room...

Selling AI...

 If you are someone selling AI or AI enabled/powered solutions, it would be good to bear the following in mind.

• Most end customers or end users think AI is all powerful. Magic wand and can solve all the problems. They would say, "This is the problem and it can be solved in this way using AI and why is that it is not solving"  They may not realize that their systems may not be good enough or capable to leverage their AI or their data not good enough to train or be more reliable or even there are better and simpler alternatives than AI
• Most client firms could also possibly have their own tech teams and they might be competing you with intensely than ever before. 
• Most of the clients firms probably have burnt their fingers by the half baked promises and unfulfilled promises and as a result would look at anything you say with lots of suspicion
• It is better to call out what are the features you have already built and what is on the roadmap. Again clients would want to know what is vaporware and what are empty promises and how much of that is real
• Case studies, validations, references and testimonials could help, but you are served by adding caveats as you would not have a better and actual insights on the state of data and how they are organized and how easy or difficult would the training be and how quickly you can get to the 100% reliability. In other words, be transparent, and if anything undersell rather than oversell

As the saying goes, more the things change, more the things remain the same...

What I want from Google...

 Am definitely excited by the Gemini 3 launch as much as any other tech bro...

However, all I would want from Google is the following enhancements to the NotebookLM (as they say in Tamil, that that man that that problem)

1. Ability to upload doc and epub formats. I have many ebooks in epub format and it would really be a great help to upload them directly to NotebookLM

2. Sync up with Google Keep directly. Google Keep is simple, powerful. It is my brain dump, digital note taker. How much I would love to sync my Google Keep directly with NotebookLM

Doing the right thing

 Was reminded off these two events. 

Things being cryptic are intentional!!

Bunch of us were evaluating a bunch of firms. 5 firms to be precise. Most of the firms were represented by the stakeholders themselves. One of the firm had made an exception and sent their senior person. 

None of us were bothered that an agent was sent on behalf of the principal. 

Across the board with all the 5 firms, the discussions were casual. More open, more informal. More friendly. As a result, guard was down and people were speaking freely.

This exceptional firm who had sent a senior person, made an off handed remark, in fact offered an information unsolicited, something to the effect of "Oh we don't do X because it is risky" Basically the person made that statement to showcase they are robust, they have best practices. 

The room was full of men. One of them, responded, "Thank goodness, She (mentioned the name) is not here, if not you would have had a tough time" The aforementioned "She" was the final decision maker for our evaluation. 

This exceptional firm was really exceptional, they were the largest, best, would have ranked the top in all metrics we were evaluating. 

At the end of the day, we huddled up internally for the review to prepare the recommendations before presenting to the decision maker.

The analyst who had prepped the deck outlining pros and cons for each firm had just mentioned, "Not culturally aligned" across this exceptional firm. None, literally none said anything about how exceptional this exceptional firm was or how they were actually crushing. All of us moved on without spending another second. 

Another Incident

Bunch of us were at a dinner. It was me who had organized that dinner with internal and external stakeholders to get to know each other and could help us with one of the critical initiative at the time.

One of the external stakeholder was unnecessarily rude to one of the waiters. It was odd, yet could be considered par for the course. Not always, folks treat the support people in a nice way and if they think not being nice is okay, they behave that way. 

One of my senior stakeholder pulled me aside and said, ensure we don't engage with this person. 

Good culture and Good values and Good principles are about doing the right thing, when no one is watching and even when stakes are really high!!!

Open AI feature requests

 CustomGPTs in chatGPT is such a cool stuff. More especially for non-tech folks to build something cool and powerful without much Tech knowledge.

However for a tool that making life easier, it could be far better and make life easier, if following few notes and error handling, enhancements and instructions are available.

First and foremost, the access to the editor and precondition to access it.

1. The editor is not accessible in the app mode. It can be accessed from the browser

2. Even from the browser, customGPT is available, starting only from Go users. If you are not a paid member and if you try to access, it should have a message that one has to be a paid user and have a CTA or redirect link to become a paid member. Well, In India, all users are go users, so at least for the next year, editor will be accessible for India based users. It can be and should be fixed for users in other regions.

3. The profile pic file limit. Though Dall E image generation for the profile image is cool, if i try to upload an image, have no idea what are the file formats supported and the size limit. I tried uploading a 5.5MB file and just got a random error message than a specific message

4. The description doesn’t support any formatting. It would be good to have formatting. In addition it also has character limit and it is not mentioned upfront. 

5. In the knowledge section, there are limits to the file size and and number of files that could be uploaded. The message/info could be made available than to try and figure out later.

What Would Jobs Do??

TLDR:

I have built a custom GPT: What Would Jobs Do?  

https://chatgpt.com/g/g-68f7a59494c481918995e7eecb050617-what-would-jobs-do-wwjd

Long Story:

When I was 11 or 12, a neighborhood senior kid told me about Apple, Mac and Steve Jobs. I genuinely thought he was bullshitting me thinking that i don’t know about Bill Gates. 

Fast forward, when I wanted to buy a gift for someone very close during my first onsite trip, a friend was like, if you really want to gift properly, get them a iPod mini. It was the entry product and still it was too expensive when compared to other mp3 players. 

I was curious and went down the rabbit hole and that is how my fascination and adoration with Steve Jobs got started. It was too strong, I ended up writing a book about him in Tamil. It is been more than 10 years and now and then I still get fan mail for it.

The unintended consequence of deep diving about someone like Steve Job is, me losing my mind over when people (read tech bros, founders) channel their inner “A” and passing it as modeling the Jobsian behavior. 

Probably, one of the most misunderstood personality. Thanks to the way, he was portrayed by most of main stream media (For what it’s worth, folks close to Steve himself felt the authorized biography of Walter Isaacson itself didn’t do justice and they got Brent Schlender and another author for redux of Steve Jobs bio)

So for more than few years, I have been meaning to write two books in English.

One, compile all his quotes and put it as a book.

Two, based on quotes, based on pivotal moments, write about how one could learn from Jobs to make a dent in the universe rather than being a painful “A”

I started compiling all his videos, interviews, books that I missed earlier and the books published after my book. (I had to rely a lot on iCon and lot of early articles across publications like Forbes, BusinessWeek, Time, Wired and Fortune to write my book; The Walter Isaacson wasn’t published when I was done with mine)

However, I never got around to writing them. I couldn’t get around to getting the transcripts from the YouTube video complilations. 

Later, I started playing around with NotebookLM and chatGPT to write scripts to compile the transcripts from videos. Meanwhile, I also wanted to be AI literate and was reading around and playing around with tools. 

Then it occured to me, wait a minute, what if I use AI to model Steve Jobs behavior. I have these many books, these many articles, videos and I could give it Open AI’s GPT builder.  Simple. (I couldn’t be more correct as well as more wrong; Correct cause, it is still relatively easy to use the GPT builder but still it is not that simple to build the Knowledge files to serve as inputs to the GPT builder) 

One, using the books as a whole would violate, Open AI’s usage guidelines which prioritizes fair use boundaries.  

More than that, the Input Token limits and practicality. 

The GPT file upload system doesn’t “absorb” the entire content at once like training a model. Instead, it uses retrieval techniques that pull in relevant file snippets (based on the prompt) when generating a response.

• Even If you upload an entire 700-page book, or books it won’t be searched efficiently.

• You may get partial context, or the model may miss relevant insights buried deep in long documents.

• There’s also a token cap (~100k per request) which limits how much of the file it can process per response.

And Quality of Responses Decreases with Raw Bulk

Feeding a GPT unstructured, untagged, long-form books:

• Makes the assistant guess context too often.
• Reduces precision in responses.

So, I realized this was more challenging (in a way) than writing a book cause, you still have to create topic notes from books, themes, organize it and not just that, these files should explicitly call out as  the GPT wouldn’t automatically “know” what’s from Jobs and what’s from me unless I make that distinction explicit in the formatting. It needs, content in a specific format, with attributes and tags, calling out, Quote, Source, Comment, Interpretation and the files cannot be ambiguous or cannot have unclear content. GPT may not know where the quote ends and where my comment begins. It might conflate my interpretation with Jobs’ own words.

It is cause of the way, how the GPT works.

When you upload a file to a Custom GPT, it doesn’t “read” the whole thing every time. Instead, it:

1. Searches for the most relevant chunks of content related to the prompt.
2. Pulls those chunks into the response as background.
3. Uses context to decide what’s a quote, what’s commentary, and how to blend it into the answer.

The clearer your formatting, the more accurate this retrieval. So how to build the files.

Q1:.txt or .docx — Which Is Better?

Format	Pros	Cons
.txt	” Lightweight, loads fast✔ No hidden formatting✔ GPT parses text cleanly	No headings, styles, or tables Can get messy with long documents
.docx	Supports headers, bolding, bullet points, tables✔ Good for structured documents with commentary	Slightly heavier Risk of hidden metadata (tracked changes, formatting issues)

Recommendation:

• If you’re uploading clean, well-structured material with multiple sections, .docx is better.
• If you’re uploading shorter, raw text content like quotes or notes, .txt is fine.
• In both formats, use clear headers or tags ([QUOTE], [COMMENT], etc.) for GPT to parse meaningfully.

You can use .docx files with tables, and GPT can infer structure better from them than from unformatted .txt.

 One Big File vs. Multiple Small Files?

Approach	Pros	Cons
One Large File	Easy to manage✔ Avoids GPT file upload limit (“10 files max)Good for a single tightly themed topic	Retrieval becomes fuzzy if file mixes many unrelated topics❌ Hard to update incrementally GPT may struggle to find the most relevant snippet
Multiple Small Files	Better for topic-based retrieval” Easier to test and update individually” More accurate context matching	More upload effort (GPT Builder has file count limits) Slightly harder to maintain if not organized well

Best is to use multiple small files grouped by theme or purpose.

Why this works:

• GPT fetches only what’s needed based on your prompt (e.g., hiring questions won’t trigger irrelevant product quotes)
• Easier for you to add/update one theme without breaking the others

Eventually, I ended up with a guideline of max of 20 files, with each file at 100-200 pages /25-35K words per file.

• Each file must be ≤ 512 MB  .
• Text/doc files are capped at 2 million tokens per file

(More on the 20 file limit and 2 million tokens per file are at the end of the article)

So Now my challenge was with all these video transcripts, articles, and books, how do i organize the files and with the format to train the GPT!!

So when the files are uploaded properly, 

• GPT indexes each file separately
• When a user asks a question (e.g., “What would Jobs say about launching MVPs?”), it:
  
1. Searches for relevant files (e.g., Design + Product + Risk files)
2. Extracts relevant quotes/snippets
3. Uses those to inform the response

➡️ Better-separated files = better semantic matches, fewer irrelevant quotes, and faster processing.

I was wondering what could I do to create the files in a better way (read as without going through the pain/pleasure of reading each and every line of the content again, write notes and organize it for the machine to understand)

That is when I realized what If I could use NotebookLM. So uploaded all the content I had to NotebookLM. Asked it create mind maps. It helped me to come up with the themes. Again fed the mindmaps to chatGPT and Gemini and asked it to build the themes that should be covered. Then I gave the themes and asked the chatGPT to create prompts for each theme to query in notebookLM and created theme based documents with both prompt and response which became the knowledge builder files.

From there, it was easy to build the GPT builder following the instructions and prompting the chatGPT on how it could be built. 

The shocking secret anatomy of a Dan Brown Novel

For a while, was resisting the temptation to read the latest Dan Brown Novel. His last one, Inferno, was a disappointment  and me in my Locked In Mode, felt I am better off reading non-fiction, and AI related stuff.  

Last Saturday night, woke up in the middle of the night and I really needed a break to take my mind off of things and thought, what the hell, let me give it a shot.  Though it was a usual Dan Brown, it didn’t disappoint and it was unputdownable and there in lies his genius. 

More than 2 decades back, I read Da Vinci Code in a single sitting and was so amazed for few days.  In fact for a while until i read the secret of the success by the Author Sujatha. He said, the success is due to the factor, he mixes the fiction and non-fiction in the right proportions and you as a reader at the moment of reading, cannot discern which is fiction and non-fiction. After reading this it was like, lifting of the veil/disappearance of the fog. 

Later, the more I read, I could realize and appreciate, how they have written the book, how they place the red herrings, how the chapter ends, how the characterization is done and so on. [Until recently, I didn’t realize or know on how to articulate this phenomenon /habit. Apparently it is called reading for form, most of us read for content, we don’t read for form or structure, not with the intent of oh, this is what the author is trying to do, basically, you don’t dissect the anatomy] [In fact, hated the Inferno, mostly cause, second chapter and I was able to figure out the antagonist and it was such a bummer to read]

[Oh, I thought, I figured out the plot twist at two places even here but he did pull a fast one or should I say Sidney Sheldon but it was a good sleight of hand]

However, when I read this latest one, though I could see what was happening, and how it could happen, it was intriguing and kept me on the hook. Though I didn’t finish the book in one sitting (Hello Old age, and other responsibilities of an adult) the book was indeed a good one and would recommend reading

But wait where is the Anatomy??

1. Robert Langdon should do swim in the first few chapters 

2. City as a character. More it is mystic and historical better. [I really do want to know, does he holidays in such places and comes up with the inspiration or does he decide, well, i want to holiday in the city so let me make it a center piece of my novel]

3. Pick up an organization that we all think we know but has more layers to it. Vatican, NSA, and CIA

4. Through out the novel, have few central themes that are focus of interest to public but are little obscure and controversial in nature. The old vs new, the new is not that new, but actually old. Fringe research, interesting anecdotes, trivia that nerds would know but make it mainstream. (For e.g did we really land in the moon, does moon exist, you get the drift]

5. Add conspiracy. Take science fiction and make it look it is plausible. 

In other words, I think the inner prompt he gives himself is, take equal proportions of Michael Crichton, Sidney Sheldon and Jeffrey Archer and dumb it down and take that would appeal/correlate to a large audience. 

After this out of curiosity did as the ChatGPT, “ What are the common themes across all dan brown novels” It is also a good read!! (I also think it is not trained on his latest book)

https://chatgpt.com/share/69076371-8838-8000-a4ad-5107e6e6fa9f

To buy the book: https://amzn.to/43NUxTw