Who is Farhan Lalji?

I’m becoming a bit of a spreadsheet nerd.  Whenever I have the opportunity to look at some numbers and do a bit of crunching I get a bit nervous with anticipation – nerdy, I know!  Sometimes I won’t really need a spreadsheet but just love working and seeing the numbers work.  When I was looking for a new set of speakers for the house I put together a spreadsheet on my phone as I went from store to store looking at the number of channels the wattage and the price, broke it down in price per watt and negotiated with the retailers on Tottenham court road accordingly – my wife was pretty embarrassed but we got a good deal and some nice speakers.

I’m also becoming a bit of a Facebook addict, when I have a spare minute I’m busy looking at our MBA class group, or catching up with friends I haven’t seen in ages.

Today I decided to merge these two and look at periods in my life, the length of time spent in these periods and the friends on Facebook I’ve made accordingly.

Using the networks facility on Facebook I worked out that I have friends from my time in Toronto (22 years), in London (7.5 years), McMaster or Hamilton (4 years), London Business School (2 years) and Yahoo (2 months).  I wanted to take into account factors like people might not be on the network but still registered as friends of mine or other elements, but thought it will probably normalize across the board.

After looking at the numbers and my friends on Facebook, I saw that of my 251 friends 70 were on the Toronto network, 54 were on the London network, 25 were on the London Business School network, 3 were on the McMaster network and 3 were on the Yahoo network.

So the percentage of my life in comparison to the percentage of my friends looks like this:
Toronto – 77% of my life, 28% of my friends
London – 23% of my life, 22% of my friends
London Business School – 7% of my life, 10% of my friends
McMaster – 13% of my life, 1% of my friends
Yahoo -0.67% of my life, 1 % of my friends.

So, Toronto and McMaster are underperforming, London is performing adequately, London Business School and Yahoo are outperforming the others.

That’s really interesting as that’s probably how I feel about these parts of my life right now, not too engaged by Toronto or by McMaster at the moment, London feels about right, and I am really happy and engaged by the London Business School and Yahoo friends and experience.  I guess the numbers really don’t lie.