Who is Farhan Lalji?

Coming back from vacation and reading about how to taking time off from work on the Harvard’s Discussion Leaders site was a pretty interesting coincidence. I don’t take enough holidays and when I do I end up occasionally checking email and reading blogs and what not.

Working too hard can be counter productive. If you’re exhausted it’s hard to be really effective. You don’t add any perspective or allow for any creative down time. Two examples in the post from HBSP hit this on the head. The first was Bear Sterns and how the CEO was working for 72 hours straight during some moments, that’s just setting yourself up for combustion. And having read that Clinton worked mother’s day and hasn’t taken any time off from the campaign trail didn’t make me admire her, it made me pity her.

Life is too short to work too hard. But that doesn’t mean that you don’t work smart or that you don’t out-perform the competition. It just means that you enjoy your down time so that you can make the most of your time at work. Not sure if I was able to do that last week, but I plan on doing more of that in the future.

I just finished reading Seth Godin’s the Dip. It was a quick, enjoyable read that’s helped me focus a bit.

The book talks about how anything worth having needs dedication and is usually pretty hard and how quitting a dead end masquerading as an opportunity (or as Seth calls them a “Cul-de-Sac”) is a good thing.

It’s hardly rocket science, I know. In fact the Missus told me “That seems pretty obvious” when I brought it up with her last night. But it’s funny how you can invest a lot of your time and effort into something that offers very little value and not think that you should drop it and focus on something really valuable – sunk costs apply to everything in my opinion. Or on the other hand how you can think something is too hard and forget why you’ve started down the path in the first place. Sometimes you need a kick up the backside to remind you that this is a dip and you need to power through it.

So thanks Seth, it was a good and short read and just what I needed this week.

I finished reading the Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt this week. A lot of it was pretty common sense and some things were surprising, like religious people being happier.

One of the things that caught me off guard was work and achievement of work as a source of happiness. In hind sight this looks obvious, but for some reason I hadn’t thought of it. The book goes over the notion that people can look at work as a job, a career or a calling. Me and the wife had an interesting discussion around this subject. I’ve, personally, gone from work being seen as a job (coding websites – aside: this wasn’t my calling, but I can definitely see how some developers would see this as a calling) to a career (managing coders of websites) and now I’m trying to find my calling in the internet industry. She’s always looked at teaching as a calling.

Of course people who find work as a calling are happier then people who look at their work as a job. But beyond that actually getting down and working and having accomplished stuff – whatever that stuff might be or however task oriented it is – can also be a source of happiness.

So, do you see what you do as a job, career or a calling? And are you happier when you get stuff done, regardless of how miniscule or detailed the tasks might be?

Just finishing Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness and just finishing the NCAA basketball tournament. What do these two events have in common? Well in it Taleb discusses how we rely on past performance too much, how survivor and hindsight biases effect our decisions and the value we place on things.

I filled out two tournament brackets and with the knowledge that never before have more then two number 1 seeds made the final four. The phrase “Never before have more then two number 1 seeds made the final four” played over and over again in my mind as I filled out my brackets.

Imagine my dismay as I watched Kansas beat Davidson last night to ensure that four number 1 seeds were in the final four.

My life is filled with semi-randomness at the moment. The book made for timely reading indeed.

My definition of a portfolio is having a range of investments where risk is diversified. If you’re investing, you’re likely to be taking this type of approach. Venture Capital and other industries are likely to take this approach. When recently considering life decisions I decided that maybe taking a portfolio approach to life isn’t a bad thing.

In short, don’t put all your eggs in one basket. When this comes to career planning or goals it leads to a non-linear career path.

Non-linear career paths are awesome. It means you go from venture to venture, from idea to idea, industry to industry. But the goals should be set. For me, early on it was to earn a certain salary or to pay off debts, but as I’ve get older my goals have changed, but the approach to reaching them shouldn’t. You have a number of interests and you keep yourself open to whichever opportunities arise to follow whichever interests.

Whether it’s a Taoist approach, a Zen approach or a portfolio approach, whatever, it’s all about openness with a focus on what’s in the horizon.

(Thanks Vinay for the title inspiration)

Whoever said beggars can’t be choosers? It wasn’t me. As I walked from the gym to the tube this evening I was approached by a homeless man and we had the following exchange:

Him: Hey man, I’m really hungry. Need to get some food. Got 20p?
Me: Sorry man, I got 5p
Him: (pause) Naah I need 20p
Me: You sure?
Him: Yeah no thanks.
Man walks off.

I continued to walk to the tube, stunned at a refusal of one quarter of the funds requested. Oh well.

When I was in University the internet was just being discovered. I subscribed to a Yahoo! email account, taught myself html on Geocities and fell in love with the web. I was lucky to have such experiences.When I left University, circa 2000, I came to London at a time when you didn’t need a Computer Science or engineering degree to be a web developer. I got job offers for roles that were bigger then my skills. I got lucky.

Sure there were tough times; I went to work in the public sector when the private sector money was drying out. But I learnt a lot over that period. Mostly, I learnt I was cut out to be a developer.

I went back to school and graduated with a great class, as the current FT rankings will testify. Made some great friends during this time and had some phenomenal experiences.

We sold our flat a couple of months ago, before the sub prime mortgage crisis and now the housing market looks like it’s turning down. Luck was striking again.

Now that I’m at Yahoo! it kind of feels like I’ve come full circle. And with the latest news around the company I’d be lying if I didn’t say I’m a little nervous about what the future holds. But whatever it holds I’m looking forward to the ride.

I would be remiss if I didn’t say Shukar/shukran somewhere in this, so there it’s been said.

I started this blog as I finished the MBA to document my transition from a graduate to a professional. Professional what? I’m not sure. Right now it’s a marketer working for Yahoo! Allow me to think out loud for a couple of minutes.

Last week I was listening to a great podcast from Stanford University’s Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series. The particular podcast was on angel investing and had Ron Conway and Mike Maples discussing their experience. Something Mike Maples said really stuck with me, he basically said that we’re lucky enough to have a tremendous education behind us (he was talking about Stanford, but could equally apply to London Business School) so we have no excuse for not doing something your passionate about. I couldn’t agree more.

We had some close friends over for lunch the other day and amongst the great conversation we were discussing our jobs and what we’re doing. Some of us were still trying to figure out what we’re passionate about and some of us know what we’re passionate about and are working in those fields.

Either way, there’s no excuse for not being passionate about what you do. Because if you’re not it’s easy to do something else.

It might seem difficult, but as someone who fell in love with the internet (as sad as it might sound its true) and moved from studying health to doing web development to studying at LBS to working for Yahoo! I have to believe, with passion and commitment, that anything is possible.

A lot of the world doesn’t have that kind of flexibility. Most of the people of the world grow up not being able to make more then a dollar a day. As someone who has access to capital, education, and information I feel blessed and I totally agree with Mick Maples, there is no excuse for not doing what I’m passionate about.

Will I always be this passionate about online? Who knows, I’m not sure. But whatever I decide I’m passionate about I’m lucky enough to know that I have the education and the experience to transition into something else.

Three things I’m thinking about today:

1. It’s kind of crazy that if you build an exceptional brand that gets engrained into people, it’s hard for a competitor to overtake you, no matter how much better the experience is.
Inspiration: the fact that Mapquest still dominates the US mapping market

2. Investment into public transport is only half the battle against climate change and carbon emissions, people need to stop seeing cars as status symbols and more as big polluters.
Inspiration: the new Tata nano and the fact that so many Indians are going to enter as car owners.

3. Standard of living doesn’t equal quality of life, it seems like the more we have the less time we have to enjoy it.
Inspiration (joint):
a) this story I heard about a fisherman who meets a capitalist, and the capitalist says “Why you should sell your fish”
and the fisherman says “Why?”
Capitalist says “Because then you’ll have lots of money and you can build a company selling fish.”
Fisherman says “But why would I want that?”
Capitalist says “Because you can make lots of money.”
Fisherman says “But why would I want that?”
Capitalist says “So then you can retire.”
Fisherman says “But what would I do then?”
Capitalist says “I don’t know… fish?”
b)The story of stuff, it’s a bit long - 20 mins plus a bit of loading time - but definitely worth watching.

As regular readers and friends may know the wife and I spent 7 days by the Red Sea just after Christmas and over New Years. The holiday was a veg out, lie by the beach, get some rays time holiday and we did just that.

The bad – although the hotel promised wifi the connection was slower then dial up in 1995, pretty much non existent. The food was kind of iffy, the weather was up and down (between 19 – 25 degrees Celsius, when it was down we avoided the pool and wore a t shirt), and the hotel was full of Russians (who for some reason butted in line / refused to queue, were loud and wore the most audacious outfits) and Speedo’s – one of my favourite pics is of a man wearing a Speedo with a t-shirt that said illegal missing an l so it read ilegal. New Years Eve was a bit of a nightmare which included a British singer who had a mullet, wore a leather vest and sang Barry White, Lionel Richie and Hot Chocolate! The last point should probably go into a category called the down right weird!

The good – we relaxed, the food was decent enough that neither of us got sick, I had a lot of desserts and barely any vegetables – although the wife would say that was very bad. The weather for 5 out of 7 days was just right; I was able to swim in the pool and the ocean. And we met some interesting people and had some interesting conversations.

The great – Petra was beautiful, we took some amazing pictures there and felt like we had traveled back in time, our guide was amazing with three degrees under his belt we gave us theology and archeological insights. The people are unbelievably friendly across the region. And the entire time I felt amazed to be around the foundation of the religions of Abraham.

Were we to go back we probably would avoid the package holiday crowd and stick to our usual tactics of booking things separately and figuring stuff out as we go along. Never the less, we relaxed, enjoyed ourselves and took some great pictures!