The purpose of this post

These are notes and excerpts I took directly from the short book, True Love, from Thich Nhat Hanh. I am a novice to meditation, and the practice of mindfulness. This book is a wonderful introduction.

I received this book as a gift from a special person in my life. The timing couldn’t have been better. I wanted to share these notes with my dearest friends—my sangha.

TL;DR & Notes

In order to love, we have to be mindful and present, and communicate that energy to our loved ones. Taking refuge in the sangha is important. The sangha is a practice community in which brothers and sisters in the Dharma practice the cultivation of mindfulness daily: eat, drink, wash dishes, work in gardens, drive—and not just during times of sitting meditation.

The are four aspects of love that we can attain through mindfulness.

There are also four mantras to keep in mind.

Beware...

I dreamed about my dad. It was like a movie reel through time.

I saw him clearly. I saw how he interacted with his friends, his golf buddies. He was generous with the younger guys. He tried to give them advice. He gave a young man some pocket money to go out and enjoy dinner with his friends.

I was sitting there, a kid, observing at the table side. Like I often did when I was little amongst adults.

I saw other people I knew in flashbacks; 20 years younger. I saw my aunt and uncle and myself circa 1990s; grainy imagery.

Through the dream, my father’s features changed. I watched him as he aged and his hair turned silver. Through it all he was his animated self, full of life! Only older, but he was never less authoritative.

This dream began and ended with me picking up his medical records. I spoke to a nurse for a moment before tears came down my chins. A good cry.

I woke up in tears...

He was a passionate giver and a prolific producer. He had one of the strongest work ethics and he always smiled.

Passion

His work was his passion. He wore his belief on his sleeves. He was stubborn and lived by his principles. He could be abrasive, misunderstood, and controversial. People who understood his tenacity loved him; everything he did was out of passion. He made friends and foes alike as an artist. He also wanted to share this passion with everyone; he was a teacher, a researcher, an author, an architect, a public servant.

Generosity

He made friends through all walks of life. He organized get-togethers for his classmates, trips to Japan for his associates, and years of lectures for his students. He stopped and talked to homeless and disabled people, and got to study behaviors and designed public bathrooms for people with disability. He gave away new toilet designs that were...

Sam Altman talks about how important it is to have momentum.

In the last few months since we started working on MagicBus, we’ve felt the momentum swings.

I think momentum comes from building off of different small wins.

Sometimes I feel like I am in a slump and fall behind on emails; things just don’t feel right.

The only way to fight this slump is to face everything head on.

We have a task list. I find that ticking things off the list everyday is a great way to gain momentum.

Getting to inbox zero is also another way to get back the momentum. Sometimes I discover a great gem in the pile of emails. and I wish I had seen it sooner.

More often than not, momentum comes from our customers. When I see how excited they get, I know we are onto something really important, and that feels great.

Sam Altman told the story of Facebook’s growth team in the early days. How small wins from the...

Today I had a lackluster product experience through BloomNation. I selected same-day delivery and picked a great looking bouquet. The flowers never got delivered because the florist did not have cornucopia in stock as part of the arrangement.

I got an email at the end of the day and was told that the last delivery truck had left. It was really a bummer to my entire experience because the florist said she’d left two voicemails earlier in the day—and I wished she or the system had emailed before the truck left.

She was professional, but this brought up an interesting misalignment in priorities as a customer and a vendor.

My priorities:

1. I wanted flowers delivered TODAY and not next Monday when cornucopia arrives in store
2. I wouldn’t care if the cornucopia was swapped out for something else

Florist’s priorities:

1. She wanted the bouquet to be as perfect as the design on BloomNation
2. She...

Every product manager should be like Digg Reader’s CTO Michael Young & Spuul’s CPO Michael Smith (Smitty)

Since the new Digg Reader came out I have been hugely impressed by the work and attention to details.

My loyalty grew partly because of how responsive Michael Young, its CTO, has been. He responded to my tweets when I least expected it, consistently. This was the surprise factor that brought delight.

Here are two separate occasions when Michael Young responded to me about my RSS frustrations.

When my RSS feed didn’t work, I didn’t think it was Digg Reader’s fault at all. But it was Michael Young’s personal touch that gained my attention and made me love the product.

This reminds me of a conversation I had with Smitty, one of the best product guys that I know. He responds to every review and comment on Google Play Store, Facebook, Twitter. A few months ago I wrote a blog...

Lucas Carlson put himself out on the web (I respect that a lot) and challenge the usefulness of incubator and accelerator programs.

He penned this post, “Incubators are Bullshit”, and I couldn’t help but write a comment on his blog to voice my opinion. I strongly believe that accelerators are in the people business

My original comment on Lucas’s blog post

What seems to be “busy work” at incubators sometimes do amount to nothing. I’d like to share this with the incoming companies at JFDI.Asia (disclaimer: I manage the accelerator program) as a reminder of what not to do (endless hours of intro meetings with mentor whiplash) and what to seriously focus on (spend time with customers, focus on OKM, and on building and testing the product).

Lucas, I looked up and saw that you live in Portland—I don’t know the scene there—but not every part of the world has a strong know-how or a startup...

Here are a couple of articles that stood out for me in the last few weeks.

On Leadership

• Sam Altman for President, by Paul Graham
• How to Get a Job at Google, by Thomas Friedman
• Satya Nadella, Chief of Microsoft, on His New Role, by Adam Bryant

I have been thinking a lot about what it means to be a leader. These three pieces all touch on the topic. All three point to the essentiality of humility in a leader, in recognizing when to lead, and when to step down.

From Friedman’s piece,

What we care about is, when faced with a problem and you’re a member of a team, do you, at the appropriate time, step in and lead. And just as critically, do you step back and stop leading, do you let someone else? Because what’s critical to be an effective leader in this environment is you have to be willing to relinquish power

From the interview with Satya Nadella,

I was throwing very ordinary...

I love sci-fi and so do the partners at JFDI.Asia; Meng had introduced me to many great design fiction books, and they shaped the way I thought about the future.

Two days ago, Hugh asked if I had thought about where humanity would be in 30 years’ time—the year, 2043. My imagination ran wild.

In 2043…

Creating orbital habitat will be the new goal for Elon Musk & co. Google will be providing the analytics to monitor the efficiency of electricity consumption. One of the first prototypes of orbital habitat will have just launched by 2043.

Essentially, it is a concrete jungle with oxygen preserved only for human use—a mega-space-station. Gravity will be a tenth of the earth in the habitat, and a few dozen privileged Silicon Valley executives will have reserved properties on the station.

The biggest technology enabler for this is our increased mastery of synthesized artificial...

Andrew Parker mentioned two of my favorite books as what he thought were important to entrepreneurs (original post). I started to think about what were some of the most important books to me that shaped me.

Here is a list in no particular order. I segmented them into five different categories. I’m starting to believe founders, teams, and their investors need to share common values (culture) in order to succeed—and these books create that “culture.”

Mentality of a Founder

Founders at Work

• This book got me started—interviews with founders of Web 1.0 companies, including Paul Buchheit and a bunch of very recognizable names today. It goes into the early stage of their businesses, the hardest times, etc. Livingston (author) is also Paul Graham’s wife and Partner at YCombinator

Hackers and Painters

• Collection of essays by Paul Graham. Some of the observations he made around 2000 are...