[CTQ Smartcast] How Mid-Career Professionals Can Keep Themselves Relevant, with Navin Kabra
Navin Kabra is CTO and Co-Founder at ReliScore, helping companies filter job candidates based on evaluation of actual job-related skills. Navin is also an advisor to startups and a teacher. A computer scientist, Navin has worked in the software industry in diverse roles and has been an active voice on social media even before it was fashionable to do so.
In this Smartcast with CTQ’s J Ramanand, Navin tells us how mid-career professionals can keep themselves relevant, especially via learning, networking, and weaving their way through new trends. We also talk about building habits, routines, and systems for oneself.
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(Read the shownotes below or skip to the transcript)
Some things we spoke about
Why mid-career professionals come to you for advice
Three pieces of tactical advice for anyone looking to make a change
What should someone do to avoid potential irrelevance?
The importance of ‘diversity of thought’
How do you measure success for yourself?
Designing your life
How Navin the Engineer taught himself to network, and why you should too
How does networking enable future relevance?
The Tuning Fork approach to using Twitter well
What not to do on Twitter
Learning to write better and regularly
What teaching youngsters has taught Navin about how to learn
Navin’s system for learning anything new
The enduring relevance of the Bhagvad Gita
How to find time for learning new things
Navin’s habits & routines
&
HTML and Hindi film song quizzes!
LINKS TO BOOKS AND ARTICLES MENTIONED IN THE SMARTCAST
Books
Links
Platforms & Tools
Ideas we spoke about
The sources of power within an organisation
The power of weak ties
How to learn the principles of writing
Elon Musk’s Semantic Tree system for learning
Spaced Repetition
The Bhagwad Gita’s shloka: Karmanye vadhikaraste Ma Phaleshu Kadachana
How to make a habit stick
If you enjoyed this topic, watch the CTQ Smartcast on Why Curiosity Makes the World A Better Place.
READ THE TRANSCRIPT OF THIS EPISODE
[00:00:00]
Our guest on this CTQ Smartcast is Navin Kabra, who's a computer scientist, a startup founder and advisor, a teacher, a lifelong student, and a social media regular, even before it was fashionable to be one. We could have had 10 different conversations with him. But in this Smartcast, we explored the idea of future relevance for mid-career professionals, especially through the prism of his own experiences.
Ramanand: Navin, welcome to the Smartcast.
Navin Kabra: Glad to be here. I love Smartcast.
Ramanand: Great, thanks! Let me start with something that a lot of people come to you for. You generously volunteer your time, you help people at a crossroad, typically, people with say 1 to 3 decades of experience, looking for some kind of change. So tell me a little bit about what these conversations are typically like, and what do you think leads to this conversation?
Navin Kabra: Basically, people who have been in a software career for 15-20 years, they are the ones approaching me, because they're looking for some sort of a change. Just because of my tech experience, I am reasonably well connected in the software ecosystem in Pune. So that's why they end up approaching me. The reason for the change is, what people tell me is that they're just feeling that they are learning nothing new, it's stagnant, and so on. That's why they're looking [00:02:00] for a change. Maybe they've been working for a big company for 5-10 years and now they would like to try out some exciting startups.
But unsaid possibly, I'm also guessing that in some cases, what is happening is either their role, or their kind of background, no longer has as much importance to the industry, as it had before. Or the whole company itself might be in that situation and not being able to adapt to the changing work. That's where it gets interesting. The other reason they end up having to approach me, even the good guys with very strong backgrounds, great experience, is that they have spent their entire life inside this one company, and they have no idea of whom to approach and if yes, how to approach.
Ramanand: They've accumulated a lot of social capital within their organization, but it doesn't often translate outside. Is that something that you've seen?
Navin Kabra: Absolutely, there are two major problems with that. One is that just by talking to them, looking at what they have done within the company, you can see that this person is a very accomplished person and like you said, would be highly respected within their company, but they would not be known outside at all. And more importantly, they don't know anybody at all. I mean, it is surprising to me that even people with 15-20 years of experience, when they start looking for a job, they go to a company's website and fill out their careers page or whatever for. Anybody who's done this a few times would know that there's just no way you're going to get a job like that. The best way to get a job [00:04:00] is to get a warm introduction to someone inside the company and they just don't have that.
There is another problem with the fact that they have been within their little company, not little, but within just one section. And that is lack of awareness of what is going on outside, lack of awareness of what the world values now. If I give an example of a company, which does say very high end, good quality infrastructure software, and this person last 15 years has become a wizard at C and kernel programming. But the problem is that outside of one or two such companies, the bulk of the world now is at higher layers in the application. They want Java, they want Python and all these new-fangled things.
Now, these guys are smart, they could pick these up, but at this point, they haven't even heard of these things or have such a vague idea of what all of that involves, that in an interview, they would come off as quite ignorant. Even though it's something that could be fixed with just a little bit of work, but that's something they have never even thought of so far.
Ramanand: I want to ask a follow up question. One is that when someone like this comes, they're probably feeling a little vulnerable, they're opening up, I think, in many cases, those of us when we meet people like this, you and someone like Amit Paranjape, your co-founder, are the first ports of call, we send them to you for this. My first question is, tactically, what do you tell them to do at that point? Secondly, what would you have ideally liked them to have done a year, two or three years before that point? I mean, that point never arrives. So tell me the tactical thing that you tell them and what should someone do to avoid the situation? [00:06:00]
Navin Kabra: There are three layers of tactics. Very short term and simple tactics, just involve filling out your LinkedIn profile properly. Often, these people will have just one liners, they won't be connected to too many people. So, filling it out properly, fully with an entire paragraph for each role you have done, and so on, and then going out, using LinkedIn to connect to as many people as you know. That's the most basic because then using that, the next tactic is that you look around, poke around, try to find which companies you might be interested in. That's something we can help them with, given their background, we can tell that this is a company you should be interested in.
But the next step then is to use that LinkedIn set of connections, and see whether you can find someone, in every company that you are interested in, find someone that you know or find someone who's one-hop away, so that there is someone you know, who can introduce you to someone within that company. This is the most basic tactical trick, which takes just probably a few hours. Then the next level might be that, if you are a C++ wizard, the problem is that C++ is an extremely complicated thing. Anybody who is a C++ wizard is highly capable. The problem is that C++ jobs are disappearing. So then what you have to do is you have to recast yourself in terms of what the market now wants. That might involve going around and picking up some of the new things that you haven't [00:08:00] had to pay attention to so far. That might involve doing some Coursera courses, reading up articles, things like that. So that's the next level of preparation that we suggest.
Somewhere in between, is also reading a book like, What Color is Your Parachute? What that book teaches you really well is that getting a good job is an art. There is a method to it, there is a process to it, there's a bunch of things you can do, which can significantly improve your chances. This is something nobody learns. Some people get it instinctively. But especially people who have been just in one company-one job for a long time, who've never had to look for a job, don't think of these things instinctively. And What Color is Your Parachute? would then help you to do it well.
Ramanand: What should someone do, say three years before so that they don't have to come and have this conversation with you? Maybe they should have a much better kind of conversation with you.
Navin Kabra: For that, let me go back to what are these people often lacking? I'm not saying everybody has this problem. But I've seen some part of the problem I'm going to describe, in a lot of people over time. Just a few days back, I saw an article by the founder of Django, the Python framework, where he said that in an organization, power comes from three sources. He uses 'power' in a more general sense, in the sense of something that helps you achieve things, [00:10:00] something that helps you get things done. And that comes from three things, either your role, or your expertise, or your connections, relationships.
The problem with a lot of people is that in the early part of their career, they are focused either on just the role or the expertise, expertise as in the fairly lower-level expertise they're thinking of, that I am a Java programmer, I am a DevOps person, that kind of expertise. And role, as in, I am a software engineer in this company. Now, I'm a senior software engineer, now I'm a lead engineer and so on. Later part of their career, even the expertise is gone, then it is only the role.
The problem is that in the long term, the relationships matter much more. And these are relationships which are not mandated by the company. Role is something that you have been made the lead, which means the people who are under you have to listen to you. That's the theory. In reality, it never works out unless you've managed your relationships well. Similarly, when you're dealing with your peers, etc., if you have good relationships with people, you can get far more done in much less effort than anything else. That is something I would like people to fix, which is work on your relationships within the company, and outside the company.
What a lot of people call networking, that needs to happen. So that is one broad area that I think people should pay much more attention to. The other thing I would like them to do is have diversity, [00:12:00] a little less focus. I run into too many people who are like, Okay, you know, I am a programmer. So that's all I'm ever going to do. I'm a Java programmer. So I'm just going to learn Java, Java, Java, Java, and this new-fangled Kotlin has shown up, actually, you will never have even heard of Kotlin. Or if you'd hear about Kotlin, you're saying, You know what, my company doesn't use Kotlin. So, why bother? This same thing, as in, being too focused on what your current role is, and what your company wants right now, and not looking a little past it into things that are interesting, things that are maybes, that's a problem, not just in your area of expertise, like Java versus Kotlin, versus Haskell, but also in your role.
If you think of yourself as a programmer, should you not think about any other role like product management, or sales or technical support, and so on? Far too many people are reluctant to think of themselves or try different roles. The same lack of diversity in thinking is there even in their relationships. This is my team, this is my boss, this is my boss's boss. Those are the only people I interact with. I don't bother to find other interesting people in the company, in other groups, or outside, and so on. So this combination, two dimensions, one is role, expertise, and relationships, and the second is broadening out, diversifying a little bit. These two things, I think people need to work on.
Ramanand: These are some very fascinating points and I actually want to dig into many of them, especially from what you've been doing, because we've seen you operate. But before we come [00:14:00] to that, just going back a little bit more. What do you think is the source of this, if we call it tunnel vision, say, what do you think is the source of this? I actually also want to throw in another point, which is that was this generation, a little too successful, a little too early doing exactly one thing for too long?
Navin Kabra: I think there are two problems. One is what you said that since the late 90s till now, almost, especially in India, especially in the software industry, what has happened is that there's just been so much growth, that even without you having to work very hard, you have done well in life. Things have come a little easy. I mean, you just get into this one company and you just keep doing your job well and you keep progressing upwards. That is part of the problem.
But there is a bigger and earlier problem. If you think about very small kids, they are diverse. They don't have any hang-ups about whether I only play this kind of game or I don't play that kind of game or so on. As you grow older, that starts coming in. Same thing with relationships. Anybody they meet, they are instantly friends with. And then slowly, our school system tries to beat this out of you. Because you know that in 12th standard there is going to be an exam. You're either going to do the science, or you're going to do the commerce or something. Right from an early age, you decide on a focus and that's it. That's all you're going to do. And you're not going to look aside and somewhere on the way, if you found art interesting, your parents will say, you know what, you can do this after you graduate, or something like that. [00:16:00] So, from an early age, we are taught to focus on a few things. Of course, nowhere are relationships actually used anywhere other than your tiny friends' group or study group and so on. That's where it ultimately comes from.
Ramanand: Right. In fact, what you've touched upon is called out in the book Range by David Epstein.
Navin Kabra: Yes.
Ramanand: I think it differentiates the Roger Federer style diversity versus the Tiger Woods, early focus. It's a very nice anecdote for those people. One final question before I dig deep into some of these threads, does it also call for a change in how these... A lot of people look at the number of people under them as a metric. It is also a societal metric. Your parents' generation understood that metric of success very well. If you have to shift away from that, what should someone use as a running metric of success at any given point of time? Is there something that you've drawn for yourself?
Navin Kabra: This one, it gets into philosophy, and to some extent, I feel it is also a personal preference kind of thing. If someone wants to focus on how many people work in my organization, who am I to tell them that that's the wrong metric. On the other hand, I chose not to be driven by that. In fact, after my 12th standard, where I did extremely well, I just decided that after this point, I'm not going to put so much focus on my studies and my career ever. Since then, I have consistently taken decisions, which [00:18:00] would be considered by many as sub-optimal.
I studied a little less in IIT, and ended up in a top 10 University instead of a top-five University. Then even there, I did my PhD while doing a whole bunch of other things. So, I spent seven years doing my PhD instead of 4 or 5, then decided not to go to Silicon Valley and instead come back here, and so on. But, I don't want to tell anybody else that this is a better way or this is the right way. This is what works for me. Am I happy every morning? At the end of the day, is there lack of stress? Do I get to spend time with my family every day? Those are the things I look at. But I think other people are made differently. My ambitions are different; people's ambitions are different. So that's not something I want to give a strong edict saying that Thou shalt do this or Thou shalt not do that.
Ramanand: Did people around you think you underperformed?
Navin Kabra: Of course, all the time, everyone around me, from my own mom, to colleagues to pretty much everyone. There are enough people who are not even shy of saying it to me on my face. That's fine.
Ramanand: That brings me to another book that you often recommend to people, which is Designing your Life, which helps answer these kinds of... helps you make certain kinds of decisions like the one that you did. Can you tell us a little bit about that book, and why do you recommend that to people?
Navin Kabra: When I first heard the concept of the book, I was very intrigued. [00:20:00] Because of my work in the past, I have been exposed to user centered design, which started in the 90s, probably, and had become quite big, is even now quite a big thing. And a lot of designers spend a lot of time in the software industry when you're designing a product, then thinking from first principles that what does the user really want to achieve? And we want to help them achieve that. So first, before we even design the buttons and the colours on the product, I need to know what the user wants to do and figure out is this product really helping them do this or not? It's a fascinating thing. It is something that really opens your eyes to how your thinking falls in very standard ruts. You are just doing things, so often we all do things just because that's how it's always been done.
So, these two guys, the Prof. was head of the design department at Stanford, and a guy who worked on design in Apple, these are both people who are pretty much top of their game in design. One day they got the idea, why don't we apply these principles, user-centered design to our own lives? Why don't we do that? And they started doing that, they started running workshops for other people to apply those principles to their lives. It was extremely successful. People from teenagers all the way to 80-year-olds found it very useful. That workshop, they converted that into a book. And that's what it does, for your own life. Too many people, they have ended up where they have ended up by just taking the next step, which was the most [00:22:00] common step for everybody around them.
The reason you went to do engineering was because engineering or medical was the most sought after thing. Within engineering, the reason you did computer science was because that was the most sought after thing. If you did electrical, that was because you didn't get computer science and the second best was electrical, and so on. The same thing happens even in your job.
That's why at the age of 35, you are vaguely unsatisfied with life, and then you have a midlife crisis. But then again, if I just tell you that, why don't you design your life on first principles? It's not that easy. These guys have spent a lot of time studying how to come out with first principles. And that book has a bunch of exercises you can go through, a specific process you can follow for an entire week watching what activities you did, how did it make you feel? Counting them all up and then using that to figure out what are the things that you really like to do? What are the things that you hate doing but they're necessary? Which ones are the things you hate doing, but they're not necessary either and so on. Then based on that, you can make some pretty big changes or small changes in your life.
Ramanand: They have very nice workbook-style exercises that they can do. Just to recap, here you are like an archetypal geek, with a computer science degree and doctorate to boot. And here we are talking about design, we are talking about relationships, not things that are typically in the engineering syllabus. So let's talk a little bit about the relationships and the networking part. Because that is something a lot of people associate you with. I think one thing that works in your favour is that you are one among them. I think you've gone from that community, [00:24:00] and you're showing how networking can be done. Not the marketer who does networking, the engineer who does networking. So, let's lay the foundation, why do you think networking is important for your average engineer, or manager kind of person?
Navin Kabra: Before I go there, I should also point out something fairly important. That this is not something that came naturally to me. I think it would help to get an idea of what kind of a person I was. In my last year of engineering, I had applied to US universities. During that time, what you're supposed to do is send what we call ‘suck letters’ to professors in universities, the idea being that the universities you are targeting, you find professors there, who are working on interesting things, and then you send them some sort of a letter, which will get them to like you, and then they will influence the admissions committee or they might just directly give you research assistantship or something like that. I didn't write a single such letter, because it just made me very uncomfortable to even think about that. I never wrote a single letter, it is possible that I got into a lower-ranked University, because I didn't do this.
Then, during the latter half of my PhD, an advisor would fund trips to the top conferences in our field. And the reason for that was that I was supposed to go there, and schmooze, the world changed, but the idea was the same that in the conference, there are top guys from industry and academia, all the accomplished people are there in this conference, because it is the top conference. And my job [00:26:00] was to go, introduce myself to each one of them, talk to them and all of that. Ultimately, the idea was to get them to like me, to know about me, so that when I am looking for a job, it would be much easier for me. There was a group of my friends, similar thought process and similar boat, where we were extremely uncomfortable doing that. This was not something that felt at all natural to us, even if we tried, it would have been very awkward. So we would just go to the conference, and then these four or five of us off in a corner by ourselves, and never schmoozed anybody, until and unless we were forced to.
Of course, when I came back to India and I joined Veritas, I started off as a person like that. Somewhere along the line, I don't know what changed. But the key point was this, that one day, I thought that there is so... when I came back to India, by the way, this was before it was coming back to India wasn't common. Because the general impression was that India has very boring, low end of work, the good work is all in the US. I'd come back with that impression and then when I saw the kind of work these people were doing; I was very impressed. And I also felt that most people didn't know all of this was going on. In fact, even within the company, one group didn't know what the other group was doing. I just felt I needed to help people know what was going on.
So I started a little internal blog, where I would go find each group, talk to somebody in that group, and write up what they're doing, how interesting that was. Now, this is networking. The stuff which I refused [00:28:00] to do for 20 years before that, and probably took a career hit because of that, I was now going out of my own will and for no good reason. Why? Because I felt it was going to help other people. That is what made the difference. Most people who are like me, a lot of engineers are like me, and when it comes to networking, they feel it is like you are going and trying to sell yourself. And that is cheap. That is despicable. That is not something you're supposed to do because you're supposed to be modest. And if your work is good, it will speak for yourself.
What changed when I started doing this was that I was no longer trying to sell myself, I was no longer doing something for myself, I was doing something where I was more interested in the person I'm talking to, I wanted to find out what they were doing. And I was doing it to help the others, the people who are going to read my blog. Then for various reasons, when I quit Veritas, I realized that the same thing is in need at Pune level. And that's why I started Pune Tech, the blog. That was the reason why I started going around and finding interesting companies, and interesting companies in Pune, people in Pune. That's why I am so well networked. Not because I was trying to help myself, but because I was trying to help others.
Ramanand: I just wanted to ask one thing. I think you also had a blog related to Hindi films or something like that for a while. When was that?
Navin Kabra: In fact, that was long before... I mean, '94 is when I started. HTML was so new. There was a news group for Hindi songs, Hindi music, and somebody else, Avinash Chopde had already collected 400 songs [00:30:00] and put them in Hindi font and so on. But he would distribute it as a zip file that you could download and then you could look at yourself. And me and another friend of mine, we would take part in these lyrics quizzes, where somebody would give the lyrics from the middle of a song, and you have to guess which song it is. To be able to cheat at that quiz effectively, what I felt was, if there was a searchable HTML, HTML was new in those days. If there was a searchable HTML database of these songs, then I could cheat. So that's why I built it, I put it up on the web, and I didn't even realize when it became so popular.
Ramanand: Maybe networking is not the right word for this. I think it probably needs a PR update or a PR champion for it.
Navin Kabra: Yes. That is true. Basically, because people don't understand that this way of doing networking is actually a very good way. Ultimately, it does end up helping you. I can't tell you how much all of this has helped me personally, also, both in my personal life as well as in my work. But that was never my primary intention. And that's why I was able to do it.
Ramanand: Just as an aside, how I know about this Hindi resource is because our mutual friend Niranjan Pednekar told me that was the first thing Navin was famous for. It still lingers on; you don't know how it's going to play out. So, come back to why therefore, especially from a future relevance or for the future point of view, why is it worth scratching your itch, making other people successful? [00:32:00] Now, all this, which you put under networking, how does it pay off in your opinion?
Navin Kabra: The most important thing is that, remember, the biggest problem we said earlier, was that people are too narrow, both in terms of role versus expertise versus relationships. And within each one of them, in terms of what you're doing, you need to broaden out. But broaden out is that, then the world is very broad. Why don't you just go and do scuba diving, why don't you do this? Why don't you do that? So you need to have some idea, some source, or sources, where you're getting ideas for what to do, and then some sort of filtering to decide which ones are worth doing. The easiest, best way is to have smart people do it for you. That is what networking helps with. That is the first thing. So these people, this network of yours, they become your source of ideas of things to try, what works, what doesn't work? What is exciting these days? That's the first thing.
Second important thing is something called the power of weak ties. There was some research in the 70s, I think, where this person looked at people searching for jobs, and what was the source for the successful people, the people who found jobs? Where did that introduction or that connection or that information, where did it come from? The research showed that, overwhelmingly, it didn't come from your close friends, it came from people you knew vaguely. Like an acquaintance, [00:34:00] not somebody you are in touch with every week, but maybe once a few months, you're in touch or something like that. That is a bit of a surprise.
But when you think about it, it's not so surprising. So, your closest friends, whatever opportunities they are aware of very likely you are also already aware of. Their information isn't that much more than your information. Whereas your weak acquaintances are the ones who are most different from you and connected into a different network, and can introduce you there. That is one. Second is that for something like a job, let us say, it takes very little effort for the weak acquaintance to make the connection. But the amount of value that one-line email adds is huge. So as long as there is a weak connection, it can have a lot of value. The larger number of weak connections you have, the more you can get done. This applies not just to jobs, it applies to things like, you got into some trouble with the police and now you need to get in touch with the police commissioner, the power of weak ties. You need information about this school that you heard of and it seems very interesting, but also a little risky. So how do you find out more? It's going to be the power of weak ties that help you with getting to the right people there. There are a lot of things in life that help when you have a network like this. Those are the two major important ways in which networking helps.
Ramanand: In fact, taking on that weak ties thing, I think students of computer science who’ve done their graph theory will know how it actually plays out mathematically. It takes you from one cluster to [00:36:00] another. In fact, I think that's the same thing you probably see with ideas as well. Where these weak ideas that you spot from different parts of your network are probably telling you something about the future, your network, your immediate network isn't telling you right now. That's pretty interesting.
Navin Kabra: To give an example, the reason my Hindi songs lyrics thing got so famous is because I was connected to two networks. One is these people who are painstakingly collecting songs, and proofreading them and all that. And on this side, I was very interested in what's happening with technology and what's this new thing called HTML. I was just able to combine them with very little effort, and ended up doing something which nobody else had done before.
Ramanand: Fascinating. So let's go a little more concrete, let's tell people how you can go about networking now, if you have the desire to do so. Let's start with something like Twitter. Tell me a little bit about your tuning fork approach to Twitter.
Navin Kabra: We'll talk about Twitter, because that's the easiest one to go with. But the same ideas apply to everything, not just social media, even real-life networking. The basic idea is that think of a tuning fork, you hit a tuning fork, and it's now vibrating at a certain frequency. If there is anything else nearby, if you remember from your school lab days, if there is anything else nearby whose natural frequency is the same, that thing will start resonating. Now, the same applies to Twitter.
On Twitter, if every day you keep tweeting about the topics you're interested in, no matter how arcane those topics are, I mean, if you're a scuba diving enthusiast, if you [00:38:00] are into knitting, and you're like a complete geek with really complicated stitches and so on. You keep tweeting about that regularly and what will happen is that both, through searches, through retweets and the mighty algorithm, what's going to happen is that you are going to start finding other people who share those interests. Then very soon, you will end up with these little communities of people who are interested in the same things.
So as long as you are actively curating your Twitter feed, two things you have to be doing. One is you have to be regularly tweeting about the things that interest you. Second is actively unfollowing, the people who are not adding value and finding new people to follow. Then over a period, six months, one year, two years, what happens is that Twitter helps you find really good people, great people that are in your area of interest, no matter how obscure that area of interest is. That's why this tuning fork thing. Your tweets are the tuning fork which goes out into the world, and then you look to see what else is resonating. Now, the most important part of this is that, they say you are the average of the five people closest to you.
A more generalized version of it, is that if you want to pick up a new habit, surround yourself with people for whom that is normal behaviour, and then soon you will become that. If you want to become a runner, you start following runners on Twitter or you get into two or three runner WhatsApp groups, and they're constantly chattering about running and this and that, within three months you will start running. That's what Twitter helps you do. You find your tribes using the tuning fork idea, [00:40:00] now you're surrounded by those people, and what they're talking about will give you ideas for what you should do. The fact that you're getting inputs about that area will help you do more in that area.
Ramanand: It's a lot like gardening, I think, the weeding process, it's the same thing. You just have to tend to it pretty regularly. I think the art of Twitter is also what you don't do with it. What is it that you don't do?
Navin Kabra: Oh, absolutely. One is that you have to ruthlessly unfollow people who are not taking you in the correct direction, who are not adding value. That often might end up including your friends, your close friends. It is not easy to do that, it is not easy to unfollow someone, especially when you know that person someday is going to notice and ask you Hey, you don't follow me. But you have to do it.
A couple of things that I try hard not to do with Twitter is one, no news. Anything which is breaking, anything which is very topical, anything which is just right now, and I feel it will just suck you in, it will be a huge time sink. Lots of people think social media is a waste of time. That's because you're wasting time there. So get rid of anything which is breaking and current and news. Similarly, anything which is outrage oriented.
The other thing, lots of people think, the ones who don't think Twitter is a waste of time, think Twitter is full of horrible things and outrage and nasty things. That's because that's what you're following. So anyone who's spending too much time talking about or tweeting about current items, unfollow. [00:42:00] Anybody who's either outraging or retweeting outrage, or engaging with outrage, unfollow. Anyone who's going off in tangents or a time sink, which you really don't want to do, unfollow. That's the important thing. Same thing, yourself, don't be a person who does any one of these things.
Ramanand: I know, you've built your own Twitter client, tell me what is different about it?
Navin Kabra: Basically, in the initial days, I wrote it just because I needed some project to teach myself Python and Django, and this is the project I picked. But then over the years, what I've found is that I don't want to be at the mercy of the Twitter algorithm. I don't want Twitter to decide what to show me. So my client, for all the people I follow, it shows me everything that is Tweeted by them. And I treat it more as email, as in, I go in, follow a chronological order. And then when I have reached a certain point, I can with one click, I can just delete everything before, so that way I can read everything.
Second thing is that I can use it to do bookmarking and things like that. I can integrate it with my other systems. Putting things in Pocket, and putting things in my Notes, and so on. Third is that I hide the photos and the user names and other things of the people I'm following, just their handle, so that I can focus on the content, rather than all the other extraneous things. Then there are a bunch of other smaller things I do. For example, [00:44:00] if I feel that someone is tweeting too much news or too much outrage, in my client, I can mark them as this person is on probation. If I ever find a good tweet from them, I can remove them from probation. But if they remain on probation for two weeks, then they get unfollowed automatically. Stuff like that I have done.
Ramanand: This is like the Shishupala treatment for bad behaviour on Twitter.
Navin Kabra: Yes, absolutely. In fact, that is what internally I'd given it that name, you get 100 sins and then you get kicked out.
Ramanand: I'm sure someone's going to try and hack your system to find out where they stand in that. So Navin, before I go to the next topic. Let's take a lighter note and do a quiz question. We can't let you go without asking you a quiz question.
Navin Kabra: Yeah, I understand.
Ramanand: I'm going to ask you a question and you should tell me what this is a mnemonic for. This mnemonic simply stands. Please Do Not Teach Students Pointless Acronyms. I'll give you a hint. I'll repeat it. Please Do Not Teach Students Pointless Acronyms.
And the hint is: networking, but not the kind we were talking about so far.
Navin Kabra: Oh, this is the ASI seven layers?
Ramanand: Yes, absolutely right.
Navin Kabra: Yes. Presentation...
Ramanand: Physical... All the way up to application. Good. You got that. You still remember a little bit. Just bringing it back to the networking that you and I are comfortable calling networking. So the other thing I wanted to get into, was that with something like Twitter and Social networking, because a lot of it is media channels is writing and writing regularly, which is, again, something which is hard for a lot of people. Tell me a little bit about writing. I know [00:46:00] you did some of these HTML experiments before, you had a blog. So were you good at writing part of it from before? Or again, is this something you taught yourself to do?
Navin Kabra: Writing is something that has improved over time. The first inflection point was my PhD itself. I still remember the day in August '94, when I wrote my first paper, and I submitted it to my advisor, and he didn't get past the first page, there were so many red marks. Then I fixed whatever those were, and sent it back. And again, I think for like five or six iterations, he'd never got past the first page. At one point, he started doubting himself, because he knew I'm a reasonably smart guy. He called in a different PhD student, an older student, and asked him, Do you understand what is going on? Even that person said, No. I don't know, something clicked there. When he kept returning. I think at that point, I realized that the point of writing the paper isn't to put down everything I know. It is to make sure that the reader understands, or more importantly, somehow, especially a lot of our teaching in schools, is like, I am teaching this and if you don't understand, you're stupid, or you're not paying attention.
Unfortunately, that's not how the real world works. In the real world, the reader is busy. Reader doesn't want to put in too much effort into this, the reader is going to skim, and the reader has many other things to do. So unless you can grab their attention and keep it, if you can't do that, it's your fault, not the reader's fault. [00:48:00] You can't expect the reader to be paying attention and if something they don't understand, go and look up the dictionary or a reference book. As soon as I understood that, my writing significantly improved from that point on. In fact, that is one of the most important outcomes of my PhD. I didn't become a researcher after that, much of my PhD work I never used after that. But this has stayed with me. That was the first inflection point.
Second was around 2007 or 2008, when I was bored of my big company job and I wanted to take a break. I had an idea that I wanted to write a novel. So I went and bought five or six books on writing well. Now, that novel never happened. But those books really helped me understand how to improve your writing. Once that had gone in my head, that there are these techniques for improving writing, after that, it becomes easier. So let me give an unrelated story and then relate it back. I have a very good typing speed. But I never actually learned typing.
What happened was that after my first year in IT, I knew that I'm going to be doing computers for a long time. So maybe I should learn typing. And during the summer vacation, I had nothing else to do. So I joined the typing institute near my house. Within one week, that place shut down. But in one week, they taught me the basics. That you are supposed to use all your fingers, you're supposed to keep them on this row, and then only move one finger. That much was enough for me to realize that if I keep doing this, if I keep practising this, my typing is going to get better. Then over the years, I picked up one more technique, [00:50:00] one more technique. But that initial thing, knowing that there exists an entire branch of techniques, that helps. As soon as you know that, then over the years, if you keep an eye out, those techniques will come to you. And then you can keep practising and you can improve.
The same happened with my writing. Once I read those books, I knew that there exist all these techniques for writing. My writing has improved since then.
Ramanand: It reminds me of when I was enrolled into a typewriting class after 12. Because, keep your options open. It was like the opposite of future relevance. Can you name a couple of these books or any other books that you recommend to people?
Navin Kabra: There are two different kinds of writing. One is fiction writing, where you are trying to evoke emotions, you're trying to get people to imagine things. That is one category of writing. A different category of writing is more informational, where you want to present something clearly, to the reader.
For the second, and the second one is what is going to be relevant to most people listening to this. Pretty much anything you're doing in life, if you can communicate well, clearly, you are going to be much better than those who cannot communicate. So for that, there is a book called Style – Toward Clarity & Grace, by... I'll give the name later, I forgot.
Ramanand: That's okay. We'll find it and link it. Go ahead.
Navin Kabra: So that is a brilliant book. I'll give you one example of writing and how it is taught. I don't know if you've ever heard [00:52:00] but lots of people, especially those who have done anything related to writing, know that you're supposed to use active voice and not passive voice. You must have heard of that. It never made sense to me. Why? And I asked some actual writers... not a writer, there were some technical writers in the company I was working for. And they also knew that. I thought they would know this. I asked why. And they said, Well, because active voice is more active. And that still continued to not make sense to me.
This book, with actual examples, showed me two things. The big difference between active voice and passive voice, especially because it is moving the focus to the first... the focus is always on the subject of your sentence. So by using active voice, you're moving the focus to the person doing something, by using passive you are moving the focus to what is happening. Usually you want the focus to be on who's doing what, that's what is meant by active voice is active. But the other important thing I learnt there, is why does even passive voice exist in that case? Sometimes, if you're writing a paragraph, you don't want to be jumping back and forth between different topics. So, depending on what you're talking about, you want to keep your focus on something. That sometimes means that you have to use passive voice, to not shift the focus to somebody else.
My point with this long story was that there are these principles of writing, which will not really make sense to you, or even if they made sense, it will not go inside, until you have seen real examples of some text before and after. That is done very well by that book.
Ramanand: So let's come [00:54:00] back to social media, Twitter, even things like Substack, you've recently started a Substack. Tell me about where all do you write these days? What is the subtle mindset shift that you're making when dealing with these different kinds of media?
Navin Kabra: The biggest mindset thing is that in the modern world, there is too much information. It is very easy to consume information. Especially for somebody like me, when I'm following so many smart people, it is very easy to get sucked into just learning more and more and more. But, just having a head full of insightful things is not very useful. Ultimately, you need to create something. In my case, that will be writing. Writing is something that can be a good output in my case. So that has been one shift, I have decided that I need to write more.
The other part of it is, I said about diversity, you can't just be focused on one thing. So that comes even in my writing. I don't know what's going to click. For all the things that got popular, like my Hindi song lyrics thing, my Pune Tech thing, when I created it, I had no idea how popular it was going to get. And conversely, there are other things also, which I thought was going to be big and it never went anywhere. So I keep trying different things and then depending on what works, what's going forward, I stick with some and some I don't continue. So that's the framework in which this is happening. Right now, I'm writing on Twitter. Then the second one is Substack, I've started, then I got busy with other things [00:56:00] and lost a little bit of discipline. So I haven't updated it in a while. I need to restart that. But I do see Substack as an important dimension.
Third area is not writing per se, but I give talks. That involves a bunch of the same processes as in, you have to pick a topic, then you have to compress it, you have to sequence it properly, you have to communicate it well. So I do that quite regularly. Along the same lines, I teach small courses also, like at GenWise, I'm teaching courses. So that's another place of output. And finally, the most recent one that I have started exploring is Discord. The idea is to create communities around the topics that I find interesting. And something let's say that I would have written about, but instead of just writing and leaving it out in the world in the blog, why not create a community around that topic so all people can hang out, people can, whatever they find interesting, they can post there. If somebody has questions, they can post the question, I can answer it if I know the answer, or I can drag in an expert from somewhere who will answer that question, and so on.
So I expect that in the next few years, a good chunk of my output is going to be on various Discord servers. Because Discord also allows a very great combination of audio channels, this whole clubhouse thing that everybody is so excited about, Discord has had that for quite some time. Discord combines the text writing with the audio channels, and that I feel is a fairly powerful medium. [00:58:00]
Ramanand: Talking about Discord, it's interesting that a lot of these have come from so-called non-serious pursuits, the sort of gaming has brought it in and since you referenced the fact that you're teaching youngsters about interesting topics. When you're talking about thinking critically about news and the information we consume, things like cryptography. In fact, topics that I think even adults should be learning about. Tell me a little bit about the experience of teaching younger people, what is different about it? What is fundamentally the same about learning? What have you discovered about learning from this experience?
Navin Kabra: One thing that just remains true no matter what is that the thing I told you I learned in my PhD - if somebody doesn't understand, that's my fault. So being able to think about this person, who am I teaching it to, what do they already know? Start with that base, and then slowly build up to whatever that... So this is what they already know, this is what I want to teach them. Which means I have to put bricks here, here, here, here, here. That process remains the same whether I am teaching kids or whether I'm teaching adults. The fun thing with teaching kids is that they don't come with too many preconceptions. So it's like a blank slate, you start talking and they are excited by whatever you say and so on. That is one.
Second is that you can create these courses where it is like five, one-hour sessions in a week and the kids will come. Adults often will not have time to do that or they will want... just give me the highlights in half an hour or one hour. That's different. [01:00:00] But the most important thing is what I end up learning from the kids? That's why I'm on Discord. Doing all of this is how I discovered that a bunch of kids like hanging out on Discord more than any of the other platforms that exist. That's why I decided, they are using it initially for fun, Discord is a gaming sharing platform. But ultimately what kids do today is what the world ends up doing 10 years later. That's what you need to learn from them. You have to watch the kids instead of saying that I am going to teach this and this is how I'm going to teach it, dragging the kids over here, in which case they will come reluctantly, but they will not be happier, you need to go to them, that this is what they like doing. So can I use that to also teach them? So that's what I've been learning and that has been a very fun journey.
Ramanand: I want to broaden it by asking what is your system for picking something new? For instance, in the last few years, you've taught yourself blockchain, quantum computing. So let's say something like NFTs, which is now all the rage comes along, what would you do? How would you approach it? How would your next couple of months, years look like, assuming you were going to delve into it?
Navin Kabra: Let's not assume I was going to delve into it. That is the first question. Should I delve into it? That's, in fact, the most important question, because if I'm going to put effort into it, then of course, I can put effort, I can learn it. But should I put effort into it is a far more important question. That's where Twitter comes into picture. [01:02:00] Remember, we talked about networking and how, if you have built a decent network, that's where you will get ideas of what's interesting, what's trending and so on? Correct? That is what I use in deciding which topics that I want to delve into. Initially, I hear on Twitter, in my real-life network, I have an idea of who is an expert in what area and whose opinions should be given how much weightage for which kind of info. That over time, slowly starts getting... start registering themselves. This person talked about it. Then a week later, this person also mentioned it, and now this other person is mentioning it. At some point, it flips over and I decide whether I need to learn about this.
Now, for learning, there is a technique, which Elon Musk very well-articulated. He said that the way to learn something is to think of it as a semantic tree. First, there is the trunk and the branches and those are the very basics of that area of knowledge. Then upon each branch are hung the smaller branches and the leaves and the flowers and so on. So, to learn, you have to first learn the big structure, you have to learn the trunk and the branches first, and only then you learn the details so that you can hang the details in the appropriate places. Otherwise, they're just going to be too difficult for you to remember. That's what I do.
When I decide that I want to pick up an area, first I will read a broad overview from somewhere. Often it will be Wikipedia, once in a while, it will turn out that [01:04:00] Wikipedia is not a good source. So in the case of Bitcoin, it turned out to be a Coursera course by the Princeton guys. That would be the first. And in the first reading, I don't bother with too much of the details. Right now I'm interested in the tree, the trunk and the branches. So the reading is going to happen in multiple phases. Sometimes it will just be reading the same thing multiple times. First time I read just to get a feeling for the trunk. Next time when I'm reading it, I will now pay attention to the branches. The third time I'm reading it, I'll be paying attention to the leaves and so on. The second thing is that this can also shift. Once I've gotten an idea of something then I will move on to deeper articles. Sometimes, I might read an entire book on it or something like that.
The next step in this process... once I've decided that this is something... the first reading will be a casual one, where I haven't decided whether I'm going to get even deeper into this. But once I've decided that there's going to be further readings, then while reading, I will also be taking notes. I try to imagine myself that I'm going to have to teach this to somebody. Often what I will do is I'll just commit to teaching a topic. For example, I'm now pretty close to saying that in the first week of April, I will give a talk on the immune system. Right now I know very little about the immune system. But once I commit myself, then I will learn. And while learning if I'm taking notes, the point is that I will learn much better. Most importantly, when I actually teach someone else, the primary outcome of that is that I learn far better. [01:06:00]
The other thing that happens is that when I'm teaching, they will ask questions. Every once in a while, there'll be questions about entire sub-spaces or topics that I missed. Then I will go back and pick those up later.
Ramanand: One thing that has changed from when you were a student was that a lot of understanding about how we learn has made it into the mainstream. For instance, things like spaced repetition. Tell me a little bit about how you have integrated that as part of your everyday life.
Navin Kabra: Just for people who are not aware of spaced repetition, the basic idea is that the human brain, the way memory works, is that the first time you encounter some piece of information, you're probably going to forget it within 30 seconds. But within 30 seconds, if you encounter it again, then now you're going to remember it for like a day. Just before you forget it tomorrow, you'll revise it again, now you're going to remember it for a week. So the way you forget, how long it takes you to forget something, has an exponential back-off thing. There's a lot of research where this has been shown. There are two aspects to this. That is one.
The second is that if it is an area you are familiar with, or this concept is very similar to some concept that you already know, then you are going to remember much faster and this exponential back-off will have smaller constants, whereas it is something completely unknown to you, then you're going to forget faster. So the thing is that if you want to memorize 20 things, they all shouldn't be revised at the same schedule. Some of them have to be revised faster, the more difficult ones, and some have to be revised, [01:08:00] and these days, you get software, which does all of this automatically for you. And what it does is reduces the amount of time taken to learn something new by orders of magnitude.
I didn't know about this at all until three years ago, but since then, all my learning has changed completely. The way I learn has changed and what I learn has also changed. There were a whole bunch of things, which for 10-15 years, I didn't bother learning, because it involved too much memorization. This includes things like Category Theory, which I tried two or three times and gave up. Quantum Computation, which I tried a couple of times and gave up. But it also includes tools like Org-mode and Emacs, which there are just so many things to learn that I couldn't pick it up. All of these I was able to do ridiculously easily once I understood the spaced repetition. So that has been a game-changer for me in some ways.
Ramanand: So let's say you're doing the immune system talk in 3 weeks and you started reading about it, how would you put this into your spaced repetition system?
Navin Kabra: While I am reading, remember, I'm going to read it in three phases. The first phase, I'm just going to look at the trunk and the branches. In the second phase, and so on, right? The things that I put in my space repetition system, and the app is called Anki. So I'll just refer to Anki. The initial things that go into my Anki will be related to the trunk and the branches and that's all. In fact, I will not come back to this topic again for a week or so. [01:10:00]
During that week, my Anki will keep bringing these things up regularly for me. By the end of that period, now that has gone into my memory and it is solid, and it is well established, which means that now when I do my second reading, I am ready for the smaller branches, because this structure is now well established. Then during the second reading, the things that go into my Anki, the numbers will be higher, but there will be smaller details, there will be other branches, and so on. The thing is that, when you think about trunk, branch, leaves, this is a hierarchical structure. The same thing is true with learning, the spaced repetition system.
Too many people think of memorization as just single facts that you're memorizing. You are memorising 11 X 13 is 143, or whatever, that's not true. You can memorize conceptual things also. Once, a base of concepts has been established, the next thing that you memorize, can use these concepts. Then the next thing can use even higher-level concepts. So that all the way at the top, you could be memorizing fairly abstract and philosophical things also.
Ramanand: Do you have a time in the day when you practice with Anki?
Navin Kabra: Sometimes. Basically, there is some morning slot, where I finish off my Twitter and then as soon as that gets over, the next thing I do is finish off my Anki. Once in a while, I don't have enough time, it doesn't get through. The good thing about Anki is that it's on my mobile. [01:12:00] It doesn't take a lot of time commitment. Just one thing to revise literally takes a few seconds. So even if there is a meeting, and the other person hasn't even shown up and I'm here waiting for three minutes. I can go through my Anki in those three minutes and 30% of my Anki for the day is done. So all my Anki pretty much can get done in the interstitial gaps during the day. In that sense, Anki has zero overhead.
Ramanand: Right. Okay, Navin. Before we go to our concluding segment, maybe let's ask one more question for you. In 2017, as you know, Parliament passed the GST. GST was launched in this big bang ceremony in Parliament. Prime Minister Modi said that GST is similar to something, because of the number of chapters, the number of meetings it took to come up with GST. So what was he making a connection to because of the number of chapters in the GST, as well as the number of meetings it took for GST to come to life? Since you said, we are getting into the realms of philosophy. So that's your hint.
Navin Kabra: Oh, the Bhagavad Gita.
Ramanand: Yes, good. It has 18 meetings and 18 chapters. Let's move to a bunch of your mental models. You refer to this in a lot of conversations in your writing. You even did a talk on the Bhagavad Gita. Tell me why you think it plays a role in your day to day functioning? [01:14:00] A lot of the topics that we've touched upon today, how do you see its connection?
Navin Kabra: There is a long answer to this and a short answer. The long answer, I often give a half an hour talk, where there are four or five things in the Bhagavad Gita, which I feel have very strong parallels to what a lot of modern gurus and modern management gurus and scientists are saying. I'll not get into that today, but just taking Karmanye vadhikaraste itself. I think that is very important. One of the most important things in my life. In fact, one of my long-running Twitter threads is I love pointing out how so many different modern people, things that they're saying, they're suggesting is just a corollary of Karmanye vadhikaraste.
Ramanand: You could have tweeted it.
Navin Kabra: The thing is that a lot of what you do in life, you're thinking I want to achieve this, and so on. As soon as you start thinking too much in terms of the goals and your results, and so on, it warps your thinking, it makes you make incorrect decisions. Whereas, a very good way of doing it is that you focus on the process and just check whether you did the right thing, are you putting in the right kind of effort? That's what Karmanye vadhikaraste tells you. Success is probabilistic, effort is deterministic. So you should be focused on the effort, you repeatedly put in the effort, and probabilistically, the success will come to you. It's one of those things that as a kid, I had heard so many times, [01:16:00] and it sounds nice. But when you see, it's only when you see it applying in real situations, after you've seen, say 10 examples of it, that's when the real depth of it and the importance of it starts coming through.
Ramanand: Just staying with this, this idea of mental models that you used, is there a mental model, say from the world of computer science that you refer to? Or finds resonance in your life?
Navin Kabra: Not necessarily computer science, but just generally the software industry. There is venture capital, that business. That had a profound impact on me, because when I learned that a venture capital company, if it invests in 10 startups, about eight of them are going to fail badly. So you lose all your money on them. And one returns something. But the 10th company, the 10th one returns so much money that it makes up for all the other eight losses. Now, it just reminded me of something I had read as a kid, about the Bollywood film industry, that when 10 movies are made in Bollywood, eight of them lose money for their makers, one of them just returns enough. But the 10th, one returns so much money that it makes up for all the other losses, and that's what is keeping the industry afloat. Yash Raj Films is still doing well on the basis of Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge.
I grew up as a middle-class person. This was absolutely not normal thinking. If we are [01:18:00] going to buy a book, we would read three reviews about the book in newspapers, ask two friends who have already bought the book, whether it's a good book or not, and only then buy the book. And then if you buy a book, you better well read it. Because if you don't read this book, you're not going to be allowed to buy the next book. This kind of thinking pervades all of the middle-class thinking that anything you do; you have to make it count. If it doesn't work out, then that's a failure.
Whereas when you think like a VC, you have to take these bets, that you look into things where you know, eight of them are going to fail, but the one that succeeds, is going to more than make up for things. So now, when I buy books, if there is a chance that I will really love the book, I will buy it. I will not even think about it, and a whole bunch of them, I will not read. Of the 10 books I buy, three or four, I will not read, another three or four, I will start reading and then give up after one chapter and not at all feel bad about it. But then the one book that I end up reading all the way through like say James Clear's Atomic Habits, that changes my life. So this ‘think like a VC’ thing, slowly once you get an idea about it, it starts affecting everything you do and you can see.
For example, if I'm even writing Twitter threads, I put out 10 threads. Most of them just sink without a trace, no engagement, nothing. But then every once in a while one thread just clicks and so much comes out of it. More and more things I'm beginning to find that 'think like a VC' really helps.
Ramanand: And you think that since we are now in a world where at least for a lot of people, it's abundance more than scarcity and therefore, we're now able to make these [01:20:00] bets more easily.
Navin Kabra: Absolutely. For a book, in those days, you had to actually physically buy a book. And there was no choice other than to buy the entire book. Now, you can choose to read articles about the book, online PDFs exist, variations exist, pretty much anything you want to do has become cheaper. So being able to take these bets is much easier now. Absolutely.
Ramanand: The one thing that is still scarce, and a lot of people listening to you will say, this is all good for Navin, who is very productive, and is not managing 50 people. So where will the time come from? What is your answer to that?
Navin Kabra: Time... really... for example, we talked about designing your life. There is some exercise where if you go through a week, and you just look at where all you are spending time, you will realize that you're spending a lot of time on a lot of wasteful things. Things that just don't go anywhere. It takes a little bit of discipline, a little bit of hardening your heart to cut out some of these things. Then you can make time. Just because this is how you've always done things and this how everybody else always does things, you are doing it; and changing it is going to cause some raised eyebrows and some people to get a little unhappy and so on. But, in the long term, it doesn't matter. Even the people with raised eyebrows will figure things out and come around a little later.
Like I said, I don't read news, the only news I call it tube lights raiser, the user tube light on Twitter, that the only news worth knowing about is the one which reaches me in spite of all my efforts to stay away. [01:22:00] So, remove news and suddenly so much time gets freed up. Similarly, I happen to be someone who doesn't really watch sports, unless it's a group activity, then I'm there for the group, not for the sport. For people who are, say, managing 50 people and all of that, I would say, if Anand Mahindra can find time to tweet, and you don't find time to tweet, there is something wrong with you. I mean, usually the simplest explanation is that they are not delegating enough. And delegation is something you better learn at some point. I think if it is work-related, there's lots of things you can cut out by either delegation or stop attending stupid meetings.
Ramanand: Okay! We're almost at the end of our Smartcast, I'm going to end this with a couple of quick-fire questions. I want to end with habits and routines, your habits and routines, and recommendations around that. So here goes. The first question is, the first thing that you do in the day in a very planned manner?
Navin Kabra: It's exercise. I do a combination of yoga and weights. Because as you grow older, you're going to lose muscle mass and that will be the reason for all your problems. So exercise-oriented towards building muscle mass has to be done. So, that is the first one.
Ramanand: Okay. One tip that you give to people to make their habits more sticky, a new habit more sticky?
Navin Kabra: I think the simplest tip would be to read James Clear's Atomic Habits that contains lots of detailed [01:24:00] information. But the one liner, the most important part of that is to take on a very tiny change, but do it every day. Instead of trying too much straight away. Say if you wanted to go on a diet, suddenly cutting out all burgers and all fatty foods is not going to work. Whereas just reduce one thing from your diet, let us say, or just one thing and only dinner, I will not have this, and then stick with it for a month, then the next one becomes a little easier, then the next one becomes easier. So make it a five-year plan with teeny tiny improvements each time.
Ramanand: The next question is one habit that you're trying to pick up?
Navin Kabra: The one habit right now is writing more regularly. I'm still not doing a good job of it. I mean, I'm tweeting regularly but larger pieces regularly is something I need to figure out how to do it.
Ramanand: You're not a big fan of podcasts yet, I believe. So, what keeps you from it?
Navin Kabra: Two things. I mean, basically, I can read much faster than I can listen to. Usually, if somebody is talking, I get bored. And then once I get bored, I stop paying attention and then I miss the next five minutes, and so on. That is one problem with podcasts. The other is that I don't have a commute. And during yoga, you can't listen to anything because there is an instructor. That's where a lot of people listen to podcasts. If they're doing something else, they can listen. I don't have anything in my daily routine, where this is there. Plus, what I have, I feel that podcasts [01:26:00] are something that, because you couldn't take the time to write it down and compress it, and remove the extra stuff. That's why you're doing a podcast. The same thing could have been written in a format that takes much less time. So even during my weights that I do, that time I can listen to things. I prefer listening to books on Audible, rather than podcasts.
Ramanand: When do you read your books? In other words, what's the typical time we'd find you reading a book?
Navin Kabra: There is no typical time. Basically, during the day, my sequence is that first I finish off Twitter, then I finish off my Anki, then I will finish off the articles that I have lined up for this. And then I will read a book. Every once in a while what happens is that one book I'm reading just grabs my attention. And then I might just put it at the head of this queue and all these other three go to the back until the book is finished. But typically long chunks of time for reading I will get on Saturday and Sunday, and then smaller chunks during the week.
Ramanand: Okay. My final question is rather appropriate. Is there a closing down ritual or routine for the day, due you stayed off digital devices, something like that?
Navin Kabra: Usually after about 6:30-7:00, I don't do work-related things at all unless there's an emergency of some sort. From that point onwards I'm hanging out with family, talking and all that. Every once in a while, as a family or with my wife, we might just sit together and then read Twitter. That is something we do. But at the end of the day, dinner is together with [01:28:00] everybody in the family. After dinner, me and my wife watch some TV together. That would be like a winding down thing because it's not intense. It is something simple. We watch it and we will go to sleep. So, usually, the evening slowly tapers off from work, you have come down to just Twitter, to just a mindless TV thing, and then go to sleep.
Ramanand: The family that tweets together stays together. Navin, on that note, thank you so much. I said at the beginning that we could have had 10 different conversations with you. This was just one of them. So I'm sure we'll try and find time for the other nine. Thank you so much.
Navin Kabra: Sure! It was great talking to you. Thanks.
Ramanand: Thank you, Navin.