4 Life Lessons To Guide You Through 2023
I remember, when I was 8 years old, sitting outside the house watching the night sky with my mum as she told me the stories of “Kalausi” — a monicker for one of the formidable candidates vying to be our next area Member of Parliament in the 2002 elections. It was rumoured, she said, that “Kalausi” was an astronaut — someone who could go to the moon. It is the most memorable childhood memory I have and I said to her that when I grow up, I’d like to be an astraunot and one day go to the moon as well. That is how my interest in Science was born. When I finally got to high school in 2009, Physics quickly became my favorite subject as my Physics teacher introduced us to the Scientific Methods — a set of procedures scientists use to solve Scientific problems — including going to the Moon. It involved treating anything novel as a hypothesis, subjecting it to experimentation to collect data, analyzing the results of the experiment to form a conclusion. These results could either prove the hypothesis right or wrong and thus had the final say into what became a scientific principle.
Several years later and we’ve found ourselves treating our startup — Patika — as a scienific lab whereby ideas are accepted from all around the corner, subjected to an experiment and results collected to see if the idea works to help us achieve the mission or not. The ones that work are retained while the ones that don’t are discarded — the best idea wins. What have I learned from this process and that could be applied to every part of our lives?
- “It’s Only By Opening The Box That We Know Which It Is”
Quantum Physics had rocked the world of Science with notable scientists like Niels Borh and Albert Einstein being on the opposite sides. Borh proposed the Copenhagen Intepretation which stated that a quantum particle does not exist in one state or another, but in all of its possible states at the same time. Then comes the famous Schrodinger who, in an attempt to expain the Copenhagen Interpretation, proposed a thought experiment that we now know as Schrodinger’s Cat — the cat is placed in a box with a bottle of poison that will break open at any random time. Until the box is opened, the cat can be considered to be both dead and alive. But we know in real sense, the cat can’t be both dead and alive. It is only by opening the box that we know which it is. What does this have to do with our lives? Sometimes we might have very strong opinions and beliefs about certain ideas and feel like they’re the best to set us up for success but that’s never close to the reality. Like Schrodinger’s cat, those ideas can be considered as leading to both failure and success until you test them out.
It’s only by testing out the ideas and observing the results that we actually know which it is: a success or a failure.
Do not spend time planning it all out in your head, do not spend time aguing over whose idea is better than the other. Hypothesize, get it out of your head by experimenting quickly, analyze the results and YOU WILL KNOW.
2. “No theory is perfect. Rather, it is a work in progress, always subject to further refinement and testing.”
Thinking Like Bayes means that we always update our beliefs as new information comes in. “Every moment is a learning moment and every learning moment should make us update our existing ideologies and make us become different but better people,” I wrote. It means that even after opening the box and knowing which idea is likely to lead to success, that’s never the end of the road. Life is a learning process which involves questioning current beliefs and whenever new information comes in, being ready to adopt it in favor of the old beliefs — no matter how dear they were to us. There is a time we believed the Earth was flat based on information we had as at that time. After new information, we now know its a geoid — continuing to hold onto the good old days of flat earth does you no good; there are no good old days in Science. If your colleagues or friends question your ideas, do not see it as an attack on your person but rather, listen to the evidence they’re presenting. If it makes sense, then you have to agree with them.
Individuals do not win; only ideas win — and it matters not from whom the idea comes.
3. Follow The Light
I was introdued to computers in 2013 and one of the things I learned early on is that computers only think in binary — 1s and 0s. The idea that even the most complex things like videos and audios in my favorite songs were stored as 1s and 0s and that these 1s and 0s were actually simply electrical signals (Off and On switches — as represened by Claude Shannon) was simply mind boggling. That alone gives us the eternal life lesson of what it means to solve complex problems by breaking it down into its most basic components. But I was more taken aback when I learned about Machine Learning and how a computer is able to learn from data and make accurate predictions of the future with impeccable accuracy. At the center of how a machine learns is “The Objective Function.” The objective (error) function is more like a deviation from a known truth. The computer solves a problem, gets a result, compares it the the truth and checks by what margin it is wrong. It repeats the same thing but with updated parameters, each time trying to minimize the error margin until it gets to the closest possible it can to the truth — this is called Optimization in Mathematics. At any moment in time, the computer knows where it needs to be (the light), where it currently is, how far it is from the light and simply follows the light through self-correcting until it gets there. Like the 3 wisemen in the Bible followed the light until they found themselves in Bethlehem where the king had been born, our lives mostly mirror the same phenomenon. As a startup, for instance, the light can be “To hit $1M in revenues”, as a person making New Year Resolutions, the ligh can simply be “To have $10k worth of investments by end of 2023.” At any single point in time, nothing else matters other than where you are and how far away you are to the light. You could do a million things in the process but just like the computer, it doesn’t matter much as long as it can take you to the light within the shortest time possible.
Be like the Computer. The computer learns by not fearing to be wrong and when it realizes it’s wrong, it simply corrects itself millions of times.
4. “Give Me A Lever Long Enough And A Fulcrum To Place It And I Can Move The Earth.”
The journey to holding $10k in investments by simply following the light isn’t as simple as it seams. Along the journey, are millions of possible paths you could take: some are longer, some are more streinuos, some are mere dazzling squirrels that might distract you with short term gains and if not careful, giving up or going off-course is a more likely possiblity than actually reaching the light. Should you take a loan from the bank? Should you take funds from your parents? Should you save first? Should you put it in crypto or real estate or start a food vending business? This is the art of decision making and one in which I always say that it is safe to “Act Like Markov.” Under Markovian decision making, you are only as good as your last state. Your next state is solely dependent on where you currently are, historical wins or losses are insignificant. To move you closer to the light (the reward), you have to choose your actions wisely: comparing the set of choices with their rewards and choosing the action that indicates the best long term return — this being the light you’re following. In the computer world, we know that simply following the light blindly can be daunting, time consuming and resource heavy. To make it simpler, algorithms such as gradient descent were devised to help the computer know how to quickly optimize the objective function in the shortest time possible and with the least resources possible; what we’re basically doing is “giving the computer leverage” knowing very well that it doesn’t have the resources and time to brute force its way around it. Anything that makes your life easier is a “yes.” Anything that helps you get closer to the light with the least effort is a “yes.” The 3 wisemen could have walked but instead travelled by horses & camels.
Knowing the advantages you have at your disposal and making use of them in your decisions to help you move closer to the light faster than your peers; this is the art of leverage.
Archimedes couldn’t be more right when he said, “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum to place it and I can move the Earth.” A daunting task like moving a whole planet made possible through leverage.
Bonus #5: Turn The Water On
Michael Seibel and Dalton Caldwell tell the story of a house with leaking water but where the specific pipe or location that’s leaking isn’t known. There are two ways to fix it: one is to carefully check all pipes and joints to try observe which section would be broken while the other is to simply turn the water on and see where the leak is coming from.