Orbit Change Conversations

How we interact with nature is changing due to the digital age. Photography has become personal. Now it’s time for learning to go personal. Just as people build their own photographic collage of a trip, we should be able to build our mind-map when we encounter awe-inspiring artifacts.

Terence Tao has offered a fascinating analogy of quantum mechanics using computer games. He is able to explain many aspects of quantum mechanics like “many-world” existence of reality, the dual particle and wave existence, the quantization phenomenon, Bell inequality violation, and more. This raises the question: What if QM ceases to be so esoteric? Might it not then have a social impact much like Copernicus’ heliocentric theory and theory of evolution?

Management theory and education is too focused on formulas. I don’t think success in business comes from a formula. It comes from making good choices using powers of critical thinking. It comes from execution based on hustle and energy.

Building software is not all fun. Some parts of it involve considerable tedium. The best parts are the idea stage and the coding stage. In one sense, Agile Programming (AP) reinvents the process around these fun parts. I have concluded that writing an essay-type blog (like mine) is the AP version of writing a book. You just focus most on the idea and the writing and can ignore the scaffolding that you need for a book. In fact, this parallel between software development and blogging goes deeper. Writing is like coding only more difficult but equally fun.

My parents constantly encouraged me to step outside my comfort zone. I have consciously applied that philosophy to my professional life. Ravi Aranke’s excellent comment a few days back has helped me construct a more cogent argument for following this strategy.