In the midst of the COVID-19 outbreak, I have been one of those fortunate enough to self-quarantine at home with the time and freedom to observe and reflect on what has been going on over the past several weeks and beyond. Like many, I feel anxious for what’s to come. I am also extremely proud of my friends and family who work in healthcare, and doing what I can to help those who have been directly affected.
Though these days I write more than ever in the form of notes, idea dumps, and daily journaling, I realise I have been on hiatus for over a year on this blog. It was one of those things that was always in the back of my mind but I just couldn’t get around to metaphorically put pen to paper. So I am using the suddenly limited options in my day-to-day activity as a springboard to kickstart this again.
The question now is what to write about. A few months ago at the turn of the decade, which feels like a decade ago in itself, I wrote a long reflection about what was a pretty transformative 2019 for me in terms of worldview, priorities, personal and professional growth. When I started this website in late 2017 the goal was for it to be my home on the internet, somewhere I can direct people to if they want to learn about the things I have worked on, am interested in, and my current projects. It also served as space to share my knowledge about decentralized technologies, the applications and potential of which I am more excited about than ever and to which I will continue to dedicate my efforts.
However, the best, most cutting edge tech in the world is only as good as the humans who design them. By design I don’t just mean how it looks but the implications that a product has on individuals and society at large. This quarantine freed up my bandwidth to observe and reevaluate how I was spending my money, time, and mind space, both as an individual consumer and as someone who is trying to build products that people want, that helps contribute to a better world in some way.
Thanks to the internet, web/mobile-based apps and online content are relatively cheap to produce (code, blogging, recording videos), and costs nothing to distribute (publishing a post on Medium, YouTube, or deploying to the App Store), which is why more makers and entrepreneurs have been flocking to do so. This permissionless innovation has been a great thing because we as consumers, the market, decide on what the best products are. We “vote” on what the best products are by downloading them, using them, spending money on them and telling our friends about them. I love platforms like Product Hunt, HackerNews and “Product Twitter” where I can discover and play around with up-and-coming projects that sometimes turn into what I consider my “staple apps” - a product I use daily or has completely changed the way I do a thing.
If digging through the aforementioned platforms is the “active” way of product discovery, I am going to make an assumption here that the majority discover products semi-passively, that is, either through marketing campaigns or word of mouth. I say semi-passively because with today’s ad targeting technologies, you had probably scouted around for something in that product’s category, e.g. Googling “best mindfulness apps” or browsing yoga mats on Amazon, and then suddenly seeing ads for Calm and Gaia everywhere.
Two interesting questions arise from this observation: one is for us as consumers; and the other is for the entrepreneurs who will build or are building products.
Reflections as a Consumer
On the consumer side, how do we as consumers parse signal from noise when it comes to the products that are truly beneficial to us, those that make us healthier, happier, more productive, more creative etc. when we’re being marketed to left and right that the next best thing is one click away? One answer is to go to a review site and read the pros and cons that have been pre-digested for you. The more time and energy-consuming way is to actually try them out, poke around with the interface, and sometimes learn keyboard shortcuts to see how efficient you can really be with this new thing. I realize that most people don’t have time for this and have higher priorities, but I also believe that there exists a product or idea out there that will alter the way you live, work, or earn money. Discovering it at the right time can be very rewarding and advantageous. After all, this is what investors are ultimately looking for too - a team of people who are building products that people will want.
But what happens when we’re bombarded with new and supposedly improved options all the time? Personally I enjoy trying out new products most of the time, and eagerly adopt it or make the switch from an alternative if it does turn out to significantly improve my life or work. I’m thinking mostly about productivity and collaboration tools here because there are has been *a lot* of new ones that have come out over the past few years. With this unexpected mass switch to remote work, these tools will be put to the test. Whether you use them personally or professionally, there are switching costs involved. You have to spend the time figuring out how to use them, migrating data from one app to another, convincing others to adopt it and so on. If you work with multiple teams or companies, they are unlikely to have their “collaboration stack” 100% in common, which means more apps to download and check every day. Not to mention all the notifications.
I’m also anticipating there will also be a boom in things-you-can-do-at-home and virtual events type apps and content, which will be marketed to us quite heavily. I don’t know about others, but I for one do feel some FOMO or curiosity when I see ads for a free MOOC or webinar with some guru on XYZ. Nothing wrong with these, but it does cost us attention and mental energy that we could have used towards our goals. The reason we feel FOMO is likely due to our non-zero amount of interest in this content - these ads were specifically targeted to us. This of course extends to social media and recommendations of Tweets, Instagram and TikTok accounts you might be interested in. One click, and you’re pulled further into the rabbit hole of algorithmic attention-grabs. The question is how do we keep control of our own attention despite this, especially as we have to interact with technology now more than ever to communicate and get stuff done? I think that it’s perfectly fine to gorge yourself with the junk food of memes and celebrity gossip once in a while. But like actual junk food, it should be in moderation. In future posts I’d like to further explore what we can do to keep our attention in check. Because I have come to realize that whoever controls our attention, controls our future.
Reflections as a Producer
On the entrepreneurial side, what is the thing to work on? There are many answers for this. The question is better framed as “what is the most important thing that I can work on”, and even then the answer will differ from person to person depending on their values, expertise, and interests. The lucky few of my friends who have answered this question for themselves early are already well on their way to tackle it through their work in medicine, education, policy, arts etc. Looking back, I didn’t think about this question hard enough as a high school and college student. If I had, I would have tailored my path a bit differently to better prepare myself to tackle whatever the answer was. Thankfully, we no longer have to solely rely on formal enrolment in institutions to learn from the best minds alive and throughout history. If we have a laptop with an internet connection, we can be well on our way to tackling our own answers to this question. It’s the question I would pose to my college-senior self.
It actually contains two parts:
What is the most important thing...
This pertains to your values and issues that matter most to you. It has merit whether it be related to healthcare, housing, poverty, environment, wellbeing, entertainment, education etc. (..am I just listing SDGs?). It also has merit at local and global scales. There are “experts” who will tell you what’s most important but keep in mind that they, too, have their own agendas. Observe what’s going on in the world, introspect, and decide for yourself. If your goal is to “make a positive impact” I think the SDGs are a good starting point.
...that I can work on
This is about your interests, capabilities, what you’re uniquely good at, or a topic you know about more deeply than everyone else. I presume something that’s some combination of the above is also something you enjoy. It doesn’t have to be engineering or the arts or academic research, it can even be your magnetic personality or a uniquely valuable network that you can tap into for a wide myriad of favors. If you can leverage these things and apply them in the context of what’s important to you, I think you can be pretty successful and fulfilled.
Therein lies what I have been mulling over during my quarantine. Through weekly side-project related Zoom calls with self-quarantined friends around the globe I’ve noticed that many people have reached a similar realization that the things that they thought were important up until the pandemic, were not. Conversely, we are also yearning for things that we took for granted before like using public transport without a face mask or smalltalk with our neighborhood baristas in the mornings. This is a transitory and reflective time for many, whose immediate priorities are their health, their loved ones’ health, and making ends meet. I wonder about the “staple” products in our post-coronavirus world: the role they will play in our society and the influence they will have on our planet. The ideas for these are probably brewing as part of someone’s reflective process, or even out of desperation as we speak.
Reflections as an Individual
So back to the question, for those of us fortunate enough to have some freedom to reflect, can we emerge from the crisis with more clarity for what is truly important to us, and what impact we want to have on the world? Moreover, how can we develop ourselves to be physically and mentally, socially, intellectually, and technically adept enough to create that impact? The order of these -ally’s are deliberate. I can expand on those in future essays but let’s expand on the first one here.
Physical health is a straightforward one. While we can’t all turn into David Goggins, how we care for our physical wellbeing is the foundation upon which everything lies. It’s amazing how much difference good sleep, diet and exercise can make. Now more than ever we must also pay attention to our mental health and wellbeing. What goes on internally, the stories we tell ourselves, and our hidden biases dictate so much of what we project to the world through our words and actions, which in turn influence experiences that reinforce our biases and on it goes. Do you have a platform or support system to go to to express and talk about these things? I imagine that for many, this is the first time experiencing being at home for a prolonged period. Even for those of us accustomed to remote work, being quarantined into working from home is not the same thing as having an option to work remotely. Though coronavirus has been around for months now, self-quarantine has only globally taken place over the past few weeks. Should this continue for months, I anticipate the honeymoon period will soon subside and online avenues to have these types of conversations will play a big role in helping us stay reasonably optimistic. I can’t imagine what it’s like for those juggling a business and working full time with kids at home. How do we connect those desperate for actionable advice with those who have them?
The pandemic has hit the economy hard. First, I witnessed my friends in the tourism and leisure industry watch as their cash flow slow down to a halt. I see lines of empty taxis in Bangkok (who usually get their pick of passengers) waiting desperately on quiet streets. Friends in the airline industry, grounded without paychecks for an indefinite amount of time. On LinkedIn and Twitter I’m seeing more and more layoff updates from my colleagues in the US startup tech industry as well. Some of my friends who are on the frontlines battling this in hospitals are running out of masks. Some are stuck in foreign countries unable to return home. I’ve signed petitions and donated money and masks, but feel like I could be doing more, even if it's as simple as boosting morale through online conversations. Is there a platform for this? Should we create one?
I was in my early teens and living a naive, comfortable life in Bahrain through the 2008-2009 financial crisis. This is the first mass economic downturn that I’m witnessing and have been impacted by in my lifetime. This is a time in history that my generation will tell their grandchildren about. Personally, I’d like to be able to tell them that it was a time of compassion and increased vigilance for one another. A time that those who could help, did however much they could. A time we leveraged technology, networks, and collective intelligence to support each other and solve a global problem.
… A time when we took lessons from a crisis to create a world that does better for its people and other living beings. I actually intended for this essay to be about the emergence of coronavirus [hint: wildlife trafficking], but instead found myself thinking more about its higher-order effects on myself and individuals around the globe, so decided to run with it. I hope this essay has provoked some thoughts, or even prompt you to get in touch. At the very least, I consider it a long-winded introduction to what’s to come in terms of content on this blog: an exploration of how we stay mindful and keep our attention in check in a world full of noise, how we design and create better products for humans, society, and our planet, and how we prepare ourselves for the future.
Though the impact of COVID-19 has been exacerbated by politics, misinformation and institutional inaction, I believe its cause can be attributed to our too-large-an-interference with natural systems. Specifically, taking animals from their natural environments, putting them under extreme stress, and basically playing pathogen mixologist in pursuit of short term profits. I will explore the relationship between natural systems and pandemics and lessons we can learn moving forward in the next article. Until then please take care of yourselves and each other. If you’re on the frontlines battling this, I’m sending my prayers and best thoughts your way - we’re all indebted to you for your service 🙏🏼
Feel free to comment your thoughts, you can also reach me here or on twitter
Nich