akrish

What separates the good from the great? Is it talent, sheer work-ethic, or a mixture of both? I know from experience that you can’t achieve greatness just through work-ethic; I used to spend countless hours training so that I’d be a “great” soccer player, and I’d say I never made it past the “good” stage. I’ve had this debate with some of my friends and family, and I’ve always steadfastly held that you need both talent and drive to make it big in anything. I’m not exactly sure what’s really changed my viewpoint from then, but I think now I’d also add that you need scrutinizing attention to detail, along with work-ethic and maybe some talent, to become great in almost every activity that you engage in.

So why attention to detail? Let me proceed with a short anecdote to maybe clarify my point: I practiced my clarinet for the first time in about 5 months today. I decided yesterday that I’m going to audition for the University Wind Ensemble this coming semester so I need to be practicing everyday for that audition. I didn’t sound all that great, but I haven’t forgotten anything and I’m really excited to hear myself getting better over the next couple weeks. On the whole, I still retained a lot of the dexterity and technical ability that I had before, but I noticed a bunch of small things that I was unhappy about and need to work on. However, I don’t remember ever mastering these details in my playing (or even trying to master them for that matter), which made me ask myself: “Why hadn’t I mastered them when I used to play clarinet every day?” When I practice now, these minor things are so glaringly wrong to me that I devote my time exclusively to fixing them, so how come when I used to practice, I didn’t notice or care about the same mistakes I was making. I’m pretty sure the reason was that they’re really hard to fix, and I don’t like to do things that I find to be really hard.

So back then, I learned to shrug off these egregious mistakes and I thought that I was on my way to become a “great” clarinetist. But when I look at it now, I realize that without scrutinizing these flaws in my playing and working to fix them, I have no hope of becoming great. Without paying particular attention to the hard things that I hadn’t already mastered, I was just going through the motions, and even though I would put in the time and practice, it wasn’t really getting me anywhere. I was a “good” clarinet player, and to become “great” I needed to focus on the subtle details that were adversely affecting my sound.

Here’s another situation: I’ve spent a decent amount of time designing websites. With web design, due to the sheer number of sites out there, there’s a huge disparity between the “well-designed” sites and the “amazingly-designed” sites. When I visit a website, I immediately know if it’s amazingly-designed (unfortunately, this disparity makes the “well-designed” sites just suck) and I’m sure most people have the same impression. The thing with web design is that ever single pixel of your page must be scrutinized, or your presentation will be awful. I know that I’ll never be even good at it, because I don’t have the patience to fix really minor issues that literally make or break a web site. In this regard, attention to detail (along with serious work-ethic and passion) is essential to being a good web designer.

I’m not entirely sure if what I’m really talking about should be called attention to detail; maybe it should just be lumped in with work-ethic. But it’s working smart; fixing the things that are hard to notice and even harder to fix. It’s a willingness to take on the most difficult of challenges rather than circumvent them or take the easy way out. I think I notice the details that are hard to fix, but I really don’t enjoy working on these things and usually just completely avoid them. My standard web design thought is, “It looks ok, I can probably just leave it like that,” when I know that there are tons of flaws with my website. Greatness comes from noticing the really minor problems, and then putting in the time to overcome them.

I think college has helped me pretty significantly in my attempts to achieve greatness. First off, I know that I have a much more determined attitude and a lot more drive than I used to do. I can see it in the way that I’m running with a lot more motivation and enthusiasm than I used to. I also see that I have a lot more patience with working on things that I find really hard. I noticed that today when I was practicing clarinet. I definitely wasn’t like this in high school though, and even though I’m not exactly where I want to be yet, I’m pretty happy with how college has helped me out.

I guess maybe all you need for greatness is some talent and a lot of hard work. But work ethic does include attention to detail and serious drive to address all those details that you find. I’m pretty sure everyone has the capacity and ability to work, and I also like to think that everyone is talented at something, so maybe then everyone has the ability to become great.

So it’s December, 24th, Christmas eve, and the Krishnamurthy family is getting ready to celebrate another quiet Christmas together. This year though, there’s no tree, there’s no extended family, no friends. We just started watching Ocean’s 13, on pirated DVD, smuggled from China (as in it still has Chinese subtitles). Actually it has some kind of Chinese and also some German, I have no idea why. It’s looking like a great Christmas (no seriously).

I actually really like days like this. It’s a holiday and people tend to do special things, but I enjoy spending some time with my family, helping make dinner, relaxing and watching a movie (which I guess is special). It’s not something that a lot of people do on a regular basis, considering everyone’s ridiculously hectic lives (it’s the same for me too), but it’s very restful and it’s an amazing way to spend a holiday. I hope that everyone else takes these couple of days to relax and spend time with their family.

The movie’s starting to pick up, so I’m going to end my post here. I’ll write more about what I’ve been up to during break and what I plan to do for the rest of it soon. Please have a safe, fun, happy holiday. Spend time with your families and your friends, and just enjoy however many vacation days you have.

After a grueling two and a half weeks of non-stop studying, I’m finally done with my final exams and with that, fall 2007 semester seamlessly comes to a close. In retrospect, this semester was probably the best of my college times in almost every respect. The semester really flew by; I still have vivid images of moving in and the first day of classes, but at the same time I feel like a lot of time has gone by. It’s bizarre, I know, but I can see that time has passed when I look at how I have grown, how my friendships have solidified and how much I’ve learned this semester. At the same time, each individual week seems like a blur when I think about it.

This semester was my first semester living off campus (I live in a house with some of my best friends). It was an amazing experience that certainly has helped me grow and become more independent. I have a lot more responsibilities and there are serious consequences for not taking care of them. I have to spend a lot more time thinking about what food I want to eat (if I want to eat well), along with many other financial obligations such as rent, utilities and others. In a lot of these respects, living off campus felt a lot like being an adult, or at least what I think being an adult would feel like, except for the fact that I could go “home” to my parents at will and they would always pamper me and feed me.

Despite the added responsibility, living off campus was a lot more fun than living in the dorms. It’s really amazing to live in an environment where your best friends are always around and it takes absolutely no effort to spend time with them. My friendships with my house-mates and a few others have definitely matured as a direct result of living off campus. The only downside to this is that I neglected a lot of my friends who didn’t live with me. Take my soccer buddies for example: last semester we would hang out 2 or 3 times a week, just playing soccer, or getting dinner, or something and this worked because we all lived near each other. Now many of us have moved off campus and further away, and as a result, we don’t end up hanging out nearly as much as we used to. We did have an intramural soccer team so we played soccer together about once a week, but it wasn’t the same as the late night games that we played last year. So really, living in the house had it’s upsides and it’s downsides, but on the whole it was a really good experience. Next semester there’s a soccer field opening up really close to where me and some of my soccer friends live, so I think we’ll end up hanging out a lot more.

Changing subjects entirely, the amount of academic material that I learned this semester truly boggles me. I took four engineering classes, and I enjoyed all of them in regards to subject matter. I think it may have also helped that my professors were outstanding and they all did a good job of showing their excitement in the material, which naturally got me a lot more interested in it. It also helped that my classes overlapped a bit, so I saw different sides of the same concepts while reinforcing my understanding. For example, I learned about propositional logic from a proof writing side in discrete math, from a relational calculus query writing side in databases, and we also talked about it in signals and systems. There were tons of theoretical subjects that I learned about in discrete math that I saw applications of in databases and signals and systems, which got me a lot more interested in the material. Academically, the semester was the most intellectually stimulating so far.

Carrying my trends from summer, I tried to run and exercise a lot during the semester. I didn’t find it hard to balance school work with exercise but it was harder to motivate myself to go running in comparison to the summer. In the summer I had a nice schedule that I stuck to pretty religiously, but with work varying from day to day it becomes a lot harder to maintain a schedule. Fortunately, I discovered the running club (it’s a group of students who run a lot…) and joined them for runs a couple times a week earlier on in the semester. I noticed significant progress when I tragically injured myself and wasn’t able to exercise for about a month. Now I’m starting to get back into it, and during winter break I’ll probably spend a lot of time running (hopefully).

So it’s finally over. I now have about a month of rest and relaxation and by R&R I really mean 8 hour days working on my startup. But that’s all going to be fun work so I really won’t mind it. Plus I’ll get to spend time with my family and all of my high school friends so I’m really looking forward to going home. And it all starts again in a month when school opens for the spring!

Lots of short random things here.

1. Changed the layout a bit. Please tell me what you think. The header image is some fractal from wikimedia commons (I don’t think I’m supposed to use it without giving rights so… Thank you Jonathan Zander.) I personally think it’s a decent layout but will probably be updating it after finals are over.

2. Firebug is really awesome. If you ever do web design it’s almost a must have. It made changing my layout a lot easier.

3.  You can base a company off of almost anything. Mod My Life has a really strange idea that’s pretty entertaining but I don’t really see how they’re going to make money. The video clip on Tech Crunch was pretty amusing. Also made me feel a lot more comfortable about our company idea, which we think has a much more solid business plan.

4. Finals really suck. It’s not that I really mind taking exams, it’s just that productivity goes way down. I had 2 finals today (only 2 more to go!) and in between the two, I didn’t really spend time studying for the 2nd one but rather, I puttered around on the internet. I didn’t really want to study (obviously), but I also wasn’t ready to focus my energy on anything else and so I ended up killing a couple of hours. Not that that’s entirely a bad thing, it was good to have some free time to do nothing.

5. My mom used to say to me and my friends, “As if playing video games isn’t bad enough, you all sit around and watch each other play video games.” yeah… definitely did that for several hours today.

6. I really want to play soccer soon. It’s been awhile.

7.  It’s funny. This week, the house that I live in has become harmlessly divided. Half of us have been sleeping “normal” hours (i.e. going to bed between 12-2am and waking up between 8am-noon) while the other half have been sleeping at really odd hours (i.e. going to bed between 8am and noon and waking up whenever they so desire). I woke up early today (7am) to go to a final and found that 5 people were still awake. This has kinda gotten me thinking about human nature a bit and how different people are. Like I have to get a decent amount of sleep to be productive (or even function at all) the next day and even still I do the best work in the morning. On the other hand, some of my friends work the best between 2 and 6 in the morning. This was true even earlier in the semester, but it’s seemed to be exaggerated by finals week. I’m not really going anywhere with this, I just think it’s funny and interesting.

8. Random question: Is it bad to eat raw pasta?

It’s that time of the year again. Not the holiday season (well it is, but that’s not what I’m referring to), but it’s finals season! It’s time to learn everything all us college students were supposed to learn during the semester but never did. I have tons of studying that I need to do, yet this past weekend, I don’t think I even spent two hours working. I socialized, goofed around, wasted time, you name it, but for some reason I didn’t really think school work was important. The weekend reminded me of some thoughts that I’ve had lingering around about balancing school/work with fun that I wanted to write down.

Hassan wrote a article about this on my house blog (read it here) and I think I’m going to echo a lot of his sentiments but it’s something I feel like I should write down anyway. I find it really hard to balance those two aspects of my life. One week I’ll lock myself up in my room and study all day every day, then the next week I won’t even crack open my textbooks. This process seems to repeat with increasing magnitude over time. (If you could model it as a function it would look something like f(t) = (e^t)cos(wt)…. wow I’m nerdy) Anyway, that’s not what I call balance. Like Hassan said, that’s compensation. I find myself working hard one week to compensate for all the fun that I had the previous week, mostly because I feel guilty about not getting anything done and vice versa. After a week of really intense work, I feel like I need some recovery time and take the next week off. Once that cycle starts, it’s pretty hard to get out of it.

For most of my life, I’ve been taught to prioritize work before fun (for a good reason I suppose). Prashant’s dad gave us three rules before coming to college that were not only pretty funny, but also pretty good tenets for the college years. They were (in order of importance): get good grades, stay out of trouble, have as much fun as you can. And again I was given the emphasis on work. I definitely agree with this philosophy, unfortunately, when there’s no end to the work, the fun part of college suffers.

And I’m not really talking about school work. I don’t actually spend that much time on school work and haven’t really had to worry about it this semester. I’m talking more about the other commitments I’ve made, like to my research team, my business partners, my blogs, and my other personal projects. There are too many work-related things that I have/want to work on that I don’t get as much time as I’d like to spend with my friends and meet new people. When you couple the work work with my exercising and music, there really isn’t much time left in the days. I guess the problem is ultimately that I take on too much stuff, but that’s because I’m really interested in a lot of different things. Ultimately, I’ll probably have to cut down on my commitments but I’m not willing to do that yet. For now, a lot of my personal projects just end up moving really slowly because I don’t devote appropriate time to them.

All of the things that I take up are legitimately things that I enjoy doing (including school for the most part) and I often think of them as fun activities, they just aren’t very social activities. I really enjoy sitting in my room and playing guitar by myself, but that’s not helping me strengthen my relationships with my friends or form new relationships with others.

It’s probably too late to change anything this semester. It is exam time and I do have a significant amount of studying to do, so I guess I should lock myself in my room and hit the books for the rest of this semester. Ironically enough, I’m pretty sure I’m at the social peak in the sinusoid and am having a hard to motivating myself to study (hence writing this article). I’m thinking that next semester I’ll have a good opportunity to change this lifestyle and although I’m not sure what exactly I’d do to change it, I’m hoping that I’ll find a better balance next semester. For now, it’s back to wonderful Ampere’s Law (yippee!).