One of the less-talked about benefits of reading is being able to “humble brag” about all the books you’ve read.

On a completely unrelated note, here are the best Books I read in 2019.

If one of your goals is to read more in the new year, you should start with these books.

(note: There are typos in this post. Consider this my personal rough draft that I am sharing for public knowledge. For posts like these, the marginal value of fixing typos, is less than the marginal time spent fixing typos.)

You can also read the original article on my blog.

How to Fail at Everything and Still Win Big (buy on Amazon)

Basically a self-help book that is actually different from any other self-help book I’ve ever seen.

I don’t think I’ve ever read a self-help book cover to cover because those aren’t my type of books but Scott Adams has a remarkable ability to explain concepts in an extrememy concise, pithy, funny and memorable way. He is also extremely practical and tangible with a lot of his advice. I think engineers and people in STEM will like this book because it’s written in a very pragmatic way he is also super contrarian so a lot of things he says are not things you have heard before.

This is probably the best book I read in 2019. If you want a very practical, no BS book on how to be more successful, I strongly recommend you read this book.

Tangentially, Scott Adams himself is also an exceptionally persuasive writer. I’ve read a lot of good books, by a lot of great authors,authors that could be described as smart or articulate but I don’t think any of them are as persuasive as Scott Adams.

I really wish I started taking book notes earlier, so I could have notes for this book to refer back to, it’s so full of practical advice. Here are the highlights. Quoted directly from page 3:

1. Goals are for losers.
2. Your mind isn’t magic. It’s a moist computer you can program
3. The most important metric to track is your personal energy
4. Every skill you acquire double your odds of success
5. Happinesses is health plus freedom
6. Luck can be managed, sort of.
7. Conquer shyness by being a phoney (in a good way).
8. Fitness is the lever that moves the world.
9. Simplicity transforms ordinary into amazing

other notes

His important patterns for sucess, which he stresses is purely anecdotal and excludes the ones that are 100 percent genetic

1. Lack of fear of embarassment
2. Education (the right kind)
3. Exercise

The Amazon links are affiliate links.

Thinking in Bets is a book about how to make better decisions when you don’t have all the facts. People often say life is like chess but really it’s more like Poker because there is information asymmetry and luck. Lots of good insights in this book and I would strongly recommend following Annie Duke on Twitter and me @tomiwa1a.

She does such a good job of explaining human behavior using data, stories and humor. My favorite part of the book is that she doesn’t just explain human behavior she also offers practical solutions on how to make better decisions and improve your behavior pattern as you will see in my notes below. I think she could write a really good book on relationships/dating/marriage and it would be popular with both men and women.

• “Resulting”: Judging a decision based on the result instead on if the process you followed was right. For example, Pete Carrol’s decision to pass the ball in 2016 Super Bowl [5]
• Ask For Temporary Agreement in Truth-Seeking: If someone is emotionally offloading to us, ask if they just want to vent or are looking for advice for what to do next. She suggests the phrase. “Do you want to just let it all out [and talk about it] or are you looking for what to do next?” [174]
• Very profound quote on how we should think about happiness as a long term stock that steadily rises and pay less attention to the day-to-day fluctuations. Very cool graph of Berkshire long-term vs short-term stock price to illustrate this [192].

In a world with so much information how do you sort through all the noise and make sense of what actually matters?

Quick highlights

• “AI/social media/ the internet is ruining everything”, they said the same thing about books and the printing press [14]
• How to teach children to thrive in an information society
• The role of doctors in modern medicine, why some doctors justify lying to their patients and why most doctors may end up getting replaced by machine learning algorithms [249]
• How to organize your digital files: Make search a forethought, how will I look for this when I need it [320]
• Sleeping more efficiently with bimodal sleep [189]

Lebron Inc. by Brian Windhorst is about how Lebron has built his business empire from his Freshman year in St. Vincent St. Mary’s in Akron in 2001 (tk verify Lebron high school freshman year) to his new team Los Angeles Lakers in 2019. Brian Windhorst has been following Lebron since 1999 so he is one of the few well known sports media people that has been following Lebron literally his entire career, and even before that.

Lebron is my favorite athlete and one of the most influential people on modern culture. I have a lot of respect for all of the things he does off the court, from I-Promise schools to Uninterrupted, to how he posts on Instagram #tacotuesday, I am totally here to #WitnessGreatness. I am also super observant about how aware he is both on the court and off the court.

-In 2006, record industry was being disrupted by streaming and Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre were loking for ways to make money [121]

• Dr. Dre suggested shoes, Iovine suggested speakers, they settled on headphones (Beats by Dre)
• The 2008 summer olympics, Lebron encouraged the US mens’ basketball team to wear the headphones and they invited other athletes to wear it
• Brian points out that when Lebron said “taking my talents to South Beach” that’s exactly what Kobe said (taking my talents to) in 1996 when he was announcing that he was going straight from high school to the NBA [157]

Contrarianism is cool right now. But What If We’re Wrong by Chuck Klosterman is one of the best books that I’ve read on how to be a contrarian thinker (tied with Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile).

As you can see, one of my longest book reviews yet. An extremely fascinating and insightful book. The kind of book where you read certain parts and you will pause and find yourself thinking, “that can’t possible be true… but what if it is…”. If you want to become a more creative thinker or think about things from a perspective you haven’t considered before I strongly recommend But What If We’re Wrong.

Peter Thiel says that it’s not enough to be contrarian, you have to be contrarian and right. I don’t know if Klosterman is necessarily “right” (and to be fair, he’s not suggesting a lot of the ideas in the book as being “right”) but I think he does an excellent job of creating a new lens on how to think about popular ideas or what I call, “generally accepted stories we tell ourselves”.

“But I know these imperative perspectives have no origin in my own brain. The first time I ever heard Frank Lloyd Wright’s name, I was being told he was brilliant, which means the first time I looked at a building he designed, I thought either, “That is what brilliance looks like,” or “This is what everyone else recognizes as brilliance… [91]

• Interviews Neil DeGrasse Tyson: “I will add that in 1603 the microscope was invented, and in 1609 the telescope was invented. So these things gave us tools to replace our own senses, because our own senses are quite feeble when it comes to recording objective reality…I can establish an objective truth that’s not a function of my state of mind, and you can do a different experiment and come up with the same result” [100]
• Funny story about two people having a “beer conversation” about the meaning of life and if God exists. A 3rd person walks in says they are both wrong. That “It turns out our moral compass comes from neither God nor ourselves. It comes from Brenda. Brenda is a middle-aged computer engineer living in the year 2750, and she designed the simulation that currentl contains all three of their prefab lives”[127]

Dataclysm is a book by Christian Ruder, the founder of OkCupid, a dating site. The book is about the site’s data can tell us about relationships and human behaviour. If you are interested in learning more about dating habits in society and more broadly, what people say they like versus what they actually like, I would recommend you read this book.

• One of my favorite meta takeaways from this book is that directly observing people’s behaviours is much more effective than asking them due to the Hawthorne effect
• Essentially, if you ask someone on the phone, “Would you date someone from a different race than you?” some people may lie and say yes because it’s the socially desirable thing to say, even though they would only date people of the same race.
• However, if you just observed their behaviour on a dating site and tracked how often they messaged people of opposing races, that would be a lot more instructive
• “men and women experience beauty unequally” [128]

How to be a Capitalist without Any Capital (full notes, buy on Amazon)

How to be a Capitalist without Any Capital by Nathan Latka is a book about how to start building wealth when you don’t have any money.

Very tactical and highly actionable, though I occasionally got a bit of salesy, used-car salesman, penny-pinching, vibes and there are some micro-optimizations and “hacks” that I feel may not even make a meaningful impact on building long-term wealth.

However, I would remind readers that the best way to build long-term wealth, in my opinion is to make something people want. Give people value in order to get what you want.

Shows a picture of his tax return [6]

• Offers a lot of interesting insights on how to watch your competitors are doing and how to learn from them (similar web, todoist, ahrefs, semrush, siftery) [214]
• I found it very interesting how he alludes to Software Private equity being his next big move [249]
• I am also bullish on technology/software private equity, I actually took a private equity course in business school (course review of the private equity class is coming soon, subscribe to my blog to get notified when it comes out)
• I remember reading a stat somewhere that the best performing private equity firms were technology/software focused: Vista Equity partners led the group (maybe this is cyclical) but there’s a lot of untapped opportunity in software still. It feels like we are at peak SAAS but sometimes it seems like we have barely even scratched surface.

Scott Adams explains the different tactics and persuasion moves that Donald Trump used to win the 2016 US Elections. Most people were surprised by Trump’s win but he was on of the few people that predicted his win.

He references Robert Cialdini’s book, Influence a lot. I’ve read both and would recommend both books as they teach a lot about human behaviour but Scott Adams’ humorous writing style makes Win Bigly an easier, and very enjoyable read. Though, some of the conclusions are slightly depressing at first when the book makes you realize how irrational we humans can be, but then you feel liberated and happier because you have a better toolbox for understanding how the world works.

Even the book title is funny: “Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter”

The Soul of Basketball is about the 2010–11 NBA season from the perspective of Lebron James in Miami Heat, Doc Rivers coaching the Boston Celtics, Kobe Bryant in the Los Angeles Lakers and Dirk Nowitzki with the Dallas Mavericks.

I find the NBA to be such a fascinating league. I have recently become very interested in media, culture and where humans are spending the most attention. The NBA has done such an impressive job of innovating to stay culturally relevant and creating a platform for NBA players to be the most culturally relevant athletes with the most leverage in the modern era.

• Biggest takeaway from this book is the idea of leverage and the “player empowerment” movement in the NBA
• Lebron’s generation was the “AAU” generation: players who were told they were great and already had a platform in high school BEFORE they played an NBA game [12, 26 74,]
• NBA talent like most social things in life follow a power law distribution
• In simplest terms: the best 20 players in the NBA probably have 80% of the market value or 80% of the “championship winning talent”
• A lot of very interesting anecdotes on how Mark Cuban “disrupted” the NBA in terms of bringing more transparency to NBA officiating, and marketing as owner of Dallas Mavericks [96].

You can also read the original article on my blog.

Originally published at https://blog.tomiwa.ca on January 8, 2020.

In a world with so much information how do you sort through all the noise and make sense of what actually matters? Here are my notes from The Organized Mind by Daniel Levitin which aims to answer that question.

For the month of May I read the book The Organized Mind by Daniel Levitin. I actually originally went to the library to read Presuasion but came across this book when I saw the byline/subtitle: “Thinking Straight in an Age of Information Overload”. I sometimes feel like I am bombarded by so much information and keeping my head organized with all this information can be a challenge. I was intrigued to see a book that helped address this issue.

Original book summary: https://blog.tomiwa.ca/the-organized-mind-summary-notes-and-review/

You can find all my book notes on my blog: https://blog.tomiwa.ca/tag/books/

You can find book notes drafts on my Github: https://github.com/ademidun/book-notes

Summary

• “AI/social media/ the internet is ruining everything”, they said the same thing about books and the printing press [14]
• Why Multitasking is overrated and the true cost of multitasking [16]
• Using Bayesian probability to make smarter bets [229]
• A framework to use for deciding wether to undergo a surgery procedure [240]
• How to lie with statistic [247]
• How to teach children to thrive in an information society
• The role of doctors in modern medicine, why some doctors justify lying to their patients and why most doctors may end up getting replaced by machine learning algorithms [249]
• How to organize your digital files: Make search a forethought, how will I look for this when I need it [320]
• The importance of developing both the left and right side of your brain, why National Cancer Institute invited artists to a cancer brainstorming session
• The story of Salvatore Iaconesi, an engineer that open sourced his medical data to help crowdsource solutions to his cancer [380]
• How a team of MIT scientists found 10 balloons hidden by US Military DARPA hidden across America [114]
• Do wet roads cause rain? Correlation vs Causation [348]
• Sleeping more efficiently with bimodal sleep [189]

Books are Evil

When the written word was introduced 5,000 years ago people complained that it would ruin society. [14]

Many of these similarities sound interestingly similar to many of the complaints people have about modern technology.

People said it would make people lazy, how would you detect fake news, they worried the technology could rot the mind.

Plato’s King Thamus decried: dependence on written would “weaken men’s characters and create forgetfulness in their souls”.

Greek poet, Callimachus said books were a “great evil”. Roman Philosopher Seneca said that “the abundance of books is a distraction”.

When the printing press came in the 1400s, many complained that this was was the end of intellectual life. Erasmus complained that there were a swarm of books. Leibniz said there was a “horrible mass of books that keeps on growing” which would cause a “return to barbarism”. Descartes recommended ignoring accumulated texts and instead relying on one’s observations.

These are all very smart people, yet they were unable to see the benefit of books

This is very prescient because the current vogue thing to do is complain that technology and social media is making our society worse. When in reality these technologies, for the most part are making our societies better and the real problem is how humans occasionally misuse them.

This is why I like to study history, because the more lessons I can draw from the past. I can get a clearer understanding of what happens in our modern society.

Attentional Switching, Why Multi Tasking is Overrated

Levitin makes a point about how attention is a limited-capacity resource and there is a cost when you switch your attention between multiple tasks. This is why I always tell people that multi tasking is massively overrated and really what most people is doing a series of tasks individually but switching back and forth between them and thus doing neither effectively. If you want to be very productive, I personally recommend focus on one task, finish the task, then switch to another task. [15]

Down the Categorization Rabbit Hole

The author spends a lot of pages talking about the science and structure of categorization [28]. Talking about how humans categorize words and why some languages have different words for animals and other languages only have 2 words to distinguish between land and sea animals. I think this section could have been shorter because I personally wasn’t interested in it but it’s hard to fault a book for such a subjective, personalized criticism.

I think there was a missed opportunity to add that Eskimos have 300 words for snow and the reason for why that is.

Our Brain Tries to Understand Our Brain

[Insert brain diagram from page 42]

An interesting thing about this book is that the author goes fairly deep on cognitive neuro-science which is a topic, along with genetics that I am gradually learning more about. There are some similarities between this book and Ray Dalio’s Principles which I have shared notes on as well.

I’m a bit conflicted because I feel like when explaining technical concepts you must walk a fine line between simplified enough for a general audience but rigorous enough to validate that your science is legitimate. I don’t know much about cognitive neuroscience yet but I wonder if we oversimplify our understanding of the brain.

I am also implementing a lot of neural network machine learning algorithms in my computer science research work with Atila so drawing parallels between the human brain’s biological neural net and a computer’s digital neural net is very interesting exercise in multidisciplinary, latticework thinking, if you find this interesting strongly encourage you to check out Charlie Munger’s latticework of mental models.

Story Time: DARPA Missing balloons.

The story he tells on page 114 is one of the best stories I have ever read in a book [114]:

In December 2009, The US military advanced research Group (DARPA) offered $40,000 to anyone who could find the 10 balloons they had placed around the United States. This is the same group that created the internet, or at least the model for what became the internet.

A lot of very smart researchers involved pointed out that traditional intelligence gathering techniques would not work.

A team from MIT was able to solve the challenge in under nine hours. I also have to personally add that their solution was extremely clever. How did they do it?

Aside: Before you keep reading, I would encourage you to take about a minute to think about how you would solve this problem. Imagine you have been tasked to find 10 balloons placed in plain sight all over your country, how would you go about solving this problem?

The MIT team allocated $4,000 to finding each balloon. If you found the right balloon you would get $2,000. If you recruited a friend to join the program, your friend would get $2,000 and you would get $1,000. If a friend of the friend you recruited found the balloon, you would get $500 and so on. It took 4,6665 people less than nine hours to find all the balloons. If that’s not genius, I don’t know what is!

This to me was so fascinating. The author cleverly draws connections to how the same idea inspires things like Wikipedia and Kickstarter. I also drew parallels behind how this idea of collaboration and incentives, inspires the crowdsourced scholarships and media content on Atila.

Interesting anecdote on an engineer, Salvatore Iaconesi who open sourced his medical records to find treatment options for his brain cancer. [118]

Levitin says that sleeping 6–8 hours a day is a relatively modern invention and that our ancestors did segmented or bimodal sleeping. They would sleep four or five hours after dinner, stay awake for one or more hours in the middle of the night, then another four or five hour round of sleep. [189]

I just think this is an interesting experiment to try and for people who have trouble sleeping or feeling rested after sleeping, this might help.

Quick puzzle for you!

What word can be joined to all of these to make three new words? [201]

crab sauce pine

A tennis player named John McEnroe used to compliment players on things they were doing well, drawing attention to it, the player would overthink it and start messing up.[207]

Sompe simple tactics for getting things done and productivity [211]

• if something takes up mind space, write it down
• take walks every once in a while
• Schedule some form of daily physical activity
• if something takes more than five minutes, do it now
• Figure out what your time is subjectively worth, so you can spend time more efficiently by asking “does it make sense to just pay someone $50 to do this for me” (E.g. I used to pay my sisters to wash the dishes when it was my turn. My mom hates when I do this. )

Life Time (Or how to Stay Young) [215]

• As people get older they often perceive that time is racing by
• Often because their cognitive processes also start to slow down so life feels like it is going quickly
• Younger people tend to view life as open ended and discover what they like
• Older people view life as constrained and want to preserve what they already know they like
• One way to stay young mentally and physically is to keep your mind and body interactive
• Learn a new hobby, spend at least an hour a day socializing, one hour of physical activity a day
• As people start to live longer, healthier lives, (and outsourcing and automation continues to progress) I thank that the “post retirement rebranding” will result in more people having the opportunity to retrain themselves later in their lives

Organizing Information for the Hardest Decisions

This section was really good and a bit intense. He talks about how to organize information for the very important decisions in your life, your health and the health of those around you.

This is just a preview of my summary for this book, you can read the rest of the summary on my blog.

Paul is an incoming management consultant at Bain and Company. Before that he was an investment banking summer analyst at RBC after declining an interview at Goldman Sachs and founder of a food delivery company called Dine Easy. He is currently in his final year in the honours business program at the Ivey Business School.

In this episode we talk about why he chose investment banking and consulting and if he was chasing prestige or doing what he genuinely enjoyed. We talked about how he feels when people say “you only got an opportunity because you’re black or because you’re a woman”, why he left banking to join consulting and much more.

Full interview at Atila.ca

Timestamp

• “You’re doing banking and consulting, the two most stereotypical, cliche business school careers. How much of that is your genuine passion versus doing it for prestige/clout?” — 32:25
• How do you feel when people say “you only got that because you’re black” or “you only got that because you’re a woman”? — 14:15 [highlights]
• Why he turned down Goldman Sachs and Moelis interviews to work at RBC — 14:00 [highlights]
• How he got an investment analyst internship at Scotiabank after just first year in university — 9:36
• Why he moved into consulting and left banking? — 20:40
• Banking being a good old boy’s club, having to conform and leave his identity at the door — 20:00
• “This is without a doubt The craziest week of my entire life…” — 26:00
• How he got the investment banking job at RBC — 13:00
• How he got the management consulting job at Bain — 21:05
• How he knew consulting was right for him and the consulting interview process — 35:35
• Where do you see yourself 1, 5 and 25 years from now? 37:40
• Why did you start Dine Easy and what did you learn from its successes and failures? — 42:09

Links

Watch Full Video

Listen on Spotify

Listen on iTunes

• Paul’s LinkedIn: https://ca.linkedin.com/in/paulokundaye
• Tomiwa’s twitter, @tomiwa1a: https://twitter.com/tomiwa1a
• Atila TV Instagram, @atilatech: https://www.instagram.com/atilatech/
• The scholarship Paul won to get the RBC investment banking role: https://atila.ca/scholarship/rbc-capital-markets-diversity-scholarship
• Paul’s Application for the RBC Scholarship: https://atila.ca/essay/OkPaul/rbc-general-and-capital-markets-diversity-scholarships-2017
• The Two books that Paul is currently obsessed with:
• Factfulness — Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World: https://amzn.to/2Oi8jpu
• The Order of Time Book: https://amzn.to/2Oi8EZi
• Gates Notes: https://www.gatesnotes.com/

Consulting and Banking for Prestige versus Passion and Interview Prep

Tomiwa Ademidun: Now I have to ask you this. You’ve doing banking and consulting, the two most stereotypical, cliche business school careers. So my question now is how much of you going into banking and consulting is just doing what everyone else is doing, all the other smart people are doing it, sort of doing it for “clout” versus it being your genuine passion and something you enjoy?” — [32:25]

Paul Okundaye: 100% and that’s a teeter totter you have to be real with yourself. With banking again, I realize now that hindsight is 20/20 a lot of me going into banking was #1, I love math and I love whole= problem solving, analytical stuff. I actually enjoy that part of banking, building the models.

But I realized that on the whole I was mostly going into banking because it was the most prestigious job and this is the thing people starting to discuss now is Prestige chasing just for the sake of it. “Oh I’m going to do banking because it’s the quote top job’ for someone coming out of business school. You can make the same argument for consulting as well.

I genuinely think I’m a lot happier with my choice for me specifically. Again, this is something that is person dependent. I have a lot of friends who are going into banking who absolutely love it. One of my coworkers at RBC this summer we used to call him the banking robot, he’s in the program at McGill that only accepts like 20 people, Portfolio management program. So this guy loves it, he asks to stay at late as possible. So if that’s you, screw what I’m saying, screw what everyone else is saying, do it. You need to be real with yourself and I realized that wasn’t me. There is diminishing marginal returns on the nth dollar when you get to a certain point.

I actually did the math obviously before I switched into consulting. I looked at my pay cheque from RBC and the hours I was working and I looked at my paycheque from Bain and the hours I would be working at Bain and it was proportional. At RBC I’d probably be working around 90 hours, at Bain around 60–70 and the pay ended up being proportional.

TA: But that’s entry level salary. With banking, long term you make more money.

PO: But my point though is that the grind part is at the entry level. Once you’ve Done your two years in banking it gets easier. But you’re selling yourself for two years. Don’t fool yourself it’s a tax, You have to accept that. Do I like it enough that I’m willing to pay that tax. That is something where I was real to myself off where I said I would rather have my weekends off and take less money and leave the office every day at 7 or 8. Instead of leaving the office at 11, 12 1am

TA: But on the consulting part. We both have a lot of friends that want to go into consulting, MBB not so much they enjoy doing it but all their friends are doing it. All the smart people are doing it. So for you how much of you going into consulting is because it has a lot of clout, it’s going to look good on my LinkedIn, versus consulting is what I enjoy doing? [35:15]

PO: Don’t fool yourself there is always a base level of I need to progress, I want to go to business school or I want to be successful and knowing a brand name MBB on your resume helps. But at the same time, the key part and the distinction for me why I knew that consulting was right was the interview prep process. SO preparing for banking versus preparing for consulting, I actually enjoyed preparing for consulting and that was the key part for me.

For banking I needed to learn how did I build a DCF and all that stuff. Banking it’s just like recall. Its deterministic, its 1+1 =2, there’s always a right answer. But consulting by definition you need to be a jack of all trades.

How I prepared myself was that I lived downtown when I was working there for the summer. So when i walked home from work, i would see a business and try to analyze it from the outside. Based on how many people are in there right now, it’s 7 o’clock, I look at this neighbourhood, this is the traffic flow, is this a good business. Now I can’t turn by brain off , but I found I really liked that process.

Or even doing case interviews, I would do a practice interview with someone, they would give me a business case, I would use my problem solving to figure out is this the right option for them. I would make mistakes and learn from them. That process was how I knew I actually liked consulting. Because if I was just doing it for the clout chase and I didn’t like it, I would have done it anyway. I would have been like this sucks, this prep sucks but I have to do it for the prestige. That’s how banking was. That’s how I realized that I didn’t like the prep for banking, I was good at it but i didn’t enjoy. That’s the distinction for me.

You Only Got That Job Because You’re Black

Tomiwa Ademidun: You mentioned the diversity scholarship. One thing that’s controversial right now is the idea of “you only got this because you’re black” As someone who got a job through the diversity program. How do you feel when people make comments like that. [13:55]

Paul Okundaye: Well I tell them that I turned down two interviews at Goldman Sachs LA and Moelis and Company LA. I had the interviews, I knew I didn’t want to work there. Actually, let me put it this way. For me personally, I don’t like the united States, I couldn’t see myself living there long. So initially when I was looking at these banking jobs and I networked with Goldman and Moelis, my thought process was. Okay, it’s pretty stupid but I’m going to get a job in LA so I can do the “LA flex” for the summer and then come back to Toronto full time. Then I was like if I want to come back to Toronto full time , where’s the best bank in Canada to work for? RBC.

My Goldman and Moelis interviews were set for August and I signed for RBC in July. When I ended up getting the job I thought, How stupid would I be if I turned RBC now just go “flex in LA” for the summer just to try and come back to RBC again next year. So with the whole diversity affirmative action. People say you get this job because you’re this or you get the job because you’re that. Well, how many other opportunities did I not get because I’m black or did I not get because someone saw my name, that looks like a complicated last name you’re [resume is]going in the no pile.

I’m not saying it’s a perfect system but its the reality of the situation. Like I said earlier, life is not fair. We all get dealt the poker hands we get dealt with. Some of us have to use our uncles because we have those uncles. People like me that don’t have those uncles, this is ur way.

What are You Currently Obsessed With?

TA: Now we’re coming to the last part of the interview. There’s a question I like to ask called what are you currently obsessed with? This can be anything. It can be a new workout at the gym, a new Youtube channel, a new Instagram, a new restaurant, a book, podcast anything. What are you currently obsessed with? [48:15]

PO: Definitely a book. The last book I read, no the current one but the one before that. I read a lot, I’m a voracious reader. One of the last books I read is called Factfulness by Hans Rosling. Bill Gates has this website called Gates Notes and I’m a follower of that and every year he publishes the best book of the year and that was one of those. The book talks about Factfulness and ten reasons we’re wrong about the world is. Ten reasons why the world is better than we think it is. Humans tend to have this negativity, nostalgia bias. Every generation says in my good old days and we always tend to think the world was better than it is now. So unfortunately this guy died recently, but he was a scientist of Sweden who went to the top of his career and presenting to the who is who of why they are all wrong about the word. So he’s giving key facts. So let me ask you if the average man right now goes to school for 10 year,s how long average woman goes to school for?

TA: Six.

PO: Nine. Exactly, so these are the things he talks about. Or what do you think the literacy rate is for children in developing countries. 20%, 40% or 80%.

TA: 40%

PO: 80%. Not to pick on you, I was wrong on all them too. So this is the format he presents the book in. He will posit this question to you and show you why your negativity bias is wrong.

TA: Yeah, because all my answers were all negative than the actual answer

PO: Yeah, so that is a cognitive bias we have. The book doesn’t just talk about facts, it talks about how can you navigate this post truth era we live in. How can you contextualize and use facts and knowledge as your weapon. It was fantastic, I highly recommend it . Factfulness, by Hans Rosen

TA; I’ll link it. What book are you currently reading now. W

PO: Currently I’m reading The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli.

TA: What’s the best way to reach you?

PO: Facebook

TA: We’ll also link your LinkedIn because that is very public facing.

Closing General Advice

“If you are already the person that you want to be today, then what are you striving for?”

TA: The final question, I’m still working on this question, so bear with me. I will ask two questions, pick which one you want to answer. Paul at 16, what would you tell your younger self. Or you can answer from the perspective of someone watching this right now, piece of advice you want to give them. [53:15]

PO: I think I’ll go with the second one because I’m mostly happy with how things have turned out. In terms of anyone watching this. I’m going to assume you are between grade 12 to second year. That’s the vantage point I’m giving this advice. Because I feel like I’m not in any position to give anyone my age advice, what do I know?

For grade 12 to second year, get involved! Get involved , get involved, get involved. It doesn’t matter what it is, find something you’re interested or passionate about and make an impact. It’s not enough to be a general member. It’s not enough to be a “researcher” and attend meetings. Find somewhere you can make an impact where you can get that feeling. Like I did when i went home and I laid down and I said, wow I just did something, I just made a difference. That feeling you can’t fabricate it right. Don’t think about I’m doing this to get the resume, the resume and the professional experience come after you get that feeling not before. Don’t put the horse before the cart. Do things because you’re interested in them because you make an impact and feel good. Then that impact will help you succeed. Don’t do things because you want to succeed. Make an impact and then you’ll succeed.

TA: You know how you said you wanted to do three things when you graduate. I think you should add a fourth one, motivational speaker. That was fantastic advice. Also, to add on to what Paul said, that advice does not only apply to people in high school or university or younger than Paul. At any age you’re in, even if you’re working a full time job, get involved in the community, get involved in things you’re interested in. It will always be useful to you down the line

PO: And be a lifelong learner. Never stop you have to constantly keep iterating because I’ll repeat what my friend said to be because it really stuck with me. So at Ivey we have this scholarship called the Entrepreneurship scholarship and I was fortunate enough to get one. Zak, who we both know. Everyone had to give a 3 minute speech and he said this and it really resonated with me, “If you are already the person that you want to be today, then what are you striving for?” You have to be a lifelong learner, you have to constantly improve, constantly iterate, then make an impact.

TA: Well said, Paul thanks for joining us men

PO: Thanks for having me, this was great, I hope it was great for you guys as well.

TA: We’ll catch you guys on the next episode of Atila TV, peace!

Full interview at Atila.ca

Bain Consulting, RBC Investment Banking, Ivey Business School and Why he declined Goldman Sachs… was originally published in Atila Tech on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Ruth Grace Wong joins us on this episode of Atila TV to talk about her path from getting rejected from medical school twice, to doing a Master’s in computational biochemistry and working as a software engineer at top technology companies such as Google and Pinterest.

She also talks about advice for people who want to either become doctors or work in the tech industry, her work as a Manufacturing engineer/maker, what volunteering at a hospice taught her about compassion and gratitude, working at a larger versus smaller company, advice for females in tech and much more.

Note: This transcript has been summarized for brevity, if you would like to help transcribe the full interview, edit videos or help Atila TV in any way, please send an email to tomiwa@atila.ca.

Watch on Youtube

Podcast:

Listen on Spotify

Listen on iTunes

Timestamps

• What were you like in high school? [1:50]
• Why she switched from wanting to studying to CS to wanting to be a doctor in high school? [2:45]
• Advice for people who want to go to medical school? [5:50]
• Learning compassion, empathy and gratitude from volunteering at a Hospice [7:30]
• How did you feel after getting rejected from medical school and what did you plan to do next? [8:30]
• How did you get the Google internship? [8:30]
• How did you get the Pinterest Job? [11:55]
• Software engineer by day, manufacturing engineer and maker by night [14:40]
• Lessons learnt from successful and failed projects? [16:50]
• Working for startup versus big companies versus starting your own company? [18:45]
• Advice for females in tech on taking more opportunities? [22:45]
• How to network and prepare for interviews for a top tech company? [25:45]
• How Ruth plans on raising kids while furthering her career? [28:25]
• What is Ruth currently obsessed with? [30:00]
• General life advice [32:40]

Links

• Ruth’s Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ruthgracewong
• Ruth’s Website: https://ruthgracewong.com/
• Ecoqube: https://getecoqube.com/
• Leave Me Alone Sweater: https://www.boredpanda.com/diy-leave-me-alone-sweater-ruthgrace/
• https://www.betabrand.com/leave-me-alone-sweater?sscid=11k3_74m8x
• The Egg Machine Ruth is obsessed with: Dash Rapid Egg Cooker https://amzn.to/2RFjvRi

Tomiwa: Ruth at 16. What were you like in high school? [1:50]

Ruth: [laughs]I was such a weird kid.

Tomiwa: The implication is that you’re not weird now [laughs].

RUth: I’m still wierd but I’m more comfortable with it, I think.

Tomiwa: Good Answer

Ruth: I liked to read. In tenth grade I took a civics class where I picked a career and budget my life based on that career and I picked CS but for some reasons I switched to wanting to be a doctor. After I realized I was not going to get into medical school, I went back to wanting to be a computer scientist.

Tomiwa: You said for some reason. What was that “for some reason” that you switched from computer science to wanting to be a doctor.

RUth: I don’t know. I liked computer science, i was taking classes in high school . I went to Earl Haig. My ninth grade tech teacher knew that I liked it and was decent at it. He told my tenth grade teacher and I skipped a grade after taking a test and I was feeling really good about how well I was doing.

I think gettin closer to University- My dad’s a doctor and he’s very happy. I think most of the doctors I know are really happy and really fulfilled and really successful. He wanted me to be a doctor and everyone wants to help people.

Tomiwa: Another thing that is very common is that people who are studying pre med but can’t get into medical school, they have to go and get a master’s degree so they can get a job…

Ruth: Yeah, that’s what I did.

Getting Into Medical School

Tomiwa: We’ll get to that. Do you have any advice for people who are aspiring doctors?

Ruth: If you want to go into medical school, it’s important to focus on your resume and extracurriculars. I encourage people to go into programs that they actually like and they have a passion for. That way even if they don’t get into medical school they won’t feel like it was for nothing and you’ll still have skills and relationships that you’ll be happy with no matter what.

For example, I did some extracurriculars that were really meaningful. I volunteered close to St. Joseph’s near Western. That was really good life perspective.

Tomiwa: In what sense?

Ruth: The people who work there are so compassionate and so empathetic. It’s definitely to strive for and something you wouldn’t’ see elsewhere. And having the experience of taking care of other people, it takes you out of your own problems. You’re like “Okay, whatever stuff I am sad about or upset about is not that big of a deal in the long run”. It gives you a nice centering and perspective.

From Medical School Rejection to Google and Pinterest

Tomiwa: So at that point when you didn’t get into medical school, I’m guessing you’re feeling a bit dejected? How are you feeling at that point and how are you thinking about “okay, What am i going to do next?”

Ruth: After I finished my undergrad degree, I did Google Summer of code. At the beginning of my university I worked at a mouse lab doing wet lab work. For my thesis [project I worked at a bioinformatics lab getting into more computational work. Also, my degree was specifically an honours specialization in computational biochemistry so I was like okay if I don’t get into medical school at least it has the word computer in the name so maybe I can do that. So I applied to google summer of code. There was a lab there, I believe bader lba from U of T that had an open source project called medsavant and some f the doctors at sick Kids used it because the kids have genetic disorders. So they can use the software to find what kind of single point mutations the kids might have and what protein/metabolic pathways that can affect,

So I signed up for that lab so because it was something I had some experience in, even though it was my first paid programming gig, I was able to get into there. Then the summer afterwards I was referred for actual google. So I interned there in the middle of my master’s degree and then after graduating my master’s degree I ended up at Pinterest.

Tomiwa: Why did you decide to do a master’s degree?

Ruth: At the end of my fourth year, I knew that I hadn’t gotten into medical school for the second time. So I knew I had to do something where if I didn’t get into medical school it would still work out.

So during my master’s degree I built up computer science skills. The master’s degree was programming because it was bioinformatics. Only a bit of wet lab work doing PCRs and DNA but most of it was programming. So during the master’s I was able to intern at Google and do Google Summer of Code.

Tomiwa: So you intern at Google a couple of times and you get a sign back offer to go back full time?

Ruth: After my internship, I did the exit interviews and I totally bombed one of them. So I didn’t get a regular full time offer. I got an engineering residency full time offer.Where you do some projects and coursework then like 97% of people who finish the program get a full time offer. Its meant for people who don’t have such a strong CS program.

So I got that offer, but because I got a regular full time offer from Pinterest., I didn’t need the Google residency offer.

Tomiwa: How did the Pinterest opportunity come about and how did you prepare for that interview?

Ruth: I was following the algorithm I guess, were you apply for as many companies as you can in september; where you apply for as many companies as you can and you see what shakes out.

I went to Major league Hacking Hack the Planet Hackathon in 2015 I think, in the computer history museum which was really cool. At the hackathon, three was the Andreessen Horowitz talent agency looking for student to put in their talent pool that they would refer to the startups they would invest in. So one of the MLH staff referred me for that and they got me in touch with Pinterest. I also went to Grace Hopper, which was funded by Google, after my internship, they paid for me to go to Grace Hopper and I was able to get some more interviews that way.

I did onsite and Facebook, Uber, Dropbox and Pinterest.

Tomiwa: Did you get offers to any of those companies or was it only Pinterest?

Ruth: I got an offer for Uber but didn’t end up taking it.

Tomiwa: Why did you pick Pinterest over Uber

Ruth: [thinks]

Tomiwa: if it’s money you can say money.

Ruth: [laughs] Definitely money, definitely money. Uber didn’t negotiate. But I also had a better interviewing experience at Pinterest over Uber and Pinterest had more mentoring opportunities.

Software Engineer by Day, Maker and Manufacturing Engineer by Night

Tomiwa: So that’s your “work” life. I know on your Linkedin it says Site Reliability engineer by day, maker by night. Tell us more about the maker part of your life.

Ruth: Oh, I should update it to say manufacturing engineer. I haven’t told my manager this yet, if he googles me he will find out. I have a part time job as a manufacturing engineer. I am working for my friend’s company. Their flagship product is ecoqube. They make hydroponic and aquaponic desktop kits. So little gardens that water themselves. This has been a process for me.

So I came to San Francisco in summer of 2016 after finishing my master’s. I went to a conference called Effective Altruism Global. They had this event there called Hamming Circles, where you figure out the biggest problem in your life and the other people in the group of 4 or 5 spend 10–15 minutes helping you just figure out.

Reflecting on it. I was like the reason I really like this position at Pinterest is because its software at scale. I feel like if I’m going to make an outsize impact there’s only a few fields that allow for that. So software at scale is one of those. For example, what we’re doing at Pinterest where there’s thousands of servers but there’s only one or dozen site reliability engineers so you basically have to automate and build systems to manage everything. That’s software at scale.

Other fields you can make an impact are shipping logistics. So how stuff moves around the world. So inequality around the world is not a matter of not having enough, but tis about distribution.

Another one is manufacturing. So how do you get hardware objects made at scale. So knowing I Really liked making things with my hand in my spare time, I really wanted to get into that. So that’s what I’ve been doing. SRE by day Manufacturing engineer by night.

Tomiwa: Off camera. Off air I guess you could say. I was asking you about things you’ve done in the past like the Leave me Alone sweater, the Growbox. You said that you stopped it because they all failed and you then you had to start making money. So tell us about projects you’ve made in the past and what you’ve learned from both your successes and your failures.

Ruth: Let’s see. I decided that I wanted to do that in summer of 2016. The first project I wanted to try my hand at manufacturing was the grow bucket. This was based off space buckets, which is a very popular subreddit. Where there is a community of people who grow mostly marijuana, but you can grow anything. Some people grow cherry tomatoes, hot peppers, that kind of thing, inside 5 gallon buckets. You install lights, fan, maybe a carbon filter and then you grow inside.

So I wanted to make a kit that was affordable, kind of a DIY kit. I was using buckets that I got from local bakeries, so they were food save, i just had to clear them out. I bought enough for a 100 kits or maybe 50 kits and then because I was buying the lightbulb and extension cord etc. in bulk I was able to get my cost down to $30 and I wanted to sell the kit for $50 and I went to maker faire. I think the problem is that people don’t want to do things that are DIY, like buckets that have been used by bakeries before. They want a more finished project. So I sold 1 or two and that was it. I had to recycle the other buckets.

Tomiwa: If someone is in a transition period in grade 12, graduating university, thinking about switching jobs and trying to decide what to do next. Do you have any advice for them?

Ruth: I think it’s not that important to have a comprehensive life strategy. Its okay to figure it out as you go along and the important thing is not to worry too much about if you’re doing the right thing. The important thing is to try a lot of things and something will stick. Like “Okay this is what I like, this is what I’m good at”

Tomwa: Looking at your story for example…

Ruth:

Like, I’m not qualified for any of the jobs I take. The team that I interned on at Google was SRE on the persistent disk team. I came in the first day, my mentor was like do you know what a file system is. I said I think I do, but I don’t think I understand it the way you do. I hadn’t taken a computer architecture course at all. That was such a struggle, like it was in C++ even at the end of my internship I was googling “What’s the difference between an asterisk and ampersand ?”

Advice for Females in Tech Industry

Tomiwa: I’m actually glad you brought that up. There’s a statistic out there, I’m going to make up the numbers but you’ll get the general idea. Where 87% of guys will apply for a job they’re not qualified for. But a lot of time women may not apply for a job unless they meet all the qualifications

Ruth: The way I heard it is that the average guy will apply for a job that their 75% qualified for but the average woman will only apply to 100% qualified.

Tomiwa: Do you want to speak to that. Especially working in the tech space. For women or any females watching this. The importance of just taking the risk and putting yourself out there.

Ruth: Yeah! Just apply, don’t be afraid. You can even be smart about it, you don’t have to throw your resume into the void. You can find somebody who knows somebody who works at the company you’re interested in and be like I really like your company and I want to talk to you about it. You can get some information on what candidat their looking for and if you can apply now or spend some time furthering a skill before applying to your dream job. I really encourage you to just try.

Tomiwa: If someone’s trying to decide between a big company like a google or a Facebook. Where the company itself may have more impact but I have a smaller role. Or should I go work for a smaller company. The tradeoffs between a larger vs smaller company.

Ruth: My husband and I actually have opposite opinions on this. For me, working for a larger company was great because they have a lot of infrastructure around mentorship and you can work with a lot of senior people. I don’t have a CS degree I feel really out of place here, for my master’s I was doing scripting in R which is not software engineering.

I do feel like based on the other senior people on my team, as I progress in my career it would be good for me to work at smaller, less operational mature companies to get my chops. But then the way my husband ended up doing it; he had a React textbook and he read it and made a project in React on the side. Then he got hired by Locust 21 , startup in Waterloo, then he got hired by Top Hat then he got his job at Cruise, he’s trying to come out to join me because I was in SF for a year. He went the opposite, where he’s going from a slightly small company, to bigger to bigger.

The way he did that was he made himself good at a technology that was hot. React is a software development framework that’s hot right now. So you can go either way.

What to Study and How to Network for a Tech Career

Tomiwa: The thing you mentioned about studying what’s hot right now. People ask, what’s the hot thing right now that I should study. I’m sort of thinking just pick what you’re most interested in. Most software engineering roles, if you’re a python expert and your company uses Ruby on Rails they’ll still hire you if you are good at learning things fast. But people will ask this question so I want to give them an answer. If people are thinking what should I study, what’s the hot new thing that makes the money. What advice would you give?

Ruth: Talk to people working in your industry. Figure out what your dream job is. Figure out what you need to get there.

TOmiwa: For example, for SRE I know Devops is big right now, docker etc. If someone wants to work as a SRE what are some hot things they should be looking at?

Ruth: Its difficult because for SRE at scale, you can’t really do it as a side project. Sure you can spink up a docker container and get some familiarity there it’s not going to be the same…

Tomiwa: Actually you know what, sorry, scrap that question. Forget about that question. The better question is, I don’t know if I already asked this but whatever we’ll do it live. If someone wants to work for software engineer at a tech company what should they be doing right now.

Ruth: It depends on the company. If its a large company Google, Facebook, Amazon, Pinterest, there’s an application timeline and basically there’s an algorithm to get in. You put in your application for August or September. You study really hard. You read the bible, which is Cracking the Coding Interview in this context and you just spend a lot of time just grinding on questions. I think it will take a few months to get good. Of studying really hard and forsaking some of your grades because this is more important. And then you go for the coding interview. I think Even at my best I would fail one out of 3 onsite interviews.

Study hard. Apply wide.

Tomiwa: Any advice on how to network? [28:15]

Ruth: Hackathons, meetups. It’s super, super important to talk to people who are actually working in the industry, the company that you want to work for. There is so much insider information right? It’s like studying really hard for the coding interview. Students don’t know that they need to do that. They don’t know what to expect in terms of how long it will take to get good at this. So it’s really easy to start and be like “Oh I’m not cut out for this”. I’m just bad at this.” But like no, it takes everybody a long time to get good. People are just grinding harder than you… and forsaking their school to do it.

Long Term Plan (1,5 25 years): Raising a Family While Building a Career

Tomiwa: There’s a question that I might scrap but I might keep it because it gets some interesting responses. Its the 1,5,25. What would you like to be doing, where do you see yourself 1 year, 5 years and 25 years from now?

Ruth: Oh gosh, So I got married this summer and we are actually expecting a baby in May.

Tomiwa: Double congratulations!

Ruth: Thank you. My thinking about this is that I’m into SRE and manufacturing engineering. It’s going to take me a long time to get really good at these things. To the level that I want to be at. To the level where you are a senior engineer and you can really pick and choose the impact that you want to make.

So I am hoping that while I raise kids, I can build those skills. And then i have a few people at work, whose kids are like seven years younger then me. So they’re almost my parents age and their emazing engineers, still being so productive, they know so much and so good at what they do. So I’m like they had kids when they were my age and their still working adns till productive and their kids old enough to take care of themselves. I think it will be good for me to have kids now and slowly build up my skills as I go along and then really have the impact I want, when my kids are old enough to take care of themselves.

What are you Currently Obsessed with?

Tomiwa: There’s a question that I found recently from the Gary Vaynerchuk Youtube channel. The question is what are you currently obsessed with. This can be anything. It can be apodcast, a new book, Youtube channel, Instagram account, restaurant, activity, anything. What are you currently obsessed with?

Ruth: A bit of context, I mentioned that I have this manufacturing engineering job and it actually pays money so I’m not negative on my projects now in terms of money. But I got it because I was working on this growbucket project, and someone introduced me to Kevin who is the CEO of ecoqube. I was joining their engineering meetings for a few months. He invited me to go to China with him for a few weeks. I asked my manager, please please can I go. I did I was at their factory it was so cool, helping them develop their product, put it into production, then he hired me after that.

So I’m working there part time. So I’ve been thinking a lot about products and so one product that Robin my husband bought this year. It’s really simple its a device that cooks eggs. So you plug it in, there’s only one button, it’s the power button. There’s this little cup where if you want soft boiled eggs you put in a bit less water, if you want hard boiled eggs you put in more water.

There’s like a little plastic thing that you put the eggs on, it goe up to six eggs. There’s also a tool that you use to poke holes so it doesn’t explode.

When the water boils up it dings the timer and then your eggs are done and its perfect. Their exactly what you want every time and its so low effort. That has been a real inspiration for me. If you eat eggs everyday or every overt day, then this is huge. You are saving so much time and so much effort, so much mental energy of thinking about cooking. Its one product that does one thing, really well. So I’m like Okay, that’s something where if we have a product, I have to figure out what is it solving and make sure it solves that really well. Everything else is extraneous.

[Tomiwa’s Note: The egg Machine I THINK she is referring to is the Dash Rapid Egg Cooker.]

General Life Advice

Tomiwa: Second last question, is general life advice. To give some context before you answer this question. You mentioned something very, very interesting about working in a hospice. Then I know there was an article that went viral a while back about the nurse that interviewed a bunch of people asking if they have any regrets, in their final stages of their life, on their deathbed what have the learnt. Again, your answer does not have to be that deep or that profound. But any general life advice or career advice, anything you want to tell people what would tyou say?

Ruth: To not regret their life?

Tomiwa: No that’s what I’m saying. Based on your life so far, what are some of the biggest lessons learnt.

Ruth: I don’t know. I guess try not to worry so much.

Tomiwa: Nice, very simple…

Ruth: Well I’m in a very privileged position because I have a job that pays the bills and the job is 40 hours a week so I can spend my spare time doing whatever. So when you are in that position, if you’re in school ad you have student loans and you’re going to be okay. Don’t worry so much, spend your time furthering whatever you find interesting. It’s always worth it to try new things just in case you find something that is your place in the world.

Tomiwa: Awesome, so if anyone found anything you’re saying interesting and they want to talk to you a bit more how can they find you.

Ruth: Just Google me.

Tomiwa: You can also find her on LinkedIn,. I think LinkedIn is the safest route because its the most public facing and it’s the least creepy.

Ruth: I don’t’ check it super often but if you google Ruth Grace Wong and you find my contact information you can reach out to me.

Tomiwa: Ruth, thank you for your time.

That concludes our interview with Ruth. I hope you enjoyed it and got something useful out of it.

Here are some links on some of the topics we covered this episode:

Links

• Ruth’s Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ruthgracewong
• Ruth’s Website: https://ruthgracewong.com/
• Ecoqube: https://getecoqube.com/
• Leave Me Alone Sweater: https://www.boredpanda.com/diy-leave-me-alone-sweater-ruthgrace/
• https://www.betabrand.com/leave-me-alone-sweater?sscid=11k3_74m8x
• The Egg Machine Ruth is obsessed with: Dash Rapid Egg Cooker https://amzn.to/2RFjvRi

Note: This transcript has been summarized for brevity, if you would like to help transcribe the full interview, edit videos or help Atila TV in any way, please send an email to tomiwa@atila.ca.

From Medical School Rejection Twice to Google and Pinterest Software Engineer: Ruth Grace Wong —… was originally published in Atila Tech on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Note: If you don’t have time to read this whole article, skip to the Key Takeaways (or The “Do This” List). Its short, sweet, very actionable, and to the point.

Ray Dalio is one of the most successful investors of all time with a net worth of about $18.1 billion. The company he founded, Bridgewater is the world’s largest hedge fund with over $124.7 Billion in Assets under management. But that’s not the point.

The point, is that the hedge fund industry is one of the most secretive, competitive industries in the world. So when one of the most successful people in such an industry, is giving a glimpse into how his brain works and how he built Bridgewater, we should all try and see what lessons we can pick from his story and apply to our life.

This essay is a review of Ray Dalio’s Principles. I will split this essay into 2 parts: a review and high level summary of what the book is about and some actionable, key takeaways on things you can start or stop doing after you’ve read the book.

I’ve also included a lot of book recommendations because I learn via the latticework mental model(connecting what I just learnt to things I’ve learnt in the past) this helps me remember and understand things better.

Note: If you found this essay useful, I would really appreciate if you could please provide some feedback. This is my first time doing something like this and I want you to enjoy the next one even more. What books should I do next? Was it too long? Too many book recommendations? Less opinion and more review? Less review and more summary? Please let me know.

Personal Bias Disclaimer

I actually first read Principles about two years ago when I was recruiting for jobs in the finance industry. Back then it was a series of PDFs on the Bridgewater site. I have also interviewed at the company before in the past (long story, short, I ran into visa issues).

I am already very familiar with some of the ideas he presents with the article and I have already internalized and applied a lot of these principles over the last two years, so I found myself skimming many parts of the book as I had essentially already read them. Though, to make it more useful for you my steadfast reader, I will try to review the book through the lens of someone less familiar with his ideas.

Note: I am also an Amazon affiliates member.

Book Review and Summary

The book is organized into 3 sections: Where I’m coming From, Life Principles and Work Principles.

Where I’m Coming From

This part of the book is essentially an autobiography that details his life from birth (1949) to present day. Tracking his journey as a middle class child in Jackson Heights, New York City, who worked as a caddy at the local golf course and country club [note: fact check if that is true], which is how he first got introduced to the stock market (I think Carl Icahn has a similar story) The child of a jazz musician father and homemaker mother, he was a very mediocre student in high school and university because he didn’t excel at things that he was forced to do or when he didn’t know why he was doing something. He found motivation in financial markets, pulled himself together, got into Harvard business school, one thing led to another and the next thing you know he’s the head of the world’s largest hedge fund.

The most interesting part is witnessing how much economic history Bridgewater has lived through. He tells the story of Bunker Hunt (page 28) who was at one time the richest man in the world only to get ruined by large speculations when the price of Silver fell in March of 1980. Or the Mexican debt default of 1982 that almost collapsed the US economy and almost ruined Dalio and Bridgewater.

You get the sense that Dalio is a deep student of history, both by experience and by studying it. A lot of his decision making is based on well informed pattern matching, course correction and most importantly, systematically documenting those learnings into their trading algorithm, more on this later.

One thing I noticed about him is that he is very self-aware and spends a lot of time reflecting on his decisions. This is a recurring theme throughout the book; being honest with yourself and course correcting. His ability for deep, honest self-awareness reminds me very much of George Soros. I kept making this comparison while reading the book I would also recommend Soros’ The Alchemist of Finance and Soros on Soros for more on that topic.

My biggest complaint on this section is that even though I admire how much he opened up and transparent he was, I think he could have done more. More specifically, I felt like a lot of the times when he was opening up on a mistake he made there was still this thin veneer of spinning his flaws in a positive light. For example, when his closest friends took him out to dinner and said that other people found working with him unbearable because he would humiliate and belittle at them and make them feel unmotivated (page 62).

His conclusion from the dinner was that those people didn’t understand him well enough. Though I feel like a more honest self-assessment would be just accepting the fact that he probably just needed to work a bit more on finding the right balance between being nice and polite while being radically transparent.

It’s always very tough when public figures write books because they have a lot of reputation at stake so they can’t be fully transparent. For example, when talking about the 2008 financial crisis, I felt like he was trying to be very safe saying things like “the politicians tried their best, it was a tough situation etc”. Though, I feel like he is one of those people who had a front row seat and could have been very candid and transparent about what happened, key mistakes that were made and how to avoid making the same mistakes again.

Life Principles

Dalio does a great job of taking very broad ideas on the abstract concept of “how to live a meaningful life” and simplifying it into 5 key points:

1. Embrace Reality and Deal with it
2. Use the 5-Step Process to Get What You Want out of Life
3. Be Radically Open-minded
4. Understand that people are wired very differently
5. Learn how to make decisions effectively

Embrace Reality and Deal With It

The core of the first point is that to truly have a successful life we must have a deep, honest perception of reality and what is true. He introduces the formula: Dreams + Reality + Determination = A Successful Life. Of course, even reality and truth can be subjective so he recommends using the laws of natures and evolution, combined with inputs from others to get a more objective perception of reality.

Continuing with the trope of evolution, he mentions that Pain + Reflection = Progress and the way to develop yourself to the next level is by pushing past painful moments. Another point which is reminiscent of Soros who used to say that he performed at his best when he was under physical pain. Obviously, this should be taken with several grains of salt, but it’s an interesting point to think about.

Use the 5-Step Process to Get What You Want out of Life

This part is summarized very well in the first page of this section:

1. Have clear goals
2. Identify and don’t tolerate the problems that stand in the way of achieving those goals
3. Accurately diagnose the problems to get to their root causes
4. Design plans that will get you around them
5. Do what’s necessary to push these designs through to results

Be Radically Open-Minded (page 182)

Occasionally, when you read a book you learn a lot about a tangential field that you weren’t expecting to learn about. For this book, I learnt a lot about cognitive neuroscience and how the brain works. The big idea from this section is that your brain is composed of two “yous” the higher level you and lower level you. The lower-level you is the amygdala and the lower level you is the prefrontal cortex. Dalio does a great job of explaining how the lower level you is like an attack dog that acts subconsciously and emotionally against your higher level you which is acting logically and consciously.

He explains that when someone disagrees with you, your lower level you takes it as a personal attack and reacts angrily and emotionally. This happens subconsciously so when you try to explain your behavior, your explanations don’t make sense because your “deep-seated, hidden motivations are in control”. Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow is another great book I would recommend looking at if you find this section interesting.

Another big idea in this section is what he calls “radical open-mindedness”. Essentially, he challenges you to think about how willing you are to change your mind on something. He has some interesting concepts on how to identify and fix closed-mindedness:

“Triangulate your view with believable people who are willing to disagree”: When you have an opinion on something, find smart people who have different opinions and weigh their opinions against what you believe.

He lists seven signs of closed-mindedness, here are four of them:

1. You are more likely to make statements than ask questions
2. You focus more on being understood than on understanding others
3. You block others from speaking
4. You have trouble holding two thoughts simultaneously in your mind

Some suggestions he has on how to deal with open-mindedness:

1. Regularly use pain as your guide towards quality reflection: Mental pain happens when you are too attached to an idea and someone or something comes along and challenges it. Your amygdala (“lower level/emotional you”) will kick in and you become angry or irritated. Instead, use this as a clue that you might be wrong and think about the question in a thoughtful way.
2. Get to know your blind spots: Make a list of all the times you made bad decisions because you didn’t see something that other people saw. Ask others, especially those who saw what you missed to help you with the list. Write it on paper, tack it on a wall and stare at it. The next time you are about to make a decision in this area, make sure to consult others for their opinion.
3. Meditate: Dalio is a big advocate for Transcendental Meditation and believes that it helped make him more creative, calmer and provided him with better perspective. He mentions that it may not work for everyone but it worked for him so he just wants to pass it along.

Understand that people are wired very differently (page 204)

In this section he explains that people’s brains are wired very differently so we all perceive reality in distorted ways.

Side Note: While writing this on the bus home, I realized that this review is already 6 pages long in Google Docs and I have skipped so many parts. If you find any of this interesting I strongly encourage you to get the book or rent it from your library.

This chapter is very dense with a lot of good points, but in the interest of brevity I will pick the three ideas I found most interesting:

1. Meaningful work and meaningful relationships aren’t just nice to haves — they are genetically programmed in us: If you’re reading this you’re probably already vaguely aware that having loving relationships is the key to a happy life. But Dalio takes it a step further and says that there is science to back this up. He mentions two books; Subliminal by Leonard Mlodinow and The Meaning of Human Existence by Edward O. Wilson. He uses these two books to emphasize the point that the only real, fundamental difference between humans and other animals is our social ability to collaborate between large numbers of humans from different groups. Even migrating birds, schools of fish or worker ants who seem to collaborate in a large group, typically only do so within one large group.He ends the chapter on a very interesting rabbit hole where he imagines what the future of thinking looks like. He gives the example of genetic engineers giving someone optic lobes from birds if they want to improve their vision. Unfortunately, he ends it there saying its not going to happen anytime soon so let’s focus on more practical matters. It would have been fun to hear his dreams and ideas regarding what the future of genetics looks like.Another great book which brilliantly covers the social nature of humans vs other animals and has some interesting ideas on evolution is Homo Deusby Yuval Noah Harari. He also explores the fascinating field of genetic engineering and biohacking. I strongly recommend that book as well, one of my top five favorite books.
2. Realize that the conscious mind is in a battle with the subconscious mind (page 218): Dalio refers back to the idea presented in page 182 about lower-level and higher-level you. Just like animals, many of our decision making drivers are below the surface. Just like other animals we don’t “decide” to hunt or sleep or fight, we simply follow the instructions coming from the subconscious parts of our brains. Some parts of our subconscious parts are “dangerously animalistic”, others are smarter and quicker than our conscious minds.Moments of inspiration and creativity tend to come from our subconscious and learning how to cultivate the lines of communication between conscious and subconscious allows you to think more creatively. Most people only see the conscious mind and believe that they can accomplish more by cramming their conscious mind and forcing it to work harder. Though, counterintuitively, clearing your head can be the best way to make progress. He recommends meditation and putting yourself in a state of relaxation to reach this point.
3. Find out what you and others are like: I liked this section because it touches on something I have been thinking about a lot recently, the importance of Emotional intelligence and social skills in the modern society. It also brushes ever so slightly into interesting topics like categorizing people with assessment tests and the ability to predict people’s actions and behaviours.This opens up an entire can of worms on what does a world where algorithms can accurately predict human actions and predictions look like. Algorithms that can accurately predict the probability of you committing a crime or getting into an Ivy league school at the age of 13, just by analyzing you psychologically and biologically. I will leave the reader to ponder that and caution you to leave subjective “feelings” out of it but asses if you are prepared for such a world.One skill which I have been dedicating quite a bit of time for in my personal development and which I hope will help me in a rapidly changing future is understanding human nature better and being able to predict what people will do in various situations. Two of my favorite books of all time on this topic are: Influence by Robert Cialdini and Lessons of History by Will and Ariel Durant. If you really want to go down this rabbit hole, you should read about the Sidonia character from Benjamin Disraeli’s Coningsby.

Learn how to make decisions effectively (page 234)

Dalio makes decisions for a living and he has been objectively good at making decisions. This chapter aims to explain his framework for making decisions and turning it into a systematic and rules-based method that people can just follow (or more likely, an algorithm that can be run by a computer). Of course, what Dalio does for a living is very complex and not everything can be done by a computer (yet! See the conclusion section for more on this). Thus, some of the principles mentioned here tend to be a bit abstract but there are some interesting points made here:

1. Keep in mind both the rates of change and the levels of things, and the relationship between them: When you are analyzing a situation it is not just the current state which matters but the rate at which it is improving and if the rate of improvement is moving at a rate that it will get to an acceptable point that matters.Put simply: You start an online business. Initially, product variety is low, the recommended items algorithm is converting poorly and your cost of customer acquisition is high. Simply, your product is not that great and you are generating a net loss every quarter. Though this is not too big of a deal. Provided you are quickly iterating on your customer and market feedback and data, making the product better and improving your unit economics. If you have a clear path to profitability before your company runs out of money or motivation you have the history of Facebook, Amazon and Google.

“When you ask someone whether something is true and they tell you it’s not totally true, it’s probably by-and-large true”

1. Be Imprecise: This part had me nodding my head vigorously and saying “Exactly!” It is so well written that I will just quote it directly:“Whenever a big picture “by and large” statement is made and someone replies “Not always” my instinctive reactions is that we are probably about to dive into the weeds -i.e, into a discussion of the exceptions rather than the rule, and in the process will lose sight of the rule. To help people at Bridgewater avoid this time waster, one of our just-out-of-college associates coined a saying I often repeat: “When you ask someone whether something is true and they tell you it’s not totally true, it’s probably by-and-large true”
2. I will combine the next 3 points together because I think they are very important:
3. Raising the probability of being right is valuable no matter what your probability of being right already is
4. Knowing when not to bet is as important as knowing what bet are probably worth making
5. The best choices are the ones that have more pros than cons, not those that don’t have any cons at all

In my opinion all three of those points are related to the concepts of expected value calculations and less obvious but also about risk taking. I think that sometimes we humans can be too risk averse and one of the reasons is that we are not very good at calculating the cost benefit probability of a decision we make. More importantly, we tend to overestimate the downside of action and underestimate the downside of inaction. I haven’t read the book but Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke is a book that a friend strongly recommended to me which covers this topic and he also recommended the podcast based on the book.

Convert your principles into algorithms and have the computer make decisions alongside you (Page 257)

The final section is where things start to get really interesting. Here he dives deep into his framework and process going from Thinking -> Principles -> Algorithms -> Great Decisions.

The idea is that you should take your thought process for the steps and rules you follow when making decisions and translate it into an algorithm which a computer can understand. He suggests “developing a relationship with your computer alter ego” where you teach each other what you do best, so that you can improve your decision making. He believes the computer is the link to collective decision making and will “almost certainly advance the evolution of our species”.

This gets fairly abstract, but some examples can help make this more practical:

1. Smart Gmail filters and autoresponders that handle the 50% of your mail that is periodic and often requires the same actions.
2. An automated HR system that scrapes resumes and LinkedIn of job applicants to automatically determine which candidates to advance to the next stage.
3. A smartwatch that is wired to your brain, bloodstream and scans all your emails, texts, social media interactions and tells you what to eat, what career to go into, who to marry etc. (page 260 — Interestingly, this is also one of my long term goals with Atila, helping people figure out what lifestyle or career they should choose)

Obviously the leap from 1 to 3 is extreme, but it might be closer than we think.

Though he is generally very optimistic about the future of AI, he worries about the dangers of people blindly accepting the results of AI without understanding it deeply.

Dalio categorizes AI into 3 broad types: expert systems, mimicking and data mining. Expert systems are what they use at Bridgewater where they see how different scenarios emerge under different circumstances based on a logical understanding on a set of cause-effect relationships. Mimicking, which is basically computers observing data and applying them in decision making without an understanding on the relationships between them. Finally, we have data mining which is powerful computers ingesting large amounts of data and looking for patterns.

Essentially he is raising the topic of explainable AI. Which is AI that gets us the right results but we can’t “explain” or “understand” how it works. There is a fascinating article by a machine learning designer from Google, Cassie Kozyrkov called “Explainable AI Won’t Deliver, Here’s Why” that makes a very interesting counter argument about why trying to explain or understand AI may not be the right way to think about it, I strongly recommend it for anyone interested in that topic.

Though, I must commend Dalio because he plays both sides very well himself. He concedes that maybe it’s his “lower level” self that is driven towards explainable models and not his logical and reasoning self. He allows for the fact that if a model works accurately but we’re not able to explain it, that might be sufficient. It’s rare for authors to poke holes in their own arguments in such a transparent way so I commend Dalio for closing the chapter in a very intellectually rigorous way.

Work Principles (Page 279)

In the final section Dalio explores his principles for how he runs Bridgewater and how he keeps his employees aligned on the same culture and vision. Though, I think this section is useful for anyone trying to get a group of people to work towards a common goal (sports team, non-profit, political party, startup etc.).

He begins by mentioning that he thinks of companies as a machine, composed of people and culture and they both affect each other.

Which reminds me of the theory of reflexivity, an idea explored in Soros’ Alchemist of Finance. He divides the section into Work Principles… to get the culture right, to get the people right and to build and evolve the machine. Just like the previous two sections, he explores a wide range of topics so I will pick one idea from each section that I found most Interesting.

Work Principles to Get the Culture Right (Page 318)

Be Radically Transparent:

In 2007, the once media-shy Bridgewater started making headlines for their concept of “Radical Transparency”. Media were shocked to discover a culture where every meeting would be recorded, people would have baseball cards made highlighting their strengths and weaknesses and Ray Dalio, the CEO himself sent a company wide email congratulating an intern who had scolded him for “wasting everyone’s time by being unprepared”. Some critics say that the radical transparency has been taken too far, but the general idea is very much a step in the right direction.

Too often in organizations and relationships, people avoid confronting hard truths because of fear and ego. Dalio makes the case that truth can only be achieved by being transparent in our relationships with others. I would also add that as the internet and social media continues to grow at scale, I think that the people and organizations which are the most transparent and honest will outperform others.

Work Principles to Get the People Right (Page 394)

Constantly Train, Test, Evaluate, and Sort People (Page 420):

[I made a note to myself to add a paragraph to this section but I forgot. Then I got too lazy to add it as this article was already taking too long. If there is enough interest (i.e. one person emails or tweets at me) I will increase the priority of this and add a review/summary of this section.

Understand that people you and the people you interact with will go through a personal evolution: When you first enter into a professional or working relationship with someone you are both at a certain point in your lives. Thus, you interact with each other based on your current circumstances in life. The challenge is that if you have a fixed mindset, when you or the other person changes, it is hard to consciously recognize this and adjust how you’ve been interacting with the other person.

An example might explain this better: You are the head of sales for a real estate company and your top sales agent is Wendy. When Wendy first joins your company she is young, ambitious and wants to make money fast. You both have aggressive personalities and frequently yell at each other which is fine; you are both comfortable with and actually enjoy that kind of “banter”. Wendy is good at her job and you reward her well by promoting her to more demanding positions and giving her more money, which motivates her further, she gets better at her job, the cycle repeats. Then Wendy gets married and has kids.

Now, Wendy still enjoys working and is still good at her job. Though she now wants to spend more time with her family, is looking for more work life balance and has grown past the aggressive sales culture. Unless, you have a radically transparent relationship, you and Wendy are both very self aware and have a candid conversation about this; there is a high chance you will keep interacting with Wendy based on how she was five years ago, as opposed to how she is now.

This characterizes many relationships in our life. Not just professional, but also personal relationships between spouses, parents and kids, best friends etc. So when someone says “You’ve changed”, its not necessarily an insult. Instead, understand that they’ve changed as well, so your relationship must also change. Only you can control if this change is for the better of for the worse.

Work Principles to Build and Evolve Your Machine

The key ideas in this section are an exploration of ideas mentioned earlier in the book: Which i would summarize as follows:

1. Think of your organization as a machine. Where the inputs are the people and the culture and the output are your goals
2. When the output is not working properly, probe deeply and honestly to find out where things are going wrong and have candid conversations to get to the root cause
3. When you come up with a plan to fix the input, systemize and document those rules into a process that can be followed
4. Have protocols and governance in place to make sure everything works smoothly

This is a major simplification of the ideas so here is an image of one of the summary pages to provide you with a bit more details:

Key Takeaways (or The “Do This” list)

Derek Sivers once said that whenever he recommended certain books to his friends, they would tell him “I don’t have time to read a whole book. Just tell me what I should start doing”. So he created something called a “just tell me what to do” list. In spirit of that, here are a list of things we could start or stop doing based on the ideas in this book:

• Get your closest friends and family members and ask them to tell you what they believe your biggest weaknesses are and what are some things you do, which they don’t like.
• Take a personality test (e.g. assessments.principles.com) or see a therapist and psychoanalyze yourself to figure out what type of person you are. E.g. left-brain or right brain, big picture or detail oriented etc.
• When someone disagrees with you or challenges you, take a quick second to consider how you feel “emotionally” (lower level you) vs how you feel “logically” (high level you)
• When you form an opinion on something, find reasonable people who disagree with you to stress test your opinion
• When trying to think of creative ideas, don’t actively think about the subject you’re brainstorming for. Try to put your mind in a state of relaxation to make it easier for the idea to flow from your subconscious.
• Learn how to code, or at least, learn how to “think and speak in algorithms” as it may be may be more important than any language
• Try to write down your thought process for common tasks and translate it into an algorithm that a computer could follow and learn from
• Great people are hard to find so if you get a great employee, be willing to pay above market rate to keep them
• Don’t monday morning quarterback. Avoid evaluating past decisions based on what you know now, evaluate based on what could reasonably be known when the decision was made.
• Study history and pattern match things you see today with what you’ve learnt from history
• Make a list of all the times you made bad decisions because you didn’t see something that other people saw. Ask others for input, especially those who saw what you missed to help you with the list. Write it on paper, tack it on a wall and stare at it. The next time you are about to make a decision in this area, make sure to consult others for their opinion.

Closing Thoughts

Note: If you found this essay useful, I would really appreciate if you could please provide some feedback. This is my first time doing something like this and I want you to enjoy the next one even more. What books should I do next? Was it too long? Too many book recommendations? Less opinion and more review? Less review and more summary? Please let me know.

I was very surprised that a giant of finance such as Ray Dalio is being very public and sharing his teachings with others. The skeptic in me wonders if there is an ulterior motive, but I’ve learnt that when people do nice things, I try to give them the benefit of the doubt and I really appreciate him sharing his knowledge with others.

He definitely put a lot of effort into this book and it shows. Very well researched and he references a lot of studies and papers. Though, I wish that when he references a study or paper in the footnotes he also includes the author and title so we can find it easier.

If I wanted to really nitpick I would also say that the book was a bit high level and could have been a bit more practical. Again, he is dealing with a very abstract topic which is hard to break into simple actionable steps but at time.

This is also the most organized book I have ever read. He does a very good job of breaking things out into sections, numbered items, diagrams and always summarizes his points at the beginning and end of most sections. This makes it a perfect book to use as a reference guide to refer to multiple times later in the future.

The major thought I came away with is the idea of systemizing everything that we have learned as humans into a set of rules and heuristics that can be simulated by computers. We already have computers deciding whether or not to buy a stock. This system would decide whether or not to hire a fund manager and whether or not to promote him. This will undoubtedly raise endless ethical debates and arguments from various sides. Though, I think when all is said and done, and people realize that computers are quicker, cheaper and better than us at making most decisions, they will start deciding everything they can for us. It almost becomes a moot point to debate how we feel about it if this will happen anyway. Instead, we need to ask ourselves how we can best prepare for that situation.

Ultimately, this is one of the most idea dense books I have ever read (Antifragile, Poor Charlie’s Almanack and Lessons of History are the three others). So many good ideas per page even while rereading, it I keep adding more to my notes. I really tried to be as concise as possible but there are so many good ideas that even at 5,604 words, I still feel like I left a lot out.

He is very transparent about lessons he’s learnt from his personal life which I admire as it’s not easy to open up like that. Though, I think he could have been more candid about some of his observations and thoughts on his professional life and what he’s observed by having a front row seat in the financial and political industries. Overall, a very good book that I would recommend if you want to gain a better understanding of the two ultimate machines, your brain and your mind.

Originally published at blog.tomiwa.ca on December 6, 2018.

Emily Chen (IG:em.chenn) joins us on the first episode to talk about how she got into U of T medical school without a degree, advice for students studying pre med programs and the importance of work life balance and self care.

Originally published at atila.ca.

Video:

Podcast:

The Atila Podcast by Tomiwa Ademidun on Apple Podcasts

The Atila Podcast

Timestamps:

What type of high school student were you — 1:10

Cold Calling Professionals in grade 10–2:37

McMaster Health Science Rejection and wakeup Call — 4:09

What if I I don’t get into medical school — 5:00

Biggest life jumps and importance of self care — 8:12

Living up to expectations of immigrant parents while making yourself happy — 9:40

Handling lack of motivation and burnout — 10:58

Where do you see yourself in 5 and 25 years — 12:34

Advice for aspiring doctors or anyone who just want to help others — 16:07

Interview

Tomiwa Ademidun: Think back to when you were 16 years old. What Type of high school student were you? [1:10]

Emily Chen: I was really keen when I was in high school, to be very honest. When I was in grade 11 and grade 12 in particular I was involved in a lot of different clubs and activities. Whether it was in the school community, greater Oakville community; I was always involved in some project or conference. It was a bit much to be quite honest with you.

But I also really love school. I took a lot of the math and science classes and I really enjoyed that. I was really fortunate because my friend group had a lot of similar interests as me as well in terms of the academic and getting involved sense and we were all in it together and it was actually quite fun.

TA: At What point did you realize you wanted to be a medical doctor and why? [1:58]

EC: Good question. I think that started from grade 10. At that point I realized I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and I knew that grade 11 and 12 were very integral years because that was when I had to start applying to different university programs and deciding on a rough career path of what I wanted to pursue. So in grade 10 was when I start just cold calling people and trying to look into different career options. So shadowing opportunities, just doing my own research online and I did a lot of shadowing with different professionals and different types of carers

TA: So in grade 10/11 you literally just cold called an optometrist and said can I just watch you for a couple of days? [2:37]

EC: Yeah, so I did that. It’s actually not as hard as you think it is. Because for health professionals we all — or at least I had my own optometrist at the time. So I just walked into her office and I just asked her can I observe you, can I shadow you for an hour. That was a really great experience because it made me realize what Field I would be interested in and what I wanted to look more into as well as which ones I didn’t see myself pursuing and I could just cross those ones off.

How Were You Preparing in High School

TA: So you’re in grade 11, saying “I want to be a doctor, that’s what I want to do” What kind of medical schools were you looking at? What kind of courses are you taking? How are you preparing for that path?” [3:11]

EC: Good question …

TA: Stop always saying good question. I mean if ,You can if you want to but you don’t have to.

EC: [laughs] Okay, can you repeat the question?

TA: [laughs] Okay so you’re in grade 11, you know you want to go to medical school. What kind of schools are you looking at and how are you preparing for that path?

EC: I think in grade 11, although I was maybe roughly looking at the different medical schools in Ontario and in Canada I think I was more focused on how to get to that point. So focusing more on the undergraduate schools. I knew that for both undergrad and medical school I wanted to stay in Canada preferably Ontario, and so as a result for undergrad programs I only applied to Ontario schools. I was looking into different science programs and the medical sciences program, which is the one I ended up choosing.

Getting Rejected from Mcmaster Health Science

TA: I know MacMaster has a very good reputation. I think McMaster health science is very well known. Why did you choose Western over McMaster health science? [4:09]

EC: So I actually did apply to health science at McMaster. Thought I would go, thought I would get in and everything. But I actually got rejected from the health sci program, that was a big, that was a very healthy wake up call for me. Because I had all my eggs in one basket and when I got the rejection letter I realized: “Where am I going to go? What am I going to do?”. So I started researching other schools, and I looked into Western’s medical science program and it really caught my eye. I did a campus tour there and I just fell in love with the campus and the program was so great because all of the modules that you can choose in upper years and a lot of the course that you pick are focused on the human body and the medical sciences, which is what I wanted to take away from an undergraduate science program.

What if I don’t get Into Medical School

TA: So now that you get into Western. You’re working towards your undergrad degree, hoping to get into medical school. Did you ever start worrying that I have my health sci. degree. If I don’t get into medical school what’s my plan B? [5:00]

EC: Yes, oh my goodness yes, for sure. That thought has been in my head many times. I had a bit of a mid-undergrad crisis I guess you could call it. Because I just woke up one day and I asked myself, “What are you doing. Sure you want to go to medical school but are you sure? If that doesn’t work out what are you going to do?” I think these are questions every undergrad has to ask themself at every single stage of their education. Just to kind of steer yourself on the right path.

So What I did, Was I just did a lot of research on what you can do with a BsC degree. I did more emailing, did more cold calls. You know just messaging people, messaging old contacts that you have and just having phone conversations with them is very helpful. Looking into different grad programs, I was looking at Master’s programs in healthcare, in quality improvement and even in Ivey[business school]. I was considering pursuing a business degree as well.

TA: Wow. Why did you consider a business degree? 7:40

EC: I was also interested in business in high school. Had I not chosen business in high school, I definitely would have chosen a commerce degree. I just liked it because the business world seemed so exciting. Since I had those 2 interests and I had a bachelor of science already under my wing. I thought that combining business and sciences would have been a really, really great and exciting career path.

TA: One thing viewers may not know is that you actually did not need to get your undergrad degree before you went to U of T. Why did you feel the need to get your undergrad degree?

EC: So I got into U of T [medical school] after my third year. At that point I didn’t finish my four year bachelor of med sci degree. But I thought about it and decided to take summer courses to finish up a three year major as a bachelor of science. I just wanted to do that because I knew that I spent so many years at Western, I loved what I was studying and I spent so much time at effort walking towards that degree I just didn’t want to leave it at that.

So for me I guess it was a little bit of closure. But also, I think that there are many perks to finishing your degree and having a degree and having that under your name. Just as an example, for medical school at least, you have the option of completing a masters in tandem with your medical school education. And in order to get opportunities like that you need to get a bachelor’s degree already. I think it opens up more doors for you.

TA: You said something off camera about “Who am I? Let’s say I’m in medical school and for whatever reason I’m not able to get through. Undergrad is kind of an insurance policy”. Can you talk a bit more about what you were saying.

EC: I wouldn’t say it’s an insurance policy. I think it’s important that right now I don’t have my MD, I am an MD candidate, I am working towards that. But all of that aside, who am I, what do I have. I have a bachelors of science and I’m very, very proud to say that. I had a great few years at Western and I learned so much and I think that having that bachelors of science kind of solidified that.

TA: So going from high school to undergrad, and now medical school. What would you say were some of the biggest jumps you had to make and the biggest lessons you’ve learnt along the way. [8:12]

EC: I think the jump from any level of education, whether it’s from high school to undergrad, undergrad to medical school, there’s always going to be learning curves. Every different level of education has different demands from you as a person as well as the curriculum demands. I think the biggest lessons I learned was that of self care and a lot about work life balance. In high school, I was stressed out about the work I had at hand. Then in undergrad I realized that wow high school is such child’s play, now this is the real deal, now I am still stressed out. Even in medical school, sometimes I feel like I’m just a big ball of stress to be honest.

One of the biggest learning curves was that of time management and self care. It’s always important, no matter how busy you are, it’s always important to put some time in there for yourself, to discover who you are as a person. Even though you are a student, even though you will be a doctor one day, you’re always going to be a person as well. Its important to hold on to that, to discover who you are, your personality, what you love and don’t love. What your hobbies. Its really important to hold on to that. I think that giving yourself those self care days and being able to hit the reset button really helped motivate me even more.

Living Up to Immigrant Parents’ Expectations

TA: As a child of immigrants. Immigrant parents typically- they brought their children to a new country. They want to give them a better life and set really high standards for them. How do you find that balance between making your parents happy and living up to their high expectations for you and sort of paying them back. Versus doing what you want to do and making your own self happy. [9:40]

EC: That’s a great question. I think growing up, to be completely candid with you, I think I did get a lot of pressure from my parents. But as a result over time, I think I kind of took that and I started to put pressure on myself. Because I wanted to make them proud and I wanted to make them happy because they sacrificed so much for me and I really do appreciate that and I wanted to show them that. But that’s not what drove me to pursue a career in medicine. I chose that because I genuinely wanted to do that from the bottom of my own hearts and not because my parent told me to.

I know that medical school is a very long journey. I am only nine weeks in as a first year student and I know that there is so much more ahead. I think that if I was told to go into med school by my parents, that wouldn’t be incentive enough for me personally to pursue this.

Dealing With Burnout and Importance of Self Care

TA: [Checks recording] You’ve obviously done very well for yourself and you seem to be a very type A , very motivated person. But we all go through days where you just can’t motivate yourself to get out of be, you’re just like losing motivation. How do you power yourself to get through those periods.[10:58]

EC: Okay we all face those days. Regardless of where we are in life and what field we’re in I think everybody faces that. Burnout I guess you would call it. What helps me, personally what helps me is hitting the reset button and taking those self care days. To take care for yourself and reflect on why you got here in the first place. Why you chose to come to where you are presently. And sometimes it helps if you just think about all that enthusiasm that you had in undergrad and high school. Even reading my medical school application is really motivating for me to get out of bed and go to the library and make my past self proud. I think reflecting on the past and why you’re here, that’s is one thing.

As well as looking at at what’s ahead and what the future could hold for you and what the future will hold for you. I find that talking to those who are more experienced, whether they’re upper years or people who are currently practicing medicine, so doctors in the field is really really motivating for me. Because when they tell me about the perks of their job and how much they love their job, or the cool types of techniques that they’re doing, it makes me want to focus and get through this test and be the best that I can be now so I can get to that stage in the future.

Where do You See Yourself in 5–25 Years?

TA: I have a question I call the 1, the 5 and the 25. So essentially where would you like to be a year from now, 5 years from now, 25 years from now.[12:34]

EC: Wow, good question. Let’s see where I am in the present first. So I am in my tenth week of my first year of medical school. Even though we’ve had this ten week period to transition into the swing of things. I feel like I’m still not fully integrated into the demands of medical school. I still procrastinate like crazy which is awful that’s something that I did in high school, and undergrad and told myself I would stop. But, here I am still doing that. So hopefully, second year medical school I can tame that habit a little more. Be more integrated into the curriculum so I can make the most of my learning, have a good system set in place for myself and be more disciplined.

But at the same time I hope I can still hold on to my work and play balance. I’m pretty happy with that for now. Hopefully, I can improve in my clinical skills as well. Hopefully I can learn to use my stethoscope by that point, that’s something I can’t wait to do. So that would be one year from now. Hopefully I can still be involved in the community.

You said five years from now. So five years from now I would be in my residency program. At that point I hope I can hold on to all the enthusiasm that I had as a first year med student and all the energy that I had as an undergrad. And make the most of my learning in the clinical environment to make myself the best doctor I can be. Hopefully, have a good sleep routine at that point. I heard residents get very little sleep and drink a lot of coffee so I guess I’ll be doing that. Hopefully I can still make time for myself, to keep myself grounded as not just a resident but also a person.

TA: Let’s sneak forward a bit and Say 10 years from now. You’ve finished medical school and you’ve finished your residency, you’re now a doctor. Doctor Emily Chen, Doctor Chen. What kind of doctor would you like to be? What would you like to specialize in and things like that?

EC: Sure that’s a good question as well. So I’m still exploring different options. What I love about my U of T curriculum and I’m sure other med schools do this to; is that they give you so much exposure to explore different specialties. But if you could ask me now what I want to do I would say family medicine. Because I love how its like the front line practice of medicine and I like how it focuses a lot on and can focus a lot on preventative care. I love to build a relationship with a family or just people I guess and follow them through their different stages of life and influence their habits along the way. I think that is really important and I would love to do that.

At that point, hopefully I can still stay grounded. Hopefully, work won’t be completely my life but I will take it seriously because I guess those would be the first years after I graduate so I have to put the hours to make the payoff bigger in the future.

So I guess 25 years from now. Wow, I will be pretty old by that point. Hopefully, have an established practice. Hopefully, know what I’m doing at that point. Be very engaged with my practice and with my work but also find time for myself and my family. I hope that at that point I won’t just be focused on my clinic or just be focused on my practical skills as a doctor. That I can also integrate my own passions in that practise as well and weekly routine. Weather thats finding a good cause that I’m interested in or volunteering some time as a doctor I think that would be really cool.

Advice for Aspiring Doctors and People Who Want to Help Others

TA: Now do you have any final advice for people who are considering a career in the medical field or getting into medical school. Even if they don’t want to be a doctor, maybe they don’t want to go to medical school. Maybe they just want to help people. What kind of advice would you give them.[16:07]

EC: Okay, first for people who are considering going into medicine.[thinks] I think it’s very important to establish why you want to go into medical school for one and most importantly why you want to be a doctor. So in order to do that I think a lot of self-reflection is very important. Figuring out who you are why you want to do this as well as gaining some exposure in the field. Ether it’s in the hospital or the clinic or whatever. Because really if you commit yourself to this, this is going to be the rest of your life. You have to be very passionate, you have to have a love for learning and a love for what you love for the career to avoid burnout and to keep that motivation.

I would also say do some research because applying to medical school, in Ontario, in Canada in the States, wherever can be very competitive. So it’s important that you fulfill all the requirements that you have as well as maintaining your own integrity in who you are as a person.

As for people who just want to be good people and help others. I would say find your passions and just run with them. I would say try to get involved with some leadership roles if you can. Say you find an organization or a volunteer opportunity that you’re very interested in, stay there as a volunteer for a little bit and then try to move up in leadership positions as you can, to make the biggest impact that you as a student or you as a person can do.

TA: Emily, thank you for your time.

Extra Resources:

• U of T Medical School
• Western Medical Science
• McMaster Health Science

Originally published at atila.ca.

Getting into Medical School Without a Degree, Advice for Pre Med Students, Work Life Balance and… was originally published in Atila Tech on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Introduction

In this article, you will learn the theory of how service workers work. I provide a short tutorial to apply that theory to make a website that runs without the internet. Finally, I’ll discuss what this means for you and the future of the internet.

I get excited when talking about service workers. I am going to go on a quick rant on the problem this solves and why this is awesome. Then I dive into the theory of how service workers work and why it is awesome. If you want to jump straight to the theory or the tutorial, go to the sections starting with titles Theory and Application for the code.

This blog post is also available as:

• Youtube Video
• Slide deck
• Podcast

Table of Contents

• Websites are Strange
• Theory: How Servicer Workers Work
• Application: Tutorial on How to Build Offline Websites
• Prerequisites
• Installing the Service Worker
• Part 1a: Build The Service Worker
• Service Worker Output
• Part 1b: Testing The Service Worker (#2001441)
• Creating A Mini Server
• Inspecting the Server Requests
• Where are the Files Being Saved?
• Part 2: Saving External Data (Part 1 Git Tag: pwa-tutorial-0.1 )
• Saving External API calls: #8593ada
• Part 3: Notify Users of New Updates (Part 2 Git Tag: pwa-tutorial-0.2)
• Part 4: Deployment (Part 3 Git Tag: pwa-tutorial-0.3)
• Conclusion
• Who Needs Mobile Apps
• The Future of Websites
• Further Reading

Websites are Strange

I realized something recently that made me truly realize how powerful service workers can be. When I have internet, it feels like there are infinitely many things competing for my attention.

But when I am on a plane for example, and there is no internet connection, the competition for my attention is much less fierce. The three things I can usually do is look through my photos, watch a downloaded movie or read an ebook.

With service-workers, if you are able to deliver an offline web experience for your users, you are able to get their attention in one of those few moments when the competition for it is least fierce.

Let’s start with a simple diagram. What do the two circles in this Venn diagram represent?

Let me give you a hint. Amazon, Alibaba, and Facebook are some of the world’s biggest websites, servicing millions of users every day. Here are some stats to put things in context for you:

• Alibaba $25 billion in sales in one day (singles day)
• 40% of cloud computing clients use Amazon Web Services Including Apple, Netflix, and CIA
• 2.2 Billion people use Facebook every month, 700 million on Instagram

This is all well and good but there’s just one small problem. Without wifi, their entire websites are completely unusable. Even if you just want to do simple tasks like look at product reviews for items that are already in your shopping cart, you can’t do anything.

Now compare that to sites like Google Drive or Atila.ca. Atila.ca doesn’t have a million users but even when you have no internet connection, you can still use the site. Google Drive is another website that does this well. You can actually use Google Drive even without internet. Like how you would use a desktop app like Microsoft Word. Learn something new everyday right?

In the past, it almost seemed like a truism that websites would not work without the internet. Once you realize the potential of service workers, you completely change your perspective on how you think about websites. You begin to imagine the significant user experience improvements we can have on our favorite sites.

Imagine if you are on the subway commuting to work with no internet. You do not even have any cell phone service. But you could still review the product reviews of the items in your Amazon shopping cart. Or you’re on a long plane ride. While your phone is in airplane mode you can read the most popular articles from The New York Times. Or your favorite articles in a list that you chose to save for later.

You can see that the potential is great and it easy to start daydreaming. Let’s get back to reality and dig into the theory of how this is all possible.

Theory: How Servicer Workers Work

A service worker is a proxy or messenger between your browser and the internet. When your web app asks for resources (images, html files, json API etc.) the service worker gets it for you without needing to ask the internet. In literal terms, it is a Javascript file that gets shipped along with the rest of your app. This file has code that tells your app how to intercept network requests and get it from your network cache.

Typically, when a website is first loaded, the web browser makes a set of requests to the network for the assets that your website needs to run. Typically including:

• html files for content display
• CSS files for styling
• Js files for application logic
• Images and other assets

When your internet is not working, there is no way for the browser to contact the network to retrieve the files necessary for displaying the website. So it fails and you get the infamous “jumping Dinosaur” on Google Chrome.

With service workers. The first time you visit a site, in addition to the usual set of index.html, styles.css, main.js etc. files that get requested, the browser also requests a service worker javascript file from your website. This file then gets downloaded and saved to your browser cache. The serviceworker file then downloads, versions and caches all the files in your application to serve it for later.

This has two very important benefits. As is mentioned in the title, this means that even when your internet connection is down, the website will still work. It never actually has to ask the internet for anything. The service worker has all the files you will need.

Conversely, this also means that even if you do have internet, the application will also run faster. On future website loads, instead of making a full round trip to the network to get the application files. It simply retrieves the files from the browser cache and serves it to the user.

Application: How to Build Offline Websites

Prerequisites

Before you start make sure you have the following installed

• Node.js® and npm
• Make sure you have node 8.X or greater (node -v ) and npm 5.x or greater ( npm -v)
• Globally install Angular CLI:
• npm install -g @angular/cli
• Google Chrome Browser (optional, but recommended)
• Google Account (optional, only if you want to deploy to Firebase)

Launch the project

• Go to https://github.com/atilatech/atila-web-app
• Clone the demo.atila.ca web app from Github: atila-web-app
• Check out the pwa-tutorial branch: git checkout pwa-tutorial
• Check out the tutorial start commit: git checkout pwa-tutorial-0.0
• Install npm modules: npm install
• Start the app!: ng serve -o

If you get a No NgModule error, go to any .ts file and put a space. This is a really strange bug but you can read this Github issue for more information.

Installing the Service Worker

In order to install the Service Worker and get access to the various Service Worker objects in our app, we need to do the following.

1. Install the @angular/serviceworker module: npm install @angular/serviceworker
2. This installs an npm package that includes various service worker Javascript objects that we will use in the future steps
3. Tell angular-cli to build project with service worker: ng set apps.0.serviceWorker=true
4. Tell angular CLI to automatically produce a Javascript file that contains the code for the service worker when building project explained in the next step.
5. Configure your service worker in ngsw-config.json
6. This tells your service worker, exactly what files it should be saving and how it should be saving them
7. assetGroups: files that are included as part of the app
8. When the app updates, these resources update as well
9. dataGroups: external resources not versioned with the app
10. Install Mode: What caching strategy to use when first seeing this file
11. UpdateMode: What caching strategy to use when updating the file, after we’ve already installed it
12. Caching strategy
13. Prefetch: Save these files before we even ask for it
14. Lazy: Save these files only after they’ve been requested at least once
15. Add a manifest.json file and reference it in index.html

Service Worker Configuration

• This tells your service worker exactly what files it should be saving and how it should be saving them:
• assetGroups: files included as part of the app
• When the app updates, these resources update as well
• dataGroups: external resources not versioned with the app
• Install Mode: What caching strategy to use when first seeing this file
• UpdateMode: What caching strategy to use when updating the file, after we’ve already installed it
• Caching strategy
• Prefetch: Save these files before we even ask for it
• Lazy: Save these files only after they’ve been requested at least once
• You can check out the official angular documentation on servicer worker configuration for more details

Manifest.json

{
"name": "Atila",
"short_name": "Atila",
"start_url": "index.html",
"display": "standalone",
"icons": [{
"src": "assets/img/favicon-bg.png",
"sizes": "512x512",
"type": "image/png"
}],
"background_color": "#194f87",
"theme_color": "#194f87"
}

This is what turns your app from a web app to a progressive web app. It allows your web app to be similar to a native mobile. It allows users to install your app to their home screen.

Register the Service Worker (#d2b186f)

Now we need to actually tell our app that a service worker exists. So we register the service worker module in our app module.

// src/app.module.ts

import {ServiceWorkerModule} from '@angular/service-worker';

…

Imports: [

…,

ServiceWorkerModule.register('/ngsw-worker.js', {enabled: environment.production}),]

Then we register the service worker file if our browser has service worker support and we are are in production mode.

// src/main.ts

if ('serviceWorker'  in  navigator  && environment.production) {

console.log("Service Worker in main.ts");

window.addEventListener('load', () => {

console.log("on page Load Service Worker in main.ts");

navigator.serviceWorker.register('/ngsw-worker.js', {

scope: '/',

})

.then(registration  => {

console.log("Service Worker registration completed main.ts", registration);

});

});

Part 1a: Build The Service Worker

Service Worker Output

Next, we will build the project: ng build --prod

Let’s take a look at the dist/ folder to see what building an app with service worker looks like.

Service Worker Output: ngsw.json

Recall that in the previous step we created a file called ngsw-config.json. This file specifies what types of files we wanted our service worker to cache and how we wanted to cache it. When the project gets built, the rules in the ngsw-config.json gets expanded to include exactly what files we will be caching. The ngsw.json file also includes a hash table to index and retrieve the cached files. The hash table also allows us to version our files. We can keep track of what versions of our file is running and if we should get a new version.

Service Worker Output: ngsw-worker.js

This file is literally the service worker. We registered it earlier in our main.ts file. It is a plain javascript file. It contains the code and logic for how your service worker registers and caches data to a database. If you’re up for a challenge, try looking through the code and see if you can understand what is happening.

Part 1b: Testing The Service Worker (#2001441)

Creating A Mini Server

• Service workers are used in an offline context. We need a server that can simulate offline environments
• Install npm http server
• Npm install http-server@0.11.1 --save-dev
• Build and Run the server:
• ng build --prod (optional)
• http-server -p 8080 -c-1 dist

Inspecting the Server Requests

• Visit Chrome Network tab in devtools
• Do this before going to localhost!
• Open a new tab
• Right-click somewhere blank on the screen
• Inspect > go to Network Tab
• Open http://localhost:8080/

Note that there is no wi-fi in the top right. Check the devtools console: The external network resources fail with 504 but our files are successful (200).

Where are the Files Being Saved?

Open the application tab in Devtools and you will see the local cache section. This is the “database” where the service workers are saving your files. That there are 2 tables. One which contains the actual resources our app needs. Another hash table with hash keys that point to each file name, as we saw in our ngsw.json file. That’s it! You now have a simple but functional offline first web app. Continue to part 2 for adding more cool features.

Part 2: Saving External Data (Part 1 Git Tag: pwa-tutorial-0.1 )

Why are None of my APIs Working?

When you try to navigate click on a link, you will notice a server error. Your service worker doesn’t have those APIs in your database, but we can add it. Pop Quiz! If we want to tell our service worker to cache a new type of file where should we put the code to do so:

1. Manifest.json
2. Ngsw-config.json
3. App.module.ts

You can see the network requests failing in your dev tools network tab.

Saving External API calls: Configuration (Github Diff)

Now we will configure our ngsw-config.json to cache external API URLs as well. Two caching options:

1. Freshness: Go to the network first, if missing, go to the
2. Performance: Go the cache first, then go to network

Saving External API calls: #8593ada

You might need to use a separate URL that allows your app to access it via CORS. We will use a special JSON service to simulate (“mock”) our blog API. We don’t have permission to use official Atila API’s

• Change ScholarshipService.getPaginatedScholarships:
• Go to src/app/_service/scholarship.service.ts#L47
• Change: this.http.post(${this.scholarshipsPreviewUrl}?page=${page}/, form_data) to: this.http.get(https://api.myjson.com/bins/dx1dc)
• Change BlogPostService.getBySlug:
• Go to src/app/_service/blog-post.service.ts#L25
• Change: this.http.get(${this.blogUrl}blog/${username}/${slug}/) to: this.http.get(https://api.myjson.com/bins/v5ow0)

Part 3: Notify Users of New Updates (Part 2 Git Tag: pwa-tutorial-0.2))

When a new version is available from the network, the service worker still serves the old version in the cache to save time

• Add your profile to the team page: src/app/team/team.component.ts
• Add your image and some information in the team data array
• If you rebuild the project and restart the server, you’ll notice that your profile doesn’t appear yet.
• We can add a snackbar to notify the user of new updates
• npm install @angular/material@5.1.1 — save (you might already have this)
• Then we create swUpdate to listen for updates from the SW and update if a new version is available.Github Diff

// src/app/app.component.ts
    
import {SwUpdate} from  "@angular/service-worker";
...
    Constructor (..., public swUpdate SWUpdate,)
...
ngOnInit() {

if (true) {

// check service worker to see if new version of app is available

if (this.swUpdate.isEnabled) {

this.swUpdate.available.subscribe(() => {

const snackBarRef = this.snackBar.open('New version available', 'Load New Version');
snackBarRef.onAction().subscribe(

() => {

location.reload();
});
			});
		}
	}
}

Rebuild and reserve your application

Part 4: Deployment (Part 3 Git Tag: pwa-tutorial-0.3)

Deploying to Firebase Hosting

To see the effect of service worker, we should deploy it to a real website. I like Firebase Hosting. You can take a web app from your localhost to a live website in less than 5 minutes with a few simple steps. I’ve been doing this for almost 2 years now and I still get impressed with how easy the process is. Lately, I have also been playing around with AWS S3 Static website hosting. This is another good alternative you can look into:

Deployment Prerequisites:

1. Create a google account
2. Create A firebase account and a firebase project
3. install firebase tools globally: npm install -g firebase-tools@4.2.0
4. Log in to firebase: firebase login
5. Initialize Firebase Repo: firebase init
6. Choose the following settings:
7. Choose hosting as the project type
8. Change public folder to dist/
9. Configure as a single page app
10. Overwrite idnex.html? NO
11. Deploy! Firebase deploy
12. Visit the URL in the command line output to see your app

That’s it! Congratulations you now have a website that can work without the internet.

Conclusion

Who Needs Mobile Apps

I’ve written previously about why I strongly believe that startups and companies should design their technology products as progressive web apps instead of mobile apps. My core arguments being:

1. Having to maintain 2 separate Android and IOS codebases is a pain: 2 sets of users, 2 sets of developers, 2 sets of problems. (Things like Flutter and Ionic are cool but I don’t believe they address the fundamental issue of 2 separate codebases.)
2. Most people only use the same 5 apps a day, so convincing them to download another app will be very difficult.
3. Approval and Distribution through the Apple App Store and Google Play Store gatekeepers are not fun.

Some of the core arguments against web apps include things like:

1. Offline accessibility
2. Better user engagement because of push notifications
3. Access to Native hardware features like cameras

With features like service workers, I have just shown how we can enable websites to work offline. Progressive web apps also enable push notifications.

Native hardware features are still the one advantage which mobile apps have, though this is changing. Unless it’s mission critical for your app to have these native features, I strongly encourage startups and companies to consider looking into making their next app a progressive web app.

I think that the future of the internet will see more applications distributed through browsers and URLs than native apps and the app store. In an ironic case of history repeating itself, this is actually a throwback to the advent of the internet in the 90s when companies like Netscape and various “.com startups” were doing very well distributing their software through the web.

The Future of Websites

Wouldn’t it be awesome if other sites applied that same philosophy? Imagine if you’re like me and you have an hour plus commute to work every day. Forget about wifi, they don’t even have cellular service on the subway.

Now suppose I want to buy Bluetooth headphones and I want to read some Amazon reviews before I make my decision. Wouldn’t it be awesome if I could cache the product details for the items in my shopping cart and read the reviews on my way to work? Then by the time I get to work, I can just buy the item I want.

Or imagine you’re on the plane for a quick flight from Toronto to Ottawa. You load up the NY Times to catch up on morning news but the site gives the famous “Google dinosaur”. In an ideal world, the NY Times should cache the top 5 most popular articles. This allows users to read the articles and leave comments offline. The comments can be synced when they connect back to the internet.

Google Docs does this best. Google Docs is Microsoft Word, Powerpoint and Excel but better and built for Chrome. You don’t need the internet to use Microsoft Word. Because Google Docs runs in a web browser, you should be able to use Google Docs to access and edit your recent items. Which is exactly what Google Docs does well.

I feel slightly proud of the fact that the great Amazon and NY Times websites need the internet to run. I am humble that little Atila.ca runs just fine with and without internet. ;) When the internet is down, you can still see featured scholarships, blog posts and other pieces of content.

Okay, these are mostly #FirstWorldProblems. But another thing that gets me really excited about this technology, is building the internet for the next billion users. For people who have very slow or inconsistent internet connection.

For example, HospitalRun is an offline first application. It manages hospitals in the developing world. These are places where intermittent connectivity is a fact of life. It allows records to be carried to remote clinics, where there may be no internet. It then syncs those records when there is. (h/t jonbellah.com)

At Atila, one of our projects is increasing access to scholarships for students from developing countries. So it would be awesome if they could seamlessly read sample essays and work on their scholarship applications even if they lived in places with a poor internet connection.

I personally find the idea of service workers and offline-first web applications very fascinating. Simple technologies with the ability to fundamentally change the day to day habits of billions of people are why I chose to study software engineering and why I love this field. I’m really excited to not just see how the future of the internet will unfold but also help build the future of the internet and how we will interact it. The future is already here folks. Thanks for reading.

Further Reading

• Angular Official Service Worker Documentation
• Angular University: Angular Service Workers
• Add Service Worker to Existing Angular App
• Angular Firebase — Deploying an Angular App to Firebase

How to build websites that work without internet using Angular & service workers was originally published in We’ve moved to freeCodeCamp.org/news on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Prior to starting my current company, I founded a startup called Phlock. I built a device that let you unlock doors using your phone and share keys with friends in real time. Phlock didn’t actually fail, but something much worse happened: I simply let it disappear.

Originally published at the Atila Blog.

Here’s a video of an early prototype:

In the summer of 2017, I came up with the idea for Atila (a platform to search for and apply to scholarships). Without ever actually making a conscious decision, I gradually started spending less time on Phlock and more time on Atila.

By the time school started in the fall, Atila had a fully functional prototype and we were planning on launching soon.

Meanwhile, the Phlock Github repo hadn’t been touched in over 2 months. I had been so busy with Atila, and Phlock was still so obscure, that few people actually knew or cared about it. It had quietly slid into the abyss.

In this article, I’d like to share with you some things I’ve learned from starting a company that disappeared.

• Start with Software — it’s called Hardware for a Reason 😄
• Web Apps over Mobile Apps
• Quitting is Underrated
• Share the Journey
• Love the Process

Tomiwa is a software engineering at business student at Ivey Business School. He is the founder of Atila and works as a software engineering intern at Properly.

Start with software — it’s called hardware for a reason

One of my biggest lessons is that if you are a first time entrepreneur, you should really consider starting with a software as a service company. There are too many variables in a hardware startup. If it’s your first time starting a company, some of the challenges in hardware will finish your company before you even start. Or worse, after you’ve started.

What are the problems?

The single biggest challenge is a lack of iteration speed and the long feedback cycles. When you are starting a company, you need to be able to have a hypothesis, test the hypothesis, and iterate quickly on the response you get.

Starting a company can be so counterintuitive that, most of the time, it’s better to just release something that doesn’t even fully work yet. That way, at least people can show you why it doesn’t work and you can quickly give them a better version.

However, with hardware you typically have a hypothesis based on what the market wants. You work on it for a long period of time, then get feedback on it. The problem is, by the time you get the feedback, your company may no longer have the money, motivation, or market interest to iterate on the feedback.

The other problem with hardware is that there are too many variables that are out of your control. We entrepreneurs like to be masters of our own destiny and captains of our ship, and hardware can turn you into a wimpy leaf. When you start a company, it feels like there are so many little things that can go wrong and your company will fall.

Fortunately, with software companies, you have a lot of control over making a product that the market wants, and that gives you leverage. With software, if something doesn’t work it’s usually your fault. This is actually a liberating feeling. In hardware, there are too many external suppliers, vendors, investors, distributors and so on that have leverage over you and can impact the future of your company.

My friends often pitch me on business ideas they have. When it involves anything hardware-related, and they’ve never started a company before, I often give them the same advice.

Keep the same idea you have, but think of a subset of that problem which could be solved by a purely software solution through a web or mobile app. Build that first, and then once you know you can deliver a tangible product (and, more importantly, make something people want), you can start adding the hardware components to your idea.

Web apps over mobile apps

If I was to redo Phlock, I would have made the mobile app into a web app or added a “phlock-lite” version that was a web app. This advice is not strictly relevant to Phlock, because there was a hardware component so a native mobile app was necessary. But I think that the future of software will be delivered through web apps over mobile apps.

I wrote another post about this (see the Progressive Web Apps section). The punchline is that web browsers, JavaScript, and web apps are becoming more powerful. But at the same time, people are becoming increasingly reluctant to download new apps from app stores. As a startup, many companies take themselves out of the game, because many people won’t download the app before they can even find out if its bad or good.

Quitting is underrated

One of the things I learned from Phlock was a new way of thinking about quitting. There were a couple weeks when I kept working on Phlock in the name of “finish what you started” and “never give up.” But this may have been a mistake.

People either quit because something is too hard, or because what they’re doing is taking them down the wrong path. Of course the great Jedi mind trick is that many people quit the right path because it’s too hard, and then they convince themselves that they quit because they were going down the wrong path.

I myself have this issue sometimes. But then I ask myself “If this was easier, would I still want to do it?” I don’t think I consciously knew I was doing it at the time, but in retrospect, that question helped me realize my time was better spent on Atila.

Share the journey

One thing I wish I did more during my work with Phlock was documenting and sharing more of the thoughts I had and the things I made. I think this is beneficial for two reasons:

1. The serendipity of the Internet has allowed cool opportunities to come out of people finding the things I have shared.
2. Documenting my ideas for future generations to see is pretty cool. I could also use it as a public archive that would give a snapshot of where my head was at the time, and how my thinking has changed.

Finally, I spend a lot of time in open source land and I’m always amazed by the stuff that people create and share on the Internet for free. This is why I think that giving back to the open source community whenever you can is a good thing.

I have open-sourced some of the code I used to build Phlock. I’ve included the Java source code for the Android app that allowed users to share keys with each other in real time, and the code that controlled the microcontroller which locked and unlocked the door deadbolt.

There are a lot of files, and parsing what can and can’t be shared will take a bit of time. So I’ll be sharing the code ad-hoc and based on community interest. If anybody wants me to upload more stuff let me know (tomiwa@atila.ca).

Love the process

Looking at my folder with all the Phlock code, I have these weird mixed emotions of indifference and concern. I spent so much time and cognitive load on Phlock that leaving it to do something else was kind of sad. But at the same time, I enjoyed building Phlock and I really feel like I left it for a good reason. This is why I feel good about my choice today.

I really enjoyed the day to day grind and process of building Phlock, and the skills that I learned were effectively an investment in whatever I do next. When I have talks with people about career advice, I often ask them to focus on the median emotion of their decision. In other words, ignore the emotional high social validation of a prestigious job, and think of what a regular, unspectacular day and life as an entrepreneur would look like.

Imagine a rainy Monday morning waking up for a full day of work or a quiet Wednesday afternoon in the office. With Phlock, and now with Atila, there are many days where nothing particularly special happens, except “work stuff.” Often those are some of the best days. Finding happiness in normalcy is something that has helped me a lot, and maybe it might help you.

Final thoughts

This post was more divergent than most of my other essays — and most of my other essays are already quite divergent. However, I think that by covering a wide range of thoughts, everyone can find a little bit of something that will be relevant to them. Thanks for reading, and have a great day.

What I learned from Phlock, my hardware startup that disappeared was originally published in Atila Tech on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.