Welcome To The Grind

Rise and shine.
6am and your hand can’t make it to the alarm clock before the voices in your head start telling you that it’s too early, too dark, and too cold to get out of a bed.
Aching muscles lie still in rebellion, pretending not to hear your brain commanding them to move
A legion of voices are shouting their unanimous permission for you to hit the snooze button and go back to dreamland, but you didn’t ask their opinion.
The voice you’ve chosen to listen to is one of defiance.
A voice that’s says there was a reason you set that alarm in the first place. So sit up, put your feet on the floor, and don’t look back because we’ve got work to do.
Welcome to The Grind!
For what is each day but a series of conflicts between the right way and the easy way,
10,000 streams fan out like a river delta before you, Each one promising the path of least resistance.
Thing is, you’re headed upstream
And when you make that choice, when you decide to turn your back on what’s comfortable and what’s safe and what some would call “common sense”, well that’s day 1.
From there it only gets tougher.
So just make sure this is something you want.
Because the easy way out will always be there, ready to wash you away, all you have to do is pick up your feet.
But you aren’t going to are you?
With each step comes the decision to take another
You’re on your way now
But this is no time to dwell on how far you’ve come.
You’re in a fight against an opponent you can’t see
Oh but you can feel him on your heels can’t you?
Feel him breathing down your neck
You know what that is?
That’s you…
Your fears, your doubts and insecurities all lined up like a firing squad ready to shoot you out of the sky
But don’t lose heart
While they aren’t easily defeated, they are far from invincible
Remember this is The Grind
The Battle Royale between you and your mind, your body and the devil on your shoulder who’s telling you that this is just a game, this is just a waste of time, your opponents are stronger than you.
Drown out the voice of uncertainty with the sound of your own heartbeat
Burn away your self doubt with the fire that’s beneath you
Remember what you’re fighting for
And never forget that momentum is a cruel mistress
She can turn on a dime with the smallest mistake.
She is ever searching for that weak place in your armor
That one tiny thing you forgot to prepare for
So as long as the devil is hiding the details, the question remains,”is that all you got?”, “are you sure?”
And when the answer is “yes”. That you’ve done all you can to prepare yourself for battle THEN it’s time to go forth and boldly face your enemy, the enemy within
Only now you must take that fight into the open, into hostile territory
You’re a lion in a field of lions
All hunting the same elusive prey with a desperate starvation that says VICTORY is the only thing that can keep you alive
So believe that voice that says “you CAN run a little faster” and that “you CAN throw a little harder” and that “you CAN dive a little deeper” and that, for you, the laws of physics are merely a suggestion.
Luck is the last dying wish of those who wanna believe that winning can happen by accident, sweat on the other hand is for those who know it’s a choice, so decide now because destiny waits for no man. And when your time comes and a thousand different voices are trying to tell you you’re not ready for it, listen instead for that lone voice in decent the one that says you are ready, you are prepared, it’s all up to you now.

Source: http://sub.garrytan.com/the-three-kinds-of-laziness

We speak of three kinds of laziness. The first is simply to spend all your time eating and sleeping. The second is to tell yourself, “Someone like me will never manage to perfect themselves.” In the Buddhist context, such laziness makes you feel that it’s pointless even trying, you’ll never attain any spiritual realization. Discouragement makes you prefer not even to begin making any effort. And the third kind… is to waste your life on tasks of secondary importance, without ever getting down to what’s most essential. You spend all your time trying to resolve minor problems, one after another in an endless sequence, like ripples on the surface of a lake. You tell yourself that once you’ve finished this or that project you’ll start giving some meaning to your life.

The antidote to the first kind of laziness— only wanting to eat and sleep— is to reflect on death and the impermanent nature of everything. We never know when we’re going to die or what circumstances are going to lead to our death. So there isn’t a moment to lose in getting down to what’s really essential. The antidote to the second kind of laziness — feeling too discouraged to commit ourselves to spiritual practice—is to reflect on the benefits that such inner transformation will bring. The antidote to the third kind—attending to details rather than to the essentials—is to realize that the only way to get to the end of our endless projects is to drop them, and then turn to what gives life its meaning without waiting any longer. Life is short, and if we want to develop our inner qualities it’s never too soon to start getting down to it.

—Matthieu Ricard, Buddhist Monk and Molecular Biology PhD, in his book of conversations with his philosopher father, “The Monk and the Philosopher”

Update: I’m also waiting to experiment with Enigma.io, the data startup that was the winner of TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013.

I spent the day checking out RecordedFuture, a startup that provides tools for web intelligence, forecasting and predictive analytics. Founded in 2008, their investors include the CIA (In-Q-Tel Ventures) and Google Ventures.

How does it work ?
Unstructured data on the web ————> RecordedFuture performs linguistic analysis, entity and event extraction, identification of business or product relationships ————> Allows you to filter based on context (organization, technology, person, event, time), momentum(measure of related online activity), sentiment (positive,negative) ————> visualization in clusters, timelines, network graphs ————> derive your insights

The idea is to complement keyword-based Google searches with search and analysis based on the context of information.

Extraction of Temporal data -

Inside RecordedFuture -

All of these searches could be done using Google, but this tool could help you quickly see relationships, chronological context, sort based on media type(mainstream, blogs, niche) for your searches. There is also a tool to setup custom alerts, which I am yet to explore.

More links -
https://www.recordedfuture.com/this-is-recorded-future/

An Introduction to Recorded Future
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YQNQ_GLe9Q

Building Complex Queries - Example with Iran
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRZCI55VDYw

Competitive Intelligence with Recorded Future
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTJQ1c46BGE

For the folks from IIT Kanpur, Kharagpur and a bunch of places on the west coast looking for the Vibration Reduction prototype that I presented at Open Hack India 2012.
If you are interested in working on an open-source solution for enabling vibration reduction on iOS or android, contact me at notspam [ a t ] n i r a j r d o t com. Thanks

* Don’t be a jerk
* Don’t take anyone for granted
* Enjoy the moment
* Be honest, always
* Be humble
* Be kind
* Respect people’s wishes
* Allow endings
* Fail openly
* Have an amazing haircut

All I ever needed to know in life, I learned from Calvin and Hobbes.