K's Weekly # 3

Karthi Subbaraman -

Welcome to the third edition of K's Weekly. If you are new to this weekly newsletter, I share learnings from week-in-a-life of a maker (i.e: me).

Here are a bunch of learnings from being curious, doing experiments, reflecting deeply, launching stuff, meeting new people, getting excited about things, and absorbing information around me. So far there has never been a dull week in 15500+ days of my life. I am positive it is gonna be exciting forever.

Let's dig in.

Weekly check 1-2-3

This week of mine was a mega reflective week. Many projects came to a closure this week serendipitously.

A side-note: I measure my life in projects. Accoridng to me life is a bunch of projects. I classfiy them as finite and infinite.

Definition:

Finite projects have a start date and an end date, clear objectives, outputs and metrics.

Infinite one are rhythmic and they keep happening. For example for a walk everyday, writing the daily bog or a weekly newsletter, having a meal, being vegan etc. They are ON forever.

You could convert them as finite projects if need be but you could decide to just keep them ON mode forever.

In that sense many finite projects came to an end this week.

For example, the long term diploma for makers (15 months), design learnstreams for non-designers (50 days), keystone accelerator cohort (8 weeks), workflow wonder program (4 weeks), Home Studio for Xperian and its founders (8 months), home sale to fund the home studio (6 months) and 6 more projects came to an end this week. I am super pumped that in next two weeks, as of 2 April 2021 we complete our 1000 days moratorium in Xperian.

I am grateful to everything. Especially I am thankful to  everything that happened in 2020.  The year has been intense, chaotic and at the same time charismatic.

I don't have a sob story per se. Rather I choose not to have a sob story in my life. There is always someone who goes through more pain than me and there is always someone who goes through more pleasure than me. What is there to sob about?

My take away: Things happen and we learn from everything that happens. The choice is to learn and adapt or to not learn and suffer. It is a clear choice. I chose the former.

2020 wasn't particularly a rosy year for me but I guess that compounding pain is the one that gave exponential personal growth inside. It is like a real-time experience of a phoneix bird rising from the ashes.

New me, New life

We generally do this for new years and new decades but I decided to do it now. No special occasion, no special year or no special turning point. Post the mega reflection week, I just felt it is time to consolidate life from all the learnings from projects so far. It is time to simplify life further.

Design is all about obsessively simplifying things to a point where the thing becomes so significant in life.

The new life is exciting and new me is even more exciting. I am using all the clarity  from projects and designing a much simpler life.

Here is a simple 5 point framework I am using to design my life further.

  • Main effect = Dying Well (definition - If i don't wake up tomorrow morning, did I live my life at my max potential till this moment?)
  • Side Effect = Great health, Enough wealth, Impactful Career, Amazing tribe, Useful knowledge.
  • Tick with the ticking clock. Don't live a moment of this precious life unconsciously.
  • Parallel tasking with projects. One keystone project at a time. Many projects can be on slow burn but focus on one project only.
  • Share everything I learn with my tribe. The struggles are real. The learnings are genuine. The intent is authentic. I don't know who wants it but I am sure it will be useful to someone in a similar context going through similar trials and tribulations.

Everything life fits into this framework. It took me 4 years and countless experiements to simplify life to this stage. My fancy ass term for this process is LIFE DESIGN. It is interesting that clarity also happens on a hindsight only. So reflect every day. You may be missing out on a lot of learnings without reflection.

Weekly Series for K's Blog

4 months ago I had exemplery success putting out stuff on substack as a monthly series.  I wrote about things that excite me. I covered neuroscience, personal finance, weight loss and life design as four 30 days series. To be made into a epub format soon.

As a super structured learner I like things in a sequence. As a neuro-nerd I empathise with the pain associated with unrelated information bombardment on brains. Consuming so much unreleated stuff does more harm than good. It is be hard on our brains to fathom how much is coming despite the quality of content. I can't do thebombarding because I care about my brain and your brain.

I had a mixed success with the series. On one end my maker tribe loved it and on the other end some folks were fatugued by a 30-day 300 word series. That is about 10K words to consume every month. A few wanted a serendipitous post everyday like how all blogs work. A series as a blog was screwing their mental model of a blog. I did empathsise with that and started writing different topics that makers might be interested. But somewhere this threw me off as a creator. I had to find a balance badly.

After a lot of experiements, I settled on a weekly themed blog. It is not a series, it is not serendipoitous but everything we read that week is connected to a theme. It also stands as an individual blog on that day. Arriving at this system design was win-win for both the creator in me and the consumer in my tribe.

Now came a different problem.

I did have different ideas to write about in a day. There are some days with amazing flow and I write more. There are some days nothing more than 10 words pop out of me. So I needed a place to express to keep the momentum on. So I stress tested my blog all this week and here is my final tenets for the system design.

  • If a space is my creative gym, I should feel free to workout anytime. The sweat is real. As a creator it should enable my flow. Creative productivity is crazy and unpredictable so I can add a boundary for the sake of it.
  • As a creator I should have only one space to create as managing many will be hard.
  • If my tribe is interested in my creative gym, they will come here and read it anyways.
  • If my tribe prefers to get my daily blog as an email, it will be the blog that goes by the weekly theme.
  • If my tribe needs to get only my K's Weekly, then only this will be sent.

What a simple system design and all managed as workflow. Why did this not hit me earlier 🙈 This is the "n" th time I am acknowledging that constraints breed creativity. Constraints are so powerful. It certainly makes you a better designer.

That is how much I churned this week.

What a powerful week? I exclaimed to myself 🎉

I didn't have much time to read any books this week. I didn't consume much social media as well. My screen time was ~40 mins tops on average. I did rest better this week with so much reflection going on. I couldn't have asked for more.

How has yours been my friends?

Until next week,

K 🎉