Pirates of silicon valley / fountain head

The holiday vacation in Vancouver gave me the chance to watch two great movies in one day! Really I should have watched these two movies earlier. Had not watched such good movies for a while!

These are the kind of movies when I watch I can feel I made them! It's like, I feel they are showing me stuff I imagine in my head and now, someone else has thought about them and made all the way to produce and make a moving pictures out of them.

The idea that a man must live for his own sake and not to sacrifice himself is such a true idea. Reminds me of a day in my undergrads when I was arguing with a friend over a topic and i made a point that I won't care what other people think of me. I recall him giving me a cliche answer: "don't be such a self-satisfied person". This saying never made sense to me. I replied back: how come a man can not be satisfied of his own thinking? If I am thinking and believing in something, that's me and that implies I am satisfied with it. People who are not satisfied of themselves must be people who say other people's thinking not their own. The state of being dissatisfied of self is an unstable state and a healthy mind would quickly move away from that state to a self-satisfactory one. That's is too obvious to argue about.

Working with Mike in The company has out me through lots of new learnings about how to execute an idea and how important it is to market yourself and your great ideas. This is something university never teaches anyone and and as such, lots of great ideas are buried in schools in research labs or in papers simply because there are not executed into human life.

How to use our brain - 1

There is something in me, and I suppose in a lot of other people, which keeps reminding me that I need to make a contribution in human society. To make a contribution essentially means to make changes how people think and how people act. And the purpose why we want people change perhaps can be explained by intrinsic evolution in all aspects of life on earth ( and in universe).

In order make contribution, I need to stay healthy mentally and physically. To stay healthy means using brain and body often, and rehearse them regularly. Two to three sessions of swimming per week would not take too much time, and will keep my body up to the level of performance I want.

To keep my brain up to speed all the time is a bit trickier. Depending what kind of profession you are pursuing, you need to expose yourself to certain kind of problems and try to solve them without giving up. Although its good to exercise all regions of your brain on a regular basis, its not always easy abd nay take a lot of time. Moreover, most of us tend to be good at doing a limited types of tasks and bad at doing others due to having a non-balanced brain and its neural structures solidified from birth or during early childhood. So, it might be a better investment to reinforce our strength by doing more of things that requires those strength, and push our brain to perform the tasks that we often don't like to do jut enough that we can survive as become necessary from time to time.

fight and friendship

I learned a very important lesson regrading a healthy and honest relationship with people: It is very important that you try hard to understand the other party's perspective and arguments and try to see the world from their eyes. But equally important is that you should also express your true opinion back even though your complete disagreement with the other party bring a bitter moment afterwards. Fighting straight forwardly will finally result in a much better ending than hiding your true opinion with the false hope that passing time might cut away the root of the differences.

I have to develop practices how to implement this in my relationship at both work and home.

These days there is a Wiki for everything. Learn how you should fight:)
http://www.wikihow.com/End-a-Fight-with-a-Friend

value-driven relationship

Today was a tiring day in our business. One of the customers- who was not the real customer I discovered, and had bought the product and assigned it to someone else to “try” it to see if the product has any use in his class decided to cancel the agreement because the actual user –who had no authority to make a decision if she wanted to use this or not and just was supposed to use it, used the product very poorly. This is the second time that I am realizing we sold the product to someone whom we should have identified at the beginning as not an early adopter of our technology in our start-up.

I now have a much more clear understanding who a real customer is: The real customer is the one, who has a need, and selects a product carefully that does the job he/she wants, and uses it properly and will be often happy (well assuming that the product really does the job it promises it does). If you sign up for a soccer team, for example, and you do not have suitable shoes, you will go to mall, look up available products and buy a pair that helps you play well in the field without sliding and falling. You are a happy costumer for that shoe and the shoe company loves you too.

Sometimes you do not feel you have a need but you buy a product and still are a real customer. Suppose since your childhood, you have been always using knife to chop onions when you cook. You are walking in a mall some day either for fun or just to do regular grocery shopping, and you notice an ad that says if you buy an onion chopper, you will save yourself time and make the job easy. The price tag is there and you know your budget, and decide to try it. You initially did not have a need, but you correctly identified the value of the product and willingly chose to buy.

You may think I am talking obvious, but there is a third group who are poison in the market and you should think twice before selling them your product: If the buyer decided to buy your product because he was afraid of saying “No” to you, he might be ruining the market by badly using the product and spreading negative opinion about your company by giving bad testimonials to others (a bad situation to be for start-ups who have limited number of customers). If he said yes, because he is your friend and is saying “yes” only to do you a favor and probably thinks what you offer “might be” useful somehow in his life at some point, he is in fact ruining your market. And if the buyer did not have a need nor understood the value of your product and yet decided to buy it because she knew that someone else would pay for the cost other than herself, be warned that she can be potentially a dangerous bug for your market.

After the first experience with a bad customer, I knew that I should not approach someone who is willing to setup a meeting with me only because he knows me. That was why I very clearly asked in our meeting that he should feel free to decline if he does not see any value. I knew him personally as someone who never says things unless he believes in it (and in fact I always admired him inside for this side of his characteristic) and I trusted when he told me that he sees value and is not going to waste my time. And he said “yes”. The problem was that the value he saw was not the value we were offering. He just took the technology totally wrong. I was hoping that I could correct him in the next meetings as we normally meet with customers regularly before the actual execution of the project. It turned out that he got too busy to meet me again and my emails in his inbox were his least priority and remained unanswered. After a month and just a few days before the start of the project execution, when I noticed that he is just too busy to meet with me and even not showing any need to get some quick training how to use the product, I saw him in a hallway and told him: Look! I know that we already have spent about 5k for this project and you signed an agreement that you use the system, but I would not mind if you cancel this here. Till this point, I was doing not too bad, but the bad mistake was the email I sent him just one hour after the brief conversation in the hallway. In my email I tried to discourage him to cancel because of the principle we had that a new technology needs some “push” at the beginning, and because we thought we have a sale and have spent resources. Why should one be interested in losing a sale he tried hard to close? Anyways, his final reply was basically that he “makes” someone else to use it. His teaching assistants.

This lesson was probably one of the biggest lessons that I learned since we started this business a year ago. I knew it theoretically before by sitting in marketing seminars and reading books, but now I know what they really mean and how I should talk to customers if I believe I have something that I know has a true value. Remember to build your relationship only upon values and nothing else.

incomplete PhD

My PhD research is finished. Almost finished. Almost, only because one of my supervisors- who does not really have any plan what goal he is trying to achieve other than publishing papers- is pushing for one more paper by asking me to do something which is essentially a repetition of what I have already done, but in a somewhat new fashion: I have pushed a micro object precisely along a desired trajectory and have shown that adaptive controllers using artificial intelligence can accomplish this task. He asks me to repeat this work to push multiple objects as a proof of concept for micro-assembly, i.e. we can automate the process of positioning different micro objects. At this moment, I don't have any motivation to do that, although it may only take 1 or two months of work to finish that task and get the degree. I tried to convince that supervisor that it is essentially the same piece of research we have done already and that really does not change anything in terms of doing something novel, but he insists that without doing that, he would not consider my work as "complete" and hence I can not defend my PhD.
Anyways, doing something which I do not deem of any immediate value is really hard for me, especially when I have tens of more interesting things to do. So at this point, I keep myself busy doing things I love, rather than those I am supposed to do because of some external force.

PS: You will soon (in a few weeks or months) will read an interesting post here about my ancestry profile and my genealogy. I am only waiting for the price to drop off or I get a bit richer to order this DNA test. I see a tremendous potential for clinical knowledge advancement if more users around the world take the test. Exciting, isn't it?

goal

My unexpected little progress in the past 10 days has resulted in a deep sadness in my mind. Why? I had high expectation of my progress after working hard for summer and making good progress in THM stuff. I went to the extend that I set a goal on Aug. 20 that I was going to finish the paper by Aug. 28 and I was really positive I would (and I really worked hard on that week too). Things has gone not much since then. Why? I have experienced with my life that a project can be extended forever if you don't decide to wrap it up at some point. I finished my Master thesis one year later than when I should have. And I was overdue for my BSc thesis defense for 8 months too. Was it really because I unnecessarily lingered on working on non-important details? I think so.

If this stage of my research is going to be as important as my Master thesis was (in terms of its effect in life in general and facilitating my path to my destination), then I should really consider wrapping it up faster.

Hold on Mohsen. you are miscalculating your past works. You underestimate the work you did in master thesis. That work was a great piece of research, thu you might not be satisfied yet.

Not feeling of regret. To gurantee the happiness of future, one should try to foresee himself and try to predict what in the future will be seen as mistake which he/she could have avoided committing by studying its effects thoroughly before doing it.

"Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal". Never take your eyes off your goal and always focus on it. The company could be a temporary target through which your path to final goal passes. How about the research you are doing every single night till past midnight and over all the weekends? Is it along your goal Mohsen? My goal:improving human health and doing research toward fixing the problem of aging. I should be well focused on this Mohsen.....Once you know what you gana get, nothing and no one has the power to stop you from reaching it. It is just recognizing truly what your goal is and what makes you happy ultimately. Lets finish this second paper fast and get to the more interesting stuff for cell manipulation. YES! lets just DO it.

im in love with molecules

من عاشق ملکولها هستم. من ملکولها رو خیلی‌ دوست دارم. ملکولها کلی چیزای قشنگ میسازن. مثلا، من تمام ملکولهایی که ملیحه رو میسازن رو خیلی‌ دوست دارم. اونها ژنهایی رو درست کردن که باعث میشن ملیحه اینجوری تو همه عکسها بخنده و شاد کنه همه رو، خیلی‌ ملکولهای نازی باید باشن.

من کلا عاشق ملکولها هستم. حتا اونهأی که ژنهای یه میکرب خطرناک رو میسازن که باعث مرگه ما آدما می‌شه. من اون ژن زبرو زرنگ رو خیلی‌ دوست دارم. آخه داره پا به پا آدما با این همه ادعا عقل و هوششون میاد و تسلیم هم نمی‌شه. من ملکولهایی که تسلیم نمیشن رو خیلی‌ دوست دارم. اونایی که تو رقابت نفسگیر با ملکولهای دیگه، برنده و پیروز بیرون میان. راستی‌! من رقابت کردن رو هم تو زندگی‌ خیلی‌ دوست دارم. معتقدم که زیبایی جهان هستی امروزی، نتیجهٔ سالها رقابت تنگاتنگ تمام ملکولهای این هستی‌ با یکدیگه است. البته من اتمها و حتا ذرات ریزتر از اتمها رو هم دوست دارم. قشنگی‌ اونا اینه که اونا هیچ وقت از بین نمیرن. همیشه هستن. اما با این حال، من مسلما ملکولها رو بیشتر از اتمهاشون دوست دارم. کلا ملکولها خیلی‌ دوست داشتنی هستن. میدونی‌ چرا اینو میگم؟ چون اگرچه ممکنه یه ملکول از یه ملکول دیگه شکست بخوره و اتمهاش از هم بپاشه، اما این باعث می‌شه که دفعه بعد این اتمها یاد بگیرن، یه جور دیگه با هم دست به یکی‌ بشن تا یه ملکول زرنگتر بسازن. بعد این ملکول زرنگتر (که همیشه خوشگلتر هم هست و باعث می‌شه که دنیا زیباتر بشه) میره به جنگ اون ملکولی که قبلا ازش شکست خورده بود، و باهاش زورازمایی می‌کنه.

راستی‌، ملکولهای مهدی جانم هم خیلی‌ باحالن. یه سری از این ملکولها که داخل کلهٔ مهدی جانم هستن، یه کاری می‌کنن که ملکولهای تو ماهیچه‌های چشمهای مهدی، برن زوم کنن رو یه سری ملکولها شیطون که معمولا ما آدما خیلی‌ دقت نمی‌کنیم، و از اونا عکس بگیرن. اونوقت ما و خیلی‌ دیگه از آدما بتونیم اون بازی قشنگ ملکولها رو ببینیم و کلی‌ لذت ببریم...

دنیای من این سالها این ملکولها و بازی قشنگشون با هم دیگه است.‌ای ملکولهای دنیا، من واقعا دوستون دارم!