I'd like to share a journey with you. It's a journey that I've been on for three years. One that has transformed my life, touched the people I interact with, altered my perception of the world and most importantly, made me realize my dreams and what it takes to accomplish them.
I'd like to share the journey of losing weight and discovering myself.
Read MoreMy career, short as it is, has demonstrated a pattern that repeatedly occurs after bad situations: People move on. They psychologically shift to whatever is next on their plate and hope for the best. Taking the time to reflect, understand what happened and the conditions that led to a bad outcome is what leads to professional growth. That's how intuition is developed: Wit, Wisdom aren't divinely handed to us on birth, they're cultivated, formed out of our experiences and the lessons we draw from them.
Foresight – the ability to anticipate and recognize problems and bad behavioral patterns and conditions before they have the chance to sprout and wreck havoc becomes a very powerful force when combined with hindsight. Hindsight helps you deal with issues when they happen, foresight helps you prevent those preconditions from happening in the first place. Whereas hindsight is a defensive mechanism, foresight is an offensive mechanism. Failure is the most effective form of growth. It provides us the experience necessary to develop our foresight.
Read MoreI left Syria in 2003, I was 15 at the time. At that time, the best internet connection you could get was ADSL and it was about 1.5-2mbps in the best of times. For a techie like me, it was a living hell. I remember the first time I came to the US and saw broadband. I would look away for a moment, then look back and wait not realizing that the page has already loaded. Anyway, I came back in 2005 and people everywhere suddenly had 3G dongles attached to their laptops and they were surfing the web at speeds that match the LTE speeds that we get on our iPhone 5s today.
This was the first time I saw the Chasm perform a proverbial reach-around. In this case, the laggers – Syria – had eclipsed the innovators – The US – in mobile internet connectivity. Nobody needed to ruin all the sidewalks in our ancient country to wire up cables, we got to skip that whole stage of internet development and jump straight to 3G. Add on top of it government support and a lot of foreign investment, and you got yourself a top-of-the-line cell network with cell towers throughout the cities. I'm seeing a "Chasmic reach-around" again these days, only this time, I'm the innovator who's getting blind-sided by, wait for it, my parents.
Read MoreI recently wrote a retrospective on the last 12 months, and included some high-level goals. I want to expand on those goals and add some more ones along with some context on why I chose these goals.
Read MoreFor the past two years, I've written a retrospective on my year. I didn't want to stop the tradition, but I'm also in the process of transitioning my blog and couldn't write it there, so I'll share it here and cross-post it when the blog is ready.
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