2021 - The Year Of 21 Books

2021 is coming to an end, I thought to take this moment to reflect back on how the year was and what did I do differently this year. This year has been special in so many different ways, and I am grateful for more things that I can list down here. 

Having said that, I want to talk specifically about a new habit that I am super grateful for. It's a habit that I have developed over the past 1.5 years: The habit of reading books! 

I was never a reader, I hated it, most of the time I would sleep when I try to read a book. I always knew the importance of reading, but never could get into a good cadence for reading a book on a regular basis. 

But since last 1.5 years slowly but steadily, I have stared reading more than ever and on a regular schedule.

So what changed? Well I have to thank 2 people mainly for this change. First is Abhishek, he is the most ferocious reader I have ever known. I have always wondered how he manages to read so many books. Actually meeting and seeing a person who can read so much, gave me confidence that it's definitely doable. 

And second, I need to thank Roopesh, he has pushed me hard to read and keep reading. His belief that everyone should read, learn and grow is infectious.

Reading needs a conducive environment. You need the following things for the reading habit to be cemented:

• Time
• A good book 
• Strong desire to learn and grow 

He has been instrumental in all 3 of them. 

Time

Although, Makkajai is a startup, we do not work in constant stress of timelines, we have a very calm approach to getting stuff done. This ensures there is time at hand to do more than just work. In fact reading to learn and grow during office hours is not only considered acceptable, it is encouraged! 

Now, don't get me wrong here, it's not ok to lax around, not do our work and pretend to read. Most of the time we are reading so that we could do our job better than what we are already doing. The belief that everyone can learn something that they didn't know before - the growth mindset, is core to our culture.

A good book

Having a good book available for your disposal is another ingredient to consistent reading. Buying a book takes money, sometimes it's less but sometimes the books are more expensive. The monitory resistance to forming this habit is a real thing. 

To remove this friction we have a simple rule: If you want to buy a book to learn, read and grow, its on the company! 

In fact, all of us have a corporate card assigned to us. We can be used it to buy any book we want to read. This might be a small thing, but helps remove the friction of buying a book.

Strong desire to learn and grow 

Desire to read has to come from within, you got to feel it. Looking at other people around me reading consistently and growing, certainly motivated me to do better and be a better version of my self.

Now that my rant is over, let's look at the list of books that I have read this year:

1. The 5AM Club
2. Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win
3. Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts
4. Thinking, Fast and Slow
5. Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
6. Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works
7. The Strategy Book ePub eBook: How to Think and ACT Strategically to Deliver Outstanding Results
8. Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business
9. The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons in Creative Leadership from the CEO of the Walt Disney Company
10. Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters
11. Sprint: How To Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days
12. Elon Musk
13. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable
14. Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Field Guide for Leaders, Managers, and Facilitators
15. Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built
16. The Coaching Habit Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever
17. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck
18. Thinking in Systems: International Bestseller
19. An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management
20. Will
21. INSPIRED: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love (Silicon Valley Product Group)

I know its not a lot, but for a person who read close to 0 books the previous year, it's quite a list! 

Book Summary: Ikigai - The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life

I truly believe everyone should have reading as one of their habits. It gives us great insights and widens our horizons. Reading takes you places and gives you new ideas. At Makkajai, we have been buying lots of books for office reading. 

We observed that even though we have lots of good books in office, not everyone is reading them or making an effort to read them. To push everyone to read more often, we came-up with a simple idea. Everyone has to write one pager book summary every month! 

It doesn't matter what book you read, it doesn't matter how thick or thin it is. All that matters is that everyone writes a book summary for the book they have read.

Very recently, I had read the book Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life by Hector Garcia and Francesc Miralles. It goes without saying that, this is a pretty awesome book. To keep up with the tradition, I did write a short book summary this book. Turns my team members liked the summary hence, I decided to convert he book summary into a blog post in the hope that, more and more people will find this book interesting and worth reading.

Book Summary

This books demonstrates various topics related to Art of Living. Its the art of living and not art of existence or survival :). The book defines what is ikigai and the rules of ikigai. In Japanese, ikigai (生き甲斐) is a combination of letters that mean "life" and "to be worthwhile". Authors of the book try to unravel the secrets of long and happy life.

How do they do it? They conducted a total of one hundred interviews in Ogimi, Okinawa - Japan to try to understand the longevity secrets of centenarians and super-centenarians i.e. people who have lived for 100 and 110+ years!

The village of Ogimi in Japan has the most number of centenarians and super-centenarians in the world. Authors talk about various experiences while interviewing centenarians and super-centenarians.

So what did they find? 

Ikigai can be illustrated with this diagram very easily. It’s basically an intersection of “What you are good at”, “What you love”, “What the world needs” and “What you can be paid for”!

• Ikigai roughly translates into “the happiness of always being busy.” 
• We all have a certain passion inside us, a thing that we love to do and the thing that keeps us going. A unique talent that gives meaning to our days and drives us to share the best of ourselves until the very end. 
• If we don’t know what this thing is yet, then our mission is to discover it.
• Everyone’s ikigai is different, but one thing we have in common is that we are all searching for meaning. 
• When we spend our days feeling connected to what is meaningful to us, we live more fully; when we lose the connection, we feel despair. 
• Our ikigai is hidden deep inside each of us and finding it requires a patient search. 
• Once we discover our ikigai, pursuing it and nurturing it every day will bring meaning to your life.
• One thing that everyone with a clearly defined ikigai has in common is that, they pursue their passion no matter what.

What are the rules for Ikigai?

• Stay active; don’t retire. Keep doing things that you love to do.
• Take it slow. Don’t be in a hurry all the time. This is one of the most important thing to remember. Live life fully from today, right now, in this moment, do not wait for some obscure time in the future to do it.
• Eat less. Only about 80% of your hunger. Obviously its not easy to figure out what is 80% of hunger, but the idea is to not fill up your stomach to 100% of its capacity :)
• Surround yourself with good friends. If you are to live longer, you will need good company when you are old.
• Get in shape, exercise and regularly move your body. At least try and do mild exercise 3-5 days in a week.
• Smile and do it often. This is something that we all can do more of.
• Reconnect with nature. Appreciate its beauty. Grow a garden in your home, go for a trek!
• Give thanks and mean it.
• Live in the moment. A lot of times we are either worried about the future or sad about the past. Don’t do it, Live in the moment.

Avoiding Stress & Existential Crisis

Many people seem older than they actually are. Why do you think that happens?

• Research into the causes of premature ageing has shown that, stress has a lot to do with it.
• Existential crisis, on the other hand, is typical of modern societies in which people do what they are told to do, or what others do, rather than what they want to do. Peer pressure, makes us do things that we don't really care about.
• People often try to fill the gap between what is expected of them and what they want for themselves with economic power or physical pleasure, or by numbing their senses
• Those who give up the things they love doing, lose their purpose in life.

Be in Flow

Flow is the mental state in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energised focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity!

• We have to focus on increasing the time we spend on activities that bring us to state of flow, rather than allowing ourselves to get caught up in activities that offer immediate pleasure.
• Concentrating on one thing at a time may be the single most important factor in achieving flow. Too many times we try to do things in parallel and divide our attention. This is a sure shot recipe for not achieving the state of flow.
• Our ability to turn routine tasks into moments of micro-flow, into something we enjoy, is key to our being happy.
• The happiest people are not the ones who achieve the most. They are the ones who spend more time than others in a state of flow.

Slow Living

• Being in a hurry is inversely proportional to quality of life. As the old saying goes, ‘Walk slowly and you’ll go far.’ 
• When we leave urgency behind, life and time take on new meaning.
• There is a huge difference between being in a rush all the time vs keeping yourselves busy with things that you love to do.
• Never stop doing the things that you love to do!
• Slow living doesn't mean that we stop being busy, it means we stop being in hurry!

And finally here are a few secrets of centenarians in their own words:

What should we do to live a long and happy life?

• Don’t worry
• Cultivate good habits
• Nurture your friendships every day
• Live an unhurried life
• Be optimistic
• Eat and sleep, and you’ll live a long time. 
• Learn to relax.
• Your mind and your body. You keep both busy, you’ll be here a long time.

Overall, I have learned a lot from this book and pretty sure that everyone can learn many things from it. Do read it and let me know how you liked it.

We Are Hiring!

We Are Hiring! Yep, you head me. We Are Hiring!

If I had to describe my entire journey at Makkajai in one word, it would be "FUN". Every single day has so much to offer, new challenges, newer and bigger problems to tackle, lots and lots of learning and above have lots of fun!

It's a company that I co-founded, so I am programmed to like it. However, here are some data points that might help you decide for yourself. Here is a small list of achievements from the past year

• We have written code in about 8 different programming languages.
• Build lots of tools and services to enable our marketing team drive organic growth
• Built and released 3 new games, with a very thin DEV team.
• Did numerous hours of play testing of our games with actual kids. Incorporated play testing feedback into our apps.
• Our Content team built 60 books worth of printables which is available to print from our apps

We are growing, we want to do even more awesome stuff.

If you are bored doing routine stuff, if you are in your comfort zone and that scares you, here is your opportunity. 

Click Here to see all our open positions, apply only if you don't fear challenges and are ready to make a real impact on learning outcomes for millions of kids worldwide!

How to show realtime translucent background frost/blur effect similar to iOS UIToolbar

In our app "Monster Math - Best Arithmetic Game. Ever" we wanted to show a parental gate screen, when people click on the "Upgrade" or "Restore" button.  The parental gate screen should have a realtime translucent background frosted glass/blur effect, similar to how its shown in the UIToolbar.

So essentially what I wanted was something like this.

The actual view with a carousel, Upgrade and Restore buttons on it

The parental gate with a translucent background frost effect similar to iOS UIToolbar

I searched around, to see if I can find an inbuilt API in iOS that can help us do this.  But unfortunately there is nothing exposed by Apple that helps us do it.  That said, Apple did show a simple trick that can give us the desired effect very easily.

How do they do it!

This can be done in 3 simple steps

• Convert the underlying UIView to an UIImage
• Frost/Blur the UIImage
• Set this new frosted/blurred UIImage as background of your new view

NOTE: The explanation of how to do these steps can be found in this SO Answer.

Convert the underlining UIView to an UIImage

This can be done by creating a new category of UIView and adding the following method to that category

Frost/Blur the UIImage

To frost/blur the UIImage that we created in the previous step we can use the Apples Image Effect category.  The code for ImageEffects category looks as follows

Using this ImageEffects category we can frost/blur any UIImage as follows

Set this new frosted/blurred UIImage as background of your new view

This is by far the simplest step of all.  All that needs to be done here is to set the newly created UIImage as the background of your new view.  Our game is developed with Cocos2d and we could do this using the following lines of code

The end result is very satisfying.  It looks great on the devices as well!

Thats all folks! I hope you like this realtime frosted glass/blurred effect as much as I do.