In Pursuit of Wisdom

When I first went to see my house 1st week of November, I noticed a Tesla charger installed on the garage. It got me the idea that I need to buy a Tesla. I explored the option to buy a Tesla a few years back when we went to visit our friend Nody and Russell in Austin, Texas. But I decided against that considering the relatively lower milage and hence frequent need to charge the car outside. At that time Tesla didn't have as many super chargers like today (30,000+). But now that the milage is significantly higher and my Honda Accord is not in a good shape, I found the legitimate excuse to consider buying a Tesla, in addition to the fact that electrical vehicles are going to be the future of transportation. I initially thought of buying a Tesla Model Y SUV but then quickly opted for Model 3 Sedan. Few days ago, I showed Shusmita Model 3 in a road and she didn't feel quite content with its relatively smaller size. So I decided to pick Model S instead. In terms of color I was think...

2021 was another eventful year in my life. Here are some reflections on it and what I am looking forward to. Looking Back on 2021 How do I feel about the past year? What were my emotional highlights and lowlights? What’s most important in my life right now? What really matters to me? How did I do on my most important priorities this past year? What have I learned? What do I need from myself and others to make an honest assessment of my life, my priorities and what matters most to me and those I love? How clearly do my actions and choices reflect those priorities? When thinking of these questions few things come to mind. By start of this year I have accepted the fate of pandemic of covid-19 and how it has changed our life style. I accepted I can't just travel anywhere I like including visiting Bangladesh to meet my parents, brothers and relatives. I continued reading and writing book reviews every week. I overshot my goodreads book reading challenge by finishing 81 books this year ...

Finally Shusmita and I purchased a house close to my daughter's school in Fremont. We have been thinking of buying a house for some time but I had to wait until my stock lockup period was over early November for me to be able to arrange the down payment. We got the keys yesterday (23rd November), just a day ahead of the 45 days closing deadline. When middle of this year we started to look for hosue, I thought we will need some time before we can find one that we like. I had early 2022 in the back of my mind. But as it happens, all on a sudden we liked a house so much that we couldn't resist and went through a bid war to win. It's a 5 bed 4 bath 2 storied house, 3122 sq ft with 8160 lot size. We used Redfin agent and did our loan processing with Rocket Mortgage. We are very grateful to our friends and family who supported and guided us along the way. Wali Bhai and Asha bhabi have been visiting all the potential houses that we went to check. Nody, Russell, Ashfaq, Shumi, Sumi...

Similar to   last year , we had a great Marqeta Talent Show this year as well. I participated in 2 sessions this time – one solo and another in a group performance. As I have been reading lots of leadership and management books, I came up with an idea to promote some of the very best books I read and am about to read. Hence I wrote a fictional letter to our CEO using many of the name of books as a building block to compose the sentences of the letter. I also put the image of the book after the names of each book so that its easier for the audience to visualize. I hope you will enjoy it. For my group performance I read out loud the following quote in English, Bengali and Hindi. The one who plants trees, knowing that he will never sit in their shade, has at least started to understand the meaning of life. –  Rabindranath Tagore যে গাছ লাগায়, সে জানে যে সে কখনো তাদের ছায়ায় বসবে না, সে অন্তত জীবনের অর্থ বুঝতে শুরু করেছে।

  My friend  Suman Hossain (Ashfaq) came with excitement last weekend after finishing this book and asked us that we must give him a pen and paper and listen to him. He explained  The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity  by Carlo M. Cipolla which he just finished! He even bought few copies of this book and gifted me one to read quickly (tiny book, you can finish in half an hour). I finished it and am equally excited to share with you fo what I understood about intelligent, helpless, bandit and stupid people across any population and time. The Five basic laws of human stupidity described are -  Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation. The probability that a certain person is stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person. A stupid person is one who causes losses to another person or a group of people while they gain nothing or may even suffer losses. Non-stupid people always underestimate the ...

I got to know  Shahed Islam  via LinkedIn when he commented on some of my leadership posts that I shared in my wall. We found common interest and enthusiasm in the area of leadership and management theories and practices. Hence we synced up in a zoom call one day and talked about why we are so fond of Patrick Lencioni, John Maxwell, Simon Sinek, Malcolm Gladwell, Gary Vaynerchuk et al. Since then we have been discussing several topics in a monthly basis taking break from our busy time of work and life. He demonstrates what we very well know as servant leadership and is keen to help out people both here in USA as well as in Bangladesh. So when he came up with a plan for a series of interviews with different leaders and picked me to talk about a topic I was happy to participate. As a result here is my half an hour talk on his site the  Managed Coder .