In Pursuit of Wisdom

One of my colleague from Marqeta first told me about this book, so I put it into my top queue for to-read list. Then couple of weeks back in a company offsite, our CEO Jason Gardner mentioned this book. So as soon as I was done with How Google Works, I started this book. I found this book very thought provoking. It's a philosophy of life that can be of practical use at any place and time. The author talks about how to build new narratives so that we get rid of blame games and instead pay attention to the needs of people and ourselves. Here are some sample ways that we can use to communicate in a nonviolent compassionate way. You may initially find it a bit difficult or unreal but with time it will become natural I hope. Can I interrupt you for a moment? There's something going on in me. Use it when you want to interrupt someone because you dont want to listen any more. Do you have space to listen to me for like 10 minutes? Use it when you want someone to lis...

Last year I finished 2 books that told the stories of Sillicon Valley startups in ways that I liked very much -  The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz  and  Zero to One by Peter Thiel . This April another book came up but I couldn't make time to read it until now. I just finished the audiobook - Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley's Bill Campbell by Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg, Alan Eagle. It's a great book on leadership, management and business in general based on the lessons from Bill Campbell. Bill was a former executive at Kodak and then Apple, and later became the CEO of Intuit. He was also an informal executive coach to many tech giant CEOs/COOs, including Steve Jobs, Eric Schmidt, Sunder Pichai, Marissa Mayer, Dick Costolo, Dan Rosensweig, Donna Dubinsky, Sheryl Sandberg, Ben Horowitz, and many others. I am thinking of many of the lessons I am trying to internalize after reading this book. If you are a manager o...

I became undefeated champion today in  19th US National Class Chess Championship  organized by  BayAreaChess . I played in A section (Under 2000) in 2 days format while Ahyan played in B section . (Under 1800). I won first 4 rounds and drew the final round to be champion. Ahyan didn’t get a good tournament this time as he is trying to settle in this relatively new B section. So far all my games were hard earned slow endgame wins, three times being a pawn down with slight or no compensation. I should receive $1008 first prize along with the champions trophy.  You may find the  final standings here . Also I have recorded below all the 5 games I played in this tournament. Rohan Rajaram  (1794) vs.  Ashik Uzzaman  (1947) 1/2-1/2 Hyatt Regency, Burlingame, California: US National Class Championship: 2019.09.29 In the final round I needed a draw while my opponent Rajaram needed to defeat me to be champion. He thought h...

I listen to many speakers, watch youtube lectures, follow tweets as well as posts from LinkedIn, Medium and other blogs. Over time I came to listen to some of the speakers repeatedly either for their eloquence in speech or for their insightful message. Here I am compiling a list of best of them as per my taste. Please feel free to compile your own and share with me so that I can enrich my list.  Shykh Yasir Qadhi  - American Sunni Muslim Scholar and one of the most eloquent speakers. Check out his  youtube videos . Richard Feynman  - Famous Physicist. Check out his youtube lectures, twitter quotes or read his 2 books  Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!  and  What Do You Care What Other People Think? Naval Ravikanth  - A serial entrepreneur in bay area. Follow  his tweets  and listen to his lectures in seminars. Jordan Bernt Peterson  - Clinical psychologist and writer of  12 rules For Life . Follow his  youtub...

In 27th May 2018 late afternoon in one of my regular visits to my friend Ashfaq's house, I found him with the book 12 Rules For Life: An Antidote To Chaos by Jordan B. Peterson. He mentioned that he recently ordered it from Amazon but after reading part of the forward he was thinking to return it unless I am interested to read it. My eyes just sparkled as I got some great references of books like Sapiens, Thinking Fast and Slow, The Three-Body Problem (trilogy) etc from him in the past. So he gifted me the book and I started reading it. It's difficult to over estimate how much I liked the book and even more difficult to explain in how many dimensions I discovered a non-fiction book can enrich your thoughts. The book talks about 12 life lessons that you can follow to make the best of your existence. The lesson titles are given below and the titles don't represent properly what he actually means when you read the chapters in detail. Stand up straight with your shou...

Ashik Uzzaman was born and raised in Dhaka, capital city of Bangladesh. He finished his post-graduation in Economics from University of Dhaka while completing diploma in software engineering from NIIT. He came to USA with job as a java developer in 2005 and currently working as a Senior Software Engineer at Roku. He, along with his son Ahyan Zaman, is a regular participant in chess tournaments on the west coast. How old were you when you first learned how to play chess? Who taught you? – I was about 8 years old when I learned to play chess. I learned it from my cousin. How has chess effected your decision making process off the board? – Chess makes you efficient considering many possible outcomes in parallel. This helped me consider pros and cons of making any decision carefully. Chess also helped me learn when to take time, observe and weigh in detail before making any conclusions. So I think it helped me in my career choice, my education and my social skills....

This finally happened.  Ahyan  defeated me for the first time in a competitive chess tournament despite my rating being more than 300 points than his. We are playing in 19th Henry Memorial Chess tournament today at Mechanics Chess Institute, San Francisco. This is a 5 round Swiss where after first 3 rounds both of us were at 2. Consequently I got white in 4th round against him. I gained a pawn putting some positional pressure and got greedy to get the second pawn. So I got into a long defensive position and miscalculated a pin which I thought I can defend. Well no. Ahyan piled all his pieces on the pinned Bishop despite having only 1 minute left in his clock. As it was a game in 40 with 5 seconds delay, seeing very low time in his clock, I didn’t resign until getting checkmated with the hope to flag him down on time. But we it didn’t work out for me. I have never given up any game in my life, and did my best to win. But kudos to him. Recently he had been crossing me in tactic...