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I was reading Nassim Taleb’s works and one of the writings that stuck to my mind was how seemingly harmless things can add up and cause great distress over a period of time.

There are lots of activities that does not have any significance if done in isolation but when done repeatedly or multiple times over a period of time it ends up creating a profound problem. One such he states is smoking a Cigarette. The risk of smoking just one cigarette will not even have any noticeable effect on the body, but it is a well known fact that years of smoking will eventually lead to bad health compared to non smokers.

In the current knowledge world it applies to our habits at workplaces as well. The risk due to procrastinating a whole day and not learning anything new in a day is almost zero, in fact it can happen for a few months without much effect on one’s ability that is how we take vacations; but there will come a time when we will be left out of the crowd if that procrastination prolongs.

Simple things we do or don’t do in a day can cause a lot of harm in the long run.

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During the Deepavali festival celebrations, I will step out of the house early in the morning with a big bag of crackers, incense sticks, candles & match box; and won’t return home until I have exhausted all the crackers and lit a bonfire at the end of the day. If I come back home when parents are around, they would hold me back at home spoiling my precious day so I would try not to go back to home at all.

Deepavali was the first lesson in managing things at hand for me. Twice I was left out with a box of crackers and nobody around had a matchstick to light a fire, everyone’s situation was the same; you get back home you can’t come back until you are permitted to leave the house again. So no one could run back home and bring a matchbox, stores were also closed so we had to curtail our celebration and return.

Every year we are better in mind power than the previous year, so we learnt to avoid running out of match sticks by using a lot of incense sticks, keeping the fire alive through candles. We also learnt to light an incense stick with another incense stick. Yet we would hit the dreaded problem of the last match stick, at this point all of us would gather all the paper, leaves and twigs lying around and make a bonfire so that we can continue further.

Lighting the last match stick meant everyone gathers around close to break the wind, holding our breaths and giving the task to the eldest person in the group. We will make sure the last match stick is well used. Though this looks like seemingly benign, the mindset of splurging unless when things become scarce is extremely present. I used to light a box full of matches within an hour on seemingly useless things.

We are very hard on our future self, even if the future self is just a few hours away

Instant gratification does not let us see into distant future, it is also hard to teach to people such an abstract term but I have seen my grandparents tried to imbibe this from my childhood days. Even though there would be plenty of water, they never consumed more than that was required. Food was always upcycled, rarely thrown away. They still carry water bottles before leaving the house, while I still look to buy a throwaway bottle.

And yes the obvious one, they treated every match stick as the last match stick they had and carefully used them.

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Cumulative and compounding effects are poorly perceived by us, so is our understanding of micro behaviours (not to be confused with micro-optmisation) that have impact on large outcomes. I read the following story in the book ‘You can win’ by Shiv Khera which had many short stories that stay in mind for a long time.

“A baker who is illiterate, operates a very profitable business. His hearing loss also meant that he was not aware of current affairs happening at large. The only thing he did was, bake very good different kinds of breads which was so famous in the town that a lot of people stop by to keep trying his exotic varieties; as he did good business he sent his son for higher studies. When the son joined the business he was shocked to see his father making very expensive breads and experimenting with many more types; he was shocked because he knew the economy took a downturn recently and a lot of people are going to struggle keep themselves fed. He convinced his father to bake only plain bread so that people could afford. Slowly the customers ended being disappointed that their favourite varieties are no longer available and stopped coming. The business had to shutdown as no longer customers turned up, the father tells his son you are right the economic depression is here glad that I listened to you.”

The above story is profound, how a simple technique of listening to customers and keeping them happy kept a business blooming even in tough times. Rolling up information is only possible when people acknowledge that I don’t understand everything going on but let me learn from each step or be unaware of lots of things.

This is why some of the best developers I meet always have an element of doubt when they take a new step and make sure there are many safety nets. I have seen know it all attitudes that have brought down multi million dollars programs to stand still.

This is not new so called ‘Agile’ methodology wisdom. This thought has been there for millennia as told in the Tamil proverb – அடி மேல் அடி வைத்தால் அம்மியும் நகரும் (Adi mel adi vaithal ammiyum nagarum) which means “even seemingly large & heavy stones can be moved step by step”. This was told very often by my grandparents whenever I picked up tough new lessons in school.

If you are a software engineer and want to be very productive, ditch the attitude of “know it all” or “get every thing right always”. Instead of it, approach step by step and reap the benefits that accumulate over time that are easy to roll back when things go wrong.