On Failure

Failing to meet the marriage market's arbitrary standards. My main failure was that I was overweight and drank socially. I wasted 4 years of my life on that whole process where the only people winning are the brokers. Share markets treat their instruments wayyy better.”

I think it is yet to come fully in a way that matters. I would consider something as a true failure only when my own understanding was structurally incorrect. My understanding of the marriage market was structurally incorrect. I saw it through the lens of Sooraj Barjatya movies. Obviously, that was a failure. But to fully admit to a failure you must have worked hard at building it expecting it to work out. I am doing that with Purna Medha right now. If the market changes, if a huge chunk of people suddenly decide that they are not going to be using AI after all (it is still a highly optional tech), my business would lose its core foundation. So that failure if it happens would definitely be extremely hard to fully admit because so much of it was actually the right instinct.”

A desperate need to consistently explain why it is a success. Write about it. Try to convince everyone that it is going well. Put it up on social media. When something fails structurally, the first instance of realisation is enough. Every kind of discomfort that follows is simply an extension of that realisation.”

Yes. 3 broad systems. Education. Corporate. Marriage. All 3 systems tried to convince me very hard I was the sole reason something didn't work out. It trained me to accept responsibility for the entire system without having any power to change anything about it. I am neurodivergent. My support needs were different from the norm, and maybe that's why I don't count people as failures. Human beings are so messy and approximate that it is a miracle anything occurs correctly at all. I only count systemic failures as true failures because in that case it is a design issue that can be fixed by the right administrator.”

Hahaha, this is such a good question, man. Love it. Failure is the only thing that taught me anything about intelligence at all. Success is an outcome. A record. Intelligence is the living process. It is unpredictable, messy. You're often playing completely blind. That is where true intelligence lives. In complete darkness. Deep Learning models themselves are based on error correction. Without them, how would you know what works, what was the design? There is no feedback mechanism. But success is an essential condition for intelligence to be validated and turned into a standard process accessible to all. Failure is its natural substrate of development.”

I panicked and then calmed down. Got frustrated again and then calmed down again. I wrestled with the idea of 'You spent zero time breaking your brain over AI and now you want to be a run away success! Not fair!'. Then I calmed down again. Then I started developing the risk framework and I sensed fear. My own panic reflected in the market in a different way. The days of sure shot startup success (which was a myth to begin with) have given way to all companies feeling stuck and blind as AI adoption gets shoved down everyone's throats. I sensed that while everyone shouts about dangers of AI on Linkedin in the same breath as wonders of AI, no one actually has any idea what to do with it or how to manage it. As more structural issues got revealed about the market and businesses, I became more horrified with the potential mad storm that is hovering over everyone's head. So now I feel empathy. Somehow I am on the same boat as everyone else despite the vast gap in success and wealth.”

I think it will take about a year of trainings going badly as well as risk assessment. If the net contribution of Purna Medha's services to companies and individuals is more harmful than helpful then it is a structural problem and I will not feel ok charging people money for the services. That would be my failure condition, I suppose.”