I have a collection of books I wanted to read. Books that are all over the place and don’t help with my goal or purpose. So I am no longer going to be focusing too much on just randomly reading and will focus on improving the Cycles. While this may seem like it will limit my focus and understanding of the world I do not think that is necessarily the case. The books I tend to read are within the cycles anyways, but they are focused too much on singular pieces.

My goal now is to improve the specific piece of the puzzle for a particular section. This can incorporate any reading that I want but it also drives me to focus on a few things. How this transpires is that I will be focused on reading to improve a single limb or part of a cycle that I want to improve, incorporate the ideas of what I read, and move to the next limb to improve. This means a continuous improvement of the limbs by removing the waste and simplification of each limb.

This also means that any improvements I make also need to be focused on the specific cycle.

I am in the process of deleting YouTube. Whenever I go on there I get captured by the algorithm and end up wasting hours and hours. It is getting worst and worst as there are a million things with very little value and the AI slop is making sifting through it all annoying.

This is not to say there are not valuable insights to be gleaned. I do value the asymmetrical views of Prof Jiang, Peter Zeihan, Glenn Diesen, and Firstpost and such but I feel like I can engage with them in an alternate manner. I believe the best way to make this happen is through a pull method where I get the content send to me to read when I get time.

Second, there is content that I watch over and over again that I can likely just download and have on my machine. Finally, I do not think I need to be on YouTubr for this. I can use alternative methods.

I am getting less and less value from it. I am getting pulled into junk content, I am watching feel good stuff with no real value, and in general what I watch makes me anxious and doesn’t help me feel good. In a lot of way it pushes my attention into the world as opposed to making me better.

I am going to move back to a News Reader to manage this data.

One of the things I realize about spirituality is that there needs to be distinct times where we spend time in the outside world and time when we are focused completely on the inner world. This distinction is important as trying to mix the two is a disaster. When spending time in the inner world the outside world must be avoided as much as possible. When dealing with the outside world we can also combine with the inner world.

But most of the time should be spent on the inner world. Putting order to the inner world so that when we are faced with the outer world we are quick and efficient. The inner world means family, cleaning, meditation, prayer and so on. The outer world is work and whatever is needed to interact with the world.

I have updated the tapas to incorporate how I am dealing with this changes.

On Tuesday, I spent most of the day worried that it was the end of the world. That there will be a nuclear war because of Trump’s tweets in regards to Iran. This proved to be a waste of time as Trump chickened out and no destruction happened. However, I spent a whole day worried, figuring out what my last meal should be, etc. This was all basically fruitless endeavor.

What I realize is that we are ants. We need to work and continuing doing our work and try to make that work useful and better for the world. If in the process of doing our work we get crushed or killed it really isn’t up to us. We need to just be the best at what we do regardless of the situation and circumstances.

This seems to be the true meaning behind pratyahara. To move the senses away from the world and turn inward. The world will be the world, we cannot do anything about it. Our goal is to move inward and let the world be. It shouldn’t move us and who wins and who loses doesn’t matter. Our goal is to see the circumstances and move the world towards the path we think is ideal without having the world move us in the process.

We need to be stable and rooted in Isvara the pinnacle of stability and trust Him to do what needs to be done. Getting tied into the waves is not fruitful.

Sevaka and Sakha have a cycle. These cycles are the 8 limbs for sevaka and the Capital, Team, Venture cycle for sakha. What I realize is that I must simply improve both these cycles. Each of these have simple outcomes. By simplifying the outcomes the cycle becomes easier and easier to manage.

• Sevaka. Each of the limbs needs to be reviewed and improved daily. Find any part that you are not doing well and figure out a way to improve it.
• Sakha. Capital, Team and Ventures all require optimizations. Each piece has simplified outputs.

By focusing on these two cycles the goal becomes in essence an engineering and quality problem. The outcomes for each are now known. Further, the way to approach this is through the quality equation.

• Quality. Focus on what is wrong and improve each piece. Learn as needed to improve that piece without trying to add a bunch of books for no reason. Depth is better than shallowness. Adding knowledge to improve the cycles. Each of these cycles has depth both for the individual and the business.
• Simplify. Simplicity is better than complexity. So each piece will be simplified continuously.
• Output Metric. Each piece also has a specific measurable outcome making it easy to understand how we are doing.

All of this means that the tasks that are done, etc. will be to optimize the above. The goal is to go quickly through each of the cycles and optimize as fast as possible.

The news is devastating and we are all but about to face an economic collapse. It is not an if but when at this point. But getting tied to the news is depressing because it doesn’t allow you to function. I am addicted to how things will fall apart. While this is useful for preparing for the inevitable it is also useful to not pay attention to this and let Isvara do His job.

In that regard I am trying to limit the scope of when I am going to pay attention to the news as well as my scope of worldly topics. I am in a way addicted to the learning aspect and not enough of the action aspect. I like to read more and more, listen more and more, to get more and more knowledge about the worldly affairs, but all of this makes me more and more depressed because we can’t control it in anyway. We can control the little part of life that we have, but not the grand experiment.

This will require quite a few changes.

• Minimize News. I am going to limit my news period to the sakha time meaning I am only going to read and watch news for about an 2 hours during the day at most. This will happen in the evening time when I am already not doing a whole lot of work.
• Optimize for the Real. I am going to focus more on the sevaka side of things and focus on things that don’t change. The only thing real is that which doesn’t change. That which doesn’t change is Isvara. So meditation, gardening, and other activities that are not based on the world are good enough.
• Limit Argument. I am no longer going to argue with people about politics and the news. It just doesn’t provide any happiness, I am up in arms about things, and I am just unpleasant to talk to. It is better to build a better world, than to talk about the dying of the world. I will not discuss or get into it with people.

These three things are going to be what I am going to try to address.

I have started to hate the unfettered capitalism that has lead to the private equity industry which has taken over a large portion of America. It loads up each company with debt and destroys the value of the individual business. However I do find the structure of private equity to be useful. It is an effective strategy because it separates the concerns of the capital from the concerns of the venture. While the venture needs to grow to sustain itself, it is not concerned per se with finances. It is a product that is grown independently.

In that regard I have divided the sakha into three specific components:

• Capital. Will focus on financials and taxes.
• Team. Focused on hiring and training. Standardizing experiences of the team that we hire.
• Ventures. Building specific businesses with a focus on free cash flow.

This structure allows me to have the sakha focused completely on the world. The sevaka piece can then focus on the inner world. The goal is to split the focus such that everything I do is pushed out into the the buckets of the inner world and outer world.

One of the big problems I had was that I was incorporating a lot of the outer world into the sevaka path. While yama can be considered Karma Yoga, it should be more to learn how to be a Karma Yogi not necessarily the tactical aspects. The part should be completely moved to the sakha path.

The inner world includes a lot of things including meditation, gardening, cleaning, exercise, and study. All of these are important and can all be done during the sevaka time. Overall this simplifies a lot of my goals.

I am moving back to Github Actions hosted by Microsoft and away from self-hosting. The gist of the way things lie at the moment are that we will be having higher energy prices which will translate to higher compute costs and things that are JIT will be a bit more cost effective at the moment.

This means removing unnecessary compute actions and such.

opsZero is reaching a decade in age. While I have grown it I have made a lot of mistakes which I want to address systematically. Second, opsZero is going to be standardized allowing us to grow in a consistent manner and as a single brand. Lastly, with the geopolitical situation access to compute is going to become more important and we will be returning to a world moving away from the Cloud and focused on cost and efficiency.

While we will have to address the situation of opsZero, the Iran War has created a new World Order in which the East dominates and power will wholesale move out of the West. One of the pillars of this new world will be India. As the value of the dollar shrinks the only outcome for a lot of Western companies is to move their bases to India.

Failures​

opsZero's focus has been scattered in terms of technology and business. We have moved the business into areas that are just not our core competency. Here are a list of our failures:

• Partnerships. We have focused too much on partnerships and they haven’t yielded much. Most of the partners we have worked with have gone bankrupt or have been dismantled. I met some interesting people but overall not useful in terms of revenue generation. I would even state that the AWS Partnership is a failure. These companies have gone full blown into AI putting an immense amount of CapEx with the expectation that it will replace humans. Ironically, this is destroying the human relationships that power these businesses in the first place.
• Ventures. Multiple brands, multiple APIs, different services, etc. while fun are a waste of time. It is diffusing the energy of the company on too many things and makes it difficult to communicate to the team what we are working on. It makes more sense to have a single brand of opsZero and add additional levers to that brand.
• Sales. Because of the different brands it has become hard to sell as each brand requires a different set of expertise. The gist of it is that we are a DevOps Agency with a focus on Cloud + AI. That is the core of the company and it is on top of that we add additional capabilities. However, my sales has been honestly not this. It has been going all over the place. There is no core focus that everything else is built around.
• Resale. We decided to do reselling which is a painful business that is not worth the time. It is low margin, the APIs are annoying, the taxes confusing and so on. The time and energy I focused on it the last two years were largely pointless. I should have focused on other things like growing revenue without the need of an AWS. Reselling isn’t glamorous and is monotonous.

Standardization​

Because of the failures listed above we will be changing the business. For the next stage of our growth we are going to focus on a few things and deemphasize many others.

1. One Brand. Everything will be under the opsZero brand. No ifs and buts. I will no longer be dealing with multiple brands. It is just a pain to deal with and we already have the opsZero brand being strong anyways so it doesn't make sense to manage multiple brands.
2. Product First. We will incrementally release new product under opsZero. Since we are limiting the focus to just opsZero.com it will make it easier to develop.
3. Aggressive Direct Sales. We will build our own sales team that will be aggressive in nature looking to grow the company.
4. Limited Resell. We will only do resell if it makes sense, it is not the core part of our business. We will only do resale for companies we provide DevOps services.
5. Limited Partnerships. We are going to do direct sales and focus our energies on that. We will only do partnerships if there is value. Going direct to customer is better than having an in between. What this means is growing the company internally. To focus on increasing the size of the company.

Verticals​

opsZero has been chasing every niche and this hasn't been fruitful. This has us chasing enterprises, SMBs, startups, etc., etc. This has proven to be ineffective. Each industry has a different tempo, requirements and style. Each is different from the other and we haven't created a tempo of outreach. Chasing after healthcare companies is difficult versus chasing after enterprise, etc.

So we will focus on just three verticals that are under served and where we can drive a lot of value:

1. Startups. I do believe that the startup ecosystem will move to India and the USA market will dry up as capital costs increase due to the Iran War. So new startups will largely die off, but for the time being this is still a primary area we need to go after.
2. SMB. There are a lot of SMBs in second tier cities that don't have expertise that need DevOps. We can gain significant leverage in these areas.
3. Healthcare. Focus on healthcare and the needs of healthcare customers.
4. SLED. City and local governments will need support as their taxes crash when the US economy tanks. They will need to be more efficient. SLED is complex but it will allow us to become sticky overtime.

Solutions​

We are diversifying from the Cloud to be more Hybrid Cloud. Especially, with the Iranian attacks on the AWS UAE data centers the age of centralization is over. As the American Empire crumbles the centralization of power into American companies like AWS also starts to reduce. So decentralization becomes the norm again.

• DevOps. The basis of our go to market. We do all DevOps with OpenTofu/Terraform as the basis.
• Kubernetes. Kubernetes is our bread and butter. We will focus on making this the core of our value. Moving Windows, Linux, etc. workloads to Kubernetes is a primary goal.
• Identity. Setup and manage identity solutions.
• Compliance. Focusing on HIPAA, SOC2, PCI-DSS, etc.
• Datasets. Build and host core datasets for companies that want to use these for their own specific use cases.
• DBA. Database and performance tuning to lower the cost of compute for companies.
• AI. Low cost AI compute solutions such as running workloads on Macs, etc.
• FinOps. Resale business, but we will likely limit to just the Cloud.

One of the goals with the products side is to focus on build out using open source.

New World Order​

With the Iran War we will see a rather fast destruction of the American Empire. Wealth and power will move to the East specifically India and China. Incidentally, I also think this means multinationals will move East as well. With a drop in the dollar and a lack of growth opportunities in the US a period of stagflation will take over the country and a debt crisis will essentially cut the dollar's value by 50%. Low growth and high inflation means hiring people in the US becomes an economic burden resulting in wholesale migration of jobs East.

Multinationals are not inherently tied to a location. They move as needed to different jurisdictions based on their focus on profitability. This is nothing new and has been a constant throughout history. This disadvantages SMBs and startups that don’t have these relationships or ability to build businesses in India. Migration of these roles to India is the area that we will target.

However, as multinationals and other companies didn’t die when the British Empire collapsed there is a way to get through to the other side of the American Collapse. We need to understand that we are moving to a:

• Low Energy. As Middle East War rages the amount of energy drops by 25% for the foreseeable future. Low energy will also affect other things such as chips and food. Overall, energy becomes exceedingly expensive.
• Resource Poor. With energy going up the amount of resources such as capital that is available to people and businesses will reduce. This means there will likely be less capital intensive businesses that will become the norm.

To address this situation we must force ourselves towards two specific goals.

• Low cost. We will focus on being the low cost provider. Our goal is to drive costs further down.
• Standardization. Standardize all parts of the business and continuously reduce costs for ourselves and our customers.

Hindurastra​

Lastly, the goal of our business is to strengthen and turn India into a Hindurastra. As the American Empire dies, Sanatana Dharma will be a dominant force in the world. India will have a difficult time for the next few years, but once the 30s come along there will be a rapid acceleration of energy and focus with India becoming one of the major forces alongside China.

When this happens Indians will notice that Hindu Dharma is the driving force of the world. With Buddhism in China or Yoga in America. This will lead to a recognition of India's spiritual contribution to the world and a return to our roots. The timeframe around the 2040s is when India will become a spiritual power again.

So our goal until then is to grow internally using Sanatana Dharma as our core.

To get started in my reading I am focusing my energies on a few sections:

• Biographies. Read biographies of saints and yogis.
• Meditation. Learn the foundations of meditation.
• Cooking. Learn how to cook well.

This also includes a general study of the Hanuman Chalisa, Yoga Sutras and the Bhagavad Gita. The goal is to deepen the study of these three texts.

However, to understand the texts is to study the saints who lived the yogic life. The stories are easier to remember than prescriptions so that is the focus of my energies. Once the stories are internalized then I can then understand the Bhakti and Prayer. The Sadhana portion is there to remove the blemishes and figure out how to lead a more yogic life.

The goal is to build devotion. It is not at this point to decern Brahman or get into pure meditation. It is to purify myself and to get into a belief of Isvara without doubt.