“Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” - Peter Drucker

I have failed as a businessman because I have focused on strategy instead of culture. To win is not to get a bunch of mercenaries and tell them what to work on. It is to create a common identity, a common epistemology. The common culture defined through epistemology leads to the creation of strategies and the eventual execution. The strategy continues long past the individual who created the system.

In business then the goal is not to just work on something but to have an epistemology on how to understand the world and how to then execute upon it.

A sevaka is the base unit of that epistemology. All sevakas needs to have a common culture a common way of understanding the world and a common purpose that leads to the desired outcome. This supersedes any individuality that a person may have. It requires a common culture and understanding and thinking about knowledge.

There is a lot of prophecies in the West about Biblical End Times and such and I always freak out a bit about it, get depressed and genuinely feel like I am contributing to evil. Then I realize I am a Sanatani and it doesn’t matter. Brahman is everything, if Brahman wants to set in motion something the let Brahman do so. In Sanatana Dharma the cycles of time are endless. There is no real end. There is just change. The end of one age is the start of another.

Death in the Vedanta sense doesn’t really matter. For the end goal of all souls in to attain God. Freaking out about a potential end time based on a different theology doesn’t help much. While there will be immense violence and a depression, and more are coming soon I am not worried. We need to take it one step at a time and assume that spiritual growth happens when there is suffering as it shows the true nature of oneself. Hopefully, my true nature is good and is not a coward.

So the “end times” we will face will a period of spiritual growth as material wealth fades. So the point is not to cling to life, but to grow spiritually. It means that we have to give our best.

https://samraja.substack.com/

One of my favorite apps is the Notes app. With 18,883 notes in my Done folder. It is more a todo system than a Notes app per se. However, one of the problems I have with the Notes app is that I just don’t seem to define a full project. They are always half assed and I have to continuously revisit projects. This just makes things feel like they never get done. There is no measurement of the number of projects actually completed. Basically, it is a rolling spec that always changes and is not really defined. Lastly, this all lives within my Notes app so the actual goal is never communicated to the broader team.

If you were to ask me how many company projects I have completed this year and how do I know if they were successful the answer to that question is I don’t know. I am just at a loss for the outcomes because I honestly don’t know the outcomes. The baseline for using the Notes App is I can move fast with the consequence that my team doesn’t really know what to expect next until I tell them.

The main reason that I moved to the Notes app was Notion was slow and became unweildy and to be frank I wanted a simpler system. But the problem with the Notes app is that I am the only one who has access to my notes so others aren’t really able to access them.

I completed a migration of all the websites to Cloudflare Workers from Cloudflare Pages. We were using a combination of Cloudflare Workers and Pages and deployments were starting to have issues. These include the different ways that Pages treats branches versus Workers. Anyways, seems like there are more features on Cloudflare Workers and this will simplify our deployment capabilities.

As I setup my day I find that my intellect works better in the morning and midday and by the end of the day it is spent and I do more things based on the heart. That is I don’t have much willpower by the end of the day. My routines need to follow a similar pattern in that they need to rise and fall with my energy levels throughout the day.

Currently, I have a lot of tasks that are both intellectual as heart filled mixed and matched. I need to figure out which are more based on heart and which are based on intellect. As I get tired though the day the intellectually taxing tasks are difficult for me to focus on.

Why have this difference between heart and intellect? They focus on different outcomes. When you are thinking with the intellect I need to be rational and scientific with a process defined. When I am working through the heart I need to be more sensitive and see things through love and devotion. These two modes conflict and continuously context switching between them is not ideal. So the day needs to be setup to be either Heart based on Brain based.

Based on this I am changing the order of some of my routine:

• Start the day with Bhagavad Gita
• Study Yoga Sutras
• Study Sanskrit
• Study Vivekananda, Sivananda, Chinamaya, and Dayananada
• Study Hanuman Chalisa, Ramakrishna, Ramayana and Puranas

I have been using Makefiles as long as I can remember. When I was using Ruby I was fond of Rake. I have largely stayed with Python as my language with opsZero. Using Python the ecosystem while large and diverse has the problem of being a pain to get consistency.

With uv that has changed. It is really easy to invoke binaries, have multiple Python versions and in general the speed of running things is just great. With uv a core install I am moving from make to invoke as my process manager.

Why now?

Well uvx invoke works well and I don’t have to worry about random breakages.

uv init --bare
uv add --dev invoke fabric
uv run invoke

As a process oriented person my orientation is a process oriented organization. Within these processes are certain output goals that we have that allow us to have a sustained growth. But we use process to continuously grow the business. One of the problems is that processes and measurements tend to live in different places making it confusing to understand how a business is doing. Our businesses had different methods of measurements or no measurements at all. This has lead to a businesses and employee development that to be completely frank were shit.

I am implementing Standard Operating Procedures across the existing businesses starting with DiscountCloud, Kubespot, PolicyCop and opsZero. The goal of these SOPs is to have a common process standard across everything I do. The approach I am going with this is to do more actionable tasks first then go back up the stream to the more higher level ideas.

So the standardization I intend to work on will be done in phases in this order:

1. Feature / Bug. Standardize Feature and Bugs
2. Kanban
3. SOP.
   1. Value Stream Map
   2. Routines
      1. Deming
   3. Reports
      1. WBR
         1. Output Metrics
         2. Input Metrics
4. PRFAQ
5. Assign Owners

| By performing their prescribed duties, King Janak and others attained | perfection. You should also perform your duties to set an example for the good | of the world. Whatever actions great persons perform, common people follow. | Whatever standards they set, all the world pursues. -Bhagavad Gita 3.20-3.21

I am merging JnanaPress into abhiyerra under sevaka. As a part of the process of continuously improving myself having my sadhana be separate from myself as an example I set to others is not useful. If I am going to be leading businesses I need to myself become an example of what I am leading. I don’t expect what I am doing to be independent. I intend to be the first sevaka where what I propose I follow.

I can’t always meditate or sit for prayer. Further, my study is all over the place and not consistent so I am trying to simplify my Routine. Instead of having three types of Meditation I will just have one. This will just be a meditation for 20 minutes and study of the sastras for 10. So a 30 minute block of study. This simplifies the practice and I have the exact same type of meditation every time so that I can get into a groove.

Having three different types of meditations is not fruitful and is a bit distracting. By having a single type I can get into the same type of meditation every time. Secondly, having the study after the meditation I can focus after clearing my mind instead of distracting it. I am performing a Raja Yoga which is “yogas citta vritti nirodah” so distracting the mind by focusing on a verse first seems to be counterintuitive. So my focus is to read the texts after.

Lastly, I may not always be able to meet the meditation time. So if I cannot meet it I will focus on working on studying the sastras or study some spiritual text.

As part of my Meditation routine I had the study of supplemental texts, but what I found was that this I am going through too many different supplemental texts and not really focusing on any one of them at a time. Secondly, reading secular texts was not happening such as how to be a better father. So I am making some changes to my Routine to solidify the Study & Work time.

They will be two hour chunks of time and I will focus on my work but the first Study & Work will start with 30 minutes of spritual study and the last Study & Work will end with 30 minutes of spiritual study. My focus on these spritual studies will be to the read the same text so that I can focus on getting through a single book.

The primary textual focuses are the Hanuman Chalisa, Yoga Sutras and Bhagavad Gita. Everything else being supplemental to these three core texts. By reading only one supplemntal text at a time I can then focus on improving a single area of weakness instead of spreading myself thin.

The supplemental texts are texts to assist in understanding and put into practice the core texts better. For example, reading "Meditation and Spiritual Life" is there to assist my understanding of the Yoga Sutras. My reading of the "Gospel of Ramakrisha" is a way to understand the Bhagavad Gita better. My reading of Vivekananda is a way to understand the Hanuman Chalisa better.

Finally, since I am moving my study of these texts into the Study & Work period I can spend larger chunks of time reading them when I have time. This allows me to have a larger chunk of time to focus on these texts instead of just small chunks. Each of these supplemental texts are not just for reading but for putting into practice and so having larger chunks of time is important so I can take the knowledge and implement it.

One of the reasons I think this change is also good is that if I do not make it to reading the supplementary texts so I can read other texts I don't mentally feel bad. I still am reading the sastras so it is okay. I can read other texts when I have time.