87 posts tagged with "sadhana"

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.

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.

AI is a disruptive force. I was skeptical about its impact but now seeing the rapid developments by Anthropic I can say I am now a convert. While in 2025 AI was in development stage at this point we are in an accelerated implementation stage.

There are some significant changes I see happening:

• More work will be expected out of fewer people. Companies like Tata, Infosys and other outsourcing firms will likely require more output per person as AI can fulfill a lot of the simple tasks. Specialists will likely be turned into AI tools. The people doing the tasks will become reviewers, not writers.
• As people and companies build their own tooling specific to their company’s use case the need for data becomes more important. Data becomes a way of building tools.
• Services as a business model will be impacted. If companies can put together their own custom solutions targeting their needs with AI tools guiding them then the need for services becomes niche. Companies will hire consultants for specific cases not for general purpose.
• AI will make everyone entrepreneurs. The cost of building something is going way, way down. While there will be slop, we are going to rapidly be able to create new things. The cycle of creative destruction will speed up. New products can be created and launched rapidly. We are back to the MVP world where even Microsoft is shipping junk product to iterate quickly. Yes, there will be slop but this is a matter of normality for most startups. So slop in of itself is not that problematic.

What does it mean for us?

We are going to transition to becoming an AI first product company. We will be focusing less and less on services and will be completely focused on products that have AI at the core. The products will be based around being inputs for AI to make additional decisions around.

The goal is for us to launch a product quickly, set up the processes for improvement, and sell and market with a few workers. This will require a mindset shift in the way we work. Currently, we have a services mindset where delivering high quality work to customers is expected instead we need to change to a mindset of velocity.

Some things we need to do:

• Launch fast. We need to launch new initiatives quickly. The market will tell us based on if people buy our products or not.
• Less permissions needed. Everyone should be able to build and deploy new features without asking for permissions. We will have a few criteria but everyone should be able to launch as needed.
• Vibe code, deploy and test. Build quickly using vibe coding. Use AI tools to launch new offerings.

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.

It is easy to ruminate on the past and future of a business but it is hard to see where you are in the present. Data forces you to understand the present. Once you have figured out the present and always clearing out anything in the past or future then you can clear your mind to the capabilities you have and remove anything that does not provide value.

The data fueled present is much like meditation for an individual. It forces a company to also be in th present.