Category: Wanderings

The art of finishing

Akshat Rathi4 Comments

Even before starting to follow Seth Godin, I believed in the value of finishing what I started.

May be this habit stems from a childhood experience. My parents did not allow me to leave the dining table till I had finished everything on my plate. If I had to over eat then so be it, next time I will learn to put no more food on my plate than was needed.

The habit then extended into other things. I am not satisfied till I’ve finished the book that I started. I cannot leave a cinema midway even if the first half isn’t exactly great. I won’t leave a conversation in the middle (if I had the choice too), I will wait for it to come to a conclusion or bring it to one.

This habit of finishing what I started helps quite a lot. I am able to derive maximum value from an activity that I can. Most importantly, it provides me with enough motivation to keep going. Most activities have a great start, a boring middle and superb end. Many people start something because it looks interesting but give up in the middle because the initial charm has disappeared. Many times if an activity is continued till the end, there is something in store that no one expects. If for nothing else, it is worth finishing something just to get to this unexpected outcome.

There is also a good selfish reason for finishing what you start. An activity when completed can go down on the list of things that you have ‘done’. That list is a self-confidence builder. When you look back, you know that you had the ability to not only start but also finish so many things. It allows you to start something new knowing what all you are already capable of doing. That can be a great motivation to start a new activity that is more challenging than anything you have done before or even motivation to finish something you haven started knowing that you have done something more difficult than this before.

Although finishing is a great habit, it has it’s downsides too. For example, when I am reading an article on the web or even a research paper I would like to read every word of text even though that may be unnecessary.

I think what it boils down to is our ability to judge the value of an activity. And to be able to accurately judge the value of an activity is a hard thing to do. Mostly because of lack of experience, in my case at least. It is then when I decided that if I am not sure what the value of a certain activity might be then I will finish it and evaluate the value at the end of it. In this way I can improve my value judgement for such activities in the future and thus improve my capacity to take the decision to quit or to keep going.

I am proud of many things that I have finished and I am sure to have many more in the future if I can keep going.

Healing polymers by light

Akshat RathiLeave a comment

Polymers that can be healed could extend the lifetime of materials in so many applications. Chemists from the US and Switzerland have for the first time developed polymers that can be healed by exposure to ultraviolet light alone.

In the recent years, many strategies have been developed for healing polymers. In many cases, they are healed by heating to the glass transition temperature which transforms the polymer from its hard state into a molten state enabling the polymer chains to reform. Unfortunately, this technique is slow and difficult to use in practice. To overcome the problem, a method was needed to manipulate polymeric structure at the molecular level.

Burnworth et al. used supramolecular polymers which are lower molecular mass polymer units held together in long chains by metal-ligand bonds. These non-covalent bonds are weaker than the bonds that hold hydrogen and oxygen atoms in a water molecule but strong enough to enable the new material to possess polymer-like properties.

Metal atoms have special affinity to electron rich ligands. This allows metal atoms to form metal-ligand bonds in a polymer with ligand groups present in it its structure.

More importantly, working with these metal-ligand bonds has enabled the researchers to manipulate the bonds at the molecular level with light energy. A polymer sheet deliberately cut to 50% of the film thickness was exposed to UV light in the range of 330 – 390 nm. It was observed (as seen in the picture) that the polymer ‘healed’ by filling up the cut that was made earlier.

Metal-ligand bonds of the kind present in this polymer allow for the conversion of light energy into heat. In this case, the light energy causes the surface of the polymer to rapidly heat up to 220 °C in a very short time. The healing occurs in this state when polymer is allowed to flow and re-arrange. The advantage of using light energy lies in its specificity. Unlike heat energy, it is possible to direct light energy to precisely those areas which require repair.

Also because different metal-ligand complexes absorb light at different wavelengths it should be possible to tune the wavelength of light needed for healing. Thus, one can imagine that it may be possible to heal a broken mobile phone case just by keeping it in sunlight.

Reference: Mark Burnworth et al., Nature, 472, 334.

Letting go off expectations and goals?

Akshat Rathi8 Comments

Leo Babauta writes about living a life with no goals and without expectations. Yes, the blog is called zen habits and may be its only zen monks who are able to do what Leo wants people to do. That would have been ok if he wrote this for zen monks alone. But that is not the case, he writes this for everyone. I find this to be a problem.

David Damron wrote about why Leo is wrong about goals. His five reasons are that:

  1. A goal can teach you how to handle your emotions
  2. Focus on a goal can deliver measurable results
  3. The journey is more appreciated when you set your sights on “Destination X”
  4. There’s faith that you will achieve a goal by just being and then there’s faith in focused action that you will achieve a goal
  5. A community is far likelier to back a goal than a way of life

Leo’s rebuttals to all those points run around one argument – I have lived a life without goals and I know that it works better. I suppose that his arguments for living without expectations may also lie on the same thread of arguments.

At present, I find this philosophy of living very hard to digest. If you can live a life like Leo where you are self-employed and make enough money to support your family then it might be possible to live that way.

Yes, theoretically I’d love to be able to live without goals or expectations. I’d like to do whatever takes my fancy like spend my time climbing the mountains, swimming the seas and enjoying the peace. All would have been well if I was in a Himalayan monastery supported by philanthropy to search for the ‘ultimate truth’. But that is not the case, I live a life that we have built for ourselves after many millennia of organised human effort.

I am not trying to be philosophical when I say that this life that I am able to live is better than the life that I would have had, had everyone of us lived without goals or expectations. It is a better life from a utilitarian perspective. Sure there are many more who are poor and suffering from the time when Buddha walked the earth. But there are also many many more who are able to experience new things, live longer and have the ability to contribute to humanity than those who did in Buddha’s times.

We have achieved what we have through innovation and hard work.

Many times the achievement has been possible only because of organised hard work. Organisations and institutions would fail without goals and a clear vision.

One may argue that at least for innovation it might be better to live a free life. We can explore and learn new things and in the process develop new things. Sure that is one way to look at innovation. Innovation is very a murky area to explore but one thing we know is that there is no fixed formula to innovate. But in certain situations, we might have been able to innovate only because we were pushed by goals and expectations.

I am not trying to destroy Leo’s idea. I think there is value in the advice but it has limited applicability. If everyone adopts this philosophy of living without goals and expectations, many things will not work and we may not progress.